Killing Time: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  However, he was distracted at the moment, not by the questions of the important officials, but by the presence, in the back of the room, of the detective to whom he had been handcuffed on the returning airplane. This man had avoided looking at him during the flight, but now that they were no longer joined in steel, were a dozen feet apart and separated by the intervening persons, he was aware of the detective’s close watch on his countenance. The man had a peculiar interest in him, beyond the superficialities of police work. It was personal, not organizational, and expressive of a genuine human requirement. Detweiler had sensed his distress across the manacles, but at the time it would have been out of order, bad taste, to breach the association of captor and captive, to sully the dignity and equilibrium of this traditional arrangement, by word or deed.

  Now, however, they were in another situation. One which, furthermore, the detective understood, as revealed by his explanation to the district attorney of Detweiler’s agreement with the newspaper, his admirable disposal of the misapprehensions on both sides. He was in a unique sympathy with Detweiler, though he himself might very well be unaware of it.

  It was Detweiler’s observation that so many people failed to understand where their interests lie and thus are self-resistant.

  Detweiler sat at the head of a plain wooden table. The room was brightly, even harshly illuminated, but no more so over his chair than any other. None of his interrogators struck matches slowly or turned a spotlight on his face or threatened him. It was cosy, the collective body-heat all to the good, for the room had been cool on entry.

  The district attorney was saying: “… anything to the women after you strangled them?”

  Detweiler said: “They promised me, in the car coming here from the airport, that I would be fed again.”

  “How about it, Joe? You’ll have to tell it sooner or later.” Crews chuckled, reached over and playfully slapped Detweiler’s forearm. “Now, I would say you were pretty clever to stay silent—if you hadn’t already admitted these killings. I think you would have been so hard to crack, frankly, that I am certainly grateful you confessed. You have really helped us, but why stop there? Unless you give us more of the particulars, we will probably assume the worst. Now, I don’t consider myself your enemy. I’ll have to bring you to trial because that’s my job, but I can do it gently or I can do it in a pretty unfriendly way, because I figure the man who doesn’t cooperate with me is no friend of mine, so why should I help him? I just don’t know yet about this case. You surely had a good reason for killing three people. I’d like to hear whether it’s good or bad.”

  “What about that promise to feed me?” asked Detweiler.

  The D.A.’s eyes roamed for a while as if he were tracking a bird through the sky. Then he said quietly: “Who made it?”

  Detweiler pointed over Mr. Crews’s head to the older detective, standing behind, and he was interested to hear that the D.A. knew who it was without turning.

  “Shuster,” said Crews.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Get him something to eat.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Shuster?”

  “Sir?”

  “I don’t mean you. Send What’s-his-name.”

  “Tierney,” said Shuster.

  So that was it: Tierney. Detweiler thought it a very good name, and was annoyed that the district attorney had not known it. Mr. Crews went down several degrees in Detweiler’s estimation: not to know the name of one of the men he sent to fetch a fugitive seemed irresponsible.

  Detweiler still did not feel it was his own place to use the name, so he spoke to Tierney informally, as the detective moved towards the door.

  “What I would like is a tunafish-salad sandwich on white bread without mayo, and a chocolate milk shake.”

  Tierney stopped and looked at him silently.

  Mr. Crews helpfully told Detweiler: “He is waiting because you have not said whether you want lettuce.”

  “Oh,” said Detweiler. “Well, what do you think? By this time of night the lettuce is likely to be wilted.”

  Just as this care for detail was causing Detweiler to think better of the D.A., Mr. Crews barked nastily: “Get going, Tierney!”

  Tierney did as told. As it happened, he was not nearly so upset as Detweiler by the D.A.’s failure to know his name. Nor was he outraged by having to act as errand boy or waiter for a murderer. Tierney seldom allowed himself to be victimized by false pride. In the case of Betty Bayson the issues of pride were real. Had she gone to bed with Detweiler?

