The Order of Death

by Hugh Fleetwood

  December 29th. I am afraid.

  January 20th. I must let him see me. That way, whether I like it or not, the ball will start rolling.

  February 8th. Tomorrow I shall either let him see me, or I’ll go round to the apartment when he’s there, and have the doorman call up. In case—I’m not sure what in case—but anyway; maybe from tomorrow my address, or my last known address, will be c/o Fred O’Connor, 88, Central Park West, N.Y.C.

  When Fred had finished reading he put the notebook back in his pocket. When he got back to the apartment he would burn it, he decided. Or maybe he would tear it up into small pieces, mix it with Smith’s food, and make him eat it….

  *

  It was a cold, blustery, wild night—around eleven—by the time Fred hurried from the subway and walked quickly towards his block, and as he did he thought how pleasant it would be up in the apartment, with Smith finally beyond help, and he totally out of danger. How very pleasant, sitting listening to the wind, and knowing that he was completely in control. And he was—as long as Marguerite Archell Smith hadn’t suspected him, which he didn’t think she had, or didn’t mention him to anyone, which he didn’t think she would—completely in control now. Perhaps, he thought, he would call in sick tomorrow too; just so he could enjoy to the full his victory. The lord in his kingdom, with his guilty slave….

  *

  Smith was still lying on the floor of the bathroom. He looked at Fred, and the notebook in his hand, and then closed his eyes.

  Fred smiled, and said, ‘I liked your grandmother.’

  Smith’s eyes stayed closed.

  Fred put the notebook down on the edge of the bath, went over to the boy, and removed the tape from round his head.

  ‘You hungry?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Smith muttered.

  ‘I liked your grandmother,’ Fred repeated.

  ‘Why?’

  Fred was about to answer when he realized that he didn’t know. After all, the old lady with her disturbing living room and odd sense of humour—symptoms of a madness that would develop more fully in the grandchild?—shouldn’t have been the sort of person he liked. And yet he had.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said finally. ‘But I guess—there’s something —regular about her. Straight. She’s not weak.’

  Smith didn’t reply. He didn’t seem interested in the subject of his grandmother, or in anything else. He simply lay there, with his shaven head and red-rimmed eyes, and gazed at the notebook, as if it were a dream he had had, and now had lost forever—or as if he were consciously, purposely avoiding Fred’s eyes.

  ‘What happened to your parents?’

  Now the boy did look up at him, and—strangely—gave him a sort of smile. ‘My father died of drink at the age of thirty-six. He was my grandmother’s son. My mother got married again three months after his death, and killed herself on the second day of her honeymoon. She thought she had married someone rich and discovered that her new husband only had a rich mother who gave him pocket-money when he begged for it. Like my father. I reckon she couldn’t stand having made the same mistake twice. Or perhaps there were other reasons.’ The smile, even more strangely, became almost intimate. ‘They were weak, both of them, and my grandmother destroyed them.’ Then the smile faded, and once again the boy became expressionless; expression­less as one who has been defeated, and knows it, or—Fred stared at him suddenly, struck by something about the pose of the thin white body—expressionless as one who is trying hard to conceal some expression, some emotion. Because he wasn’t completely defeated looking, as he should have been. There was a tension about him, an air of waiting for something to happen, that there shouldn’t have been under the circumstances. After all—what could happen? Everything that was ever going to happen to him in his whole life had happened. But—Fred shook his head. He was imagining things.

  ‘I think your grandmother liked me,’ he said.

  ‘She likes everyone,’ Smith muttered. ‘Specially if they’re mad.’

  Fred wondered whether he should hit him. But he decided not to. There was no point in it any longer. He had won, and Smith, however he behaved, whatever he said, had lost.

  ‘Do you want to shit?’

  ‘No. Not now.’

  Why not, Fred wondered. What was he waiting for? ‘I read your notebook,’ he said. ‘Or should I say your novel.’

  Smith nodded, and didn’t reply.

