Killing Time

by Thomas Berger

  The message, of course, was impossible. Naturally he could not honor his promise to Detweiler to print it as is. Indeed, it was not even accessible to revision. The managing editor had already assigned a deft reporter to prepare a new version. Detweiler would have been extradited by the time the first installment appeared, under close guard. He was, after all, a homicidal maniac, with no rights.

  The local police were an awfully nice bunch. Detweiler thought that now he had confessed to breaking the law, he would be mistreated, because he knew that cops hated criminals, and he had begun, already in the publisher’s office, to make his body hard, impervious to torture. In such a state he could have been beaten for hours without feeling pain or showing a bruise: like a rod made of vanadium steel. However, the process of transformation took a lot out of him, annealing his mind as well: he was good for little else than endurance, so ordered. Therefore he was relieved when the plainsclothesman dispassionately hooked the claw of the handcuffs on his wrist and made it snug through the ratchet, secure but not painful. It actually felt good to Detweiler. The detective himself wore the other manacle; they were linked in the Law. It was the first time Detweiler had ever had an official connection.

  Photographers kept taking pictures. “Just one more, Joe…. Joe, this way…. Inspector, move in close, please. Take him by the arm.” Busy, lively fellows, with winking lights. The publisher at last ordered them off and came to shake his hand.

  “Good luck, Joseph.”

  “Good luck to you,” said Detweiler. “That lawyer hasn’t called back yet, has he?”

  “Don’t worry,” the publisher said. “A message is at the pier. He’ll get it the moment he steps ashore.” Melrose, the criminal attorney he had promised to get for Detweiler, was fishing for tarpon off Fort Lauderdale.

  Detweiler said: “I want to thank that reporter, Pat Allen, whose idea this was in the first place.”

  “He’s back at work.” The publisher laughed. “We have to get a paper out, you know. But I’ll have someone tell him.”

  Detweiler suddenly twisted himself in pride, jerking the attached detective. “I wish you would tell him yourself. It was his idea.”

  Now the publisher’s laugh was somewhat hateful. He said: “You have my word.”

  The police took Detweiler for a ride through city traffic and then gave him a sparkling clean cell, equipped with a toilet and washstand and a bed. He would have liked to use the first, but people kept passing the door and privacy was unobtainable, so he lay down on the bed and went to sleep. Later they woke him for an excellent meal: meat loaf, stewed tomatoes, peas, and raspberry Jello. It was so delicious that tears came to Detweiler’s eyes. He took tiny mouthfuls so as to prolong the pleasure. The only thing missing was A-l Sauce.

  He called the guard. “You wouldn’t happen to have any A-l Sauce?”

  The guard was about to respond with leaden irony (ain’t no hotel), but looking at Detweiler’s face, he checked the impulse. He felt as if he had but narrowly avoided committing a breach of manners; had been on the point of breaking wind before one of his own offspring.

  Instead he said gravely: “I’ll see.” He went into the room in which a delegation of officers awaited the out-of-town detectives, expected to arrive by air within the hour. Reporters were also in attendance.

  Many murderers had passed through this functionary’s care in his term of service, and they never bored him, though his strategy was often to pretend otherwise. He was always interested to hear of their subsequent disposal whether by electrocution, gas chamber, or lifelong immurement; whatever, he had if only in a small way participated, and a man’s work is peculiarly associated with his being. For some he even felt pity. He was, however, not sorry for Detweiler. He took him seriously.

  He went to the chief of detectives, who was just finishing a one-word, yet long-drawn-out response to the comment of a subordinate: “Yeahh”—a sour, negative sort of affirmation. When he finished he retained enough of the accompanying facial expression to turn it on the guard.

  “He wants some sauce for his meat.” It was already the custom not to sound Detweiler’s name.

  “He can go fuck himself.” It was not the chief who answered, but the subordinate, a young detective endeavoring by various devices to appear more seasoned, among them a willed slackness of jaw.

  But the chief said to the guard: “I guess we wouldn’t want them to say we can’t take care of their prisoners.” To the young detective: “Go down to the delicatessen.”

  “Which one?”

