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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE - The Man Called Sport
PART ONE
The Psychiatrist of the Damned
Agatha
Jessie
The Woman in the Chair
Don’t You Want to Touch Me?
The Cemetery
The Secret Friend
Good Morning, Dr. Conrad
PART TWO
Don’t Say a Word
Tough
One Simple Question
At-Home Mother
Street Clothes
The Murder of Robert Rostoff
What Is the Number?
D’Annunzio
Plumber’s Helper
The Kid
The Painful Chair
He’s on His Way
Time to Kill
Time Runs Out
In the Clocktower
PART THREE
Ten
Prince of the City
Tale of the Tape
Island in the Mist
Skeeter and McGee
Specter
Eddie the Screw
Marshal Dillon
Aggie and Elizabeth
Digging
Stupid Chloroform
PART FOUR
Breakout
In the Nursery
222 Houses Street
Lewis McIlvaine and His Constitutional Rights
Maxwell
Midnight
Stairs
The Broom Handle
Ho Sung’s Chow Mein Palace
Death
A Bum in a Doorway
Maxwell Again
What Conrad Remembered
The End
BOOKS BY ANDREW KLAVAN
Praise for Andrew Klavan’s - Don’t Say A Word
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright Page
This book is for Richard Friedman
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am extremely grateful to the following people:
Maureen Empfield, MD, and Howell Schrage, MD, for generously providing me with insights on the treatment of mental illness, the administration of a psychiatric hospital, the use of antipsychotic drugs, and so on;
Tim Scheld, one of New York’s best and busiest radio reporters, for helping me get into some of the city’s off-limit locations;
Richard Scofield, MD, for his kindness in providing free medical advice to fictional characters;
my wife, Ellen, as always, for her patience and editorial assistance.
PROLOGUE
The Man Called Sport
The right apartment was tough to find, so they murdered the old lady. The man called Sport knocked on her door. He was dressed in green overalls so he’d look like a plumber. Maxwell stood off to one side, out of the line of the old lady’s peephole. Maxwell was wearing green overalls too, but he didn’t look like any plumber. No one was going to open the door to let Maxwell in.
Sport was presentable, though. He was a young man with a round, smooth face. He had straight brown hair that fell down in a youthful shock on his forehead. He had a brilliant smile and friendly, intelligent brown eyes.
The old lady’s name was Lucia Sinclair. When she heard Sport’s knock, she called out through the door.
“Who is it?” She had a high, fluty voice. A rich woman’s voice. Sport didn’t like it. Back in Jackson Heights, when he was a kid, he’d worked Saturdays as a delivery boy for the A & P. Lucia Sinclair had the kind of voice women used when they told you to put the grocery bags in the kitchen. Sometimes they didn’t even look at you when they told you.
“It’s the plumber,” Sport called out pleasantly.
He heard the little metal cap slide off the peephole. He gave Lucia Sinclair a look at his bright smile.
“Rick sent us,” he said. “Mrs. Welch downstairs is getting water in her bathroom walls. We think the leak may be coming from your apartment.”
He heard the peephole slide closed. He heard the chain lock slide open. He glanced up at Maxwell. Maxwell smiled eagerly. Maxwell was getting excited now.
The door opened and there stood Lucia Sinclair. Not bad looking actually for such a crone, Sport thought. She was small and slender. She had a heart-shaped face, the cheeks pinched but not saggy and wrinkled. Her short silver hair was set in an old-fashioned wave. She wore a loose flannel shirt and pale blue Jordache jeans. Expensive jeans, like the women he used to deliver groceries to. They would bend over their change purses and show off their asses. “Put the bags in the kitchen,” they would say. They didn’t even look at him.
Well, thought Sport, Maxwell ought to have a good time with this one.
Lucia Sinclair stepped back to let Sport in. She smiled and patted her hair into place.
“I’m afraid I’m a bit of a mess,” she said. “I’ve been doing a little gardening.” She gestured gracefully. At the far end of the long living room, there were sliding glass doors. The doors gave out onto a small balcony. On the balcony, there were several potted plants and flower boxes. “Very little gardening, I should say,” Lucia Sinclair babbled on. “But it does seem to produce a great deal of dirt and I …”
She stopped. It made Sport smile the way the words just died on her lips. She stood there with her jaw hanging down. She stared and Sport saw gray depths of fear open in her eyes. She was looking at Maxwell.
Maxwell came in and shut the door behind him.
Sport could remember the first time he had seen Maxwell. It was in the Correctional Institution for Men on Rikers Island. Sport had been working as a correction officer there—a guard. It was early afternoon and he was resting his feet. Sitting in a wooden chair, tilted back against the cinderblock wall in the officers’ stations near Dorm C. When they led Maxwell in, Sport’s lips parted. Sport’s chair lowered until its legs clicked against the concrete floor.
“Holy shit,” he whispered.
And he thought: There is a man you want to make friends with.
