Enough Rope

by Lawrence Block

  Rooker was a young man with a thoughtful face. He said yes, he was in charge of the Waldek killing, and just to start things off, could he have name and address and some other details?

  Warren Cuttleton gave him all the details he wanted. Rooker wrote them all down with a ballpoint pen on a sheet of yellow foolscap. Then he looked up thoughtfully.

  “Well, that’s out of the way,” he said. “Now what have you got for us?”

  “Myself,” Mr. Cuttleton said. And when Sergeant Rooker frowned curiously he explained, “I did it. I killed that woman, that Margaret Waldek, I did it.”

  Sergeant Rooker and another policeman took him into a private room and asked him a great many questions. He explained everything exactly as he remembered it, from beginning to end. He told them the whole story, trying his best to avoid breaking down at the more horrible parts. He only broke down twice. He did not cry at those times, but his chest filled and his throat closed and he found it temporarily impossible to go on.

  Questions—

  “Where did you get the knife?”

  “A store. A five-and-ten.”

  “Where?”

  “On Columbus Avenue.”

  “Remember the store?”

  He remembered the counter, a salesman, remembered paying for the knife and carrying it away. He did not remember which store it had been.

  “Why did you do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why the Waldek woman?”

  “She just . . . came along.”

  “Why did you attack her?”

  “I wanted to. Something . . . came over me. Some need, I didn’t understand it then, I don’t understand it now. Compulsion. I just had to do it!”

  “Why kill her?”

  “It happened that way. I killed her, the knife, up, down. That was why I bought the knife. To kill her.”

  “You planned it?”

  “Just . . . hazily.”

  “Where’s the knife?”

  “Gone. Away. Down a sewer.”

  “What sewer?”

  “I don’t remember. Somewhere.”

  “You got blood on your clothes. You must have, she bled like a flood. Your clothes at home?”

  “I got rid of them.”

  “Where? Down a sewer?”

  “Look, Ray, you don’t third-degree a guy when he’s trying to confess something.”

  “I’m sorry. Cuttleton, are the clothes around your building?”

  He had vague memories, something about burning. “An incinerator,” he said.

  “The incinerator in your building?”

  “No. Some other building, there isn’t any incinerator where I live. I went home and changed, I remember it, and I bundled up the clothes and ran into another building and put everything in an incinerator and ran back to my room. I washed. There was blood under my fingernails, I remember it.”

  They had him take off his shirt. They looked at his arms and his chest and his face and his neck.

  “No scratches,” Sergeant Rooker said. “Not a mark, and she had stuff under her nails, from scratching.”

  “Ray, she could have scratched herself.”

  “Mmmm. Or he mends quick. Come on, Cuttleton.”

  They went to a room, fingerprinted him, took his picture, and booked him on suspicion of murder. Sergeant Rooker told him that he could call a lawyer if he wanted one. He did not know any lawyers. There had been a lawyer who had notarized a paper for him once, long ago, but he did not remember the man’s name.

  They took him to a cell. He went inside, and they closed the door and locked it. He sat down on a stool and smoked a cigarette. His hands did not shake now for the first time in almost twenty-seven hours.

  Four hours later Sergeant Rooker and the other policeman came into his cell. Rooker said, “You didn’t kill that woman, Mr. Cuttleton. Now why did you tell us you did?”

  He stared at them.

  “First, you had an alibi and you didn’t mention it. You went to a double feature at Loew’s Eighty-third, the cashier recognized you from a picture and remembered you bought a ticket at nine-thirty. An usher also recognized you and remembers you tripped on your way to the men’s room and he had to give you a hand, and that was after midnight. You went straight to your room, one of the women lives downstairs remembers that. The fellow down the hall from you swears you were in your room by one and never left it and the lights were out fifteen minutes after you got there. Now why in the name of heaven did you tell us you killed that woman?”

