“You look gorgeous and girlish in that little skirt.”
“Well it’s not exactly the right season for it but I thought a little frivolity was called for.” But she was pleased by the compliment, clumsy as it may have been.
In his vague fantasies it was much too easy to see her making a warm serene home. He took her glass from her and went to refill them both; he felt unnerved.
She trailed him into the kitchen. “You really did a job on your face.”
“I hadn’t tightened the blade in the razor. Incredibly stupid. I did all this with one swipe before I realized the blade was loose.”
“I’d better get you a cartridge razor.”
“I bought one this morning.” Actually he’d always used a cartridge razor but he’d bought a brand new one today and thrown the old one out. The first time she went in the bathroom she’d see the cardboard-and-plastic package on the rim of the wastebasket. It was the details, he thought; concentrate on every detail, get it right, forget nothing.
“What’s this gizmo?”
“Trash compactor.”
“My goodness. You’ve really got all the mod cons in this building. Dishwasher, compactor—is that a self-cleaning oven?”
“I’m waiting for the self-making bed.”
“And the self-vacuuming rug. Wasn’t there a Ray Bradbury story …?” She accepted the highball and moved back into the living room. “What’s your resolution for the new year?”
“I don’t know. What’s yours?”
“Haven’t you noticed—I haven’t had a cigarette all evening.” She attacked her drink like an addict snatching an overdue fix: she made a comic act of it. “I’m going out of my mind with nicotine withdrawal.”
“It’ll get worse before it gets better.”
“Were you a smoker?”
“Long time ago. I gave it up when the surgeon general started issuing threats.”
“My God you’re disgustingly virtuous. You don’t smoke, you eat and drink in moderation. You haven’t got anything to give up.”
“I was thinking of giving up sex.”
“Good Lord. Whatever for?”
“So that you could talk me out of it.”
“How strong a case would I have to present?”
“Not very.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Turnips,” he said triumphantly.
“What?”
“I’ll give up turnips.”
“You hate turnips.”
“Exactly.”
“Bastard. I’m getting no sympathy at all. Look at me. I’ve got the shakes, my eyes are watering, I’m knotted up with indescribable pain, I’m a complete and utter wreck with a ten-ton monkey on my back. And you’re offering to give up turnips.”
“How about Brussels sprouts?”
“I could kill you.”
“No you couldn’t,” he said.
26
SHE LAY on her right side, hands under her cheek. He left the bed slowly because he didn’t want to wake her; he went into the kitchen, slippers flapping along the floor, and went through the ritual of assembling utensils and ingredients to make the English coffee she liked—a mixture with warm milk.
Beyond the window the city was crystalline: the sky unusually deep, the buildings of the Loop colored crisply by the morning sun. It looked like a giant Kodachrome projection in very sharp focus.
He wondered how many revelers had died from knife or bullet.
He crossed the front door and opened it and found the morning paper on the mat; he brought it in and shot both locks. The coffee was beginning to bubble. He unfolded the newspaper on the table.
He heard the shower begin to spray against its frosted glass door. He smiled a little and turned down the flame under the saucepan of milk.
The headline caught his eye.
DOES VIGILANTE INSPIRE VIOLENCE?
Two New Year’s Eve incidents led Captain Victor Mastro of the Chicago police to comment last night that defensive violence in Chicago may be on the increase because of widespread publicity over the killings of the mysterious vigilante.
Talking off-the-cuff to reporters at the Police Commissioner’s annual Open House for the Press, Captain Mastro referred to two incidents reported earlier in the day.
In one case, a South Side woman repelled a mugging attempt by two unidentified youths on populous Martin Luther King Boulevard. The woman sent the youths running after she fought them off with a heavy length of iron pipe which she had been carrying in her handbag.
In the other case, an attempted holdup of a filling station on Canfield Road in Norridge was thwarted by an attendant who took a loaded shotgun from its hiding place beneath the cash register and fired both barrels, apparently injuring both would-be robbers, although the two men got away in their car and are still at large. The gas station attendant was quoted as saying, “The vigilante’s got it right, man, there’s only one language these guys understand.”
Captain Mastro said, “There’s a danger in this kind of thinking. When an armed robber comes into your place of business, you run a tremendous risk if you resist him. A lot of these men are hardened criminals. Unless you’re as tough and as expert with guns as they are, the chances are pretty good that you’ll end up the loser if you get into a gun battle with them. It’s our official policy to recommend against the possession of any deadly weapon, even it it’s purchased purely for reasons of self-defense. It’s too easy for people to get hurt or killed. A few dollars out of a cash register isn’t worth a shopkeeper’s life.”
But when asked whether Chicago’s street-crime rate had been reduced since the vigilante case began, Captain Mastro refused to comment. “Any answer to that question would be misleading right now,” he said. “There are too many factors involved.”
He carried the two cups of coffee into the bedroom. She came out of the bathroom naked, toweling beaded water off her shoulders. The ends of her hair were matted damp. She smiled—very warm and still a little sleepy.
“Happy New Year.”
