The Eye: A Novel of Suspense

by Bill Pronzini

  But he didn’t cut all the way through; he stopped beneath the window he’d earmarked for his entry. The gangway was deeply shadowed, and someone on the sidewalk would have to pause and look closely to see Hiller in his dark clothing.

  He took his time moving a large metal trash can, so as not to make any noise, and then stood on its lid so he could reach the window. Inside he could see a dark kitchen, white stove and refrigerator like pale tombstones. The window was over a sink; he made a mental note of the cannisters on the counter so he wouldn’t kick them over when he crawled inside. There was an iron lattice over the window, but it was fastened to the frame with small screws. Hiller used the screwdriver on his Swiss army knife to loosen the screws on one side of the latticework, then bent the rusty iron back and out of the way.

  The window was locked. Switching to the large blade of the knife, he worked on the old, brittle putty holding in the glass until he’d loosened the corner of the long center pane near the lock. He slipped the point of the knife blade beneath the glass and pried back. With almost no sound, a neat square of glass popped out into his hand, allowing him easy accesss to the lock. He inserted the handle of the knife through the opening in the pane and flipped the catch.

  He was inside within half a minute, dropping nimbly from the sink, his soft-soled jogging shoes noiseless on the kitchen floor. He knew the layout of the apartment because one of the woman’s dope customers had described it to him: a long living room along the front, the rear section divided between bathroom and small bedroom. The first thing he did was to stand for a moment and let his eyes get accustomed to the dimness; then he flashed the narrow yellow beam of the penlight around briefly, to orient himself; and then he made his way to the bedroom.

  Surprise, surprise. Two people were sleeping in there.

  Even before he reached the open bedroom door, he heard the regular breathing of the two. He tensed, cursed wordlessly—but those were his only reactions. He’d worked before with his victims on the premises, a time or two by choice. He could tell when someone was about to wake up, because he had learned to monitor their breathing; he was an expert on the sounds of sleep. So the woman had dragged somebody home with her tonight. So what? It was too bad, but it didn’t change things much at all.

  A streetlamp outside provided faint illumination in the room, so when Hiller looked in he could see that it was a man the woman had in bed with her. The window air conditioner was on, and the bedroom was cool. The man had the white sheet tucked up under his chin; the woman lay sprawled on her back with one slender, pale leg exposed. The room contained the stale, unmistakable scent of frenzied sexual coupling.

  For a moment Hiller experienced a sensation of power. He knew their secrets, these two, and if he wanted to he could have the woman; they both would be easy enough to deal with while they slept. He could shove the man into a closet, spend the rest of the long night with the woman. Just knowing that was all he really needed. The woman was no prize anyway; the guy in her bed was either hard up or a junkie who hadn’t had the price of a fix. Or maybe just a guy who liked his women ugly.

  Hiller slipped into the bedroom, shielding the penlight beam with his hand. He went to the dresser and silently checked the drawers, all the time with an ear cocked to the rhythmic deep-sleep breathing of the couple in bed. He found a diamond ring that might be worth a few hundred dollars, and some earrings and a necklace that might or might not be paste.

  In the closet he found an expensive mink stole; he had been in the business long enough that he could appraise furs by feel. He draped the stole around his own shoulders and returned to the dresser, checking to see if anything was taped to the backs of the drawers. Nothing. He checked behind the drapes to see if an envelope was pinned there below window level. Nothing. And the jumbled shoe boxes on the closet shelf contained only shoes.

  The woman made a sighing sound.

  Hiller froze—a still, displaced shadow.

  She rolled onto her side and nuzzled the man’s shoulder. He continued to breathe in a regular nasal rasp through his nose. The woman’s softer breathing evened out.

  Hiller’s heartbeat slowed; the momentary fright left him, and the feeling of secret power returned. It wasn’t uncommon for burglars to piss or shit in the homes of their victims, to show their disdain and the power they’d held. Hiller didn’t need that; just knowing was enough … just knowing.