He was way over six feet tall, was Maxwell. His shoulders were hunched and his muscular arms hung down heavy at his sides. He was built like a grizzly bear: that huge, hulking shape; the shambling movements, thick with power. His head jutted forward, like a bear’s or like a caveman’s head. His great chest stretched his prison greens. He looked like he was about to burst out of them.
But his face … . That’s what caught Sport’s attention right away. The look of his face. It was small, squarish, with wispy blond hair lying across the top of it. A large, flat nose like a black’s and thick lips too and sunken eyes—brown eyes sunk down so deep they stared out of the shadows at you kind of sadly, as if they were trapped in there.
Christ, Sport thought, it’s not like a man’s face at all. Not like a man’s and not like an animal’s either. It was like a baby’s face stuck on the top of this great bear’s body. All that lumbering force—and a frightened baby’s face on top of it.
Just then, as he came into the dorm, Maxwell was scared. Sport could see it. He was scared of being in jail. His lips were turned down in a big frown, as if he might cry.
His e
yes kept shifting back and forth over the expanse of cots and footlockers—and men, mostly black men, who turned to stare at him with baleful, speculative eyes.
It was, as it turned out, his first time in. He had just pulled six months for exposing himself in a playground. His lawyer had bargained it down from sexual assault.
And Sport could see with a single glance that there was far more to the man than that.
Lucia Sinclair stood looking at Maxwell now and couldn’t speak. Sport saw in her eyes that she knew she had made a mistake. He could almost hear her thinking: If only I hadn’t opened that door, if I just hadn’t opened that door.
Too late, cunt, Sport thought.
He smiled pleasantly again. “Now, if we could just take a look at your bathroom, ma’am.”
Lucia Sinclair hesitated as she tried to think her way out of it. The loose skin around her lips shivered. “Yes, of course,” she said finally. “Just let me …”
She made a move to the front door. Tried to step around Maxwell, reached for the knob.
Maxwell grabbed her wrist. Held it.
“Take your hands—” she began to say.
Then her mouth widened in pain. Her eyes filled. Maxwell held her thin wrist tightly. He twisted her arm slowly away from the door. A small, strange, dreamy smile passed over his lips.
Lucia Sinclair barely managed to whisper, “Please …”
Maxwell released her. She stumbled backward and fell to the floor. She slid away from them up against the wall. She didn’t get up. She cowered there. Sport liked that. She was not such a big-shot bitch now. She cowered there and rubbed the reddening skin of her wrist. She stared up at Maxwell. Maxwell stood over her. He was breathing heavily, his great shoulders rising and falling.
Sport spoke quietly. “Now, if you’d just show him the bathroom, ma’am.”
The old woman turned to Sport. Her eyes looked as if they had been jacked open. “Please,” she said. The fluty trill was gone. It was just an old woman’s cracked, trembling voice now. “Please, you can take anything you want.”
“Max,” Sport said.
Lucia Sinclair cried out in pain as Max reached down and grabbed her. He grabbed her just under her armpit with one huge hand. The old woman had to scramble to her feet to keep Max from yanking her arm out of its socket. She kept looking at Sport, appealing to Sport. She must’ve known it was no good appealing to Maxwell.
“Please,” she said again. “Don’t hurt me. Don’t let him hurt me.”
Sport raised his hand. He spoke in a soft, reassuring murmur. “He won’t hurt you, ma’am. Just go on ahead into the bathroom with him.”
“Please,” Lucia Sinclair said. She was crying now. A track of tears was on each cheek. Her lips shook. Her whole face seemed to have sunken in and turned gray.
Max pulled her down the short hall toward the bathroom door. She kept calling back to Sport.
“Please. I can’t hurt you. I won’t even call the police.”
Max reached the bathroom door. He flung her through it roughly. He stepped inside after her.
Sport heard her whimper one more time. “Please.” And then she gave a hoarse cry from deep in her throat: “Oh, God.”
And the bathroom door swung shut.
Of course, there was no stopping Max now, anyway. Not once he got that look on his face, that dreamy smile. That was the thing about Maxwell: he liked doing it; it turned him on. Like when they did the Freak. Maxwell got a hard-on, an actual hard-on, just from cutting the guy’s throat. The Freak was thrashing around on the floor, kicking around and gurgling. He was grabbing at his neck and the blood was spurting out between his fingers. And there was Maxwell, standing over him, his eyes bright, his lips parted, a line of drool running down the side of his chin—and a genuine banger standing up in his pants like a tent pole. Sport was sure Max would’ve whipped it out right there. Whacked off right there with the guy dancing and shivering underneath him. But Sport was grabbing at Maxwell’s shoulder, practically yelling at him, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” Maxwell finally nodded sheepishly and ran his hand up through his thin blond hair.
Still, he lingered another moment for all that. He stayed to watch the Freak die.
