Mr. Apology Page 9

  Berger shut his eyes. Why didn’t he put that knife away? “It’s very hard, George. It’s extremely difficult. I don’t know how to begin. Do I just say to her, ‘I’m terribly sorry, Angela, but your husband happens to be gay’? Don’t you understand how hard that is?” He listened to the soft sound of George’s fingers stroking the blades. Then he pulled on his shirt and opened his eyes and wished with all his heart that he could stand back from the whole situation and laugh until there were tears in his eyes. He looked at George. A vain young man who was forever putting his head to one side and staring at his own reflection wherever he could find it—in store windows, in those aluminum things that contained napkins in coffee shops, in the side mirrors of cars, anywhere he could see a likeness of himself. Beautiful, a beautiful boy, but the relationship isn’t going anywhere because I don’t want it to, I don’t need it. Are you lying to yourself again, Bryant?

  George held the knife beneath the light of the bedside lamp. He flipped the blades back into the handle, weighed the knife in his hand, smiled. “So you’ll stay locked inside your sweaty little closet, Bryant, is that it?”

  Berger didn’t speak. He felt panic all over again, a quickening of fear, standing on the blind dark edge of a precipice: Dear God, have I fallen in love with this vain young man? He found himself staring at the knife. “I wish you’d put that thing away, George. It makes me nervous.”

  George flipped the knife in the air, caught it deftly. Berger watched it flash in the light. This quality in George he was sometimes aware of—what was it? Something of menace? Something explosive? As if there were a device quietly ticking away in his heart? He stared at his trembling fingers. His whole life suddenly seemed to him filled with indescribable terror: It was as if he were locked in a blank white room without windows. And no door. Neither entrances nor exits. I cannot love this boy. I cannot afford to even think such a thing.

  “Are you really going, Bryant?”

  “I have to.”

  George put his hand between his own legs, touching himself. “Don’t I tempt you? Don’t you find this tempting?”

  “You know what I think of it,” Berger said. There was shame now and it seemed to burn through him with the ferocity of acid. He stared down at the floor—his pants, underwear, tumble of socks, twisted necktie. At home he hung these things away fastidiously. But not here—here he couldn’t wait to sling everything aside, couldn’t contain himself.

  George laid the knife on the bedside table. “Sometimes, Bryant, I’m very tempted to place a telephone call.”

  “Tempted? I don’t think I follow.” But you do, you do follow. You can easily spot the meandering trail of George’s mischief.

  “A certain number in Bedford Hills. To a certain woman who waits there, lonely and impatient. I’d say something like …‘Angela, Bryant has a brown mole on his ass, left cheek to be precise.’ I’d say something like that.”

  A joke, a mischief. It amounted to nothing more. “I think I know you better than that, George.”

  “Of course you do. You know your George very well, don’t you?”

  The tone of his voice. Maybe just beneath the veneer of words, hidden under the polish of language, there was a sense of threat. Berger studied the young man’s face. The large open smile, the innocent expression. He reached out and laid a hand on George’s wrist. A wonderful drunken night, George’s body pressed to his, limbs tangled, sweat against sweat, arms pinned against arms, George’s cock in his mouth.

  You don’t love him, Bryant.

  You can’t.

  What does he do when I leave here? Does he go out, cruise the bars, casually pick somebody up and they fuck together?

  It hurts. Why does this thought hurt so badly?

  I want him now. I want him again.

  He reached down for his socks. He rose and put on his pants, buckled the belt. He did up the buttons of his shirt. Trains: Why couldn’t he bring to mind the timetable he knew so well? He glanced at George as he dressed: Could he really imagine George calling Angela?

  “What will I do when you go?” George said. “What is a lonely young man supposed to do?”

  “You won’t be lonely.” An ache, the whole sentence was a pain. You won’t be lonely, George, you’ll be able to go out and find somebody and—

  George smiled. “How do you know what I do when you leave?”

  Berger said nothing. A slow train to Bedford Hills would give him enough time in which to concoct a convincing fiction. If there were a train that slow. He moved towards the door, picking up his overcoat as he went.

