The Two Timers

You can’t let Kate walk through the city at night looking like that, a voice told him urgently, but the alternative was to crawl after her, to knuckle under. He hesitated, then turned in the opposite direction, numbed with self-disgust, swearing bitterly.

It was almost two hours later when the police cruiser pulled up outside the house.

Breton, who had been standing at the window, ran heavy-footed to the door and dragged it open. There were two detectives, with darkly speculative eyes, and a backdrop of blue uniformed figures.

One of the detectives flashed a badge. “Mr. John Breton?”

Breton nodded, unable to speak. I’m sorry, Kate, he thought, so sorry — come back and we’ll go to the party.

“I’m Lieutenant Convery. Homicide. Do you mind if I come in?”

“No,” Breton said dully. He led the way into the living room, and had to make an effort to prevent himself straightening cushions like a nervous housewife.

“I don’t quite know how to break this to you, Mr. Breton,” Convery said slowly. He had a broad, sunburned face and a tiny nose which made scarcely any division between widely spaced blue eyes.

“What is it, Lieutenant?”

“It’s about your wife. It appears she was walking in the park tonight, without company — and she was attacked.”

“Attacked?” Breton felt his knees begin to swim. “But where is she now? Is she all right?”

Convery shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Breton. She’s dead.”

Breton sank down into a chair while the universe heaved and contracted around him like the chambers of a vast heart suddenly exposed. I did it, he thought, I killed my wife. He was dimly aware of the second detective taking Convery to one side and whispering to him. A few seconds later Convery returned.

“My partner reminds me I’ve jumped the gun a bit, Mr. Breton. Officially, I should have said that the body of a woman had been found with identification on it which suggested she was your wife, but in a clear-cut case I don’t like prolonging things. Just for the record, have you any reason to believe that the body of a woman of about twenty-five, tall, black-and-gold hair, wearing a silver-blue cocktail dress, we found near the 50th Avenue entrance of the city park, would not have been that of Mrs. Breton?”

“No reason. She was out alone this evening, dressed like that.” Breton closed his eyes. I did it — I killed my wife. “I let her go alone.”

“We still have to make a positive identification; if you like, one of the patrolmen will drive you to the morgue.”

“It isn’t necessary,” Breton said. “I can do that much.”

The refrigerated drawer rolled out easily on oiled bearings, forming an efficient cantilever, and a stray thought intruded determinedly on Breton’s mind. A good machine. He looked down at Kate’s cold, dreaming face, and at the jewels of moisture curving precisely along her eyebrows. Of its own accord, his right hand moved out to touch her. He saw the blackness of oil rimming the fingernails, and willed his hand to stop. Thou hast not a stain on thee.

Lieutenant Convery moved into a corner of his field of vision, close at hand yet light-years away across a universe of pulsating fluorescent brilliance, “Is this your wife?”

“Who else?” Breton said numbly. “Who else?”

An indeterminate time later he learned Kate had been clubbed, raped and stabbed. A forensic expert added that they could not be sure of the order in which those things had happened. Breton contained the knowledge of his guilt successfully for a matter of days, while going through senseless formalities, but all the while he knew he was a bomb in which the charge had already ignited, that he was living through the nanoseconds preceding his disintegration into human shrapnel.

It came, with the spurious gentleness of a filmed explosion, on the day after Kate’s funeral. He was walking aimlessly through the city’s north side, along a street of time-defeated buildings. The day was cold and, although there was no rain, the sidewalks were wet. Near an undistinguished corner he found a clean, new feather and picked it up. It was striped pearly gray and white — dropped by a bird in haste — and he remembered how Kate had worn her clothes like plumage. He looked for a windowsill on which to set the feather, like a single lost glove, and saw a man in shabby denims smiling at him from a doorway. Breton let the feather fall, twinkling and tumbling, onto the greasy concrete and covered it with his foot.

His next action to be guided by his own identity came five weeks later, when he opened his eyes in a hospital bed.

The intervening time was not completely lost to him, but it was flawed and distorted like a scene viewed through pebbled glass. He had been drinking hard, annihilating self-awareness with raw spirit, contracting the frontiers of consciousness. And somewhere in the midst of that kaleidoscope world was born an idea which, to his fevered mind, had all the simplicity of genius.

Psychopathic killers were hard to find, the police had told him. They could not hold out much hope in a case like this. A woman who goes into the park at night alone, they seemed to be saying, what did she expect?

Breton had found himself uneasy in their presence, and decided the dismaying thing about the police mentality was that dealing so much with criminals made them aware of another system of morality. Without sympathizing with it, they nevertheless came to understand to some extent, and the needle of their moral compass was deflected. Not their direction — because so long as the amount of bias is known it is still possible to steer — but this, he deduced, was why he felt like a player who did not understand the rules of the game. This was why he was looked at with resentment when he asked what results they were getting — and at some point early in the last weeks he decided to invent new rules.

Kate’s murderer had not been seen and, as he had no circumstantial motive for the killing, there was nothing to link him physically to the crime. But, Breton reasoned, there was another kind of connection. Breton had no way of knowing the killer — but the killer must know him. The case had been well covered by the local papers and television services, both of which had carried Breton’s picture. It would be impossible for the killer not to have shown interest in the man whose life he had so savagely twisted. And, for a time, Breton came to believe that if he encountered the killer on the street, in the park, in a bar, he would know that man by his eyes.

The city was not large, and it was possible that in his lifetime he had, at one time or another, glimpsed every man in it. Obviously, he had to get into the streets and keep moving, going everywhere that people went, making a rapid playback of a lifetime’s exposure to the city’s corporate identity — and someday he would look into another man’s eyes, and he would know. And when that happened…

The mirage of hope glimmered crazily in front of Breton for five weeks, until it was finally extinguished by malnutrition and alcoholic poisoning.

He opened his eyes and knew by some quality of the light on the hospital ceiling that there was snow on the ground outside. An unfamiliar emptiness was gnawing at his stomach and he experienced a sane, practical desire for a dish of thick farmhouse soup. Sitting up in the bed he looked around him and discovered he was in a private room, which was barely rescued from complete anonymity by several sprays of deep-red roses. He recognized the favorite flowers of his secretary, Hetty Calder, and there was a vague memory swirl of her long homely face looking down at him with concern. Breton smiled briefly. In the past, Hetty had almost visibly lost weight every time he got a head cold — he hesitated to think how she might have been affected by his performance over the recent weeks. The desire for food returned with greater force and he reached for the call button.

It was Hetty who, five days later, drove him home from the hospital in his own car.

“Listen, Jack,” she said desperately. “You’ve just got to come and stay with us for a while. Harry and I would be delighted to have you, and with you not having any family of your own…”

“I’ll be fine, Hetty,” Breton said. “Thanks again for the offer, but it’s time I went back home and began gathering up the pieces.”

“But will you be all right?” Hetty was driving expertly through the slush-walled streets, handling the big old car as if she were a man, blowing through her cigarette every now and again to send a flaky cylinder of ash onto the floor. Her sallow face was heavy with anxiety.

“I’ll be all right,” he said gratefully. “I can think about Kate now. It hurts like hell, of course, but at least I’m able to accept it. I wasn’t able to do that before. It’s hard to explain, but I had a feeling there ought to be some