Killing Time

by Thomas Berger

  So they set about it, an easier task than they had supposed: Starr was skin and bones though he usually had a good appetite for food as well as liquor. Neither could bear to unbutton Starr’s foul clothing—he stank enough while fully dressed. They hauled him to the bathroom as he was, Harry at the shoulders and Dill carrying the feet, lowered him into the tub, and turned on the shower again. Watched it splash onto his unshaven visage, darken the suit. The reporters themselves were dampened by the ricochet.

  Starr at last opened his mouth and drank as a child might, standing in the rain. Then he began to gurgle, and fearing he would drown, the newsmen hauled him up and over the white incline and onto the bathmat, which he overhung, puddling, at each end. He was heavier to lift when wet, and Dilworth professed to have sprained, or strained, something. A hand to the small of his back, he hurled a large white towel at Starr. Harry Clegg knelt and slapped Starr’s face, to and fro.

  Dill laughed in a hiss; and Starr opened his eyes, afraid of snakes. He had been aware for some moments that he was being summoned to life, but had remained apathetic: it was their job, not his. He started to shiver as the full import of the cold water reached him, though it was not an altogether unpleasant experience.

  Harry watched Starr’s eyes revolve ever more slowly, finally clicking into position like cylinders in a pinball machine.

  “Here,” he said, suffocating him in the towel. “Dry off.”

  Of course it took several hours to bring Starr around to operational condition. Having to go out and buy the subject new clothing to replace the wet stuff, Dilworth spotted a shop in the hotel lobby which offered resort wardrobes for those visitors en route to Caribbean vacations. As a joke, and also for convenience and simplicity, Dill purchased therein a pair of brick-red cotton slacks, a sport shirt of candy stripes, straw sandals.

  Surprisingly enough, for Dill had not taken his sizes, the summery togs fitted Starr very well. He looked like a beachcomber who had been picked up and dressed by wealthy practical jokers in an effort to lift a sagging holiday. The reporters had got several quarts of black coffee into him, then a steak, then peach pie with strawberry ice cream: his own choice of menu. He asked for no more booze. Still he would not talk.

  Could not, he claimed; all was blurred: effect of the horrible crimes, police brutality, long-term illness, bad luck. Clegg sat on the hand with which he wanted so much to knock out Starr’s rotten teeth, and stared at Dilworth, then gave him the high sign.

  They went into the corridor and closed the door.

  “It’s already running into money,” Dill said. “I hope Ed will O.K. the charges for those clothes. You know what a hotel markup is on their shop stuff, but I couldn’t take time to look around town for bargains.”

  Clegg nodded in answer to a portly housekeeper’s ritualistic greeting. She walked on, with her eyeglasses and keys. Essentially they were actresses, playing maternal parts, thoroughly unnecessary, since the maids cleaned the rooms. “Come back to us again,” she would say when they left, if she could catch them. Contractual friendships made Harry’s skin crawl. He loathed telephone operators who said “Good morning” before they identified the firm. “Yeah, we have gotten nothing out of him so far. It’s like trying to pick up a dime after you trimmed your fingernails. I know this type. If a man’s completely rotten already, he can’t be corrupted. He is fearless. He has no needs.”

  “Who wants to corrupt him?” Dill said. “We just want the story.” He habitually rejected Clegg’s keen insights.

  Clegg frequently suffered from a nervous illusion that a tiny fragment of cigarette paper clung to his underlip, and he would pluck there.

  “Thay,” he said, his fingers still at his lip, “think he’d talk to a girl?”

  “That’s more money yet,” Dill noted, dropping both shoulders of his drab suit. “Brother!” He took two steps, swung around, returned.

  “Look at it this way,” said Harry. “So far we got nada. I don’t understand what he’s trying to pull. I figured he would talk his head off; they always do. That’s turd about the beating Shuster gave him. He doesn’t show a mark, and you do, you know, if hit with anything that’s hard enough to hurt, rubber or whatsoever. He’s just a rotten wino.”

  “Then he won’t go for a girl,” Dilworth said with obvious relief. “Alcoholics can’t perform. That’s basic. Women mean nothing to them.”

