The Eye: A Novel of Suspense

by Bill Pronzini

  My problem was that I was turned down by the Columbia School of General Studies, then dropped after a one-semester engagement by a federal arts program funded through NYU. In short, I was out of a job and quite bitter about it.

  It was the trust fund that bailed me out. My mother had hoarded it in New York’s Chemical Bank, as she had hoarded love in the vault of her heart until her death, and on my thirty-fifth birthday I received enough money not to have to worry about finances for years to come. She who had been the first of X’s redheads, and with him sown the seed that was to be Lewis B. Collier, warned me of the doom and dissolution of all poets, and provided for me.

  After receiving my inheritance, I stopped sending resumes and studying the Sunday Times section advertising faculty positions. I moved into this high rise apartment on the wrong side of the Hudson. Like X, I began to drink. Like X, I began to atrophy.

  And then one day, on an impulse I now know was fate, I bought the telescope I saw displayed in the window of one of those difficult to categorize shops on East Fifty-seventh Street.

  Soon afterward, I realized that I wasn’t like X, who is rather famous in the academic world for his long downward odyssey to oblivion. X fell a long way and learned little; I, on the other hand, moved within a very narrow range and learned quite a lot.

  Unlike X, I have not dwindled nor will I dwindle to nothingness. It is not death which I embrace, which fascinates me. The pleasure I derive from bestowing death on the wicked is quite apart from the physical sensations during and after the act. Only the smallest of mortals would think otherwise. It is not that with the death of Charles Unger I discovered that I enjoy ending life—the sensual absorption of the powerless by the powerful, the ultimate communication with the victim.

  No, not at all. Unlike X, whose poetry is that of the futile and the impotent and the damned, I can act out not only my own destiny but the destiny of others. Because unlike X, I am destiny. I have been transformed and gifted with true and total freedom and command.

  I do not kill because I enjoy it.

  I have proved that, haven’t I?

  12:35 P.M. — MARIAN SINGER

  She had not gone to Brooklyn to visit her sister; she’d lied to Wally about that, the first major lie she had ever told him. Instead she had gone to Otto Kreig’s flat on East Ninth in the Village.

  Marian had never done anything like this before, not once in all the years she had been married, and she’d been very tense. Her fidelity hadn’t been a matter of morals—she had helled around quite a bit in her college days—and it hadn’t been that she’d felt any great loyalty to Wally. God knew, he had given her enough provocation: the way he mistreated her, ignored her physical and emotional needs; the fact that at the best of times he simply was not a very good lover. No, she had remained faithful because she had never met anyone else who interested her. And after she started to put on weight … well, she was afraid of rejection. She doubted if anyone would want an overweight, sagging-breasted woman pushing forty.

  Then she had found out Wally was seeing another woman, that ripe doe-eyed bitch who lived across the street. She’d seen them together in Riverside Park one day, holding hands, snuggling up to each other. At first she’d been hurt, then angry, then resigned. What good would it do to confront him? He might actually walk out on her, as he’d been threatening to do for years, and then where would she be? She needed a man, even a poor excuse for one like Wally. Too much time had passed; she would not do well alone. So she had determined to grin and bear it, let the affair run its course. Wally knew which side his bread was buttered on. He wouldn’t willingly leave her for a cheap waitress with no money and no prospects.

  Even knowing about his affair, she might have remained faithful if she hadn’t met Otto two weeks later. It had been at a showing downtown of a prominent sculptor’s work that she had gone to alone because Wally wasn’t interested. Otto was a German immigrant who had moved to New York from Dusseldorf a few years before—a big powerful man in his forties, with enormous hands and sad blue eyes and a pleasant smile. Like her, he was a sculptor, although he didn’t have to eke out a living at it the way she did; he was independently wealthy, the son of a successful furniture manufacturer. He had shown surprising interest in her that day, and later, when she brought some samples to his flat, he had shown equally surprising interest in her work.

