Westlake, Donald E - Novel 41

by Levine (v1. 1)

  Levine's heart stopped, one beat.

  And every muscle, every nerve, every bone in his body tensed and tightened and drew in on itself, squeezing him shut, and the sound of the revolver going off slammed into him, pounding his stomach.

  The boy screamed, hurtling down out of the light, the gun clattering away from his fingers.

  "Jesus God have mercy!" breathed the patrolman. It was Wills. He came on in, unsteadily, the flashlight trembling in his hand as he pointed its beam at the boy crumpled on the floor.

  Levine looked down at himself and saw the thin trail of blue-gray smoke rising up from the barrel of his revolver. Saw his hands still tensed shut into claws, into fists, the first finger of his right hand still squeezing the trigger back against its guard.

  He willed his hands open, and the revolver fell to the floor.

  Wills went down on one knee beside the boy. After a minute, he straightened, saying, "Dead. Right through the heart, I guess."

  Levine sagged against the wall. His mouth hung open. He couldn't seem to close it.

  Wills said, "What's the matter? You okay?"

  With an effort, Levine nodded his head. "I'm okay," he said. "Call in. Go on, call in."

  "Well. I'll be right back."

  Wills left, and Levine looked down at the new young death. His eyes saw the colors of the floor, the walls, the clothing on the corpse. His shoulders felt the weight of his overcoat. His ears heard the receding footsteps of the young patrolman. His nose smelled the sharp tang of recent gunfire. His mouth tasted the briny after-efl"ect of fear.

  "I'm sorry," he whispered.

  THE SOUND OF MURDER

  Detective Abraham Levine of Brooklyn's Forty-Third Precinct sat at his desk in the squadroom and longed for a cigarette. The fingers of his left hand kept closing and clenching, feeling awkward without the paper-rolled tube of tobacco. He held a pencil for a while but unconsciously brought it to his mouth. He didn't realize what he was doing till he tasted the gritty staleness of the eraser. Then he put the pencil away in a drawer, and tried unsuccessfully to concentrate on the national news in the news magazine.

  The world conspired against a man who tried to give up smoking. All around him were other people puffing ciragettes casually and unconcernedly, not making any fuss about it at all, making by their very nonchalance his own grim reasons for giving them up seem silly and hypersensitive. If he isolated himself from other smokers with the aid of television or radio, the cigarette commercials with their erotic smoking and their catchy jingles would surely drive him mad. Also, he would find that the most frequent sentence in popular fiction was, "He lit another cigarette." Statesmen and entertainers seemed inevitably to be smoking whenever news photographers snapped them for posterity, and even the news items were against him: He had just reread for the third time an announcement to the world that Pope John XXIII was the first Prelate of the Roman Catholic Church to smoke cigarettes in public.

  Levine closed the magazine in irritation, and from the cover smiled at him the Governor of a midwestern state, cigarette in F.D.R. cigarette-holder at a jaunty angle in his mouth. Levine closed his eyes, saddened by the knowledge that he had turned himself at this late date into a comic character. A grown man who tries to give up smoking is comic, a Robert Benchley or a W.C. Fields, bumbling along, plagued by trivia, his life an endless gauntlet of minor crises. They could do a one-reeler on me, Levine thought. A great little comedy. Laurel without Hardy. Because Hardy died of a heart attack.

  Abraham Levine, at fifty-three years of age, was twenty-four years a cop and eight years into the heart-attack range. When he went to bed at night, he kept himself awake by listening to the silence that replaced every eighth or ninth beat of his heart. When he had to climb stairs or lift anything heavy, he was acutely conscious of the labored .heaviness of his breathing and of the way those missed heartbeats came closer and closer together, every seventh beat and then every sixth and then every fifth

  Some day, he knew, his heart would skip two beats in a row, and on that day Abraham Levine would stop, because there wouldn't be any third beat. None at all, not ever.

  Four months ago, he'd gone to the doctor, and the doctor had checked him over very carefully, and he had submitted to it feeling like an aging auto brought to a mechanic by an owner who wanted to know whether it was worth while to fix the old boat up or should he just junk the thing and get another. (In the house next door to his, a baby cried every night lately. The new model, crying for the old and the obsolete to get off the road.)