  He went to the nightstand by the bed. It yielded nothing except the man’s wristwatch—considerate of him not to risk scratching the woman. On the way back to the door, he removed the man’s wallet from his pants laid out neatly on a chair and slipped it into his own hip pocket. He would check its contents later. The man was wearing a gold wedding ring, but the hell with that. It would be much too risky to try to work it off his finger.

  Hiller didn’t want to search the kitchen unless he had to; it was easier to make an accidental noise in the kitchen than in any other room. He went to the living room instead. In there, beneath some cellophane-wrapped mints in a candy dish, he found several small plastic containers of white powder. But he left the cocaine alone—if that was what it was. He didn’t mess with hard drugs, not selling, not buying, not using. He needed all his wits all the time.

  It took him less than five minutes to find the rubber-banded wad of bills hidden inside the hollow base of a lamp. How fucking original! Grinning, he slipped the bills into his pants pocket.

  Almost finished now. He moved into the kitchen, over near the window. Then he unzipped and unfolded the Totes bag, began stuffing the mink stole and assorted smaller items inside.

  Not five feet away, on the other side of the wall, a toilet flushed. The abrupt sound was like a watery explosion.

  Hiller held his breath, poked the rest of the stole into the bag and worked the smooth nylon zipper that he’d lubricated with soap. He was steady. He’d had close calls before—plenty of them.

  As he straightened, holding the bag by its strap, the floor creaked behind him. Hiller spun around. The man standing naked in the living room doorway was broad-shouldered, thick through the chest, strong-looking. Hiller didn’t know why he hadn’t gone back to bed after using the bathroom; hungry, maybe, or thirsty. Who could tell? That was the risk of the job: people’s unpredictability.

  He didn’t panic; he never panicked in a tight situation. He used his brain instead, his intelligence. Running for the window was a dangerous move; he had no way of knowing how the big man would react. And there was no way to make the front door. Let the big guy make the first move, then. Hiller kept his tensed body still, his eyes on the other man—waiting, calculating distances and angles.

  It was another ten seconds before the big man moved. He picked up a wine bottle from the top of the refrigerator, but he didn’t come forward with it. Hiller saw the glint of his gold wedding ring, thought he knew what the guy was thinking: Here he was with a woman not his wife, and if he got mixed up in police business everyone would find out and maybe he’d be in deep shit.

  “It’s your lucky night, fuckhead,” the man said. He didn’t sound the slightest bit afraid. It crossed Hiller’s mind that, Christ, he might be an off-duty cop.

  Hiller dropped the Totes bag full of loot. He wanted his hands free. “Lucky how?”

  “I ain’t between you and the window,” the man told him.

  Hiller received the message with a surge of relief. He spun on his heel, jumped onto the sink, knocking over the cannisters, and was out the window like a spooked cat. He vaulted off the lid of the trash can and hit the gangway pavement running.

  He stopped running when he came out on Sixty-ninth, because he didn’t want to attract attention; but he walked fast, and he kept looking back over his shoulder. Nobody was chasing him. But that didn’t stop him from sweating; his shirt was sodden and already plastered to his skin. He rolled up his sleeves and unfastened the top button of the shirt.

  Near the park, an elderly couple emerged from the door of a restaurant and walked towar
d him, the old guy holding on to the woman’s elbow as if he were guiding her through a mine field. Neither of them glanced at him as they passed, and he felt better.

  A Checker cab turned the corner, its roof light glowing. On impulse, Hiller stepped into the street and hailed it. He told the driver to take him to West Ninety-sixth and Amsterdam. He could walk home from there after making sure he wasn’t being followed.

  As he settled back in the rear seat and the cab accelerated, he felt the pressure of the stolen wallet against his right buttock. His hand moved to the roll of bills in his side pocket. He felt like laughing out loud. The big son of a bitch would be sorry he’d let him go, and even sorrier when the woman found out the money was missing from the lamp. Probably there’d be one hell of a fight.

  Well, screw both of them; they were lucky he had only had stealing in mind. What if the big bastard had walked in on somebody with a gun? Fat lot of good a wine bottle would have done him then. And the woman still had her mink and jewelry. Sure, they were both lucky; not as lucky as Benny Hiller, but lucky enough.

