Lonely Hearts

81

Two men get stuck in an elevator together and that event changes their lives forever.

 

Originally publishes in the zine Nightlight a slash Starsky and Hutch anthology edited by April Valentine in 1886.

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Dave Starsky sat for a few minutes in the parking lot before climbing out of his car. It was raining, a slow, chilly drizzle, and he wished he could just stay inside the car where it was dry and warm, especially since the alternative was attending the meeting he had scheduled inside the large, imposing building.

He looked up toward an eighth floor window, where he would soon be going. It was to be his last meeting up there and he should be glad. Instead, he felt at loose ends. There was no pride in accomplishment, and no sense of getting out from under, either. All he felt was the same vast emptiness that had been his constant companion for so many years.

Reaching out to shut off the engine, Starsky pulled his keys from the ignition of the battered red Torino. He got out, locking the car door and wiping his hand across the rain-dampened, scratched fender as he left. The white paint of the stripe along the side of the car was chipped, but in his mind’s eye, he could see the car as it had looked when it was new. Maybe now, now that he would have his freedom completely, he would feel like getting the car painted. He wiped his wet hand on the leg of his jeans, then stuffed his fists into the pockets of his dilapidated flight jacket and headed toward the building’s entrance.

The lobby was nearly empty. Starsky checked his watch; it was almost four o’clock. Friday afternoon. What a lousy time to schedule a meeting with a parole officer. But that wasn’t something Starsky had had any say about.

He crossed the lobby and rang for the elevator. It seemed like forever until the doors opened to admit him. He realized he was beginning to feel nervous about the meeting—little things like the time it took an elevator to arrive were beginning to get on his nerves.

He stepped inside the empty lift and pressed the button that would take him to the eighth floor. The doors slid closed and the elevator, after a short pause, began its ascent. Starsky leaned back in the corner, listening to the
groaning of the pulleys and cables as the ancient vehicle slowly took him higher.

On the sixth floor, the car stopped and the doors opened to admit another passenger. Starsky didn’t even look toward the other man until he spoke.

“You going down?”

“Huh? Oh—no. Goin’ up to the eighth.”

The tall blond shrugged and stepped in anyway. “Beats waiting,” he explained in a voice that sounded tired and apathetic.

Starsky nodded, looking him over. The man wore faded jeans that were ragged around the hem where they dragged the ground and a plaid shirt jacket over a dingy brown turtleneck. The light hair was long, dusting the shoulders, and a mustache partially obscured the down-turned mouth. Starsky noted that there were lines around the large, light blue eyes, creases that spoke more of pain and sadness than smiling. Yet there was a toughness in the face, and Starsky figured that in this man, the line between apathy and action was very fine.

He looked like so many guys Starsky had known on the streets—and off. If he were in this building, he must be here for the same reason as Starsky. “Visit with your P.O.?” he asked the blond, who was now leaning in the opposite corner of the elevator.

The question seemed to take the other by surprise. Roused from his study of the lighted numbers above the doors, he met Starsky’s eyes. “Yeah.” It seemed a difficult admission for him to make. “You, too?”

Starsky nodded. “Last one. Seven years on parole.” He sighed, shoulders lifting as he tried to feel positive. “This time. And I plan on makin’ it the last.”

The wide blue eyes gave him an appraising look. “You’ve been on parole before?” The man sounded as if he doubted that could be true.

“Yeah. Second time. I —” Starsky stopped speaking as a particularly loud groan was emitted by the works of the elevator. The car gave several jerks, then stopped completely. They were halfway between the seventh and eighth floors.

“Shit! What the hell’s gone wrong with this thing?” Starsky stepped forward and slapped at the control buttons, first the eighth floor, then the one marked ‘door open.’ Neither had any result.

He raised his fist and pounded at the seam between the closed doors. He was about to hit them again, when his wrist was grabbed hard and he turned to find himself face to face with the blond. Icicle blue eyes looked deep into his own. Starsky felt chilled, way down inside. But the man’s voice was soft.

“Hey, take it easy.”

Starsky swallowed and lowered his arm, twisting his wrist to free it from the stranger’s hold. He drew a deep breath. “It’s just—I don’t like bein’ in…a small place like this.” His voice trailed off and he again turned toward the bank of controls. He cleared his throat, trying to subdue his claustrophobia. “We gotta get this thing goin’ again. I don’t wanta be late.”

