Killing Time

by Thomas Berger

  But he was relieved to miss his dinner. His son had married a small dark girl whom Shuster did not like. She seemed to be a type of Communist and usually managed when in his presence to bring up the subject of the alleged brutality of the police. Shuster’s daughter, on the other hand, was married to a cop who served on the Vice Squad and went about midtown inciting whores to pick him up, take him to their rooms, and strip for him, at which point he would show his badge and make the arrest.

  Arnold pretended in front of his wife to dislike the work I and had once asked his father-in-law to put in a good word for him with Homicide. But when Shuster had so done, Arnold muffed the subsequent interview with the captain; on purpose, Shuster was convinced. And henceforth he believed that Arnold either climbed into bed with the hookers before the arrest, as they usually claimed before the judge, or, what was perhaps worse, got some weird satisfaction from eyeing them. Whatever, a veteran Vice-Squad man was an oddball, though Shuster had no sympathy for prostitutes. He regarded any sort of lawbreaker with contempt.

  Shuster had told Tierney he could stay at home until mid-afternoon and get his Christmas out of the way before reporting to work. Tierney showed up at about 1:30.

  Tierney removed and hung up the jacket of his Sunday suit.

  Shuster filled him in: the medical examiner could find no evidence that either woman had been sexually molested; the fingerprints on the screwdriver were smeared and unidentifiable; no latent prints had been turned up; detectives were canvassing the neighborhood, results negative thus far; the routine et cetera. From what I gather about Billie, if we wanted a complete list of everybody she was screwing we might as well take down every man’s name in the phone book. Do you think Betty is the same kind? I saw she had eyes for you.”

  This was news to Tierney, to whom the people involved in a crime were almost fictional characters, in no personal relation to himself. He had marked the features of Betty’s face, body, speech, and attire and could accurately identify certain unstated predispositions, implications, suggestions on her part so long as they did not apply to him.

  Tierney had telephoned Appleton’s sister in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, at midnight on Christmas Eve, having come across a letter of hers among the boarder’s effects. She turned out to be a Pennsylvanian, married to a Southerner, and was much affected by her brother’s death although she had not seen him in eleven years. She knew he had no other living relatives and doubted that, with his equable temperament, he had enemies. His last profession of which she had been aware was that of used-car salesman.

  “Lately,” said Tierney, “Appleton did some part-time selling for Oppenheimer Creations, costume-jewelry wholesalers…”

  Shuster listened consciously to very little of Tierney’s routine reports. In the same fashion he had received the oral and written material produced by the other officers and the medical examiner. On the other hand, he accepted everything, dumping it, so to speak, in a mental wastebasket into which he might later reach and seize what he needed. He was certain the crimes had been committed by a psycho, for psycho motives, and his investigation would have the strength of this bias, yet he would ultimately reject nothing, not even when the murderer had been found and executed. Five years hence Shuster would still remember that Sol Oppenheimer, say, had some remote connection with the Starr-Appleton murders. Passing Oppenheimer’s office building, Shuster would see the brass plate on the facade and recall that the wholesale jeweler had once hired a man who was later to be murdered, and the memory would produce in the lieutenant’s soul a little twinge of distaste for Oppenheimer, but also a small thrill as well, as when one comes across the souvenir of an old affair of the heart. Shuster was joined to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of persons by such links.

  “What’s with old Starr?” asked Tierney, not considering that Shuster, being of similar years, might take offense. It was indeed flattering to Shuster that Tierney did not make the association. The inspector understood that, but therefrom he also identified Tierney’s weakness: Tierney thought of himself as youthful, which is another thing than merely being young. Combined with the latter it could be debilitating. Shuster himself had always been in professional matters at the psychic age of forty, from which one can reach out in either direction.

  “Going to work him out right now,” said the lieutenant. “Come along.” But he insisted that Tierney precede him through the doorway, be for a step or two a parody of his superior. The young man stumbled slightly in executing the order, as Shuster knew he would, and performed an awkward shuffle with a uniformed officer who just then passed along the corridor. Shuster flanked them gracefully and left Tierney to his own devices.

  Starr had been kept all night in an interrogation room furnished with only a table, two chairs, and an overhead lamp that had never been extinguished. He had not been touched, yet he ached in every articulation. He had now been away from drink so long that he felt unearthly, a state much like that of usually sober persons who get drunk. Starr could walk a straight line only after the alcoholic content of his veins reached a certain degree. It was just as well he did not operate a car, proficiently to drive which he would have had to drink himself into an illegal condition.

  He was also lonely, and troubled by memories of the bodies to which he had had such a meager reaction when they lay before his eyes. He was actually yearning for someone to come and beat him, just for the company. But thus far on Christmas Day he had been visited only by the officer who brought his meals, and another had led him twice to the toilet, both of these men remaining silent.

  Starr suspected the police had no right under law to hold him in this fashion, but he had not yet asked for counsel. Lawyers frightened him more than cops. He slept sitting upright on a wooden chair, awakening occasionally to shift his bony hams.

