The Eye: A Novel of Suspense Page 6

  “Anything comes up during the night,” Manders told them, “I’ll get you on the phone.”

  “Thanks,” Tobin said. “I feel so much better knowing that.”

  Oxman said good night to Tobin in the squadroom and left the precinct house alone, down the thirteen concrete steps to the street. As he walked to his car, he glanced about him at the darkened apartment and office buildings nearby; the night concealed the disrepair of the old brick structures. The warm air seemed clean and oddly comforting. His footfalls gave off a resonant, larger-than-life sound that seemed to fly back at him from all directions.

  Like most New Yorkers, his feelings about his city were paradoxical. He was a native; he’d been born in Brooklyn, and he’d lived there near Prospect Park until his mother’s death from cancer when he was nine. Then he’d been sent away to Chicago to be raised by an aunt who had treated him decently enough but always in a brisk and impersonal fashion that was the antithesis of his mother’s natural effusiveness and warmth. He remembered most his mother’s rich laugh, her head thrown back, her long dark hair swaying with her mirth. She had been healthy-looking, vital, right up to the final days. His mind, but not his heart, had finally forgiven her for leaving him and his father alone.

  At eighteen, after his graduation from high school, he had returned to live with his father, who had managed a chain of dry-cleaning establishments in Queens. He and his father had never been close, and he had resented the decision to ship him off to Chicago after his mother’s death, although he understood that it was grief that had made the old man do it. But after his return they had spent time together, and grown to know each other; they had remained close until his father’s death seven years ago. They had exchanged letters regularly during Oxman’s hitch in the Army in Europe, then during his brief stay at the University of Michigan.

  With both the Army and his fling as a student among younger and more serious scholars behind him, he had returned again to New York. Always he seemed drawn back to the city. From its majestic towers to its miserable tramps in the Bowery, it was part of him, and he of it. Though he had never been able to articulate the fact, he had known it even in his early twenties. In a way, it was the reason why he had married Beth—a native New Yorker like himself—four months after meeting her at a party in the Village. And it was what had compelled him to join the New York City Police Department that same year.

  He’d been a good cop from the beginning. Stable. Steady. Marked by superiors as a methodical and conscientious officer whose career would be useful and rewarding, if never meteoric. He had never questioned an order, never questioned the law. He had always understood the law, at least that aspect of it that made being a cop difficult sometimes, that a cop had to accept and learn to work around.

  Then, four years ago, he had been injured in the line of duty, struck by a getaway car driven by a frightened armed robber who was out on parole at the time he tried to heist a luggage shop on West Forty-fourth. Oxman had seen his face through the windshield; the felon had realized that, had stopped the car and reversed it, deliberately swerving to run him down. Oxman had leapt out of the way, but not soon enough to avoid a broken pelvis. He’d still managed to draw his revolver and fire several shots at the car, blowing a tire; the holdup man had been caught and charged with attempted murder as well as armed robbery. But plea bargaining had gotten him off with a seven-year sentence, and he had been paroled after two years and three months and was still free as far as Oxman knew. Oxman had spent weeks in a hospital bed and almost a year as an outpatient. He still limped a bit in cold weather.

  Maybe that incident was what had made him begin to wonder about the law, about his life. It was about that time that the worm of doubt had started to bore into his mind. It was easy enough to accept the law’s faults if you looked at them objectively; but this was something else. This was personal. And the assailant, protected by the law, had gotten off with nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

  From that time on, he had fallen into the habit of looking at things through the eyes of the victim, or through the eyes of the horrified bystander. A cop shouldn’t do that. A cop couldn’t do that and keep on being a good cop.

  Or, hell, maybe he could; Oxman just didn’t know anymore. He didn’t know anything anymore, he thought as he unlocked and opened his car door. Maybe the city had finally begun to wear him down. Or maybe his marriage had, because it had stopped being a good marriage a long time ago. A combination of things, probably, burdens accumulated by time and growing heavier by the year.

  I’m getting old, he thought. Old and tired.

