Death Wish (5 page)

“It's better than they deserve. They ought to be hunted down like mad dogs and shot on sight. They ought to——”

“Pop, you're just working yourself up. It's not doing anybody any good. I feel the same way you do, I understand exactly what you're going through. But they haven't even caught these bastards yet and you're already jumping to the conclusion that some smart lawyer's going to get them off the hook. What's the use of aggravating things with useless speculations? They haven't got these kids, for all we know they never will get them. Why get upset about miscarriages of justice that haven't even happened yet?”

“Because I've seen the way these things work. Even if the police catch them they just go right out again through the revolving door—right back out onto the streets. And largely because of well-meaning bastards like
you!
Hasn't any of this even made you stop and think about what you're doing?”

“It's made me stop and think,” Jack said. He turned his glance toward the kitchen. “Let's just let it go at that for the moment, shall we?”

“What are you kids made out of? If I were you I'd have handed in my resignation two days ago and put in an application for a job on the District Attorney's staff. How can you conceive of going back to your office and going right on defending these filthy little monsters?”

“It's not all that simple and you know it.”

“Do I?” he demanded. “Isn't that maybe our biggest failing? Copping-out with the complaint that it's not all that simple? By God maybe it
is
all that simple and we just don't have the guts to face it!”

“So you'd like to just strap on a pair of cowboy six-guns and go out there and gun them down, is that it?”

“Right now,” Paul said, “that is exactly what I'd like to do. And I'm not a hundred percent sure it's the wrong idea.”

“My ears are pretty good, you don't have to shout.”

“Sorry,” Paul snapped.

Jack sat there in his rumpled black suit, his hair standing out in wild disorder; his eyes mirrored a bitterness that Paul understood and felt.

Paul kept his eyes on Jack's face too long; it made Jack get up and move to the liquor cabinet. “You want a drink?”

“I could use one.”

“Bet you thought I'd never ask.” Jack's smile was too brief. He opened the cabinet door and poured two glasses half-full of Scotch. No ice, no mix. He handed one to Paul and went back to the couch. “I'm sorry if I seemed patronizing. I guess I was trying to be reassuring—not because it would calm you, but because with all this desperation in the air I needed calm words myself. Does that make sense?”

“Of course. I'm sorry I blew up.” But they were talking like cautious strangers now. He didn't know which was worse.

Jack said, “All week I've been remembering something that happened—oh, two-three years ago. It must have been after midnight. I'd been up in midtown on some chore, something to do with a client, and it was a nice night so I was walking home. I ran into a teen-age girl outside Bryant Park. She was a wreck. It turned out she'd been gang-raped right there in the park. I gave her carfare and told her to call the police. I don't suppose she ever did.”

“Why not?”

“She was kind of flippy. Probably being gang-raped wasn't exactly her idea of a fate worse than death. She was sore at them, but not really mad. You know what I mean?”

“I can't say I do, altogether.”

“What I guess I'm getting at is that so many of these things simply aren't taken seriously any more. Or at least they're taken for granted. Do you know what that girl said to me? She said she should have known better than to go into Bryant Park at that hour. She almost seemed to think it was her own fault. She wouldn't have been raped if she hadn't gone there. It's a weird time we live in.”

“Are you trying to say,” Paul breathed, “that Carol's mother invited this to happen by something she herself did?”

“Not at all. Don't fly off the handle again. I suppose if both of you had lived as if you were in a besieged fortress—use the peephole religiously, never let a stranger inside the apartment, put extra locks on the doors, never travel outside the apartment without a vicious guard dog on a leash—I guess if you chose to live like that she might still be alive, but who can put up with that?”

Paul knew people who did.

“Look, Pop, I know this won't set well right now, but in time you're going to have to think of it as a tragic accident—as if a disease had struck her down, or a runaway bus on the street. It's no good getting worked up into demands for vengeance and retribution. Even if they catch these three bastards and put them away for the rest of their lives it won't really change anything.”

Paul waited for the inevitable
It won't bring her back
but Jack never uttered it; perhaps, after all, he was not totally insensitive to the more blatant clichés.

“We both have to face that,” Jack droned on relentlessly. “In these times you have to feel inadequate if you can't slip a door-lock open in three seconds with a plastic calendar card—every kid on the street can do that. Do you know the crime statistics? I hear them every other day from some sourpussed Assistant D.A. There's an assault or a robbery every twelve seconds in New York—something like seventy thousand reported cases last year, and that's probably less than half the number that didn't get reported. In felony cases they only make arrests in about one-sixth of the cases and of those they only get convictions on about one-third. Of course in murder cases it's a lot higher—the police usually solve about eighty percent of them, but still we have about three murders a day in the city. You and I and Carol and even Mom—we're statistics now. On that God damned blotter. That's what makes it so damned hard to maintain your personal perspective: To you and me this is the most devastating thing that's ever happened—to the cops it's something they see all the time, so often they just can't keep getting worked up about it.”

Paul felt acid. “Thank you, Jack, you're a balm and a consolation to me.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound like a wise ass. But I'm in this business, I guess you could say—at least I'm on the periphery of it, I have to deal with the police every day. And I think you've got to be prepared for the possibility that nothing more is ever going to develop in this case. You've got to go on living, haven't you?”

“No,” Paul said slowly, “you don't have to go on living.”

