Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  Transferring his toilet articles from his hospital kit to his suitcase, he then clapped the bag shut and buckled it. Still operating entirely in the dark, or rather just from whatever minimal light came from the streetlamps across the way, he then proceeded to dress.

  His wardrobe that evening was the uniform of a Pan American flight purser. It bore wings over the left lapel and a black nameplate with the name WATFORD over the right.

  The uniform was completely authentic in that it had once belonged to Watford when he had worked as a flight purser for Pan Am—a period of some eight months at the conclusion of which he had been cashiered by the airline for a number of undisclosed irregularities, or so his employment record stated. The same record attested to the fact that for the period of eight months in which he was employed, he phoned in sick approximately fifty percent of the time. His final task was to pack a lightweight gray tropical business suit into a Val-pac he could carry over his shoulder.

  Before leaving the house that evening Watford attended to several tasks. First, he disconnected the phone from its trunk outlet. Next, he switched off the furnace and finally, he emptied into his wallet his total cash savings of seven-hundred-some-odd dollars from a small steel box he kept in the attic.

  There were no outstanding bills to pay. No mortgage on the house. He had been fortunate in that the house left to him by his mother he now owned scot-free. All that was due were the annual city taxes which, happily, were paid up till late in the fall. With a feeling of relief, almost exhilaration—the exhilaration he invariably felt at the prospect of flight—he carried his bag and Val-pac downstairs, then locked and double-bolted the door. In his impeccably pressed purser’s uniform, white shirt and black tie, with the peaked hat and flight wings, he looked almost dashing as he stepped out from the doorway and into the street.

  Gazing both right and left, and satisfied that the patrol car had not returned, he stepped down the three flagged steps onto the curbside, then made his way briskly to the corner where he hailed a cab and directed the driver to take him out to Kennedy.

  14

  “May I see the passenger manifold, please?”

  “Yes, Purser. Which flight?”

  “802.”

  “Dallas-San Francisco, 11:40 P.M. Still reporting on time. You posted for that?”

  “So I’m told.” Watford smiled at the pretty blond ticket agent behind the Pam Am desk and received a smile back. The girl who’d been behind the desk for nearly eight hours and was tired thought the purser was not uninteresting.

  It was slightly past 10:00 P.M. Activity behind the desk was slow to virtually nonexistent, and the girl with the wheat-white hair and the flirtatious eyes made no secret she was pleased to see him. “So you’re told?”

  “Filling in for a buddy, that’s all. Last-minute emergency. I just got in from Chicago about two hours ago. No sooner do I get home and get my shoes off than they call me and tell me to get right back down here again. This 802?”

  She handed him the manifold. At a glance he had the information he wanted. Just as he suspected—for a flight at that hour, the big 747 was undersubscribed. Possibly just half-full. There were plenty of empty seats about so that a single, unclaimed one would scarcely be missed. Watford quickly noted that 11 A, 13F, 16B and 22B were all unassigned. He committed the fact to memory.

  “Where does she board?” Watford asked.

  “Gate nine. You’ve got plenty of time. They won’t start till ten forty-five or eleven. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you around here before.” She gazed up into his slightly reddened face, then glanced at his nameplate. “Watford, is it?”

  “That’s right. Charles. Charley, if you like.” He smiled right back at her.

  “I do. Charles is a bit stuffy for my taste.”

  He smiled crookedly and glanced at her tag. “You’re Haines?”

  “Millicent—Milly, if you like.”

  “My niece’s name is Millicent. I prefer it to Milly. You’re a perfect Millicent.” He sensed he was making a conquest. “Can you check my bag through to Frisco? I’ll keep the Val-pac with me.”

  She tagged the canvas bag and sent it wobbling off on a roller ramp. Together they watched it disappear through a port covered with strips of dangling leather.

  With nothing left to do, and the girl smiling expectantly at him, Watford was momentarily at a loss. He gazed round the terminal uneasily. “Slow tonight, isn’t it?”

