Westlake, Donald E - Novel 41 (8 page)

 
          
 
"Perkins," said Levine, the minute
he walked in the room, before
Crawley
had
a chance to give the game away by saying something to Ricco, "this is Dan
Ricco, a reporter from the Daily News."*

 
          
 
Perkins looked at Ricco with obvious interest,
the first real display of interest and animation Levine had yet seen from him.
"A reporter?"

 
          
 
"That's right," said Ricco. He
looked at Levine. "What is this?" he asked. He was playing it
straight and blank.

 
          
 
"College student," said Levine,
"Name's Larry Perkins." He spelled the last name. "He poisoned a
fellow student."

 
          
 
"Oh, yeah?"
Ricco glanced at Perkins without much eagerness. "What for?" he
asked, looking back at Levine.
"Girl?
Any sex in it?"

 
          
 
"Afraid not.
It
was some kind of intellectual motivation. They both wanted to be writers."

 
          
 
Ricco shrugged.
"Two
guys with the same job?
What's so hot about that?"

 
          
 
"Well, the main thing," said
Levine,
"is that Perkins here wants to be famous. He
tried to get famous by being a writer, but that wasn't working out. So he
decided to be a famous murderer."

 
          
 
Ricco looked at Perkins. "Is that
right?" he asked.

 
          
 
Perkins was glowering at them all, but
especially at Levine. "What difference does it make?" he said.

 
          
 
"The kid's going to get the chair, of
course," said Levine blandly. "We have his signed confession and
everything. But I've kind of taken a liking to him. I'd hate to see him throw
his life away without getting something for it. I thought maybe you could get
him a nice headline on page two, something he could hang up on the wall of his
cell."

 
          
 
Ricco chuckled and shook his head. "Not a
chance of it," he said. "Even if I wrote the story big, the city desk
would knock it down to nothing. This kind of story is a dime a dozen. People
kill other people around
New York
twenty-four hours a day. Unless there's a good strong sex interest, or
it's maybe one of those mass killings things like the guy who put the bomb in
the airplane, a murder in
New York
is filler stuff. And who needs filler stuff in the spring, when the
ball teams are just getting started?"

 
          
 
"You've got influence on the paper,
Dan," said Levine. "Couldn't you at least get him picked up by the
wire services?"

 
          
 
"Not a chance in a million. What's he
done that a few hundred other clucks in
New York
don't do every year? Sorry, Abe, I'd like
to do you the favor, but it's no go."

 
          
 
Levine sighed. "Okay, Dan," he said.
"If you say so."

 
          
 
"Sorry," said Ricco. He grinned at
Perkins. "Sorry, kid," he said. "You should
of
knifed a chorus girl or something."

 
          
 
Ricco left and Levine glanced at
Crawley
, who was industriously yanking on his
ear-lobe and looking bewildered. Levine sat down facing Perkins and said,
"Well?"

 
          
 
"Let me alone a minute," snarled
Perkins. "I'm trying to think."

 
          
 
"I was right, wasn't I?" asked
Levine. "You wanted to go out in a blaze of glory."

           
 
"All right, all right.
Al took his way, I took mine. Whafs the difference
?*
*

 
          
 
"No difference," said Levine. He got
wearily to his feet, and headed for the door. "I'll have you sent back to
your cell now."

 
          
 
"Listen," said Perkins suddenly.
"You know I didn't kill him, don't you? You know he committed suicide,
don't you?"

 
          
 
Levine opened the door and motioned to the two
uniformed cops waiting in the hall.

 
          
 
"Wait," said Perkins desperately.

 
          
 
"I know, I know," said Levine.
"Gruber really killed himself, and I suppose you burned the note he
left."

 
          
 
"You know damn well I did."

 
          
 
"That's too bad, boy."

 
          
 
Perkins didn't want to leave. Levine watched
deadpan as the boy was led away, and then he allowed himself to relax, let the
tension drain out of him. He sagged into a chair and studied the veins on the
backs of his hands.

 
          
 
Crawley
said, into the silence, "What was all that about, Abe?"

 
          
 
"Just what you
heard."

 
          
 
"Gruber committed suicide?"

 
          
 
"They both did."

 
          
 
"Well —what are we going to do now?"

 
          
 
"Nothing.
We
investigated; we got a confession; we made an arrest. Now we're done."

 
          
 
"But
— "

 
          
 
"But hell!"
Levine glared at his partner. "That litde fool is gonna go to trial, Jack,
and he's gonna be convicted and go to the chair. He chose it himself. It was his
choice. I'm not railroading him; he chose his own end. And he's going to get
what he wanted."

 
          
 
"But listen,
Abe "

 
          
 
"I won't listen!"

 
          
 
"Let me —let me get a word in."

