So Long As You Both Shall Live (87th Precinct) (14 page)

“Or a linen truck. I thought it might’ve been delivering linens or something.”

“Linen trucks look like this, too,” Ollie said.

“Yeah, but the truck I saw in the alley wasn’t that one.”

“How about this one on the next page here? This looks like a bigger van than the one on the cover.”

“No, the one I saw wasn’t that big.”

“Okay, let’s keep turning. Here’s a smaller one.”

“The orange one, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“The truck I saw was white.”

“I know, forget the color for a minute. We’re going for size and body type.”

“No, it didn’t look like that,” Bailey said.

“But was it a Step-Van?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

“Well, look at these,” Ollie said, turning to the last page in the folder. “These pictures show how the Chevy Step-Vans can be equipped. Here’s one for a company that sells fire-prevention gear, here’s one—”

“There,” Bailey said. “That’s what it looked like.”

“This one?”

“The other one. Right there on the bottom of the page. It looked something like that.”

“Here?” Ollie said, and pointed to the photograph.

“That’s the one,” Bailey said.

They were looking at a picture of a white van with red lights just above the windshield, and red lights mounted on the hood. A red stripe ran completely around the center of the van, and lettered onto this stripe in white, on the hood and sides of the van, was the word
EMERGENCY
. The copy to the left of the photograph read:
Step-Van King equipped with electronic life-support equipment found in most hospital emergency rooms. Can handle four litter patients.

“A goddamn ambulance,” Ollie said.

There were six buttons on the bodice of the gown, spaced between the square neckline and the Empire waist. The gown was made of cotton, with rows and rows of tucked white lace, and more lace on the cuffs of the full sleeves. A silk-illusion veil crowned Augusta’s auburn hair, and she was carrying a small bouquet of red roses. He had dressed her himself, fumbling with the delicate lace-edged panties and bra, sliding the lacy blue garter up over her left thigh, adjusting the veil on her head, and then presenting her with the bouquet. He led her barefooted into the living room now, and asked her to sit on the sofa, facing him. She sat, and he told her to clasp both hands around the shaft of the bouquet, and to hold the flowers on her lap and to look straight ahead of her, neither to the right nor to the left, but straight ahead. He was standing directly in front of her, some six feet away, as he began his recitation.

“We are witnesses here,” he said, “the two of us alone, we are witnesses to this holy sacrament, we are witnesses. You and I, man and woman, and child asleep in innocence, we are witnesses. We are witnesses to the act, we have seen, we have seen. I have seen her before, yes, I have witnessed her before, I have seen photographs, yes, she knew this, she was a famous model, there would be roses at the door, roses from strangers, they would often arrive without warning. I have seen photographs of her, yes, she was quite famous, I have seen her dressing, too, I have sometimes witnessed—the bedroom door ajar, I have sometimes in her underthings, yes, she was quite beautiful, I have witnessed, but never naked, never that way,
das Blut, ach!
”

He shook his head. Though Augusta knew no German, she instantly understood the word
“Blut.”
He repeated the word in English now, still shaking his head, his eyes on the roses in Augusta’s lap.

“Blood. So much blood. Everywhere. On the floor, on her legs,
nackt und offen,
do you understand? My own mother,
meine Mutter.
To expose herself that way, but ah, it was so very long ago, we must forget,
nein?
And in fairness, she was dead, you know, he had cut her throat, you know, forgive them their trespasses, they know not what they do. So much blood, though…so much. He had cut her so bad, yes, even before her throat, she was so…so many cuts…she…everywhere she had touched, there was blood. Running away from him, you know. Touching the walls, and the bureau, and the closet door, and the chairs, blood everywhere. Screaming,
Ach, ach,
I covered my ears with my hands,
Bitte, bitte,
she kept screaming again and again, Please, please,
Bitte, bitte,
where is my father to let this happen to her, where? There is blood everywhere I look. Her legs are open wide when I go into the bedroom, there is blood on the insides of her legs, shameless, like a cheap whore, to let him
do
this to her? Why did she allow it,
why?
Always so careful with
me,
of course, always so modest and chaste—Now, now, Klaus, you must not stay in the bedroom when I am dressing, you must not peek on your mother, eh? Run along now, run along, there’s a good boy—petticoats and lace, and once in her bloomers, with nothing on top, smelling of perfume, I wanted so much to touch you that day, Augusta, but of course I am too small—you are too small, Augusta, your breasts. You are really quite a disappointment to me, I don’t know why I bother loving you at all, when you give yourself so freely to another. Ah, well, it was a long time ago,
nein?
Forgive and forget, let bygones be bygones, we are here today to change all that, we are here today as witnesses.”

