A Time of Predators

Chapter 1

Rick Dean had inherited his mother’s dark good looks and his father’s nervous energy. Waiting for Debbie Marsden in the Jaycee cafeteria, he realized that he was tapping rhythmically on the tile floor with his right foot. Relax. Last Friday was over, couldn’t be changed. By the newspaper reports, there was no way they ever could be tied in with what had happened to that Harold Rockwell.

No way, that is, except one.

He wiped a hand across his forehead. Where in hell was Debbie? Of course, she had to get a ride up from the university after her nine o’clock, but he had told her ten-thirty sharp in the caf, had cut his Survey of Western Civ to meet her. He shouldn’t be cutting even gut courses, not today. Not the Monday after...

Could that Paula Halstead have gotten their license? Hell, it had been dark, she’d been running... He wouldn’t have panicked and tromped that Rockwell if she hadn’t come running up that way. Who could have known he was married, for Christ sake, with a kid and everything? And then that crap in the papers about him being blinded. You couldn’t blind a guy just by pushing him around a little, could you?

Rick’s leg was jiggling again, his foot tapping the tiles. In sudden vivid recall, his heel was against the yielding neck muscles, he could feel the face being ground into the gravel. He shredded the glowing tip of his cigarette in the ashtray; what sleep he had lost over the weekend had been from fear, not remorse.

Rick stood up suddenly and waved, sloshing coffee across his tray. The girl was just his age, with long toffee-colored hair worn absolutely straight and framing a heart-shaped face. She moved like a filly.

“I’m sorry I’m late. I had to wait for a ride, and—”

“That’s okay, Deb.” Rick made his voice nonchalant so she would not know it was important. After all, Paula Halstead could identify him: maybe not the car, maybe not the others, but him. They sat down.

Debbie Marsden had expressive blue eyes, wide-set. Her nose turned up too much and she had a long upper lip, and though her mouth was accented with too much lipstick she still looked younger than her nineteen years. All except her figure. Her body really had filled out in the nine months since he last had seen her.

“You made it sound important on the phone, Rick.” There was vague petulance in her voice. “After not hearing from you for months—”

“The folks have really kept me hitting the books this year. Ma’s afraid I’ll get drafted.”

What did she expect, for Christ sake, a hot-line to her dorm? He’d taken her to the high school senior prom, then dated her a couple of more times before last July, when they’d gone swimming out at Sears Lake. She’d let him get all steamed up afterwards, on a blanket up from the beach, and then had left him hanging. Still, she was the only person he knew going to the university. He made his voice casual.

“Say, Deb, do you know a prof at the U named Halstead?”

“Curtis Halstead?” She was not a beautiful girl, but when she smiled her face came vibrantly alive. “Know of him. He’s a full prof in the anthropology department. One of my girl friends, Cynthia, has him for a course. I met his wife at a faculty tea last September.”

Rick made himself stir the cold coffee left in his cup. Talk about blind luck! “Could you... ah... get his home address?”

“Why, I suppose so, Rick. Wouldn’t it just be in the phone book?”

Wow. That woman, that Paula, must have shaken him up worse than he’d thought. He should have come up with the phone-book idea. The woman was frozen in his memory like a fly in amber, that was the trouble: her gleaming blond hair, her startling blue eyes, her high cheekbones, the thin parted lips with the teeth gleaming between them like...

“Is anything wrong, Rick? You look so funny...”

Good old Deb. He stared at her, as if seeing her for the first time. Man, she’d really grown up during those months. He hadn’t meant Paula to be mentioned, just Halstead himself, since Debbie might have read about that Rockwell creep in the newspapers and seen Paula’s name, as Rick had. But he remembered from high school that she had only been interested in international affairs, all that crap, like his Dad was in the stock-market reports. She thought he looked bothered, huh? He raised his head to give her the look that worked on his Ma even when she was sore about something.

“Well, you see, Deb, there’s this sort of mix-up...”

“Rick, are you in trouble?” Her eyes shone; she took his hand in both of hers as if it were a fragile treasure. Her lips were parted. Hell, he should have thought of this right away; she’d lived just two streets away when they’d been kids, had always acted a little gone on him.

“Not really in trouble, Deb, just...” His facile imagination took over then, as it always did when he was conning some chick, even his Ma. “You remember the Triumph that Dad gave me for graduation? And remember what he said about having an accident with it if I’d been drinking?”

“Rick, you didn’t smash up your car!”

“No, nothing like that. It’s just that, ah, yesterday I’d had a couple of beers and was coming from the parking lot at the bar I’d been in up by Five Points, and I just touched fenders with this other car.”

“And Professor Halstead was driving the other car?”

“His wife was.” Rick’s imagination was in full flight now, he could almost see the tall slender woman getting out of her car — a Mercedes, say — with a flash of shapely woman leg and a dazzling smile. “This morning I got thinking that if she went to her insurance company and it got back to Dad, somehow...”

