Chase (4 page)

The nightmare, Mrs Fiedling, then breakfast, one bit of bad business after the other . . .

Ordinarily, the counter at Woolworth's was a guarantee of privacy, even if every stool was taken. Businessmen reading the financial pages, secretaries drinking coffee and chattering each other fully awake, labourers slumped forward over greasy eggs and potatoes that their wives had not risen to fix for them -none of the customers wanted to talk or be noticed. The proximity of the seats, the elbow-to-elbow circumstances left no room for graceful dining unless one could pretend that there was really no one else about. That Tuesday morning, however, Chase discovered, halfway through his meal, that most of the other people there were watching him with only poorly disguised interest.

When he had sat down, the pert little blonde waitress had said, ‘Good morning, Mr Chase. What will you have?’ He should have known then that everything was not as it should be, for he had never been on friendly terms with her and had never told her his name. The ubiquitous newspaper, spread across with his likeness, betrayed him wherever he went.

He stopped eating halfway through, left a tip, paid his bill and got out of there. His hands were shaking, and the backs of his knees quivered as if his legs would let him down.

He went to the newsstand to purchase a paperback and was confronted with so many copies of his own face in the paper racks that he turned away at the door without going in.

At the liquor store, the clerk commented on the size of his purchase for the first time in months. Clearly, he seemed to feel it was improper for a man like Chase to drink so much. Unless, of course, the whiskey was for a party. He asked Chase if he was giving a party. Chase said that he was.

Then, anxious for the barren confines of his little attic room, he walked two blocks toward home before he remembered that he now had a car. He walked back to it, embarrassed that someone might have seen his confusion, and when he settled in behind the wheel he felt too tightly wound to risk driving. He sat there for fifteen minutes, looking through the service manual, the ownership papers and the temporary owner's card, then started the engine and drove home.

He did not go to the park to watch the girls on their lunch hour, because he feared recognition. If one of them should come over to him and try to strike up a conversation, he would not know what to do.

In his room, he poured a glass of whiskey over two ice cubes and stirred it with his finger.

He turned on the television and found an old movie starring Wallace Beery and Marie Dressier. He had seen it at least half a dozen times, but he kept it on just the same. The repetition, the stability of the sequential scenes - through thousands of showings in movies theatres and on television - soothed his nerves. He watched Wallace Beery make a clumsy romantic pass at Marie Dressier, and the familiarity of that awkwardness, seen so often before and in that same exact detail, was like a balm on his mind.

At 11:05 the telephone rang.

He finally answered it, denied permission for an interview and hung up.

At 11:26 it rang again.

This time it was the insurance agent with whom the Merchants’ Association had taken out a year's policy on the Mustang, in Chase's name. He wanted to know if the coverage was adequate or whether Chase would like to increase it for a nominal sum. He was upset when Chase said it was adequate.

At 11:50 the phone rang a third time. When Chase picked it up, the killer said, ‘Hello, how has your morning been?’

Chase said, ‘What do you want?’

‘Did you see the papers?’ His voice was hoarse, a loud whisper.

‘One of them.’

‘Lovely coverage of your heroism, a great deal of purple prose, don't you think?’

‘I don't like publicity,’ Chase said, hoping to put himself in the man's good graces, even while he understood their roles should be reversed.

‘You have a knack for getting it, all the same.’

‘What do you want?’ Chase repeated.

‘To tell you to be by your phone at six this evening. I have spent the morning researching your biography, and I have similar plans for the afternoon. At six I'll tell you what I've found.’

Chase said, ‘What's the purpose in that?’

‘I can't very well pass judgment on you until I know what sort of transgressions you're guilty of, can I?’ Under the pervading wheeze of protesting vocal cords lay a trace of that amusement Chase had previously noticed. The man said, ‘You see, I didn't randomly select which fornicators I would punish up on Kanackaway.’

‘You didn't?’

‘No, I researched the situation.’ The man chuckled, an indulgence that strained his damaged throat and made him cough like a heavy smoker. When he had control of his voice again, he said, ‘I went up there every night for two weeks and copied licence-plate numbers. Then I matched them up until I found the one most often repeated.’

