There are different ways of mourning.
When a man’s fiancée is the victim of a brutal, senseless massacre in a bookshop, he can react in many ways, all of which are valid, none of which can be predetermined. He can cry his eyes out for a week or a month, and then accept the death, accept the fact that life goes on, with or without the girl he was going to marry one day, life is a progression, a moving forward, and death is a cessation. Bert Kling could have accepted the life surrounding him, could have accepted death as a natural part of life.
Or he could have reacted in another manner. He could have refused flatly to acknowledge the death. He could have gone on living with the fantasy that Claire Townsend was alive and well someplace, that the events which had started with a phone call to the squadroom on the thirteenth of October last year, moved into the shocking discovery of Claire among the victims in the bookshop, and culminated in the vicious beating of the man who’d killed her-he could have gone on pretending, indeed believing that none of these things had happened. Everything was just the way it was. He would continue to wait for Claire’s return, and when she came he would laugh with her and hold her in his arms and make love to her again, and one day they would be married. He could have kidded himself in that way.
Or he could have accepted the death without a tear, allowing grief to build inside him like a massive monument, stone added to stone, until the smiling outer visage became the ornate facade of a crumbling tomb, vast, and black, and windswept.
It is perhaps simple for an accountant to evaluate the murder of his fiancée, to go through the tribal custom of mourning, and then to cherish the memory of the girl while philosophically adjusting to the elementary facts of life and death. An accountant adds up columns of figures and decides how much income tax his client owes Uncle Sam. An accountant is concerned with mathematics. Bert Kling was a cop. And being a cop, being involved daily in work which involved crime, he was faced with constant reminders of the girl he had loved and the manner in which she had met her death. It was one thing to walk the streets of the precinct and to cross a six-year-old kid who stood on a street corner waiting for the traffic to pass. It was one thing to be investigating a burglary, or a robbery, or a beating, or a disappearance. It was quite another thing to he investigating a homicide.
The facts of life in the 87th Precinct were too often the facts of death. He had looked into the lifeless eyes of Claire Townsend on October 13th last year, and since that time he had looked into the lifeless eyes of three dozen more victims, male and female, and the eyes were always the same, the eyes always seemed to look up beseechingly as if something had been ripped forcibly from them before they were ready, the eyes seemed to be pleading for that something to be put back, the eyes seemed to beg silently, “Please give it back to me, I wasn’t ready.” The circumstances of death were always different. He had walked into a room and found a man with a hatchet imbedded in his skull, he had looked down at the eviscerated victim of a hit-and-run, he had opened a closet door and discovered a young girl with a rope knotted about her neck, hanging from the clothes bar, he had found an alcoholic who had drunk himself to death in the doorway of a whorehouse, the circumstances were always different-but the eyes were always the same.
“Please give it back to me,” they said. “I wasn’t ready.”
And each time he looked into a new pair of eyes, he turned away because the image of Claire Townsend on the bookshop floor, her blouse stained a bright red, the book lying open in a tent over her face, his hands lifting the book, his eyes looking into her own dead and staring eyes, this image always and suddenly flared into his mind and left him numb and senseless. He could not think clearly for several moments, he could only turn away from each new corpse and stare at the wall like a man transfixed while a private horror movie ran in the tight projection booth of his mind, reel after reel until he wanted to scream aloud and stopped himself from doing so only by clenching his teeth.
Death meant only one thing to Kling. Death meant Claire Townsend. The daily reminders of death were daily reminders of Claire. And with each reminder, his emotions would close like a fist, tightly clenched; he could not open it, he could not afford to let go. He withdrew instead, retreating from each grisly prod, accepting the burden of memory wearily, refusing sympathy, forsaking hope, foreseeing a future as bleak and as barren as the present.
The equation that day in the tiny office of Michael Thayer in the Brio Building was a simple one. Hawes examined the equation dispassionately, uncomfortable in the presence of Kling and Thayer, recognizing the source of his discomfort, but finding no solace at all in the recognition. Irene Thayer equaled Death equaled Claire Townsend. Such was the elementary equation that seemed to electrify the very air in the small room.
The room was on the sixth floor of the building, its single window open to the April breezes, it contained a desk and file cabinet and a telephone and a calendar and two chairs, Michael Thayer sat in one of the chairs behind the desk Hawes sat in the chair in front of the desk, Kling stood tensed like a spring coil alongside Hawes, as if ready to unlock and leap across the desk the moment Thayer said anything contradictory. A stack of completed greeting-card verse rested alongside Thayer’s typewriter in a neat, squared pile. A sheet of unfinished doggerel was in the typewriter.
“We work pretty far in advance,” Thayer said. “I’m already doing stuff for next Valentine’s Day.”
“Don’t you find it difficult to work so soon after the funeral. Mr. Thayer?” Kling asked.
The question seemed so cruel, so heartlessly devised, that Hawes was instantly torn between a desire to gag Kling and a desire to punch him right in the mouth. Instead, he saw the pain flicker in Thayer’s eyes for an instant, and he almost felt the pain himself, and then Thayer said very softly, “Yes, I find it difficult to work.”
“Mr. Thayer,” Hawes said quickly, “we don’t mean to intrude at a time like this, believe me, but there are some things we have to know.”
“Yes, you said that the last time I saw you.”
“I meant it then, and I mean it now.”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Did you know your wife was going to sue you for divorce?” Kling asked abruptly.
Thayer looked surprised. “No.” He paused. “How do you know that?”
“We talked with her lawyer,” Hawes said.
“Her lawyer? Art Patterson, do you mean?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He never said anything to me about it.”
“No, sir, she asked him not to.”
“Why?”
“She wanted it that way, Mr. Thayer.”
“Mr. Thayer,” Kling said, “are you sure you had no inkling that your wife was about to divorce you?”
“None whatever.”
“That’s a little odd, isn’t it? A woman plans to leave you next month, and you haven’t got the slightest suspicion that something’s in the wind.”