He stopped there, watching her. Women were really dumb about cars and insurance, anyway, and Deb knew his old man was a broker.

“But... what can I do, Rick?”

“Do you think maybe you could find out when she’d be home alone? I mean, I wouldn’t want to ask her in front of her husband to not report an accident to her insurance company, and just let me pay her for the repairs. Not with her old man a college prof and all.”

Men were such babies with their precious male pride. Just in her one year at the U, Debbie had learned that a wide-eyed look of rapture during class lectures meant a better grade from any male prof, even the old ones past thirty who should know better. But she was really glad that Rick had come to her for help; she’d been crushed last summer when he’d dropped her, after she’d gone further with him than she had with any other man before.

“All right,” she said, smiling abruptly. Her teeth were white and even; Rick could remember when she had worn braces. “I’ll pretend I’m interviewing him for the student newspaper or something.” She stood up. “I’ll be late for glee club rehearsal, Rick, but you can call me tomorrow at Forrest Hall.”

Leaving, she wondered if he had called her just for help in straightening out about the accident. Maybe, when he called tomorrow... She wondered if he still ran around with those icky kids, that Julio who gave her the creeps, and that fat one, Heavy, and the big dumb one with the funny eyes who’d quit school before he graduated. Champ, that was it. They’d always been the ones who were sent down to the principal’s office to be disciplined.

Watching her slip away through the crowd with a wave of her hand, Rick suddenly realized that she was really a wild-looking chick. In the months since he’d last seen her, she’d staled wearing her hair different, and her figure sure had filled out. But then, unexpectedly, he thought of Paula Halstead. Blue eyes binning in a brown, slender face. Maybe if he just went over to her place, alone, told her how it had happened, maybe she’d just agree not to tell the cops about him. And then maybe she and he could...

Wiggy, for Christ sake. That’s what he was, wiggy. She was a hell of a big danger to him. Period. What did they do to you for blinding some guy? And it all had started out so simple, too; just a little fun, like they used to have with kids in high school from the lower grades, getting them down behind the boiler in the basement and taking their lunch money away from them. Instead of wiggy ideas about Paula Halstead, he ought to be figuring out how he could make sure she couldn’t identify him. If she couldn’t, he was safe. If she could...

Well, if she could, he somehow had to make sure that she wouldn’t. That meant he had to find some leverage, something to scare her with.

But how? Maybe he could get old Debbie to help him, he thought, with the vague outline of a plan forming in his mind. Without her knowing what he really was doing, of course.

And when all this was over, maybe he’d start picking up on old Debbie again. She’d developed into some real prime stuff.

Chapter 2

“All right, all right,” growled Curt Halstead. He jerked his tie savagely, bulging the flesh over his shirt collar. His muscular, thickening body was encased in gray slacks and an old flannel sports jacket with leather patches over the elbows. “So you’ll go down to the police department and look at more pictures on Monday. Why?”

“Because they blinded that boy,” Paula said in a cold voice.

She was leaning in the bathroom doorway, arms folded. They were on the second floor of the old isolated frame house which had been their home since Curt had joined the Los Feliz University staff in 1954. Their bedroom windows overlooked the university golf course.

“I’m sure they didn’t mean to blind him; it probably was some horseplay that got out of hand. And since it happened a week ago, why would you be able to recognize any of them if you did see them again?”

“I’d recognize that one,” she said grimly.

Curt finished with his tie, and ran a comb perfunctorily through his black, close-cropped hair. It hadn’t yet begun to gray, but it was thinning, especially around the crown of his head. He looked impatiently at his watch. “Why do you always start these conversations when I’m late for my Friday night seminar?”

She met his brown eyes steadily. “Because I want you to understand my position. I’m going to keep looking until I find that boy. Stopping to grind Harold Rockwell’s face into the gravel was the most vicious thing I’ve ever seen anyone do to another human being.”

“Why do you insist on words like ‘vicious’? Sick, maybe, but—”

“I saw his face when he did it,” she flared. “You didn’t. Evil: naked, willful evil. I want that boy caught, and I want him punished.”

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” grunted Curt. He got his briefcase from the spare bedroom he had converted years before into a study, and was followed by Paula to the head of the stairs.

“What time can I expect you home, Curt?”

He grimaced; he had more than the beginnings of a double chin. “I might be a little late,” he said judiciously. “Young Chuck Belmont is reading his paper on ‘The Relation of Culture to Human Evolution’ — a damned brilliant piece of work, actually — and I imagine there’ll be some discussion afterwards.”

Paula said drily, “I’ll set out a bottle of wine before I retire.”

