The Outsider (49 page)
Authors: Richard Wright
“That's just it!” Cross burst out. “I might forgive you if you had been going to kill me. But, no; you were going to make me a slave. I would never have been able to draw a free breath as long as I lived if you had had
your way. I'd have suffered, night and day. You would have dominated my consciousness. No, no, Hilton, there's more here than you say. Goddammit, there
is
! If not, then why all this meaningless suffering? If you had killed me, that would have been a simple act. Killing Bob might have been in a way merciful. He wasn't happy. But to make him suffer ten long years! Hell,
no
! You say life is just life, a simple act of accidental possession in the hands of him who happens to have it. But what's
suffering
? That rests in the sensesâ¦You might argue that you could snatch a life, blot out a consciousness and get away with it because you're strong and free enough to do it; but why turn a consciousness into a flame of suffering and let it lie, squirmingâ¦? No!” Cross's eyes were unblinking, seeing not Hilton sitting there staring at him, but Eva's diary, those pages telling of deception, of shame, of fear; and, too, he was remembering his own agonies in Chicago. He rose from the bed and looked wildly about the room.
“No, Lane,” Hilton was saying. “What are you going to do?”
Yes, he would turn up the radio, good and loud; it would help drown out the pistol shot. He turned the knob up and a leaping flood of jazz music filled the room. Hilton rose slowly, sensing that Cross was preparing to act. Cross kept the gun on him, then he saw the bed. Yes, make him get down there between those mattresses, and the sound of the bullet would not be heard.
“Lane, Lane, you're crazy!” Hilton was saying, his head shaking.
Cross saw that the man was losing his grip, was going to pieces.
“Take it easy, Hilton,” Cross told him.
“You can't get away with it, Lane!” Hilton begged.
His hands lifted themselves in a plea. “They'll hear the shotâSomebody will knowâThey'll catch youâListen, you want money? I got a few thousandâI'll give you anythingâBut
don't
do this⦔
Cross was possessed. He was crouching a little in the knees and his finger was conscious of the trigger. No, not yet; load the .32 and use itâ¦That was betterâ¦He backed off from Hilton, pulled out the .32, and, holding his own gun on Hilton, he took one bullet from his pocket. He took his handkerchief and quickly wiped the bullet clean of his fingerprints and slipped it into a chamber of Hilton's gun, his eyes hard on Hilton's face. His fingers fumbled as he worked, for he expected Hilton to make an effort to overpower him while he was nervously busy breaking the .32 and putting the cartridge inâ¦
Trusting, hoping for luck, Hilton rushed at him and Cross met the attack with a sharp blow from the butt of his gun across Hilton's forehead. The man slumped to the floor, still conscious, his eyes filmed with fear.
“No, Lane; no, no!”
Hilton was weeping now, suffering. Cross knew that he had to do it quickly or he could not do it at all. The sight of that tortured face was unnerving him. He stopped, grabbed Hilton by the collar, and yanked him toward the bed. He was surprised at how light the man was; and Hilton, in his craven fear, offered little resistance, as though he thought that being pliable might placate Cross and make him compassionate enough to spare his life.
“No, no, noâ¦For God's sake, Lane, don't
kill
me!”
He put his gun in his pocket and now held the .32 in his right hand. He kicked Hilton and muttered:
“Get on the bed!”
He had to act quickly, or this man's wild face would make him stop. Hilton, with glazed eyes, scrambled obediently upon the bed, his hand still held shakingly before his eyes.
“Lane, Lane, listen
âPlease!
” he sobbed.
Cross paused. Never in his life had he seen a man so undone by fear. He grabbed Hilton's head and, pulling one corner of the mattress up, he forced it over Hilton's head. Quick, quick, or he could not do it. Hilton's fingers were now clawing at Cross's hand that held his head to the bed. Cross placed the .32 at Hilton's temple and squeezed the trigger; there was a click. Oh, God, four of the chambers were empty; only one chamber was filled. Hilton's mouth was moving, but fear robbed him of the capacity of speech. Cross squeezed his finger on the trigger again and another empty click sounded, then again and there was a spurt of blue flame and a gaping hole showed in Hilton's temple and Cross was aware of the dancing waves of jazz music that swirled around the room. He saw that circling the bloody bullet hole in Hilton's temple were black powder burns.
