Small Town

by Lawrence Block

Page 52

 

  It was hard now to recall why he’d established that pattern in the first place. He’d seen and recognized the young man; following him, it seemed as if he was being specifically led to the sites of his next sacrifices. It hadn’t occurred to him to question this at the time, and now, looking back on it, he failed to see what his purpose might have been. You couldn’t say it had no rhyme or reason.

  It had rhyme, certainly, but the reason was less readily apparent.

  No matter. It was done.

  H E S A T A T T H E window, watching the city.

  The apartment was a comfortable one, light and airy, comfortably furnished, with two window air conditioners that kept the place almost too cool throughout an August heat wave. It was spacious as well, occupying the entire top floor of a narrow three-story frame house on Baltic Street, in the part of Brooklyn known as Boerum Hill. He remembered Baltic Street from Monopoly; it and Mediterranean were the cheapest properties on the board.

  This Baltic Street was nicer than that, although he imagined the neighborhood had been marginal twenty or thirty years earlier.

  Now, like so much of Brooklyn, it had benefited from gentrifica-tion, and was attracting middle-income New Yorkers, unable to find space they could afford in Manhattan, or in long-desirable parts of the borough like Brooklyn Heights.

  Evelyn Crispin, the woman whose apartment this was, was one such person. She was fifty-one years old, and worked as a legal secretary at a Wall Street law firm. She had been married in her twenties, and a wedding picture in a frame on her dresser showed her as a young and pretty bride, standing beside a beaming groom. He’d died a few years later, killed in an automobile accident, and shortly thereafter she’d moved to New York to start a new life. It had evidently been a solitary life, and for the past fifteen years she’d led it in this Baltic Street apartment, which she shared with a cat whose name William Harbinger did not know.

  The cat, nameless or not, demanded periodically to be fed. It did so now, weaving itself around his ankles, rubbing its body against him to attract his attention. He went into the kitchen, got a can of cat food from the cupboard. There were only two left on the shelf, and when they were gone he’d have to figure out what to do about the cat.

  He opened the can, spooned the food into its dish, placed the dish on the floor. Watching the animal eat, he was reminded that he ought to eat something himself, and opened a can of lentil soup and another of roast beef hash, which on balance did not look all that different from what he’d just fed to the cat. He heated the soup in a saucepan and the hash in a frying pan, transferred the contents to a bowl and a plate, and sat at the kitchen table to eat his meal. When the cat hopped up onto the table to investigate, he took it by the scruff of the neck and tossed it across the room.

  That would do for now, but next meal it would try again; the beast was capable of learning, but not of retaining what it learned.

  When he was finished eating he washed his dishes in the sink, wiped them dry with a red-and-white checkered dishtowel, and put them away. He was, he thought, the ideal tenant. He washed the dishes, made the bed, and fed the cat. He even watered the plants, although he suspected he was overwatering at least one of them.

  He checked the refrigerator’s freezer compartment, and it had obligingly made ice of the water he’d put in the ice cube trays. He filled a bucket with the cubes, refilled all four trays with tap water, and dumped the bucket of ice cubes in the bathtub. Then he closed the bathroom door and returned to the front room and his chair by the window.

  H E M I S S E D H I S B O O K S , his histories, his diaries of old New Yorkers. As far as he knew, they were still in his storage locker in Chelsea, but that wasn’t a safe neighborhood for him. In a sense, no neighborhood was especially safe. His picture had been in all the papers and on all the news programs, and America’s Most Wanted had shown it to the whole country. ( Let’s get this coward off the streets! had been the urgent message of the show’s intense host, and he’d found this puzzling. He didn’t expect the public to understand what he was doing for them, but in what respect could he be seen as cowardly? Evil, perhaps; he could see how they might view his actions as evil. But certainly not cowardly. ) In Chelsea, though, the residents could be expected to feel more personally connected to what he had done, and to have looked more intently at his photograph. He couldn’t expect to pass unnoticed there. Nor could he be certain that the police had not already traced the storage locker, in which case they were very likely keeping it under surveillance. He missed his books, but he didn’t need them, and didn’t care to risk walking into a trap.

  The phone rang, and he let it ring. There was an answering machine, but he’d disconnected it, not wanting people leaving messages. There weren’t many calls, and this was the day’s first.

  There’d been a call early on from her office, and he’d returned that call the following morning, explaining that Ms. Crispin had been called out of town suddenly for a family emergency, that she’d asked him, a neighbor and friend, to notify them, and that it was impossible to say when she might return. Two days later he called them again to report that her aunt had in fact died, that Ms.

  Crispin was the woman’s sole heir, and would remain in Duluth.

  “She’s not even coming back for her things,” he said, sounding aggrieved himself. “I’m supposed to pack everything and ship it to her. She must think I don’t have anything better to do. ” So there wouldn’t be any more calls from the office.