 
          
 
Levine was on his feet suddenly, and now it
all came boiling out, the indignation and the rage and the frustration.
"Damn it, you don't know yet! You've got another six, seven years yet. You
don't know what it feels like to lie awake in bed at night and listen to your
heart skip a beat every once in a while, and wonder when it's going to skip two
beats in a row and you're dead. You don't know what it feels like to know your
body's starting to die, it's starting to get old and die and it's all downhill
from now on."

 
          
 
"What's that got to do with
— "

 
          
 
"I'll tell you what! They had the choice!
Both of them young, both of them with sound bodies and sound
hearts and years ahead of them, decades ahead of them.
And they chose to
throw it away! They chose to throw away what I don't have any more. Don't you
think I wish I had that choice? All right! They chose to die, let 'em
die!"

 
          
 
Levine was panting from exertion, leaning over
the desk and shouting in Jack Crawley's face. And now, in the sudden silence
while he wasn't speaking, he heard the ragged rustle of his breath, felt the
tremblings of nerve and muscle throughout his body. He let himself carefully
down into a chair and sat there, staring' at the wall, trying to get his
breath.

 
          
 
Jack Crawley was saying something, far away,
but Levine couldn't hear him. He was listening to something else, the loudest
sound in
all the
world.
The fitful
throbbing of his own heart.

 
          
 
Detective Abraham Levine of
Brooklyn
's Forty-Third Precinct was a worried and a
frightened man. He sat moodily at his desk in the small office he shared with
his partner, Jack Crawley, and pensively drew lopsided circles on the back of a
blank accident report form. In the approximate center of each circle he placed
a dot, drew two lines out from the dot to make a clockface, reading
three o'clock
. An eight and a half by eleven sheet of
white paper, covered with clock-faces, all reading
three o'clock
.

 
          
 
"That the time you see the doctor?"

 
          
 
Levine looked up, startled,
called
back from years away.
Crawley
was standing beside the desk, looking down at
him, and Levine blinked, not having heard the question.

 
          
 
Crawley
reached down and tapped the paper with a horny fingernail. "
Three o'clock
," he explained. "That the time
you see the doctor?"

 
          
 
"Oh," said Levine. "Yes.
Three o'clock
."

           
 
Crawley
said, "Take it easy, Abe."

 
          
 
"Sure," said Levine. He managed a
weak smile. "No sense worrying beforehand, huh?"

 
          
 
"My brother," said
Crawley
, "he had one of those cardiograph
things just a couple of months ago. He's just around your age, and man, he was
worried. And the doctor tells him, *
You'll
live to be
a hundred.'"

 
          
 
"And then you'll die," said Levine.

 
          
 
"What the hell, Abe, we all got to go
sometime.'^

 
          
 
"Sure."

 
          
 
"Listen, Abe, you want to go on home?
It's a dull day, nothing doing, I can
— "

 
          
 
"Don't say that," Levine warned him.
"The phone will ring." The phone rang as he was talking and he
grinned, shrugging with palms up. "See?"

 
          
 
"Let me see what it is," said
Crawley
, reaching for the phone.
"Probably
nothing important.
You can go on home and take it easy till
three o'clock
. It's only ten now and —
Hello
?"
The last word spoken into the phone mouthpiece.
"Yeah, this is
Crawley
."

 
          
 
Levine watched
Crawley
's face, trying to read in it the nature of
the call.
Crawley
had been his partner for seven years, since
old Jake Moshby had retired, and in that time they had become good friends, as
close as two such different men could get to one another.

 
          
 
Crawley
was
a big man, somewhat overweight, somewhere in his middle forties. His clothes
hung awkwardly on him, not as though they were too large or too small but as
though they had been planned for a man of completely different proportions. His
face was rugged, squarish,
heavy
-jowled. He looked
like a tough cop, and he played the role very well.

 
          
 
Crawley
had
once described the quality of their partnership with reasonable accuracy.
"With your brains and my beauty, Abe, we've got it made."

 
          
 
Now Levine watched
Crawley
's face as the big man listened impassively
to the phone, finally nodding and saying, "Okay, I'll go right on up
there. Yeah, I know, that's what I figure, too." And he hung up.

 
          
 
"What is
it.
Jack?" Levine asked, getting up from the desk.

 
          
 
"A phony," said
Crawley
. "I can handle it, Abe. You go on
home."

 
          
 
"I'd rather have some work to do. What is
it?"

 
          
 
Crawley
was
striding for the door, Levine after him. "Man on a ledge," he said.
"A phony.
They're all phonies. The ones that really
mean to jump do it right away, get it over with. Guys like this one, all they
want
is
a little attention, somebody to tell them it's
all okay, come on back in, everything's forgiven."

 
          
 
The two of them walked down the long green
hall toward the front of the precinct. Man on a ledge, Levine thought. Don't
jump. Don't die. For God's sake, don't die.