  This was incredible. He did not remember any movies. He did not remember buying a ticket, or tripping on the way to the men’s room. Nothing like that. He remembered only the lurking and the footsteps and the attack, the knife and the screams, the knife down a sewer and the clothes in some incinerator and washing away the blood.

  “More. We got what must be the killer. A man named Alex Kanster, convicted on two counts of attempted assault. We picked him up on a routine check and found a bloody knife under his pillow and his face torn and scratched, and I’ll give three-to-one he’s confessed by now, and he killed the Waldek woman and you didn’t, so why the confession? Why give us trouble? Why lie?”

  “I don’t lie,” Mr. Cuttleton said.

  Rooker opened his mouth and closed it. The other policeman said, “Ray, I’ve got an idea. Get someone who knows how to administer a polygraph thing.”

  He was very confused. They led him to another room and strapped him to an odd machine with a graph, and they asked him questions. What was his name? How old was he? Where did he work? Did he kill the Waldek woman? How much was four and four? Where did he buy the knife? What was his middle name? Where did he put his clothes?

  “Nothing,” the other policeman said. “No reaction. See? He believes it, Ray.”

  “Maybe he just doesn’t react to this. It doesn’t work on everybody.”

  “So ask him to lie.”

  “Mr. Cuttleton,” Sergeant Rooker said, “I’m going to ask you how much four and three is. I want you to answer six. Just answer six.”

  “But it’s seven.”

  “Say six anyway, Mr. Cuttleton.”

  “Oh.”

  “How much is four and three?”

  “Six.”

  He reacted, and heavily. “What it is,” the other cop explained, “is he believes this, Ray. He didn’t mean to make trouble, he believes it, true or not. You know what an imagination does, how witnesses swear to lies because they remember things wrong. He read the story and he believed it all from the start.”

  They talked to him for a long time, Rooker and the other policeman, explaining every last bit of it. They told him he felt guilty, he had some repression deep down in his sad soul, and this made him believe that he had killed Mrs. Waldek when, in fact, he had not. For a long time he thought that they were crazy, but in time they proved to him that it was quite impossible for him to have done what he said he had done. It could not have happened that way, and they proved it, and there was no argument he could advance to tear down the proof they offered him. He had to believe it.

  Well!

  He believed them, he knew they were right and he—his memory—was wrong. This did not change the fact that he remembered the killing. Every detail was still quite clear in his mind. This meant, obviously, that he was insane.

  “Right about now,” Sergeant Rooker said, perceptively, “you probably think you’re crazy. Don’t worry about it, Mr. Cuttleton. This confession urge isn’t as uncommon as you might think. Every publicized killing brings us a dozen confessions, with some of them dead sure they really did it. You have the urge to kill locked up inside somewhere, you feel guilty about it, so you confess to what you maybe wanted to do deep in your mind but would never really do. We get this all the time. Not many of them are as sure of it as you, as clear on everything. The lie detector is what got to me. But don’t worry about being crazy, it’s nothing you can’t control. Just don’t sweat it.”

  “Psy
chological,” the other policeman said.

  “You’ll probably have this bit again,” Rooker went on. “Don’t let it get to you. Just ride it out and remember you couldn’t possibly kill anybody and you’ll get through all right. But no more confessions. Okay?”

  For a time he felt like a stupid child. Then he felt relieved, tremendously relieved. There would be no electrified chair. There would be no perpetual burden of guilt.

  That night he slept. No dreams.

  That was March. Four months later, in July, it happened again. He awoke, he went downstairs, he walked to the corner, he bought the Daily Mirror, he sat down at a table with his sweet roll and his coffee, he opened the paper to page three, and he read about a schoolgirl, fourteen, who had walked home the night before in Astoria and who had not reached her home because some man had dragged her into an alley and had slashed her throat open with a straight razor. There was a grisly picture of the girl’s body, her throat cut from ear to ear.

  Memory, like a stroke of white lightning across a flat black sky. Memory, illuminating all.

