Killing Time Page 9

  “The brother that you never had,” Arthur added helpfully, unconscious of the double entendre.

  Betty’s trouble had always been that when she found a man with whom she felt intellectual affinity, he did not appeal to her physically, and vice versa. She could hardly bear to be alone in Arthur’s presence unless he was pawing her.

  “And your sister?” asked Tierney.

  Betty passed a hand across her high forehead. “You are being rather inconsiderate, you know. The funeral is this morning.”

  Tierney made the usual catch-all excuse, that he was merely doing his job. Then: “If Detweiler is as harmless as you say, then he has nothing to fear. But you know, various people see various sides of a given individual. We have heard that Detweiler could be a crank about noise. At another place where he lived for a while, he assaulted a fellow roomer because he was annoyed by his radio.”

  “Whose radio?” Betty pointed her nose at Tierney’s scalp. “I don’t believe a detective should be ambiguous. Do you realize from what you said it could be Joe almost killed the roomer because the roomer was peeved at Joe’s radio?”

  Tierney replied with sarcasm. “Lady, I’m not a writer like you. I’m just a simple-minded police officer, stupidly looking for the practical joker who choked your family to death so you could stay in a luxury hotel for the holiday season.”

  Arthur had been standing at the window, watching the fall of snow. Then it dawned on him that the detective was being rude.

  “Officer,” he turned gravely and said, “you are coming perilously close to slander. More of that and you’ll find yourself in a very awkward situation.” Arthur was rather formidable when his rights were threatened: he often predicted lawsuits against double-parkers who obstructed his car, neighborhood hi-fi owners whose apparatus smote his nervous system.

  Tierney stared sardonically at his own shoes, which happened at the moment to be damp from melted snow. He refused to wear rubbers, but he was always touched by his wife’s urging them on him.

  “Well, you just do that, Mr. Bayson,” he said, though Arthur had not specified any form of action, “but meanwhile I have to find a murderer. You fight the police; that’s real smart.”

  Arthur failed to get out an answer before his indignation evaporated. Obviously Tierney was a decent individual and an efficient practitioner; no doubt he had his reasons for this provocation. Like that of many high-spirited women, Betty’s energy occasionally focused on meaningless targets.

  Arthur mentally threw up his hands and turned again to look out the window. He might take a walk in the afternoon, if the snow had not got too deep. On the other hand, the worse the weather, the less likelihood one would be mugged. He must ask Tierney whether it was true that, as he had heard, fewer crimes were committed in inclement seasons: if so, it indicated that criminals were normal in at least that respect.

  With the supreme effort of an aircraft leaving the clutch of earth, Tierney climbed above the situation, and asked impersonally: “Does Detweiler make a living with his art?”

  Bored by Arthur’s intervention, Betty suddenly reversed her style.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose nobody ever knows what anybody else might do.” Her smile expressed pathos. “We are all basically strangers. Perhaps back of his facade Joe is a monster. There’s no guarantee. I am conscious of odd impulses in myself that scare me, from time to time. I believe I could kill, having the opportunity.”

  Tierney disregarded this useless confession but of course did not let on to Betty, rather stared narrowly at her as if considering seriously whether she might be the murderer, which he divined was what her ego demanded. He saw that heretofore he had been far too impersonal with her.

  “I suppose you could. A lovely face can conceal a black heart.” This was certainly a purple passage in Tierney’s idiom, and ordinarily he could not have pronounced its like except in temporary irony. But now his attitude towards Betty was becoming wholly ironical, a definitive role. Years before, Tierney had played the part of a girl in a class play at his all-male high school. In the street-clothes rehearsals he could not bring himself to mimic feminine attitudes: his soul dropped a portcullis against that distortion. But once in full disguise, frock and flowered hat and high heels (feet killing him), he was oddly free to bend his wrist, switch his hips, and vainly touch his wig with two sets of fingertips when under observation by a boy playing a boy; that is, when the entire context was make-believe, so was the code. No one could say that in real life Tierney displayed an iota of swishiness, but in this single case of dramatic invention his imposture was pronounced superb by a guffawing audience who knew him otherwise as the football team’s high scorer—precisely the point of the joke.

