“That’s not — ”
The detective cut him off. “Answer my question, Peter.”
“Of course I don’t,” he said — a forced concession.
“So what are you afraid of? A big guy like you. I don’t get it. A guy slugs me, I’d want to see his ass in a sling. I want to see him punished. All I’m asking, Peter, is that you help us enforce a law which is for your protection. Is that too much to ask of a guy like you?”
Peter suffered the question. “I don’t know,” he said, meaning “go to hell.”
“Don’t you understand what I’m saying, Peter? In this country, the law is you. You are the law.”
Peter looked at the detective for a moment as though he were looking in the mirror. “If it is me,” he said, “then I think it’s possible that I’m afraid of myself.”
The detective laughed gratefully. It was as if, without knowing it, starting from opposite positions, they arrived at the same truth. And whose terror was the greater?
Peter picked up a glass ashtray from the corner of the desk and began to play with it, tossing it from one hand to the other.
The detective’s eyes peering through private keyholes followed the flight of the ashtray. Be careful, the eyes said, I hate death. In his own voice, the detective said, “Then you’ll make an identification? All you have to do is sign your name on a sheet of paper. That’s all.”
“I told you before, Lieutenant — the man you brought in was not the one who hit me.”
“What kind of fool do you take me for?” The detective stood up abruptly and Peter had a vision of himself being shot while trying to escape from the police station. He took a tentative step backward.
Two policemen came in with an unkempt, weasel-faced man who looked like Ira Whimple. “Attempted rape,” one of them said.
“Do you want to make a statement?” the detective asked the rapist. (They looked enough like each other to be brothers.)
“She gave me the evil eye,” the man said, directing his remarks to Peter. “I couldn’t do but what I did.” “I see.” Peter nodded.
“The girl was no more than ten years old,” the other policeman said. ‘This guy’s some kind of nut, Lieutenant.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” the detective said solemnly, smiling a wink at the older of the two policemen. “Have him fingerprinted and mugged, Frank, and get a statement — he looks like a talker to me. Find out if he’s ever been booked before.”
“Sure thing, Lieutenant.”
“I’m innocent,” the man protested to Peter. “What’s your crime?”
He was out of the office before Peter could explain that he also was innocent.
“Well, I’m through fooling with you, Peter,” the detective said, looking in his desk drawer for something (a gun?). “We both know that Auntie Windsor was the one who slugged and robbed you. Are you going to make an identification or not? You know, you can be jailed for withholding evidence.”
Peter hesitated, considered the alternatives, liked neither. Sweated.
‘Well? Get off the pot.”
Peter planned to say, All right, I’ll sign it (better Windsor’s death than his own) but when he opened his mouth, “No” flew out like a dying bird.
“I’m sorry you said that, Peter.” A tear of sorrow at the corner of his mouth.
Peter walked to the door, his back to the detective, expecting to be shot down at any minute. …
“Come back here with my ashtray, Peter.”
“Sorry.” He returned the ashtray to its place.
The detective smiled balefully. “Well, Peter, I must say you’re a disappointment to me.” He blew his nose, a call to battle.
“My name to you, Lieutenant, is Mister Becker.”
The detective honked his nose again. “As I say, Peter, you’re a disappointment to me.”
Peter, bumping into a chair as he left, escaped with his life; Mister Becker, barely.
| 9 |
Afterward he was sorry, but not about that — about other things.
Fired from his job, Peter returned home early for dinner, came home at two twenty-five (a little late for lunch) and besides, there was no one there to have lunch with.
And besides: where was she?
Lois’s classes, he knew (like the back of his hand, like the underside of his tongue), were over at twelve; even if she had gone to the cafeteria for lunch and afterward to the library to get some books, she should have been back by two. He gave her a half-hour’s grace; then, benevolent, though out of work, he gave her another fifteen minutes free of charge, but somewhere inside his head the meter was running, ticking off the fare: a nickel of blood every quarter of an hour.
He found himself, for all his irritation (though perhaps because of it), desperately in love with her — his desire for her an ache extending from chest to groin. He was reminded of a Sunday they had gone for a drive to Bear Mountain, and had in an open field, under a tree, come together in a fever of love. He could almost taste the memory. They had remained in the field, holding each other all afternoon and into the night, not wanting to leave. “Let’s never go back,” Lois said. “Okay,” he agreed, “we’ll stay here forever.”
Where was she? At a quarter to four — Lois still not home — Peter stopped hallucinating long enough to call Herbie.
Gloria answered. “I’m sorry, there’s no one by that name here,” she said.
“By what name? This is Peter, Gloria. Herbie’s brother,” he added in case she had forgotten.
“Oh!” Silence. “How do I know it’s you?”
How? “Who else would claim to be me?” he said. “Also, you can recognize me by my body odor.”
Silence. “You don’t have body odor, Peter. I mean, I’ve met men who are really offensive to be in the same room with.”
“Yeah?” What could he say? “As a matter of fact, Gloria, I like your smell too.”
“It’s French perfume. Herbie gets it from some importer friend of his.”
“What’s Herbie doing?”
Gloria sighed. “He’s out of town for a while, Peter. On business.”
“When do you expect him back?”
“I’m not supposed to say anything, but really, I don’t know. Really I don’t.”
He didn’t know what to believe; Gloria had an absolute incapacity both, it seemed, for telling the truth and for lying credibly. “Is Herbie in some kind of trouble?” he asked.
“Isn’t he always?” Then, as if she hadn’t already given it away: “He went west, somewhere in the West, Peter, on some kind of business trip. That’s all I know. Word of honor.”
“Where in the West?”
She didn’t know. Somewhere in the West.
Peter added up his information: “You don’t know where Herbie is, or what he’s doing, or when he’ll be back. Do you know anything?”
“I know I’m all by my lonesome,” she said dolefully.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Love burned in his groin, the song of his sorrows. “Do you need anything?”
He thought he heard her shrug — the phone in its way a marvelous instrument — envisioned her collapsing into Herbie’s Goodwill sofa, “Stardust” crooning to her, serenading them both in the background.
“Well,” he said, tired of talk, listening.
He heard her nod.
“Can you hear the music?” she asked after a while. He nodded.
“I can’t hear you, Peter … Peter? Hey, have we been cut off?”
“Yes.”
“You! You had me worried about you. I thought maybe you’d fainted again, like last night when you tried to hit Herbie. How are you, by the way? Hold on. I’m going to turn the record over, or would you like to hear it again?”