Death Wish (3 page)

The cop said, “I don't know too much about it myself. Later on you could call the precinct. You want the number?”

“Please.” Paul took out his pen and found a scrap of paper in his pocket—the American Express receipt from lunch. He wrote on the back of it as the cop dictated:

“Twentieth Precinct. Seven-nine-nine, four one hundred. The station house is right around the corner from your building, I don't know if you've noticed it. One-fifty West Sixty-eighth, that short little block between Broadway and Amsterdam.”

“Who should I ask for?”

“I don't know who'll be in charge of your case. Probably one of the Detective Lieutenants.”

“Who's the head man there?”

The cop smiled very slightly. “Captain DeShields. But he'd only refer you down to whoever's in charge of the case.”

“Do you mind telling me whatever you do know?”

“It's not much. I wasn't the first one to get there. It looks like some men got into the building without the doorman seeing them. Maybe they were junkies, they usually are. Looking for something to steal.”

“How did they get into our apartment?”

“Afraid I don't know. If the door wasn't double-locked they could've slipped the lock with a plastic card. Or maybe they just knocked and your wife let them in. Burglars often do that—knock to find out if anybody's home. If nobody answers the door they break in. Otherwise most of them make up some lame excuse about being on the wrong floor, and go away.”

“But these didn't go away.”

“No sir, I guess not.” The cop's delivery was impersonal, as if he were testifying in court, but you could feel his compassion.

Paul said, “They got away,” not a question.

“Yes sir. We still had patrolmen searching the building when I left, but I don't think they'll find anyone. It's possible somebody saw them in the building or on your floor. Maybe somebody rode with them in the elevator. There'll be detectives over there, they'll be asking everybody in the building if they saw anyone. It's possible they might get descriptions. Anyhow I imagine your daughter will be able to describe them as soon as she's feeling a little better.”

Paul shook his head. “They're never found, these animals. Are they?”

“Sometimes we catch them.”

Paul's glance flicked belligerently toward the doorway to the corridor. For God's sake, when were they going to tell him something? He was beginning to fill up with undirected anger but he wasn't ready to think about revenge yet.

The cop said lamely, “They're doing everything they can.” It wasn't clear whether he meant the detectives or the doctors.

There was a loud groan. It could have been any one of a dozen people in the room. Paul wanted to bolt to his feet and force his way through the door; but he wouldn't know where to turn once he got past it. And someone would throw him out.

The rancid stink was maddening. After a while—he wasn't reckoning time—the cop got to his feet clumsily, rattling the heavy accoutrements that hung like sinkers from his uniform belt. The thick handle of the revolver moved to Paul's eye level.

The cop said, “Look, I shouldn't have stayed this long. I've got to get back to my partner. But if there's anything I can do, just call the station house and ask for me, Joe Charles is my name again. I wish I could've been more help.”

Paul looked up past the revolver at the cop's hard young face. Jack reached up to shake the cop's hand: “You've been damned kind.”

They sat endlessly waiting for Authority to come and speak. Jack offered him a cigarette, forgetfully; Paul, who had never smoked, shook his head. Jack lit up the new cigarette from the glowing stub of the old one. Paul glanced up at the No Smoking sign but didn't say anything.

On the opposite bench a woman sat in evident pain but she kept stolidly knitting at something yellow: a man's sock? A child's sweater? Her face was taut and pale. Whatever her malaise she managed to clothe it in dignified resistance to fate. Paul felt like a voyeur; he looked away.

Jack muttered, “They may have been kids you know. Just kids.”

“What makes you say that?”

“We get them every day at Legal Aid. They're out of their heads, that's all. They'll swallow ten of everything in the medicine cabinet and shoot up whatever they can lay their hands on.”

“You think these were hopped up?”

“Well, that's an obsolescent phrase, Pop, it doesn't exactly apply any more. Maybe they were tripping on speed or maybe they were junkies overdue for a fix. Either drugs they'd taken or drugs they couldn't get—it works both ways.”

“What's the point of speculating?” Paul said bleakly.

“Well, it's the only thing I can think of that might explain this. I mean there's no rational motive for a thing like this.”

“We always have to make sense out of things, don't we.”

“Something happens like this, you have to know why it happened, don't you?”

“What I'd like to know,” Paul answered viciously, “is why it couldn't have been prevented from happening.”

“How?”

“Christ, I don't know. There ought to be some way to get these animals off the streets before they can have a chance to do things like this. With all the technology we've developed you'd think there'd be some way to test them psychologically. Weed out the dangerous ones and treat them.”

“A couple of hundred thousand addicts in the streets, Pop—who can afford to treat every one of them as long as we go on spending seventy percent of the budget beefing up weapons to overkill the rest of the world?”

You sat in a dismal emergency waiting room and talked tired generalities. It always came around to that. But neither of them had any real heart for it and they lapsed quickly into fearful silence.

It was the kind of place in which you did not look at things; you avoided looking. Paul's eyes flicked from the door to his knotted hands and back again.

Jack got up and began striding back and forth, too vinegary to sit still. One or two people glanced at him. Interns and nurses came in, got people, took them away. An ambulance arrived with a stretcher case whom two attendants carried straight through into the corridor. Esther and Carol must have been brought in like that, he thought. Possibly the theory was that if you were able to navigate into the place on your own feet you were healthy enough to wait six hours. Paul felt his lip curl; he straightened his face when a nurse appeared but she had come for someone else.