  When he arrived at his house in Queens he saw that the windows were dark. It was eleven thirty; Beth would no doubt be in bed asleep. He let himself in, moving as quietly as the burglars he had sought over the years. He made his way through the dark living room to the kitchen, switched on the overhead light. There were dirty dishes in the sink. Water from the faucet dripped steadily into one of the dishes with a rhythmic plink, plink, plink.

  He gave the faucet handle a twist and the dripping stopped. He got a glass down from the cupboard, poured some milk, drank it in three long gulps. Then he set the glass in the sink along with the other dishes, turned off the light, and went into the bedroom.

  Beth was lying on her side: mound of hip, fan of tousled blond hair splayed over her pillow. The portable TV she used as a nightlight was tuned soundlessly to the Tonight Show. While he removed his clothes he thought about waking her, but only fleetingly. He knew that if he did, the result would be rejection and dissatisfaction along with guilt that he couldn’t pity her for her sexually debilitating headaches that puzzled even the best of doctors.

  As he placed his holstered service revolver on the dresser, he saw Beth’s vials of pills on the table by the bed and wondered how many of them were placebos. More than one doctor had suggested that her headaches were a mental as well as physical affliction and might have to do with impending menopause. But no psychiatry for Beth, oh no. Twice she was to begin psychoanalysis and each time she had stomped out on the first visit.

  One of the psychiatrists had confided to Oxman that she might in some way enjoy suffering, as if that idea might be a revelation for him. But it wasn’t. Everyday he saw unconscious motives compel people to destroy their own and others’ lives.

  Stepping into his pajama bottoms, he glanced at Johnny Carson moving in his curiously marionettelike way before his studio audience. If it hadn’t been for Beth, Oxman would have turned up the volume; he just wasn’t ready for sleep yet. As it was, he switched off the TV just as Ed McMahon appeared cradling a box of dog food, beaming down at a scottie eagerly lapping the product from a bowl.

  He was careful not to disturb Beth as he crawled into bed. He lay curled on his side, facing away from her, toward the deeper darkness of the wall. His eyes were wide open. The homicides on West Ninety-eighth Street were still heavy on his mind, but they weren’t the only things that were keeping him awake.

  In spite of himself, he couldn’t seem to stop thinking about Jennifer Crane.

  THE COLLIER TAPES

  Slip of darkness, blackest patch of night, shadow in smooth motion among shadows—how futile! The Eye has observed the evil ones come and go, seen them through the windows of their apartments. Though they don’t know it, they live only on my whim. I must confess that I enjoy that. Any time I choose I can cancel all their debts and favors owed, put an end to their petty lives and send them into the depths of hell. Heed the Book of Common Prayer, evil ones: “Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.”

  Only a matter of time. Only a matter of my choosing.

  My first choice was Charles Unger. Have I explained about him? Not in enough detail, perhaps, and he is important. Because he was the first, and because it was through him that I realized my destiny and achieved my apotheosis.

  The Eye had closely observed him, along with all the others in my universe. A cantankerous old man, red of n
ose and gray of hair, a prodigious consumer of alcohol. But it was not drink that led to his death, except indirectly; it was rudeness. For he was rude to me, and that is a form of blasphemy.

  I was walking one afternoon in the midst of that which is mine, having parked my car some distance from West Ninety-eighth, as I generally do. I felt my power that day as I walked among my children, felt it surging through me like an electrical current. And Charles Unger, whom I considered to be without sin at that time, rudely shoved me aside so he could cross an intersection before the traffic light changed. A cab screamed to a stop quite near me. Furious, I protested. But Unger was drunk; he became loud and belligerent, turned and shoved me again so that I stumbled backward over the curb and almost fell. Then he walked on in mortal ignorance.

  I was stunned and I did not act immediately. But I understood as I watched the lurching old man push his way through other pedestrians and cross the street that he had made a fatal mistake. In my mind he was already dead, and so he would be, and was, in actuality. He had left me no choice. As Bailey said, “He hath no power that hath not power to use.” So, in a sense, not acting against Charles Unger would have diminished my power.

