The Longest Second

DEATH ON HIS MIND

He was a man with no past. He’d lost his memory in a brutal slashing.

He lived for one purpose. To destroy the person who had robbed him of his future.

All he had to help him was a girl he didn’t trust—a girl who might lead him straight into the arms ... of the killer.

BILL S. BALLINGER

THE LONGEST SECOND

Copyright © 1957 by William S. Ballinger

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

• Chapter 1
  
• Chapter 2
  
• Chapter 3
  
• Chapter 4
  
• Chapter 5
  
• Chapter 6
  
• Chapter 7
  
• Chapter 8
  
• Chapter 9
  
• Chapter 10
  
• Chapter 11
  
• Chapter 12
  
• Chapter 13
  
• Chapter 14
  
• Chapter 15
  
• Chapter 16
  
• Chapter 17
  
• Chapter 18
  
• Chapter 19
  
• Chapter 20
  
• Chapter 21
  
• Chapter 22
  
• Chapter 23
  
• Chapter 24
  
• Chapter 25
  
• Chapter 26
  
• Chapter 27
  
• Chapter 28
  
• Chapter 29
  
• Chapter 30
  
• Chapter 31
  
• Chapter 32
  
• Chapter 33
  
• Chapter 34
  
• About Bill S. Ballinger
  
• Bibliography
  

The Longest Second

TO LAURA

IT can happen that the planets stand still and eternity holds its breath. A second becomes a lifetime, and it is the longest second in the world for you alone.

When I awakened, I stared straight above me at the ceiling —a large oblong shape painted a drab white. Someplace in the room a small hooded bulb threw a pale stingy light into the darkness. After a moment I could hear the moving of bodies, the rustling of clothes in the room, and I attempted to turn my head.

It was then I realized that my throat had been cut.

The pain ran down both sides of my neck, burrowing hotly within my chest. I gasped, choking for air.

The next day I regained consciousness again. A large glass jar of glucose hung above my bed, and drops of it flowed through a transparent plastic tube into my arm. The fluid poured life into my body; it didn’t hurt. Soft rubber-soled footsteps approached my bed and a face, capped in nurse’s white, peered down at me. Her face, long, thin, and preoccupied, broke into an impersonal smile when she saw that my eyes were open.

“Ah,” she said; her hand appeared suddenly and her fingers touched my lips. “Don’t try to speak. Just keep quiet, I’ll be right back with the doctor.” Her footsteps hushed away and I continued to lie there, feeling the throb of my pulse beating against the needle in my arm. From the corner of my eye, I sensed rather than saw the presence of a large floor screen. On the other side of the screen, I heard the giving of bed springs, the heavy turning of a body. Then silence.

Within a few minutes, the nurse returned, trailing a step behind a doctor. They stopped at the foot of my bed, and the doctor glanced over a chart which was attached there. He was a young man, with a pink-and-white skin and light brown hair cut short. He looked young.

Suddenly it struck me that I didn’t know my own age. I didn’t even know my own name.

The doctor lowered the chart and raised his eyes to look at me. “You’re a very lucky man,” he said, his voice serious. “You don’t realize what a close call you’ve had.”

Lifting my left arm, the one without the tube in it, I pointed to my throat. The doctor nodded. “Yes,” he said, “your throat has been cut. Did you do it?”

I didn’t know.

The doctor continued, “At present you’re unable to talk. Frankly it’s possible that you won’t speak again.” He watched me carefully. I felt no particular reaction. It was as if he were discussing someone else. He looked at me. I looked back at him.

It was the nurse who broke the silence. In an attempt to soften the blow, she said, “Well, we must hope for the best.” Her voice sounded determinedly optimistic, as well as banal.

The doctor nodded. “In the meantime,” he said, “you’ll have to lie quietly. Don’t try to speak, don’t attempt to move your head. If you do, you may begin hemorrhaging. For the next few days we’ll keep you under sedation. You’ll spend most of your time sleeping.” The nurse approached the side of my bed. Lifting my left arm, she swabbed it deftly with alcohol and then I felt the sudden bite of a hypodermic. The doctor and nurse disappeared behind the screen. After that I went to sleep again.

Perhaps it was the morphine which made it begin, but I found myself in a reoccurring nightmare. At first there wasn’t much to it; it was only that the hospital room was no longer the same room. It was another room, darkly lit except for a light in the far corner. I kept waiting for something to appear from behind that spot of fight. That was all. But the terror of waiting, the anxiety of suspense, the anticipation of fear were freezing. Never have I been so monstrously frightened.

As if this were a scene on a loop of film which kept going around over and over again, the nightmare continued. I waited, alone with my horror. Possibly I waited in this nightmare for three days, because it was three days later when I again recognized the doctor. Once more he was standing at the foot of my bed. When I focused my eyes on him, he inclined his head to look at me intently. “Well,” he said, “you’ve had a long sleep ... seventy-two hours.” I began to nod. “Don’t do that!” he commanded sharply. “Keep your head as still as you can. I think most of the danger of hemorrhaging is over, hut you must continue to be careful.”

Tentatively, I raised my left hand and lifted a finger at him. He regarded me thoughtfully. I lowered the single finger, then raised two. I repeated this several times. Then he smiled and again. “That’s a good idea ... excellent! Raise one finger for ‘yes,’ two fingers for ‘no.’ All right?”

I raised one finger. “We’ll need some information for our records,” he said, “so let’s see if you can answer my questions yes or no. There was no identification on you when you were picked up by the ambulance. Do you have any identification?”

I raised two fingers: no. The doctor looked puzzled for a moment. “Are you listed in the phone book?” he asked.

Was I, or was I not, fisted in the phone book? Not knowing my own name I couldn’t say one way or the other. I couldn’t answer. Desperately, I turned the palm of my hand upward in a noncommittal gesture.

