Until You Are Dead (27 page)

Another microphone, and a TV mini-camera from Channel Seven Eyespot news.

"Commissioner, could you tell me the significance of this donation?"

"Our alarming crime statistics are a matter that should concern us all, Bill, and while organizations like Citizens Against Crime are alerting people to that fact, establishments like Care Halfway House are doing their share on the front lines, so to speak."

"Do you intend to run for Congress, Commissioner?"

"There is a bridge -"

"I think they want us outside," Reverend Callahan said. "Mrs. Dunhaker has arrived with the check."

Indeed, on the front porch of the neatly trimmed brownstone stood the redoubtable stout form of Mrs. Irene Dunhaker, president of Citizens Against Crime. Several re
porters were talking with her while a knot of neighborhood people and a few minor city officials gathered at the base of
the steps. A microphone had been set up, Commissioner Brell saw, as he and Reverend Callahan stepped outside. Television cameras from all the major channels were on hand.

Both Reverend Callahan and the commissioner shook hands with the smiling Mrs. Dunhaker for the press, then the commissioner stepped nimbly to the microphone.

"It's all there in the statistics," he said, when at last he got to the point. "In this age of 'revolving door' courts and
prisons, we have here an example of what can be done to
help sincere men regain their honesty and self-respect — for their own good and the good of the community. In the past
four years a mere six percent of the ex-residents of Care Halfway House have been arrested for a serious offence. And this during a period when our city's crime rate has risen forty-eight percent!

"Some of the men who've passed through this building I have known personally as habitual criminals and thought to be incorrigible. I'm happy to say that Reverend Callahan has proved me wrong! The once-familiar names no longer
show up on the police blotters, in the statistics. I can think of no better place for the earnestly donated funds of Citizens Against Crime." With an elaborate gesture Mrs. Dunhaker handed the commissioner the $5,000 check. Without looking down at it, the commissioner passed it on to Reverend Callahan.

"I'm pleased," Reverend Callahan said, stepping to the microphone and smiling his beautiful smile. Flashbulbs popped. "Pleased for myself and for my boys . . . the fellas who have succeeded against odds that had overwhelmed them before. I'm happy for all of us . . . and all of us thank you." He kissed the smiling Mrs. Dunhaker on the cheek and shook hands with the smiling commissioner. Flashbulbs popped again. End of presentation.

F
rom a third floor window Reverend Callahan looked down at Commissioner Brell's taxpayer-purchased sedan as it slowed briefly for the corner stop sign, then made a left turn. Members of the press and Mrs. Dunhaker had likewise departed. A few area residents stood below, enjoying the sunshine and chatting. Then, still talking, they began to walk slowly toward the corner.

Reverend Callahan turned away from the window, toward Willie Clark, a short, sad-faced man who had recently been released from an eight to ten year sentence for bank robbery. Despite his plea of not guilty, there had been little doubt of his guilt — no doubt at all in the minds of the jury — as he had been surprised inside the bank's vault after closing time. He was the latest to be recommended to Care Halfway House.

"I'd like you to meet Ben Wert," Reverend Callahan said, nodding toward where the ex-safecracker sat in a corner with his legs propped up on a footstool. "He's something of
an expert in your field and a member of our guidance staff."

"I know him by reputation," Clark said warmly.

"Then I'm sure you'll listen to what he has to say and accept his help."

"You got caught on that bank job because you used too much explosive on the safe and somebody on the street heard," Wert said with something like condescension. "And you left a window open where you'd shorted the alarm and entered. What you'll learn here is not only everything about safe-cracking but about breaking and entering as well.

"A good safe man needs some of the skills of a good house-breaker. Another staff member will instruct you in that." Wert let his legs drop from the footstool and sat up straight. "You've got to listen close here, Clark. We teach you everything you need to know, but then it's up to you."

"What he's saying," Reverend Callahan said with a reassuring smile, "is that when you leave here, we don't want you to become the wrong kind of statistic."

W
ith his eyes still focused on the girl on the other side of the restaurant, Alex Goodnight watched the waiter approach, a mere shadow figure in the corner of his vision.

At precisely the right moment he turned and addressed the waiter. "Just coffee, please. Black."

Alex's voice was slightly but not very noticeably slurred. He sensed rather than saw the waiter nod and leave. Again Alex focused his attention on the girl, and again the gold ball point pen between his large fingers moved occasionally with surprising speed and deftness. The small notebook before him on the table, inconspicuous behind the sugar container and salt and pepper shakers, was a maze of shorthand.

The girl looked up for a moment and caught his gaze and he moved his eyes away casually, waiting a full half minute before daring to look again. When he looked back she was no longer interested in him, but was still talking animatedly to the man across the table from her.

Alex's sad but alert blue eyes watched her. She had well formed and mobile red lips across even teeth, rather pretty lips, easy lips for a deaf man to read. He watched the slight stretching motion of the
e's,
the rounded, almost pouting
o's
and the delicate touch of her tongue on the tips of her even teeth for the
th's.

Whenever she said something that might be of interest, or mentioned one of the names Alex had been told to watch for, his gold pen moved idly but with nimble speed across the note paper.

The waiter arrived with the coffee, and Alex's fingers flipped the page of the notebook to reveal harmless looking business notes. The waiter left, the page was flipped back, and Alex nonchalantly sipped his coffee from the cup in his left hand.

The girl looked up and noticed him again. She looked away quickly, placing widely spread fingers in her short blonde hair in an unconscious gesture of distress.

