Death Wish

3

He followed the signs to Emergency and found Jack sitting tense with one shoulder raised, twisting his knuckles. Jack looked up without recognition.

“I’m sorry. My cab got hung up in traffic. You must have been here quite a while already.” He felt he had to apologize to someone.

Jack said, “You may as well sit down. They won’t let us in there.”

People on the hard wall-benches sat holding minor wounds and invisible illnesses. The room had a smell and a sound; the sound was a muted chorus of agony but it was the smell that Paul couldn’t stand. Hospital staff in dirty white clothes kept hurrying in and out. An empty ambulance pulled away from the open ramp. There must have been twenty people in the room, most of them sitting, a few rushing in and out, and except for one woman who sat blindly holding a little boy’s hand, none of them seemed to pay any attention to one another. Pain was private, not for sharing.

A cop sat on the bench beside Jack. Paul sat down on the other side of him. Jack said, “The officer’s kind enough to stay and see if he can help. This is my father-in-law.”

The cop extended a hand. He had a tough black face. “Joe Charles.”

“Paul Benjamin. Can you tell me — what’s happened?”

“I was telling Mr. Tobey here. We didn’t want to question Mrs. Tobey too much, she’s pretty shaken up.”

“What about my wife?” He said it quietly; he wanted to scream it. But you talked in muffled tones in a room full of strangers in anguish.

A man sat holding an injured arm against his belly, bleeding onto his lap. Paul wrenched his eyes off him.

The cop was saying, “We don’t know. She was still alive when they took her out of the ambulance.”

She was still alive — the implications of the cop’s choice of words set the pulsebeat drumming in Paul’s temples.

A young man in white came into the room in company with a nurse. The young man beckoned to the woman with the small boy. The woman took the boy by the hand and followed the intern and the nurse out of the room. The man with the injured arm watched them until they were gone. Blood kept soaking into his trousers. After a moment the cop said, “Excuse me,” and got up to walk over to the man, dragging a handkerchief out of his pocket.

Paul stared at his son-in-law: Jack’s face was gray. He didn’t seem compelled to talk so Paul prompted him. “What did he say?”

“Not much.” Too stunned to be drawn out? Paul tried again:

“Did you talk to Carol?”

“Yes. She didn’t say much that made sense. She seems to be in shock.”

“And — Esther?”

Jack shook his head. “Look, it’s very bad.”

“For God’s sake tell me.”

“They beat them both up.”

“Who? Why?” He leaned forward and gripped Jack’s wrist. “You’re a lawyer. Think like one. Testify like a witness, can’t you? Tell me.”

Jack shook his head as if to clear it. “Pop, I just don’t know. Two men, maybe more. Somehow they got into your apartment. I don’t know if they broke in or if Mom or Carol let them in. I don’t know what they wanted there. I don’t know what they did or why, except that they — attacked — them both. Oh, not rape, I don’t mean rape. That wasn’t it. They just — beat them up.”

“With their hands?”

“I guess so. There was no blood that I could see. I don’t think they could have used knives or anything, there would have been blood, wouldn’t there?”

“Who called the police? You?”

“No. Carol called the police. Then the police called me.”

“When did it happen?”

“I don’t know.” Jack looked at his watch and shot his cuff absently. “Couple of hours ago now, I guess.”

Paul tightened his grip on Jack’s wrist. “What about Esther? What did he mean, still alive?”

Jack’s chin dropped; he stared at his shoes. “Pop, they... they must have twisted her neck as if she were a rag doll.”

A nurse came in and touched the cop on the arm. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to stop the man bleeding.”

“It’s not arterial, officer. And it’s better to let him bleed a little than to put an unsterilized handkerchief on the wound.”

“Miss, I’ve seen enough cases of shock from loss of blood. Now I know you people are swamped. I’m only trying to help out.”

“Thank you, then. That’ll be all.” The nurse took the injured man by the arm and led him away. The man looked over his shoulder at the cop but never changed expression.

The cop came back to the bench. Jack said, “What happened to him?”

“He was in a bar. Somebody broke a bottle in half and carved his arm. No particular reason — he didn’t even know the man. These hot summer days people go a little crazy. But I guess you know enough about that.” The cop seemed to feel an obligation to apologize for everything that had happened in the world. Paul understood how he felt. It was as if whatever happened was your fault and you ought to try and make amends.

Paul said, “Can you tell me anything about this?”

The cop said, “I don’t know too much about it myself. Later on you could call the precinct. You want the number?”

“Please.” Paul took out his pen and found a scrap of paper in his pocket — the American Express receipt from lunch. He wrote on the back of it as the cop dictated:

“Twentieth Precinct. Seven-nine-nine, four one hundred. The station house is right around the corner from your building, I don’t know if you’ve noticed it. One-fifty West Sixty-eighth, that short little block between Broadway and Amsterdam.”