  “Don’t I get a goodbye kiss, Bryant?”

  The embrace was warm, smothering. Step away, he told himself. Step back. Break free. Leave this situation.

  “One last thing, Bryant. If you had the guts to tell your wife, you wouldn’t have to scurry around like this. Comprendez?”

  “Comprehended,” Berger said. He smiled at George, then closed the door behind him. He walked along the corridor to the elevator, pressed the button, waited. This is the last time, he thought.

  The very last.

  5.

  The grubby window of the office faced a brick wall: On a clear day you could see the rainpipes opposite. Nightingale couldn’t take the view, the sense of claustrophobia. He turned from the window and looked down at the papers on his desk, then glanced across the room at Moody, who was flicking the pages of a magazine. Psychology Today. Nightingale sat down behind his desk. In the pit of his stomach, in a place you couldn’t soothe just by rubbing your belly with your fingertips, something was turning over and over. Something unpleasant, bad. How could Moody just sit there going through that magazine? He could be as cold as the kitchens of hell. Nightingale shut his eyes because he couldn’t stand to look at his partner, couldn’t take the sight of the papers on his desk, couldn’t take anything very much right then. Close the eyes, withdraw, a sensory retreat. Trouble was, it didn’t transport you very far from the mundane world—the sound of Moody flipping pages, the rattle of something loose in the radiator system, the persistent buzz of a fly at the light bulb overhead. It didn’t carry you very far from the horrors of things. Camilla Darugna, for instance. He opened his eyes. You learn something about the dead woman and it sickens you and you try not to let certain pictures form inside your head even though images are clamoring for your attention, revolting images, sick things rising from the dark inside your mind. She lies there dead and …

  And then.

  And then.

  He slung his feet up on the desk and tried to think of something real nice. Green fields, rolling hills, wondrous cloud formations. The hills of West Virginia. Shit, the last thing he needed was a John Denver record playing through his brain. Goddamn goddamn goddamn—

  “What the fuck are you reading, Doug?”

  Moody looked up over the magazine. “It concerns self-confrontation. Interesting.”

  Nightingale spread his hands and stared at the cover of Moody’s magazine. CAN YOU INHERIT DEPRESSION? No, he thought—you need to work hard for it. You need to be exposed to the dead. The ghoulish. You couldn’t inherit anything like that. He said, “Don’t get me wrong, Doug. I mean, we get this godawful report and you just sit there calm as hell and read your magazine. Doesn’t it affect you? Doesn’t it touch you somewhere?”

  “Sure,” Moody said. “It fascinates me. The intimacy of strangulation followed by—”

  “Fascinates? Fascinates? Fascinates? Sometimes you worry me, Doug. Sometimes I catch myself asking the question: Where does Doug Moody really live? Where does he really live?”

  Moody put the magazine down and smiled. “Your subjectivity overwhelms me, Frank. That’s your problem. You can’t take a step back and look at things with distance.”

  “Don’t lay any shit about distance on me. I’m too tired, Doug. Too weary. Some days my bones feel like those candy sticks you see kids sucking on. Distance! I face a cold fact like this and it turns my stomach!”

  Moody s
troked his smooth face. “I can’t let it get to me that way. It isn’t constructive. I need to be objective if I’m going to think, Frank.”

  Constructive. Objective. Nightingale sighed. These were the words of some freshman essay. What did they have to do with the way Camilla Darugna died? He was sweating, pools of liquid in the lines of his palms, underarms, streaks of perspiration on his forehead. Maybe it was weariness, fatigue, the grinding way the human condition just wore you right down. But there were some things he couldn’t quite grasp. Okay, he could maybe sympathize with some henpecked little guy who, one fine day, out of the old blue, blows his wife away. Maybe the unemployed guy who’s desperate to feed his kids and shoots the liquor store clerk during a robbery. Just maybe he could find an iota of sympathy for the perpetrators in situations like these. But he couldn’t relate to this Darugna affair at all. The guy strangles her and then.

  And then.

  This is where you hit the brick wall, Frank.

  The place where you just can’t cut it.