“It is.” She dropped the towel and embraced him. Her skin was tight from the shower. He had a saucer and cup in each hand; he put them down carefully and closed his arms around her. Her kiss was soft and slow. “Thanks for making it the happiest one in a long time, darling.”
She disengaged herself and went to her clothes; he watched the sway of her small’round hips. He said, “There’s coffee here.”
“I think I’ll wait. If I drink it steaming hot I’ll only want a cigarette.”
When he had showered and dressed they sat in the kitchen spooning segments of grapefruit and Paul said, “I don’t have to report for work until Monday. That gives us five days. Why don’t we go away somewhere? How about New Orleans?”
“Oh I’d love that. I’ve never been to New Orleans. But I’ve got to be in court tomorrow and Friday.”
“We’ll do it another time, then.”
“I’ll hold you to it.” She pulled the morning paper around. “Mastro again. My God, if this vigilante business goes on much longer he’ll be the most famous cop in the country. Next thing he’ll be running for President.”
“What sort of guy is he?”
“He’s all right. A good cop, really. He’s got a brain and he still knows how to use it—he hasn’t been anaesthetized by the bureaucracy. But nobody ever heard of him, outside of the professionals, until the vigilante case started. Now he’s had a taste of what it means to be a celebrity, and I think he’s learning fast how to make the most of it. Christ I’d like a cigarette. How can you read the morning paper without a cigarette?”
“You get used to it after the first ten or fifteen years.”
“You’re a fat help.”
He had to tread gingerly. “The paper yesterday said he’d identified the vigilante’s guns. I got the impression between the lines that he knows more than he’s telling the public.”
“That’s the impression they want to give. They want the
vigilante to think they’re closing in on him. Actually they’re no closer than they were the day it all started. They haven’t got any leads at all.”
“But what about those witnesses in the pizza place?”
“They saw somebody in a car at night. He had a gun in his hand and bullets were flying around. They saw it through a filthy window, from a brightly lit room, looking out into a dim parking lot thirty or forty feet away. What do you think?”
“Do they think it’s just one vigilante or a bunch of them?”
“They haven’t got any idea.”
“Personally I’d guess it was just one guy,” Paul said. “He’s pretty clever, obviously. He must be clever enough to use two or three different guns just to confuse the police.”
“Beats me,” she said. “And it beats Vic Mastro too, I’m afraid. He wants to nail the vigilante—he knows how much it would do for his career. But he doesn’t want it to happen too quickly. Vic wants to milk it for every ounce of publicity he can get before he finally marches up the City Hall steps with the vigilante in handcuffs.”
“Do you think that will happen?”
“Eventually it’s bound to. Sooner or later the vigilante will make a mistake. He may have made one already—the night he tangled with that nut with the machete. He may have been cut pretty badly. They’re canvassing all the hospitals and private doctors within a hundred-mile radius. They may find him. If this one doesn’t turn up any leads, the next one will. The vigilante has one fatal disadvantage. He only needs to make one mistake. That’s all, just one, and he’s finished. The police can make all the mistakes in the world. They only need to be right once.”
“You make it sound cut and dried. Inevitable.”
“It is, really. It’s only a question of time.”
“What if the vigilante just decided to retire or move on to some other town?”
“Who knows,” she said. “The interesting question to me is, what happens if they do catch him?”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s quite a hero to a lot of people out there. What happens if we have to put him on trial?”
“I see what you mean.”
“We could have demonstrations—even riots. Nothing’s unheard of in this town. A vigilante trial in Chicago could turn into an incredible political football.”
“I wonder how it would turn out,” Paul said. “More coffee?”
27
THURSDAY MORNING he dropped Irene at her office and drove south into the slums. He spent the day prowling the inferior regions of the city but the extreme clear cold was keeping people off the streets and at half past two he went back toward the center of the city to carry out the next step in his plan.
He’d singled out half a dozen ads from the classified real-estate page and he looked at four of the offices until he found one that suited his purpose. It was on a backwater fringe of the Loop near the intersection of Rush and Grand Avenue. There were a parking garage, several woebegone shops, a bar, a porno-poster shop, and on one corner a vacant lot and beyond it a building undergoing demolition.
The ad led him to a three-story brick building old enough to be grimed with soot. A narrow passage between two storefronts led him up a flight of steps. The superintendent had a cubbyhole on the landing; he was a bald man with a black monk’s fringe above his ears, in need of a shave and a beer-free diet; he led Paul up another flight to the top floor.
The office was a single room. Its two filthy windows looked out upon Grand Avenue. It was offered as a furnished office: that meant it had a desk that looked as if it had been bought surplus from the army, a flimsy swivel-chair on casters with frayed upholstery, a dented filing cabinet, a gooseneck lamp on the desk, the threadbare remnants of a rug; the lamp and the ceiling fixture had no bulbs in them but someone had left half a roll of toilet paper on top of the filing cabinet. There was a coat closet—two bent wire hangers—and a legend on the frosted glass pane in the door had been badly scraped off, leaving enough paint behind to see that a previous occupant had been a novelty company. There was a black phone on the desk but the superintendent told Paul it would need connecting. The rent was eighty dollars.