The tall stranger moved in close and reached over his shoulder to press the emergency call button. The shrill alarm precluded talking for long moments. When the sound finally cut off, the elevator car seemed to echo in the sudden stillness.

Starsky looked away from the penetrating blue eyes to glance at his watch. Four o’clock, exactly. “Damnit.” His P.O., Arthur Chamberlain, was a stickler about time.

The other man moved to lean against the wall next to him. “Looks like you’re going to be late, after all,” he said mildly.

“What’s it to you?” Starsky figured it was just his luck to be stuck in an elevator with a weirdo. “You’re not goin’ anywhere either, ya know.”

The blond shrugged. “I don’t worry much about schedules anymore. Time just doesn’t have the same meaning it once did.”

Starsky glared at him. “Then you ain’t never done hard time, man. Cause that makes every minute seem pretty damn important.”

The ice blue gaze faltered, and the voice dropped. “The time I did was hard, make no mistake.”

“Listen, what’s the use of standing here discussing semantics?” Starsky demanded. He saw the flicker of surprise in the man’s expression and thought to himself, see, just because I’m an ex-con doesn’t mean I can’t use big words. But he didn’t belabor the point. “How are we going to get out of here?”

As if in answer to his question, there was a pounding from above. They heard a scraping sound of metal against metal and then a voice called out.

“Anybody down there?”

“Yeah.” Starsky moved to the center of the elevator and shouted up toward the grating in the ceiling. “Two of us. What’s the problem?”

“Don’t know yet. We’ve called the elevator company. It may take them a while to get here.”

“Great.” Starsky rolled his eyes, looking toward his fellow passenger, but the man’s expression was more grudging tolerance than commiseration. “Can’t we just climb out?”

“No. There’s live wires loose up here. Too dangerous. Sit tight.”

“Hey—I got an appointment…”

Starsky stopped yelling. The scraping sound from above interrupted him and he realized there was no one up there now to hear him.

“Aw—fuck.” He stomped to the far side of the car and slid to a sitting position. The stranger remained standing for a moment, then hunkered down, too, sitting with his legs crossed, Indian fashion.

“Well, what should we talk about? The weather? Sports? Story of our lives?”

Starsky regarded the quiet-voiced speaker as if he were a mad man. He didn’t feel like talking, not in small talk and certainly not in sharing life experiences with this smiling idiot. He revised his earlier opinion. The blond wasn’t anything like anyone else Starsky had ever met, in prison or out. He was taking all this much too calmly, like he got some personal enjoyment out of the inconvenience and in Starsky’s discomfiture.

“You don’t seem at all bothered by this,” Starsky told him in a sullen tone.

Wide shoulders shrugged. “What’s the point? I prefer to just sit back and see what happens.”

“Sounds like you’re watching a game, not trapped in an elevator.”

“Life’s a game, isn’t it?”

Just for a moment, the eyes lost their look of studied neutrality. They were shadowed with regret, for an instant filled with emotion so deep that Starsky realized the calm was only an act. Then, the eyes cleared, and returned to meet Starsky’s, daring him to disagree.

“Yeah. Life’s a game,” Starsky said, “and I don’t like being on the losing team.” He hesitated, then asked a question, thinking he understood. “So, you’d rather not be on any team, is that it? You’d rather be just a spectator?”

“Don’t think I ever fit in on a team.” The quiet voice seemed too clear, too honest, within the confines of the elevator.

Starsky tried to defuse the growing intensity. “Hey—who does? If everybody fit in perfectly, who’d they get to fill up all the pens, huh?” He laughed at his own self-deprecating humor.

“Don’t talk like that.” The stranger sat forward. “Just because you’re an individual…”

“What?” Starsky couldn’t help wondering what insight the man might be about to impart.

The elevator gave another sudden groan, a sound of grinding metal and protesting machinery. It lurched, jerking up briefly, then stopped again. Starsky and his companion exchanged a glance. “Maybe it’s fixed already,” Starsky said in a rush.

There was another bump, another louder squeal of tortured metal and the elevator moved. Up, in one short jerk, and then down.

