The Eye: A Novel of Suspense (2 page)

“I don’t want your money, sinner,” the man said.

And Simmons understood then. He understood and he couldn’t believe it, things like this didn’t happen, it couldn’t happen to
him
, he had just gotten laid, he was only thirty years old, he had never done anything to anybody, it wasn’t fair. “No,” he said aloud, “oh God no, no …”

They were his last words, his last perceptions.

He never heard the crack of the gun and he never felt the bullet that slashed through his temple and took away his life.

8 A.M. — E.L. OXMAN

As soon as Oxman walked into the Twenty-fourth Precinct he knew there was trouble.

He could see it in the face of Sergeant Drake, behind the high muster desk, and in the faces of the uniformed patrolmen hanging around waiting for their tour to start. It was in the air, too; you got so you could smell it after a while. He went past the desk, past the sign that said
All Visitors Must Stop Here and State Their Business
, past the other sign that said
Detective Division
and had an arrow pointing upstairs, and climbed to the second floor. Nothing much seemed to be going on in the squadroom when he entered; the other detectives, some coming on duty as he was, some going off, were engaged in normal activities, and there were no visitors and nobody in the holding cell. But one look at his partner, Art Tobin, and Lieutenant Smiley Manders conversing at Tobin’s desk was all Oxman needed for confirmation. There was trouble, all right. Big trouble.

He hung up his hat and coat, and signed himself in on the roster board. He needed a cup of coffee; Beth hadn’t bothered to make any this morning and he hadn’t had time to do it himself, but Manders was already gesturing at him. “Over here, Ox.” Oxman reluctantly bypassed the table with the coffee on it.

“What’s up?”

“Another street killing on West Ninety-eighth early this morning,” Manders told him. He was tall and thin, with a long jowly face and a perpetual frown. The detectives under his command called him Lieutenant Smiley, though never to his face. “That makes three in two weeks. It looks like we’ve got a psycho on our hands.”

“Who got it this time?”

“Man named Simmons, Martin Simmons.”

“He live on the block like the other two?”

“No. He was an advertising copywriter, lived on West Seventy-third. We don’t know yet what he was doing on Ninety-eighth.”

“When did it happen?”

“Sometime between two and three
A.M.,
” Manders said. “Richard Corales, the super at twelve-seventy-six, found him at six o’clock, just inside the alley adjacent to his building.”

“Any chance it was a straight mugging?”

“None. The victim had thirty-eight bucks in his wallet and a fancy watch on his wrist.”

“Who took the squeal?”

“Gaines and Holroyd. They haven’t turned up much.”

“No witnesses, no leads,” Oxman said sourly.

Manders nodded. “Same as in the other two cases. So far, nobody even owns up to hearing the shot.”

“Anything from Ballistics yet?”

“Too early. But you can bet the bullet will match the ones used in the previous homicides.”

Tobin said, “It’s got to be a random thing, Elliot Leroy. A psycho with a gun.”

Oxman glanced at his partner. Tobin was twelve years his senior, just turned fifty-four—one of the first blacks taken on the force in the postwar period when there was a halfhearted attempt to include the minorities. He was a complex and private man; Oxman had worked with him eight years now, but he still didn’t know him well, still didn’t understand what made Artie run. A good cop, though. Efficient, intuitive, disciplined. He also had a dry sense of humor and a penchant for needling people in a mild fashion, as if that was his way of paying back the white majority for past injustices. Like calling Oxman by his given names. He knew Oxman hated the names his parents had saddled him with, that he preferred to be addressed as Ox or E.L. But Tobin never missed an opportunity to call him Elliot Leroy.

“Why would a psycho start killing people on one particular city block?” Oxman asked him.

Tobin shrugged. “Do psychos need reasons?”

“Yes. They don’t have to be rational reasons, but a psycho always has some sort of purpose. You know that, Artie.”

“Maybe he lives on the block and hates his neighbors.”

“Then why kill an outsider like Simmons?”

“Could be Simmons used to live on the block,” Tobin said, “or had a connection with one or both previous victims.”

“That’s an angle you’ll want to check out,” Manders said. “You’re handling the other two shootings, you get this one too. It’s your baby; deliver it.”

