“No …” I said.
She ignored me. “But do you know what it’s like? Do you know what it’s like to lose the one person you love most in the world?”
She turned on her heels and was gone. I heard her flat shoes slapping wearily against the floor tiles as she vanished.
For a few minutes I sat alone in my cubicle. I sat alone with my cigarette and her question.
Then I put out the cigarette. Then I answered the question.
“Yes,” I said to the emptiness.
A long time ago, it must be almost ten years now, back when I first came to the Star, I covered a sniper attack on Fifth Avenue. It was Christmastime, December twenty-second. The Avenue, between Thirty-fourth and Fifty-ninth, was one long steady river of humanity. It was a colorful river. Red hats and green scarves, blue and yellow and brown coats all blended together into what seemed a single mass. That mass flowed steadily from where the mechanical dwarves hammered out presents in the window workshops of F.A.O. Schwarz’s toy store, past the high towers covered with tinsel, electric lights, and starbursts, past the enormous color-dotted tree outside Rockefeller Center, to the bottom of the Empire State Building, which presided solemnly over the whole great human continuum.
The sniper’s name, it turned out later, was Wilfred Campbell. He was from the Bronx, a black man with a jowly face and mournful eyes. He was a window washer. Worked in Manhattan mostly.
About three months before, he’d hit the numbers. It was not an enormous jackpot, but there were a few grand at least. He went out to celebrate at one of the neighborhood spots. It was in an old wooden box of a building, green paint chipping from the boards. There was a sign above the window with the words “Girls! Girls! Girls!” painted on it and a picture of a cocktail glass tilting to one side. Campbell had never been in the place before. He was a churchgoing man, married, couple of kids. He usually stayed away from places like this.
But he went in this night. He watched girls in G-strings dance on top of the bar. He took to one of them, a skinny little teenager who called herself Yvette. He paid her to dance on top of his table. He bought her a couple of overpriced drinks. He told her about the jackpot he’d won. After she got off work, she let him come home with her. She lived only a few blocks away from Wilfred’s place.
Wilfred stayed with Yvette for two months. That’s how long his money lasted. During that time, he lost his job for not showing up. His wife left him, moved back in with her mother. His kids stopped talking to him. Wilfred didn’t seem to care. He bought Yvette dresses with spangles on them. He bought her shoes. He rented limos to take her to dinner in. All of this, Yvette later told me, she took with no strings attached. She continued to dance at the bar. She even turned tricks sometimes. Wilfred never complained. Sometimes, she said, she couldn’t even stand the sight of him, couldn’t bear his touch. He didn’t seem to care about that either. She let him live with her. That’s all he seemed to want.
When his money ran out, she told him, “Sorry, honey, but now you got to go.” He nodded. He seemed to understand, she said. He left without a fuss.
Now Wilfred owned two guns, a .38 caliber pistol and a small caliber rifle. A .22, I recall. He went home and got them both. He put the pistol in the pocket of his army jacket. He put the rifle in a duffel bag. He took the subway into midtown Manhattan.
He carried the duffel bag into a building on the corner of Fifth and Fifty-fifth. It was about six in the evening then. The shopping crowd was thickening with the rush hour crush.
Wilfred walked right past the security desk. He carried his duffel bag onto the elevator. He rode up to the fourth floor. There was a movie company up there. It took up the entire floor. Wilfred had frequently been the guy to wash their windows. He knew just the one he wanted.
The secretary at the front desk was gone but the door to the story department was open. Wilfred walked through, carrying his duffel bag. He came into an empty hallway. There were doors to offices on either side of it. He walked to the first door on his right and went in.
A young woman was sitting at the desk in there. Behind her was a broad window looking out on the brownstone steeple of the Presbyterian church.
The woman looked up at Wilfred. She smiled brightly. She asked him what she could do for him. Wilfred wrestled the big .38 from his pocket. He pointed it at her and fired. Her smile vanished in a burst of red. Her body rocketed off her chair. It thumped onto the floor.
Wilfred kicked the door shut and locked it. He carried the duffel bag to the window, set it down next to the woman’s twitching body. He unzipped the bag and brought out the rifle.
Wilfred shoved the barrel of the rifle out through the pane of glass. The glass shattered. Gleaming triangular shards of it spun down through the air toward the people below. Three adults and four children were injured when they were struck by the falling glass. Wilfred took aim and opened fire.
With that big a crowd, with all the music and the lights, it took a long time before the people knew they were being slaughtered. The victims fell silently. The people behind them shoved to get by. On the steps of the church, a young salesman visiting from Houston, Texas, collapsed backward into his wife’s arms. She saw his eyes staring upward. She saw the round, raw, red hole between them. She screamed as he slipped from her grasp to the pavement. Her scream became a gurgle. Wilfred had shot her in the throat.
The people passing beneath the church saw that. They’d looked up when they heard the scream. They’d seen the blood bubble suddenly out of the woman’s neck. They panicked. The panic spread. The mob on the Avenue surged and shrieked and fell away again and again like the waves of a stormy ocean. Cars stopped short as people tumbled wildly off the sidewalk. The scream of horns joined the screams of the people.