Starsky felt his stomach try to rise up through his throat as they fell. He put out his hands, trying to steady himself by bracing them on the floor at either side of his body.

There was a great tearing sound above his head and the elevator floor tilted. The blond slid across the slanted surface, falling against Starsky. Their legs tangled and their hands grabbed in a purely instinctive grip, awaiting the impact of the lift hitting bottom.

The impact never occurred. The falling slowed and stopped, somewhere above the bottom floor of the building, Starsky imagined. Something above had given way while something else held on. “Cable must have broken on one side,” he gasped, panting hard in the aftermath of shock.

The blond was sitting up slowly, rearranging his long limbs. “Sorry,” he said, withdrawing his hands from where they’d grabbed at Starsky’s arm and collar. He looked closely into Starsky’s eyes. “You okay?”

Starsky thought the stranger looked more shaken than he was. He felt bruised from their collision and his head hurt in back where it had hit against the wall when the elevator had jerked up just before it fell. He reached to rub at the aching area.

Large hands pushed his own aside, feeling through his curls carefully to examine the bruise. “You’re gonna get a little lump back there, but it doesn’t seem too bad.”

“Thanks.” Starsky didn’t know what else to say for a minute. The gentleness of the stranger’s touch had surprised him. He didn’t look like a man who reached out to others that often. What had he said, “Don’t think I ever fit in on a team”? That didn’t seem right, but Starsky didn’t feel like puzzling it out just now. “How about yourself?” he asked instead. “You all right?”

The big hands smoothed back long strands of fine blond hair. “I think so.” He drew a deep breath. “Whew. That was the fast way down, I guess.” The tall man slid over to sit along the wall next to Starsky.

He failed to see the humor. They could have been killed or badly hurt. The car was sitting at a crazy angle with the floor on a slant. The lights had dimmed in the fall and now, in the sudden silence after the deafening screeches, the elevator seemed smaller to Starsky. He wanted out.

He turned, reaching up to grab the rail above his head, and dragged himself to his feet. He pushed along the uphill surface of the floor until he got to the doors and pounded on them, hollering as loud as he could.

“Hey! Anybody up there? We’re still inside the elevator! What’s goin’ on up there?” He threw himself toward the control panel, hitting at the emergency button. It failed to work. So did the ‘door open’ one. Fear and frustration combined to worsen his claustrophobia and Starsky pounded at the controls, skinning his knuckles against the metal buttons while he continued to yell at the top of his lungs.

He was slipping—or the car was lurching again, he didn’t know which. All of a sudden, he felt strong arms banded around him at his shoulders and waist, stilling his struggles. A calming voice spoke, just above his ear. He
could feel the warmth of the man’s breath, and for a moment, he didn’t even listen to the words.

“Calm down, I said.” Sounding a little sharper, the words finally penetrated. “You’ll hurt yourself. And you’re rocking the whole damn car.”

“Huh?” Starsky looked up, wild-eyed. He had panicked, he realized. Damn. It didn’t happen often, but when it did it left him feeling wacked out like everything had turned upside down, like he was locked up again, or worse like he was a kid back in New York and everything had just been taken away from him all over again. It was humiliating. Starsky closed his eyes.

“Come on. Let’s get back over here and sit down.”

One arm drew away from him, steadying them as they moved along the wall and down the slanting floor, but the other stayed tight about his waist. Starsky needed the support. He was grateful that when they reached the other side of the elevator, the man stayed close. He eased them back down in a sitting position, fitting them into the narrowed angle formed by the floor and wall. Starsky found himself leaning against the solid chest and shoulder.

The quiet voice was still speaking soothingly. A hand rubbed at his shoulder. “Better now?”

“Guess so.” Starsky shivered. “Reminds me of bein’ in stir.”

“Yeah.”

He could feel the other’s heart pounding almost as hard as his own. The sensation was strangely comforting. He lifted his wrist and tried to focus on his watch.

His hand was taken by the stranger’s. The blond reached into a pocket and pulled out a clean handkerchief to dab at the broken skin over Starsky’s knuckles.

“Ow.” He couldn’t help a slight flinch. His hand was released abruptly.

“Sorry.” The arm was pulled from around Starsky’s shoulders and the man sat twisting his handkerchief between his hands.

