In the Still of the Night (2 page)

“Yeah.” After a few seconds Gibbons said, “Ever have anyone hang on to you, Phillips? The more you shake them off the tighter they hang on. She’s like that. When I can’t stand it anymore I let her have it, and you know, the poor girl likes it? When I get over the rage, see, I’m sorry. Then she’s all over me. Do this to me, do that. I go out of there hollering. If I didn’t, I’d kill her.”

“So why don’t you?”

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” Gibbons said.

“You’re still living in the same place?” Phillips asked.

“Same loft, same wife, same stinking elevator. You’ll have to watch that.”

Phillips had no intention of going near an elevator. Elevators were traps. If there weren’t stairs … but he knew there were. He’d used them the one time he’d been there. He said nothing, however. He’d hear Gibbons out. He did things his way, but that wasn’t to say it couldn’t be changed to suit the circumstances.

“I got to tell you, we’ve been broken into twice. That’s how I got the idea. I scared them off once. Next time I wasn’t there. They beat up on Mary Ellen … Messed the place up. I figured it’s a good idea for us to mess things up, too.”

Us,
Phillips noted.

“I could do it myself when I get there,” Gibbons reconsidered. “No, better not. You never know how you’ll feel when the time comes. We’ve been married thirty years, you know. If we’d had kids everything might have been different.”

Yeah, you’d beat up on the kids, Phillips thought. He twisted in his seat. The family talk was making him nervous. “Let’s stick to business, okay? Let’s hear your game plan and I’ll tell you if it’ll work.”

“It’s so simple, it’s scary. The first two floors in my building’s industrial, see—in by eight A.M., out at five. I’ve got the fifth floor, right? I’ve been there fifteen years. But the owner’s turning the third and fourth floor into apartments. More bucks. All these classy apartments are ready. But they can’t get occupancy certificates. The plumbing’s fucked up. A few hundred bucks under the table, no problem. But it’s not my business. The thing is, after quitting time there’s nobody, but nobody, in the building.”

There was never nobody, by Phillips’s reckoning, but he said, “Okay, let’s have the rest of it.”

“A couple of nights a week I’m in the habit of staying out late. I don’t stay over, but I stay plenty late. She knows where I am but I call her anyway, especially since the break-in. I got a downstairs key for you. You’ll have to get rid of it good.”

“I don’t want your key,” Phillips said.

“The night we settle on, you’ll be in the hall outside the door when I phone. I’ll let you know the time I’m going to call her and you’ll wait a couple of minutes after you hear the phone ring. Then you’ll ring the doorbell. Maybe knock and ring at the same time. The bell doesn’t always work. I’ll tell her to find out who it is, and when she calls out to you, you’ll say it’s Sergeant Nichols from the precinct. You brought a package ’round for me.” Gibbons laughed. “That little package keeps turning up, don’t it? Fact is, that’s what happens once in a while. I’ll tell her to open the door and it’ll be that simple.”

“Nothing is ever that simple,” Phillips growled.

“But we can work ’round it?”

“Suppose I can’t make it on target, or something gets in the way, like the real Sergeant Nichols?”

“There is no Sergeant Nichols. Then we start over another time. If you’re not there she can’t let you in, can she?”

“Have you got a revolver, Sergeant?”

“I’ve got my service .38. I was damn glad to break it out the night of the attempted robbery.”

“What if your wife has it in her hand when she comes to the door?”

“She can’t. I took it over to the office last week when things got uptight between her and me.”

“Think she’d kill you if she got the chance?”

“Hell no. I was scared she might kill herself.”

Stupid-head me, Phillips thought. Insurance companies didn’t pay off on suicides. “I want that gun,” he said.

“The hell you do. It’s got my name all over it. I had to register it at the precinct when I retired.”

“The weapon’s no problem, but I want that one. I’ll tell you why. This is how it’s got to play to Homicide: No phone call. Let them figure out why she opens the door. You’ve told her time and again not to, right? So when she opens it, she comes on with your revolver—” Gibbons tried to interrupt. “Listen to what I’m saying. She comes on with the gun. The guy outside the door knocks it out of her hand. Maybe she gets shot in the scuffle. The cops can figure that out, too. That’s how it’s got to play to Homicide. In real life the shooter hangs up the phone before he leaves the premises. That way you know it came out like it was planned. Is there a witness on your end of the phone?”

