Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  16

  “… and you say you were standing approximately here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “No moon?”

  “No moon.”

  “So the light was poor. No illumination from any other place? Like across the way?”

  “No, man. Like I told you. It was dark, dark, dark.”

  “You couldn’t see his face?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Features. Color. Build?”

  “Nothing. Like I told you. The guy’s a hundred feet on the other …”

  “Right. Okay. You told me. Let’s check that.” Mooney unwound a long steel tape from a spool. “Could you hold that for me just a minute?”

  The young Italian construction worker, Enzo Vitali, grasped an end of the tape while the detective slowly walked the spool out over the tar roof.

  It was noon, late May. Bright sunshine. Perfect kite-flying weather. A day for the park, or possibly a ride up into northern Westchester or Connecticut. Eager to finish, Mooney moved along a bit more quickly, for he planned to make a dash out to the track that afternoon where they were racing yearlings.

  Buffeting over the rooftops, the wind tended to barrel the big man along. His outsized powder blue trousers flapped and billowed in the twenty-mile-per-hour gusts.

  “Now this is where you first saw him?” Mooney came to an abrupt halt at a point on the ledge. “Yeah— Well, maybe a little more to the left.” Obediently, Mooney stepped sideways. “Like this?”

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  The detective glanced downward at his tape. “It’s 106 feet. And you say he was standing with his back to you? Elbows on the ledge? Gazing out, like this?” Vitali studied the detective’s pose reflectively. He was a lean, muscular man with dark restless eyes and wavy, meticulously coiffed hair. He was, Mooney judged, no more than twenty-five.

  “That’s right. Just lookin’ out like that. Just like you’re doin’ now.”

  “When did you first see him?”

  “I was standin’ here. Leanin’ against the chimney stack like I’m doin’ now. See?” The young man had got himself into the spirit of the thing. “I’m just waitin’ here for the girl, see? I got nothin’ to do. So I light a cigarette, see? Like this?”

  Vitali extracted a cigarette from his package and lit it. “The minute I light it, I see the guy. He must’ve heard my match ‘cause he’s turnin’.”

  “Like this?” Mooney swung round.

  “Yeah. That’s right. And then … then …”

  “He sees you? Right?”

  “Yeah. Right. He looks directly at me for a minute.”

  “A minute? That’s a long time.”

  “Well, maybe less. A little less.”

  “Still you don’t see his face?”

  “No, man. How could I? Like I told you? It’s too dark.”

  Mooney prodded him on. “Then?”

  “Then he starts for me. He’s a pretty good-sized guy. I mean I can see that all right. He starts comin’ directly at me and I sense I’m gonna have trouble.” Mooney started walking toward the young man. “He gets about halfway to me and already I’m lookin’ round for somethin’ I can bash the fucker with. A brick, a pipe, anything. But instead of comin’ to me, he hangs a sharp right …”

  “Like this?” Mooney veered sharply.

  “That’s right. Then heads off there. To the ledge. Where the fire escape is.”

  Mooney paced off the distances once again, his spool paying out the measures. “Here?”

  “That’s right. Right there.”

  Mooney recorded 191 feet in his note pad and glanced gingerly down over the ledge. No more than six feet below was the top-floor fire escape. At the point where he stood was a large chalk circle marked off by the detectives and the forensic unit that had gone over the area several days before for prints and any other possible telltale signs. They had found nothing.

  But now, however, there were several witnesses who had actually claimed to have had a view of the alleged “Bombardier” as the newspapers had so fondly christened him. One was Vitali, the construction worker; the other was Mr. Rosenzweig, the widower and retired postal clerk who had seen a person on his fire escape the night of the fatal incident. He too, however, had not seen enough of the man to make any kind of a solid composite description. But just below his fire escape, ten feet or so to the pavement, was a sizable splash of dried blood. That too had a chalk circle marked round it. And a successful blood-typing had been taken from it.