 
          
 
The address was an office building on
Flatbush Avenue
, a few blocks down from the bridge, near
A&S and the major
Brooklyn
movie houses. A small crowd had gathered on
the sidewalk across the street, looking up, but most of the pedestrians stopped
only for a second or two, only long enough to see what the small crowd was
gaping at, and then hurried on wherever they were going. They were still
involved in life, they had things to do,
they
didn't
have time to watch a man die.

 
          
 
Traffic on this side was being rerouted away from
this block of Flatbush, around via
Fulton
or
Willoughby
or DeKalb. It was a litde after
ten o'clock
on a sunny day in late June, warm without
the humidity that would hit the city a week or two farther into the summer, but
the uniformed cop who waved at them to make the turn was sweating, his blue
shirt stained a darker blue, his forehead creased with strain above the
sunglasses.

 
          
 
Crawley
was
driving their car, an unmarked black '56 Chevy, no siren, and he braked to a
stop in front of the patrolman. He stuck his head and arm out the window,
danghng his wallet open so the badge showed. "Precinct," he called.

 
          
 
"Oh," said the cop. He stepped aside
to let them pass. "You didn't have any siren or light or anything,"
he explained.

 
          
 
"We don't want to make our friend
nervous,"
Crawley
told him.

 
          
 
The cop glanced up,
then
looked back at
Crawley
. "He's making me nervous," he
said.

 
          
 
Crawley
laughed. "A phony," he told the cop. "Wait and see."

 
          
 
On his side of the car, Levine had leaned his
head out the window, was looking up,
studying
the man
on the ledge.

 
          
 
It was an office building, eight stories high.
Not a very tall building, particularly for
New York
, but plenty tall enough for the purposes of
the man standing on the ledge that girdled the building at the sixth floor
level. The first floor of the building was mainly a bank and partiailly a
luncheonette. The second floor, according to the lettering strung along the
front windows, was entirely given over to a loan company, and Levine could
understand the advantage of the location. A man had his loan request turned
down by the bank, all he had to do was go up one flight of stairs —or one
flight in the elevator, more likely —and there was the loan company.

 
          
 
And if the loan company failed him too, there
was a nice ledge on the sixth floor.

 
          
 
Levine wondered if this particular case had
anything to do with money. Almost everything had something to do with money.
Things that he became aware of because he was a cop, almost all of them had
something to do with money. The psychoanalysts are wrong, he thought. It isn't
sex that's at the center of all the pain in the world,
it's
money. Even when a cop answers a call from neighbors complaining about a couple
screaming and fighting and throwing things at one another, nine times out of
ten it's the same old thing they're arguing about.
Money.

           
 
Levine's eyes traveled up the facade of the
building, beyond the loan company's windows. None of the windows higher up bore
the lettering of firm names. On the sixth floor, most of the windows were
open,
heads were sticking out into the air. And in the
middle of it all, just out of reach of the windows on either side of him, was
the man on the ledge.

 
          
 
Levine squinted, trying to see the man better
against the brightness of the day. He wore a suit —it looked gray, but might be
black —and a white shirt and dark tie, and the open suit coat and the tie were
both whipping in the breeze up there. The man was standing as though crucified,
back flat against the wall of the building, legs spread maybe two feet apart,
arms out straight to either side of him, hands pressed palm-in against the
stone surface of the wall.

 
          
 
The man was terrified. Levine was much too far
away to see his face or read the expression there, but he didn't need any more
than the posture of the body on the ledge. Taut, pasted to the wall,
wide-spread. The man was terrified.

 
          
 
Crawley
was
right, of course. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the man on the ledge is a
phony. He doesn't really expect to have to kill himself, though he will do it
if pressed too hard. But he's out there on the ledge for one purpose and one
purpose only: to be seen. He wants to be seen, he wants to be noticed. Whatever
his unfulfilled demands on life, whatever his frustrations or problems, he
wants other people to be forced to be aware of them, and to agree to help him
overcome them.

 
          
 
If he gets satisfaction, he will allow
himself, after a decent interval, to be brought back in. If he gets the raise,
or the girl, or forgiveness from the boss for his
embezzling,
or forgiveness from his wife for his philandering, or whatever his one urgent
demand is, once the demand is met, he will come in from the ledge.

 
          
 
But there is one danger he doesn't stop to
think about, not until it's too late and he's already out there on the ledge,
and the drama has already begun. The police know of this danger, and they know
it is by far the greatest danger of the man on the ledge, much greater than any
danger of deliberate self-destruction.

 
          
 
He can fall.

 
          
 
This one had learned that danger by now, as
every inch of his straining taut body testified. He had learned it, and he was
frightened out of his wits,

 
          
 
Levine grimaced. The man on the ledge didn't
know —or if he knew, the knowledge was useless to him —that a terrified man can
have an accident much more readily and much more quickly than
a calm
man. And so the man on the ledge always compounded
his danger.