The Eye: A Novel of Suspense (7 page)

His gaze shifted to the three yellow file folders before him on the desk. The Peter Cheng, Charles Unger, and Martin Simmons files, containing the scant information regarding their murders. The Ballistics report on the Simmons homicide was also there; he picked it up again and glanced over it. The weapon they were after was a .32 caliber Harrington & Richardson automatic, rifled with a six-groove left-twist spiral. Pitch, ten and a half inches; groove depth, ten-thousandths of an inch; groove width, forty-two thousandths …

He slapped the report down, rubbed at his tired eyes. Elsewhere in the squadroom, there were the sounds of night-shift activity: one of the detectives joking with a patrolman while he booked a suspect; another detective talking to someone on the phone; one of two black men in the holding cell complaining, “It ain’t fair, man! It ain’t mothafuckin’
fair!
” Someone outside in the corridor let out a loud horselaugh. Somebody else shouted for Adams in Clerical. And all of this was backgrounded by the distant, monotonous voice of the dispatcher directing patrol cars about the miles of Manhattan streets in a blank-verse litany of violence. The sounds of Oxman’s world. They stayed with a cop forever, echoing in the recesses of the brain as long as the mind functioned. There was no genuine retirement from his job, not ever.

He picked up one of the case folders from his overflowing In basket—just one of several other cases he was supposed to be dealing with. The world didn’t stop for anyone or anything; life lurched on, and so did death.

Oxman realized he was getting maudlin. He took another sip of the bad coffee, opened the folder. He was shuffling through it when Tobin came in.

Tobin crossed the room to Oxman’s desk and cocked a hip against one corner of it. He looked as tired as E.L. felt. His gray pinstripe suit was wrinkled and his shirt was partly untucked beneath his vest. He was developing quite a paunch, Oxman noticed.

“How’s it going, Elliot Leroy?”

“You know, you’re putting on weight around the middle,” Oxman said. Hell, he could play it mean too. Nobody liked pounding the bricks till past ten at night when you were supposed to be. on the dayshift. Sometimes Tobin seemed to think he was the only one who suffered. Artie was one efficient cop, but he’d been hired at the wrong time and he still carried traces of a persecution complex from the time when he
had
been persecuted because of his race.

Tobin gazed at him out of his flat brown eyes with the crescent of white showing beneath each pupil. “I guess it’s the good life,” he said, straight-faced.

Oxman grinned wearily. “Yeah.”

“Anything new?”

“Not over on Ninety-eighth. How about you?”

“Same thing. What did Gaines and Holroyd turn up on Martin Simmons?”

“Not much,” Oxman said. “He was an advertising copywriter for Flick and Flick on Madison Avenue. Lived alone, didn’t have many close friends, or so it would seem. They say at the agency that he was a bit of a swinger, liked to frequent the singles bars. Been in Manhattan a little less than two years, originally from Kansas City.”

“Kansas City,” Tobin repeated.

“Sure. Home of the Royals, the Chiefs, and the Kings.”

“Uh-huh. Did Simmons ever live on West Ninety-eighth?”

“No. The apartment on Seventy-third is the only one he’s had since he came to the city.”

“Any acquaintances on Ninety-eighth?”

“Just Jennifer Crane, evidently.”

“You talk to the Crane woman?”

“I talked to her.”

“I don’t suppose she could be the perp?”

“Doubtful. Can you see a woman giving somebody her phone number, then following him outside and shooting him near her building?”

“Don’t rule it out,” Tobin said.

“I don’t. I just can’t see it happening.”

“Maybe this Jennifer Crane brought Peter Cheng and Charles Unger home too, zapped them after they balled her.”

“Sure, the black widow murderess. Good news copy.”

Tobin ran spread fingers through his thinning, wiry hair. “Okay, so how do you see her?”

Oxman shrugged. “Like thousands of other New York career women, doing her job, humping on the treadmill.” Oddly, he regretted the words as he spoke them. He did sense some difference in Jennifer Crane, though nothing he could frame in words for Tobin.

“Well,” Tobin said, “you’ve got better insight with these white chicks than I do.”

Oxman let that go; the hell with Artie and his subtle baiting.

