The man increases his stride, quickens his steps. He breathes deeply, and his breath strains against his lungs in anticipation. It is a race against time, a race to catch her before she reaches the corner. The crowds flow silently past on the sidewalk, as he narrows the remaining distance between them. ‘It’s her all right!’ The jockey voice is excited... ‘I told you, I told you!’
She pauses now on the corner waiting for the light to change, and the man flings his steps across the few remaining patches of concrete. He is standing beside her; he is looking straight ahead. She hasn’t seen him yet. So... carefully... so very carefully... he turns his head to look into her face.
It is the face of a complete stranger.
The jockey voices rise in a roar of silent, derisive laughter.
‘Look... look up ahead,’ says another jockey voice. ‘See that other girl... take a good look. It’s her! I tell you, it’s her!’
The man shakes his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘it isn’t...’ but his steps begin to quicken again...
And at night! At night, when the pillow becomes hot and the sheets are turned and twisted on the bed. and the jockey voices become unbearable, a man can sometimes rid himself of them. But at a price. It’s like this: You close your eyes, although the room is brightly lighted, because if the room is dark, it is entirely unbearable. The light shines faintly pink through your eyelids, and it becomes small points of color. By watching the color, your eyes turn back upon themselves, and become a supernatural type of camera that can pierce the past, record the present, and probe the future. It looks across distance and penetrates buildings, walls, and rooms. For instance... that night, the last time you saw her... before she left, she said something about having a date with another man.
Now this is the time for the camera to show how good it is. That last night suddenly becomes tonight... without any effort at all. The camera pans slowly around the four points of the compass, and locates a building... the walls dissolve, and instantly you are inside an apartment. Nothing is clear, inside the apartment, except you are suddenly in a bedroom. She is there. A man is there. The man’s face is out of focus, but that is not important, because her face is clear. It is etched sharply, and the camera makes her as beautiful... as any night you care to remember her to be. (Of course, if you really know the man, his face will be in focus, too. If you don’t know him, it is scarcely the fault of the camera for being a little hazy.)
She puts her arms around his neck, and the camera dollies in for a close-up. You see the way she lowers her eyes... eyes so heavy with desire it is impossible for her to keep them completely open. And you see the moisture on her lips as she parts them, and lifts them up for the man to cover with his own. Time means nothing to the camera, because as she is kissing him, the camera cuts to a long shot, and instantly they are naked, and are standing pressed together in each other’s arms.
By this time, of course, the pain of watching is unbearable, and you try desperately to turn the camera off, as it begins to truck in on a shot of the bed. You know what the next picture is going to be, because you have been in that same picture... many, many times. You manage to switch the camera off, but only for a few seconds because it switches itself on automatically again. Throughout the night, you manage to get only a little rest... in between the moments you manage to keep the camera turned off.
There is another time, too. It doesn’t matter whether it is day or night, when a man can escape both the jockey voices and the camera. That is when he is drinking. But drinking doesn’t make it any better; it simply substitutes an older set of memories for the newer ones. The jockey voices are quiet and the camera isn’t working, and after a sufficient number of drinks, you talk aloud in the voice of the man you are, and you are replied to by the voice of the man you were.
‘Hell,’ you say, ‘all men are crooked to some extent...’
‘Not all men.’
‘Well, most of ’em,’ you say. ‘Everybody gets away with something!’
‘You’ve gotten away with plenty. So, if what you say is true, you have nothing to complain about. But tell me, are you proud of it?’
‘Well... not exactly. But I’m not ashamed either,’ you say hurriedly.
‘You like it this way, then?’
You refuse to answer that one. ‘What else could I do?’ you ask. ‘I didn’t want it the way it turned out. I wanted it the way it might’ve been...’
‘You got what you paid for. It’s easy to devalue money. It’s easier to devalue morals.’
‘Oh, for Christ sake! Stop it. Next you’ll be telling me the meek will inherit the earth.’ You don’t like it. You shake your head, and have another drink. But you have the conversation going and you can’t stop it. So you add, finally, ‘You have to take what you want... when you have a chance to get it!’
‘Eddie Stack thought the same.’
‘Let’s forget about Stack,’ you say.
‘You can’t forget him. Look at it this way. Stack wanted money, so he took it. It didn’t do him any good. So then you took it. Did it do you any good?’
‘No,’ you say.
‘He wanted freedom, so he took it. Then you took it away from him. Do you have any freedom, Emmet? Can you be free of the jockey voices, the camera, and the conversations with me?’
‘No,’ you say.
‘And Rose? Stack wanted Rose. He took her. And you took her away from him. Do you still have Rose?’
This has gone far enough! You refuse to accept this question with a no. ‘I’ll have her,’ you say. ‘Goddamnit! Just watch! I’ll get her again.’
