I waited. I didn't see how this fit in.
"Experimenting. In Manhattan." He stopped then, as if I should understand. I didn't.
"How does this relate to Melanie?" I asked.
"No one's been murdered in the city in three weeks."
"Yes," I said.
"It's the heat."
"Beg pardon," I said, "usually heat causes people to go crazy, not to stop going crazy."
"I know," Glisando said. "But we've been studying the effect of weather on the human killing impulse."
"It's a defense contract," his wife said softly, as if I hadn't heard it the first time. It was all I could do not to snap at her. She apparently thought public servants didn't have the intelligence of a gnat.
"As a rule, human beings don't kill each other when the temperature goes below zero," Glisando was saying, "even if they can't leave the house for days. It just doesn't happen. But if the mercury is above ninety degrees for a long time, murder rates climb. We thought if we could isolate the impulse, we could negate it."
"We?"
"We," he said. "I can't go into all of this. I don't understand much of it myself. I was there to be the forecaster, and the predictor, and to help develop computer models on weather patterns. But to make a long story short, we thought we'd isolated the impulse— we had in lesser mammals— so we field-tested on Manhattan."
That woke me up. "Manhattan?"
He nodded. "It's an island, which means it's controllable, and it's got fairly predictable weather patterns. We knew, for example, there'd be a long heat spell this summer. We just didn't know when."
"So you're not causing the heat?"
He laughed, a mirthless sound that was more a reaction to my ignorance than any amusement on his part. "No. Of course not."
"You're causing the murder rate to go down?"
"Actually, my colleagues are. They're biologists and psychologists. I simply worked on the weather aspects of it." He'd said that already. I just hadn't understood it before. Maybe I did need Mrs. Glisando as an interpreter.
"And they do this through—?"
"A combination of chemicals and hormones that have to do with the brain. I don't understand much of this myself, but it's on the disk."
"So they're spraying the city with some kind of chemical?"
"It's not that simple, Detective," he said. "Like I said, it's on the disk."
"The disk is in my hand, not the computer. You can explain it to me."
Glisando shook his head. "I'm not here to talk science. I want to get my daughter cleared."
The man was loony, and his wife wasn't much better. I wanted them out of the precinct. I wanted the case closed.
"In order to clear her, you have to tell me how all this science is relevant," I said.
Glisando glanced at his wife. "We had to test our theory," he said, "in all kinds of weather. Take the fourteenth of February, for example."
The night Dudich had died. The night of the cold spell. The night of all the homicides. I remembered that even before Melanie Glisando had mentioned it to me.
"We had to see if we could make people behave contrary to our assumptions," Glisando said.
"People don't usually kill on cold nights," his wife said, as if I hadn't understood.
I had. I was just in shock. I couldn't believe they'd haul this out to protect their daughter. I couldn't believe anyone would believe I'd believe this.
"If what you're saying is true," I said slowly, "then all the deaths in the city that night could be laid on your doorstep."
"The company's," he said, as if he'd already thought of that.
"And the government's."
He shrugged. "They said it all balances. No one's been dying all summer."
I stared at them. They stared at me. I had nothing to say to them. If his theory was true, then this was something as big as the atomic-bomb tests with human guinea pigs at ground zero, the ones that happened in the fifties. If it wasn't true, it was the strangest story I'd ever heard anyone make up to get someone else off the hook.
And The Silence lent just enough credence to it. More than enough.
There were butterflies in my stomach.
It was my turn to clear my throat. I did, and swallowed hard. "So your program works," I said, trying to keep my voice calm. "And since it does, is it going to spread from city to city? Are you going to cover the countryside with this— chemical?"
He shook his head. "It didn't work."
I frowned. "You just said it did work. No one died."
"But the violence continues. That's what we missed. We didn't change people's basic nature. We just muted it."
"Or made it quirkier," I said, thinking not of this heat wave and The Silence, but of all the bizarre deaths all winter long.
His wife bowed her head. He closed his eyes and turned away from me. I waited, but that last shut them up. They seemed to have nothing more to say.
"I'm keeping the disk," I said finally.
Glisando turned back to me. "Illness makes people think irrational thoughts."
"And drugs make them act on it," I said. "That's never really been an excuse before."
I don't remember that night
, Melanie Glisando had said to me.
God's truth. I woke up unable to remember going to bed
.
God, I was in the wrong place to hear this conversation. Too many strange things had happened. Too many strange things were still happening.
"I'm not going to charge Melanie," I said. I stood and opened the door. "But that's only because I can't do anything worse to her than is already being done."
"She's not a bad person," Mrs. Glisando said.
I turned to her. "Let's say for a moment that I believe your husband. Let's say that he did something to this city to make the murder rate climb in cold weather. Whatever he did wasn't one hundred percent effective, or we'd all be dead. It only allowed those with a predisposition to murder to commit the act."
Glisando shook his head. "You don't understand," he said.
I looked at him. "Yes," I said. "I'm afraid I do."
* * *
That night, I watched the weather on television. The first hurricane of the season was blowing up from the Carolinas, and the heat wave, so stifling and oppressive, was at an end. I kept my windows open and, sure enough, about 3 A.M., the wind howled through the building canyons and the rain pelted the streets and the air got cool.
