Death Wish

16

There was no mention in the Times. The Daily News had two brief paragraphs on page ten: PAROLEE SLAIN IN R’SIDE PARK. “Thomas Leroy Marston, 24, was found shot to death last night in Riverside Park. Marston had been released from Attica State Penitentiary two weeks ago on parole after serving forty-two months of a five-year sentence for grand larceny.

“At his sentencing three years ago Marston admitted he had been a heroin addict. Police refused to guess whether his death was connected with drugs. Marston was shot three times by a small-caliber revolver. The assailant, or assailants, have not been apprehended.”

The police were looking for him. It was only to be expected. They weren’t likely to find him. It was easy to read between the lines in the News. The police were theorizing that Marston had tried to double-cross a dope pusher and the pusher had shot him. Fine; let them drag some of the pushers off the streets for questioning.

But he was going to have to be more careful in the future. He had made several mistakes; half the night he had sat in the living room with the gun on the table in front of him, coolly assessing the events. There were several mistakes, mainly of omission. He had not stopped to make sure Marston was dead. He had not disguised himself in any way; if there had been an eyewitness he would have been too easily identified. He had come straight home and it was possible the doorman, if ever questioned, might remember the time of Paul’s arrival.

In the future. What is it that I’m planning to do?

The hell with it. He wasn’t going to lie to himself. The streets and parks were public places. He had a right to use them whenever he chose. And anyone who tried to attack him or rob him would have to take his chances.

Friday evening he met Jack at a Steak & Brew and they talked about the technicalities of the commitment. Paul contained his grief by channeling it into anger; he was resigned to Carol’s pain and his own loss; beginning to think less of his own agonies and more of those who hadn’t been victimized yet. By stopping Marston he had prevented God knew how many future crimes from happening.

He took a cab straight home and stared at the television until he fell asleep in front of the set.

Saturday he awoke with a throbbing headache. He’d had nothing to drink the night before; he couldn’t understand it. Possibly the air pollution. He swallowed aspirins and went across the street to the Shopwell to get groceries for the week. He had to stand in a slow line at the checkout counter; the headache was maddening and he wanted to elbow his way straight to the cash register. The headache dissipated during the morning but by midafternoon it had returned; he tossed the crossword puzzle on the floor and decided to take a nap, sleep it off.

It was dark when he came to. The darkness unnerved him; he went around the place switching on lights. When he looked at his watch he found it was nearly nine o’clock. Christ I can’t spend another night in this place. Maybe a movie. He examined the newspaper listings; the only thing worth trying was the double-bill rerun of James Bond films — he didn’t have the patience for an intellectual artsy picture and everything else was pornographic dreck.

The features ran at even-numbered hours but it didn’t matter. He took the subway local to Fiftieth Street and walked down Broadway to the theater. Entered the auditorium in the midst of a Technicolor car-chase and found his way to a seat and let the choreographed wide-screen violence absorb him.

The second film ended with someone being crushed to death in an enormous machine that reduced an automobile to a chair-sized cube of metal. He left the theater shortly before midnight, too restless to sit through the first half of the other film.

After the spectacular sound-volume of the theater’s speakers, the racket of Times Square seemed muted and unreal. He stopped to get his bearings, feeling strange and oddly guilty: he had never gone to movies by himself and he felt as if someone had just caught him masturbating. Once a long time ago he had been briefly in San Francisco over a weekend, waiting for his Army discharge; he had spent most of Saturday and all day Sunday going from one triple-feature to another. He had seen eleven movies — seven of them Westerns — in those two days. It was the nearest thing to a Lost Weekend he had ever experienced. After six months behind a typewriter on Okinawa and nearly two seasick weeks on a troopship he had owned no strength to take in the sights of San Francisco or enjoy its notorious night pleasures; he had lost himself in the never-never land of Tex Ritter and John Wayne and Richard Dix and Bela Lugosi.

