The Eye: A Novel of Suspense

by Bill Pronzini

  The room he was in was dim, illuminated only by light from a streetlamp outside, but even at that Hiller could see that it was neat and nicely furnished. Not the sort of place he’d have figured for a junkman like Lorsec. He moved quietly through the apartment, using his penlight to examine the living room but keeping it shielded so light wouldn’t show in the windows. He searched drawers, beneath cushions, behind drapes, under lamps.

  Nothing.

  Hiller went into the bedroom and started tossing the dresser drawers. He was surprised at the quality of clothing, and at the fact that half of it belonged to a woman; Lorsec must be living with someone. There was even some pretty good jewelry, and fifty dollars in small bills rolled and rubber-banded beneath a stack of underwear. Hiller helped himself. Why not?

  He was stuffing the money into his hip pocket when he heard the noise out in the front room. The back of his neck crawled. It sounded like somebody had opened the door, come inside the apartment.

  Hiller started back toward the bedroom doorway—and the front-room lights came on. He blinked, lifting a hand to shade his eyes. Then he was looking at a big man wearing slacks and a light-colored blazer, a guy with a face Hiller had never seen before and a strained, determined expression that Hiller didn’t like.

  The man was pointing a gun at him.

  A cold band of fear pressed tight around Hiller’s chest, binding him where he stood. He stared at the stranger with the gun, confused. Who was he? What the hell was he doing here? Why didn’t he say something?

  Hiller eased his head around, darted a look at the bedroom window. It was barred with wrought-iron: a typical Manhattan window. Hiller knew he should have checked it earlier, found out if there was another way out of the apartment; now it was too late. He looked back at the guy with the gun.

  “Hey, listen, pal …” he said.

  The hand holding the weapon was rigid, the finger tight on the trigger.

  “Listen,” Hiller said, “all I want to do is walk out of here. All right? I just walk out of here.” He took a step toward the man, his hands out in a pleading gesture.

  The muzzle flashed. Something slammed into Hiller’s chest; the world seemed to reverse rotation, and the next thing he knew was the feel of his fingers clawing into the rough nap of the carpet and he realized he was on the floor. Blood rose in his throat, dribbled out of one corner of his mouth. A long way off, somebody was screaming.

  “Why?” he managed to say.

  And then he died.

  11:00 P.M. — MICHELE BUTLER

  The picture on the TV in Michele’s bedroom had gone haywire again, merging into a disjointed pattern of flickering diagonal lines that cast asymmetrical shadows over the walls and on the bed where she lay with Marco. The volume was turned off; the TV had served its function as a nightlight to provide the sort of soft illumination that he felt was conducive to sex.

  Sex with Marco. Michele shivered, remembering the groping voraciousness of his experienced hands, the sour odors of his frail body and his breath. She had not had to fake frigidity with him; all he had aroused in her was coldness and revulsion. Her skills as an actress had been tested to the fullest, but she thought she had handled it well enough. Cooperated, let him do what he wanted to her twice already, but responded to him not at all. Still, he hadn’t seemed to mind. Marco was an animal; all he cared about was his own gratification.

  She lay staring up at the ceiling, hating him, hating herself a little for allowing this to happen. The stale scent of her couplings with him hung heavy in the still air of the bedroom. Marco was asleep, lying on his back with his arms flung loosely at his sides, his head thrown back, his hair comically mussed and a little-boy expression on his face. The regular rasp of his breathing was the only sound in the room, and it seemed to grow louder and louder, harsher and harsher, until it began to grate unbearably on Michele’s nerves. She had to get away from it, away from Marco, if only for a short time.

  She rolled onto her side, trying not to tilt the mattress, then sat nude on the edge of the bed. She stayed there for a moment, making sure she hadn’t awakened him; even in the faint light from the TV, she could see that the insides of her thighs were still reddened from the friction of his frantic lovemaking.

  Full of traps, she found herself thinking, life is full of traps. Why does it have to be that way? She sighed, almost a moan, and stood up.

  “Hey, where you goin’, sweets?” Marco murmured behind her.

