Лоуренс Блок - A Time to Scatter Stones

“And he believed you?”

“Maybe not right away. The first thing he did was protest his innocence. He didn’t know you, he never threatened you, and he swore to God and everybody he wouldn’t do it again.”

“ ‘I never borrowed from you a pot,’ ” Elaine said, in an unconvincing Jewish accent. Ellen looked puzzled. I knew the reference, but decided it could wait.

I said, “I didn’t want to listen to it. I put a couple of strips of duct tape over his mouth. That scared him, because it meant we weren’t going to have a conversation. I think he knew what was coming.”

“An unfortunate accident,” Elaine said, answering Ellen’s unspoken question. “Your Mr. Paulsen fell down a flight of stairs.”

“You threw him down the stairs? What if somebody saw you?”

“It’s an expression,” I explained. “Years ago there would be times when a cop took something personally. Hauling the perpetrator down to the station just wasn’t enough. So you’d take it out on him with your fists or your boots, and the explanation for his injuries would be that he fell down a flight of stairs.

“And sometimes,” I remembered, “it was the literal truth. Vince Mahaffey and I caught a domestic in Park Slope, neighbors called it in because of the screams coming from the apartment. Hulking brute of a husband, little mouse of a wife, and he’s done a good job of beating the crap out of her.”

Elaine was nodding, remembering. I’d told her the story, possibly more than once.

“ ‘Oh, it’s nothing, officers. I’m clumsy, I fell down, I tripped over something, it happens all the time, it’s all my fault.’ In other words, no, she won’t press charges. We talked to the neighbor who’d made the call, and weren’t surprised to learn this happened a lot. She almost didn’t call, she said, because there’d been cops there before, and the same thing always happened. The husband denied everything and the wife insisted it was an accident and he never laid a finger on her. So she usually just let it go and tried to tune it out, but this time it was worse than usual and she was afraid he’d actually kill her.

“I said I guessed there was nothing we could do. Mahaffey said, ‘Fuck that shit,’ and went back to the wifebeater’s apartment and hauled him out of there. ‘She won’t press charges,’ he said. ‘You’re wasting your time.’ Mahaffey said maybe she wouldn’t press charges, but he was charging the son of a bitch with resisting arrest. ‘What resisting? What arrest?’ And Mahaffey took him to the head of the stairs and tossed him. He missed more steps than he hit, but he hit plenty and he landed hard, and he was pissing and moaning and yelling that something was broken, and Vince got him to his feet and threw him down another flight. The apartment was on the fourth floor, I remember that, because the bastard went down three flights in all.”

“Your partner threw him down three flights of stairs?”

“Two,” I said.

“But you said—”

“You can blame the third flight on the Masked Avenger,” Elaine said. “Am I remembering it right? He wanted you to have a hand in it, didn’t he?”

“So I couldn’t report him for it,” I said, “but I never would have done that, and I’m sure he knew it. I think it was more that he wanted us to share the act. And he didn’t want me to miss out on something he thought I’d enjoy.”

“And did you? Enjoy it?”

“ Enjoy might not be the right word,” I said. “But I have to say it was satisfying. Mahaffey picked him up afterward and cuffed him, and the poor bastard was sure there was more coming, but he just hauled him out of there and we put him in the back seat of the squad car. ‘You want to go around resisting arrest,’ Mahaffey told him, ‘you ought to hold off until you’re a little better at it.’ ”

But I hadn’t pitched Paulsen down a flight of stairs, although the image was not without appeal.

What I did was give him a beating. I used my feet more than my hands, and I left his face alone. I did things that wouldn’t show unless he took his clothes off. I kicked him in the ribs and the groin and the kidneys.

“I had to force myself to do it,” I remembered. “What a lot of people will do is work themselves up, build up a load of hate. The guy they’re working over is the worst man in the world, and they’re doing God’s work by kicking the shit out of him. I couldn’t manage this. He wasn’t an evildoer who had to be punished. He was a problem that had to be solved.”

Elaine: “And this would solve it?”

“If he was completely delusional, like the woman who dropped in on David Letterman, then probably not. Or if he was a stone psychopath who didn’t think in terms of consequences. But he wasn’t quite that crazy. He was fixated on a particular woman in a dangerous way, an unacceptable way.” I looked at Ellen. “He wasn’t going to stop stalking you, and sooner or later he’d find you.”

“But you found him first.”

“And I needed to hurt him, and scare him, and make it clear to him that you weren’t worth the trouble. At one point I paused to kneel down next to him and told him how he was going to behave from now on. ‘You can never call her again,’ I said. ‘You can never go near her apartment. You can never look for her, or hire someone to find her. You can never write her a letter. If you see her on the street, you’d better turn around and walk in the opposite direction.’ ”

“Or otherwise you’d hunt him down and kill him.”

“Yes.”

“And he believed you?

I’d crouched over him, my forearm across his throat. I’d leaned just a little of my weight on him. I could kill you right now, I’d told him, and increased the pressure a little.

“Yes,” I said. “He believed me.”

After a beat she said, “And would you? If he turns up again, if he stalks me, what would you really do?”

“What I said I would.”

“You’d kill him?”

Killing hasn’t been a big part of my life, and I’ve never taken it lightly. I can only think of one instance when it occurred after I’d been able to take time to think about it. The man was named James Leo Motley, and in a sense he brought Elaine back into my life, and for that I might have been grateful to him.

But he did so by flying out to Ohio to rape and murder her friend Connie Cooperman, and then he came back to New York and killed a bunch of other people. He capped it by stabbing Elaine, and very nearly killing her. The crew in the Emergency Room saved her, but it was touch and go for a while.

I wound up in the apartment where Motley had touched down, and he wound up unconscious after I’d almost wound up dead. I hated him, not surprisingly, for what he’d done and what he tried to do. But I didn’t kill him out of hate, or out of a desire to see him punished.

But I knew that, even if he went back to prison, there would be a day when he got out. And he’d go on doing what he’d been doing, because that was what he did and who he was. There was really only one way I knew to stop him, one way that was sure to work. If there was another, I couldn’t think of it.

And so I did what I had to do.

“I don’t think he’ll give you any more trouble,” I told Ellen. “But if he does, yes. I’ll find him and I’ll kill him.”

Ellen had to use the bathroom, and Elaine went off to the kitchen and started water boiling for pasta. They’d come straight home from the meeting, she said, and hadn’t eaten. I admitted that I hadn’t either.

“Plus you had an arduous day,” she said, “with all that walking, and then kicking the crap out of whatshisname.”

“Everett Allen Paulsen,” Ellen supplied. “I guess his last name is where the Paul came from.”