Death Wish

18

Thursday he returned the car to the agency before he went to work. He spent most of the day in the corner office with Henry Ives and George Eng going over the collated Jainchill figures. He had trouble keeping his mind on the subject at hand. George Eng was among the liberal wealthy; he lived behind the barricades of a great Park Avenue apartment house and sent his children to a private school but even so he spent twenty minutes that afternoon in bitter indignant complaint about the savage adolescents who extorted money from kids outside the school and, if they didn’t have any, beat them up for sport. Eng’s younger son had come home a few days ago bruised and limping. The police hadn’t found his attackers. Eng’s son wasn’t reticent about it; it was just that they had been strangers to him. Public school kids, or dropouts; they were taking to hanging around private schools waiting for the students to come out.

He had dinner with Jack and they talked pointlessly about Carol. Jack had been out to see her yesterday; there was no change. Every day left room for a little less hope.

Later that night in the East Village he shot a man coming down a fire escape with a portable TV set.

It had been a slow weekend for news. Somewhere along the line the police had begun to make connections and the story made the Saturday evening newscasts and the front page of the Sunday Times as well as its editorial page.

By the next morning the newspapers had picked it up with full energy. Inspector Ochoa was the Times’s Man-in-the-News. In the Daily News on the editorial page the Inquiring Fotographer’s man-in-the-street question was, “How do you feel about the vigilante killer?” and the six answers ranged from “You can’t take the law into your own hands” to “They ought to leave that guy alone, he’s doing what the cops should have done a long time ago.” The afternoon Post editorialized, “Murder answers no questions. The vigilante must be nailed before he murders any more victims. We urge the Manhattan D.A. and the NYPD to spare no effort to bring the psychopath to justice.”

He got up in the middle of the night. The sleeping pills weren’t working very well any more. He made a cup of tea and re-read the newspaper accounts. The cup and saucer rattled in his hand, the tea rumbled uneasily in his stomach; he heard himself whimper softly.

There was no appeasement of his distress. He was miserably lonely; he didn’t want to spend the night with a woman — he didn’t want to spend the night at all. He thought of Ochoa and his special detail: they were out there somewhere, ambitious men stalking him when they should have been guarding the honest citizens. An entire city slashing itself to extinction and all the police could do was search for the man who was trying to show them the way back.

It was a little after three. He didn’t go back to bed. He had cleaned the gun since its last firing, but he cleaned it again and sat a long time debating whether to continue carrying it in his pocket all the time. It might be safer to find a hiding place for it. As far as he knew, he had left no clues that would lead the police to him; but their technology was impressive and it was possible some hint might cause them to question him at some point. It would be better not to have the gun on him.

But there was no place to hide it. If they became suspicious of him they would surely search his apartment and his office. Other than those two places there was no other cache that would be safe and easily accessible. He thought up elaborate schemes worthy of gothic horror stories: digging out a brick in the basement, hiding the gun behind it — but all those were risky notions. A small boy might stumble on the hiding place; the building handyman might find it. The gun was the only positive and irrevocable connection between him and the killings. If the police ever got their hands on it they could match it up to the death bullets, and they could trace it to him effortlessly because the gun’s serial number was registered to him in Washington through the dealer who’d sold it to him in Arizona.

Half-past four in the morning. His thoughts pendulumed from extreme to extreme. If they caught him he would kill himself, it was the clean neat way. No. If they caught him he would fight it out in the courts; he would get the best lawyers and they would have public sympathy on their side.

It wasn’t inevitable that he would be caught. They had no objective cause to suspect him, as long as he was careful. His campaign was a reasoned one, not the result of mindless compulsions; he could pick and choose his time and place, he could suspend his operations until things cooled off. He had the options of free will. The editorialists were wrong of course; he wasn’t psychotic, it wasn’t an uncontrollable obsession, he wasn’t compelled by diseased brain-cells to keep slaughtering innocent victims until he was caught — he was no crazy strangler begging for punishment through self-hate. I’m a nut, of course, he thought, but it was only by comparison with the insane norms of society that he was abnormal. What he was doing was extreme. But it was necessary. Someone had to do it: someone had to show the way.

“You can see it in the kids,” George Eng said. “They used to be anti-police. Not any more. My kids are pro-cop with a vengeance. Can you blame them? The junkies are looting everything. Ripping off school calculators and lab equipment, mugging the kids. My son has a friend in one of the schools up in Westchester — they had to close the school this week. Vandals. They flooded the building with fire hoses — ransacked the place, urinated on the chairs, splashed paint all over the walls. I’ll tell you something, this fellow who’s out there killing them may be doing us all a service. Do you know we’ve got sixty-eight tenant families in my building and forty-one of them keep Dobermans and German shepherds? There aren’t that many dog lovers, believe me. Not when the price of an attack dog’s gone up to damn near two thousand dollars.”