  The Eye observed him for several days after that. I would smile as I watched him idly stumble about the neighborhood. He was restless in his retirement, unsure of how to spend his time, not realizing that nearly all of it was already spent. Then one night I parked my car in the usual place, walked into my domain, and waited for Charles Unger to return from a tavern he habitually frequented in the evenings. And after first whispering to him of vengeance and of the wages of sin, I released him from this life.

  On my way home last night, I understood that Unger would not be the last of the evil ones to receive swift justice by the hand of the deity. Death is the swift and deserved end for the sinner. To eliminate the wicked is to strengthen the lives of the chaste and the pure. A good god is a just god, and I was determined to be both.

  It was not difficult to select the second evil one to die. Peter Cheng I had observed with various young men, some Chinese and some Caucasian; his homosexual couplings were a mockery of all that is good and clean. And then, one night before his unshaded window, the Eye observed him lewdly exhausting his passion with two young men in leather costumes, while an obese Chinese woman looked on, stroking herself. It was bizarre and repugnant. Could I allow Peter Cheng to remain among the living after this?

  I forgave him as I sent the bullet into his brain and freed him from his sins. I forgave Charles Unger as well; and I will forgive all the others who are to follow.

  Oh, I admit again that Martin Simmons was a mistake, and yet I have decided that he, too, deserved to die. He was a fornicator, an evildoer; he brought his evil into my universe, and he paid justly with his life. I have forgiven him too.

  The Eye continues to scan the windows of the buildings across the river, even as I dictate these words. Most of the windows are dark now, shades and curtains drawn; most of my children are asleep. The sinners too—some of them. The brief sleep before the final one soon to come.

  Do they suspect, any of them, what is in store? Do they sense the higher purpose that is mine, or glimpse the specter of pale horse and rider? There is poetry in death, as every poet knows. Perhaps those about to die can somehow detect the meter of their own imminent demise.

  Yet if they do, they ignore it. Far removed (though not so far as they choose to believe) from the primal state, they do not listen to the cells of their own bodies, the ancient silent voices hinting of eternity. They do not really know. And they will not, until the pale horse appears before them, and his name that sits on him shall be Death.

  PART 2

  SATURDAY

  SEPTEMBER 21

  9:00 A.M.

  WALLY SINGER

  When Marion announced that she was going to Brooklyn to spend the day with her sister, Singer barely managed to hide his elation. It surprised him. She didn’t get along with her sister; hell, she didn’t get along with anybody, the fat cow. But she was upset about the shootings, she said, and she wanted to get out of the neighborhood for the day. She couldn’t talk to him; all he cared to do was argue and pick on her. Ellen, at least, was family and would offer a sympathetic ear.

  Singer told her he didn’t care what she did, and she was gone at 8:45. He waited fifteen minutes, spending the time in the bathroom trimming his sparse beard and daubing himself liberally with English Leather cologne. Then he locked the apartment, rode the elevator downstairs, and went out to the street.

  There was an unmarked police car parked at the curb. He’d seen it before, so he knew it belonged to the detectives from the Twenty-fourth Precinct. He didn’t like the police much, particularly the sandy-haired cop named Oxman; Oxman’s shrewd eyes and probing questions, boring at him as if he were guilty of something, had left him with a bad case of nerves yesterday. Still, there was a certain comfort in knowing the law was around. Nothing else was going to happen with the police crawling all over the block.

  Singer crossed the street, went up the steps of 1279, and pressed the button alongside the smudged white card that read 2-C Cindy Wilson. It took a full minute for Cindy’s voice to say scratchily from the intercom box, “Yes, who is it?”

  “It’s Wally. Buzz me in.”

  “Wally! Yes, just a second …”

  The lock on the entrance door made a burring sound. Singer pushed inside, climbed the stairs to the second floor. Cindy had the door open and was peering out when he came down the hall. She was wearing a dressing gown over a baby-doll nightgown; her dark hair was tousled and she looked sleepy. Singer’s eyes moved over her body as he approached. She wasn’t much to look at, really, but she had a damned good body, slender, well filled out. God, it was nice to have a slim woman after all the years with Marian.

