Westlake, Donald E - Novel 41 (18 page)

 
          
 
I can't do it, Levine thought. I can't do it
to him.

 
          
 
He said, "Danny, you're wrong. Listen to
me, for God's sake, you're wrong."

 
          
 
"You better run, cop," crooned the
voice. "You better hurry."

 
          
 
Levine heard the boy, soft slow sounds closer
to his left, weaving slowly nearer. "I don't want to kill you,
Danny!" he cried. "Can't you understand that? I don't want to kill
you!"

 
          
 
"I want to kill^ou, cop," whispered
the voice.

 
          
 
"Don't you know what dying is?"
pleaded Levine. He had his hand out now in a begging gesture, though the boy
couldn't see him. "Don't you know what it means to die? To stop
,likeawatch
. Nevertoseeanythinganymore
,nevertohear
or touch or know anything any more.
Never to be any
more."

           
 
"That's the way it's going to be,
cop," soothed the young voice. Very close now, very close.

 
          
 
He was too young. Levine knew it, knew the boy
was too young
io
feel what death really is. He was too
young to know what he wanted to take from Levine, what Levine didn't want to
take from him.

 
          
 
Every fourth beat.

 
          
 
Thirty-seven years.

 
          
 
"You're a dead man, cop," breathed
the young voice, directly in front of him.

 
          
 
And light dazzled them both.

 
          
 
It all happened so fast. One second, they were
doing their dance of death here together, alone, just the two of them in
all the
world. The next second, the flashlight beam hit them
both,
the clumsy uniformed patrolman was standing in the
doorway, saying, "Hey!"
Making himself a target,
and the boy, slender, turning like a snake, his eyes glinting in the light, the
gun swinging around at the light and the figure behind the light.

 
          
 
Levine's heart stopped, one beat.

 
          
 
And every muscle, every nerve, every bone in
his body tensed and tightened and drew in on itself, squeezing him shut, and
the sound of the revolver going off slammed into him, pounding his stomach.

 
          
 
The boy screamed, hurtling down out of the
light, the gun clattering away from his fingers.

 
          
 
"Jesus God
have
mercy!" breathed the patrolman. It was Wills. He came on in, unsteadily,
the flashlight trembling in his hand as he pointed its beam at the boy crumpled
on the floor.

 
          
 
Levine looked down at himself and saw the thin
trail of blue-gray smoke rising up from the barrel of his revolver. Saw his
hands still tensed shut into claws, into fists, the first finger of his right
hand still squeezing the trigger back against its guard.

           
 
He willed his hands open, and the revolver fell
to the floor.

 
          
 
Wills went down on one knee beside the boy.
After a minute, he straightened, saying, "Dead. Right through the heart, I
guess."

 
          
 
Levine sagged against the wall. His mouth hung
open. He couldn't seem to close it.

 
          
 
Wills said, "What's the matter? You
okay?"

 
          
 
With an effort, Levine nodded his head.
"I'm okay," he said. "Call in. Go on, call in."

 
          
 
"Well. I'll be right back."

 
          
 
Wills left, and Levine looked down at the new
young death. His eyes saw the colors of the floor, the walls, the clothing on
the corpse. His shoulders felt the weight of his overcoat. His ears heard the
receding footsteps of the young patrolman. His nose smelled the sharp tang of
recent gunfire. His mouth tasted the briny after-efl"ect of fear.

 
          
 
"I'm sorry," he whispered.

 
          
 
Detective Abraham Levine of
Brooklyn
's Forty-Third Precinct sat at his desk in
the squadroom and longed for a cigarette. The fingers of his left hand kept
closing and clenching, feeling awkward without the paper-rolled tube of
tobacco. He held a pencil for a while but unconsciously brought it to his
mouth. He didn't realize what he was doing till he tasted the gritty staleness
of the eraser. Then he put the pencil away in a drawer, and tried
unsuccessfully to concentrate on the national news in the news magazine.

 
          
 
The world conspired against a man who tried to
give up smoking. All around him were other people puffing ciragettes casually
and unconcernedly, not making any fuss about it at all, making by their very nonchalance
his own grim reasons for giving them up seem silly and hypersensitive. If he
isolated himself from other smokers with the aid of television or radio, the
cigarette commercials with their erotic smoking and their catchy jingles would
surely drive him mad. Also, he would find that the most frequent sentence in
popular fiction was, "He lit another cigarette." Statesmen and
entertainers seemed inevitably to be smoking whenever news photographers
snapped them for posterity, and even the news items were against him: He had
just reread for the third time an announcement to the world that Pope John
XXIII was the first Prelate of the Roman Catholic Church to smoke cigarettes in
public.