  Where it lies slightly beyond your experience, your understanding, your belief.

  He stared at the sheets on his desk. There was a sister out in New Mexico by the name of Carmella. Carmella and Camilla—it had the ring of a vaudeville act, tap-dancing sisters or twin bearded ladies. And there was a brother, the brother Shenandoah Silvertree had mentioned, one William Arthur Chapman, address unknown. Two arrests for narcotics. One back in 1974 for marijuana. The other, in ’76, for possession of cocaine. Lowlife drug user, no big deal. He leaned back in his chair and the images swarmed in on him again.

  The kitchen. The dead woman on the floor. Her legs spread.

  You can’t get inside this killer’s head no matter how hard you try. You can’t get through all that fog.

  This animal looks down at the dead woman and something snaps in his brain and he loses any relic of control he might ever have had and he reaches down and his fingers pull her panties to the side and he lowers himself—

  A ghoul. The kind who’d dig up fresh graves.

  He lowers himself on to this dead flesh and he sticks his dick inside her and he fucks her after she’s dead and he leaves his sperm for a pathologist to find—

  Necrophilia.

  Moody’s word.

  A monster. You’re looking for a monster.

  He rose from his chair and paced the office. He stood at the window and stared at the brick wall opposite. Sarah, he thought. Come home to me. Come back home and we can start all over again and everything will be fresh and good and loving. Don’t stay up there in that frozen wasted town.

  Necrophilia.

  He turned from the window when he heard somebody step inside the office. He recognized Channing, a tiny bald man from the lab who carried himself as if he were convinced he had just lost out, by one vote, on the Nobel prize. He wasn’t in any mood for Channing and his supercilious manner.

  “Prints, prints,” Channing said. He might have been delivering pizza. “I have a make on the prints. Anybody interested? Anybody awake around here?”

  Nightingale moved towards his desk. “Tell us about the prints, Channing.”

  “They’re all over the place,” Channing said, smirking like a smug elf. “You can’t turn around in that apartment without finding them.”

  “Whose prints are they?”

  “They are the property of a certain William Arthur Chapman. Brother of the deceased.”

  Moody put his magazine down and looked at Channing. “The brother’s prints?”

  “Are you sure?” Nightingale asked.

  “I’m always sure, lieutenant,” Channing said.

  The brother’s prints, Nightingale thought.

  Moody was standing up, moving across the room, seizing the envelope from Channing’s hand and shaking it open on the surface of his desk. He moved in an agitated way and there was a tiny nerve of irritation working in the muscles of his jaw. “William Arthur Chapman,” he was saying, repeating the name as if he were speaking the numbers that had just come up on his winning lottery ticket. “Necrophiliac incest. Well, well, well. I know this freak, Frank. I know this Billy Chapman.”

  “How come?” Nightingale asked. Necrophiliac incest.

  Moody, his moment of excitement having apparently passed, sat down behind his desk and gazed at the prints. “It goes back a couple of years before I went to college, when I was working burglary and I got this call to pick up a guy in a hotel room over on Lexington. He was supposed to have a room filled with hot items. So I trucked on over there—what do I find? This Billy Chapman character completely doped up. I mean, totally fried, Frank. There were no stolen items in the room but a pile of dope and all kinds of paraphernalia. I figured it was a clean collar—I had a guy who was completely stoned, I had about eight pounds of grass, which he was apparently retailing back then, and there were probably four or five grams of coke as well.” Moody paused. He gazed down at the prints again. He had an odd look on his face, one Nightingale hadn’t seen before—some strange mixture of regret and determination. Moody went on: “It was my first collar, Frank, if you don’t count some traffic tickets from way back. This was my first real one. I figured I had it cut and dry. What happens?” Moody sighed, drew one hand over his face. Then he shrugged. “It gets thrown out of court. Billy Chapman walks on a fine technicality, the kind only lawyers and judges understand and cops don’t. You know the score, I’m sure. What I’ll never get out of my mind is the expression on that punk’s face when he walked. He looked at me—you ever seen the kind of look that is really just a silent way of saying fuck you, asshole? That’s how Billy Chapman looked. I’ve never forgotten it.”