  So he glanced now at Betty’s shiny knees before coolly meeting her eye, acknowledging her body on the way up, as it had not really occurred to him to do earlier because both he and she were married. As it was an aspect of his professional performance, he made no attempt to conceal this from Arthur, who had heard the speech flattering Betty and turned to watch him.

  Arthur usually felt only pride when his wife’s person evoked admiration from other males, did not even take umbrage at teen-age catcalls towards the concentrically globed seat of Betty’s slacks. But Tierney represented the Law. To detect evidences of lasciviousness, or indeed any personal appetite, in him was to fear for the future of the common weal. Arthur plodded across and put his hand on Betty’s shoulder, announcing stiffly: “I think that’s enough questions for today.”

  Having at last and by accident established a rapport with Betty, Tierney disposed of her husband. He said, flagrantly star ing at her body, “Let’s let Mrs. Bayson decide for herself. She looks very healthy and self-reliant to me.”

  The wind up was in Betty. Her head, in the new hairdo, felt helmeted. Whereas with the queer reporter she had resisted Arthur’s interference, she now intertwined her fingers with his, compounding her strength vis-á-vis the aggressive maleness of Tierney, who was one of the policemen who had beaten her father, whose statements she had jealously read in the rival newspaper. Tierney had a granite jaw; a short but jutting nose; a hard crewcut head. His left breast, over the heart, bulged with his concealed revolver—or so it seemed to Betty. (It was the way Tierney sat, his jacket bunching out; actually the .38 rode in a clip-holster at the side of his belt; nor had he ever taken a life with it.)

  “That’s all right,” she said, and each man supposed she was addressing him. “Things begin to come back to me when I think of Joe, since you insist,” she told Tierney. “You ask about his art work. He modeled a head of me once, laboring over it for weeks. It was not a photographic-type resemblance, of course. Mother never liked it, and Billie thought it was funny; it was bald, you see. Joe said hair was not basic to the structure, being arranged by what he called accident: you have it cut and set, and so on. But your basic bones don’t change.”

  Arthur continued in the jealous vein now, though when he had called upon Betty in the old days and met Detweiler as a resident of the same apartment, he had had no qualms about him.

  Accusingly he said: “I never saw that.”

  “No,” Betty answered, still speaking to Tierney, Arthur after all being mostly behind her chair. “He called me into his room. There it sat, on the desk before him, my head, bald and cold but it was spiritually me all right: I always thought he had real talent. Then he said, handing me a little tack hammer, ‘It’s your right,’ he said, ‘to destroy this miserable image.’ He meant that in a flattering way; it couldn’t do justice, he said, to the living original. But I refused: ‘Oh no, Joe. Oh no.’ He said, ‘Then it’s my right.’ And with true zeal he struck it once in the center of my skull and a lot of cracks appeared, then slowly the fragments parted and fell. I felt very queasy.”

  Betty waited. Tierney glanced at Arthur hulking above her in his sack suit. Detweiler was wrong in the theory that only the fundamental structure mattered. Human beings were of a piece, including thei
r attire. A skeleton was not necessarily basic.

  Look at Tierney being intellectual! thought Tierney, catching himself up. There was something corrupting in the subject of Detweiler. God damn him. Tierney began to hope he would prove innocent, but he wanted to find him first.

  Betty got tired of waiting. “‘Right’ was the word he used.”

  Arthur made a blurred noise and dropped her hand. “Aw, Betty, I don’t think it’s wise to take that pretentious talk seriously.” He was still jealous but saw his motive as rather a concern that if Betty made too much of this nonsense she might get Detweiler into hot water. He wondered whether she realized she had changed her tack and was being damaging to the guy and for what? Vanity. Ordinarily Arthur saw that quality as an aspect of his wife’s hearty response to life. But Tierney wanted someone for Murder. That tended to be forgotten in a rush of hotel suites, newspaper articles, steaks, snowfall, the posing of a would-be artist: let’s, Arthur said silently, get back to the law of gravity.

