The Stalker Read online

  The limping man looks up at her for a long moment. A whore, a cheap whore; but he feels hunger in his loins. “No,” he answers slowly, “I don’t mind.”

  The girl sits down and crosses her legs, and the short skirt of the dress pulls up on her thighs: more iridescent white cream. His eyes linger there, and he can smell her perfume dark and musky. “I’m Alice,” she says.

  “Hello, Alice.”

  “Would you like to buy me a drink?”

  “All right.”

  “Well, groovy.”

  “What would you like?”

  “Bourbon and water.”

  The limping man signals and the yellow-haired waitress moves toward them, her heavy thighs rippling beneath the dancing fringe of her skirt. She takes his order and returns to the bar, and Alice says, “What’s your name, honey?”

  “Smith,” the limping man answers, and Alice laughs. A cheap whore, he thinks, but she’s almost pretty when she laughs.

  “Where you from, old Smith?” Alice asks.

  “Everywhere,” the limping man says. “And nowhere.”

  Alice laughs again. “My, how poetic.” She puts her hand on his thigh very lightly and leans close to him and presses her white spilling breasts against his arm. “You wouldn’t be a poet, would you?”

  Her hand is like hot fire on his leg. “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “What would you be then?”

  The limping man does not answer, and the yellow-haired waitress comes back with a tray containing a draft beer and a glass of tea. The limping man gives her three dollars. She nods, retreating. Alice sips the tea, and then puts the glass down and presses her breasts tighter against his arm. He feels them spongy-soft there and looks down into the shadowed valley between them and begins to breathe unevenly. The music builds to a crescendo from within the walls of the room, and the red-haired girl moves faster and faster on the stage, until her nude hips are a blur of motion. Alice strokes the limping man’s thigh, drawing her hand higher. “Do you like me?” she asks.

  “Yes,” he answers, “I like you,” and he is thinking of Yellow again, Yellow screaming through the gray, damp fog.

  “I’ve got a room down the street, honey,” Alice says softly. “We could go there if you like.”

  Yellow screams and screams, but rhythmically now, in time with the beat of the music. The limping man breathes rapidly, irregularly, and her hand sets fire to his trouser leg.

  “I’m very good, you know,” she says.

  “Are you?”

  “I’m very, very good.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty dollars.”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “I’m a lot of woman, honey.”

  “I’ll give you twenty-five.”

  “Compromise time,” she says. “Thirty-five.”

  “Twenty-five or nothing.”

  “Thirty-five or nothing.”

  The music continues, but the scream ends abruptly and is replaced by a faint, faraway sound, the sound of a pebble tumbling down a mountainside. But then that sound, too, dies, and there is silence, and in his mind the limping man sees Yellow lying dead and broken and bloodied at the bottom of the cliff. Alice’s hand brands his thigh and she breathes into his ear, “I know a lot of things, old Smith honey, I know a lot of ways to make a man happy. Thirty-five dollars is a bargain price.”

  “All right!” the limping man says urgently, standing. “All right, let’s go!”

  Alice smiles. “You won’t be sorry.”

  “Let’s go!” he says again, and pulls her to her feet. They make their way quickly toward the curtained entranceway.

  Behind the bar, the light-skinned Negro watches them with his implacable stare, and smiles very faintly, and on the stage the nude girl dancer sinks to her knees with her head hanging down and her long red hair shielding her body like a gossamer cloak as the music terminates and the pink spotlight winks out.

  Chicago lay cold and bright and aloof under a darkly overcast sky when Larry Drexel’s flight from San Francisco arrived at O’Hare Airport a few minutes past ten Tuesday night.

  Immediately after claiming his single suitcase, Drexel entered a cab in front of the main terminal and instructed the driver to take him to one of the larger downtown hotels, where he had made telephone reservations that afternoon. He settled back against the rear seat as the cab began to make its way out of the airport, removed a cheroot from his suit pocket, and lit it carefully.

