Death Wish

by Brian Garfield

  “Why not?”

  “She was kind of flippy. Probably being gang-raped wasn’t exactly her idea of a fate worse than death. She was sore at them, but not really mad. You know what I mean?”

  “I can’t say I do, altogether.”

  “What I guess I’m getting at is that so many of these things simply aren’t taken seriously any more. Or at least they’re taken for granted. Do you know what that girl said to me? She said she should have known better than to go into Bryant Park at that hour. She almost seemed to think it was her own fault. She wouldn’t have been raped if she hadn’t gone there. It’s a weird time we live in.”

  “Are you trying to say,” Paul breathed, “that Carol’s mother invited this to happen by something she herself did?”

  “Not at all. Don’t fly off the handle again. I suppose if both of you had lived as if you were in a besieged fortress—use the peephole religiously, never let a stranger inside the apartment, put extra locks on the doors, never travel outside the apartment without a vicious guard dog on a leash—I guess if you chose to live like that she might still be alive, but who can put up with that?”

  Paul knew people who did.

  “Look, Pop, I know this won’t set well right now, but in time you’re going to have to think of it as a tragic accident—as if a disease had struck her down, or a runaway bus on the street. It’s no good getting worked up into demands for vengeance and retribution. Even if they catch these three bastards and put them away for the rest of their lives it won’t really change anything.”

  Paul waited for the inevitable It won’t bring her back but Jack never uttered it; perhaps, after all, he was not totally insensitive to the more blatant clichés.

  “We both have to face that,” Jack droned on relentlessly. “In these times you have to feel inadequate if you can’t slip a door-lock open in three seconds with a plastic calendar card—every kid on the street can do that. Do you know the crime statistics? I hear them every other day from some sourpussed Assistant D.A. There’s an assault or a robbery every twelve seconds in New York—something like seventy thousand reported cases last year, and that’s probably less than half the number that didn’t get reported. In felony cases they only make arrests in about one-sixth of the cases and of those they only get convictions on about one-third. Of course in murder cases it’s a lot higher—the police usually solve about eighty percent of them, but still we have about three murders a day in the city. You and I and Carol and even Mom—we’re statistics now. On that God damned blotter. That’s what makes it so damned hard to maintain your personal perspective: To you and me this is the most devastating thing that’s ever happened—to the cops it’s something they see all the time, so often they just can’t keep getting worked up about it.”

  Paul felt acid. “Thank you, Jack, you’re a balm and a consolation to me.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound like a wise ass. But I’m in this business, I guess you could say—at least I’m on the periphery of it, I have to deal with the police every day. And I think you’ve got to be prepared for the possibility that nothing more is ever going to develop in this case. You’ve got to go on living, haven’t you?”

  “No,” Paul said slowly, “you don’t have to go on living.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more of that.”

  He stood splayed with the drink in his hand. His lowered head swung back and forth like the head of a worn-out prelim fighter in the ring, trying to locate his opponent. “I’m not thinking about suicide, I didn’t mean that.” But he kept bulling it, thinking. His breathing was shallow; his sphincter contracted, he formed a loose fist. “I’ve never hit a man in anger in my life. Never called a black man ‘nigger’ or stolen a penny from any man. I’ve given money and my own time to a dozen worthwhile causes from block associations to the N-Double-A-C-P.”

  “And this is the thanks you get,” Jack murmured. “I know, Pop. And it’s true, and there’s no answer to it.”

  “There’s one answer I intend to demand. I want those three killers.”

  “They’ll probably get them. They may not. But if they don’t, what do you plan to do? Turn your back on every decent principle you’ve ever stood for? Join the Birchers or the Ku Klux Klan?”

  “Well, I don’t know what I’d do,” Paul said vaguely. “But Christ, there ought to be something.”

  “You mean like hire a private eye? Or get a gun and go looking for them yourself? Those things only happen on television, Pop.”

  “Well, just the same you may have hit on something there. A private detective might be——”

  “Private detectives aren’t what the movies make them out to be, Pop. They exist for the purposes of getting divorce evidence and providing security services like industrial counter-espionage and bank guards. There are no private eyes who investigate murder cases, and even if there were, they wouldn’t be able to hold a candle to the police. At least the police have manpower and organization and know-how.”

  “And total indifference.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. You remember that policeman who stayed with us at the hospital?”

  Paul even remembered his name: Joe Charles. “He was only a uniformed patrolman.”

  “Sure. But he’s a human being. He does care, Pop. Some of them are corrupt and some of them don’t give a shit, but the cops aren’t really the pigs we made them out to be in college.”

  “Like unto thee and me,” Paul growled. “It doesn’t change the fact—if your estimate is correct—that there’s an excellent chance these animals will never be brought to justice.”

  “Justice—or revenge?”

  “What difference does it make what you call it?”

  Jack shook his head. “All I’m saying is you and I may never be able to do a thing about this. Obviously we can’t go out into the streets and find these killers ourselves. We wouldn’t begin to know where to look.”

  “Then you’re saying we should just forget the whole thing. Go back to bed and pull the covers up over our heads.”

  “Or write letters to the Times.”

