Part 7

The next time Benny Knox confessed to a crime he did not commit, again a murder, was two years later--a year ago, when Benny was thirty-four. That time he did not get off so lightly, for several good reasons. The crime was not yet solved, and it had been a wanton, purposeless killing that bore all the earmarks of having been committed by a mentally deranged person. A few days later it turned out to have been committed by a pair of teenage heroin addicts, but until then Benny had rather a rough time of it. His story was hard to disprove; it made sense insofar as it covered all the facts that had appeared in the papers. Only one thing saved him from being actually charged with the crime and getting his name and picture in the papers as a murderer--which would have been very bad for business at the newsstand, even though he would subsequently have been cleared. Some people would still have been afraid of him. The thing that had saved Benny had been his choice of a weapon. The news stories had said only that the man had been beaten to death with a blunt, heavy weapon. After the autopsy the police knew that the weapon had been a section of rusty pipe; not only did some of the wounds clearly indicate its diameter but tiny fragments of rust had been found embedded in the victim's skull. But they had not given this particular bit of information to the newspapers, and Benny's imagination had supplied him with a baseball bat as the blunt heavy weapon he had used. Moreover, he was unable to remember where he had obtained it or what he had done with it afterward.

The police, that time, were not so ready and willing to release Benny Knox. He'd given them a hard time and caused them a lot of work. For a while they'd seriously considered charging him despite the one discrepancy in his story. The rest of it made sense and could have been true. Further, they were convinced that he was, or at least had been, sincere in thinking he had committed the crime. That made him a psychopath, and it could be that he was a potentially dangerous one. If he could imagine himself to have committed a crime possibly someday he might really commit one.

They held him while Dr. Kranz, an alienist who was a friend of the police commissioner's and who usually advised the police on borderline cases like Benny's, talked to him twice and also had a long talk with Mrs. Saddler, who knew more about Benny's background and history than anyone else. Dr. Kranz saved Benny.

"Benny Knox," he wrote in his informal report to the commissioner, "seems to have a mental age of about eight. While it is true that many adults with that mental age find themselves unable to adjust to the world and to earn their own way in it, thereby requiring institutionalization, others do make the adjustment, especially ones who still have parents or other mentors to guide and help them.

"Mrs. Saddler stands _in loco parentis_ to Knox, and she is a very sane and sensible woman. With her help, he does all right. Of course she is about twenty years older than he (that is my guess; I did not ask her age) and it is statistically probable that she will predecease him, but even this may not lead to his becoming a public charge. Mrs. Saddler is aware of the problem and has in mind solving it when the time comes, in other words, if and when she finds herself getting too old to run her boarding house any longer. She knows other rooming and boarding house keepers, some younger than herself, and believes she will have no difficulty in finding one willing to take over Benny. She says he is pleasant, tractable and easy to get along with, and his earnings are sufficient that he will represent a profit and not a burden to whoever takes care of him. The biggest problem, in fact, will be to find someone sufficiently honest not to make too much of a profit on him.

"So much for his adjustment to society despite his subnormality and now to what you've been waiting for me to discuss, his abnormality, his fantasy of believing that he has committed crimes of which he is innocent and wishing to be punished for them. From what I can learn he seems to have been a wonderfully 'good' boy and probably did nothing that, even in his own mind, merited the punishment he now seeks. I would say that his guilt feelings were given to him by his father. His father--who raised Benny alone after his mother died in childbirth--was a fiery fundamentalist minister. He taught his son what he himself believed--a good but vengeful God, original sin, a very literal brimstone Hell, eternal damnation for the sinner. These are very heady and frightening doctrines even for a person of normal mentality.

"He feels himself guilty of unnameable sins and since he cannot name them--and thereby obtain punishment and through punishment forgiveness--he builds the fantasy of having committed a real sin, one for which he _can_ be punished. A nameable real sin becomes surrogate for an unnameable one.

"The prognosis? Incurable. He may 'grow out of it' or its symptoms may become worse or at any rate more frequent.

"Does this mean he should be put in an institution? I personally do not think so. He will probably again--and possibly again and again--become a mild thorn in your side by confessing to other crimes. As a matter of police routine you'll have to check his story out, and thereby run into a little extra work and expense. But--at his present rate of two years having elapsed between his last confession and his current one--the cost of this slight amount of police work once in a while will be a minute fraction of the cost to society of institutionalizing him and supporting him for the rest of his life. So my recommendation is that you give society a break by letting Benny support himself as long as he can.

"I don't think there's any chance of his becoming dangerously insane. I can't guarantee that, of course--but neither can I guarantee it in your case or mine. And I can say for him what I can say for you or me: at present none of the three of us shows signs or inclination toward any dangerous aberration.