Times Square was a running sore, jostling with the chalky bodies of hookers, open-mouthed tourists, swaggering male prostitutes, men slipping furtively into peep-show theaters and porno bookstores. Cops in pairs every few yards: they were all on the take because if they weren’t, half the people in sight would be under arrest. These were the dregs, this was their cesspool. Their dreary faces slid by in the overpowering neon daylight and Paul turned quickly uptown, full of angry disgust.

Out of the tinsel, up toward Fifty-seventh. The new car showrooms, the groups in good clothes on the corners looking for taxis to take them home from their after-theater dinners.

A cop on the corner, the steady watchfulness of his eyes: Paul walked past and felt his face twitch. Before he had done it, he had been convinced there was no danger: they could never get him. But now it had happened and he was beginning to think of a hundred ways they could find him. A witness? Fingerprints — had he touched anything? He felt his face flaming; he went on into Columbus Circle, clutching the gun in his pocket. Suppose a cop stopped him and asked him something: could he handle it? He was such a poor dissembler.

The Coliseum, now the handsome buildings of Lincoln Center looking like something miraculously spared by the bombing attacks that had reduced the surrounding neighborhood to gray rubble. The city had the look and feel of occupation: the walk up Broadway was a combat mission behind enemy lines and you never met the eyes of the hurrying head-down strangers you passed.

That was it, then, he thought; he was the first of the Resistance — the first soldier of the underground.

Monday in the lunch hour he went down into the Village and browsed the shops on Eighth Street and Greenwich Avenue and then on Fourteenth Street. At different shops he bought a dark roll-neck sweater, a reversible jacket with dark gray on one side and bright hunter’s red on the other, a cabbie’s soft cap, a pair of lemon-colored gloves.

Before ten that evening he took a bus up to Ninety-sixth Street and walked across town into Central Park. The tennis courts and the reservoir were to the right; he crossed the transverse to the left and walked along above the ball-playing fields. He was wearing the cap and the jacket gray-side-out. Come on, now.

But he walked all the way through the Park without seeing anyone except two bicyclists.

Well, everyone was afraid of the Park nowadays. The muggers knew that; they had shifted their hunting grounds elsewhere. He nodded at the discovery — now he knew; he wouldn’t make this mistake again.

At the Fifth Avenue wall he made a turn around the children’s playground and started to walk back up toward the transverse but then in a chip of light between the trees he saw a motionless figure on a park bench and something triggered all his warning systems: the short hairs prickled at the back of his neck and he moved forward through the trees, letting his breath trickle out slowly through his mouth. Something was stirring there — he had picked up movement, as insubstantial as fog, but it was there. He stopped, watched. He had to fight a cough down.

It was an old man slumped on the bench; probably a drunk. Wrapped in a ragged old coat, huddling it to him. That wasn’t what had alerted Paul; there was someone else.

Then he spotted the shadow. Slipping slowly along behind the park bench, moving up from the drunk’s blind side.

Paul waited. It might be a curious kid, harmless; it might even be a cop. But he didn’t think so. The stealthy purpose, the careful stalking silence... Into the light now: a man in skin-tight trousers and a leather jacket and an Anzac hat cocked over one eye. Moving without sound to the back of the bench and looking down at the sleeping drunk.

The intruder’s head lifted and turned: he scanned his horizons slowly and Paul stood frozen, not breathing. Fingers curling around the gun in his pocket.

The black man came around the end of the park and as he stepped onto the path his hand came out in sight and Paul heard the crisp snap as the knife flicked open. He’s going to rob that poor drunk.

The black man looked around again before he turned and crouched down by the drunk. Paul stepped forward through the trees. “Stand up,” very soft.

From his crouch the intruder broke into an immediate run. Racing toward the safety of the farther trees.

Paul fired.

The gunshot arrested the black man: he stopped and wheeled.

He thinks I’m a cop.

Well, that wasn’t a miss, you son of a bitch. It was just to turn you around so you can watch me shoot you. He trembled in rage: he lifted the revolver and stared into the black man’s eyes, hard as glass. The man was lifting his hands into the air in surrender. The sight of his vicious sneering face electrified the skin of Paul’s spine.

He stepped forward into the light because it was important that the intruder see him. A muscle worked at the back of the black man’s jaw. Then the face changed: “Hey, man, what’s goin’ down?”

