Killing Time Page 28

  “Do I have your permission?” Isobel rubbed her toes together, the nylon rasping as if she walked through a bush.

  “My permission?” At this Betty uttered a shrill laugh, almost a neigh, signifying her preposterous deficiency. Over no creature, in no situation in all the vast universe did she possess an ounce, a molecule, of power. In all equations she was zero. Even Eunice Pell, a stupid, homely, pustular girl, yet privy to her father’s secrets, had a more vivid sense of being.

  “It means a lot to me,” said Isobel, but did not try to catch her eye. Instead she rolled up on a hip and backed it towards the wall, providing a cove, a sitting place for a visitor, on the narrow bed. She made no further invitation, and Betty would not accept this as such. The thought of approaching Isobel on her own volition was repugnant. She would have complied if asked; she must, having no power and no responsibility. She was only a young girl.

  “Where will my father live?” she asked the heavy woman on the sagging bed.

  “Yes, well,” said Isobel, now with a sudden, yearning glance. “Did your mother fail to mention?” She flattened her hips, skirt straining, and rose upon a shoulder. “In my office building they needed a janitor, or should I say custodian. I obtained this position for him or anyway put in a word. It comes with quarters, basement but nice: little bedroom, toilet, and stall shower, maybe a hotplate for soup and coffee. Has to reside there because of nighttime maintenance: keep the boiler on, watchman duties, early trash removal, and so on. I’ll tell you Andy was grateful. I only did what I could. He’s not a well man, dear, and should have his cough checked into. I hope you girls take your chest x-rays yearly.”

  Billie had two wonderful pearlike breasts, but Betty still had grown no bosom worthy of the name, wore a brassiere only so that the backstrap would show through a thin blouse. She supposed that men looked for this, all the more so if nothing was displayed in front. She was tall for her age and had older ways, could handle a cigarette as if smoking were habitual to her, listened serenely to conversation without squirming or picking at her hair. Undoubtedly she was taken as older than her numerical years. High-fashion models had no more chest than she.

  “So that leaves this room empty,” said Isobel. “Why not sublet my own apartment? I thinks, make a profit on it and pass part along to your Momma as boarder here.” Isobel’s cheeks grew fatter as she pressed her chin into her neck. “A lot can be done with this room. Do you sew, dear? And can help me stitch up some curtains? Oh, we will have fun, we women.”

  Betty’s mother spoke from the hallway. “Here you are, you two, here you are.” She made it sound as if she had had to search, as though they were in hiding from her. “Could I break this up?”

  “We’re great friends already,” Isobel said in archness, peering intensely, meaningfully, at Betty, a look for which there was no foundation. “She’s been making me feel at home. Has offered to help with the curtains. Wasn’t that nice?”

  In an abrupt gesture Mrs. Starr thrust the grocery list at Betty, swiftly, crisply, militarily precise, a dispatch to carry through enemy lines by a courier hitherto untried, but the only one around.

  Never again did Betty come that close to Isobel; never was she asked; never did she catch Isobel in compromising circumstances with any living being. In a few months Isobel moved away without clamor or evident ill will and was seldom mentioned thereafter. Then began the series of male boarders, of which Joe Detweiler had been the last while Betty was in residence.

  So much of life was tendency, likelihood, possibility; that which might have been, could have, would have, perhaps was, perhaps not. Only Joe Detweiler had acted decisively, had leaped the gulf between supposition and occurrence. Betty had underestimated him, but then she was sane and he was mad. For this reason she had long since ceased to think of the real Joe, incarcerated, or even as he had been when a boarder at the Starrs’.

  Her own creation, possession, named Noel Phillips, was a sensitive young painter who fell in love with Margaret, and from there on, Margaret exercised absolute control over the narrative. Betty had no force left, could only listen. She had not suspected that the imagination was an even more ruthless authority than time. So her novel, heretofore violent, ended with no commotion whatever, reversing the living events which had presumably been its source, and omitting, denying the murders which in life had been at once so climatic and so senseless. Margaret and Noel, in the end, simply fled out into the world, there being no further story in requited love.

