Phyllis

by Howard Fast

  My respect for Comaday went up in that he had brought with him a policewoman who was also a registered nurse and who was able to take care of Phyllis and give her a sedative and make those few hours a little easier for her. The only small thing I could do was to make sure that no questions were directed at her. I convinced Comaday that there were no questions she could answer, and whatever questions he had were best directed at me.

  His own world was better ordered than mine and he accepted less easily than I did the fact that a brutal, senseless murder like this could be merely an object lesson and a warning. We sat in the living room and talked and Comaday kept coming back to the fact that it could have been a coincidence—a thief, a prowler. After all, it was a large city and no week went by when some woman alone was not attacked or even murdered.

  “Like this?” I said to Comaday. “Prowlers attack and murder a woman like this?”

  “It happens,” he said.

  “It happens,” I agreed, “but when it happens to Phyllis Goldmark’s mother and when it happens the night I’m on my way up here and when it happens the way it happened, coincidence has been pulled too thin. It didn’t happen that way, Comaday, and you know it.”

  “I don’t know a damned thing,” he said.

  We were alone in the room then—just Comaday, Fredericks, and myself—and I said to him, “Then maybe it’s time you knew something. Maybe it’s time you learned something. Maybe it’s time you learned what that goddamned home-made bomb of yours is worth! I was offered half a million dollars for it yesterday.”

  “The hell you were!” Comaday cried.

  “That’s peanuts,” I said. “The large offers are still to come.”

  “You should have told us,” Fredericks said. “You get nowhere keeping stuff like that to yourself, Clancy; you should have told us.”

  “The Commissioner here is tired of hearing my stories,” I said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Comaday snapped.

  “You told me to find Horton,” I said. “This didn’t change anything. Anyone can say to me, “There’s a million dollars in this for you, Clancy.’ It’s just talk and talk is cheap.”

  “Not anyone,” Fredericks said.

  I looked at him.

  “Not anyone, Clancy, only someone who knows about the bomb. I don’t want to begin to think that you keep things to yourself. Only trouble can come from keeping things to yourself.”

  Comaday looked at me strangely and asked quietly, “Are you going to find Horton, Clancy?”

  “I’ll find him,” I said.

  I went in to Phyllis after that. She had been given a sedative and she lay on her bed on the brightly colored quilt with a robe spread over her. The policewoman sat next to her. I bent over Phyllis and kissed her on the cheek. Then she clung to me.

  “Don’t leave me, Clancy,” she begged me.

  “I won’t leave you,” I said, “believe me, I won’t leave you, Phyllis. Not any more. But now we have to get in touch with someone—some relative of yours. Can you think of someone I should get in touch with?”

  She gave me the numbers and I called an aunt and also the cousin in Great Neck. I didn’t go into any explanations over the telephone except to say that Mrs. Goldmark had died suddenly, that I was a friend of Phyllis, and that arrangements would have to be made. I liked Golden better when he agreed to drive in immediately and take care of whatever had to be taken care of. The aunt said she would come to the apartment and stay with Phyllis tonight.

  Then I went back to the living room and asked Comaday to put a man on at the apartment for the rest of the night. He agreed to that. I also told him that I wanted five hundred dollars of expense money in cash. Comaday thought it was a good deal. His world might be coming to an end, but that alone was not sufficient reason to shell out five hundred dollars of expense money to a plainclothesman. However, I managed to convince him. I told Phyllis that I would see her later and then I rode downtown with Comaday to pick up the money.

  part eight VANPELT REVISITED

  COMMISSIONER COMADAY pushed the five hundred dollars across his desk toward me, his cold eyes contemplating me judiciously. I knew what the action did to him—five hundred dollars was probably more money than he had ever before given to a cop on the job. He was probably thinking that it undermined the basic concepts of his Department and instituted a new era of senseless waste. His eyes followed me as I tucked it into my wallet, and he couldn’t help saying,

  “That’s a damn lot of money, Clancy. I don’t know what the hell you’re going to do with all that money.”

  “Whatever is left over, I’ll return.”

  “That much money is a temptation to a cop,” Comaday said, “to any cop.”

  “Look,” I told him, tiredly, “I brought one hundred fifty thousand dollars down here to you, didn’t I?”

  “That’s different.”

  “Sure, that was different,” I agreed. I got up to go. Comaday said,

  “Wait a minute, Clancy. What goes on with you? Are you in love with that girl?”

  “Does that also come under the call of duty?”

  “What the hell, Clancy, take the chip off your shoulder. Nothing’s under the call of duty. You’ve got no duties to me—I’ve got no duties to you. We’re just doing the best we can.”

  “That’s what I’m doing—the best I can,” I agreed. And then I left.