 
          
 
Levine closed the magazine in irritation, and
from the cover smiled at him the Governor of a midwestern state, cigarette in
F.D.R. cigarette-holder at a jaunty angle in his mouth. Levine closed his eyes,
saddened by the knowledge that he had turned himself at this late date into a
comic character. A grown man who tries to give up smoking is comic, a Robert
Benchley or a W.C. Fields, bumbling along, plagued by trivia, his life an
endless gauntlet of minor crises. They could do a one-reeler on me, Levine
thought.
A great little comedy.
Laurel
without Hardy.
Because
Hardy died of a heart attack.

 
          
 
Abraham Levine, at fifty-three years of age,
was twenty-four years a cop and eight years into the heart-attack range. When
he went to bed at night, he kept himself awake by listening to the silence that
replaced every eighth or ninth beat of his heart. When he had to climb stairs
or lift anything heavy, he was acutely conscious of the labored .heaviness of
his breathing and of the way those missed heartbeats came closer and closer
together, every seventh beat and then every sixth and then every fifth

 
          
 
Some day, he knew, his heart would skip two
beats in a row, and on that day Abraham Levine would stop, because there
wouldn't be any third beat.
None at all, not ever.

 
          
 
Four months ago, he'd gone to the doctor, and
the doctor had checked him over very carefully, and he had submitted to it
feeling like an aging auto brought to a mechanic by an owner who wanted to know
whether it was worth while to fix the old boat up or should he just junk the
thing and get another. (In the house next door to his, a baby cried every night
lately.
The new model, crying for the old and the obsolete to
get off the road.)

 
          
 
So he'd gone to the doctor, and the doctor had
told him not to worry. He had that little skip in his heartbeat, but that
wasn't anything dangerous, lots of people had that. And his blood pressure was
a little high, but not much, not enough to concern himself about. So the doctor
told him he was healthy, and collected his fee, and Levine left, unconvinced.

 
          
 
So when he went back again three days ago,
still frightened by the skip and the shortness of breath and the occasional
chest cramps when he was excited or afraid, the doctor had told him the same
things all over again, and had added, "If you really want to do something
for that heart of yours, you can give up smoking."

 
          
 
He hadn't had a cigarette since, and for the
first time in his life he was beginning really to understand the wails of the
arrested junkies, locked away in a cell with nothing to ease their craving. He
was beginning to be ashamed of himself, for having become so completely
dependent on something so useless and so harmful. Three days now. Comic or not,
he was going to make it.

 
          
 
Opening his eyes, he glared at the
cigarette-smoking Governor and shoved the magazine into a drawer. Then he
looked around the squadroom, empty except for himself and his partner,
Crawley
, sitting over there smoking contentedly at
his desk by the filing cabinet as he worked on a report. Rizzo and McFarlane,
the other two detectives on this shift, were out on a call but would probably
be back soon. Levine longed for the phone to ring, for something to happen to
distract him, to keep mind and hands occupied and forgetful of cigarettes. He
looked around the room, at a loss, and his left hand clenched and closed on the
desk, lonely and incomplete.

 
          
 
When the rapping came at the door, it was so
faint that Levine barely heard it, and
Crawley
didn't even look up.

           
 
But any sound at all would have attracted
Levine's straining attention. He looked over, saw a foreshortened shadow
against the frosted glass of the door, and called, "Come in."

 
          
 
Crawley
looked up. "What?"

 
          
 
"Someone at the
door."
Levine called out again, and this time the doorknob
hesitantly turned, and a child walked in.

 
          
 
It was a little girl of about ten, in a frilly
frock of pale pink, with a flared skirt, with gold-buckled black shoes and
ribbed white socks. Her hair was pale blonde, combed and brushed and shampooed
to gleaming cleanliness, brushed back from her forehead and held by a pink bow
atop her head, then cascading straight down her back nearly to her waist. Her
eyes were huge and bright blue, her face a creamy oval. She was a little girl
in an ad for children's clothing in the Sunday Times. She was a story
illustration in Ladies' Home Journal. She was. Alice in Blunderland, gazing
with wide-eyed curious innocence into the bullpen, the squadroom, the home and
office of the detectives of the Forty-Third Precinct, the men whose job it was
to catch the stupid and the nasty so that other men could punish them.