  Nightingale shook his head. “It happens. It happens all the time, Doug.”

  “Now this same punk killed his own sister. Then he fucked her,” Moody said.

  Necrophiliac incest. Nightingale turned and looked out the window. There was an empty feeling in the center of his stomach suddenly, a moment of sickness. You get older, he thought. You get older and the world falls apart, things don’t add up anymore, all the old codes and standards and decencies just don’t apply. A guy kills his sister, then he fucks her.

  I can’t get inside that kind of mind. I can’t get a fix on that one. A nightmare. Maybe a few years back I might have taken it in my stride, stepped back from it and looked at it the way Moody seemed to—dispassionately. Not now. What kind of madness did it take to do what Chapman had done? What kind of outrageous lunacy? Maybe I should leave this world to the young guys like Moody and let them handle it; they seem better equipped somehow. He passed the palm of his hand across his forehead. The office seemed very warm all at once, the air stuffy and unbreathable. He heard himself sigh.

  He stared out the window again. Falling night.

  And out there in the dark a monster.

  6.

  The size of the room overwhelmed Harrison, the way the three members of the grants committee sat behind a long table piled with folders, looking as if they were members of an inquisition. The folders were obviously the applications of other candidates, Harrison’s rivals for the $10,000 awards that were given annually by the committee. He sat down and stared at the three gentlemen and had the unsettling feeling that thumbscrews were about to be produced and applied mercilessly to his fingers.

  The man who sat at the middle of the table introduced himself as Professor Hutchinson. He was a slim bald man of about fifty and he wore a tweed suit, which gave him the appearance of someone who took tea on Sunday afternoons at the vicarage and stared out at the damp English countryside through leaded windows. He opened Harrison’s folder, glanced at it, then passed it to the other members. The man on Hutchinson’s right was called Koppel—the trendy one, Harrison thought, complete with leather vest and black polo-necked sweater and a big medallion, suggestive of some Aztec conceit, against his chest. The other guy was called Shultz: He had a red rummy kind of face, his nose covered with small threadlike cracks. A boozer’s face. Hutchinson
, Koppel, and Shultz: the three wise men of the arts. Harrison was conscious of sweat in the palms of his hands.

  “We’ve read your application,” Hutchinson said. “I think we have some questions for you, Mr. Harrison.”

  Harrison fidgeted in his chair and thought, Let’s make a deal, my friends. If you give me your check for the ten grand now, I’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have. He glanced at the windows of the room a moment; he could feel an interrogation coming on and he didn’t much like it.

  “What made you think of this idea?” Shultz asked.

  “I’ve been interested in the criminal mind for a long time. I’m trying to understand it,” he said. His throat was dry. “I had the idea that Apology would provide an outlet for criminals—”

  “But some of the calls you get aren’t necessarily criminal, are they?” Shultz interrupted.

  “Well, I get all kinds of messages. I brought a sample tape for you to hear. That should give you some idea of the wide range of calls I’ve received already.” Mr. Apology’s Greatest Hits, he thought.

  Koppel said, “You’re basically providing a service, I suppose. We live at a time when people are suspicious of old institutions. Anything associated with big government. They dislike organizations. Whereas they once might have sought out a priest or a counselor, I think nowadays they’re more reluctant to take these steps than they used to be.”

  Ah, Harrison thought. My man.

  “Even inside a marriage,” Koppel said. “Perhaps one mate doesn’t want to discuss a problem with the other. It could be an attraction to another person, an infidelity, a financial matter. It could be anything. What I’m saying is that the traditional lines of communication are drying up in our society and a service like Mr. Apology can, so to speak, pick up the slack. What could be more comforting than the chance to make an anonymous confession? The same thing holds true in the criminal sphere as well as the domestic.” Koppel paused and rubbed his medallion as if he expected a genie to materialize inside the room. He looked at Harrison and smiled. “I see this project as a kind of useful bridge building. Making a connection between dark, furtive areas of our society and the healthy light of confession.”