Eng’s eyes had narrowed to a fighter’s squint; his mouth became small and mean. “The kids want law and order even more than we do. The only trouble is, with the police department we’ve got, it takes the cops a month to find the police commissioner. That’s why I think it was inevitable a guy like this would come along. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion he’s probably a cop himself — fed up with revolving-door courts and the red-tape delirium and the Goddamned Supreme Court. I’d lay pretty big odds on that — he’s a cop. He knows this is the only language these criminals understand. He’s giving us a deterrent for them. It’s neutralizing a few of them and I imagine it’s scaring a lot more of them off the streets. I’d be interested to see how the crime statistics have moved since this guy started — I’ll lay a small fortune muggings are way down.”

Watching him across the restaurant table Paul only grunted now and then to show he was listening. He hadn’t decided what tack to take in discussions like this; he knew they would come up, but should he defend his actions or condemn them?

In the meantime he listened very carefully to everyone — listened for inflections in their voices. He had to: it wasn’t what they said but what they didn’t. He had sensitive antennae, he would know if anyone suspected him, but he would have to know it quickly.

That was the hardest part to bear. There was no one he could tell. No one to confide in.

No one at all.

It was important to avoid patterns. The police often worked on a modus-operandi basis. Once they pieced together a pattern in his activities they might be able to set traps for him. There had to be no commonalities from one act to the next: no regular time intervals, no regular time-of-day, no pattern of area concentration.

Thinking back he realized he had begun to create a kind of geographical pattern. He had started on the upper West Side in Riverside Park. The second killing had been in Central Park near Fifth Avenue. Both within walking distance of his apartment. Then he had moved down into the truck district on the border between Chelsea and the West Village. After that the East Village. It was beginning to make a circle; would they anticipate his next killing on the upper East Side? Aside from Times Square it was the only mid-Manhattan area he had not yet hit.

Avoid it, then. Backtrack this time. The West Village.

Hudson, Greenwich, Horatio, West Twelfth, down Bank Street. He carried a paper bag in which he had a carton of milk and a loaf of bread: a man carrying a package looked less suspicious.

It was just past two o’clock in the morning when he came up Seventh Avenue and entered the subway at Twelfth Street. Dropped his token in the slot, pushed through the turnstile and went down the stairs to the platform.

The smell was foul. The station was empty at this hour; his feet were sore and he stood wearily with his shoulder tipped against the clock pillar, waiting for the express.

He looked a good mark and he expected to be accosted but no one else entered the station. The train roared into the tunnel and he stepped aboard and took a seat by the door. An ancient wino slept on the opposite seat; two burly blacks with lunch pails sat at the end of the car.

The train crash-crashed through the Eighteenth Street local station without stopping. A Transit Patrolman walked through the car and stopped to shake the wino awake and give him a lecture; Paul couldn’t hear the words. The cop got the wino on his feet and prodded him ahead through the door at the car-end vestibule. When it opened, sound rushed in, and a cold wind. The door slid partway shut and lodged there. One of the black workmen got up and pushed it closed.

At Penn Station the workmen got off and Paul was alone in the car. The line’s green traffic lights whipped past the filthy windows. He began to read the advertising placards above them.

The train screeched into the lights of the Times Square station and threw Paul around on the seat when it braked to a sharp halt. Two tough kids entered the car and sat down facing Paul. Hubcap collectors, he thought drily. They gave him insolent looks and one of them took out a pocket knife, opened it and began to clean his fingernails.

You could tell they were scum by looking at them. How many old women had they mugged? How many tenement shops had they knocked over?

The earsplitting racket of the train would cover the sound of the shots. He could leave them dead in the car and they might not be found until the train got somewhere in the Bronx.

No. Too many risks. At least three people had seen him in this car — the patrolman and the two workmen. They might remember. And suppose someone at Seventy-second Street boarded the car while Paul was stepping out of it? A subway was a trap; too easy to be cornered.

If they accosted him he would take the risk. Otherwise he would let them go. So it’s up to you two. He watched them narrowly.

They didn’t pay him much attention. They both looked sleepy — strung out on heroin? In any event they didn’t stir until the train scraped into the station. They were on their feet ahead of Paul and he followed them across the platform and up the stairs. Maybe they would stop and jump him here.

They didn’t. Out through the turnstiles, through the back door, across the traffic island and the pedestrian crossing to the corner of Seventy-first and Amsterdam. The boys walked south across the street and down the avenue sidewalk and Paul let them go; the precinct station was just around the corner down there and anyhow it was too close to his apartment. He wondered if they could realize how lucky they were.