  It made Paul look at him; it was the kind of sarcasm you didn’t expect of Jack.

  “I guess you’re right,” Paul said. “I guess you’re right.”

  “We may have to get used to it, Pop.”

  “I guess we can try.”

  5

  He didn’t sleep at all that night; but he hadn’t expected to. There were chloral hydrate capsules if he wanted them. He didn’t. He felt the longer he went on drugging himself out of it the longer it would take to purge himself of his demons. It was better to face them and have it out.

  It was the first night he had spent in his own apartment since the murder. He had left Carol’s apartment early, before the sun went down. He hadn’t planned that, it had come out of an argument: Carol somnambulistically had served up something barely edible and the three of them had sat down to it listlessly. They pushed food around on their plates and said very little. Once Jack got up to put a Mahler recording on the stereo; a few minutes later he got up again and took it off. No music would have been right for that hour—heavy music intensified the despondency; trivial music would have mocked it.

  In the circumstances none of them had the stomach for silence and so they had begun to talk: awkward, forced. The significant things were not to be said; it was bad enough having to think them. So they had attempted to make impersonal conversation but it was too much of a strain and inevitably the talk had come around to things closer to home: whether Paul would keep the apartment now, whether they should call the police to find out if anything had developed or whether they should wait for the police to call them.

  In the end it had led to another argument about retribution vs. reality and Paul had got to his feet to make some angry point, his voice trembling, and Carol suddenly had covered her ears with her palms and screwed her eyes shut and uttered an earsplitting shriek.

  “You’d better go on home,” Jack
had said.

  “I’d rather wait till the doctor gets here.”

  “No, I think it would only upset her more. You can understand that.”

  Jack had given her a pill and put her to bed while Paul was calling Dr. Rosen; now Jack picked up Paul’s jacket and handed it to him. “I don’t mean to seem cruel.”

  “Damn it, I’m her father.”

  “Right now you’re a reminder of her mother, I think.”

  A sharp remark rose to his tongue—something acid about Jack’s license to practice parlor psychiatry—but he had let it die there; Jack was too vulnerable, there was too much heat already.

  So he had left, bile in his throat. A taxi from Horatio Street to the upper West Side. He’d got out of the taxi at the corner of Seventieth and West End, crossed the avenue with the light and walked up the half-block to the apartment house, staring with belligerent suspicion at every face on the street.

  The night man on the door gave him a nod and a polite smile of recognition as if nothing had ever happened. Was it possible he didn’t know? Paul stopped automatically to unlock the mailbox. It was crowded with small stiff envelopes—sympathy cards. He shoved them in his pocket, locked the mailbox and went along the corridor from the lobby to the back elevator. He rode up part-way with a middle-aged couple he’d seen often enough to say hello to; he didn’t know their names. If they had seen the papers they hadn’t made the connection; they nodded and said goodnight when they got out at the seventh floor, leading their Pekingese on a leash snuffling and tugging. Paul rode on up to the twelfth floor, put the key in the lock and pushed into the apartment with his stomach muscles tensed, not sure what he was going to find or how he was going to react to it.

  Someone had slid a note under the door. It lay askew on the carpet. He bent down to pick it up, ready for anger, half expecting it to be a threatening letter from the killers. It was a sympathy card from the Bernsteins next door. He put it together with the stack from his pocket and left the pile on the end-table under the mirror in the foyer.

  They had moved into this apartment after Carol had started college and it had become regretfully evident that she was no longer going to live at home with them for any extended periods of time. There was only the living-room, middle-sized, and the large corner bedroom and bath, and the kitchen off the entrance foyer. The building was forty or fifty years old, it had the high ceilings and multitudinous closets of its vintage, the curious moldings that ran around the walls a foot below the ceiling, the Edwardian ceiling-light fixtures. It wasn’t quite old enough to have a bathtub on claw feet, but the bathroom had that flavor to it. It was a small apartment but comfortable, it had more than its share of windows and most of them looked down upon the attractive row of converted brownstones on the opposite side of Seventy-first Street.

  He kicked the door shut behind him and glanced into the kitchen and walked into the living room. The place had been tidied; everything was neat. Had the police gone to the trouble? It wasn’t the cleaning lady, she came on Mondays. He scowled; he had expected to find wreckage, he had occupied himself thinking about cleaning the place up.

  The flavor of Esther was in the place but it didn’t seem to affect him. He walked through the rooms trying to feel something. It was as if his subconscious was afraid to let him feel anything.

  Something unfamiliar caught his eye and it took him a moment to figure out what it was. He had to run his eyes around the living room and study each object. The chairs, the coffee table, the bookcase, the television, the air-conditioner in the window.…

  He went back. The television. The killers had stolen the television.

  It was a console; it stood in the corner where the old portable had squatted on its table. It looked like a color set—the kind with built-in stereo and AM-FM radio. He crossed the room in four long strides.

  There was a note:

  Paul—

  In hopes this may make it just a

  bit more bearable—

  Our very deepest condolences,

  —The Guys at the Office

  P.S.—We stocked the refrig.

  It broke him down: he wept.

