“Does the room interest you, Detective Oxman?” Collier said from the floor. “All of these throw aways were collected in my kingdom by Willie Lorsec.” A sound came out of his throat, more a giggle than a laugh. “A lovely joke, that name, don’t you agree?”
“Joke?”
“Such a plodder you are; evil without imagination. Willie Lorsec is an anagram of Lewis Collier.”
A rivulet of sweat trickled down Oxman’s cheek; he wiped it away. “Why did you collect all this junk?”
“Why? As evidence, of course. To augment what the Eye observed, to uncover sin that the Eye could not see. What mortals throw away tells a great deal about them.”
Now Oxman understood the method in the man’s madness: In the guise of Willie Lorsec, junkman, Collier had prowled West Ninety-eighth Street learning the intimacies of the block’s residents from the contents of their trash. He had also established himself as an apparent resident of the neighborhood, made everyone including Oxman think he belonged there. That was how he’d been able to come and go, to escape so readily after each of his homicides, without arousing suspicion. He had manufactured at least part of his own luck.
“Those keys on the wall,” Oxman said. “What about them?”
Collier smiled again; he seemed almost to be enjoying himself now, as if he were the one holding the gun. “Keys to various buildings and apartments in my universe. Duplicate keys. Willie Lorsec made friends with several building superintendents, played gin rummy with them, talked baseball with them, gained their confidence. It was a simple matter to appropriate certain keys long enough to have duplicates made, so that when the time came, God could do his work.”
“Quit talking about God, damn you,” Oxman said. “You’re not God.”
“Oh, but I am. Haven’t I punished several transgressors for their sins, snuffed out their evil lives? Even Benny Hiller I led to a building where he assumed I lived and thus, through the force of my will, ended his life. I can still end your life too, Detective Oxman. I can still destroy you.”
“You’re not going to do any more destroying. It’s all over for you, Collier.”
“Is it? Oxman, Oxman, Oxman, you’re such a fool.”
Oxman took a step toward him, then stopped and shook his head. No. It was over; he had the psycho, had him in handcuffs, and hurting him physically was as senseless as Collier’s own acts of violence. There had been enough craziness these past few days; he wasn’t going to go crazy himself.
He let out a long breath that hissed like escaping steam in the quiet room. Collier was watching him with a flat unblinking stare, the faint smile still on his lips. Oxman stepped away at an angle toward a telephone that sat on a spindly three-legged table. He reached out to pick up the receiver—
And in that instant when his eyes flicked away to the phone, Collier levered up in a sudden agile motion and charged him.
The swiftness of the move caught Oxman with his body turned sideways; he tried to twist back, to bring the .38 to bear. But Collier’s lowered head slammed into his arm, knocked the gun loose and sent it bouncing away, knocked Oxman into the three-legged table. He went down with Collier on top of him, splintering the table; felt sharp teeth sink into his left ear.
The pain of the bite forced a whine from Oxman. He caught hold of Collier’s head in both hands, wrenched it aside and ripped the teeth loose from his ear. He saw Collier’s mouth: It was stained with blood. The man was actually snarling at him, spewing spittle and blood and hot breath. Collier’s weight held him pinned for a moment, but Oxman was able to get a handhold on the pullover sweater and heave the writhing body off him.
Oxman struggled with the wreckage of the table, shoved up onto one knee with his hand clapped to his torn ear. Sweat clouded his vision; he ducked his head against his arm to clear his eyes. But because Collier’s hands were cuffed behind his back, Oxman didn’t pay enough attention to him. When he lifted his head he saw that Collier was twisted on his back, legs in the air; somehow, with the strength and agility of madness, he had managed to get his manacled hands over his buttocks, was sliding his arms around his shoes and up in front of him.
Oxman thought fleetingly of the Smith & Wesson .38 in his pocket, realized he didn’t have enough time to get it out, and threw himself at Collier instead. They grappled, rolled. Collier’s strength was enormous; he came up on top, pinning Oxman with his weight. Oxman heaved with his forearms, got his head and shoulders off the carpet, almost pulled free.
He didn’t see that Collier had grabbed hold of the telephone cord until it was too late, until the cord was being wound around his neck and jerked tight.
Breath clogged in his throat; he felt his lungs constrict. Desperately, he clawed at the cord with one hand, clawed at Collier with the other. The room seemed to tilt, to soar. His left hand lost its grip on Collier’s sweater, flailed out and down to the carpet—and touched hard plastic, the telephone receiver.
Oxman’s fingers closed around it, lifted it, swung it against the side of Collier’s head. Did it again, and again, making dull cracking sounds against flesh and bone. The room had begun to go dim; tiny pinpoints of light seemed to explode behind his eyelids. His right arm kept moving independently, rising, falling, smashing over and over with the receiver.
The pressure on his throat lessened. And Collier fell away from him, mouth agape, blood streaming down his face. Oxman kicked at him, drove him back into the couch. Then he struggled to his knees, gasping painfully as he tore the telephone cord from around his neck.
Collier lurched to his feet, using the couch arm as a fulcrum. He hesitated for a moment, seemed about to launch himself at Oxman again; but Oxman was up too, swaying, bracing himself. Collier yelled something that sounded like “Evil!” and ran for the balcony door.
Oxman stumbled after him, saw Collier wrench the door open, go through onto the balcony, then push the door closed behind him and lean his weight back against it. Without thinking, acting on reflex, Oxman stopped two paces from the door and drove his foot against the metal frame just above the latch. There was enough force behind the kick to burst the door outward, to shatter part of the glass. And to propel Collier in an off-balance stagger across the balcony.
