“Thanks, Grierson,” Romano said. Sometimes he resented these new cops, the eager-beaver kind who had college degrees and studied law in night school. But they were useful. Romano hated to wade through long reports and Grierson knew it. Grierson could type with all ten fingers. He did most of the clerical poop that was part of a cop’s job. Romano hated to peck at the typewriter with two thick fingers. He always made mistakes. After doing it for more than twenty years, he made mistakes.

The lieutenant began to skim through the report on Ferguson. He didn’t read it carefully. He could depend on Grierson. Suddenly he paused and his thick eyebrows knit together.

“He was in that vet’s place right over on Staten Island,” he said.

Grierson said, “That’s right. Bay Heaven. It’s one of the biggest Army general hospitals in the country.”

“Get your hat,” Romano said. Romano was tying his shoe laces. “Why?” asked Grierson.

“We’re going over to Staten Island,” Romano answered. “There just might be some medic still around who remembers Ferguson.”

Grierson rose and stretched. “Oh, well,” he said, “its a nice day for a ferry ride.”

They left the police car parked on the lower deck of the ferry and climbed up to the top. They stood by the rail, letting the wind whip their faces, watching the skyline of Manhattan recede into the distance. More than eight million people lived and worked and had their being in this immediate area, Romano thought. One of them was called The Butcher.

“I wish I had some easy job,” the lieutenant said aloud. “Like finding a needle in a haystack.”

It took nearly two hours of questioning and waiting and checking the files at the hospital before they found a doctor named Bowers. He was an elderly man with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. After he had glanced over the files he remembered Lester Ferguson among the thousands of patients who had been under his care during the last dozen years. He remembered him quite clearly.

“A most interesting case,” Bowers said. “His wound was comparatively trivial, a fragment of shell in the leg that required surgery, but did no permanent damage. He didn’t even limp as a result. But he was in shock for an incredible length of time. Weeks, months, even. Sometimes he would lapse into a catatonic state. He would lie there on his cot, his body rigid, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. And he would murmur something in a kind of awed and frightened whisper. ‘The face,’ he’d say, ‘the face.’ He’d murmur that over and over again.

“It was trauma, of course, some shocking experience that had been repressed and had made a lasting impression on him. We couldn’t bring out what it was or when it had occurred. It might have been in his childhood. It might have been anything and it might have happened at any time. I always say a thing like that is a splinter under the skin of the mind. You have to extract it somehow. We tried various techniques. None of them seemed to work. Finally, we hit on sodium pentothal, the stuff the newspapers call truth serum. I doubt we’d use it now we have the new relaxing drugs, but it did the trick. When he was under the influence of the drug we questioned him, and we finally brought it out, removed the splinter, you might say.

“He’d seen a face, or thought he’d seen one, staring at him through a broken window during street fighting while they were mopping up some little town in Italy. He thought it was the Face of Evil, as he called it. It must have been a pretty horrible experience for him. He was wounded right afterward, but the face stayed in his mind. Once we got him to tell us about it, we purged the thing and he was on his way to recovery.”

“You think he saw a real face in the window?” Romano asked. “Or was it just some sort of delusion?”

The doctor shrugged. “It’s hard to say,” he answered. “It could have been a real face. It could have been the face of some enemy sniper trapped there in a ruined building. The street was piled with dead and dying men, probably. Such faces aren’t very pretty. Whatever it was he saw, he thought it was the Face of Evil. He called it that. You have to understand that Ferguson was a very religious man. He’d been studying for the ministry when he went into the Army. Killing is a terrible experience for any man. That was especially true for a man like Ferguson. Most soldiers go through a war never knowing for sure that the shots they fire have killed an enemy. Ferguson knew for sure. Just a few days before he was wounded, a few days before he saw the face, he’d been decorated for wiping out an enemy strongpoint with a grenade. Five machine-gunners were killed by the grenade.”

“And when you brought it out, when you made him tell you about the face — this Face of Evil — he was cured?” Romano asked.

“From the clinical view, he was,” Bowers answered. “He came out of shock. The catatonic periods did not recur. We kept him around awhile for observation. He was perfectly normal when he was discharged.”

“Ferguson saw the face again last night,” Romano said flatly.

Bowers said, “I’m sorry. That is bad, of course, but it happens sometimes, years later. Usually it’s some shattering experience that brings it on.”