  * * *

  They had never had a color set and he hadn’t seen many color programs—only the occasional badly tuned football game above a bar, and once or twice the Academy Awards on some friends’ enormous set. He spent twenty minutes fiddling with the thing, tuning in all the channels, trying to find amusement. He was too restless. He switched it off and thought about making a drink, but decided against it.

  The phone rang. It was Jack. “Dr. Rosen just left. He’s prescribed some stronger sedatives. He’s arranging an appointment for her with a shrink Monday morning.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s the best thing right now.”

  “I hope it’ll help snap her out of it. I imagine it will. Rosen says he’s got a very good man.”

  “I imagine he would.”

  “It was damned nice of him to come. Where can you find a doctor willing to make house calls on Friday night any more?”

  “He’s been our family doctor for almost twenty years.”

  “Well, I’ll let you know if anything changes. Right now she’s asleep—doped up. The poor kid. Christ, this is a rotten thing.… How about you? Are you all right up there? You can still come back down and spend the night if you’d feel better. I know it must be miserable up there all alone.”

  “I’ll have to get used to it sometime. This is as good a time to start as any.”

  “There’s no need to make it too hard on yourself, Pop.”

  “I’ll be all right,” he growled. “I’ll probably drop by tomorrow to look in on Carol.”

  “Fine.”

  After he hung up the apartment seemed emptier. He reversed his earlier decision and made a drink. Carried it into the bedroom and sat down, jerked at his tie, bent down and began to unlace his shoes.

  He kicked them off and reached for his drink and heard himself cry out.

  He couldn’t believe it. He had always managed to bottle things up; anything else was weakness. He sat like a stone, writhing inside, experiencing terror from the crazy random impulse to do violence: he wanted to smash out at anything within reach.

  Finally he began swinging his fist rhythmically against the side of the mattress. He got down on one knee and swung from the floor. It didn’t hurt his fist and it didn’t do the mattress any damage and after a little while he knew there wasn’t going to be any satisfaction in it. He remembered a kid in high school who’d put his fist through the panel of a door in one of the study halls—all the way through it. He couldn’t remember whether the kid had done it on a dare or just out of sheer rage; the kid had been one of the athletes, a bully everyone feared. Paul thought about slugging a door but he was afraid of pain, he didn’t want to break his hand.

  A hammer, he thought. That would feel good—taking a hammer to something, swinging it as hard as you could.

  And do what? Smash up the furniture? The walls?

  His brain kept frustrating him.

  In the middle of the night he got up and took a shower. Lying on the bed drying off, he wished Esther were there. He would have shouted at her and it would have made him feel better.

  Just last week he had noticed how overweight she was getting—the way the flesh of her sapless breasts and her armpits were bunched around the edges of her bra; how thick her hips had become, her waist and thighs, the soft heavy padding of flesh under her chin. Well she was forty-six years old, a year younger than Paul, almost to the day: they were both Aquarians.

  Aquarian acquaintances, he thought. All the intense promises when you were youthful; but after marriage they had settled into their lives without any sparks. They had slowly got fat and out of shape. They had both been strangely old before they should have been—as if they had never been young.

  In the beginning she had been an attractive girl who moved gracefully and had a soft voice, mercifully lacking in the brass that coated the
tongues of most of the city girls he met. He supposed they had liked each other from the outset. They had gone on liking each other. There had been surprisingly few fights; he knew they both had been repressed people who had to build up a head of steam before being able to give vent to their rages, and by the time things became that intense there was usually some outside outlet—the office, the community volunteer groups where Esther worked almost full-time and Paul had contributed as much time as he could spare.

  Now with hindsight he was unhappy with the feeling that they had both played life too carefully. Was he sad now because he had loved her, or because he was guilty that he hadn’t loved her? Nothing left now but a fistful of lost dreams—but then they were dreams that had been lost long ago; her death perhaps was nothing more than a punctuation mark. It had been, most of the time, a good quiet friendship—not what they had dreamed of in the early days, but perhaps the highest possibility either of them was capable of attaining. They did not blame each other for things; yet when he saw friends and acquaintances who adored their husbands or wives, he remembered his envy.

  Now what would he do with himself on the weekends?

  It hadn’t been a Technicolor marriage but she had become a condition of his life. It was important to have someone. He began to understand what his father, who had lived alone a good part of his life, had endured.

  It came again: a shortness of breath, a debilitating rage that flooded all the tissues of his body.

  He disentangled himself clumsily from the twisted sheets and went into the bathroom, switched on the light and stared at himself in the mirror. His ginger hair was getting very thin on top. The freckles that covered his cheeks and hands seemed to have multiplied and intensified to the texture of knockwurst. His eyes were in red pouches; he saw the flabby lines in his face and throat, the beginnings of a sagging pot in his belly that pulled creases into his sides along the ribs. A washed-up, used-up carcass. He walked into the kitchen, moving nothing but his legs; poured a new martini ten-to-one, not bothering with ice, and padded back into the living room. When he sat down he realized it was the first time he had moved naked through the apartment in years. They had both failed to overturn their pristine and modest backgrounds; they always changed clothes in the bedroom, they never walked naked through the living room and kitchen.