  “Balls,” replied Clegg. “There is no man that a woman doesn’t mean something to. I’m serious, Dill. Even a fag responds to a woman: he hates or envies her, she makes him queasy. Same thing’s true of a lush who’s sexed DC. A woman gets some kind of rise out of him even if it isn’t the main event. These killings are involved with sex, even though the women weren’t attacked. Starr’s wife was sleeping with the boarder, Billie was screwing everybody. Who knocks off two women in a row except for a sex motive?”

  Harry was speaking intensely but kept the volume too low to be heard by Starr inside the room. Nevertheless he now steered Dilworth to the end of the corridor. A fire-escape door there looked twenty stories down a wall broken only by the frosted-glass windows of sixty bathrooms. What a quantity of waste that added up to, thought Dill, who had a dirty, as opposed to a sexy, mind.

  Clegg resumed: “I’d like to make Starr for the murders.” His lifted eyebrows suggested the anticipation of triumph. He dug Dilworth in the ribs. “Huh?”

  “Come on, Harry,” said Dill. “He’s weak as a cat, for one. Then Shuster was at him for hours, whether he beat him or not. Then why would he all of a sudden get worked up to the point of killing by a situation that had existed for years?”

  “Dill,” said Clegg, “I know you won’t go for it, but I’ll lay it out for you anyhow. Don’t start screaming until I’m done.”

  Dilworth found that speech invidious. Clegg could be very offensive in such subtle ways, though he never quarreled openly with anybody.

  “O.K., here goes.” Harry put up both hands and backed off with his trunk and neck, speaking rapidly: all this in preparation for Dill’s expected reaction. “I think Starr was screwing Billie.”

  Dilworth’s face became a mask of desolation.

  “That’s right,” Clegg said, going into a scarifying whisper. “His own daughter.”

  Dill produced a kind of whimper.

  “All right, all right,” said Harry. “But look how it fits. Mrs. Starr catches them at it, Starr strangles her in a rage. The boarder hears the scuffle, runs in, and Starr kills him too. That leaves Billie, and she has to be knocked off because she has seen it all.”

  Dill calmed down; it was too ridiculous to take seriously. “If you want to speculate, you could just as well say the boarder was laying both women and Starr killed the whole tribe out of disgust. Except you have seen that drunk in there with his bird chest and chicken arms, and you’ve looked at the boarder at the morgue and seen he was husky when among the living, and the police so far have so little evidence that they haven’t even put a theory together. Why haul in Krafft-Ebing?”

  Dilworth would certainly admit that incest existed in the world. In seven years as a crime reporter he had seen much, and at least heard of more in the way of remarkable combinations. One man had been convicted of obscene acts with a Muscovy duck. Another had allegedly had congress with a fantastic electronic device, though the case was dismissed for insufficient evidence.

  Yet the more he saw of human oddity, the firmer Dill’s belief that only the normal was operative in significant experience, to the degree of 99 per cent. The man with the electronic apparatus had no effect whatever on life in general.

  The way Dill looked at it was that even if Harry’s preposterous theory held water, it told nothing of value. Murder was murder irrespective of the motive. Three persons were dead, whether for love, money, power, or something nastier.

  He expressed himself to Harry, and Clegg said: “Oh, I agree that interest in the crime for its own sake is ghoulish. But that’s what the readers are, Dill, all those hard
working, standard types who wouldn’t say it if they had a mouthful. Speaking for myself, I want to see the murderer caught, and speaking as a newspaperman, I’d like to crack the case myself. Nothing wrong with that. I’m just tossing the hat at the wall to see if it will find a hook someplace. I say we should get a girl for Andy. Something might transpire, and Christ knows we aren’t getting anywhere as it stands.”

  Dill grimaced. What bothered him was the idea of calling in a whore as a professional colleague. That would be an admission of failure in one’s craft. He was amazingly naive for a veteran reporter, Harry told him. Cops used stoolies all the time. They were themselves, or the paper was, paying Starr to talk in the first place, paying for the hotel. The opposition was paying Betty.