  On entering the room Shuster took the free chair, and Tierney leaned against a dirty white wall, his shadow lurking towards the corner.

  “Andy, Detective Tierney,” said Shuster, making ironic gestures of introduction. The quick red eyes in Starr’s slow gray face shifted from one man to the other. “Did you have a good night? Sorry we could not find you a bed, but they were all being put to use by criminals. Sometimes it is not comfortable to be an innocent man.” His harsh laugh was not echoed by either Starr or Tierney. Indeed, the younger detective looked more melancholy than the suspect.

  Shuster released a long, moaning breath. “Andy, Andy, what are we going to do with you? Two neighbors saw you on the block ten minutes before the crimes took place.” This was a lie. “The super at your house says you went out just before seven.” True. “And we found out some interesting items from the other roomers: seems you invite little girls in from the neighborhood and ask them to do dirty things for a piece of candy.” This was also a lie as to fact, but it reverberated with a kind of dream-truth. Shuster could be fiendishly cunning.

  As it happened, Starr had enjoyed fantasies in which he lured small girls to a private place, but not for beastly pleasures; rather, to inhale their bouquet, to hear their fluty voices, symbolically to warm his cold bones at their glow, as he had once done with his daughters when they were yet too young to be turned against him by his jealous wife. This was clear love and not clotted sex, the latter being an accumulation, as if of orange peelings, bacon rinds, and eggshells, and he occasionally discharged it, as if carrying rubbish to a dump, on some cheap whore.

  However, he knew himself incapable of elucidating these truths for anyone. He believed Shuster’s assertion that his fellow roomers had blackened his name, and since he had never given them any reason so to do, he assumed it was merely another example of the motiveless malignancy which other people had directed at him his life long.

  “Now, Andy,” said Shuster, “it is Christmas Day. When would a better time come to clear your conscience? I’ll just ask the stenographer to step in, you dictate a nice straight confession, and then you can go to a real nice cell, with your own bed and crapper. Of course they serve up
a real Christmas dinner: turkey, cranberry sauce, and the works. You also will be letting young Tierney here go back to his family for the day. Do the decent thing, Andy. That’s all I ask.”

  “I never did it,” Starr replied, his voice froglike.

  Shuster failed to acknowledge the statement. He went on in the same manner, intimate without being sympathetic. “Here’s the way I see it. You had it in for that boarder a long time. You wouldn’t have minded if he just had a once-in-a-while tumble with your old lady, who you were separated from anyway. But you couldn’t swallow them openly living together, right? And acting like husband and wife in front of you when you came visiting. On Christmas Eve it was too much. You had been stewing about it for a long time. You had a drink or two in the company of those people, something was said on one side and then on the other, and an argument began to shape up.”

  Shuster nodded confidently at this point, wiped his mouth, and stared into his hand.

  “Billie came in, a little high from a Christmas office party at one of those magazines she modeled for. She took a shower and then joined the rest of you in the living room. She was naked under her bathrobe and crossed her legs sitting on the sofa, giving Appleton an eyeful. You got to thinking maybe he was having his way with her also.”

  Starr had got genuinely interested in the narrative, in which the character that represented himself had certain attributes for which he had always yearned. The real Starr had been incapable of arguing with his wife and still less with one of her lovers. For years she had humiliated and abused him, and his habitual return was a snivel that looked like a smile, or, when really hounded, a headlong flight. He much preferred Shuster’s version.

  “The argument grew warmer, and Billie got involved in it. Your wife went to Billie’s room. You followed her, killed her, then shoved the body under the bed, hoping at least to get out of the apartment before she was discovered. But Billie entered the room at that point. You had no choice. Unlike your wife, Billie managed to make enough noise so Appleton heard it. He was back in his own room by then, tinkering with a radio.

  “As you were leaving Billie’s room he rushed out of his, screwdriver in hand. Taking a quick look in, he saw the bodies and pursued you up the hall, through the kitchen, and into the living room, where you and he grappled. He dropped the tool; you picked it up and killed him with it. You then left the apartment, and lingering nearby in concealment, you waited for the arrival of Betty and Arthur Bayson, after which you returned as if it was your first visit there of the evening.”

  Shuster interlaced his fingers and made his eyebrows speculative. “The details might have been slightly different, but that’s essentially the way it happened. A good counselor might even get you manslaughter. Mrs. Starr might have thrown something at you, attacked you with a nail file. Looks like Billie scratched your face.” He nodded towards a tiny cut on Starr’s chin, actually the work of a dull razor in a shaky hand the evening before.

  “If she did it before you touched her throat, you might even have been defending yourself. In the case of Appleton, of course he approached you with a deadly weapon. I don’t think you’ve got a hope of acquittal, frankly, but you could very well get out in ten years.”

  Reconstructing the crime for a suspect was one of Shuster’s favorite exercises. Snares and booby traps lay concealed within the terrain of such an account. Had Shuster guessed wrongly, the subject would feel superior to him for a moment, and nothing was more dangerous to the guilty than self-congratulation. If on the other hand Starr was innocent—and Shuster believed him so—the more details, the better; and whether or not they corresponded to fact was of no importance. The essential thing was to seem omniscient, and thus to demolish in any person so irresponsible as to be associated with a crime all hope and all pride.

