Chase (16 page)

‘Don't move!’ he shouted across the roof of the Mustang.

She responded much better than he could have hoped. She did not continue instinctively to open the door, as most would have, thinking the danger behind her. If she had opened the door any wider, she would have been dead a moment later.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘He's been in the car.’

‘Judge?’

‘Yes.’ He cleared his throat. His mouth was dry, and his tongue stuck to the roof of it when he tried to speak. ‘Don't open your door any wider. Let it go slowly back into place, but don't slam it or shut it tightly.’

‘Why?’

‘I believe he's wired explosives to your door.’

She was silent for a long moment, and when she finally spoke, she was genuinely frightened for the first time. ‘How can you tell?’

‘When I opened my door, the overhead light came on. From here, I can see a single strand of heavy-duty wire leading from the window knob on your door into the glove compartment. The explosives must be in there, for he's taken out the bulb in the glove-compartment door and left the door open.’

‘But how in the world did you-?’

‘We used to check a car in Nam before we got in. The Cong used the routine on us regularly.’

She had been slowly releasing the door as they conversed, and now she let go of it as it came to rest against the frame.

‘Now walk away from the car and get back by the building.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Disarm it,’ Chase said.

‘I won't let you-’

‘I've done it a dozen times before,’ he said. ‘Now do as I told you.’

When she was far enough back to be safe from any accidental explosion, Chase opened his door the rest of the way and sat down in the driver's seat.

A white panel delivery truck roared by, leaving a wake of sealike echoes that shushed back and forth between the brick walls of the apartment houses.

Chase leaned over the console between the bucket seats and peered into the open glove compartment. Even in the weak light, he could see the pebbled curve of the grenade. It had been taped securely to the shelf the glove-compartment door made when it lay open, then further bound by lengths of heavy-gauge wire that encompassed the width and breadth of the small door. The wire knotted around the window knob on the passenger's door led directly to the steel arming ring at the top of the grenade and was twisted around that bright loop many times.

Chase got out of the car and went to the apartment house steps where Glenda was waiting. ‘Do you have any household tools? A pair of pliers would be the thing.’

‘Needlenose pliers?’ she asked. ‘I have a pair of those that came with my Christmas tree lights.’

‘Good enough,’ he said.

While she was gone, he stood by the steps with his hands in his pockets, trying not to think what the grenade would have done to her. He might have been hurt himself, but she would have been literally torn apart as the sheet metal of the Mustang door shattered like glass.

She came back with the pliers. ‘How long?’ she asked.

‘Five minutes,’ he said. ‘Wait right here. I don't think we have to worry about Judge for the moment. He'll have been confident the explosion would finish us off.’

In the car again, he leaned over the console and caught the trigger wire in the back jaws of the pliers, squeezed the handles shut and began to twist back and forth as rapidly as he could manage. There was actually little danger of exploding the hand grenade now, though he would not feel safe until the trigger wire had been severed. Judge had given the lead at least ten inches of slack, a generous safety margin for all the work that Chase had to do.

Judge had not intended to make the disarming process easier by providing the slack, of course. His purpose had been to insure that Glenda had partly opened the door before the grenade could go off, so that the full force of the explosion would strike her more directly. Indeed, with that much slack, and the seven seconds between the pin-pull and the detonation, she might even have slid inside and sat down without noticing the wire, aware of the danger only when it was too late to escape.

The trigger wire snapped in two as Chase applied one last, hard twist to it.

He put the pliers down and crawled over the console, sat in the passenger's seat. He opened that door to let some of the streetlight flood in, and then set to work snipping the wires that bound the grenade in place. Those and the strips of black electrician's tape came away with little problem. When he freed the metal pineapple and tested its weight, there was no longer any doubt in his mind that it was a live piece and not just a stage prop Judge had put there for a laugh.

Chase wrapped the grenade in the chamois waxing cloth that had come with the car and tucked it into the glove compartment, which he locked.

He got out of the car, unwound the wire from the window knob and pushed that under the seat, closed the door and walked to the steps. ‘It's all done.’

‘Where's the dynamite?’ she asked.

