Of Sound Mind, page 27
“No. That’ll do it for tonight.”
Oliver breathes.
“These two guys’ll show up sooner or later, the ones Miss Kroll named,” says the cop. “Neither one’s around right now. We got our eyes peeled.”
“Any wild guesses?” Oliver asks Janet.
“If they’re not here and not in the building”—she shakes her head—“your guess is as good as mine.”
“Yeah, it’s a big city, right?” He turns back to the patrolman. “You know, Rog, I’d really like to get this guy.”
“Which one?”
“Well, actually, both of them. Alive.”
Inside, beyond the platform, the Dumpster sits like a giant crypt on wheels. The chute spits out a new stream of trash.
Janet’s hand shoots to her mouth, and her whispered words are exhaled through spread fingers.
“Oh, God.”
Up through the steel-girded, spider-webbed innards of the City Hall tower rides Richard, climbing to the heights. The backs of the luminous, golden clock dials slip into his field of vision and slowly recede below the floor of the elevator as it rises, the distance from the ground increasing by only a few feet per second. When the elevator finally stops and the door opens, and Richard steps onto the narrow circular walkway of the observation deck, a night sky greets him, dark and coarsely clouded, transformed from the tepid overhang of twilight. Airplanes crisscross in the southern sky, and below, a prairie of lights stretches to eyesight’s limit.
He knew he would somehow be here at the end; he belongs here. He looks up at the massive statue of William Penn above him, folds his arms. He has the luxury of several minutes for the elevator to complete its descent and then return. All of his insides are quiet now, all the neurological circuitry unblinking; he is at ease, no heartbeat thumping the chest, no constricted throat, no grinding stomach. He is as relaxed as if he were taking a hot bath and has settled into the water’s caress, a slap here, a soapy swirl there.
From the bowels comes the elevator’s wheeze, the faintest of sounds only Richard Keene could pick up at this distance. Still, his nervous system does not rebel. He is calm, feels a serenity he has never felt before, yet his senses are keen and his resolve certain. He hears the elevator climbing, feels its vibration through the rubber soles of his sneakers, in his instep, and up his ankles to his shins. The rider is his nemesis, and it is here in the rippling crosswinds at the top of the city—still its symbolic zenith, despite taller, more modern buildings—that Richard will make his stand.
This time he will go all the way to the top of the statue. The route to William Penn’s bronze hat is one of peril and audacity. But on the other side waits release. A free sweep of sky, and the floating kiss of eternity.
Consciously engineering this odyssey, or drawn to this precise site like the proverbial moth to the flame—whichever, he is here.
He flexes his knees, the bad one complaining but game, and primes himself for a powerful spring upward, the kind of lift he needed for a successful high jump when he tried out for the middle school track team and didn’t make the cut. It will take a healthy leap to reach the access platform so he can hoist himself onto it and get to the long ladder that cuts through the statue’s cavity. There is no room for a running start. He has no shorter workman’s ladder at hand.
Richard revs up his breathing and windmills his arms like some big, goofy bird readying for stationary takeoff. When he leaves the ground, the bad knee does not balk, or if it does, his will overrides it. No extraneous noises—no sounds at all, in fact—clutter his senses. There is only his body and its capacity, and the space between it and the next level. And when he flies up, and his hands and forearms thump the wooden platform, again his concentration is such that no sounds are allowed to intrude, even as he knees and elbows and scrapes his way up and over.
The base of the statue yields to an opening like a rounded, hidden fold at the mouth of a cave or an amusement-park funhouse. It leads to the statue’s interior, a narrow hollow through which a ladder rises more than thirty feet through one of the massive legs, the torso, and the head, all the way to the twenty-two-inch hatch that opens Billy Penn’s hat to the elements. Richard knows all this because he’s read about it in an article somewhere, maybe in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
He waits on the platform.
