Strange Highways (76 page)

“Sure, me and Mike were buddies,” he said when Ben asked him about Karnes. “What’s it to you?”

” I don’t think the cops are doing enough to nail the killer, and I don’t like the idea of some lunatic running around with a grudge against me.”

“Why should I care?”

“Your friend was killed.” ‘

“Everybody dies. Don’t you watch the evening news?”

Because Cable was wearing mirror sunglasses, Ben couldn’t see the teenager’s eyes. He found it unnerving to watch his twin reflections in those silvered lenses and be unable to tell for sure whether Cable’s attention was focused on him, on the parade of girls, or on the swimmers in the pool.

“I wasn’t there when it happened,” Cable said, “so how could I know anything that would help?”

Glenda said, “Don’t you want Mike’s killer to be caught?”

Because Cable didn’t move a fraction of an inch or even tilt his head one degree to answer her, it was obvious that behind his mirror glasses, his attention was already on Glenda. “Whatever happens,” he said cryptically.

“We talked to Louise Allenby,” Chase said.

“Entertaining, huh?”

“You know her?”

“Pretty much.”

“She said maybe Mike had some trouble with a guy a while ago.”

Cable didn’t reply.

Ben said, “She thinks this guy made a pass at him.”

Cable frowned. “Mike, he was your fundamental pussy hound.”

“I don’t doubt that.”

“Man, he didn’t even get laid till he was halfway through his junior year, and then once it happened, he just went nuts for it. Couldn’t keep his mind on anything else.”

Ben looked around uneasily at the teenage girls vying for the lifeguard’s attention. Some were as young as fourteen or fifteen. He wanted to tell Cable to watch his language—but that would mean the end of their conversation.

“You know his parents,” Cable said, “you can see why Mike would go off the deep end over something—pussy, drugs, booze, something just to prove he was alive.”

“I’ve never met his folks,” Ben said.

“Ma and Pa Tightass. He just sort of broke loose, all at once. After that, his grades dropped. He wanted to get into State, but he wasn’t going to make it if he didn’t pull up his grade-point average. No college deferral. Hello, Vietnam.”

Screams rose from the pool. They could have been the shrieks of a hyperkinetic child at play or the frantic cries of a drowner. Marty Cable didn’t turn to see which. He still seemed to be focused on Glenda.

“Physics was his worst subject. He had to get a tutor Saturdays. The guy was a sleaze.”

“This was who made the pass at him?” Glenda asked. “The tutor?”

“Tried to convince Mike there was nothing wrong with swinging both ways. Mike got another tutor, but this guy kept calling him.”

“You remember the name?”

“No.”

“Not even the first name?”

“No. Mike, he got another tutor, passed physics. But you stop and think about it, what was all the trouble for? He’s never going to go to State after all, is he? He might’ve been better off just forgetting about physics and screwing his brains out. Better use of what time he had left.”

“With that attitude, then what’s the point of doing
anything?”
Glenda asked.

“Is no point,” Cable said, as if he thought she was agreeing with him. “We’re all meat.” To Chase, he said, “You know how things really are—you were in Nam,” as if he himself understood the horrors of the war thanks to his monthly subscription to
Rolling Stone.
“Hey, you know how many nuclear bombs the Russians have aimed at us?”

“A lot,” Chase said, impatient with the boy’s cynicism.

“Twenty thousand,” Cable said. “Enough to kill every one of us five times over.”

“I’m not too worried until it’s six times.”

“Cool,” Cable said with a small laugh, impervious to sarcasm. “Me neither. Not worried about a damn thing. Take what you can get and hope you wake up in the morning—that’s the smart way to look at it.’

As a pair of squabbling crows flew low overhead, the lifeguard tilted his face toward the sky. The sun was a ferocious white fire on his mirror glasses.

* * *

Lora Karnes apparently didn’t believe in makeup. Her hair was cut short and carelessly combed. Even in the July heat, she wore loose khaki slacks and a long-sleeve blouse. Although she must have been in her early forties, she seemed at least fifteen years older. She perched on the edge of her chair with her knees together, her hands folded in her lap, hunched forward like a gargoyle that was queerly disturbing yet insufficiently grotesque to be used on a cathedral parapet.