  So he'd gone to the doctor, and the doctor had told him not to worry. He had that little skip in his heartbeat, but that wasn't anything dangerous, lots of people had that. And his blood pressure was a little high, but not much, not enough to concern himself about. So the doctor told him he was healthy, and collected his fee, and Levine left, unconvinced.

  So when he went back again three days ago, still frightened by the skip and the shortness of breath and the occasional chest cramps when he was excited or afraid, the doctor had told him the same things all over again, and had added, "If you really want to do something for that heart of yours, you can give up smoking."

  He hadn't had a cigarette since, and for the first time in his life he was beginning really to understand the wails of the arrested junkies, locked away in a cell with nothing to ease their craving. He was beginning to be ashamed of himself, for having become so completely dependent on something so useless and so harmful. Three days now. Comic or not, he was going to make it.

  Opening his eyes, he glared at the cigarette-smoking Governor and shoved the magazine into a drawer. Then he looked around the squadroom, empty except for himself and his partner, Crawley, sitting over there smoking contentedly at his desk by the filing cabinet as he worked on a report. Rizzo and McFarlane, the other two detectives on this shift, were out on a call but would probably be back soon. Levine longed for the phone to ring, for something to happen to distract him, to keep mind and hands occupied and forgetful of cigarettes. He looked around the room, at a loss, and his left hand clenched and closed on the desk, lonely and incomplete.

  When the rapping came at the door, it was so faint that Levine barely heard it, and Crawley didn't even look up.

  But any sound at all would have attracted Levine's straining attention. He looked over, saw a foreshortened shadow against the frosted glass of the door, and called, "Come in."

  Crawley looked up. "What?"

  "Someone at the door." Levine called out again, and this time the doorknob hesitantly turned, and a child walked in.

  It was a little girl of about ten, in a frilly frock of pale pink, with a flared skirt, with gold-buckled black shoes and ribbed white socks. Her hair was pale blonde, combed and brushed and shampooed to gleaming cleanliness, brushed back from her forehead and held by a pink bow atop her head, then cascading straight down her back nearly to her waist. Her eyes were huge and bright blue, her face a creamy oval. She was a little girl in an ad for children's clothing in the Sunday Times. She was a story illustration in Ladies' Home Journal. She was. Alice in Blunderland, gazing with wide-eyed curious innocence into the bullpen, the squadroom, the home and office of the detectives of the Forty-Third Precinct, the men whose job it was to catch the stupid and the nasty so that other men could punish them.

  She saw, looking into this brutal room, two men and a lot of old furniture.

  It was inevitably to Levine that the little girl spoke: "May I come in?" Her voice was as faint as her tapping on the door had been. She was poised to flee at the first loud noise.

  Levine automatically lowered his own voice when he answered. "Of course. Come on in. Sit over here." He motioned at the straight-backed wooden chair beside his desk.

  The girl crossed the threshold, carefully closed the door again behind her, and came on silent feet across the room, glancing sidelong at Crawley, then establishing herself on the edge of the chair, her toes touching the floor, still ready for flight at any second. She stu
died Levine. "I want to talk to a detective," she said. "Are you a detective?"

  Levine nodded. "Yes, I am."

  "My name," she told him solemnly, "is Amy Thornbridge Walker. I live at 717 Prospect Park West, apartment 4-A. I want to report a murder, a quite recent murder."

  "A murder?"

  "My mother," she said, just as solemnly, "murdered my stepfather."

  Levine glanced over at Crawley, who screwed his face up in an expression meant to say, "She's a nut. Hear her out, and then she'll go home. What else can you do?"

  There was nothing else he could do. He looked at Amy Thornbridge Walker again. "Tell me about it," he said. "When did it happen?"

  "Two weeks ago Thursday," she said. "November 27th. At two-thirty p.m."

