Killing Time

by Thomas Berger

  It occurred to Detweiler to ask: “What do you want?”

  “Look at those two old killers,” said Mrs. Walt, nodding her orange cocoon towards the ancient combatants at the bar, one of whom was still pushing the other, who accepted it doggedly while trying to return to his original position: both were now afoot, but had not moved far. The bartender stayed distant, deftly rinsing glasses. He had not collected Detweiler’s dollar.

  Walt answered gravely, meeting Detweiler’s eye: “The impossible. My youth.”

  “In my opinion,” said Detweiler, “if you don’t mind me saying so, ‘impossible’ is not the right word, but rather ‘irrelevant.’ Time can only get to you if you let it. Don’t you sense that whatever your body is or does, and your mind too, for that matter, you, the essential you, stays the same? Did you ever hear of an old soul or a young one?”

  Walt looked from Detweiler to his wife and back.

  “I’m using the word ‘soul’ because it’s convenient,” Detweiler explained. “What I mean is a sort of energy of awareness, a definite conviction that you exist. Do you feel that you exist any less than when you were younger?” He nodded brightly at Walt disregarding physical intelligence from his groin, into which, across and under the table, Mrs. Walt had insinuated her stockinged foot. She had apparently slipped her shoe off.

  Walt stared disagreeably at Detweiler’s right earlobe and corrugated his own upper lip.

  “Well,” Detweiler asked heartily, “are we here or not? You can begin basically. Where is your youth? Where is your old age? One was once here and the other will come. But where are they now? Where do they come from and where do they go? No place. But you are always here, right? Where is here? Wherever you are: that’s how you tell. It’s certainly not noplace. And if you are here, then it must be worthwhile.”

  Walt shifted his eyes to Detweiler’s chin and mumbled sourly.

  Undeterred, Detweiler said: “So youth and age are not things to be taken seriously. They are not to be gained or lost, except in a mechanical way: Einstein says if you go fast enough, time stops. Therefore how can it be important?”

  Mrs. Walt suddenly wiggled her toes vigorously. He pulled his chair back several inches and her foot fell audibly to the floor.

  Walt crowed in triumph, spearing with forked fingers an imaginary olive from the air between him and Detweiler. “If you say it don’t all go up in shit when you die, you are a dirty liar.”

  Detweiler reflected that it had been an error to get involved in a consideration of Walt’s dead-end mystique. This was the kind of wasteful distraction he could avoid were he to find a surgeon to stem the leakage of vital force. There would then be nothing for Mrs. Walt to probe towards, she who, in maximum stretch was now sitting on the small of her back, red head hooked onto the top of the chair, scarcely above table level. She looked like a midget from Detweiler’s perspective. He could feel her toes once more. He could also sense, and even see from the bottom of his eye, his inflated lip, which now felt more like a growth than a pain.

  “You’re a rumdum slob,” Walt said ferociously and left the table, in a limp that Detweiler had not hitherto noticed. He took two steps and then returned and without warning hit Detweiler in the right eye. Detweiler of course closed it and caged it in his fingers, and watched from the good one Mrs. Walt squeeze wincingly into her shoe and follow Walt to the door, through which, both waving goodbye to the bartender, they exited.

  Soon thereafter the aggressor of the two old men hit the other with a beer bottle. Without examining the fallen, the bartender got a dime from the till, entered the public telephone booth next to a door marked “Toilet,” and placed a call. Detweiler watched the proceedings through his good eye, serenely. He no longer found the violence infectious. He was still sitting there when the police arrived, two of them, large men in blue. They burst in as if propelled by some source of energy on the sidewalk, but collected themselves quickly and stared at the recumbent old-timer whose head lay in blood. He who had committed the assault raved through a toothless mouth, to them but more to the world at large, that the victim had made indecent advances to him, which was a crime. The police took him away. He announced he would go “under protest,” and showed as much by his indignant, foot-slapping march.

