Until You Are Dead

by John Lutz

  "If I'm not being charged," Brubaker said patiently, "I think I'll wander on home."

  Eggers rested a broad hand on his shoulder, and Brubaker sat still and sighed. What was the law, an instrument for harassment? "I'd phone my lawyer," he said, "only I don't believe we'll reach that point. Because we all know I don't deserve this heat. But I'm getting tired of seeing a cop car outside my apartment every time I look out the window."

  Eggers ignored him and drew Deal and Hastings into the main office. He closed the door on the interrogation room. "You guys were supposed to keep an eye on Brubaker. Was he home last night?"

  "He was there at eleven thirty-two, sir," Hastings said. "We checked his place of residence several times through the night and there was always a light on, but the eleven thirty-two time is the only one we can confirm on the basis of physical sighting."

  Eggers stared at Hastings.

  "Verification by way of a photograph, sir," Hastings added.

  "What?"

  "He means he took Brubaker's picture when he walked past his window," Deal explained.

  Eggers looked perplexed. "Why did you do that?"

  "He's an incurable shutterbug," Deal cut in, before Hastings could launch into an endless explanation.

  "That would help provide an alibi for Brubaker," Eggers said bleakly, and even Hastings knew enough to keep quiet. "How long can we hold Brubaker?" Deal asked.

  "About five more minutes," Eggers said. "Which is when I expect a report from Identification."

  Even before he'd finished speaking, the desk phone buzzed. Eggers picked up the receiver, punched the blinking line button, and as he listened his face glowed and became almost handsome.

  "That was I.D.," he said, replacing the receiver. "Brubaker made a mistake. There was a fingerprint on the window frame of Edna Croft's apartment, and it belongs to him. That's enough to get a search warrant for his apartment." He charged into the interrogation room.

  Brubaker was standing up, tucking in his shirt.

  "Sit back down," Eggers commanded. He informed Brubaker that he was under arrest and began reading him his rights.

  Brubaker sat tolerantly until Eggers was finished. He was a pro. He realized he must have dropped a print. "I was in that lady's apartment about a week ago," he said, "to ask if she needed any odd jobs done. She gave me a portable television to fix for her. It's in my apartment now."

  "We'll see what she says about that," Eggers told him, "as soon as she regains consciousness."

  Brubaker shrugged with exaggerated nonchalance and grinned. "I think I'll make that call to my lawyer."

  Sergeant Hall escorted Brubaker to the front desk, where he would be booked and allowed his phone call.

  As Deal and Hastings were about to leave Eggers' office, the phone buzzed again. This time Eggers' face changed for the worse as he listened. He aged a decade in the time the receiver went from his ear back to its cradle.

  "Edna Croft died ten minutes ago," he said glumly. "Another heatstroke victim." He slammed a meaty fist into his palm. "Now there's no one to refute Brubaker's story, no one to testify against him. There's no way to get a conviction when the victim is dead. Legally, it's almost impossible to prove that a crime has even taken place."

  "When are you going to release Brubaker?" Deal asked. "Now," Eggers snapped. "I have to."

  When Deal joined Hastings the next evening after muster, Hastings had already vacuumed the patrol car and was standing beside it waiting for him. Deal was tired. The business with Brubaker had disturbed him and he hadn't been able to sleep this morning. He'd spent most of the day downing popcorn and beer and watching a ball game on television. Hastings looked as if he'd spent the entire day getting a facial and having his uniform pressed.

  "Let's get going," he said as Deal approached. "We've been given the pleasure of arresting Arnie Brubaker." Deal's eyebrows arched in disbelief. "Says who?"

  "Captain Eggers. I talked to him this afternoon at his home."

  "You went to Eggers' house when he was off duty and weren't thrown out?" Deal stared incredulously as Hastings nodded.

  "We don't have much time," Hastings said, climbing in behind the steering wheel. "The news media have already received anonymous phone calls instructing them what time to be at the precinct house."

  "Anonymous phone calls?" Deal said. "How would you know that?"

  Hastings started the car and they drove from the garage. "I'll explain it all in good time," he said.

