Westlake, Donald E - Novel 41 (23 page)

 
          
 
It cost him four dollars, including the tip.
If she was still alive, it was the bargain of the century. But as he hurried
into the building and down the long narrow lobby to the elevators, the sound
he'd heard as he'd left his home came back to him, he heard it again in his
memory, and all at once he realized it hadn't been the baby next door at all.
It had been the telephone.

 
          
 
He pressed the elevator button desperately,
and the elevator slid slowly down to him from the eleventh floor. It had been
the ring of the telephone.

 
          
 
So she'd made her move already. He was too
late. When he'd left the house, he'd been too late.

 
          
 
The elevator doors opened, and he stepped in,
pushed the button marked 4. He rode upward.

 
          
 
He could visualize that phone call. The little
girl, hushed, terrified, whispering, beseeching. And Peg, half-awake, reading
his note to her. And he was too late.

 
          
 
The door to
apartment 4
-
A was ajar, the interior dark. He reached to
his hip, but he'd been in too much of a hurry. The gun was at home, on the
dresser.

 
          
 
He stepped across the threshold, cautiously,
peering into the dark. Dim light spilled in from the hallway, showing him only
this section of carpet near the door. The rest of the apartment was
pitch
black.

 
          
 
He felt the wall beside the door, found the
light switch and clicked it on.

 
          
 
The light in the hall went out.

 
          
 
He
tensed,
the
darkness now complete.
A penny in the socket?
And this
was an old building, in which the tenants didn't pay directly for their own
electricity, so the hall light was on the same line as the foyer of apartment A
on every floor. They must have blown a fuse once, and she'd noticed that.

 
          
 
But why?
What was she
trying for?

 
          
 
The telephone call, as he was leaving the house.
Somehow or other, she'd worked it out, and she knew that Levine was on his way
here, that Levine knew the truth.

 
          
 
He backed away toward the doorway. He needed
to get to the elevator, to get down and away from here. He'd call the precinct.
They'd need flashlights, and numbers. This darkness was no place for him,
alone.

 
          
 
A face
rose
toward
him, luminous, staring, grotesque, limned in pale cold green, a staring devil
face shining in green fire against the blackness. He cried out, instinctive
panic filling his mouth with bile, and stumbled backwards away from the thing,
bumping painfully into the doorpost. And the face disappeared.

 
          
 
He felt around him, his hands shaking, all
sense of direction lost. He had to get
out,
he had to
find the door. She was trying to kill him, she knew he knew and she was trying
to kill him the same way she'd killed
Walker
.
Trying to stop his
heart.

 
          
 
A shriek jolted into his ears, loud, loud,
incredibly loud, magnified far beyond the power of the human voice, a
world-filling scream of hatred, grating him to the bone, and his flailing hands
touched a wall, he leaned against it trembling. His mouth was op>en,
straining for air, his chest was clogged, his heart beat fitfully, like the
random motions of a wounded animal. The echoes of the shriek faded away, and
then it sounded again, even louder, all around him, vibrating him like a fly on
a pin.

 
          
 
He pushed away from the wall, blind and
panic-stricken, wanting only to get away, to be away, out of this horror, and
he stumbled into an armchair, lost his balance, fell heavily forward over the
chair and rolled to the floor.

 
          
 
He lay there, gasping, unthinking, as
brainlessly terrified as a rabbit in a trapper's snare. Pinwheels of light
circled the corners of his stinging
eyes,
every
straining breath was a searing fire in his throat. He lay on his back,
encumbered and helpless in the heavy overcoat, arms and legs curled upward in
feeble defense, and waited for the final blow.

 
          
 
But it didn't come. The silence lengthened,
the blackness of the apartment remained unbroken, and gradually rationality
came back to him and he could close his mouth.
painfully
swallow saliva, lower his arms and legs, and listen.

 
          
 
Nothing.
No sound.

 
          
 
She'd heard him fall, that was it. And now she
was waiting, to be sure he was dead. If she heard him move again, she'd hurl
another thunderbolt, but for now she wcis simply waiting.

 
          
 
And the wait gave him his only chance. The
face had been only phosphorescent paint on a balloon, pricked with a pin when
he cried out. The shriek had come, most likely, from a tape recorder.
Nothing that could kill him, nothing that could injure him, if only
he kept in his mind what they were, and what she was trying to do.

 
          
 
My heart is weak, he thought, but not that
weak. Not as weak as
Walker
's, still recovering from his first attack. It could kill
Walker
, but it couldn't quite kill me:

 
          
 
He lay there, recuperating, calming,
coming
back to himself. And then the flashlight flicked on,
and the beam was aimed full upon him.

