God Told Me To (10 page)

“I’ll be perfectly honest, Lieutenant. If you’re looking for an expert to testify in court, there are cheaper men than myself.”

“That’s not why I’m here, Doctor.”

“Fine. I loathe courtroom appearances.”

The obstetrician’s face lost some of its smile and became pensive as Nicholas explained what he wanted.

“What is the reason for your interest, Lieutenant?”

“A case I’m investigating. I’m not at liberty to discuss it.”

The obstetrician brought out a pipe and began packing it with a tobacco blend he took from a cannister on his desk.

“We doctors aren’t at liberty to discuss our patients.”

“I’m not asking you to violate your oath, Doctor.”

“Touch and go, don’t you think?”

He lit his pipe with a wooden match he took from a designer box. He watched the match until it had burned close to his fingertips, blew it out, dropped it in a clean ashtray which he pulled from a desk drawer.

“I hide the ashtrays. A bit of subterfuge. I’ve found a number of patients don’t have confidence in a doctor who smokes.”

“About the Phillips baby.”

He puffed at the pipe as if trying to lose himself in a cloud of smoke.

“It was a long time ago, Lieutenant. Very long.”

“Why are you reluctant to talk about it?”

“To be perfectly honest, it was a delivery I’ve always wanted to forget.”

“Why?”

He tapped the stem of his pipe against his teeth. “I’m sure in your profession you’ve had cases you would rather not remember.”

“Doctor, I don’t intend to leave until I get some answers.”

“I was still an intern. I hadn’t yet seen everything. In the past twenty years I would guess I’ve seen just about every possible kind of infant mutation. Monstrosities. Cases where it would have been a blessing had the Lord entered in and spared parents and infant alike the agonies of life. Infants with missing parts. Thalidomide babies. Even Siamese twins.”

He paused.

Nicholas asked, “Was the Phillips baby mutated?”

“Yes and no. I realize it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, but it was and it wasn’t mutated. First of all, it simply didn’t have the face of a child. There was an odd grown-up look about it. Difficult to describe adequately.”

The obstetrician snapped his fingers and sat straighter in his chair. He pointed the stem of his pipe at Nicholas.

“I just realized something. I’ve just returned from a European vacation. Florence. Beautiful city. You know how Italy is. Churches and religious paintings all over the country. Some of those artists who did the Madonna and Child. They painted the Christ Child so that it didn’t look at all like a child. And that’s how the Phillips baby looked.”

“Innocent, saintly?”

He nodded. “I realize it sounds ridiculous. But that does seem an apt description.”

“What else?”

“I was getting to it. What so struck me about this child was the lack of clearly defined sexual characteristics.”

“Was it a hermaphrodite?”

“Even with a hermaphrodite one sex generally takes precedence over the other. Often the dominant sex doesn’t appear until the child has passed its infancy. No, the Phillips baby was something entirely different. It was as if the sexual gender had not yet developed. As if it were still in progress.”

“Yet you chose to call it a male.”

“I suppose I thought that was the best thing to do. The mother didn’t seem upset when I broke the news to her. She didn’t even seem surprised. She referred to the child as
him
. So I went along with that.”

“What about the father?”

“If you mean the husband, I met him only briefly at the time of the delivery. I got the feeling that he was not the father. Naturally, I never mentioned this to Mrs. Phillips. She seemed both possessive of and disinterested in the child. Very resentful of myself or any nurse who had to handle the baby. Yet she didn’t have a name for it. As I recall it was still unnamed when she took it home.”

“Did she ever return for any postnatal care?”

“Not to my knowledge. I wonder how the child turned out?”

“A male or a female. Or something else entirely different. When I find out, I’ll let you know.”

The obstetrician shook his head. “No. I don’t think I want to know.”

Though Greenwich Village has a reputation for bohemianism, and is widely thought to be populated by libertines and misfits, it would have been difficult to find a more middle-class, family-oriented man than William Morton. He and his family lived in a floor-through apartment in a fine old brownstone building on West Tenth Street. He was active in community affairs, a member of the VID (Village Independent Democrats club), and the current chairman of his street’s block association. He had his own business, a small printing shop over on Hudson Street that was within walking distance of where he lived.