The elevator arrives and disgorges Davis Braun, who eyes the empty space and walks halfway across the observation deck. Richard issues a brief, birdlike whistle from above, and Braun snaps his head upward. He smiles an I-got-you smile but one that has elements of recognition that Richard is a fellow lunatic, and even a worthy adversary. It’s a smile that has all of Braun’s potent charm in it, a poison Tastykake.
Richard turns from him and disappears into the statue. Inside the thirty-seven-foot bronze giant, he grabs a rung and gets his footing on the ladder. He brushes against the cast metal as he ascends, visibility blacker than tar. His serenity vanishes. Dread seizes him, the sweats of closed-in fear, but he fights it on equal terms now. He convinces himself that the darkness is his ally because he can keep his eyes open and imagine that he is on a beach whose ocean hugs the horizon, or that he’s drifting in the sky, caressed by clouds. The mind rules. And now he begins to gather strength from each step up, the altitude recharging him like water aerating the gills of a landed fish tossed back into the ocean.
He knows that Braun will be coming after him. They’ll finish this thing, at last.
He hears him, feels him, on the ladder, twenty feet below. Richard runs out of ladder and fits himself into the hatchway, which is snug as an MRI scanner or a blanketed bed. But the dread is gone, all gone, dismissed by adrenaline. He places both hands on the metal surface above him—the underside of the hatch itself, the very top of the statue—and feels about for a handle or latch but locates none. So he pushes for all he’s worth and feels it give a bit. He lowers his hands a few inches, then thrusts them upward so that the heels hit first, and the palm and fingers complete the impact. He feels more give and repeats the motion.
This time, the hatch flies open and the night rushes into the space. A refrain of wind, a darkening sky speckled with early stars. Richard pokes his head out and breathes in the sky-cooled air.
He knows Braun is climbing toward him.
He eases himself through the opening and onto the top of William Penn’s hat, now on his knees, palms down, and then up on his haunches. He rears up, gritted teeth pulsing his jaw, to a full standing position. A mountain climber at the summit. The city spreads before him, even more alive than when viewed from the enclosed observation deck, a platter of shapes and angles and lights, and he feels a literal part of the tapestry rather than a spectator. This is no oil canvas or planetarium display, no mere scenic exhibit but a fabric that has stitched him to its center.
He carefully slides onto the brim when he hears Braun near the hatchway. There is little maneuvering room here—a hop, skip, and a jump, and you’re in free fall. But for Richard’s purposes, there’s enough. This is where intrepid city workers drape giant, sheet-like logos of the town’s sports teams when a championship has been won. Bright, colorful symbols the populace can rally around. Up here at the peak of dreams.
Braun’s head is visible just above the hatch, and his eyes locate Richard immediately, then scan the bronze hat, this unlikely perch he has reached. He climbs through in segments—shoulders, chest, waist—pausing at each to gauge the playing field and his equilibrium. He knees his way out of the hatch and, when he finally stands, slowly but gloriously, like a giant character righting itself on a parade float, he faces Richard on the brim, just below him and six feet away. They stand in a dancing wind surrounded by a dizzying panorama but notice neither.
“The perfect suicide,” Braun says.
“Are you volunteering?”
Braun smiles. “Who will notice us all the way up here, at nighttime yet? I can always count on people being oblivious.”
He takes a tiny step, six inches, and feels his weight supported. The other foot, same thing. Richard holds his ground.
“You’re a crazy one,” Braun says, as he sits and slides tentatively onto the brim, his words chasing through the wind to Richard’s ears. Richard hears them as if through a megaphone, for his senses are ultrasharp, every nerve and corpuscle strung to the limit.
“Who’s the girl?” he asks Braun, trying to sound just as conversational. “The girl in the Dumpster.”
Braun’s smile chills him. “What do you care?”
“I have my reasons.”
“Good for you. Tell you what—it doesn’t matter now . . . Madelyn Burke. That’s her name. People call her Maddie. Happy?”
“Who is she?”
“Just some girl . . . By the way, I didn’t kill her. Your girlfriend killed her.”