“It was a shattering experience,” Romano told the doctor. “Ferguson’s wife was killed by a murderer they call The Butcher.”

The Lieutenant rose and nodded to Grierson. He was ready to leave.

As the police car rolled off the ferry onto Manhattan Island, Grierson said, “It’s nearly five. Do we knock off now and catch some shuteye, or are we starting another tour of duty?”

“Drive to City Hospital,” Romano answered. “I want to try and talk to Ferguson again.”

Inside the hospital, Romano saw the same doctor he had spoken to that morning, the thin man with the high cheekbones and the small mustache.

“I’d like to talk to Ferguson again,” he said. “I won’t be but a little while.”

The doctor said, “Didn’t you get our message, Lieutenant?”

“What message?” Romano asked.

“We called your office and left word. Lester Ferguson died of a cerebral hemorrhage about an hour ago.”

Romano merely nodded, accepting it.

Grierson shook his head angrily. “So the only person who could tell us what The Butcher looked like died without identifying him,” the young detective said.

“Oh, he identified him,” Romano answered softly. “Come on, Grierson. I want to look in on Ferguson’s flat.”

The Fergusons had occupied the ground floor of a house of mellowed brick on a pleasant, tree-lined street in Greenwich Village. Romano got the key of Ferguson’s apartment from the superintendent. Daylight still showed through the windows, but the apartment was shadowy and Romano switched on lights.

He said, “Ferguson must have been sitting in that chair right there when he came back to consciousness after his stroke.” He crossed the room and sat down in a chintz-covered easy chair.

“He came to,” Romano continued. “He was confused. He probably wasn’t too sure where he was, even. He called to his wife, and she didn’t answer.”

Romano got to his feet. “The bedroom door was closed. Ferguson walked toward it.” Romano walked toward the bedroom door and opened it. He switched on another light, stood in the doorway.

“He looked down and saw his wife’s body on the floor, right inside the doorway. Then he looked up and saw the murderer’s face staring at him through a window.”

Romano drew aside, “Come over here, Grierson,” he said. “Stand here in the doorway.”

Grierson obeyed.

“Look straight ahead of you,” Romano said. “You see, Ferguson was right. There is a window.”

Grierson was a good cop and a conscientious one, but sometimes his mind did not work too fast. He turned to Romano, his face blank.

Romano said, “You want me to draw you a picture? Ferguson saw the face of the man who killed his wife in what he called a window, the thing that’s right in front of you. He called it The Face of Evil, but it was The Butcher’s face, the face of the psycho who killed five women in this neighborhood.”

Grierson didn’t see a window.

All he saw was his own face reflected in the mirror on the wall.

Smart Sucker
by Richard Wormser

Gwen’s fingers worked up and down Henry’s thigh ecstatically. “Let's bump Henry off,” she said. “We don’t need him any more.”

He went, a guy determined to make two more calls before the end of office hours, along the dark and dirty street. Torn newspapers and empty cigarette packages skittered along the gutter, and a lean black cat, not quite mangy, scuttled up a narrow alleyway.

When he raised his head to see if he was anywhere near number 1262, the Merser Printing Company, the damp wind caught the brim of his new hat and he slapped a quick hand on the crown to hold it down. The wind was strong enough to make the briefcase in his other hand a problem.

His name was Henry Croft, he sold office supplies, and he believed that hard work, a neat appearance and attention to his customers’ individual needs would some day make him rich. He had a wife, one and seven-ninths children, lived in the suburbs — though not in as good a house as he someday hoped to own — and was generally considered a pretty good guy.

He did not belong in a place like this Slack Street except to pass through, selling a few typewriter ribbons and maybe a filing case or two. Which was why he was here.

Now, raindrops began to fall, big, idle ones that rolled in the dust of Slack Street without breaking. A frugal guy, he thought first of the new hat, the newly-pressed suit. He stepped into a doorway.

Then the rain changed, became the kind in which the drops are small and driven hard; the lasting kind of rain. He shifted the briefcase to his other hand and looked around.

Through unwashed windows neon ads for a couple of breweries shone at him from across the street. A bar, but one so lowly that it didn’t have a name — just BAR & GRILL in letters that might have been born gilt on a once-black background.

Waiting for the wind to slacken for a second, he made the dash across the street toward the neon.

As he made it into the bar, the wind took the heavy door away from him and slammed it shut. He gave the apologetic smile of an intruder.

Nobody smiled back at him.