Blissfully cool.
That morning, a man jogging despite the rain (or maybe because of it) through Central Park was mugged and beaten to death. A drug runner for one of the local gangs was shot on 42nd Street, and a broker was found strangled near the Exchange. By the time I got up, the news was already blaring on the radio.
The Silence was over.
Within days our caseload filled back up. But that didn't stop Bob from finding the evidence he needed to pin the murder of the neighbor on the husband and wife. Nor did it stop Weisburg from identifying the man who'd swallowed the finger as the head of a smuggling ring that had double-crossed the mob. The finger still had prints, and it belonged to the man's wife, who was alive and willing to talk if she was sent to witness protection.
Only Hawkins didn't solve his crime, which was no surprise. It's hard to make a case with just a torso and part of an arm for evidence. All the other body parts floating around the city didn't match.
The team thought I'd failed too, and I let them. I didn't say anything about Glisando or her nutty parents, at least not to the other wagerers. I did some double-checking, found out where Nic Glisando worked, found out, too, that he'd been there all night the night Dudich had been murdered. So Nic Glisando hadn't killed his daughter's lover, and neither had the wife. She'd been out of the country, visiting relatives in Europe.
Maybe it was that news that made me make three copies of the disk on the department's computer. Or maybe it was my innate caution. I gave one copy to my captain and the second to the
Daily News
. The
Daily News
apparently read the disk and printed the speculation that Glisando had laid on me, but by then, The Silence was long forgotten. The story ended up on page ten, bottom, a two-inch column that no one seemed to notice.
My captain thought the information on the disk as strange as I did and wrote it off to the flakiness some people could exhibit when under stress.
That's what I told myself too. But I keep the third copy of that disk in my desk and the original in a safety-deposit box because I'm as superstitious as the next guy. Maybe more so. And I'm keeping a graph now too. On one line is the ambient temperature in Manhattan, on the other, the number of homicides. I tell you, if things start looking strange, or we get some more Silence, I'm marching up to that farm upstate and getting more information, like what the government is really going to do with the knowledge if the experiments succeed.
What I'll do with that information, I haven't a clue. And at this moment, it's not really an issue. Things are back to normal. I'm overworked, overloaded, and suffering from stress. When a car backfires, I duck like I always have, knowing that random gunshots are happening again, and that people are dying at the hands of other people, just like they have from the time Cain had it in for his hapless brother Abel.
Hard to believe, even for myself, that I'm praying there won't be another Silence. Statistics experts say there won't, that this was just one of those anomalies that happen from time to time, something strange for the record books. The religious nuts blame the millennium, as they always do, and the change back to man's inherent evil nature. The alternate-timeline folks say that we'd been in a bubble, and now we're back on track.
I like those ideas a lot better than Glisando's. Glisando's means that human mind-control is possible, and that would put people like me, people who know but aren't affected, under an obligation to stop whatever's going on. And I don't like moral conundrums like that. I don't want my mind controlled any more than the next guy, but I also don't want the guy next to me to haul out his daddy's hunting knife and carve me into Sunday dinner because he's sick of sweating too much for the eighth day in a row.
So far my chart has shown nothing, and I doubt it ever will. People will say anything when their kid's dying, and could be up for murder at the same time. People'll say anything.
But what crosses my mind, usually at night, usually before I fall asleep, is that little thread of guilt that showed itself in Nic Glisando's face every time he frowned, the way he wouldn't quite look at me, the way he protected his soul. I believe his daughter killed Joel Dudich. Glisando believes it, too. Only he thinks that she did it because he was working on some strange government experiment.
I think she did it because, at home, she'd never learned how to take responsibility for herself.
The Silence was one of the strangest things I've ever seen on the job. But, you know, it wasn't the strangest. Because in our ice-blue files, there are a million things that one human being has done to another for reasons only those two people fathom, and maybe not even they do. And we're just supposed to solve cases; we're not supposed to understand them.
That's the hardest thing of all, realizing, when you come down to it, that every human being is a mystery to others. Maybe people like Glisando believe someday they'll find a way to make people do whatever they want. But I just don't believe it.
Bill Pronzini
The Big Bite
BILL PRONZINI
has lately concentrated his career on such award-winning mainstream suspense novels as
Blue Lonesome
without forgetting his role as one of America's preeminent private detective authors. The Nameless series grows richer, wilier, and crustier with each new outing. A Balzacian take on one working-class man's life in contemporary San Francisco— spanning thirty-some years now— the series grows in importance as the years tick by. Many flavors-of-the-month will fade. Nameless will stand for decades and perhaps longer as a vital, original part of crime novel heritage. "The Big Bite," published in
The Shamus Game
, sees Nameless's welcome return to the short form after a five-year vacation.
The Big Bite
Bill Pronzini
I
laid a red queen on a black king, glanced up at Jay Cohalan through the open door of his office. He was pacing again, back and forth in front of his desk, his hands in constant restless motion at his sides. The office was carpeted; his footfalls made no sound. There was no discernible sound anywhere except for the faint snap and slap when I turned over a card and put it down. An office building at night is one of the quietest places there is. Eerily so, if you spend enough time listening to the silence.