  ‘You better eat your food, anyway. Even if you’re not hungry.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Smith crawled over to the dog’s bowl and knelt in front of it. And then, just as he seemed about to start lapping up the mush, he suddenly looked up at Fred again. Only this time he looked up not with a smile, but with a look of—and there was no mistaking it—contempt, and scorn, and, somehow, triumph. The trans­formation shocked Fred, and made him nervous. He said, ‘What the hell are you looking at me like that for?’

  The boy’s lips opened and closed; and now he seemed about to laugh. He went on staring at Fred—at him, but also through him, and past him—and then whispered, ‘You thought you’d won, didn’t you?’

  ‘What the hell,’ Fred started again, and took a step forward. And then he stopped, and froze. He became aware of the sound of the wind, and faintly, in the distance, the sound of cars. He became aware of the bathroom as if he had never seen it before—taking in every detail, every tap and tile. He became aware—horribly aware—of every inch of Smith’s wretched white body; he could almost count the pale hairs on the thin flaky arms. And he became aware of the fact that there was someone standing behind him, in the bathroom door.

  He turned, slowly.

  Bob was pointing a gun at him. He said tragically, and grimly —absurdly grimly, as if he were finally playing a part in a film which he had been rehearsing for years but still wasn’t very good at—‘Take the cuffs off the boy, Fred.’

  Fred obeyed. It wasn’t safe to argue with someone who was playing a part they weren’t sure of. He also, without being told to, untied the boy’s feet.

  ‘Get out of here,’ Bob said to Smith. ‘Go get some clothes on.’

  ‘You can’t let him go Bob,’ Fred said calmly. ‘He’s the cop-killer. I got proof. It’s all written down in there.’ He pointed to the notebook.

  Bob glanced at it, and muttered, ‘Good. Then I’m taking him in.’

  ‘You can’t do that Bob,’ Fred said calmly.

  ‘I’m going to,’ Bob said.

  ‘You realize—’

  ‘Yeah, I realize.’ Bob stared at Fred, and then looked at the dog’s bowl on the floor. He said, ‘You’re crazy Fred.’

  He said it in his special, grim voice—and then suddenly, he gave up his part, realizing obviously that it wasn’t for him, and rushed on, frowning now, and in his usual, concerned voice. ‘You can’t do this sort of thing, Fred. Lenore saw about the boy’s disappearance in the paper and remembered his name, because apparently he had written her a letter once which she’s always kept framed in her office because she thought it was so funny. And when she told me about it, I realized who it was, and guessed that you were still keeping him here. I should have realized before. God I feel terrible. I’m going to take the boy in and—I’ll tell the whole story. I—’ Bob’s handsome face started to crack with emotion, and with the consciousness of his own nobility. ‘You’re crazy Fred,’ he said again; only this time he said it with wonder, and sadness. ‘How could you have done something like this?’

  ‘I had to have proof.’

  ‘But to treat the boy like a dog. To shave his head. To—treat him like this.’

  ‘It was the only way to get proof.’

  ‘But what were you going to do with this proof?’

  ‘I would have taken him in.’

  Bob gazed at him, and then, only tragically, shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t have Fred. You know that. You would have kept the boy here, or killed him.’

  Smith, who had been standing, watching the scene, finally sp
oke. He said—and sounding now, once more, like a bored silly social boy playing a game, ‘He wouldn’t have killed me.’

  ‘Go and get dressed,’ Bob said.

  Smith walked out of the bathroom, squeezing past Bob, and called plaintively to Fred, ‘Where are my clothes?’

  ‘In the closet where they were before,’ Fred called back. Then, to Bob, he said, ‘I’ll tell you what I was going to do Bob. As soon as I could I was going to sell the apartment. I could have moved out in a day. And then I would have taken the boy in. And if he’d told some story about me having an apartment on Central Park West—well, everyone’d have said he was crazy.’

  ‘There would have been documents. The doormen could have testified.’