  Michele stiffened. Without turning she said, “I’m thirsty and I’m going to get something to drink. Do you want anything?”

  “You got any beer?”

  “I think so.” She seemed to recall two long-ignored cans of Budweiser shoved to the back of the refrigerator.

  “That’ll do fine,” Marco said. “You hurry back, sweets. I feel another hard-on coming on.”

  She repressed a shudder. Behind her as she padded out of the bedroom, she heard his cigarette lighter click as he lighted another joint.

  In the kitchen, she ran some cold water, filled a glass, and drank the water down. She really was thirsty, as thirsty as she’d ever been. Then she opened the refrigerator, and in the bright light streaming from it wrestled with the pull-tab on one of the beer cans until it defeated her. She’d let Marco open it. The cold air from the refrigerator was going to give her pneumonia; her bare feet were like ice.

  When she returned to the bedroom he was still lying on his back, with one arm behind his head, smoking his joint and staring at the shadows playing on the ceiling. Michele set the beer on the table by his side of the bed. “I couldn’t get it open,” she said.

  He grinned dreamily. “No problem.” The ember of the marijuana cigarette glowed like a red warning light as he took another puff. “You want a joint?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. He’d kept trying to get her to smoke one with him, or to take a hit off one of his; she had never smoked marijuana and she didn’t want to start now, with him, but she almost wished she’d done it, gotten herself stoned. That would have made the past few hours a lot easier to handle.

  “Come on back to bed,” Marco said.

  She returned to the bed, stretched out tensely beside him. She had something of the rigid aspect of a corpse in a funeral home; she knew it and didn’t care. He wouldn’t notice. She understood now that he saw only what he wanted to see.

  “You know, sweets,” he said, “you got a lot to learn about sex. Lucky thing for you you got somebody like me to teach you the finer points. You take a blowjob, now—” He stopped speaking. And then he said in a different voice, “What the fuck!” and sat bolt upright in bed, staring past her at the doorway.

  Startled, Michele opened her mouth to ask him what was wrong. But her head turned at the same time to follow his gaze, and the question died in her throat; she saw what was wrong.

  The dark shape of a man stood in the bedroom doorway.

  She jerked upright, just as Marco had done, and gaped in disbelief. The man was holding something bulky in his arms: one of the throw pillows from the sofa. It flashed through her mind who he must be; the terror that came rushing into her was paralyzing, greater than any she had even known.

  The black figure moved, took on a curious vigor, extended the wadded pillow toward her and Marco like an offering. “The wages of sin,” he said softly, “is death.”

  Michele had a glimpse of the gun he held behind the wadded pillow. She tried to scream, tried to expel her terror, but her throat was too constricted even to allow the passage of breath. She heard Marco whimper behind her—and suddenly he was gripping her upper arm, her hair, yanking her sideways so her body shielded his. But he hadn’t moved fast enough.

  There was a muted slapping sound. And Marco’s head seemed to explode.

  Blood spurted from the hole that appeared where his left eye had been; droplets of it splashed hot on her arm, her cheek. Marco’s hands released her. His body toppled backwards and the back of his head thunked against the headboard.
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  Michele screamed.

  11:15 P.M. — E.L. OXMAN

  In Jennifer’s apartment, directly below Michele Butler’s, Oxman heard the scream. It wasn’t very loud, and at first he wasn’t sure what it was. He came up off the living room couch, where he had been sitting and thinking while Jennifer worked on a set of fashion sketches at her drafting board. Hunger had driven them out of bed at eight o’clock, and they’d been up ever since.

  His sudden movement caught Jennifer’s notice; she stopped working and stared over at him with puzzlement in her green eyes. “What’s wrong, E.L.?”

  “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  Then, from the floor above, there were hard thumping noises—footfalls, somebody running. Every muscle in Oxman’s body went taut. He drew his service revolver, ran to the door, snapped off the locks. He threw the door open, said sharply to Jennifer over his shoulder, “Lock up again behind me!” and rushed into the hall.

  As he took a step toward the stairwell, he heard the whine of the descending elevator.