  They interrupted Brubaker's late-night snack, which Brubaker angrily pointed out to them as they entered his apartment. Deal gazed at the half eaten burned pizza on the Formica table and didn't see why Brubaker minded being interrupted.

  "I thought this burglary charge was all settled," Brubaker said, glancing at a portable TV on the floor in a corner.

  "I talked to a social worker who delivered a portable fan to Edna Croft last night," Hastings said. "Edna Croft was a complete invalid. The social worker put her to bed, then stayed to visit with her, watching the Tonight Show on the television set you said the deceased gave you last week to repair for her."

  Brubaker's pale eyes reflected an uneasy moment, then hardened. "Finish what you came to say. The anchovies on my pizza are getting cold."

  "At twelve-twenty A.M. I took a photograph that included Edna Croft's apartment building. She lived in a one-room efficiency. It has only one window. In the photograph, which I had enlarged, that window is open, and you can even see a corner of the portable fan sitting inside it — all exactly the way the social worker says she left things around twelve-thirty. Which means that you had to steal that TV and leave your fingerprint after that time, and before Edna Croft was found unconscious."

  Brubaker sneered. "So you can place me in the apartment last night. Haven't you heard?" he said. "The old lady died. It's kinda difficult for the prosecutor to make a case when there's no victim around to press charges or testify."

  "Murder victims never press charges or testify," Hastings pointed out.

  "Murder?" A puzzled wildness entered Brubaker's eyes.

  Deal moved between him and the door.

  "Edna Croft died of heatstroke," Hastings said. "My photograph shows her window the way the social worker says she left it — open. When Edna Croft was discovered unconscious in that oven of a room, her window was closed. She couldn't have gotten out of bed to close it even if she'd wanted to. You closed it behind you on your way out, which resulted in her death. Causing a death during the commission of a felony is second-degree murder. And that's what I'm placing you under arrest for — murder." He began informing Brubaker of his rights, reciting from memory.

  Brubaker bolted for the open window to the fire escape. Deal hit him behind the knees with a shoulder in a perfect flying tackle. Brubaker grunted and dropped hard, his upper body slamming against the window sill. Deal dragged him back to the center of the room and handcuffed him just as Hastings was finishing his recitation.

  It was a neatly tied package, Deal thought, lifting Brubaker to his feet. Hastings' photograph and statement would substantiate the social worker's testimony and the stolen television set would be the kind of hard physical evidence a jury couldn't ignore. And it was all possible because Hastings had compared his photograph with the report stating that Edna Croft's window was closed when she was discovered dying.

  With the television set loaded into the trunk of the patrol car, Deal drove them back to the precinct house. As they pulled into the garage with their prisoner, he noticed several TV-news vans parked nearby. He let Hastings lead the subdued Brubaker toward the stairs to the booking area where the press would be congregated, then as they were almost to the steps he called Hastings' name and both men turned.

  "Hold that pose," Deal said, aiming Hastings' camera at policeman and prisoner. Snick, whir. "One of you is gonna like this picture!"

  Hastings smiled handsomely even though he knew there was no film in the camera. Just to get in the practice.

  L
ife Sentence

  Marvin Millow lay quietly, feeling the somehow unfamiliar rhythm surge through his body. For a moment, just a fraction of a second, he'd thought he was dead, but now with logical disappointment and instinctive joy he realized the operation had been a success. It didn't surprise him, but still he'd hoped for death.

  Millow was remembering vaguely now as he came out of the anesthetic that had blanked his mental processes for the past five days. He'd been eating dinner and watching the telescreen in his cell (some ridiculous ad about the new turbine cars) and suddenly the pain had shot through his chest. Then had come the clatter of his food tray on the cement floor, the hurried footsteps of the guards, the long, smooth ride on the motorized stretcher down the cell-lined halls as the other prisoners looked out with only mild interest. Their faces, Millow remembered, had been almost featureless, only pink blurs of expression behind the dizzying vertical gleaming bars rushing past.

  Millow remembered his body being shifted around, an inhalator being fitted over his mouth and nose, the weakening struggle he'd put up, and now . . . now here he was, propped up slightly in his bed with his eyes open.