Starsky felt a little weird, seeing the spots of his own blood on the white fabric. Yet that didn’t seem to matter at the moment. His fellow captive seemed upset, as if he had done something unforgiveable. His reaching out had been so spontaneous, like he just naturally knew how to be solicitous. Had he been rebuffed once too often in the past, his comfort refused? Had he been punished for his ability to touch and care? Starsky had once longed for someone who would treat him like that, but the years of meeting nothing but callousness had made him put up walls between himself and others. “It’s okay.” He pressed his stinging knuckles to his mouth. “Guess we’ll be in here a little while longer, huh?”

The wide mouth curved up in a little smile. “Looks that way.”

He looked nice smiling that way, Starsky decided. He grinned back. “Long as we’re kinda stuck here, guess we’d better introduce ourselves. I’m David Starsky.” He stuck out his hand.

The other took it in his own; they shook. “Kenneth Hutchinson.”

“Kenneth Hutchinson,” Starsky repeated. “That’s quite a mouthful. What do your friends call you—Ken?”

A shrug. “Don’t have that many friends anymore, actually. Some of them call me Hutch.”

Starsky grinned again. “That’s better. More unique—fits you.”

“Meaning I’m unique?” The light eyes looked dubious, but ‘Hutch’ was laughing.

“Hell, yes.” Starsky was more convinced than ever, but he couldn’t help joking. “You’re the only guy I ever been stuck in an elevator with!” They both chuckled. It was worth it to see the guy looking so much happier. Starsky
raked his curls back off his forehead, sighing. “Whew, that makes me feel better. You know, what you said before about talking—you still want to? I mean, it’d take my…our minds off being stuck down here.”

“Okay. What do you want to talk about? Sports? The weather?”

“How about the stories of our lives?” Starsky felt suddenly that there was a lot he could share with this man. He wanted to get to know Hutch, see what it was that made him tick, learn how he could be both so caring and gentle and yet so apathetic. Starsky remembered how Hutchinson had reacted when he’d been asked about visiting his parole officer. Maybe he hadn’t gotten out that long ago and was still hurting from being behind bars and still learning how to adjust to life on the outside. Starsky had been there himself; maybe he could help in his turn.

“There’s not much to tell,” the blond was saying, again twisting the soiled handkerchief. He drew a deep breath, then gazed across the dim interior of the elevator and began speaking in a low voice. “I was born and raised in Minnesota. My father was in business there, but I wasn’t interested in that whole corporate scene. I got married—much to my family’s displeasure—and moved out here.”

“They didn’t like her?”

Hutch shook his head. “Mainly because she wasn’t their first choice for me. Mom said she’d turn out to be no good—and I guess she was right. Van wanted money and I wasn’t making it fast enough to suit her. So we split up.”

“You got divorced?” Starsky was gently encouraging. “What kind of a job did you have?”

Hutch gave a brief laugh and turned to look at him. “Believe it or not, I was studying to be a cop.”

“No shit?” Starsky clamped down hard on the feelings that thought engendered in him, his own never-realized dreams and conflicts still unresolved since childhood. But they were talking about Hutch, not him. “How’d you ever end up on the wrong side of the law?”

“My wife.” Hutch was shaking his head, as if he still couldn’t believe it himself. “She came back into my life a couple of years later. Just to use me, like always. And I was too dumb to see it. She was using my place as a hideout while she tried to get away from a jewel fence she worked for. His men found her there and killed her.”

There was a short silence. Starsky didn’t know what to say. Hutch sat as if lost in memories, then he shrugged. “I… couldn’t prove somebody else did it.”

Starsky swallowed hard. “You did time for your wife’s murder?”

The eyes that turned to regard Starsky were as cold as they had been in the first few minutes of their short acquaintance. “I didn’t do it, I said.”

“I believe you.” It was Starsky who reached out this time, taking hold of Hutch’s arm with both his hands. “I was just surprised. Lotta guys say they’re innocent, but… That’s rough, man.” He figured he was making things worse by babbling on, so he just shut up.

The hard light went out of the blue eyes still locked with his own, leaving them looking only defeated. Hutchinson looked away finally.