  “Oh shit,” said the chief. “Where they have the policy game, on the corner. Unless you want to pay for it yourself.”

  “A-l Sauce,” said the guard.

  Shuster decided to go himself to extradite Detweiler, and took Tierney as his partner. Tierney was in trouble. Shuster first accepted that as a fact when the man ahead of Tierney shoved a briefcase too far under the seat and it emerged behind, encroaching on the detective’s foot room. Tierney kicked it back viciously, but as the aircraft took off the case returned, like a bad conscience. The owner seemed already asleep. Tierney unbuckled his own belt and hurled the case into the overhead rack. Of course the stewardess appeared on the instant, stretched to retrieve the case and in so doing showed an inch of sexless white slip between navy-blue jacket and skirt. As always with them, she was so girdled as seemingly to have but one buttock.

  She gave the case to Tierney. “Please put this under your seat, sir. And please fasten your belt.”

  Tierney went into an inarticulate rage. He tried to buckle his belt while holding the case. His coat gaped open, revealing the pistol at his left waist. Seeing it, the stewardess lost the spuriously sweet, falsely committed expression she had been trained to show even during outright disaster. Her trace of mouth disappeared, she turned her putty-face towards the cockpit and began to walk in that direction.

  Shuster climbed over Tierney. Without apparent haste he caught her at the cockpit door. “Miss,” he said, “we’re police officers. That’s why the gun.”

  “I know,” she said, “Are you following someone on board?”

  Shuster said no.

  “I still have to tell the pilot.”

  “Why?” Shuster on general principles disliked any publicity whatever. It was never to a detective’s advantage to be recognized by anybody.

  “Because he’s in authority.” She opened the door, giving Shuster a brief glimpse of that seat of power, all switches, from which he was excluded, and closed it behind her.

  Depressed by the exchange, he returned to find Tierney had apparently dumped the case in the owner’s lap, a tight-assed midtown type, and was glaring at the back of his short haircut.

  “You need a drink,” Shuster told his subordinate. “Move over and take the window seat.”

  Tierney’s state was altered by what he interpreted as generosity, though Shuster’s motive was rather in the interests of convenience. But then when Shuster attempted something genuinely kind, Tierney froze.

  Shuster said: “I don’t know what you’re doing with Betty Bayson, and I don’t want to, but in the end you’re not going to like yourself.”

  Tierney asked, “May I have permission to go to the toilet?” He scrambled out over Shuster’s legs, so that the point in changing seats was lost.

  If an officer wanted a piece he could always get it from a female less troublesome than Betty Bayson: the women relatives of offenders were always better game than witnesses.

  Detweiler was sleeping again when the extraditing detectives arrived, but woke up as they stood outside the bars with their local colleagues and looked at him. He gazed drowsily at them and then his eyes drifted away in indifference, like those of a lion in a zoo.

  Tierney was in a strange state of mind. He despised criminals in an impersonal way, more so when they had been apprehended than while the pursuit continued: in captivity they bore the additional stench of failure. Psychotics of course were another matter: the first problem wa
s to determine whether a given example was genuinely a psycho or faking. That determination was not legally a policeman’s business, yet try to find the officer who would not make it. You had to. You were only human.

  But at the first sight of Detweiler, Tierney experienced the onset of two convictions. One, that Detweiler was crazy and thus necessarily beyond moral judgment. Tierney could not have explained this decision. Nothing in Detweiler’s appearance was even eccentric—except perhaps his suit.

  The second feature of Tierney’s reaction was that he hated Detweiler immediately, desperately, savagely. He would have liked to beat him to death and beyond: to pulp him, as-it were, trampling his vital organs. This passion was unprecedented; he had felt nothing like it when, the year before, he had collared the pimpled wretch who sodomized and mutilated a two-year-old or the apish truck driver who killed his sick wife with repeated blows to the head.

  Tierney did not disclose these feelings to anyone else either by deed, word, or implication. He apparently looked at Detweiler with the same indifference as that with which the killer gazed at him. Eventually he was coupled to Detweiler by the handcuff’s other claw, and the three of them, Shuster and the Siamese twins, caught a return flight.