  Her earnest calm called for belief. But children with wild stories were not unknown to the precinct. Children came in with reports of dead bodies in alleys, flying saucers on rooftops, counterfeiters in basement apartments, kidnappers in black trucks —And once out of a thousand times what the child reported was read and not the product of a young imagination on a spree. More to save the little girl's feelings than for any other reason, therefore, Levine drew to him a pencil and a sheet of paper and took down what she told him. He said, "What's your mother's name?"

  "Gloria Thornbridge Walker," she said. "And my stepfather was Albert Walker. He was an attorney."

  To the side, Crawley was smiling faintly at the girl's conscious formality. Levine solemnly wrote down the names, and said, "Was your father's name Thornbridge, is that it?"

  "Yes. Jason Thornbridge. He died when I was very small. I think my mother killed him, too, but I'm not absolutely sure."

  "I see. But you are absolutely sure that your mother killed Albert Walker."

  "My stepfather. Yes. My first father was supposed to have drowned by accident in Lake Champlain, which I consider very unUkely, as he was an excellent swimmer."

  Levine reached into his shirt pocket, found no cigarettes there, and suddenly realized what he was doing. Irritation washed over him, but he carefully kept it from showing in his face or voice as he said, "How long have you thought that your mother killed your rea — your first father?"

  "I’d never thought about it at all," she said, "until she murdered my stepfather. Naturally, I then started thinking about it."

  Crawley coughed, and lit a fresh cigarette, keeping his hands up in front of his mouth. Levine said, "Did he die of drowning, too?"

  "No. My stepfather wasn't athletic at all. In fact, he was nearly an invalid for the last six months of his life."

  "Then how did your mother kill him?"

  "She made a loud noise at him," she said calmly.

  Levine's pencil stopped its motion. He looked at her searchingly, but found no trace of humor in her eyes or mouth. If she had come up here as a joke —on a bet, say from her schoolmates — then she was a fine little actress, for no sign of the joke was on her face at all.

  Though how could he really tell? Levine, a childless man with a barren wife, had found it difficult over the years to communicate with the very young. A part of it, of course, was an envy he couldn't help, in the knowledge that these children could run and play with no frightening shortness of breath or tightness of chest, that they could sleep at night in their beds with no thought for the dull thudding of their hearts, that they would be alive and knowing for years and decades, for decades, after he himself had ceased to exist.

  Before he could formulate an answer to what she'd said, the little girl jounced off the chair with the graceful grace-lessness of the young and said, "I can't stay any longer. I stopped here on my way home from school. If my mother found out that I knew, and that I had told the police, she might try to murder me, too." She turned all at once and studied Crawley severely. "I am not a silly little girl," she told him. "And I am not telling a lie or making a joke. My mother murdered my stepfather, and I came in here and reported it. That's what I'm supposed to do. You aren't supposed to believe me right away, but you are supposed to investigate and find out whether or not I've told you the truth. And I have told you the truth." She turned suddenly back to Levine, an angry little girl —no, not angry, definite— a definite little girl filled with stern formality and a child's sense of Tightness and duty. "My stepfather," she said, "was a very good man. My mother is a bad woman. You find out what she did, and punish her." She nodded briefly, as though to punctuate what she'd said, and marched to the door, reaching it as Rizzo and McFarlane came in. They looked down at her in surprise, and she stepped past them and out to the hall, closing the door after her.

  Rizzo looked at Levine and jerked his thumb at the door. "What was that?"

  It was Crawley who answered. "She came in to report a murder," he said. "Her Mommy killed her Daddy by making a great big noise at him."

  Rizzo frowned. "Come again?"

  "I'll check it out," said Levine. Not believing the girl's story, he still felt the impact of her demand on him that he do his duty. All it would take was a few phone calls. While Crawley recounted the episode at great length to Rizzo, and McFarlane took up his favorite squadroom position, seated at his desk with the chair canted back and his feet atop the desk, Levine picked up his phone and dialed the New York Times. He identified himself and said what he wanted, was connected to the right department, and after a few minutes the November 28th obituary notice on Albert Walker was read to him. Cause of death: a heart attack. Mortician: Junius Merriman. An even briefer call to Merriman gave him the name of Albert Walker's doctor, Henry Sheffield.