They sat quietly, Hutch keeping his eyes on some distant point across the elevator, Starsky covertly studying his profile from under dropped lashes. He now saw for the first time the sensitivity of the fine mouth, the perfect features marred by grim lines and concealed by the too-long hair and pulled-up collar. A few years ago, the guy had walked into prison, tall, blond, beautiful and innocent in more ways than one. Starsky knew first hand the many kinds of hurt that could be inflicted from behind prison walls. His own face reflected the strain of what he had gone through during those years he had been locked up. And he had had his own street experience as a kind of preparation. Here beside him was someone who had suffered spiritual hurt as well as physical. A part of Hutchinson had turned cold and unfeeling, and had grown tough enough to fight, Starsky could see. yet there was an inner strength in the man, and an ability to reach out to someone in need. Life’s just a game to him, he says, and he doesn’t fit on the team. Damn. 

Hutch finally seemed to come back from the place to which he had withdrawn. He cleared his throat noisily and turned to meet Starsky’s eyes. “Sorry.”

“Nothing to apologize for.” Starsky patted the arm he had been holding and let go.

“What about you?” Hutch seemed embarrassed to ask.

“Oh, it takes a kid from the streets of New York a long time to go bad,” he began a little flippantly.

“Don’t.” Hutch’s protest brought him up short. “There you go again, just like before.”

“What?” Starsky couldn’t remember saying anything like Hutch seemed to mean. The things the man observed fascinated him.

“Saying you don’t fit in, that because of that you’re just right for prison.” He hesitated; Starsky could see he wanted to say more.

“Go on, Hutch,” he urged. “Say it right out. You’re among friends.”

A brief smile crossed the sad face. “You know—I really feel like I am. What I mean is, I’m not all that bad a judge of character, and you don’t seem like most of the men I knew in the joint. You don’t seem like the kind of man who belongs behind bars.”

It had been a long time since anyone had said something like that to Starsky. The sentiment touched him deeply and he sensed that Hutchinson was sincere.

“That’s what I hoped to become this afternoon. Just somebody who had paid his debts and could be an ordinary citizen from now on.” He had thought he felt nothing about finishing his parole. Now missing the appointment filled him with regret.

“You can make up the meeting.” Hutch seemed to be able to read his mind. “But it won’t be the same as getting out from behind it today.”

Starsky nodded, too full of emotion to say anything for a moment. Finally, he spoke again. “You still want to hear my story? Unless you’re maybe afraid you misjudged me and I turn out to be even worse than you thought?”

He had supposed Hutch might scold him again, but this time the blond just chuckled. “I think I can handle it.”

“Okay.” Starsky stretched his legs., trying to get comfortable. “I grew up in New York. Back when I was a kid, I really respected the law and all that. But I learned it didn’t do any good to respect what the system says we should.”

“I hear you.”

Starsky recognized the sound of bitterness when he heard it. “Yeah. I watched my father die. They shot him down in the street, right in front of me. I guess you could say I got in with the ‘wrong crowd’ after that.”

“You saw them kill him?” The other’s eyes were probing, sensitive to Starsky’s pain.

He drew in a deep breath. After all these years, it was still hard talk about. Starsky knew his life would have been different if his father had lived—and yet he also knew that no one had pushed him into the life he’d led. He had never talked about the things he really thought had changed him from an eager to please kid into the person who had believed laws were written with the express purpose of inconveniencing him. Yet, somehow, he sensed that the man trapped in the elevator with him would understand.

“I haven’t told anybody this in years—guess I thought I was ashamed about it and that the guys I knew on the inside and dealt with on the streets would think it made me bad news or something… my father was a cop. He was a policeman all his life and that’s what got him killed. I found out later my father was associated with a guy named Joe Durniak, who was into so many things illegally I couldn’t even count them. I was never sure how my dad was linked with him, but it tarnished his memory for me. The guys who killed him—they could have hated him for being an honest cop, but they could have also murdered him because he was in Joe Durniak’s pocket. Anyway, my mother was worried about my running the streets, so she sent me out here to live with my aunt and uncle.

