Night-Bloom (12 page)

Baum glanced sharply at Mooney, then smirked. “You look a little puzzled, Francis. Why? What’s troubling you? This is not exactly the way you see things, ay? You want it all neat and convenient with motives, the way it was a hundred years ago when you grew up. Well, it’s not, my friend. All that’s changed. I’m sorry to tell you that’s not the way the game’s played today.”

Mooney sat for a time, eyes blinking, tongue sliding across his parched lips. He was unconvinced. At last he spoke. “I just don’t buy this guy in the gray suit. Your model, God-fearing, tax-paying citizen, going back and forth to a job all year. Raising kids. Then, one night a year, going bonkers on a rooftop. That just don’t wash. And like I told you—always in the same area and always the same time of the year.”

“Repetition compulsion.”

Mooney’s eyes opened and he leaned forward. Baum hastened to clarify.

“Repetition compulsion. An overwhelming urge to replicate over and over again certain actions or activities, even if you recognize they are destructive to you. Like your eating, Mooney.”

“Oh, Christ. Don’t
you
start on that now.”

“It’s true. Think about it. It’s not at all uncommon for people to have urges, associate certain actions and undefined emotions with a certain time of year. Why they do it, we can’t say. You say it has something to do with the motion of heavenly bodies as they affect the human psyche. That’s a kind of nice, kitschy little theory you’ve got there about the solstice and all. But it’s voodoo and I just don’t happen to buy it. Still, I grant you, your guy appears to grow active about the end of April, the beginning of May. But, more probably, the repetition of crime during that particular period is merely symbolic of some trauma that person may have suffered years ago during the same period. The person doesn’t necessarily recall the events of the trauma. Undoubtedly, they were painful and he was forced to bury them deep somewhere in his mind. The subconscious, however, doesn’t forget. Like a savings bank, it keeps all of your bad memories on deposit for you. And if you don’t draw on those memories, I mean consciously, the interest builds and builds, compounding itself, until you’ve got quite a nice little bundle there. With your fellow it’s all bottled up for twelve months. Then, on just one night a year, the whole thing is permitted to blow. That’s when he goes up to the roof, beneath the stars, to reenact this perennial ritual.”

Baum’s arm snapped upward and he checked his wristwatch. “Gotta go. I have a session with a recidivist wife-beater.” He laughed and started to gather his papers.

Mooney lumbered out of his chair. “Can we just review this thing before you go?”

Baum’s eyes rose heavenward as though he were pleading for mercy. “You asked for a silhouette, Mooney. I provided one but you’ve spurned it. For the record, however, I’ll repeat. Fortyish. Middle class. Educated. Fastidious. Compulsive. A nitpicker. Highly civilized, but underneath a sump of guilt and self-loathing. In short, my friend,” Baum shot the clasps on his battered briefcase and stuffed it beneath his arm, “look for a solid, upright, pious Christian, patriotic American. You should have no problem, Mooney. There are millions of them out there.” Baum hooted, pounded the detective’s back and bustled out.

“… and you say you were standing approximately here?”

“That’s right.”

“No moon?”

“No moon.”

“So the light was poor. No illumination from any other place? Like across the way?”

“No, man. Like I told you. It was dark, dark, dark.”

“You couldn’t see his face?”

“Nothing.”

“Features. Color. Build?”

“Nothing. Like I told you. The guy’s a hundred feet on the other …”

“Right. Okay. You told me. Let’s check that.” Mooney unwound a long steel tape from a spool. “Could you hold that for me just a minute?”

The young Italian construction worker, Enzo Vitali, grasped an end of the tape while the detective slowly walked the spool out over the tar roof.

It was noon, late May. Bright sunshine. Perfect kite-flying weather. A day for the park, or possibly a ride up into northern Westchester or Connecticut. Eager to finish, Mooney moved along a bit more quickly, for he planned to make a dash out to the track that afternoon where they were racing yearlings.

Buffeting over the rooftops, the wind tended to barrel the big man along. His outsized powder blue trousers flapped and billowed in the twenty-mile-per-hour gusts.

“Now this is where you first saw him?” Mooney came to an abrupt halt at a point on the ledge. “Yeah— Well, maybe a little more to the left.” Obediently, Mooney stepped sideways. “Like this?”

“Yeah. That’s it.”

The detective glanced downward at his tape. “It’s 106 feet. And you say he was standing with his back to you? Elbows on the ledge? Gazing out, like this?” Vitali studied the detective’s pose reflectively. He was a lean, muscular man with dark restless eyes and wavy, meticulously coiffed hair. He was, Mooney judged, no more than twenty-five.

“That’s right. Just lookin’ out like that. Just like you’re doin’ now.”

“When did you first see him?”

“I was standin’ here. Leanin’ against the chimney stack like I’m doin’ now. See?” The young man had got himself into the spirit of the thing. “I’m just waitin’ here for the girl, see? I got nothin’ to do. So I light a cigarette, see? Like this?”

Vitali extracted a cigarette from his package and lit it. “The minute I light it, I see the guy. He must’ve heard my match ‘cause he’s turnin’.”

“Like this?” Mooney swung round.

“Yeah. That’s right. And then … then …”

“He sees you? Right?”

“Yeah. Right. He looks directly at me for a minute.”

“A minute? That’s a long time.”

“Well, maybe less. A little less.”

“Still you don’t see his face?”

“No, man. How could I? Like I told you? It’s too dark.”

Mooney prodded him on. “Then?”

