Death Wish

by Brian Garfield

  Dear West End Avenue Resident:

  The residents of this neighborhood are understandably and gravely concerned with the priority-matter of SAFETY on the streets.

  Police statistics show that addicts and muggers are most likely to prey on the citizenry on dark, or poorly illuminated, streets; and that improved lighting on city streets has been demonstrated to cut crime as much as 75 percent.

  Your Block Association hopes to purchase and install a system of total saturation street lighting along West End Avenue and the side streets from 70th to 74th.

  City funds are not available for this type of installation. Many neighborhood associations have already exercised initiative in purchasing high-saturation lighting in their areas. The cost per light is $350; within the area of our Block Association, individual contributions of as little as $7 each will enable us to saturate our neighborhood with bright lights and drive the criminals away into darker areas.

  Your contribution is tax deductible. Please contribute as much as you can, for your own safety.

  With sincere thanks,

  Herbert Epstein

  He left it open on his desk so he would remember to make out a check.

  Years ago he had spent some of his weekends visiting his uncle and aunt in Rockaway. You could tell the rank and importance of the local mobsters by the brightness of the floodlights around their houses: they were the only people who had reason to fear for their lives.

  * * *

  Tuesday they took Carol to the rest home near Princeton. It was the first time he had seen her in weeks and although he had prepared himself he couldn’t help showing his shock. She looked twenty years older. There was no trace of the coltish girl with the sweet and touching smile. She might as well have been a display-window mannequin.

  Jack kept talking to her in his gentle voice—cheerful meaningless talk, the kind you would use to soothe a skittish horse—but there was no sign she heard any of it; there was no sign she was aware of her own existence, let alone anyone else’s. They have this to pay for, he thought.

  On the Amtrak train back to the city he sat beside Jack looking out the window at the slanting gray rain. Jack didn’t speak. He seemed worn out by the fruitless effort to reach Carol. Paul tried to think of something comforting to say but he quickly realized there was nothing.

  There was a peculiar gratification in seeing how badly Jack was taking it. It made Paul feel the stronger of the two. He wasn’t breaking down at all; he was taking it in his stride.

  But then his thoughts turned inward and he saw there was no reason to be smug; he was keeping his own equilibrium only because he seemed to have been struck by the edge of the same malaise that had infected Carol—the inability to feel anything. It was as if a transparent shield had been erected around him—as if his emotional center had been anesthetized. It had been closing in around him for several days, he realized. He remembered the mugger in Riverside Park: that had terrified him; but it was the last time he had known real fear. The second time—the man who’d tried to rob the drunk—he’d felt very little; he remembered it with vague detachment as if it were a scene from a movie he’d watched a long time ago.

  He walked the streets that night but no one attacked him. At midnight he went home.

  17

  Wednesday morning from the office he telephoned Lieutenant Briggs, the Homicide detective. The police had nothing to report by way of progress in apprehending the intruders who had killed Esther and destroyed Carol’s life. Paul summoned enough righteous outrage to reduce the lieutenant to a string of whining apologies and excuses.

  When he hung up he realized how counterfeit his indignant outburst had been. He had done it on impulse because it seemed to be the thing that was expected of him and he didn’t want to attract suspicion by any hint of unusual behavior. He was finding it surprisingly easy to act the innocent role: easy to be the injured helpless citizen, easy to look straight into people’s faces without fear that his guilt would show. How quickly he had picked up the habit of guarding his secrets—as if he had been allowed to write out his own letters of reference, leaving out everything except what he chose to put in.

  That night he decided to invade a new part of the wilderness. He took the subway down to Fourteenth Street and walked over into the truck district underneath the West Side Highway. Drunks slept beneath the overhanging loading platforms of the warehouses; the huge gray doors to the loading bays were locked formidably. On the side streets under the shadow of the elevated highway the light was very poor and the big trucks were lined up in uneven rows, half blocking the narrow passages. The air was cold and heavy; it wasn’t raining but it had the feel of rain. The still thick night seemed to blot up light.

  He found a car parked askew to the curb, as if it had been disabled and its driver had pushed it out of the center of the roadway and gone for help. The car had been stripped: the hood was up, the trunk-lid up, the car propped on bricks and stones. Its wheels and tires were gone. He looked under the hood: the battery had been removed. The window of the driver’s door had been smashed in. When he looked at the raised trunk-lid he saw it had been pried open; the lip of it was badly mangled. Six hours ago it might have been a good car with a leaf in the fuel line or an empty gas tank; now it was a gutted derelict.

  A lump of hot rage grew in his belly.

  Set a trap for them, he thought. There had to be a way. He kept walking, gripping the gun in his pocket, and after a little while he had it worked out in his mind.

  Wednesday morning he phoned a rent-a-car office and reserved a car for overnight use.