  “E.L.!” Jennifer was asking urgently behind him. “What’s going on!”

  “Get inside and lock the door!” he commanded again. He hesitated for a second to be sure she would comply, then he charged ahead to the stairs and half-ran, half-stumbled down them, racing the elevator to the lobby.

  At the second-floor landing, he caromed off the rough plaster wall and almost lost his balance; pain lanced through his shoulder. As he shoved away from the wall, breathlessly started to pound down the last flight of stairs, he heard the elevator door open below, the hollow rhythm of running steps.

  The lobby was empty when he reached it, the front door already easing closed on its pneumatic stop.

  Cursing violently, Oxman stretched his stride and hit the door running. He’d forgotten how heavy it was and he was nearly knocked off his feet by its resistance. But is swung open, and he was through and out and then down the concrete steps to the sidewalk.

  Except for a pair of headlights approaching from Riverside Drive, the street was deserted.

  Oxman didn’t realize that he had kept on going, out into the street, until the brakes squealed and the approaching car rocked to a stop close by, almost hitting him. He veered away, got back onto the sidewalk. The driver gave him a blast of the horn and yelled something at him, but Oxman barely heard. He kept swiveling his head back and forth, eyes probing the darkness for a sign of anyone on foot.

  Nothing. Whoever had come out of the building had hidden himself, or entered another building; had been swallowed by the night.

  Oxman holstered his service revolver, stood breathing hard, bent over with his hands on his knees. Too old for this, he thought, too goddamn old …

  When the burning in his lungs eased he hurried back inside the brownstone. The elevator was still at lobby level; he rode it up to the fourth floor. The resident across the hall from Michele Butler, Wally Singer, had his head poked out of the door to his apartment; he pulled it back when he saw Oxman and the door slammed shut. Oxman kept hoping he was wrong about the meaning of the cry he’d heard, the fleeing steps, but when he reached Butler’s door he knew he wasn’t.

  It was standing ajar.

  He drew his revolver again, called out, “Miss Butler? This is the police.”

  Silence from within.

  Oxman shoved the door all the way open and stepped inside, dreading what he might find. The only light seemed to come from the bedroom: the flickering, pale light of a television set. He found the switch for the ceiling globe in the living room, flipped it on, and then went slowly into the bedroom.

  He smelled the stench of cordite even before the fluctuating light from the TV showed him the two still figures on the bed. There was a reaction in his stomach, the same reaction he’d felt too many times before. He crossed the room, again holstering his weapon, and switched on the bedside lamp.

  Blood gleamed in the sudden glow. The naked man, he saw, was Marco Pollosetti; one look at the composition of blood and brain matter on the headboard, like a grotesque Rorschach test, and another at the crimson hole where Pollosetti’s left eye had been, were enough to tell Oxman that the man had died instantly. But the Butler girl was still alive. Shot in the chest, smeared with blood, unconscious; he could see the barely perceptible rise and fall of her breasts, and when he pressed his thumb against the artery in her neck he felt a faint pulse.

  He found a heavy blanket in the bedroom closet. When he had covered her with it he ran out into the living room, located the telephone, draped his handkerchief over the receiver, and put in an emergency call for an ambulance. Then he dialed the number of the Twenty-fourth.

  “This is Oxman,” he said when the switchboard answered. “Put me through to Lieutenant Manders.”

  “Ox,” Manders said, within ten seconds, “what the hell’s going on there? I just tried to call you, and the Crane woman said you ran out with your gun drawn——”

  “Another shooting,” Oxman said tersely. “In the apartment above Jennifer’s.”

  “What!”

  “Two people shot this time—Marco Pollosetti and Michele Butler. Pollosetti’s dead, but the woman is still alive. In bad shape, though. I’ve got an ambulance on the way.”

  “Good Christ!” Manders said. “When did this happen?”

  “Just a few minutes ago.”

  “Shit! I thought we had the son of a bitch; I figured it was over.”

  “Over? What’re you talking about?”