“For awhile, I thought everything would be okay, that I could forget how it felt to know people weren’t what you thought they were. But then, I found out something about someone else that he had kept hidden. A neighbor of ours, a man who was like a second father to me… he turned out to be gay.” Starsky swallowed, old disillusionments rising to choke him. “It wasn’t finding out that bothered me. It was knowing he had lived a double life—lied to me, not trusted me or anybody else in his life. I could have handled his being gay—hell, love’s love and since then I’ve certainly seen it all in the joint. But he was a cop, too, like my father. I thought being a cop meant something special—pride, partnership, I don’t know. But if men can’t be honest with the people important to them…”

Hutch shifted position, ending up a few inches closer to Starsky. His eyes were brilliant with emotion. “It wasn’t right of him. Hurt you a lot, didn’t it?”

Starsky couldn’t answer, he just let out his breath in a long sigh. He resumed his story, mainly to get away from the troubling feelings talking about John Blaine had evoked. “I joined the army. That was stupid. I ended up in ‘Nam, of course. That’s where I got involved with drugs. When I got home, I called Joe Durniak and he set me up with some connections out here. I was sent up the first time for dealing. Three years. When I came out, I got in business for myself, you know—numbers, drugs. I got involved with Frank Malone. And his daughter. I wasn’t good enough for her, he thought. One night, she told me she was leaving. I went to talk to her father ’cause I knew he was at the bottom of it. We got into an argument and he ended up dead. The police said at first that it was premeditated, but I think they were so glad to get rid of Malone that it was bargained down to manslaughter.”

“Frank Malone?” The blue eyes were huge. “Didn’t that make it kind of difficult for you on the inside?”

It would have been easy to brag that he had been tough enough to preclude any problems from Malone loyalists in prison, but for some reason, Starsky found he couldn’t lie to Hutchinson. “Yeah, I almost bought it.” He slipped open the first three buttons of his shirt to reveal the red scars he carried on his chest. “Knife fight. I lost so much blood before the guards found me they thought I wouldn’t make it. They took out part of a lung and a bit of my stomach, too.” He had had almost no will to live, he remembered. There was a time when he had been angry with the doctors for pulling him through. “Oh, well. Keeps me from having to do anything too strenuous for a living.”

Hutch didn’t say anything for a long time. His gaze had gone from the scarred chest to look with obvious concern into Starsky’s eyes, then he broke the contact to stare down at his clasped hands. The silence was not uncomfortable, though. Starsky felt like they shared it as much as their conversation. What was it about this guy, he wondered. Why was it so easy to talk to him, to touch him? He didn’t make friends quickly, didn’t usually like others trying to get too cozy with him. But being with Hutchinson was different, easy.

He finally broke the silence. “So, what do you do now? I mean, I guess bein’ a cop ended when you were convicted, right?”

Hutch looked up in surprise. “Why’d you say that? No, I never became a cop. I quit the academy just before graduation.”

“You did? Why?”

“Oh, hell. I don’t know. I’ve asked myself maybe a thousand times. It just—wasn’t right. Something was missing. I’ve never been able to put it into words. Something was just…”

“Missing. I know.” Starsky’s words were barely a whisper. He had felt it all his life, as if a piece had been taken out of his personal puzzle. He had never been able to find it and yet without it, he had always felt unfinished, incomplete. So many empty years, and he had never found anyone who even understood. “I always thought it was because I lost my dad when I was so young.” He was murmuring in wonderment at the revelation, hardly aware that he was speaking aloud. “But that wasn’t it, not really. It was more like… something was out of place. Things were happening to me, but not the way they were supposed to…”

There was a light in the bright eyes that hadn’t been there before. “Like if things had only been a little bit different, they would have been… I don’t know —right,” Hutch finished for him.

“Yeah.” Starsky sat looking at Hutch, scarcely believing he could be so completely understood. The feelings that washed over him were somehow too intense. He shied away from them, thinking that maybe it was just the situation, being trapped with Hutchinson was bringing out the sentimentalist in him, that part Starsky had tried to lock away forever. He remembered late night talks with guys on the inside where everyone seemed to bare his soul. In the cold light of morning, though, those confidences could be used against you. Inside, as well as on the streets, he had learned not to trust, not to open himself. It had kept him feeling empty, but it had kept him alive.

He sensed though that the man sitting next to him was like no one else he had ever talked to. He had already told him more about himself than he usually admitted to longer acquaintances. There seemed to be something fine and strong and essentially decent in Hutch, a dignity that could neither be faked nor beaten out of him. And something open and needful and caring about the man spoke to Starsky on another level, made him want to trust him and be worthy of his trust. There was still, way down inside himself, a core of honest decency, a part of him that hated the drugs and the numbers and breaking all the laws. He’d hated the phoniness of that world he had chosen to live in, hated himself being phony. Maybe, with the right kind of friend to stand at his side, Starsky could allow that part of himself its freedom.

