Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

Then, while she struggled, he drove the point of the ice pick precisely into her heart.

He left her there, dead and turning cold. He dropped the ice pick into a sewer. He found the subway arcade and rode the IRT back to where he had come from, went to his room, washed hands and face, got into bed, and slept. He slept very well and did not dream, not at all.

When he woke up in the morning at his usual time he felt as he always felt, cool and fresh and ready for the day’s work. He showered and he dressed and he went downstairs, and he bought a copy of the Daily Mirror from the blind newsdealer.

He read the item. A young exotic dancer named Mona More had been attacked in Washington Heights and had been stabbed to death with an ice pick.

He remembered. In an instant it all came back, the girl’s body, the ice pick, murder—

He gritted his teeth together until they ached. The realism of it all! He wondered if a psychiatrist could do anything about it. But psychiatrists were so painfully expensive, and he had his own psychiatrist, his personal and no-charge psychiatrist, his Sergeant Rooker.

But he remembered it! Everything, buying the ice pick, throwing the girl down, stabbing her—

He took a very deep breath. It was time to be methodical about this, he realized. He went to the telephone and called his office. “Cuttleton here,” he said. “I’ll be late today, an hour or so. A doctor’s appointment. I’ll be in as soon as I can.”

“It’s nothing serious?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “Nothing serious.” And, really, he wasn’t lying. After all, Sergeant Rooker did function as his personal psychiatrist, and a psychiatrist was a doctor. And he did have an appointment, a standing appointment, for Sergeant Rooker had told him to come in whenever something like this happened. And it was nothing serious, that too was true, because he knew that he was really very innocent no matter how sure his memory made him of his guilt.

Rooker almost smiled at him. “Well, look who’s here,” he said. “I should have figured, Mr. Cuttleton. It’s your kind of crime, isn’t it? A woman assaulted and killed, that’s your trademark, right?”

Warren Cuttleton could not quite smile. “I... the More girl. Mona More.”

“Don’t those strippers have wild names? Mona More. As in Mon Amour. That’s French.”

“It is?”

Sergeant Rooker nodded. “And you did it,” he said. “That’s the story?”

“I know I couldn’t have, but—”

“You ought to quit reading the papers,” Sergeant Rooker said. “Come on, let’s get it out of your system.”

They went to the room. Mr. Cuttleton sat in a straight-backed chair. Sergeant Rooker closed the door and stood at the desk. He said, “You killed the woman, didn’t you? Where did you get the ice pick?”

“A hardware store.”

“Any special one?”

“It was on Amsterdam Avenue.”

“Why an ice pick?”

“It excited me, the handle was smooth and strong, and the blade was so sharp.”

“Where’s the ice pick now?”

“I threw it in a sewer.”

“Well, that’s no switch. There must have been a lot of blood, stabbing her with an ice pick. Loads of blood?”

“Yes.”

“Your clothes get soaked with it?”

“Yes.” He remembered how the blood had been all over his clothes, how he had had to hurry home and hope no one would see him.

“And the clothes?”

“In the incinerator.”

“Not in your building, though.”

“No. No, I changed in my building and ran to some other building, I don’t remember where, and threw the clothes down the incinerator.”

Sergeant Rooker slapped his hand down on the desk. “This is getting too easy,” he said. “Or I’m getting too good at it. The stripper was stabbed in the heart with an ice pick. A tiny wound and it caused death just about instantly. Not a drop of blood. Dead bodies don’t bleed, and wounds like that don’t let go with much blood anyhow, so your story falls apart like wet tissue. Feel better?”

Warren Cuttleton nodded slowly. “But it seemed so horribly real,” he said.

“It always does.” Sergeant Rooker shook his head. “You poor son of a gun,” he said. “I wonder how long this is going to keep up.” He grinned wryly. “Much more of this and one of us is going to snap.”

The old mansat on a low three-legged stool in the courtyard. He had removed his caftan and sandals. Hilliard had thought he’d be wearing a loincloth beneath the caftan, but in fact the old man was wearing a pair of boxer shorts, light blue in color. The incongruity struck Hilliard for a moment, but it did not linger; he had already learned that incongruity was to be expected in West Africa. Hilliard, nominally a cultural attaché, was in fact a coordinator of intelligence-gathering in the region, running a loose string of part-time agents and trying to make sense of their reports. Incongruity was his stock-in-trade.

He watched as two women — girls, really — dipped sponges in a large jar of water and sluiced the old man down with them. One knelt to wash the old fellow’s feet with near-biblical ardor. When she had finished she stood up, and her companion indicated to the old man that he should lean forward with his head between his knees. When he was arranged to her satisfaction she upended the clay jar and poured the remaining water over his head. He remained motionless, allowing the water to drain from him onto the hard-packed dirt floor.

“They are washing him,” Atuele said. “For the ceremony. Now he will go into a room and light a candle and observe its flame. Then he will have his ceremony.”

Hilliard waited for Donnelly to say something, but his companion was silent. Hilliard said, “What’s the ceremony for?”

Atuele smiled. He had a well-shaped oval head, regular features, an impish white-toothed grin. He had one white grandparent, and was dark enough to be regarded as a black man in America. Here in Togo, where mixed blood was a rarity, he looked to be of another race altogether.

“The ceremony,” he said, “is to save his life. Did you see his eyes?”

“Yes.”

“The whites are yellow. There is no life in them. His skin has an ashen cast to it. He has a stone in his liver. Without a ceremony, it will kill him in a month. Perhaps sooner. Perhaps a week, perhaps a matter of days.”

“Shouldn’t he be—”

“Yes?”

“In a hospital, I was going to say.”

Atuele took a cigarette from the pack Donnelly had given him earlier. He inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, watching the smoke rise. Tall poles supported a thatch woven of palm fronds, and the three of them sat in its shade. Atuele stared, seemingly fascinated, as the smoke rose up into the thatch.

“American cigarettes,” he said. “The best, eh?”

“The best,” Hilliard agreed.

“He came from the hospital. He was there a week. More, ten days. They ran tests, they took pictures, they put his blood under a microscope. They said they could do nothing for him.” He puffed on his cigarette. “So,” he said, “he comes here.”

“And you can save him?”

“We will see. A stone in the liver — without a ceremony it is certain he will die. With a ceremony?” The smiled flashed. “We will see.”

The ceremony wasdoubly surprising. Hilliard was surprised that he was allowed to witness it, and surprised that its trappings were so mundane, its ritual so matter-of-fact. He had expected drums, and dancers with their eyes rolling in their heads, and a masked witch doctor stamping on the ground and shaking his dreadlocks at unseen spirits. But there were no drums and no dancers, and Atuele was a far cry from the stereotypical witch doctor. He wore no mask, his hair was cropped close to his skull, and he never raised his voice or shook a fist at the skies.