Cape Fear (2 page)

“Please,” she said in an entirely different voice, and he
knew that he would have to tell her. He opened the ice chest and took out another can of beer. He opened it and offered it to her, but she shook her head. He took the can down by a third. “All right. But understand that I’m a natural-born worrier. Everything is so good that I’m superstitious. I want to keep this very precious apple cart of ours standing on its wheels.”

“I can help you worry.”

“Or maybe laugh me out of it. I hope so. A weird thing happened when I came out of the office on Thursday. But that isn’t the starting place. It starts on a certain trip overseas you might just possibly remember.”

He knew she could remember. There had been only the one trip back in 1943 when First Lieutenant Samuel B. Bowden of the Judge Advocate General’s Department took a lengthy cruise on the old
Comte de Biancamano
, which was being operated by the U.S. Navy. He had embarked wearing his Pentagon pallor and had eventually ended up in New Delhi in Theater Headquarters of the C.B.I.

“I’m not fixing to forget it, lover. You were gone a good chunk of time. A good chunk out of my life. A bad chunk, I should say.”

“You haven’t heard me go through the Bowden symposium of side-splitting war stories for some time, but do you happen to remember my anecdote about Melbourne? It wasn’t very funny.”

“Sort of. Let me see. You got off there and you got mixed up in something and the ship went on without you because you had to be a witness, and you never caught up with that footlocker we packed with such loving care.”

“I was a key witness at a court-martial. A rape case.”

“Yes, I remember that. But I don’t remember how you came to be a witness.”

“Several of us got a hotel room and I was taken drunk on Australian ale. They make it of distilled sledgehammers. It was a June night, and cold. I decided I needed the walk back to the ship. It was two in the morning. As I was getting myself thoroughly lost, I heard a whimpering in an alley. I thought it was a puppy or a kitten. But it was a girl. She was fourteen.”

He knew that the special half-drunken flavor of that night would never leave his memory. The great stone city with its wide, deserted streets, just a few lights burning. The sound of his heels echoing coin sounds from the empty walls. He was humming “Roll Out the Barrel.” It became nicely resonant when he was opposite the mouths of the alleys.

He decided a puppy or a kitten could be smuggled onto the ship. And then he had stopped and stared without comprehension at the pale tumbled legs, the brute rhythm of the attacker, and heard the animal whining, heard the meaty crack of his fist against her face. With comprehension had come a high-wild anger. He had wrested the soldier away from her and, as the man had scrambled up, had struck wildly and with all his strength and had hit the hard shelf of jaw. The man had grappled with him weakly, then slid down, rolled onto his back and, to Sam’s astonishment, had begun to snore. He ran out and a few moments later hailed a Shore Patrol jeep.

They had held him over for the court-martial. The girl
was fourteen, big for her age and very plain-looking. Her father had been sick in the night, and she had been on her way to her aunt’s house to get help when the drunken soldier, Max Cady, had caught her and pulled her into the alley.

“Didn’t they hang him?”

“No. But it was close. He was a twenty-five-year-old staff sergeant with seven years of service and over two hundred days of combat in the islands. He’d been pulled out with a bad case of jungle rot and jungle nerves and sent to a rest camp near Melbourne. It was his first trip into the city. He was drunk. She looked older, and she was out on the street at two in the morning.”

“But even so.”

“They gave him life at hard labor.”

He remembered how the sergeant had looked in court. Like an animal. Sullen, vicious and dangerous. And physically powerful. Sam looked at him and knew how lucky the punch had been. Cady had looked across the court at Sam as though he would dearly enjoy killing him with his hands. Dark hair grew low on his forehead. Heavy mouth and jaw. Small brown eyes set in deep and simian sockets. Sam could tell what Cady was thinking. A nice clean non-combat lieutenant. A meddler in a pretty uniform who’d never heard a shot fired in anger. So the pretty lieutenant should have backed right out of the alley and gone on his way and left a real soldier alone.

“Sam, darling, are you trying to say that …” She had a frightened look on her face.

“Now please don’t get jumpy. Don’t get nervous, baby.”

“Did you see that man on Thursday? Did they let him out?”

He sighed. “I never get a chance to finish anything. Yes. They let him out.”

He had not expected Cady to come bobbing up out of ancient history. He had merely forgotten the whole affair. Too many other impressions during those overseas years had blurred the memories of Cady. He had come home in 1945 with the rank of captain. He had got along well with his colonel, a man named Bill Stetch, and after the war he had come to New Essex at Bill’s invitation and had joined the law firm.

