The Eye: A Novel of Suspense (32 page)

“He have a first name?”

“Sure. Lewis.”

“Lewis Collier,” Oxman said. The name tasted bitter in his mouth. “He’s got a telescope set up on his balcony, right?”

“That’s right. A stargazer.”

“Yeah. You know if he’s home?”

“He’s home,” the doorman said. “He came in not five minutes ago.”

There was a tightness in Oxman’s groin; the palms of his hands were faintly damp.
Lewis Collier
, he thought.
He’d better be the one
. As wired up as Oxman felt right now, he didn’t know what he’d do if they’d miscalculated somehow and Collier really was nothing more than a stargazer.

“I’m going up to talk to Collier,” he said. “Don’t get any ideas about announcing me before I get there.”

“Not me, officer.” The doorman still looked uneasy. “We got a lot of elderly people in the building; nothing rough is going to happen, is it?”

“I hope not,” Oxman told him. It was at least half a lie.

He pushed in through the double doors, crossed the plush lobby to the elevators. They were almost invisible because their doors were walnut-paneled like the walls. When he pressed the Up button a door slid open and he stepped inside the elevator, punched the numeral twenty on a flat sheet of back-lighted plastic. The door hissed shut and the car launched itself upward.

The twentieth floor hallway was deserted. Oxman went along a thick maroon carpet to the end of the hall on the south side, to the door marked 20-E. There was no peephole in the door; that made things a little easier. He drew his service revolver, clamped his teeth together, and used the knuckles of his left hand to knock.

Several seconds passed in silence; Oxman could feel himself sweating. He was about to knock again when a voice called from inside, “Who is it?” The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t be sure.

“Doorman, Mr. Collier,” he said, disguising his own voice to approximate that of the ex-jock’s downstairs. “Can I see you for a minute?”

“What about?”

“Your car, sir. There’s a problem with it.”

“Problem?” the voice said. Then Oxman heard the sound of the locks being thrown, the chain being slid free of its slot; the brass doorknob rotated and the door opened inward.

“What sort of——”

The man inside stopped speaking when he saw Oxman; an expression of recognition, of frightened astonishment crossed his heavy features. But there was also an expression of surprise on Oxman’s face, because the man wasn’t a stranger to him; he knew Lewis Collier, but not by that name.

He knew him as Willie Lorsec.

9:20 P.M. — ART TOBIN

Tobin regained consciousness in the ambulance taking him to St. Luke’s Hospital. He knew that was where he was because he could hear the warbling sound of the siren, see the two white-coated attendants hovering above him in the familiar jouncing confines; and he knew that was where he was going because St. Luke’s had been the emergency destination of the other West Ninety-eighth shooting victims, Jack Kennebank and Michele Butler.

But even though he realized those facts, his mind was still full of fuzziness; and the pain in his belly was almost unbearable.
Gut-shot
, he thought.
That motherfucker got me good. He got me good and I didn’t get him at all
.

“We better pick up some time, Mel,” one of the attendants yelled up to the driver. “We can’t stop the bleeding; this guy’s taking plasma like he figured there was a shortage.”

“For him there is a shortage,” the other attendant, a huge black man, said as he leaned over Tobin and applied a fresh compress. The man’s white coat was stained with crimson streaks, Tobin saw.
My blood
, he thought, awed.
My blood
.

“That prick up ahead won’t let me pass,” the driver said. He gave the siren a series of short, urgent blasts. Seconds later, the ambulance gained speed; one of its tires bounced over something as the machine roared into a turn.

“You think we’ll make it in time?” the white attendant asked the black one.

“I don’t know, man. It’s gonna be touch and go.”

Yeah
, Tobin thought, clenching his teeth against the pain,
but we’ll make it, all right. I’m not going to die like this. That bastard won’t kill me too. I am not going to die like this!

Yowling like something itself wounded, the ambulance raced onward through the night.

9:35 P.M. — E.L. OXMAN

Collier, or Lorsec—whatever the hell his name was—let out a frightened bleating sound and tried to jam the door closed again. But Oxman hit it with his right shoulder, putting his full weight behind the thrust. Collier cried out a second time as the door slammed into him, sent him reeling backward into the room.