Chase said, ‘Why?’

‘To discover the most deserving sinners,’ the stranger said. ‘In this state, for two dollars, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles will trace a licence number for you. I had that done and learned the identity of the boy who owned the car. From there, it was a simple matter to investigate his background and to learn the name of his partner in these activities. She was the third girl that he had gone with, steadily, and she was not the only one he entertained on Kanackaway even when she thought he saw her and no one else. She had her own promiscuous affairs, too. I followed her, twice, when other boys picked her up, and one of those times she gave herself to her date.’

‘How do you know all this?’ Chase asked.

‘Listen to me,’ the stranger said. ‘Never mind my methods.’ His anger sent him into another coughing fit. When he was recovered, he said, ‘They were both sluts, the boy as well as the girl. They deserved exactly what they were to have gotten - except that you saved her.’

Chase waited.

The man said, ‘You see, I must research you as thoroughly as I did those first two. Otherwise, I would never be sure if you deserved the judgment of death or whether I had murdered you simply because you had interfered with my plans and I wanted revenge. In short, I am not killing people. I am executing those who deserve it.’

Chase said, ‘I don't want you calling here again.’

‘You can stop me?’

‘I'll have the line bugged.’

‘That won't stop me,’ the stranger said, again amused. ‘I'll simply place the calls from various booths around the city, and I'll keep them too short to trace.’

‘If I refuse to answer my phone?’ Chase asked.

‘You'll answer it.’

‘What makes you sure?’

‘You'll want to know what I've learned about you, and you'll want to know when I've passed judgment on you, when you'll die.’ His voice had grown progressively less audible through the last dozen words, and now he seemed unwilling to force it any longer. ‘Six o'clock this evening,’ he reminded Chase, then hung up.

Chase dropped the receiver, uneasily aware that the killer knew him better than he knew himself. He would answer every time, of course. And for the same reasons he had answered all the nuisance calls of the last few weeks rather than obtain an unlisted number. The only problem was that he did not know just what those reasons were.

Impulsively, he lifted the receiver and placed a call to the police headquarters downtown. It was the first time in ten and a half months that he had used the dial, initiated a call. The police number, along with the numbers of the firehouse and River Rescue, was on a sticker at the base of the phone, as if someone had wanted to make it as easy as possible for him to make this move.

When the desk sergeant answered, Chase asked for Wallace, gave his name. At the moment he was not above using his present fame to cut red tape.

‘Yes, Mr Chase, can I help?’ Wallace asked.

He did not say what he had intended to. Instead he asked, ‘How is the investigation coming along?’

Wallace was not averse to talking shop. ‘Slowly but surely,’ he told Chase. ‘We found prints on the knife and sent copies of them into Washington and to the state capital. If he's ever been arrested for a serious crime or if he's worked for any branch of the government, we'll have him in twenty-four hours.’

‘And if he's never been printed?’

Wallace said, ‘We'll get him anyway. We found a man's ring in the Chevy. It didn't belong to the dead boy, and it looks as if it would be too small for your fingers by a size or three. Didn't lose a ring, did you?’

‘No,’ Chase said.

‘I thought so. Should have called you on it, but I was pretty sure about it. It's his, right enough.’

‘Anything else besides the prints and ring?’

‘We're keeping a constant watch on the girl and her parents, though I'd appreciate it if you didn't say anything about that to anyone. We'd like to see him try for her where we could get at him.’

‘Might he?’

‘If he thinks she can identify him, yes. Remember, he knows she got a good long look at his face, and he has no way of knowing how badly her mind was working then.’

‘I guess so.’

‘It's occurred to me that we wouldn't be far off if we gave you a tail as well. Have you thought of that?’

Alarmed out of proportion by the suggestion, Chase said, ‘No. I don't see what value that would have.’

‘Well,’ Wallace observed, ‘the story was in the papers this morning. Though he probably doesn't fear you identifying him as much as the girl, he might bear a grudge of some sort.’

