Killing Time: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  Clegg hauled up from the bed, swallowing with a tongue of suede. He stumbled to the bathroom and took a drink through his hand from the ice-water tap. Then he returned to the bedroom and heard Starr say: “What do you think about that?”

  Clegg walked across the room, thrust the breakfast table aside, lifted Starr by the collar with his left fist, and hit him in the mouth with the right. He saw blood on his hand: his own. He had cut his knuckle on one of Starr’s rotten teeth.

  By afternoon he was out of a job; he was also codefendant, with his paper, in a suit for assault and battery. The paper’s big-time attorneys eventually battered Starr’s sleezy lawyer, by a combination of veiled money and open threats, into a more tolerant position, and the suit was dropped. Starr’s fee for the series was increased, and Dilworth took over the writing thereof.

  Betty Bayson endured the funeral in a type of trance, though no one knew that to see her: she cried at the undertaker’s and again at the graveside, and at the latter was observed so doing by a crowd of those ghouls who manage to discover the loci of such events despite official secrecy. There were only about thirty of them, but most were hard-core, standing in shank-deep snow, passive except for one woman with milky blue eyes, who slipped past the guarding cop and asked Betty for an autograph, saying: “I’m glad you done it, dear. God bless you.” Betty sniffled and sighed.

  Technically the burial was inconvenient owing to the snowfall. Snow was several inches deep in the open grave and still descended. Functionaries dusted it off the coffin-tops now and again, which appeared pathetic because pointless, since both receptacles would shortly go below ground and there lie unprotected throughout eternity against ravages worse than crystals of frozen water. This thought occurred to the Presbyterian minister who had been drafted into service though none of the Starrs, dead or alive, had been his parishioner. But he went where called by the mortician. A veteran of his trade, he had a kit, as it were, of phrases that would fit any mortal: of daughters, of mothers, of the bereaved; and it was in no way disrespectful or false that he used them in his valediction on the murdered Starrs. They were, or had been, human; as was he; as were all.

  Perhaps his remarks were more eloquent when applied generically than when he had known the deceased and could speak of particularities, death being the only truly universal event. He did his job at both mortuary and cemetery, and Arthur for one thought it very good indeed but avoided thanking him because of an embarrassing puzzlement as to whether or not a preacher should be tipped after a funeral as after a marriage.

  Alloway accompanied the Baysons throughout, but got little from Betty in her present state, into which she had fallen by surprise in the cab en route to the funeral parlor: it was not so much depression or despair or melancholy or sorrow as total nullity: suddenly everything, including herself, seemed to be made of frosted glass. Externally this was due to the falling snow through which one must needs peer in such weather. Within, however, it unaccountably contradicted her habitual sense of lucidity, which had if anything grown more assured in the days since the murders. Betty had always felt she immediately understood anything of an emotional or moral or intellectual nature. All at once, she did not. And did not care to, had no interest.

  She sat—or, at the graveside, stood—contemplating the absolute void, multiplying zeroes. It was neither a pleasant nor an unpleasant situation; it was nothing at all, nonexistence.

  Her father did not show up for either part of the ceremony. Only Arthur had thought of notifying him, but didn’t know where to look.

  Afterwards, when the undertaker’s limousine had delivered the three of them to the hotel, Alloway made his congé, hot-footed it down to the paper, and wrote for tomorrow’s edition an account of Betty’s alleged reflections while viewing the obsequies: “As the caskets slowly sank from sight into the cold ground, I murmured a final farewell to my loved ones. Theirs would be the peace which passeth”

  Tierney appeared promptly at four. While he had talked to Betty that morning, his ex-partner Matthias had shot himself. Shuster had taken Matty off active service pending a departmental hearing that would consider whether he had been negligent in leaving his extra pistol where the punk could lay hands on it. Only Matty knew, and Tierney suspected, that the punk had been given it by Mrs. Matthias.