  “‘Right,’” Betty repeated, unmoved by the plea. She kept staring ever more brightly at Tierney, but he refused to crack.

  Choosing to pretend the whole performance was in answer to the question he had asked at the outset, he instead asked: “Then how did he make a living?”

  Snorting in laughter, Arthur came back into play. “Stuffing animals!” He walked self-consciously away from Betty’s chair, shoulders high as if he were cold: he was dramatizing the absurdity of the information. He shot himself onto the far end of the sofa of which Tierney occupied the cushion nearest Betty, threw out his heels, punched together his large white hands.

  Tierney: “Huh?”

  “Taxidermist,” said Arthur.

  “Where?”

  Arthur splayed his feet, rolling them on the heel-backs; then he made pigeon-toes. “Don’t know,” he said shyly. “Betty?”

  But his wife, holding her ground, said: “He wanted to make something real, not reproduce or imitate what already existed. The original is always perfect because it is original. Which is not the easiest concept to grasp.”

  “Very interesting,” murmured Tierney, telling the truth; he had heard and even, despite Betty’s implication, understood: he had been obliged at college to study Aquinas and other thinkers. But his clear and pressing duty was to establish in space and time the taxidermy shop, leaving metaphysics to those professional at it.

  “Was this his own business or did he work for someone else?”

  Suddenly Betty showed enthusiasm. “I went there with him once. We walked from home. I don’t know the name or address, but I could take you there probably.”

  Tierney rose and found a classified telephone book, as he knew he would, in the middle drawer of the table-desk. The book was in mint condition: a beautiful virgin directory, and Tierney fingered it with reverence and a concomitant pleasure.

  Having located the rubric “Taxidermists,” he carried the book to Betty, who smoothed her lap to accept it, but he tarried until her hands reluctantly came up. He was all business.

  Head down, pink nail quickly exhausting the possibilities, too quickly, she soon said: “I don’t recognize any of these names. Never knew the right one.”

  “Then look at the addresses,” said Tierney, standing away.

  “No,” Betty said for each entry, “no, no, no. Don’t see any that could possibly be, unless he moved.”

  Arthur, resting or thinking under a visor of hand, heard a knock at the door, went to answer, and saw Alloway’s dung-eating grin on the threshold.

  “It is eleven already?”

  “Ten or so past,” the reporter said conscientiously through chapped lips. “Hard to get a cab in the snow. If it keeps up they’ll all go home, as they do when it rains.”

  Arthur nodded almost affably, discovering in himself a novel tolerance towards Alloway as a result of a new suspicion of Tierney. He gestured at the reporter’s coat, the snowflakes on which were hard to see, melted or whole, in the black-and-white houndstooth. “Better hang it in the bathroom.” Then pointed imperiously, so there could be no doubt, at Betty’s.

  Alloway colored slightly at this acknowledgment that Betty’s quarters were the peculiar locus of his needs, but he was getting anxious now to find out what Tierney was up to, had been trying with the other part of his attention to hear the detective over Arthur’s and his own commonplaces. He flopped his coat across the seat of the nearest straightback chair and, in distinction to the sidling movement in which he entered the suite, he stalked forthrightly at the detective, as the newsman that he was.

  “What’s the latest on Detweiler?” he asked, even ignoring Betty for the moment.

  Tierney gave him a tile-glazed eye, said: “Call the Department.”

  “And ask for Matthias, huh?” Alloway returned, brandishing his needle.

  Quick to sniff the bouquet of ill will, Betty asked: “Who’s that?”

  “One of the real brains at Homicide,” said Alloway. “Taught Tierney everything he knows.” Alloway didn’t give a crap about maintaining good relations with the police. As a pro of the written word, he always had one up on the cops, who were almost obliged to be inarticulate, and nowadays he anyway usually did feature stuff, often exposés of city departments, for which he got little official cooperation. He preferred to work with social reformers and critics, for whom he had contempt but who spoke in platitudes which were easily quoted, and criminals, whom he admired because they frightened him.

