361 - Donald E. Westlake [58]
I smiled at her earnestness and the well-memorized sentence, phrased and rephrased in countless imaginary dialogues. “Once you marry Mr. Partridge,” I told her, “you’ll be able to overcome Mr. Cheever’s influence, I’m sure.”
She blushed. She was light enough to do it beautifully. Her fingers fussed with the papers on her desk.
I was sorry to embarrass her, she was a pleasant girl. But she would sooner answer my question if distracted. I said, “Could you give me Mr. Cheever’s home address? I do have to talk to him today.”
“Yes, of course!” She was overwhelmingly grateful at something else to think about. She scooped up a small notebook and leafed through it. I borrowed pencil and paper and copied down the address. It was only a few blocks away, on 110th Street, a building facing the park on the north side.
It was a sprawling old stone apartment building, dating back to Harlem’s days of eminence, when all four sides of the park were limited to the white well-to-do. It had fallen since. Plaster peeled in the huge foyer. The same drab obscenity was scratched seven times in the elevator walls. The eighth floor corridor was marred by bubbled, cracked, dry and eroded paint crumbling from the walls. I went through a gray door marked service E-H. I was in a small pentagonal gray room. Bags of rubbish leaned against the walls. The concrete floor was a darker gray. The four doors curving around me in Cinemascope each had a letter scrawled on it in white paint, far less professionally than on the front apartment entrances out along the corridor.
The door marked G was locked. I stopped when I realized how relieved that made me.
I had killed one man without meaning to. I had killed another man in the midst of rapid action, without having a chance to think about it. I had no idea whether I could kill a man coldly and intentionally.
What if I couldn’t? To talk of revenge is one thing, but what if I couldn’t do it?
I forced into my mind my last picture of Dad, dying in terror, spewing blood. I thought of Bill, and the wife I hadn’t met. I remembered how I had looked in the full-length mirror at Lake George. I felt the dead seed in my head where a small glass football could not replace an eye. I looked at the jagged hole that had been clawed into my life.
But it did no good. I didn’t hate Cheever. I didn’t hate any of them. I felt a sad lonely pity for myself, and that was all.
Wasted, it was all wasted. I was frail and ineffectual, I’d come all this way for nothing.
I leaned back against the entrance door and slid down it till I was sitting on the floor, knees high before my chest, raincoat bunched around my hips. I crossed my forearms on my knees and rested my brow on my arms. Weak, and wasted, and meaningless. Lost, and broken, and impotent.
Until I got mad, at myself. I raised my head and glowered at the white-painted G and whispered stupid insults at myself in idiotic fury. And then after a while that dulled too, and I just sat there, legs stretched out now, and looked at the bags of rubbish, and let my head do whatever it wanted.
I sat there about two hours. When I got up my back was stiff, but I had my role straightened out. I had jerrybuilt a justification for my existence. I was a weak and unworthy vessel, but I would take the life from William Cheever and the other one. If I had been strong and capable, I could kill them out of a cold fury, a dispassionate rage. Instead, I would kill them cheaply, I would kill them only because that was what I was supposed to do.
Back doors get cheap locks. A