There were six people in the bar, counting the bartender; four men, two women. Or rather, four boys and two girls; all of them had the unlined faces of the early twenties, despite their late-forty eyes.

Bubbles chased themselves endlessly around the brightly-lit rim of the juke box, out of rhythm with the rock-and-roll number that was playing.

Henry Croft laid his briefcase on a stool, wiped it with his handkerchief and then carefully placed his hat on the dried surface. He told the bartender: “Scotch on the rocks.”

The bartender gave his dark hair an unnecessary slicking with both palms, and said: “I don’t read you, Mac.”

“Scotch whiskey and ice. No water, no soda.”

“Whyn’t you say so?”

Henry Croft perched himself on the stool next to his hat and case. The young man on his right smelled slightly sweaty and more than slightly pomaded. The girl beyond him languidly pulled up her skirt and scratched a dead white thigh. The bartender slapped an old-fashioned glass in front of Henry Croft and waited for a dollar bill; he threw a quarter back in exchange.

The wind shifted and rain slashed viciously against the windows.

The scotch had never crossed salt water; its oil clung to his tongue, its peculiarly acrid aroma went up his nose and made him feel like he’d slept all night in a freshly-painted room.

The juke box stopped and one of the old-young men pushed away from the bar and languidly dropped another nickel in. The same record started; nobody seemed to be listening.

The bartender said: “Think he’s a cop, Juney?”

Juney was the one who’d nickelled the machine. He said: “We’ll find out.” He ambled slowly toward Henry Croft, without looking at him. Even with Henry, Juney swept the briefcase and hat off onto the floor, and slouched down on the stool they had occupied. He said: “Beer.”

When the bottle had been opened and the beer poured, he tasted it and said: “Naw, Carley. He’s no cop.” He smiled at Henry Croft between them. “Pick up your hat, man. What you so scared of?”

The one named Carley said: “That’s a good hat, man. Too good to lay on the floor.”

Henry Croft bent slowly and retrieved the hat and briefcase. The back of his neck ached all the time he was bent over, expecting the rabbit punch, the thin knife blade, the unknown. But nothing happened.

Juney said: “Drink your drink. You’ll hurt Carley’s feelings.”

Henry Croft picked up the glass. It was nearly to his mouth when the girl reached over and knocked it out of his hand. The bad whiskey, the ice, the glass itself rolled down the front of his suit. The girl laughed. “Change seats with me, Juney. I like this square.”

Carley began to laugh. It was a funny laugh, without humor, or friendship behind it. “Watch yourself, mister,” he said. “When Gwen gets hot, she sizzles.”

Juney slid out of his seat, and the girl slid over. She put her hand on Henry Croft’s shoulder and slowly slid it down his arm until she could grab his wrist. Her hand was stronger than it looked; she had a pasty, sickly complexion. She was about twenty. “You got a name?”

“Henry.”

“Buy me a drink, Henry. I’m Gwen.”

He nodded at Carley. The bartender grinned, and poured a straight shot for Gwen, threw something on top of ice for Henry. The girl knocked her drink down in a single swallow, and moved her hand from Henry’s wrist to his thigh. “What you want in here, Henry?”

He had to clear his throat twice before he could speak. “A drink. To get out of the rain,” he said.

Gwen laughed her flat laugh again. “Oh boy. Some rain.”

It didn’t make any sense. Henry Croft grabbed his glass, and this time Gwen let him swallow the oily stuff. She caressed his thigh gently. “You like me, Henry?”

“Sure, Gwen. Sure.”

Carley said: “That’ll be a buck-fifty, mister.”

Henry Croft took his wallet from his hip pocket. He laid two dollar bills on the bar, and started to put the wallet away. Gwen reached out and took the wallet from him and shoved it down the front of her dress. “You want to treat me right, don’t you, Henry?”

He pulled away from her and then lunged at the point of her V-neck. Just as his fingers touched the cloth, Juney hit him on the jaw. He went back against the bar, and Carley brought a bottle down on his head, and he was quiet. Black and quiet.

When he came to he was in a car. It was still raining; almost the first thing he knew was the sweep and swish of the windshield wipers. He moaned and felt his head, confusedly; he had no idea where he was or why he was here, or how he’d gotten there.

Then the whole business of the bar came back to him. Carley, the bartender, was driving, and the girl Gwen was next to him, on the front seat. She had turned around. She said: “Juney, he’s moving.”