Chapter 4
The tramp's death btjrst upon htm with the fury of a climax. His body shook, stopped. He caught his breath and toppled aside, falling away from her. weak now, barely able to move. His mind swam and his eyes snapped shut and, instantly, he was asleep.
You might legitimately ask whether he fell asleep or passed out, whether he fainted or what. It was sleep.
The woman's death drained him and left him empty and fulfilled at once, and he had no strength left with which to stay awake. He did not pass out because he felt no sense of shock. He did not faint because he was not the fainting type of person. He slept.
Fallon didn't sleep long. An hour, two hours. When he awoke it was as though he had slept for three weeks, and his whole being was gloriously rested and alive. He stretched, breathed deeply. And then he reached out and touched the cool flesh of the dead woman in bed with him and recoiled at the contact. He looked at her and saw her, and she was there, in bed beside him and very dead with the knife still in her heart.
It was true, then. He had killed her. It had been no dream, it was true, he was a murderer and she had been his victim, his first victim, and probably, judging from the way he had felt then and the way he felt now, not his last victim.
It was true.
He looked at her, not sick and not sorry. He touched her flesh, looked at the surprisingly small amount of blood that she had lost. Dead bodies do not bleed, and the knife had claimed her quickly, so there was very little blood. It had already dried around the knife. He looked at her, and he was surprised not that she was dead but that this lifeless corpse in bed beside him was something that had once lived. It seemed impossible to think that she had ever been alive, incredible that she had lived just, hours ago, extraordinary that he had been the instrument of her death.
But all these things were true. And, on a more mundane level, it was also true that he ought to get the hell out of her apartment, and damned soon. She was dead and he had killed her, and there would be hell to pay if anybody ever managed to figure all that out. There would be hell to pay, and he would have to do the paying, and this did not appeal to him.
Could they pin it on him?
He didn't think so. The pickup had been elaborately casual and nobody at the bar had paid a great deal of attention to him, or to Shirley either, as far as that went. Hell, most of them were drunk. And he had never been to that bar before, and would never go there again, so it was hardly as though he had been surrounded by old friends when he picked her up, or when she picked him up, to be more accurate about it.
So nobody knew they had left together. And, except for the cabbie, nobody knew they went to her place together. And the cabbie had not paid much attention to them, had in fact ignored them entirely. And no one had seen them enter her apartment.
The only thing that was left was fingerprints. His prints were on file all over the place, what with all the times he had been picked up on one charge or another, and if they lifted his prints from the knife they would know just who they were looking for the minute they got word from Washington.
Now, fingerprints are pretty much an overrated phenomenon. You find a good one once in a while, but usually you don't, and the public tends to exaggerate their importance. They can help prove something you already know more often than they can tell you something.
In this case, they weren't going to tell anybody anything. Lee Fallon took his time, going over the apartment with the utter thoroughness of a Dutch housewife. He scrubbed and rubbed every surface that might have held a print, whether he could have touched it or not. He didn't trust his memory and he didn't leave anything , to chance. He cleaned that apartment, and when he was through his prints were not there for anybody to find. He did, all in all, one hell of a good job.
The only hard part was cleaning his prints off the knife. He had the feeling that he might have left prints on the blade of the knife, and that some of them might still be there. He had driven the knife into her chest up to the hilt, and he couldn't get away from the notion that, if he drew the knife out, all the blood in her body would come gushing out after it, as if the knife were serving as a cork. He knew this was nonsense, that dead bodies don't bleed, but the feeling remained. Finally he took a breath and yanked the knife out of her and wiped off the blood and what prints might have been on the blade, and set the knife down gingerly and wiped off the handle as well, and then, for no particular reason at all, stuck the middle finger of his right hand into the bloody hole in her chest. It gave him a thrill. He didn't know why, but it did.
He got dressed.
He left her apartment.
