Killing Time

by Thomas Berger

  He was fascinated by the little crowd. To Detweiler any ride on the subway was a feast. He looked from one passenger to the next, eager but cautious: people were put off by too much enthusiasm. Which would he choose? He read the headlines on the old man’s newspaper and saw something there that caused him to cross the aisle, sit down, and look at the profile of bald head and hairy ear.

  After a while the old man turned to stare back, prepared to show irritation, but when he saw that Detweiler’s interest was in him rather than in stealing a free read of his paper, he was flattered. Embarrassed by the emotion, however, he turned away.

  “Excuse me,” said Detweiler. “I broke my glasses this morning, and I am very nearsighted. I can’t read the station signs.” At random he chose a destination and asked if they were near it.

  “Fifteen minutes yet,” replied the old man, at first politely avoiding Detweiler’s eyes. Then he suddenly peered into them with his own rheumy pair. “I don’t wear glasses at my age; you are blind without them, too bad. It is dangerous not to see good when even perfect specimens are murdered. If you can’t see, then you never read the paper this morning: three slain last night, including a beauty. Anything else you want to know from the paper? Comics or horses?”

  “No, thank you kindly,” said Detweiler. “The same news will all be there again tomorrow and the next day after that. I am interested only in the things that last.”

  The old-timer grunted and fell silent for a while, annoyed at such a lofty attitude on the part of a youth with bad eyes, yet also stimulated by it.

  “You have got to think of something,” he said at last in benevolent exasperation. “What else is there but what happens daily? That is life, though I agree the best of it isn’t always in the papers. For my money, I would not print so much about mayhem and killing, in order that kids not get influenced in the wrong way. For when they do good, nobody writes of it.” He chewed at his blue lip.

  “Why,” asked Detweiler, squinting through his weak eyes—for he experienced his impostures to the bone; though normally he enjoyed 20-20 vision, he now genuinely saw only a blur beyond the three-foot mark—“why read of life? Life is here and now, this train, these wicker seats, this motion. For you and me that murder is a story. We know of it only what we have been told by someone else. Nor was it the personal experience of the newspaper reporter, who is just passing on what he has been told.”

  The man shook his head, amused by the infantile philosophy. “You’ll be nowhere at all unless you believe somebody. You must figure in each case whether the guy telling you has got an interest in lying. When you buy a used car, the salesman’s got every reason to lie, O.K. The papers exaggerate to sell more copies, O.K. Maybe the model ain’t so hot-looking in reality, who knows? But she was strangled all right. That I believe, and I am interested because she was a person and so am I.”

  He had never before worked out his motives for so simple and obvious an endeavor as reading the daily news. He had taken it on faith that being old, he was wise. He felt affection for this young man who had given him the opportunity to prove it. His own children never let him say a word. He fished two tangerines from his bag and offered one to Detweiler, who accepted it gratefully.

  Detweiler peeled the fruit and reveled in the aroma. Carefully he lifted off the underskin webwork, then pursued the remaining white filaments each by each. The train had gained two stations before he was done, and the old-timer had almost finished eating his own tangerine, having slung the peelings under the seat. Detweiler wished with all his heart that he could convince the man that at the moment these tangerines were life, were quite as consuming, vibrant, and significant as those murders. Every experience was as valid as the next. Nothing was born and nothing died.

  But from Detweiler’s silence the old man assumed that his own eloquence had triumphed and he moved to consolidate his position.

  “Police are questioning the father,” he said. “Imagine that, his own wife and daughter. Well, maybe he was provoked.”

  The first segment of tangerine, to which Detweiler had so looked forward, turned sour in his mouth. He put the rest of the fruit and the peelings into a coat pocket, stood up, and walked along the swaying, clattering coach to the door.

  The old man was astonished. He wondered whether he had said something offensive, decided quickly that he had not, and put the boy down as a nut. As the train stopped and Detweiler stepped out, the old-timer shouted: “This ain’t your stop!” Too late: the nearsighted screwball was already running through the turnstile.