The house was as drab and quiet as the woman. The living-room furniture was heavy and dark. The drapes were shut against the July glare, and two lamps shed a peculiar gray light. On the television, an evangelist was gesticulating furiously, but the sound was muted, so he seemed like a crazed and poorly trained mime.

Framed and hung on the walls were needlepoint samplers with quotations from the Bible. Mrs. Karnes evidently had made them herself. Curiously, the quotations were obscure and enigmatic, perhaps taken out of context. Ben couldn’t make much sense of them or quite grasp what spiritual guidance they were supposed to offer:

I WILL LAY MINE HAND

UPON MY MOUTH

-
Job, xl, 4

PUT THEM IN MIND …

TO OBEY MAGISTRATES

-
Titus, iii, 1

BLESSED IS HE,

WHOSOEVER SHALL NOT

BE OFFENDED IN ME

-
Luke, vii, 23

AND JACOB SOD POTTAGE

-
Genesis, xxv, 29

The walls also featured framed portraits of religious leaders, but the gallery was an eclectic mix: the pope, Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, a couple of faces that Chase recognized as those of tackier television evangelists with more interest in contributions than in salvation. There seemed to be a wealth of religious feeling in the Karnes house—but no clear-cut faith.

Harry Karnes was as drab as his wife and the room: short, only perhaps ten years older than Lora but so thin and prematurely aged as to be on the verge of frailty. His hands shook when they were not resting on the arms of his Barcalounger. He could not look directly at Ben but gazed over his head when speaking to him.

On the sofa beside Glenda, Ben figured that visitors to the Karnes house were rare indeed. One day, someone would realize they hadn’t heard from Lora or Harry in a while and, upon investigation, would find the couple sitting as they were now, but shriveled and shrunken and long mummified, dead a decade before anyone noticed.

“He was a good boy,” said Harry Karnes.

“Let’s not lie to Mr. Chase,” Lora admonished.

“He did well in school, and he was going to college too,” Harry said.

“Now, Dad, we know that isn’t truthful,” Lora said. “He went wild.”

“Later, yes. But before that, Mother, he was a good boy,” said Harry.”`

“He went wild, and you’d not have thought he was the same boy from one year to the next. Running around. Always out later than he should be. How could it end any way but what it did?”

The longer that Chase remained in the warm, stuffy house, the chillier he became. “I’m primarily interested in this physics tutor he had back in the beginning of the year.”

Lora Karnes frowned. “Like I said, the second teacher’s name was Bandoff, but I don’t remember the first. Do you, Dad?”

“It’s in the back of my mind, Mother, but I can’t quite see it,” said Harry Karnes, and he turned his attention to the silently ranting preacher on the television.

“Didn’t you have to pay the man?” Glenda asked.

“Well, but it was in cash. Never wrote out a check,” said Lora Karnes. She glanced disapprovingly at Glenda’s bare legs, then looked quickly away, as though embarrassed. “Besides, he only tutored for a couple of weeks. Michael couldn’t learn from him, and we had to get Mr. Bandoff.”

“How did you find the first tutor?”

“Michael found him through the school. Both were through the school.”

“The high school where Mike attended classes?”

“Yes, but this teacher didn’t work there. He taught at George Washington High, on the other side of town, but he was on the list of recommended tutors.”

“Michael was a smart boy,” Harry said.

“Smart is never smart enough,” his wife said.

“He could have been something someday.”

“Not with just being smart,” his wife corrected.

The Karneses made Ben nervous. He couldn’t figure them out. They were fanatics of some sort, but they seemed to have gone down their own strange little trail in the wilderness of disorganized—as opposed to organized—religion.

“If he hadn’t gone wild like he did,” Lora said, “he might’ve made something of himself. But he couldn’t control himself. And then how could it end any way but how it did?”

Glenda said, “Do you remember anything at all about the first tutor—where he lived? Didn’t Mike go there for the lessons?”

“Yes,” said Lora Karnes. “I think it was in that nice little neighborhood over on the west side, with all the bungalows.”

“Crescent Heights?” Glenda suggested.

“That’s it.”

Turning away from the television, looking over his wife’s head, Harry said, “Mother, wasn’t the fella’s name Lupinski, Lepenski—something like that?”

“Dad, you’re right. Linski. That was his name. Linski.”

“Richard?” Harry suggested.

“Exactly, Dad. Richard Linski.”

“But he wasn’t any good,” Harry told the wall past Ben’s left shoulder. “So we got the second tutor, and then Michael’s grades improved. He was a good boy.”

