Death Wish

by Brian Garfield

  Chills swept him furiously. He took the top magazine off the unread pile beside the couch; opened it at random and read a long paragraph and went back to start it again, realizing he had not paid attention to the meaning of the words. After the second try he gave it up and closed the magazine.

  This wouldn’t do. He had to do something; he had to start making some sort of plans.

  He decided he would call the police in the morning. Maybe they had to be needled.

  He swallowed half the martini and looked around the room with a different glance: trying to picture how it had happened. Where had they done it? On the carpet? Right here on this couch? He tried to visualize it.

  It was hard to form a picture. He had never seen real violence except on television or in the movies. Until this had happened, he had been secretly convinced that a good part of it was fictitious—part of the spurious hearty masculine myths that city men constructed to reassure themselves of their machismo and the toughness of the world they inhabited. Intellectually he knew better but in his private emotions and fantasies he did not really believe, in a personal way, that hoodlums and killers existed. He had lived his entire life in the Sin Capital of the world, except for the two years they had lived within commuting distance of it, yet never with his own eyes had he seen any vice or corruption, or any violence beyond the occasional arbitrary explosion of a motorist or pedestrian so overcome by inarticulate rage that he began to shout at taxi drivers and beat their fenders with fists. He had never seen a bookie, never known a gangster. He knew drugs were pushed in the neighborhood: one block east was Needle Park, and he had seen the faces full of listless ennui which he understood belonged to addicts, but he had never seen drugs change hands, never seen a hypodermic needle outside a doctor’s office. Sometimes he had been frightened by the harsh laughing packs of teenagers who roamed through subway trains and stood in knots on street corners, but he had never actually seen them commit acts of violence. Sometimes it was hard to escape the feeling that the pages of the Daily News and the Mirror were filled not with fact-news but with the lurid fantasies of pulp-fiction writers.

  He knew plenty of people whose apartments had been burglarized. Once, three or four years ago, Carol’s purse had been snatched by a quick nimble arm darting through a closing subway door. Those things happened but they happened anonymously; there was no real feeling of personal human violence to them.

  Now he had to get used to an entire new universe of reality.

  6

  There was a crime story in the Sunday Times Magazine and Esther’s name was in it. Sam Kreutzer called at ten that morning to tell him about it. “How are you getting along?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “It’s a rotten time. Is there anything at all we can do, Paul?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Maybe you’d like to come over and have dinner with us one night this week.”

  “Can I let you know later on in the week, Sam? Right now I don’t much want to see anybody.” He wanted to evade the kindnesses of friends. It hadn’t happened to them; it was secondhand to them. You only bled from your own wounds. There was a saccharine quality to people’s sympathy, they couldn’t help it, and pity was a cruel emotion at best.

  He called Jack. Carol was still asleep. Paul said he’d telephone again later; he probably wouldn’t come there to eat unless she was feeling much better—otherwise a raincheck?

  He went out to buy the Times. Walked up the avenue to Seventy-second and over to the newsstand by the subway station on Broadway. It was quite warm. He narrowly watched the flow of people on the streets, wondering for the first time in his life which of them were killers, which were addicts, which were the innocent. Never before had he felt acutely physically afraid of walking on the streets; he had always been prudent, used taxis late at night, never walked dark streets or ventured alone into uninhabited neighborhoods; but that had been a kind of automatic habit. Now he found himself searching every face for signs of violence.

  He carried the Times back along Seventy-second Street, walking slowly, consciously looking at things he had spent years taking for granted: the filth, the gray hurrying faces, the brittle skinny girls who stood under the awning in midblock. There wasn’t much traffic—on these last warm Sundays after Labor Day everyone fled the city, seeking to prolong the summer as much as they could by soaking up sunshine in the country or at the crowded beaches.

  A woman stood staring vacantly into a display window of one of the cheap variety shops. There was a red sign in the window: ¿Cómo sabe Vd. que no tiene enfermedad venérea? How do you know you haven’t got V.D.? She was a primitive woman, her dark face mottled with scars, her mouth loose: an ancient slut, an evil hag with a greasy shopping bag pendant from her doughy hand. How many killers had sprung from her loins? How many muggers had lain between her ancient yielding thighs?

  He rushed back to the apartment, alarmed.

  Monday he was still deep in what he decided was post-trauma tristesse. He had taken sleeping pills last night; they made him irritable in the morning. Last night he had decided it would be best to go in to the office today—even if he didn’t get any work done it would be better to have familiar people around him—but now he knew he couldn’t face any of them.

  He went to the bank because he was low on cash. It was a short walk, across the street from the newsstand on the corner of Broadway and Seventy-second. The same route he had followed yesterday to buy the Times; the same route he had followed thousands of times, to and from the subway to go to work. Yet now it was different. He slipped into the bank as if it were a hiding place.

  He had thought of buying a heavy cane and carrying it as a weapon. But it would be unwieldy at best; someone with a knife could get in under it, and it might anger them if they saw you carrying an obvious club.

  At the counter he stood behind a fat man in a grease-spotted apron who was buying change, probably for a lunch counter’s cash register. The man went away with a sack heavy with coins wrapped in paper rolls.