Wilfred kept firing calmly, expertly. He saw a little girl lost and crying in a bookstore doorway. He shot her in the chest. He saw a man scrabbling up the church stairs over the fallen body of an old woman. He put a hole in the back of his skull.
By the time I got there, following the cops, seven people had been shot dead. More than twenty-five had been wounded. That was the end of it for the most part. Wilfred ran out of ammunition and quietly gave himself up.
When they led him out of the building, I pressed in close to the protective cordon of police. The other reporters shoved up against me. Between one blue-uniformed arm and another, I saw Wilfred pass. His head was bowed. His hands were cuffed behind him. Two cops had him by the elbow, escorting him through the storm of shouted questions and flashing bulbs. He passed within two feet of me. So I shouted at him. That was my job. I shouted the only question I could think of.
“Hey, pal, why’d you do it?”
Wilfred lifted his sagging face as he was urged on. He stared at me with his big, yellow, melancholy eyes.
“Because, mister,” he said quietly, “I loved her that much.”
He hanged himself in his cell the next day.
I thought about old Wilfred when I got home that night. I thought about his answer. I thought about Timothy Colt and how he died. I thought about a lot of things.
Before that, I hadn’t had time to think. I’d been busy serving the greater good of journalism. After Valerie Colt left, I dashed off my sidebar on my fight with Colt’s killer. Standard stuff. Took about half an hour to write. When it was done, I pretended I was working on it a while so I could keep from handing it to Cambridge before deadline. As it turned out, my relatable friend was fairly pleased with it. He didn’t give me too much trouble.
A little after six o’clock, I took myself home. I felt sick and sore. My throat was raw from too much smoke and talking. My belly stung from too much aspirin, too little food. The rest of me hadn’t stopped aching since that morning. By the time I trudged into the crumbling old brick apartment building on Eighty-sixth Street, I wasn’t thinking of anything but a shower and a drink and bed.
My apartment on the fourth floor was dark when I came in. Dark but for the glow from the t
riplex movie theater across the street. That glow gave a hard, glinting quality to the night pressed against the window. It touched the shadows of furniture with gaudy tones of gold and red.
I pounded my fist against the wall a couple of times to chase the roaches away. Then I turned on the light. I threw my copy of the paper down on the couch and headed for the kitchen.
My bottle of J&B was on the counter. I grabbed it with one hand, pinched a glass with another. I carried them out to the living room. I set them down at the desk by the window. I set myself down in the desk’s swivel chair. I poured a drink.
The first sip of the liquor made me feel better all over. The hangover I’d had all day disappeared. The pain in my stomach eased. The soreness in my limbs faded. I stared out the window at the movie marquee. I thought about Wilfred Campbell.
I thought about Wilfred, and I thought about the doctor who’d talked to me that afternoon.
Take better care of the machinery or you’re a dead man.
I sipped the scotch. It tasted bitter. What did he know, anyway?
I thought about Wilfred, and I thought about Valerie Colt. I thought about her sadness, about her crumbled pride.
Do you know what it’s like to lose the one person you love most?
Yeah, I knew. I knew, all right. I’d loved my wife once. Constance. And my daughter, Olivia: I’d loved her more than anything. But one day my wife decided she didn’t want to be my wife anymore. And another day, years later, my daughter decided she didn’t want to be alive. She was fifteen then. She lived in Europe with her mother. She was working as a counselor in a summer camp. She wrote me a letter from there. She told me she was learning to find beauty in the real world with all its sadness. Then she walked into the woods and hanged herself from a tree. I thought about her now. I thought about Valerie Colt. I thought about Wilfred Campbell.
I thought about Wilfred and I thought about Valerie’s husband, Tim. Timothy Colt, one of the best in the business.
When’s the last time you saw your woman, Wells? When’s the last time you saw her?
I thought about him saying that to me.
You don’t see her. You don’t give a shit.
I thought about him lying dead in the morgue with no one to identify his body but the wife he’d deserted. The wife he’d deserted for a dead woman. For an obsession. I thought of his words that night, that drunken declaration of his loneliness and his anguish.
Eleanora. Eleanora, my love, my love.
And then he died. Without warning. Without even a chance to cry out, to bitch about the unfairness of it. His arteries slit by an expert twist of a curved knife. That’s what I call not taking care of the machinery.
You don’t give a shit about anything.
I thought about Chandler Burke.
When’s the last time you saw her, Wells?
She lived over fifty miles away, up in Grant County. That hadn’t seemed to matter at first. At first she’d come down to the city a lot. I’d take an occasional trip up there. Mostly, when we could, we’d spend our weekends together in the big bed in the next room. She liked to make omelets in the morning. I’d wake up to the smell of them. Over the weeks, she covered the cracks in my walls with posters and photos and drawings. We shopped for them in the little stores downtown. There were pictures of the Flatiron Building, Madison Square Garden, Central Park, and so on. Scenes of little old New York seemed to be the theme of it. I hung them up while she gave directions. She was grim and fussy about it in her old-maid schoolmarm way. It made me smile. I even smiled when she bugged me about how much I smoked and how much I worked. I liked to shut her up by kissing her. She was not fussy or grim when we were making love.