Jack sat down with a grunt and lit a new cigarette. The floor around his feet was littered with crushed butts. “God. I can't take this, Poor Carol—Jesus.” A quick sidelong glance at Paul: “And Mom. What a rotten——”

Paul put his elbows on his knees and held his head between his hands, feeling as if it weighed half a ton.

Jack said, “At least they could talk to us. Damn it, how much would it cost them to send someone out here for a minute and a half to tell us what's going on?”

Paul stirred. “You're sure they know we're out here?”

“I talked to the doctor when we got here. He knows.”

“Well, I suppose he's got a lot of emergencies back there.”

“He could send
some
body.”

It was childish and Jack seemed to realize that; he subsided. Paul slumped back against the wall and watched smoke curl up from the cigarette. “What's this doctor like?”

“Young. I suppose he's a resident.”

“I wish we could have got Doctor Rosen.”

“They're always out of town when you need them. The son of a bitch is probably playing golf in Putnam County.”

“In this heat?”

Jack waved his cigarette furiously; it was his only reply.

Paul had taken a long time to warm to his son-in-law; he still felt uncomfortable with him. Jack came from New Mexico, he regarded the city as a reformer's personal challenge, he approached everything with humorless earnestness.
What a strange way to think at a time like this
. If ever there was a time to take things seriously.… Perhaps it was because he needed an object for his rage and Jack was at hand.

Carol had sprung Jack on them: an elopement, the marriage a
fait accompli
. Esther had always set a lot of store by ceremony; her unhappiness had fueled Paul's dislike for the young man. There had been no need for them to elope, no one had prohibited the marriage; but they had their own ideas—they claimed they'd run away to save Paul and Esther the expense of a big wedding; actually it was more likely that they simply thought it a romantic thing to do. They had been married by a Justice of the Peace without friends or family present. What was romantic about that?

Carol had gone on working as a secretary for the first three years to support them in a Dyckman Street walkup while Jack finished law school at Columbia. It had made things hard for Paul and Esther because there was no way to be sure how much help to give them. They had the pride of youthful independence and accepted things with graceless reluctance as if they were doing you a favor by accepting help from you. Perhaps they felt they were. But Paul had spent twenty-three years being unapologetically protective toward his only child and it wasn't easy to understand her cheerful acceptance of that Dyckman Street squalor. The kind of place you couldn't keep cockroaches out of. Fortunately when Jack had passed the Bar exams and got the job with Legal Aid they had moved down to the West Village to be nearer his office; the apartment was one of the old railroad flats but at least it was more cheerful.

Jack had the zeal of his generation. His dedications were more compassionate than pecuniary; he was never going to be wealthy but he would support Carol well enough; probably in time they'd buy a small house on Long Island and raise babies. In the end Paul had accepted it all, accepted Jack—because there was nothing else to do, because Carol seemed content, and because he began to realize it was lucky she hadn't taken up with a long-haired radical or a freaked-out group of commune crazies. She had the temperament for it: she was bright, quick, pert, impatient, and she subscribed to a good deal of anti-Establishment sentiment. Probably she had tried various drugs in college during her two years of student activism; she had never volunteered a confession and Paul had never asked. She had a good mind but her weakness was a tendency to be sold by the last person who talked to her: sometimes she was too eager to be agreeable. Jack Tobey probably exercised exactly the kind of steadying influence she required. It would be silly to hold out for more than that.

Jack wore glasses with heavy black frames across his beaky nose; he was dark and shaggy and he dressed with vast indifference—most of the time you found him in the jacket he was wearing now, a hairy tweed the color of cigarette ashes. Scuffed brown shoes and a bland tie at half-mast with his shirt open at the collar. Paul had seen him in action in the courtroom and it had been one of the few times he recalled seeing the kid in a business suit; afterward Carol had explained that Jack made the concession to decorum only because he had got to know the judges and their habit of exercising their prejudicial sarcasms on unkempt young defense attorneys.

… A plump young man in white appeared at the door and it made Jack stiffen with evident recognition. The doctor located him and came forward. “Your wife will be all right.” He was talking to Jack.

Paul stood up slowly and Jack said, “How's my mother-in-law, Doctor?” in a voice that presupposed the answer.

Paul cleared his throat. “May I see her?”

The doctor's head skewed around. “You're Mr. Benjamin? Sorry, I didn't know.” It was an apology without contrition. The doctor seemed jaded; his voice was rusty, tired beyond any expression of emotion. He seemed to need to ration his feelings.

“I don't——” The doctor's round young face tipped down. “Mrs. Benjamin is dead. I'm sorry.”

4

At the funeral he was still in a dark fugue, a dulled pervading unreality.

It was the wrong day for a funeral. The heat had dissipated, the inversion layer had gone somewhere; it was a mild day filled with sunshine and comfort. Funerals had a rainy association for Paul and the chiseled clarity of Friday's air made the incidents even less real.

That first night—Esther had died Tuesday—they had sedated him and he only vaguely remembered the taxi ride to Jack's apartment. Jack had given him the bed and in the morning Paul had found him in the living room on the couch, smoking, drinking coffee; Jack hadn't slept at all.

Paul had emerged from his drugged sleep neither rested nor alert. The unfamiliar surroundings heightened his sense of existential surrealism: it was as if he had been born fully grown half an hour before, into an alien world of meaningless artifice. He had forgotten nothing; but when he found Jack in the living room and they began to talk, it was as if they were actors who had sat in these same places and said the same lines so many times that the words had lost all intrinsic meaning.