Killing Time: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  “Have you killed anybody else?”

  “I don’t know,” Detweiler said. “I certainly don’t fight people with the plan of killing them. I can tell you that. Yet I suppose there isn’t much point in fighting unless somewhere in the back of your mind is a knowledge that life is always at stake. But the other person, being human, knows that too, so it is fair.” He thought a moment and added: “Of course, you will find people who pretend otherwise.”

  “Fight?” said Tierney. “Is that your name for it? When the other person is a woman? Why don’t you admit you like to beat up girls, to hurt them: the more pain they have, the more your kicks. They are soft and you are hard. You can prove you’re a man then, striking something stiff against something that gives. Otherwise you wouldn’t know.”

  “I don’t fight with the other person in mind at all,” Detweiler answered. “That’s what I mean by its being impersonal. I’m thinking exclusively of myself at such times, and they get in the way. You may be correct when you say I am a pervert, because of my tendency to get trapped in details though my aim is universality. But so far as sex goes, I am so normal in that area I have tried repeatedly to get rid of my penis.”

  Tierney tried to ignore the statement; he had no use for it; but Detweiler persisted. “I have never been able to accomplish that. So you are right about my being yellow. I took a razor blade in my right hand, and my organ in the left, and I started to make a cut down at the root. Puncturing the skin wasn’t painful, a razor blade is so sharp, so I got it inserted all right, but when I reached—”

  Tierney shoved his chair back and walked rapidly to the barred window. Because of his work many men must have stood, must be standing, in a similar attitude in various places of confinement. Necessarily he always minimized the discomforts of prisons, doubted their adequacy as punishment—if that Chinatown mugger had, in the course of robbing him, killed the man in the polo coat he might have got as little as twenty years of three nourishing meals per day, Saturday night movies, Sunday baseball games, payment for making license plates in the prison factory, not to mention training by masters in his true vocation, against the day he would escape or be paroled. But now Tierney understood that if he himself ever committed a punishable crime he must lose his life before capture: he could not endure constraint. Detweiler, however, seemed not to mind; he was insane. He was not faking in his description of the attempted mutilation. Tierney could feel its authenticity in his own groin, he who sometimes came naked from the shower to lather his face over the basin, to wet the razor, but never to lift it before he had hung a towel from his waist.

  Detweiler was saying, with his boyish grimace: “Gee, it really hurt! So I stopped. Believe me, it is an awful thing to try to cut off your penis. It is terrible.” He sounded like an adolescent registering an extravagant complaint against a minor catastrophe: flat soda, term paper.

  If degeneration this was, it must be a subtle form, too fine for Tierney to distinguish. He could see that Detweiler was serious, and as a fellow man, even one who had never attempted it, he must affirm that self-mutilation would be painful. One knew that as a basic truth. Being mad, Detweiler had to test it for himself. Tierney formulated a definition for a maniac: he who accepts nothing on faith, a kind of scientist of the soul.

  But an obvious question remained.

  “Why?” Detweiler repeated, but not rhetorically. He seemed to do nothing for effect. He was the only suspect Tierney had ever interrogated whose response could not be called a performance. “I suppose more vital energy is lost by that route than by any of the other orifices, certainly any but the mouth.

  “Now, I am aware of the theory that sexuality is initiated in the mind, and not the organs, but remove the organs and the mind will adjust to the new situation. Take a bull and make him an ox and you will see he loses his aggressive character but none of his strength.

  “So the idea was far from ridiculous. What was lacking was courage on my part. I really don’t like pain, and it seems pointless to inflict it on oneself in this day and age when anesthetic surgery is practiced everywhere. So I got into the habit if I would pass a municipal clinic of going in and making my request. But I’ll tell you this: I never found a doctor who would do it. So I continued to lose a lot of force constantly. You know how you often wake up in the morning with a physical craving for sex which has come from nowhere, or riding a subway, not even looking at women, and your organ is suddenly in a ready state, intruding into your thoughts, which may be of an entirely abstract nature. This has led me to consider whether sex really has anything to do with people, oneself included. It so often seems inanimate.