“My girlfriend?”
“That’s right. Sweet, little Lori Calder.”
Now it’s Richard’s turn to smile, but he doesn’t. “You don’t have to lie now, Braun.” It’s the first time that he’s addressed him by name. “What’s the point?”
“I’m not lying.”
“Why would she kill her? And how?”
“Let’s keep it simple: she’s the jealous type. She killed Eleanor, too—how’s that grab you? Little girl can be a terror . . . I guess you could call me a facilitator.” He looks pleased with his word choice.
“A facilitator,” Richard repeats softly. He can’t bring himself to believe what he’s just heard. “So now it’s time for you to kill her?”
“Why would you think that?”
The wind skitters between them. Richard braces himself. “In the trash room this afternoon—”
“Yeah?”
“You and Lori—”
“That was sex, my boy. You’re a little short on your education . . . But you always show up, don’t you?” The wind swoops and hisses. “How does that happen?”
Richard just stares at him.
Braun is about an arm’s length away, and in the fraction of a second that it takes for him to lunge at his target, Richard sidesteps with perfect economy and leaves the bigger man swatting at air currents that tease from head to toe. Richard is in his element, surefooted at the apex, but does not counter, even though Braun is off-balance and seems ripe for a shove.
They square off again, and Braun hesitates as a look of wonderment comes over him. “I’ll be damned,” he says.
“You already are.”
“I’ll take you with me,” Braun says, as if offering a ride to work. Below the two of them, the broad visage of William Penn surveys his real estate, unmoved by their dance overhead. Radio-tower lights on a neighboring building blink at the sky.
Now Braun is on him, and this time Richard avoids the brunt, but not all, of the short charge; they are both down after Braun’s shoulder collides with the left side of Richard’s flat chest. In rising, Braun slips and then slips again, and there is no further margin for error on this unenclosed summit more than five hundred feet off the ground. He flounders on the mild slope as he scrambles to stand once more.
Richard is on his feet and silhouetted against a mass of night-white cloud. He is a step from the hatch—he could try to scramble down and take the elevator out of harm’s way, but he has no intention of doing that. There is no safety in that. He has his monster on a limb, and he wants to cut it off.
And now Braun has lost his comfort level. He sees rotting bodies everywhere yet remembers that he has left a warm one at the 42s. The unbidden image of his mother takes hold of him at this precise moment, and he isn’t sure what he feels—some curious mingling of embarrassment and arousal—but he does know that it’s something he wants to extinguish and fast. He has a quarry to catch. He has Keene in his crosshairs, figures he’ll nail him with the next charge. But he is overheated and sweating beyond the cooling powers of the unrelenting wind. He is leaking, juices ebbing out of him.
Something is coming for him.
A gust of wind leaps up and takes him as he stands, moves him like a piece on a chessboard, right off the bronze brim and into open space on a cushion of air. Richard jerks forward at the sight, but there is nothing to do. Braun hangs there a frozen moment, like a bird seeking direction. And then he is gone, and the gust is gone, its trailing breeze just a flutter whispering unintelligible secrets fifty stories above the pavement.
NINETEEN
The news about a jumper off the statue of William Penn comes over the police radios, springing out of squad cars and echoing in the alley. Oliver is the only one to make a connection.
Good God. What he said those times on the telephone. Strange talk about that poet and all. Whitman. Under your boot soles, he said. Scale the heights, he said. Way up high. The words, and the way they were said, have stuck with Oliver.
A little tug at his stomach and throat. The clincher: Scaling that shaky ladder with impunity, all the way up to the second-level ceiling on the first day he came to the station.
“I hope that’s not our boy,” Oliver says to Janet, though he believes otherwise.
Janet seems in her own world as she leans against a strip of brick wall at one end of the loading dock. Finally, she realizes that Oliver has said something to her. “I’m sorry, what was that again?”
“Someone just jumped off the top of City Hall.”
“What?”
“Or fell,” Oliver adds. “We just got a report.”
