One Night Stands and Lost Weekends

One Night Stands and Lost Weekends Page 20

“Not at all. I’m rather interested now, you know. It’s not something you see every day.”

They waited. After several minutes, a pair of shackles plummeted through the air and dropped to the ground about twenty yards from the two Altheans.

“Ah,” said the first. “He’s found the key.”

Moments later, the second pair of shackles followed the first, and the key followed soon thereafter. Then the prisoner walked to the edge of the tower and leaned over the railing gazing down at them.

“Awesome,” said the second Althean. “I’m glad he can’t escape.”

The prisoner regarded them thoughtfully for several seconds. Then he mounted the railing, flapped his wings, and soared off into the sky.

ONE NIGHT OF DEATH

IT WAS JUST SEVEN O’CLOCK. I heard the bells ring at the little church two blocks down Mercer Street, and the bells set me on edge.

Seven o’clock.

In five hours they would kill my father.

They would take him from his cell and walk slowly to a little room at the end of the corridor. It would be a long walk, but it would end with him inside the little room, alone, with the door closed after him. Then he would sit or stand or wait.

At precisely twelve o’clock, they’d open the gas vents. The cyanide gas would rush into the chamber. Maybe he’d cough; I didn’t know. But whether he did or not, the gas would enter his lungs when he breathed. Oh, he’d try to hold his breath as long as he could. My dad’s a fighter, you see, but there are some things you can’t fight.

The gas would kill him. Then they would draw the gas back into the tanks to save it for the next one, and they’d take my father’s body out of the room. It would be buried somewhere.

I couldn’t stay in the house another minute. I couldn’t sit watching my mother try to dull the pain with glass after glass of cheap muscatel, couldn’t listen to her crying softly. I wanted to cry, too—but I didn’t know how anymore.

I slipped on my jacket and left the house, closing the door softly. It was cool outside. The air was crisp and fresh, with a breeze blowing and the fallen leaves skittering along the pavement.

It could have been a beautiful night, but it wasn’t.

My father was a murderer, and tonight they were going to kill him.

Murderer. The picture that word makes isn’t right at all. Because my dad’s not a cruel or a vicious man or a money-hungry man. He was a cutter in a dress shop, not too long ago, and he saved his money so that he could go into business for himself in the Seventh Avenue rat-race.

It was no place for him, a mild, easy-going guy. The law of the Avenue is kill or be killed, screw the competition before they screw you. But Dad didn’t want to hand anyone a raw deal. He just wanted to make pretty dresses and sell them. And Seventh Avenue isn’t like that, not at all.

He managed to stomach it. It kept us eating good and he managed to make the kind of dresses he wanted. A man can learn to adjust to almost anything, he told me once. A man does what he has to do.

Dad’s partner was a man named Bookspan, and he handled the business end while Dad took care of production. Bookspan was a crook, and the one thing Dad couldn’t adjust to was a crooked partner, a partner who was cheating him.

When Dad found out, he killed him.

Not impulsively, with the anger hot and fresh in him, because he’s not an impulsive sort of man. He bided his time and waited, until he and Bookspan took a business trip to Los Angeles. He picked up a pistol in a hockshop in L.A. and blew out Bookspan’s brains.

And they caught him, of course. The poor guy, he didn’t even try to get away. It was an open-and-shut case, premeditated and all. He was tried in L.A. where the murder took place, and he was sentenced to death at San Quentin.

I walked around aimlessly, just thinking about it. Here I was in New York, and my father was going to die on the other side of the continent. In less than five hours.

Then, of course, I realized that it would be eight hours. There’s a time difference of three hours between New York and California. He had eight hours to live, and I had eight hours before it was time to mourn him.

How do you wait for a person to die? What do you do, when you know the very minute of death? Do you go to a movie? Watch television, maybe? Read a magazine?

I hadn’t even noticed where I was, and I looked up to discover that I’d drifted clear over to Saint Mark’s Place. It was natural enough. I used to spend most of my time on that little street, just east of Third Avenue and north of Cooper Square. I used to spend my time with Betty, who used to be my girl.

Before the murder.

Murders change things, you see. They turn things upside down, and suddenly Betty wasn’t my girl anymore. Suddenly, she wasn’t speaking to me any longer. I was a murderer’s son.

Dan Bookspan wasn’t a murderer’s son, though. He was the same rotten, smooth-talking, crooked kind of a bastard as his old man, but his old man was dead now. So Dan Bookspan had my girl.

I got the hell away from Saint Mark’s Place. I walked south to an old joint on the corner of Great Jones Street and the Bowery. I sat down on a stool in the back and ordered rye and soda. I sat down there with bums stinking and babbling on either side of me, in a Bowery bar where no one cared that I was just seventeen and too young to drink, and I poured the rye in.

The time passed, thank God. The television was going but I didn’t look at it, and there were a few brawls but I didn’t watch or participate. I just wanted to get loaded and watch the hours go by until it was three in the morning and my father was dead.

