The man nodded. “This is just hypothesis,” he said, “but let’s suppose he just killed a person once for the sheer hell of it. To find out what it felt like, say. To enlarge his area of personal experience.”
“God.”
“Can you accept that hypothetically?”
“I guess so. Sure.”
“Okay. Now we can suppose further that he liked it, got some kind of a kick out of it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have wanted to continue. There’s certainly precedent for it. Not all the homicidal maniacs down through history have been driven men. Some of them have just gotten a kick out of it so they kept right on doing it.”
“That gives me the shivers.”
“It’s a frightening concept,” he agreed. “But let’s suppose that the first person this clown killed was named Ackerman, and that he wanted to go on killing people and he wanted to make a game out of it. So he—”
“A game!”
“Sure, why not? He could just keep on with it, having his weird jollies and seeing how long it would take for the police and the press to figure out what was going on. There are a lot of Ackermans. It’s a common name, but not so common that a pattern wouldn’t begin to emerge sooner or later. Think how many Smiths there are in the city, for instance. I don’t suppose police in the different boroughs coordinate their activities so closely, and I guess the Bureau of Vital Statistics doesn’t bother to note if a lot of fatalities have the same last name, so it’s a question of how long it takes for the pattern to emerge in and of itself. Well, it’s done so now, and what does the score stand at now? Twenty-seven?”
“That’s what the paper said, I think.”
“It’s quite a total when you stop and think of it. And there may have been a few Ackermans not accounted for. A body or two in the river, for instance.”
“You make it sound—”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know. It gives me the willies to think about it. Will he just keep on now? Until they catch him?”
“You think they’ll catch him?”
“Well, sooner or later, won’t they? The Ackermans know to be careful now and the police will have stakeouts. Is that what they call it? Stakeouts?”
“That’s what they call it on television.”
“Don’t you think they’ll catch him?”
The young man thought it over. “I’m sure they’ll catch him,” he said, “if he keeps it up.”
“You mean he might stop?”
“I would. If I were him.”
“If you were him. What a thought!”
“Just projecting a little. But to continue with it, if I were this creep, I’d leave the rest of the world’s Ackermans alone from here on in.”
“Because it would be too dangerous?”
“Because it wouldn’t be any fun for me.”
“Fun!”
“Oh, come on,” he said, smiling. “Once you get past the evilness of it, which I grant you is overwhelming, can’t you see how it would be fun for a demented mind? But try not to think of him as fundamentally cruel. Think of him as someone responding to a challenge. Well, now the police and the newspapers and the Ackermans themselves know what’s going on, so at this point it’s not a game anymore. The game’s over and if he were to go on with it he’d just be conducting a personal war of extermination. And if he doesn’t really have any genuine grudge against Ackermans, well, I say he’d let them alone.”
She looked at him and her eyes were thoughtful. “Then he might just stop altogether.”
“Sure.”
“And get away with it?”
“I suppose. Unless they pick him up for killing somebody else.” Her eyes widened and he grinned. “Oh, really, Emily, you can’t expect him to stop this new hobby of his entirely, can you? Not if he’s been having so much fun at it? I don’t think killers like that ever stop, not once it gets in their blood. They don’t stop until the long arm of the law catches up with them.”
“The way you said that.”
“Pardon me?”
“ ‘The long arm of the law.’ As if it’s sort of a joke.”
“Well, when you see how this character operated, he does make the law look like something of a joke, doesn’t he?”
“I guess he does.”
He smiled, got to his feet. “Getting close in here. Which way are you headed? I’ll walk you home.”
“Well, I have to go uptown—”
“Then that’s the way I’m headed.”
“And if I had to go downtown?”
“Then I’d have urgent business in that direction, Emily.”
On the street she said, “But what do you suppose he’ll do? Assuming you’re right that he’ll stop killing Ackermans but he’ll go on killing. Will he just pick out innocent victims at random?”
“Not if he’s a compulsive type, and he certainly looks like one to me. No, I guess he’d just pick out another whole category of people.”
“Another last name? Just sifting through the telephone directory and seeing what strikes his fancy? God, that’s a terrifying idea. I’ll tell you something, I’m glad my name’s not such a common one. There aren’t enough Kuystendahls in the world to make it very interesting for him.”
“Or Trenholmes. But there are plenty of Emilys, aren’t there?”
“Huh?”
“Well, he doesn’t have to pick his next victims by last name. In fact, he’d probably avoid that because the police would pick up on something like that in a minute after this business with the Ackermans. He could establish some other kind of category. Men with beards, say. Oldsmobile owners.”
“Oh, my God.”
“People wearing brown shoes. Bourbon drinkers. Or, uh, girls named Emily.”
“That’s not funny, Bill.”
“Well, no reason why it would have to be Emily. Any first name—that’s the whole point, the random nature of it. He could pick guys named Bill, as far as that goes. Either way it would probably take the police a while to tip to it, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“You upset, Emily?”
“Not upset, exactly.”
“You certainly don’t have anything to worry about,” he said, and slipped an arm protectively around her waist. “I’ll take good care of you, baby.”
