The Stalker

12

In his room at the Graceling Hotel, the limping man lay in darkness, his hands clasped behind his head, resting, thinking. Through the rain-streaked glass of the single window, he could see the coral-tinged light from some proximate but unseen neon sign blink on and off, on and off, on and off through the thinly falling night mist. Faint automobile sounds drifted through the panes and beneath the wood frame, muted, directionless.

The luminescent dial of his wristwatch read: 10:25.

Five minutes.

Everything was ready. He had all the items he needed—save for the one he would buy on the way—in a large, double-strength shopping bag with braided-twine handles. The Ruger .44 Magnum Blackhawk revolver was freshly oiled and freshly cleaned and freshly loaded, wrapped again in the chamois cloth at the bottom of the American Tourister briefcase. He wouldn’t need it, of course; but it was there, and it was ready. Just in case.

He watched the greenish second hand of his watch sweep another minute away.

10:26.

In one hour, perhaps an hour and a half at the outside, barring difficulties unforeseen, Green would die.

And there would only be Orange.

The limping man smiled faintly in the darkness and swung his legs off the bed and sat up and gained his feet. He found his canvas shoes and put them on, and put on his overcoat, and lifted the shopping bag and the briefcase from the glass-topped surface of the writing desk. He went to the door and opened it and stepped out into the hallway and locked it behind him.

He looked at his watch again.

It was exactly 10:30.

Fran Varner stared at the telephone in the kitchen of her Santa Clara apartment, willing it to ring, willing Larry’s voice to be on the other end, knowing that it wouldn’t ring at all, waiting for a few more minutes to pass so that she could dial his number again for the twentieth or thirtieth time since six o’clock.

Thinking about the growing foetus deep in her womb.

She hadn’t been able to put off seeing a doctor any longer; she had finally realized that yesterday. She had to know, one way or the other. She had made an appointment with a physician in San Jose whom she had once seen for a virus infection. Embarrassed and ashamed by the absence of a wedding band on her left hand, she had refused to meet the doctor’s eyes during the consultation and the subsequent examination; but he had been very nice, and very kind, and very understanding. He wasn’t there to make moral judgments, he had told her; that wasn’t his profession—or his inclination. He would know the results tomorrow, he had told her. Call him at three.

She had called him at two-thirty, holding her breath as his nurse put the call through to him, telling herself the tests would prove negative, they simply had to prove negative . . .

And then he had come on the line and said quietly, “I’m sorry, Miss Varner, the Achheim-Zondek was positive. You are pregnant.”

She had taken it very well, considering.

She had telephoned El Peyote immediately after promising the doctor she would come in for regular check-ups, and told Juano, who was managing things while Larry was away, that she wouldn’t be in tonight—she had some kind of bug. Then she had gone home and thought it all through, weighing the alternatives.

How much did she love Larry Drexel? More than life itself, that was how much. But suppose he wouldn’t marry her when she told him of the child? Suppose, as she had feared all along, he refused flatly? Did she want this baby—her baby, their baby—more than she wanted Larry?

No, she wanted nothing, no one, that much.

Then her recourses were clear.

Adoption.

Or abortion.

The latter was totally unthinkable. In spite of everything, she was incapable of committing a sin of that magnitude; if she had been unable to prevent the conception of human life by simply taking birth control pills, how could there be within her the capacity for destroying an unborn child, a child of and within her body, from the seed of the man she loved?

But adoption—yes, she would do that. It wouldn’t be easy, especially if she saw the baby after it was born, if she held him (her?) in her arms, so warm and soft and defenseless; it wouldn’t be easy, but she would do that if it meant keeping Larry. She would find a good foundling home where they screened the applicants very carefully, where only those who desperately wanted a baby and would give it love and a good home and all the requisite material benefits, too, were allowed to adopt, and if necessary she would do it out of her money. Of course that wouldn’t be necessary, because Larry wasn’t a cruel man—strange and cold at times, but never cruel; he wasn’t like those men you read about in books who got a girl in trouble and then denied all responsibility and abandoned her completely. Not Larry, not her Larry.

Why, she might even be wrong about his refusal of marriage.

He might want to marry her with the baby coming.

There really was a good chance of that.

There really was.

She had to see him, she had to tell him about the child in just the right way. And she had to do it soon, very soon.

