Life Penalty Read online

  “In the meantime, what about your piano lessons? Have you given any thought to starting them up again?”

  “I can’t,” Gail answered quickly as the waiter approached and cleared away the salad bowls, reappearing a minute later with the pasta of the day. “I’ve tried to sit down and play a few times and I can’t even do that. My hands start to shake. I see Cindy—”

  “It’s probably just as well,” Laura said, cutting her off gently. “I think you need something that gets you out of the house.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Gail told her, digging into her pasta, knowing they were not thinking the same thing at all.

  FOURTEEN

  For the rest of the summer Gail divided her time between her home in Livingston and her excursions into Newark and East Orange. Her days were spent traveling in her car from one run-down street to the next, casing the stores that had been recently robbed in much the same way she envisioned the perpetrator of the crime had done, watching those who went in and out, those who loitered nearby, her eyes watchful for anyone who might fit the vague description of her child’s killer. In the beginning, she rarely got out of her car.

  She was always home by four o’clock, in time to get supper ready for Jack and Jennifer. When her husband and daughter walked through the front door at the end of the day, they invariably found Gail in the kitchen putting the finishing touches on dinner. They had no idea how she spent her days.

  “Oh wow, I’m tired,” Jennifer exclaimed one evening, falling into her seat at the kitchen table.

  “Tough day?” Gail asked, putting the roast on the table for dinner. “Careful, it’s hot.”

  “Looks good,” Jack said, starting to help himself.

  “I hope so,” Gail worried. The traffic out of East Orange had been bad, and she’d been late getting home. She wasn’t sure the meat had had enough time to cook.

  ‘“I don’t know how Dad does it every day,” Jennifer continued. “Some of these people … they can’t sit still for two seconds, or it’s like pulling teeth to get them to smile. They’re so stiff, and some of them think they’re God’s gift to the camera. You should see the poses! But Dad’s terrific. He’s so patient with everyone. He listens to them telling him which is their best side or what kind of mood they want to capture, and he agrees, and then he just goes ahead and takes his pictures the way he intended to all along.”

  Gail smiled. It sounded like Mark.

  “Sometimes I think a picture is going to be beautiful because the woman he’s photographing is beautiful, but Dad will tell me to wait and see, and sure enough the woman doesn’t photograph well at all. And other people who aren’t all that good-looking, their pictures turn out gorgeous. Dad says that some people are naturally more photogenic than others.”

  Gail sat down and put a small amount of food on her plate. “So, you’re having a good time, are you?” she asked, very proud of her daughter and pleased that she was enjoying herself as much as she obviously was.

  “I can’t believe the summer’s half over,” Jennifer sighed.

  “It is?” Gail was genuinely astonished.

  “It’s August 1 tomorrow.”

  “August 1,” Gail repeated numbly. Time was passing so quickly, passing her by. She’d accomplished nothing.

  “Gail …” Jack’s voice was puzzled. “Are you all right?”

  “Oh sure,” Gail said, quickly jumping back into the conversation. “Is the meat too rare?’

  “Just right,” Jack told her. “Does anybody feel like a movie tonight?”

  “Sounds great,” Jennifer said immediately.

  “I don’t think so,” Gail said at the same time. “You and Jack go,” she added.

  “Come on, Gail. It’ll be good for all of us to get out together.”

  “We’re going out together on Friday,” she reminded them. Carol had called over the weekend with the announcement that she had managed to get tickets for the latest Broadway smash and that they were all to be her guests, no arguments permitted.

  “That’s Friday,” Jennifer protested. “This is Tuesday.”

  “That’s enough excitement for one week,” Gail said, the tone in her voice indicating that as far as she was concerned the. discussion was over. “Eat your dinner,” she told her daughter.

  Jennifer stared across the table at Jack.

  “We’ll go,” he said to her. “If your mother changes her mind between now and the time we leave, she can always come with us.”

  Gail smiled, but she knew, and they knew, that her mind was made up.

