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 reached 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 mid-afternoon 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!” And 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.”
The Death of a Bum
Abraham Levine of Brooklyn’s Forty-Third Precinct sat at his desk in the squadroom and wished Jack Crawley would get well soon. Crawley, his usual tour partner, was in the hospital recovering from a bullet in the leg, and Levine was working now with a youngster recently assigned to the squad, a college graduate named Andy Stettin. Levine liked the boy — though he sometimes had the feeling Stettin was picking his brains — but there was an awkwardness in the work without Crawley.
He was sitting now at the desk, thinking about Jack Crawley, when the telephone rang. He answered, saying, “Forty-Third Precinct. Levine.”
It was a woman’s voice, middle-aged, very excited. “There’s a man been murdered! You’ve got to come right away!”
Levine pulled pencil and paper close, then said, “Your name, please?”
“There’s been a murder! Don’t you understand—”
“Yes, ma’am. May I have your name, please?”
“Mrs. Francis Temple. He’s lying right upstairs.”
“The address, please?”
“One ninety-eight Third Street. I told all this to the other man, I don’t see—”
“And you say there’s a dead man there?”
“He’s been shot! I just went in to change the linen, and he was lying there!”
“Someone will be there right away.” He hung up as she was starting another sentence, and looked up to see Stettin, a tall athletic young man with dark-rimmed glasses and a blond crewcut, standing by the door, already wearing his coat.
“Just a second,” Levine said, and dialed for Mulvane, on the desk downstairs. “This is Abe. Did you just transfer a call from Mrs. Francis Temple to my office?”
“I did. The beat car’s on the way.”
“All right. Andy and I are taking it.”
Levine cradled the phone and got to his feet. He went over and took his coat from the rack and shrugged into it, then followed the impatient Stettin downstairs to the car.
That was another thing. Crawley had always driven the Chevy. But Stettin drove too fast, was too quick to hit the siren and gun through busy intersections, so now Levine had to do the driving, a chore he didn’t enjoy.
The address was on a block of ornate nineteenth-century brownstones, now all converted either into furnished apartments or boarding houses. One ninety-eight was furnished apartments, and Mrs. Francis Temple was its landlady. She was waiting on the top step of the stoop, wringing her hands, a buxom fiftyish woman in a black dress and open black sweater, a maroon knit shawl over her head to keep out the cold.