A Killer's Essence

by Dave Zeltserman

  “They’d think I was insane if that happened,” he said hopelessly.

  “Yeah, well, we’ll see.”

  “You realize this isn’t going to help you.”

  I didn’t answer him. The idea of going to the station scared the hell out of him, that much was obvious, and I couldn’t help feeling lousy about it. It made me feel almost as if I were pulling wings off a fly. We walked in silence.

  When we approached my car I tried making small talk, asking him if he was following the Yankees-Sox series. As if to answer me, a gurgling noise came out of him. He had stopped dead in his tracks, his face drained of color and his mouth screwed open as if he were trying to scream. My first thought was that he was having a heart attack, but then I realized his eyes were transfixed on a man walking in front of us. What I thought was a heart attack was raw terror. My heart started racing. The man up ahead didn’t have on a Mets sweatshirt; he was dressed more like a lawyer, wearing a bluish-gray pinstriped suit, but there was a reason why Lynch reacted so violently at the sight of him. I reached inside my jacket for my holstered service revolver and took hold of it.

  “Is that who you saw yesterday?” I asked in a whisper.

  Lynch shook his head.

  “What then?”

  “Nothing,” he said breathlessly.

  I looked from Lynch to the man walking down the street and back to Lynch. There was no question that the man terrified him.

  “What is it about him? And don’t tell me nothing!”

  The man had turned the corner and was out of sight. I let my hand slip off my service revolver. Lynch wasn’t saying anything, and wasn’t going to say anything. Whatever it was that terrified him was locked up tight. I reminded myself that he was an even crazier sonofabitch than I was so far giving him credit for. Christ, I almost chased a man down in the street because of the delusions of an obviously disturbed mind. I wondered briefly how this guy functioned in the world.

  Lynch had been holding his breath and finally let it out so that he was now breathing raggedly. When he could he told me he had never seen the person before, and for me not to mind him.

  I stood there wondering what I was doing. Lynch was drenched in sweat and his eyes and mouth twitched the way a meth head’s would. I almost took him back to his apartment. How could I trust anything coming from him? But as I said before he was all I had. If I didn’t get lucky with him I knew my next break in the case wouldn’t come until another body was found. And I knew there would be another body. There was too much bloodlust with the last killing.

  I asked Lynch if he needed to see a doctor. He told me he didn’t. I recited the warning signs of a heart attack and asked if he had any of them. Again, he told me he didn’t. Some color had come back to his face and he was breathing more normally.

  Neither of us said a word as I drove to the precinct. Once we got there, I led him through the station house and to an interrogation room on the second floor, and the whole way Lynch kept his eyes shielded so he wouldn’t have to look at anyone. I sat him down and brought him first a black coffee and a couple of doughnuts, then a stack of mug shot books. He mumbled out a thanks for the coffee and with resigned futility picked up the first of the mug shot books. I left him alone, stood on the other side of a one-way glass partition, and watched as he listlessly studied the photos in the book. If anything his expression had become more grim. Any hope of one of those photos clicking something inside him was a pipe dream at best.

  Phillips had left for the day. He wanted to be updated on any new developments, so I called him at home and told him I found our witness and that we had a description of what the perp was wearing that night. I also let him know that our witness at that moment was at the precinct looking through mug shot books. I left out the part about Zachary Lynch’s mental stability, or his claim about seeing hallucinations. Phillips remained quiet while I filled him in. When I was done he commented about how I had to start cutting back on my overtime hours, the implication being that I needed to start working harder during my shift. Not a word about Rich Grissini or how his operation had gone. I thanked him for his encouragement and got off the phone. After that I found Joe Ramirez and filled him in, giving him the whole story, hallucinations and all. He raised a skeptical eyebrow and asked me what I thought.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is this an act or is he genuine?”

  “I’m pretty sure he’s genuine. If he wanted to get out of being a witness there’d be easier ways than faking these hallucinations. Although, who knows, maybe this is all tied to a disability claim from the accident he says he had years ago.”