  Detweiler’s mother, who never read the newspapers, might very well never know precisely of his disposition. If a fellow communicant in spiritualism brought up the matter, she could be relied on to dismiss it neatly. Such money as remained after paying the lawyer he would have forwarded to her. She might through extrasensory means get some sense of him, but since he was not in trouble—trouble to Detweiler being when things did not add up, which was scarcely the case now he was on his way towards execution—she would not know pain. He soon fell asleep once more; it was serene to float upon an ocean of cloud.

  Tierney avoided looking at Detweiler, but felt his attached arm grow slack. Shuster sat behind them, alone in that row, whether by arrangement or merely because of a shortage of passengers, Tierney did not know. In Shuster’s company he was nowadays a flunky. Shuster knew nothing of the actual relations between him and Betty: the man was bluffing, as he so often did in the interrogation of criminals. Tierney had reported only that he and Mrs. Bayson had revisited the Starr apartment on her suggestion. Her memory of the missing stuffed animal might have proved valuable had not Detweiler come in of his own volition. It was all reasonable. Unless that patrolman, Spinelli, was one of Shuster’s informants. The lieutenant had various spies throughout the Force, though he complained himself of being spied on by his departmental enemies.

  For his part, Shuster did not believe in criminal insanity. That was a defense lawyer’s tripe or, worse, a psychiatrist’s. Detweiler, he thought, might beat the rap. He was light-complexioned. He had turned himself in, and he had confessed in a style used by those who intended to plead insanity. Shuster disliked the interrogation of psychos. You had to listen to a lot of malarkey, and then their lawyers always managed to suggest to the jury that you abused them. His heart fell as he perused the typescript of Detweiler’s interminable composition for the newspaper. He kept getting lost on the third page.

  On landing the airplane was met by a delegation of policemen and an entourage of official cars. Shuster’s schedule was to wait until the other passengers had struggled into their coats and exited, before he rose and signaled to Tierney that they should haul Detweiler out.

  A reporter and photographer came aboard. Disregarding the stewardesses, Tierney threatened to shove the camera up someone’s rectum, and Shuster, agreeing with him for once, vowed silently to take the badge of the officer who had let them by, but was forced to abolish that resolution when he reached the open hatch and recognized the police commissioner standing at the bottom of the mobile stair.

  The press and TV had their way for the next quarter-hour. Detweiler cooperated with the cameramen, looking this way and that on command, but he said nothing in answer to the shouted questions, which were hardly serious. Anyway, he had signed a contract giving exclusive rights to his utterances to the newspaper and its syndicate, and he was not the one to go back on his word.

  Eventually he was led into the rear seat of a police car and sat, like the filling of a sandwich, between the two detectives who had accompanied him on the airplane.

  For the first time he spoke to the man to whom he was handcuffed.

  “Will I be fed again?”

  Tierney did not answer. He continued to repeat his fantasy concerning Detweiler’s activities as a resident of the Starr apartment. Betty denied that her relations with the killer had been intimate, but Tierney took this rather as circumstantial evidence that they had been at it like rabbits. She was hateful and vicious and cunning enough to know she could hurt him, Tierney, more by maintaining this fiction than by admitting what was obvious to reason.

  Shuster said: “You cooperate with us, son, and we’ll cooperate with you.” The old bastard never forgot his job.

  Detweiler noticed from his limited view of the world outside that every trace of snow had already vanished from the city streets, and he found it interesting to think that if he had scooped a cupful of it the other day and preserved it in the ice-cube compartment of a refrigerator he would by now have a rare substance, indeed probably unique: old snow. Frozen time.

  At police headquarters he was conducted into the midst of more newspapermen, and the commissioner was there again, and also, finally, the man whose responsibility it was to see him condemned to death. Detweiler therefore was interested in him. He was in somewhat the same relation to Detweiler as Detweiler had been to the Starr woman and the boarder.

  This man, wearing a suit of beautiful brown flannel, approached him and said, “Joseph Detweiler, did you—”

  “Excuse me,” Detweiler interrupted, firmly though not in the slightest degree insolent.

