It was past two when I got back to the city room. I started making phone calls again, trying to track down the witnesses. I actually caught up with one in Arizona, but she wasn’t talking. “I didn’t see nothing then,” she said, “and I didn’t see nothing now.” She hung up on me.
After that, I called an attorney who used to be with the D.A.’s office. Then I started calling the cops.
That was the worst of it. The cops. I know for a fact that a lot of them would love to see Watts crucified, but they don’t want to see an outsider like me drive the nails in. More than once that afternoon, the line went dead in my ear. When a cop did talk, the hostility crackled on the line like static. One old detective told me to take care of myself. He said it just before he hung up. He didn’t sound very pleasant when he said it. I wasn’t making any friends among New York’s finest. All the same, I kept calling.
Around seven that evening, Emma Walsh came out of her office. She started walking around the city room. Hands behind her back. A proprietary look in her eye. She nodded at a couple of reporters. They nodded back and then buried their heads in their work. She wandered over toward me.
I was eating dinner and reading over some clips from the morgue. I was tilted back in my chair, my feet on the file cabinet. I was tearing into a corned beef on rye and dripping mustard on the folder that lay open on my lap. There hadn’t been much in the paper fifteen years ago about E.J.’s disappearance. It seemed to have gotten lost in all the news about the Conti hit.
“How goes it?” Emma said. She glanced at my feet. I dropped them to the floor. I tossed the folder onto my desk.
Emma sat on the file cabinet, while I swallowed some corned beef. “It’s good,” I said. “It’s perky.”
“Careful.”
“Really. I’ve never felt so … so vibrant about a story before.”
She almost laughed. Almost. “Never mind that. Have you got it?”
I wagged my head, ate some corned beef. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I’ve got it. A lot of cops have heard the story, so it’s been around. One thug sort of gave me confirmation on the names. A lawyer who used to be with the D.A. is on record saying he suspected Watts at the time. I was going to run it by Rafferty, then call Watts for his no-comment. Then we can see where we stand.”
“Okay.” She stood up. “You know, if you had a computer terminal, you could just push a button for that morgue stuff.”
I smiled at her thinly. “Yes, ma’am.”
I called Watts at his precinct. The desk said the lieutenant wouldn’t be in until tomorrow. His home number was unlisted, but I dug out my Rolodex and found him. I called him at home. A machine answered. Watts had gotten divorced after the drug scandal, I remembered. He lived alone. I left a message on the machine. I said it was urgent. Then I hung up and waited.
The phone did not ring. An hour later, I made the calls again. I got the same answers. The bulldog deadline came and went. I called again, struck out again.
I gathered with Rafferty and Emma at the city desk. Rafferty swiveled in his chair. I perched on the desk, smoking. Emma stood next to me.
“Do we need him?” she asked.
Rafferty’s bullet head tilted to one side. “We ought to give him a chance to respond before we accuse him of murder. We don’t want it to look like a vendetta.”
“It is a vendetta,” I told him.
“Well, I know that. But we don’t want it to look like a vendetta. And if we wait for tomorrow, you can track him down man-to-man.” He looked at me with his deadpan eyes. “If we leave it a day, do we get scooped?”
“No. Not a chance. D’ Angelo went in for emergency radiation last night. He’s not talking to anyone. Hell, he could be gone already.” I called out across the room: “Oh, Fran, dear. Would you please dial up St. Vincent’s and check on the condition of Frank D’ Angelo? Thank you.” I said to Emma: “She’s great, that one. You gotta watch her.”
Rafferty made a noise in his throat.
“What about Watts?” said Emma. “If we let him have an extra day, it may give him time to get at us.”
I shook my head. “How? How can he get at us?”
Emma thought it over. She shrugged at Rafferty. Rafferty thought it over. He shrugged back at her.
“Okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay, that’s it. We hold it for tomorrow.” Rafferty turned a stone eye on me. “It’s ten-thirty, Wells, go home. We’ll let you know if he calls for the late edition.”
