Death Sentence

6

Before he left them the two journalists had consumed prodigiously and their bickering had lost its amicability: they were threatening each other like blowhards in a Western saloon. The bartender intervened but it only persuaded O’Hara and Ludlow to take the quarrel outside into the night where they started feinting like boxers in the drifting snow.

Paul faded into the darkness. He had never understood men who fought for fun.

He had nursed two beers for hours and come away with valuable items of information and innuendo. He knew something of the organization and disposition of the police — their districts and patterns of patrol, their levels of diligence and indifference. He had gained a rudimentary idea of the organization of the force’s homicide detectives and captains — it was somewhat different from the vertical structure of the New York department — and he’d learned something about the Chicago Crime Commission. He’d been told demographic and commercial facts that didn’t appear on his street maps — Old Town, New Town, the Lithuanian and Polish and Italian and Chinese neighborhoods, the hardcore centers of the four police districts in which nearly half of Chicago’s violent crimes were reported. He’d learned that police surveillance was highest and most efficient in the First Ward — because it was the home ward of the city’s venerable political machine and because it included the showcase Loop — and that it was thinnest in the west and southwest districts.

He’d learned a great many details, some of which might prove inaccurate; nevertheless it had been worthwhile and the two reporters had played nicely into his hands. They’d had to: ask a man to talk about a topic on which he considers himself an expert and he will happily oblige.

He found his way back along Rush Street to the open lot where his car was parked. He ransomed it, declined a receipt and drove south toward the inferior regions of the city.

He was hunting again. At first in New York he’d tried to rationalize it. He’d walk down Riverside Park late at night with his hand on the gun in his coat pocket, and he’d convince himself he was only doing what any peace-loving citizen had a right to do — walk unafraid in a public park. Any predator who might attack him was asking for whatever happened: It’s not my doing, he can leave me alone if he wants to. But he couldn’t delude himself forever. He wasn’t strolling in those parks at two o’clock in the morning for exercise or enjoyment. He was prowling for a kill and any other description of it had to be rationalization. The gun in his pocket wasn’t there for self-protection. He wasn’t defending himself, he was attacking: setting a trap, using himself as the bait and closing the trap when the predator entered it.

He’d asked himself why. He took no pleasure from watching a man die. There was no perverted thrill in it. Inevitably his reaction afterward was painful nausea. He did not feel particularly cleansed or particularly triumphant. Relief, sometimes, that he had come through again without injury; but it wasn’t a challenge that thrilled him, it wasn’t anything he had to prove to himself — it wasn’t macho. He’d spent months thinking of nothing else but there were some things you could analyze to death without ever being able to explain them. It was — what? A sense of obligation? Not a compulsion, not a perverse addiction, no; it wasn’t something he felt compelled to do. It was simply something that ought to be done. A job, a duty uncertainly defined; he couldn’t get closer than that.

When he was deep inside the urban ferment of the South Side ghetto he chose a boulevard lined with shabby stores and drove slowly through the sparse traffic until he saw an open pawn shop. He cruised past it, made the next right turn and had no difficulty finding a place to park; it was not a neighborhood in which you parked your car overnight on the street with any expectation of finding it intact in the morning.

He locked the car carefully and made sure all the windows were shut tight. When he walked back toward the light at the intersection he passed a tall black-bearded man in a wide-brimmed leather hat who moved to the far side of the sidewalk and didn’t look at Paul as they passed each other; the tall man receded into the shadows and Paul turned the corner.

There was a thin stream of pedestrian traffic to and from the late-closing supermarket; he went past it, the price placards in the windows and the closed-circuit security eyes high on the walls and the armed private guard near the door. Next to it was a liquor store, closed, a steel grillwork locked over its windows; then an Army-Navy surplus store and finally at the corner the pawnshop overhung by its spherical brass triad. Paul went inside and browsed for five minutes, exchanged not more than four words with the proprietor and returned to the street.

When he reached the sidewalk he had his wallet in his hand and he was counting the money in it as if he had just put it there. He thrust the wallet clumsily into his outside coat pocket, making a show of it, and walked back past the supermarket to the next corner, moving his hand inside the coat pocket, switching his grip from the wallet to the .38 revolver.

