Death Wish (15 page)

“Of course it helps when your husband's a lawyer and the judge is a friend of his.” Her face whipped up. “Do I look as if I'd neglect my children? … Shit, never mind, how could you be expected to answer that? Look, I promised we'd talk about something else. What are you doing here? Vacation?”

“Business. Very dull, I'm afraid.”

“All the way from New York. It must be big.”

“Big for some people. For me it's just my job.”

“What do you do? Or is that prying?”

“No, not at all. I'm a C.P.A., I'm doing an audit of a company's books. It's hardly a sensitive subject but I promise you it's less interesting than dishwater.”

“Well, then. What shall we talk about? Nuclear submarines? The weather?”

“I don't mind, really.”

“We don't really have to talk at all. It's such a strain sometimes, isn't it.” She gathered her handbag and tossed off the rest of the Scotch. “Why don't we go?” The voice was pert but she wasn't meeting his eyes.

He walked her across the motel's concrete apron, concentrating on his balance. She trailed along beside him with her vague involuted smile, her hips swaying from the slender stem of her waist. “The station wagon with mud all over it, that's me. My room.”

“I'll say goodnight then, and good luck to you.”

“No.” She turned under the porch overhang. “Do you like me? Do you like me at all?”

“Yes—I do.”

She opened the door; it hadn't been locked. She drew him inside and pushed the door shut behind him. The only light was what slotted in through the half-closed blinds. Against it her eyes glittered, betraying a wild desperate appetite. “I want to hold you. I want you to hold me. Please hold me for a minute.…”

He reached for her and they breathed liquor on each other, and kissed; he felt the tears on her cheeks. “Oh, come on to bed,” she said, “we both seem to need it and it's a friendly thing for two people to do, isn't it? Isn't it?”

He awoke conscious of having dreamed. Weakness in all his fibers; a pounding dull headache, a dehydrated pain in his abdomen.

“You can open the other eye now, I've made some coffee.”

He sat up and took the cup. His fingers were unsteady. He looked at her for the first time. She still had a red patch on her chin from his stubble.

The coffee made a good smell but it tasted terrible. He put the cup down half-full. “Thanks.”

She was already dressed—the same blouse and leather skirt as last night. A good looking woman, he thought. Small, too thin, a little leather around the eyes; but damned good looking. In the night he'd lain drowsily between sleeps, thinking what it would be like to live with a woman who could take his mind off the TV commercials and the killers in the alleys.

She said, “I'm all packed. I thought of letting you sleep it off, but it occurred to me it would be awkward if I left and the maid came in and found you here.”

An abrupt tug in his throat; an instant's wistful panic. “You're going?”

“Time to hit the road. It's a long way to Houston.” She patted her lips with a tissue, set the cup down in the saucer and stood in front of the mirror smoothing down her skirt. “Thank you for last night. I needed somebody to help me make it through to this morning.”

It occurred to him as she went out the door that she probably didn't even remember his name.

“So long, Shirley Mackenzie.”

He wasn't sure she heard him; the door continued to close. Clicked shut and left him very alone in the room.

“Oh, Jesus,” he croaked, and began to cry.

*  *  *

It was Saturday; he spent the half day in the Jainchill conference room and had lunch at a franchise hamburger drive-in and drove toward the center of town, down Speedway to Fourth Avenue and left down Fourth toward the tracks. The sporting goods store was where he remembered it. He went inside and said, “I'd like to buy a gun.”

On the plane he dozed with his head against the Plexiglas pane. The stewardess went down the aisle looking at passengers' seat belts; the lights of New York made a glow in the haze over the city. They circled down in the holding pattern and landed at Kennedy. In the terminal on his way to baggage-claim he stopped at a counter to pick up a present for Carol: she had always had a tooth for bitter chocolate. He bought half a dozen Dutch bars and put them in his briefcase on top of the papers which concealed the .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and the six fifty-round boxes of ammunition.

He collected his suitcase and went out to the curb debating whether to spend the fifteen dollars on the taxi ride; in the end he took the airport limousine-bus to the East Side Terminal in Manhattan and a taxi home from there.

The apartment was stuffy although it was a cool night outside. He threw the windows open and took his briefcase into the bathroom, where no one across the street could see inside; the pane was frosted. He lowered the lid of the toilet and sat down and took the revolver out, and held it in his fist, staring at its black oily gleam.

14

He had it in his pocket when he went to work Thursday morning. He breathed shallowly in the jammed subway car but when someone caromed against him with a lurch of the car he shoved the offender away roughly: the gun was making him arrogant, he was going to have to watch that.

He rode the Shuttle across town in the same car with a Transit Patrolman who stood in the middle of the swaying car watching everybody with stony unimpressed eyes. Paul didn't meet them. He had spent ten minutes propping up mirrors in the apartment to look at himself from every angle and make sure the gun in his trouser pocket didn't make too obvious a bulge; he knew the cop had no way of detecting its presence but his nerves drew up to a twanging vibration and he hurried across the platform the instant the doors opened.

It was a very small gun, a compact five-shot model with a short barrel and a metal shroud over the hammer to prevent it from snagging on clothing. He had told the store clerk he wanted a little gun for his tackle-box, something that wouldn't crowd the reels and trout-flies and wouldn't get tangled in testlines. The clerk had tried to sell him a .22 single-shot pistol but Paul had declined it on the grounds that he wasn't a good enough shot to feel safe with only a single bullet. He had had to reject a .22 revolver as well and that had made the clerk smile knowingly and make an under-the-breath remark about how everybody ought to have the right to carry a gun in his glove compartment and this ought to be just the thing don't you think?