  Outside in the street I turned up my collar, put my hands in my pockets, and began to walk uptown. It was a cold, raw night and my bones were full of death and all the fatigue of sorrow. I felt nothing or else I felt so many things that it added up to nothing. I felt that it was none of Commissioner John Comaday’s goddamned business how I felt about Phyllis Goldmark or any other woman, alive or dead. I also tried to tell myself and persuade myself that it was none of my own business, but that didn’t work too well. I was full of a death sickness, a horror sickness; I was filled up to surfeit and to overflowing with the whole mood and temper of our time, with its civilized cruelty and its barbaric brutality, its senseless fears and its dismal uncertainties. I could only reply to myself that I was playing an idiot’s game with a cast of idiots surrounding me and I was sufficiently well read—or poorly read, if you would have it so—to know that it had never been very much different and that now, as a thousand years ago, there were no sane answers to what we were doing, where we were coming from or where we were going.’ I had five hundred dollars in my pocket; I could take a taxicab to the airport and buy a ticket for somewhere—for anywhere. I was lost already, so it made sense for me to ask myself why I should not be lost entirely, completely and forever.

  I accepted my own prerogative and asked myself whether I was in love, and then I was able to explain to myself that I did not intend to be in love, that I did not want to be in love, and that this was necessary to my own defense and my own existence. I could survive almost anything and everything in this world I had never made and had never wanted; the fragment of doubt lay in a woman. I had survived the death of one woman I loved, but not easily, and now I was filled with a monstrous anxiety concerning Phyllis. I felt it in my head and my heart and in the pit of my stomach, and I had to persuade myself not to go to the nearest telephone and call her and get my own proof that she was alive and unharmed.

  I thought of all this as I walked on through the night, turning east on Canal Street, and then I did it anyway. I went into a drugstore and used a telephone. The policewoman was still there and she said that Phyllis was sleeping. Golden was expected, Phyllis’s aunt was there, and the policeman was posted outside the door.

  “Tell her when she wakes up,” I said, “that I called.”

  “I think she’ll sleep through until morning,” the policewoman answered.

  After that, I was ravenously hungry and I turned into Mott Street, where there was a place I knew and where the food was good. The owner, Ling Chun, joined me at my table and kept me polite and respectful company while I stuffed myself with sea bass,
fried Chinese style, and bean curd. Finally he observed that I appeared to be eating more out of anger and frustration than out of reasonable appetite.

  “And that, Clancy,” he said to me, “is not a civilized approach to food. We serve very good food here and only now and then do we have customers whose discrimination matches it. I have always considered you such a customer, and it grieves me to find you so disturbed.”

  I said to him, “Tell me, Chun, you live here in an island in the world. How do you live with it? Doesn’t the world ever disturb you?”

  “No one is ever as much disturbed as a cop,” Chun replied thoughtfully. “You know, Clancy, that in the olden times there were no police. I believe that the first police force, as we know it, was set up in London in the nineteenth century. A policeman is something very new, and he has never been worked out properly.”

  “He has been worked out properly, believe me.”

  “No, I mean it a little differently. You asked me about the island here, which we people call Chinatown. The world touches us, but we build our own walls. This is because we are a very old people who never actually became modernized. I think that everyone has to build some kind of a wall, except a cop. He has no walls—not even to carry around with him—so the practice of living comes very difficult for him and he is not prepared for it the way a physician is or the way a priest is.”

  “I will tell you what I think,” I said. “I think that every goddamned one of you Chinese carries around the burden of proving that he’s a philosopher. I hate two-bit philosphy warmed over for the occasion.”

  “You have a point there,” Chun nodded. “A modest point but, nevertheless, an element of truth.”

  I finished my fish then I said to him, ‘Tell me, Chun, how would your philosophy respond to the fact that the world was going to end in about two weeks?”

  Chun shrugged. “You and I are alive tonight, Clancy. No one has guaranteed us two weeks more. The world will probably come to an end tomorrow. I took a course in statistics and probabilities which brought home to me the fact that we live arithmetically; it’s the law of averages that maintains us and the universe.”

  “That’s cold-blooded and pessimistic. How the devil did you come to take a course in statistics?”

  “At one time I had seriously intended to become an insurance salesman. I even dreamed of being the oriental tycoon of the insurance business. I ended up running a Chinese restaurant.”

  “I ended up as a cop,” I said. Then I finished eating and used his telephone directory. I found the address I wanted, said goodnight to Chun and then considered going all the way uptown to pick up my car. I decided that tomorrow would be time enough for that, and I took a taxicab to the address I had found in the telephone book. It was almost midnight when I rang Vanpelt’s doorbell.

  It was a brownstone house on 112th Street near Riverside Drive. Vanpelt lived on the third floor and, as with so many of the converted brownstones, his place consisted of one large, square room, a tiny kitchen, and a tiny dressing room. He was still dressed when he opened the door for me and certainly surprised to see me—sufficiently surprised to have no words to greet me with. He ushered me into the room and closed the door. He was in shirt sleeves and a sleeveless sweater and he had been watching his television and helping himself out of a bottle. He was a little drunk but not very much so. He walked straight enough, as he went to turn off the television, but when he faced me after that, his eyes had trouble focusing, his speech was a little thick. He told me that he was surprised but pleased. He tried to smile and he apologized for the condition of his place, which could have been cleaner and neater. I took off my hat and coat and threw them on an old, spotted overstuffed couch. Vanpelt wanted to know whether I wouldn’t join him in a drink. I shook my head.

