He turned off the computer.
He’d found that he was thinking of McKinney more than ever as a human being. And he had to think of him, must think of him — and all cops — as his enemy.
That evening he took Anna to a Thai restaurant he’d heard good things about, and afterward, as they started to drive back to her place in the clear evening light, he said, “You know, we’re not far from where I grew up.”
“Really?”
“Honest. You can look it up in the history books.”
“You are funny. Can we go see?”
“You do know what to say, don’t you?” It was amazing, he thought, how almost light-hearted he could become with her.
He didn’t know why, but he suddenly wanted to show it to her, the house and the neighborhood where he’d lived before they moved to the suburbs.
They drove slowly through the neighborhood, stopping now and then at places that had been so important to him. He pointed out the windows of his old bedroom, showed her where the kids would play ball, even the approximate spot where he’d shot the blackbird. He showed her my old place, too, and explained how we’d just about lived in each other’s houses. And over there was the house where the first kid about his own age died, a boy of eight who had what was thought to be a cold and simply died. But no, he said quickly, he was wrong: That was the second death. The first had been Eddie, a kid who had been in the second grade with him and who’d been killed by a truck when he ran into the street after a ball.
“For years,” he said, “I’d see his mother walking around the neighborhood all alone. She seemed like a ghost.”
Over here, some ten blocks away, was his old grammar school, and close by were the woods and creek where Will Jansen and he would play Tarzan and where his mother would occasionally come looking to make sure he hadn’t drowned. And where she once caught them sitting back against a large rock smoking cigarettes and looking up at the sky.
It was only when they were driving away that he became aware that it wasn’t so much that he had wanted Anna to see his old house and neighborhood. That was a big part of it, to be sure. But most of all, he thought, he’d wanted to feel, even for just the short time they were there, all that innocence again.
In bed that night, with Anna asleep next to him, he thought about that innocence.
He had read somewhere that serial killers, or maybe every kind of ruthless killer, showed signs of cruelty in childhood, such as torturing animals. One of the things he remembered that fit in was the time an elderly woman who lived close by called to Will Jansen and Alan as they were walking by her house. They were no more than eight at the time.
“Would you boys do me a big favor?”
She was a woman they were sort of afraid of, since she had what they looked on as a witch’s face, and lived alone in a large house and was rarely seen.
“I got this cat that’s gone crazy,” she said. “I called the police yesterday and once today and they’re still not here. I’m an old woman and I need help, would you help me get rid of it? Please?”
She pointed to a covered basket from which they could hear screeches and scratching.
“Just drop it in the creek for me, that’s all, will you? It’ll be an act of mercy.”
He and Will looked at each other. He ached to say no but didn’t know how to say it to an old woman. And he guessed that Will didn’t either.
“Go on. Please, boys, go on.”
He and Will each took hold of a handle and carried the shaking, screeching basket to the woods. There they quickly set it down among the trees — not in the creek — and ran back as though running from ghosts.
Then there was the time a couple of years later when he and Will were playing in the garage attached to Alan’s house. A boy from a couple of streets away, just a year or so younger than they, appeared in the doorway. He was “slow,” and so when they closed the door behind him and said he was their prisoner and would never see his mother and father again he believed it. The only way they would let him go, they told him, was if he would go to Haines’s grocery store, about a block away, and ask for “pigeon milk.”
Oh, Alan recalled, what a laugh they’d had as he walked off.
But what troubled him most of all, now, was that it had been his idea, not Will’s.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sam Haggerty called me a week later while Detective Murray was sitting with me at my desk, to ask with a sound of desperation in his voice if I saw any “daylight” in the “Harmann case,” which was his way of asking when did I think I could write it.
“No, and I’m afraid I won’t anytime soon,” I told him. “Like I said, the case is still very wide open.”
“Well, have you got anything else for me?” he demanded, annoyed. “You know I need copy.”
“I really haven’t seen anything that strikes me as that good.”
“You haven’t seen anything?” he repeated, sudden anger in his voice. “Hell, maybe you’re reading different papers than I am.”
And he rattled off two crimes in western Pennsylvania and one in New Jersey. “Have you checked on any of them?”
“No, but I will.”
“Listen, if you’re not interested any more or you’re too busy, tell me. Just tell me.”
“I would, but it’s not so.” I glanced over at Murray, as if he could hear Haggerty’s voice.
“All right then,” and with that he hung up.
I was angry as I put down the phone, not so much at him as at myself, that I was still back — even for a little while — to writing that crap. I looked at Detective Murray.
Harold Luder had led police to the gravesites of two more of his victims, one a girl of nine, the other a girl of fifteen, both of whom had been missing for years.
“He’s told the truth about three murders so far,” he said, “but he’s beginning to confess to so many things we don’t know yet which if any of it is full of crap.”