With the resistance of Collier’s bulk gone, the door crashed against the inside wall. Oxman staggered, regained his balance, and saw that the psycho had been thrown to the floor. Collier scrambled onto all fours, started to shove upward to his feet.

“Hold it right there!” Oxman snapped at him. He had his .38 leveled and his finger tight on the trigger; it took an effort of will not to squeeze off a shot. “Don’t move; don’t even breathe.”

Collier froze in position. He was wearing dark slacks and a Navy blue pullover; behind him, on the couch, was a dark-colored windbreaker. Oxman backed up, caught hold of the door with his free hand, and threw it closed; his eyes never left Collier’s face. Then he moved over to within five feet of the man, gestured with his .38.

“Down on your belly,” he commanded. “Hands behind you. Do it!”

Collier obeyed. Oxman’s breathing was labored and he was still sweating; his finger kept wanting to twitch on the revolver’s trigger as he approached the man. He knelt with one knee in the middle of Collier’s back, the muzzle of the .38 pressed tight to Collier’s skull, and with his left hand he unhooked the handcuffs from his belt. It took him ten seconds to get the cuffs locked tight around the thick wrists, another five to slap at the dark clothing and verify that Collier was unarmed. The big man lay motionless through all of that, his face buried in the carpet.

Oxman straightened finally, breathing easier. He moved to where the windbreaker lay on the couch. One of the pockets bulged, and the bulge turned out to be the Smith & Wesson .38 that had no doubt killed Jack Kennebank and Marco Pollosetti, that had maybe killed Artie Tobin. He picked it up by the trigger guard, dropped it into his jacket pocket.

He stood over Collier and read him his rights in a thick voice. When he said, “Do you understand all of that?” Collier rolled over onto his back and stared up at him. The man’s ego, his mental equilibrium, had returned and gained dominance. Collier seemed to swell with it. The fear on his face had been replaced by a kind of defiant cunning that Oxman had seen before and knew was dangerous.

Oxman moved away a few steps; just being near Collier made him tremble with rage. He watched Collier twist himself onto all fours, then straighten up on his knees. The hatred he felt for this diseased lump of human flesh was itself like a tumor inside him.

“I feel the same for you, Detective Oxman,” Collier said.

“What?”

“Hatred. I can see it in your eyes. But mine is the pure and the just, the hatred of good for evil, of God for one fallen from grace.”

“Yeah,” Oxman said.

“I seem to have underestimated you. The forces of evil are greater than even I anticipated. How did you find me?”

“Your goddamned telescope.” Oxman could see it through the closed glass door to the balcony, like a giant finger pointing at the sky. “All those calls you made to me, all that crap about the Eye—that’s where you made your mistake, Collier. Once I tumbled to the telescope, the rest was simple enough. Just a matter of police work.”

“And the other policemen? Where are they?”

“They’ll be along pretty soon.”

“Indeed?” A faint, superior smile touched Collier’s mouth. “I shot your partner tonight. Did you know that?”

“I know it, you bastard.”

“Blasphemy. Evil from the mouth of evil. It should have been
you
, Detective Oxman. It was your life, your wickedness, I sought to end. An unfortunate accident that I encountered Detective Tobin instead.”

Oxman had been concentrating so heavily on Collier that he hadn’t really been aware of his surroundings. But now they intruded on his mind. He glanced around. The luxury apartment was filled with a mixture of expensive furniture and junk, further testimony to Collier’s madness. Alongside the fancy brocade couch was a rusty old washtub turned upsidedown and supporting a shadeless, broken lamp. On the mahogany sideboard was an array of small junk items: clipless pens, a torn rubber dildo, an open ring box, dozens of other, less easily identifiable objects. Bulging burlap sacks and plastic trash bags littered the plush beige carpet. And on one wall was a crumbling corkboard with a dozen or so keys attached to it with pushpins.

“Does the room interest you, Detective Oxman?” Collier said from the floor. “All of these throw aways were collected in my kingdom by Willie Lorsec.” A sound came out of his throat, more a giggle than a laugh. “A lovely joke, that name, don’t you agree?”

“Joke?”

“Such a plodder you are; evil without imagination. Willie Lorsec is an anagram of Lewis Collier.”

A rivulet of sweat trickled down Oxman’s cheek; he wiped it away. “Why did you collect all this junk?”