  “Come on,” said Clegg. “Let’s put it to him.” He knew Dilworth’s trouble was the pretentiousness that so often accompanied supersensitivity. Dill loved to do those over-all surveys of social problems—juvenile delinquency, venereal disease, suburban crime—in which the raw material was hygienically statistical and the conclusions pointlessly universal. He retreated from specific realities; still, after all these years, looked grim on visits to the morgue. On the other hand, that character made him a good partner for Harry, as Harry realized. Clegg himself could have waded nonchalantly through a reservoir of blood, so long as it had not issued from his own veins. This was not callousness but rather health; he was ultimately less egoistic than Dilworth.

  They returned to the room and found Starr still sitting in an overstuffed chair, stupefied, drinking coffee.

  Dill had another try before Harry could suggest the new plan.

  “I figure you for a man who has never got a chance to tell his story,” Dilworth said sympathetically. Starr looked at him through eyes that expressed no judgment; they resembled those of a jungle animal long maintained in comfortable captivity: no recognizable friends, really, but no enemies either. “We’re going to give you a fair shake,” Dill went on, “tell your side of it. A million people will read that tomorrow morning. You’re a celebrity.”

  Starr’s viscous eyes swam slowly away like bits of sewage in a sluggish drain.

  Standing behind the chair, Harry said: “How about a girl? We’ll have a party. A real cute girl I know. Anything goes. She’ll like you, Andy. She gets her jollies with mature men.”

  Starr’s eyes floated back and solidified as ball bearings. He twisted inside his resort shirt, some gray chest-hair springing out at the V-neck.

  He said very clearly: “You wouldn’t crap me?”

  “Never,” said Clegg. “I’ll call her now.”

  “How far she have to come?” Starr fondled his own unshaven cheek, in as ugly a gesture as Dilworth had ever seen.

  “Be here instantaneously.”

  Starr rose vigorously on his arms. “Tell her to keep it on ice for a half hour. I got to get cleaned up.”

  Chapter 5

  SHUSTER was in possession of the account book in which Mrs. Starr had recorded the names, and subsequently the forwarding addresses, of the persons who had boarded with her. An individual named A. A. Smart had left Mrs. Starr’s to move only two blocks south and one east, where according to the phone book he was still in residence.

  To interview him, Shuster sent Tierney and another detective, a huge man named Matthias. Matty stood six feet five, weighed two-forty, and therefore had to buy his clothes in those special shops that catered to outsized individuals.

  Matthias’ presence caused Tierney to feel a physical despair of the type suffered by people who live under a mountain. There was always a shadow in the upper corner of one’s eye. Matty also habitually stood too near whomever he engaged in conversation, loneliness being a concomitant of his size. He craved the protection of the standard-made. His head alone must have weighed seventy-five pounds, his ears were like hands, his nose as large as a baby’s head and much the same shape.

  Shuster liked to believe that Matthias produced the desired effect in interrogations by simply looming over the subject while a smaller man posed the questions, but Tierney was not so sure. Matty had only one style: if the threat posed by his sheer bulk yielded insufficient returns, he tended to assume the burden of proof, in the discharge of which he might throw the subject through a closed door.

  Tierney pressed the button under Smart’s typewritten name-plate and soon heard the buzzer that opened the door. The elevator seemed even smaller than it was, with Matthias as fellow passenger. He instinctively leaned against Tierney, transferring no weight but maintaining contact. Tierney pushed him away under the guise of searching for a cigarette, kept him so by blowing clouds of uninhaled smoke towards Matty’s hat.

  They deboarded on the fifth floor and Tierney ground his cigarette against the tile floor. The building had been remodeled from an ancient walk-up. The externals were new—elevator, metal apartment doors, wall-paint of pale blue—but the old fundamentals were in some places evident, in others to be assumed. The window on the landing had a wooden sash, scarred though much painted over. An indifferent craftsman had laid the new tiles over the veteran floor, which undulated slightly. Here and there cement had squeezed above the level, causing an underfoot roughness. Tierney could feel the reluctance of his right shoe to proceed with grace. Lifting it in his hand, he saw the sole had worn through in the superficial layer. Matthias of course bumped into him from behind, too gently to knock him down, but Tierney was thereby thrown into an impatient mood.