The day was an odd one. Before, when he had thought of killing and had more or less taken it for granted that he would kill someone, sooner or later, and that he would enjoy it-well, he had never then known just what it would be like. And it was a funny, eerie feeling. He was nervous and he was shook up and he was distraught, and he couldn't escape the feeling that everyone he passed on the street was able to look at him and see at a glance that he was in fact a killer. The old mark of Cain bit-as though the fact of Shirley's death showed itself in some mark upon his forehead.
Crud.
He knew it was crud, but knowing and feeling are two different things, which, if you stop to think about it, is probably just as well. He knew it was crud but it still felt every bit as real, no matter what he knew. He had crossed a Rubicon (although, since he had never heard of cliches, this was a phrase he would not have used). The die was cast (although he didn't know that die was half of a pair of dice, and thought that the die was cast was in reference to industrial plants, where they cast a stamping die and then stamped out the pieces; it made substantially the same sense that way). The fat, too, was in the fire.
He had killed.
He had murdered.
And this simple fact made for a new self-image for one Lee Fallon. Before he had been a penny ante crook, and then he had been a rapist on the lam, and finally he had become, through sheer will power, a reasonably successful professional stick-up man who specialized in liquor stores. But now he had to step out and upward into a thoroughly new category.
He was a killer.
He was a murderer.
It changed his whole outlook on life. It made him feel good and it made him feel evil. It shook him and it thrilled him both at once, which should not be so odd, since a thrill and a shake-up are not so far removed in respect to their basic components. But, in one way or another, it managed to change everything and to make everything different. And so his day was an odd one, as we have already seen-although nothing really odd happened that day in and of itself.
Like, he went to a shooting gallery. There's nothing so odd about this. On 42nd Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue there is a fairly large and certainly profitable establishment which houses about sixty coin-operated amusement devices ranging from pick-up-a-prize steam shovels to fortune telling machines to two-player hockey games to God knows what. In the back, there is a flea circus, which is pretty good, and a geek show, which is sickening. And in the rear and over to the left side as you walk in there is a shooting gallery, and a lot of people go there.
Like the clock in the Baltimore lobby, it is a meeting place. If you tell someone you will meet him at the shooting gallery, he knows where you mean, and he knows where it is, and you can meet there far more certainly than if you said, say, that you would meet him simply at Times Square. It's also a rather good shooting gallery in that they don't give out any prizes or tabulate any scores there. Now, this absence of prizes may not seem destined to make something good, but if you are hip and if you dwell on this, you will understand quickly enough.
To wit-a shooting gallery that has to give prizes to good score will cheat you. The targets are off whack, or the gun barrels are untrue, or some other gaff, easy to come by because there are more gaffs than cockroaches in the city of New York, which is saying something. But a shooting gallery that just sells you seven shots with a .22 Long for a quarter is not gaffed because there is nothing to win. You pay your quarter and you shoot an honest if cheap rifle at a host of honest targets, and while you don't win anything at least you don't lose anything, and that kind of a break is all anybody in his right mind should expect.
But I digress. The whole point of this is to see how killing had changed Lee Fallon, and this applies in relation to the shooting gallery. He went there.
He had gone there before, maybe two or three times, and he had always done fairly poorly. The moving targets he never hit; he didn't know how to lead them with the rifle; how to time the shot so that the bullet arrived at a given point at the same instant that the target got there. The stationary targets were easier, but not all that easy. Before he stuck a long knife into Shirley's heart he stank at the shooting gallery.
Now, though, he was good. Quite good. Almost excellent.
And the difference was simple. Before, when he shot at a cardboard duck, he thought of it as a duck. And missed.
Now he though of it as a girl. And hit it.
It was the same with all the targets. He thought of them as girls, young girls, nubile girls, naked girls, virginal girls, and he shot every one of them deader than a lox. With shooting, as with other things, all any man really needs is an incentive. And when he could imagine the targets to be girls, Fallon was one perfect ace of a marksman.
But that's just an idea, just something to get the point across. Fallon spent the day wandering. He wandered all over the place, did things, bought things, saw things. He did not do one single thing that was in the least unusual or noteworthy until seven-thirty-six in the evening, by which time the sun had set and the day was history.
Even so, it was an odd day.
Ah.