  He thought: Who would have figured Kilduff to turn out the way he did? Crap-yellow, and running scared. He came undone at the seams this morning at Sebastopol; I shouldn’t have said anything to him at all about killing Helgerman, but how could you predict a reaction like that?

  It turned his stomach remembering how he had had to patronize Kilduff: “It’s nothing as relatively unimportant as exposure, or even a prison sentence, facing us now, Steve. It’s life and death, kill or be killed—the law of the jungle. No judgments, no great moral decisions, Steve; kill or be killed, pure and simple.” But he’d finally gotten him calmed down on the drive back to San Francisco, telling him that they would talk it all out again when he got back from Chicago; but there was no figuring how long it would be before Kilduff got to thinking on the thing and made some damned-fool move that would blow the whole scene—like going to the police, spilling his guts . . .

  He couldn’t let that happen. He had too many things going for him—El Peyote and Cantina del Flores, which he now owned one hundred percent as of Monday morning at 10:43—too many avenues opening up, each of them leading to golden rainbows, to allow one son of a bitch who didn’t have the balls for justifiable homicide to queer it all. He had thought it all out very carefully on the plane, and the way he saw it, he had just one way to go. The idea of tracing Helgerman back to San Francisco really wasn’t feasible, and he’d just be kidding himself if he actually thought he could determine his whereabouts that way; but if he could learn where Helgerman lived, where he called home now, then there was a good chance he could reverse the entire situation. Helgerman would have to come home eventually, wouldn’t he? And when he did, then he would become the hunted and Larry Drexel would become the hunter.

  As for Kilduff . . . well, he had made his goddamned bed, hadn’t he? He was approaching the deep end, no mistake, and it was a certainty that he was going over the edge before too long. There was the distinct possibility that. Helgerman would get him before then, because he had gotten Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp and Conradin; but there wasn’t any assurance of that. And suppose Helgerman made a try and failed? Kilduff—straight to the fuzz for sure.

  So he couldn’t afford to take the risk—he couldn’t afford to wait. The thing to do was fly back to San Francisco tomorrow sometime, whether or not he located Helgerman’s address, because he could always return to Chicago and Granite City again. Get Kilduff alone somewhere, like he should have done before he left. Just the two of them.

  And then hit him on the head.

  Eliminate the threat once and for all.

  Drexel moistened his lips, staring out at the flickering lights of the Windy City. He didn’t much care for the idea of that, not really; they had been friends once and there was the chance Kilduff would straighten up, you never knew. But the odds were all wrong, and friendships meant nothing when it came to your own ass. He would do it, all right; there was no other choice in the matter. You had to protect yourself, didn’t you?

  Well, didn’t you?

  9

  Trina Conradin lay with her eyes open wide in the canopied antique bed she had shared with her husband, in the big white house on Bodega Flat, and listened to the wind and the rain and the sounds of night, and asked God again and again, silently, rhetorically, why her husband had died. She lay without moving, the cool white sheets pulled up tightly to her throat, waiting for the momentary respite of sleep, waiting in vain for sleep that never came. All that came were ghosts, ethereal wraiths fluttering, whispering
, playing tag along the high ceilings and within the old dark walls. And she couldn’t cry any more; she couldn’t cry.

  At the first pale, filtered light of morning—what day? Wednesday?—the storm abated; the wind grew tranquil and the thunder ebbed into nothingness and the sound of the rain was very gentle on the glass panes of the window. Trina lay in the warm, empty bed and tried to imagine her future. What would she do? Where would she go? There were too many memories, too many ghosts, in this big old house—and in Bodega Bay. Sell the house, then, and sell Jim’s boat and go away somewhere. To live alone somewhere, alone . . .

  She pushed the thoughts away; not now, she told herself, this isn’t the time. She slid out of bed, and dressed in a pair of old black capris and a gray pullover sweater, and went downstairs to the kitchen.