  Nor did the man take it so, being in no doubt of his authority.

  He said, below his long nose and short lip: “I am the district attorney of this county.” He peered for a moment at Detweiler and added patiently: “My name is Crews.”

  Detweiler said: “You can beat me if you want, but I will not break my contract.”

  The district attorney’s heavy eyebrows crawled up his steep forehead. “We don’t do that sort of thing.” Then he gazed abstractly at everyone and no one, and asked: “Contract?”

  Tierney was still there, behind the principals, no longer manacled to the killer. He waited respectfully until it was apparent no one else would speak, then elucidated: “Sir, I think he believes his agreement to give the exclusive story to the newspaper means he can’t talk to anybody.”

  Crews said: “Will you take my word for it that your contract does not apply to what you tell us?”

  “I certainly will, Mr. Crews,” Detweiler replied. That was a weight off him.

  The district attorney’s brows had not yet come down. “Well then,” he said, “did you murder Mrs. Wilma Starr, Miss Wilhelmina Starr, and Mr. E. C. Appleton on Christmas Eve last?”

  “No!” Detweiler said with force. “I did not murder them. I killed them.”

  “All right, all right,” said the police commissioner, who on arriving at headquarters had lost the gladhanded politician’s charm he had shown at the airport. “We want to hear exactly what you did and how.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Detweiler. “I don’t want this distorted. I think I better wait until my attorney arrives.”

  Once again the D.A. addressed the room at large. “Who is his counsel?”

  Shuster answered in the anonymous voice he reserved for such occasions: “Henry Webster Melrose.”

  “I have heard of him,” responded the D.A., and everyone but Detweiler smirked painfully.

  Chapter 13

  MELROSE did not like to defend madmen. Otherwise he had few prejudices as to clients. He had represented so many professional killers that his enemies had success in labeling him as a gangsters’ counsel, with the implication that he was therefore himself a criminal. This
reputation proved of great value, bringing him not only more business from the mobs, but also from little helpless people who had got into trouble: and if condemned for taking an enormous fee from the employers of one Joe Guglielmo, accused of murdering one Vito Marino with a sawed-off shotgun and sinking the corpse, weighted with a cargo of cast-iron objects, into a body of water, Melrose could always point to his subsequent defense of some penniless Negro charged with breaking his wife’s neck in a family quarrel.

  Melrose could have done so if he wished, but as it happened he never defended himself: he had too much contempt for others. In return, except by the disreputable elements, he was universally feared and detested, for his associations, for his arrogance, but mostly for his habitual courtroom victories. He had served as defense counsel in eighty-two capital cases and had never yet lost a client to the executioner.

  As to the moral guilt of his clients, Melrose had no interest whatever. If they confessed to him, as they sometimes did, his immediate and only concern was as to whether they had also done so to anyone available to the prosecution. Not that he was discouraged even though the district attorney possessed a detailed statement admitting all and signed by the creature Melrose must defend, along with eight eyeball witnesses. Melrose preferred hopeless cases and preposterously unfavorable odds. He loathed criminals and, as a man who lived by his wits, despised violence. Had he been a police officer, no lawbreaker would have received his mercy. As a judge he would have been implacable—and furthermore would never have tolerated a Melrose in his court.

  But as it stood he was neither more nor less than an attorney at law, and his opponents must encounter him on that ground or void the field. In any trial that which was tried was the prosecution’s case. According to the great and fundamental principle of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, the accuser bore the burden of proof. Not even the massive power of the state could penetrate this armor into which Melrose had buckled himself at the beginning of his career and in which he expected to be buried, like Frederick the Great in his impregnable Prussian uniform. Therefore Melrose could afford to be otherwise disaffected from his fellows. He had no political ambitions, no social or ethnic identifications, and secretly, and contrary to the charges of his enemies, he was essentially modest. His opinion of himself was not so high as his assessment of others was low. He existed in a time and place in which, it seemed to him, only relative judgments were feasible: he perhaps came off better than most because he was almost alone in wanting to practice his profession: to do the job, and not to gain love or power or the approbation of anonymous hordes living or dead.