  "How do you feel?" Dr. Steinmetz asked, and they both knew it really didn't matter, not even from a clinical standpoint.

  Millow was alive.

  "I didn't make it," Millow croaked in a distant, sad voice.

  "You should be glad to be alive," Dr. Steinmetz said. He was a plump, shiningly clean man with dark framed glasses over very intelligent eyes. "You should be thankful for the excellent medical attention you receive."

  "Why," the slow, faltering voice asked from the bed, "so I can go back to my cell now and do the same things I've done for sixty-three years?"

  Dr. Steinmetz was turning on his best bedside manner. "You got life imprisonment with no eligibility for parole," he said. "There was a time, under archaic law, when you would have been sentenced to death. You did kill a man."

  "I did," Marvin Millow said wearily. "I did kill a man."

  Dr. Steinmetz smiled down at him as if he'd achieved some minor victory.

  "It was my heart this time, wasn't it?" Millow asked.

  "Yes, but it's all right now."

  "You've given me a plastic heart?"

  Dr. Steinmetz nodded. "The newest synthetic. There's no danger at all of the body rejecting it."

  Millow closed his eyes. Why should there be any danger from this, after what he'd been through over the years? First had come the leukemia, when he was in his sixties, and they had completely replaced his blood with a fluoral carbon emulsion that served him just as well or better. Then had come the liver transplant, the artificial kidney, the abortive suicide attempt that had required only a few stitches, and six years ago the artificial lung. Despite all this, Millow was, in his own way, healthier now than he'd been in his twenties. Of course he looked ninety-six years old. It was the responsibility of the state to maintain his health, but the taxpayers didn't pay for cosmetic surgery.

  "Are you all right?" Dr. Steinmetz asked, but he wasn't really curious. He too had unshakeable faith in modern medicine.

  Millow didn't bother to open his eyes. His chest ached deeply with each breath and his body throbbed, but he was "all right."

  "Will they ever let me die, Doctor?"

  "None of us are immortal," Steinmetz said. "On the outside you would have been dead twenty years ago. But here you're the state's responsibility." He was silent for a long moment. "You know, Marvin, you don't really want to die. None of us do."

  "It seems that it should be my prerogative," Millow said with old bitterness.

  "It should be," Steinmetz agreed. "And the man you killed should have had the same prerogative."

  Millow opened his eyes and stared at the spotless white ceiling as the doctor left the small room and closed the door behind him.

  The man he'd killed. But that had been so long ago. So very long ago. Was he now the same Marvin Millow who had carefully plotted and carried out the murder of his wife's lover? Could he ever have felt that strongly about anything, have had that much will? Could he ever have loved a woman as he must have loved Marian?

  Millow remembered the Marian of his youth as if she'd been a character in a book he'd read years ago, or a cast member in a movie he'd seen at some time on the telescreen. That Marian didn't seem quite real to him now, didn't seem as if she ever had been real. Neither did Creighton, the man he'd killed. For that matter, had there ever been a tall, proud, dark-haired Marvin Millow who had breathed love so deeply he had killed for it? Of course there had been. But not anymore. Those fires had died now, and the ashes had long since blown away.

  Marian had divorced him after the trial, and for over fifty years Millow hadn't seen her or heard from her. Then one day seven years ago, with terrifying suddenness, she had visited him. She had looked so much older that Millow hardly recognized her. So much older! Her blonde hair had turned a lusterless gray, her full lips had become thin and sunken, her once graceful figure was now thick and stocky. It could be that she finally came to see him because in a strange way she was indebted to him. He had loved her enough to kill for her. And yet there might have been something else, something he could never fathom.

  Every Sunday then, for the next three years, Marian came and sat and talked to him through the clear Plexiglas shield. And then one Sunday she didn't come, and he heard that she'd died. That was all he heard, but he managed to clip her obituary from the newspaper, and he still had it, curled and yellowed, among his personal effects.

  How was it he still missed Marian, not the young Marian who was only a dream, but the Marian who had come to visit him faithfully every Sunday afternoon for those three years? A man who was dead in everything but body should miss no one.

  The accelerated healing pain in Millow's chest was growing. Strangely, as if the pain had been anticipated, a young intern entered and injected him with a sedative.