  Joe thought that over. “That would be a kick in the pants, wouldn’t it? If he’d been faking all these years and can’t come clean now because of a claim he’s still trying to milk. What do you think, you saw his performance out on the street, how good was it?”

  “Pretty damn good. But then again, kind of a funny coincidence for him to go nearly catatonic over the first person we come across.”

  Joe scowled considering this. Rubbing a thick hand across his eyes, he let loose with a weary sigh and told me that I needed to look into Lynch’s background. “Find out if he’s even on disability,” he said. “Check into this so-called accident. We need to know if he’s legit how much of what he’s telling us we can trust. If he’s really seeing these hallucinations, maybe they’re exaggerations of what he’s really seeing and we can still get something useful out of him.”

  “Yeah, I bet that’s all it is. Exaggerations. And I’ve got dark holes instead of eyes.”

  Joe gave me a deadpan stare.

  “You said it, not me.” He pushed his chair away from his desk and stood up, straightening his back slowly and grimacing with each vertebra that cracked. “I’ll go talk to this guy and see what I think.”

  I followed Ramirez out of his office. While I walked with him I asked whether any more bodies had turned up with missing fingers and perforations from .40 caliber slugs.

  “Not yet,” he said. “But give it time.”

  He disappeared into the interrogation room. I watched through the glass partition as he introduced himself to Lynch. I couldn’t help feeling insulted by the way Lynch was able to look at Joe straight on, and at how comfortable he seemed with him. I watched them talk for a few minutes and then headed back to my desk.

  Chapter 7

  Thursday’s one of the nights when I get to call my kids. After our divorce, Cheryl remarried and moved a hundred and ninety miles away to Cumberland, Rhode Island. My lawyer told me I had little chance of joint custody with the hours I worked and the nature of my job, so I didn’t fight her on moving our kids out of state, and because of that, she pretty much agreed to what I asked in return. Still, it wasn’t as amiable as it might sound. There were a lot of hard feelings between of us—she had her long laundry list of issues, and me, I felt blindsided by the divorce. I guess I shouldn’t have. I knew there were problems. The last year or so together I could feel the frost building up, but I was just too damn tired from the job to figure out what was eating at her, and according to Cheryl that was the final straw, the one thing she couldn’t forgive me for. I think she was full of shit about that part of it. If she were completely honest about it she’d admit that her biggest issue with me was that she ended up a stay-at-home mom instead of a big-time Hollywood actress like one of her cousins. She always felt as if there were bigger things in store for her and that it was my fault that none of those bigger things ever happened.

  I called her at home and her new husband answered, which annoyed me as it always did. They had caller ID and there was no reason why Cheryl couldn’t have picked up, but as usual she didn’t, and I was stuck trading small talk with the new hubby until he called Cheryl to the phone. When she got on I could feel the frost before she even breathed a word.

  “It’s past nine o’clock,” she said, her voice mostly flat but with that unmistakable edge she had when she was aching for a fight. “Your vis
itation order requires you to call by eight.”

  “I’ve been on the job. This is the first break I’ve had in hours.”

  “If it was important enough to you you would’ve found the time.”

  I found myself tensing. The same tired old argument. I took a deep breath and released it slowly, trying to keep from taking the bait.

  “Cheryl, not tonight, okay? It’s been a long day. How about letting me talk to my kids?”

  “Emma’s already in bed. I’m not waking her.” She hesitated for a long moment before telling me she’d see whether Stevie wanted to talk to me. After a few minutes my son came on. His voice sounded hurt as he mumbled out a hello.

  “I guess you’re mad at me, huh?” I said. “Here I am over an hour late calling you. I feel bad about it but this is the first chance I’ve had all night to call.”

  “Why, what have you been doing?”

  “Looking for someone who did a pretty bad thing.”

  “I’m not a kid. You don’t have to talk to me like I’m a kid!”

  He was only eleven. He was still a kid as far as I was concerned, but I guess eleven today isn’t the same as when I was his age.

  “Okay, fair enough. The guy I was out looking for murdered someone.”