  To safeguard what he was old-fashioned enough to regard as his honor, Matty had tried to blow his brains out. But from professional experience he knew that a suicide in which the subject discharges a firearm into the mouth is a nasty affair for those first to discover his remains: like a watermelon smashed against the wall. He did not wish to impose that unpleasantness on his wife, to whom he bore no ill will. So he got himself a room in a cheap hotel, a hot-bed establishment used by streetwalkers, a lair for petty criminals and junkies, and too quickly—because the mise en scene was unendurably degrading—he whipped his revolver towards his lips, pulled the trigger, and blew off the top of his face, but remained quite alive, even conscious until doped at the hospital. The doctors predicted he would survive, though naturally with only one eye.

  Tierney spent the early afternoon hanging around the hospital though he was useless there, Matthias continuing under heavy sedation. Weirdly, Tierney lingered in hopes that Matty’s wife, whom he had never seen, would show up, and he suspected every forty-year-old woman in the visitors’ lounge of being she. What he had in mind was not clear to himself; he could not imagine such a confrontation—which is why he stayed there for two hours; he, a police officer, killing time.

  However, Mrs. Matthias did not appear, or if she did he could not identify her in the despondently furnished hall into which various folk trudged to sit somber-faced—though a few were merry: had either got the good news their loved ones were recovering or were malicious, sadistic types or perhaps merely heirs of someone whose condition had lately been pronounced hopeless.

  At last Tierney left the hospital and went to Betty’s hotel.

  “Where’s the reporter?” he asked.

  “Gone,” said she in a flat voice and with no special expression. “My husband is downstairs eating. He missed lunch and—”

  “All right,” Tierney broke in as if he were questioning a suspect given to ungermane ramblings.

  “Are you allowed to have a drink?”

  “No,” Tierney said. “Get your coat.”

  Betty carried out the order, brought the garment into the living room and struggled girlishly to thread her arms through the sleeves, with Tierney maintaining his obdurate stand in the corridor.

  Downstairs they left the elevator and passed the otherwise unoccupied restaurant in which Arthur partook of an extraordinarily late lunch or early dinner. Tierney could see him through glass doors, raising a fork laden with something soft and white, a mess of the melted cheese and cream with which that sort of place habitually masked honest meat.

  Actually Arthur was eating mashed potatoes: he shared Tierney’s distaste for luxury; had sent away the unctuous wine steward and drank ice water. He failed to see the departure of his wife and the policeman, of which, however, he had received foreknowledge from Betty.

  The afternoon whiteness had turned dirty above and underfoot, the guttered snow crusting with intermixed filth, though not so durably as to bear weight, as Betty discovered when she waded to Tierney’s automobile.

  Betty observed nothing coplike in the car except the two-way radio and a certain metallic odor. Tierney drove east and then south, and when Betty first registered their situation she saw the familiar block, and then the very house in which her kin had lately been done to death. She was disturbed by her refusal to be disturbed by the recognition, but this she forgot as Tierney ground the car in hub-deep at the left curb, next to a fireplug, and got himself onto the sidewalk, leaving her again with the unpleasant pedestrian chore.

  Owing to the inclement weather, the cop on house-guard no longer stood before the door; he sat, with a colleague, in a police car parked just ahead of Tierney’s. Tierney excha
nged nods with them. He had keys to the doors of house and apartment, went first through both, and not until Betty was well through the latter, stood in the known living room the carpet of which showed a fresh-washed area, a blond pool amid dirty beige, marking where the boarder had bled his last, did Tierney look at her. And when he did, it was queer.

  Queer to be here at all, queer to notice that the capricious heating system had for once overreacted to the challenge of the outside weather. It was rotten hot, tropical, breath-denying, and dim, with a smell of dust.

  “Now,” Tierney said, queerly it seemed to Betty because of the spite in his voice, “I want you to look around carefully and see if anything’s missing or out of place. I know you did that once, but I want you to do it again.”

  Betty at last understood what was queer about the place: its irrelevancy, her absolute lack of association with it. Their coming here now was an exercise in fantasy: pretend familiarity, pretend you care, when the real thing is melting snow in your boots, wet fabric at the instep, a nasty, crawling clingyness. Betty loathed being damp in any particular: it was as if one had been flayed and reinserted in the reversed skin. She shivered.