“Who should I ask for?”

“I don’t know who’ll be in charge of your case. Probably one of the Detective Lieutenants.”

“Who’s the head man there?”

The cop smiled very slightly. “Captain DeShields. But he’d only refer you down to whoever’s in charge of the case.”

“Do you mind telling me whatever you do know?”

“It’s not much. I wasn’t the first one to get there. It looks like some men got into the building without the doorman seeing them. Maybe they were junkies, they usually are. Looking for something to steal.”

“How did they get into our apartment?”

“Afraid I don’t know. If the door wasn’t double-locked they could’ve slipped the lock with a plastic card. Or maybe they just knocked and your wife let them in. Burglars often do that — knock to find out if anybody’s home. If nobody answers the door they break in. Otherwise most of them make up some lame excuse about being on the wrong floor, and go away.”

“But these didn’t go away.”

“No sir, I guess not.” The cop’s delivery was impersonal, as if he were testifying in court, but you could feel his compassion.

Paul said, “They got away,” not a question.

“Yes sir. We still had patrolmen searching the building when I left, but I don’t think they’ll find anyone. It’s possible somebody saw them in the building or on your floor. Maybe somebody rode with them in the elevator. There’ll be detectives over there, they’ll be asking everybody in the building if they saw anyone. It’s possible they might get descriptions. Anyhow I imagine your daughter will be able to describe them as soon as she’s feeling a little better.”

Paul shook his head. “They’re never found, these animals. Are they?”

“Sometimes we catch them.”

Paul’s glance flicked belligerently toward the doorway to the corridor. For God’s sake, when were they going to tell him something? He was beginning to fill up with undirected anger but he wasn’t ready to think about revenge yet.

The cop said lamely, “They’re doing everything they can.” It wasn’t clear whether he meant the detectives or the doctors.

There was a loud groan. It could have been any one of a dozen people in the room. Paul wanted to bolt to his feet and force his way through the door; but he wouldn’t know where to turn once he got past it. And someone would throw him out.

The rancid stink was maddening. After a while — he wasn’t reckoning time — the cop got to his feet clumsily, rattling the heavy accoutrements that hung like sinkers from his uniform belt. The thick handle of the revolver moved to Paul’s eye level.

The cop said, “Look, I shouldn’t have stayed this long. I’ve got to get back to my partner. But if there’s anything I can do, just call the station house and ask for me, Joe Charles is my name again. I wish I could’ve been more help.”

Paul looked up past the revolver at the cop’s hard young face. Jack reached up to shake the cop’s hand: “You’ve been damned kind.”

They sat endlessly waiting for Authority to come and speak. Jack offered him a cigarette, forgetfully; Paul, who had never smoked, shook his head. Jack lit up the new cigarette from the glowing stub of the old one. Paul glanced up at the No Smoking sign but didn’t say anything.

On the opposite bench a woman sat in evident pain but she kept stolidly knitting at something yellow: a man’s sock? A child’s sweater? Her face was taut and pale. Whatever her malaise she managed to clothe it in dignified resistance to fate. Paul felt like a voyeur; he looked away.

Jack muttered, “They may have been kids you know. Just kids.”

“What makes you say that?”

“We get them every day at Legal Aid. They’re out of their heads, that’s all. They’ll swallow ten of everything in the medicine cabinet and shoot up whatever they can lay their hands on.”

“You think these were hopped up?”

“Well, that’s an obsolescent phrase, Pop, it doesn’t exactly apply any more. Maybe they were tripping on speed or maybe they were junkies overdue for a fix. Either drugs they’d taken or drugs they couldn’t get — it works both ways.”

“What’s the point of speculating?” Paul said bleakly.

“Well, it’s the only thing I can think of that might explain this. I mean there’s no rational motive for a thing like this.”

“We always have to make sense out of things, don’t we.”

“Something happens like this, you have to know why it happened, don’t you?”

“What I’d like to know,” Paul answered viciously, “is why it couldn’t have been prevented from happening.”

“How?”

“Christ, I don’t know. There ought to be some way to get these animals off the streets before they can have a chance to do things like this. With all the technology we’ve developed you’d think there’d be some way to test them psychologically. Weed out the dangerous ones and treat them.”

“A couple of hundred thousand addicts in the streets, Pop — who can afford to treat every one of them as long as we go on spending seventy percent of the budget beefing up weapons to overkill the rest of the world?”

You sat in a dismal emergency waiting room and talked tired generalities. It always came around to that. But neither of them had any real heart for it and they lapsed quickly into fearful silence.

It was the kind of place in which you did not look at things; you avoided looking. Paul’s eyes flicked from the door to his knotted hands and back again.