‘No dynamite, just a hand grenade. I wrapped it and locked it in the glove compartment.’

She looked ill, the colour gone from her face. ‘Is that safe?’

‘Perfectly safe. It can't go off unless someone yanks the pin loose.’

‘Where could he have gotten a hand grenade?’

‘I don't know,’ Chase said. ‘I guess there are a number of ways. I intend to find out some day.’

‘What do we do now?’ she asked.

‘We go see Louise Allenby, like we planned. Now it seems even more urgent to track down that bastard.’

In the car, as he started the engine, she said, ‘I must congratulate you on your good nerves. This hardly seems to have upset you at all.’

‘It did, though,’ he said. ‘I don't think I've ever been so upset in my life.’ He knew he had to conserve himself for hate, hate directed toward Judge, hate that would benefit him if he nurtured it.

Louise Allenby answered the door wearing the tops of blue-flowered pyjamas that barely covered her below the curve of her ass, and she had a very slick come-hither look for him. She said, ‘I knew you'd be back to get the reward -’ Then she saw Glenda and said, ‘Oh!’

‘May we come in?’ Chase said.

She stepped back, confused, closed the door after them.

Chase introduced Glenda as a close friend, though he felt that Louise saw instantly past the description. Her face soured into a pout that was not at all the woman but completely the child she was.

She said, ‘Will you have a drink this time?’

‘No,’ Chase said. ‘We've only got a couple of questions, and we'll be going.’

I'm
drinking tonight,’ she said. She flounced across the room and made herself something Chase could not identify. She stood with her right hip cocked so that the pyjama tops pulled up slightly on her round, firm buttocks, soft and white against the tan of her legs. When she came back, she sat down in such a fashion that for a brief moment it was all there and visible and pretty, then swung one leg over the other and shut down the best part of the show. ‘What are your questions?’

Chase felt uncomfortable, but he could tell that Glenda was enjoying his embarrassment and the girl's anger. She sat on one of the stiff chairs, looking exceedingly delicious, her own legs crossed and much more fetching than Louise's legs for all the younger girl's nakedness.

Chase said, ‘You said you'd gone with Mike for a year before - before he was murdered.’

That's about right,’ she said. She looked at Glenda, looked down at her legs, frowned just the slightest, then returned her gaze to Chase and never took it from him until he got up to leave. ‘What about it?’

‘In that time, did you ever notice anyone following you - as if they were keeping a watch on you?’

‘Recently? No.’

‘Not just recently,’ he said. ‘Even weeks ago, or months ago.’

She hesitated, sipped her drink and said, ‘The beginning of the year, about February and March, there was something like that.’

Chase felt his throat catch, and he did not want to speak for fear that it would all prove to be nothing and would put them right back where they had been when they walked in the door. At last he said, ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, when Mike first said he was following us, I j ust laughed, you know?’ She frowned, remembering how she had laughed and wondering now if she had not been all wrong. ‘The idea was silly, right out of a movie. Mike was like that, too, always off on one fantasy or another. He was going to be a painter, did you know? At first he was going to work in a garret and become famous. Then he was going to be a paperback-book illustrator and then a very famous industrial designer. He never could decide - but he knew whatever it was he would be famous and rich. A dreamer.’ She shook her head, so wise with hindsight, knowing that dreams and plans don't work.

‘What about being followed?’ Chase asked. He did not want to anger her by prodding her the wrong way, for he knew she had the kind of temper that might make her clam right up. On the other hand, he didn't want to spend the rest of the night listening to a biography of Michael Karnes.

‘It was a man in a Volkswagen,’ she said. ‘A red Volkswagen. After a week or so of listening to Mike, I started watching myself, and I found out it wasn't another fantasy. There really was someone following us in a red Volkswagen.’

‘What did he look like?’ Chase asked.

‘I never saw him. He stayed far enough behind and always parked far along the kerb when we went in somewhere. But Mike knew him.’

Chase felt, for an instant, as if the top of his head were coming off, and he wanted to reach out and shake the rest of it out of her without having to go through this question-and-answer routine. Calmly he said, ‘Who was the man in the VW?’