“Tell me about it. What is he like? How in the world did he find you?”

“I don’t think it’s trouble. It can be handled. Anyway, when I headed for the lot on Thursday, a man I knew I’d never seen before fell in step with me. He kept grinning at me in a funny way. I thought he was crazy.”

“Can we go in now? Can we? Is it time?” Bucky yelled shrilly, racing toward them.

Sam looked at his watch. “You’ve been goofing off, my small, untidy friend. You could have been in five minutes ago.”

“Hey, Jamie! It’s time.”

“Bucky, wait a minute,” Carol said. “You don’t go out beyond that rock. You
or
Jamie. Understand?”

“Nancy goes ’
way
out.”

“And when you pass the life-saving tests she’s passed, you can go ’
way
out too,” Sam said. “Don’t gripe. And see if you can keep your head down.”

They watched the boys go into the water. Nancy and her friend stood up. She waved at her parents. She tucked her dark hair into her cap as she walked to the stern of the
Sweet Sioux
. Sam looked at her and felt sad and ancient as he saw how quickly her slim figure was maturing. And, as always, he thanked private gods that Nancy took after her mother. The boys took after him. Sandy-red hair, knobbly bone structure, pale-blue eyes, freckles, over-sized teeth. It was evident that at maturity both boys would be like their father, incurably lean, shambling, stringy, tall men of physical indolence and ropy toughness. It would have been tragic if he had willed his only daughter such a fate.

“It was that same sergeant, wasn’t it?” Carol said in a small voice.

“The same. I’d forgotten his name. Max Cady. His sentence was reviewed. He was released last September. He served thirteen years at hard labor. I wouldn’t have recognized him. He’s about five nine, wide and thick-set. He’s more than half bald and deeply tanned, and he looks as though you couldn’t hurt him with an ax. The eyes are the same and the jaw and mouth are the same, but that’s all.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“Not in any explicit way. He had control of the situation. And he was enjoying himself. He kept telling me I never had the word, I never saw the picture. And he kept grinning at me. I can’t remember ever seeing a more disconcerting grin. Or whiter, more artificial-looking teeth. He knew damn well he was making me uncomfortable. He followed me into the lot and I got in the wagon and started it up. Then he moved like a cat and snatched the key out and leaned on the sill, looking in at me. The car was like an
oven. I sat in my own sweat. I didn’t know what the hell to do. I couldn’t try to take the key away from him. That’s nonsense.”

“Could you have gotten out and gone after a policeman?”

“I guess so. But that didn’t seem very … dignified. Like running to Teacher. So I listened. He was proud of the way he found me. When his defense officer was questioning me, it came out that I got my law degree from Penn. So Cady went to Philadelphia and got somebody to check the alumni records for him and got my home address and business address that way. He wanted to give me the word on what thirteen years of hard labor was like. He called me lieutenant. He used it in every sentence. He made it sound like a dirty word. He said that because it was June it made it sort of an anniversary for us. And he said he’d been thinking about me for fourteen years. And he said he was glad I was doing so well. He said he wouldn’t have wanted to find out I had a lot of problems.”

“What … does he want to do?”

“All he said was he wanted to make sure I had the word, the big picture. I sat there sweating, and finally when I demanded my car key, he handed it to me. And he tried to give me a cigar. He had a shirt pocket full of them. He said they were good cigars. Two bits each. As I backed out he said, still grinning, ‘Give my best to the wife and kids, Lieutenant.’ ”

“It’s creepy.”

Sam wondered whether he should tell her the rest of it. And then he knew he had to. She should know the rest of it so that she would not be careless—if it came to that.

He patted her hand. “Now brace yourself, Carol-bug. This may be only in my mind. I hope so. But this is what has been chewing on me. You remember that I was late on Thursday. Cady used up a half hour. I had a lot of chance to observe him. And the more I listened, the more a little warning bell rang, louder and louder. You don’t have to be a trained psychoanalyst. Somehow, when a person is different, you know it. I suppose we all run in a pack, in a sense. And there are always little clues to the rogue beast. I don’t think Cady is sane.”

“My God!”

“I think you should know that about him. I may be wrong. I don’t know what words the doctors would have for it. Paranoid. I wouldn’t know. But he can’t blame himself. I tried to tell him it was his own fault. He said if they’re big enough they’re old enough, and she was just another Aussie bitch. I didn’t have the word. I couldn’t see the picture. I think he was the type of Regular Army enlisted man who despises officers anyway. And he’s come around to believing that the incident in the alley was perfectly normal. So I took thirteen years out of his life, and I should pay for it.”