It was either that same morning or the next, as I try to piece it all together, that a few things fell into place that led Alan to take a subway instead of driving to work.
One was that he needed to take his car to the dealer’s for some work that had to be done. He had made the appointment a couple of weeks earlier. The second was that the place was several miles from his office and he didn’t feel like waiting the half hour or so for the dealer’s van to take him and several others downtown. And a subway entrance was right outside.
So, at the same time that a certain stranger was standing somewhere near him, he was waiting on the platform for a subway he hadn’t been on in several years.
Standing there among a crowd of people waiting for the train, he was suddenly angry at himself for not having taken a cab, for having let himself forget that someone could still identify him from the sketch. So he didn’t look at any faces, never noticed anyone in particular, just kept looking down the tracks for the first sound and sign of the train. It was only as the train made the turn far down the tracks and came roaring toward the station that something caught his attention to his left.
In a blur of motion a man next to him took a fast step across the yellow warning line on the platform, started to spring onto the tracks, and somehow, instinctively, both of Alan’s hands were on him, straining to pull him back. And now his arms were completely around the man, for he was struggling to get loose and was pulling Alan out with him; and now they were stumbling around on the platform together as the cars rumbled and clanked past them and then came to a stop.
The fellow tore free, and after a few swings at Alan he ran through the startled crowd and, from what Alan was to hear, up the stairs to the street.
Alan spent a minute or two just sitting on the platform, trying to clear his head, a man’s voice asking, “Are you hurt, are you okay?”
He remembered nodding and the voice saying, “You mean you’re hurt? You want an ambulance?”
“No, I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
<
br /> And Alan was nodding again, and then another voice, a woman’s, was saying, “What a crazy, he almost killed you!”
Alan stood up, aware that what he’d thought was a crowd around him was only two or three people, that everyone else had boarded the train and was gone. Then within a few moments a cop materialized. Someone had apparently told him about the incident and sent him running here.
“How’re you doing there, buddy?”
“I’m okay.”
“You’ve got a bruise on your face. Maybe you ought to go to an emergency room.”
Alan touched his cheek. “No, I’ll be okay, I’m all right.”
“What happened, you tried to stop him from jumping and he fought you?”
Alan nodded. “It just happened so fast.”
“Do you know the guy?”
“No.”
“Anyone here know the guy?” He turned to the others. But apparently no one did. Then back to Alan: “Did you get a good look at him?”
“No, it happened so fast. All I’m sure of is he had black hair.”
“Was he white? Black?”
“I think white.”
“Latino?”
“I don’t know.”
“Anyone know?” The cop looked around.
One man said definitely white — although he, too, hadn’t gotten a look at the man’s face — and that he was “like” in his late thirties or maybe early forties, which Alan had the feeling might be right.
The cop took out a pad and said to him, “Let me have your name.”
“It’s ok, I’m all right.”
“This isn’t for you, buddy, it’s for me.”
“Alan Benning.”
“And your address.”
For a few moments Alan found that he couldn’t think of his own address. Maybe it was brain-freeze brought on by this uniformed cop standing there questioning him. Or maybe it was aftershock. But the only thing he could think to say was, “I’m with the Tomlinson Foundation,” and when the cop asked where that was that’s when Alan’s address came back to him and he gave it to him.
The first thing Alan did when he got to the office was go to the men’s room. He had a large welt on his left cheek. It hadn’t hurt before but it was tender now. One of the secretaries noticed it as he walked by her desk, and she looked about to say something but didn’t. Ron Jameson frowned and then gave a slight smile above his bowtie.
“What happened to you, friend?”
“Just a stupid accident.”
“And the other guy?”
“He’s probably answering the same questions I am.”
Elsa Tomlinson’s face showed concern when he went to her office later with some papers that needed her signature.
“How did you ever do that?”
“It was just an accident. It’s fine. I ran into somebody’s elbow.”
“Somebody’s elbow?” she repeated.
“I took a subway here, and there was a crowd and I got in the way of an elbow.”
She looked at him curiously.
“I was not in a bar fight,” he told her, managing a smile.
He didn’t know if that reassured her. But the next morning was totally different. He had looked through the newspaper before leaving for work without seeing anything about the incident — not that he really expected to — but when he approached his office his secretary smiled at him from her desk and said, “Congratulations.”
“For what?”
“Did you see this?” She held up the newspaper. And his heart started to sink.
She stood up and opened it to one of the back pages and handed it to him, smiling. Then she pointed to a popular local gossip column, Sid’s Place, which he hadn’t even thought to look at. He scanned it quickly.