  Paul bought a ten-dollar roll of quarters. Back in the apartment he slipped it into a sock, knotted it, and crashed it experimentally into his cupped palm. Then he put it in his pocket. He would carry it all the time henceforth.

  He wasn’t gentle; he was a flabby coward. It was dawning on him that the most terrifying thing about his existence was his ineffectualness.

  He felt like a fool. He took the roll of coins out of his pocket, untied the sock, and went to put the roll of quarters away in the drawer of an end table. The drawer opened an inch and then stuck. He jerked at it; it came out, fell from his hand, tumbled onto the rug. The oddments from it—safety pins, decks of cards—flew across the floor.

  He blurted a string of oaths at the top of his lungs.

  After he had put the drawer back and gathered up its droppings he re-wrapped the roll of quarters in the sock and returned it to his pocket.

  He called a locksmith and the man agreed to come round Wednesday and change the locks, replace them with heavy models that couldn’t be slipped with cellulose or broken by pressure.

  For several hours he sat constructing fantasies of methods of boobytrapping the apartment against intruders. Shotguns with wires attached to the triggers. Grenades.

  After that he began to call himself names: stupid idiot, paranoid fool.

  Jack phoned a little after five. “I’ve been trying to get you since noon.”

  “I had the phone off the hook. Too many sympathy calls.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Did Carol see the psychiatrist?”

  “Yes, we went around there this morning. He seemed like a nice guy, pretty level-headed. He prescribed some tranquilizers and said she’d probably take a little while to get over it. I think he spent more time talking to me than he spent with Carol. A lot of speechifying on how I have to be calm and patient and understanding with her until she’s over it. You’d think she was pregnant.”

  “It sound
s as if he’s probably right, though. Aren’t you relieved?”

  “I was at the time. But she’s incredibly depressed, Pop. She hardly reacts at all when I talk to her. It’s like talking to a wall.”

  “Maybe that’s partly the effect of the tranquilizers.”

  “Maybe,” Jack said without conviction.

  “Do you think it would do her any good if I came around to see her?”

  “No. I mentioned it to the doctor. He said it might be better for her not to see you for a little while. I told him you might be hard to convince, but he seems to feel it’s important to try and protect her from certain associations with the crime. Evidently she identifies you with it because it was your apartment. Now please don’t misunderstand, Pop—it’s not that she blames you for anything. But it might be better if you didn’t see her for a few days.”

  “That’s what he said, is it?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry—I know things are hard enough for you without——”

  “Never mind, I understand.” He wasn’t sure he did, altogether; but he didn’t want to start an argument. It would be fruitless. “Well, I’ll call you tomorrow.” He rang off, feeling dismal.

  He had called the police Sunday morning; he phoned again Monday evening and was put through to a Lieutenant Malcolm Briggs. “Yes, that’s right, Mr. Benjamin, I’m in charge of the case.”

  “I was just wondering if anything had developed. Any—leads.”

  “Well, I’d like to be encouraging, but right now we haven’t got anything strong enough to call a lead. We’ve pinned down one or two people who saw a group of kids hanging around the front of the supermarket at about the right time of day that afternoon. One of our witnesses says he thinks he’d recognize them if he saw them again, so if we do pick them up he’ll be able to do a show-up for us. But so far no one’s been able to pick them out of our mug books. Your daughter looked through the mug pictures yesterday, of course, but she wasn’t positive enough about any of the faces to identify them.”

  “I didn’t know she’d been to police headquarters.”

  “She wasn’t. I talked to Mr. Tobey, he told me her condition, so I managed to talk the deputy inspector down there into letting us have a couple of patrolmen relay the mug books over to her at her apartment, one at a time. She went through all our photo files of people who’ve had records of anything close to this kind of modus operandi. As I say, she didn’t pick any of them out. She did give us something of a description, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “She seemed to be pretty sure that two of them were Puerto Ricans and the third was black. Of course he may have been a black Puerto Rican—there are quite a few of them.”

  “Well, isn’t there a method you people use of reconstructing faces with drawings of various features?”

  “The Identikit, yes, sir. She didn’t seem to feel up to that.”

  “Well, she should be feeling better within a few days.”

  “She can have a crack at it whenever she’s ready, sir.”

  After the connection broke, Paul thought of half a dozen more questions he should have asked. He brooded at the telephone, then dialed the Horatio Street number.

  “Jack?”

  “Oh hello, Pop. Anything wrong?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me Carol had been through the police mug books?”

  “I guess it must have slipped my mind. I mean she didn’t recognize any of them.”

  “It must have been damned upsetting for her.”

  “She insisted on it, Pop. It was her idea.”

  “Judging by what’s happened I don’t think it was such a good idea.”

  “Well, at the time I thought it was an encouraging sign that she had the gumption to want to do it. Afterward it only seemed to make it worse, though.” Jack’s voice cracked slightly: “Hell, Pop, what are we going to do?”

  He wished he had an answer.

  When he hung up he realized why Jack hadn’t told him about it. Jack had anticipated an explosion; he knew how protective Paul could be.