He swallowed hard, still feeling the intensity of the moment sharply. He had learned not to put too much stock in hoping. He tried to smile, sought something he could say that would bring the emotions back into normal perspective. “Hey, didya ever play that old ‘what if’ game?”

Hutch shook his head, grinning in tolerant amusement at the abrupt question. “Huh? What do you mean?”

“Think about it. What if things had only been a little different? How would it be?” He thought a moment. “Like, what if your parents had never met? You might never have been born. Or what if your name was Anderson instead of Hutchinson? You might have ended up being a doctor and married into the richest family in town.”

Hutch was chuckling now. “You’re nuts, you know that? How about, what if I’d never left Minnesota or you’d stayed in New York?”

Starsky suddenly saw a more serious side to the questions. “Yeah,” he asked softly, “like, what if your wife hadn’t been murdered at your place?”

Hutch was right with him, emotionally as well as philosophically. “Or what if your father had lived?”

Those were the kinds of ‘what ifs’ it did no good to ask. Yet Starsky could not help posing one more. “I’d thought about becoming a cop when I was a kid, you know. But after my dad and the other friend… Well, I just rebelled at the idea of being on the force. But what if my rebellion had made me even more determined to be the kind of person they should have been? I might have ended up at the police academy, too. We might have met years ago.”

“We might have at that.” Hutch’s hand moved to touch him again, clasping his forearm, squeezing it a little and not withdrawing. Not apologizing, either, Starsky noted.

“I was always looking for something and never found it.” Hutch’s whisper marveled. “Never thought I was supposed to. Thought I should just take things as they came to me and stop hoping for something more.”

“I know.” Starsky’s hand gripped his shoulder. “I know.”

The sudden sounds of banging and scraping metal parts interrupted them. Both men looked up then, helping each other to rise, managing to stand at the side of the slanting car.

“Hey, down there, you guys okay?”

“Yeah. Can you get us out?” Starsky answered for both of them.

“The fire department is here. We’ll have you free in a few minutes.”

The voice stopped, but the banging got louder. Starsky didn’t mind. One word echoed over and over for him: free. Until now, he didn’t think he had ever really known what it meant.

Twenty minutes later, the two men climbed out of the mangled elevator. Paramedics checked them over and pronounced them healthy. The time was six-thirty and Starsky learned that his parole officer had left for the day.

Walking side by side, they climbed the steps leading out of the basement and emerged on the street. The rain had let up. The sun was trying to peek out for the little time it had before it set. Starsky noticed how the light seemed to catch in the strands of Hutchinson’s hair. Spun sunshine, that’s what the man looks like…

They found themselves in the parking lot. Hutch hesitated beside the brown Ford parked next to Starsky’s car. It looked even more uncared for than his own. “Well?” he said. “What do we do now?” He seemed a little anxious, as if he thought that, now rescued, the rapport they had shared while trapped in the elevator would disappear.

Starsky wasn’t about to let that happen. He grinned. “How about some dinner? What do you like—Mexican, Italian or plain old American?”

If it were possible for such a world weary face to hold an expression of both relief and embarrassment, Hutch’s managed it. “Whatever. I’m starved.”

“We’ll take my car,” Starsky decided. Have to do something about that heap he drives. Maybe when I go to get Merle to work on my car… He nodded toward the passenger side. Hutch came aroun the Torino and climbed in.

Starsky slid into the driver’s seat, knowing he was beaming like a fool. He shouldn’t be. Arthur Chamberlain would probably never believe he had missed his appointment because he’d been trapped in the elevator. There would probably be a bench warrant issued for him before the weekend was out, Starsky figured. It didn’t seem to matter, though.

“You know, I think that smile of yours brought the sun out,” Hutch was saying speculatively, his eyes appraising the effects of Starsky’s expression. He stretched out his long legs and leaned back, looking perfectly at home in
the Torino.

“I wonder,” Starsky said as he revved the engine to growling life, “what if that elevator hadn’t gotten stuck?”