“Take a lot of Vitamin C,” she said.

“Sam Kreutzer would have prescribed chicken soup.”

“It couldn’t hurt.” Her voice was thin; it was a poor connection. “Are you sure I can’t bring dinner over?”

“No, really, I’d just as soon not spread this cold around—especially to you. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Take care.” She said it tenderly; then the line was dead. For a moment he continued to hold the receiver against his ear, as if to maintain the thread of contact with her.

He had a bit of a head cold but that was only the excuse. He’d broken the date because he didn’t want her to see the scraped streaks on his face. Another day or two and he could pass them off as shaving cuts; until then he didn’t want to be seen by anyone—especially by Irene. She was too close to the inside: she’d know just about anything the police knew, and she was quick enough to put things together if given the evidence.

Even the newspapers were speculating on the blood-stains found in the snow. The police were analyzing them.

If the blood found on the snow fails to match the blood types of the dead assailant and the injured mugging victim, Captain Mastro said, police believe they may be a step closer to identifying the vigilante.

They were jumping to the wrong conclusion, evidently. They thought the vigilante had been cut by the machete. But in any case they were assuming the vigilante was wounded and Paul intended to stay in the apartment until he looked presentable.

Analysis of powder stains on the dead man’s clothing indicates he was shot at pointblank range. Angle of entry of the lethal bullets indicates the shooter was prone at the time of the killing. Had he been knocked down by a blow from the machete? Chicago police aren’t saying. But Lloyd Marks and his blind daughter Joanne had something to say this morning when reporters were granted interviews in Marks’ hospital room. “I hope he wasn’t cut too bad,” Marks told reporters. “Because all I can say is, thank God that man showed up when he did.”

It was a break for him that the New York police had kept the “vigilante” alive there: five killings, attributed to him in the newspapers, had been committed in Manhattan and Brooklyn while Paul was in Chicago. But at some level of authority there were men who knew the truth. If those men in New York decided to be candid with their colleagues in Chicago it was possible that the Chicago police might begin to sift information about any New Yorkers who had moved to Chicago in the past few weeks. If that happened they could hardly fail to scrutinize him closely. They’d interview Spalter and Childress, they’d question the employees of his apartment building, and he had no doubt they’d get around to Irene. There was no way to allay suspicion entirely but he had to be careful far beyond mere circumspection; he had to be absolutely certain he’d left no clues at all. Suspicion was one thing; evidence another. All they’d need would be one scrap.

He had to be as expert as a consummate professional. Everything had to be thought out: every ramification had to be considered. It was like a chess game.

Amateur status had protected him. He was unknown to the professionals—both the detectives and the underworld. He had no criminal contacts; therefore no informer could betray him. He had no criminal record; therefore no dossier could pinpoint him. He had the tacit approval of an unknown number of police officers and the investigation was being pursued less enthusiastically than it would have been if he were a mad killer of random innocents. The vigilante terrorized no one except those who deserved it, in the eyes of the police and a good part of the public.

It wasn’t hard to size up these factors dispassionately.

But there was another factor that was harder to deal with

Just twelve hours prior to the machete tragedy on the South Side, two Oak Park youths had been slain by bullets from a .45 automatic pistol while apparently in the act of stripping a parked car. (See story on page 11.) Yesterday’s incidents, therefore, bring to fourteen the total death toll attributed to Chicago’s vigilante—or vigilantes; police have not yet determined whether more than one mysterious perpetrator is involved. The repeated use, at seemingly random intervals, of two separate murder weapons may suggest there are two separate vigilantes, Captain Mastro said, but “doesn’t necessarily prove it.”

23

IN HIS fantasies he had dialogues. At first with Esther after she died; then with Carol after she’d been institutionalized. Now occasionally in daydreams he articulated his reasoning to Irene.

“Yesterday I killed another one.”

“Why?”

“He had a machete. He was attacking a man and a blind girl.”

“How many does that make now?”

“In Chicago?”

“Since you started in New York.”

“I don’t know. Twenty-five maybe. I don’t notch my guns.”

“Are you afraid?”

“I’d be weird if I wasn’t.”

The imagined dialogues followed a pattern but sometimes the wording changed; his fantasies refined and rehearsed fitfully.

“What scares you, Paul? What are you afraid of?”

“Death. Pain. The police. I don’t want them to find out who I am.”

“Is that all?”

“Them. The ones in the streets.”

“You’re afraid of them.”

“That’s why we’ve got to fight them.”

“Is it? Is that why you hunt them?”

“It started in blind anger. I wanted revenge. Retribution for what they’d done to my wife and my daughter.”

“But it changed?”

“There are still such things as good and evil.”

“You see it as a crusade?”

“I don’t know. I heard them talking about messianic delusions. It’s not that. I’m not trying to save the world. I’m only trying to show people that they can defend themselves. They shouldn’t have to live in terror every time they step out the door.”

“No, they shouldn’t. But why should you take it upon yourself?”

“Somebody’s got to do it.”

“That’s a cliché.”

“So?”

“It’s not an answer to the question.”

“I don’t know how to answer it. I just do it.”

“Put it another way. Killing them—how do you justify that, in terms of good and evil? How do you justify murder?”

“Is it murder? Self-defense, execution, protecting the rights of innocent people, wiping out a disease—you can call it a lot of things besides murder. Even war. It’s a kind of war.”

“You’ve killed unarmed people. Kids.”

“Once I shot a kid who was climbing out a window with a television set in his arms.”

“And you passed a death sentence on him. Was it a capital crime?”

“You can smell it. If anybody’d got in his way he’d have killed them without a second thought.”

“Is that your answer?”

“If my actions have prevented a single innocent person from being killed by these animals, then I’m justified. That’s my answer.”

“There’s something else, though.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s not just something you do out of a feeling of duty.”

“No. I do it because they scare me. I’m afraid of them and that makes me hate them. Hate—it’s an honest feeling.”

It went around in circles and he never found its ending.

24

¶ CHICAGO, DEC. 30TH—A violent double-homicide late last night in the Ford City shopping center may have provided Chicago police with their first important clue to the identity of the vigilante.

The killings took place at 11:20 p.m. when two hold-up men entered the Pizza Heaven counter restaurant, held five people at gunpoint while they cleaned out the cash register, and left the restaurant only to be cut down in a hail of bullets by a man in a car, firing a pistol from his open car window.