  “Typical week night. Very boring. The terminal pretty much empties after eleven. It’s worse in the winter when the weather’s cold.”

  A passenger presented himself at the desk. Watford watched her check his reservations on the computer and make his seat assignment. “Gate nine,” she said cheerily.

  “One of yours,” she remarked after the man had gone.

  Watford murmured something to himself, then said: “Guess I better get on down there now, too.”

  “You’ve still got plenty of time.”

  “I’ve got a lot of odds and ends to see to once I get on board.”

  She shrugged and gave him a wry little smile. “No one knows better than you. Good flight, Purser.” She paused a moment, then corrected herself. “I mean, Charley.”

  “See you.” He smiled, waved and started out toward gate 9. When he glanced back she was still there, head down at her empty counter, working over some papers. The immense hollow shadows of the nearly empty terminal, and the eerie cobalt light enveloping the Pan Am counter suddenly filled him with the most unaccountable sense of desolation.

  It was yet far too early for any significant accumulation of passengers at the flight gate. The seat assignment desk was still empty, and there were no Pam Am personnel about. Even the destination placards had not yet been posted.

  Beyond the desk, looming immense and unreal through the big panoramic glass that looked out onto the field, were the nose and fuselage of the big 747—Flight 802, Dallas, San Francisco. Striding easily back behind the desk, Watford moved in his purser’s uniform as easily and naturally as he’d moved earlier that morning in the white coat of a pediatric surgeon.

  It was a simple matter locating the concrete stairway leading down to the service area on the field. In another moment he was out on the tarmac. A blast of warm diesel-scented air pressed heavily against his cheek and suddenly he was in the midst of high-pitched engines warming, maintenance crews crawling over the wings, rubber fuel hoses coiling upward into the wing tanks, porters wrestling bags and boxes off the luggage carts and into the open bays of the big clipper ship.

  None of the crew had yet appeared. But the doors were all open, including that of the flight cabin out of which a single orange night light glowed. Jaunty as ever, he mounted the aluminum ladder stair leading to the first-class section and boarded the plane as if it were his own.

  He went forward and sat for a while in the pilot’s seat in the dim illumination of the flight cabin. He had picked up a clipboard inside and by now he was checking dials and switches, making notations on his clipboard with the utmost care.

  He was aware of passengers starting to gather at the gate, watching him from behind the big plate windows as if he were some uniquely privileged initiate of inner mysteries. The sensation of being observed in that fashion pleased him mightily.

  Somewhere near 11:00 P.M., when he could see crowds and activity round the seat assignment desk, he finally thought it prudent to depart the cabin. With the plane still empty, he slung the Val-pac over his shoulder and made his way back to one of the lavatories in the rear. No sooner had he locked the door behind him, than he was slipping quickly out of the purser’s uniform and into his light gray business suit.

  Overhead in the lavatory canned music had been switched on through crackling loudspeakers. Watford completed his toilette to a Mantovani rendition of “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” slipped his purser’s uniform into the Val-pac, then sat down on the john and prepared to wait.,

  Outside, just beyond the door, he could hear t
he chatter of two flight attendants prepping their bar carts. Shortly, he heard the bang and clatter of passengers coming aboard, luggage being slammed up into the bays above the seats, outerwear going into the wardrobes, the rattle of glasses. There was a good deal of vibration when the engines were first switched on. A short time later he heard outside doors being sealed and the voice of a stewardess doing the flight-safety drill.