  Summer was done when Betty finished writing her book, and by then she no longer saw Tierney. The break had come one hot August afternoon when, on pulling his sweating body off hers with the noise of loosening adhesive tape, he went into the bathroom across the hall and, without closing the door, made water loudly. No doubt he had done this before, but the heat of the day, the airless, westward-facing bedroom with the beige blind made orange by the suppressed sun, and the smell of Tierney’s perspiration—not unpleasant, but strange: like roasted peanuts—exaggerated the effect. She was suddenly furious that this crude cop should be using the private toilet in her home, and when he emerged to climb into his striped shorts, she noticed for the first time how disgustingly he was haired from clavicle to groin, not an unbroken mat, but in clumps, as if it had been patchily sprayed on.

  She rolled over, face in the pillow, exposing her beautiful behind, perfectly formed, the only portion of her body of which she was vain. She was luring Tierney to display his worst, and was not disappointed. He reached over and smacked her on the right buttock, then slipped his shirt on over his head, like a sweater: he never unbuttoned it all the way, nor did he usually take off his socks. Thus he was extremely quick in doffing and donning his attire, which furthermore he always arranged as near as possible to the bed, sometimes on a chair, sometimes the floor, with his pistol uppermost. For months he had first put on both underwear and trousers, gun at belt, before going to the bathroom, as if she might rifle his pockets in the interim.

  He had now got to dashing in, taking his pee, and returning swiftly. Once dressed he would be very leisurely about returning to wash. He might insist she go first. Coming back she would see him sitting in his jacket, necktie in place, on the edge of the bed, perusing his notebook. Before he left he would plunge in, closing the bathroom door this time, and run the water, presumably rinsing his part: he took no shower, even in scorching weather.

  Tierney’s post-sex ritual had never thrilled Betty. But there was no good way for a man to clean up afterward, except perhaps Arthur’s discreet and utter silence: he decently refrained from going to the toilet for an hour or so, though he apparently washed himself thoroughly and with dispatch—there was no good way, because of the universal male implication that the act was defiling. How vulnerable they were all made by their external genitalia; men could not even run properly unless it was strapped down. Tierney for example when naked would be no match for the weakest clothed criminal.

  “Tierney,” she said, rolling over on her back, “policemen are always scared, aren’t they?”

  He slipped the loop of the tie, which had not been unknotted, over his head and under the already buttoned collar. He seemed to take no offense at the question.

  He said, as if it were self-evident: “They might get killed. That’s what is different about the job.”

  “I didn’t mean that kind of fear,” said Betty, watching him close his fly. “I mean scared to the core, scared of being wrong, of being foolish, of being disobeyed, scared of life. In fact, the only thing you are not frightened of is being killed, else you wouldn’t have taken the job.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Tierney said genially, indifferent to the subject of the moment as he always was after sex. Even this, to Betty, was evidence of fright; she was fond of her theory. She had, however, not made a place for Tierney in her novel, for the obvious reason that there were no murders in that narrative. Thus he had no ideal role for her. He was stuck in reality, hairy and urinating. And scared.
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  But she had misinterpreted his mood, which he now revealed to be neither genial nor indifferent. He repeated: “Well, I don’t know who is scared and why, but when there is shit to be cleaned up we come with our shovels and when the job is done we hear we stink.”

  “And you do,” Betty averred. “And you’re too scared to admit it.”

  “Call me up next time you are in trouble.”

  “I will,” she said, “and you’ll come.”

  Unobtrusively he had grown furious. Now he conspicuously took himself in hand and asked: “Why are you pushing me all at once?”

  “It just occurred to me,” Betty replied, “that in six months I have never got anything from you but your lust, and that’s not unique. I could get that from the garbageman.” With unprecedented fairness, she gave him a moment at this point to be nasty and ask if she had. But, perhaps because of his numerous professional opportunities to work off his venom, Tierney was not verbally malicious. He continued to stare morosely in Betty’s direction.

