The Eye: A Novel of Suspense Read Free Page A

victim number three, that commonality no longer existed: Simmons hadn’t lived on West Ninety-eighth or anywhere else in the neighborhood. The only evident factor linking the three homicides was that the victims had all died on that same city block.
    Tobin said the same thing Oxman was thinking: “There’s just nothing here, Elliot Leroy. A retired grocer, a Chinese import-export dealer. Throw in Simmons and it makes even less sense.”
    “Unless Gaines and Holroyd have turned up a connection. Or we do.”
    “Want to bet that won’t happen?”
    “No. But there’s got to be some reason for the killings, some reason why even a madman would start blowing people away on one particular block.”
    “Yeah,” Tobin agreed dryly.
    “We’ll find it. And we’d better do it fast, because if it is a psycho he’ll go after number four sooner or later.”
    “Motive isn’t the only thing we’d better find fast.”
    “You mean the psycho himself?”
    “I mean,” Tobin said, “it’s our baby. We’d better find a way to deliver it.”
    THE COLLIER TAPES
    He didn’t live on the block.
    Martin Simmons did not live on the block!
    I should have been more careful. But what was Simmons doing there? He should not have been there at that time of night. Closed community, very stable for the West Side, not many late visitors. How was I to know when I saw him come out of the building that he was a stranger, an interloper? Martin Simmons, 112 West Seventy-third Street, advertising copywriter—it was all there on the radio this morning. How was I to know?
    But I should have been more careful. Jennifer Crane, the harlot who lives in 1276, has brought home men before; she picks them up in singles bars and brings them to her apartment. The Eye has seen her stepping out of taxis with half a dozen different men. Martin Simmons was probably one of her conquests. Of course: That explains what he was doing on the block at three A.M.
    Poor Martin. My apologies and regrets, and I promise for your sake that I will not make the same mistake again with someone else. I will be much more circumspect, I will not make any more random choices. If I began to act indiscriminately, if I do not limit myself to residents of my little universe, if I bring down my wrath upon visitors, guests, passersby, then I will have fallen from grace and descended to the level of psychopathology. That must not happen.
    Lewis B. Collier, former adjunct Associate Professor of English, Keeper of the Eye, Lord and Conscience of West Ninety-eighth Street, is not a psychopath.
    I am not a psychopath.
    I am a deeply and righteously angered Avenger; I am the Angel of Death. Be sure your sin will find you out. And the wages of sin is death. Order, structure, motive, discipline. I will be justified unto the grave and vindicated in the Hereafter.
    A half hour has passed since I began dictating this entry. I spent those thirty minutes on the balcony with the Eye.
    God’s Eye.
    Have I discussed the Eye in any detail? No, I don’t believe I have. It is a powerful six-inch reflecting telescope, a much-refined version of the type first constructed by Sir Isaac Newton in 1668. It weighs approximately fifty pounds. It has several eyepieces, including a high-magnification six millimeter piece which I had specially ground some months ago by an expert who works for the local astronomy clubs. The polished concave mirror at the Eye’s base, which gathers light and forms the image, has also been specially ground.
    I purchased the Eye a year ago, when I imagined myself interested in astronomy. Contemplation of the heavens, however, did not amuse me as much as I had anticipated. It was only when I realized that it could be used to observe people , stars in a different and far more flawed firmament, that I began to appreciate its true worth. Now it has become the Eye of God, through which I can follow the petty, sometimes sinful lives of the inhabitants of the West Ninety-eighth Street block,