She called El Peyote again, but Juano didn’t know where he had gone—“back east somewhere, I think, he didn’t say exactly”—and he didn’t know when Mr. Drexel would be back. Yes, he would have Mr. Drexel call her as soon as he showed up there, yes, no matter what time it was, yes, he would tell him it was urgent.

Fran had begun calling his home then, just before six, and it was ten-fifty now. No answer yet, and her phone had not rung. She continued to stare at the instrument, and she imagined she could feel the child move inside her. She closed her eyes and put one hand against her abdomen, pressing it there; then she opened her eyes again and with her other hand lifted the receiver out of its cradle, put it down on the breakfast bar, dialed Larry’s number again, and then picked it up and put it to her ear. She listened to it ring five times, six, seven, eight...

Then: “Yeah, hello?” a little breathlessly.

Her hand tightened around the receiver, and she leaned forward, her heart singing violently in her chest. “Larry? Oh, thank God!”

“Fran?”

“Yes, darling,” she said. “Oh, Larry, I ...” The words constricted in her throat, and she swallowed and tried again. “Larry, I have to see you.”

“Sure, baby,” he said. His voice was distant, abstracted. “Tomorrow, at El Peyote.”

“No, no, tonight.”

There was a brief silence. Then he said, “Look, Fran, I just got in from Chicago. It’s late, and I’m tired...”

“Larry, I have to see you!”

“Not.”

“Please, please, I have to!”

“Goddamn it, I told you no.”

“Darling, please, it’s . . . it’s very important.”

“I don’t give a crap how important it is,” he snapped. “Not tonight. Do you understand? Not tonight!”

He hung up.

Fran replaced the receiver very carefully. Her eyes were like polished amber pebbles glistening in a thin rain. She felt warm moisture begin to flow high along her cheekbones, and she put up her hands with the palms turned outwards to wipe it away—the gesture of a pigtailed little girl scolded for mud-pie batter on a pink organdy dress.

But she wasn’t a little girl any more, oh no, not now, especially not now; what she was, was a consummated woman, carrying the illegitimate child of her lover in her womb, and the sooner she faced that, the better it was going to be for her, and for Larry, and for her unborn daughter or son. It was certainly time for her to assume the responsibility of her situation, to take some initiative in seeing it through this primary crisis, instead of merely lying back all dewy-eyed and trembling and innocently passive. She took her hands down and drew in several deep breaths, and her mouth firmed into a tight, resolute line. Yes. Yes, it was certainly time.

She thought: You’re the father of my baby, Larry, and you have to know that, for better or for worse, and you have to know it now, tonight. It’s the wrong time, perhaps—you’re tired and you’re in a poor humor and I’m more afraid now than ever of what you’ll say when I tell you—but I can’t wait, I just can’t wait, not until tomorrow, not this night through. I have to tell you, I’m going to tell you. I am.

She went into the bedroom and put on her plastic, belted raincoat and a matching, softly wide-brimmed rain hat. Then she left the apartment and went down the wood-and-fieldstone outer stairs to the parking area in the rear courtyard, running a little through the gentle rain to where her car was parked. She fumbled with her keys and got the door unlocked and slipped inside. She had a glimpse of the dashboard clock in the pale light from the ceiling dome just before she closed the door after her.

The time was 11:02.

Andrea Kilduff held the telephone receiver pressed tightly with both her small hands, listening to the distant, empty circuit noises humming through the earpiece. No answer.

On the fifteenth ring, she put the receiver back on its hook and shivered tremulously inside her heavy wool jacket. She hugged herself, and the wind moaned across the wet, puddled blacktop outside the glass walls of the public booth, fanning clumps of darkly painted autumn leaves toward the bright fluorescent lights of the Shell station at the opposite end of the rectangle. And there was the mournfully constant hissing of cars passing along the rain-slick expanse of Highway 101, near the first of the three Petaluma exits less than a thousand yards away.

Why didn’t he answer? she asked herself silently. It’s after eleven now; he should be home. He really should be home. Where would he be at this hour on a Wednesday night? He never goes to bars or anything like that, and seldom to the movies, and he certainly wouldn’t go walking in Golden Gate Park this late. Maybe he’s... out with someone. Well, no, I don’t think so. No, he wouldn’t be, but he isn’t home and he should be home.

Andrea retrieved her dime and dialed the apartment number again, carefully. She let it ring another fifteen times. Again, no answer.