  Shortly past eleven, Mr. Spencer, from the mortuary, arrived solicitous and apologetic to present Trina with a thin black leather-bound book which had Inscribed Memories printed in gold leaf on the cover. He took her hand and held it for a brief moment, as if it were a fragile sparrow’s egg, and offered once more his whispered condolences. When he had gone, Trina sat in one of the dated wing chairs in the dark sitting room and opened the book and looked at the facing page. In raised black script: That the memory Of the beloved departed May always be preserved, We have compiled This book of Inscribed Memories.

  We present this record to you In appreciation of your confidence and As a tribute to your loved one, Who will Linger in fond remembrance throughout The years to come.

  On the page following, in the same printing, and handwritten carefully with a nibbed pen: In Memory Of And on the page following:

  Entered into Rest

  Sitting there, Trina still was unable to cry. She turned the parchment-like pages of the book in her lap slowly until she came to one divided into two columns, one headed: Friends; the other: Relatives . So few, she thought, so very, very few. Her eyes moved slowly down each column and then paused on the last signature under Friends: Steven Kilduff, San Francisco. She tried to place the name, to remember if she herself knew it from some past place or time, or if Jim had mentioned it, but it was totally strange and evoked no response in her mind. Steven Kilduff. Had that been the man who had spoken to her in the mortuary yesterday? Or was it the name of the other man, the dark Latin one? Why had only one of the two men signed the guest book in the vestibule? Why—?

  Oh God, what difference does it make? Trina thought abruptly. She closed the memorial book. What difference does any of it make now—Jim’s dead, Jim’s dead, and everything else is meaningless.

  She stood and went upstairs and put the book on the small reading stand by the bed. Then she descended again and entered the library—a small room with three walls of glassed-in bookshelves—just down the hall from the sitting room. She had to find something to do, something to keep her hands and her mind occupied . . .

  Trina crossed to the roll-top desk and sat down in the stiff-backed armchair before it. Jim had handled all the financial responsibilities, by mutual consent, and she knew nothing about such things, really, having been given a budgeted allowance each week for food and incidentals. But she would have to learn; she would have to learn a lot of things now. She rolled the top up. Chaos—Jim had not been the most organized of men. Trina began to wade through the assortment of pigeon-holed, spindled, and stacked papers.

  Twenty minutes later, she found the safe deposit key.

  It was in a small locked steel strongbox in a locked bottom drawer of the desk. She had opened the drawer with a key on Jim’s ring, which the Sheriff’s Department had returned to her on Monday with the remainder of his personal effects, and which she had subsequently put in a small tray on the desk. There was nothing else in the drawer save for a new supply of checks from their joint account, and two boxes of canceled checks. The strongbox—for which she located a little silver key on the ring—contained, among other papers, their insurance policy, the deed to the house, ownership certificates on Jim’s boat, The Kingfisher, and their marriage license; and it contained as well the safe deposit key, in an envelope with a series of yearly payment receipts from the West Valley Savings and Loan in Santa Rosa. The newest receipt was dated June, 1970, and she noticed that it was made out in both their names.

  Trina held the key, Number 2761, in the palm of her hand. She remembered, a long while past, signing a paper from the bank on a safe deposit rental; Jim had said something vague at the time about keeping important documents there. She frowned. All the documents of any import were right there in the strongbox. Why had Jim then kept the safe deposit all these years, paying the rental promptly when it fell due? What did he have inside?

  Unaccountably, Steve Kilduff found himself thinking about the day he and Andrea met.

  February, 1963; he had been back in California almost a year, then, with the money in seven different San Francisco banks and a deal in the works with an operator named Thalinger, who was forming a combine to purchase virgin timberland for development near the Salton Sea in Southern California. It was practically an unprecedented coup, according to Thalinger, guaranteed to turn all the shareholders into rich men inside of five years—hell, it simply couldn’t miss. Except that it did, by a sour mile, and he had lost two thousand in faith money. But that wasn’t until later, after he and Andrea had met.