  On her excursion into East Orange the following afternoon, Gail decided it was time to get out of her car.

  She began this new phase of her plan by opening an account at a branch of a savings and loan that had suffered a spate of recent robberies. While she waited in the long line in front of the teller’s window, she perused the other customers, an almost even mixture of middle-aged whites and blacks, the women marginally outnumbering the men. The place itself was typically nondescript.

  Gail wondered what she was doing here, turning toward the main entrance just as the door opened and a young man with a slim build and dirty-blond hair came inside. He stood for a few minutes in the lobby and looked around, balancing on one foot and then the other, his head turning restlessly from side to side. Gail watched him, transfixed. He moved back and forth, his hands now going to the insides of his pockets. His eyes quickly passed over the other customers in the bank, stopping momentarily on Gail, looking her up and down before turning away again. Had he been measuring her for a bullet? Gail wondered, trying to will his eyes back to hers. But the youth had discarded her for a young girl in a pair of tight red elastic pants. Gail watched as he sauntered over to one of the counters containing the withdrawal and deposit slips, his eyes never leaving the pants of the teenage girl.

  Gail moved forward in the line, felt someone come up behind her and half turned to catch the side of the youth’s face. She was about to speak when she felt the stab of something sharp against her ribs. She lifted her elbow and saw the black tip of the gun. She waited breathlessly for his next move. But nothing happened and when she looked again, it wasn’t the youth at all, just a man with a briefcase nudging her to move ahead. It was her turn with the teller.

  She opened a small account with ten dollars. The teller made no comment, and the entire transaction was accomplished in a quarter of the time Gail had spent waiting. She hung around for a few minutes afterward, pretending to fumble in her purse by the door, waiting to see what the youth would do, keeping track of who went in and out, realizing again how many young men could be described as slim and fair-haired. She could not allow herself to get discouraged, she decided, as the young man, having connected with the girl in the red elastic pants, pushed past her at the door as if she weren’t there.

  In the next two days Gail opened similar accounts in a variety of banks and savings institutions throughout the shadier sections of Essex County, spending hours in her car, still more hours on her feet, patrolling the streets, all the while watching and waiting.

  She began frequenting the numerous pawnshops in Newark and East Orange, startled at first by the amount of merchandise she found there. The first day, she took no part in the transactions, shaking her head and muttering a feeble “just looking” whenever someone asked if there was anything specific she was after. The next day Gail took in several items (an old brooch, some trinkets that had been lying around the house for years) and pawned them. She received eighteen dollars in total and deposited the money in one of her new accounts.

  On Wednesday afternoon Gail ate lunch in a local greasy spoon, carefully photographing with her mind the noontime customers. On Thursday she brought her own lunch in a paper bag and ate in a nearby park with the men whose own paper bags concealed only bottles of cheap wine. She received many strange looks and realized it was the way she was dressed. She looked simply too well-off to be a frequenter of parks and greasy spoons. She’d h
ave to do something about that, she decided, mentally reviewing her wardrobe for potentially suitable items.

  On Friday she drove reluctantly into Manhattan to meet her sister for lunch. Carol had insisted, and Jack had agreed, that she drive in early so that the two sisters could have some time alone together. Jack and Jennifer would get a lift into town later with his receptionist.

  Gail had gone along with the plan, afraid to make waves, to do or say anything that might be misconstrued. She felt it was important that everyone feel she was looking forward to this outing as much as they were, even though inside she felt nothing at all.

  Jack had his work; Jennifer had her summer job, and her father as well as her stepfather. They both seemed able to function quite well without her. Gail simply wasn’t needed anymore, despite what everyone kept telling her. Except for brief lapses, Gail’s family and friends accepted her outer persona as genuine, and she was increasingly careful not to let her real feelings surface.

  What were her real feelings? she wondered on the drive into Manhattan. She had none. She was dead inside. A Broadway show would hardly be enough to bring her back to life, although she would laugh and clap and pretend to enjoy it as much as everyone else.

