Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Ray, she could have scratched herself.”

“Mmmm. Or he mends quick. Come on, Cuttleton.”

They went to a room, fingerprinted him, took his picture, and booked him on suspicion of murder. Sergeant Rooker told him that he could call a lawyer if he wanted one. He did not know any lawyers. There had been a lawyer who had notarized a paper for him once, long ago, but he did not remember the man’s name.

They took him to a cell. He went inside, and they closed the door and locked it. He sat down on a stool and smoked a cigarette. His hands did not shake now for the first time in almost twenty-seven hours.

Four hours later Sergeant Rooker and the other policeman came into his cell. Rooker said, “You didn’t kill that woman, Mr. Cuttleton. Now why did you tell us you did?”

He stared at them.

“First, you had an alibi and you didn’t mention it. You went to a double feature at Loew’s Eighty-third, the cashier recognized you from a picture and remembered you bought a ticket at nine-thirty. An usher also recognized you and remembers you tripped on your way to the men’s room and he had to give you a hand, and that was after midnight. You went straight to your room, one of the women lives downstairs remembers that. The fellow down the hall from you swears you were in your room by one and never left it and the lights were out fifteen minutes after you got there. Now why in the name of heaven did you tell us you killed that woman?”

This was incredible. He did not remember any movies. He did not remember buying a ticket, or tripping on the way to the men’s room. Nothing like that. He remembered only the lurking and the footsteps and the attack, the knife and the screams, the knife down a sewer and the clothes in some incinerator and washing away the blood.

“More. We got what must be the killer. A man named Alex Kanster, convicted on two counts of attempted assault. We picked him up on a routine check and found a bloody knife under his pillow and his face torn and scratched, and I’ll give three-to-one he’s confessed by now, and he killed the Waldek woman and you didn’t, so why the confession? Why give us trouble? Why lie?”

“I don’t lie,” Mr. Cuttleton said.

Rooker opened his mouth and closed it. The other policeman said, “Ray, I’ve got an idea. Get someone who knows how to administer a polygraph thing.”

He was very confused. They led him to another room and strapped him to an odd machine with a graph, and they asked him questions. What was his name? How old was he? Where did he work? Did he kill the Waldek woman? How much was four and four? Where did he buy the knife? What was his middle name? Where did he put his clothes?

“Nothing,” the other policeman said. “No reaction. See? He believes it, Ray.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t react to this. It doesn’t work on everybody.”

“So ask him to lie.”

“Mr. Cuttleton,” Sergeant Rooker said, “I’m going to ask you how much four and three is. I want you to answer six. Just answer six.”

“But it’s seven.”

“Say six anyway, Mr. Cuttleton.”

“Oh.”

“How much is four and three?”

“Six.”

He reacted, and heavily. “What it is,” the other cop explained, “is he believes this, Ray. He didn’t mean to make trouble, he believes it, true or not. You know what an imagination does, how witnesses swear to lies because they remember things wrong. He read the story and he believed it all from the start.”

They talked to him for a long time, Rooker and the other policeman, explaining every last bit of it. They told him he felt guilty, he had some repression deep down in his sad soul, and this made him believe that he had killed Mrs. Waldek when, in fact, he had not. For a long time he thought that they were crazy, but in time they proved to him that it was quite impossible for him to have done what he said he had done. It could not have happened that way, and they proved it, and there was no argument he could advance to tear down the proof they offered him. He had to believe it.

Well!

He believed them, he knew they were right and he — his memory — was wrong. This did not change the fact that he remembered the killing. Every detail was still quite clear in his mind. This meant, obviously, that he was insane.

“Right about now,” Sergeant Rooker said, perceptively, “you probably think you’re crazy. Don’t worry about it, Mr. Cuttleton. This confession urge isn’t as uncommon as you might think. Every publicized killing brings us a dozen confessions, with some of them dead sure they really did it. You have the urge to kill locked up inside somewhere, you feel guilty about it, so you confess to what you maybe wanted to do deep in your mind but would never really do. We get this all the time. Not many of them are as sure of it as you, as clear on everything. The lie detector is what got to me. But don’t worry about being crazy, it’s nothing you can’t control. Just don’t sweat it.”

“Psychological,” the other policeman said.

“You’ll probably have this bit again,” Rooker went on. “Don’t let it get to you. Just ride it out and remember you couldn’t possibly kill anybody and you’ll get through all right. But no more confessions. Okay?”

For a time he felt like a stupid child. Then he felt relieved, tremendously relieved. There would be no electrified chair. There would be no perpetual burden of guilt.

That night he slept. No dreams.

That was March.Four months later, in July, it happened again. He awoke, he went downstairs, he walked to the corner, he bought the Daily Mirror, he sat down at a table with his sweet roll and his coffee, he opened the paper to page three, and he read about a schoolgirl, fourteen, who had walked home the night before in Astoria and who had not reached her home because some man had dragged her into an alley and had slashed her throat open with a straight razor. There was a grisly picture of the girl’s body, her throat cut from ear to ear.

Memory, like a stroke of white lightning across a flat black sky. Memory, illuminating all.

He remembered the razor in his hand, the girl struggling in his grasp. He remembered the soft feel of her frightened young flesh, the moans she made, the incredible supply of blood that poured forth from her wounded throat.

The memory was so real that it was several moments before he remembered that his rush of awful memory was not a new phenomenon. He recalled that other memory, in March, and remembered it again. That had been false. This, obviously, was false as well.

But it could not be false. He remembered it. Every detail, so clear, so crystal clear.

He fought with himself, telling himself that Sergeant Rooker had told him to expect a repeat performance of this false-confession impulse. But logic can have little effect upon the certain mind. If one holds a rose in one’s hand, and feels that rose, and smells the sweetness of it, and is hurt by the prick of its thorns, all the rational thought in creation will not serve to sway one’s conviction that this rose is a reality. And a rose in memory is as unshakable as a rose in hand.

Warren Cuttleton went to work that day. It did him no good, and did his employers no good either, since he could not begin to concentrate on the papers on his desk. He could only think of the foul killing of Sandra Gitler. He knew that he could not possibly have killed the girl. He knew, too, that he had done so.

An office girl asked him if he was feeling well, he looked all concerned and unhappy and everything. A partner in the firm asked him if he had had a physical checkup recently. At five o’clock he went home. He had to fight with himself to stay away from the police station, but he stayed away.