"I do suggest one precaution, however. Any time he again comes in with a confession, whether or not it's one you can immediately rule out without investigation, hold him until I can talk to him again and determine whether his degree and kind of mental disturbance is at that time such that I might want to change my recommendation."

That had been a year ago. Now Benny Knox was disturbed again. Not suddenly, not just tonight; his realization that he was the man who had murdered the two women, the man the police were looking for, had come to him gradually over the past week. At first he hadn't been sure, he couldn't really remember. But that wasn't surprising; from time to time there were so many things that he couldn't remember. Even now he couldn't remember _why_ he had killed them--it must have been just because he was bad, evil. People were born evil and only through God and Jesus could they become good and even then before they could get into Heaven they must confess to the evil things they had done and be punished before they could be forgiven.

He closed his eyes and had a mental picture of his father and his father was holding out a hand to him and saying, "You've done wrong, Benjamin. Confess and let them punish you so you can be forgiven, or I'll never see you again. You'll go to hell and burn forever." His father's face was really his father's face, for there was a picture of his father's face on Benny's bureau and he saw it every day and couldn't forget what his father had looked like. But his father's body was clad in shimmering robes and seated on a throne. Benny often got his father in Heaven and his Heavenly Father mixed up and was as likely to pray to one as to the other.

He said, "Yes, Father, I will," aloud and opened his eyes. They fell upon his hands lying in front of him on a pile of newspapers. Big, strong hands. Strangler's hands. Hands that could kill easily, and had killed.

Footsteps approached and stopped, and he looked up. Officer Hoff stood there, grinning down at him. "Hi, Benny. Will you take your big paws off that pile of papers so I can take one?"

Benny lifted his hands and dropped them in his lap, out of sight, and Officer Hoff took one of the papers and put it under his arm. He didn't put down a dime, but Benny hadn't expected him to; policemen didn't have to pay for papers. He didn't know why not, but the man from whom his father had bought the newsstand had explained to him that policemen didn't have to pay for little things like newspapers. It was part of the cost of doing business, he'd explained, whatever that meant. You didn't charge policemen for their papers and then they liked you and helped you if you needed help. Well, he needed help now. Maybe Officer Hoff would want to arrest him right now. Officer Hoff was a nice man.

He said, "Mr. Hoff, I killed them two women. You want to arrest me? Or should I walk around to the station myself?"

Officer Hoff had quit grinning. He shook his head sadly. "Not again, Benny. You didn't--"

"I really did, Mr. Hoff. I--choked them to death." Benny held up his hands, the evidence.

Officer Hoff shook his head again. "Well--I'll radio in from the car. Maybe they'll want me to bring you in. I'll see. We're pretty busy tonight."

He walked downstreet to the curb where the squad car was waiting, another officer at the wheel. He got into the squad car. Benny was afraid at first that they'd drive off, and then he saw that the squad car wasn't moving. And after a couple of minutes Officer Hoff got out of it and came back.

He said, "No, they don't want us to bring you in. Lieutenant Burton--you know him? Red hair?"

Benny hadn't known the name but when Officer Hoff said, "Red hair," he remembered he'd talked a lot with a policeman with red hair, down at the station. He couldn't remember what they'd talked about, but he remembered the hair. He nodded.

"Well, he wants to see you. But there isn't any hurry. You can go ahead and sell the rest of your papers, no use their going to waste. Then you go to the station and he'll see you."

Benny nodded again. "All right, I'll go round."

"Be sure you do, and don't forget." He shook his head a third time. "Benny, you didn't kill them dames--we checked you out on it, long ago. You and a lot of other people. But just the same don't you forget to go to the station. If you don't go there right after you quit we'll have to come to the rooming house to get you."

"I won't forget, Mr. Hoff. I'll go there."

Benny sadly watched Officer Hoff get back into the squad car and watched the squad car drive off.

Officer Hoff hadn't believed him either. But the policeman with the red hair would believe him, when Benny told him all about it.

9:00 P.M.

A clock somewhere was striking nine as Ray Fleck got out of the taxi in front of Dolly Mason's apartment, and he knew that he was on time. He'd had trouble finding a cab and had thought he was going to be late--not that a few minutes late would have mattered but if he was very late Dolly would be annoyed; Dolly got annoyed easily if you were late for a date with her. Then just at the right moment a cab had pulled in to the curb right near him to discharge passengers, and he'd caught it.

A turn in his luck? God, he hoped so. _Everything_ had been going wrong today and tonight, up till then. What had got into him to pop off about Connolly's thirty-dollar bet when it had been Sam's that Amico had been talking about! A lousy six bucks, and he _had_ forgotten about it by then. Connolly's thirty had been the one on his mind. Hell, he thought disgustedly, he really couldn't blame Amico for not believing that he'd not been covering bets and dragging down right along, when he'd come up with a boner like that.

