Pittman stared at the copy of the check.
“Well, are you going to admit it, or are you going to make me go to the trouble of bringing you and the cabbie face-to-face so he can identify you?”
Pittman exhaled tensely. Given what he intended to do seven days from now, what difference did it make? So I broke into a house to save an old man’s life, he thought. Is that so big a crime? What am I trying to hide?
All the same, he hesitated. “Yes. It was me.”
“There. Now don’t you feel better?”
“But I can explain.”
“Of course.”
“After I call my lawyer.”
Pittman passed the detective at the door to the bedroom and entered the living room, heading for the telephone.
“We’re not going to have to go through that, are we?” The detective stalked after him. “This is a simple matter.”
“And I want to keep it simple. That’s why I want to call my lawyer. So there aren’t any misunderstandings.”
Pittman picked up the phone.
“I’m asking you not to do that,” the detective said. “I have just a few questions. There’s no need for an attorney. When you were with the old man, did he say anything?”
Pittman shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Did he say anything?”
“What’s that go to do with…? So what if…?”
The detective stepped closer, his face stern. “Did… the… old… man… say… anything?”
“Gibberish.”
“Tell me.”
Pittman continued to hold the phone. “It didn’t make any sense. It sounded like Duncan something. Then something about snow. Then… I don’t know… I think he said Grollier.”
The detective’s features tightened. “Did you tell anybody else?”
“Anybody else? What difference would…? Wait a minute. This doesn’t feel right. What’s going on here? Let me see your identification.”
“I already showed you.”
“I want to see it
The detective shrugged. “This is all the identification I need.”
The detective reached beneath his suit coat, and Pittman stiffened, his pulse speeding at the sight of the gun the detective pulled out. The gun’s barrel was unusually long. Pittman suddenly realized that it wasn’t a barrel but a silencer attached to the barrel.
Policemen didn’t carry silencers.
“You meddling shit, you give me any more trouble and I’ll put a goddamn bullet up your nose. Who else did you tell?”
The tip of the silencer snagged. As the man’s gaze flickered down toward his suit coat, Pittman reacted without thinking, a reflexive response. Despite his self-destructive intentions, he had no control over his body’s need to defend itself against sudden fear. Startled, in a frenzy, he swung the phone with all his might, cracking its plastic against the man’s forehead.
The man lurched backward. Blood streaked his brow. He cursed, struggling to focus his vision, raising the pistol.
Terrified, Pittman struck again, smashing the man’s nose. More blood flew. The man fell backward. He walloped onto a coffee table, shattered its glass top, crashed through, and slammed against the floor, his upturned head ramming against the metal rim of the table.
Staring at the pistol in the man’s hand, Pittman raised the phone to strike a third time, only to discover that he’d stretched the extension cord to its limit. Trembling, he dropped the phone and searched desperately around for something else with which to hit the man. He grabbed a lamp, about to throw it down at the man’s head, when at once he realized that the man wasn’t moving.
6
The man’s eyes were open. So was his mouth. His head was propped against the far metal rim of the coffee table. His legs, bent at the knees, hung over the near rim.
Holding the lamp high, ready to throw it, Pittman stepped closer. The man’s chest wasn’t moving.
Dear God, he’s dead.
Time seemed to have accelerated. Simultaneously Pittman felt caught between heartbeats, as if time had been suspended. For seconds that might have been minutes, he continued to stare down at the man with the gun. Slowly he set the lamp back on its table. He knelt beside the man, his emotions in chaos.
How did…? I didn’t hit him hard enough to…
Christ, he must have broken his neck when he smashed through the glass. His head hid the metal side of the table.
Then Pittman noticed the blood pooling on the floor under the man-a lot of it.
Afraid that the man would spring into motion and aim the gun at him, Pittman touched the corpse’s arm and shifted the body. He swallowed bile when he saw that a long shard of glass had been rammed into the man’s back, between his shoulder blades.
Pittman’s face felt clammy.
He was thirty-eight years old. He had never been in the military. Apart from the previous night and the Saturday seven years earlier when the two men had broken his jaw, his only experience with violence had been through people he had interviewed who were acquainted with violence, either as victims, criminals, or police officers.
And now he had killed a man. Appalled by the blood on the telephone, he gingerly set it on its receptacle.
What am I going to…?
Abruptly he worried that somebody had heard the crash. He swung toward the wall behind which the neighbor’s television blared-people laughing, an announcer saying something about a trip to Jamaica, people applauding, a game show. He expected to hear urgent footsteps, the neighbor pounding on the door.
Instead, what he heard was the TV announcer giving out a prize on the game show. No matter the noise from the television, his apartment seemed eerily quiet.
What if I was wrong and he really
Breathing with effort, Pittman opened the man’s suit coat and took out the police identification that the man had shown him. A card next to the badge said that the detective’s name was William Mullen. The photograph on the ID matched the face of the dead man. But as Pittman examined it, he was unnerved to discover that the photograph had been pasted over another photograph, which didn’t look anything like the corpse. Pittman checked the man’s wallet, and in addition to almost four hundred dollars, he found a driver’s license in the name of Edward Halloway, residence in Alexandria, Virginia. Pittman had never heard of any New York City policeman who lived several states away. This definitely wasn’t a cop.
What the hell was he, then?
7
The phone rang.