 
          
 
He raised his head, looked into the light. He
could see nothing behind it. "^No, Amy," he said. "It didn't
work."

 
          
 
The light flicked off".

 
          
 
"Don't waste your time," he said
into the darkness. "If it didn't work at first, when I wasn't ready for
it, it won't work at all.

 
          
 
"Your mother is dead," he said,
speaking softly, knowing she was listening, that so long as she listened she
wouldn't move. He raised himself slowly to a sitting position. "You killed
her, too.
Your father and mother both.
And when you
called my home, to tell me that she'd killed herself, and my wife told you I'd
already left, you knew then that I knew. And you had to kill me, too. I'd told
you that my heart was weak, like your father's. So you'd kill me, and it would
simply be another heart failure, brought on by the sight of your mother's
corpse."

 
          
 
The silence was deep and complete, like a
forest pool.

           
 
Levine shifted, gaining his knees, moving
cautiously and without sound.

 
          
 
"Do you want to know how I knew?" he
asked her. "Monday in Civics Miss Haskell told you about the duties of the
police. But Miss Haskell told me that you were always at least a month ahead in
your studies. Two weeks before your stepfather died, you read that assignment
in your schoolbook, and then and there you decided how to kill them both."

 
          
 
He reathed out his hand, cautiously, touched
the chair he'd tripped over, shifted his weight that way, and came slowly to
his feet, still talking. "The only thing I don't understand," he
said, "is why. You steal books from the library that they won't let you
read. Was this the same thing to you? Is it all it was?"

 
          
 
From across the room, she spoke, for the first
time. "You'll never understand, Mr. Levine," she said.
That young voice, so cold and adult and emotionless, speaking out
contemptuously to him in the dark.

 
          
 
And all at once he could see the way it had
been with
Walker
. Somnolent in the bed, listening to the
frail fluttering of the weary heart, as Levine often lay at night, listening
and wondering. And suddenly that shriek, out of the midafternoon stillness,
coming from nowhere and everywhere, driving in at him

 
          
 
Levine shivered. "No," he said.
"It's you who don't understand. To steal a book, to snuff" out a
life, to you they're both the same. You don't understand at all."

 
          
 
She spoke again, the same cold contempt still
in her voice. "It was bad enough when it was only her. Don't do this,
don't do that. But then she had to marry him, and there were two of them
watching me all the time, saying no
no no
, that's all
they ever said. The only time I could ever have some peace was when I was at my
grandmother's."

 
          
 
"Is that why?" He could hear again
the baby crying, the gigantic ego of the very young, the imperious demand that
they be attended to. And in the place of terror, he now felt only rage. That
this useless half-begun thing should kill, and kill

 
          
 
"Do you know what's going to happen to
you?" he asked her. "They won't execute you, you're too young.
They'll judge you insane, and they'll lock you away. And there'll be guards and
matrons there, to say don't do this and don't do that, a million million times
more than you can imagine. And they'll keep you locked away in a little room,
forever and ever, and they'll let you do nothing you want to do, nothing."

 
          
 
He moved now, feeling his way around the
chair, reaching out to touch the wall, working his way carefully toward the
door. "There's nothing you can do to me now," he said. "Your bag
of tricks won't work, and I won't drink the poison you fed your mother. And no
one will believe the suicide confession you forged. I'm going to phone the
precinct, and they'll come and get you, and you'll be locked away in that tiny
room, forever and ever."

 
          
 
The flashlight hit the floor with a muffled
thud, and then he heard her running, away from him, deeper into the apartment.
He crossed the room with cautious haste, hands out before him, and felt around
on the floor till his fingers blundered into the flashlight. He picked it up,
clicked it on, and followed.

 
          
 
He found her in her mother's bedroom, standing
on the window sill. The window was wide open, and the December wind keened into
the room. The dead woman lay reposed on the bed, the suicide note conspicuous
on the nightstand. He shone the light full on the girl, and she warned him,
"Stay away. Stay away from me."

 
          
 
He walked toward her. "They'll lock you
away," he said.
"In a tiny, tiny room."

 
          
 
"No, they won't!"
she
was gone from the window.

 
          
 
Levine breathed, knowing what he had done,
that he had made it end this way. She hadn't ever understood death, and so it
was possible for her to throw herself into it. The parents begin the child, and
the child ends the parents. A white rage flamed in him at the thought.

 
          
 
He stepped to the window and looked down at
the broken doll on the sidewalk far below. In another apartment, above his
head, a baby wailed, creasing the night. Make way, make way.

 
          
 
He looked up. "We will," he
whispered. "We will.
But in our own time.
Don't
rush us."