At seven-thirty-six in the evening, Lee Fallon spent one hundred dollars for a gun.
He had never bought a gun before. He had bought the cap pistol, of course, and he had used the cap pistol, but there is a veritable world of difference existing between a cap pistol and a real gun that shoots real bullets, as any fool can plainly see. And Fallon wanted to move out of the toy category. So far he had been lucky. Each holdup had gone off without a snag, and in all three instances the persons whom he held up had not wanted to find out whether the thing in his hand was a gun or not. If they didn't find out, that was all fine and dandy, and then the toy was as good as the real thing. But if they wanted to offer some genuine resistance, then the toy ceased to be valuable.
So he wanted the real thing.
At seven-thirty-six that night, he went into a pawn shop on Third Avenue in the lower Twenties, one of the last remaining pawn shops on a street that, ten years ago, swarmed with them. He went up to the counter and told the beetle-browed pawnbroker that he wanted to buy a .38-caliber gun.
"A gun," the man said.
"A revolver."
"Yes."
"You wish to spend how much?"
"Oh, fifty dollars," Fallon said. "No more than that. I'll go fifty, though, for a good gun."
"You have a permit, of course."
"Of course," Fallon said.
The pawnbroker went away for a few minutes, then came back. He had a gun in his hand that looked like a companion to the cap gun Fallon had used in the three holdups, the little Woolworth's Special that had performed so well for him. Once he saw how much the two guns looked alike, Fallon could understand why the liquor dealers never offered any resistance.
"I could let you have this," the pawnbroker said.
"For how much?"
"For fifty dollars."
"And have you got a box of ammunition?"
"I could give you a box of shells for five dollars."
"Throw them in, then."
The pawnbroker got the box of shells.
"Let's see now," Fallon said. "Let me just see if I can get the hang of this." He fitted a cartridge in place and spun the cylinder to put the bullet under the hammer. He pointed the gun at the pawnbroker.
"I don't have a permit," he said gently.
The pawnbroker turned fishbelly white.
"This is half of a stickup," Fallon said. "I don't want your money. I don't even want to steal this gun off you. You understand what I'm saying?"
The pawnbroker didn't.
"I want to buy silence," Fallon said. "This gun is fifty and this box of shells is five more, which is fifty-five. I'm not taking any money from you, I'm not even stealing this gun. Instead I'm giving you a hundred dollars."
The pawnbroker was looking at him oddly, reserving judgment. Fallon kept the gun pointed at him with his right hand and reached into a pocket with his left hand. He pulled out a wad of five twenties and put them on the counter.
"One hundred dollars," he said.
The pawnbroker didn't say anything.
"This is for you," Fallon told him. "For the gun and the shells, and for me not having a permit. And for, if the gun gets traced back to you, you give them some line of cruel about how it got out of here. Some phony description, some pack of lies."
"How do you know I'll do that?"
"Because I'm playing straight with you," Fallon said. "And because if you don't I'll find out, and if I find out I'll come back here and kill you. Slow, so it hurts a long time."
The pawnbroker nodded again, slowly. "You figured it all out," he said.
"That's the best way."
"You got nothing to worry about," the pawnbroker said. He made the five bills disappear from the counter. "I just made a nice sale," he said, "and I hold no grudges. Anyway, cops stink."
"You know it."
"If you're gonna shoot anybody with that thing," the pawnbroker said, "make it a cop. They really stink."
Fallon laughed softly. He put the gun in one pocket and the box of shells in another pocket and got out of the shop. He walked away quickly in the darkness, scurrying down toward Fourteenth Street and stopping just once to spin the cylinder of the revolver and get the live shell out from under the hammer. No sense carrying a gun that might go off all by itself at any moment. He had met a guy in stir who had done that, and had shot off the big toe from his left foot. You could get along with nine toes, maybe, but it seemed like a silly way to go through life.
