God Told Me To

by C. K. Chandler

  “You’re getting to be a very spooky man, Peter Nicholas. I don’t know if I want to be married to a spooky man. Ghosts are supposed to have cold hands and icy feet and hollow weenies. What kind of children would we have? Vampires. Little goblins. Poltergeists.”

  She quit when she saw he wasn’t laughing with her. She reached across the table and lifted his hand by the thumb and gently shook it.

  “Hey. You going to spend a night at home for a change?”

  He nodded. Grinned a slightly lopsided grin that gave his tired features a boyish quality. Playfully scolded, “Listen, little lady, a cop’s wife has to get used to being alone now and again.”

  “Swell. For my next affair I’ll try shacking up with a fireman.”

  He made a feeble attempt at a joke about firemen and hoses.

  She said, “I’m not yet a cop’s wife. I am getting damn lonely being a cop’s woman.”

  He snapped, “I’ve been busy! Okay! Told you what I’m doing. Thought you understood.”

  He threw back his snifter and drained it. She decided not to say anything as she watched him raise the empty glass and wave it until he got the waiter’s attention. He kept his eyes on the table until his refill came. When he spoke again, it was with an apologetic tone.

  “If we were married. Know what? I’d have had you meet me in Chinatown. Chinese is a cop’s banquet. Unless he’s taking it on the arm. Then it’s steak and lobster. I know cops who hate lobster. They get sick at the sight of one. But if it’s on the arm, that’s what they order.”

  She smiled, not entirely sure which course to take with him, and said, “That’s not you.”

  “Oh, I’ve taken a few meals. And my first day on a beat. Believe me, ever since I was a kid I’d had this fantasy. I’m walking the beat and I pass a street vendor. I grabbed an apple, polished it against the uniform, and ate it. Really made me feel like a true cop, that did.”

  She laughed.

  He sipped his drink, paused, and his voice turned serious again. “You, uh, you don’t believe at all in the supernatural, do you?”

  “I confess I don’t.”

  “I’ve always known it exists.”

  “You believe it exists. Nobody knows for sure.”

  “Sometimes I’ve felt closer to God than to people. Hell, Casey. I’ve watched you read the daily horoscopes. That’s supernatural.”

  “That’s for fun, Peter. Now we’ve been more or less through this before. What you want to believe is fine with me. Just so long as it doesn’t involve bringing home sacrificial virgins.”

  “Don’t tease, Casey. A lot of people feel the same as I do. There’s a church on every street corner.”

  “And there’s a new Messiah reaching in every pocket.”

  He finished his brandy and became silent.

  She faked a yawn. “Now I know why priests can’t get married. They’d make such boring husbands.”

  “I’m sorry. We’ll get a check and leave.”

  “I’m curious. I’m not knocking, but since you’re so devout, why didn’t you become a priest?”

  “I thought about it while I was at Fordham. Thought about it quite a bit. Then my stepfather got sick and the family needed the money. The police department happened to be hiring at the time.”

  She smiled. “So you became a cop and went out and stole an apple.”

  They paid the check and left.

  Nicholas was standing under the warm rain from the shower head when Casey joined him. She soaped and washed him, and then she went down on him. Nothing happened. They went to bed and nothing happened there either. Casey became frantic in her attempts to arouse him. He blamed it on the case, the exhaustion and tension of the case, and he tried to satisfy her with his hands and mouth and it wasn’t with passion that Casey bit her lip until it bled. She faked an orgasm to bring it all to an end.

  The clerk at the marriage license bureau showed Nicholas where to find the files for the past four years and wished the detective luck. He shot a glance at his watch and set to searching the thick volumes. His head ached from the alcohol he had drunk last night. The names in the volumes swam in and out of focus and he had to re-examine certain pages two or three times. After exactly six hours and twenty minutes the information he wanted came into focus. The type was dark and clear and all he could think was, it’s been waiting here all this time. Bernard Phillips had married a woman named Lauren. And in the phone directory he found a Lauren Phillips listed at a Washington Heights address.