  “Did you find him?”

  “Not yet. I found a witness, but I don’t think he’s going to be able to help me. He doesn’t see things the way you and I do. He sees things differently.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I took a sip of my coffee and made a face at the bitterness of it. “I think he sees stuff distorted, kind of as if they’re nightmares. Probably the way your Red Sox are seeing things right now after the beating they took last night.”

  “It was a close game last night. Just wait. They’ll bounce back when they come home to Boston.”

  “Sure they will,” I said. “Everyone here’s talking sweep.”

  “Yankees suck,” Stevie said.

  “Hey, fresh mouth for an eleven-year-old.”

  “Well, they do,” my son argued stubbornly.

  “Sweep,” I said.

  “Dad, I don’t want to go to New York for Thanksgiving.”

  “Why don’t you want to come?”

  “Because.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  He hemmed and hawed for a while, then told me it was because he wanted to hang around with his friends.

  “Stevie, I’ve put in to take time off, and I’ve got things planned for us. Knicks tickets, Radio City Music Hall—”

  “I don’t like your girlfriend. That’s the reason, okay? I don’t want to be there with her.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and pushed a hand through my hair. I wasn’t up to this either. I couldn’t have just one easy conversation with my kid.

  “There’s nothing wrong with her—”

  He snorted, interrupting me. “Yeah, right. Bambi. Mom says that’s a stripper’s name.”

  “Your mom shouldn’t be saying stuff like that, and you and Emma are going to come here for Thanksgiving.”

  I thought I heard him mutter, “We’ll see,” but while I was still trying to decipher what it was he had said he told me he had to go and hung up before I had a chance to ask him to tell Emma that I loved her. I thought about calling back, but I didn’t. I was afraid of what I might end up saying to Cheryl and I didn’t know what to say to Stevie. Instead I sat and thought about the distance that had developed between my kids and me. It was there with Emma and it was getting worse with my son. Even him becoming a Red Sox fan was part of it. He was five when I took him to his first Yankees game and by the time he was eight he was a diehard fan. His favorite player was Derek Jeter, and like Jeter he wanted to play shortstop and was always trying to copy the way his hero played. And then there was his Yankees jersey: number two, Jeter’s number. That used to be his most prized possession. After Cheryl divorced me he threw his jersey away, and all of a sudden he hated the Yankees and loved the Red Sox. I guess in his mind it was a way of striking back at me. The logic of a nine-year-old. For the last year he’d argue with me until he was nearly hoarse that Jeter stunk and Nomar Garciaparra was the best shortstop in baseball. I tried to handle it good-naturedly and with humor, especially after the Red Sox traded Garciaparra late this season, and that just frustrated him all the more. I was at a loss as to how to deal with his obvious resentment toward me.

  I sensed someone standing close by and saw Joe Ramirez frowning at me.

  “Deep in thought?” he asked.

  “Yeah, you could say so.”

  He handed me a folder. Inside was a police report from six years ago for a convenience store robbery up in Harlem where the cashier was killed and a bystander was shot in the chest. As I read the report more carefully I saw that the bystander was Zachary Lynch, and that he had been clinically dead for six minutes before being revived. The report didn’t mention anything about hallucinations afterward or any other lingering mental illness. The case was still open. Lynch had been unable to remember anything about the shooter and there were no other witnesses. Joe had written a name on the front of the folder.

  “That’s the neurologist who treated him at Mount Sinai,” Joe said, referring to the name he had written. “Lynch was a first-year med student at Columbia when he was shot. Since then he taught himself computer programming and works in his apartment doing contract jobs. He’s never been on disability. Another thing, his hallucinations are consistent. If we find the perp, he claims he’ll be able to identify him. We wouldn’t be able to use him in court, but at least we’d know we had the right guy.”

  “You believe him?”

  Joe shrugged. “About how reliable he’d be, I don’t know. That’s why you need to find out more about his condition. But yeah, I believe he thinks he sees hallucinations.”

