“Huh?”
“Nothing. A pleasure meeting you, Mark, me lad. Tell your parents they’re lucky to have you. Luckier than they’ll ever have to know.”
“Whatcha mean?”
“Nothing,” the man said agreeably. “Now I have to walk all the way back to the ferry slip and take the dumb old boat all the way back to Manhattan and then I have to go to...” he consulted a slip of paper from his pocket “... to Seaman Avenue way the hell up in Washington Heights. Pardon me. Way the heck up in Washington Heights. Let’s just hope they don’t turn out to have a charming kid.”
“You’re funny.”
“You bet,” the man said.
“Police protection,” the lieutenant was saying. He was a beefy man with an abundance of jaw. He had not been born looking particularly happy, and years of police work had drawn deep lines of disappointment around his eyes and mouth. “That’s the first step, but how do you even go about offering it? There’s a couple of hundred people named Ackerman in the five boroughs and one’s as likely to be a target as the next one. And we don’t know who the hell we’re protecting ’em from. We don’t know if this is one maniac or a platoon of them. Meaning we have to take every dead Ackerman on this list and backtrack, looking for some common element, which since we haven’t been looking for it all along we’re about as likely to find it as a virgin on Eighth Avenue. Twenty-two years ago I coulda gone with the police or the fire department and I couldn’t make up my mind. You know what I did? I tossed a goddam coin. It hadda come up heads.”
“As far as protecting these people—”
“As far as protecting ’em, how do you do that without you let out the story? And when the story gets out it’s all over the papers, and suppose you’re a guy named Ackerman and you find out some moron just declared war on your last name?”
“I suppose you get out of town.”
“Maybe you get out of town, and maybe you have a heart attack, and maybe you call the mayor’s office and yell a lot, and maybe you sit in your apartment with a loaded gun and shoot the mailman when he does something you figure is suspicious. And maybe if you’re some other lunatic you read the story and it’s like tellin’ a kid don’t put beans up your nose, so you go out and join in the Ackerman hunt yourself. Or if you’re another kind of lunatic which we’re all of us familiar with you call up the police and confess. Just to give the nice cops something to do.”
A cop groaned.
“Yeah,” the lieutenant said. “That about sums it up. So the one thing you don’t want is for this to get in the papers, but—”
“But it’s too late for that,” said a voice from the doorway. And a uniformed patrolman entered the office holding a fresh copy of the New York Post. “Either somebody told them or they went and put two and two together.”
“I coulda been a fireman,” the lieutenant said. “I woulda got to slide down the pole and wear one of those hats and everything, but instead the goddam coin had to come up heads.”
The young man paid the cashier and carried his tray of food across the lunchroom to a long table at the rear. A half dozen people were already sitting there. The young man joined them, ate his macaroni and cheese, sipped his coffee, and listened as they discussed the Ackerman murders.
“I think it’s a cult thing,” one girl was saying. “They have this sort of thing all the time out in California, like surfing and est and all those West Coast trips. In order to be a member you have to kill somebody named Ackerman.”
“That’s a theory,” a bearded young man said. “Personally, I’d guess the whole business is more logically motivated than that. It looks to me like a chain murder.”
Someone wanted to know what that was.
“A chain murder,” the bearded man said. “Our murderer has a strong motive to kill a certain individual whose name happens to be Ackerman. Only problem is his motive is so strong that he’d be suspected immediately. So instead he kills a whole slew of Ackermans and the one particular victim he has a reason to kill is no more than one face in a crowd. So his motive gets lost in the shuffle.” The speaker smiled. “Happens all the time in mystery stories. Now it’s happening in real life. Not the first time life imitates art.”
“Too logical,” a young woman objected. “Besides, all these murders had different methods and a lot of them were disguised so as not to look like murders at all. A chain murderer wouldn’t want to operate that way, would he?”
“He might. If he was very, very clever—”
“But he’d be too clever for his own good, don’t you think? No, I think he had a grudge against one Ackerman and decided to exterminate the whole tribe. Like Hitler and the Jews.”
The conversation went on in this fashion, with the young man who was eating macaroni and cheese contributing nothing at all to it. Gradually the talk trailed off and so indeed did the people at the table, until only the young man and the girl next to whom he’d seated himself remained. She took a sip of coffee, drew on her cigarette, and smiled at him. “You didn’t say anything,” she said. “About the Ackerman murders.”
“No,” he agreed. “People certainly had some interesting ideas.”
“And what did you think?”
“I think I’m happy my name isn’t Ackerman.”
“What is it?”
“Bill. Bill Trenholme.”
“I’m Emily Kuystendahl.”
“Emily,” he said. “Pretty name.”
“Thank you. What do you think? Really?”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well,” he said, “I don’t think much of the theories everybody was coming up with. Chain murders and cult homicide and all the rest of it. I have a theory of my own, but of course that’s all it is. Just a theory.”
“I’d really like to hear it.”
“You would?”
“Definitely.”
Their eyes met and wordless messages were exchanged. He smiled and she smiled in reply. “Well,” he said, after a moment. “First of all, I think it was just one guy. Not a group of killers. From the way it was timed. And because he keeps changing the murder method I think he wanted to keep what he was doing undiscovered as long as possible.”
“That makes sense. But why?”
“I think it was a source of fun for him.”
“A source of fun?”
The man nodded. “This is just hypothesis,” he said, “but let’s suppose he just killed a person once for the sheer hell of it. To find out what it felt like, say. To enlarge his area of personal experience.”
“God.”
“Can you accept that hypothetically?”
“I guess so. Sure.”
“Okay. Now we can suppose further that he liked it, got some kind of a kick out of it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have wanted to continue. There’s certainly precedent for it. Not all the homicidal maniacs down through history have been driven men. Some of them have just gotten a kick out of it so they kept right on doing it.”
“That gives me the shivers.”
“It’s a frightening concept,” he agreed. “But let’s suppose that the first person this clown killed was named Ackerman, and that he wanted to go on killing people and he wanted to make a game out of it. So he—”
“A game!”
“Sure, why not? He could just keep on with it, having his weird jollies and seeing how long it would take for the police and the press to figure out what was going on. There are a lot of Ackermans. It’s a common name, but not so common that a pattern wouldn’t begin to emerge sooner or later. Think how many Smiths there are in the city, for instance. I don’t suppose police in the different boroughs coordinate their activities so closely, and I guess the Bureau of Vital Statistics doesn’t bother to note if a lot of fatalities have the same last name, so it’s a question of how long it takes for the pattern to emerge in and of itself. Well, it’s done so now, and what does the score stand at now? Twenty-seven?”