The Stalker

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.

He said, “Listen, is Andersson anything to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Fiancé or boyfriend, like that?”

“No, he’s just a fellow I work with. At Prudential Life, in Oakland. We came up last night as part of a group, on a chartered bus for the weekend; but Kjel drinks too much, he really does, even this early in the day, and—”

He leaned forward. “Will you have dinner with me tonight?”

She blinked. “Pardon me?”

“Will you have dinner with me tonight?”

“Well, I . . .”

“There’s a roadhouse a couple of miles from here;” he said. “You buy your steaks by the pound and cook them yourself over wood charcoal. Do you like jazz? Gutbucket, with a lot of soul horn?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“We can go to Richie’s afterward, on Interstate 40. It’s a wild place. When you walk in, you feel like you’ve regressed forty years, to Bourbon Street in the twenties, if you know what I mean. What do you say, Andrea? Seven o’clock?”

She touched the tip of her tongue to her lips, and held it there, as a cat will do sleeping, and her eyes locked with his, probing, touching, and after a very long time—unsmiling now, eyes still locked—she said softly, “Yes, seven o’clock, Steve.”

They were married in San Francisco five weeks later . . .

Kilduff lay on the unmade bed in the Twin Peaks apartment chainsmoking, with the hammered-bronze ashtray balanced on his chest, reliving it as vivid as yesterday, hearing her voice, seeing her so perfect and so innocent sitting there in the booth; and that night, all in soft blue ski clothes, and the touch of her lips for the first time—sweet, chaste, trusting, warm; and later, in San Francisco, at the Top of the Mark and the Venetian Room and that little place in the Russian colony on Clement, music soft and lights soft and the feel of her in his arms; and still later, the first whispered words from his lips under a so-corny gibbous moon, “I love you, Andrea,” and her reply, breathless, a little awed, “Yes, oh yes, Steve, and I love you!”

Halcyon days, the days of wine and roses . . .

Viciously, now, Kilduff ground out his cigarette in the bronze ashtray and swung his feet down and went into the kitchen. All gone, all dead, long dead—Jesus, why am I thinking about her like this? Why now, especially why now? He opened the refrigerator, a mechanical gesture, and looked inside: full larder, full to overflowing. She’d probably gone shopping before she left; that was the way Andrea was—walk out with a man’s guts in her hands, dripping, but make sure he has enough food in the refrigerator. He slammed the door, turning.

Andrea, Andrea, I need you.

He stopped. No! Goddamn it, Kilduff, no, it’s over, it’s finished; she ran out, didn’t she? The money ran out and she ran out, you don’t need her, she’s destroyed your love, you don’t need her, you—don’t—need—her.

Into the living room. The drapes were drawn, and it was dark in there. The rain came down in a soft, steady cadence on the balcony outside, and the wind tugged gently at the weather stripping around the glass doors, calling out. He held his right hand up to his eyes, and the hand trembled; he let it fall and returned to the bedroom and lay on the bed again.

What am I going to do? he asked of himself silently—the same question he had been asking of himself since yesterday morning, since Drexel had revealed to him in that coffee shop in Sebastopol what he was planning. But there was no answer now, either. He was caught in a vise, in one of those medieval iron maidens, caught in the middle with only two ways to go, with only two choices, no more and no less.

The police.

Or a party to murder.

No middle road, no tightrope line—one or the other. But which one? Could he walk into the Hall of Justice and into the Detective Bureau and say, “I’m one of the six men who robbed the Smithfield Armored Car in Granite City, Illinois, eleven years ago,” could he walk in there and say that? But could he condone murder, passively allow Drexel to kill Helgerman in cold blood even though it was Helgerman’s life or theirs? Yet he had to do one of the two, he had to make the decision, and soon, soon...

Suddenly, he sat upright on the bed with his heart plunging in his chest, and cold marrow fear, a different fear now, flowed through him like warm oil. Oh God! he thought, oh God! Because he didn’t know if he could choose, he wasn’t at all certain he could make that decision; because there was an added dimension now, you see, something he had refused to comprehend before; because he understood with cold, complete clarity why he had been thinking about Andrea and why he needed her in spite of his self-deception that he did not; because in that moment Steve Kilduff realized exactly what he had become.

The single word echoed and re-echoed in his mind.

Coward, coward, coward...