And time, which at first has been a nebulous matter of ticking seconds and turning calendar leaves in a normal, well-ordered life, under great stress becomes a hazy, twisting, slipping, useless commodity of which a man is entirely unaware. He is thankful for this unawareness, because his pain becomes unreal, too, and he is conscious of it only in a two-dimensional quality. Eventually, however, time of a different nature returns... and it becomes real, adding new depth to his memories, a new and eternal sharpness to his pain. Hours go by, and a man looks at his watch to see that only two minutes have escaped from its watertight case; nights become endless, loaded with dragging seconds, each second a reservoir of despairing memories.
And so it was with Rafferty.
The blow on his head, and its immediate shattering pain, had resolved into a great, and aching, dullness in the back of his brain. It played a counterpoint to each conscious thought and movement of his day, and at night receded to a throbbing presence in the shadows of his mind. It blurred his thoughts, furring the edges, but leaving the hard core of his memories and growing fantasies untouched. It rode with the jockey voices, unheard but omnipresent as he walked down the street; omniscient, it watched the revealing lens of the camera; omnipotent, it directed his conversations, as he stood in solitude at the bar in Vince Korum’s place.
It blended with time, so that time and pain were indivisible. Separate, each was bearable, but joined in an awful formula, they became intolerable.
Rafferty’s mind was now usually a thing apart, working by itself at its own bidding. It was occupied, constantly, in examining each old memory... squeezing it dry... searching for additional pains to scrutinize. At some time in these final days, it hesitated in its re-examinations long enough for Rafferty to face himself for a final, despairing decision. ‘Find Rose,’ he said and waited for his mind to give him an answer. ‘Find Rose,’ he repeated. ‘This time I won’t let her get away...’ His mind, which had paused only briefly in its scavenging, agreed. ‘All right,’ it said, and returned to its picking. ‘There was a hint of rain in the air, a suggestion that relief might be coming for the hot uncomfortable city. The softer lights of electricity blended with the colours of their vivid neon neighbors, throwing a delicate, shimmering, multicolored haze against the September sky. The lowering sky, held back by this mantle of light, muttered to itself in the restless heavens and stirred uneasily in darkness.
Rafferty waited across the street from Rose’s apartment, his body motionless against the front of a building, his eyes fixed on the entrance to the shabby walk-up, and he held them there, for interminable periods of time, without relaxing his vigil. Occasionally he would shift the weight of his body, his hands hanging heavily in his pockets, while his eyes remained unblinking. In the back of his head the pain crawled and moved like the embryo of an unborn thing, although his mind continued dredging and sorting its desiccated memories. His eyes, however, never wavered from the vacant doorway.
At long intervals, footsteps sounded on the deserted street, the jockey voices raising a clamor until a spokesman had been selected. ‘Here she comes!’ the jockey voice shouted, ‘here she comes now!’ And Rafferty would draw in his breath, searching the street with his eyes, until the owner of the footsteps had been located... and rejected. Stolidly, he returned to the watch... his eyes again unmoving. Throughout the city, time ticked away on a million clocks... time clocks in factories, elegantly carved clocks on marble mantels, alarm clocks on beside tables, on diamond wrist watches, heavy-cased pocket watches, and Mickey Mouse watches in the rooms of children, each of them manufacturing an artificial tick from eternity, making of it a second, molding the seconds into minutes and the minutes into hours.
The patina died slowly over the city, as the lights went out one by one and the darkness of the heavens inched forward cautiously to the ticking of the clocks... assaulting a doorway here, capturing a rooftop there. Gradually, the night, too, began to run out of time, and for the few brief moments before dawn, it was content to hold its own, while Rafferty remained against the building, his eyes unmoving, his mind busy with its own affairs.
And then, suddenly, she was there.
He had not heard her come. He had not seen her approach the apartment, but his eyes told him she was there, climbing the steps to the entryway. And a man was climbing the steps beside her. His mind stopped its searching and confirmed the fact.
Rafferty stepped away from the shadows of the building, and walked across the street. He was erect now, his arms hanging loosely by his side. ‘Rose!’ he called, his voice strong, and sure, across the distance between them.
She paused on the steps, motionless for an instant, then slowly faced him. The man at her side turned, too, surprised and undecided. He was wearing trousers and a shirt, with no jacket. The shirt was open at the collar, with tie pulled loose and askew; under his arms were dark, stained, half-moons of perspiration. In the darkness his face was indistinct, a pale blur filled with the night shadows, and he spoke uneasily to Rose. ‘Who’s this?’ he asked.
Rafferty paused at the foot of the steps, looking up... his eyes fixed on the woman. ‘I’ve been waiting a long time. Rose,’ he said.
The man stepped slowly down and forward to meet Rafferty. ‘We don’t want any trouble...’
‘Hush, Tom!’ Rose’s voice cut sharply between the two men. Abruptly, the life left it and she added tonelessly, ‘You’d better go...’