  Detweiler plunged into a phone booth, found the number of police headquarters in the tattered directory, dialed it, and asked for Homicide. He was still in the station, and the noise was deafening as the train pulled out. When his hearing returned, a voice was saying, “Who is this?” with a hard edge, as if it had already asked the same question more than once.

  “I want to talk to the officer in charge of the investigation of those murders.”

  “What is your name?” the voice asked. It was now definitely an order rather than a request. Detweiler felt his nerve endings tremble with the beginnings of ferocity. He was peculiar in that he could not endure a command. Abuse, derision, contempt could not touch him, but he took orders from no human agency. He prayed now that this voice would not persist.

  “Let me talk,” he said, “to the officer investigating the Starr murders.”

  It was Tierney who took the call. “Give me your name and address,” he said in answer to Detweiler’s question.

  “Let me tell you something, sir,” he said to Tierney. “I will not acknowledge these impertinent questions at this time. I will not be distracted! Do you understand?”

  Tierney said calmly: “All right, sir. Just take it easy. Nobody is going to give you a bad time.”

  “I realize that you gentlemen are doing as well as you can,” said Detweiler, “but if you think Mr. Starr killed those people, you are making a terrible mistake.”

  Tierney cleared his throat. He knew a crank when he heard one. He was also aware that once in a thousand times a crank could furnish useful information. It was not out of the question that this one might himself have committed the crimes. It was quite as likely, however, that some joker was pulling a hoax. College boys and drunks occasionally tried to delude those who enforced the law. Tierney himself had once on a dare, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, phoned the local precinct station with a bogus complaint to the effect that a gorilla was abroad in his neighborhood. The desk sergeant, an old hand, promptly told him off. Tierney had been impressed, amazed by the instantaneous certainty of the sergeant. Actually, wild animals did now and again escape from zoos and circuses; the story was not preposterous per se.

  This experience, so insignificant on the surface, had been one of the most influential factors in Tierney’s subsequent decision to join the Force. Assurance meant much more to him than authority. He had no great urge to ferret out, or even to punish. His need was to be right. When he was assigned to Homicide, he found his earliest, naive ideal embodied in Shuster, but by that time his belief in himself had dwindled through some years’ duty as a patrolman, during which tour he had often been incorrect in his unspoken judgments. This had not affected his performance, else he would never have been promoted to detective, but it troubled him, made him perhaps too conservative when dealing with the obvious. For example, he assumed Shuster had seriously considered Starr as a suspect. Having discovered this was not so, he was at a loss to explain the event. Then Shuster had sent Starr home. “He’ll go to the papers,” he said to Tierney, “and tell them we kicked him around all night and we’ll deny it, which nobody will believe, and that’s exactly what we want.”

  Tierney had been studying this matter when he received the call from Detweiler, and now believed he got the picture: the police must be made to seem as ruthless as the man who had committed the murders, else the public would have no confidence in the Department. But. Tierney had learned that principle as
a rookie. The Force was force, not justice or understanding or pathos or regret. He should not have felt any personal emotion towards Starr, except perhaps a routine contempt for a man who so obviously gravitated towards the un-respectable.

  Now, talking to this crank, who might be killer or joker or nothing, Tierney was suddenly struck by an urge to hang up the telephone. He resisted that, but gave in to a succeeding impulse that was even more reckless.

  He asked with genuine anger: “What makes you think your opinion is valuable? Why should I listen to you?”

  Shuster’s eyes widened at this apparent irregularity. It was not standard to lose patience with an anonymous caller, whatever the provocation. The proper tone was weary, bored, sometimes ironic, always superior.

  Detweiler, on the other hand, was cleansed of his own ire by Tierney’s show of weakness. He hastened to speak in his most fetching way, his voice like that of a contrite child.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please forgive me.” He felt utterly helpless when faced with disapproval.

  “How old are you?” Tierney asked sternly.