  At half-past ten he drove down the West Side Highway to the Eighteenth Street ramp and went rattling down the chuckholed exit to the warehouse district. On Sixteenth Street a police cruiser rolled slowly past him and the cops inside gave him an incurious glance. He went around the block and found a spot between two double-parked trucks on the right-hand side of the street, away from the street lights. He parked the car there at an awkward angle and wrote in a crabbed hand on a scrap of paper, “Out of gas—back soon,” and stuck it under the windshield-wiper blade. It was the sort of thing motorists did to avoid getting tickets. He locked the doors conscientiously and walked away from the car making a show of his disgust; went around the corner and quickly continued around the entire block; and posted himself in the shadows diagonally across the street from the car. He stood between the close-parked trailers of two semi-rig trucks, with a good field of view and good cover in the deep shadows.

  Now and then a car went by. A pair of homosexual pedestrians, walking fast out of fear, touching each other intimately and laughing. He had heard the faggots sometimes drifted “the trucks” in search of pickups. It was the first time he’d seen it.

  He found them vaguely revolting; they induced the same kind of discomfort he experienced when he had to look at a cripple. There was always something deeply disturbing about deformities you weren’t used to and couldn’t understand. But they were no threat to anyone except themselves and he had no impulse to do anything but let them go by. Fools, he thought, wandering this area at night unarmed. They’re asking for it.

  He backed up: that was wrong. They had a right to walk unmolested; everyone did.

  Someone had to guard the city. Obviously the cops weren’t doing it. He’d spent quite a bit of time in this neighborhood two nights in a row and he’d seen only one passing patrol car.

  Then it’s up to me, isn’t it?

  * * *

  He had to wait nearly an hour but finally they came—two thin boys in a battered old station wagon. They drove past the parked rental car at first. Went by it very slowly, the boy in the passenger seat rolling down his window and craning his neck out to read the little message under the wiper. Paul tensed. The two boys were in animated conversation but he couldn’t hear their words; then the station wagon gunned away and he eased back between the two trailers. He would give it another half hour and then call it a night.

  It cam
e down the street again. The old station wagon. Rolled to a stop in front of Paul’s car.

  They’d gone around the block then. To make sure there weren’t any cops.

  They got out of the station wagon and opened its tailgate. He watched them remove tools—a crowbar, something else. Very professional.

  When they opened the hood of his car Paul shot them both.

  18

  Thursday he returned the car to the agency before he went to work. He spent most of the day in the corner office with Henry Ives and George Eng going over the collated Jainchill figures. He had trouble keeping his mind on the subject at hand. George Eng was among the liberal wealthy; he lived behind the barricades of a great Park Avenue apartment house and sent his children to a private school but even so he spent twenty minutes that afternoon in bitter indignant complaint about the savage adolescents who extorted money from kids outside the school and, if they didn’t have any, beat them up for sport. Eng’s younger son had come home a few days ago bruised and limping. The police hadn’t found his attackers. Eng’s son wasn’t reticent about it; it was just that they had been strangers to him. Public school kids, or dropouts; they were taking to hanging around private schools waiting for the students to come out.

  He had dinner with Jack and they talked pointlessly about Carol. Jack had been out to see her yesterday; there was no change. Every day left room for a little less hope.

  Later that night in the East Village he shot a man coming down a fire escape with a portable TV set.

  * * *

  It had been a slow weekend for news. Somewhere along the line the police had begun to make connections and the story made the Saturday evening newscasts and the front page of the Sunday Times as well as its editorial page.

  A VIGILANTE IN THE STREETS?

  Three men, all with criminal records, and two teen-age boys with narcotics arrest records, have been found shot to death in four Manhattan areas within the past ten days—all five shot by bullets from the same revolver, according to the police.

  Deputy Inspector Frank Ochoa, placed in charge of the case on Friday, is calling it “the vigilante case.” Inspector Ochoa said no connection has been found among the five victims except for their “criminal tendencies” and the fact that postmortem ballistics tests have shown that all five were killed by bullets from the same .32 revolver.

  From circumstantial evidence the police theorize that all five victims may have been engaged in criminal acts at the time of their deaths. Three of them, including the two 17-year-old boys (the only two of the five who were found dead at the same place and time), were found under suggestive circumstances. The two boys were found in the midst of a station wagon-load of car-stripping tools. The most recent victim, George Lambert, 22, was found with a stolen television set at the foot of a fire escape leading down from the window of an apartment from which the set had been stolen. The window showed signs of forcible entry.

  The other two victims, found in upper Manhattan parks, may have been engaged in narcotics trading or armed robbery. Both were armed with knives.

  These facts have led the police to the tentative conclusion that a self-styled, one-man vigilante force is stalking the city with a .32 revolver. “It has to be some guy looking for retribution,” Inspector Ochoa believes. “Some nut that thinks he’s a one-man police force.”

  Inspector Ochoa has assigned a special detail to the case. “We’re beginning to put it all together. Until a couple of days ago these cases were all in separate Precincts, which is why we’ve been a little slow making the connection. But we’re on it now and the Department expects to apprehend the killer very quickly.”