He dropped the corner of the mattress and lowered the volume of the radio. Hilton's hands still moved; a labored breathing went in and out of the thin lips; there was a groan and the form on the bed was quiet. Cross strained, listening. There were no sounds in the corridor. He had to get out of hereâ¦The .32â¦Yesâ¦He wiped it clean of fingerprints on the sheet of the bed and tossed it beside Hilton's hand. He paused, then forced the gun into Hilton's fingers.
He looked about. His fingerprintsâSuddenly he did not want to try to save himself. What was the use? But he had to. He took a dirty shirt of Hilton's and wiped wherever he thought he had touched. He had to go, had to get out of this room. He was more concerned
with getting away from the sight of that grotesquely grey face with its gaping mouth than with saving himself. He went to the door, opened it slowly and looked into the corridor. He saw the retreating back of a man. He waited until the man had turned a corner, then he went out of the room, drawing the door to, and walked toward the elevator. He seemed to be floating along without effort; he was never able to remember afterwards making any attempt to run or hide. But when he got to the elevator, he pushed a button and then seemed to realize that he ought not be seen by the elevator boy. The shadow of the car heaved into view through the glass door of the elevator and he ducked away. He saw a flight of steps leading down; he took them, running, then slowed and walked on down to the lobby. Act natural, he told himself. He walked across the lobby, passing one or two people who glanced casually at him. He came to the newsstand and stopped.
“A
Daily News
,” he said.
He paid for the paper and, as he turned to walk to the door, there flitted through his head an idea of a way to establish something resembling a partial alibi for himselfâ¦Ought he try it? Why not? Holding the paper before his eyes and pretending to scan the headlines, he glanced quickly about. No one seemed to be aware of him. Yes, he would do it. He went casually to the desk and asked the clerk:
“Is Mr. Hilton in?”
“Oh, yes; I think he's in now, sir,” the clerk replied; he seemed to remember that Cross had asked for Hilton before. Turning, he examined the board holding the keys, then spoke to a brunette girl who sat facing a switchboard to his left. “Will you ring Mr. Hilton, pleaseâ¦? Room 342.”
“Okay,” the girl said.
“Who shall we tell him is calling?” the clerk asked.
“Lionel Lane.”
“Tell 'im Mr. Lane is calling,” the clerk told the girl.
Cross watched the girl plug in on room 342 and jiggle a tiny lever. A young woman with a suitcase came to the desk and Cross stepped to one side and listened as she inquired for a roomâ¦
“There's no answer from Mr. Hilton,” the girl at the switchboard told the clerk.
“No answer?” the clerk asked. “But I saw him go up a few minutes ago.”
“I'll try again,” the girl said.
“Won't you wait a second?” the clerk asked Cross. “We're trying to locate Mr. Hilton.”
“Certainly.”
“Did you have an appointment with 'im?”
“Well, yes. He asked me to come and see him as soon as possible. No time was specified,” Cross explained.
“She's ringing him again,” the clerk said, giving the woman with the suitcase the hotel register to sign. “Won't you sit down?”
“Thanks,” Cross said.
He sat. He hoped that his present actions would indicate in any future inquiry that he had not been upstairs. Would a murderer act as calmly and politely as he was acting now?
“There's no response at all from Mr. Hilton's room,” Cross heard the girl speaking.
“I'm sorry, sir,” the clerk said, “but we don't seem to be able to locate Mr. Hilton for the moment.”
“That'll be all right,” Cross said, rising.
“Would you care to wait awhile?”
“Well⦔
“Would you like to leave a message?”
Before Cross could answer the elevator door opened and several people came out into the lobby.
“Just a minute,” the clerk said, turning to the elevator boy. “Say, Sam, did Mr. Hilton go up?”
Sam looked blank and shook his head.
“I don't know.”
“What's the matter with your eyes?”