While Max was in the bathroom with the old lady, Sport wandered around the living room. It was quite a place the old woman had. Very ritzy. Very posh. Not much direct sun, but plenty of early-autumn daylight pouring in through the balcony’s glass doors. Beautiful coppery rugs on the parquet floors. A dining table all made of glass with silver candle holders on it. Heavy wooden chairs with scrolled arms and legs and tapestries of fruits and vines for their upholstery. Dark wooden bookcases with old, heavy books on them. And real rosewood cupboards and showcases with fancy knickknacks behind the glass: silver goblets, pewter pitchers, small ivory sculptures of horses and Buddhas; photographs in silver frames of a smiling couple, a suburban house, a little blond girl smiling, a little towheaded boy.
Sport paused before the showcases as he strolled through the room. He examined the knickknacks behind the glass, bending toward the glass with his hands clasped behind his back. This was the real class, all right, he thought. The genuine article.
When he was a kid out in the Heights, he’d wanted to be a singer. Not one of these rock-singing faggots either, but a real nightclub singer. A Julio or a Tom Jones or even a Sinatra. He dreamed of wearing a tuxedo and singing ballads. Holding the microphone in one hand, stretching the other out toward the crowd. The women sighing, screaming. The cigarette smoke drifting over him. This was the kind of place he had imagined living in then. Actually, he had imagined a house, a place in Hollywood, down the road from Johnny Carson’s house. But a real elegant place like this one with fancy, carved furniture people would admire.
Sport paused before a bookshelf to bend toward a copy of Little Dorrit with a brown-leather, ribbed binding. He straightened now with a sigh.
Unfortunately, he had never gotten to wear a tuxedo or stand in a nightclub holding a microphone. And the only woman he had heard screaming was his mother. He could remember—he could sometimes feel—her pocked moon of a face pressing in on him. Her hot breath and the hot beer in it washing over his own face.
“I fart better than you sing,” she had explained to him in a voice that sounded like a cat caught in a blender. And then she had demonstrated her point. “Hear that? That’s you singing. That’s how well you sing.” She had farted again. “I’m singing,” she had screamed. “Listen to me, everybody. I’m singing through my ass.” And the hack of her laugh sent the stench of beer over him again.
A sound from the bathroom caught Sport’s attention. Sport glanced back over his shoulder at the hallway. He wasn’t sure what the sound had been. A thud, something dropping maybe. Or a hollow, wordless grunt; a moan. He was reminded of something Maxwell had told him when they had been getting to know each other out at Rikers. One night as they whispered together in the bathroom after lights out, Maxwell had confided in him shyly, even sweetly. He liked to cut the tongues out of cats, he said, and then break their legs and listen to them try to howl.
Sport shook his head and smiled as he moved away from the bookshelf. That Maxwell. What a sketch.
He wandered over to the glass doors now, the balcony doors. He stood before them, looking out. He rocked back and forth on his heels, his hands clasped behind his back.
The balcony itself was very small. Not much more than a triangular concrete ledge really. The few plants and flower boxes the old lady had been working on took up most of the space. Standing where he was, Sport could look out over the ledge and see the courtyard five stories below. It was a long, thin stretch of grass with a few sculpted hills of pachysandra on it. There were wooden benches here and there. And there was a slate path running down the center of it. The path ran from a gravel arbor under a vine-covered latticework on Sport’s left to a small rectangular fish pond on his right. The courtyard’s fourth wall was formed by the rear of a church. Its brownstone wall and sta
ined-glass lancets stood just beyond the fish pond.
Sport raised his eyes from the courtyard. He looked out at the building across the way. Lucia Sinclair’s apartment was in the back of her building on East Thirty-fifth Street. The building on the other side of the court was over on Thirty-sixth. It was close, twenty yards away at most. Close enough anyway.
Just then, behind him, there was a tinkling sound. The knickknacks were rattling in their shelves. Maxwell, he thought, was obviously hard at work. He turned and surveyed the apartment again. Hard at work, he thought, getting me a lease on the place.
It was a trick Sport had learned from a drug dealer at Rikers. A high-class blood; a real high roller by the name of Mickey Raskin. Mickey had taught Sport the fine art of short-term apartment hunting. First, said Mickey, read the obits. Find a stiff, preferably without survivors. Next, approach the landlord or super and hand him an envelope stuffed with a year’s rent. Tell him you need the apartment for a month, two at most, no questions asked. The only risk, Mickey said, was running into an honest landlord. In other words, it was foolproof.
It was a good method, Sport agreed. But the obit angle, that needed some work. Sport didn’t need just any apartment. He needed this apartment, or one right nearby. So he couldn’t wait for an obit, he had to create one, as you might say. And in a day or so, when the “obit” appeared, he would show up at the building and ask to talk to the super. I read about the old woman’s murder in the Post, he would say, and I want to rent her apartment for a month when the police are done with it. At first, the super might be disgusted, or even suspicious. But then Sport would put an envelope in his hands. When the super looked down and saw how thick the envelope was, he would stop being disgusted and he would stop being suspicious. When the police were done—in a week, maybe two—the apartment would be his.