  Hiller began to feel some of the euphoria he felt after every job. Luck was a thing some people emerged from the womb with, and he’d been born with his own plus someone else’s share. By Christ, he could go on forever without getting nailed by the law. Forever!

  He rested his head against the seatback, smiling. One side of him knew he was taking on more and more risk lately, almost as if he were challenging the laws of man and the laws of chance. Another side of him, the side Hiller listened to, thought that was bullshit. The last thing he wanted was to get caught, to spend years in a goddamn cage. The challenge was there, maybe, but it was all calculated so that the odds were heavily in his favor. And he had the luck, didn’t he? He had the luck.

  When the driver dropped him off on West Ninety-sixth, Hiller tipped him a five. Why not? Share the wealth. There was no need to worry about the cabbie remembering him as a fare, because the cops would never get on to tonight’s caper; the woman and her big bastard boyfriend would never report it.

  Hiller walked home grinning, breathing night air sweet as nectar.

  10:35 P.M. — E.L. OXMAN

  Oxman was exhausted. He’d spent most of the day and part of the evening interviewing residents of the twelve hundred block of West Ninety-eighth. Nearly everybody who lived on that block had been covered, either by him or Artie Tobin or Gaines and Holroyd, and none of them knew a damned thing about Martin Simmons’ murder, or were willing to admit it if they did.

  Slumped in his desk chair at the Twenty-fourth, Oxman sipped coffee from the squadroom pot; even doctored with milk and sugar, it tasted bitter, gritty. He was wired enough already, but he needed the coffee to pump him up and get him through the last few minutes of paperwork before he could go home.

  He looked around at the stifling, disorganized clutter of the squadroom. Two months ago he’d again been passed over for promotion, which not only would have meant a much-needed increase in salary but a potential transfer to a better precinct than the Twenty-fourth. He remembered, a little bitterly, what Jennifer Crane had said about his name suggesting he was a plodder. He knew he gave others that impression. Maybe Jennifer Crane was one of the few who sensed something deeper in him than the bent of a creature of routine. The Department conceded that he was relentless—his record made that evident—but they made the mistake of interpreting relentlessness as lack of imagination. He was a good cop, damn it. He deserved that promotion.

  His gaze shifted to the three yellow file folders before him on the desk. The Peter Cheng, Charles Unger, and Martin Simmons files, containing the scant information regarding their murders. The Ballistics report on the Simmons homicide was also there; he picked it up again and glanced over it. The weapon they were after was a .32 caliber Harrington & Richardson automatic, rifled with a six-groove left-twist spiral. Pitch, ten and a half inches; groove depth, ten-thousandths of an inch; groove width, forty-two thousandths …

  He slapped the report down, rubbed at his tired eyes. Elsewhere in the squadroom, there were the sounds of night-shift activity: one of the detectives joking with a patrolman while he booked a suspect; another detective talking to someone on the phone; one of two black men in the holding cell complaining, “It ain’t fair, man! It ain’t mothafuckin’ fair!” Someone outside in the corridor let out a loud horselaugh. Somebody else shouted for Adams in Clerical. And all of this was backgrounded by the distant, monotonous voice of the dispatcher directing patrol cars about the miles of Manhattan streets in a blank-verse litany of violence. The sounds of Oxman’s world. They stayed with a cop forever, echoing in the recesses of the brain as long as the mind functioned. There was no genuine retirement from his job, not ever.

  He picked up one of the case folders from his overflowing In basket—just one of several other cases he was supposed to be dealing with. The world didn’t stop for anyone or anything; life lurched on, and so did death.

  Oxman realized he was getting maudlin. He took another sip of the bad coffee, opened the folder. He was shuffling through it when Tobin came in.

  Tobin crossed the room to Oxman’s desk and cocked a hip against one corner of it. He looked as tired as E.L. felt. His gray pinstripe suit was wrinkled and his shirt was partly untucked beneath his vest. He was developing quite a paunch, Oxman noticed.

  “How’s it going, Elliot Leroy?”