“Oh, will you?”
“Count on it.”
They walked together in silence for a while and after a few moments she relaxed in his embrace. As they waited for a light to change he said, “Collecting Emilys.”
“Pardon?”
“Just talking to myself,” he said. “Nothing important.”
The Dangerous Business
When she heard his car in the driveway she hurried at once to the door and opened it. Her first glimpse of his face told her all she wanted to know. She’d grown used to that expression over the years, the glow of elation underladen with exhaustion, the whole look foreshadowing the depression that would surely settle on him in an hour or a day or a week.
How many times had he come home to her like this? How many times had she rushed to the door to meet him?
And how could he go on doing this, year after year after year?
She could see, as he walked toward her now, just how much this latest piece of work had taken out of him. It had drawn new lines on his face. Yet, when he smiled at her, she could see too the young man she had married so many years ago.
Almost thirty years, and she treasured all those years, every last one of them. But what a price he’d paid for them! Thirty years in a dangerous, draining business, thirty years spent in the company of violent men, criminals, killers. Men whose names were familiar to her, men like Johnny Speed and Bart Callan, men he had used (or been used by) on and off throughout his career. And other men he would work with once and never again.
“It’s finished,” she said.
“All wrapped up.” His smile widened. “You can always tell, can’t you?”
“Well, after all these years. How di
d it go?”
“Not bad. It’s gone better, but at least it’s finished and I got out of it alive. I’ll say this for it, it’s thirsty work.”
“Martini?”
“What else?”
She made a pitcher of them. They always had one drink apiece before dinner, but on the completion of a job he needed more of a release than came with one martini. They would drain the pitcher, with most of the martinis going to him, and dinner would be light, and before long they would be in bed.
She stirred at the thought. He would want her tonight, he would need her. Their pleasure in each other was as vital as ever after almost thirty years, if less frequently taken, and they both lived for nights like this one.
She handed him his drink, held her own aloft. “Well,” she said.
“Here’s to crime,” he said. Predictably.
She drank without hesitating, but later that evening she said, “You know, I like our toast less and less these days.”
“Well, get a new toaster. We can afford it. They have models now that do four slices of bread at a time.”
“I mean Here’s to crime. You knew what I meant.”
“Of course I knew what you meant. I don’t know that I like it much myself. Here’s to crime. Force of habit, I guess.”
“It takes so much out of you, darling. I wish—”
“What?”
She lowered her eyes. “That you could do something else.”
“Might as well wish for wings.”
“You’re really that completely locked in?”
“Of course I am, baby. Now how many times have we been over this? I’ve been doing this my whole life. I have contacts, I have a certain reputation, there are some people who are kind enough to think I’m good at what I do—”
“You’d be good at anything you did.”
“That’s a loyal wife talking.”
“It’s still true.”
He put his hand on hers. “Maybe. Sometimes I like to think so. And other times it seems to me that I was always cut out for this line of work. Crime and violence and sudden death.”
“You’re such a gentle, gentle man.”
“Don’t let the word get out, huh? Not that anyone would be likely to believe you.”
“Oh, baby—”
“It’s not such a bad life, kid. And I’m too old to change now. Isn’t it funny how I get older all the time and you stay the same? It’s my bedtime already, an old man like me.”
“Some old man. But I guess you’re tired.”
“I said bedtime. I didn’t say anything about being tired.”
But in the days that followed she knew just how tired he was, and there was a brooding quality to his exhaustion that frightened her. Often at such times he liked to get away, and they would flee the city and spend a couple of weeks unwinding in unfamiliar terrain. This time, when his depression failed to pass, she suggested that they go away for a while. But he didn’t want to go anywhere. He didn’t even want to leave the house, and he passed the daytime hours sitting in front of the television set or turning the pages of books and magazines. Not watching the television, not reading the books and magazines.
At one point she thought he might want to talk about his work. In their first years together he had been excited about what he did, and at times she had felt herself a participant. But with the passage of time and with his growing discontent about his profession he tended to keep more and more of it to himself. In a sense she was grateful; it alienated her, the corruption and violence, the wanton killing, and it was easier for her to love him if she let herself dissociate the man from his work. And yet she wondered if this didn’t make the burden on his shoulders that much heavier for the lack of anyone to share it.
So she made an effort. “You’ve hardly talked about it,” she said one afternoon. “It went well, you said.”
“Well enough. Won’t make us rich, but it went quite smoothly. Hit a couple of snags along the way but nothing serious.”
“Who was in this one? Johnny Speed?”
“No.”
“Callan?”
“I don’t think I’m going to be able to use Callan anymore. No, none of the regulars came into it this time. Let’s say I put it together with a cast of unknowns. And there was nobody in it I’d care to work with again.” He chuckled mirthlessly. “Hardly anybody got out of it alive, as a matter of fact.”
“Then it was very violent.”
“You might say that.”
“I thought so. I can tell, you know.”
“You’ve said that before. It’s hard to believe, but I guess I believe you.”
“If there were just a way to avoid the violence, the awful bloodshed—”
He shook his head. “Part of the game.”