  Thus far it had worked otherwise with Starr, who had no hope and little pride to begin, but was developing some of both under Shuster’s tutelage. He also wanted to impress Tierney, who was young enough to be his son. Starr had yearned for a son, if not always then at least since his daughters had grown sufficiently old to turn against him. He noticed, the evening before, that Tierney had questioned Betty, and he assumed that she had given the junior detective a very low estimate of her father. Yet Tierney looked at him not with disgust but with compassion. Men were much more generous than women, and young men more so than old. Unlike women, most other men usually wished you well, perhaps because, as members of the same club, they had a stake in your fortunes, particularly if they were young and saw you as a prediction of what they might become.

  Listening to Shuster’s remarkably consistent account of the crime committed by the fantasy-Starr, the real one recognized his obligations to the faith of youth. Tierney believed him guilty, he could see, believed him capable of that terrible, manly violence; whereas it was just as clear that Shuster did not and was tormenting him as his wife always had, so as further to reduce his self-esteem.

  When he understood the situation Starr still feared Shuster but he no longer believed the lieutenant invincible. After all, his wife had played that role long before Shuster, and she now lay in the morgue. Starr survived, and always would. He knew that. Yet he had never done more than maintain his position, which was very low indeed; had never improved it, never won a victory.

  His chance had come. Because he had gone so long without a drink, he was utterly drunk in the only viable meaning of the word.

  Looking at Tierney, conveying love and asking more in return, Starr said: “I did it all right. It happened just like you say. I was jealous of my old lady and the boarder. I got an ungovernable temper. I used to beat her up a lot, and the girls too, when I lived there. I always been violent. Guess I lost control, it was Christmas Eve and seeing them sitting there like that….”

  While Starr was still talking, Shuster rolled his eyes, got up, and left the room.

  Tierney slowly approached the empty chair, put his hands on its back, leaned forward.

  “Tell me about it,” he asked in a sad, youthful voice.

  “It was like he said.” Starr faltered, upset by Shuster’s sudden departure. He needed both of them, enemy and friend, for satisfaction.

  “It took a strong man,” Tierney said, helpfully.

  “I might not look like I have a lot of strength, I know,” Starr answered. “I been in poor health for years. But when I get worked up—I just wanted to slap her face, is how it began. But I couldn’t stop, got to punching her. Hit her maybe twenty-thirty times and her head fell back like a doll or dummy. Then Billie came in screaming at me, and the same thing happened again. It was terrible, like watching a picture of it happening and not taking part myself….”

  “Beat them both to death,” said Tierney, stating and not questioning. His eyes were high on the wall.

  Starr nodded. He meant his tone to be contrite, but instead it was eager: “I’m ready to take my medicine.”

  Tierney continued to look at nothing. “You filthy old man,” he said in the same melancholy tenor. “You never touched them. They were strangled.”

  Starr’s swallow was like the rubbing of chapped hands.

  Detweiler’s work consisted of helping people to make the most of themselves. He believed that the great flaw in the accepted morality was the better-to-give-than-receive principle, as a result of which it was a rare person who knew how to accept a kindness, whereas the world was overrun with donors. So what he did to compensate for the imbalance was to travel about among the public and arrange opportunities for total strangers to befriend him.

  In a crowded subway car, for example, he would pretend to be lame. It was gratifying to see the seated passengers as he limped on board, contesting with one another to claim the power he had made available. Detweiler understood that this state of affairs must be depressing to the truly disabled, and therefore he himself made it a practice never to do a favor for a cripple, but rather to ask a kindness. He would collide with a blindman, saying, “Excuse me, I am blind.” Al
ways the individual concerned would lead him to a seat, guide him across an intersection, and, of special interest to Detweiler, would often conceal his own disability. That is, would believe he was concealing it, which did him a world of good. For a few moments, anyway, he was not blind, for experience is the interaction of contrasts.

  Today, Christmas morning, the car that Detweiler rode was otherwise empty for several stations. Then five persons came on board: two young Puerto Rican men, a middle-aged couple, and an old man who carried a paper bag. Then, just as the doors had begun their closing glide, a nimble-footed Negro girl performed a running entry, breathing through her bright red mouth.

  Choosing a subject was sometimes the most difficult phase of Detweiler’s work. Who among the present company most needed to be reassured that he, or she, could exert force? Several of these persons no doubt knew social deprivation, but that was of no concern to Detweiler, who was interested solely in fundamentals. He saw the girl, for example, as a lively, attractive young woman. The middle-aged couple were past their prime, no doubt suffered from bad feet and worse digestion, but had each other. The old man might be alone in the world but appeared self-possessed, glanced -at no one, put the paper bag against his thigh and opened a tabloid. The young fellows conversed in Spanish, a language to which Detweiler was partial because he could understand nothing said in it, and was therefore not distracted by the arbitrary demands of reason.