  “You know, you’re putting on weight around the middle,” Oxman said. Hell, he could play it mean too. Nobody liked pounding the bricks till past ten at night when you were supposed to be. on the dayshift. Sometimes Tobin seemed to think he was the only one who suffered. Artie was one efficient cop, but he’d been hired at the wrong time and he still carried traces of a persecution complex from the time when he had been persecuted because of his race.

  Tobin gazed at him out of his flat brown eyes with the crescent of white showing beneath each pupil. “I guess it’s the good life,” he said, straight-faced.

  Oxman grinned wearily. “Yeah.”

  “Anything new?”

  “Not over on Ninety-eighth. How about you?”

  “Same thing. What did Gaines and Holroyd turn up on Martin Simmons?”

  “Not much,” Oxman said. “He was an advertising copywriter for Flick and Flick on Madison Avenue. Lived alone, didn’t have many close friends, or so it would seem. They say at the agency that he was a bit of a swinger, liked to frequent the singles bars. Been in Manhattan a little less than two years, originally from Kansas City.”

  “Kansas City,” Tobin repeated.

  “Sure. Home of the Royals, the Chiefs, and the Kings.”

  “Uh-huh. Did Simmons ever live on West Ninety-eighth?”

  “No. The apartment on Seventy-third is the only one he’s had since he came to the city.”

  “Any acquaintances on Ninety-eighth?”

  “Just Jennifer Crane, evidently.”

  “You talk to the Crane woman?”

  “I talked to her.”

  “I don’t suppose she could be the perp?”

  “Doubtful. Can you see a woman giving somebody her phone number, then following him outside and shooting him near her building?”

  “Don’t rule it out,” Tobin said.

  “I don’t. I just can’t see it happening.”

  “Maybe this Jennifer Crane brought Peter Cheng and Charles Unger home too, zapped them after they balled her.”

  “Sure, the black widow murderess. Good news copy.”

  Tobin ran spread fingers through his thinning, wiry hair. “Okay, so how do you see her?”

  Oxman shrugged. “Like thousands of other New York career women, doing her job, humping on the treadmill.” Oddly, he regretted the words as he spoke them. He did sense some difference in Jennifer Crane, though nothing he could frame in words for Tobin.

  “Well,” Tobin said, “you’ve got better insight with these white chicks than I do.”

  Oxman let that go; the hell with Artie and his subtle bai
ting.

  The frosted glass door to the lieutenant’s office opened and Manders came out. Oxman thought, as he had many times before, that Lieutenant Smiley resembled a starving basset hound. But he was a basset hound with stamina; Oxman had seen him work twenty-four-hour days without any noticeable effect, and right now he appeared as fresh as if he’d just reported for work.

  When he saw Oxman and Tobin his lean, sad features gave in to gravity and he frowned. “So you two are still here,” he said. He was a good one for stating the obvious.

  “Wrapping up some paperwork,” Oxman said, motioning with his head toward his In basket.

  “The hell with that stuff. I’ll have Davidson do it in the morning. You concentrate on the Ninety-eighth Street thing. The goddamn media is already onto the idea that we might have a random serial killer on our hands.”

  “It could be they’re right.”

  “Yeah.” Manders lit a cigarette, held it at arm’s length and stared at it through a haze of smoke as if it, too, was part of a plot to make his life difficult. “I’m going to put somebody in undercover tomorrow. See if anything turns up that way.”

  “Good idea,” Tobin said.

  “There’s a vacant apartment at twelve-forty. I’ve already talked to the building super; he’ll let the undercover man use it.”

  “You know who it’ll be yet?”

  “Not yet. I’ll let you know in the morning.”

  “He’ll work with us, though, right?”

  “Right,” Manders said. He drew deeply on his cigarette; ashes dropped onto his shirtfront and clung there. “Why don’t you two go home? I’d rather have you here fresh in the morning than sitting around late tonight hashing things over.”

  That suggestion was fine with Oxman. He stood and replaced the West Ninety-eighth Street files in the cabinet; then he shrugged into his suit coat. Tobin was standing also, carefully tucking his shirt in around his burgeoning gut.