“But he didn’t say that?”

“No. He didn’t say that. He was having a dandy time. He knew that I was squirming. What’s the matter?”

Her eyes were very wide and focused. She looked beyond him. “How long has he been in New Essex?”

“I don’t know. I got the impression he’d been around a few weeks.”

“Did he have a car?”

“I don’t know.”

“How was he dressed?”

“Khaki pants, not very clean. A white sports shirt with short sleeves. No hat.”

“Something happened over a week ago. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. A week ago Wednesday, I think it was. In the morning. The kids were in school. I heard Marilyn barking her fool head off and I figured she had some horribly dangerous game treed—a chipmunk or something. So I didn’t pay any attention until she gave a shrill yelp. Then I went out in the yard. She was circling back through the field, tail tucked under, staring back toward the road. There was a gray car, sort of beat up, parked on the shoulder, and there was a man sitting on our stone wall, facing the house. He was well over a hundred yards away. I got the impression he was a heavy man, and he was bald, and he was smoking a cigar. I stared at him but he didn’t make a move. I didn’t quite know what to do. I guess Marilyn had been barking at him, but I couldn’t be sure he’d thrown a stone or anything at her. If he’d just pretended to throw a stone, our courageous dog, friend of man, would have reacted the same way. And I didn’t know if sitting on the wall is trespassing. The wall marks our line. So Marilyn and I went back into the house and she went under the living-room couch. The man made me sort of uneasy. You know, kind of alone out there. I told myself he was a salesman or something and he liked the view, so he stopped to sit and look at it awhile. When I looked the second time, he was still there. But the next time I looked he was gone. I don’t like to think it could have been … him.”

“Neither do I. But I guess we better assume it was. Damn it, we ought to get a better dog.”

“They don’t make better dogs. Marilyn isn’t exactly brave, but she’s sweet. Look at her.”

Marilyn, awakened from her sleep by the whooping and splashing of the kids, had gone into the water. She was a spayed red setter with a beautiful coat and good lines. She churned around after the swimming children, yipping with her spasms of joy and excitement.

“Now that I’ve depressed you,” he said with a heartiness he did not feel, “I can get over onto the bright side. Even though good old Dorrity, Stetch and Bowden do corporation and estate work and handle tax matters, I do have friends in the police force. In our tidy little city of one hundred and twenty-five thousand, Sam Bowden is reasonably well known, and possibly respected. Enough so that there seems to be an idea that some day I should run for something.”

“Please don’t.”

“I’m trying to say that I’m one of the boys. And the boys take care of their own. Yesterday I had lunch with Charlie Hooper, our bright young city attorney. I told him the story.”

“And I’ll bet you made it sound like some kind of a joke.”

“My hands weren’t trembling and I didn’t look haunted, but I think I made him see that I was concerned. Charlie didn’t seem to think it would be a special problem. He took down the name and description. I believe the dainty phrase he used was to have the boys ‘put the roust on him.’ That seems to mean that the officers of the law find so many ways on the books to lean heavily on an undesirable citizen that he departs for more comfortable areas.”

“But how could we be sure he leaves, and how would we know he wouldn’t sneak back?”

“I wish you hadn’t asked that question, honey. That’s what I’ve been thinking about.”

“Why don’t they put him in jail?”

“What for? My God, it would be nice if you could do that, wouldn’t it? An entirely new legal system. Jail people for what they might do. New Essex goes totalitarian. Honey, listen to me. I always use the light touch, I guess, when I talk about the law business. All we moderns shy away from any hint of dedication. But I believe in the law. It’s a creaking, shambling, infuriating structure. There are inequities in it. Sometimes I wonder how our system of law manages to survive. But at its base, it’s an ethical structure. It is based on the inviolability of the freedom of every citizen. And it works a hell of a lot more often than it doesn’t. A lot of very little people have been trying to whittle it into a new shape during these mid-years of our century, but the stubborn old monster refuses to be altered. Behind all the crowded calendars and the overworked judges and the unworkable legislation is a solid framework of equity under the law. And I like it. I live it. I like it the way a man might like an old house. It’s drafty and it creaks and it’s hell to heat, but the timbers are as honest as the day they were put up. So maybe it is the essence of my philosophy that this Cady thing has to be handled within the law. If the law can’t protect us, then I’m dedicated to a myth, and I better wake up.”