  Had he absolute power, Tierney’s first act would have been to abolish the freedom of the press. He had read Alloway’s initial installments of Betty’s story: swill. Future segments, now, no doubt would present a perverted image of Detweiler. Shuster had expressed his usual amoral satisfaction at that likelihood: “Might goose him into coming in.” Which was highly unlikely and still no excuse. Tierney could have bought his wife a new winter coat with what Alloway’s paper paid the hotel per diem to accommodate this vain bitch and her blockhead husband.

  He stood up and said commandingly: “I want a private word with you, Mrs. Bayson.”

  “Surely.” Betty loved this. She led Tierney to her bedroom while Arthur watched with little, angry bear-eyes, and Alloway stepped rapidly in their wake, calling to Tierney: “What are you trying to pull?” Betty slammed the door on him, leaned against its inside surface, knee bent, foot lifted, as in the outmoded response to a kiss.

  Tierney gestured to her to come over by the window: the reporter might listen at the door. He said in an undertone: “You think you can find the taxidermy shop?”

  Standing so close to him, Betty detected Tierney’s odd smell, neither pleasing nor repugnant in the standard sense: perhaps cleaning fluid or some Irish-Catholic incense. For her part Betty and also her room reeked of a costly scent she had obtained in the hotel drugstore and put on the tab. Tierney pretended to himself that he was suffocating. He disliked overdone women as well as spicy foods. He remembered what he had not noticed when it was current: that Betty had been attractive in a straight, clean, girlish way before she mucked herself up with hard hair and burnt eyes.

  Betty answered in a whisper, conspiring: “I said I could take you there.”

  Tierney felt foolish. He moved about, saw through the open bathroom door a set of beige underwear drying on the shower rod.

  “How soon can you shake off that reporter?”

  Newspapermen often talked piously of keeping a confidence if so requested by the police, but invariably proved treacherous in practice. It was like getting a hungry shark’s promise to ignore a bleeding swimmer.

  “He’ll be here all day,” said Betty, still whispering. Then, louder, she blurted: “Oh, I forgot the funeral.”

  The cheap little cunt, with no respect for the dead. And thinking that, Tierney knew his first faint desire for her.

  Like the banging of conscience, Arthur’s thumps sounded upon the door. He cried: “Betty, we better get started.” Alloway could be heard urgently querying: “Where? Wher
e?”

  “When will you be back?” asked Tierney.

  Betty replied, figuring: “There’s the service, then the trip to the cemetery, the burial, then the ride back. Maybe by four, four-thirty to be on the safe side. You pick me up here?”

  As if she were making a date. But what Tierney found much more appalling was a tendency in himself to assume the same style: indeed, he identified hers by means of his own.

  “All right,” he said harshly, policing himself. “And don’t tell the reporter.” He hated having to explain. “Whatever your opinion, Detweiler is shaping up as a psycho. They are harder to trace than normal people, and we haven’t got a line on him so far. If you can think of anything else about him it might help. But the reporter will blow it.” He saw her back in the dressing-table mirror, across the room, and beyond it his own still-collegiate face looking solemn, his newfound irony against her ebbing, or perhaps altering to mere cruelty. “And hire the taxidermist to write his series. They don’t care, you see? A few years ago reporters like Alloway found out the place and pickup time for the ransom of a little boy, went there in a crowd with camera trucks and radio cars parked all down the block, and scared off the kidnaper. He strangled the child and buried it in a marsh.”

  In the mirror Tierney saw the tips of his fingers appear over one of her shoulders, like an epaulet. He gripped her in the clutch of moral ardor, not animal lust. His hand did not seek to palpitate or warm or even feel; else Betty would have cried out for Arthur and subsequently reported the incident to the police department. She would not suffer herself to be caressed extramaritally. But Tierney was stating a principle, and besides, was hurting her. She would show a bruise there tomorrow, a kind of insigne of office: Betty Bayson, honorary policewoman.

  “They have no, no—” Tierney struggled for an idiom, his iron claw deep into her tender shoulder muscles. In a second she would scream, not for help, not to bring about cessation, but rather to celebrate her enduring the unendurable: she, the frailest Starr, the one who so far had eluded wounding.