  She had a bookcase full of books, mostly paperback novels, but one illustrated volume called Lost Brooklyn, filled with photographs of buildings, many of them quite magnificent, which had fallen to the wrecking ball. He liked looking at the pictures and pondering the transitory nature of all things, even buildings. But he couldn’t get transported by pictures as he could by text.

  H E H A D P L E N T Y O F money. Before they’d identified him, before they put his picture in the paper, he’d realized that his days of anonymity were over. Accordingly he’d used the ATM, drawing the $800 daily maximum for three days in succession. His expenses were lower now, too, since he couldn’t go to a hotel, or eat in a restaurant. The $2,400 he’d drawn would last him for the time that remained to him.

  Before he found the Baltic Street apartment, he’d had to be resourceful. He didn’t dare sleep on park benches, fearing he’d wake up to a patrolman tapping the soles of his shoes with his nightstick, then taking a good look at him when he sat up and opened his eyes. He didn’t need much sleep, though, and got what he required an hour or two at a time in air-conditioned movie theaters. He rode the G train to Greenpoint and bought shirts and socks and underwear at a bargain store on Manhattan Avenue, which seemed safer to him than Fourteenth Street, and ate in ethnic enclaves in Queens, where the residents were more caught up in tensions over Kashmir and civil war in Colombia than the doings of white people in gay bars in Manhattan.

  Then he found Evelyn Crispin’s apartment, and his life became less of a struggle. She had a cupboard and refrigerator full of food, and a soft bed for him to sleep in, and a comfortable chair and a television set with cable reception. She had neighbors, too, but he never saw them. He left the apartment after two A. M. and returned before five, and never encountered anyone.

  Every day that he stayed out of sight, the likelihood of their capturing him diminished. The hunt would go on indefinitely, but the public, with its eight million pairs of eyes, had a notoriously short attention span. Look how quickly they’d forgotten all about the man who’d sent anthrax through the mails. Other stories were already competing for their notice, and the Carpenter’s facial features, not that sharply delineated in their photo to begin with, would blur and soften and recede from the forefront of their collective memory.

  Before long he would be invisible again.

  S O M E O N E W A S R I N G I N G T H E doorbell, knocking on the door.

  He’d been drifting, lost in reverie, no
t asleep but not entirely awake, either, and now he sprang from his chair and turned toward the door. Someone had a key in it and was turning the lock. They couldn’t get in, he’d thrown the bolt, but he had to do something.

  He picked up a knife in the kitchen, then went to the door, called, “Yes? Who is it?”

  “It’s Carlos,” a voice said. “Come to check on Miz Crispin. You want to open the door?”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I was in the shower and I heard you banging on the door. You’ve upset the cat terribly. ”

  “I don’t want to upset nobody,” Carlos said. “Where’s the lady?

  Been days now and nobody’s seen her. ”

  “She’s out of town,” he said. “Didn’t you get the note she left?”

  “What note?”

  “She’s in Duluth,” he said. “Her aunt passed away, she had to go there. Are you sure you didn’t get the note?” A woman’s voice said, “Duluth?”

  “In Minnesota. I’m a friend of hers, I’m taking care of her cat until she comes back. She asked if I’d stop in and feed the cat and water the plants, and I said I’d move right in, because my air conditioner died and just try to get them to come in the middle of a heat wave. ”

  “I know she’s from Minnesota,” the woman said.

  “I just wanted to make sure she was all right,” Carlos said.

  “She’s fine,” he said. “I had a postcard from her the other day.

  Come around tomorrow and I’ll show it to you. ”

  “No, I don’t have to see no postcard. I just . . . ”

  “Listen,” he said, “the water’s still running in the shower.

  You’re good to be concerned. She’s fortunate to have such good neighbors. ”

  “I’m the super. This building and three others on the block. I’m sort of responsible, you know what I mean?”

  “I do,” he said, “and I appreciate it. ”

  He stood there, gripping the knife, until he heard their footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs.

  H E W A S G O I N G T O have to decide about fingerprints.

  To leave them or to wipe them away? There were persuasive arguments on both sides. If they found his fingerprints, and thus knew he’d taken refuge here on Baltic Street, he’d be catapulted back into the headlines. Of late there’d been little about him, some of it speculation that he might have left the city, might be in Mexico or Brazil or seeking refuge in some Arab nation ( with his terrorist brothers, one columnist suggested), or that he might even be dead. His fingerprints would end such speculation, and would lead authorities to widen their search from Manhattan to the outer boroughs. The invisibility he’d begun to regain would afford less protection.

  On the other hand, he’d be far from Boerum Hill, far from all of Brooklyn, by the time they even saw the need to look for fingerprints. Safety aside, might it not be advantageous to let the city know that the Carpenter was alive and well, and still devoted to his work? Fear was a powerful emotion, and had already served him well.