“I don't want to hear any more of that.”

He stood splayed with the drink in his hand. His lowered head swung back and forth like the head of a worn-out prelim fighter in the ring, trying to locate his opponent. “I'm not thinking about suicide, I didn't mean that.” But he kept bulling it, thinking. His breathing was shallow; his sphincter contracted, he formed a loose fist. “I've never hit a man in anger in my life. Never called a black man ‘nigger' or stolen a penny from any man. I've given money and my own time to a dozen worthwhile causes from block associations to the N-Double-A-C-P.”

“And this is the thanks you get,” Jack murmured. “I know, Pop. And it's true, and there's no answer to it.”

“There's one answer I intend to demand. I want those three killers.”

“They'll probably get them. They may not. But if they don't, what do you plan to do? Turn your back on every decent principle you've ever stood for? Join the Birchers or the Ku Klux Klan?”

“Well, I don't know what I'd do,” Paul said vaguely. “But Christ, there ought to be
some
thing.”

“You mean like hire a private eye? Or get a gun and go looking for them yourself? Those things only happen on television, Pop.”

“Well, just the same you may have hit on something there. A private detective might be——”

“Private detectives aren't what the movies make them out to be, Pop. They exist for the purposes of getting divorce evidence and providing security services like industrial counter-espionage and bank guards. There are no private eyes who investigate murder cases, and even if there were, they wouldn't be able to hold a candle to the police. At least the police have manpower and organization and know-how.”

“And total indifference.”

“I wouldn't say that. You remember that policeman who stayed with us at the hospital?”

Paul even remembered his name: Joe Charles. “He was only a uniformed patrolman.”

“Sure. But he's a human being. He does care, Pop. Some of them are corrupt and some of them don't give a shit, but the cops aren't really the pigs we made them out to be in college.”

“Like unto thee and me,” Paul growled. “It doesn't change the fact—if your estimate is correct—that there's an excellent chance these animals will never be brought to justice.”

“Justice—or revenge?”

“What difference does it make what you call it?”

Jack shook his head. “All I'm saying is you and I may never be able to do a thing about this. Obviously we can't go out into the streets and find these killers ourselves. We wouldn't begin to know where to look.”

“Then you're saying we should just forget the whole thing. Go back to bed and pull the covers up over our heads.”

“Or write letters to the
Times
.”

It made Paul look at him; it was the kind of sarcasm you didn't expect of Jack.

“I guess you're right,” Paul said. “I guess you're right.”

“We may have to get used to it, Pop.”

“I guess we can try.”

5

He didn't sleep at all that night; but he hadn't expected to. There were chloral hydrate capsules if he wanted them. He didn't. He felt the longer he went on drugging himself out of it the longer it would take to purge himself of his demons. It was better to face them and have it out.

It was the first night he had spent in his own apartment since the murder. He had left Carol's apartment early, before the sun went down. He hadn't planned that, it had come out of an argument: Carol somnambulistically had served up something barely edible and the three of them had sat down to it listlessly. They pushed food around on their plates and said very little. Once Jack got up to put a Mahler recording on the stereo; a few minutes later he got up again and took it off. No music would have been right for that hour—heavy music intensified the despondency; trivial music would have mocked it.

In the circumstances none of them had the stomach for silence and so they had begun to talk: awkward, forced. The significant things were not to be said; it was bad enough having to think them. So they had attempted to make impersonal conversation but it was too much of a strain and inevitably the talk had come around to things closer to home: whether Paul would keep the apartment now, whether they should call the police to find out if anything had developed or whether they should wait for the police to call them.

In the end it had led to another argument about retribution
vs
. reality and Paul had got to his feet to make some angry point, his voice trembling, and Carol suddenly had covered her ears with her palms and screwed her eyes shut and uttered an earsplitting shriek.

“You'd better go on home,” Jack had said.

“I'd rather wait till the doctor gets here.”

“No, I think it would only upset her more. You can understand that.”

Jack had given her a pill and put her to bed while Paul was calling Dr. Rosen; now Jack picked up Paul's jacket and handed it to him. “I don't mean to seem cruel.”

“Damn it, I'm her father.”

“Right now you're a reminder of her mother, I think.”

A sharp remark rose to his tongue—something acid about Jack's license to practice parlor psychiatry—but he had let it die there; Jack was too vulnerable, there was too much heat already.

So he had left, bile in his throat. A taxi from Horatio Street to the upper West Side. He'd got out of the taxi at the corner of Seventieth and West End, crossed the avenue with the light and walked up the half-block to the apartment house, staring with belligerent suspicion at every face on the street.

The night man on the door gave him a nod and a polite smile of recognition as if nothing had ever happened. Was it possible he didn't know? Paul stopped automatically to unlock the mailbox. It was crowded with small stiff envelopes—sympathy cards. He shoved them in his pocket, locked the mailbox and went along the corridor from the lobby to the back elevator. He rode up part-way with a middle-aged couple he'd seen often enough to say hello to; he didn't know their names. If they had seen the papers they hadn't made the connection; they nodded and said goodnight when they got out at the seventh floor, leading their Pekingese on a leash snuffling and tugging. Paul rode on up to the twelfth floor, put the key in the lock and pushed into the apartment with his stomach muscles tensed, not sure what he was going to find or how he was going to react to it.