“Always have to get your little dig in, don’t you? Because I enjoy a glass or two of wine...” He cut off the rest of it, shook his head, and went down the stairs. Paula watched him cross the living room to the front door, almost hungrily, but he didn’t look back. She sighed, went down the stairs herself, and turned right through the double doors leading to the dining room and the lighted kitchen beyond.

Could Curt be right? About her protesting too much? Ever since the attack on Rockwell, she had lived with a strange... what? Excitement was too strong a word: anticipation, perhaps. Expectancy. Involving herself completely in the search for the attackers, pushing the police in their investigation. Could Curt be right?

Over the years they had modernized the kitchen with bright new stainless-steel fixtures, metal storage cabinets, and maroon vinyl tops on the flat surfaces to give her plenty of work area. She began the supper dishes automatically, getting out the dishpan and draining rack, shaking out soap powder, sousing glassware in steaming suds.

Perhaps she was being unnecessarily alarmed over teen-age horseplay, as Curt put it, which had gotten out of hand and had ended in tragedy. Perhaps she was merely a frustrated woman seeking some outlet for a mild discontent with her life, her marriage, even herself.

Paula paused, holding a plate under the hot-water tap and barely feeling the smart of the steaming water running over her hand.

No. She had seen it in that boy’s face, along with the fear. Pleasure. Excitement. The sort of excitement that the big lie propounded by mothers to their daughters and women’s magazines to their readers claimed was to be gained from sex.

Paula dried the dishes, put them away, and carefully set out the accusing bottle of wine on the coffee table by Curt’s reading chair. Then she went out onto the narrow front porch, nearly buried in the thick overhang of live oaks, and listened to the frogs chorusing in the ditch between the drive and the golf course.

It seemed important, suddenly, to know whether she actually was using the attack on poor Harold Rockwell for some obscure inner satisfaction. Know thyself, as... who had said? She smiled in genuine pleasure. Plato, or Socrates, or Pythagoras, or Chilo, or Thales. It had always amused her that no one knew whose sage advice on knowing it was.

What was the answer, then? Another affair? The first had been five years before, with a visiting English professor whose courting had been the direct antithesis of Curt’s bearish love-making. Candlelit suppers at remote rendezvous; flowers; passionate poems cribbed so shamelessly from the classics that she had found it unflattering. And the denouement in unfamiliar motel room beds? Distressingly familiar: counterfeiting orgasm as she did with Curt, to heighten her lover’s pleasure while experiencing none herself. No, an affair was no answer at all.

Through the screening bushes she could see the flicker of approaching auto lights on the blacktop below. They caught the bright yellow sweater of a girl coming up the road from the university. Strange to see a girl walking along this isolated road at night, alone. A girl who looked pretty, with toffee-colored hair, worn long, visible only in flashes through the foliage. The car passed, dropping her back into darkness. Then Paula heard the aluminum folding door of the phone booth across the road creak shut. That explained it. An insistent date, a slapped face, a phone call to the folks. But the light in the booth went on only momentarily, showing the girl, then the door reopened.

It was like watching a home movie, where the flickering figures were familiar yet remote, without real relation to one’s own life.

Restless, Paula spent some minutes prowling the bookshelves which flanked the old brick fireplace. Her mind kept returning unbidden to Curt’s remark. Yes, he was right: her avid pursuit of the investigation somehow was unhealthy. She would look at the last batch of “mug” shots on Monday, but then would let Rockwell s poor ruined face and that other young, strained, defiant one slip back into the limbo where they belonged. The attack on Rockwell really was no concern of hers.

She ought to be thankful for Curt, not dissatisfied with him. He was older now, less demanding sexually; and despite their bickering they were fond of one another. No matter what they said, Paula doubted that other women got any more than that from their marriages. If she sometimes felt that life was wrapped in too many layers of padding, it probably was the psychological onslaught of premature menopause. Her marriage might, after all, be like Sally Redmond’s. Poor Sally, convinced that her husband’s occasional evening at the chemistry lab was actually being spent in some heavy-busted grad student’s bed.

Now that she thought of it, Sally had said something about perhaps dropping by this evening while Curt was gone. Good Lord, she hoped not. Sally was more than she could cope with reasonably tonight.

Paula sighed, contemplating with resignation the possible martyrdom of her evening.

Chapter 3

They were to meet at a drive-in on El Camino Real, that old regal high-way which once connected the California missions and now is the artery for a dozen Peninsula cities between San Francisco and San Jose. It was Friday-night crowded, which was the reason Rick had chosen it. His fire-red Triumph was parked a block away; Heavy’s station wagon would serve for the evening’s foray.

Champ Mather was second to arrive. Rick watched him slouch across the blacktop lot between the carloads of exuberant kids — among them yet forever set apart by something that brooded in his tanned. Indian-beaked face. Despite his awesomely powerful body, his dark deep-set eyes were weak and tentative, with a tiny mouse of chronic panic peering from them.