  “Did you know that the common ant experiences sexual desire only once in a lifetime? That bears some thought, especially since like human beings ants are social creatures and build great cities, structures, roads, fight wars, and there is reason to believe even have a sort of politics. I don’t care much for those ant colonies that you can buy already made up, though: encased in glass and with tiny manmade buildings labeled ‘School’ and ‘Church’ and ‘Town Hall.’”

  Tierney had once as a boy read a science-fiction story in which the entire world as we know it was but a drop of water on the slide of a colossal microscope. Hurricanes and earthquakes were caused by the probing of the massive personage who operated the instrument. His eye was the sun.

  Tierney still stood at the barred window, looking through which he now saw, across the areaway, a lighted office, a detective he knew on the Safe & Loft Squad. They were always busiest at night, obviously the optimum time for a hired arsonist to burn the warehouse of a businessman in trouble. Tierney had no difficulty in making the immediate transition from fantasy to such a routine recognition. Lawrenson, the Safe & Loft man, had just made first-grade detective. Tierney was not up for promotion, had been only nine months in second-grade. Lawrenson had been on the Force for years and years and was at least a decade older than Tierney; his upgrading had been long overdue. Tierney did not feel any sense of injustice, but Shuster would have.

  Shuster had been a lieutenant since Christ was a patrolman—an expression of his own. He resented every promotion, even Tierney’s though he had recommended Tierney for it, and he had some dirt on everybody. Shuster would know for example that Lawrenson had, two years before, bought an eight-room house costing much more than he could afford, both in down payment and monthly installments. Shuster knew all the grafters, the sadists, the adulterers; undoubtedly he had a thing or two on the D.A., and perhaps even the mayor. Yet none of this knowledge represented power—that was the interesting thing to Tierney. Shuster stayed a lieutenant.

  Meanwhile there sat Detweiler, the ultimate criminal, the man who Tierney was willing to believe had murdered for no motive at all. And Tierney had his back turned to him. It had been preposterous for the commissioner to take away his gun. Tierney was certain that lethal instruments were irrelevant, in Detweiler’s view.

  He turned and asked: “How did you happen to use a screwdriver on Appleton?”

  “Isn’t that something?” said Detweiler. “I never knew what his name was until you people here began to use it. To me he was just a man. I had left Mrs. Starr and Billie in the bedroom and was walking slowly along the hall towards the living room when his radio suddenly stopped playing. I guess it was his radio, because it had been playing in the room I used to rent when I lived there and the door had been ajar all the while, though I didn’t know who was in there because you couldn’t see from the hallway. And I didn’t want to know, because it was deafening and loud noise always makes me want to kill the person who is making it, and I didn’t go there to get into a fight.

  “So by the time I reached the living room the effect of the beautiful stillness came over me, and I stopped to enjoy it. I didn’t have any place to go and so was in no hurry. You have no idea how sweet it was there in the absolute quiet: inanimate objects are at their best in the silence. There was one lamp on a table near the windows and its soft light made the
fabric of the sofa look like velvet, and I had never before noticed that the shadows made a pattern on the carpet that undoubtedly had a significant meaning could one have read it. When you speak of nothingness in any area it is often only because of insufficient knowledge. Everything is teeming with life. I’m convinced of that.”

  In the harsh light Detweiler seemed almost translucent, and if he cast a shadow, he contained or consumed it. He was portable in every sense of the word, with no excess, leaving no mark. He was almost nothing but mind or spirit, and that was warped. He was worthless.

  Yet Tierney listened with a peculiar sympathy. Detweiler’s view of things had a logic of its own: if you accepted a loud radio as sufficient motive for killing, then you must also admit the sense in enjoying the shadows on a carpet. Consistency is a value which the sane must support in ordinary circumstances; all the more so when consorting with the disorderly. But Tierney, who had seen those blue-faced, tongue-biting, dis-tended-eyed corpses of Mrs. Starr and Billie, the worst of murders, far worse than when the mortifying body is broken and can shed its blood—in gunshot and knife murders, the victim loses some of his corporeality; strangled, his gain is horrible—Tierney also marveled at Detweiler’s facility in making transitions.