  At the time, he was spending a couple of weeks at a ski lodge in Sugar Pine Valley in the Sierras, just taking it easy while the thing with Thalinger simmered, looking for willing pussy and not having any trouble finding it, living the good life, getting his. This one day, a Saturday, he’d been up on one of the intermediate slopes, trying halfseriously to get a big lemon-haired chick named Judy to ball him in a snowbank—“What the hell do you mean it’s too cold? Eskimos do it in an igloo, don’t they?”—and not having any luck at all, but enjoying himself immensely. He had come down to the lodge finally and put his skis up and crossed the ice-slick parking lot under the thin powder that had fallen all morning. There was a café in a big log building opposite, at the base of a slope where fifteen or twenty cabins nestled, smoke curling up through the brick chimneys on a couple of them, freezing white when it touched the chill air, and the whole thing had reminded him of a tranquil Christmas-card scene. He had got up onto the lograiled porch, whistling, when he looked through the rimed plate-glass window on the left and saw her sitting in one of the booths with a tall, blond guy in a fur-lined parka. She had her ebon hair down, falling across her shoulders and around onto her chest like silk, and her cheeks were a cherubic pinkish-red from the warmth inside, and she was smiling with her head cocked a little to one side, and the Scandinavian ski sweater in white and black that she wore was pulled tight across her small, round breasts as she leaned forward to listen to what the blond guy was saying.

  He stopped and stood there on the porch for a long moment, with the snow falling around him and his breath making little puffs of vapor on the cold air, staring at her frankly and openly, and finally she seemed to become aware of his eyes through the glass and lifted her head and looked at him briefly, the smooth skin of her forehead wrinkling into two thin horizontal lines and the smile turning quizzical, lingering; but then she looked back to the blond guy again, and in his mind it was as if she had forgotten him, negated his existence with that simple averting of her eyes, and he went to the door and opened it and walked in and went straight to the booth and stood there looking down at her.

  “My name is Steve,” he said. “Steve Kilduff.”

  Her forehead wrinkled again, and the same quizzical, curious smile came onto her pink lips. “Hello,” she said uncertainly.

  The blond guy looked up at him with open hostility. His cheeks were pinkish-red, too, but on the table were two empty hot-buttered-rum mugs from the café’s connecting bar, which had more to do with his color than the interior warmth. His eyes had a faint opaqueness, the whites interwoven with crimson lines. He said, “Flake off, McDuff.”

  “Kilduff.” />
  “Whatever the hell,” the blond guy said. “Flake off.”

  He kept looking at her, at her great luminous black eyes. “What do you say? Do you want me to leave?”

  “I . . . don’t know,” she answered. “I don’t know you.”

  “I’m Steve,” he said. “Steve Kilduff, from San Francisco.”

  “Listen,” the blond guy said, “nobody invited you. This is a private discussion.”

  “Oh, Kjel,” she said. “Don’t be like that.” And to him, “I’m Andrea Fraser; and this is Kjel Andersson,” smiling.

  “Oh, a Swede,” he said.

  “What the hell do you mean by that?” Andersson asked hotly.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Please, Kjel,” she said. “Don’t make a scene.”

  “For Christ’s sake!” Andersson said, looking at her. “Whose side are you on?”

  “I’m not on anyone’s side.”

  “Tell him not to make a scene, then.”

  “He isn’t raising his voice,” she said, and there was the barest hint of anger in her tone now.

  “Well, maybe you’d like me to flake off.”

  “Yes, maybe I would.”

  “All right, then, goddamn it!” Andersson said petulantly and slid out of the booth and glared angrily at Kilduff. He stalked to the door and went out.

  He looked down at her and said very softly, “Would you mind if I sat down with you, Andrea?”

  “Well . . . no, I guess not.”

  He sat down and kept looking at her, tasting her with his eyes, and inside him there was a paradoxical mixture of feelings old and new, intermingling as one: he felt an intense surging in his loins of sheer physical desire—he wanted her, he wanted her body as he had never wanted the body of any other woman; and yet he was consumed equally by a kind of fatherly-brotherly selfless knight-errantry that in itself precluded physical contact.