Collier might have caught his momentum at the railing if the Eye had not been in his way. But his foot struck the metal tripod of the telescope, spinning him half around; his arms slashed the air, wrapped around the heavy telescope and jerked it backwards with him. Eyes wide and luminous with fright, he teetered for an instant against the waist-high railing——
And then he and the Eye flipped over backwards, out into empty air twenty stories above the earth, and were gone.
Oxman ran to the railing, his shoes crunching on broken glass, and looked over. Collier screamed all the way down, his arms still wrapped around the telescope. When the screaming stopped, vertigo seized Oxman and forced him to back away. He took one long look at the city across the river, the city that teemed and stifled and altered and destroyed; then he turned and went back inside the apartment.
People were milling around out in the hall; he could hear their querulous, alarmed voices. But he didn’t pay any attention to them. One of his hands was bleeding, studded with slivers of broken glass, and more blood continued to leak from his bitten ear; he didn’t pay any attention to those things, either. He picked up the phone, saw that it was still working, and sank wearily onto the couch.
Surrounded by the refuse of other people’s lives, by the dark distorted world of Lewis Collier, he called Manders to tell him it was finally finished.
EPILOGUE
LATE OCTOBER
E.L. OXMAN
He stood at the window of Jennifer’s apartment, looking down at the traffic and pedestrians on Riverside Drive. The neighborhood had returned to normal. For a while the media had reveled in the aftermath of the mass murders and in the bizarre nature of their perpetrator, making much of the fact that Lewis Collier had believed himself to be God, the fact that he h
ad virtually lived on West Ninety-eighth Street in the guise of Willie Lorsec; they had even implied that the police should have picked up on the clue that Willie Lorsec was an anagram for Lewis Collier, that it had been some sort of subconscious desire by Collier to be caught and stopped—completely ignoring the fact, as Lieutenant Manders had pointed out in print, that no one in the Department had heard of Lewis Collier until the night of his death. But eventually the murders had become news as old and uninteresting as last season’s sport’s page, and the media had turned to other sensationalism to sate the appetites of their readers and viewers. And the people of West Ninety-eighth had digested their fear, had begun to breathe again and to come back into the world. They had survived; and life went on.
Art Tobin had survived too. He had spent two weeks in the hospital, in considerable pain at first, and another two weeks recuperating at home. Oxman had talked to him just that afternoon; Tobin was scheduled to return to work a week from Monday. Oxman was glad of that. Glad that Artie, his friend Artie, was alive and well. Even glad that Artie was starting to taunt him again with the same old thinly disguised insults.
Oxman himself had survived. Manders had not reported his relationship with Jennifer to Internal Affairs, but there was nothing he’d been able to do about Oxman’s conduct on the night Lewis Collier died—the failure to report from the photo lab, the lone-wolf confrontation with Collier that had taken place out of his jurisdiction in another state. Oxman had been suspended from the force without pay. There had been a hearing, he had been severely reprimanded, and he was still on suspension. But his spotless prior record was in his favor, and Manders and some others in the Department were on his side; there seemed to be a pretty good chance he would be back to work soon. Maybe at about the same time Artie came back, so they could be a team again. He hoped it would work out that way; whatever else he was, he was a cop. Being a cop was all he knew. Being a cop was all he was.
Except for Jennifer, of course. Their relationship had also survived, had grown stronger now that Beth had moved in permanently with her mother and completed the mercy killing of their marriage by filing for divorce. He spent some nights here with Jennifer, and she spent other nights with him at his house in Queens—Beth had agreed to let him keep the house, because he had agreed to let her have everything else. And it had been good between them. And it kept getting better. And now he was sure.
Jennifer came up next to him at the window. “What are you thinking, E.L.?”
He turned to smile at her. “I was thinking about you.”
“Good thoughts?”
“Very good. Jennifer … would you consider marrying me when the divorce is final?”
She cocked her head at him; her eyes were serious. “Is that a proposal?”
“Yes. I’ve been thinking about asking you for a week now. This seems like as good a time as any.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Marriage … I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”
But her eyes said differently; he thought he saw the answer in her eyes. He put his arm around her. “All right,” he said. “You think about it. We’ve got plenty of time.”
She nodded.
“Plenty of time,” he said again. Because with all that had happened to them, they had been victims only for a little while, only in a small way. In this place, in this time, it wasn’t so easy not to be a victim in some way; what mattered was whether or not you survived. Maybe they could keep on surviving. Maybe the future was going to be good to them both. It was something to hope for. It was something to believe in.
Right now, it was enough.
About the Authors
John Lutz is the author of more than forty novels and more than two hundred short stories and articles, covering nearly every mystery subgenre. Among his awards are the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award and the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award. His novels and short fiction have been translated into almost every language and adapted for almost every medium. He and his wife split their time between St. Louis, Missouri, and Sarasota, Florida.
Bill Pronzini is the author of the Nameless Detective mysteries, America’s longest-running PI series, as well as more than thirty suspense novels. He has won or been nominated for every prize offered to crime fiction writers, including the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives in California with his wife, the crime novelist Marcia Muller.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are 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.
Copyright © 1984 by Bill Pronzini and John Lutz
Cover design by Neil Alexander Heacox
ISBN: 978-1-4804-8509-9
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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The Eye: A Novel of Suspense Page 26