  “How long did you stand there?”

  Detweiler said happily: “I don’t know! Time did not apply. Funny, I had been trying for years to bring time to a stop and never succeeded. Oh, I could slow it up some. Everybody knows that time goes fast when you eat delicious food or make love or engage in any entertaining or attractive pastime. And slowly if you don’t care for what you are doing. But take a swallow of strawberry milk shake and try to hold it—I don’t mean the actual fluid but the exquisite sensation of sweet and fruit and smooth and mellow and slippery and cool in one instant retained infinitely, or let go and then summoned back next day or week or year.” Detweiler was radiant. “My God, wouldn’t that be wonderful?” He fell back into the chair. “We have it all, but lose it, let it go, proceed to the next phenomenon, distracted by what seem to be successive promises.”

  “Appleton entered the room while you were looking at the carpet,” said Tierney, who had a job to do.

  “Obviously he did,” said Detweiler, shrugging. “I was aware that he was saying something, perhaps not words but sounds. I suppose now that he had seen Billie, anyway, whom I had left on the bed. I had put Mrs. Starr underneath, because I didn’t want Billie to be upset by the sight when she came in, and—”

  “Where was Billie while you were strangling Mrs. Starr?”

  Detweiler said: “I want to follow the line I’m on at the moment. Can’t you see I am developing a point, and furthermore, one which you got me started on by asking about Appleton?”

  Tierney, pulling at his lips, accepted the rebuke and, his claustrophobia was thereby diminished. Detweiler’s insistence on arranging his own kind of order made him more feasible as a companion in a locked room. Tierney returned to the chair opposite the murderer, turned it back to front, and straddled the seat, folding his arms along the top rail.

  Detweiler nodded smartly and proceeded. “It gradually dawned on me that someone else was in the room and not in sympathy with me, so that time was starting up again, slowly and uncertainly at first, as when you pick up a clock that has wound down and begin to tighten the mainspring, tock…tick…tock-tick, tock, tick, ticktock, ticktockticktockticktock! I turned around and saw this man, rather large and baldheaded. He was making sounds that I could not distinguish, and they did not seem to be synchronized with the movements of his lips.

  “Well, it was rather embarrassing. I said, “I’m Joe Detweiler. I used to live here, in the same room that you have.’ I walked towards him and put out my right hand. He was trembling but looked friendly. He put his hand out, but as I was about to shake it, I saw he was holding a screwdriver in it. I said, ‘What’s this?’ He spoke at last, thickly as if he had a cold but understandably: ‘Fiddling with the radio. Station knob loose; tiny screw.’ He said pathetically: ‘This screwdriver has too big a blade.’

  “I thought what he needed was one of those screwdriver sets in which ever smaller blades are fitted one into the next, and all nestle in the handle of the biggest, underneath a metal cap. You unfasten the cap and shake out one after the other until finally you can go no farther and you have a delicate little blade that will fit even the tiny screws in a wristwatch.

  “However, I didn’t tell him that. I remembered how loudly he had been playing the radio while I was talking to Mrs. Starr. I said: ‘You should have consideration for other people. Don’t you know that sound can kill?’ This is true, and has been done in laboratories with white rats and guinea pigs, and isn’t it terrible that living animals should be destroyed to prove what everybody knows in his heart? People who have to prove things are either crazy or immoral, but people who make noise are insensitive, deadened by the repeated impact of molecules of sound.”

  “So,” said Tierney, “you had given your name to Appleton, and realizing he would identify you, you killed him with his own screwdriver.”

  “Not quite,” said Detweiler. “You know how different actual experience is from any speculation about it, and even a description by a participant, for that matter. That is what makes Realization difficult: it is definitely not memory. In fact, memory obstructs and perverts the process, for we all have our selfish interests to serve in the ordinary recollection. For example, I am trying now with the best of my ability to remember what happened with Appleton.”