  The truth was that the only time she felt alive was when she was searching for death. But it would be pointless to try to tell anyone that. They would suggest anxiously that she seek professional help. They wouldn’t understand. Did she?

  Carol had made reservations for lunch at the Russsian Tea Room. “I know it’s touristy and kind of hokey, but what the hell?” she laughed, and Gail laughed with her. “You look good. A little thin.”

  The two sisters walked along Broadway toward Fifty-seventh Street, Gail taking careful note of the hawkers and seedy shops that lined the streets.

  “I’d forgotten how filthy it is,” Gail remarked, sidestepping a pool of fresh vomit that lay in the center of the street.

  “This is clean,” Carol said with sincerity. “A few years ago it was worse than this.”

  Gail looked in the windows of all the stereo stores, but they seemed filled more with pornographic video tapes than with traditional stereo equipment. As they approached the corner, Gail saw a small crowd surrounding a lone man whose hand was waving something in the air, his voice raised and strong.

  “Let’s cross the street,” Carol advised.

  “What’s he saying?” Gail asked, ignoring her sister and drawing closer to the crowd.

  The something in the man’s hand turned out to be a petition advocating stiffer penalties for violent crimes. Gail listened enthralled as the man told of his son-in-law having been knifed to death in an attempted robbery ten months before. The man collecting the signatures went on to say that the youth responsible had been found soon after the incident and brought to trial. After many delays the case was finally heard and the guilty party sentenced to twenty-one months in jail for manslaughter. The shock of this light sentence was further aggravated when the man was informed by the police that the killer would probably be out on the streets in seven months.

  “Let’s go,” Carol whispered uneasily, tugging on Gail’s arm.

  Gail extricated her elbow gently from her sister’s grasp, watching the faces of the people in the crowd as the man spoke, studying their reactions. The growing crowd listened attentively, almost respectfully, their faces reflecting concern, even fear, and perhaps admiration, as the man went on to explain that he had subsequently quit his job and begun traveling across the country, launching a national petition campaign calling for stiffer penalties for violent crimes. So far, he boasted, he had almost one million signatures. Gail quickly added her own to the list, and Carol did likewise, as the woman beside them exclaimed that it probably wouldn’t do much good, that politicians were notoriously deaf unless an election was around the comer. The woman had signed anyway.

  “I’ve signed every petition that’s ever been drawn up,” she told them. “I’ve campaigned till I’m blue in the face for the return of the death penalty …”

  “What good does the death penalty do?” another woman interjected. “It’s never deterred anyone. We’ve got to learn to rid our minds and bodies of all this hate or we’ll never live in peace. We have to find God and accept that His way is the only way …”

  “I can’t believe that God wants innocent people to die and their killers to go free.”

  “Spare us these high-school diatribes on the existence of God,” a plump man stated vehemently. “if there is a God, then He has absolutely no bearing on my life.” The woman who had mentioned God now silently crossed herself and whispered a prayer in the crowd’s behalf. “The point is that it doesn’t matter what you sign or even whom you elect in New York.

  We have a governor who’s promised to veto any capital-punshment statute that the legislature passes, just like his predecessor did. Just getting capital punishment back on the books doesn’t mean it’s going to get anything accomplished.”

  “It’s a start,” someone said.

  “I’m not in favor of capital punishment,” a man said loudly from behind Gail. “It doesn’t solve anything.”

  “I’m with you,” a woman who had not spoken before agreed. “It only makes us as barbaric as the killers.”

  “Baloney,” the plump man shouted.

  Carol was once again tugging on Gail’s arm. “Gail, let’s go.”

  “If we could only be sure that the courts would lock these people away forever …”

  “Never happen.”

  “They’re out on the street before you are,” the man with the petition exclaimed bitterly. “Everyone feels so sorry for them. They’re misunderstood. They had miserable childhoods. Well, that’s too bad. I, for one, say that we should stop worrying so damn much about the criminals and start paying some attention to the victims and their families. We’re the ones who have to live the rest of our lives with what these murderers have done.”