  Interpreting this manifestation as evidence that she was moved by a poignancy of place, Tierney became less spiteful: she was not, then, as callous as he had supposed; she was capable of sorrowful recollection, of family loyalty, had not sold out. He was somewhat ashamed of himself for bringing her here for a personal motive, to rub her nose in it. He felt shame because it had been unprofessional: he had nothing more to learn from the physical disposition of the apartment. His job was to find Detweiler. Yet he malingered in this living room, which was dull and characterless like all scenes of murder when the humanity had been removed. Ghosts never walk where life has been taken illegally: the cop’s superstition.

  He gave her a kind glance. To which she crinkled her nose and whined, an adolescent: “My feet are sopping!” She stamped them, which worsened the condition, the captive moisture having no exit. “Can I go and get a towel?”

  Taken by surprise, Tierney said rhetorically: “Why not?”

  Betty insisted on answering. “Don’t you have to keep it all as is?”

  “No,” Tierney said abruptly. “We know what’s here.” He turned away in embarrassment at the personal note. His own feet were also wet. When dry his shoes would show a waterline: a thing he wouldn’t want his wife to see, with her obsession about rubbers. She never seemed to worry that he might get shot or knifed in his line of work, having a Catholic girl’s fatalism in that regard, but a cold fell within her area of command, too petty for God yet all the same sometimes lethal. Her Uncle Jack sneezed one day, died a week later.

  Betty went through the kitchen and along the hall, which was dark but to her unspooky. She threw the bathroom switch. No towels hung on the racks: the laboratory men had taken all away. Spares were in the cabinet below the washstand, stacked on the left, well separated from scouring powder and cellulose sponge. She fetched one, sat on the closed toilet, removed her boots, and having undone the garter clips, peeled off her stockings and hung them over the lip of the tub. Her feet were excessively pink.

  Tierney appeared in the doorway. He said: “Are you all right? You were gone a long time.”

  “These boots,” said she, “have a flannel lining. It’ll take a long while to dry.”

  She rose and went towards him, he backing considerately away, still in his overcoat in the unbearable heat. She had left her coat across a kitchen chair.

  In the hall, walking barefoot on the worn runner, she approached Billie’s door, stopped there and asked plaintively: “Is this where? Did she meet him face to face?” Betty was not thinking of Joe Detweiler at this moment, nor of Billie, but rather constructing an ideal crime, with ideal murderer and victim, ideal violence devoid of pain or even motion, silent.

  She stepped inside the room. The police had taken away the bedclothes, leaving the striped mattress.

  Tierney reluctantly moved out of the spill of light from the bathroom. Being decent, he muttered: “That’s it.”

  “What?”

  “About it,” he said, reaching the entrance of the room.

  “Oh.” She turned and met his eye.

  He said: “If your boots are dry, we better go on our way.”

  “Give them a few minutes.”

  He nodded and retreated to the living room.

  Betty lowered herself slowly onto the bare bed, taking care her skirt was modestly arranged lest Tierney come back. She was a virtuous woman, unlike her late sister.

  Chapter 9

  AFTER HIS NAP Detweiler set about finding a doctor. His mother would have been no help in this regard, because she believed all physicians were charlatans and, when ill, a rare situation for her, doctored herself with herb teas, compounds of charcoal and honey, pulverized roots, and the like, and was soon fit. Detweiler himself felt that doctors had their place in the scheme of things for those who needed the services they supplied. Most people if sick beyond a certain degree required someone else. It was the otherness that did the trick: being ill was essentially being lonely.

  Detweiler walked several miles so as to get out of the neighborhood though he was utterly unknown there, had not been raised locally, but he was well aware that someplace police were searching for him and had undoubtedly sent his name and description around the country. He did not wish to expose himself publicly in the immediate environs of his mother’s home, on the chance that some busybody would notice that she and the wanted man had the same surname, and that her son had suddenly turned up.

