“That must have been hard.”
“It was, I suppose. You get used to it, just as you get used to being alone. I worked for over twenty years for the same corporation. Five years ago they offered me early retirement. ‘You’ve been such a good and faithful employee for so many years that we’ll pay you to quit.’ They didn’t use those words, obviously, but that’s what it amounted to. I accepted their offer. I didn’t really have much of a choice in the matter.”
“And that gave you money to invest.”
“It gave me money that I had to invest if I was going to have sufficient income to see me through. Savings bank interest wouldn’t be enough, and I’ve never been comfortable with risk. You flew here, didn’t you? I’ve never flown anywhere in my life. I’ve always been afraid to fly. Isn’t that ridiculous? I shot a man dead in the street, I murdered him in cold blood without turning a hair, but I’m afraid to get on an airplane. Did you ever hear anything so ridiculous in your life?”
I tried not to glance at the tape recorder. I just hoped it was getting all this.
I said, “When the boat sank…”
“The Magnar Syversen. A floating death trap. You’d expect better than that from the Scandinavians, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, it was an accident.”
“Yes, an accident.”
“And that was relevant, wasn’t it? The policy you held on the life of John Wilbur Settle was for fifty thousand dollars, and if he’d stayed home and died of AIDS that’s what you would have received in the course of time.”
“Yes.”
“But because his death was the result of an accident…”
“I got twice that much.”
“A hundred thousand dollars.”
“Yes.”
“Because the policy had a double-indemnity clause.”
“Which I didn’t even know about,” he said. “I had no idea whatsoever. When the insurance company check arrived I thought they’d made a mistake. I actually called them up, because I was sure that if I didn’t they’d come around wanting the money back with interest. And they told me about double indemnity, and how I was getting twice the face amount of the policy because of the way Mr. Settle died.”
“Quite a windfall.”
“I couldn’t believe it. I’d paid thirty-eight thousand dollars for the policy, so I was already getting a very good return on my investment, but this was just remarkable. I had very nearly tripled my investment. I’d turned thirty-eight thousand dollars into a hundred thousand.”
“Just like that.”
“Yes.”
“So you entered into another viatical transaction.”
“Yes. I believed in it as an investment medium, you see.”
“I can understand why.”
“I put some of the proceeds in the bank and the rest in a viatical transaction. I bought a larger policy this time, seventy-five thousand dollars.”
“Did you first make sure there was a double-indemnity clause?”
“No! No, I swear I didn’t.”
“I see.”
“I never asked. But when I received the policy—”
“You read it.”
“Yes. Just, you know, to see if there was such a clause.”
“And as it happened there was.”
“Yes.”
I let the silence stretch, drank some more of my tea. The red light glowed on the side of my little tape recorder. The tape advanced, recording the silence.
“Some commentators have been very critical of viatical transactions. Not as an investment, everyone agrees that they’re a good investment, but the idea of waiting for a person to die so that you can benefit financially. There was a cartoon I saw, a man walking in the desert and vultures circling overhead. But it’s not like that at all.”
“How is it different?”
“Because you just don’t think about the person that much. If you think of him at all you wish him well. I’d certainly rather have a man enjoy one more month of life than that my investment mature one month sooner. After all, I know he’s not going to live forever, that much is a medical fact, and both my principal and the interest on it are guaranteed by the irreversible biological progress of his condition. With both Harlan Phillips and John Settle, why, I knew they were going to die, and within a fairly certain period of time. But I didn’t dwell on it, and I didn’t wish it sooner.”
“But with Byron Leopold it was different.”
He looked at me. “Do you know what it is to be obsessed?” he demanded.
“I’d have to say I do.”
“If the disease were to run its course and he to die of it, I would get seventy-five thousand dollars. If he should happen to be struck by a car, or slip and fall in the bathtub, or die in a fire, then I would receive twice that amount.” He took off his glasses, held them in both hands, and stared at me, defenseless. “I could think of nothing else,” he said. “I could not get the fact out of my mind.”
“I see.”
“Do you? I’ll tell you something else that happened. I began to think of it as my money. The whole amount, one hundred fifty thousand. I began to feel entitled to it.”
I’ve heard certain thieves say something similar. You have something and the thief wants it, and in his mind a transfer of ownership occurs, and it becomes his—his money, his watch, his car. And he sees you still in possession of it and becomes seized by a near-righteous indignation. When he relieves you of it, he’s not stealing it. He’s reclaiming it.