“There won’t be.”

“You won’t have to mess up the apartment. The shooter’s got the piece. To him it’s worth the kill.”

“I want to think about it,” Gibbons said. “That gun’s like my right arm.”

What bothered Phillips more than anything else about the job was his hatred of Gibbons. He didn’t like working inside a building. He’d take fences over walls any day. And he didn’t like it that the contract was on a woman. But every time he thought of Gibbons it was like something started crawling inside him. He could see his puffy face, his screwed-up eyes. And he knew that if ever he saw this man lay his hand on the wife he’d go berserk. It was like that when he saw anybody knocking a kid around. He’d almost got arrested once in a supermarket when he caught hold of a woman and pulled her away from where she was slapping the kid in its stroller. He didn’t want to think too much about Mary Ellen. Where the hell was women’s lib? She’d be better off dead, he told himself, than spoiling her life with Gibbons. But there was the twenty thousand dollars. The most he ever got for a hit was five grand.

The final meeting before the hit date occurred at Gibbons’s loft. Mary Ellen played cards every other Wednesday night at the church hall. Gibbons would go over to McGowen’s Pub for a few beers and then pick her up on his way home. When he told her he was staying home that night, that he didn’t feel so great, she wanted to skip the card game. But when he blew up at her for it, she took off. He called after her that he’d pick her up as usual.

Phillips was watching from across the street. There wasn’t much traffic, most of it the precinct cops taking in the whores from Eleventh Avenue and the crosstown Thirties: sweep night. There were night-lights on all the floors of Gibbons’s building—pale, low-wattage bulbs you’d think would die any minute. And he couldn’t see a homeless slob on the street, the cleanest street in town. Real treacherous. Gibbons’s wife left the building at ten minutes to eight. He wasn’t sure at first that it was her, the way she walked with her head up, her shoulders back, a tote bag swinging at her side. Good legs and noisy heels. It had to be her. The time was right and nobody else came out of the building. He could hear the clack of her heels far down the street.

That night he got into the vestibule the way everybody else did, by ringing Gibbons’s bell and waiting to be buzzed in. He even took the elevator to the fifth floor. Never again. It climbed one floor after another as though it wouldn’t make the next. Gibbons was waiting for him in the hallway. “Did you see her?”

“It must’ve been her. Nobody else came out of the building.”

“I don’t pick her up till ten, but I’d like to get you out of here as soon as we get things settled.”

“Suits me.”

“Want a drink?”

Phillips shook his head. “Let’s get on with it.” He sat down on a straight chair, having hooked it out with his foot from the round polished table. Mary Ellen kept a bare and tidy house. No plants, a couple of holy pictures. He thought about all the room there was in a loft. William, raised in a railroad flat, would go wild in a place like this. Phillips’s nerves began to jump, the tension grabbed at the back of his neck when Gibbons returned.

“Fifty C-notes,” Gibbons said, and took a packet of mixed old and new bills from a paper bag. “Want to count them?”

“You do it for me,” Phillips said.

Gibbons put the already heavy bag down carefully on the table, removed the rubber band from the bills and slipped it onto his wrist. He counted the bills aloud, stacking them by tens on the table. “Satisfied?”

Phillips stood up and took his wallet from his slacks pocket. “Give me twenty of them.” He stuffed them into the wallet and put it away. “Put the band back on the rest of them.” He put the packet into his breast pocket.

They confirmed the date of the hit and the date and place of the final payoff. Phillips sat down again and they went through the setup one last time. Phillips looked around at the phone where it sat on a table between two easy chairs that faced the television set.

“What about the bedroom phone?”

“I told you, it’s on a jack that’s broke. I’m supposed to fix it but I won’t.”

Phillips got to his feet. A wall clock with one of those sunshine faces showed a quarter to nine. He motioned to the paper bag. “Let’s have it.”

“Take it.”

“I don’t want the bag. Hand me the gun.”

“Goddamn it, take it yourself.” The sweat glistened on Gibbons’s forehead.