  “Well,” he said, “it seems a little late for a social call, Clancy, but I must say I’m delighted—I am—I’m delighted. I’m not a good sleeper. I never really get to bed before two in the morning. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink?”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “The way the place looks,” Vanpelt said, “I mean a woman comes in in the morning and cleans the place up but she doesn’t do a very thorough job. It gets to looking seedy about this hour.”

  “Do you know what happened today, Vanpelt?”

  He stared at me and then shook his head. He went over to the easy chair where he had been sitting, fell into it and picked up his drink. “Should I know?” he asked. “Is it something important?”

  “Miss Goldmark’s mother was murdered.”

  He put down his drink and stared at me without any particular comprehension. “Do you mean Phyllis?” he said.

  “That’s right, Vanpelt, her mother was murdered today.”

  “That’s a terrible thing,” he said slowly, “that’s a shocking thing.”

  He picked up his drink again, but I walked over to him and knocked it out of his hand. I grabbed him by his shirt and sweater, pulled him out of his chair, and flung him onto the couch. The shirt ripped. He lay sprawled on the couch for a moment and then rolled onto the floor. He picked himself up from the floor and faced me, trembling.

  “What’s wrong with you, Clancy? What are you doing? You’re my friend.”

  “The hell with that! I’m no friend of yours, Vanpelt. You turn my stomach.”

  “I didn’t ask you here,” he cried, “for Christ’s sake, Clancy, I didn’t ask you here.”

  “Then I asked myself here. You talked big yesterday, Vanpelt. You talked very clever and very big and you talked about half a million dollars—half a million dollars for what?”

  Vanpelt shook his head slowly. I walked over to him and twisted his shirt and sweater in my fist. I felt sick and ashamed of myself and his hot alcoholic breath in my face made me feel sicker; but I had started this and I had to finish it. I had to finish the whole thing. It had waited too long and it wouldn’t wait any longer.

  “You were buying something for half a million dollars, Vanpelt. What were you buying? And what were you using for play money? Who’s behind you and who’s in this with you?”

  He began to blubber. “It was bluff; it was all a bluff; I tell you it was just a bluff, Clancy. I was poking around in the dark. I was looking for something. Didn’t you ever look for something?”

  “I’ve looked for something,” I nodded.

  “Then you can understand.”

  “I don’t understand a goddamned thing.”

  He was afraid of me—terribly afraid of me—and totally unaware of the fact that I had ever been afraid of him. He blubbered and squirmed in my grasp and tried to explain to me how a man sits and waits and watches and hopes that something will come along that can be turned into money.

  “You offered me the money!” I shouted at him. “You miserable, fat son of a bitch—you offered me the money—whose money?”

  “I tell you it was bluff, Clancy, believe me.”

  I held him with my left hand and slapped him hard with my right hand. I slapped him twice and he crumbled to the floor, tears rolling down his cheeks.

  “Get out of here,” he whimpered, “get out of here and leave me alone. Goddamn you, you’ve got no right to come in here and beat me up. Who in hell do you think you are? Leave me alone!”

  I bent down, grabbed his foot, and dragged him around in a circle. He rolled over on his face and I kicked his buttocks and told him to get up. He sat up then, the tears still flowing, and stared at me with a mixture of hate and hopelessness.

  “Who hired you?” I shouted at him.

  “No one hired me,” he whimpered. “I swear to God, Clancy, no one hired me. I guessed that you were a cop or an agent or a G man or something, and I knew it was big. How smart do you have to be to know that the way Horton disappeared was something big? Then I said to myself that they put you in to find out where he was, and where he was or whatever you could find out could be worth a lot of money.”

  “You’re not that stupid,” I said
disgustedly. “No one is that stupid, Vanpelt.”

  “I am,” he replied. Then he put his face in his hands and began to cry. Then he dropped his hands and looked up at me through the tears. “What are you going to do to me, Clancy?”

  “Nothing,” I said. I put on my hat and coat. When I walked out, he was still sitting there on the floor, tears rolling down his face.

  I felt that I should not have been born. I no longer hated Vanpelt—only myself. I walked for a long time and when I looked at a street sign, I was at Eighty-sixth Street and Broadway. I went into a bar there and had four drinks. It was a beginning. I wanted to get drunk—more drunk then I had ever been before. The four drinks left me sober and cold with not even the thinnest edge of happiness. So I paid for them and went home, and walked through the wreckage and the debris of my own apartment, and crawled into my own patched-up bed.