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they still have no clues as to the identity of the killer of Mrs Maureen Cavalier, the Queens housewife found strangled in her apartment six days ago.
    Taking a pair of scissors, he cut the report out, pasted it onto a sheet of white paper, slipped the sheet into his typewriter, and tapped out with one small, dark finger:
    The name of the person that you seek
    And have sought for the past week
    Is Colleen Lane. To make an arrest
    Go to apt. 11B, 251 89th St—West.
    It was hardly inspired, he realized; for one case, a few years ago, he had worked on his prosecuting poem for ten days, giving not only the name and address, but also inventing evidence and providing a motive. But then there had been more than ashes and disappointment; there had been horror, and hot irons, and blood. Still, short and to the point, it would do.
    *
    An hour later, a small neat man with sallow skin and a neat off-black moustache, a small and fine-boned man with an insistent cough, he was making his way back from Queens—where he had mailed his letter, addressed to a local precinct station—feeling relieved and at ease for the first time in … well, for the first time in nine months. Now, at last—until he moved—he could relax; could spend his evenings at the theatre, or at the movies, or simply sitting at home reading poetry, without feeling guilty. Without feeling that he should be sitting in a dark room, staring out at the lighted window of an apartment across the street, doing, so he thought, his duty as a citizen. Or as more than a citizen perhaps. As a man. As a human being. He had paid, as it were, this year’s taxes. Now he could do his duty to himself. To, even, love. For he did love, he swore to himself. He loved life. And it was because he loved it so passionately that he had to denounce, in the only way he knew how, all that he considered to be against life; the vast, ever encroaching, eternally eroding tides of greyness, of bleakness; of deceit and misery and cruelty. And while he knew that the little or not so little poems that he sent anonymously to the police once a year—and had been sending for the last eighteen years—accusing people of crimes they hadn’t committed, were obviously dismissed by the police as the work of a crank, if not amadman, he didn’t in the least feel that he was a crank, let alone a madman. For the people he accused, while certainly not guilty of the crimes for which he denounced them, nor indeed probably of any crimes for which they could have been prosecuted under the law, were, nevertheless, guilty; guilty of standing unrelentingly, unrepentantly, on the side of death. And as such they were often, he was convinced, not only guiltier than those who killed in actual fact (for didn’t these ‘real’ murderers frequently kill at least in the name of love?) but were, ultimately, responsible for the acts of those real murderers. They created a climate with their hatred, their envy, their loathing of life, that caused, inevitably, storms—which in turn produced, somewhere or other, a fatal flash of lightning. They put stresses on the earth, that could only, in the end, be relieved by a devastating quake. Of which they themselves were rarely, if ever, the victims …
    So how could anyone, he thought, as he came up out of the subway at 86th Street and went towards a telephone booth, call him a crank or a madman? Oh no; the cranks and the madmen were those who ignored the creators of dark clouds; who ignored the strainers of the fragile earth; and who shrieked for revenge when disaster struck. Of course he wasn’t so idealistic, or foolish, as to hold that murderers shouldn’t be held responsible for their deeds; only he wished that more action be taken against those who prepared the air for the flash, and the ground for its sudden fault. Action such as he took; which at worst was merely symbolic, and at best something which would cause embarrassment, difficulties, and even—or was it too much to