Immediately the doctor grasped my meaning. “You mean you don’t know who you are?”

Yes, I agreed, raising one finger.

“You’ve lost your memory?” he continued.

Yes.

“You’ve forgotten your name and address?”

Yes.

He ran his hand over the top of his short brown hair. “Did you try to take your own life?” he asked me finally.

Again I raised my hand, palm up, to indicate there was no answer.

Turning away from the bed, he absently pushed the sections of the floor screen together, shoving it to one side. “Tomorrow,” he said, “you’ll be well enough to see the police. Perhaps they’ll be able to identify you.”

He left the room, and for a few minutes I stared ahead of me, into space over the foot of the bed, thinking. Even then, I had no particular reaction to the situation. My wound caused me no great pain, only a combination of sensations. Burning was one; aching was another. These sensations were not actually pain, at least not in the literal sense, and were not too bad to bear. Possibly I was still under drugs.

Holding my hand before my face, I studied it. I could not remember having seen it before, and I examined it carefully and with curiosity. The hand was large, rather broad, and with strong fingers. The nails were trimmed and in good condition, showing they had received care. Turned over, the palm showed no calluses from laboring.

The back of my hand, under additional inspection, disclosed a shadowing of heavy hair; the skin was smooth and unwrinkled.

I hadn’t used my hands to earn a living; this was the first fact I had been able to discover about myself. I dropped my hand on the bed. But my name. What was my name? Who was I? Then names began to run through my mind, coming from nowhere, without effort: Aly Khan, Duke of Windsor, Ernest Hemingway, Gary Cooper, Colonel Horstman, Adlai Stevenson, Goethe.

The flow stopped with a jolt. It was as if I had slammed down a floodgate. What had I been doing; what had I been thinking? These names which I recalled, which I remembered from somewhere, had come flooding back into my mind; but these were names which most people see and hear through newspapers, radio, television, motion pictures, and books during the course of their daily life. Did I really know them, or at least some of them? Or had I only heard about them?

In my excitement, I struggled to a sitting position. Immediately I choked, gasping for air, strangling, and I fell back against the pillow. From across the room I heard a voice say, “You better take it easy. You heard what the doc said.”

After a few moments I could breathe again. Running my eyes past the foot of my bed, into the room beyond it, I searched for the voice. The end of a second bed came into view. I couldn’t see who was in the other bed—only the two white pyramids the feet made beneath the sheet. The voice began again. It was a man’s voice, high and unpleasant. “I heard the doc talking to you,” he said, “and I gather you got to take it easy and not talk.”

I said nothing, while the voice continued, “We’re sort of roommates, us being in the same room.” Into my mind flashed a fleeting picture of another room, a university room, with a heavily raftered ceiling and rough plastered walls. Another roommate far distant and past. But the scene fled immediately under the cascade of words in the room. “My name is Merkle, Edward Merkle. My friends call me Ed,” the voice from the other bed went on; his voice droned as he told me about his sickness, about his operation. I closed my eyes while his words washed over me, smothering me under an avalanche of sound. Somewhere in a description of his job, I fell asleep, although there was something that I wanted to recall. But I couldn’t recall it right then.

THE
Eighth precinct station, in Manhattan, is located on Mercer between Third and Fourth streets. It is a five-story building with a gray stone front; five steps lead up to the heavy, wooden, carved double-door. The upper halves of the door contain delicate ironwork, and are flanked by two metal lamps set against the facade of the building. At night these lamps glow with a greenish light.

The precinct runs from Houston Street, on the Bowery, across to Sixth Avenue (or the Avenue of the Americas), then uptown to Fourteenth street. It is a cosmopolitan area including parts of the Bowery, manufacturing districts, New York University, sections of Greenwich Village, exclusive lower Fifth Avenue, shopping sections, Washington Square, a slice of Broadway, and innumerable side streets containing charming town houses, brownstones converted into boardinghouses, big modern apartments, walk-up flats, restaurants, cafes, bars, some night clubs, cheap hotels, expensive hotels, Sailor’s Snug Harbor, Salvation Army posts, a constantly busy fire department, and many rich churches.

One hundred and eight uniformed police and sixteen detectives work out of the Eighth precinct. As a rule, the Eighth is a fairly quiet and peaceful precinct, offering no particular problems to the men working in it. But, occasionally, when it does have a crime, it has a good one, or weird one, enough to satisfy anyone working on it.

It was approximately two
a.m.
when the call came through, and Precinct Detective David Burrows was assigned to it. He was on the midnight to eight
a.m.
shift. Mercer Street, which in the daylight has nothing to offer in the way of a view, early in the morning is dark, narrow, quite dirty, and is lined with melancholy buildings and warehouses.

Burrows drove, with two uniformed men, to the address reported and was nearly immediately joined by Detective Alvin Jensen, from Homicide East. From that moment on, the two detectives ... Burrows as the precinct detective, and Jensen from Homicide ... would cooperate, integrating their activities, and sharing the responsibilities.

Squad cars, three of them, were pulled up in the narrow tiny street, their headlights washing the night away from the front of the house with the body before it. The Squad cars were added to in number by the arrival of the police laboratory truck.

Burrows walked over to the body and looked down at it. Tentatively he touched the lifeless hand with the tip of his finger. He took a deep breath and said to Jensen, “This looks like a dandy.”

MISS PIERSON
entered the room carrying a jar of glucose. ‘Time for another intravenous,” she said. She hung the jar on a hook by the bed and attached a length of plastic tubing. Merkle watched her with interest. Anything in the room interested him; he refused to read, and spent his time talking to me. When the nurse placed the needle in my arm, Merkle said to me, “It was just a week ago today they brought you in.”