Paul signed a six-month lease in the name of his deceased brother-in-law. He gave the superintendent one hundred and sixty dollars in cash for security and the first month’s rent. At no time did Paul remove his gloves. He told the superintendent he ran a small mail-order business in personalized greeting cards; the superintendent showed no curiosity. He gave Paul keys to the outside door, the office door and the bathroom down the hall.
Paul said he’d had a fire in his previous building. He inquired about fire exits. The superintendent showed him the back stairs: fire stairs that went down to a steel door on the ground floor at the rear of the building. It gave out onto an alley cluttered with trash cans. You could open the door from inside without a key but you couldn’t enter from outside without one; the outside had no handle and there were steel buffer plates grooved into the doorframe to prevent a burglar from slipping the lock with plastic or wire.
He spent the rest of the afternoon preparing the remainder of his cover. He ordered cheap printed stationery and a few rubber stamps, mailing envelopes, a postage meter, a second-hand typewriter, a packet of stick-on address labels, a small bag filled with office miscellany: paper clips and ballpoint pens, cellotape, manila file folders. Then he went up State Street to a card shop and bought twenty dollars’ worth of assorted greeting cards.
He stopped at a public booth and called the telephone company; gave the name and previous address and phone number of his brother-in-law in New Jersey and asked the company to connect the telephone in his new office. The appointment was made for Monday morning.
Neuser Studios was born. At half past four he returned to the flyspecked office and distributed his office supplies, wearing rubber kitchen gloves he’d bought in a variety store on his way back from State Street. He slipped one greeting card into each manila folder and stacked them all in the filing cabinet. He set up the old typewriter on the desk and screwed light bulbs into the fixtures.
He’d spent nearly three hundred dollars including the rent and security. It was for the single purpose of establishing a hiding place for the guns.
He could no longer afford to have the guns in his apartment, nor even in his car when he left it unattended. When he began work at Childress his apartment and car would be empty all day long: suspicion might lead Mastro’s troops in his direction and he could afford to take no chances; his apartment and car might be searched.
At the other end of the investigation it was possible they’d canvass arms dealers; there might be ten thousand .38 Centennials in the Chicago area but there was the remote possibility they’d question Truett in the Wisconsin gun shop and find out that Robert Neuser had bought the two pistols there. They’d start hunting for Neuser then. They’d find him listed in an office on Grand Avenue and they’d search the office, and they’d find the guns.
But they wouldn’t connect Neuser with Paul. He must never leave a single fingerprint in the office or indeed anywhere in the building.
Or on the guns.
He cleaned both of them, oiled them and wiped them down. He wiped the cleaning kit as well; then put kit and both guns in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. It had no lock and there was always the chance a burglar would break into the place and steal the guns but if that happened it would do Paul no real harm; it might even provide a red herring for the police to chase, if the burglar used the stolen guns.
In any case he could always buy another gun.
When he returned to the street it was dark and the rush-hour traffic was diminishing. He got his car out of the parking garage and turned north toward Irene’s apartment.
28
¶ CHICAGO, JAN. 3RD—A twelve-year-old boy shot and wounded his sixth-grade teacher yesterday when she scolded him for classroom misbehavior, Chicago police reported.
¶ CHICAGO, JAN. 3RD—When a ro
bber with his hand in his coat pocket threatened to shoot a CTA bus driver if the farebox wasn’t handed over, the bus driver shot him.
The robber proved to be unarmed.
The robber carried no identification. He died at County Hospital without regaining consciousness after emergency surgery.
“He said he had a gun in his pocket,” said the driver, James Sweet, 31, of 3108 W. Beach. “I didn’t aim to be another dead robbery victim.”
CTA regulations prohibit transit employees from carrying guns. “But I’d rather be fired and alive than employed and dead,” Sweet said. “As far as I was concerned it was my life or my job.”
Sweet said he had been carrying the gun since he first heard about the vigilante.
The robber boarded Sweet’s Number 46 bus on Western Avenue near Addison and began to threaten Sweet as soon as the doors closed, Sweet said. There were no other passengers on the bus. Sweet immediately activated the secret distress signal which has been installed on all CTA buses, but no police responded immediately to the alarm.
“He gave me no choice,” Sweet said. “I don’t carry a key to the farebox. I couldn’t hand it over. And even if I could, why should I?”
Sweet has been a bus driver for seven years. “It’s been getting worse and worse,” he said. “Drivers get knocked over nearly every day now.”
The robber, described as being in his early twenties, is being investigated through fingerprint identification.
A CTA spokesman said Sweet would not be suspended or dismissed immediately; a decision is forthcoming, he said, pending departmental investigation.
No criminal charges have been brought.
29
COOK COUNTY Juvenile Court was housed in a long flat dark building, square and stylelessly modern; it was five stories high and might have been a factory or a company headquarters, or a leprosarium. It fronted on the point of an acutely triangular block, bias-cut by the diagonal slash of Ogden Avenue.
Ogden’s Route 66 truck traffic rumbled past steadily. Paul turned out of the stream and parked on Hamilton Avenue opposite the side entrance of the Juvenile Court.
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