  He had concentrated his personality on this one question, like a monster. Yet as he took a devious exit from the building in order to elude the newspapermen who infested the main passages, and went out through the streets, Tierney was an efficient officer, alert, semper paratus, suspicious of current phenomena. He saw two punks straining to jump a light, gave them a hard look; which they returned too idly to suggest the car was stolen.

  Then he passed a polo-coated man who breathed stertorously and moved in a slightly eccentric stride. Tierney stopped to consider a delicatessen window. The place was closed, the glass, with no light behind it, reflecting the far side of the street and the pedestrians thereon. Before Tierney acted on what he saw, a patrolman came along testing doors.

  Tierney said, giving unobtrusive directional signals: “Black coat, brown hat, carrying something in the folded newspaper. His mark’s the drunk in the polo coat.”

  The patrolman said: “Shit, he’s made us!” Tierney turned quickly to watch the potential mugger drop the paper, and whatever was inside, in a litter basket and walk smartly westward. They did the same, the beat cop snatching up the discarded tabloid without breaking stride: it contained a length of iron pipe. They fell in beside the suspect, Tierney inside and the patrolman on the curb.

  The man was fair-complexioned, in his middle twenties, and still retained some acne. They walked him to a darkened block and around the corner, the uniformed officer inquiring as to name, address, and profession, and enumerating the disadvantages of appearing again on his beat.

  The suspect’s name was Horace Manners. He said, respectfully: “It isn’t illegal to carry a piece of pipe if you’re a plumber’s assistant.”

  “No, it isn’t, Horace,” said the patrolman. He shoved Manners, face-forward, against the wall of a building, frisked him, then pounded him to the ground with the pipe. He helped Manners up, and said: “I’ll call you when my toilet is busted, Horace.” He began to work him over again and seemed to have the situation in hand, so Tierney left them and went to the Chinese restaurant he had originally been heading for. He ordered egg rolls and chicken chow mein to go, and while he waited he watched the pimps and their whores having a late dinner before the girls went on their tours of duty.

  Tierney had once brought his wife to this restaurant, on a rare occasion when they could afford to eat out; but early in the evening, long before whore-time. His wife’s idea of a prostitute, like her image of any other kind of lowlifer, had its source in the movies: a busty redhead who swayed along the street swinging a beaded purse. A hood was a pockmarked guy who talked from the side of the mouth. A rapist was a big Negro, and so on. His wife stayed altogether innocent of evil, and it was to Tierney’s taste to keep her so, his home being his castle, though his work permitted him to return there only intermittently.

  He had seen his wife only once, briefly, since the strange episode with Betty Bayson. Tierney lived in a two-bedroom apartment, and was father to two young children and a baby. Before taking the flight, he had gone home to change his shirt and underwear and collect his toilet articles. He could have used a shave at the moment: his chin felt grainy from the inside. Tierney dreaded being soiled in any fashion.

  He decided to call his wife, which was not necessarily considerate in view of the late hour, and anyway she was trained not to hear from him for extended periods. She would not be worrying now; undoubtedly she was asleep. It was therefore not a kind impulse that took him to
the wall phone in the grimy passage between dining room and kitchen. No booth: the instrument hung unprotected and the caller rather more so in the traffic of rice bowls.

  Katherine answered in the middle of the second ring. The home phone stood at bedside.

  “Sorry, Kath, if you were sleeping. Just letting you know I’m back.” Tierney pressed himself against the wall to avoid a passing tray.

  She said: “No, somebody called about midnight and woke me up. And woke up the kids. And we all got settled when now—”

  “I’ll be down here all night,” Tierney said. “Who called?”

  “An informant.”

