The Stalker Page 6

  Drexel’s eyes shifted to Kilduff. “The old school reunion,” he said with no trace of levity.

  “Except that half of the class is missing,” Kilduff said in the same humorless tone. “What’s this all about?”

  Conradin’s hands were still wrapped tightly around the brandy snifter. “Yes, let’s have it, Larry.”

  “All right,” Drexel said. “Here it is, pure and simple; last month, in October, Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp were killed, all of them, in separate accidents. Cavalacci, when his car mysteriously blew up in a parking lot; Wykopf, in front of a truck that unaccountably slipped its hand brake in a garage he owned; Beauchamp, when his private plane suddenly exploded in midair.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” Conradin said reverently. He drained the remaining brandy in the snifter.

  Kilduff felt an odd coldness on the back of his neck, but that was all, really. Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp were men he had known eleven years ago; half-faceless men viewed with objective recollection, and he did not experience any real sense of loss at the news of their deaths. He said, “How do you know all this?”

  Drexel’s lips pursed into a thin white line. “If it matters, I’ve kept tabs on all of you over the years. I’m careful, damned careful, and I never did approve of the idea of absolute separation. I knew where you all had come from originally, and I figured that you’d either return to your home towns or stay in Illinois after the Statute ran out. I checked telephone directories and city directories and made a few discreet inquiries here and there and took subscriptions to local newspapers; after a while I found out where each of you were and what you were doing.”

  “I don’t like the idea of that,” Kilduff said. “The agreement—”

  “To hell with the agreement,” Drexel said coldly. “You’d better be thankful I did it that way. It might save your life.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “For Christ’s sake, do you think it’s coincidence that three of us died in the same month, all in unexplained accidents?”

  Kilduff moistened his lips. “What else could it be?”

  “Murder,” Drexel said. “That’s what else it could be.”

  The single word—murder—seemed to hang suspended in the nowsilent room, an embodied entity that held Conradin and Kilduff transfixed for a long moment. Finally Kilduff said very softly, “You’re crazy, Larry.”

  “Am I?”

  “You actually believe the three of them were murdered?”

  “I’m damned if I can accept the coincidence of all three dying in the same month. Two of them, maybe; but not all three.”

  “Is that why you called this meeting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you think the three of us are next? Because of Granite City?”

  “Yes, that’s just what I think.”

  Conradin stood and walked jerkily to the credenza. “Larry, there’s nobody who’d do a thing like you’re suggesting. A man would have to be insane. . .”

  “That’s right,” Drexel said. “A man who is insane, a man who somehow found out we were the ones who robbed that armored car in Granite City, a man who’s decided in his twisted mind that we’re directly responsible for a lot of things that happened to him as a result of the holdup. A man like Leo Helgerman.”

  “Who?” Kilduff asked.

  “Helgerman, the goddamned Mannerling guard Jim hit when he blew his cool in that parking lot.”

  “Oh Christ!” Conradin said. He poured his snifter full again and drank it off. He had begun to tremble noticeably. His face blanched.

  Kilduff said, “Larry, you’re dreaming!”

  “The hell I am,” Drexel said vehemently. “He was partially paralyzed with spinal damage for a while, wasn’t he? It was in the papers how bitter he was, how badly he wanted all of us caught.”

  “That’s a natural reaction, after what happened.”

  “Maybe it turned into an unnatural vendetta.”

  Kilduff stared at him incredulously. “Are you saying Helgerman’s mind snapped and he’s become some kind of avenging angel who’s killing us off one by one eleven years later? Larry, you can’t expect us to accept an incredible fantasy like that.”

  “Goddamn it, stranger things have happened.”

  “So have stranger coincidences than three of us dying by accident in the same month.”

  “Look, do you think I like the idea? It scares the hell out of me. But there’s the possibility that I’m right, and you’d better face up to it.”

