Bannerman waited.
Suddenly, the precinct house seemed impossibly big and he inside it impossibly small. Impossibly small and very vulnerable. He waited a little longer and then shouted, “Everything okay?” But there was no answer. What had Steinwitz heard? Bannerman wished his partner had at least given him some idea before he had just gone off like that. It wasn’t like him. It wasn’t like him at all. Damn me for leaving the fucking gun downstairs, he thought.
He strained to listen. He strained so hard he imagined he could hear the clock near the front desk ticking. But that was two sets of doors, a flight of stairs and two corridors away. Maybe it was his watch. Bannerman lifted his arm and looked at the watch-face. It was a little before four a.m. He lifted it all the way to his ear and listened for a gentle ticking. There was no sound.
He turned around to the cage and watched Mellor’s body for signs of movement. Had he moved? Had Mellor turned around and watched him while he had been watching the door? He didn’t like to think that. He didn’t like to think of Mellor quietly turning around, quietly standing up and oh-so-quietly shuffling across the cage towards his back. His unprotected, unsuspecting back. Sure there were bars between the two of them but were bars enough? Maybe the prisoner could have reached through those bars and grabbed him ... maybe he could have ripped his—
He shook his head and scattered the black thoughts away like crumbs from the table. “Hey, Mellor!” He banged on the bars again. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty ... rise and shine. Come on!”
The body just lay there, didn’t move a muscle.
He was dead. That was it. The guy had up and died on them. Here they were, jumping at the slightest sound, and all because of some guy lying dead in the cage, stiffening up right now, probably. Maybe he should check on him.
Bannerman looked around for the keys and saw them hanging from the hook on the wall beneath a large, hand-drawn sign that said POKEY in big letters. He walked across and lifted the keys, feeling something slide in his stomach as he held their coolness in his hand. He jingled them and watched for some sign from Mellor. Nothing. He walked back to the bars and rattled the keys across them. Nothing.
He shuffled through the keys until he hit on the right one and then inserted it into the lock, turning it slowly.
“Hey, I ain’t sure you wanna be doing that, man,” said Gershwin from the door. “I ain’t sure you wanna be doing that a-tall.”He slammed the door behind him and strolled across the squad room. Bannerman watched him, suddenly aware of the dumb look he must have on his face.
“Where you been? Didn’t you hear me calling you?”
Gershwin frowned, raised his shoulders and splayed out his hands. “Hey, I’d heard you, man, I’d’ve answered. What’s up?”
Bannerman pulled the key from the lock and checked the cage-door again. Just to be safe. “I’ll tell you what’s up,” he said. “Marty heard something downstairs and—”
“Wasn’t anything.” .
“Wasn’t—”
“I just saw Marty, downstairs. He said to tell you it wasn’t anything.”
“What was it then? Must’ve been something.”
Gershwin answered with a shrug. “He didn’t say. The wind? Who knows, man? Nothing.”
“Where is he now?”
“Downstairs. He’s still downstairs.”
“What’s he doing?”
“He didn’t say.”
Bannerman rubbed his face with his hands. “God, I don’t know ... this whole thing is spooking me.”
Gershwin sat down at the desk that Steinwitz had been sitting at and pulled open the desk-drawer, propped his feet on it. Just like Steinwitz. He clasped his hands behind his head - again, just like Steinwitz - and nodded. “What whole thing is that, man?”
Bannerman watched him for several seconds and then smiled.
“What’s funny?”
Bannerman laughed.
Gershwin returned the smile. “What is it, man?”
“It’s you ... you guys.” Bannerman shook his head.
Gershwin joined in the nervous laughter, only his contribution didn’t seem to sound quite so nervous. “What?”
Bannerman felt the smile slip from his face and, as it slipped, he watched the smile on Gershwin’s face slip, too. Yeah, what? he thought. What the hell was so funny?
“Nothing,” he said. “Forget it.” He turned to the cage and felt Gershwin’s eyes watching him. He rattled the bars, though he knew there would be no response. Then he looked across at the squad-room door.
“You want another coffee?” Gershwin said.
It was like somebody had encased Bannerman’s back in ice. He wanted to ask how Gershwin had known he had already had a coffee; he wanted to ask why Gershwin had plopped down into exactly the same chair at exactly the same desk as Steinwitz; how he’d known which drawer to pull out; why he’d propped his feet up in just the same way as Steinwitz; why he’d clasped his hands behind his head, just like Steinwitz again. But then he didn’t want to ask those things. There was a large part of his head that said: No, let’s not play their game; let’s not show them we’re falling for it. And there was a small part of his head, a tiny, darkened part, where the sun never shone and where things - even the most ridiculous things - were simply accepted ... where questions were never asked. That part said, Don’t let him know you know.
Know what? said the big, rational part.
Just don’t let him know, came the answer.