  Detweiler sometimes felt sorry for other people; so much of life seemed loathsome to them. He waited until the ambulance came for the old man who had been wounded or killed, and after the accompanying interne, dressed in soiled ducks, had sent the victim out upon a litter borne by attendants in impeccable whites, Detweiler waylaid the doctor, displaying his puffed lip and sore eye.

  He said, craftily: “May I come along and get treatment?”

  “Put cold compresses on those and get some rest,” the interne answered and departed.

  Detweiler’s dollar lay yet where he had left it, anchored by some spilled beer so as to go unstirred by the commotion of the battle. He waved it at the bartender.

  Who, back at his glass-washing sink, called pleasantly: “Walt took care of that.”

  “But I had my beer before I met him,” Detweiler stated.

  “No, he caught it.”

  The other persons at the bar showed no curiosity about this exchange. Detweiler, however, found it remarkable. Had Walt, then, directed Mrs. Walt to make his acquaintance? And if so, why? In generosity or meanness? To whom?

  As always Detweiler had had an interesting day. When he arrived at his mother’s apartment, standing in the interior hall he could hear her speaking in falsetto behind the closed door of the living room. She was holding a séance. From the hatrack hung the outer garments of her co-participants, the deceased loved ones of whom would speak through her if she made successful contact. They would all be holding hands so as to make a human circuit. What they were after was a kind of Realization, but too simple-minded to appeal to Detweiler, who repaired to the kitchen and ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He then went to bed and fell asleep while pulling the blanket towards his chin.

  Chapter 10

  TIERNEY darkened the doorway.

  Betty said: “I thought of something else in connection with Joe Detweiler. He once gave Billie a mounted squirrel. It stood on the dresser the last time I was in here before the murders.”

  She wanted encouragement, but Tierney seemed strangely indifferent, saying merely that he would go over the inventory: perhaps the technicians had taken it to the lab. He admitted he had not seen it.

  He asked: “Are you ready to go?”

  Betty preceded him into the hall, and he waited until she had turned through the kitchen door before he extinguished the bathroom light. She lingered at the stove, where on entry he could have collided with her, but his reflexes were astonishing. The illumination rippled smoothly across the linoleum from a floor lamp in the living room beyond.

  “You’re sure it’s Joe.”

  “No,” Tierney answered literally.

  “But you will get him.”

  Tierney shrugged, a movement she more heard than saw.

  Betty said: “You have guns and radios and labs and the power to take away somebody’s freedom for parking next to a fireplug. Joe is one man, or boy really, skinny little fellow and soft in the head. He might not even know you’re looking for him: I don’t think he ever reads the papers. He wouldn’t have the faintest idea where or how to hide out.”

  She was ready now to go on into the living room, but Tierney, it seemed to her, was reluctant to move. Or to speak. His physical effect was bulky in the half light: he still wore his overcoat.

  The slick chill of the linoleum reminded her she was barefoot.

  “My boots and stockings.”

  “I dried them out,” said Tierney.

  Betty wandered from the kitchen into the light and saw her boots standing erect on the shallow sheet-metal cap of the radiator between the front windows. She crossed the pale area of carpet where Appleton had died.

  “Where are my stockings?”

  “Here
.” Tierney took them from the pocket of his overcoat. It seemed odder to her that he surrendered them with no embarrassment, than that he had carried them so. He next denied her the opportunity to ask him to turn aside while she put them on: ostentatiously he retired to a far corner, stooped, gathering the skirts of his coat, and peered at the baseboard.

  She was shod when he returned.

  “Find something?”

  “Old scar, varnished over,” said he. “Caught the light.”

  “These old apartments,’’ she stated.

  Tierney helped her into her coat, though not considerately, holding it too high. She went up on her toes. “You must have a tall wife.”

  “No,” Tierney said obtusely. She is about your size.”

  “And blonde,” Betty guessed, having penetrated the sleeves at last, keeping her back to him while she fastened the three big wooden buttons. He made no answer.

  She turned and said: “I’m trying to regard you as a person.”

