Killing Time: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  D. I would probably have asked the same question. That’s why I did not understand it was humor. To establish the situation with two military men, whose profession is to shoot the enemy, and one of them holds a loaded gun and is ordered by a superior to fire it—well, it is hardly shocking or in any way unusual that the target would be a person, an enemy.

  M. Do you think the sergeant would refer to an enemy by an intimate, diminutive form of the enemy’s first name, like “Will”?

  D. It might be in a civil war, when enemies are often members of the same family or dear friends. Or Will could be a fellow soldier, a military prisoner being guarded by the private. He tries to escape, and the guard must shoot him, even though he knows him by his first name. Anyway, I am known as “Joe” around here. If I were trying to escape, someone would probably say: “Fire at Joe.”

  M. You are awfully ingenious, Joe. Do you think you are different from most other people?

  D. Well, if I am, then I shouldn’t be the one to say it, God knows, either morally or legally.

  M. God. You believe in God?

  D. I could not have killed those three people without God’s faith in me.

  M. You felt you were doing God’s will?

  D. Look here, it isn’t easy to take human life.

  M. I have read some of your earlier statements and know you are much occupied with Time. Are Time and God synonymous?

  D. Oh, no. God is not Time. To kill Time is to know God.

  M. Joe, would you say yourself that you were crazy?

  D. As I said before in answer to the other question, I can’t answer that, because to do so I would have to stand outside myself, because the frame of reference for such a judgment is exterior to the person being judged. Anyway, that is not my job, but yours. Do you think I’m crazy?

  M. I don’t think you are a mad dog slavering at the mouth, a weird monster, or anything of the sort. But I do believe that you can be proved insane from the legal viewpoint.

  Detweiler shrugged goodhumoredly. “Why?”

  “To put it briefly at this point,” answered Dr. Metcalfe, “because I believe you think you are God.”

  “That’s not precise, but I won’t argue,” Detweiler said. “And it should be added that I think you are too.”

  “I am also crazy?”

  Now Detweiler laughed. That was the kind of joke he could appreciate.

  “No,” he said. “You are also God.”

  Detweiler made good friends among the guards, who did him favors—brought thicker portions of stew, extra soap, changed his towel frequently—though he no longer asked anything special as had been his wont when first arrested; he was relaxed now. Mr. Melrose continued to drop around, which Detweiler appreciated because he knew the lawyer had other cases. In fact, he expressed concern that Melrose might be wasting time on him, which was quite another thing than killing it.

  Melrose said: “Don’t worry, Joe. I can look after myself.”

  Detweiler asked: “I’ve been wondering, are you all alone in the world?”

  “No,” said Melrose, “I have several young lawyers who work for me, as well as an office staff.”

  “I meant, outside your job.”

  “I’m a bachelor, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Like me,” said Detweiler. “Or me as I was on the outside. I guess you can’t call a prisoner anything but a prisoner. Do you know a lot of girls?”

  “I’m afraid that when you get to my age, you know girls but they don’t know you, at least not in the way they did when you were younger. Nowadays I choose a woman for decoration. I get an infantile pleasure from eating in expensive restaurants, accompanied by a conspicuously beautiful, elegant young lady. This pleases me aesthetically and also has a practical use: it is often mentioned in the gossip columns, which are read by potential jurors, making men jealous and annoying mature women. These reactions are however often merely superficial. In some deeper area of the soul they are favorably impressed, and take it as evidence of my potency.”

  Melrose shrugged and went on: “The girls always understand their role. Beautiful women are born with an innate understanding of publicity. I never make a pass at them, and they never expect one. Even in my days as a bedroom athlete I seldom made love to unusually decorative girls. They lie there like a salmon mousse.”

  The lawyer peered at Detweiler and ceased to smile. He said: “I apologize. It is sadistic to speak of women to a man in confinement. Please forgive me.”

  “I brought up the subject,” said Detweiler. “I haven’t seen a woman in ever so long, and I like to hear about them.”

