Romano covered his mouth with his hand and belched. He said, “Ferguson came to. I talked to him a few minutes. He says he saw a face that wasn’t human staring at him through a window that isn’t there.”
“One of those,” said Grierson.
“We’ve got to believe it,” Romano replied. He was trying to convince himself, not Grierson. “We’ve got to believe he saw The Butcher’s face. Later on he may remember and tell us something we can work on. He’s got a heart condition. He had a slight stroke when he got home last night, the medics say. When he came out of it and saw the body, his mind was fogged. He thinks the window was directly opposite the door. It isn’t. But he could have stepped around the body, turned right and seen the face there in the only window. We’ve got to keep on thinking he did.”
“The lab finished with the knife,” said Grierson. “It adds up to nothing. The fingerprints were only smudges.”
Romano nodded glumly. “Like usual,” he said. “I’ve been on the force since you were playing hopscotch. In all that time I’ve seen just one murder solved by fingerprints. The murderer was considerate. He left his prints in a pot of jeweler’s wax.”
Grierson said, “The poop on Ferguson is on your desk. Top folder. I looked it over. He’s a solid citizen. Nobody had a word to say against him. Manages a book store on lower Fifth Avenue that sells Bibles and religious stuff. He’s a pillar of the church. All his neighbors and his clergyman and the shopkeepers he deals with had a good word to say for him. He met his wife at his church. They’ve been married six years. No children.”
“That’s all?” Romano asked.
“Not quite,” said Grierson. “He was a student at a Divinity College when the war broke out. He wanted to be a minister. He could have been deferred from the draft, but he enlisted in a combat unit. He was an infantryman. He was with Clark’s Fifth Army all the way up The Boot. His record was good. Bronze Star decoration. Made staff sergeant. Was wounded slightly and got a Purple Heart. He was hospitalized a long time. It wasn’t the wound. He also suffered battle shock or combat fatigue or whatever it was they called it.”
“That means he’s a nut?” Romano asked. “It means he might see faces in windows that aren’t there?”
Grierson shrugged and yawned again. “Not unless a couple of million other guys who are walking the streets are nuts,” he answered. “There were at least that many cases of combat fatigue during the war, I understand. It’s a temporary breakdown of the nervous system, that’s all.”
“Thanks, Grierson,” Romano said. Sometimes he resented these new cops, the eager-beaver kind who had college degrees and studied law in night school. But they were useful. Romano hated to wade through long reports and Grierson knew it. Grierson could type with all ten fingers. He did most of the clerical poop that was part of a cop’s job. Romano hated to peck at the typewriter with two thick fingers. He always made mistakes. After doing it for more than twenty years, he made mistakes.
The lieutenant began to skim through the report on Ferguson. He didn’t read it carefully. He could depend on Grierson. Suddenly he paused and his thick eyebrows knit together.
“He was in that vet’s place right over on Staten Island,” he said.
Grierson said, “That’s right. Bay Heaven. It’s one of the biggest Army general hospitals in the country.”
“Get your hat,” Romano said. Romano was tying his shoe laces. “Why?” asked Grierson.
“We’re going over to Staten Island,” Romano answered. “There just might be some medic still around who remembers Ferguson.”
Grierson rose and stretched. “Oh, well,” he said, “it’s a nice day for a ferry ride.”
They left the police car parked on the lower deck of the ferry and climbed up to the top. They stood by the rail, letting the wind whip their faces, watching the skyline of Manhattan recede into the distance. More than eight million people lived and worked and had their being in this immediate area, Romano thought. One of them was called The Butcher.
“I wish I had some easy job,” the lieutenant said aloud. “Like finding a needle in a haystack.”
It took nearly two hours of questioning and waiting and checking the files at the hospital before they found a doctor named Bowers. He was an elderly man with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. After he had glanced over the files he remembered Lester Ferguson among the thousands of patients who had been under his care during the last dozen years. He remembered him quite clearly.
“A most interesting case,” Bowers said. “His wound was comparatively trivial, a fragment of shell in the leg that required surgery, but did no permanent damage. He didn’t even limp as a result. But he was in shock for an incredible length of time. Weeks, months, even. Sometimes he would lapse into a catatonic state. He would lie there on his cot, his body rigid, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. And he would murmur something in a kind of awed and frightened whisper. ‘The face,’ he’d say, ‘the face.’ He’d murmur that over and over again.
“It was trauma, of course, some shocking experience that had been repressed and had made a lasting impression on him. We couldn’t bring out what it was or when it had occurred. It might have been in his childhood. It might have been anything and it might have happened at any time. I always say a thing like that is a splinter under the skin of the mind. You have to extract it somehow. We tried various techniques. None of them seemed to work. Finally, we hit on sodium pentothal, the stuff the newspapers call truth serum. I doubt we’d use it now we have the new relaxing drugs, but it did the trick. When he was under the influence of the drug we questioned him, and we finally brought it out, removed the splinter, you might say.
“He’d seen a face, or thought he’d seen one, staring at him through a broken window during street fighting while they were mopping up some little town in Italy. He thought it was the Face of Evil, as he called it. It must have been a pretty horrible experience for him. He was wounded right afterward, but the face stayed in his mind. Once we got him to tell us about it, we purged the thing and he was on his way to recovery.”
“You think he saw a real face in the window?” Romano asked. “Or was it just some sort of delusion?”
The doctor shrugged. “It’s hard to say,” he answered. “It could have been a real face. It could have been the face of some enemy sniper trapped there in a ruined building. The street was piled with dead and dying men, probably. Such faces aren’t very pretty. Whatever it was he saw, he thought it was the Face of Evil. He called it that. You have to understand that Ferguson was a very religious man. He’d been studying for the ministry when he went into the Army. Killing is a terrible experience for any man. That was especially true for a man like Ferguson. Most soldiers go through a war never knowing for sure that the shots they fire have killed an enemy. Ferguson knew for sure. Just a few days before he was wounded, a few days before he saw the face, he’d been decorated for wiping out an enemy strongpoint with a grenade. Five machine-gunners were killed by the grenade.”
“And when you brought it out, when you made him tell you about the face — this Face of Evil — he was cured?” Romano asked.
“From the clinical view, he was,” Bowers answered. “He came out of shock. The catatonic periods did not recur. We kept him around awhile for observation. He was perfectly normal when he was discharged.”
“Ferguson saw the face again last night,” Romano said flatly.
Bowers said, “I’m sorry. That is bad, of course, but it happens sometimes, years later. Usually it’s some shattering experience that brings it on.”
“It was a shattering experience,” Romano told the doctor. “Ferguson’s wife was killed by a murderer they call The Butcher.”