Sid’s agents tell him that Alan Benning, senior vice president of the Elsa and Jonathan Tomlinson Foundation, did a bit of “charity work” that was, sadly, under-appreciated to say the least. Alan stopped a stranger from jumping in front of a subway train — and received punches in “gratitude” from the man, who then ran away. Alan, we — if not a certain ingrate — honor you...
By now several other secretaries were smiling at him from their desks. He couldn’t wait to go behind his own desk.
Just a few minutes later Elsa Tomlinson was smiling at him from the doorway.
“You are one modest fellow, aren’t you?”
“Elsa, I really didn’t do anything.”
“Oh yes. I know all about that. How’s your face?”
“I’m fine, everything’s fine.”
“Well, I’m proud of you. Okay?” And she nodded, as if stamping it with her signature.
Later that day he got a call from a woman who identified herself as “Melanie Hollins from the Toby Miller Show.”
“From where?” He was so startled that he said it even though he knew the name: It was one of the morning cable shows.
“From the Toby Miller Show. I’m an assistant producer. We heard about your experience in the subway yesterday and we think it will make an interesting short conversation with Toby. You wouldn’t have to come to New York, we would —”
“No,” he interrupted, “I appreciate it but I’d rather not.”
His face all over the country?
“Really? Oh, why not? The rescuer becoming a victim —”
“Look, I did nothing great. I didn’t even mean to do it. It’s just something that happened.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I mean it. I’d rather not.”
He had just about calmed down about the call when Elsa was in his office. She looked annoyed even before she spoke.
“You turned down a national interview? I can’t believe it.”
“Elsa, it didn’t deserve it.” He was getting tired of saying it. “I really didn’t do anything.”
“Didn’t do anything. You know, you really don’t have to save the world to do something good. The Toby Miller Show. I don’t believe this.”
And now he knew that her public relations people had set it up.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
When he came home he found one message and two hang-ups on his machine. The message was from me. It started off with something very clever, like, “Alan, when did you start using the subway? Seriously, that guy’s got to be a nut. Anyway, I want you to know that Patty, Mom and I are so proud of you.”
Anna called a few minutes later.
“Oh, honey, someone at work showed me the article just as I was about to leave. She’d heard me mention your name and wanted to know if it was you. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I’m so proud of you. But what an awful thing he did to you.”
“It wasn’t all that bad, believe me.”
“But to attack you — that was terrible. He must really be crazy.”
“Probably.”
“You know who needs to see this? My father. I can’t wait to call home, in fact I’m going to send them the clipping.”
Almost immediately afterward he got another call, this one from Gregg Osterly.
“Well, well, well, whatever happened?” he joked. “How did it happen? Now, the truth. Did you trip and stumble over him?”
“Damn, you must have been there.”
“And for this they give you the key to the city?”
“Not even to the men’s room.”
He laughed. “Well, congratulations, buddy. Keep it up and one day I’m going to be proud to know you.”
He appreciated the levity. The full impact of the incident hadn’t hit him until he’d gotten to the office, and it was still with him: How someone standing on that platform, surrounded by people who were thinking only of getting to work or were reading their newspapers, had wanted to die and was willing to die so horribly. What had driven him to it? Had he planned it or had it been a sudden impulse? Alan couldn’t help wondering, and wishing he knew. It seemed so damn lonely and sad.
He was angry at Elsa for trying to use it as a publicity gimmick. He had no il
lusions about charity as a business but this was so bald, so stupid. And, again, it wasn’t as if he had really done something brave or thought-out. It had happened; he’d simply reacted.
A little later, driving to Anna’s place, he found himself thinking of something else. For the past couple of minutes, and almost without realizing it, he had been thinking that maybe if he gave himself up this incident would help him, would serve to let them know he was really a good person, someone who deserved forgiveness, mercy. But then he remembered stories he’d read or heard about of killers sent away for life despite years of freedom living honorable lives.
The two of them weren’t particularly hungry, so they decided on something less than a full meal for dinner. They drove to a Jewish delicatessen about a mile away and took the booth the farthest from the counter. The evening started off well, but as it wore on he could tell that she was tired, and by the time he drove her home they both felt, without saying it to each other, that this was not a night for him to stay over.
The red light on his answering machine was on when he walked in, but it was just another hang-up. He went in the bathroom and started to undress, changed his mind, then went to the computer.
He had put the link to the Breeze directly on his computer’s desktop so that he could log onto the paper’s Web site immediately. He opened it but after a fast scan saw nothing about his crime. Like a million times before, he told himself to stop but instead he went back to older articles archived below today’s headlines. And saw that the sketch was still there, just a click away from the home page.
He forced himself to read the story, saw that the first few paragraphs were once again about the stranger in the library. But then something new: The local police were anxious to question a man who’d been arrested in Philadelphia for the murder of an eleven-year-old girl but who might be responsible for at least twenty other murders along the East Coast.
He sat back as though in a daze.
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