At a Fourteenth Street cafeteria he stopped for a couple of hamburgers and two cups of black coffee. He ate slowly, smoked a cigarette or two in flagrant violation of the plainly visible No Smoking sign, and patted his pockets from time to time, happy each time to feel the reassuring bulk of gun and shells. The pawnbroker had been a sensible son of a gun, not too crazy about the law himself to hear him tell it, and happy to pick up a hundred dollars out of the air without doing anything.
It didn't take a lot of thinking to realize that the pawnbroker had sold unregistered guns for premium prices before, and that he would do it again. But you cannot walk in cold and lay your money on the counter and ask for an unregistered gun. You have to know the pawnbroker, or give him some sort of in-group signal, or supply references. Pawnbrokers who make sales of contraband without some sort of protection usually find themselves breaking rocks for the state. Fallon had no references, and he would never been able to buy a gun that way.
So he had taken a short cut, had removed the element of decision from the game. The pawnbroker never had a chance to say no, and now he was just as glad, and Fallon had what he wanted, and everybody was happy.
When he was through eating he left the cafeteria and took a cab back to the hotel. The desk clerk said Hello, Mr. Fullmer and the elevator operator said it was a nice evening, wasn't it, and everyone smiled at him. Why not? He was a model guest, he thought. Never made noise, never had women up to the room, never snapped at any of the employees, dressed well but not flashily, and was generally quiet and unobtrusive. He was also a crook and a rapist and a killer, but they didn't know that at the King William.
Yet.
There was a fresh bottle of Jack Daniels on the dresser, one he had bought at a package store across the street just that afternoon. He had just had one drink from the bottle so far. He took it now, unscrewed the cap, and poured a generous slug into the water tumbler that he always used. He drank it down slowly and felt a warm feeling spreading through his whole body. He put the glass down and took a deep breath and lit a cigarette.
Things to do. The cap pistol was still in the drawer where he had been hiding it. He put the real gun in its place, along with the box of shells. In the morning he would have to fool around with the gun to get the feel of it. He had used a handgun before, and as a kid he had been fairly good with a .22, just as he had been good with the .22 at the shooting gallery that afternoon. But he needed some practice. When you were playing for heavy stakes, you didn't want to miss anything you happened to be shooting at.
The next time he went out, he would get rid of the cap gun. Drop it in a mailbox, maybe, the same as he had done with that damned wallet. Or give it to some kid to play with. Or take it back to Woolworth's and ask for a refund.
A mailbox had one perfect advantage when it came to getting rid of things. Nobody could take it out once you tossed it in there. If you threw something into a trashcan, some nosy old son of a witch would be sure to drag it out again. But no nosy son of a witch could open a mailbox. Not even a cop could do that, not without a warrant or a court order or something.
But the hell with it. He poured more liquor in his glass, held it to the light and looked at the rich color of it. He sipped it, drained the glass. Nothing to do now, not for the time being. There was enough money on hand for a week without stretching it, so he sure as hell didn't have to rush out and pull a job tonight.
And he didn't want a woman, either. Not to sleep with, not to beat up, not to kill. The time with Shirley had drained his lust just as surely as it had drained her life; the only difference, he thought, was that his lust would return to him and her life was gone forever.
That called for a drink, and he had one. He could feel the good bourbon working on him now, getting into his blood and swimming in his brain. He put on the radio and listened to a jazz program, hard gutbucket music that filled the room and filled his mind as well. No woman tonight, and no crime, nothing but the liquor and the music. You and the night and the music, he said to the bottle of Jack Daniels. You and the night and the music and the memories.
He did a lot of drinking but he never got wild, not that night. He drank fairly steadily and he drank fairly hard, but he never just threw the stuff down and he never took too much too soon. He just kept working on the bottle and listening to the music, changing stations whenever they threw a news program at him, not caring too much what kind of music he was listening to just so long as it stayed there to provide a background for his thoughts.
He drank, and the time passed. Somewhere along the way he got out of his clothes and into his bed. And slept.
And slept well, with no dreams.