  As soon as he was inside, she shut the door and threw the dead-bolt locks. Then she turned, put her arms around him, and kissed him lingeringly. Singer let his hands slide over the silky roundness of her buttocks, cupping them, pulling her tight against him. But she wasn’t ready for fun and games yet; she broke the kiss, eased away from him. Her eyes, he saw, had purplish half-moons under them, as if she hadn’t slept much during the night.

  “It’s so early,” she said. “How did you get out?”

  “Marian’s gone for the day, visiting her sister in Brooklyn.”

  He reached for her again, but she placed her hand against his chest. “Wait, Wally. I’m still half-asleep; I need some coffee.”

  “We can have coffee later,” he said.

  “No, I need some now. It won’t take a minute. I didn’t sleep very well and I’m still a little groggy.”

  She started away to the kitchen. Singer curbed his impatience and followed her, watching the roll and sway of her hips, the outline of her thighs under the thin gown. He could feel heat stirring in his groin. It had been four days since he’d last been to bed with her and he was damned horny. After he’d finally got rid of the detective, Oxman, and come over to see her yesterday, she’d been too upset to do any screwing. He had tried to talk her into it without success, so he’d gone home frustrated. And picked another fight with Marian as soon as she came back, because by then he’d been in a lousy mood and fighting with her gave him a measure of release.

  The kitchen was cluttered with dirty dishes, overflowing garbage bags, food remnants all over the table and the floor. The front room, with its worn furniture and piles of movie magazines, was in similar disarray. Cindy was something of a slob, but it didn’t bother Singer half as much as Marian’s tendencies in the same direction. Everything about Marian bothered him, including the fact that she was intelligent. Cindy, on the other hand, wasn’t much in the brains department, and he liked that just fine. He liked having a woman who was his intellectual inferior, a woman he could manipulate, a woman who listened to what he said and thought he was somebody important.

  She put coffee water on to boil. Sitting at the table, she brushed
crumbs off onto the floor and then ran spread fingers through her hair and yawned. “God,” she said, “I can’t seem to wake up.”

  “Why couldn’t you sleep last night?”

  “You know why. The shootings …”

  “Stop worrying about that. Nothing’s going to happen to you or me.”

  “But don’t they make you afraid?”

  “No,” he lied. The shootings did worry him, did make him a little afraid, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. Or Marian or anybody else. The way he felt was nobody’s business but his own. “The police will find out who’s doing it. They’ll get him.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I really think so.”

  She yawned again. “I took a cab home last night,” she said. “I can’t afford it, you know, but I just couldn’t come on the subway.”

  Cindy worked as a waitress at a restaurant on Columbus Avenue near Lincoln Center, from four to eleven, five days a week. That was where Singer had first met her; he’d gone there with Marian one night for dinner, and Cindy had smiled at him in a more than impersonal way, as if she liked what she saw. He liked what he saw too, and he’d gone back a few days later, alone. She’d been impressed when he told her he was an artist; creative people fascinated her, she said. Then they’d found out they were neighbors—one of those crazy coincidences that happen sometimes in a city like New York. She’d been living across the street from him for almost a year and yet they’d never run into each other before, they’d had to meet by chance at a restaurant.

  He’d asked her to go to a movie with him and she’d accepted. After that it was walks in Riverside Park, drinks in a couple of bars on Broadway. And after that, just ten days after he’d gone back to the restaurant, it was afternoons in her bed any time he could get away. Cindy was divorced and she lived alone, so there was no problem there. The only hassle was that her ex-husband was trying to convince her to let him move back in and he kept showing up unannounced. Once he’d almost caught them together. That had been a bad time for Singer; the ex-husband was a truck driver, a big bastard, and mean from what Cindy told him. Singer didn’t consider himself a coward, but neither did he go looking for trouble. He was careful now never to see Cindy on Sundays or Mondays, the two days her ex-husband was off work.