The frosted glass door to the lieutenant’s office opened and Manders came out. Oxman thought, as he had many times before, that Lieutenant Smiley resembled a starving basset hound. But he was a basset hound with stamina; Oxman had seen him work twenty-four-hour days without any noticeable effect, and right now he appeared as fresh as if he’d just reported for work.

When he saw Oxman and Tobin his lean, sad features gave in to gravity and he frowned. “So you two are still here,” he said. He was a good one for stating the obvious.

“Wrapping up some paperwork,” Oxman said, motioning with his head toward his In basket.

“The hell with that stuff. I’ll have Davidson do it in the morning. You concentrate on the Ninety-eighth Street thing. The goddamn media is already onto the idea that we might have a random serial killer on our hands.”

“It could be they’re right.”

“Yeah.” Manders lit a cigarette, held it at arm’s length and stared at it through a haze of smoke as if it, too, was part of a plot to make his life difficult. “I’m going to put somebody in undercover tomorrow. See if anything turns up that way.”

“Good idea,” Tobin said.

“There’s a vacant apartment at twelve-forty. I’ve already talked to the building super; he’ll let the undercover man use it.”

“You know who it’ll be yet?”

“Not yet. I’ll let you know in the morning.”

“He’ll work with us, though, right?”

“Right,” Manders said. He drew deeply on his cigarette; ashes dropped onto his shirtfront and clung there. “Why don’t you two go home? I’d rather have you here fresh in the morning than sitting around late tonight hashing things over.”

That suggestion was fine with Oxman. He stood and replaced the West Ninety-eighth Street files in the cabinet; then he shrugged into his suit coat. Tobin was standing also, carefully tucking his shirt in around his burgeoning gut.

“Anything comes up during the night,” Manders told them, “I’ll get you on the phone.”

“Thanks,” Tobin said. “I feel so much better knowing that.”

Oxman said good night to Tobin in the squadroom and left the precinct house alone, down the thirteen concrete steps to the street. As he walked to his car, he glanced about him at the darkened apartment and office buildings nearby; the night concealed the disrepair of the old brick structures. The warm air seemed clean and oddly comforting. His footfalls gave off a resonant, larger-than-life sound that seemed to fly back at him from all directions.

Like most New Yorkers, his feelings about his city were paradoxical. He was a native; he’d been born in Brooklyn, and he’d lived there near Prospect Park until his mother’s death from cancer when he was nine. Then he’d been sent away to Chicago to be raised by an aunt who had treated him decently enough but always in a brisk and impersonal fashion that was the antithesis of his mother’s natural effusiveness and warmth. He remembered most his mother’s rich laugh, her head thrown back, her long dark hair swaying with her mirth. She had been healthy-looking, vital, right up to the final days. His mind, but not his heart, had finally forgiven her for leaving him and his father alone.

At eighteen, after his graduation from high school, he had returned to live with his father, who had managed a chain of dry-cleaning establishments in Queens. He and his father had never been close, and he had resented the decision to ship him off to Chicago after his mother’s death, although he understood that it was grief that had made the old man do it. But after his return they had spent time together, and grown to know each other; they had remained close until his father’s death seven years ago. They had exchanged letters regularly during Oxman’s hitch in the Army in Europe, then during his brief stay at the University of Michigan.

With both the Army and his fling as a student among younger and more serious scholars behind him, he had returned again to New York. Always he seemed drawn back to the city. From its majestic towers to its miserable tramps in the Bowery, it was part of him, and he of it. Though he had never been able to articulate the fact, he had known it even in his early twenties. In a way, it was the reason why he had married Beth—a native New Yorker like himself—four months after meeting her at a party in the Village. And it was what had compelled him to join the New York City Police Department that same year.

He’d been a good cop from the beginning. Stable. Steady. Marked by superiors as a methodical and conscientious officer whose career would be useful and rewarding, if never meteoric. He had never questioned an order, never questioned the law. He had always understood the law, at least that aspect of it that made being a cop difficult sometimes, that a cop had to accept and learn to work around.