It was mostly aluminum, very lightweight. Paul had asked if there was a target range in town where he might practice with the gun and the clerk had directed him to a rod-and-gun club ten miles up in the foothills; he had paid two dollars for the use of the range and had spent Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday burning up several hundred rounds of ammunition. By Sunday night his ears had been half-deaf and ringing, and his right hand had been numb from the repeated recoil, but he was confident he could hit a man-size target from several yards' distance and for self-protection that was all you needed. Sunday night he had cleaned the gun meticulously and oiled it and wrapped it in a sock and fitted it carefully into the bottom of his briefcase. There had only been one bad moment—getting on the plane they had been searching the passengers; but he didn't look like a hijacker or a dope smuggler and he knew it. They looked down into the briefcase but didn't remove anything from it; he was passed through, politely enough, but he hadn't stopped sweating for an hour. After that he had filled up with outraged indignation against the twisted system of values that made it a criminal offense to carry the means of your own preservation. He was sure what he felt wasn't guilt; it was the fear of getting caught, which was a different thing. And they had no moral right to force a man to fear that sort of thing.

At any rate it was better than having to fear for your life. Only criminals and fools ever went to prison. If he were ever caught with the gun in his pocket it would be troublesome but he knew it wouldn't be critical; he had Jack, he knew several high-powered attorneys, and he had sufficient moral justification to insure that the worst that could possibly happen would be a token conviction on some minor charge, a suspended sentence or a reprimand. The only ones who got jailed were the ones caught red-handed committing violent felonies and even then if you had any brains you could find ways to avoid imprisonment. That was the trouble with the system. Last year Jack had defended a fifteen-year-old boy in Family Court accused of threatening a store-cashier with a knife and taking eighteen dollars from the till. The store had large signs everywhere announcing that the place was guarded by cameras but the fifteen-year-old boy couldn't read. They had picked him up within twenty-four hours. He was convicted not because of his crime but because of his illiteracy. “I had him cop a plea, of course,” Jack had said wearily. “I hate making deals with prosecutors but that's the way things work. But do you know what the real frustration is? They'll teach that kid how to read but they won't teach him the difference between right and wrong. The odds are, a week after he gets out they'll nail him again for holding up a store that didn't have protective devices. Or he'll walk into a hockshop and try to rob the till and the storekeeper will blow his head off.”

At the time it had seemed sad. Now Paul was thoroughly on the side of the storekeeper.

*  *  *

Jack, he thought. When the welcome-backs and the hearty shouts were dispensed with he went to the desk and phoned Jack's office. “I tried to get you earlier.”

“I was at the hospital.”

His fingers reached the desk and gripped its edge. “You sound terrible. What is it?”

“Not now—not through two switchboards. Look, Pop, can we meet somewhere—around lunchtime? I've juggled my calendar, I've got two court cases this morning but I'll be free after eleven-thirty or so if things don't back up in court.”

“Of course. But can't you at least——”

“I'd rather not. Look, suppose I come up to your office. I ought to get there about noon. Wait for me, will you?”

He spent most of the morning in the computer room feeding figures to the programmers. It was easier than thinking. Jack had never been the kind who hinted at mysteries; he wasn't playing a game. It had to be something to do with Carol—but that was all the more puzzling. Paul had phoned last night, he had kept in constant touch from Arizona, and nothing had occurred that hadn't been predicted—Carol was responding to therapy, the doctors expected to release her within a few weeks.…

He was back in his office by ten minutes to twelve. When Thelma buzzed he pounced on the intercom but she said, “It's Mr. Kreutzer.”

Sam came loping through the door with a slothful smile beneath his moustache. “Well, how was it out there in all that sunshine?”

“Fine—fine.”

“How about lunch? Bill and I thought we'd just pop downstairs and grab a liverwurst. Join us?”

“Afraid I can't. Jack's coming by any minute.”

“We'll squeeze him in, what the hell. We don't discriminate against lawyers.”

“No, it's family business. I'll take a raincheck. How's Adele?”

“Just fine. Kind of worried about you. She seems to feel we owe you an apology for that night. You were pretty upset, understandably, and I guess we shouldn't have jumped all over you that way. Forgiven?”

“Sure, Sam. Nothing to forgive.”

“Then you won't turn down an invitation. It's our fifteenth, two weeks from tomorrow—that's Friday the third. We're having a little anniversary get-together at our place. No presents, we're adamant about that. Just bring yourself. Right?”

“Well—yes. Thanks, Sam. I'll be there.”

“Great, great. Write it down in your calendar so you won't forget it.” Sam glanced at his watch and shot his cuff. “Well, I'll toddle along. See you.” And went.

By twelve-fifteen Paul had started to fidget. He drew a heavily crosshatched doodle around the Kreutzers' party in his appointment book; went down the hall and washed his hands; came back to the office expecting to find Jack waiting, and found it empty and sat behind the desk fooling with the revolver.

When the intercom buzzed he shoved the gun quickly into his pocket and looked up as the door opened and Jack came in dragging his heels, his eyes faded and his drooping pinched mouth suggesting dejection and anxiety. He kicked the door shut behind him.

“Well, what is it?”

“Let me sit down.” Jack went to the leather chair and sank into it like a fighter collapsing on a ring-corner stool after the fifteenth round. “Christ, it's hot for this time of year.”

“What's the matter with Carol, Jack?”

“Everything.”

“But she was getting on so well——”