“I can't remember everybody who rides in this elevator,” the boy complained.
“Maybe he's in the dining room,” the clerk said.
“Maybe,” Sam said, getting into his elevator to ride another load of passengers up.
“Look,” Cross said. “I'll just leave a note.”
“Right, sir.”
On a pad of paper supplied by the clerk, Cross wrote:
Dear Hilton: I was by to see you twice this afternoon. I'll try again tomorrow morning. Everything's fine. Hope you got some sleep after that session last night.
Lane.
P.S. Don't worry about anything. Eva's doing wonderfully well.
P.P.S. Since you're so busy, why don't you phone me instead and let's fix a time?
He folded the note and handed it to the clerk who pushed it into the letter slot, numbered 342, of the keyboard behind him.
“Thank you,” Cross said.
“You're welcome, sir.”
It was not until Cross had gone out into the cold streets that the full reaction to what he had done began to set in. He trembled as he walked. Had he acted normal enough? Could it not now be argued in favor of his innocence that he had asked for Jack Hilton
twice
? As his
mind grasped more fully the folly of his having killed Hilton, a sense of nauseous depression seized him. He had killed Jack Hilton for many reasons: to redeem Bob's betrayal, for the sake of Sarah's indignation, for Eva's deceived heart; but mainly it had been to rid himself of that sense of outrage that Hilton's attitude had evoked in him, Hilton's assumption that he could have made a slave of him. He was mired deeper now than ever in the bog of consequences flowing from his compelling acts. He would be caughtâ¦Surely they would come at him now. To be found on the fringes of
two
crimes would certainly make the police think that something was wrongâ¦All right; so what? Was he not already lost anywayâ¦?
But was it as bad as all that? Did he not have an ironical array of invisible allies on his side? Would not the police have a rather difficult job of proving his guilt in terms of motives? What motives could they impute to him? The police would first have to prove that he had killed Gil and Herndon before they could get near his motive for having killed Hiltonâ¦Lacking concrete evidence, the police would have to fall back upon psychological motives. And in that realm he was certain that even Houston, that old outlaw who had trapped himself with the law, that outsider who was privy to the secrets of the moon's dark side, would find it well-nigh impossible to bring himself to the point of believing him guiltyâ¦Even if Houston should actually believe him guilty, would he dare express his theories about it publicly? Houston had a passion for toying with daring ideas, but juggling with possibilities and realistically putting one's self in a position to say definitely that a man committed a particular crime because of those possibilities were two wholly different things. And especially when the crime stemmed from such a ghostly set of reasonsâ¦
Were not the queer motives of his crimes in themselves a kind of ally? Would not Houston, precisely because of his position of public trust, instinctively hesitate to expound an idea that went contrary to the basic tenets of normal and even abnormal actions? (For abnormal actions carried with them an aura of irresponsibility, and Cross considered himself
responsible!
) Would not his accuser have to place himself, in branding him guilty, in a
psychological
attitude that would spell the same kind of guilt that resided in the heart of the criminal? There was an inescapable element of contagion hereâ¦Who could possibly suspect him of being guilty on the basis of his
real
motives unless he himself had wrestled fatally with the same serpentine motives in his own heart? And if one had so wrestled, might he not, on finding Cross guilty, feel inclined to cross the line of law and arraign himself on Cross's side? Was that not the secret of all the revolutionary “front” groups? You flaunted a program that would appeal to a part of the forces of the enemy; you induced a section of the enemy forces to work with you and, while your enemies were standing at your side and seeing the world as you saw it, experiencing life as you lived it, they could decide that yours was as right as the side to which they belongedâ¦Until now Cross had been lucky enough to leave no tangible clues behind, and the only clues open to anybody's inspection so far were only his motivesâ¦
His crimes constituted so decisive a divergence from the plane of ordinary moral considerations, stemmed from so weird an angle of perspective that he who would find him guilty must needs go so far as to place himself at that same point of vision that he had had while committing his crimes; and that person, his accuser, would automatically and of necessity have to be
come entangled in the very guilt he would denounce! He who would judge him would have to be as much outside of the canons of normal living as he before his guilt would become evident to that judge!