  Sitting behind the steel door in the tiny cabinet, he had a sudden fleeting image of himself in the hospital that morning, lying half up in bed while the doctor wagged his finger and fulminated above him. Thinking of his masquerade as Dr. Atwell, the pediatric surgeon, he chuckled to himself and wondered half-regretfully about the nice young couple he had duped, then too, of the zoo and the museum and the sad movie with the sad little husband, and the police waiting outside his front door and the pretty Pan Am ticket agent. What a lot of ground he’d covered that day. “I killed a man,” the phrase came drifting back at him and he was at first uncertain where he’d heard it. Then he recalled. Certainly that’s what the man had said, the chap in the bed next to him at the hospital. But he couldn’t have really said that, Watford reasoned. It was probably just the effects of the anesthesia wearing off. Partial hallucination. Bad dreams and the sudden excitement of that ass Rashower making accusations. “I killed a man,” Watford strained for recall. “… Dropped something or other from the roof.” Oh, he couldn’t have …Probably just bad dreams—coming out of the anesthesia—

  The next moment he felt a slight shudder and then the motion of the ship rolling backward, being pushed out onto the runways. All through the taxiing he remained in the lav, and even till after the takeoff when they had reached their cruising altitude of 30,000 feet.

  Only then did he step out, then briskly and purposefully make his way to one of the preselected unclaimed seats he had committed to memory. It was at 22B where he finally settled, first, however, hanging his Val-pac, unnoticed by anyone, in one of the outerwear wardrobes.

  Settling in with a Time magazine, and graciously accepting the ginger ale he had ordered from the flight attendant, he glanced out the window watching the glittering New York skyline recede behind him, and breathed a long sigh of relief.

  15

  “To me this is quintessential middle class. Genteel. Fastidious. Efficient. Murder by long distance. Nothing so coarse as the laying on of hands. I’d say your man’s over thirty. More probably into his forties.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “By the fact that it’s all so clean.”

  Mooney scoffed. “About as clean as a meat cleaver.”

  “Philosophically, yes. I grant you that. But, practically speaking, as a form of homicide, it’s all extremely neat. Look for black shoes and button-down collars. A man in a gray suit.”

  “Not a kid?”

  “My God, no.” Dr. Kurt Baum, the police psychiatrist, flung his arms outward expansively. He was a short, boxlike man with a back slightly hunched, and wiry gray hair cropped close to the scalp. “Your typical street kid would never be content tossing a cinder block over the rooftop into the crowd below. A head is bashed. Brains splattered over the pavement. But so what? You never get to see it. Where’s the kicks in that?” Baum scratched his chin reflectively. “The kid from the barrio wants the body contact. He loves that part of it. Walking up to the designated victim. Skewering the fellow’s tripes with a switchblade. Seeing the blood spurt. Feeling the victim squirm under his hand as he twists the blade. Looking into the poor bugger’s eyes, seeing the panic there as life oozes out. That’s the real kicker for the newly pubescent, Mooney. The confrontation. The macho factor. Something to write home about. Standing up there face-to-face with the victim. Experiencing it all with him. Your fellow doesn’t want that. He wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole. He’s got the same psychotic rage inside him as the barrio kid but he doesn’t have the stomach to bring himself off quite the same way. No, your man’s a secretive little rascal, Mooney. Furtive. Creeping. Outwardly inoffensive, law-abiding, but inwardly a ghoul.”

  The detective was skeptical. He had his own impressions. They didn’t happen to coincide with Dr. Baum’s. From the start, Mooney had always seen his “bombardier” as some crazed, disaffected youth—undoubtedly black or Puerto Rican. Up to his ears in coke; spouting vague, half-baked theory about the social injustices of the past. Nickel-a-dozen slogans and show-business high jinks for the six o’clock news. That’s what Mooney had believed right from the start since it fit so comfortably with his own carefully cultivated theories of social history.

  Now here was this police shrink attempting to explode all of that. What the hell did Baum know anyway—with his quaint laboratory criminology that bore no relation to the hard truths of the street? What kind of a shrink worth his salt would be working for the goddamned city anyway? A fucking civil servant sawbones.

  “What about motives?” Mooney jeered. “Have you thought about motives?”

  “What about them?”

  “I mean the fact that there aren’t any. Any old victim’ll do in a pinch. To me that spells kid. K-I-D.”