“Then he starts for me. He’s a pretty good-sized guy. I mean I can see that all right. He starts comin’ directly at me and I sense I’m gonna have trouble.” Mooney started walking toward the young man. “He gets about halfway to me and already I’m lookin’ round for somethin’ I can bash the fucker with. A brick, a pipe, anything. But instead of comin’ to me, he hangs a sharp right …”

“Like this?” Mooney veered sharply.

“That’s right. Then heads off there. To the ledge. Where the fire escape is.”

Mooney paced off the distances once again, his spool paying out the measures. “Here?”

“That’s right. Right there.”

Mooney recorded 191 feet in his note pad and glanced gingerly down over the ledge. No more than six feet below was the top-floor fire escape. At the point where he stood was a large chalk circle marked off by the detectives and the forensic unit that had gone over the area several days before for prints and any other possible telltale signs. They had found nothing.

But now, however, there were several witnesses who had actually claimed to have had a view of the alleged “Bombardier” as the newspapers had so fondly christened him. One was Vitali, the construction worker; the other was Mr. Rosenzweig, the widower and retired postal clerk who had seen a person on his fire escape the night of the fatal incident. He too, however, had not seen enough of the man to make any kind of a solid composite description. But just below his fire escape, ten feet or so to the pavement, was a sizable splash of dried blood. That too had a chalk circle marked round it. And a successful blood-typing had been taken from it.

At least Mooney knew now that his man was an AB positive. In the absence of prints, reliable witnesses with corroborating descriptions, or any other hard evidence, blood typing in and of itself was not going to be very helpful. AB positive is a relatively common blood type, far too common to make an ironclad case against a possible suspect. As a matter of fact, Mooney reflected, he himself was an AB positive. A pleasant irony, he thought. He and his quarry now shared a blood bond.

“Anything else?” Enzo Vitali called to Mooney across the roof.

Mooney looked up, suddenly recalling the young man.

“Can I go now?”

“Sure. Sure, go ahead. I’m goin’ too.” Mooney lumbered over the roof. A picture of strong, spirited yearlings lining up at the post flashed before his eye. “Just don’t leave town without letting us know where we can reach you.”

“A duplex watch beats eighteen thousand vibrations per hour.”

There it was again, the voice strident, pedagogic, and hinting at impending chastisement. As usual, the voice was disembodied. It came from nowhere in particular. He was in a small bright room in the middle of the morning. He sat alone, a young boy at a kitchen table in a tiny room without doors. There were no curtains on the windows and the glare of the sun hurt his eyes. He was reading aloud from a voluminous text. He knew at once that text to be Saunier’s
Treatise on Modern Horology.

The room in which he sat was the old breakfast room off the kitchen before its refurbishment over a dozen years ago. No one but him appeared to be in the kitchen. Yet, as he read aloud in the high, tremulous voice of childhood, he had the inescapable conviction that his every move was being carefully monitored.

“The diameter of the impulse wheel is two-thirds that of the great wheel. It has thirteen teeth and beats 14,400 vibrations per hour. The balance moves slowly and is provided with a weaker balance spring that necessarily . .

Even in his half-sleep he felt a sense of growing agitation, and then brief, faintly erotic sensations. “… and therefore experience confirms that duplex escapements yielding as many as 21,600 vibrations per hour have been found to be accurate timekeepers …”

The voice, his own, drifted off, while the feeling of agitation and excitement quickened. Quite suddenly the lineaments of the darkened room impinged upon his waking eye.

“What are you doing, Myrtle?” he whispered. He never once looked down at the figure huddled slightly below him. Instead he kept his eyes riveted on the shadow-mottled ceiling. “What are you up to?” His voice was quiet and infinitely patient, though he was overcome with disgust. A series of moaning grunts issued from the figure kneeling beside him. He touched the head gently, moving a finger through the kinked, wiry hair, and suffered with quiet forbearance the pawing of his genitals.

There was an uncomfortable sticky wetness now in the region of his unbottoned pajama pants. Several times she raised her head and gasped for breath. For his part, it was a martyrdom. He suffered it all uncomplainingly, not wishing to interrupt her pleasure. All throughout it he stroked the coarse, oddly metallic hair so unpleasant to the touch.

When she was finished he rose without a word, went into the bathroom and washed himself. Returning to bed, he found her lying in the corner at the far side, her face to the wall, and weeping.

It was 4:10 A.M. now. He noted the fact from the red electric numerals on the integer clock beside the bed. How his father would have despised such a clock; charmless and unaesthetic; a clock stripped of all its inherent mystery, reduced to the vulgar functionalism of a common cash register.

She sat at the edge of the bed beside him, weeping. He reached across and stroked the knobby vertebrae beneath the cheap rayon gown.

“There, there.”

“You must hate me, Charley.”

“How could I possibly hate you, Myrtle?”

“I make you sick.”

“You don’t make me sick, Myrtle.”

“Sure I do. I may be dumb, but I’m nobody’s fool. You’re so good—and me—I’m so—” Her voice sniveled at him out of the dark. “Why, you could have your pick of any of the girls down at the bank. What you see in me, I just don’t …”

“I love you, Myrtle.” It sounded hollow, even to him. But he was too weary, too disinterested, to simulate genuine ardor.

“You really mean that, Charley?” She turned round, and leaning on an elbow stared up at him. As she did so, a shaft of moonlight fell across her pinched, birdlike features.

“Of course I mean it.”

She reached an arm round his head and roughly hugged him, pressing her nose into the warm crook of his neck. The odor of cigarette smoke rose out of her hair and mouth.