Rough Justice (6 page)

“Bastard,” I heard him whisper.

I clung to the wall, coughing hard. Smaller stars than before now sparkled in the dim room. Still on one knee, I hung my head, retching.

“Bastard,” said the other man again.

I lifted my face to him. I saw him stumble away from the chair. He bent and picked something up from the floor. I saw him, silhouetted, stand. He drew the cord out between his two hands.

I tried to say something to him. “Please,” I tried to say. I couldn't get it out. My windpipe felt as if it were closed off. My stomach felt like it was about to come up through it.

The man came toward me with the cord. He stood over me. I looked up at him, still trying to say “Please.”

He looped the cord around my neck again. I came up off the floor and slugged him.

I didn't have much in me. My fist felt like cement, my arm felt like straw. But braced on one knee like that, I had my foot on the floor to give me some drive. I drove up with it, pistoning my fist as fast as I could. I meant to hit him in the face. Under the chin. Try to knock him out, knock him back, just knock him away long enough for me to get out of there.

Instead, I caught his throat. I felt my knuckles strike against the yielding flesh and cartilage. I heard a damp crack. I felt something buckle under the blow.

Then I was staggering after my follow-through. The cord slipped off my shoulder. The other man was reeling back, his arms pinwheeling. Just as I steadied myself, he went over. He hit a lampstand. It tumbled to the floor, lamp and all, and he went down with it.

I looked around me. I still couldn't breathe. I hardly knew where I was. My neck burned. My head throbbed. I couldn't think. I remembered the pinetops of Maine.

Then I heard the man on the floor. I heard him making noises, terrible noises. I lumbered over to him.

He was rolling, tangled in the lamp's wire. Rolling this way and that, trapped between the toppled lampstand and the leg of a table. One of his hands flailed up in the air. With the other, he clutched his throat just like I'd clutched mine. He was making a steady gurgling noise. Other than that, he was eerily quiet.

“What …?” I said hoarsely, still gasping for air.

He kicked his legs helplessly. He thrashed back and forth. He reached up toward me. He made that noise.

Dread clenched in me like a fist. I stumbled back to the wall. I hit the light switch. Now I could see him. He was a kid. A boy with short sandy hair. I'd never seen him before.

His body rolled wildly over the floor. His face was purple. His eyes were bulging. Spit dribbled down the side of his throat. His legs kept kicking. His hand clawed the air.

“Oh Jesus, Jesus,” I heard myself say. My voice seemed to come from a great distance.

I tried to rush to him. But the atmosphere had turned to water. I could only swim in slow motion against the tide. I watched myself swim. Through the familiar apartment. Past the rickety wooden chairs from the thrift shop on Lexington. I wanted to scream my frustration and panic. The man was strangling while I struggled to him step after slow step.

I was still coughing as I knelt down next to him. I grabbed him. Pried his hand away from his throat. His mouth was open. His tongue was wagging. There was a weird depression where his Adam's apple should have been. I touched it desperately, tried to mold it back into shape.

“Oh Jesus, Jesus,” I said.

The kid kept choking. The purple of his face deepened. He grabbed at me, grabbed my shoulder. His eyes were bright. They were staring at me. They were pleading.

“Oh Christ, oh wait!”

I pulled free of him, clawed my way to my feet. I went for the phone on the table by the window. Swam to it in slow, slow motion. Tripped over the lampstand as I swam. Fell past it. Got hold of the table's edge.

The man thrashed. The gurgling noise became a high steady whine.

I picked up the receiver, knocking the phone to the floor.

“God damn, damn it!” I screamed.

I went to my knees. My fingers found the phone. They were shaking. I forced them in the dial. I dialed 911. I heard the ringing of the other line.

“Please, please,” I said. I wiped sweat from my face. I sat on the floor, the phone clutched to my ear. I stared at the man in front of me.

His thrashing slowed. The phone rang. He rolled onto his back. His hand clutched his throat again. I still could hear that high whine. I still couldn't think.

Then a woman's voice on the phone: “Emergency.”

“Please …” I said. A hoarse whisper. The words slurred. “Please help me.”

“What's the problem, sir? Can you tell me the problem?”

“I hit him. I … Please. I'm hurt. I can't …”

“You'll have to calm down, sir. Where are you? Can you tell me your location?”

“Location?” I put my hand to my forehead. My head kept throbbing. My pulse kept hammering.

The man lay on his back. His bulging eyes stared up at the ceiling. His chest heaved up and down.

“Sir?”

“I hit him in the throat …” I said. “Choking … Where am I …”

“Choking? On something?”

“I hit him.”

“Is he breathing.”

“He
can't
breathe!”

“Oh Jesus. You hit him?”

“Please …”

“We have to do something …”

“What?”

“He's not breathing at all?”

“Isn't this Emergency?”

“What? I don't … What?”

“For God's sake, lady! Help me here! I hit him! Oh Jesus Christ!”

The man's chest was not heaving anymore. As I sat there, staring at him, talking into the phone, I saw his hand fall away from his throat. It bounced once before it settled on the floor. His face had gone a strange, sickening shade of blue.

“Sir … Sir …” babbled the woman on the phone.

“No. Oh no. Now look at him,” I said.

“We've got to do a tracheotomy.”

“What?”

“Have you got a knife? Is he dying?”

“What do I do?”

“Is he dying right now?”

“Help me!”

“Oh Christ!”

“He's dead, he's dead.”

“Oh Christ! Oh Jesus!”

“He's dead,” I said again. My voice came from far away. “He's dead,” I kept saying. “I killed him.”

6

“You don't know who he was.”

“I told you: he was a kid,” I said. “He couldn't have been much more than twenty. How the hell do I know who he was? He was just some kid.”