Oxman asked, “Are Gaines and Holroyd still over on Ninety-eighth?”

“Yeah. But they’re due back any minute. Wait until they get here so they can brief you; then I want you on the case full time. You know how the damn media is. They’ll turn this into a scare circus, sure as hell.”

Manders clumped away and disappeared inside his office. When the door closed behind him Tobin said, “‘It’s your baby; deliver it.’ Smiley’s in rare form this morning.”

“He’s always in rare form.”

“So what do you think, Elliot Leroy?”

“I think I’m going to get a cup of coffee,” Oxman said. “Then I think we ought to go over what we’ve got on the previous shootings.”

Tobin sighed. “I just love psycho cases.”

Oxman poured his coffee, laced it with milk and sugar, and took it to his desk. Tobin came over with the reports they had written on the first two West Ninety-eighth Street homicides. Methodically, while they waited for Gaines and Holroyd, they went over the material that Oxman already knew by heart, looking for some sort of common denominator.

First victim: Charles Unger. Retired grocer, Caucasian, age sixty-five, widower, native of Manhattan, resident of apartment building at 1250 West Ninety-eighth. Found near the mouth of an alley between 1250 and 1252 by a passing patrol car, at eight
A.M.,
September 7. Shot once in the chest at close range with a .32 caliber weapon. No witnesses, nothing in the way of evidence on the scene. Neighbors and relatives of the deceased stated that he was well-liked, had no apparent enemies. Robbery ruled out as a motive; Unger’s wallet, containing fourteen dollars and three major credit cards, untouched in his pocket.

Second victim: Peter Cheng. Import-export dealer, Chinese, age forty-three, unmarried, native of Hong Kong (no relatives in New York metropolitan area), resident of apartment building at 1279 West Ninety-eighth. Found in a doorway on Riverside Drive, just around the corner from Ninety-eighth, by the driver of a newspaper delivery truck at six forty-five
A.M.,
September 15. Shot once between the eyes at close range with the same .32 caliber weapon. No witnesses, nothing in the way of evidence on the scene. Friends and business associates of the deceased stated that he was a hard-nosed businessman but had no apparent enemies. Suggestion that Cheng was a homosexual, but no verification. Check into his business dealings negative; his import-export firm was respectable and moderately profitable. No apparent connection with Charles Unger, no indication that the two men even knew each other.

Zero. No common denominator except for the fact that the two victims lived on the same block of West Ninety-eighth Street.

And now, with victim number three, that commonality no longer existed: Simmons hadn’t lived on West Ninety-eighth or anywhere else in the neighborhood. The only evident factor linking the three homicides was that the victims had all died on that same city block.

Tobin said the same thing Oxman was thinking: “There’s just nothing here, Elliot Leroy. A retired grocer, a Chinese import-export dealer. Throw in Simmons and it makes even less sense.”

“Unless Gaines and Holroyd have turned up a connection. Or we do.”

“Want to bet that won’t happen?”

“No. But there’s got to be some reason for the killings, some reason why even a madman would start blowing people away on one particular block.”

“Yeah,” Tobin agreed dryly.

“We’ll find it. And we’d better do it fast, because if it is a psycho he’ll go after number four sooner or later.”

“Motive isn’t the only thing we’d better find fast.”

“You mean the psycho himself?”

“I mean,” Tobin said, “it’s our baby. We’d better find a way to deliver it.”

THE COLLIER TAPES

He didn’t live on the block.

Martin Simmons did not live on the block!

I should have been more careful. But what was Simmons doing there? He should not have been there at that time of night. Closed community, very stable for the West Side, not many late visitors. How was I to know when I saw him come out of the building that he was a stranger, an interloper? Martin Simmons, 112 West Seventy-third Street, advertising copywriter—it was all there on the radio this morning. How was I to know?

But I should have been more careful. Jennifer Crane, the harlot who lives in 1276, has brought home men before; she picks them up in singles bars and brings them to her apartment. The Eye has seen her stepping out of taxis with half a dozen different men. Martin Simmons was probably one of her conquests. Of course: That explains what he was doing on the block at three
A.M.