I didn’t get drunk. I drank slowly, for one thing. More important, I had too much of a fire going inside of me to get tight. I burned the alcohol up before it could get to me, I guess.

By midnight I couldn’t stand it any longer. I wanted to be with someone, and being alone was impossible. I couldn’t go home, for I knew how important it was to Mom that she be by herself. She had a lot of crying and drinking to do, and I didn’t want to get in her way.

There was no one I wanted to see. No one but Betty.

It would have been so good to be with her then, to have her in my arms, holding me close and telling me that everything was going to be all right. What the hell, I thought. I walked over to the phone booth and gave her a ring.

The phone rang ten times without an answer. If I’d had anything better to do, I’d have given up. But I didn’t so I stayed in the booth listening to the phone ring. And after ten rings, she answered it.

She couldn’t have been sleeping, for there was a tension in her voice that showed she’d been busy. Her voice was tight and husky.

“Betty,” I said “Betty, I want to come over.”

There was a pause. “You can’t.”

“Look, I won’t bother you. It’s…it’s a bad night, Betty. I need someone, you know? Let me come over.”

Again a pause, and a boy’s voice in the background. Bookspan’s. I gritted my teeth and banged the phone down on the hook. I needed another drink, and I had one. And then I had another, and another.

I left the joint at one, and I walked home. I felt fine, in spite of the liquor I’d had. I walked a straight line and my head was clear as crystal. I tiptoed up the stairs, past the living room where Mom was drinking and crying.

I found what I was looking for in Dad’s bureau drawer. He’d tried to kill Bookspan before, you see. Once he bought a gun at a Third Avenue hockshop, but he never used it, never even pulled its trigger. When he finally shot the bastard, he was in California and the gun was still in the bureau drawer. It was almost as though he had left it there for me.

I left the house as silently as I had entered it, the gun snug and comfortable in my jacket pocket. At one-thirty, I climbed the stairs to the apartment house on Saint Mark’s Place.

She didn’t let me in, because she didn’t have to. They’d left the door open, and I walked in without knocking. I walked through the familiar kitchen to the equally familiar bedroom. I knew that I’d find them there.

I flung open the bedroom door and I saw them lying there, in each other’s arms. My girl. My girl, with the guy I hated most in the world. I’d expected it, but it was a hard thing to watch.

Her lips parted for a scream, but she stopped instantly when she saw the gun in my hand. Her face froze in terror, and she looked like a very little girl just then, a little girl trying to pretend she was a woman.

Bookspan just looked scared. I enjoyed the fear in his eyes, as much as I could have enjoyed anything at the time. I let them look at the gun for several minutes, without saying a word.

Then I told them to close their eyes, and then I walked to the side of the bed and struck each of them on the head with the barrel of the gun. I just used enough force to knock them unconscious. I didn’t want to kill them; I couldn’t do that.

I tore a bedsheet into strips of cloth and tied them up. I put their arms tight around each other, tying his hands around her back and her hands around his. Then I gagged them, and I waited.

When they came to, they struggled helplessly while their bodies pressed together. It could have been funny, if the circumstances had been different.

But I didn’t laugh. I just watched them for a while, waiting. I put the gun back in my pocket, because I didn’t need it anymore.

Later, I walked around the apartment, making sure that all the windows were closed tightly. It was precisely three o’clock when I opened all the gas jets full blast and left, shutting the door behind me.

But it was midnight in California.

PACKAGE DEAL

“IF I WERE YOUNGER,” John Harper said, “I would do this myself. One of the troubles with growing old. Aging makes physical action awkward. A man becomes a planner, an arranger. Responsibility is delegated.”

Castle waited.

“If I were younger,” Harper went on, “I would kill them myself. I would load a gun and go out after them. I would hunt them down, one after another, and I would shoot them dead. Baron and Milani and Hallander and Ross. I would kill them all.”

The old man’s mouth spread in a smile.

“A strange picture,” he said. “John Harper with blood in his eye. The president of the bank, the past president of Rotary and Kiwanis and the Chamber of Commerce, the leading citizen of Arlington. Going out and killing people. An incongruous picture. Success gets a man, Castle. Removes the spine and intestines. Ties the hands. Success is an incredible surgeon.”

“So you hire me.”

“So I hire you. Or, to be more precise, we hire you. We’ve had as much as we can take. We’ve watched a peaceful, pleasant town taken over by a collection of amateur hoodlums. We’ve witnessed the inadequacy of a small-town police force faced with big-town operations. We’ve had enough.”

Harper sipped brandy. He was thinking, looking for the right way to phrase what he had to say. “Prostitution,” he said suddenly. “And gambling. And protection—storekeepers paying money for the right to remain storekeepers. We’ve watched four men take control of a town which used to be ours.”

Castle nodded. He knew the story already but he wasn’t impatient with the old man. He didn’t mind getting both the facts and the background behind them. You needed the full picture to do your job properly. He listened.