  “We got a call a few minutes ago,” Manders said. “Somebody got shot a little after ten o’clock during an apartment break-in at eleven-thirty West Ninety-eighth. Intruder, not a resident. I figured it must be the psycho.”

  Oxman felt a sinking coldness in his stomach. “It couldn’t have been, Lieutenant. What happened here … it’s his work.”

  Manders cursed again. “Wholesale slaughter, that’s what’s happening over there. All right. Who found the bodies? You?”

  “Yeah. I heard a disturbance up here; that’s why I ran out. He used a pillow to muffle the shots, but the Butler woman had time to scream. I heard him leave, chased after him, but by the time I got downstairs he was gone.”

  “You get a look at him?”

  “No. But Butler must have. If the medics can save her, she might be able to give us an ID.”

  “Christ, I hope so. The media’s going to go crazy over this; so are the mayor and the commissioner. Ox, you stay tight. Tobin’s on his way to the eleven-twenty squeal, which was where I was going to send you; I’ll be over myself as soon as I can.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Oxman said grimly.

  He rang off and went back into the bedroom. Michele Butler was still breathing; he checked her pulse again to make sure. Come on, medics, he thought. Hurry it up, will you?

  As if in reply, the baying of approaching sirens sounded from outside.

  Oxman turned away from the bed, feeling sickened. It always amazed him anew what people could do to one another. It was beyond all reason, totally beyond it; it had to do with the dark recesses of the brain, the hidden dead-end corridors of the mind’s labyrinth. Sometimes he thought everybody in this city was insane. That was how he saw it more and more of late—a gigantic, teeming insane asylum.

  And there was no way to be sure if he was a keeper or an inmate.

  11:45 P.M. — ART TOBIN

  Tobin stood tight-lipped and angry in a bedroom in 1120 West Ninety-eighth. He had just hung up the phone; Lieutenant Smiley had called to tell him about Michele Butler and Marco Pollosetti, and about Elliot Leroy almost catching the bloodthirsty motherfucker who’d shot them. Tobin had figured they already had the psycho, just as Manders had, when this squeal came in. Now they were right back at the beginning, and with one and maybe two more homicides on their hands.

  Tobin still figured that this shooting was tied in with the others somehow; he didn’t like coincidence worth a damn. But if it was tied in, it was
in a way that he couldn’t even begin to understand yet.

  The resident of 1120, one Herb Blocker, was seated in the living room with his blond wife Gretchen. They had come home from a late dinner an hour ago and found someone inside their apartment; rummaging around in the bedroom. Blocker was a jeweler in the Diamond Exchange; he had a permit to carry a handgun. He’d had the gun with him. He’d used it.

  So it seemed to be a simple matter of a B and E man getting caught in the act and shot. At least, that was the way it looked now.

  Only the dead man happened to be a resident not only of West Ninety-eighth Street, but of the block where all the other shootings had taken place. When Tobin had gone into the bedroom after his arrival, to join the uniformed patrolman on guard there, something about the corpse on the floor struck his memory. He’d walked around so he could see the dead man’s face and immediately recognized Benny Hiller.

  The issue was so damned confused at this stage that Tobin didn’t even try to speculate on possible answers. He returned to the living room and listened to Blocker’s rambling story. The jeweler had never killed anyone before tonight; he hadn’t dreamed of the consequences of such a simple act as aiming a gun and squeezing the trigger. Tobin had killed a man five years ago; he knew how Blocker felt, so he was tolerant. He was still trying to get the man calmed down enough to make a coherent statement when the professionals began to arrive—the lab boys and the photographer, then Smathers, the assistant M.E.

  Smathers was a little gray-haired guy who seemed to love his work, which always struck Tobin as not only odd but obscene. He didn’t like Smathers for that reason, and because he had once heard the little honky prick refer to a black victim as “another dead nigger.”

  “Caught with his hand in the cookie jar, eh?” Smathers said as Tobin led him into the bedroom. He grinned and set down his bag. He had on his usual wrinkled three-piece checkered suit and polka-dot bow tie. A hell of a dresser, Tobin thought sourly; Smathers was one short step from being a circus clown.