  Conradin came back to the couch with the snifter full again. He sat down and stared at the dark liquid as if it held some kind of hypnotic fascination for him. But Kilduff felt a subtle release of tension; all the melodrama on the phone and all the cold, frightened sweating of the afternoon and early evening had been unnecessary. The pressure in his chest had begun to abate. He said, “How could Helgerman have found out we were the ones? It’s been eleven years, Larry, eleven years. The entire state of Illinois hasn’t been able to find out in that time.”

  “I don’t have any answers,” Drexel said. “I’m not psychic. I’m just telling you the way it is.”

  “Well, all right. Suppose you’re right. Just suppose you are. What do you think we ought to do?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “We can’t go to the police,” Kilduff said. “That’s obvious. And I’m not going to run on the strength of a monstrous improbability. I wouldn’t know how to run anyway.”

  “You think we ought to just sit around and wait, is that it?” Drexel asked. “Until another one of us dies in an ‘accident’?”

  “What the hell else is there for us to do?” Kilduff said. “We haven’t got any concrete reason to panic, no proof that the others died except by accident, no proof that Helgerman is insane and a murderer, or, for Christ’s sake, that he’s even still alive.”

  “Then we’ve got to find out,” Drexel said. “One way or another.”

  “How?” Kilduff asked. “Larry, we’re three guys pushing thirty-five who somehow managed to pull off a major crime when we were little more than kids. We’re no more experienced now than we were then; if anything, we’re less equipped today—we haven’t got that crazy, irrational, what-the-screw disregard for what happens tomorrow or next week or next month. Do you expect us to carry a .45 automatic in a shoulder holster like some Spillane character, peering furtively into shadows and asking veiled questions in dingy bars?”

  Drexel put his hands flat on his knees, his cold eyes darkly flashing. “That’s a nice speech, Steve,” he said tonelessly.

  “Listen,” Kilduff said, “all I’m trying to say is that I can’t accept the idea that Helgerman is going around picking us off one by one because we robbed an armored car eleven years ago and he ended up on disability. If you believe it, then you can do what you want.”

  “But you’re not going to do anything.”

  “No,” Kilduff said. “I’m not.”

  Without looking at him, Drexel said to Conradin, “And what about you, Jim? Is that your position, too?”

  “I don’t know,” Conradin answered slowly. “I don’t know what my position is.”

  “All right, then,” Drexel said. Abruptly, he got on his feet. “You’re both damned fools, curled up in your secure, complacent little worlds like a couple of foetuses and you think you’re inviolate, you think nothing out of the past can reach you any more. Well, all right. I don’t much care what happens to either one of you, but I care about my own neck and I’m going to do something.” He took two small white business cards from the inside pocket of his jacket and threw them on the coffee table. “If you decide to face reality, you can reach me at either of the numbers on those cards.”

  Without waiting for either of the others to say anything, he crossed to the door and went out, slamming it shut behind him.

  Kilduff and Conradin sat in unbroken silence for several moments, a pair of sculpted figures in some impressionistic museum exhibit. At
length, Kilduff said quietly, “It’s impossible. You know that, too, don’t you, Jim? The whole idea of it is inconceivable.”

  Conradin gave a slow, tremulous sigh. “Is it?” he asked. “Is it really, Steve? Or are we too afraid to admit the chance of it to ourselves, like Drexel said? Are we too afraid that we wouldn’t be able to cope with it if it were somehow true?”

  “No,” Kilduff said emphatically.

  Conradin picked up one of the white cards from the coffee table and put it into the pocket of his sheepskin jacket. “I’d better be going now.”

  “What are you planning to do?”

  “Nothing,” Conradin answered. He started toward the door, and Kilduff stood and followed him there. “Except maybe say a prayer that Drexel is wrong and you’re right.”

  “I’m right,” Kilduff said.

  “I hope to God you are.”

  “We don’t have anything to worry about.”

  “Don’t we?” Conradin asked, opening the door.

  “No, nothing.”

  “Except maybe ourselves,” Conradin said. “Good night, Steve.” And he was gone.

  Except maybe ourselves.