  Tierney of course was trying to get Detweiler to admit that the murder of Appleton had been premeditated, even if for half a minute.

  He said: “But you did tell him your name.”

  “Yes, I am positive of that,” Detweiler answered, “at least, as positive as one can be of anything of a phenomenal nature.”

  “And he found the bodies. Did he accuse you of killing the women?”

  “That he had seen Billie is really speculation on my part. I don’t know that he did, nor do I know that if he saw her lying on the bed he would recognize that the life had gone out of her. He might think she was sleeping.”

  “Naked?” asked Tierney.

  “Oh, Billie was frequently naked. She was a great one for forgetting to close doors. She was a lot like an animal in having no sense of shame about her body. If you lived there you certainly had lots of opportunities to see everything she had, but speaking of myself, I have never been terribly interested in ogling from the sexual point of view. In sex I want to get as close as possible to the center. Looking keeps you outside, confines you to yourself.

  “But supposing he did get the correct picture, he seemed bewildered. I asked him what his own name was and he didn’t answer. He did not accuse me of anything. He just stood there. I said: ‘Merry Christmas, then.’ He nodded, smiling slightly, I thought. I turned to leave and he jumped me. But I don’t think he was a treacherous man. I believe that it had taken him that long to move into action, and that he would have attacked at that moment regardless of whether my back was turned or anything else. He was strong and brave, but I think confused.

  “I would not say he was trying to kill me.”

  “So,” said Tierney, “then it was not self-defense.” He was obliged as a police officer to seek out the truth as to an alleged breach of the law. Whether a suspect was legally guilty or innocent was not his affair. Yet in practice, which is to say morality, he was gratified only by what tended to incriminate. This was quite impersonal. Tierney had by now lost the initial animosity he had felt towards Detweiler. You cannot hate a man who has no pride—no, that was imprecise: rather who has another kind of pride. Detweiler was mad, but not without a method.

  Detweiler shook his head. “I would say he wanted to detain me. He did not understand what had happened, and it is almost impossible to kill a human being—always excepting the case of pure accident—when you are confused as to your motive and theirs.”

  “And that also applies to you
,” said Tierney. “You were not confused when you killed these three persons. You knew what you wanted to do, had thought it out, planned it, and did it. Now all you have to tell me is your motive, and we can get a good night’s sleep.”

  Detweiler answered sadly: “I asked to talk to you because I believed that alone among the people with whom I have come into contact since entering the newspaper office, you would listen, not, frankly, because I thought you were terribly intelligent, but mind, in itself, is inconsequential. But now you are willfully placing yourself in obstruction, to the end that, if you had your way, I would confess to murder, pointlessly.

  “Now, I will do that for you, if you truly want it and it is not merely a nervous reflex. All I ask is that you be serious—I don’t mean solemn, you can laugh or joke, but for God’s sake accept responsibility.”

  Tierney was not caught off guard by this impassioned statement. He had expected it, had indeed tried to provoke it, and now believed he had scored another gain. He had got Detweiler to come out of moral hiding, to acknowledge if only in a negative way the crime of which he was accused. Detweiler understood the charge against him, could differentiate between right and wrong. Whatever the features of his madness, no other issue was germane to this inquiry.

  “Do you confess to the premeditated murders of these three people, or to any one of them?” Tierney asked compulsively.

  Detweiler said, in a rush of anger: “Do you want me to?”

  “I don’t come into this,” Tierney said. Then he heard himself add, inappropriately: ‘I am not charged with anything.” The personal pronoun disturbed him.

  “That’s right,” Detweiler said. “I’m certainly not accusing you.”

  “Why did you do that?” cried Tierney.

  Detweiler looked alarmed and puzzled. “Excuse me?”

  “Put that funny twist on the word I. Are you getting cute with me?” Tierney was jumping with nerves.