It wasn’t inevitable that he would be caught. They had no objective cause to suspect him, as long as he was careful. His campaign was a reasoned one, not the result of mindless compulsions; he could pick and choose his time and place, he could suspend his operations until things cooled off. He had the options of free will. The editorialists were wrong of course; he wasn’t psychotic, it wasn’t an uncontrollable obsession, he wasn’t compelled by diseased brain-cells to keep slaughtering innocent victims until he was caught—he was no crazy strangler begging for punishment through self-hate. I’m a nut, of course, he thought, but it was only by comparison with the insane norms of society that he was abnormal. What he was doing was extreme. But it was necessary. Someone had to do it: someone had to show the way.
“You can see it in the kids,” George Eng said. “They used to be anti-police. Not any more. My kids are pro-cop with a vengeance. Can you blame them? The junkies are looting everything. Ripping off school calculators and lab equipment, mugging the kids. My son has a friend in one of the schools up in Westchester—they had to close the school this week. Vandals. They flooded the building with fire hoses—ransacked the place, urinated on the chairs, splashed paint all over the walls. I’ll tell you something, this fellow who’s out there killing them may be doing us all a service. Do you know we’ve got sixty-eight tenant families in my building and forty-one of them keep Dobermans and German shepherds? There aren’t that many dog lovers, believe me. Not when the price of an attack dog’s gone up to damn near two thousand dollars.”
Eng’s eyes had narrowed to a fighter’s squint; his mouth became small and mean. “The kids want law and order even more than we do. The only trouble is, with the police department we’ve got, it takes the cops a month to find the police commissioner. That’s why I think it was inevitable a guy like this would come along. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion he’s probably a cop himself—fed up with revolving-door courts and the red-tape delirium and the Goddamned Supreme Court. I’d lay pretty big odds on that—he’s a cop. He knows this is the only language these criminals understand. He’s giving us a deterrent for them. It’s neutralizing a few of them and I imagine it’s scaring a lot more of them off the streets. I’d be interested to see how the crime statistics have moved since this guy started—I’ll lay a small fortune muggings are way down.”
Watching him across the restaurant table Paul only grunted now and then to show he was listening. He hadn’t decided what tack to take in discussions like this; he knew they would come up, but should he defend his actions or condemn them?
In the meantime he listened very carefully to everyone—listened for inflections in their voices. He had to: it wasn’t what they said but what they didn’t. He had sensitive antennae, he would know if anyone suspected him, but he would have to know it quickly.
That was the hardest part to bear. There was no one he could tell. No one to confide in.
No one at all.
It was important to avoid patterns. The police often worked on a modus-operandi basis. Once they pieced together a pattern in his activities they might be able to set traps for him. There had to be no commonalities from one act to the next: no regular time intervals, no regular time-of-day, no pattern of area concentration.
Thinking back he realized he had begun to create a kind of geographical pattern. He had started on the upper West Side in Riverside Park. The second killing had been in Central Park near Fifth Avenue. Both within walking distance of his apartment. Then he had moved down into the truck district on the border between Chelsea and the West Village. After that the East Village. It was beginning to make a circle; would they anticipate his next killing on the upper East Side? Aside from Times Square it was the only mid-Manhattan area he had not yet hit.
Avoid it, then. Backtrack this time. The West Village.
Hudson, Greenwich, Horatio, West Twelfth, down Bank Street. He carried a paper bag in which he had a carton of milk and a loaf of bread: a man carrying a package looked less suspicious.
It was just past two o’clock in the morning when he came up Seventh Avenue and entered the subway at Twelfth Street. Dropped his token in the slot, pushed through the turnstile and went down the stairs to the platform.
The smell was foul. The station was empty at this hour; his feet were sore and he stood wearily with his shoulder tipped against the clock pillar, waiting for the express.
He looked a good mark and he expected to be accosted but no one else entered the station. The train roared into the tunnel and he stepped aboard and took a seat by the door. An ancient wino slept on the opposite seat; two burly blacks with lunch pails sat at the end of the car.
The train crash-crashed through the Eighteenth Street local station without stopping. A Transit Patrolman walked through the car and stopped to shake the wino awake and give him a lecture; Paul couldn’t hear the words. The cop got the wino on his feet and prodded him ahead through the door at the car-end vestibule. When it opened, sound rushed in, and a cold wind. The door slid partway shut and lodged there. One of the black workmen got up and pushed it closed.
At Penn Station the workmen got off and Paul was alone in the car. The line’s green traffic lights whipped past the filthy windows. He began to read the advertising placards above them.
The train screeched into the lights of the Times Square station and threw Paul around on the seat when it braked to a sharp halt. Two tough kids entered the car and sat down facing Paul. Hubcap collectors, he thought drily. They gave him insolent looks and one of them took out a pocket knife, opened it and began to clean his fingernails.
You could tell they were scum by looking at them. How many old women had they mugged? How many tenement shops had they knocked over?
The earsplitting racket of the train would cover the sound of the shots. He could leave them dead in the car and they might not be found until the train got somewhere in the Bronx.
No. Too many risks. At least three people had seen him in this car—the patrolman and the two workmen. They might remember. And suppose someone at Seventy-second Street boarded the car while Paul was stepping out of it? A subway was a trap; too easy to be cornered.
If they accosted him he would take the risk. Otherwise he would let them go. So it’s up to you two. He watched them narrowly.
They didn’t pay him much attention. They both looked sleepy—strung out on heroin? In any event they didn’t stir until the train scraped into the station. They were on their feet ahead of Paul and he followed them across the platform and up the stairs. Maybe they would stop and jump him here.
They didn’t. Out through the turnstiles, through the back door, across the traffic island and the pedestrian crossing to the corner of Seventy-first and Amsterdam. The boys walked south across the street and down the avenue sidewalk and Paul let them go; the precinct station was just around the corner down there and anyhow it was too close to his apartment. He wondered if they could realize how lucky they were.
19
The party was overcrowded in Sam and Adele’s small apartment; people stood around in shifting clusters and the place smelled of the rain guests had brought in on their coats. Despite the cold outside, the air conditioners were running at full blast. There were four couples from the office and Paul knew most of the Kreutzers’ other friends but there were five or six strangers—a new couple from down the hall who’d recently moved in from Queens, a psychiatrist Adele had met a party somewhere, a girl who said she was a free-lance magazine writer doing a piece on East Side apartment dwellers, another couple whose identities Paul didn’t catch but whom he kept glancing at because the wife had a hard-pinched mouth and the husband had the kind of impersonal efficient eyes you associated with police officials and major-generals. The rest were regulars except for a smartly dressed fortyish lady stockbroker and an old college roommate of Sam’s who was in town for the weekend on business—it turned out he was the director of marketing research for a packaging firm in Denver. They were all easy to place and easy to dismiss except for the hard-eyed couple.