When’s the last time, Wells?
I guess we just liked to play house in the beginning of it. We’d both of us lived alone too long. Chandler even seemed willing to put up with the life I led. The phone call dragging me to a crime scene in the middle of the night. The unexpected source opening at the last minute. The weariness that comes of getting home at three a.m. The cynicism that comes of dealing with criminals and pols. She seemed willing to put up with all of it. And it was good in the beginning. I don’t even know how it faded away.
I guess I’d gotten busy lately. The scandal in city government was heating up. I was digging my way closer to the mayor’s office, maybe toward the governor. I was working weekends, round the clock.
You bury yourself in your work. You don’t want to give a shit.
About a month and a half ago, I’d been doing a story on a small-time triggerman namd Vitorelli. Vitorelli had killed a rookie traffic agent, a twenty-five-year-old named Russ Clinton. Clinton had had the temerity to reprimand Vitorelli in front of his friends for double-parking on a street in Greenwich Village. Clinton was also black. Vitorelli didn’t like being embarrassed in front of his friends by a black guy. Clinton vanished two days later. He was found about a week later distributed among three garbage bags in the Bowery.
I could tell from the start that the cops weren’t on it. They made a lot of serious faces at the TV cameras. They talked vaguely about following leads. But I had it on good authority that the fix was in. The constabulary was just killing time until the murder was knocked from the top spot on the six o’clock report. Soon, they knew, the clean, happy faces of the local anchormen would begin jabbering about something else, about the latest fire or sexually transmitted disease. The camera has a short memory.
But the pen remembers forever. I went after him—Vitorelli. My cop sources put me on to him and I went after him hard. In three days, I had him nailed. I had eyewitnesses to his argument with Clinton. I had his movements, his weapon, the holes in his alibis. I had enough circumstantial stuff to put him away. More than that. I had enough to force the cops to bust him.
Vitorelli, though, he had his sources, too. The night I filed the story, he and one of his goons caught up with me as I was hunting for a cab. They bundled me into the back of a car at gunpoint. They regaled me with humorous stories about what they were going to do with me if the story actually appeared in print. Their descriptions were graphic and unpleasant.
They were good enough to leave me off in front of my office so I could run right upstairs and tell the editors to kill the story. I neglected to do this, however. I hailed a cab and went home to bed instead.
Vitorelli was arrested. Then he was set free on a quarter million bail. I spent the day he got out at the movies with Chandler. I spent the night in bed with her. I had a nightmare there. I dreamed Vitorelli was chasing me. I dreamed he was chasing me and my daughter, who was already dead. Vitorelli was threatening to kill her again if he caught her. He said I’d have to watch her die.
I woke with a shout, sweating. Chandler sat up beside me, touched my arm. I shrugged her off. I went into the living room and lit a cigarette. I stood at the window in my underwear, smoking. Chandler wrapped my bathrobe around her and followed me in.
“What?” she said softly. “What is it?”
“A dream,” I said.
“About Olivia?”
I turned around, surprised. She watched me carefully. Her eyes were kind. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, and Vitorelli. That guy, that killer I just …”
“Yes, I know.” She waited, studying me. I felt the sweat begin to gather on my brow again. “Tell me.”
“Forget it. It’s just a dream.”
“Tell me anyway.”
I hesitated. The sweat ran down the side of my face, into the stubble on my jaw. My heart beat harder. I couldn’t tell if it was the dream that was spooking me or the idea of telling it. I told it anyway. Chandler was silent. She listened.
“So?” I said when I was done. “You’re the counselor. What’s it all mean?”
She smiled a little. “You’re supposed to tell me that.”
“I told you what I think. I think it’s just a dream and we should go back to bed.”
She nodded slowly. “All right,” she said. She turned away.
“I’m afraid,” I said to her. I was angry suddenly. “Vitorelli is tough. He’s tough and he’s mean and I’m afraid, all right?”
She faced me again. Her eyes were soft. The robe fell open around her. “That’s not so bad,” she said. “I spend most of my time afraid.”
We stood there together, half-naked and too damned old to look good at it. We stood there, looking into each other’s eyes, and seeing the fear inside. For a few seconds I felt we were approaching some kind of common border. Someplace where each of us ended and began at once. Someplace where, if we took just one more step, we’d be together in a different way than before. A more complete way.
We didn’t take that step. I dropped my eyes. Chandler moved suddenly, nervously toward the kitchen.
“I’ll make us drinks,” she said.
She almost never drinks.
When was the last time you saw her?
Vitorelli vanished the next day. Hasn’t been seen since. The wisdom on the streets is that some of his friends were afraid he would talk rather than do time. They also didn’t like him messing with reporters. It causes trouble for everyone.
So it was then, the night I had that dream: that was the last time I’d seen Chandler Burke. I kept calling her at first. Kept making excuses for not arranging a time to get together. But somehow, it just didn’t happen. I’d be busy or she would. There was always something. Then about two weeks ago I stopped calling.
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