A policeman, even a dedicated one, had to wait for a crime to be committed within reach before he could act on it. His very presence, in uniform, would discourage the crime’s commission in any case. Long ago Paul had learned not to waste his time in fruitless search for felons in the act of committing crimes; the odds were too long. A robbery took place in the city every three minutes according to Mike Ludlow but it was an enormous city and there were three million potential victims.

It was much more certain if you invited them to make you their victim.

When he turned the corner he half-expected to be followed but he wasn’t. No one had been tempted by the bulging wallet or the pawnshop customer’s evident carelessness.

Dry run: a dud. Well you couldn’t expect them to tumble every time.

He continued into the deeper shadows and his eyes had to accustom themselves to the inferior light farther along the block; he turned once, squinting, to make sure no one was tailing him. The sidewalk remained empty. Summoning patience he put his back to the boulevard, relaxed his grip on the gun and continued along the cracked concrete without hurry. As his eyes dilated he looked up along the sagging weathered stoops of the tenements: here and there a dim bulb but most of the entrances were unlit. There was no one in sight: it wasn’t a place where you would sit on the porch to take the air. In any case flakes drifted by and the night was too chill for it.

It was only the suggestion of a stirring in the corner of his vision but it made sweat burst out on his palms. He stopped bolt-still.

There by the car. His car.

Nothing.

But when he passed his eyes over the car again he saw a subtle line that wasn’t part of the car’s silhouette: just visible, a flat shadow no bigger than a paperback book...

He walked forward. Twenty-five feet, twenty and he had it then: it was the flat crown of a hat behind the fender. The man was crouching behind the car and didn’t realize quite how high his hat was.

Paul kept walking as if to go by the car. A sidewise glance: the hat was moving, the man was circling behind the car, crabbing his way into the street in order to stay behind cover as Paul walked past.

By the front bumper Paul pivoted on his right foot and leaped between the cars and hauled the Centennial from his pocket. He wheeled past the car and the man looked up in naked amazement — reared back in fear, lost his balance and had to whip one stiff arm behind him to brace his palm against the pavement.

Something extended from the man’s hand. The man lifted it as if it were a weapon.

Paul shot him in the face. The man’s elbow unlocked and he went down on his back. His leather hat rolled into the center of the street.

The tool rested in his splayed hand: a twisted length of coat-hanger wire. Standard for breaking into car windows.

Paul plugged his key into the door, dived into the car and started it with a gnashing grind. He locked the wheel to the left and cramped the car out of the parking space. He felt it when the rear wheel rolled over the dead man’s outstretched arm.

He went down the street without lights: if there was a witness he didn’t want his license plate to show. He turned two successive corners before he switched on the headlamps and slipped into the stream of boulevard traffic. He drove up Lake Shore Drive obsessed by the knowledge that he might have left a clue: the print of his rear tire on the dead man’s flesh.

He worked it out in his head. He drove right past his apartment building and continued into the North Side and turned off there, cruising until he found a quiet block. Ignored by occasional passing cars he jacked up the car and changed the rear tire, putting the spare on the car. Then he unscrewed the valve of the tire and bled the air out of it.

When it had gone soft he used the tire iron to pry the tire off the wheel rim. He didn’t have proper tools and it was a hard job; he worked steadily, without desperation but steadied by necessity. Finally the tire came off the wheel and he drove west until he found a weedy lot cluttered with trash. He wiped the tire off, wary of fingerprints, and left it there amid the junk; then he drove back to the apartment. Tomorrow he’d buy a new spare tire.

It was well after midnight by the time he’d cleaned and reloaded the Centennial. He switched on the radio and tuned to the all-news station but there was no report of the South Side killing yet. At one o’clock he turned it off and showered and went to bed, trying to put faces on the images of the three men who always drifted in the back of his mind: the savages who’d broken into the apartment and mauled Esther and Carol.

He’d never found them; he’d never expected to. When you set out to eradicate a disease-bearing species of insects you didn’t hunt for particular individual insects.