Then, four years ago, he had been injured in the line of duty, struck by a getaway car driven by a frightened armed robber who was out on parole at the time he tried to heist a luggage shop on West Forty-fourth. Oxman had seen his face through the windshield; the felon had realized that, had stopped the car and reversed it, deliberately swerving to run him down. Oxman had leapt out of the way, but not soon enough to avoid a broken pelvis. He’d still managed to draw his revolver and fire several shots at the car, blowing a tire; the holdup man had been caught and charged with attempted murder as well as armed robbery. But plea bargaining had gotten him off with a seven-year sentence, and he had been paroled after two years and three months and was still free as far as Oxman knew. Oxman had spent weeks in a hospital bed and almost a year as an outpatient. He still limped a bit in cold weather.

Maybe that incident was what had made him begin to wonder about the law, about his life. It was about that time that the worm of doubt had started to bore into his mind. It was easy enough to accept the law’s faults if you looked at them objectively; but this was something else. This was personal. And the assailant, protected by the law, had gotten off with nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

From that time on, he had fallen into the habit of looking at things through the eyes of the victim, or through the eyes of the horrified bystander. A cop shouldn’t do that. A cop
couldn’t
do that and keep on being a good cop.

Or, hell, maybe he could; Oxman just didn’t know anymore. He didn’t know anything anymore, he thought as he unlocked and opened his car door. Maybe the city had finally begun to wear him down. Or maybe his marriage had, because it had stopped being a good marriage a long time ago. A combination of things, probably, burdens accumulated by time and growing heavier by the year.

I’m getting old
, he thought.
Old and tired
.

When he arrived at his house in Queens he saw that the windows were dark. It was eleven thirty; Beth would no doubt be in bed asleep. He let himself in, moving as quietly as the burglars he had sought over the years. He made his way through the dark living room to the kitchen, switched on the overhead light. There were dirty dishes in the sink. Water from the faucet dripped steadily into one of the dishes with a rhythmic
plink, plink, plink
.

He gave the faucet handle a twist and the dripping stopped. He got a glass down from the cupboard, poured some milk, drank it in three long gulps. Then he set the glass in the sink along with the other dishes, turned off the light, and went into the bedroom.

Beth was lying on her side: mound of hip, fan of tousled blond hair splayed over her pillow. The portable TV she used as a nightlight was tuned soundlessly to the
Tonight Show
. While he removed his clothes he thought about waking her, but only fleetingly. He knew that if he did, the result would be rejection and dissatisfaction along with guilt that he couldn’t pity her for her sexually debilitating headaches that puzzled even the best of doctors.

As he placed his holstered service revolver on the dresser, he saw Beth’s vials of pills on the table by the bed and wondered how many of them were placebos. More than one doctor had suggested that her headaches were a mental as well as physical affliction and might have to do with impending menopause. But no psychiatry for Beth, oh no. Twice she was to begin psychoanalysis and each time she had stomped out on the first visit.

One of the psychiatrists had confided to Oxman that she might in some way enjoy suffering, as if that idea might be a revelation for him. But it wasn’t. Everyday he saw unconscious motives compel people to destroy their own and others’ lives.

Stepping into his pajama bottoms, he glanced at Johnny Carson moving in his curiously marionettelike way before his studio audience. If it hadn’t been for Beth, Oxman would have turned up the volume; he just wasn’t ready for sleep yet. As it was, he switched off the TV just as Ed McMahon appeared cradling a box of dog food, beaming down at a scottie eagerly lapping the product from a bowl.

He was careful not to disturb Beth as he crawled into bed. He lay curled on his side, facing away from her, toward the deeper darkness of the wall. His eyes were wide open. The homicides on West Ninety-eighth Street were still heavy on his mind, but they weren’t the only things that were keeping him awake.

In spite of himself, he couldn’t seem to stop thinking about Jennifer Crane.

THE COLLIER TAPES

Slip of darkness, blackest patch of night, shadow in smooth motion among shadows—how futile! The Eye has observed the evil ones come and go, seen them through the windows of their apartments. Though they don’t know it, they live only on my whim. I must confess that I enjoy that. Any time I choose I can cancel all their debts and favors owed, put an end to their petty lives and send them into the depths of hell. Heed the Book of Common Prayer, evil ones: “Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.”