  I tossed the folder onto my desk. “Good work, captain,” I said. “You got a lot out of the guy, but then again, he felt comfortable with you and was willing to open up. Me, I’ve got these dark holes for eyes.”

  Joe gave me a funny look. “You okay, Stan?”

  “It’s been a long day, that’s all.”

  “Why don’t you call it a day, then? Christ, you’ve pulled a double shift as it is. It’s not going to do any good having Lynch look through mug shot books or having him talk to a sketch artist. I’ll have a uniform run him back to his apartment. Why don’t you go home.”

  “Nope,” I said. “It was traumatic enough for him having me bring him here, God knows what one of our uncouth uniforms would do to the guy. I’ll take him back. Besides, it’s on the way to Brooklyn.”

  Joe told me to try to get some rest, that I looked like I needed it. I could’ve said the same to him—with the way his eyes looked he could’ve had soot rubbed underneath them—but I just wished him a quiet night and got up to retrieve Zachary Lynch. When I walked into the interrogation room, Lynch caught a peek at me and flinched the same as before. I couldn’t help feeling pissed off about it, especially after the way he had reacted earlier with Joe. Again, it had been a long day.

  “Put the book down,” I told him. “We’re done. I’m taking you home.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t help,” he said.

  I didn’t bother responding. Like before, he shielded his eyes while I led him through the station. Neither of us said a word to each other until we were a few blocks from his apartment. When we were stopped at a red light I asked him what he saw when he looked at me.

  He showed a sad reluctant smile. “What difference does it make, detective?”

  “None,” I said. The hell with this. The hell with sitting with this guy any longer than I had to. I stuck a pair of flashing reds on my roof, then hit the accelerator and sped through the traffic light. A few tires squealed as cars braked to keep from hitting me. The hell with them also. After I let Lynch out in front of his apartment I drove over to St. Vincent’s to check on my partner. He was still in surgery. His wife, Mary, and th
eir three kids were holed up in the waiting room. Mary told me it could be several more hours before they knew anything and that I should go home and she’d call me later. She didn’t look like she was holding up too well and neither did her kids. I sat and waited with them. At twelve thirty a surgeon came out to tell us that Rich was in post-op and that the surgery had gone well. Something about his manner seemed off to me, like he was holding something back. Maybe he was just tired. Anyway, he was only allowing immediate family to go in to see Rich. I offered Mary to wait for them so I could drive them back to Queens, but she told me that wasn’t necessary, that she and the kids were going to be spending the night with a cousin of Rich’s who lived a few blocks from the hospital. I left then, and it was one o’clock before I was crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and heading back to my apartment in Flatbush.

  A note was taped on the outside of my door from Bambi reiterating that I should go fuck myself. I took it down and went inside. It was about what I was expecting, which was the reason I didn’t call her back during the day. I didn’t bother checking whether her clothes and other stuff were still in the apartment. I knew it would all be gone. I went to the fridge, took out a couple of Miller Lites, and brought them to the living room. I sat on the sofa, cracked one of the Millers open, and drank it slowly.

  It was funny. With Bambi gone it was as if she’d never been there. Almost as if I had never known her. It was a coin toss whether I’d see her again or whether this was simply a dramatic statement on her part, but at that moment I didn’t much care either way. I finished the first beer and started on the second. It was hard at that moment to believe that she had lived in my apartment the past nine months. Same was true with Cheryl and my two kids. Even though I had pictures of them scattered about, none of it seemed real. It was as if they were ghosts, really nothing more than whispers, and it was hard to believe that any of them had ever lived there. Same wasn’t true with my parents or Mike. I could feel their presence. It had been my parents’ apartment for more than forty years, and after Pop died I stayed to take care of Mom. When her mind started to go and we needed to move her to a nursing home where she could be better taken care of, I took over the apartment. It was under rent control and I could afford it, but that was only part of the reason. Even though Cheryl always complained about the place being too small and old-fashioned, and even though Bambi wanted us to move to Manhattan, I wasn’t going to give up the apartment. I felt a connection that was too important for me to give up.