  By the next morning the newspapers had picked it up with full energy. Inspector Ochoa was the Times’s Man-in-the-News. In the Daily News on the editorial page the Inquiring Fotographer’s man-in-the-street question was, “How do you feel about the vigilante killer?” and the six answers ranged from “You can’t take the law into your own hands” to “They ought to leave that guy alone, he’s doing what the cops should have done a long time ago.” The afternoon Post editorialized, “Murder answers no questions. The vigilante must be nailed before he murders any more victims. We urge the Manhattan D.A. and the NYPD to spare no effort to bring the psychopath to justice.”

  He got up in the middle of the night. The sleeping pills weren’t working very well any more. He made a cup of tea and re-read the newspaper accounts. The cup and saucer rattled in his hand, the tea rumbled uneasily in his stomach; he heard himself whimper softly.

  There was no appeasement of his distress. He was miserably lonely; he didn’t want to spend the night with a woman—he didn’t want to spend the night at all. He thought of Ochoa and his special detail: they were out there somewhere, ambitious men stalking him when they should have been guarding the honest citizens. An entire city slashing itself to extinction and all the police could do was search for the man who was trying to show them the way back.

  It was a little after three. He didn’t go back to bed. He had cleaned the gun since its last firing, but he cleaned it again and sat a long time debating whether to continue carrying it in his pocket all the time. It might be safer to find a hiding place for it. As far as he knew, he had left no clues that would lead the police to him; but their technology was impressive and it was possible some hint might cause them to question him at some point. It would be better not to have the gun on him.

  But there was no place to hide it. If they became suspicious of him they would surely search his apartment and his office. Other than those two places there was no other cache that would be safe and easily accessible. He thought up elaborate schemes worthy of gothic horror stories: digging out a brick in the basement, hiding the gun behind it—but all those were risky notions. A small boy might stumble on the hiding place; the building handyman might find it. The gun was the only positive and irrevocable connection between him and the killings. If the police ever got their hands on it they could match it up to the death bullets, and they could trace it to him effortlessly because the gun’s serial number was registered to him in Washington through the dealer who’d sold it to him in Arizona.

  Half-past four in the morning. His thoughts pendulumed from extreme to extreme. If they caught him he would kill himself, it was the clean neat way. No. If they caught him he would fight it out in the courts; he would get the best lawyers and they would have public sympathy on their side.

  It wasn’t inevitable that he would be caught. They had no objective cause to suspect him, as long as he was careful. His campaign was a reasoned one, not the result of mindless compulsions; he could pick and choose his time and place, he could suspend his operations until things cooled off. He had the options of free will. The editorialists were wrong of course; he wasn’t psychotic, it wasn’t an uncontrollable obsession, he wasn’t compelled by diseased brain-cells to keep slaughtering innocent victims until he was caught—he was no crazy strangler begging for punishment through self-hate. I’m a nut, of course, he thought, but it was only by comparison with the insane norms of society that he was abnormal. What he was doing was extreme. But it was necessary. Someone had to do it: someone had to show the way.

  “You can see it in the kids,” George Eng said. “They used to be anti-police. Not any more. My kids are pro-cop with a vengeance. Can you blame them? The junkies are looting everything. Ripping off school calculators and lab equipment, mugging the kids. My son has a friend in one of the schools up in Westchester—they had to close the school this week. Vandals. They flooded the building with fire hoses—ransacked the place, urinated on the chairs, splashed paint all over the walls. I’ll tell you something, this fellow who’s out there killing them may be doing us all a service. Do you know we’ve got sixty-eight tenant families in my building and forty-one of them keep Dobermans and German shepherds? There aren’t that many dog lovers, believe me. Not when the price of an attack dog’s gone up to damn near two thousand dollars.”

  Eng’s eyes had narrow
ed to a fighter’s squint; his mouth became small and mean. “The kids want law and order even more than we do. The only trouble is, with the police department we’ve got, it takes the cops a month to find the police commissioner. That’s why I think it was inevitable a guy like this would come along. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion he’s probably a cop himself—fed up with revolving-door courts and the red-tape delirium and the Goddamned Supreme Court. I’d lay pretty big odds on that—he’s a cop. He knows this is the only language these criminals understand. He’s giving us a deterrent for them. It’s neutralizing a few of them and I imagine it’s scaring a lot more of them off the streets. I’d be interested to see how the crime statistics have moved since this guy started—I’ll lay a small fortune muggings are way down.”

  Watching him across the restaurant table Paul only grunted now and then to show he was listening. He hadn’t decided what tack to take in discussions like this; he knew they would come up, but should he defend his actions or condemn them?

  In the meantime he listened very carefully to everyone—listened for inflections in their voices. He had to: it wasn’t what they said but what they didn’t. He had sensitive antennae, he would know if anyone suspected him, but he would have to know it quickly.

  That was the hardest part to bear. There was no one he could tell. No one to confide in.

  No one at all.

  It was important to avoid patterns. The police often worked on a modus-operandi basis. Once they pieced together a pattern in his activities they might be able to set traps for him. There had to be no commonalities from one act to the next: no regular time intervals, no regular time-of-day, no pattern of area concentration.