He woke up feeling good, ate a big breakfast and read two morning papers. He read one of the papers twice. There was a short story about the wave of liquor holdups-evidently his three jobs in two days was a one-man crime wave or something, and evidently he had been rough enough with the old couple on Third Avenue to merit a little newspaper publicity. There was also a squib, very short, about Shirley Johanssen having been found dead in bed, stabbed to death, the evident victim of a sex crime or something. The one thing that had half-worried him was that there would be a connection drawn between Shirley and the liquor stores. There wasn't, and he was just as glad of that.
He thought of keeping a scrapbook of his newspaper clippings, laughed at the idea and went back to his room. He had bought a razor because he didn't want to get in the habit of going to the barbershop every day. He shaved himself and combed his hair and got the revolver from his drawer, and then he locked the door and started practicing. He was just getting settled when the maid knocked on the door and asked if she could straighten his room. He told her he was busy and asked her to come back in an hour or so.
He took the one bullet out of the gun and put it back in the box. Then he checked each chamber to make sure that the damned gun was completely empty. It was. He hefted it in his hand, got the feel of it, appreciated its weight and balance. He sighted with It, taking careful aim at the doorknob, and squeezed the trigger. The action was a little slow and his hand jerked a little, and he knew that he had to adjust himself to the gun's action or he would not be very damned good with it.
He got a shell from the box, opened it up and spilled out all its powder. You could ruin a gun by playing around with it when it was completely empty, he knew. He put the dead cartridge in place, cocked the hammer, sighted in on the doorknob, and squeezed off a shot.
He worked this way, aiming carefully, taking his time, getting the feel of the gun. He took aim at different targets, practiced shooting from different positions. He shot standing and seated, shot while walking, even practiced while lying down on the bed. He practiced shooting with the gun held at arm's length and practiced quick draws and shooting from the hip. He practiced for an hour, and then he hid the gun again and let the maid make up the room for him.
Of course he couldn't tell whether he would have hit his targets or not. It wasn't as though he had just finished a good session on a target range, but the practice had still done him good and he knew it. He knew the gun now, he had the feel of it, and he had managed all this without wasting a bullet or making a sound. It would be nice to get out in the country and practice some real shooting, sure. It would do him a lot of good. But he was carrying a gun without a permit, and this made it risky, and besides he could use up every last shell in one day's practice, and this was silly. The shells weren't expensive, but you couldn't buy them without a permit for your gun. He could have gotten something that handled .22-long cartridges, because you could buy those anywhere for a rifle and you didn't need a permit for a rifle. But they didn't pack enough of a punch. He wanted something that would kill a man if it came close to him.
He did a lot of walking that afternoon. He wound up on the East Side and browsed around some fairly fancy jewelry shops, looking at watches. He almost felt like buying one, but that would be silly. Sooner or later he could pick up a good one in a holdup.
All day he told himself that he would lay off pulling a job for at least three days. The liquor dealers weren't any edgier than ever, maybe, but the odd luck that had gotten him space in the newspaper was not a go-ahead signal; it would be better if he held off for a little while, because in two days that newspaper story would have worn off completely. And he could afford the lay-off. He had plenty of dough, more than enough.
Still-
The trouble was that the gun was burning a hole in his pocket, just as money burns a hole in the pocket of a spendthrift. He had a gun now, a real gun, and he Was anxious to try it out. Not to shoot someone, necessarily, but to put it to use, to see how it felt when he pulled a job with a real gun in his hand. He had a hunch it would be a lot different. It wouldn't make any difference to the person facing the gun, because a real gun was the same as a toy gun when you didn't know what you were looking at. But it would make a difference to Fallon because Fallon would know.
But another liquor store-
Well, the hell with liquor stores. There were other ways.
He picked Central Park. He went there between eleven and twelve that night, took a subway to the 72nd Street entrance and slipped inside with the gun snug m his jacket pocket and a bullet in every chamber but the one under the hammer. Five bullets, all of them ready for action. He walked through the park with the blood boiling in his veins and his heart pumping hard. He steered clear of the well-lighted paths and drifted deeper and deeper into the barren and dark parts of the park.