  Detweiler said: “Sixteen.”

  “Sonny,” said Tierney, “it is a serious thing to try to hoax the police. You could be sent to reform school for not much more than that, but seeing it is Christmas, I’m going to let you off if you promise not to do this again.”

  “I promise,” Detweiler answered and hung up. He went back to the platform and abjectly waited for the next train, with an idea of throwing himself under it, but it was too long in coming and meanwhile he was distracted by a machine that vended tiny chocolate bars. He bought one and let it melt upon his tongue: quite the best candy he had ever eaten, an exquisite experience, purging him of the guilt he had felt at trying to dupe the detective. He had not lied about his age; at that moment he had been a teen-aged prankster. Detweiler could be almost anyone or anything he wished. It was done with the will.

  “Some damn kid,” Tierney told Shuster. “Tomorrow we’ll begin to get the anonymous letters.” All the same, he should not have lost his temper. He decided to bluff it out. “He would have gone on for an hour if I hadn’t cut him short. When I was a boy we used to call the zoo and ask for Mr. Lyon.”

  “Could have been a boy,” said Shuster, merely to get the knife into Tierney, who was running off at the mouth. “I got a neighbor with a twelve-year-old kid, five foot eight in height and weighs one-sixty.” His telephone rang at that point and, grinning, he lifted the instrument.

  It was a detective in Narcotics who had just collared a junkie. When interrogated as to where he had spent the night, the addict finally named the street on which the Starr apartment was situated. A dried bloodstain appeared on the toecap of his left sneaker.

  Chapter 3

  BETTY STARR accepted an offer from a morning tabloid to write a series of articles on life with her mother and sister, and she and Arthur had been installed in her choice of midtown hotels, all expenses paid, to facilitate that project: a two-bedroomed suite, with a spacious living room between. Arthur whistled at the price he would not have to pay, and urged on by the attendant reporter, who would do the actual writing while Betty talked, ordered a big steak from room service, but while masticating its bloody segments, worried over the question of who should tip the waiter. For in a place like this, even the gratuities would come to a tidy figure.

  Betty was too excited to eat. She had always had an urge to write, had done the humorous “class will” for her high-school yearbook and in succeeding years turned out a few poems and what she called mood pieces. Aware that her work ran counter to the popular vein, she had not sought publication, indeed never showed the product of her pen to anyone except a young artist who had once boarded at her mother’s, and to him only because he was hopelessly in love with her.

  She took two sips of her maroon manhattan, and turning her chair so that she would not have to watch Arthur devour his meat—he was not the world’s most graceful eater—she said, “Where do I start, with being born?”

  A tall, loosely dressed man called Alloway, the reporter put down his glass of beer, picked up his pencil, and nodded. He had first to get some example of her talking style before he made specific suggestions.

  “I came into the world on a frosty morning in November,” Betty began. “Few people can recall any experience from when they were babies, but as it happens, I can with extraordinary vividness, even terror.”

  Alloway had expected to have his ass bored off by this narrative. The relatives of murderer and victim were usually the most tedious people in the world, could remember only the most commonplace details about the principals, were inarticulate at the outset but before long developed a case of verbal diarrhea. Betty might be simply reversing the process, but he was professionally attracted to her early use of the word “terror.”

  “Yes,” he said, “that’s the thing.”

  “I was laying—lying in my crib, looking at a string of red and blue beads that hung between its bars, when suddenly the horrible face of a monster or animal rose slowly up from the floor in my view, bared its teeth, and leaning over, bit me in the toe. Not for years did I realize it was my sister, the late Wilhelmina Starr.”

  Betty crossed her legs. Alloway briefly saw the gleam of garter clips. He was a very carnal man, a bachelor of thirty-two whose natural prey was wives. His peculiarity was fanatical: he could not so much as get it up with an unmarried girl. God knows he had tried. For six months he had gone with a maiden named Sandra, who at last, in no more contempt than pity, told him that with what we nowadays know about the human personality, and with all respect, he might be basically homo, really crave husbands but could not admit that, so went for the thing closest to them.