  A reciprocal affinity had developed in her. She felt flattered by his attention and his praise. He was such a kind, gentle man, self-effacing about his own work—unnecessarily so, she felt. His sculptures, mostly of animals with a touching aura of sadness about them, may have been a little crude, but they showed a sensitivity that she had never been able to capture in her abstracts and commercial pieces.

  At first her feelings for Otto hadn’t been sexual. Then, one night, she’d had an erotic dream about him, and after that she found herself wondering at odd moments what it would be like to sleep with him. But he had never made a pass at her, never touched her in any way; he was always the perfect gentleman. And of course she could never bring herself to take the initiative. Whenever she saw him—no more than once a week, sometimes at his flat for coffee, sometimes at this or that cafe in the Village—they talked about art, about neutral topics. Once in a while he seemed to look at her in a special way, as if he, too, wished there could be something more between them, but she could never be sure. She kept telling herself that her fantasies were silly and girlish, classic maunderings of a fat, unfulfilled woman in mid-life, almost laughable. She was lucky to have a friend like Otto, and his friendship was all she had a right to expect.

  All that had changed this morning. She had awakened next to Wally, looked at him snoring beside her, and remembered the nasty things he had said to her yesterday; then she thought about the killings on the block, the suppressed fear that was in her and that she had seen in the faces of her neighbors. An overwhelming need to get away from there, away from Wally, had seized her, followed by an acute desire to see Otto. As soon as Wally awoke, she had made up the story about visiting her sister, left the apartment, and taken the subway straight to the Village.

  Otto had seemed pleased at her unexpected arrival. He’d made a breakfast of hotcakes and sausages for her, listened to her pour out her fears, comforted her. She felt better after that and asked to see his latest sculpture. Now they were standing in his workroom under the skylight, close together but not quite touching, looking at the half-finished fawn with its sad eyes.

  When he turned to her finally, the look in his eyes was like that of the fawn, but tempered with something more, something deep and tender. “Liebchen,” he murmured.

  She couldn’t believe her ears. Darling, the word meant darling. Wally had never called her darling; he had never called her anything except bitch and fat cow. Inside her there was a sudden sensation of melting, and the next thing she knew she was in Otto’s arms, kissing him, clinging to him.

  When the kiss ended she was trembling with a mixture of fear and tension and desire. “Otto,” she whispered, “take me to bed …”

  “No. No, Marian.”

  At first she thought it was a rejection. She was a fat woman and nobody’s darling, he’d let her kiss him only because he felt sorry for her … fitful thoughts, turning her as rigid as one of her abstracts. But his big hands remained on her—gentle, so gentle. And he was whispering to her again, saying other things she could scarcely believe.

  “I want you so much,” he was saying, “but it must not be this way. You are upset, meine Teure, you only turn to me because of your anguish. It is not me, Otto Kreig, you truly want.…”

  “But it is, Otto, it is you.”

  “I am so afraid it is not.”

  “Afraid?”

  “Dear Marian, schöne Marian … I want you always, not just for today. I—I love you.”

  The tension left her suddenly and completely; so did the doubts about him and about this moment. It was the truth, and she felt limp with it, a little awed by
it. This was what she had wanted all her life, only this. The tenderness, the gentleness, the genuine caring, all the things Wally had never given her, all the things she had never known and never hoped to know.

  “Yes,” she said, weeping now, “love me, please just love me.…”

  1:00 P.M. — E.L. OXMAN

  He spent the last twenty minutes of the noon hour comparing notes with Tobin. Neither of them had turned up anything new; they kept walking into blank walls no matter who they talked to. It wasn’t a conspiracy of silence, an unwillingness of people to get involved with the police. It was simply that nobody knew anything about the homicides. The psycho, whoever he or she was, had so far done his killing with impunity and without making any apparent mistakes. It was frustrating, and a little frightening even to Oxman. He could understand how the people who lived here felt. A thing like this frayed everybody’s nerves, made even the fittest in this little corner of the jungle glance over their shoulders and start jumping at shadows.