Poor Martin. My apologies and regrets, and I promise for your sake that I will not make the same mistake again with someone else. I will be much more circumspect, I will not make any more random choices. If I began to act indiscriminately, if I do not limit myself to residents of my little universe, if I bring down my wrath upon visitors, guests, passersby, then I will have fallen from grace and descended to the level of psychopathology. That must not happen.

Lewis B. Collier, former adjunct Associate Professor of English, Keeper of the Eye, Lord and Conscience of West Ninety-eighth Street, is not a psychopath.

I am
not
a psychopath.

I am a deeply and righteously angered Avenger; I am the Angel of Death. Be sure your sin will find you out. And the wages of sin is death. Order, structure, motive, discipline. I will be justified unto the grave and vindicated in the Hereafter.

A half hour has passed since I began dictating this entry. I spent those thirty minutes on the balcony with the Eye.

God’s Eye.

Have I discussed the Eye in any detail? No, I don’t believe I have. It is a powerful six-inch reflecting telescope, a much-refined version of the type first constructed by Sir Isaac Newton in 1668. It weighs approximately fifty pounds. It has several eyepieces, including a high-magnification six millimeter piece which I had specially ground some months ago by an expert who works for the local astronomy clubs. The polished concave mirror at the Eye’s base, which gathers light and forms the image, has also been specially ground.

I purchased the Eye a year ago, when I imagined myself interested in astronomy. Contemplation of the heavens, however, did not amuse me as much as I had anticipated. It was only when I realized that it could be used to observe
people
, stars in a different and far more flawed firmament, that I began to appreciate its true worth. Now it has become the Eye of God, through which I can follow the petty, sometimes sinful lives of the inhabitants of the West Ninety-eighth Street block, two miles away across the Hudson River.

Think of it! Here I am, in my twentieth floor apartment in the Crestview Towers, in Cliffside Park on the New Jersey palisades, and yet with a twist of the Eye’s delicate rack-and-pinion controls I can bring those inhabitants of Manhattan into such sharp focus that I am able to see the color of their eyes, the smallest blemishes on their skin. I can assume their lives more intimately than they: walk with them, live with them, observe and weigh their value and their sins. They are of my universe, and I, high above them, am both their conscience and their avenging deity. As they sow, so shall they reap. The judgment is the Eye’s, not mine.

I am an avenging deity, yes, but I am not without compassion. It grieves me to have had to mete out punishment to Charles Unger and Peter Cheng. That I was the angel of their deaths only deepens my sadness, makes more wrenching my sense of loss. They are my children. I do not enjoy plucking the life from their bodies; I wish it could be otherwise. I mourn for their sins. But vengeance is mine, sayeth the deity. The judgment is the Eye’s, but the vengeance is mine.

T.S. Eliot was quite right: The spirit killeth. But the letter giveth life.

This is why I am so upset over Martin Simmons. He did not live in my universe, I had no right to exact punishment on him for his sins. I
must
be more careful. I am not a psychopath, I am just a deity. Only mine must reap what they have sown.

And there will be others who must pay the wages of sin. Sin is rife in my little universe. It must be expunged, the wicked must be destroyed.

I shall return to the Eye now. It is the noon hour and many of the children are out: the dog-walkers, the grocery shoppers, the artists and writers and musicians coming out for their first breath of the hot late-summer air. The police are there too, have been since poor Simmons was found, and I find their antics amusing. They do not know that the Eye is upon them. They do not know that the Angel of Death observes their every movement. No one on the block will ever know.

The Eye and I will soon decide which of the sinners will be punished next. Perhaps the evil one from 1272. But there are several evil ones in 1276; perhaps one of them instead. Or perhaps another on the block. The Eye will judge. And the risk does not matter; there are too many and they must all be destroyed before they contaminate the rest.

God’s Eye remains open. And my vengeance shall be swift and merciless.

12:30 P.M. — WALLY SINGER

Singer said, “You’re a stupid woman, the stupidest woman I’ve ever known. I don’t know why the hell I ever married you.”

“Don’t you?” Marian asked. She was in one of her calm periods—reasonable, icy-voiced, talking to him as if he were a child. He hated her when she was like this; he preferred her angry and yelling, or better yet, off sulking somewhere. “It was because of the ten thousand dollars my father gave me to pursue an art career, remember?”