Damn! Why hadn’t she made up her mind to call him sooner? She’d been thinking about it all day, hadn’t she?—she hadn’t slept much at all last night thinking about it. And she’d known darned well that she was going to do it, because she simply had to talk to Steve; this way wasn’t any good at all. She had to talk to him and get it all said and done with, say all the words she’d been afraid to say to him before: words like “divorce” and “property settlement” and “good-bye.” She didn’t want to say them, ever, they were like lashing epithets, but this way—her way—had been a fool’s errand from the very beginning, a defense against those words but an ineffective one, only prolonging the inevitable. At long last, she was woman enough to admit that she had been wrong. And so she had driven here from Duckblind Slough, through the wind and the rain to the nearest telephone because the Miramonte Marina and Boat Launch was closed for the night; but it had been for nothing, Steve wasn’t home...

A sudden thought struck her.

Suppose the reason he wasn’t home was because he had moved out? Suppose he had packed up his things and gone—but where? To a hotel? To a new apartment? What if he had left San Francisco altogether? What if he had just run away? Oh God, how would she find him if that were the case?

Wait a minute now. Well, for crying out loud, if he had moved out, if he had gone away, the telephone would be disconnected, wouldn’t it? Of course it would. That recorded voice would have come on and said, “I’m sorry, the number you have dialed is not in service at this time.” Of course, don’t be silly, Andrea, he’s just... out somewhere for the evening, that’s all, oh, but if he moved this morning or this afternoon, the telephone wouldn’t necessarily have to be disconnected yet, maybe they couldn’t get a man up to do that until tomorrow, maybe he really is gone...

Steve, she thought. Oh Steve!

She took her dime from the return slot again and slid it into the circular opening above and dialed the number of Mrs. Yarborough, the building manager. She had to know, she had to know right now. She held the receiver in both hands, as she had before, waiting, and through the wet glassed walls of the booth, across the puddled blacktop, she could see the wide-faced clock mounted on the wall above the door to the Shell station office.

The hands and the numerals, their luminosity eerily blurred by the rain-mist, designated the time as 11:10.

The rain fell heavily, in a diagonally silver cascade, on the James Lick Freeway just below Candlestick Park. The onrushing yellow headlamp eyes of the northbound traffic, the desperately flashing blood-red taillights on the southbound automobiles strung out ahead, commingled to form a kaleidoscopically distorted montage—surrealism in motion, a wild hallucinogenic excursion into the depths of a nightmare.

This is the Twilight Zone, Steve Kilduff thought inanely, detachedly; enter Rod Serling on a fade-over with his soporific voice explaining the intricacies of the plot...

Off on his left, the black moving water of the Bay stretched cold and lonely on a flat plane toward the jeweled but half-obscured lights of the East Bay. The wind blew and whistled in a kind of ghostly charivari at the slightly open wing window, the windshield wipers worked in hypnotic metronome cadence on the rain-drenched glass, and the treble voice of a disc jockey on the too-loud radio sent discordant vibrations of sound echoing through the car—all serving to heighten the sense of unreality which pervaded Kilduff’s mind.

He sat stiffly erect, with his hands clenching the wheel tightly and the muscles cording in his forearms. He had left Twin Peaks just before eleven, driving mechanically. He had been thinking only of Drexel; and what it was Drexel had found out, or had done, in Granite City; and what Drexel would say when he told him about Commac and Flagg—the two polite, soft-spoken cops who knew; and what Drexel would decide their next move to be; yes, and how he, Kilduff, would end up going along with it whatever it was.

Green and iridescent-white exit signs appeared, and then vanished, in the hazy aureoles of light from his head lamps.

GRAND AVENUE-SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO

SAN BRUNO AVENUE—SAN BRUNO

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

MILLBRAE AVENUE—MILLBRAE

BROADWAY—BURLINGAME

19TH AVENUE—SAN MATEO

HOLLY STREET—SAN CARLOS

WHIPPLE AVENUE—REDWOOD CITY

When would this phantasmagoria that was an all-too-real reality end? he asked himself as he sent the car hurtling along the rain-swept highway. How long would it be before the law of averages caught up with him? He was living on borrowed time, walking on eggshells, balancing one mile-high tightrope, there was no way he could possibly come out of it unscathed; there was no way, simply no way, he could ever return to the former status quo security.

The radio disc jockey announced the time just as EMBARCADERO ROAD—PALO ALTO loomed into view ahead.

It was 11:23 and thirty seconds.