  Tobin recounted his briefing session with Jack Kennebank, and Oxman didn’t blame him for being worried. He didn’t like hot dogs any better than Artie did. They would have to keep a tight rein on Kennebank, make sure he didn’t screw up. The way feelings were running on the block, one bad blunder could unleash a chain reaction of panic.

  Just before they split up again, Oxman phoned the Twenty-fourth to see if Lieutenant Smiley had anything new. He didn’t. A computer check of known criminals and individuals with a history of mental disorders who might have lived on the block at one time had turned up a few names; another team of detectives was checking them out. But none of the individuals looked promising. It was a longshot anyway, Oxman thought. Why would a former resident of West Ninety-eighth decide to start shooting people in his old neighborhood?

  Oxman came back down the block, hesitated in front of 1276, and then took the seven steps to the brownstone’s concrete stoop. He scanned the names on the tarnished brass bank of mailboxes. But he knew which one he wanted long before he read the card that said 3-D Jennifer Crane.

  All morning he had fought off the urge to see her again. But it was a losing battle. The attraction was there, damn it; it was strong, and he couldn’t deny it. She was a desirable woman, all the more so for her icy New York veneer. And he was sure there was a spark of interest on her part as well; he had glimpsed it in the blue-green mystery of her eyes, heard it in the way she’d asked him if he would be talking to her again, felt it in the way she’d stood close to him in the doorway just before he left her.

  But what was it, really, this mutual attraction? A physical thing, that was all. If it led anywhere, it would be to nothing more than an impersonal roll or two in the hay. He would be just another conquest, another statistic on her private scorecard. He had seen hundreds if not thousands of Jennifer Cranes in his life. She was like so many New York women, as if somewhere they were manufactured using the same mold. They all wore the same jaded mask and played it light and loose, and you couldn’t chip away their veneer no matter how hard you tried. Ice queens. That was his private name for the Jennifer Cranes: ice queens.

  What would it be like to go to bed with her? he wondered. What was it like for Martin Simmons on Thursday night? The thoughts made him feel uncomfortable. Too long without sex, that was his problem. How long had it been this time … a month? That was too long for any man to go without release. Who could blame him if he did tumble into bed with another woman, a woman like Jennifer Crane?

  Well, he knew the answer to that. Beth would blame him, and so would Internal Affairs and the Board of Police Commissioners. Beth, with her inexplicable skull-splitting headaches, running up hundreds of dollars in medical bills while forcing him to live a life of near celibacy. Internal Affairs with their rules about police morals—if they found out about any unprofessional conduct on Oxman’s part, they would recommend to the Board of Commissioners that he be indefinitely suspended from the force, without pay.

  So hands and mind off Jennifer Crane, he thought. It was absurd that he should even toy with the idea. He had never, not once in nineteen years of marriage, been unfaithful to Beth. What good would it do to start now?

  He made himself look more closely at the other names on the mailboxes. Royce, Munoz, Hiller, Pollosetti, Singer, Coombs, Butler, Hayfield. He had talked to all of them already, or Tobin had. No point in bothering any of them again, going over barren ground that had already been covered.

  3-D Jennifer Crane.

  She’s probably not even home, he thought, gone off to Vogue for another set of meetings. And then, in spite of himself and all the mental arguments, he reached out and almost violently jabbed the button beside her name.

  Thirty seconds passed in silence. He was just starting to turn away, with a vague sense of relief, when the intercom unit clicked and he heard her voice say, “Yes?”

  “Detective Oxman,” he said. “May I come up?”

  An almost imperceptible pause. Then, “Of course,” and the buzzer on the thick, enameled door began to whirr.