“If he died of AIDS,” he was saying, “half the money would be lost. I couldn’t get over the idea of what a colossal waste it would be. It’s not as though he would get the money, or his heirs, or anyone at all. It would be completely lost. But if he died accidentally, by misadventure—”
“It would be yours.”
“Yes, and at no cost to anyone. It wouldn’t be his money, or anybody else’s money. It would just come to me as a pure windfall.”
“What about the insurance company?”
“But they assumed that risk!” His voice rose, in pitch and in volume. “They sold him a policy with a double-indemnity clause. I’m sure the salesman suggested it. No one ever deliberately asks for it. And its presence would have made his annual premium a little bit higher than it would have been otherwise. So the money was already there. If it wasn’t a windfall for me, it would be a windfall for the insurance company because they’d get to keep it.”
I was still digesting that when his voice dropped and he said, “Of course the money wasn’t going to come from out of thin air. It was the insurance company’s, and I was in no sense entitled to it. But I began to see it that way. If he died accidentally it was mine, all of it. If he died of his disease, I’d be cheated out of half of it.”
“Cheated out of it.”
“That’s how I began to see it, yes.” He lifted the teapot, filled both our cups. “I started imagining accidents,” he said.
“Imagining them?”
“Things that might happen. In this part of the country people are killed in auto accidents with awful frequency. I don’t suppose that happens as often in New York.”
“It happens,” I said, “but probably not as often.”
“When you think of New York,” he said, “you think of people getting murdered. Although the actual murder rate’s not particularly high there compared with the rest of the country, is it?”
“Not that high, no.”
“It’s much higher in New Orleans,” he said, and went on to name a couple of other cities. “But in the public mind,” he said, “New York’s streets are the most dangerous in the nation. In the world, even.”
“We have the reputation,” I agreed.
“So I imagined that happening to him. A knife or a gun, something swift and surgical. And do you know what I thought?”
“What?”
“I thought what a blessing it would be. To both of us.”
“Both you and Byron Leopold?”
>
“Yes.”
“How did you figure that?”
“A quick death.”
“Almost a mercy killing,” I said.
“You’re being ironic, but is it less merciful than the disease? Nibbling away at your life, leaving you with less and less, finally taking away the will to live before it finally takes your life? Do you know what it’s like to watch that happen to someone you love?”
“No.”
“Then you should be grateful.”
“I am.”
He took off his glasses again, wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “She died by inches,” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“My wife. It took her years to die. It put her on crutches and it put her in a wheekhair. It would take a bite of her life, and we would adjust to that and become accustomed to that. And then it would take another bite. And it never got better. And it always got worse.”
“It must have been very hard for you.”
“I suppose it was,” he said, as if that aspect hadn’t occurred to him before. “It was awful for her. I used to pray that she would die. I felt conflicted about that. How can you pray for the death of someone you love? You can pray for relief, but can you pray for death? ‘God, ease her pain,’ I would say. ‘God, give her the strength to bear her burden.’ And then I would find myself praying, ‘God, let it be over.’” He sighed, straightened up. “Not that it made the slightest bit of difference. The disease had its own schedule, its own pace. Prayer wouldn’t slow it down or speed it up. It tortured her for as long as it wanted to, and then it killed her. And then it was over.”
The tape recorder had a sense of theater. It picked that moment to get to the end of side one. You want to open it up and turn the cassette over and start it recording again with as little fuss as possible, to keep from breaking the mood. So of course my fingers sabotaged the process, fumbling with the catch, fumbling with the cassette.
Maybe it was just as well. Maybe the mood needed breaking.
When he resumed talking, he returned to the subject of Byron Leopold. “At first I just thought that someone might kill him,” he said. “Some burglar breaking into his house, some mugger on the street. Anything, a stray bullet from a war between drug dealers, anything I’d read about in the newspaper or see on television. I’d recast it in my mind and imagine it happening to him. There was a program, I think it was based on a real case, this male nurse was smothering patients. They weren’t all terminal, either, so I don’t suppose it was strictly a case of mercy killing. I thought that might happen, and I realized if it did the death would probably be misdiagnosed and recorded as natural.”
“And you’d be cheated.”
“Yes, and never know it. For all I knew some thoughtful nurse had smothered Harlan Phillips on his deathbed. There was a double-indemnity clause in that policy, too. So for all I knew—”
“Yes.”