  Alloway had worried about his taste, but Sandra’s assessment simply made him laugh. “It’s more likely,” said he to her, “that I hate other men and want to discredit them, show I can do better.” The argument broke up their association, as his failure in bed never had, and Alloway reassumed his old pursuit of married quiff, oddly with a lighter heart than before.

  He was getting hot for Betty, and he was grateful she had not been the murdered sister. He had seen the lace-panty, bare-knocker shots of Billie and was no more moved than he would have been by photographs of stacked luggage. Betty was his type, with her housewifely Sunday suit of black velvet, white blouse, little black hat with its veil retracted, and underneath it all, white underwear over soft skin. The flesh of wives was softer than that of single girls: Alloway did not know why that was. It couldn’t be because they were older; Betty for example was in her early twenties. He would have preferred to work with her in the Bayson house in the suburbs, which surely was decorated with corny little figurines and flowered fabrics. Alloway could get an erection sometimes from one look at such domesticity. It had to be middle-class, though. He was seldom stirred by the wives of the poor; he felt little lust in tenements.

  But it was part of the deal with the paper that the Baysons would stay in a hotel. Betty had insisted on that feature. She had great strength of personality, a trait that made Alloway even hornier.

  In his professional role, however, he gave a very low value to the story about Billie’s biting her toe in the cradle, especially since Betty went on to characterize that incident as the sole interchange with her sister, during Billie’s tragically short life, that reflected aught but mutual love. “We shared our toys as children,” Betty said, “as we shared our girlish secrets later on, our joys and heartaches.”

  Alloway took down little of this, though it was very much like what he would write later on, the reason being that Betty had obviously derived her style from standard tabloid stories—some of them no doubt written by Alloway himself. Instead, he doodled, drew a picture that eventually came to represent a bourgeois living room with flowered curtains, tiny lamp on an endtable, plump couch.

  “Between us,” Betty went on, “rivalry was unknown. It helped that we were basically such different people. Bi
llie was the gay butterfly, often soaring too near the flame—”

  Arthur was startled from his coma of steak. Mouth full, gesturing with a roll, he said: “Muff…, ugh…moth, not butterfly.” He cleared his throat again. “Moth.”

  “You may be scientifically correct,” Betty responded petulantly, “but can’t you see that it would spoil the image? I want something gaudily colored, yet self-destructively attracted to fire.”

  “Some moths have bright coloration,” Alloway offered. As it happened, he was a bit of an amateur lepidopterist, having picked up the hobby from an ax-murderer on whom he had once done a story. He had inherited that unfortunate’s collection, occasionally adding to it specimens he came across when assignments took him near greenery. Though he never went out deliberately to collect: he would have thought that queer. “The Cecropia moth is as vivid as any butterfly.”

  Betty, who had mistakenly imagined that Tierney was attracted to her, had so far been blind to Alloway’s genuine interest. Or perhaps her instincts rejected an occupation so narrowly genital. She had seen the reporter as merely a kind of microphone into which she spoke, but on the basis of his latest remark she began to dislike him, believing he took Arthur’s side in the argument.

  She said: “I can’t keep to my train of thought if I am going to be incessantly interrupted. You should have gone down to the restaurant to eat.”

  Her husband made no answer, no move, chewed on. What a clod he was. Alloway could have pitched him out a window, could sooner have done that than suggest to Betty that he and she adjourn to one of the bedrooms. Alloway had no sexual nerve at all unless he got some sign from the woman.

  Arthur swallowed and spoke. “Butterflies go around in the daylight when the sun is out.” He stuck to the subject with the same persistence he had applied to his meal: he had at all costs to keep his mind off Billie’s murder, for which he felt guilty, having disapproved of her so greatly. Having had a certain fondness for Mrs. Starr, he was not nearly so affected by her death.