  “You have never even given me one flower,” she said. “No, nor so much as bought me a drink when we met downtown, before or after.”

  Tierney blinked and felt his pockets as a man does when he is dressed and ready for the road: keys, change, sap, handcuffs.

  “You don’t even talk to me,” said Betty. “When I think of you, I feel two hands pulling down my pants.”

  Tierney ran his little finger into his ear and twisted, grimacing.

  Betty said: “A whore at least gets paid.”

  Tierney replied earnestly: “Not by police officers. They do it for free if you don’t run them in.”

  Betty said: “You disgust me. You have always disgusted me.” But she could see she wasn’t denting his thick hide. He had jerked only when she touched the nerve of his profession. He was personally impervious.

  He shrugged and said: “I’ll call you.”

  She said, without hostility: “All right.” And heard him go downstairs and out the door. The fact remained that Tierney was always ready to pull down her pants, ready to use her, ready to leave when he was done. He could be relied on, predicted absolutely. Being so singleminded, he really caused her no trouble at all. Obviously, from his point of view, she had an established value, was to him as reliable as he to her. Thus, at almost no cost, she had because of him both kinds of experience of life: give and take. She would not miss him if he never appeared again, but on the other hand, he could return whenever he wished.

  In this situation there was a natural justice according to which Betty’s adultery was only technical.

  No living person knew of her book. She might not even offer it for publication and so expose herself to more assaults on the spirit. Its composition had enabled her to re-create herself, to use time as her own invention, to control experience. All else was vanity.

  She now dreaded only one thing: testifying against Joe Detweiler. If only Tierney had shot and killed him while Joe was trying to escape: the triumph of professional violence over amateur. As a writer she had an eye for symmetry, form: it was the only defense against horror. She felt she would die if forced to return to murders and murderer, the killing time. But the law insisted on it. Trial was scheduled for September, and in three sessions with assistant district attorneys she had given extensive pretrial testimony.

  She would at any rate not want her book published before the verdict was reached. For vanity did assert itself after all. It might be basically irrelevant, but it was normal, human. She sent her manuscript to a publisher whose name appeared on the spine of a cookbook, a volume, as it happened, that her mother had given her on the marriage to Arthur.

  Surprisingly enough this publisher proved neither bogus nor perverted, nor did he act as a principal, but rather assigned an editor to write Betty with cautious interest and an invitation to lunch.

  Betty judiciously picked the shrimp from her hollowed tomato; nevertheless, one slipped off a tine and fell to the tablecloth, lay there exuding pink sauce. It was the physical influence of the editor, whose plate was surrounded by a fall of saltstick crumbs, grains of rice creole, small stuff. Having dropped anything of substance, he retrieved and swallowed it. He was young and nervous and shrewd.

  He said: “You found a way and a meaning. I read about the case of course and was fascinated of course and terrified! Terrified because the murders were essentially meaningless, nonsensical. He had nothing against your—well, excuse me, it must have been awful for you.

  “What do you, who have suffered, think we should do with these people? Treat them? Put them out of their misery? Is vengeance the answer? Who knows how many Detweilers are at large in this city. If society could get to them before they get to us.” He ate a forkful of wilted, french-cut green beans. “You rightly eliminate the crimes from your novel. Let’s not mention them any more. We rejected a nonfictional treatment, an idea submitted by a newspaper reporter for a sensational quickie, to be in the bookstores two weeks after the trial ends.”

  Betty said: “That wouldn’t be Alloway?”

  The editor’s brow flexed. “Right—oh, he said he knew—”

  “That fucking son of a bitch,” said Betty in a monotone. “He’s queer, you know.” But she saw he didn’t know, and now that he did, he was frightened. Tierney was not alone in being scared; most other men joined him. Betty’s theory grew more and more all-embracing. But it had no place for Detweiler.

