Mr. Apology

by Campbell Armstrong

  “You can’t have peace, Bryant. I could tell you all about peace, you know. It just isn’t out there. It doesn’t exist. You think if you go back to your drab little Angela you’ll live your life in tranquility. Let me tell you, dear one, that if it isn’t me you’ll find yourself attracted to somebody else. Think about it. Well-known art dealer solicits sexual favors from choirboy in local church. Think about it, Bryant.”

  Choirboys. The sight of a lithe young man working on a construction site. The pretty face of a teenage boy on a street corner. He couldn’t be correct; he just couldn’t be.

  “George, I’m sick to death with the lies, the deceits—”

  “You don’t want me, Bryant? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “It isn’t that.”

  “You’re rejecting me. Is that what you’re doing? Turning me away?” George smiled suddenly. “I only have to crook my little finger and you’ll come running.”

  “It won’t work out, George.”

  “Why?”

  “It just won’t work out, that’s all.”

  “I don’t believe you know what you’re saying, Bryant.” George looked angry now. What was it about his mouth? It seemed tight and mean, looking like Berger had never seen it before. A tiny nerve worked in the boy’s jaw, as if he were grinding his back teeth. “Don’t you understand that I love you, Bryant? Don’t you understand that you love me?”

  Berger shook his head. “I’m too afraid, George. Too scared. Too tired.”

  George put his hand on Berger’s shoulder. He tightened his fingers, squeezing the flesh hard. The pain was terrible. Berger opened his mouth, saw black spots flying in front of his eyes. Then George took his hand away.

  “That’s what she wants to do to you, Bryant. She wants to squeeze you dry. Don’t you understand that?”

  Berger rubbed his shoulder and gasped. “Jesus Christ.” He stared at George, filled with a sudden longing to strike at him, to hurt him just as he had been hurt himself. Instead he went to the sofa and sat down, trying to ignore the searing pain. He looked at George, who was smiling. Why was he wearing that hideous expression, as if he found pleasure, exultation, in inflicting pain? Berger shut his eyes: The pain was like a hot cinder burning behind his lids. He could see it glow there. Pain, it was always pain. He opened his eyes, saw George go behind the sofa, could feel him standing there as surely as if he were sending out signals. Why is he standing behind me like this? Why do I feel so threatened? Berger turned his head around. George had his hands on the back of the sofa and his eyes were tightly shut and he was rocking his body from side to side.

  “You want to leave me, is that it?”

  Berger didn’t speak. He kept rubbing his shoulder. His throat was dry and he wished he were suddenly sober but the alcohol continued to churn through him, making him sick, dizzy.

  “You want to leave me!” George said.

  “George, please …”

  “I don’t like it. I don’t like it, Bryant. I don’t like the idea of somebody leaving me.”

  Berger rose, looked in the direction of the door. “George, I have to go.…” The room seemed to scream at him. The walls appeared to close in, trapping him with the certainty of a fly captured in a bottle. He could sense it all around him, the scent of danger; he imagined he could hear the soft tearing sounds of George unraveling in front of his eyes. He started to move in the direction of the door. Fear, he thought. You fear this boy, this stranger. Where was the other George, the one you held in your arms and kissed and made love with?

  “You fucker,” George said. “You miserable cocksucking fucker.” He moved to the coffee table and picked up the knife. He pulled out a short sharp blade.

  “George, put the knife down. Come on, put the knife away.”

  “You think I’d waste this on you, Bryant? It’s good steel, you know. It’s real good steel. Everybody enjoys the feel of a Swiss army knife.”

  Berger restrained an incongruous impulse to laugh. This was absurd, ridiculous, George standing there with the knife like some apprentice assassin. Himself hovering between the sofa and the door.

  “I wouldn’t waste my knife on you.”

  “Then put it away.”

  George snapped the blade back into the handle. “You’re pitiful, Bryant. You’re an excuse for a human being. You live your life like you’re always looking over your own shoulder.” George paused, then all at once he was smiling, and the expression was sweet and clear and childlike; it was as if some awful shadow had passed across his mind, as if he’d suddenly emerged from a dark tunnel and back into daylight. He dropped the knife on the coffee table.

