Death Wish

Watching him across the restaurant table Paul only grunted now and then to show he was listening. He hadn’t decided what tack to take in discussions like this; he knew they would come up, but should he defend his actions or condemn them?

In the meantime he listened very carefully to everyone—listened for inflections in their voices. He had to: it wasn’t what they said but what they didn’t. He had sensitive ante

That was the hardest part to bear. There was no one he could tell. No one to confide in.

No one at all.

It was important to avoid patterns. The police often worked on a modus-operandi basis. Once they pieced together a pattern in his activities they might be able to set traps for him. There had to be no commonalities from one act to the next: no regular time intervals, no regular time-of-day, no pattern of area concentration.

Thinking back he realized he had begun to create a kind of geographical pattern. He had started on the upper West Side in Riverside Park. The second killing had been in Central Park near Fifth Avenue. Both within walking distance of his apartment. Then he had moved down into the truck district on the border between Chelsea and the West Village. After that the East Village. It was begi

Avoid it, then. Backtrack this time. The West Village.

Hudson, Greenwich, Horatio, West Twelfth, down Bank Street. He carried a paper bag in which he had a carton of milk and a loaf of bread: a man carrying a package looked less suspicious.

It was just past two o’clock in the morning when he came up Seventh Avenue and entered the subway at Twelfth Street. Dropped his token in the slot, pushed through the turnstile and went down the stairs to the platform.

The smell was foul. The station was empty at this hour; his feet were sore and he stood wearily with his shoulder tipped against the clock pillar, waiting for the express.

He looked a good mark and he expected to be accosted but no one else entered the station. The train roared into the tu

The train crash-crashed through the Eighteenth Street local station without stopping. A Transit Patrolman walked through the car and stopped to shake the wino awake and give him a lecture; Paul couldn’t hear the words. The cop got the wino on his feet and prodded him ahead through the door at the car-end vestibule. When it opened, sound rushed in, and a cold wind. The door slid partway shut and lodged there. One of the black workmen got up and pushed it closed.

At Pe

The train screeched into the lights of the Times Square station and threw Paul around on the seat when it braked to a sharp halt. Two tough kids entered the car and sat down facing Paul. Hubcap collectors, he thought drily. They gave him insolent looks and one of them took out a pocket knife, opened it and began to clean his fingernails.

You could tell they were scum by looking at them. How many old women had they mugged? How many tenement shops had they knocked over?

The earsplitting racket of the train would cover the sound of the shots. He could leave them dead in the car and they might not be found until the train got somewhere in the Bronx.

No. Too many risks. At least three people had seen him in this car—the patrolman and the two workmen. They might remember. And suppose someone at Seventy-second Street boarded the car while Paul was stepping out of it? A subway was a trap; too easy to be cornered.

If they accosted him he would take the risk. Otherwise he would let them go. So it’s up to you two. He watched them narrowly.

They didn’t pay him much attention. They both looked sleepy—strung out on heroin? In any event they didn’t stir until the train scraped into the station. They were on their feet ahead of Paul and he followed them across the platform and up the stairs. Maybe they would stop and jump him here.

They didn’t. Out through the turnstiles, through the back door, across the traffic island and the pedestrian crossing to the corner of Seventy-first and Amsterdam. The boys walked south across the street and down the avenue sidewalk and Paul let them go; the precinct station was just around the corner down there and anyhow it was too close to his apartment. He wondered if they could realize how lucky they were.

19

The party was overcrowded in Sam and Adele’s small apartment; people stood around in shifting clusters and the place smelled of the rain guests had brought in on their coats. Despite the cold outside, the air conditioners were ru

The talk was loud and blasphemous with forced heartiness, everyone shouting to be heard; they pounded their speeches through the litany of personal questions and world problems, current movies and politics. Sam and Adele prowled the room refilling drinks and making sure people were mixing with one another—they had always been expert hosts; they introduced Paul to the lady stockbroker and later to the girl magazine-writer as if to say “Take your choice,” and a few moments later he spotted them doing the same with the ex-roommate from Denver.

The lady stockbroker revealed a new side he hadn’t detected during office hours—a knife-edged garrulous militancy for Women’s Lib—and he managed to separate himself from her quickly. The girl doing the article on East Side cave dwellers was jittery and afflicted with a tendency to reach too frequently and aggressively for fresh drinks. She smoked steadily with suicidal drags, jetting smoke from her nostrils. Paul found her equally off-putting and drifted into conversation with the Dundees until Adele went around nudging everybody toward the dining table to collect food from the buffet selection she had laid on. There was a confusion of finding places to sit; they sat on the windowsills and the floor and ate with paper plates on their knees.

Sam brought him a fresh drink. “Careful with this stuff—it’s got water in it. You know what they say about pollution.”

Paul waved his thanks with the glass. “Happy a

The talk became looser; crowded together the guests dropped confidences with increasing frankness. Gradually the men became more lecherous, the women more amorous, unburdening themselves to one another with hurt I-want-to-be-loved smiles. The girl who wrote magazine articles said to Paul, “You really seem to understand,” and reached out for his hand.