  Crime being an exclusively human enterprise, when criminals were apprehended it was usually because of information received by the police from other human beings. More often than not, these useful people were themselves criminals, than whom no one could speak with more authority on the subject. Every detective had his own collection of stool pigeons, known to himself alone. These relationships were characterized by a peculiar mutual loyalty, much more reliable than any association based on sex or even money, though the officer usually paid the informant a small sum for each item. The stoolie’s real satisfaction came from betraying more successful criminals than himself, and in his clandestine but substantive connection with the law: he was in effect the detective’s detective, the fingernail at the end of the long arm.

  As to Tierney, he would sooner have sold his wife on the street than to reveal the identity of one of his stoolies even to Shuster. That simply was not done.

  Several of his informants preferred to call him at home, so that if they were under observation or spoke on a tapped phone, the number would not signify police headquarters. But this call was unlikely to refer to the Detweiler case. Stoolies, like everybody else, were out of touch with psychos.

  “Because,” his wife went on, “she didn’t leave a name or number.”

  He did not ask Katherine to repeat the pronoun, though he had no female informants. He said: “I guess that was one of my girl friends.”

  Katherine’s habitual laugh was a tone lower than her speech; it was sometimes called “dirty” by her old school pal, Margaret Walsh, with whom she drank coffee almost every afternoon. She laughed now and said, with the stage Irish accent she often assumed for purposes of levity, and which Tierney hated, hated with all his heart, for in neither of their families had there been in living memory anyone with a genuine brogue and besides hers sounded nothing like an Ireland Irishman’s, but rather like a Jewish comedian doing a Gaelic imposture; but which Tierney found it impossible to protest again in view of the profound meaning it obviously had for Katherine, who might, in bed, as his hand traveled downwards across her navel, murmur: “Ah, me boy, me boy.”

  She currently was saying: “Tell me what kind of girl would be so shtoopid as to call a man at his marriage bed, now?”

  A smiling Chinese gestured at Tierney with a paper bag.

  Tierney said: “That’s the only kind I can get.”

  He had been at first shocked, then furious: who did that rotten bitch Betty think she was, calling his home. He controlled himself briefly, so as to tell Kath, as usual, he would see her when he saw her, hung up, grabbed the bag, paid the Chink, and left. Lucky for the pimps that they were seated well off his route, or perhaps unlucky: some were faggots, with a taste for brutality administered by attractive young policemen.

  Back at headquarters, Tierney received another surprise. Shuster stood outside the closed door of the interrogation room.

  “Here’s one for you, kid,” said the lieutenant. “He says he’ll talk now, but only to you. He says you’re the only one he feels is attuned to him, and a whole lot of other baloney.” Shuster ha-ha’d: the reverse of Katherine’s, his laugh did not sound dirty but usually was. “Let me tell you this: when an alleged psycho starts talking you would wish he was back strangling women. That little prick will keep you up all night.”

  Tierney went inside. The district attorney and the others were on their feet, and Detweiler sat where he had been.

  “All right, then,” said the D.A., apparently to both Tierney and Detweiler, as if they were in a conspiracy. Then to Tierney: “He doesn’t want a stenographer yet, though I told him he will have to go all through it again so it can be taken down.”

  “No problem, Mr. Crews,” Detweiler said brightly. “Tierney, won’t you sit down?”

  The police commissioner asked for Tierney’s gun. Tierney understood the precautionary measure: he was to be locked up with a homicidal maniac. Yet it reinforced his feeling that his colleagues were abandoning him morally.

  Chapter 14

  DETWEILER opened the bag and carefully withdrew the cardboard containers. He looked at the egg rolls, the rice, the chicken chow mein, the fried noodles.

  He said to Tierney: “This is quite a provocation.”

  Tierney lifted his expressionless eyes and said “O.K., you wanted to talk.”

  Detweiler stated: “Nobody provokes anyone else unless he has some special interest in him. The others have done what I asked. But not because they like me, or hate me. They are just doing their jobs, and they figure that it’s a kind of trade: I’ll do what they want if they do what I want. I am really learning something. I thought the police used force pure and simple. I expected to get beaten up, whereas I have never been treated more nicely. I will certainly tell that to the press.”