“Why? As evidence, of course. To augment what the Eye observed, to uncover sin that the Eye could not see. What mortals throw away tells a great deal about them.”

Now Oxman understood the method in the man’s madness: In the guise of Willie Lorsec, junkman, Collier had prowled West Ninety-eighth Street learning the intimacies of the block’s residents from the contents of their trash. He had also established himself as an apparent resident of the neighborhood, made everyone including Oxman think he belonged there. That was how he’d been able to come and go, to escape so readily after each of his homicides, without arousing suspicion. He had manufactured at least part of his own luck.

“Those keys on the wall,” Oxman said. “What about them?”

Collier smiled again; he seemed almost to be enjoying himself now, as if he were the one holding the gun. “Keys to various buildings and apartments in my universe. Duplicate keys. Willie Lorsec made friends with several building superintendents, played gin rummy with them, talked baseball with them, gained their confidence. It was a simple matter to appropriate certain keys long enough to have duplicates made, so that when the time came, God could do his work.”

“Quit talking about God, damn you,” Oxman said. “You’re not God.”

“Oh, but I am. Haven’t I punished several transgressors for their sins, snuffed out their evil lives? Even Benny Hiller I led to a building where he assumed I lived and thus, through the force of my will, ended his life. I can still end
your
life too, Detective Oxman. I can still destroy you.”

“You’re not going to do any more destroying. It’s all over for you, Collier.”

“Is it? Oxman, Oxman, Oxman, you’re such a fool.”

Oxman took a step toward him, then stopped and shook his head. No. It
was
over; he had the psycho, had him in handcuffs, and hurting him physically was as senseless as Collier’s own acts of violence. There had been enough craziness these past few days; he wasn’t going to go crazy himself.

He let out a long breath that hissed like escaping steam in the quiet room. Collier was watching him with a flat unblinking stare, the faint smile still on his lips. Oxman stepped away at an angle toward a telephone that sat on a spindly three-legged table. He reached out to pick up the receiver—

And in that instant when his eyes flicked away to the phone, Collier levered up in a sudden agile motion and charged him.

The swiftness of the move caught Oxman with his body turned sideways; he tried to twist back, to bring the .38 to bear. But Collier’s lowered head slammed into his arm, knocked the gun loose and sent it bouncing away, knocked Oxman into the three-legged table. He went down with Collier on top of him, splintering the table; felt sharp teeth sink into his left ear.

The pain of the bite forced a whine from Oxman. He caught hold of Collier’s head in both hands, wrenched it aside and ripped the teeth loose from his ear. He saw Collier’s mouth: It was stained with blood. The man was actually snarling at him, spewing spittle and blood and hot breath. Collier’s weight held him pinned for a moment, but Oxman was able to get a handhold on the pullover sweater and heave the writhing body off him.

Oxman struggled with the wreckage of the table, shoved up onto one knee with his hand clapped to his torn ear. Sweat clouded his vision; he ducked his head against his arm to clear his eyes. But because Collier’s hands were cuffed behind his back, Oxman didn’t pay enough attention to him. When he lifted his head he saw that Collier was twisted on his back, legs in the air; somehow, with the strength and agility of madness, he had managed to get his manacled hands over his buttocks, was sliding his arms around his shoes and up in front of him.

Oxman thought fleetingly of the Smith & Wesson .38 in his pocket, realized he didn’t have enough time to get it out, and threw himself at Collier instead. They grappled, rolled. Collier’s strength was enormous; he came up on top, pinning Oxman with his weight. Oxman heaved with his forearms, got his head and shoulders off the carpet, almost pulled free.

He didn’t see that Collier had grabbed hold of the telephone cord until it was too late, until the cord was being wound around his neck and jerked tight.

Breath clogged in his throat; he felt his lungs constrict. Desperately, he clawed at the cord with one hand, clawed at Collier with the other. The room seemed to tilt, to soar. His left hand lost its grip on Collier’s sweater, flailed out and down to the carpet—and touched hard plastic, the telephone receiver.

Oxman’s fingers closed around it, lifted it, swung it against the side of Collier’s head. Did it again, and again, making dull cracking sounds against flesh and bone. The room had begun to go dim; tiny pinpoints of light seemed to explode behind his eyelids. His right arm kept moving independently, rising, falling, smashing over and over with the receiver.