There was no escaping it. If he was to help beyond the marginal assistance he had already given, he would have to step into the problem completely. He could no longer feel it around the edges, trying to gauge its size and shape and substance from the fringe, like the blind man limning the elephant from the heft of its tail or trunk alone. He must embrace the problem, fully. Worse, he must step inside it and learn how its heart beat. It was a task he dreaded, a task he knew Karen Crist fully expected him to take on. He was good at the other process, the basic police work that solved most cases. He was as good at it as anyone, better than most. But it was not his genius.
If Becker was to help, if he was to have any chance of stopping Lamont before he killed another boy, he would have to live with the photographs of the dead victims. Becker quailed at the prospect. The price was always too damned high.
The photographs of the dead boys were spread across the floor like so many miniature corpses, as if Becker’s living room had become the scene of a slaughter. Before laying out the pictures, Becker had turned on every light in the room and positioned his favorite chair so his back was against the wall. He was used to fear, but he did not welcome it. It had become a frequent visitor, but never a friend and, when possible, he did all he could to diminish its effects. Horror films caused him to react with the fright of a young child, and he restricted his reading to the nonviolent safety of nonfiction and history. Becker needed no goads to his imagination; it was already filled with real-life horrors. Where others delighted in the vicarious theater thrills of being safely terrified by madmen with axes stalking baby-sitters. Becker winced and looked away. He knew it was all too true and possible.
With the room brilliantly lighted, the colors of the wounds stood out starkly against the pallor of the boys’ bodies. The original lividity of the contusions had waned after death, but the difference in color that remained was enough to show the relative age of the bruises. The older ones had begun to fade; the latest, the ones caused by blows administered on the day of death, were still intense against the surrounding flesh. The boys had been beaten over a period of time. The scientifically dry forensic report had estimated the floggings took place over a relatively short period of time, perhaps three weeks. A short period of time, Becker thought derisively. Twenty-one days of torment were a lifetime in themselves.
He stared at the photographs for a long time, forcing himself to see every detail, to let the pain the boys had felt reach out and engulf him. Then, forcing himself to move against his own dread, he crossed the room and one by one turned out the lights.
Becker sat on the floor, surrounded by the pictures, and let the demons come. He was at home, but he was no longer in the safety of his own living room. His mind was once more in the pitch-black cellar of his youth.
He felt again the density of the darkness, an envelope heavy with menace that moved across his shoulders and down his back like a malevolent, living thing. It seemed to ripple over him like a giant serpent, and even though the muscles in his back twitched with warning for him to move he knew that to turn was worse, for he might have to see the creature face to face, its eyes glowing like fire in the dark.
He did not know how long he had been banished to the cellar; there was no time there, no way to mark the minutes except to count the terrified throbbing of the blood in his veins. Nor did he understand what he had done to deserve the punishment of which the cellar was only the prelude. He thought wildly, trying to remember what childish indiscretion had doomed him, what offense had merited this retribution. It was only much later in life that he would realize it was his punishment that mattered, not the crime.
They always left him alone in the dark so very long. Shivering with fright, fearing abandonment as much as he feared the creatures that peopled his imagination in the blackness, he would be almost relieved to hear the door open at last. So alone and so scared that he almost welcomed the appearance of his tormentor.
And finally there he stood, the object of Becker’s love and loathing all at once. The heavy tread upon the stairs. The sour smell of beer on his breath. The matter-of-fact tone that only gradually rose to anger.
The beatings often began as nothing more than a chore, dutifully but wearily tended to.
“I hope you’ve had a chance to think about your behavior,” he would say.
Or, “Your mother tells me you were a bad boy.”
Or, “Anything to say for yourself?” in a voice of such reason, as if there was room for discussion, a chance for repeal or pardon. It was often the cruelest hoax, giving young Becker the flash of hope, as if a chance to explain himself or plead for mercy would lessen his sentence by as much as a single blow.
Only later would the voice drop its veil of civilization. Then it would be “bastard” and “little son of a bitch” as the rain of blows grew into a torrent.
The boy Becker would cry, of course, and clutch his father’s legs and promise to be good and promise to try harder and promise and promise and promise. As if anyone was listening. As if there were some way to avoid punishment at the hands of parents who took their delight from it. As if there was any offense so vile that a child would warrant such beatings at the hands of his loved ones.
Over time it was the “loved ones” part of the equation that injured him the most. The body could recover and grow strong. But the shock, the continually stunning revelation that his abusers, the ones to whose whim his body was held constant hostage, were the people he loved most in the world, was the part that hurt most of all and did the deepest damage.
For it was not always this way. There were times, many times, when they seemed to love him. There were times when his father would ruffle his hair with the same huge hand that delivered the blows, when the voice that growled abuse would cheer him for his athletic skills. Moments when they would laugh at the dinner table at young Becker’s antics or congratulate him on his academic grades. There were times when his mother would caress him with her warm and gentle hands, soothe him with her smile, whisper in her urgent voice to “never tell.” Never. Anyone. To tell was to risk the loss of his family’s love. To risk the loss of the very family itself. Young Becker learned the value of secrets and the deeper truth that everyone possessed them.
There were also other moments when his father’s furies would overtake him so swiftly that he would send the boy sprawling across the floor with a cuff or a kick. But these impromptu beatings were rare and quickly over. They seemed to frighten both his mother and father with their volatility and caprice.
His father, Becker knew, prided himself on being a rational man, a reasonable man, a man in control of himself. Spontaneous violence was contrary to his self-image. Both parents preferred ordered, predetermined, “rational” justice. They liked to have him beaten in a way that was in keeping with their middle-class persona.
Now in the darkness of his living room the adult Becker shrunk once more from the abrupt and shocking sting of the blows, clutched his father’s leg, whined and moaned and cried and promised-and divined his own version of the truth of human nature-and his own. As he had over the years several decades earlier, Becker formed his own template of a starkly different kind than most. But not all.
He knew he was not alone in his vision of the world, or in the bent and ugly pattern of passion that had gouged a space in his heart. There were others out there. He could recognize them. He wondered if they could recognize him before it was too late.
Wiltse, David
The Edge of Sleep
Chapter 6
I F IT HAD BEEN HIS CHOICE, Edgar Rappaport would not have reported his incident with Dee to the police because he was afraid that word of it would get back to his wife. He could explain his broken nose to her in a number of ways. The multiple bruises could have been the result of a mugging. Mimi would probably accept even being locked in his own car as the cruel whim of thieves, although by the time he got home there would be no way for her to know about his hours in the trunk curled atop his sportswear samples. He had bled on two golf shirts and crushed and wrinkled a peach-and-cream-colored tennis skirt almost beyond recognition.
The police wouldn’t accept a story of mugging, however; not after they had been summoned by the motel owner, who had finally responded to his muffled cries for help and found him in full possession of his wallet, credit cards, and cash. Edgar had no choice but to tell them the full story-or a slightly edited version that omitted his