  It was an old apartment building with only six floors and no elevator. The tag above the door buzzer read L. PHILLIPS, 4-C.

  He pressed the bell. Perhaps it was due to the age of the speaker system, but when a voice finally came through the metal grill it sounded sick and worn.

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Phillips?”

  “Unhuh.”

  “Police. Detective Lieutenant Peter Nicholas.”

  “Huh?”

  “May I speak with you?”

  The door buzzed and Nicholas entered. He was rounding the staircase on the fourth floor when the door to 4-C opened. A nude woman, her body marked with deep welts and scratches, her face drawn and gaunt, stepped into the hall. She held a straight razor in her hand. She uttered a terrible scream and attacked Nicholas with the razor.

  EIGHT

  The ambulance attendant tried to check his bleeding with pressure bandages, but by the time they reached the hospital he had lost nearly a pint of blood. He refused to let them wheel him into the emergency ward. The attendant helped him walk. Once inside the ward he found himself surrounded by a hive of white. Within moments he was led to a small room. A doctor set to work cleaning and stitching his wounds, while a nurse gave him a series of shots. He sat calmly and without flinching, watching them work on him with a dull fascination.

  He had two long gashes on his face. His left hand had been sliced to the bone. The cut on his chest bled heavily, but that wound was not as serious as the others because his jacket and shirt had taken the main thrust of the razor.

  He asked the purpose of the different shots. The nurse told him painkillers, a coagulant to slow the bleeding and one to prevent tetanus.

  The nurse said, “You’ve remarkable self-control, Lieutenant.”

  “I just don’t feel anything. Just numbness.”

  “You will,” the doctor said. “You’re in a state of mild shock. You’ll be hurting when it wears off. I’ll give you some pills, but—”

  “Don’t give me anything that’ll knock me out. I’ve got work to do.”

  “Mister, you’ve taken a hell of an attack. You’ve lost a lot of blood. You’re not going to be able to do any more work tonight.”

  “I got a job to do. Your job is sewing me up.”

  The doctor had begun with the hand. It took eleven stitches.

  The doctor said, “This hand may keep you out of action for a while.”

  “I shoot right-handed.”

  “I’m using very fine sutures on your face. But with cuts like these there’s no way to avoid scars.”

  “It’ll give me character.”

  “Okay, tough guy. Chew your bullets. I’m going to butterfly that slice on your chest and tape you in. I hope I’m around next week to pull the tape off.”

  Two detectives Nicholas knew only slightly walked in while the doctor was still working on his face. The detectives started asking questions.

  The doctor protested, “Can’t you guys wait till I’m done.”

  “Sorry, Doc,” said a detective. “When it’s one of our own we like to act fast.”

  The second detective added, “Especially when it’s a glamour boy like Lieutenant Nicholas.”

  “He can’t talk now. I’m trying to fix his face.”

  The second detective clucked his tongue. “And it’s such a pretty face, too. Always looks nice on the television or in the papers.”

  “So what were you doing, Nicholas?” the first detective asked. “Havin
g yourself a weird sex scene? Naked broad with a razor. Think the media still will call you a hero if they learn you fuck weirdos?”

  “I’m on special assignment. Call Deputy Commissioner Hendriks.”

  “We know you’re doing something special, Nicholas,” said the second detective. “You are always doing special things.”

  “You guys just write up your report.”

  The first detective said, “Give us something to write.”

  “I went to question Mrs. Phillips about my case. She came at me with the razor. I struggled. She fell down the stairs.”

  “You push her?”

  Nicholas ignored the question. “I assume the medical examiner will say she died of a broken neck. I want an officer stationed at the scene on the off chance her husband shows up.”

  The doctor complained, “Lieutenant, quit talking and moving or I’m liable to stitch up your nose.”

  The second detective said, “We’re trained detectives, Nicholas. We’ve stationed a man there.”

  The first asked, “She die immediately?”

  “She was dead by the time I got to the foot of the stairs.”