Bannerman heard Gershwin stand up from his chair. “I said, you want another—”
“No!” Bannerman turned around quickly and, just for a second, the other man seemed to falter. “No,” Bannerman said, calmer now. “Thanks.”
“Is anything wrong?”
Bannerman winced inwardly at the suspicion in the question. It oozed suspicion. He’d blown it. He glanced back at the door, irrationally considering his chances of making it. Then he looked back and started to laugh. At first, it was forced but then it just seemed to flow naturally. The ease with which it flowed amazed him. Hysteria, he guessed. He laughed so loud and so hard that it hurt. He leaned back against a desk and folded his arms across his stomach. “Is anything wrong! Hell, is anything right’s more the question,” he said between laughs that came dangerously close to out-and-out sobs. “We’re holed up here,” he said, “the three of us, with some whacko who eats people for a hobby - “he pointed to the body in the cage (Who is it in there? that dark part of his head wondered) “- and the dude up and dies on us while he’s in custody.” He took a deep breath. “Now, how’s that gonna look in the morning? Huh?”
Gershwin watched him, his head tilted slightly to one side.
“I’ll tell you how it’s gonna look,” Bannerman said, standing up and walking towards the other man, hoping Gershwin wouldn’t be able to hear his heart thudding, “it’s going to look bad.” He laid emphasis on the last word like it was cement.
Gershwin continued to stare at him.
Bannerman turned around and started towards the door, mentally counting the steps, mentally humming, mentally praying, mentally waiting.
“Where are you going?”
“To tell Steinwitz we have a problem,” he said without stopping. “A fucking big problem.” He pulled open the door, holding his neck so tight that the muscles would ache for days. If he was lucky. He walked along the corridor to the stairs, forcing himself not to run, forcing himself not to turn around.
The door clicked shut behind him. There was no other sound. Walking down the stairs, he muttered to himself. He wasn’t sure what he was muttering, but he made sure the word “problem” cropped up in it several times, and the phrase “up and died on us”, too. He imagined that Gershwin was right behind him, could almost sense his breath on his exposed neck ... breath from his open mouth ... his wide open mouth.
He walked along the downstairs corridor as loudly as he could. Bannerman, man with a mission, man without fe
ar. Yeah! “Hey, Marty?” he yelled. “Marty, we got a problem. It’s a fucking big problem, mi amigo.” He kept walking. Through the downstairs doors. Towards the main desk. Still walking. “Marty,” he yelled again, “you listening to me? You hear we got a problem?”
There was no answer. Of course.
The precinct house doors loomed ahead of him.
He kept on walking.
“Yeah, the problem we got is—” He reached the doors, reached out. “It’s big, Marty. It’s—” His hand touched the handle, grasped it firmly, and turned.
The doors were locked.
“It’s one big fucking problem,” he said in a soft voice that somehow seemed very alone.
Bannerman looked down at the lock and saw there were no keys. He hadn’t expected any.
He turned around, half-expecting Gershwin to be standing watching him, a knife and fork in his hands, chanting “Chow time!” over and over. The place was empty.
He started to walk back the way he had come, mentally cursing the security of the station: barred windows, steel doors ... you name it. “Hey, Marty? You gone back upstairs?” he shouted. Then, his voice lower, “What the fuck is the lieutenant gonna say when we hand over a dead body, for crissakes?”
Halfway along the corridor he turned into the side office he and Steinwitz - or whoever Steinwitz was now - were in earlier. He was still muttering when he picked up the receiver. Still muttering when he jabbed the numbers. But he stopped muttering—
the phones are fine
—when he heard the silence from the earpiece. He had always thought that statements like the silence was deafening were ridiculous. But here it was, real, honest-to-God deafening silence. That explained what had been bothering him earlier: no incoming calls. No complaints about domestic fights; no robberies; no shootings or knifings. Just eatings, the dark part of his head observed.
He replaced the receiver as gently as he could and leaned on the desk-top with both hands. Then he saw the file on the desk, the file that Marty had been looking at while he ate his pizza. There were stains all over it. He leaned over and read upside down:
HOBBIES - music, golf, and cooking.
That was—
hey, that’s an idea.You like cooking - go compare some recipes
—his own file. His own personal file. Steinwitz had been reading his own personal fucking file! Bannerman reached out to pick up the file and throw it across the office but managed to stop himself. Instead, he pulled open the drawer of the desk he was sitting at. His gun wasn’t there. He checked to make sure it hadn’t slid to the back, but the drawer was completely empty.
He straightened up and considered his position. It didn’t take long. Locked doors, barred windows, dead telephones, no gun - all the other firearms were locked up in a metal cabinet that only the lieutenant had a key for.
Steinwitz was walking along the corridor when Bannerman stepped out of the office. “What you—” Steinwitz started in Gershwin’s Brooklyn drawl; then he cleared his throat and said, “What’re you doing down here?” The replacement nasal tone was Marty Steinwitz’s.