Jack got up and began striding back and forth, too vinegary to sit still. One or two people glanced at him. Interns and nurses came in, got people, took them away. An ambulance arrived with a stretcher case whom two attendants carried straight through into the corridor. Esther and Carol must have been brought in like that, he thought. Possibly the theory was that if you were able to navigate into the place on your own feet you were healthy enough to wait six hours. Paul felt his lip curl; he straightened his face when a nurse appeared but she had come for someone else.

Jack sat down with a grunt and lit a new cigarette. The floor around his feet was littered with crushed butts. “God. I can’t take this, Poor Carol — Jesus.” A quick sidelong glance at Paul: “And Mom. What a rotten—”

Paul put his elbows on his knees and held his head between his hands, feeling as if it weighed half a ton.

Jack said, “At least they could talk to us. Damn it, how much would it cost them to send someone out here for a minute and a half to tell us what’s going on?”

Paul stirred. “You’re sure they know we’re out here?”

“I talked to the doctor when we got here. He knows.”

“Well, I suppose he’s got a lot of emergencies back there.”

“He could send somebody.”

It was childish and Jack seemed to realize that; he subsided. Paul slumped back against the wall and watched smoke curl up from the cigarette. “What’s this doctor like?”

“Young. I suppose he’s a resident.”

“I wish we could have got Doctor Rosen.”

“They’re always out of town when you need them. The son of a bitch is probably playing golf in Putnam County.”

“In this heat?”

Jack waved his cigarette furiously; it was his only reply.

Paul had taken a long time to warm to his son-in-law; he still felt uncomfortable with him. Jack came from New Mexico, he regarded the city as a reformer’s personal challenge, he approached everything with humorless earnestness. What a strange way to think at a time like this. If ever there was a time to take things seriously... Perhaps it was because he needed an object for his rage and Jack was at hand.

Carol had sprung Jack on them: an elopement, the marriage a fait accompli. Esther had always set a lot of store by ceremony; her unhappiness had fueled Paul’s dislike for the young man. There had been no need for them to elope, no one had prohibited the marriage; but they had their own ideas — they claimed they’d run away to save Paul and Esther the expense of a big wedding; actually it was more likely that they simply thought it a romantic thing to do. They had been married by a Justice of the Peace without friends or family present. What was romantic about that?

Carol had gone on working as a secretary for the first three years to support them in a Dyckman Street walkup while Jack finished law school at Columbia. It had made things hard for Paul and Esther because there was no way to be sure how much help to give them. They had the pride of youthful independence and accepted things with graceless reluctance as if they were doing you a favor by accepting help from you. Perhaps they felt they were. But Paul had spent twenty-three years being unapologetically protective toward his only child and it wasn’t easy to understand her cheerful acceptance of that Dyckman Street squalor. The kind of place you couldn’t keep cockroaches out of. Fortunately when Jack had passed the Bar exams and got the job with Legal Aid they had moved down to the West Village to be nearer his office; the apartment was one of the old railroad flats but at least it was more cheerful.

Jack had the zeal of his generation. His dedications were more compassionate than pecuniary; he was never going to be wealthy but he would support Carol well enough; probably in time they’d buy a small house on Long Island and raise babies. In the end Paul had accepted it all, accepted Jack — because there was nothing else to do, because Carol seemed content, and because he began to realize it was lucky she hadn’t taken up with a long-haired radical or a freaked-out group of commune crazies. She had the temperament for it: she was bright, quick, pert, impatient, and she subscribed to a good deal of anti-Establishment sentiment. Probably she had tried various drugs in college during her two years of student activism; she had never volunteered a confession and Paul had never asked. She had a good mind but her weakness was a tendency to be sold by the last person who talked to her: sometimes she was too eager to be agreeable. Jack Tobey probably exercised exactly the kind of steadying influence she required. It would be silly to hold out for more than that.

Jack wore glasses with heavy black frames across his beaky nose; he was dark and shaggy and he dressed with vast indifference — most of the time you found him in the jacket he was wearing now, a hairy tweed the color of cigarette ashes. Scuffed brown shoes and a bland tie at half-mast with his shirt open at the collar. Paul had seen him in action in the courtroom and it had been one of the few times he recalled seeing the kid in a business suit; afterward Carol had explained that Jack made the concession to decorum only because he had got to know the judges and their habit of exercising their prejudicial sarcasms on unkempt young defense attorneys.

...A plump young man in white appeared at the door and it made Jack stiffen with evident recognition. The doctor located him and came forward. “Your wife will be all right.” He was talking to Jack.

Paul stood up slowly and Jack said, “How’s my mother-in-law, Doctor?” in a voice that presupposed the answer.

Paul cleared his throat. “May I see her?”

The doctor’s head skewed around. “You’re Mr. Benjamin? Sorry, I didn’t know.” It was an apology without contrition. The doctor seemed jaded; his voice was rusty, tired beyond any expression of emotion. He seemed to need to ration his feelings.

“I don’t—” The doctor’s round young face tipped down. “Mrs. Benjamin is dead. I’m sorry.”