  “Well, you’ll see a lot next week,” Melrose said.

  Detweiler raised his brow.

  “The trial,” said Melrose. “Your trial, Joe. It begins next Monday.”

  “Already?”

  “It’s September, Joe.”

  Detweiler said: “You could have fooled me. The weather must be unseasonably warm. I still wear only my shirt when they take me outdoors for exercise. I could have sworn I had been here only a month or two. I remember it was cold when I was arrested, and then spring came and the air got warm. And that’s about it. I haven’t noticed much change since. You know, on the outside, the equinoxes used to get to me: I would get indigestion and my face would break out every spring and fall. That just goes to show you.”

  Melrose looked puzzled.

  Detweiler explained: “Being in jail. How much it’s done for me.” He could have told the lawyer more, but he respected Melrose’s wish not to be trusted. Detweiler was growing ever nearer to the accomplishment of a full-scale Realization. “I’m sorry to have made you sorry about talking of girls. I don’t miss sex.”

  “I do,” said Melrose. “Being deprived of it by Time is perhaps harder to accept than by imprisonment.”

  “You no longer feel the desire?”

  Melrose shook his leonine head. “I no longer have the patience.”

  Neither had Tierney. He never again got in touch with Betty after that midsummer argument—which had not been an argument in the sense of disagreement on established issues. He did not answer her attack on him as a lover; she made no response to his defense of the police force. They had come together in the first place through accident. In no way did she represent his considered taste in women, but you had to be a pragmatist in matters of illicit sex, taking what came along or doing without: he had a job to do.

  As to that job, he expected to be transferred back to a precinct shortly after election. A shake-up was due in the Department, and Shuster intended to cop out into retirement. Whatever else could be said about Shuster, he had been Tierney’s protector, had brought him to Homicide, had sent up good reports on him. That this had done Tierney no over-all service was not Shuster’s fault: Tierney had thereby been added to the shitlists of Shuster’s powerful enemies, though Tierney was certainly as Irish as anyone in the ruling hierarchy.

  The only conspicuous recent stink in Shuster’s squad had been provided by Matty, and the lieutenant had managed to get that reported, in the only paper which mentioned it, as an accident that happened when Detective Matthias had been cleaning his weapon. Matty resigned from the force as soon as he came out of bandages with half a face. Tierney had not seen him since, but heard Matty was working partner in an uptown cigar store and on good terms again with his wife.

  But other squads were under fire—seven bank robberies had occurred in one district throughout the summer, and no arrests had yet been made; thrice had a tailor shop been held up, diagonally across the street from a precinct house; narcotics pushers did business openly on certain street corners; the commander of the state police accused the city force of poor cooperation on some jurisdictional matter. These were among the charges made by a candidate for the city council. They were of course denied by the police commissioner and ignored by the incumbents. But hard after Election Day would come a host of transfers and superficial reorganizations—if the party out of power lost as usu
al. If they won, there would be more publicity and less actual change in the Department. Oddly enough. So said Shuster, who was apolitical. Tierney would miss him.

  “You’re going to have lots of time on your hands,” he told the lieutenant. “One of my wife’s uncles retired last year without making any plans to keep himself occupied, and—”

  “Don’t tell me,” Shuster said. “He got a heart attack while cutting the grass for the third time that week, or while shoveling snow back onto the sidewalk so he could shovel it off again. I know all those stories. Me, I’ve got plans. I’m going to hang out at the public library and look up the skirts of high-school girls doing their assignments. Then I’ll play cards Wednesday afternoons with the Old Lady and her pals. And every night I’ll have a nice hot cup of cocoa. If that gets boring I know a cemetery that needs a night watchman: I’ll sit down on a gravestone at midnight and eat my sandwich, and if I die I can be buried right on the job.”