He smiled abruptly, and looked up from the roses, directly into Augusta’s face.

“Johanna, my love,” he said, “we are here to be married today, you and I, we are here to celebrate our wedding. We are here to sanctify our union that will be, we are here to witness and to obliterate. The other, I mean. Your union with another, we will obliterate that, Johanna, we will forget that shameless performance—why did you let him
do
it?” he shouted, and then immediately said, “Forgive me, Augusta,” and walked to where she was sitting on the sofa, and took the bouquet from her hands and placed it on the floor. Then, kneeling before her, he took both her hands between his own, and said, simply, “I take you for my wife, I take you for my own.”

He kissed her hands then, first one and then the other, and rose, and gently lifted her from the couch and led her into the bedroom.

The president of Ramsey University was a man in his late sixties. He had come to the school from a college in Boston, and had been presiding there only since the beginning of September. He would not in any case have recognized the photographs Carella showed him, but he looked at them politely, and then shook his head, and suggested that Carella go through the back issues of the school’s yearbook. He buzzed for his secretary, and she led Carella into the school library, where copies of the yearbook went all the way back to the year the school was founded.

“Is this a murder case or something?” the secretary asked. She was a pert blonde in her middle twenties, wearing a skirt Carella would have thought somewhat brief for the halls of academe.

“No, it’s not a murder case,” he said.

“What is it then?”

“Just a routine investigation,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, obviously disappointed. “I thought it might be something exciting.” She shrugged elaborately, and then clicked across the length of the library on her high heels, leaving Carella alone in the echoing room.

His job would have been simpler had he known the man’s exact age, but of course he did not. Judging from the photographs, they had estimated his age at somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years old. Twenty-two is the average age at which students in America are graduated from college, and there are usually two graduating classes—one in January, and the other in June. Carella did not want to waste time. He took the outside age estimate—thirty years—and subtracted twenty-two from it, and came up with eight. That was where he would start, with the yearbooks published eight years ago. He found them on the shelves the president’s secretary had earlier indicated, and he pulled down both the January and the June issues. Beginning with the January issue, he leafed slowly through the pages, aware that eight years ago the man might have looked markedly different, and not wanting to miss him in his eagerness for a positive make. He found no one resembling the man in either the January or the June yearbooks. Patiently, he began working his way upward through the succeeding years.

He knew that he might possibly have to wade through sixteen yearbooks in all—two issues a year for the eight years spanning the possible graduation dates for a man who was now anywhere between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. Carella was prepared to scrutinize all sixteen of those yearbooks, and if he found nothing in any of them, he was prepared to look at
every
damn yearbook on those shelves. But as it turned out, he did not have to spend more than a half-hour in the school library.

The man’s name was Klaus Scheiner. He had been graduated six years ago, which put his present age at twenty-eight; their original estimate hadn’t been a bad one, after all. He had been a member of the Glee Club and the Honor Society, had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year, and had been president of the German Club. As was the custom in some college yearbooks, a couplet followed the strict listing of Scheiner’s undergraduate achievements. The couplet read:

Klaus is groovy, Klaus is cool,

Klaus is going to medical school.

The scalpel was in his hand.

He had tried to make love to her, and had failed, and now he rose from the bed angrily, and said, “Put on your underthings! Are you a whore? Is that what you are?” and watched as she lifted the long bridal gown and put on the white lace-edged panties, the only garment he had earlier asked her to remove.