  Ignoring the bell push, he rapped on the apartment door in a technique designed to threaten him who heard it, and when a small man answered the summons, he stared at him with narrow annoyance.

  “Are you Smart?”

  The little man gave him eye for eye.

  Only after Tierney had repeated the question in a menacing tone did he become aware of the pun. Even so, he chose to turn it the other way, to assume it was he who had been mocked.

  “Police officers,” he said in rebuke. Matthias bumped him again, with no excuse whatever this time. Tierney thrust his badge forth and quickly brought it back.

  “May I see that again?” asked the alleged Smart.

  Tierney furiously pushed it at him, and the man said: “Wait.” He reappeared with a notepad and pencil and, squinting at the badge in the poor light, apparently wrote down the number, for he asked Tierney to specify whether the last digit was an 8 or a 3.

  “May I have your name also?”

  Tierney scowled. “Are you being clever?” He avoided the word “smart.”

  “Sir,” said the short man, who wore a cardigan over a checked shirt and a plain blue tie, “you know very well that it is my duty, as well as my right, to demand positive identification of anyone who represents himself as a police officer. The police department themselves regularly warn citizens to do that. There are confidence men who pose as detectives. I must say your reluctance is inclined to make me suspicious.”

  “Let me give you a piece of advice,” Tierney said. “If we were not officers, you’d be in trouble right now. Your door is already open. If we were imposters, we’d already be inside and working you over. Either don’t open your door until you’re sure, or if you do, accept the situation and when they are gone, report it to the Department.”

  He felt better now that he was able to correct a citizen and assume the heavy, paternalistic style in which policemen speak to noncriminals. He knew now that Smart was harmless, it being an absolute rule in his experience that no one who resorts to violence ever questions an officer’s purposes.

  Smart’s quick nose twitched. He cocked his head like a wren.

  “That’s true,” he said, surprising Tierney, who had expected such a punctilious man to give him argument. “Come in, officers. I am A. A. Smart.”

  Tierney gave his own name and introduced Matthias, but no one tried to shake hands. In the living room they took the offered chairs, sitting in their overcoats. They were always careful to remove their hats indoors.

  Before Tierney was abl
e to say a word, Smart, perching on an arm of the sofa said: “I would have come forward voluntarily, but I knew you gentlemen work at your own pace. As you are aware, I once rented a room from the Mrs. Andrew Starr who was murdered on Christmas Eve. Therefore I knew both of the deceased women. I merely rented the room at first and did not take any meals in the apartment. Later I went on board also.”

  Smart described his profession as that of ladies’ shoe salesman.

  Tierney asked: “Are you married, Mr. Smart?” The room was neuter in furnishings and arrangement: beige rug, light-green upholstery, green ottoman striped like a circus tent, a were not officers, you’d be in trouble right now. Your door is already open. If we were imposters, we’d already be inside and working you over. Either don’t open your door until you’re sure, or if you do, accept the situation and when they are gone, report it to the Department.”

  He felt better now that he was able to correct a citizen and assume the heavy, paternalistic style in which policemen speak to noncriminals. He knew now that Smart was harmless, it being an absolute rule in his experience that no one who resorts to violence ever questions an officer’s purposes.

  Smart’s quick nose twitched. He cocked his head like a wren.

  “That’s true,” he said, surprising Tierney, who had expected such a punctilious man to give him argument. “Come in, officers. I am A. A. Smart.”

  Tierney gave his own name and introduced Matthias, but no one tried to shake hands. In the living room they took the offered chairs, sitting in their overcoats. They were always careful to remove their hats indoors.

  Before Tierney was able to say a word, Smart, perching on an arm of the sofa said: “I would have come forward voluntarily, but I knew you gentlemen work at your own pace. As you are aware, I once rented a room from the Mrs. Andrew Starr who was murdered on Christmas Eve. Therefore I knew both of the deceased women. I merely rented the room at first and did not take any meals in the apartment. Later I went on board also.”