Without thinking, I glanced at Emma. “He’s the city editor,” she said.
It had been a long time since Rafferty had heard those words. For the second time that day, he almost displayed an emotion. He almost looked perky.
It was cool and pleasant when I got outside. The air practically smelled clean. The evening rush had cleared away, and only the cabs swarmed around Grand Central. Their headlights shone in the clear spring darkness. The storefront lights all up and down Forty-second Street shone. So did the streetlamps hangdog under the stately office buildings. And the office buildings pressed black against the purple surface of the sky.
I was whistling my happy tune again as I crossed the street. And as I walked briskly in the shadow of the concrete terminal. Past the bums lined up at the charity van, waiting for doughnuts and coffee. Past their bent shoulders, unshaven faces, yellow eyes staring aimlessly through the mist from the manholes. Still whistling, I went into the terminal through the corner door.
I picked up a paper at the newsstand inside then hurried into the vast main arcade. Under the constellations arching across the ceiling above, the beggars sat against the wall, their pants legs rolled up to air their sores. The cops patrolled. I rushed past, thumbing through my paper, humming my tune.
I went down the stairs into the subway. Caught a Six just as I came down onto the platform. It was crowded inside the rackety train. I found a seat next to a gaunt man in a billowing black coat. His mouth hung open. His eyes were glassy.
I tried to read the paper some more. I stared at the sports section. CLASSIC! the back-page headline read. But I couldn’t pay attention to the story. I closed the paper in my lap. I slapped my fist into my palm. The gaunt man stared at me.
“Hot damn!” I whispered.
I had him. I had him dead to rights. That son of a bitch. I don’t forget. I never forget. He sucker-punched me. Now I had him.
There are some people who say I work too much. Lansing, for instance. She’s always saying that. She says I drown myself in my work as if it were booze. Trying to forget things. Trying to forget my wife, who left me twenty years ago. And my kid, who hanged herself seven years ago. Lansing says I work to avoid my personal life. She says I have no personal life.
But she’s wrong. She’s dead wrong.
This was personal.
I could still remember how it felt. Lying on the floor of the interrogation room. Watts towering over me. Watts’s shoes in front of my face. Blood dribbling out of my nose, smearing my cheek. As if I were some kid who’d been knocked over by a bully. I told him. I told him then. I’d have his badge, I said. I said it with all the helpless rage of the moment. Meaning it, but not believing it.
“Your badge is mine, Tommy,” I said. “Your fucking badge is mine.”
And Watts—Watts, dreamy-eyed and cool—he pulled his foot back to kick my head in. If Gottlieb hadn’t walked in just then, I’d be selling papers instead of writing them.
I got out of the subway at Eighty-sixth. I climbed up the stairway into the sound of horns, the rush of traffic. Up here, the street was still jumping. Young couples bopped by arm in arm. Movie marquees glittered. TVs glowed in store windows. I walked through it slowly, my hands in my pockets, my newspaper under my arm. I whistled a happy tune.
My five-story concrete building stands across from a movie house. There’s a low-slung shopping mall on one side of it. New high-rises all around. I pushed into the foyer. Picked up my mail. Got into the tiny elevator. Leaned b
ack against the wall as the doors closed.
I was more tired than I thought. I shut my eyes. I smiled to myself. Tom Watts, I thought. I had him.
When the door opened, I propelled myself into the hall. Down the hall to my door. I unlocked it, pushed against it with my shoulder.
I came into the familiar semidark. The lights from the street. The red glow of the movie marquee. The cracks on the wall.
I closed the door behind me. I reached for the light switch.
And someone looped a cord around my neck and pulled it taut.
5
I opened my mouth, gagging. The cord tightened. I saw white and purple starbursts explode in front of me. My lungs pounded. No air. My face got hot. The strangler leaned back, nearly pulling me off my feet. I felt my tongue forced out between my lips, my eyes straining out of their sockets.