  He remembered the razor in his hand, the girl struggling in his grasp. He remembered the soft feel of her frightened young flesh, the moans she made, the incredible supply of blood that poured forth from her wounded throat.

  The memory was so real that it was several moments before he remembered that his rush of awful memory was not a new phenomenon. He recalled that other memory, in March, and remembered it again. That had been false. This, obviously, was false as well.

  But it could not be false. He remembered it. Every detail, so clear, so crystal clear.

  He fought with himself, telling himself that Sergeant Rooker had told him to expect a repeat performance of this false-confession impulse. But logic can have little effect upon the certain mind. If one holds a rose in one’s hand, and feels that rose, and smells the sweetness of it, and is hurt by the prick of its thorns, all the rational thought in creation will not serve to sway one’s conviction that this rose is a reality. And a rose in memory is as unshakable as a rose in hand.

  Warren Cuttleton went to work that day. It did him no good, and did his employers no good either, since he could not begin to concentrate on the papers on his desk. He could only think of the foul killing of Sandra Gitler. He knew that he could not possibly have killed the girl. He knew, too, that he had done so.

  An office girl asked him if he was feeling well, he looked all concerned and unhappy and everything. A partner in the firm asked him if he had had a physical checkup recently. At five o’clock he went home. He had to fight with himself to stay away from the police station, but he stayed away.

  The dreams were very vivid. He awoke again and again. Once he cried out. In the morning, when he gave up the attempt to sleep, his sheets were wet with his perspiration. It had soaked through to the mattress. He took a long shivering shower and dressed. He went downstairs, and he walked to the police station.

  Last time, he had confessed. They had proved him innocent. It seemed impossible that they could have been wrong, just as it seemed impossible that he could have killed Sandra Gitler, but perhaps Sergeant Rooker could lay the girl’s ghost for him. The confession, the proof of his own real innocence—then he could sleep at night once again.

  He did not stop to talk to the desk sergeant. He went directly upstairs and found Rooker, who blinked at him.

  “Warren Cuttleton,” Sergeant Rooker said. “A confession?”

  “I tried not to come. Yesterday, I remembered killing the girl in Queens. I know I did it, and I know I couldn’t have done it, but—”

  “You’re sure you did it.”

  “Yes.”

  Sergeant Rooker understood. He led Cuttleton to a room, not a cell, and told him to stay there for a moment. He came back a few moments later.

  “I called Queens Homicide,” he said. “Found out a few things about the murder, some things that didn’t get into the paper. Do you remember carving something into the girl’s belly?”

  He remembered. The razor, slicing through her bare flesh, carving something.

  “What did you carve, Mr. Cuttleton?”

  “I . . . I can’t remember, exactly.”

  “You carved I love you. Do you remember?”

  Yes, he remembered. Carving I love you, carving those three words into that tender flesh, proving that his horrid act was an act of love as well as an act of destruction. Oh, he remembered. It was clear in his mind, like a well-washed window.

  “Mr. Cuttleton. Mr. Cuttleton, that wasn’t what was carved in the girl. Mr. Cuttleton, the words were unprintable, the first word was unprintable, the second word was you. Not I love you, something else. That was why they kept it out of the papers, that and to keep off false confessions which is, believe me, a good idea. Your memory picked up on that the minute I said it, like the power of suggestion. It didn’t happen, just like you never touched that girl, but something got triggered in your head so you snapped it up and remembered it like you remembered everything you read in the paper, the same thing.”

  For several moments he sat looking at his fingernails while Sergeant Rooker sat looking at him. Then he said, slowly, “I knew all along I couldn’t have done it. But that didn’t help.”

  “I see.”

  “I had to prove it. You can’t remember something, every last bit of it, and then just tell yourself that you’re crazy. That it simply did not happen. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Well.”

  “I had dreams. Reliving the whole thing in my dreams, like last time. I knew I shouldn’t come here, that it’s wasting your time. There’s knowing and knowing, Sergeant.”