These were the intangible factors that made Cross, deep in his heart, rely upon Houston, the defender of the law, to condone and protect his breaking of the law. That Houston would track him down in time he was certain, but was Houston psychologically free to act upon what he found? Had not Houston admitted that maybe some men had the right to become lawgivers? Was there not, maybe, in Houston's heart the capacity to
respect
some forms of forceful crime? Had not men respected the crimes of Napoleon, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler�
There was no confusion in Cross's mind about this. He knew well that laws, on threat of dire punishment, enjoined men against certain specific acts; but did not those laws, by their very act of being laws, by describing the crimes they prohibited, represent negative projections of man's consciousness to check his own compulsive urge to commit the very crimes which the laws inveighed against? Was not the secret force of law itself really much deeper than the mere negative injunction against certain acts? Did not the positive aspects of law imply a conspiratorial understanding on the part of vast numbers of men to prevent, in terms of action, certain areas of consciousness from
thoughtlessly
assuming the upper hand in their lives? Was not law a struggle of man against man within man? Men who made and executed laws knew that the specific laws they framed or enforced would be violated, and it was not only to brook these specific violations of the law that they intended when they made and enforced those laws. The real aim of law was to
inhibit
in the consciousness of man certain kinds
of consciousnesses which the law had to
evoke
clearly and sharply in man's consciousness, for the law possesses the strange capacity of creating vividly in man's consciousness a sense of the reality of the crime it seeks to suppressâ¦
Law, then, by inhibiting man's actions, posits a sense of crime in man; law makes the criminal consciousness of man; law makes crime a sensual object, but it casts about that sensually forbidden object a dark halo of dreadâ¦Implied in law is a free choice to each man living under the law; indeed, one could almost say a free challenge is embedded in the law: if you are
strong
enough, you can do soâ¦But you must
know
what you are doingâ¦
Cross shrewdly suspected that Houston, a self-confessed outlaw, knew this, felt it; and it was what had made him become an active defender of the law; he
had
to represent the law in order to protect himself against his own weakness and fearâ¦
He turned off Eighth Street and walked toward home. As he neared Herndon's apartment building he became aware that a police car was pulling slowly into Charles Street at the opposite end of the block. Did they know already? Tension waxed in him. Yes, he would act natural, keep his wits about him. A confrontation regarding the death of Hilton would be far more serious than the questions he had answered regarding the deaths of Gil and Herndon. The police would now wonder at the coincidence of his being disquietingly near the scenes of
two
murders in twenty-four hoursâ¦
Yes, the occupants of the police car had evidently spotted him, for the car slowed and he arrived at the entrance of Herndon's building at the same time that the car did. He feigned to pay no attention to the car
and turned to mount the steps of the stoop. The door of the car flew open and a cop leaped to the sidewalk, ran, grabbed his arm, and spun him around.
“Just a minute!”
Cross gaped at the cop a moment in simulated surprise.
“What's the matter? What do you want?”
“We want to talk to you!”
Two more policemen came running from the car and the three of them surrounded him in the growing darkness of the street. Several people paused and stared. One of the cops barked roughly:
“Get goingâThis is none of your business!”
The passersby moved reluctantly on.
“What do you want?” Cross asked.
“You're Lionel Lane?”
“That's right.”
“You'd better come with us.”
“I'll come willingly, but why?”
“You'll know why soon enough.”
He allowed himself to be led, looking in alarm from one face to the other. He would pretend to be stunned; he would not talk. As they pushed him into the car, he glanced up at the lighted windows of Eva's apartment and wondered if she knew. He was sitting jammed between the policemen when the car jerked into motion and the siren rose to a wail as the car picked up speed. Then his breath was knocked out of him as the cops seized him from both left and right and patted his pockets. They found his gun and snatched it.
“Ah, a Colt .38â¦So you carry a gun, hunh?”
“Of course⦔
“What the hell do you mean by âOf course'?”
The cop broke the gun and extracted the bullets.