  “That’s a tired old argument.”

  “There’s nothing tired about it.”

  The voices began coming very fast, falling one on top of the other like a stack of dominoes. Gail could no longer keep track of who was speaking. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound their confused and angry voices made. Their faces were unimportant. She didn’t have to see them to know them. She saw them every day in her own reflection.

  “Gail, I’ve had enough. Let’s go to lunch.”

  “I want to hear this.”

  “I don’t,” Carol said forcefully, starting to move away. “Look, we’ve signed the petition. There’s nothing else we can accomplish here. Let’s go.” Gail didn’t budge. “Gail, I’m going. Half the people signing this stupid thing are pickpockets and muggers. I’m getting out of here.”

  “I’ll meet you at the restaurant,” Gail told her.

  “Gail!”

  Gail turned her attention back to the crowd, peripherally aware that Carol had vacated the space beside her and someone else had replaced her.

  “Capital punishment tries to vindicate one murder by committing another. How can you say that’s right?”

  “Society has a right to take force against injustice.”

  “No one has the right to take a life.”

  “Nothing will bring our murdered children back to us.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “The point being?”

  “The point being,” Gail heard someone saying as she pictured her daughter’s body discarded in the dirt, “that some people just don’t deserve to live.”

  “Exactly,” nodded the man beside her.

  After that, the gathering seemed to run out of steam and the people began to disperse.

  Gail looked around the comer for Carol but she was gone. She’d have to find her and apologize. Gail turned in the direction of the Russian Tea Room, catching sight of a fair-haired youth who was studying her from a distance of several feet.

  When her eyes caught his, the youth turned his head quickly
and moved away, more than a touch self-consciously, looking back at her over his shoulder several times. Gail kept careful track of his movements, only to lose him in a fresh onslaught of pedestrians.

  She peered with great concentration through the people, but the youth had virtually disappeared. Gail proceeded carefully, looking into each store window, wondering what there was about the boy that was pulling her forward.

  He had been watching her. Had he recognized her from her photographs in the newspapers? Had he known who she was? Was it possible that Cindy’s killer had fled to New York, seeking to lose himself among the other illegals and undesirables? Could she possibly have stumbled across him in so miraculous a fashion?

  No, this was crazy, she thought, remembering her sister, about to turn back toward Fifty-seventh Street.

  And then she saw him across the street, going into what was euphemistically referred to as an adult bookstore. Gail took a deep breath and crossed the street, reaching the bookstore and pushing open its door, feeling several pairs of eyes turn in her direction as she walked inside and down the first aisle after the boy.

  Whatever she had been expecting, whatever her mind had prepared her for, she was still sickened and surprised by what she saw. Twenty New Cunts, one magazine proclaimed simply, its pages filled with appropriate close-ups. Gail riffled quickly through several of the least offensive magazines she could find, all the while edging her way to the rear of the store.

  The next aisle dealt mostly in bondage and discipline. There were photographs of women being whipped, women being chained, women being tortured with branding irons. How to Rape a Virgin, one article advised. In one memorable photograph, a woman was being stuffed into a meat grinder.

  Gail closed her eyes and tried to will the rising flood of nausea back into her stomach. Her hands shaking, she returned the magazine to its appropriate slot. She thought of Jennifer, studying the art of photography with her father. What of the people who took these pictures? she wondered. What of the men and mostly women who posed?

  She reached the last aisle. More of the same, only worse. Men Loving Boys, she read, picking up the magazine and studying a picture of a perhaps thirty-year-old man with a boy no more than fourteen. Little Girl Lost, another title announced, the accompanying photographs depicting a young girl made up to look much younger. Her long hair was braided with ribbons, her boyish body was clad in a short, open pinafore; she wore little-girl socks and shoes. And no underpants, revealing a shaved pubic area. She was being ogled and fondled by several middle-aged men.