  “And you had to have it proved to you.”

  He nodded miserably. Sergeant Rooker told him it was nothing to sweat about, that it took some police time but that the police really had more time than some people thought, though they had less time than some other people thought, and that Mr. Cuttleton could come to him anytime he had something to confess.

  “Straight to me,” Sergeant Rooker said. “That makes it easier, because I understand you, what you go through, and some of the other boys who aren’t familiar might not understand.”

  He thanked Sergeant Rooker and shook hands with him. He walked out of the station, striding along like an ancient mariner who had just had an albatross removed from his shoulders. He slept that night, dreamlessly.

  It happened again in August. A woman strangled to death in her apartment on West Twenty-seventh Street, strangled with a piece of electrical wire. He remembered buying an extension cord the day before for just that purpose.

  This time he went to Rooker immediately. It was no problem at all. The police had caught the killer just minutes after the late editions of the morning papers had been locked up and printed. The janitor did it, the janitor of the woman’s building. They caught him and he confessed.

  On a clear afternoon that followed on the heels of a rainy morning in late September, Warren Cuttleton came home from the Bardell office and stopped at a Chinese laundry to pick up his shirts. He carried his shirts around the corner to a drugstore on Amsterdam Avenue and bought a tin of aspirin tablets. On the way back to his rooming house he passed—or started to pass—a small hardware store.

  Something happened.

  He walked into the store in robotish fashion, as though some alien had taken over control of his body, borrowing it for the time being. He waited patiently while the clerk finished selling a can of putty to a flat-nosed man. Then he bought an ice pick.

  He went back to his room. He unpacked his shirts—six of them, white, stiffly starched, each with the same conservative collar, each bought at the same small haberdashery—and he packed them away in his dresser. He took two of the aspirin tablets and put the tin in the top drawer of the dresser. He held the ice pick between his hands and rubbed his hands over it, feeling the smoothness of the wooden handle and stroking the cool steel of the blade. He touched the tip of his thumb with the point of the blade and
felt how deliciously sharp it was.

  He put the ice pick in his pocket. He sat down and smoked a cigarette, slowly, and then he went downstairs and walked over to Broadway. At Eighty-sixth Street he went downstairs into the IRT station, dropped a token, passed through the turnstile. He took a train uptown to Washington Heights. He left the train, walked to a small park. He stood in the park for fifteen minutes, waiting.

  He left the park. The air was chillier now and the sky was quite dark. He went to a restaurant, a small diner on Dyckman Avenue. He ordered the chopped sirloin, very well done, with french-fried potatoes and a cup of coffee. He enjoyed his meal very much.

  In the men’s room at the diner he took the ice pick from his pocket and caressed it once again. So very sharp, so very strong. He smiled at the ice pick and kissed the tip of it with his lips parted so as to avoid pricking himself. So very sharp, so very cool.

  He paid his check and tipped the counterman and left the diner. Night now, cold enough to freeze the edge of thought. He walked through lonely streets. He found an alleyway. He waited, silent and still.

  Time.

  His eyes stayed on the mouth of the alley. People passed—boys, girls, men, women. He did not move from his position. He was waiting. In time the right person would come. In time the streets would be clear except for that one person, and the time would be right, and it would happen. He would act. He would act fast.

  He heard high heels tapping in staccato rhythm, approaching him. He heard nothing else, no cars, no alien feet. Slowly, cautiously, he made his way toward the mouth of the alley. His eyes found the source of the tapping. A woman, a young woman, a pretty young woman with a curving body and a mass of jet-black hair and a raw red mouth. A pretty woman, his woman, the right woman, this one, yes, now!

  She moved within reach, her high-heeled shoes never altering the rhythm of their tapping. He moved in liquid perfection. One arm reached out, and a hand fastened upon her face and covered her raw red mouth. The other arm snaked around her waist and tugged at her. She was off-balance, she stumbled after him, she disappeared with him into the mouth of the alley.