  “You love publicity, don’t you?” Tierney asked.

  “That’s fascinating,” said Detweiler. “Why do you say that?”

  “You turned yourself in to a newspaper.”

  “I see…. Well, maybe it’s not right to ask you this, Tierney, because doing a particular job well requires a narrowness of focus, I believe, but I wonder if you ever, in your off-duty life anyway, considered the multitude of interpretations that can be made of a single phenomenon?”

  He paused, but Tierney remained silent. Detweiler continued: “I never went to the paper with an idea of doing what turned out to be the case. But accidents occurred: at least, they seemed like accidents, though perhaps they were opportunities.” He closed the containers and pushed them across the table, saying: “I don’t eat Chinese food unless my stomach is upset. Anyway, you didn’t bring implements to eat it with.”

  Tierney took from his breast pocket a pair of plastic chopsticks encased in cellophane. He had forgotten them, but one never apologizes to a suspect. He pitched them onto the table.

  Detweiler said: “Would you like to know why I picked you?”

  “I’d rather hear about the homicides,” Tierney said, in a gritty voice, but as if to himself.

  “Did you expect to bend me to your will?” asked Detweiler. “Was this a kind of test, whether or not I would eat something as different as could be from what I ordered?”

  Tierney answered levelly; “You have admitted killing three persons. Now I understand that you are ready to explain how and why these crimes were perpetrated. I don’t know why you want me in particular to hear the explanation, and I don’t care. As for the food, you are in the custody of the police, and you will eat what you are given or go without eating. It doesn’t matter to me. There’s nothing special about you, once you are here. You are a lousy little runt who flopped at everything you ever tried except the strangling of two helpless women. You couldn’t make it in art, couldn’t hold a job, you go into tantrums because a harmless guy next door plays his radio. But you’re a genius, aren’t you? A philosopher. You don’t have to observe the rules of decent, ordinary slobs. If they get in your way, and they are women, or their backs are turned, you assault them.”

  Tierney leaned across the table. “To me you are yellow and phony and a pervert, a stinking little rat. You pull any more of that philosopher shit on me and you’ll go out tomorrow with the garbage collection.”

  When a suspect is eager to talk, as Detweiler had announced he was, his interrogator is properly at great pains to do nothing which might impede the fl
ow; rather, to encourage, to affirm, to reward; to repress that which suggests punishment or a division of the common interest. This is the time of conversion, when with the sanction of all authority, criminals serve the law and lawmen participate in crimes, walk along as accessories, supplying mislaid items. There is extant, on both sides, good will, a feeling of accomplishment in cohesion, a sense of history. What can man not achieve when he joins hands with his fellows and forsakes destructive individuality. The criminal who reaches his unique pleasure during the act of confession is a type well known to students, amateur and professional, of the human personality. Crime may be his only means of expressing affinity with, love of, the race. The police are ever eager to collaborate in such an effort, not being a punitive agency. The police apprehend, catch, seize, arrest; they do not keep; and only the courts may punish.

  Tierney reminded himself of these truths, for he suffered much from a memory of his irresponsibility with Betty. But now his seemingly uncontrolled outburst had been preceded by deliberation. He resented being selected to hear Detweiler’s confession; that the killer’s request had been honored by the D.A. was unbearable. Tierney had not captured Detweiler. If anything it had been the other way around, and now he, Tierney, was the prisoner of a politician and a murderer.

  He must show Detweiler that any further display of vanity was out of the question.

  Detweiler said: “I knew you were the only one with guts or pride. But I don’t know whether those who don’t have it can be condemned. It may be essentially the ability to resist distractions, and speaking for myself, I am so easily distracted that I have achieved very little. Listening to your estimate of me, I had to agree with you. Except that I have assaulted lots of people, not just women or men who I caught unawares. I fight a lot, but there’s nothing personal in it. Of course, that may be even less admirable than your idea, but I did want to point it out.”