‘He'd have to be a madman, then.’

‘What else is he, Mr Chase?’

‘You mean you've found no motives from questioning the girl, no old lovers who might have -’

‘No,’ Wallace said. ‘Right now we're operating on the assumption that there was no rational motive, that we're dealing with a psychotic.’

‘I see.’

‘Well,’ Wallace said, ‘I'm sorry there isn't more solid news.’

‘And I'm sorry to have bothered you,’ Chase said. ‘You've probably not had much sleep.’

‘None,’ Wallace admitted.

They said goodbye, and Chase hung up without telling him a thing, though he had intended to spill it all. A twenty-four-hour guard on the girl. They would do the same to him, worse if they knew he'd been contacted. The walls seemed to sway, alternately closing in like the jaws of an immense vice and swinging out like flat grey gates. The floor rose and fell like waves. Instability swelled around him, the very thing that had landed him in the hospital and had eventually led to his seventy-five-percent disability pension. He could not let it take hold again, and he knew the best way to fight it was to constrict the perimeters of his world, gain solace from solitude. He went to get another drink.

The telephone woke him from his nap just as the dead men, standing in a ring around him, reached for him with soft, white, corrupted hands. He sat straight up in bed and cried out, his arms held before him to ward off their cold touch. When he saw where he was and that he was alone, he sank back, exhausted, and listened to the ringing. Insistently, the thing sounded again and again until, after thirty harsh explosions, he had no choice but to pick it up.

‘Yes.’

‘I was about to come check on you,’ Mrs Fiedling said. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I'm okay’ he said.

‘It took you so long to answer.’

‘I was asleep.’

She hesitated, as if framing what she was about to say. ‘I'm having Swiss steak, mushrooms, baked corn and mashed potatoes for supper. Would you like to come down; there's more than I can use.’

‘I don't think -’

‘A strapping boy like you needs his regular meals,’ she said.

‘I've already eaten.’

She was silent for a long while, then said, ‘All right. But I wish you'd waited, ‘cause I got all this food.’

‘I'm sorry, but I'm stuffed,’ he said.

‘Tomorrow night, maybe.’

‘Maybe,’ he said. He rang off before she could suggest a late-night snack together.

The ice melted in his glass, diluting what whiskey he had not drunk. He emptied the sadly coloured result into the bathroom sink, got new ice and a new shot of liquor. It tasted as bitter as a bite of lemon rind. He drank it anyway. There was nothing else in the cupboard or refrigerator but a bag of Winesap apples, and they would be infinitely worse.

He turned on the small black-and-white television set again and rotated the dial slowly through all the local channels, found nothing but the news and a single cartoon programme. He watched the cartoons.

None of them were funny.

After that was over, he found an old movie and let the dial set on it.

The stack of glasses on the cupboard left no room for him to place his present glass when he was finished with it. He carried them into the bathroom and washed them in the sink with hot water and Ivory soap, dried them with a clean towel and returned them to the cupboard.

Except for the phone call, he had the whole evening ahead of him.

At six o'clock on the nose, the telephone rang.

‘Hello?’

‘Good evening, Chase,’ the killer said. His voice was still awful.

Chase sat down on the bed.

‘How are you tonight?’

‘Okay,’ Chase said.

‘You know what I've been up to all day?’

‘Research.’

‘That's right.’

‘Tell me what you found,’ Chase said, as if all of it would be news to him even though he was the subject. And maybe it
would
be.

‘First of all, you were born here a little over twenty-four years ago on June 11, 1947, in Mercy Hospital. Your parents died in an automobile accident when you were eighteen. You went to school at State and graduated in a three-year accelerated programme, having majored in business administration. You did well in all subjects except a few required courses, chiefly Basic Physical Sciences, Biology I and II, Chemistry I and Basic Composition.’ The killer whispered on for three more long minutes, listing impersonal facts that Chase had thought ended with himself. But courthouse records, college files, newspaper morgues and half a dozen other sources had provided far more information about his life than the killer could have gleaned from the recent articles in the
Press-Dispatch.