  At least Mooney knew now that his man was an AB positive. In the absence of prints, reliable witnesses with corroborating descriptions, or any other hard evidence, blood typing in and of itself was not going to be very helpful. AB positive is a relatively common blood type, far too common to make an ironclad case against a possible suspect. As a matter of fact, Mooney reflected, he himself was an AB positive. A pleasant irony, he thought. He and his quarry now shared a blood bond.

  “Anything else?” Enzo Vitali called to Mooney across the roof.

  Mooney looked up, suddenly recalling the young man.

  “Can I go now?”

  “Sure. Sure, go ahead. I’m goin’ too.” Mooney lumbered over the roof. A picture of strong, spirited yearlings lining up at the post flashed before his eye. “Just don’t leave town without letting us know where we can reach you.”

  MARCH-MAY/‘81

  17

  “A duplex watch beats eighteen thousand vibrations per hour.”

  There it was again, the voice strident, pedagogic, and hinting at impending chastisement. As usual, the voice was disembodied. It came from nowhere in particular. He was in a small bright room in the middle of the morning. He sat alone, a young boy at a kitchen table in a tiny room without doors. There were no curtains on the windows and the glare of the sun hurt his eyes. He was reading aloud from a voluminous text. He knew at once that text to be Saunier’s Treatise on Modern Horology.

  The room in which he sat was the old breakfast room off the kitchen before its refurbishment over a dozen years ago. No one but him appeared to be in the kitchen. Yet, as he read aloud in the high, tremulous voice of childhood, he had the inescapable conviction that his every move was being carefully monitored.

  “The diameter of the impulse wheel is two-thirds that of the great wheel. It has thirteen teeth and beats 14,400 vibrations per hour. The balance moves slowly and is provided with a weaker balance spring that necessarily . .

  Even in his half-sleep he felt a sense of growing agitation, and then brief, faintly erotic sensations. “… and therefore experience confirms that duplex escapements yielding as many as 21,600 vibrations per hour have been found to be accurate timekeepers …”

  The voice, his own, drifted off, while the feeling of agitation and excitement quickened. Quite suddenly the lineaments of the darkened room impinged upon his waking eye.

  “What are you doing, Myrtle?” he whispered. He never once looked down at the figure huddled slightly below him. Instead he kept his eyes riveted on the shadow-mottled ceiling. “What are you up to?” His voice was quiet and infinitely patient, though he was overcome with disgust. A series of moaning grunts issued from the figure kneeling beside him. He touched the head gently, moving a finger through the kinked, wiry hair, and suffered with quiet forbearance the pawing of his genitals.

  There was an uncomfortable sticky wetness now in the region of his unbottoned pajama pants. Several times she raised her head and gasped for breath. For his part, it was a martyrdom. He suffered it all uncomplainingly, not wishing to interrupt her pleasure. All throughout it he stroked the coarse, oddly metallic hair so unpleasant to the touch.

  When she was finished he rose without a word, went into the bathroom and washed himself. Returning to bed, he found her lying in the corner at the far side, her face to the wall, and weeping.

  It was 4:10 A.M. now. He noted the fact from the red electric numerals on the integer clock beside the bed. How his father would have
despised such a clock; charmless and unaesthetic; a clock stripped of all its inherent mystery, reduced to the vulgar functionalism of a common cash register.

  She sat at the edge of the bed beside him, weeping. He reached across and stroked the knobby vertebrae beneath the cheap rayon gown.

  “There, there.”

  “You must hate me, Charley.”

  “How could I possibly hate you, Myrtle?”

  “I make you sick.”

  “You don’t make me sick, Myrtle.”

  “Sure I do. I may be dumb, but I’m nobody’s fool. You’re so good—and me—I’m so—” Her voice sniveled at him out of the dark. “Why, you could have your pick of any of the girls down at the bank. What you see in me, I just don’t …”

  “I love you, Myrtle.” It sounded hollow, even to him. But he was too weary, too disinterested, to simulate genuine ardor.

  “You really mean that, Charley?” She turned round, and leaning on an elbow stared up at him. As she did so, a shaft of moonlight fell across her pinched, birdlike features.

  “Of course I mean it.”

  She reached an arm round his head and roughly hugged him, pressing her nose into the warm crook of his neck. The odor of cigarette smoke rose out of her hair and mouth.

