Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

He was dizzy. He looked at his hand, expecting to see a knife glistening there. He was holding two thirds of a sweet roll. His fingers opened. The roll dropped a few inches to the tabletop. He thought that he was going to be sick, but this did not happen.

“Oh, God,” he said, very softly. No one seemed to hear him. He said it again, somewhat louder, and lit a cigarette with trembling hands. He tried to blow out the match and kept missing it. He dropped the match to the floor and stepped on it and took a very large breath.

He had killed a woman. No one he knew, no one he had ever seen before. He was a word in headlines — fiend, attacker, killer. He was a murderer, and the police would find him and make him confess, and there would be a trial and a conviction and an appeal and a denial and a cell and a long walk and an electrical jolt and then, mercifully, nothing at all.

He closed his eyes. His hands curled up into fists, and he pressed his fists against his temples and took furious breaths. Why had he done it? What was wrong with him? Why, why, why had he killed?

Why would anyone kill?

He sat at his table until he had smoked three cigarettes, lighting each new one from the butt of the one preceding it. When the last cigarette was quite finished he got up from the table and went to the phone booth. He dropped a dime and dialed a number and waited until someone answered the phone.

“Cuttleton,” he said. “I won’t be in today. Not feeling well.”

One of the office girls had taken the call. She said that it was too bad and she hoped Mr. Cuttleton would be feeling better. He thanked her and rang off.

Not feeling well! He had never called in sick in the twenty-three years he had worked at the Bardell Company, except for two times when he had been running a fever. They would believe him, of course. He did not lie and did not cheat and his employers knew this. But it bothered him to lie to them.

But then it was no lie, he thought. He was not feeling well, not feeling well at all.

On the way back to his room he bought the Daily News and the Herald Tribune and the Times. The News gave him no trouble, as it too had the story of the Waldek murder on page three, and ran a similar picture and a similar text. It was harder to find the stories in the Times and the Herald Tribune ; both of those papers buried the murder story deep in the second section, as if it were trivial. He could not understand that.

That evening he bought the Journal American and the World Telegram and the Post . The Post ran an interview with Margaret Waldek’s half sister, a very sad interview indeed. Warren Cuttleton wept as he read it, shedding tears in equal measure for Margaret Waldek and for himself.

At seven o’clock, he told himself that he was surely doomed. He had killed and he would be killed in return.

At nine o’clock, he thought that he might get away with it. He gathered from the newspaper stories that the police had no substantial clues. Fingerprints were not mentioned, but he knew for a fact that his own fingerprints were not on file anywhere. He had never been fingerprinted. So, unless someone had seen him, the police would have no way to connect him with the murder. And he could not remember having been seen by anyone.

He went to bed at midnight. He slept fitfully, reliving every unpleasant detail of the night before — the footsteps, the attack, the knife, the blood, his flight from the park. He awoke for the last time at seven o’clock, woke at the peak of a nightmare with sweat streaming from every pore.

Surely there was no escape if he dreamed those dreams night after endless night. He was no psychopath; right and wrong had a great deal of personal meaning to him. Redemption in the embrace of an electrified chair seemed the least horrible of all possible punishments. He no longer wanted to get away with the murder. He wanted to get away from it.

He went outside and bought a paper. There had been no developments in the case. He read an interview in the Mirror with Margaret Waldek’s little niece, and it made him cry.

He had neverbeen to the police station before. It stood only a few blocks from his rooming house but he had never passed it, and he had to look up its address in the telephone directory. When he got there he stumbled around aimlessly looking for someone in a little authority. He finally located the desk sergeant and explained that he wanted to see someone about the Waldek killing.

“Waldek,” the desk sergeant said.

“The woman in the park.”

“Oh. Information?”

“Yes,” Mr. Cuttleton said.

He waited on a wooden bench while the desk sergeant called upstairs to find out who had the Waldek thing. Then the desk sergeant told him to go upstairs where he would see a Sergeant Rooker. He did this.

Rooker was a young man with a thoughtful face. He said yes, he was in charge of the Waldek killing, and just to start things off, could he have name and address and some other details?

Warren Cuttleton gave him all the details he wanted. Rooker wrote them all down with a ballpoint pen on a sheet of yellow foolscap. Then he looked up thoughtfully.

“Well, that’s out of the way,” he said. “Now what have you got for us?”

“Myself,” Mr. Cuttleton said. And when Sergeant Rooker frowned curiously he explained, “I did it. I killed that woman, that Margaret Waldek, I did it.”

Sergeant Rooker and another policeman took him into a private room and asked him a great many questions. He explained everything exactly as he remembered it, from beginning to end. He told them the whole story, trying his best to avoid breaking down at the more horrible parts. He only broke down twice. He did not cry at those times, but his chest filled and his throat closed and he found it temporarily impossible to go on.

Questions—

“Where did you get the knife?”

“A store. A five-and-ten.”

“Where?”

“On Columbus Avenue.”

“Remember the store?”

He remembered the counter, a salesman, remembered paying for the knife and carrying it away. He did not remember which store it had been.

“Why did you do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why the Waldek woman?”

“She just... came along.”

“Why did you attack her?”

“I wanted to. Something... came over me. Some need, I didn’t understand it then, I don’t understand it now. Compulsion. I just had to do it!”

“Why kill her?”

“It happened that way. I killed her, the knife, up, down. That was why I bought the knife. To kill her.”

“You planned it?”

“Just... hazily.”

“Where’s the knife?”

“Gone. Away. Down a sewer.”

“What sewer?”

“I don’t remember. Somewhere.”

“You got blood on your clothes. You must have, she bled like a flood. Your clothes at home?”

“I got rid of them.”

“Where? Down a sewer?”

“Look, Ray, you don’t third-degree a guy when he’s trying to confess something.”

“I’m sorry. Cuttleton, are the clothes around your building?”

He had vague memories, something about burning. “An incinerator,” he said.

“The incinerator in your building?”

“No. Some other building, there isn’t any incinerator where I live. I went home and changed, I remember it, and I bundled up the clothes and ran into another building and put everything in an incinerator and ran back to my room. I washed. There was blood under my fingernails, I remember it.”

They had him take off his shirt. They looked at his arms and his chest and his face and his neck.

“No scratches,” Sergeant Rooker said. “Not a mark, and she had stuff under her nails, from scratching.”