Rafferty turned his head and regarded Tom Griffin emotionlessly. ‘Go on and beat it!’ he said. There was an indefinable quality about the moment that frightened Griffin. The woman frozen, half turned on the stairs; Rafferty menacing and implacable at her feet; the darkened street and slowly graying skies of dawn stamped the picture with the grotesque reality of nightmare. Griffin backed slowly away.
‘I’ll call you in the morning,’ he said helplessly, but the woman did not reply. Griffin walked down the street, hesitating only once to glance back over his shoulder to see Rafferty still standing solid and immovable at the foot of the stairs, his head lifted watching Rose.
Finally, after long moments, Rafferty climbed upward, one step at a time, and placed his hand in hers. Then, arm in arm like two lovers, they continued their climb. In the dark of the entryway, he released her hand and she turned and looked into his face. She made no attempt to flee, to escape him; and when she spoke her voice was filled with a complete and final acceptance.
‘I guess I always knew it had to be like this,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he replied, his voice gentle, ‘there’s no other way. You can see that, can’t you?’
‘I can see that. And I can see there’s no way to make you change your mind.’
‘Not now.’
Her voice was indifferent, objectively studying the problem. ‘Yes,’ she agreed,’ it’s too late.’
‘Nothing would ever be the same,’ he explained.
‘I know, I know.’ She was growing restless. ‘Yet we both tried to keep our bargain... as well as we could...’
‘When we first met, you told me you came high. Rose.’ His voice held no anger, only a kind of wondering despair. ‘I agreed to pay for you high. So I paid with my own respect and integrity. I became a liar... a cheat; a thief and a murderer.’ His breathing was heavy in the narrow hall. ‘That’s high enough for any man to pay...’
She searched his face thoughtfully, his eyes deep pools of resignation in the night. ‘I can never belong to anyone else,’ she said, ‘because no other man could meet the price you paid...’
‘Yes, that’s it!’ His voice was grateful for her understanding. He raised his powerful hands slowly and placed them around her throat, edging them delicately under the shining cascade of her hair. Her hands crept softly up his arms, like birds homing in the dark, fluttering gently to rest on his wrists. Then his hands closed and she twisted forward and up, her lips pouting and open as if for a kiss.
It was dawn, and Rafferty walked the street, the small pools of light lapping in tiny waves against the ocean of night. He was bare of head, and he walked erect, his arms swinging slowly, in rhythm, to his deliberate stride. There was a stirring around him, the gathering of sounds, the pulsations of energy, the arousing of the great city to live yet another day. Rafferty knew the hour well; he had seen it in the lonely highway patrol cars half the nation away; he had seen it with a score of partners in the squad cars of the city; it was the beginning and the end; the time when dead men live, and live men die.
He stopped at the corner, and opened the iron police call box. The metal was covered with a light dew, and it was cold to his touch. Without hesitation he picked up the phone, and placed the mouthpiece to his face. ‘Hello,’ he said deliberately. ‘Hello? This is Rafferty, Homicide East. There’s been a killing... a woman by the name of Rose Pauli.’ He searched his pocket and found a cigarette, as he listened to the voice of the sergeant at the desk. He lit it, and inhaled deeply. ‘Naw... don’t bother,’ Rafferty replied, finally. ‘I got the guy who did it. I’ll bring him in myself.’ Slowly he returned the phone to its hook, and closed the box.
Then he began walking up the street.
Chapter Sixteen
From a clipping of the New York Register, March 21, issue of the following year:
Ossining, N.Y. Mar. 20, CNS. Emmet Q. Rafferty, former New York City police detective, was electrocuted here tonight for the confessed murder of his paramour, Rose Pauli Stack, last September.
The condemned man made no statement before entering the execution chamber, and spent his last hours in the company of his brother, the Rev. Father Sean Rafferty, who visited with him in the death cell. The convicted detective was a model prisoner while in Sing Sing, and went to his execution quietly and unaided. He entered the chair at 11:03 P.M. and was pronounced dead at 11:12 P.M.
Both police officials in New York City, and prison authorities at Ossining, refused further comments.
About the Author
William Sanborn Ballinger (1912-1980) — born in Oskaloosa, Iowa — was a bestselling author of hardboiled, noir and suspense novels known for his trademark multiple-point narrative. He worked in advertising and broadcasting in New York before moving to southern California to work as a scriptwriter for television shows such as Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, I, Spy, Cannon, M. Squad, Ironside and The Outer Limits.
Ballinger's books have sold more than
ten million copies in the U.S. His finest novels include Portrait in Smoke, The Tooth and the Nail, The Longest Second, Rafferty, The Wife of the Red-Haired Man, The Body in the Bed and The Body Beautiful.
About the Publisher
280 Steps is a publisher of crime, noir and hardboiled fiction. Discover new writers and crime classics.
For more information about 280 Steps and our titles, please visit 280steps.com
Copyright
Copyright © renewed 2013 by Cari Ballinger
First eBook edition: June 2014
Published by 280 Steps. Visit us at 280steps.com
eISBN: 978-82-93326-26-7
Publishers note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Rafferty Page 21