I reached behind me. I heard myself make a soft, choking noise. My pulsebeat filled my head. I couldn’t hear anything else. I touched the strangler’s leg. The white starbursts were going out, one by one. Everything was going out. The apartment was spinning away from me, getting smaller, darker. My hand fluttered over the strangler’s crotch. In the darkness, I saw the pinetops of the Maine forest. I saw them reaching into the thin blue of the winter sky. I had grown up in those woods. My breath made puffs of smoke as I gazed up at the trees. My breath …
I clenched my hand into a fist.
The strangler screamed. The cord loosened. I vaulted forward. The cord flew off me. I crashed against the wall. I clutched my throat. I retched. My knees buckled and I began sliding to the floor.
In the rosy light from the movie house, I saw the shadow of the man who’d tried to kill me. He was doubled over, his arm across his midsection. His other hand had grabbed hold of a chair for support.
My knee touched the floor. I fought to draw a breath. My lungs dragged the air halfway in. I started coughing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the man begin to straighten.
“Bastard,” I heard him whisper.
I clung to the wall, coughing hard. Smaller stars than before now sparkled in the dim room. Still on one knee, I hung my head, retching.
“Bastard,” said the other man again.
I lifted my face to him. I saw him stumble away from the chair. He bent and picked something up from the floor. I saw him, silhouetted, stand. He drew the cord out between his two hands.
I tried to say something to him. “Please,” I tried to say. I couldn’t get it out. My windpipe felt as if it were closed off. My stomach felt like it was about to come up through it.
The man came toward me with the cord. He stood over me. I looked up at him, still trying to say “Please.”
He looped the cord around my neck again. I came up off the floor and slugged him.
I didn’t have much in me. My fist felt like cement, my arm felt like straw. But braced on one knee like that, I had my foot on the floor to give me some drive. I drove up with it, pistoning my fist as fast as I could. I meant to hit him in the face. Under the chin. Try to knock him out, knock him back, just knock him away long enough for me to get out of there.
Instead, I caught his throat. I felt my knuckles strike against the yielding flesh and cartilage. I heard a damp crack. I felt something buckle under the blow.
Then I was staggering after my follow-through. The cord slipped off my shoulder. The other man was reeling back, his arms pinwheeling. Just as I steadied myself, he went over. He hit a lampstand. It tumbled to the floor, lamp and all, and he went down with it.
I looked around me. I still couldn’t breathe. I hardly knew where I was. My neck burned. My head throbbed. I couldn’t think. I remembered the pinetops of Maine.
Then I heard the man on the floor. I heard him making noises, terrible noises. I lumbered over to him.
He was rolling, tangled in the lamp’s wire. Rolling this way and that, trapped between the toppled lampstand and the leg of a table. One of his hands flailed up in the air. With the other, he clutched his throat just like I’d clutched mine. He was making a steady gurgling noise. Other than that, he was eerily quiet.
“What …?” I said hoarsely, still gasping for air.
He kicked his legs helplessly. He thrashed back and forth. He reached up toward me. He made that noise.
Dread clenched in me like a fist. I stumbled back to the wall. I hit the light switch. Now I could see him. He was a kid. A boy with short sandy hair. I’d never seen him before.
His body rolled wildly over the floor. His face was purple. His eyes were bulging. Spit dribbled down the side of his throat. His legs kept kicking. His hand clawed the air.
“Oh Jesus, Jesus,” I heard myself say. My voice seemed to come from a great distance.
I tried to rush to him. But the atmosphere had turned to water. I could only swim in slow motion against the tide. I watched myself swim. Through the familiar apartment. Past the rickety wooden chairs from the thrift shop on Lexington. I wanted to scream my frustration and panic. The man was strangling while I struggled to him step after slow step.
I was still coughing as I knelt down next to him. I grabbed him. Pried his hand away from his throat. His mouth was open. His tongue was wagging. There was a weird depression where his Adam’s apple should have been. I touched it desperately, tried to mold it back into shape.
“Oh Jesus, Jesus,” I said.