  “Go back to your wife, Bryant. That’s what you ought to do. Go back to her and sleep with her and stick your face between her legs and when you’re laboring through that maybe you can imagine it’s me you’re in bed with.”

  Berger said nothing. This vindictive streak in George, this explosive quality he’d felt before, the sharp gleaming edge of violence. He was uneasy, scared, longing to get out of the place and go home.

  But he didn’t move. He just stood in the middle of the room and listened to the roaring echoes of George’s words. They rang in his ears with all the resonance of huge bells. He stared at George, then he was absurdly conscious of his hat on the coffee table—but somehow he knew he would have to resist the urge to pick it up in case the act suddenly inflamed George. He realized he couldn’t predict the young man’s actions; he didn’t know what to expect any more than he knew how he was supposed to behave. Leave the silly hat, open the door, go home. And it struck him then with the force of thunder: George could kill me.

  He backed towards the door.

  He watched George slump on the sofa. A picture of despair.

  “George,” Berger whispered.

  “Fuck off. Run along home. I don’t care.”

  Berger quietly put his hand on the door handle, turned it softly. “George,” he said again, his voice low.

  George said nothing.

  Berger stepped into the hall, closing the door behind him. He walked down to the elevator and pressed the button. He heard the elevator stir in the shaft and he leaned against the wall—weak, his pulses hammering, a constriction in his throat. What am I stepping away from? What am I leaving? You never know what the right thing is until you do it, do you?

  He heard something crash along the hall and he looked in the direction of George’s apartment. George must have thrown something heavy at the inside of his door—a lamp, maybe even the coffee table. The elevator doors slid open and he went hurriedly inside and pressed the button for the ground floor. The swift downward motion of the elevator made him feel sick all over again.

  4.

  With his plump hands placed together Frank Nightingale sat down behind his desk and looked across the office at the open door leading to the hallway. A sixty-watt light bulb shone weakly outside. He watched a uniformed policewoman walk past. Rita Huddleston—she went with Malarkey in Fraud. She wasn’t at all bad-looking, tall with yellowy hair that came down to her shoulders. He felt a twinge, a pang of loneliness, like a slight hunger he didn’t have the means to assuage. Then he looked over at Moody’s empty desk, wondering where Boy Wonder could be. There had been twenty-four hours of bleak inactivity spiced with the usual insane telephone calls from freaks out there who always had the balls to confess to killings they hadn’t done. Spiced, too, with the usual poring over of statements, looking at the utterances of other people as if you might fortuitously spy something between the lines. Fat chance, he thought. He got up from behind his desk. He stared out the window a moment, turning only when he heard Moody come into the office.

  “Sperm prints, Frank.”

  “What?”

  “Sperm prints,” Moody said. “A whole new ballgame in police science. We devise a method whereby we get prints of guys’ sperm and we store this information away in the big computer, then when we run into something like the Henry Falcon a.k.a. Dicky Bird affair we
can match sperm traces with the prints in the computer. You like it?”

  “You know what I think of that idea, Doug?”

  “Tell me.”

  “It sucks.”

  “Good one, good one,” Moody said. He came across the office and perched himself up on Nightingale’s desk. “Anyhow, I was being more than a little facetious. I was only making a point. They spend millions of bucks so those Einsteins in forensics can tell us something practically useless like the fact of human sperm being inside a corpse’s mouth. When they’re deciding to throw this bread around, Frank, why don’t they stick it into something useful. What good is sperm to us?”

  “Where would you be without it?”

  “Seriously. I would have liked it better if they had the means of telling us whose goddamn sperm it was.”

  But you know, Boy Wonder, don’t you? You know it’s Billy Chapman’s, right? You’ve convinced yourself of this. You don’t need computers and printouts and all the rest of that crap. William Arthur Chapman is your man. Nightingale placed his hands together, studying the lines in his palms. Which one was the goddamn loveline anyhow?