  ‘I would have paid the doormen off. And anyway, if I’d brought in the cop-killer, I don’t think anybody would have been about to check up on me seriously. Even if they’d suspected something. Maybe they’d have called the supervisor here and just asked casually if I had an apartment here. And like I said, if I’d given him a thousand dollars or something, he would have said no, and—no. It would all have been okay, Bob. But I had to be sure he was the cop-killer. Otherwise if I’d just taken some nut in—I’d have had nothing to bargain with, if you get me.’

  Bob nodded slowly, unwillingly and unbelievingly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me,’ he murmured. ‘I mean—I’ve seen you every day practically, and all you ever did was just wink and give me the thumbs up and—all the time you had him here.’

  ‘I couldn’t have told you,’ Fred said. He risked a smile. ‘I knew you were too decent. You’d never have allowed me to do this.’

  Bob nodded again. ‘How did you get that notebook?’

  ‘He told me he kept a record of all the murders. It was in his grandmother’s house up in Providence. I been up there today to fetch it. I only got back five minutes ago. As you know,’ he added bitterly. ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘About an hour.’

  ‘Why didn’t you untie Smith yourself?’

  ‘I did, but he told me not to. He said I should wait until you were in here talking to him before I showed myself. He said you might have come in armed or something. And also I guess —I don’t know—I just wanted to see you with him. Just to have proof myself I guess. I mean—it’s all like some sick dream. I couldn’t believe you were actually doing this.’

  The two men looked at each other, both slightly embarrassed, and both uncertain quite what to say now. Finally Fred tried: ‘Don’t you think you should be pointing that gun at him, rather than me. If you let him get away now—’

  Bob gazed at him once more; gazed at him with the eyes of one who had been betrayed, who will be betrayed again, and who can do nothing about it except grieve. And then, slowly, he turned, and pointed his gun—but limply now, uncertainly—down the corridor.

  Fred didn’t hesitate for a second. He jumped. He caught Bob in the back and sent him crashing against the wall. And then, as they fell together to the ground, he twisted him over and smashed him, as hard as he could with his fist, in the face. And then he hit him with the side of his hand on the neck. He hit him five times. And then, when Bob lay still at last, he grabbed the gun that had fallen to the floor and got up slowly, breathing heavily, to his feet.

  Smith—half-dressed, but already with his woollen cap on, was staring at Bob on the floor. He looked so shocked—his eyes wide, his mouth open—that Fred wanted to laugh. Then he looked up at Fred, and started to back away from him, down the corridor.

  ‘Stay still,’ Fred said, sounding, he heard, more irritated than commanding.

  Smith stood still, and whispered in his flat voice, ‘Have you killed him?’

  Fred—as calm and clear-headed as if he had planned the whole episode in advance—smiled and said, ‘No, of course not.’ And then, as Smith still stared at him, he added pleasantly, and reasonably—after all, it was the most obvious thing in the world —‘And I’m not going to. You see, Mr. Smith—you are.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Fred leaned against the wall of the corridor and smiled at the boy again. He said, ‘Why not? You’re the cop-killer, aren’t you?’

  Smith didn’t reply. His watery blue eyes looked down at Bob, up at Fred, and down at Bob again. And then, finally, slowly, he shook his head. ‘No,’ he whispered.

  ‘No what?’

  ‘I—I can’t kill him,’ Smith stuttered.

  ‘Why not? One more—one less. What’s the odds?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No. No. No. No.’ Smith backed further down the corridor, towards the living room, whispering ‘no’ as he went. It was only when he was right at the end of the corridor that he whispered, ‘How?’

  Fred closed his eyes for a moment. He felt very tired suddenly. But then he told himself to wake up, and to think. He looked down at Bob—Bob in blue jeans and a rust-coloured sweater and a heavy blue jacket—and then started to talk. But he talked quietly, and to himself.