  Levine thanked Merriman, assured him there was no problem, and got out the Brooklyn yellow pages to find Sheffield's number. He dialed, spoke to a nurse, and finally got Sheffield.

  "I can't understand," Sheffield told him, "why the police would be interested in the case. It wcis heart failure, pure and simple. What seems to be the problem?"

  "There's no problem," Levine told him. "Just checking it out. Was this a sudden attack? Had he had any heart trouble before?"

  "Yes, he'd suffered a coronary' attack about seven months ago. The second attack was more severe, and he hadn't really recovered as yet from the first. There certainly wasn't anything else to it, if that's what you're getting at."

  "I didn't mean to imply anything like that," said Levine. "By the way, were you Mrs. Walker's first husband's doctor, too?"

  "No, I wasn't. His name was Thombridge, wasn't it? I never met the man. Is there some sort of question about him?"

  "No, not at all." Levine evaded a few more questions, then hung up, his duty done. He turned to Crawley and shook his head. "Nothing to "

  A sudden crash behind him froze the words in his throat. He halfrose from the chair, mouth wide oj>en, face paling as the blood rushed from his head, his nerves and muscles stiff and tingling.

  It was over in a second, and he sank back fnto the chair, turning around to see what had happened. McFarlane was sheepishly picking himself up from the floor, his chair lying on its back beside him. He grinned shakily at Levine. "Leaned back too far that time," he said.

  "Don't do that," said Levine, his voice shaky. He touched the back of his hand to his forehead, feeling cold perspiration slick against the skin. He was trembling ail over. Once again, he reached to his shirt pocket for a cigarette, and this time felt an instant of panic when he found the pocket empty. He pressed the palm of his hand to the pocket, and beneath pocket and skin he felt the thrumming of his heart, and automatically counted the beats. Thum, thum, skip, thum, thum, thum, thum, thum, skip, thum, thum,

  On the sixth beat, the sixth beat. He sat there listening, hand pressed to his chest, and gradually the agitation subsided and the skip came every seventh beat and then every eighth beat, and then he could dare to move again.

  He licked his lips, needing a cigarette now more than at any other time in the last three days, more than he could ever remember needing a cigarette at any time in his whole life.

  His resolve crumbled. Shamefacedly, he tur
ned to his partner. "Jack, do you have a cigarette?"

  Crawley looked away from McFarlane, who was checking himself for damage. "I thought you were giving them up, Abe," he said.

  "Not around here. Please, Jack."

  "Sure." Crawley tossed him his pack.

  Levine caught the pack, shook out one cigarette, threw the rest back to Crawley. He took a book of matches from the desk drawer, put the cigarette in his mouth, feeling the comforting familiarity of it between his lips, and struck a match. He held the match up, then sat looking at the flame, struck by a sudden thought.

  Albert Walker had died of a heart attack. "She made a loud noise at him." "The second attack was more severe, and he hadn't really recovered as yet from the first."

  He shook the match out, took the cigarette from between his lips. It had been every sixth beat there for a while, after the loud noise of McFarlane's backward dive.

  Had Gloria Thornbridge Walker really killed Albert Walker?

  Would Abraham Levine really kill Abraham Levine?

  The second question was easier to answer. Levine opened the desk drawer and dropped the cigarette and matches into it.

  The first question he didn't try to answer at all. He would sleep on it. Right now, he wasn't thinking straight enough.

  At dinner that night, he talked it over with his wife. "Peg," he said, "I've got a problem."

  "A problem?" She looked up in surprise, a short solid stout woman three years her husband's junior, her iron-gray hair rigidly curled in a home permanent. "If you're coming to me," she said, "it must be awful."

  He smiled, nodding. "It is." It was rare for him to talk about his job with his wife. The younger men, he knew, discussed their work with their wives as a matter of course, expecting and receiving suggestions and ideas and advice. But he was a product of an older upbringing, and still believed instinctively that women should be shielded from the.more brutal aspects of life. It was only when the problem was one he couldn't discuss with Crawley that he turned to Peg for someone to talk to. *Tm getting old," he said suddenly, thinking of the differences between himself and the younger men.