“Looking for you,” Bannerman said, all but placing his left hand on his hip and wiggling his right index finger like a fourth-grade school teacher. He hoped Steinwitz’s dialect-slip hadn’t been intentional - which would mean Steinwitz wanted him to comment on it - and he hoped that, if it were unintentional, Steinwitz wouldn’t think he had noticed it.
“Problem?”
Problem? Bannerman wanted to ask where Steinwitz had been, wanted to rub his nose in it. But—
don’t let him know you know
—he didn’t dare. He forced himself to walk up to Steinwitz, stand right in front of him, like he was going past, then he stopped. “I was looking for you.”
Steinwitz glanced at the office Bannerman had just left and returned his attention to his face. “I was taking a dump.”
Bannerman nodded. “Thank you for sharing that with me. Was it a good one?”
Steinwitz pulled a face and rubbed his stomach. “Think I might’ve eaten something disagreed with me.” (Was that the hint of a smile tugging at the edges of his mouth?) “What’s up?”
Bannerman slumped back against the wall and thrust his hands - his increasingly sweaty and shaky hands - deep into his trouser pockets. “Oh, nothing much. Nothing except I think maybe we’ve got a dead prisoner in the cage.”
Steinwitz narrowed his eyes and watched him. “Dead?”
He’s playing for time, Bannerman thought. He’s weighing up what kind of a threat I am to him. He’s wondering if he should stop the game right now. Does he know I know the phones are dead? Does he know I’ve tried the doors? Does he know I’ve seen that he was reading my personal file? Does he know I’ve been looking for my gun? He looked deep into Steinwitz’s eyes, searching for a sign, a sign that he was wrong, that he was being stupid and everything was a-okay. But though the eyes were Marty’s eyes - a conviction that came to him not without an element of surprise; after all, why would he study another man’s eyes, even over the many years he had known him? - then again they weren’t. They were the right colour, sure, but they were darker and without depth. Fish eyes, lacking in ... lacking in soul. He nodded. He knows, said the voice in his head. “Yeah, dead. Why don’t you go see?”
Steinwitz watched him, shuffled from one foot to the other.
“Gershwin’s up there,” Bannerman added.
Steinwitz smiled. “Better take a look then, I guess.”
“Why don’t you do that?” He stood up from the wall and started back to the main desk.
“You not coming up?”
Bannerman replied without turning around. “Yeah. First I’m gonna brew up some fresh coffee. Looks like it’s going to be a quiet night.”
“That’s the way I like it,” Steinwitz said softly behind him.
Bannerman nodded slowly as he walked towards the coffee-maker and, just for a second, he felt like giving up. He felt like turning around and telling Steinwitz, Okay, you win. But kill me first, okay? But he didn’t think that whatever it was that occupied his friend’s body now would observe such a display of generosity. Such weakness. He kept walking and felt a wave of relief when he heard the door at the end of the corridor behind him swing closed.
As he reached the desk he turned to look behind him. Steinwitz had gone. He leaned against the counter containing the coffee-maker, coffee and various mugs, and forced himself to think. What now? He looked up at the front doors, checking for signs of a key hanging somewhere next to them. Nothing. He looked across at the barred windows and, though he couldn’t see them, thought about all the empty warehouses in the streets beyond. No life anywhere.
He had to get out.
Suddenly, he jolted upright. Downstairs! He could get out from the basement. What had taken him so long? He switched on the hot water and then walked calmly but quickly across to the stairs leading down to the basement. Checking the corridor to the stairs leading up to the squad room, he placed his hand on the basement door, grimacing as he expected it to be locked.
The handle turned.
The door came open.
Another quick check to see that the corridor was clear and he slid inside and started down the stairs.
As he travelled down the air got fresher, cooler. He ran, now, taking steps two and three at a time. When he reached the bottom he stopped and looked back up the staircase, half-expecting Steinwitz or maybe Gershwin - or maybe even a bizarre hybrid of the two of them - to be thundering down the stairs wielding an axe, with Bernard Herrmann’s violins screeching in the background. But there was nothing.
He saw the spare key hanging beside the door. Bannerman bit into his bottom lip as he considered running back up the stairs to lock the door. Would he get halfway up and the door suddenly open, though?
Chow time!
He decided against it and turned to the corridor leading past the changing rooms to t
he back door. Halfway along he stopped and listened for sounds of those Psycho footsteps clumping down the stairs. But all was quiet.
He reached the back door, took the handle in his hand, turned the dead-lock and pulled. It opened.
“Where the hell you going?” Jimmy Mitulak said.
Bannerman stopped dead and stared.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Mitulak said.
“What are you doing here? You should be home.”
Mitulak frowned. “I forgot something. What are you, my mother?”
“What did you forget?” Bannerman said backing down the corridor.
“My bowling shoes. We got a match tomorrow ... actually, today now. Look, what the hell’s the matter?”
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 52