“If Byron Leopold was going to be murdered, it couldn’t look as though he’d died in his sleep, or succumbed to his disease. It wouldn’t have to be disguised as an accident. I checked, and homicide fits the definition of accident for insurance purposes. By now, you see, I was contemplating doing it myself. I don’t know when that happened, that the idea entered my mind, but once it was there it was always there. I couldn’t think of anything else.”
He had never thought of taking an active part in ending his wife’s agony. Even when he prayed for her death, it never occurred to him to do anything to bring it about. When he had reached the point that he was actively considering ways to kill Byron Leopold, it struck him that a knife or a bullet would have spared his wife a great deal of suffering.
“But I could never have done it,” he said.
“But you thought you could do it with Leopold.”
“I didn’t know. The only way I could imagine doing it was with a gun. I couldn’t possibly strike him or stab him, but maybe I could point a gun and pull a trigger. Or maybe not. I wasn’t at all certain.”
“Where did you get the gun?”
“I’d had it for years. It belonged to an uncle of mine, and when he passed away my aunt didn’t want it in the house. I put it in a trunk in the attic, along with a box of shells that came with it, and never thought of it again. And then I did think of it, and it was where I’d put it. I didn’t even know if it would work. I thought it might blow up in my hand if I tried to fire it.”
“But you used it anyway?”
“I drove out into the country and test-fired it. I just shot a couple of bullets into a tree trunk. It seemed to work all right. So I went home, and I thought about it, and I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep and I knew I had to do something. So I went to New York.”
“How did you get the gun through airport security?”
“How did I…But I didn’t go to the airport. I didn’t fly, I never fly.”
“You told me that,” I said. “I’d forgotten.”
“I took the train,” he said. “There’s no security check, no metal detectors to pass through. I guess they’re not afraid of hijackers.”
“Not since Jesse James.”
“I went to New York,” he said, “and I found the building where he lived, and it turned out there was a bed-and-breakfast just a block and a half away. I didn’t know how long I’d be there but I didn’t think it could possibly take me more than a week. Assuming I would be able to do it.”
As it turned out, he could have done it the morning after his first night in the bed-and-breakfast. He’d gone to the little park so that he could watch the entrance to Leopold’s building, and the minute he saw the man emerge on crutches and carrying a newspaper, he somehow knew it was the man he sought. AIDS showed in the man’s face, and it was evident that the disease was in its later stages.
But he hadn’t brought the gun with him. It was in his room, wrapped in a dish towel and locked in his suitcase.
He brought it the following morning, and Byron Leopold was already on his bench in the park when he got there. It had occurred to him that there might be more than one AIDS victim living at that address, given that the neighborhood seemed to have a high concentration of homosexuals. While a quick death would undoubtedly constitute a blessed deliverance for this man, whoever he might be, it seemed prudent to make sure of his identity. This was, to be sure, murder for gain, however he chose to rationalize it, and it would profit him not at all to kill the wrong person.
“So I went up to him,” he said, “and I called him by name, and he nodded, and I said his name again, and he said yes, that he was Byron Leopold, or whatever he said, I don’t remember exactly. And I still wasn’t sure I would do it, you see, because I hadn’t committed myself. I could just walk away having made the identification, and then I could do it some other time. Or I could go back home and forget about it.
“‘Mr. Leopold?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Byron Leopold?’ ‘Yes, what is it?’ Something like that. And then I had the gun out and I was shooting him.”
He was vague on the details after that point. He started running, expecting pursuit, expecting capture. But no one came after him and no one caught him. By early evening he was back on the train, bound for Cleveland.
“I thought they would come for me,” he said.
“But no one did.”
“No. There were people in the park. Witnesses. I thought they’d furnish a description and one of those composite drawings would be in all the newspapers. I thought someone would make a connection between the insurance policy and myself. But there was nothing in the papers, nothing at all as far as I could see. And I kept waiting for someone to come to the door, but no one did.”
“It sounds as though you would have welcomed it.”
He nodded slowly. “I’ve thought about it all the time,” he said, “and I still can’t explain it, not to myself and certainly not to anybody else. I had the illusion that I could go to New York and kill this man, and then I could come back here, and the only change in my life
would be that I would have more money.”
“But that’s not the way it was.”
“The instant I pulled the trigger,” he said, “the illusion vanished like a portrait in smoke blown away by a gust of wind. You couldn’t even see where it had been. And it was done, the man was dead, there was no reversing it.”
“There never is.”
“No, there never is, not one bit of the past. It’s all etched in stone. You can’t erase a word, not a syllable.” He sighed heavily. “I thought…well, never mind what I thought.”