  Oxman pushed inside. He was struck again by the familiar apartment building smells: stale cooking odors, pine disinfectant, human effluvium. “Book you,” a piece of censored graffiti on the lobby wall proclaimed. The elevator was on one of the upper floors; instead of waiting for it, he mounted two eighteen-step flights of stairs and made his way down the hallway to 3-D.

  Jennifer opened the door immediately when he knocked. As he had yesterday, Oxman took her in with a policeman’s encompassing glance. She was appealing, all right: finely boned face, long auburn hair, narrow, graceful shoulders, ample breasts and a slender dancer’s body—though her calves were unlike a dancer’s, nicely curved but not muscular. She was wearing a pair of denim pants with the cuffs rolled up to just below the knee, and a light green blouse with the top three buttons undone. There was no brassiere under the blouse and the swell of her breasts was clearly visible. He wondered if she always wore her blouse open like that, or if she had unfastened the buttons for his benefit.

  “Come in, E.L.,” she said. She was smiling, but it was an unreadable smile, showing him nothing of what went on behind it. “You don’t mind if I call you E.L.?”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t mind.”

  She closed and locked the door. “Sit down, if you like.”

  He sat on the same cream-colored sofa he had occupied yesterday. She took the small beige chair opposite him, clasped her hands over one knee. It was bright in there; the net drapes over the windows were open and slanted sunlight poured into the room, glinted off the chrome frames of the magazine illustrations on the walls. The sunshine touched her face as well, gave it a glowing quality. Like sunlight reflecting off glacial ice, he thought.

  She was thirty-one, according to the information she had given Gaines and Holroyd, but she could pass for twenty-one; only her eyes, cool green eyes that picked up the green of her blouse and shone with the color of the sea, betrayed her age. Old eyes, knowing eyes, falsely placid. What swam beneath that calm surface? Oxman wondered. He was surprised to find himself feeling a little sorry for her. He knew what this city could do to a young woman like this; the destruction could be insidious yet thorough. And yet that only added to her allure, the aura of icy sensuality she projected.

  She smiled at him again. Everything about her was transformed when she smiled. The coldness seemed to fade; she appeared older, more her proper age, but less sharply hewn and much more attractive. “What did you want to see me about?” she asked.

  “A few more questions,” he said vaguely. He felt awkward being here with her, awkward under the scrutiny of her gaze. She knows how I feel, he thought. She knows.

  “Have you found out anything more about the murders?”

  “Not yet, no. I thought you might have remembered something you overlooked yesterday.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t.”

  Oxman shifted position; it was a comfortable couch, but not for him. “You look well rested,” h
e said. “No trouble sleeping last night?”

  “Not really. Should I have had trouble sleeping?”

  “If you felt anything for Simmons, you might have.”

  “I told you yesterday, I barely knew the man.”

  “But you were intimate with him just a few minutes before he was killed.”

  “You don’t have to know someone to have sex with him,” Jennifer said. “Sex is a simple matter of biology. Or are you old-fashioned about things like that?”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Why is it too bad?”

  A shrug. “I prefer men with a more modern outlook.”

  She’s fencing with me, Oxman thought. He didn’t like it; he didn’t like women who played games. And yet, perversely, it also excited him because he sensed an underlying purpose to the game, an open invitation. The excitement in turn made him angry, at himself and at her.

  He said a little sharply, “How about guilt? Don’t you feel anything along those lines?”

  Something flickered in her eyes, behind the mask, but it was too brief for him to get a reading on it. “Why should I feel guilt?”

  “Simmons would be alive now if you’d let him spend the night with you,” Oxman said. “Or if you’d never brought him here in the first place.”

  “If I’d had any idea of what was going to happen, I would certainly not have brought him here, nor would I have asked him to leave as I did. But I didn’t have any idea. I can’t be held responsible for the actions of others, for something beyond my control.”

  “That’s a pretty callous way of looking at a man’s death.”

  “It’s a callous world, E.L. You ought to know that if anyone does.”