‘I don't know,’ she said. ‘Mike wouldn't tell me.’

‘And you weren't curious?’ he asked.

‘Sure I was. But when Mike made up his mind about something, he wouldn't change it. One night, when we went to the Diamond Dell - that's a drive-in hamburger joint on Galasio - he got out of the car and went back and talked to the man in the VW. When he came back, he said he knew him and that we wouldn't have any more trouble with him. And he was right. The man drove away, and he didn't follow us any more. I never knew what it was about.’

‘But you must have had some idea,’ Chase insisted. ‘You can't have let it drop without finding out something more concrete.’

She put her drink down. She said, ‘Mike didn't want to talk about it, and I thought I knew why. He never said directly, but I think the man in the VW had made a pass at him.’

‘A homosexual,’ Chase said.

‘I only think so,’ she said. ‘I couldn't prove it.’ She started to pick up her drink, then brightened. ‘Hey, do you think it was the same man Monday night, the one with the ring?’

‘Maybe,’ Chase said.

‘Who is he?’

‘I don't know yet. But I'm going to find out.’ He stood up, and Glenda stood up beside him.

Louise said, ‘I'll just bet that's who it was!’

‘One more thing,’ Chase said. ‘I'd like a list of Mike's friends, anyone his own age that he was close to.’

‘Girl friends too?’ she asked, just the slightest bit tart about it.

He thought a moment and decided that this was not something a boy Mike's age would discuss with girls he was dating, for fear the very idea of having been approached by a homosexual would call his own masculinity into question. With boys his own age, however, he might be inclined to bring it up as a joke, for laughs. ‘Just boys,’ he said.

‘How many?’

‘Five or six.’

‘That would probably be a waste. Mike wasn't close to very many people. I can only think of three guys, actually.’

That'll do.’

She got a piece of paper at the desk, sat down and printed the three names. She got up, put the pen away and brought the list back to him. All the getting up and sitting down was designed, he was sure, to give him a few more little glimpses of what she must have considered paradise.

‘Thanks,’ he said, seeing addresses below the names and wondering how many of Mike's best friends had been to bed with her.

At the door, Louise brushed against him, all plastic promise and manufactured musk. She whispered, ‘You know, it could have been very nice indeed.’

Glenda was in front of Chase with her back to them, and she should not have been able to hear, but she turned and smiled pleasantly at the younger girl. She said, not pleasantly, ‘But the problem is that you try too hard, Louise, really you do.’

Louise coloured, twisted away from them in unconscious - for the first time that evening - display of flesh and slammed the door in their faces.

‘She's just a girl, after all,’ Chase said, looking sideways at her. But Glenda showed no sign of understanding his point. ‘Did you have to be like that with her?’

‘She doesn't
act
like a young girl,’ Glenda snapped. ‘Not one bit like.’

He realized that she was jealous, and if circumstances had not been so tense, he might have taken the time to enjoy that.

In the car again, she seemed to have calmed down. She said, ‘What's next, Detective Chase?’

Chase sat behind the wheel, staring at the dark street and thinking about Judge. He had taken pains to be certain no one had followed them from Glenda's apartment, but he could not escape the feeling that there was a gun trained on the back of his head - or on the back of hers. The ordeal with the grenade had put him on a keen edge.

He said, ‘Let's see if any of these boys are home.’

‘At eleven of a Sunday evening?’

‘I guess not,’ Chase said. ‘But it can't hurt to try.’ He drove away, glancing repeatedly in the rear-view mirror. There was no one following them, at least not in the physical sense.

Jerry Taylor, the third boy on the list, was at home. He lived with his parents in the Braddock Heights part of the city, in a two-storey stone house set on a luxuriously planted full-acre lot. Braddock Heights provided ‘gracious’ living for professional people and their families, doctors and lawyers and the more successful businessmen. The man who answered the door, tall and greying, dressed in casual slacks, a white shirt and a tattered sweater, did not seem surprised that his son should be visited by two adults at that hour of the night. He asked if Jerry was in trouble, nodded when they said it was nothing like that, escorted them downstairs to the game room and said Jerry would be along in a few minutes. He left, and he did not return with his son.