 
          
 
She saw, looking into this brutal room, two
men and a lot of old furniture.

 
          
 
It was inevitably to Levine that the little
girl spoke: "May I come in?" Her voice was as faint as her tapping on
the door had been. She was poised to flee at the first loud noise.

 
          
 
Levine automatically lowered his own voice
when he answered.
"Of course.
Come on in. Sit
over here." He motioned at the straight-backed wooden chair beside his
desk.

 
          
 
The girl crossed the threshold, carefully
closed the door again behind her, and came on silent feet across the room,
glancing sidelong at
Crawley
, then establishing herself on the edge of
the chair, her toes touching the floor, still ready for flight at any second.
She studied Levine. "I want to talk to a detective," she said.
"Are you a detective?"

 
          
 
Levine nodded. "Yes, I am."

           
 
"My name," she told him solemnly,
"is Amy Thornbridge Walker. I live at 717 Prospect Park West,
apartment 4
-
A. I want to report a murder, a quite recent
murder."

 
          
 
"A murder?"

 
          
 
"My mother," she said, just as
solemnly, "murdered my stepfather."

 
          
 
Levine glanced over at
Crawley
, who screwed his face up in an expression
meant to say, "She's a nut. Hear her out, and then she'll go home. What
else can you do?"

 
          
 
There was nothing else he could do. He looked
at Amy Thornbridge Walker again. "Tell me about it," he said.
"When did it happen?"

 
          
 
"Two weeks ago Thursday," she said.
"November 27th.
At two-thirty p.m."

 
          
 
Her earnest calm called for belief. But
children with wild stories were not unknown to the precinct. Children came in
with reports of dead bodies in alleys, flying saucers on rooftops,
counterfeiters in basement apartments, kidnappers in black trucks —And once out
of a thousand times what the child reported was read and not the product of a
young imagination on a spree.
More to save the little girl's
feelings than for any other reason, therefore, Levine drew to him a pencil and
a sheet of paper and took down what she told him.
He said, "What's
your mother's name?"

 
          
 
"Gloria Thornbridge Walker," she
said. "And my stepfather was Albert Walker. He was an attorney."

 
          
 
To the side,
Crawley
was smiling faintly at the girl's conscious
formality. Levine solemnly wrote down the names, and said, "Was your
father's name Thornbridge, is that it?"

 
          
 
"Yes. Jason Thornbridge. He died when I
was very small. I think my mother killed him, too, but I'm not absolutely
sure."

 
          
 
"I see. But you are absolutely sure that
your mother killed Albert Walker."

 
          
 
"My stepfather.
Yes. My first father was supposed to have drowned by accident in
Lake Champlain
, which I consider very unUkely, as he was
an excellent swimmer."

 
          
 
Levine reached into his shirt pocket, found no
cigarettes there, and suddenly realized what he was doing. Irritation washed over
him, but he carefully kept it from showing in his face or voice as he said,
"How long have you thought that your mother killed your rea — your first
father?"

 
          
 
"I’d never thought about it at all,"
she said, "until she murdered my stepfather. Naturally, I then started
thinking about it."

 
          
 
Crawley
coughed, and lit a fresh cigarette, keeping his hands up in front of his mouth.
Levine said, "Did he die of drowning, too?"

 
          
 
"No. My stepfather wasn't athletic at
all. In fact, he was nearly an invalid for the last six months of his
life."

 
          
 
"Then how did your mother kill him?"

 
          
 
"She made a loud noise at him," she
said calmly.

 
          
 
Levine's pencil stopped its motion. He looked
at her searchingly, but found no trace of humor in her eyes or mouth. If she
had come up here as a joke —on a bet, say from her schoolmates — then she was a
fine little actress, for no sign of the joke was on her face at all.

 
          
 
Though how could he really tell? Levine, a
childless man with a barren wife, had found it difficult over the years to
communicate with the very young. A part of it, of course, was an envy he
couldn't help, in the knowledge that these children could run and play with no
frightening shortness of breath or tightness of chest, that they could sleep at
night in their beds with no thought for the dull thudding of their hearts, that
they would be alive and knowing for years and decades, for decades, after he
himself had ceased to exist.