“I've a permit to carry a gun,” he told them gently.
There was a moment's silence. Cross took his wallet from his inside coat pocket and tendered the permit.
“Jesus! It was issued yesterday,” a cop exclaimed.
“Has the gun been fired?”
“Doesn't look or smell like it⦔
Three minutes later the siren died and the car pulled to a screeching stop and the doors were yanked open. Cross was pushed out and hustled into the interior of a police station and made to sit facing a tough, wide-mouthed, grey-haired policeman who stood behind a desk. Cross noticed that a plaque on the desk identified the man as: Captain Ross.
“We picked 'im up in front of where he lives,” a cop reported to the captain. “We grabbed him about two minutes after we got the call. He had this⦔ The cop put Cross's gun on the desk. “Here's his permit.”
The captain quickly examined the gun, then eyed Cross intently. He rose and stood over Cross.
“Frisk 'im,” the captain ordered.
One policeman held him while another swiftly emptied his pockets and piled his package of cigarettes, his ring of keys, his wallet, his lighter, his loose coins, and his folded newspaper upon the desk. He had a moment of wild panic when the policeman pulled the balled handkerchief from his pocketâ¦But the policeman handled it gingerly, as though he was afraid of germs. He had been lucky to have thought of wrapping the bloody handkerchief inside the clean one.
“Okay,” the captain said. “Take your stuff. Where do you live?”
“13 Charles Street.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I'm a student.”
“Where?”
“Well, I haven't enrolled yetâ”
“Where were you going when the officer met you?”
“Home. I was in front of the house where I live.”
“Why do you carry a gun?”
“My life has been threatened.”
“By whom?”
“My landlord who wasâ”
“When was this?”
“Yesterday. You seeâ”
“Have you used this gun recently?”
“No. I haven't fired that gun in over five years.”
“Do you know John Hilton?”
“Of course. I just left his hotelâ”
“You had an appointment with him?”
“That's right. But why are you asking me all thisâ?”
“We'll do the questioning. Now, what was the purpose of your visit to Mr. Hilton?”
“He invited me to see him.”
“What did you say to 'im?”
The police had not mentioned that Hilton was dead, and Cross knew that they were trying to trap him into some inadvertent admission that he knew that Hilton was dead or that he had recently seen him.
“Nothing. He wasn't in.”
“But you
saw
him?”
“No, I didn'tâ¦What's wrong?”
“Did you have a quarrel with 'im?”
“No. I've never quarreled with him.”
“You were good friends?”
“I wouldn't quite say that.”
“Why?”
“I just met the man two nights agoâ”
“And when you saw him just a few minutes agoâ”
“I haven't seen Mr. Hilton since ten o'clock this morning.”
“Did he give you an appointment to see him another time?”
“What do you mean?” Cross knew that the captain was still trying to trick him into admitting that he had seen Hilton.
“I mean, when you left him this afternoon, when did he tell you that you could see him?”
“But I didn't
see
him this afternoon, I tell you.”
“What did he want to see you about?”
“Well,” Cross allowed himself to relax a little. “He wanted to talk politicsâLook, you know as well as I that Hilton's a Communist. But I thought it was legal to talk to him.”
The captain sat down and pulled from the desk drawer the note which he had given to the clerk in the hotel.
“Did you write this?”
Cross affected to be astonished as he examined the note.
“Yes. I wrote this this afternoon, about forty-five minutes ago; or maybe half an hourâ¦But how did you get this? I thought I left it for Mr. Hilton⦔
“Did you push it under the door of his room?”
“No. I left it at the desk. But where did you get it?”
“We found it,” the captain said vaguely.
The police were trying in every way possible to drag him into an area where he would make a damaging admission.
“Then Hilton must have dropped it out of his pocket, or something like that. Or maybe the hotel clerk dropped it, lost itâ¦But I could swear I left it at the desk with the clerk,” Cross allowed himself to be confused, bewildered. He looked nonplussed from one face to another. The policemen were puzzled. “What's this all about? What do you want with me? Did Mr. Hilton say something to you?”