  Baum appeared surprised at the detective’s vehemence. He shook his head and sighed. “This is 1980, Mooney. Motives are passé. Even for the over-forty crowd, motives are Victorian. Really chic contemporary crime doesn’t require anything as fusty and downright inhibiting as an excuse to murder. The really exciting thing is to play it as it lays. Let it just happen. Cool. Laid back. Someone stands in front of you on a subway platform. The train hurtles into the station. All you do is push. A man pulls up to a red light. You stroll over to the car as if to ask him a question. He rolls down his window. You put a .320-magnum to his head and POOF. Or you stand up on a rooftop under the stars with a forty-pound cinder block. Then just let it drop down, slip from your fingers into the crowd below. Roulette. Round and round it goes. Where it stops, nobody knows. No regrets.” Baum’s chubby little hands rummaged the litter of his desk for a tobacco pouch. “It’s all part of the New Man construct,” he continued enthusiastically. “Go to the movies. See a ball game. Bash someone’s skull with a cinder block. It’s all recreation. There are no motives because there are no real actions. It’s just storybook. Purely imitative. Acting. Everyone is acting some cheap serial melodrama of bloodshed and retribution.”

  Baum glanced sharply at Mooney, then smirked. “You look a little puzzled, Francis. Why? What’s troubling you? This is not exactly the way you see things, ay? You want it all neat and convenient with motives, the way it was a hundred years ago when you grew up. Well, it’s not, my friend. All that’s changed. I’m sorry to tell you that’s not the way the game’s played today.”

  Mooney sat for a time, eyes blinking, tongue sliding across his parched lips. He was unconvinced. At last he spoke. “I just don’t buy this guy in the gray suit. Your model, God-fearing, tax-paying citizen, going back and forth to a job all year. Raising kids. Then, one night a year, going bonkers on a rooftop. That just don’t wash. And like I told you—always in the same area and always the same time of the year.”

  “Repetition compulsion.”

  Mooney’s eyes opened and he leaned forward. Baum hastened to clarify.

  “Repetition compulsion. An overwhelming urge to replicate over and over again certain actions or activities, even if you recognize they are destructive to you. Like your eating, Mooney.”

  “Oh, Christ. Don’t you start on that now.”

  “It’s true. Think about it. It’s not at all uncommon for people to have urges, associate certain actions and undefined emotions with a certain time of year. Why they do it, we can’t say. You say it has something to do with the motion of heavenly bodies as they affect the human psyche. That’s a kind of nice, kitschy little theory you’ve got there about the solstice and all. But it’s voodoo and I just don’t happen to buy it. Still, I grant you, your guy appears to grow active about the end of April, the beginning of May. But, more probably, the repetition of crime during th
at particular period is merely symbolic of some trauma that person may have suffered years ago during the same period. The person doesn’t necessarily recall the events of the trauma. Undoubtedly, they were painful and he was forced to bury them deep somewhere in his mind. The subconscious, however, doesn’t forget. Like a savings bank, it keeps all of your bad memories on deposit for you. And if you don’t draw on those memories, I mean consciously, the interest builds and builds, compounding itself, until you’ve got quite a nice little bundle there. With your fellow it’s all bottled up for twelve months. Then, on just one night a year, the whole thing is permitted to blow. That’s when he goes up to the roof, beneath the stars, to reenact this perennial ritual.”

  Baum’s arm snapped upward and he checked his wristwatch. “Gotta go. I have a session with a recidivist wife-beater.” He laughed and started to gather his papers.

  Mooney lumbered out of his chair. “Can we just review this thing before you go?”

  Baum’s eyes rose heavenward as though he were pleading for mercy. “You asked for a silhouette, Mooney. I provided one but you’ve spurned it. For the record, however, I’ll repeat. Fortyish. Middle class. Educated. Fastidious. Compulsive. A nitpicker. Highly civilized, but underneath a sump of guilt and self-loathing. In short, my friend,” Baum shot the clasps on his battered briefcase and stuffed it beneath his arm, “look for a solid, upright, pious Christian, patriotic American. You should have no problem, Mooney. There are millions of them out there.” Baum hooted, pounded the detective’s back and bustled out.