  All this while Shuster was looking at photographs of a body some kids had recently found while swimming in a local river. “The thing I will miss most about this job is the floaters,” he said. Floaters were notoriously difficult to identify if they had been in the water for a time. Shuster hated every floater personally. He was reading a description of the corpse’s clothing. “How did a floater get a handmade shirt? No laundry marks? If it was tailor-made the store will have a record. Think you’ll ever wear tailor-made shirts, Tierney? In a pig’s ass you will. I read the other day about What’s-his-name, you know that fag actor who always plays detectives.” Shuster could never remember a celebrity’s name. “It says he has his handkerchiefs tailor-made. How about that? Nothing’s too good for his snot.”

  Tierney said: “The store identified that shirt as one they made for a T. C. Livingston. He’s a stockbroker. His wife said the laundry lost it the first time it was sent.”

  “The boogie girls who work for laundries steal them blind,” Shuster said, “and give the loot to their studs. But this floater’s Caucasian.” He squinted at the photo. “Isn’t he? Hard to tell, black as he is. The bastard.” He stared at Tierney. “What’s Livingston’s wife like?”

  “About thirty-five and—”

  “I meant in the sack,” Shuster cut in. “These rich broads, they have it in the same place as a working girl, don’t they?”

  Tierney said: “Tie was from one of those two-for-a-dollar shops. No label on the coat, ripped off.”

  “Floaters always do that,” said the lieutenant. “Before jumping in.”

  “This one was knifed first.”

  “I know,” Shuster said. “He told the perpetrator, ‘Do you mind ripping out my lapels before you throw me in? I want to give Shuster a hard time.’” The lieutenant spoke as if he believed this literally. Floaters always brought his paranoia to a head. He dropped the photograph at last, and said: “What happened? Did Bayson’s husband throw you out on your ass?”

  “For a man who has as many enemies as you, Lieutenant,” Tierney permitted himself to say, “you must also have some friends.”

  “Informants aren’t friends,” Shuster answered. “As you damn well know.” He glared at Tierney in rare, brief, but genuine hatred. “You’re not the only one who got a lot of gash when he was young.”

  This gave Tierney an opportunity to tell Shuster what he otherwise would not have dared to. “Lieutenant, I’m going to miss you.”

  “You’re damn right you will,” Shuster said with sufficient ungraciousness to show he was pleased. “Without me you’ll soon be back in a uniform.”

  Occurring at a rate of two a day, more than 250 murders had been committed in the city since Detweiler’s arrest, including negligent and nonnegligent manslaughter, though not manslaughter by vehicle. Detweiler had got more publicity than the average perpetrator, the average, if there was one, being some low-income individual who shot or stabbed a friend in, or just having departed from, a neighborhood bar. There was also great reason to believe that many murderers went unpunished, their crimes undetected or misinterpreted. Many floaters had died by drowning pure and simple, showing no wounds: whether they fell in or jumped or were pushed would never be known. Occupying a subway track as a train came along was another popular form of dying; whether the victim had jumped of his own volition or been given a boost by an enemy or merely an overanxious, impersonal crowd, was difficult if not impossible to determine. Shuster had no grudge against a subway loser, though: they usually carried identification.

  All the same, arrests were made. Of reported homicides about 90 percent were solved in one way or another. Only two days before, Tierney and his current partner, a detective named Herron, had collared two suspects in the murder-by-beating of a minor official in the longshoremen’s union. These individuals, if they were ever brought to trial, were prepared to plead justifiable homicide in self-defense, having taken the precaution to wrap the stiff’s fingers around a switchblade knife. Some wino had stumbled on the body, lifted the knife, and tried to hock it. But the pawnbroker blew the whistle on him and the precinct detectives kicked him around a little, which is always done to winos because they expect it and unless they get it will remain sullen and uncommunicative, and sit around stinking up the place, with yesterday’s crap in their pants. This little sideshow, however, had no substantive reference to the main event.