He was a most methodical man. His habits were steady as a monument. On his way home from work, he would walk to a Hudson Street saloon known as the Sazarac House and have two mugs of beer. He would never spend more than an hour in the saloon and he always left the bartender a fifty-cent tip.

Between the Sazarac and his home there was a delicatessen where he stopped at least two evenings a week. The deli stocked his favorite brand of popcorn:
Jolly Time blue.
He knew the same brand was cheaper in supermarkets, but he felt the elderly couple who owned the deli were nicer to deal with than the A&P. He would also purchase a six-pack of soda and two pints of coffee ice cream.

William Morton liked few things more than sitting in his favorite chair and watching television with his family. They ate dinner early, within minutes of his arriving home, so that Morton would be free to watch Walter Cronkite read the news. With the exception of Cronkite, he left the viewing choices to his wife and two children, though he did have a preference for wildlife documentary shows.

Around eight-thirty or nine-o’clock, he would go to the kitchen and either dish out ice cream or prepare popcorn. His family thought that was what he was about to do on this particular night when he rose from his chair and left the living room. But instead of going to the kitchen, he went to a closet and took out a rifle.

Nicholas hadn’t been home in over a week. Nor had he bathed or showered. He spent his nights in the cheap hotel listening to the police band on a radio and to the sounds of the prostitutes in the room next door. He would lie back on the bed or sit in the single chair, listen, and sip brandy. Normally he kept the lights out and the room would be lit by the flashing, bouncing neons from the street below.

His days were spent going through the motions of finding Bernard Phillips. He was no closer now than he had been a week ago, but he felt that each day was in some odd fashion drawing him nearer to Phillips. Inevitably, as if their meeting were predestined, he would confront Phillips. The combination of the obstetrician’s remarks and the slashing attack had convinced Deputy Commissioner Hendriks to give him more time on the case. Nicholas, though, was prepared to leave the department if necessary and to continue his search on his own.

He had told himself his reason for not going home was that he didn’t want Casey to see his wounds. Over the phone he’d told her he had received a couple of minor cuts, nothing to worry about. She had hung up on him.

He called out to Hempstead once and talked with his wife. He used a pay phone in the hotel lobby, and while speaking with Martha he watched the prostitutes plying their trade. He put a lot of dimes into the phone, but after he hung up he couldn’t remember what they had talked about.

His facial stitches had been removed today. His face was still stiff and tender and livid scars marked his forehead and cheek. The doctor had wanted the stitches to stay in his hand for another week. Nicholas was impatient and used a razor blade on them. After cutting the sutures with the blade, he used his teeth as tweezers to pull the threads from his flesh.

He flexed his hand, half expecting it to reopen. Droplets of blood oozed from where the sutures had been. He thought pouring brandy over his hand would stop the oozing. That caused burning but didn’t stanch the blood. He went to the bathroom down the hall from his room and washed the hand in cool water, bound it with a clean handkerchief.

On the way back to his room an emaciated black prostitute with purple hair and one blind eye propositioned him. She wasn’t attractive. He spotted her for a junkie, and her drug-drained features made it impossible to estimate her age. But he looked her up and down and was tempted. Until she smiled. Her teeth were black and rotten. He pushed past her and went into his room.

He lay back on the bed and listened to the police band.

The purple-haired prostitute kept the room next door. Unlike most of the other hookers, who booked by the hour and then took their earnings home to their pimp, this one was a permanent resident. She was too worn for any pimp to want to take her into his stable. About an hour later Nicholas heard her making the squeals of phony passion. For the first time since he’d lived here, he began to fantasize about the sounds. Erotic pictures flashed through his mind. The ugliness of the prostitute heightened his fantasy as much as it repulsed him.

She was still squealing when the report on William Morton came over the radio.

The bodies of Morton’s wife and two kids were being removed when he arrived at the West Tenth Street address. He took charge of the case and started interrogating Morton.

“Can you tell us why you did this, Mr. Morton?”