  “They also came up with some hair, Doug. They tell us it was dyed. They haven’t told us the exact kind of dye yet, but they probably will.” A question suddenly nagged him. He gazed at Moody for a second, then said, “Let me ask you something. It kinda troubles me. Why would somebody like Chapman go to all the trouble of changing the color of his hair? It doesn’t fit the picture I’ve got of him—strung-out, a doper. I can’t see him going inside a store and buying a bottle of Grecian Urn.”

  Moody said, “You surprise me, Frank. He’s disguised himself. After killing his sister, what else would he do?”

  Nightingale nodded. Up to a point, he thought. Up to a certain point it sounded okay—except in his experience of dopers, they weren’t exactly people who cared about appearances. They could camouflage themselves well enough without the aid of something that came in a bottle. He thought about Henry Falcon now, trying to imagine somebody mounting him, coming inside the old guy’s mouth. He wasn’t so good these days at seeing such pictures as he used to be. Time and weariness, he thought. The core of lovesickness.

  Moody said, “We need an oracle, Frank. Like the ancient Greeks. We need this ominiscient entity we can just go ask questions. Where is Billy Chapman, O wise one?”

  “Who’s gonna win the three-thirty at Aqueduct?”

  “Stuff like that,” Moody said. He was strolling around the office. Nightingale noticed how fatigued he looked, his skin somewhat grey, a lack of lustre in his eyes.

  Nightingale looked from the window, staring at the wall opposite. It was black out there. You feel like a juggler sometimes, he thought, tossing balls in the air that were labeled Camilla and Henry and Billy. And they were rising faster, spinning harder than you could ever hope to follow. He moved back to his desk and sat down, then tilted his chair back and stared up at the ceiling. Sometimes you forgot the faces of the victims. Sometimes you blocked them out, hid yourself away from how they had looked at the point of their deaths, and you remembered only the incongruous details of murder. A garter belt. A pair of tights. A shopping list stuck to a refrigerator. A notebook bound in velvet. He found his gaze drawn to the open door; Rita Huddleston was going past again. He watched her: There was the soft scent of perfume hanging in the air, tantalizing, blood-warming.

  He took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose, then folded the thing away. He picked up a manila envelope from his desk and tipped it over: Photographs of the late Henry Falcon spilled out. A gallery of horrors. He could hardly stand to look at them. If you could talk, Henry, what could you tell us? You could describe the guy who snuffed you out and an artist would come and make a passable drawing and the picture would be circulated and it would inevitably resemble a whole bunch of people. The telephone would be red-hot with tips, claims, outright falsehoods. If you could talk, Henry. But then you couldn’t have talked with your mouth full, could you? Sick humor—how else did you contrive to get through the days when they seemed endless and there wasn’t a distinction between dawn and twilight and all the noons suggested darkness? He stared at the pictures. Sperm and hair samples. No prints. No apparent theft. Just a brutal sex crime. And what kind of person commits that kind of crime?

  Moody said, “Billy Chapman’s last known address was the Hotel Christopher on Thirty-ninth Street. The Doss-house of the August Moon. Cheap rates by the month, guaranteed rodent infestation of every room. Before that, at the time of his first arrest, he was a denizen of the McBurney YMCA on Twenty-third Street. He obviously never put much weight into home living, Frank. You get a pattern. Cheap hotels, institutions, flophouses. He doesn’t seem to know any better. I’d say he’s ensconced in a similar sleazy establishment right now. The kind of place where I first met him.”

  Nightingale stuffed Henry’s pictures back inside the envelope; he might have been scooping the ashes of the departed inside a funeral urn. “There’s a whole maze of flophouses out there, Doug. It’s another world. The reason I can’t waste manpower on hitting every flophouse is because one, I just can’t spare it; two, a lot of desk clerks don’t know their ass from their elbow; and three, most of the names in the registers—if there happens to be a register—are probably phony. Last time I looked at a register in a cheap hotel there was one Pearl Harbor, two John Hancocks, a John Smith, a Laurence Olivier, and a couple that called themselves Mr. and Mrs. Bob Dylan. You start in on that kind of maze and pretty soon you’re not going from one lobby to another; you’re going from room to room. You know how many rooms there are?”

