Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

The dreams were very vivid. He awoke again and again. Once he cried out. In the morning, when he gave up the attempt to sleep, his sheets were wet with his perspiration. It had soaked through to the mattress. He took a long shivering shower and dressed. He went downstairs, and he walked to the police station.

Last time, he had confessed. They had proved him innocent. It seemed impossible that they could have been wrong, just as it seemed impossible that he could have killed Sandra Gitler, but perhaps Sergeant Rooker could lay the girl’s ghost for him. The confession, the proof of his own real innocence — then he could sleep at night once again.

He did not stop to talk to the desk sergeant. He went directly upstairs and found Rooker, who blinked at him.

“Warren Cuttleton,” Sergeant Rooker said. “A confession?”

“I tried not to come. Yesterday, I remembered killing the girl in Queens. I know I did it, and I know I couldn’t have done it, but—”

“You’re sure you did it.”

“Yes.”

Sergeant Rooker understood. He led Cuttleton to a room, not a cell, and told him to stay there for a moment. He came back a few moments later.

“I called Queens Homicide,” he said. “Found out a few things about the murder, some things that didn’t get into the paper. Do you remember carving something into the girl’s belly?”

He remembered. The razor, slicing through her bare flesh, carving something.

“What did you carve, Mr. Cuttleton?”

“I... I can’t remember, exactly.”

“You carved I love you. Do you remember?”

Yes, he remembered. Carving I love you, carving those three words into that tender flesh, proving that his horrid act was an act of love as well as an act of destruction. Oh, he remembered. It was clear in his mind, like a well-washed window.

“Mr. Cuttleton. Mr. Cuttleton, that wasn’t what was carved in the girl. Mr. Cuttleton, the words were unprintable, the first word was unprintable, the second word was you. Not I love you, something else. That was why they kept it out of the papers, that and to keep off false confessions which is, believe me, a good idea. Your memory picked up on that the minute I said it, like the power of suggestion. It didn’t happen, just like you never touched that girl, but something got triggered in your head so you snapped it up and remembered it like you remembered everything you read in the paper, the same thing.”

For several moments he sat looking at his fingernails while Sergeant Rooker sat looking at him. Then he said, slowly, “I knew all along I couldn’t have done it. But that didn’t help.”

“I see.”

“I had to prove it. You can’t remember something, every last bit of it, and then just tell yourself that you’re crazy. That it simply did not happen. I couldn’t sleep.”

“Well.”

“I had dreams. Reliving the whole thing in my dreams, like last time. I knew I shouldn’t come here, that it’s wasting your time. There’s knowing and knowing, Sergeant.”

“And you had to have it proved to you.”

He nodded miserably. Sergeant Rooker told him it was nothing to sweat about, that it took some police time but that the police really had more time than some people thought, though they had less time than some other people thought, and that Mr. Cuttleton could come to him anytime he had something to confess.

“Straight to me,” Sergeant Rooker said. “That makes it easier, because I understand you, what you go through, and some of the other boys who aren’t familiar might not understand.”

He thanked Sergeant Rooker and shook hands with him. He walked out of the station, striding along like an ancient mariner who had just had an albatross removed from his shoulders. He slept that night, dreamlessly.

It happened againin August. A woman strangled to death in her apartment on West Twenty-seventh Street, strangled with a piece of electrical wire. He remembered buying an extension cord the day before for just that purpose.

This time he went to Rooker immediately. It was no problem at all. The police had caught the killer just minutes after the late editions of the morning papers had been locked up and printed. The janitor did it, the janitor of the woman’s building. They caught him and he confessed.

On a clearafternoon that followed on the heels of a rainy morning in late September, Warren Cuttleton came home from the Bardell office and stopped at a Chinese laundry to pick up his shirts. He carried his shirts around the corner to a drugstore on Amsterdam Avenue and bought a tin of aspirin tablets. On the way back to his rooming house he passed — or started to pass — a small hardware store.

Something happened.

He walked into the store in robotish fashion, as though some alien had taken over control of his body, borrowing it for the time being. He waited patiently while the clerk finished selling a can of putty to a flat-nosed man. Then he bought an ice pick.

He went back to his room. He unpacked his shirts — six of them, white, stiffly starched, each with the same conservative collar, each bought at the same small haberdashery — and he packed them away in his dresser. He took two of the aspirin tablets and put the tin in the top drawer of the dresser. He held the ice pick between his hands and rubbed his hands over it, feeling the smoothness of the wooden handle and stroking the cool steel of the blade. He touched the tip of his thumb with the point of the blade and felt how deliciously sharp it was.

He put the ice pick in his pocket. He sat down and smoked a cigarette, slowly, and then he went downstairs and walked over to Broadway. At Eighty-sixth Street he went downstairs into the IRT station, dropped a token, passed through the turnstile. He took a train uptown to Washington Heights. He left the train, walked to a small park. He stood in the park for fifteen minutes, waiting.

He left the park. The air was chillier now and the sky was quite dark. He went to a restaurant, a small diner on Dyckman Avenue. He ordered the chopped sirloin, very well done, with french-fried potatoes and a cup of coffee. He enjoyed his meal very much.

In the men’s room at the diner he took the ice pick from his pocket and caressed it once again. So very sharp, so very strong. He smiled at the ice pick and kissed the tip of it with his lips parted so as to avoid pricking himself. So very sharp, so very cool.

He paid his check and tipped the counterman and left the diner. Night now, cold enough to freeze the edge of thought. He walked through lonely streets. He found an alleyway. He waited, silent and still.

Time.

His eyes stayed on the mouth of the alley. People passed — boys, girls, men, women. He did not move from his position. He was waiting. In time the right person would come. In time the streets would be clear except for that one person, and the time would be right, and it would happen. He would act. He would act fast.

He heard high heels tapping in staccato rhythm, approaching him. He heard nothing else, no cars, no alien feet. Slowly, cautiously, he made his way toward the mouth of the alley. His eyes found the source of the tapping. A woman, a young woman, a pretty young woman with a curving body and a mass of jet-black hair and a raw red mouth. A pretty woman, his woman, the right woman, this one, yes, now!

She moved within reach, her high-heeled shoes never altering the rhythm of their tapping. He moved in liquid perfection. One arm reached out, and a hand fastened upon her face and covered her raw red mouth. The other arm snaked around her waist and tugged at her. She was off-balance, she stumbled after him, she disappeared with him into the mouth of the alley.

She might have screamed, but he banged her head on the cement floor of the alley and her eyes went glassy. She started to scream later, but he got a hand over her mouth and cut off the scream. She did not manage to bite him. He was careful.