  “Oh, Charley. Charley, darling. I’m so lucky. So lucky it’s me you want. Me you need. Only I wish …” She started to whimper again.

  “Now don’t let’s start that again, Myrtle.”

  “I know. I know.” She swiped her teary eyes with the back of her hand. “It’s just that I wish … I wish, just that you’d hold me more. And love me. It just ain’t natural the way you keep yourself from me for so long. You know what I mean?”

  He was quiet for a time, suffering her wet embrace and her nose boring into his neck. “I told you when we started this, Myrtle …”

  “I know. I know, Charley.”

  “I said then I wasn’t taking you in as a mistress or a lover.”

  “I know that, Charley. I know what you said. Still …”

  “I told you then, Myrtle, I was not going to take advantage of your misfortune.”

  “I know, Charley. And you haven’t. You’ve lived up to your word. And that’s how come I have so much respect for you. Other guys I know … a girl without money, without a job, no friends or relations to help her out … other guys would have moved in on a situation like that.”

  “I told you, Myrtle, I respect you too much.”

  “I know, Charley. I know.” She snuffled and wiped her eyes with a crumpled tissue. “Still, I wish you’d hold me more. And touch me. I’m a woman, Charley, and … and Christ, I need touching.”

  Watford lay on his back, hands cradled behind his head, find stared at the ceiling. He appeared to be pondering some careful, deeply considered point. Snuffling and daubing fitfully at her eyes, she watched him and waited. At last he spoke:

  “When I saw you working in that bar that first night, Myrtle, and the way those fellows in there talked to you, and how the owners treated you, I just knew I had to somehow put a stop to that.”

  “I know it, Charley, and I bless you all my life for what you done. Ain’t it been …” She laughed, catching herself up. “There I go again with the ain’ts. See what I mean when I say I’m just not good enough for you?” She laughed again, somewhat selfconsciously. “Hasn’t it been great, though, is all I meant. These past five months. Just you and me together in this little place. You with your nice, steady job down at the bank. And me waiting here with supper when you get home. And you gettin’ out of your uniform and all, and takin’ off that awful pistol, and then us sittin’ down and havin’ a drink before dinner. Ain’t that been nice, Charley?” Her face floated up at him out of the moonbeam, stupid and imploring. “Hasn’t it, I mean, been nice?”

  “Sure it’s been nice, Myrtle.” He patted her as if she were an old retriever. “I wouldn’t change it, not any of it, for the world.”

  She sat up suddenly in bed and hugged her knees. “Well, then, why is it I can’t make you happy?”

  “You do make me happy, Myrtle.”

  “No, I don’t. You’re a million miles away. I want to do things for you. You’re always doin’ things for me. You give me money and presents. I want to give you things, too, Charley. But you don’t seem to want nothin’ back from me in return. That’s not normallike. Not like other relationshipslike. Other guys I’ve known have given me things too, but like they always wanted something back in return. That was the deal. They never had to say it. You just knew it. And you knew the deal would last just so long as they were happy with what they were gettin’ back on their money. Not you, Charley. You always give. You don’t ask for nothin’ back. And I guess … I guess that’s what makes me feel like”—her voice started to quaver—“like you don’t care about me. Like either you just feel sorry for me, or maybe that I just plain old disgust you.”

  She buried her head in her knees, and in the next moment her entire body was convulsed with sobs. “Now, now,” he stroked her helplessly.

  ” ‘Cause, let me tell you,” she sobbed. “I don’t need anyone’s pity. And if I disgust you …”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Myrtle.” He hugged her hard to his chest. She was yielding and compliant, making happy little burbling sounds as he kissed and stroked her. “Don’t ever … For pity’s sake, don’t you ever think such a crazy thing.”

  He could not bear the thought that his inattentiveness, his sexual complacency, had hurt her so deeply. Now he set out to disabuse her of such thoughts. Ardor at 4:00 A.M. was not easy to come by, but he was not going to let the hour stop him.