  Moody dropped the Billy Chapman fact sheet he’d been reading. “In an ideal world we’d have the ideal number of men.”

  “In the same world, Doug, we wouldn’t have warrens of flophouses. So we wouldn’t need that many men.”

  Moody turned, looking puzzled. Then he appeared to let Nightingale’s remark go, as if the logic of it were too perplexing for him. Nightingale swung his chair around so that he faced the window. He stared out into the dark for a while, then swung back again and looked at Moody.

  “Billy Chapman,” he said.

  “What about him?”

  “Why would a guy like that suddenly go on a killing spree, Doug? I mean, what is it that might snap inside him and turn him from some punk thief and dopehead into a fully fledged monster?”

  Moody shrugged. “Sweet mysteries. Maybe the dope gets to him. The paranoid abyss. Maybe the habit’s become enormous. He doesn’t mean to kill, only steal. But he meets resistance.”

  Nightingale nodded, looked down at the surface of his desk. “You think he did both these killings.”

  “That’s what I think.”

  “There’s no sexual crimes on his fact sheet.”

  “He’s a late starter, that’s all.”

  Nightingale shut his eyes. He wished he were as convinced as his partner. He wished he could pin everything on W. A. Chapman. It made things real easy. One simple target. But what he had a hard time getting around was the fact of Moody’s old grudge. It lay like an obstacle in his path: The Boy Wonder wants Chapman to be the killer. He sighed, got out of his chair, circled the office.

  Moody said, “Look, Frank, you got two strangulations. You got the sexual thing in both cases. One definite necrophilia, right? The other a possible—shit, what would the word for that be? Whatever, it’s a real connection. It’s a definite link. You can’t ignore it.”

  “I guess,” Nightingale said.

  The telephone was ringing.

  Moody went to answer it, silent for a long time as he listened to the message from the other end of the line. Then he put the receiver down and stared across the room at Nightingale.

  “We’ve got another one, Frank.”

  “Shit.”

  “A bad one. A real bad one this time.”

  Moody was already reaching for his coat. A real bad one this time, Nightingale thought. What had the others
been? Good ones? He got up, took his coat from the peg on the wall, struggled into it.

  “A woman,” Moody said.

  Nightingale made no response, wondering why it was always worse when the victim was a woman. He followed Moody out into the corridor. How bad was bad anyhow?

  5.

  Madeleine lay in the dark with her eyes open, listening to the sound of Harry’s regular breathing. He’d fallen asleep about an hour ago and now she felt oddly abandoned, shut out from a world she could never enter, a very private place of dreams. She stared at the outline of the window where a thin touch of light fell against the glass from somewhere. There was the sound of night rain—it rattled on the window, stroked the roof, slithered noisily into a rainpipe outside. You could imagine the whole city as an island of rain afloat in the dark, the swollen river knocking against quays, piers, touching the hulls of silent ships.

  She sat up and clutched the sheet to her breasts, looked at the shape of Harrison beside her. Their lovemaking had been slow, unhurried, the foreplay more elaborate than any she’d ever encountered—there wasn’t one part of her body he hadn’t explored with fingertips, tongue, the palms of his hands. He might have been trying to memorize the contours of her flesh as if he were planning to make a map.

  Reaching out, she let her fingers touch his hair lightly. Then she ran her hand between his shoulder blades a moment. She leaned, kissed the nape of his neck, pushed the sheet back, stepped onto the floor. She stared at the red and green lights of the answering machine. And she remembered how when they’d come back to the loft from the restaurant the first thing he’d done was come inside the bedroom and play back his messages like a kid on Christmas morning who can’t wait to rip the wrapping off his presents. The first thing he’d done, she thought. For a few minutes she might not have existed; he might have been totally alone in the room.

  Okay. He gets absorbed. He goes deep.

  It’s only fair. Right. It’s his project, his baby, his work.

  It’s a big part of him.