  Kilduff shut the door and returned to the living room and sat in the chair again, he seemed to be doing a lot of sitting in that chair. He sat there and stared at nothing and thought about Drexel and what he had said, and Conradin and what he had said, and about Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp lying in cold dark boxes beneath the cold dark earth; he thought about them for a long, long time ...

  ... And Andrea came to him in the darkness of the tiny cottage bedroom, nude and unashamed, an alabaster naiad haloed in sweet innocence, diminutive and Elysian and proud in the so very pale honeymoon-shine drifting in through the minute apertures in the bamboo blinds. She came to him with her arms held wide and her mouth scrubbed free of rouge, her eyes lidded with unaffected, loving sensuality, her breasts small-white and tense, the nipples and aureoles fine exquisite black diamonds, the melanoid triangle of her pubic hair a swath of the softest velvet demurely hiding the pure still waters beneath. She came to him with his name on her lips and lay beside him on the conjugal bed, breathing warm honey against his neck, warm honey, and there was the taste of her, feel of her, an aching of acute pleasure in his genitals. He was moving within her now—strange, there seemed to have been no virginal obstruction, no innocence, strange. And then he was saying her name over and over, “Andreal Andrea! Andrea!” moving faster and faster and faster but she began to dissolve beside him, no no no, began to fade into a nebulous shadow, no no, and then she was gone, no, gone, and he was alone again, alone not in the tiny cottage bedroom with its honeymoon-shine but alone in a dank, fetid cave, so very dark, and the smell of millenniums of decay was in his nostrils. He shrank into a corner and felt the viscid slime of subterranean stone against his nude body, and then from across that malefic cavern there came a movement, a slithering of something unimaginable, a foul sucking, crawling sound, and he shrank deeper into the corner, terrified, seeing a fulvous pinpoint of light appear before him, gradually expanding, illuminating a shape within the hazy glow, a shape which became a faceless, monstrous thing of such unspeakable horror that he opened his mouth and began to scream with his very soul, for the nameless faceless thing was coming nearer, coming closer, reaching for him with an extremity that dripped putrefaction . . .

  Kilduff came up out of the chair in a single convulsive leap, standing with his heart plunging impossibly in his chest and the length of his body encased in a thick mucilaginous sweat. At first he was still in that cave, still cowering just beyond the reach of the horror in his dream; but then his mind began to clear and the trembling of his body ceased and he realized it had been only that: a dream. His eyes moved upward to the sunburst clock on the wall: twelve-fifteen. He had mesmerized himself, sitting in the chair, into the nether world of the subconscious.

  He went into the kitchen and drank a glass of ice water from the refrigerator; his throat was raw and parched. In the bedroom he undressed and slid between the clean, cool sheets of the bed and closed his eyes. And when fatigue brought sleep flooding over him finally—

  Andrea came to him in the darkness of the tiny cottage bedroom ...

  6

  The limping man left the Graceling Hotel at eleven o’clock Sunday morning. He walked through heavy damp fog—one hand firmly grasping the handle of the American Tourister briefcase, and suspended over his right shoulder by a thin carrying strap, a cracked vinyl case containing an inexpensive pair of Japanese-manufactured binoculars—to the parking garage on Geary, where he had left the rented Mustang the previous afternoon.

  He presented his claim check to the attendant on duty, and when the car was brought down from one of the upper floors, he locked the briefcase and the binoculars inside the trunk. Moments later, he drove up to the street.

  It was still early, of course, he knew that—there really was nothing he could do until after dark—but leaving now assured him of plenty of time to select a place of concealment from which he could observe Yellow’s movements. Besides, Yellow’s moment was close at hand now—very close, perhaps as close as that very night—and the limping man was possessed with a certain nervous excitement, the same excitement he had experienced prior to Red and Gray and Blue. He could not simply remain in his hotel room for the entire day.

  With his right hand he manipulated the dials on the automobile radio until he found a station which played old standards. He turned up the volume, thinking of Yellow as he drove with cautious rapidity through the chill, mist-shrouded San Francisco morning.