  Days passed in dizzying cycles of wakefulness and sleep. Then one morning when Millow awoke, Dr. Steinmetz was there, his eyes smiling behind the dark glass frames.

  "You're progressing nicely, Marvin."

  Millow said nothing. The pain was still in his chest, though not as bad, and he felt slightly nauseous most of the time.

  "You should be well enough to have visitors soon," Steinmetz said, studying some X-rays he had in a yellow folder.

  "Tell the warden he can see me anytime," Millow said, and immediately he was sorry he'd said it, for he saw that it gave Steinmetz some small satisfaction to see that the patient was recovering his sense of humor.

  Millow drew a deep breath and focused his gaze on the doctor. "I almost died this time, didn't I?"

  Dr. Steinmetz nodded. "It was rather close — until we got you to the operating room."

  "I wish you had let me die," Millow said. "Just living is no reason to want to live. A man has to have something, some hope or interest in the future."

  "You may be right," Steinmetz agreed, surprising Millow with his frank reply.

  Millow let his head sink back into the soft white pillows. He only knew he didn't want to spend even one more endless night back in his cell, pacing on stiff, unwilling ninety six-year-old legs, while the thing inside him paced.

  "I'll check with you the beginning of next week," Dr. Steinmetz said, pinching the yellow folder closed and smiling.

  "I'll be here," Millow said as the doctor left and the door locked automatically behind him.

  The room was as small and bland as Millow's cell, and like his cell there was no escape from it except death. But they were careful to eliminate even that avenue to freedom. Every item and furnishing in the rooms and cells of the prison were dull, soft and harmless as possible. If only one of the nurses or an intern would forget and leave a sharp instrument behind! A scissors, a glass bottle he could break! Anything! Millow sighed. He probably wouldn't even have time to bleed to death. They'd check him on the closed circuit viewscanner and pump more of the cursed artificial blo
od in him to prolong his artificial life.

  As he'd promised, Dr. Steinmetz came to see Millow at the beginning of the week. The doctor looked unusually cheerful, even for him.

  "How's the unwilling patient today?"

  "Feeling better, damn you!"

  Steinmetz laughed. "Yes, you must be improving, though naturally there's still some pain. You were on the operating table a long time."

  "It still hurts," Millow said, "but not as much."

  "You'll be on your feet shortly," Steinmetz said, "and as brooding and unhappy as ever."

  "That's comforting."

  A buzzer sounded, one long, one short. Dr. Steinmetz, his features set in an absent smile, looked up. "That's for me," he said to himself as much as to Millow. "I'll be back shortly." He turned and left the room.

  But the door! He hadn't shut the door quite hard enough to latch it, and there was a slender strip of darkness where Millow could see out into the dim hall.

  And instantly Millow knew what he would do. He would step out into the hall, and he would run, as fast as he could, away from this dread room, away from their lifesaving, life prolonging drugs. And when he felt that he must stop, he'd run harder, until something in his ancient, half natural body gave. Millow's lined face broke into a grin as he climbed painfully from the bed. Death by running.

  He tested his legs carefully. Yes, there was enough strength in them, just enough. Millow moved to the door and peered through the crack out into the hall. There was no one, no one in sight. A pang of exultation shot through his body and he was out, out into the hall and running.

  At first nothing happened, and Millow's strength surprised him. He felt rather ridiculous as he ran unnoticed, like some white flannelled, geriatric track star, his bare feet plopping regularly on the tile floor. Then the pain came, hot and sharp, and Millow groaned despite himself. He could imagine stitches popping, tissue tearing, and he made his legs strain harder to propel him forward. The hall ended, and he turned down the corridor lined with cells, and he was aware of those blank, pale faces staring out at him as he passed. The corridor was silent but for the sound of his footfalls and his labored breathing. The pain invaded his body again and stayed longer, causing Millow's breath to catch, his legs to buckle. He was on the cool tile floor without realizing he'd fallen, and he struggled to his feet and began to run again. He made only a few steps before the pain sapped the will from his mind and he collapsed, rolling slowly onto his back. This time he couldn't rise.