  It made him wonder why he hadn’t exploded more forcefully than he had. Things were still bottled up inside him, under high pressure. Something was bound to burst.

  7

  On Thursday Carol was hospitalized at Columbia-Presbyterian for observation; at least that was what the psychiatrist called it.

  By Thursday morning Paul had begun to realize how dangerous it was to coop himself up alone. The longer he spent in the apartment the more terrifying the outside world became. He had to bestir himself. It was too easy to seal himself off, stare at imbecilic television programs and blank walls. Drinking more than he ate. Getting no exercise at all. He kept thinking he was having heart attacks.

  Except for the hours when he tried to sleep he avoided the bedroom. It was too full of Esther. He knew he should pack her things and get rid of them but he didn’t want to go near them yet so he confined himself to the living room, the kitchen, the foyer; sometimes striding back and forth from one to the other but usually sitting blankly in front of the television console whether it was turned on or not.

  He had only been out of the apartment three times on brief excursions in the past one hundred hours. That was no good. The body rotted, the mind deteriorated; only the demons of subconscious fantasies thrived.

  He decided to call Sam Kreutzer at the office and take Sam up on the invitation to dinner if it was still open; he prepared himself for the possibility that Sam and his wife would have some other engagement for tonight, and reached for the phone.

  It rang before he touched it. Jack, to tell him about Carol’s hospitalization.

  Paul didn’t remember the conversation clearly afterward. He knew he had shouted at Jack—damn fool questions to which Jack couldn’t possibly have the answers; cruel inane accusations that only succeeded in eliciting chilly replies from Jack. Finally Jack hung up on him.

  He hadn’t even got the psychiatrist’s name. He would have to call back and get it. But not right away; he had to give Jack time to cool off first—and give himself time for the same thing.

  He showered—scrubbed himself viciously until the flesh stung with a red rash. Shaved with meticulous care. Got into a completely clean set of clothes from the skin out for the first time in five days. His best office suit—the gray gabardine Esther had insisted he buy in the Oxford Street shop the last time they had been to London, three years ago. He knotted his tie precisely and fixed it to his shirt with the silver tiepin. Wiped off his shoes with a rag. Checked himself in the mirror, re-combed his hair, and braced himself to walk out the door.

  In front of the building splinters of shattered glass lay like frost on the sidewalk—a broken bottle. He stepped around it and looked both ways for traffic and jaywalked across to the east side of the avenue. When he walked up Seventieth toward Broadway the children were leaving P.S. 199, making a racket, traveling in packs and knots. His stomach muscles knotted. At first he didn’t look any of them in the face—as if by pretending they didn’t exist he could prevent them from seeing him. He let them flow around him. There was a lot of rough-edged laughter in high voices. Did it have a savage brutal ring to it or was he only hearing it that way?

  As he forged into the midst of the yelling mass he suddenly began looking them straight in the faces. In his pocket his fist closed around the knotted sock, weighted with its roll of coins.

  One tall youth caught Paul’s glance. The youth’s eyes flickered when they touched Paul’s: flickered and slid away. Paul almost stopped. His head swiveled to follow the youth, who said something to the kid beside him; they both laughed but they didn’t look back in Paul’s direction.

  He had the light at the corner; he trotted across Amsterdam and was stopped by the light at Broadway so he turned right on the curb and began to walk toward Columbus Circle. He was out of the packs of kids now; his gut relaxed. But his thoughts raced: what had he expected? To be attacked in the midst of a street crowded with schoolchildren? To get into
a stare-down match with that tall youth, and come to blows?

  You have got to get hold of yourself.

  He approached the clean attractive buildings of the Lincoln Center complex. A sudden impulse sent him across Broadway on Sixty-fifth and he went into Central Park, heading across town.

  Just inside the park a bum staggered near with palm outstretched; and Paul, who had always felt obliged to pay off the infirm ones, hurried past with his face averted.

  The park was covered with the leavings of callous humanity: discarded newspapers, crumpled lunch bags, rusty bottlecaps, rustless empty cans, broken bottles. Several years ago he had worked an entire summer, every spare hour of it, for the volunteer anti-litter campaign. All right, they’ve been told, they’ve had their chance.

  He didn’t follow the implications of the thought through: he was afraid to.

  Near the zoo a drunk sat swaying on a bench. His eyes tracked Paul. He looked as if he had no past and was entitled to no future. He kept watching Paul, his head turning to follow Paul’s passage. It set Paul’s teeth on edge. He hurried through the zoo and out onto Fifth Avenue.

  He had started with no particular destination, only an urge to get out, get moving, put an end to his unhealthy isolation. By now he knew where he was heading. He quickened his pace even though his feet were beginning to get hot and sore.

  The door sucked shut behind him. Marilyn the receptionist, who was a matronly twenty-six-year-old brunette with the suggestion of a double chin, did a double-take that contrived to combine in one expression amazement, pleasure and sympathy. “Why Mr. Benjamin!” she chirped. “How nice!” Then she remembered; her face changed with comic abruptness. “Oh we were all so frightfully sorry to hear … Poor Mrs. Benjamin … It must have been just terrible for you——”