  “She say anything?” asked the second.

  Nicholas pushed away the doctor’s hand. He spoke angrily, “I told you she was dead. Get out of here.”

  “Sure, Nicholas. Only why do you think she did it?”

  “A warning.”

  Nicholas went to the morgue after leaving the hospital. He waited while the medical examiner did an autopsy on Lauren Phillips’ body. His left hand was beginning to throb. His face was stiff from the forty-one stitches the doctor had given him, and his chest was tightly bound by tape. He still wore his torn and bloody clothes. When the medical examiner came to him, the first thing she said was:

  “You look worse than what I did to that stiff.”

  He was in no mood for banter. “What was the cause of death?”

  “Broken neck.”

  “The scratches on her body?”

  “Self-inflicted. I found scrapings of her flesh under the fingernails. The burns were probably done with a cigarette.”

  “Age?”

  “Early twenties.”

  “Did you notice anything strange about her features?”

  “No.”

  “When she attacked me her face was twisted in a horrible way. But when I got to her body at the foot of the stairs she had a gentle, tranquil look.”

  “She was obviously insane. At the instant of death she suddenly felt at peace. It’s not unusual, Lieutenant.”

  “Did you find anything else?”

  “She hadn’t eaten in at least forty-eight hours. You might be interested to know there was a mistake on the information card.”

  “What?”

  “It lists her as Mrs. Phillips.”

  “So?”

  “She wasn’t a Mrs. anybody. She was still a virgin.”

  He went to the Times Square area and found a clothing store still open. He bought a shirt and a cheap suit. He left his ruined clothes on the floor of the fitting room, then returned to the Phillips address in Washington Heights.

  The officer stationed there was bored. While Nicholas searched the apartment, the officer constantly muttered his discontent. The droning voice rankled Nicholas’s nerves.

  There was little to search. The apartment was bare of all but a few items. Nicholas went over everything carefully. He sometimes had to stop and sit for a moment. His wounds and medications were beginning to cause dizziness. He nearly fainted once and grabbed hold of the droning officer’s arm to keep from falling. The single chair in the place was a rickety old bentwood that had probably come from the Salvation Army. Each time he sat in it he thought it might collapse under his weight. He breathed slowly and deeply until his strength returned and the chair seemed to sway beneath him. The stitches in his face itched. He longed to tear off the bandages and scratch. He accidentally banged his bad hand a few times and it felt as if it were on fire.

  The officer droned on and on. He reminded Nicholas of a bothersome insect.

  “I’d rather stand duty in front of an embassy than do this. Leastwise I’d see a few people. This is the pits. Nothing here to read. No TV to watch. No radio. You notice, Lieutenant, how there’s nothing here?”

  Nicholas sighed, “I noticed.”

  “Maybe they were ripped off. I was at a scene like this last week. People went away for a weekend. Came back it was like the Santini Brothers, you know, the moving company, like they had been there. Took everything. Even the light bulbs and a fucking roll of toilet paper. Know what the investigating officer told the poor schmucks? Move out of the city.”

  Nicholas shook his head. “Lauren Phillips wasn’t ripped off.”

  “She sure as hell couldn’t live like this. Maybe what happened was everything was repossessed. Those finance companies. They’ll clean you out like Ex-lax.”

  Nicholas picked up a blanket from the floor. It was filthy and gritty with dirt. “She slept on this.”

  “A nut bag. What can I tell ya?”

  There was nothing in the refrigerator except a jar of moldy jam and a half loaf of rock-hard white bread.

  “I checked that out before, Lieutenant. Thought there might be a beer or something.”

  In addition to the pathetic squalor of the apartment, Nicholas took note of two significant things on a wall. An upside-down crucifix. And a lipstick-scrawled message—the now familiar message: God told me to.

  The officer muttered, “You think that stuff there shows she was into witchcraft?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Upside-down crosses are a witch thing. I read that once.”

  “It’s meant to throw me off the track.”

