Well, pleasant as it is to talk on, duty calls and I must get back to work.
Your friend,
JOE DETWEILER
Melrose replied:
Dear Joe,
I was touched by your letter, as I have always been touched by your concern for me. I assure you that I, too, found our conversations extremely rewarding. I shall be interested to hear more of the progress of your work.
Now some news. I have been offered an appointment to the bench. Oddly enough, our old opponent, Mr. Crews, was instrumental in bringing this about. If you recall, you and I once talked of whether I wanted to be a judge. I said then that I did not have the courage for the job. I have since changed my mind, or perhaps my heart. I have accepted. I could not have done this without your moral support.
May I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and you will understand when I call myself your client as well as
Your friend,
HENRY W. MELROSE
Though he knew it was not a joke, Detweiler laughed anyway when he received this missive. He had also written to Tierney.
Dear Tierney,
I never did get a chance to speak to you again after the trial. I wanted to ask you for a favor. Will you please convey to Betty Starr my sympathies. I really went up there last Christmas merely to wish her season’s greetings and give her a little present of a stuffed squirrel. I know I told you I intended to kill her, but that was not literally true. It was mainly to encourage you at the time, because your duty was to interrogate me and you weren’t getting anywhere. I could never harm Betty. She is my ideal, and I still love her.
Now, as to yourself, I hope you know I value our friendship and think of you often. Please be careful. Your job brings you in contact with many dangerous people, and you must not let your attention stray.
Every good wish.
Sincerely,
JOE DETWEILER
Tierney was carrying this letter in his pocket as he entered a telephone booth in a midtown drugstore and dialed Betty’s number.
“Tierney,” he said. He did not try to anticipate his reception.
“Hi!” Betty sounded friendly.
It suddenly occurred to Tierney that it might be bad taste to mention the season. Today was Christmas Eve again, the anniversary.
He said: “I thought it was time to check up on you.”
“Oh.” She sounded cautious.
“Can you talk?”
She laughed. “Arthur’s still at the office party, feeling up the secretaries. What do cops do on Christmas Eve?”
“I have the day off for a change. I’m doing some shopping.”
“Gifts for the wife and kids?”
He grunted an uncomfortable affirmative, this reference for some reason causing him to feel more guilt than had the physical adultery.
Then she said brightly: “I’m pregnant.” He knew an even greater unease, but refused to ask when or by whom.
She said: “And I’ve written a book.”
“It sounds like you are making out all right.”
“Yes,” Betty said, “and don’t worry. You’re not mentioned in it.”
Tierney hung up, went out into the crowded street, and wandered along looking in the windows of sporting-goods stores. His son had asked for a basketball, but Tierney resented being told what to buy. It was alien to the spirit of Christmas. He stopped before an eye-catching display of knives, a dozen or more, stuck by their points into a large ball of cork, a sort of porcupine. All types, clasp, Scout, throwing, sheath, including a stiletto of the kind he had once taken away from a suspect who had presented its business end to his belly. Tierney had got a citation for that arrest.
The individual standing next to him at the moment was a male Caucasian, age approximately twenty-five, height about five-ten, weight one-forty, dark brown hair, bad complexion, no hat, wearing a red-and-black wool jacket.
It was Tierney’s day off, but policemen were never excused from duty. He observed this individual, who stood too long before the knives while other window shoppers came and went, and would not move to facilitate anyone’s passage. Tierney himself wanted to get beyond, to the cameras, but he could not move around this individual because of the traffic entering and leaving the store.
“Let me by here, fella,” he said. “You’re not going to buy a knife. You might hurt yourself.”
The individual turned and looked yearningly at Tierney. Tierney smiled in a tough but genial way.
“Come on,” he said, and the individual swiftly brought out from under his shirt an eight-inch hunting knife and pushed its blade into Tierney’s entrails.
Tierney felt it only as a pressure, a shove. The keen blade penetrated his clothing, skin, and bowels too quickly for pain and cleansed itself on the way out through the coat. So he saw no blood. For an instant he still believed the man was merely showing the weapon to him.
Then the knife was back in his body again and he lay upon the sidewalk and the assailant knelt beside him, stabbing him everywhere, and there was panic in the Christmas crowds. He could not move, yet he remained conscious and strangely not uncomfortable in the warm bath of his own blood.
The nearest traffic cop arrived and shot the assailant in the chest, neck, and head. The fourth bullet missed the target and hit the shoulder of a woman shopper, maiming her for life: so she claimed in the subsequent suit against the city.
The assailant died before Tierney, his brains across the sidewalk and halfway up the show window. A number of policemen were there when the ambulance arrived, and one had reached into the mess of Tierney’s coatfront and got out his badge and slashed wallet. Tierney recognized nobody. He was put on the stretcher and lifted into the vehicle. He heard somebody say the inevitable, “Here’s the pile of garbage,” in reference to the assailant’s corpse.
He remembered he had forgotten to pass Detweiler’s message on to Betty, though that had been his alleged reason for calling her. Nor had he made the most of Detweiler’s warning. But then nobody had to remind him he might get killed at his job.
The assailant turned out to be a psycho with a long history of treatment. The Department gave Tierney an inspector’s funeral.
At his hospital, eating Jello, weaving baskets, and Realizing all manner of historical incidents, Detweiler failed to learn of this incident. He never had kept up with the news.
END.
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Copyright © 1988 by Thomas Berger
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Thomas Berger, Killing Time: A Novel
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