  Over lunch he had taken the simple precaution to say: “Mother, I wonder if on this visit you would call me, to my face and when speaking to your friends, something other than Joe?”

  “Sure,” answered his mother, gathering up several wedges of a fried round of baloney onto her fork. “How would you like ‘Ernest Blue,’ or ‘Randolph Binocular’?”

  Detweiler laughed his head off. His mother certainly amused him. “What a name!” he cried. “Where did you get that one?”

  “Made it up,” said she. “I know a lot of things.” She narrowed her eyes and nodded wisely.

  “I’ll take Ernest Blue,” Detweiler said soberly. “And not be your son but your nephew. O.K.?”

  “All right.” His mother was very good at this sort of game and would never slip up, even if awakened suddenly in the middle of the night, until he called it off. She doted on make-believe and novelty.

  So off he went. The weather had held clear and cold, too cold to snow, as he was assured by two of the several persons with whom he exchanged greetings on the walk: a candy-store proprietor and a policeman.

  The latter had looked uncomfortable though buttoned up in his greatcoat, and Detweiler expressed sympathy: “You have a chilly job.”

  The officer quickly inspected him, found no reason for action, and amiably made the observation on the unlikelihood of snow.

  Before entering the candy shop Detweiler unobtrusively took out a penknife and cut his thumb, wrapped a handkerchief around the wound, and went inside.

  “Too cold to snow,” said the man behind the counter.

  Detweiler said: “Say, I just cut my hand while sharpening a pencil. It’s not deep, but the knife was kind of rusty. Maybe I ought to see a doctor so I don’t get blood poisoning.”

  This went over big with the man, whose mother, he said, had wanted him to be a doctor. He had not had the brain, patience, or money to go in for med school, but had retained an inclination towards therapeutic pursuits.

  “Let’s see the wound,” he cried, hurling himself halfway across the counter. Detweiler had no choice but to unwind the handkerchief and display his bloody thumb.

  “Not so bad,” said the man. “I’ll take care of it forthwith,” using a consciously comic pomposity of idiom as part of his bedside manner. He insisted that Detweiler come along to the tiny lavatory let into the rear wall, where he cleansed the cut with soap
and water, dried it on toilet paper, applied hydrogen peroxide “which won’t smart,” and finally fought an adhesive bandage free and plastered it around the decommissioned thumb.

  Thus Detweiler was frustrated in his initial attempt to reach a physician in this town, although he had a valuable experience which was not to be sneezed at. He wandered on throughout the day, mostly by foot, for he had little money and he was also leery of the distractions available on public transport. No doubt by striking up an acquaintance with a fellow passenger he could eventually be directed to that person’s family doctor, but he was aware that the operation he sought fell out of the ordinary range, that the doctor might believe him a kind of nut and mention the incident, with raised brow, to the patient who sent him, and the latter might feel ill-used by the anonymous fellow who had once shared his bus seat, truth being the loser.

  The alternative was to move slowly and carefully, making a long-term friend rather than a transient acquaintance, and then, when one could rely on informed sympathy, to put the question. The trouble with this was that Detweiler could make a true friend only of a member of the opposite sex. With men there was always an instinctive rivalry, as much, he was ready to admit, on his part as on the other fellow’s. It was the meeting of protuberances, of like configurations that would not mesh. As much as he liked most other men, he hated them fundamentally.

  Betty Starr had been his friend from the moment he took the room. It was she who served him the largest portion of meat at table, who listened intently if he spoke, who offered him first choice of the newspaper. Without announcement she began to wash and iron his clothes, not part of his deal with Mrs. Starr, and cleaned his room, which was, but she did it with a care no boarder could expect. She had even once left behind a blue cornflower in a crystal bud-vase. There could be no doubt these were marks of special favor, for she was not an agreeable girl in general. She made caustic remarks to her mother and often quarreled so loudly with Billie that Detweiler, separated from them by two doors and the hallway’s width, had to cover his ears.