But Jesus, did Joe have to get so tough about it? Twenty-four hours to raise four hundred and eighty bucks, or else. His face was still sore from the two flat-handed slaps Monahan had given him and his stomach still ached from the blow there. But those things would pass, the pain of them and the humiliation of them. But if he lost his job he was sunk, really sunk. If he lost his job the way Joe would make him lose it, under a cloud with the J. & B. Distributors and on the outs with most of his customers to boot, he'd never get a reference and never get another job, here or anywhere else, selling liquor.

Many people thought Ray Fleck was a good all-around salesman who could do well selling almost anything to almost anybody, but Ray knew better; he'd tried. His first foray into selling had been just after he'd quit high school about three-fourths of the way through his senior year--he was failing in several subjects and wasn't going to be graduated anyway--and it had been a try at selling brushes door to door. He'd hated it, especially the long hours the company had expected him to work, and he'd stuck it out less than a week, during which time he'd earned seven dollars and some odd cents. He'd tried to stay home and loaf around for a while but finally became fed up with his father calling him a no-good and with not having any spending money, and he started to look for work again. During the next seven years he held a lot of jobs but none of them for very long. All in all he worked about half of the time, but he got by because his father, a certified public accountant, had a fairly good income and, after a while, gave up trying to collect anything from his son in the way of room and board, so all the money Ray did make went for clothes and entertainment.

The jobs he held were many and varied. Soda jerk, counterman, assistant shipping clerk, driver of a delivery truck, what have you. He never held any job longer than a few months; half of them he quit because the work was too hard or too boring; he was fired from the rest for a variety of reasons, usually for goofing off. Once, in a bad period, he was fired for dipping into a till but luckily the employer didn't prosecute so he didn't have a police record because of it. The job he had held longest, and had most hated, during that period had been with the army when he had been drafted at twenty. And he had held that job only five months instead of the usual period. He had suddenly developed a violent allergy to wool, and since the army wasn't geared to provide special uniforms and bedding for him, it had the choice of discharging him or letting him ride out his hitch in the infirmary. It discharged him. The allergy had gradually diminished; by now he could wear wool suits except in very hot weather, but in cold weather he still used quilts or comforters instead of blankets.

Several of his jobs during that period had been selling jobs; he'd tried insurance, automobiles, hardware, and a few other things. But he hadn't lasted at those jobs as long as at others. He could turn on a pleasing personality and could make people like him, but he lacked the perseverance and determination necessary to succeed at selling, which is a lot tougher job than most people think.

Until at the end of the seven years he found himself and found the one job he both liked and could do well at. It was time that he found it, for his parents had just died, his mother only a month before his father, and free room and board were out; he _had_ to keep a job if he wanted to eat regularly.

And the job he had finally found was a natural for him. He liked hanging out in taverns. He liked to be able to buy rounds of drinks and being able, within reason, to put them on an expense account. He liked the hours. The only part of the job that he considered work was the calls he had to make at liquor stores and he was willing to do that chore for the sake of the rest of the job. He liked drinking and he had an excellent capacity for holding his drinks. The job brought him into contact with others who, like himself, loved gambling and enjoyed talking horse racing, dog racing, the odds on a pennant race or matching coins for drinks. Best of all, the job let him make money--and make it doing what came naturally.

And now he was going to lose that wonderful job, unless he could raise four hundred and eighty bucks in twenty-four hours. Joe Amico had meant every word of what he'd said, and Joe could make his threats good, too. He wouldn't last a week in his job if Joe started spreading the word around. He _had_ to raise that money now; it was a matter of desperate necessity.

He paid off the taxi, and that left him thirteen dollars, thirteen lousy dollars.

Dolly, he thought, don't fail me now! He'd already decided, in the taxi, not to start off by asking for any special amount; he'd just tell her he was in a desperate jam and needed every cent he could possibly get. Maybe she'd come up with five hundred and take him off the hook completely. If that happened, he wouldn't risk the poker game at all; he'd make sure of having the dough for Amico, to save his job. That came ahead of everything else, now.

Of course she probably wouldn't have five hundred in cash at the apartment, that would be too much to hope for, but a check would be all right; he'd have all day tomorrow to cash it. How much could he offer her for five hundred? To pay her back six hundred within two weeks? That ought to be enough to tempt her, but hell, he could go even higher if he had to. After all, he hadn't given her his right name so she couldn't locate him to heckle him. Not that he wouldn't pay her back as soon as he could--if she was reasonable, like wanting six for five. If he had to promise her anything extortionate, like a thousand for five hundred, then she could whistle for it and it would serve her right for being greedy.

He hurried up the two flights of stairs and along the corridor, knocked on Dolly's door.

She opened it, first on the chain, and then when she saw who it was she said, "Hi, Ray honey. Just a sec," and closed the door a moment to slide off the chain and open it wide.