  Myrtle Wells, for her part, was not about to be stopped either. Ambition and guile ran a little deeper and possibly darker there than Watford gave her credit for. Within the small compass of her drab, mean, thoroughly misbegotten life, Charles Watford loomed like the Prince of Wales. He was the best main chance. The daughter of a pipe welder at a naval yard in Puget Sound, the only kind of men Myrtle had been exposed to were those who used to regularly immobilize themselves on Saturday-night six-packs, and as a matter of principle, liked to cuff their women about a great deal. Charles Watford, for whatever his idiosyncrasies, was the closest she’d ever come to human tenderness and seeming economic security in a male. She was not about to let that go too easily. ,

  “Charley, Charley,” she swooned beneath him, biting his shoulder, smothering her moans in his armpit. “Oh, Charley, that’s so good. Deeper—go deeper, Charley. More. More.”

  Her thighs coiled sinuously round his middle while he rocked above her in his cool, passionless way. “I love you, I love you,” she kept gasping in his ear while the excitement in her voice mounted to sobs and little quivering shrieks.

  Afterward, depleted and strangely sad, Watford slept. Myrtle Wells, however, lay awake on her pillow, still vibrating like a plucked string. Her skin tingled from the encounter and her chin was bruised from where his unshaven beard had abraded it. She minded none of that, but only folded her arms across her chest with a proud, defiant expression, as if embracing herself, and smiled enigmatically into the approaching dawn.

  18

  At the First National City Bank of Kansas City, Charles Watford was looked upon as very much a favorite son. In the six months he had served there as a security guard, he had won the affection of his colleagues and the admiration of his superiors. He had applied for the job on the basis of a record of service as a sergeant of the U.S. Military Police in Vietnam. He had never been any such thing, but he was buoyed by the unalterable conviction that having certified to that effect on his application, the odds were greatly in his favor that the deception would never be discovered.

  He was right. Security checks in such matters are notoriously slipshod and, in Watford’s case, only the most perfunctory check had been authorized. Consequently, Watford was hired and in no time at all had proved himself an invaluable asset to First National City as well as a fearless adversary of aspiring ba
nk robbers. He may as well have been the very thing he attested to on his application, for with remarkable aplomb, he had foiled two attempted holdups. In addition, he had demonstrated that he was a man who conducted his affairs with such exemplary discretion as to make it highly unlikely that he would ever prove an embarrassment to the bank.

  What’s more, Watford looked the part perfectly. He was attractive, polite and unfailingly attentive to his duties. Given his strong predilection for masquerade, he naturally loved to don the smart gray flannel guard’s uniform with the strip of navy piping running up the trousers. The crowning touch was the .45-caliber service revolver buckled smartly to his hip. At a time when he was still smarting from the indignity of banishment from his sister’s home, and still imagining himself to be a four-starred item on the New York City Police Department’s Ten Most Wanted list, his unremarkable job at the bank out in the boondocks of Kansas suited his needs perfectly. It afforded him an opportunity to keep a low profile as well as build his badly depleted financial reserves. How long he would stay, he could not say. In all his adult life he’d never been able to conceive of any job he held as anything more than merely transitory. For his part, he was always biding time and awaiting the propitious moment to bolt. And when it came to bolting, he had an unerring instinct for just the right moment. In much the same manner that epileptics describe the aura preceding the full attack, so, too, Watford’s bolt was invariably preceded by a whole series of minute, but by now familiar, neuromuscular alarms. As of yet those alarms had not manifested themselves. But something in the uncanny, almost feral prescience of the man told him that shortly they would.

  Watford’s closest friend at the bank was T. Y. Bidwell, the second security guard and Watford’s partner. A dozen years his senior, Bidwell was a gaunt, leathery individual with flinty, rakish features. He’d been married three times, and in the final instance to two ladies simultaneously. He was a Texan, or more precisely, a Texarkansan who preferred to pass himself off as pure Texan for whatever special cachet he thought attached to that. Lean, coppery, rawboned, he was the quintessential cowhand. A high liver, after hours he made directly for the more boisterous watering holes of Kansas City, where he could depend on an everready supply of bourbon and pretty women.