I was in an office now. An office at the precinct house. A dirty cube of a place. I was sitting in a torn-up swivel chair next to a gunmetal desk. The desk was buried under papers and styrofoam cups. The death-green carpet was burned by cigarettes. The fluorescent gave off a dingy light. The white Venetian blinds had turned yellow decades ago.

“All right,” said the lawyer. “I know you're upset.” He had cleared a place for himself on the edge of the desk. He perched there, hovering over me.

“I'm not upset,” I told him. “I'm fine.”

“It is a difficult situation.”

“These things happen. I'm fine.”

He was a natty, slender man, about fifty. Dressed in a tweed suit, wearing a bow tie. His face was long, rectangular. He had coiffed silver hair, thick silver eyebrows that hovered low over his mild eyes. His expression was calm, almost sweet, almost beatific. I don't know why he made me think of an executioner.

“May I go on?” he asked very quietly, very gently. “I know it's hard, but I'm trying to help you. I'm just here to try and help.” He was the lawyer the newspaper had sent. His name was Gerald Morgenstern.

Absently, my hand went up to my throat. There was no bandage on it. I could still feel the groove in the flesh, the mark of the cord. I swallowed hard, testing for the pain. It was still there. “All right,” I said thickly. “All right. Go on.”

“So …” Morgenstern leaned forward. A lovable professor drilling his student. “You didn't know him, and you didn't let him in.”

“We went over this with the cops … Oh hell, all right. I didn't let him in.”

“The door was locked.”

“That's nothing. Anyone could pop it.”

“The detective said there was no sign …”

“You could pop it with a bobby pin. I'm telling you. I've done it.”

“Okay, okay.”

He held up his two hands in a gesture of peace. I sneered and looked away from him, looked at the filthy blinds over the window. Then I looked away from them, too: they made me feel shut in, trapped.

“What time is it anyhow?”

Morgenstern glanced at his Timex. “A little after four.”

“Christ.”

“We'll be here awhile.”

“Four in the morning.”

“You want more coffee?”

“Christ, are they gonna charge me or what?”

Now he lifted his hands in a different gesture. “I don't know. They're talking with the ADA now. I pressed them to decide so you wouldn't have to …”

His voice trailed off. I glanced up into his gentle gaze and felt my stomach turn. So I wouldn't have to spend the night in the cage—that's what he was going to say.

I swallowed again, hard this time. “How's it look?”

“Oh, fine. Very good.”

“I mean really.”

Morgenstern pursed his lips. He looked down at his knee, at the hand resting on the tweed. He drummed his long slender fingers. I gazed at the top of his silver hair.

I gazed at him, but I didn't really see him. I saw the kid lying dead on the floor of my apartment. I saw him flung back in the posture of his agony, his back arched slightly, one knee slightly raised. His face was that awful shade of blue, and he was staring up at my ceiling with bulging eyes.

For a long time—it seemed like a long time—I'd sat with him. Sat against my table. Stared and stared at him. I was holding the phone in my lap, I remember. The operator's voice was still going. On and on. I could not make out the words. Just the sound of her voice, crazy with panic, crazier than me. It was the loudest sound in the room for a while, her voice, her panic. Before the sirens started, anyway. The sirens, their high wails. They came to me only dimly at first. Then, slowly, they got louder and louder. Small points of noise spreading over the other noises of the city, over the operator's voice. On the windowpane, the steady red stain of the movie marquee was washed away by the flashing red glare of the cruisers. I glanced up at it and realized that my mouth was hanging open. I closed my mouth. I wiped the drool off my chin with a sleeve. The operator was still talking. I hung up the phone.

The uniforms had been the first to arrive. Two patrolmen, one big and husky and yellow-haired, one small, Hispanic, slim. The big one knelt by the boy on the floor. He felt for a pulse on the boy's neck. The smaller one knelt down beside me, looked deep into my eyes. He said something. I don't remember what.

Soon, there were more patrolmen. And three men and a woman from EMS. One of the EMS guys also knelt by the boy and felt his pulse, just like the cop had. Then the EMS guy looked up at the woman with him and shook his head: No. I lowered my face when he did that. My lips were trembling.

After a while, another man from EMS, a black guy with the shadow of a mustache, came over to me. He knelt in front of me, leaned his face into mine. His breath smelled of pepperoni. He put his hand on my forehead and tilted my head back. He examined my neck for a few moments. He spoke to me, too. I don't remember what he said either.

The Crime Scene Unit showed up, and the M.E. But I didn't stay for that. Two of the uniforms took hold of my arms and helped me to my feet. Each one grasped me by an elbow. I stood between them and stared down at the dead boy.

The patrolmen led me to the door. As I went out, I looked over my shoulder. The boy lay on the floor, his knee still raised, his back still arched, his eyes staring, bulging.

They took me out.

“John?”

I blinked. I was gazing at Morgenstern's face now. His lips were still pursed, his eyes still mild.

“Shall we go on?” he said again, very softly.

I shrugged. “I don't know. What's the point anymore?”

“I know you're upset.”

“I'm not upset. Stop saying that.”

“All right.”

“He tried to kill me. I killed him first.”

“Yes, I know. Of course.”

“Why should I be upset?”

He smiled. I guess it was supposed to be reassuring. “You shouldn't be. You shouldn't be. You acted in self-defense. I'm sure the D.A.'s people will agree with that.”

I sucked in another breath. “So what's taking them so long?”

Morgenstern wagged his silver head. “Well … that I.D., you know. That's pesky. Once they get an I.D. Then they'll know what's what.” His voice just kept that tone. That soft, gentle, kind-to-the-condemned-man tone. Rhythmic like a lullaby, his silver eyebrows going up and down, keeping the slow time. “The important thing now is for you to try …”