“I know, but—”
“Part of the game.”
She let it go.
His mood lifted, of course. The depression had been deeper than usual and had lasted longer than usual, but it was not nearly so deep or so enduring as some he—and she—had been forced to live through in the past. Some years previously drinking had become a problem. Alcoholism was virtually an occupational illness in his profession, and of course it made efficient functioning impossible.
He’d gone on the wagon for several years, then found he was able to drink normally again. A single martini before the evening meal, a pitcher of them at the conclusion of a job, an occasional beer with lunch when he was resting up between jobs. But drinking never became a problem again, and she thanked God for that, even as she prayed to God that he could get into a line of work that didn’t take so much out of him.
She raised the subject again one evening. He’d begun to talk about going back to work, not right away but before too long, and she wondered how he could face it so soon.
“You don’t have to work so much,” she said. “The kids are grown and gone. You and I have everything we want and money in the bank. You don’t have to drive yourself.”
“It’s not a matter of driving myself. I can’t sit idle too long. It gets to me.”
“I know, but—”
“Rather wear out than rust out. Trite but true.”
“Couldn’t you try something else some of the time? Couldn’t you try doing what you really want to do?”
He looked at her for a long moment, then turned his eyes aside and gazed off into space. Or, perhaps, into time.
“I’ve tried that,” he said at length.
“I didn’t know that.”
“I didn’t really want to talk about it. It didn’t work out.” Now he turned to face her again, and the expression on his face was enough to break her heart. “Maybe there was once something else I wanted to do. Maybe at some stage in my life I had the potential to do other things, to be somebody other than the man I turned into.”
But I love the man you turned into, she thought. I love the man you are, the man you’ve always been.
“I may have the dreams,” he said. “But that’s all they ever were, baby. Dreams. You know what happens to dreams when you wake up. They go where smoke goes, into the air. Maybe I was born to do what I do. Maybe I just trained myself and wound up painting myself into a corner. But I’m an old man now—”
“You are like hell an old man!”
“—and it’s all I know how to do and all I even seem to want to do. I’ve spent my whole life with crooks and grifters and strong-arm men, and I’ll spend the rest of it with the same awful types, and yes, there’ll be violence, but I guess I can go on living with that.”
He smiled suddenly, and not merely with his mouth. “It’s not so bad,” he said. “It’s depressing when I think of what might have been, but the hell with that, kid. I’m doing what I was cut out for. That’s a hard thing to admit to yourself and it hurts, I’ll say it hurts, but once you make yourself believe it, then it becomes a liberating thing.”
She thought for a moment. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.”
And
so she was prepared a week later when he told her he was ready to go back to work. He’d been restless for a day or two, pacing back and forth across the living-room rug, jotting incomprehensible notes on long yellow pads of paper, even mumbling and muttering to himself. Then on Monday morning he looked at her over the brim of his second cup of coffee and told her.
“Well, the signs were there,” she said. “You’re sure you don’t want more time off?”
“Positive.”
“And you know what you want to do?”
“Uh-huh. I’m going to use Johnny again.”
“Johnny Speed. How many times have you used him?”
“I don’t know. Too many, I guess. He’s got a lot of miles on the clock but I guess he’s good for another go-round.”
“How long do you think it’ll take?”
“Couple of weeks.”
“Be careful.”
He looked at her. “Oh, come on,” he said. “The violence never touches me, baby. You know that.”
“Oh, but it does.”
“Come off it.”
“It’s a dangerous business.”
“Dangerous business,” he said, tasting the phrase. “I kind of like that.”
“Well, it is.”
“I like the phrase,” he said. “I don’t know that it fits my life—”
“I think it does.”
“—but it certainly fits the current project. Dangerous Business. A Dangerous Business. Which do you prefer?”
“I don’t know. The Dangerous Business?”
“You know, that’s best of all. The Dangerous Business. I think I’m going to use it.”
“Don’t you have to make sure nobody’s used it already?”
“Doesn’t matter. There’s no such thing as copyright on titles. I thought you knew that.”
“I must have forgotten.”
“The Dangerous Business. A Johnny Speed Mystery. Yes, by God, I’m going to use it. It has a nice ring to it and it fits the plot I’ve got in mind.”
“It fits, all right,” she said. But he was caught up in the book he’d start that morning and didn’t even notice the tone of her voice.
Death Wish
The cop saw the car stop on the bridge but didn’t pay any particular attention to it. People were apt to pull over to the side in the middle of the span, especially late at night when the traffic was thin and they could stop for a moment without somebody’s horn stabbing them in the back. The bridge was a graceful steel parabola over the deep channel of river that cut the city neatly in two, and the center of the bridge provided the best view of the city, with the old downtown buildings clustered together on the right, the flour mills downriver on the left, the gentle skyline, the gulls maneuvering over the river. The bridge was the best place to see it all. It wasn’t private enough for the teenagers, who were given to long-term parking and preferred drive-in movie theaters or stretches of road along the north bank of the river, but sightseers stopped often, took in the view for a few moments, and then continued across.