A scream: it had to be the little girl’s voice. He searched the shadows. There was a strange whacking noise: loud, sudden; he couldn’t make it out. He ran along the edge of the street. The girl began to scream again and he heard the hard slap of flesh against flesh; the scream was cut off abruptly in its middle.
It was close by him. Somewhere almost directly across the street. He left the snowbank and slithered across the iced asphalt, lifting the Centennial from his pocket. His face stung where he’d fallen on it.
The man in the beret leaped at him.
He came from a well beyond the stone railing of the front stairs: a single bound onto the curb, an immense weapon raised high overhead—huge, a great enormous blade.
Machete.
The man’s eyes gleamed in the night. Paul lost his footing, went down, broke his fall with the heel of his left hand. The two-foot machete loomed above him, lofted in both hands: a wallet fell on Paul’s leg. The man’s bewildering cry thundered: “Get that mother!”
Paul fell back flat in the street: he fired.
The bullet caromed off something. It slid away with a sobbing sound.
Trigger and then trigger again.…
He was still shooting when the revolver was empty and the machete clattered on the ice and the man was falling across Paul’s overshoes.
He dragged himself out from under, trembling uncontrollably. He got to his knees.
The man died with a blast of breath and a single twitch, and a stench that immediately expanded around him.
Paul crouched, staring at the dead man as if to prove to himself that he could take it.
Finally he stood, trying to breathe through the nausea. Around the body it was spreading, a great bloodstain like a psychiatrist’s inkblot.
He stumbled toward the stone steps and peered into the darkness there. At the foot of the service stair, half a floor below ground level, the young girl stood huddled in the corner. Her face was slack with shock.
Her father sagged beside her, sitting down, his back to the stones, clutching an arm from which blood poured sickeningly. His chin was down on his chest; he was rocking himself in pain. He never looked up.
But the young girl stared upward and Paul thought, She’s seen me.
Then when he moved her eyes didn’t stir. He saw the glaze then, the unfocus.
She was blind.
That was why her father had held her so closely by the hand.
He heard a siren. He couldn’t tell where it was or which direction it was going.
He reached up. The empty gun was still in his hand. He dragged the back of his hand across his cheek. Blood still dripped from the scraped side of his jaw where he’d fallen.
The girl was trying to speak to him but the siren grew louder.
Paul lurched away.
22
“AM I FORGIVEN?” He held the phone against the left side of his face and tentatively prodded the scab on his right cheek with a finger.
“Take a lot of Vitamin C,” she said.
“Sam Kreutzer would have prescribed chicken soup.”
“It couldn’t hurt.” Her voice was thin; it was a poor connection. “Are you sure I can’t bring dinner over?”
“No, really, I’d just as soon not spread this cold around—especially to you. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Take care.” She said it tenderly; then the line was dead. For a moment he continued to hold the receiver against his ear, as if to maintain the thread of contact with her.
He had a bit of a head cold but that was only the excuse. He’d broken the date because he didn’t want her to see the scraped streaks on his face. Another day or two and he could pass them off as shaving cuts; until then he didn’t want to be seen by anyone—especially by Irene. She was too close to the inside: she’d know just about anything the police knew, and she was quick enough to put things together if given the evidence.
Even the newspapers were speculating on the blood-stains found in the snow. The police were analyzing them.
If the blood found on the snow fails to match the blood types of the dead assailant and the injured mugging victim, Captain Mastro said, police believe they may be a step closer to identifying the vigilante.
They were jumping to the wrong conclusion, evidently. They thought the vigilante had been cut by the machete. But in any case they were assuming the vigilante was wounded and Paul intended to stay in the apartment until he looked presentable.
Analysis of powder stains on the dead man’s clothing indicates he was shot at pointblank range. Angle of entry of the lethal bullets indicates the shooter was prone at the time of the killing. Had he been knocked down by a blow from the machete? Chicago police aren’t saying. But Lloyd Marks and his blind daughter Joanne had something to say this morning when reporters were granted interviews in Marks’ hospital room. “I hope he wasn’t cut too bad,” Marks told reporters. “Because all I can say is, thank God that man showed up when he did.”
It was a break for him that the New York police had kept the “vigilante” alive there: five killings, attributed to him in the newspapers, had been committed in Manhattan and Brooklyn while Paul was in Chicago. But at some level of authority there were men who knew the truth. If those men in New York decided to be candid with their colleagues in Chicago it was possible that the Chicago police might begin to sift information about any New Yorkers who had moved to Chicago in the past few weeks. If that happened they could hardly fail to scrutinize him closely. They’d interview Spalter and Childress, they’d question the employees of his apartment building, and he had no doubt they’d get around to Irene. There was no way to allay suspicion entirely but he had to be careful far beyond mere circumspection; he had to be absolutely certain he’d left no clues at all. Suspicion was one thing; evidence another. All they’d need would be one scrap.
He had to be as expert as a consummate professional. Everything had to be thought out: every ramification had to be considered. It was like a chess game.
Amateur status had protected him. He was unknown to the professionals—both the detectives and the underworld. He had no criminal contacts; therefore no informer could betray him. He had no criminal record; therefore no dossier could pinpoint him. He had the tacit approval of an unknown number of police officers and the investigation was being pursued less enthusiastically than it would have been if he were a mad killer of random innocents. The vigilante terrorized no one except those who deserved it, in the eyes of the police and a good part of the public.
It wasn’t hard to size up these factors dispassionately.
But there was another factor that was harder to deal with
Just twelve hours prior to the machete tragedy on the South Side, two Oak Park youths had been slain by bullets from a .45 automatic pistol while apparently in the act of stripping a parked car. (See story on page 11.) Yesterday’s incidents, therefore, bring to fourteen the total death toll attributed to Chicago’s vigilante—or vigilantes; police have not yet determined whether more than one mysterious perpetrator is involved. The repeated use, at seemingly random intervals, of two separate murder weapons may suggest there are two separate vigilantes, Captain Mastro said, but “doesn’t necessarily prove it.”
23
IN HIS fantasies he had dialogues. At first with Esther after she died; then with Carol after she’d been institutionalized. Now occasionally in daydreams he articulated his reasoning to Irene.
“Yesterday I killed another one.”