  ‘We’ll take him downstairs to the service entrance. Then—or rather before that—I’ll go out and steal a car and park it outside. We’ll put him in the car and drive him—’ he paused, and then gave a slight smile— ‘to the park behind the Natural History Museum. Then we’ll make sure no one’s about, and we’ll take him out of the car and take him into the park, and then—you’ll cut his throat with a bread-knife.’ What he didn’t say was that, as soon as Smith had cut Bob’s throat, he would shoot him—with Bob’s gun. And then they would be found together; the cop-killer, and his last victim. Whether he himself would hang around, and say that he had witnessed the double slaying; or whether he would come back to the apartment, he hadn’t quite decided. But he would probably—no, now he thought about it, he would certainly, as he had decided before when he had been planning to kill Smith alone—come back to the apartment. Because it might be difficult to explain how Bob could have shot the boy when he was already—even before his throat had been cut—dead; killed by a series of blows on the side of the neck. And he was dead, he was sure. But he didn’t want Smith to know it. The boy had to think that he had killed Bob. He had to take this guilt, too, upon himself.

  He said, ‘Go back to the bathroom.’

  Smith cowered at the end of the corridor and didn’t seem about to move. But when Fred, lowering his voice now, repeated, ‘go back to the bathroom’, he appeared to shudder slightly, and then walked slowly towards him, never taking his eyes off Bob. He stepped into the bathroom as if he were in a trance.

  Fred followed him, put the handcuffs on him, and tied his feet. Then he sealed his mouth—he couldn’t be bothered to bind up the whole head—with tape.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ he said, ‘in five minutes. I hope.’

  He locked the bathroom door, then walked down the corridor to the hallway, and let himself out. He took the elevator down—it was an old brown elevator, with inlaid wooden walls, and he stroked the wood absent-mindedly as if assuring it that he would soon be back—and walked out of the main door, nodding, with a smile, to the doorman.

  *

  He didn’t have to steal a car. The service entrance to the building was a green iron door at the bottom of a small flight of steps on West Sixty-Ninth Street. And parked right outside was a big, light blue, very suitable looking Ford station-wagon, which Fred had no difficulty in opening the door of.

  He walked round the block a couple of times, and then went back into his building, nodding and smiling once again at the doorman.

  *

  He untied Smith’s feet, and put his scarf over his taped-up mouth. He put on a pair of gloves; fine gloves, that he kept in the closet along with his silk suits and shirts. He went into the kitchen, took the bread-knife, and put it into his pocket. (It was a small bread-knife, and a large pocket.) He picked up Bob’s gun—a snub-nosed .38 pistol—from the floor where he had put it after having locked Smith in the bathroom, and before going out to get the car, and put that in his pocket too. Then
, with only a certain amount of difficulty—but he had never felt stronger in his life—he picked Bob up and managed to sling his body over one shoulder. And then, when he had found his balance, he took the gun out of his pocket again, pointed it at Smith, and whispered ‘come on’.

  They walked, Smith leading, through the hallway, on down the corridor, past the small empty rooms that should have been guest bedrooms, or studies, or maid’s rooms, to the back door. Then they stood still for a moment and glanced at each other, as if they both knew that this would be the last time they would see each other in this apartment. Then Fred opened the door and whispered to Smith, ‘Call the elevator.’

  He himself stood just inside the door, with Bob hanging off him like a giant fox around an old woman’s shoulders, until the elevator arrived.

  He whispered to Smith, ‘Open the door.’

  The door of the service elevator didn’t open automatically, and was an iron grille that made quite a lot of noise as Smith opened it.

  Fred, with his human fox-fur, closed the apartment door be­hind him, stepped into the elevator, closed the iron grille him­self, and pressed the button for the basement.

  How quiet the building was at night, with only the rattling elevator breaking the silence….

  When they stopped, Fred stood still for a moment, with the gun, in his right hand, pressed into Smith’s back. Would there be someone in the basement, he wondered. Would the doorman in the lobby have heard the elevator, and come down to investi­gate? Would Smith try and kick something, or make some noise? He looked at the small amount of face visible between the boy’s black cap and the scarf, and frowned at it, menacingly. But Smith didn’t seem to see him. He was too scared, Fred guessed.

  He whispered, very softly, ‘Open the door, quietly.’

  Smith, thinking, or knowing, that his life depended on his doing exactly as he was told, opened the door more quietly than Fred himself could have done.