“You do not have to answer,” he said. “I
know
what you are, I have known for a long time.”

She said nothing.

“I suppose you are disappointed in me,” he said. “Someone like you, who knows so many men. I suppose my performance was less than satisfying.”

Still, she said nothing.

“Have you known others like me?” he asked. “In your experience, have you known others who could not perform?”

“I want you to let me go,” she said.

“Answer me! Have you known others like me?”

“Please let me go. Give me the key to the front door, and—”

“I’m sure you have known a great many men who had medical problems such as mine. This is entirely a medical problem, I will see a doctor one day, he will prescribe a pill, it will vanish. I myself was almost a doctor, did you know that? I was Phi Beta Kappa at Ramsey University, did you know that? Yes. I was an undergraduate there, Phi Beta Kappa. And I was accepted at one of the finest medical schools in the country. Yes. I went for two years to medical school. Would you like to know what happened? Would you like to know why I am not a doctor today? I could have been a doctor, you know.”

“I want to leave here,” she said. “Please give me the key.”

“Augusta, you are being absurd,” he said. “You cannot leave. You will
never
leave. I am going to kill you, Augusta.”

“Why?”

“I told you why. Would you like to know what happened in medical school, Augusta? Would you like to know why I was expelled? I mutilated a cadaver,” he said. “I mutilated a female cadaver. With a scalpel.”

They knew he had gone to medical school from Ramsey U, and they knew the vehicle parked in the service courtyard of the hotel had been an ambulance. So first they went through the city’s five telephone directories looking for a listing for a Dr. Klaus Scheiner.

There were no Klaus Scheiners in any of the directories.

So they looked up at the clock on the squadroom wall, and they manned the squadroom telephones, and began calling each and every hospital in the city. There were a lot of hospitals, but they all had to be called because the man Klaus Scheiner had gone to medical school, and he had been driving an ambulance on the night of the abduction. Assuming he worked at one of the hospitals, there would be an address on file for him. That’s all they wanted or needed: his address. Once they got that,
if
they got that, they would break in on him. But getting that address,
if
it existed,
if
he indeed worked at one of the hospitals, meant making telephone calls. And making telephone calls took time.

Kling made none of the calls.

“Hello,” Willis said into the telephone, “this is Detective Willis of the 87th Squad, we’re trying to locate…”

“A man named Klaus Scheiner,” Meyer said into the telephone. “He may be a…”

“Doctor,” O’Brien said, “or perhaps he’s…”

“Connected in some other way with the hospital,” Carella said.

“That’s Scheiner,” Parker said. “I’ll spell it for you. S…C…”

“H…E…” Delgado said.

“I…N…” Hawes said.

“E…R,” Ollie said.

Kling paced, and listened, and watched.

And waited.

She backed away from him.

He was coming for her with the scalpel in his hand. He was between her and the doorway. The bed was in the center of the room, she backed toward it, and then climbed onto the mattress, and stood in the middle of the bed, ready to leap to the floor on the side opposite whichever one he approached.

“I urge you not to do this,” he said.

She did not answer. She watched him, waiting for his move, poised to leap. She would use the bed as a wall between them. If he approached it from the side closest to the door, the right-hand side, she would jump off onto the floor on the left. If he crawled onto the bed in an attempt to cross it, she would run around the end of it to the other side. She would keep the bed between them forever if she had to, use it as a barrier and a—

He thrust the scalpel at her, and seemed about to reach across the bed, and she jumped to the floor away from him, and realized too late that his move had been a feint. He was coming around the side of the bed, it was too late for her to maneuver her way to the door, she backed into the corner as he came toward her.

She would remember always the sound of the door being kicked in, would remember too the swift shock of recognition that darted into his eyes and the way his head turned sharply away from her. She could see past him to the front door, could see the bolt shattering inward, and Steve Carella bursting into the room, a very fat man behind him, and then Bert—and the scalpel came up, the scalpel came toward her.