He places a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he says. “All kinds of things come over that radio. Can’t stop it.”
“Why would that be Richard?”
“Something he said to me. I have a feeling. Could be nothing.”
“Do you really think . . . ?”
“I’m gonna check it out,” Oliver says. There’s a humming inside of him, a motor that has been started after a long period of disuse. He walks to a squad car, braces himself with one hand on the roof, and leans toward the driver. “I’m gonna see what’s up with that jumper, Rog.”
“Busy evening, huh?”
“Could say that.”
The patrolman starts the engine and eases the car into the alley; a second blue-and-white follows. Oliver returns to Janet, who hasn’t moved from her spot in ten minutes.
“You all right?”
They watch the ambulance pull away. “They’re both in there?” Janet asks.
“Yep. They’ll be going to different departments.”
She shudders.
“Sorry. Why don’t you get some rest?”
“What will you find there?”
“At City Hall?”
“Yes.”
He looks away and shakes his head. “I don’t know.”
“Who will you find there?”
Oliver looks right into her eyes—beautiful hazel eyes. She is about the age that Cassie would be, maybe a couple years older. “I don’t know that, either,” he says evenly. “But I think our guy’s comin’ out of this one whole. Just a hunch.”
“I want to go with you.”
He balks. “Well—”
“Please.”
What the hell. This kid can take it. Just like Cassie. Tough young lady.
“Let’s go,” he says, turning toward his battered Buick and almost smiling to himself. “I’m off duty, anyway.”
It’s just two turns and four blocks to City Hall, but they hit three red lights, and Oliver has no siren or emergency light for this jalopy, so Janet has time to give him a fuller summary of her sister’s death and her pursuit of Braun.
“Do your folks know what you’ve been doing?”
“Are you kidding? I couldn’t put them through that. My father would die.”
Oliver looks at her with admiration. This girl’s got guts . . . and character. Reminds him of someone.
It has begun to drizzle, and when Oliver switches on the arthritic wipers, they scrape the windshield and leave sagging ridges of water in their wake. Better to keep them quiet until the rain picks up.
Police sawhorses and yellow tape festoon Dilworth Plaza, and a crowd gathers just beyond—squad cars and TV-news vans angling in. Big doings: big-city swan dive to the pavement, film at eleven. Reporters clutch mikes and lean into the klieg lights. Braun’s body lies crumpled beneath a sheet near the tunnel leading to the courtyard, ground he trod less than an hour earlier. The police interrogate a grizzled homeless man, who, so far, is the only eyewitness at ground level. All he saw was something fly through the air and hit the ground. “Didn’t sound like much,” he says. “Like, I dunno, a bag of groceries or somethin’. Only saw it for a coupla seconds, when it was gettin’ to the ground—no, not from the top, y’understan’, don’t know what happened all the way up there. Can’t see that far anyway.”
The 911 call came in from a janitor in a high-rise office building facing City Hall, right across Fifteenth Street on Market. He was Windexing the tall windows and had a dead-on view. That call was the only one per this incident. If anyone else caught a glimpse, it either didn’t register or the random onlooker refused to believe his eyes. A daredevil’s final flight, and not much of a gallery for oohs and ahs.
Arms bracing hiked-up knees as he sits on William Penn’s hat, Richard feels immobilized. The winds continue to snake-dance on high, funneling up from below the hat’s brim and spinning off into the mist of night.
When he finally rises, a shiver runs through him and out into the air. The surface of the great bronze hat is slick with light rain. Five hundred feet below, a mad world scrambles for traction. Richard hunches at the precipice, looks up at the phantom sky and back down at the hard, level ground.
A new sensation weaves its way through him. He is sloughing off the fears and self-loathing that have constricted him forever, purging himself of the poison he has consistently administered to his system. All of it went overboard with Davis Braun, and there is no reason he should follow. He has no regret for the horror that transpired here at the heights. Behind his grimace forecasting tears is jubilance, a silent cry of triumph.