"Don't turn now," Alex watched her say, "but do you know the man at the table by the window?"

Alex didn't give the man a chance to turn and look. He glanced at his watch, gulped the last of his coffee and stood. Without looking back, he placed the money for his bill on the table and walked out of the restaurant.

As soon as he entered his fourth floor efficiency apartment Alex removed his shoes and lay down on the bed. Lying on his back, he lifted his legs one at a time and peeled off his socks. He rested there for about ten minutes before rising.

Alex was still barefooted as he walked to the refrigerator, got out a frozen dinner and put it in the oven. Going without shoes and socks when indoors was a habit he'd acquired long ago.

As he walked about the apartment, feeling the cool tile of the kitchen floor, the softness and contrasting hardness of where the living room rug met the hardwood floor, he felt all the subtle vibrations of the tenant-crowded building below him. Perhaps it made him a little less lonely.

While waiting for the dinner to heat, Alex opened the case of his portable typewriter and sat down to transfer the shorthand in his notebook to conventional English. He typed smoothly, with the speed and accuracy of a professional.

After dinner he watched part of a baseball game on television; then he went for a long walk, came home, and went to bed.

Early the next morning Alex was driving his small car up the winding dirt roads that led into the hills above the city. He turned off onto a narrow white dirt road and followed it until it became too narrow even for his small car.

Alex twisted the ignition key, feeling the engine stop, then he walked the remaining hundred or so yards to the gate in a high chain link fence.

As he approached the gate he could see the roof of the expensive but secluded house built into the hillside among the trees. When he wasn't traveling, this was where Walther lived.

When Alex was within ten feet of the fence, Waither's companions and servants, three large black German Shepherds, ran and hurled themselves against the chain link gate.

They backed off, barking loudly, and with teeth bared hurled themselves again and again.

A tingling sensation ran through Alex's head as somewhere a high frequency whistle was blown. Immediately the dogs became calm, and in unison they turned and trotted off toward the house. Alex waited patiently, and in a few minutes he felt the second tingling sensation that was his signal to enter.

Alex walked up the driveway to the low brick house and entered a side door. For the first time in his life he felt a
twinge of apprehension at what his orders would probably be, an apprehension he didn't understand. He walked down a hall and through an open door that led into Walther's office.

Walther was sitting behind his marble-top desk, methodically spelling out words with a tape gun. He had a fondness for labeling things, and Alex had seldom seen him behind the marble desk top when he wasn't turning the alphabet dial and squeezing the plastic trigger to indent the adhesive metal tape with classifications for file folders, personal or business possessions.

Walther finished the word he was working on, looked at the tape with satisfaction and squeezed the separate trigger that snipped it off. The tape fell face up on the desk, but Alex was too far away to read it.

"About the Joyce Chambers woman," Alex said in his slightly slurred voice as he laid his typewritten report on Walther's desk.

Walther nodded and smiled. He was a thin man, with even, angular features and a small but sparkling diamond ring on his little finger. He read through the pages swiftly while Alex waited, then he set the papers on a corner of the desk and looked up at Alex.

"Make yourself a drink," he said silently, pointing toward a small corner bar, and he watched as Alex did so.

Alex was one of several employees in Walther's small but unique and profitable "contracting" business. Like his fellow employees he had been adopted from an orphanage for handicapped children when he was very young, and an old German couple who was in the pay of Walther had raised him. And since Walther paid well, they had raised him to Walther's specifications.

Alex had been tutored to get along in the world as unobtrusively as possible. At the same time he'd been taught to place very little value on any kind of life, human life in particular. He had begun by killing dogs and rabbits by hand when he was nine. His job was still to kill with his hands, but no longer dogs and rabbits.

But the main thing that had been drilled into Alex's head since childhood was the thing that held Walther's operation together — loyalty, complete and unquestioning. All Walther's employees had that in common, from Alex Goodnight to the blind man in London who could study the Braille blueprint of a building and find his way unerringly through darkness to a safe, then open it with the delicate touch of his fingers.

But the deaf ones, like Alex, with their one useless sense and their overdeveloped four others, must be the most loyal of all, for they were the most dangerous.

One of the prerequisites for Walther's employees was intelligence, and because of this intelligence they sometimes began to question, to wonder why. Usually by that time they were too deeply embroiled in what they were doing to protest too much, even to themselves. But at this crisis some of them did balk, and their loyalty could not be taken for granted.

When this happened there was no alternative but to destroy them. A million-dollar operation could not be jeopardized. Of course the one trouble with that drastic precaution was that able replacements were very rare. It was, Walther often mused, an age of specialization.

Alex had finished mixing his diluted Scotch and water, the only thing he drank, and returned to sit before Walther's desk. Walther began to spell out something on the tape gun again, and he had his head bowed so that Alex had to watch closely to read his lips.

"You will have to kill the Chambers woman," Walther said, twisting the alphabet dial. "Get her alone. Do it simply and quickly, as with the man in New York."

"Yes, sir," Alex said almost by reflex.

Walther looked up and smiled rather broadly. "When
you're through with this one I think you'll deserve a nice vacation, say in Miami Beach."

Alex nodded. "That would be very good."

"Fine," Walther said. "I'll watch the newspapers and contact you when it's done." He turned his attention back to the tape gun and Alex stood and walked out of the office and back down the short hall. He knew that Walther had the dogs roaming the grounds only during night interviews.