  In the shack in Duckblind Slough, Andrea Kilduff sat bundled in her wool jacket at the wooden half-table, drinking a cup of hot black coffee. She had not slept well at all—had lain shivering beneath the heavy blankets on the Army cot, listening to that damned wind howl across the morass and across the expanse of the slough like the collective wail of souls in purgatory—and she felt chilled and cross and very much alone on this Sunday morning.

  She had cleaned the shack from top to bottom the previous day, going over everything with mop and broom and dustcloth and soapy water at least twice, putting herself into the chore with an almost mechanized fervency, making it last until day had receded into night. As a result, the two-room interior was spotlessly fastidious—almost, she thought, surveying now her labor in the light of morning, comfortably livable. Almost.

  Andrea finished her coffee and carried the cup to the tin sink and washed it out carefully, turning it upside down on the wood drainboard. She looked briefly out of the window above the sink, at the wind-swept grasses covering the inland area within her vision, at the leaden sky with its promise soon of rain, and then she turned away and sat down again at the table. She lifted the ostentatiously dust-jacketed novel she had brought with her (four hundred pages, very erotic—makes you ever so terribly horny, dear, a friend of hers had told her), but she put it down almost immediately. She didn’t feel like reading—not that she felt like sitting either, because she didn’t. Well, she was a fine one; she’d been out on her own for less than one day and already her own company bored her to tears. But there was nothing to do, nothing to keep her mind occupied the way the house-cleaning had done yesterday; at home, she had been able to call one of her friends on the telephone or go out shopping or driving or visiting if she became bored; but here, there was just nothing to do. . .

  Well, I’m certainly not chained here, am I? she asked herself. I can leave, can’t I? Well, of course I can; I’m not a prisoner in this shack, after all. There’s nothing that says I can’t leave for the day any time I want to.

  The thoughts became a firm resolution in her mind, and she stood and reached for her purse. Yes, a drive was just the thing, into San Rafael, she decided; there was one large shopping center which remained open on Sundays. She could browse leisurely there, have lunch, perhaps even go to a movie tonight. That was certainly better than just sitting here in this now-comfortable, now-livable littl
e shack in the middle of nowhere that she knew she was a darned fool for coming to in the first place, in spite of all her nice rationalizations.

  Buttoning the wool jacket to her throat, Andrea went to the door and stepped outside.

  To escape momentarily from all the hundreds of little things that had begun to remind her of Steve from the moment she first set foot inside the shack, from all the memories that a thousand cleanings could never remove from its omniscient walls.

  Standing at the edge of a small, grassy slope in Golden Gate Park, his hands pressed deep into the pockets of his topcoat, Steve Kilduff looked out over the flat, shallow water of Lloyd Lake. What I’ve got to do, he told himself, is be practical; I’ve got to put yesterday out of my mind, blank it out—Andrea and Drexel and Granite City—blank it all out with cold clear calculation and think about what I’m going to do now, now that the money’s almost gone and I’m about to be faced with the prospect of starvation. So it looks like a job, eight-to-five or equivalent, because I sure as hell don’t qualify for welfare; digging ditches or pumping gas or clerking in an office, brown-nosing the boss’s ass for that Christmas bonus and that ten-dollar semi-annual raise—why not? The trouble before was I wanted too much, expected too much; once you’ve got money, you acquire a taste for luxury, for money, and you can’t reconcile yourself to menial labor for menial wages. That was the trouble, all right, that was exactly what the trouble was, so the thing to do is go down to one of the employment agencies tomorrow and tell them I’ll take anything so long as it’s honest, tell them . . . well, now, that was pretty funny, wasn’t it? Take anything so long as it’s honest. Oh, Lord, that was really pretty damned funny, old Public Enemy Number One, The Man Who Helped Pull Off One Of The Few Really Big Unsolved Crimes In The Country, why, yes sir, I’ll take anything you have open just so long as it’s honest . . .