“Once, he was, Dad. And you know, I don’t blame him for it all. Plenty of blame for us to share in it.”

Ben felt their weird gloom sucking him down as surely as if he’d been caught in a whirlpool in a dark sea.

Glenda said, “Can you spell that last name for me.”

“L-i-n-s-k-i,” said Lora.

Richard Linski.

“Michael didn’t like him,” Lora said.

“Michael was a good boy, Mother.” Harry had tears in his eyes.

Seeing her husband’s condition, Lora Karnes said, “Let’s not blame the boy too much, Dad. I agree. He wasn’t wicked.”

“Can’t blame a child for all its faults, Mother.”

“You have to go back to the parents, Dad. If Michael wasn’t so perfect, then it’s because we weren’t perfect ourselves.”

As if speaking to the muted evangelist on the television, Harry Karnes said, “You can’t raise a godly child when you’ve done wicked things yourself.”

Afraid that the couple was about to descend into a series of teary confessions that would make no more sense than the words on the needlepoint samplers, Ben abruptly got to his feet and took Glenda’s hand as she rose beside him. “Sorry to have brought this all back into your minds again.”

“Not at all,” Lora Karnes said. “Memory chastens.”

One of the quotations on the wall caught Ben’s eye:

SEVEN THUNDERS UTTERED THEIR VOICES

-
Revelation, x, 3

“Mrs. Karnes,” Ben said, “did you make the samplers yourself?”

“Yes. Needlepoint helps keep my hands to the Lord’s work.”

“They’re lovely. But I was wondering … what does that one mean exactly?”

“Seven thunders all at once,” she said quietly, without fervor—in fact, with an unnervingly calm authority that made it seem as if what she said must surely make sense. “That’s how it will be. And then we’ll know why we’ve always got to do our best. Then we’ll wish we’d done better, much better, when the seven thunders roll all at once.”

At the front door, as Ben and Glenda were leaving, Mrs. Karnes said, “Does God work through you, Mr. Chase?”

“Doesn’t He work through all of us?” Ben asked.

“No. Some aren’t strong enough. But you—are you His hand, Mr. Chase?”

He had no idea what answer she wanted. “I don’t think so, Mrs. Karnes.”

She followed them onto the front walk. “I think you are.”

“Then God works in even more mysterious ways than anyone ever knew before.”

“I think you are God’s hand.”

The scorching, late-afternoon sun was oppressive, but Lora Karnes still chilled Ben. He turned from her without another word.

The woman was still standing in the doorway, watching, as they drove away in the battered Mustang.

* * *

All day, from Glenda’s apartment to the Allenby house to Hanover Park to the Karnes’s house, Ben had driven evasively, and both he and Glenda had looked for a tail. No one had followed them at any point in their rambling journey.

No one followed them from the Karnes’s house either. They drove until they found a service station with a pay phone.

On the floor of the booth, an army of ants was busy moving the carcass of a dead beetle.

Glenda stood at the open door while Ben searched for Richard Linski in the directory. He found a number. In Crescent Heights.

With change from Glenda’s purse, Ben made the call.

It rang twice. Then: “Hello?”

Ben said nothing.

“Hello?” Richard Linski said. “Is anyone there?”

Quietly, Ben hung up.

“Well?” Glenda asked.

“It’s him. Judge’s real name is Richard Linski.”

11

THE MOTEL ROOM WAS SMALL, FILLED WITH THE RUMBLE OF THE WINDOW-mounted air-conditioner.

Ben closed the door and checked the dead-bolt lock to be sure that it worked properly. He tested the security chain; it was well fitted.

“You’re safe enough if you stay here,” he said. “Linksi can’t know where you are.”

To avoid giving Judge a chance to find them, they hadn’t gone back to her apartment to pack a bag for her. They had checked in without luggage. If everything went well, they wouldn’t be staying the whole night anyway. This was just a way station between the loneliness of the past and whatever future fate might grant them.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, still childlike in her pink socks and twin ponytails, she said, “I should go with you.”

“I have combat training. You don’t. It’s that simple.”

She didn’t ask him why he hadn’t called the police. With what they had learned, even Detective Wallace would at least question Linski—and if Linski was the killer, then the evidence would fall into place. Anyone else would have asked him that tough question—but she was not like anyone else.