  Tierney and Herron, and everybody else on the Force, could identify the perpetrators of every crime of violence committed on the docks: the Calise Brothers, an organization of persons few of whom were actually brothers and only two of whom were actually named Calise, and neither of them had ever got so much as a parking ticket their lives long. They owned trucking companies, soda-bottling plants, linen-supply services, and provided hat-check girls for luxury restaurants, enterprises of record. Their maintenance of order on the piers went without written documentation or municipal franchise, but was an operation a good deal more efficient than the linen service, which often returned scorched napkins.

  Ordinarily the police did not bother either of the actual Brothers about one routine corpse who turned up among the refuse cans behind a dockside café, but Tierney got a rebellious hair in his ass, thinking about Shuster’s impending retirement, so he called up the bottling-works Calise, Dominick J., alias “Big D.,” though nobody called him that but the newspapers.

  After the expected delay, Tierney was put through. Calise spoke in a bland baritone.

  “I trust you are calling to inform me you have apprehended suspects in the repeated burglaries in my warehouses,” he said.

  “I’m with Homicide,” said Tierney. “We picked up two boys who work for you.”

  “Did they state that?” Calise asked ominously.

  “You know better.”

  Calise laughed and said: “O.K. But I never heard of you. Hang up and I’ll call you back.” He was well within his rights: anyone could pretend to be a police officer on the telephone. So he dialed Headquarters, asked for Tierney in Homicide, and was back on the line.

  “Do you know Vito Scarfiotti and Anthony Maio?” asked Tierney.

  Calise said: “All Ginzo names sound alike to me, but I’ll turn you over to my personnel manager. I certainly don’t keep up with every employe who runs a bottle-washing machine.”

  “How about those in specialized jobs?”

  “You mean like homicide? I don’t kill no one, Mr. Tierney. My soft drinks are pure. A bacteriologist takes samples of every batch. The competition made that one up about the dead mouse found in a bottle of our cola.”

  “These men never worked for you in any job whatever?”

  “I told you I would have it checked out,” Calise said impatiently. “I don’t get fresh with a policeman. If everybody respected the law like me, you would be out of business. I’ll put my personnel manager on the matter and he will get back to you day after tomorrow if not later today.”

  “Tomorrow a holiday for you?”

  “No, but you’ll be in court for the Detweiler tri
al, won’t you?”

  “I thought you never heard of me.”

  “You’d be surprised the imposters who call this number,” said Calise. “I thought maybe Detweiler might once of drank a bottle of my soda and you was trying to make me for aiding and abetting. I want to see him burn. I hate psychos! Listen, give Jimmy Shuster a kiss for me.”

  There was no reason to believe the greeting was sinister. In his long career Shuster had met most of the local racketeers, and mobsters always prided themselves on knowing a detective’s first name and using it if they were clean or certain they could not be proved otherwise.

  Shuster now asked Tierney what was happening in the waterfront case, and in the course of his report Tierney quoted Calise’s friendly remembrance.

  “Yeah,” Shuster said. “He likes me. He wants to hire me as chief of security for his enterprises. Been a number of burglaries around the plant, and a lot of tablecloth thefts from his linen service. Sort of consultant job. I wouldn’t have to go in every day.”

  “You are taking it?”

  “I might,” Shuster said, “I just might. But one thing I know for sure: you are not going to make him for this waterfront homicide.”

  “You are telling me to lay off?”

  “Tierney, Tierney, you dumb mick,” groaned Shuster. “The day you make Dom Calise for even a misdemeanor I’ll gladly give you my pension. So why bother with him? Go over to Missing Persons and find who lost this prick floater. Do something useful.”

  Melrose was making his last visit to Detweiler, preparing him for the trial. He said: “I still haven’t made up my mind whether to put you on the stand.”

  Detweiler said: “You can’t get out of it. I’ll be the only one in court who was at the scene of the crime.”

  “It is your right not to testify,” the attorney explained. “Because of the presumption that you are innocent. I thought you understood that, Joe. You don’t have to prove anything. The burden is on your accusers. Now, the reason why I am in something of a quandary is that knowing you as I do, I am afraid you might want to make a speech. The judge won’t permit you to do that. You will be allowed only to respond to questions.”