  Tierney raised the obscure brows over his clear blue eyes. He had a facility for maintaining himself in a neutral equilibrium while others moved futilely and aged.

  He smiled without amusement. “Brunette.”

  “And detectives always have children.”

  “Just like people.” Tierney knew as he said it that he had now willfully disarmed himself. He had as much self-pity as the next man, was underpaid and overworked, unloved and mistrusted by everybody and respected only by criminals, yet never before had he found it necessary to snivel to a woman.

  Quick to seize her advantage, Betty yet spoke slowly and as if in discomfort: “Well, I didn’t mean that, and you know it.” She was now in a position from which she could taunt him endlessly. In a merciless calling, he could expect no mercy: that was the clear morality of it.

  She looked at his right ear, which lay efficiently close against his head: he was built for action. She put her hands against the several layers of clothing between the air and his hard chest, and groped.

  “Leave your gun at home?”

  Boyishly he opened his coat and jacket and displayed the little clip-holster at the turn of his left hip. As he reached for it he caught her hand, but held it flabbily: she squeezed through and clasped the butt once, then withdrew.

  She said, grinning: “I thought about it for a long time, and did it.”

  He considered her eyes for a moment and then laboriously unfastened the strap and removed the pistol, opened the cylinder, ejected the shells, and presented the weapon to her.

  Now Betty kept her hands to herself, saying: “Actually, I’ve always been afraid of guns.”

  “Go ahead,” Tierney said, swaggering somewhat. “It’s unloaded.” The weapon was smooth and hard and smelled of oil: a man’s device in extremis, nothing in it for doubt or wonder, utterly predictable. “The way to get over a fear of something,” he sententiously went on, “is to know it. A firearm is just an instrument, with no power in itself.” He demonstrated the technique of cocking and firing, but with a thumb restrained the hammer so the trigger would not snap against space; which was bad for the firing pin.

  He dropped a bullet, bent to fetch it, saying: “We have to pay for these ourselves.” Again the note of self-pity. The shell bounced to rest between Betty’s feet. She refused to move as Tierney knelt there. He tapped her boot as a signal she should shift it.

  The doorbell rang then. Tierney let the shell go and leaped erect, stowing away his revolver in one neat motion. But before he answered the summons he did a strange thing: pushed Betty at the couch, made it clear she should lie there. As she submitted, he lifted her legs by the ankles, swung them up and on.

  Then he went into the hallway and admitted a patrolman through the street door.

  The cop said: “I am going for coffee. You folks want any?”

  “Oh,” said Tierney. “Well, we’re leaving soon. I don’t guess so.”

  The officer’s chill-flushed face nodded between his cap and high-button collar.

  “Thanks, Minelli.” Tierney instantly remembered he had got Spinelli’s name wrong, an unprecedented mistake; he had known the man for several years. No fitting apology occurred to him, so he asked: “Shuster hasn’t been looking for me on the radio?”

  “You’ll know it if he does,” Spinelli said as he left.

  Tierney called after him, at the closing door, in the empty hall under the yellow ceiling fixture: “Mrs. Bayson is resting. She doesn’t feel well.”

  Betty of course could hear this. He must go now and face her hard upon a lie, the motive for which was not obvious to him.

  She was waiting, but oddly enough showed none of the ugly triumph he expected, appeared instead as sweet and shy. She had taken off her coat and sat demurely on the couch, hair back of one ear. The bullet rested where it had been dropped. He intended to get it, was on the way, but she put out both arms.

  He knelt before her, and her legs opened to admit him in his overcoat. He had a sense only of clothing, wadded wool of his and her various nonfrictional stuffs. She avoided his mouth. Her hand once reached his groin as if by accident, drawing quickly away thereafter. Had he ceased to struggle, they would have been lying there in a heap, as though in the aftermath of an accidental collision. He tried then to pull away; even now he was not of a single mind. But she had been working unobtrusively at his belt buckle, and the zipper, and the snap fasteners of his drawers, and suddenly his shame was bare. She remained fully dressed, her skirt no higher than the lower garter clips. He alone was indecent, exposed, in violation of the ordinances, and firmly she took him into custody.