Seeing Gibbons sweat was balm to Phillips’s nerves. “It’s clean, right?” He reached into the bag and brought out the .38 police revolver. Beautiful. It looked as new as the day it came from the gunsmith. He flicked off the safety and rolled the cylinder. Every chamber was loaded. He reset the safety. “Thanks for the spares,” he said. “Got any more?”

Gibbons sucked in his breath and let it out. “The rest of the box. It’s on the closet shelf in the shoe box.”

“Leave it there.” Phillips put the gun in the pocket of his jacket, kneed his chair back into place, and went to the door. He looked back. Gibbons was still standing at the table, crumpling the bag, staring after him. He was shaking, Phillips realized. Gibbons was scared shitless. The stinking coward was scared of him. Phillips knew himself the man had good reason. “Let me out of here, will you?” he said.

Gibbons moved with a start. He tossed the bag on the table and strode to the door.

In the hall Phillips turned back. Gibbons stuck out his hand. They had never shaken hands, and didn’t then. Phillips made his hit face to face with his victim for the first time ever.

Nothing this night had gone the way Mary Ellen expected it to. She had left the house in a rage of her own and vented some of it clattering down the street. Like all her rages, it turned in on herself. She knew there was something wrong with her to take all the abuse she got from Red. It was sick to love him even more afterwards. At one time they’d taken counseling together from their parish priest. Red had insisted on it. The gist of what the priest had to say was, “Why don’t you fight back, Mary Ellen?” “I wish to God she would,” Red told the priest. But when she tried it with about as much punch as a kitten’s paw, he’d twisted her arm behind her and said, “Don’t you ever try that again.”

She knew he was having an affair and she’d left the house convinced the woman would arrive at the loft as soon as she was safely out of the way. When Red blew up because she decided to stay home with him, she felt absolutely certain. She could taste the pain and pleasure of knowing them to be in bed together—in her bed. Her mind was on fire with the thought of actually seeing it. Give them enough time and then go back quietly. She tried to concentrate on the card game at first. Red would kill her. But she didn’t really care. When an extra player showed up at the card game she gladly gave up her place. At twenty past eight she started back home, at half-past eight she left the elevator on the fourth floor and walked up the one flight of fire stairs. Before she even got near the loft door she heard the voices, Red’s and another man’s. She fled, ashamed and panicky. Red would kill her if he knew she’d come home, and he’d know why she did the minute she tried to lie about it. She got all the way back to the door of the parish hall and heard the scrape of chairs, the talk and laughter as the switch in bridge partners took place. She had no heart for the game and there wasn’t a place for her anyway. There really wasn’t a place for her anywhere. She felt ashamed, disappointed, crazy.

Whether suicide entered her mind she was never going to be able to say for sure, but she walked to the river, past the air force carrier
Intrepid
in its semi-permanent dock, and through the scattered people out on a chilly weeknight. She walked out on the long pier. Some way along it and close to the water’s edge, she found herself among materials set out for dock repair: the barricade had been overturned, the lantern an askew red eye. Backing out she sank her heel into a glob of tar. She pulled her shoe out and tried to remove the gummy residue with Kleenex, then with an emery board, finally with the nail polish remover she had in her tote bag. She only made things worse. The only place to deal with it was at home. She checked her watch under the first high-density streetlight.

She avoided passing the church hall where Red would soon be turning up to walk her home. If she hurried she could get to the loft well ahead of him. She might not have time to clean the shoe, but she could hide it away and not have to confess that part of the night’s silliness. And she’d pretend she hadn’t heard him say he would pick her up as usual. She took off her shoes and ran the last part of the way home.

Homicide Detective John Moran and his partner Al Russo took Mary Ellen and her lawyer back to the loft at seven in the morning. She had been questioned throughout the night at precinct headquarters. The lawyer, a smart young fellow recommended by Moran himself, demanded that the police charge her or release her. Moran was, to the extent his duty allowed, on Mary Ellen’s side. He had known Gibbons when he was on the force; he knew him for a smiling Irishman with a cruel streak in him, a lot of charm until it wasn’t working. Then he was a son of a bitch. He knew that Gibbons abused his wife. A jury might come out on her side, too, but it would go better for her if she confessed, let her lawyer spell out what a bastard her husband was. And it would be better for Moran himself if he could break the case now, before the brass moved in.