  “None of the neighbors know anything about the broad. Said she kept to herself. Wouldn’t answer her door if they called on her. Guess it’s too bad for you she let you in.”

  “She was expecting me.”

  He left the squalid place feeling depressed and wanting to be alone. Tomorrow he would start a trace on the history of Lauren Phillips, but he was confident it would turn up nothing to help him find Bernard Phillips. The woman was just another victim. He wondered how many more victims there would be before he caught Phillips.

  He rented a room in a cheap West Side hotel, signing the registry with a phony name. It was the type of hotel where hookers rent rooms by the hour. The walls were thin. His throbbing wounds and the sounds of professional sex from the room next to his kept him awake a long time. The sheets on his bed were clean but bore permanent stains. He watched fat roaches crawling. He needed the help of a couple stiff jolts of brandy to get to sleep.

  NINE

  The obstetrician who had delivered Bernard Phillips wore the look of casual health that only the very rich can afford. Tanned skin, a smile white with success, eyes blue and unblinking.

  “I’ll be perfectly honest, Lieutenant. If you’re looking for an expert to testify in court, there are cheaper men than myself.”

  “That’s not why I’m here, Doctor.”

  “Fine. I loathe courtroom appearances.”

  The obstetrician’s face lost some of its smile and became pensive as Nicholas explained what he wanted.

  “What is the reason for your interest, Lieutenant?”

  “A case I’m investigating. I’m not at liberty to discuss it.”

  The obstetrician brought out a pipe and began packing it with a tobacco blend he took from a cannister on his desk.

  “We doctors aren’t at liberty to discuss our patients.”

  “I’m not asking you to violate your oath, Doctor.”

  “Touch and go, don’t you think?”

  He lit his pipe with a wooden match he took from a designer box. He watched the match until it had burned close to his fingertips, blew it out, dropped it in a clean ashtray which he pulled from a desk drawer.

  “I hide the ashtrays. A bit of subterfuge. I’ve found a number of patients don�
��t have confidence in a doctor who smokes.”

  “About the Phillips baby.”

  He puffed at the pipe as if trying to lose himself in a cloud of smoke.

  “It was a long time ago, Lieutenant. Very long.”

  “Why are you reluctant to talk about it?”

  “To be perfectly honest, it was a delivery I’ve always wanted to forget.”

  “Why?”

  He tapped the stem of his pipe against his teeth. “I’m sure in your profession you’ve had cases you would rather not remember.”

  “Doctor, I don’t intend to leave until I get some answers.”

  “I was still an intern. I hadn’t yet seen everything. In the past twenty years I would guess I’ve seen just about every possible kind of infant mutation. Monstrosities. Cases where it would have been a blessing had the Lord entered in and spared parents and infant alike the agonies of life. Infants with missing parts. Thalidomide babies. Even Siamese twins.”

  He paused.

  Nicholas asked, “Was the Phillips baby mutated?”

  “Yes and no. I realize it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, but it was and it wasn’t mutated. First of all, it simply didn’t have the face of a child. There was an odd grown-up look about it. Difficult to describe adequately.”

  The obstetrician snapped his fingers and sat straighter in his chair. He pointed the stem of his pipe at Nicholas.

  “I just realized something. I’ve just returned from a European vacation. Florence. Beautiful city. You know how Italy is. Churches and religious paintings all over the country. Some of those artists who did the Madonna and Child. They painted the Christ Child so that it didn’t look at all like a child. And that’s how the Phillips baby looked.”

  “Innocent, saintly?”

  He nodded. “I realize it sounds ridiculous. But that does seem an apt description.”

  “What else?”

  “I was getting to it. What so struck me about this child was the lack of clearly defined sexual characteristics.”

  “Was it a hermaphrodite?”

  “Even with a hermaphrodite one sex generally takes precedence over the other. Often the dominant sex doesn’t appear until the child has passed its infancy. No, the Phillips baby was something entirely different. It was as if the sexual gender had not yet developed. As if it were still in progress.”