  Betty had been thirteen when Billie had told her: “Get hold of it and you can do anything with them.” Billie was fifteen and Betty assumed she was merely being dirty, theoretical, speculative. Billie in those days talked of much that she did not do: brushing cornstarch into the pubic hair to give it sheen, firming the breasts with egg-white massages, various self-manipulations as training for the control of passion and the increase of pleasure, how to belly-rub a boy hard while dancing or brush him with a knocker at the drinking fountain. In practice, to Betty’s observation, which was close, Billie realized none of these projects. She was actually very modest with boys; and as to her body, treated it as an athlete’s, showering and exercising daily, and walking on the balls of her feet so that her calves were in tension and her buttocks under strict management. She neither smoked nor drank and could not suffer the company of those who did. The boys who frequented her had like interests, were gymnasts and weightlifters, with guileless eyes and short hair. Billie in fact remained a virgin throughout high school.

  Having always believed that wrongdoing took conscious effort, Tierney was delighted to find himself now relieved of moral weight. He had a pleasant sense that time had stopped, that his capacities were therefore infinite. In apprehending the malefactor, the police take responsibility for his crimes: he who is powerless can no longer be evil. He was not troubled that Betty wished him ill. He was happily married and in no need of comfort.

  Betty began to tire but not to weaken. Here in her house she would give all and take nothing. Having caused Tierney to secrete his venom, she would drain it. Her concern was that he not interpret her intent as loving.

  All at once Tierney took charge. He was finally no pervert. He fingered aside her straining interstitial strap of pants, like a spring or rubber band, and made gliding entry, constricting as though through a ring, expanding thereafter in yielding yet close imprisonment: he could go anywhere but not unaccompanied. She would even follow him out, as retiring from one statement he prepared the next. His wife lay inert, whores drily thrusted: Tierney had not known of a third style, and was momentarily appalled. Yet the fleshly argument was overwhelming.

  Betty recognized in horror that her treasonous body was making love with his, engrossing, devouring that which it could never retain, breaking its heart, though morally she had vanquished him: proof there was no justice in creation. And now Tierney ha
d claimed her mouth and she was gulping his, and his hands had penetrated her clothing, defiling her everywhere as he could not have done were she stark naked. She was in the most calamitous, obscene disorder, and he was her master.

  It was as if she were acting as accessory to her own murder.

  The doorbell rang. Tierney hesitated for a microsecond, then pushed himself off her and retracted his trousers. It was an extraordinary moment for Betty: she was still enthralled. He closed his coat, and was whole. This seemed to take no more time than if he had not touched her. He vanished into the hallway. She kept nothing of him.

  Tierney was still open under the coat, trousers clipped at the top, but the fly gaped and his belt buckle dangled, and he knew from the absence of a certain weight that his gun had slipped from the holster he had not restrapped. Nevertheless, it was with a sense of self-possession that he again opened the street door to find Spinelli.

  The officer exhaled a burst of steam. He looked as though he had run up the stoop.

  “That was Shuster,” he said, referring to the police radio. Cold wind blew up Tierney’s overcoat and toyed intimately with him. He received the subsequent message without comment on it, but asked Spinelli to call in that he was on his way.

  Spinelli wanted to talk. “You can’t ever tell with a psycho, huh?” He erected, and gestured with, a gloved thumb. “The lady O.K. now?”

  Tierney nodded heavily. He reflected that he must be smeared with lipstick and wondered why Spinelli failed to notice.

  But Spinelli continued jovially: “Too bad the prick didn’t come in in Florida.” He steamed again and thudded his hands against his heavy blue coat.

  Tierney laughed in a kind of wheeze and closed the door. Betty was precisely where, and as, he had left her, with one exception. She held his pistol. Oddly enough, throughout the interruption he had maintained himself, or was maintained, in a state in which he could have returned and finished with her, and so preserve the order of things.