The kid kept choking. The purple of his face deepened. He grabbed at me, grabbed my shoulder. His eyes were bright. They were staring at me. They were pleading.
“Oh Christ, oh wait!”
I pulled free of him, clawed my way to my feet. I went for the phone on the table by the window. Swam to it in slow, slow motion. Tripped over the lampstand as I swam. Fell past it. Got hold of the table’s edge.
The man thrashed. The gurgling noise became a high steady whine.
I picked up the receiver, knocking the phone to the floor.
“God damn, damn it!” I screamed.
I went to my knees. My fingers found the phone. They were shaking. I forced them in the dial. I dialed 911. I heard the ringing of the other line.
“Please, please,” I said. I wiped sweat from my face. I sat on the floor, the phone clutched to my ear. I stared at the man in front of me.
His thrashing slowed. The phone rang. He rolled onto his back. His hand clutched his throat again. I still could hear that high whine. I still couldn’t think.
Then a woman’s voice on the phone: “Emergency.”
“Please …” I said. A hoarse whisper. The words slurred. “Please help me.”
“What’s the problem, sir? Can you tell me the problem?”
“I hit him. I … Please. I’m hurt. I can’t …”
“You’ll have to calm down, sir. Where are you? Can you tell me your location?”
“Location?” I put my hand to my forehead. My head kept throbbing. My pulse kept hammering.
The man lay on his back. His bulging eyes stared up at the ceiling. His chest heaved up and down.
“Sir?”
“I hit him in the throat …” I said. “Choking … Where am I …”
“Choking? On something?”
“I hit him.”
“Is he breathing.”
“He can’t breathe!”
“Oh Jesus. You hit him?”
“Please …”
“We have to do something …”
“What?”
“He’s not breathing at all?”
“Isn’t this Emergency?”
“What? I don’t … What?”
“For God’s sake, lady! Help me here! I hit him! Oh Jesus Christ!”
The man’s chest was not heaving anymore. As I sat there, staring at him, talking into the phone, I saw his hand fall away from his throat. It bounced once before it settled on the floor. His face had gone a strange, sickening shade of blue.
“Sir … Sir …” babbled the woman on the phone.
“No. Oh no. Now look at him,” I said.
“What?”
“Have you got a knife? Is he dying?”
“What do I do?”
“Is he dying right now?”
“Help me!”
“Oh Christ!”
“He’s dead, he’s dead.”
“Oh Christ! Oh Jesus!”
“He’s dead,” I said again. My voice came from far away. “He’s dead,” I kept saying. “I killed him.”
6
“You don’t know who he was.”
“I told you: he was a kid,” I said. “He couldn’t have been much more than twenty. How the hell do I know who he was? He was just some kid.”
I was in an office now. An office at the precinct house. A dirty cube of a place. I was sitting in a torn-up swivel chair next to a gunmetal desk. The desk was buried under papers and styrofoam cups. The death-green carpet was burned by cigarettes. The fluorescent gave off a dingy light. The white Venetian blinds had turned yellow decades ago.
“All right,” said the lawyer. “I know you’re upset.” He had cleared a place for himself on the edge of the desk. He perched there, hovering over me.
“I’m not upset,” I told him. “I’m fine.”
“It is a difficult situation.”
“These things happen. I’m fine.”
He was a natty, slender man, about fifty. Dressed in a tweed suit, wearing a bow tie. His face was long, rectangular. He had coiffed silver hair, thick silver eyebrows that hovered low over his mild eyes. His expression was calm, almost sweet, almost beatific. I don’t know why he made me think of an executioner.
“May I go on?” he asked very quietly, very gently. “I know it’s hard, but I’m trying to help you. I’m just here to try and help.” He was the lawyer the newspaper had sent. His name was Gerald Morgenstern.
Absently, my hand went up to my throat. There was no bandage on it. I could still feel the groove in the flesh, the mark of the cord. I swallowed hard, testing for the pain. It was still there. “All right,” I said thickly. “All right. Go on.”
Rough Justice Page 4