Flame streaked out of Paul’s gunbarrel; the shot laid hard echoes across the blacktop path and the firecracker stink of the smoke got into his nostrils.

The bullet plunged into the abdomen, rupturing it with a subcutaneous explosion of gases. Paul fired again; the black man fell back, turned, began to scramble toward the trees.

It was remarkable how much a human body could take and still keep functioning. He fired twice more into the back of the man’s head. It dropped him.

Paul glanced at the drunk. The drunk hadn’t even stirred. He was facing the other way, half-lying on the bench. Was he alive at all?

Paul crossed to the black man and looked at him. There were flecks of white saliva at the corners of the man’s mouth. His face was twisted to the side and the eyes stared blankly at nothing. His sphincter muscles had failed and an unmistakable odor hung around the body in a cloud.

Paul hurried to the drunk. The man was snoring softly.

He faded back into the trees along the bridle path. There might be a cop nearby. He hurried up toward the fence that surrounded the reservoir; just before he reached it he turned to the right and went along the side of the steep wooded slope, parallel to the fence but below it so that no one would see him silhouetted. Every few seconds he stopped and listened.

People would have heard the noise of the shots but no one would have a fix on it and they’d rationalize it had been a backfiring truck. It wouldn’t be reported. Gunshots never were. The only real risk was that someone might have seen something. A passing pedestrian he hadn’t spotted, or even another drunk lying concealed in the wood. He slipped out of the jacket and reversed it to show the bright red side; put the cap in his pocket and the gloves with it. The gun was back in his right front trouser pocket — the gun together with a rubber-banded roll of four hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills. If a cop decided for some reason to stop him and search him, Paul wanted the cop to find the four hundred dollars. It might work; he understood such things worked.

He went along the slope, losing his footing here and there on the slippery grass; he cut between the reservoir and the tennis courts and made his way across the oval drive and out of the Park by the Ninety-sixth Street gate. He felt exposed and vulnerable; he was sweating lightly in the cool air. Rickety and weak: but it was real, the lusting angry violence most people had never remotely tasted and would never understand...

In his mailbox he found a folded mimeographed flyer letterheaded with the legend of the West End Avenue Block Association and signed in the facsimile handwriting of Herbert Epstein.

He left it open on his desk so he would remember to make out a check.

Years ago he had spent some of his weekends visiting his uncle and aunt in Rockaway. You could tell the rank and importance of the local mobsters by the brightness of the floodlights around their houses: they were the only people who had reason to fear for their lives.

Tuesday they took Carol to the rest home near Princeton. It was the first time he had seen her in weeks and although he had prepared himself he couldn’t help showing his shock. She looked twenty years older. There was no trace of the coltish girl with the sweet and touching smile. She might as well have been a display-window mannequin.

Jack kept talking to her in his gentle voice — cheerful meaningless talk, the kind you would use to soothe a skittish horse — but there was no sign she heard any of it; there was no sign she was aware of her own existence, let alone anyone else’s. They have this to pay for, he thought.

On the Amtrak train back to the city he sat beside Jack looking out the window at the slanting gray rain. Jack didn’t speak. He seemed worn out by the fruitless effort to reach Carol. Paul tried to think of something comforting to say but he quickly realized there was nothing.

There was a peculiar gratification in seeing how badly Jack was taking it. It made Paul feel the stronger of the two. He wasn’t breaking down at all; he was taking it in his stride.

But then his thoughts turned inward and he saw there was no reason to be smug; he was keeping his own equilibrium only because he seemed to have been struck by the edge of the same malaise that had infected Carol — the inability to feel anything. It was as if a transparent shield had been erected around him — as if his emotional center had been anesthetized. It had been closing in around him for several days, he realized. He remembered the mugger in Riverside Park: that had terrified him; but it was the last time he had known real fear. The second time — the man who’d tried to rob the drunk — he’d felt very little; he remembered it with vague detachment as if it were a scene from a movie he’d watched a long time ago.

He walked the streets that night but no one attacked him. At midnight he went home.