He went in and she stepped aside and then closed the door behind him. The chain went on again. Few women were taking chances these days, even if a man was with them.

Dolly Mason, he saw, was practically ready for action. Her otherwise bare little feet were in mules and she wore a thin silk kimono, brilliant red, with obviously nothing at all--except Dolly--underneath it. But he was too desperately worried to be interested. Business came first, right now. Of course if he got enough money from her to end his worries for tonight, then he could relax and romp.

"Dolly," he blurted, "I'm in a jam, a hell of a jam. Life or death, almost. I need to borrow some money--just for a week or so. Have you got any?"

She took a short step back from him; she'd been going toward him to put her arms around him as she always did when he came in. "Honey, _I_ haven't got any money. Where did you get a wild idea like that?" She looked toward a handbag lying on an end table by the sofa. "I've got just eight dollars--and I can't spare any of that because it's got to last me till payday, three days. Look, I'll show you if you don't believe me."

She started toward the handbag but he said, "Never mind, I believe you. I didn't mean that kind of money anyway. And cash doesn't matter. A check will do because I can cash it tomorrow and that'll be in time, because tomorrow night's my deadline. And you'll make money on it--not lose. If you can lend me five hundred I'll give you back six, in two weeks. That's how God damn important it--"

Suddenly she was laughing. Not a cruel laugh, but an amused one. "Ray honey, I haven't _got_ a bank account, not even a savings account, let alone a checking one. I'm sorry if you're in trouble, but what made you think _I_ had any money? Honest, I haven't."

Ray Fleck took a step backward and dropped onto the sofa, put his elbows on his knees and his face into his hands. He was beat. He hadn't realized until this moment how much he'd been counting on Dolly--and how ridiculous it had been for him to have done so. He didn't know whether or not Dolly was lying about not having a bank account, but he knew, and for sure, that even if she had she wasn't going to lend him any money. Not even fifty bucks that he might manage to run up in the poker game, let alone the five hundred that it would take to bail him out of trouble. She didn't trust him that much and it wouldn't do any good to plead, to offer her a thousand back instead of six hundred. Even if she had a checking account, she'd never admit now that she'd been lying and write him a check against it.

"Ray honey, I'm sorry. Honest."

He took his hands away from his face, stared at her dully. "It's all right, Dolly. I shouldn't have--" He shook his head slowly. He'd started to say that he'd been a damn fool to expect anything but this, but there wasn't any point in finishing the sentence. The only thing to do now was to get going, go some place where he could think, and try to figure something out. He knew there wasn't an earthly chance that he could raise the four-eighty tonight, but if he didn't waste time he might still build back his stake enough to let him sit in tonight's game. His luck _had_ to change sometime.

"Ray, you do look beat," Dolly said. "Would a drink help? Let me make you a drink."

He started to say no, and then nodded instead. He really did need a drink now, and it seemed like ages since he'd had one. It had been at Connolly's, before that horrible scene at Amico's. "Sure," he said. "Make it a strong one, huh?"

"One strong drink coming up," Dolly said. She went around the screen that hid the kitchenette. He heard her taking down glasses from the little cupboard over the sink.

What an ass he'd been to remember that short story about the mistress who had given her--

Jewelry? Dolly had jewelry. He didn't know how much of it or how valuable it was, but it could be worth plenty. Not that she'd give or lend it to him, of course, but he knew where she kept it, or some of it. It was in a little hand-tooled leather box on top of the dresser in the bedroom. He'd never seen down inside it but he'd seen her open it and put jewelry into it. The last time he'd been here she'd been wearing long dangling earrings with green stones--emeralds?--and she'd taken them off the last thing and put them in the box before she'd thrown herself face down on the bed and rolled over into his waiting arms.

The jewelry in that little box might be worth plenty. Did he dare? There wouldn't be time now, even though the bedroom door stood ajar; it was clear across the living room from him and she'd surely hear him moving if he tried to go there. He'd have to go to bed with her to get a chance at the box, but it would be easy then; she always went to the bathroom for a minute or two immediately after.

Did he dare? Why not? He'd taken chances before, although never quite in this way, but then he'd never been in this bad a fix before either. Besides, it wouldn't really be stealing; it would be borrowing without telling Dolly about it. He'd make it up to her someday, when he was solvent again. If he couldn't get her back the same jewelry he could get her other stuff like it.

Thank _God_ he hadn't given her his right name. Fletcher instead of Fleck was a little close for comfort, but all she knew about him outside of his right first name was that he was a liquor salesman. But there were a lot of liquor salesmen in the city--and the police wouldn't _know_ that he'd given her his right first name, since they could find out quickly enough that he hadn't given a right last one.

Dolly came back with two drinks, both dark enough to show that she'd really made them strong.

He took the drink she held out to him and downed half of it at a gulp. It was strong enough to burn on the way down and it did help, it did make him feel better.