Central Park was no place to go at night, he knew. People with any sense in their heads stayed away from it. But there would be people there. Kids with no place else to go, and perverts looking to get picked up, and damned fools who figured a shortcut across the park was better than popping a buck on a cab-ride around. With any luck at all, somebody would drift by that Fallon could hit. He didn't figure to get much money, people with that much money did not walk through Central Park even in the daytime. But he might get a few bucks and he might get a watch, and he sure as hell would get his kicks.
He waited, still and silent in the gathering darkness. He smoked half of a cigarette, then decided that he could live without smoking for the time being. Somebody might see the glowing end of his cigarette and he was taking no chances, not even the slim ones. He put out the cigarette and did not light another.
He had a very long wait. A crew of punk kids in black leather jackets came through. They didn't see Fallon and he let them pass. They were competition, maybe, but they were certainly not targets. He had better things to do than have a fight with a bunch of damn juvies.
He waited.
And then he saw his man. He heard him coming before he actually saw him, the footsteps quick and regular on the asphalt path. Then the man came into view and Fallon took one long look at him and smiled weirdly.
A tall lean man, very well dressed, expensive shoes, an aristocratic face. Long hair carefully and elaborately combed, black on top, neatly gray at the temples. An affected walk. A cigarette in an ebony holder.
A faggot.
Pervert.
An old jerk out looking for punk kids. An old nut on the prowl. Fallon looked at him and felt his fury rising like steam on a winter morning. He knew about them, all right. He had met them all over the place, and he had met plenty a couple of times when he was in stir. A lot of guys went ape in prison. No women, nothing to do, and pretty soon a man started getting his kicks with other men.
They had tried to get to Fallon, too. At first he stayed away from them, and then he had used them when he needed them, letting them worship him while he closed his eyes and tried to pretend they were women instead of men. Afterward he always hated them and despised himself.
Now he was getting even.
He came in on the guy, moved in quickly and quietly, the gun in his hand. He gripped the revolver by its snub barrel and brought it high overhead in a looping car, sending it down hard and fast, taking the old guy on the side of his head just behind the ear. It was all done quickly and it was all done in a single motion, and there was the sharp sound of the gun butt hitting the man and the soft sound of the man crumpling like a felled ox, hitting the ground without a whimper.
Fallon dragged him into the bushes. He was out cold and he would stay that way, which was both good and bad. It was good because Fallon didn't want any trouble and it was bad because he wanted this guy to feel it, wanted to give it to him but good. He worked on him quickly, finding his wallet, stripping the bills from it, pocketing them, tossing the wallet to one side. Sixty bucks-not bad for such a quick touch, because the rotten pervert hadn't even gotten a look at him, hadn't even known he was hit. He got the watch, too, got a good Elgin from the man's dainty wrist. He put it on his own wrist and admired it. A good watch, and he was lucky it hadn't broken when the man went down for the count.
But what could he do to him? He didn't want to kill him, not for any moral reason but because he wanted to hurt the man more than he wanted to leave him dead. But how could you hurt a man who was out cold?
The answer was easy. Do something to him that would hurt him when he came to.
Fallon grinned quickly. He stripped the guy and threw his clothes into the bushes. Then, with quick measured kicks, he caved in a few ribs on each side. That would do for openers.
And then, placing the heel of one shoe on the man's body, he put all of his weight on that foot. He hopped up and down, crushing the old boy to pulp. His smile spread and he had to hold himself to keep from laughing aloud. The old boy wouldn't be getting much joy now, and probably not for the rest of his life. His equipment was ruined.
He would have liked to stick around and watch the guy wake up, but that would have been stupid. Instead he hurried through the park, heading for the street. It was time to go, time to get lost, time to get back to his hotel and relax with the spoils of the job and the happy memory of it.
But he didn't get to the street.
He heard a sound, and the sound stopped him. He listened to it, tuned in on it, and let it draw him like a magnet drawing iron filings. The sound was a personal sound, a sound of people. He followed the sound of the path and into a grove of bushes, and he saw what was making the sound.
A boy. And a girl. Together, with the girl on the ground and the boy with her.
Fallon watched them, his eyes wild and his hands clenched into tight little fists. He stared.