Morton’s eyes were red with grief. There was disbelief in his voice, as if he truly didn’t know what he’d done.

“I did it, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“My God. Oh my God.”

“Were you angry with your family?”

He shook his head. “I wasn’t even thinking about them. We were watching the TV. A movie, I think.”

“Did the movie spark anything? Is that what made you go to the closet and get the rifle?”

“I don’t know. It just occurred to me.”

“Did it occur to you to shoot your wife?”

“No. I shot Jerry first.”

“Your son?”

“Uh-huh. He was eleven.”

Morton raised a trembling arm and pointed to a pool of blood on the carpet. It hadn’t dried yet, and there was the imprint of a child’s head and shoulders in the puddle.

“And when your wife saw you fire?”

“She wanted to stop me. Then she ran.”

“You shot her in the back?”

“And in the head. Twice. I shot her two times.”

The wife’s blood and bits of flesh and tissue streaked the plaster of a wall.

The soft, dazed tone of Morton’s voice reminded Nicholas of Harold Gorman’s tone on the water tower. But there was more horror in Morton’s act than in Gorman’s. Harold had killed strangers. Morton killed his family.

“And then your daughter. What was her name?”

“Lindsay. She screamed, then she ran into the bathroom. It’s the only room in the house with a lock. I said to her, Lindsay, open the door for Daddy. I said it was a game. Mommy and Jerry are all right. It was only for fun, I told her. The gun is a toy. I said, Come out and I will let you play with it. And I’ll show you how to do the trick. After a while I heard her laugh. She opened the door and came out and she was laughing. I was laughing when I shot her.”

“You didn’t feel any remorse or guilt?”

Morton shook his head dazedly.

“I’ll miss seeing them. I’ll never see them again and I will miss them.”

He looked about the room, at the puddle on the floor and the streaks on the wall. His eyes widened and a glaze appeared to cover them. His mouth curved into a smile very similar to the one Harold Gorman had shown Nicholas. It was what Nicholas had been waiting for.

“You feel good now, don’t you, Mr. Morton?”

“Oh, yes. I don’t remember ever feeling so good.”

“Why?”

“Because. I thought I’d do something for
him.
Do it for all
he’s
done for us.
He’s
given us everything and asks for so little. How can I refuse
him.”

“Who?”

“He wouldn’t have asked me if it wasn’t right. He wouldn’t have asked me to do something wrong. I’m sure he didn’t hurt them. I’m sure they’re with him now. They’re happy. As happy as I felt the moment I did his will.”

“How did
he
speak with you? Did you hear
his
voice?”

“He
guided my hand. I didn’t have to aim. I suppose you think it was too much to ask, but you don’t love God as I do.”

“You’re a religious man, then?”

“Not until today. It came all at once. It came and I knew. I met the blond young man and learned.”

“Was the young man’s name Phillips?”

“The young man was sent to me. Sent to tell me everything.”

“Are you saying you spoke with the son of God?”

“I’m not the first one. In the Bible God told Abraham to kill his son Isaac. Sacrifices to God are nothing new.”

Nicholas asked, “Did the young man say he was the son of God?”

“Why do you all look at me as though I’m the first one.”

“Answer me, Morton. What did he tell you?”

“Life doesn’t matter.”

Nicholas grabbed Morton and shook the man. “What did the young man say!”

“Not down here on earth. Life doesn’t matter at all.”

Nicholas said loudly, “Answer me!”

“They are with God now.”

The detective threw Morton to the floor. He pushed the man’s face into the puddle of blood that bore the child’s imprint.

“Feel that! Smell it. Taste it. That’s the blood of your son. You blew the back off of his head. Is this what God wanted you to do? Where is the young man? Where?”

An officer took hold of Nicholas and pulled him off Morton.

Morton remained on the floor. He started sobbing. When he looked up, his face was wet with blood. The glaze had left his eyes, and he seemed at last to be aware of the murders he had committed.

“They were so soft. I won’t be able to hold them anymore. Or make them laugh. I used to stand them on my shoulders and walk them to their beds. They weren’t afraid of falling. They weren’t afraid of me.”