  “Well, the hell with him,” the editor said bluffly, trying to live up to Betty’s example. “As you might have gathered, we want to publish your book as a novel, as literature. The association with the unfortunate real-life events could be accidental. They couldn’t, in your development as the person you are, no doubt, but I mean insofar as the book is a worthwhile piece of creativity. And I’ll say now that I believe you could have been a writer had the murders never taken place.”

  Betty was overwhelmed. Like everyone she had an ideal statement to hear which from others she was ready to wait a lifetime: to hear that she was invulnerable to experience, that her worth was intrinsic.

  Concealing her emotion, she said simply: “Yes. That is why I don’t want to use my own name or any other reference to the case, the crimes, the trial. I don’t want to trade on that.”

  The editor seemed to shiver. “Uh-huh,” he said as an impatient waiter slid a green salad, glistening with oil, under his elbow. “You don’t? I see. Well…”

  “You agree with me?”

  “I certainly do.” He lowered his elbow within a centimeter of the salad, then suddenly raised his entire arm and brought it down upon a clean patch of tablecloth without mishap, without looking. “If the author-editor relationship is right and true, both are of one mind I agree. But I wonder.” He stared around at other diners, past them and into the bar beyond, where it was night at midday. “I wonder about my publisher. He is in business to sell books. I also wonder about our obligation?” His eyes suddenly swooped to Betty. “Yours and mine. To see that the book gets read. What, finally, would it matter if a reader was attracted on the basis of sensationalism? The book is not trash. You see what I’m getting at? Better to have vulgar advertising and a quality product than the other way around, like that men’s clothing store that runs chummy conversational ads, the soft sell in extremis, appealing to men of intelligence and good will, then you go to the store and find the rudest salespeople in town.” He grinned, but his eyes were hangdog.

  What a change from Tierney. His interest in Betty seemed so exclusively intellectual, so unselfish, and she was gratified by his example of a men’s clothing store, as if they were a couple of guys.

  “In short,” he said, “if we can attract to this book thousands of readers who come for the wrong reasons, what cause is hurt?”

  Chapter 19

  THE SECOND psychiatrist, a Dr. Metcalfe, younger than Brixton and Melrose but older than Detweiler, had no undue interest in sex. However, Detweiler was suspicious of him in the beginning, thinking he might
be tricky, so the killer responded rather sullenly at first.

  METCALFE: Why did you kill the Starr women and the boarder?

  DETWEILER: Because of love.

  M. Love?

  D. What?

  M. I asked you if the motive was love.

  D. Where did you get that idea?

  M. From you, just now.

  D. Oh.

  M. Well?

  D. Yes.

  M. Yes what?

  D. Now, Doctor, you’ve got an answer. Just hang onto it; otherwise we won’t get anywhere.

  M. You won’t explain your answers?

  D. I’ll be glad to. But what you must accept is that between a question and an answer, and an answer and an explanation, Time intervenes. You must not assume that, standing on the platform in the same place while the train moves rapidly along, you can step on board at will.

  Dr. Metcalfe suddenly looked very keenly at Detweiler and asked: “Which one is Will?”

  “Pardon?”

  Metcalfe said: “I just thought you might recall the old joke of the sergeant and a buck private he had ordered to ‘fire at will.’ The private asked: “Which one is Will?’”

  Detweiler nodded carefully. “The sergeant ordered the private to shoot this Will, and the private was making sure he aimed at the right fellow. I see what you mean. But I was using ‘will’ to mean volition, not as a person’s name.”

  METCALFE: So was the sergeant, but the private thought he meant a man. That is the joke.

  DETWEILER: Oh, a joke!

  M. Do you like jokes?

  D. When I can recognize them, but I usually can’t.

  M. Why not?

  D. Because they usually depend on a confusion, I think. Like this one. A choice of alternatives. You must choose one, and yet still remember the other. I don’t have a very good memory.

  M. Your choice was certainly clear. You assumed the sergeant was directing the private to shoot at a human being. You were not apparently shocked by a command of this sort. What would you have done had you been the soldier?