“Hi, Rick.” He slid into the booth and put permanently grimy hands on the table. “Guess l ain’t late, huh?”

“No, you’re okay. How did work go today. Champ?”

He considered it seriously. He had spent two years in ninth grade, two in tenth — Rick had shared the second with him — and then had quit school because he no longer was eligible for football. Old Mr. Bailey, the principal, had gotten him a job as gardener on four large contiguous Hillsborough estates, with a room in a boarding house a short mile distant.

“I had a good time today,” he finally admitted. “I, uh... it’s spring, y’know? They... the flowers are comin’ up good now, an’ the trees need prunin’, an’, uh... yeah, the spring’s a good time, Rick.”

Even in high school. Champ had been scouted by the pros — switched to guard, his solid 220 pounds would have been enough — but he just had not been bright enough to learn the complex defense patterns of pro ball.

Rick, glancing outside, felt his gut muscles tense. Heavy’s two-tone green station wagon was pulling up across Entrada Way.

“Okay, Champ, they’re here. Let’s split.”

Dusk had fallen, and Heavy had the headlights on. Despite its faded paint and dented body, the wagon was in perfect mechanical shape; Heavy did all his own work. Rick and Champ got in the back seat. Julio was in front with Heavy.

“Where to?” Heavy had to raise his voice nervously above the blaring pops station he always was turned to.

“Out by the university golf course — Linda Vista Road. And turn down that damned radio.” Rick’s voice was ragged with the effort of hiding the tension in it. “Drive slow. We want it plenty dark.”

Julio Escobar looked back at Rick. Before being drawn, along with Heavy and Champ, into Rick’s orbit three years before, Julio had been a savagely self-sufficient loner with only his switchblade for companionship. Sometimes, such as tonight, he wished he still was.

“You sure about the professor being gone tonight, Rick?”

“Very sure. He teaches a seminar from seven to ten, and he stops for coffee afterwards with some of the students.”

“What if someone sees my car?” Heavy demanded.

By the lights of an overtaking auto, Rick could see sweat on the fat boy’s neck. “We’ll park a quarter of a mile away.”

Entrada Way dead-ended at Linda Vista Road in a T-junction. Heavy turned south toward the university.

Champ’s brows were furrowed. “Why do we gotta come out here to her house?” he demanded.

“To see if she recognizes us.”

“What if she does?” Heavy cut in uneasily.

“I’ve got that all worked out,” Rick assured them.

The trouble was that he didn’t have it worked out. Sure, he had the approach to the house all plotted out; he knew how to find out if Paula Halstead could recognize him or not; but then it all got hazy. If she did, then what? An idea of how they could make sure she wouldn’t identify him to the police had been dancing uneasily in the back of his mind ever since Monday, when he’d talked with Debbie. But he had continued to reject it in conscious thought. Paula Halstead was damned near as old as his mother, for Christ sake, no matter what she looked like.

He leaned forward to put his forearms along the back of the front seat. To hell with it. Things always worked out. “Right up here,” he said, “is another T-junction, Heavy. Take a right into Longacres Avenue Extension, and I’ll tell you where to stop.”

Longacres skirted the northern edge of the golf course. Rick kept watch on the edge of the road, suddenly exclaimed, “Turn here.” Heavy slowed, turned into a small dirt area beside the road. “Pull up under those trees and douse the lights.”

The wagon stopped on a carpet of narrow brown leaves fallen from the eucalyptus trees, facing back toward the blacktop. With the lights and motor cut, the night washed over them with the scrape of crickets, the rustle of a breeze in the trees overhead.

Rick checked his watch. “Okay. Eight o’clock. Let’s move out, you guys.”

By the weak illumination of the interior lights, Rick proudly watched the others get out. They were his outfit, like the commando-type group way back in World War II that they’d seen in the drive-in movie last week. He really dug war movies, always saw himself as the commander of whatever group was featured.

As he reached for the door to shut it, there was a whirring along the blacktop, and a small hunched dark shape hummed by. They saw a pale flash of face turned toward them, and all ducked involuntarily.

“What the... was that a kid? On a hike?” hissed Julio.

“Christ, Rick, we was standing right in the light,” quavered Heavy. He emitted a sudden explosive belch which for once did not crack up Julio. “We gotta leave. We can’t—”

“We aren’t quitting now,” snarled Rick. “Hell, it’s dark; he was by before he could see anything.”

For a moment they wavered, group discipline shattered. Champ was the one who saved it for Rick. “We coulda been up to the house by now, you guys wasn’t always arguin’ with Rick.”

That did it. In a compact group they crossed Longacres and went out across the golf course. Rick, in the lead, glanced back at the others. Here they were, because he had wanted them to be, not for any other reason. He was in command. He stopped and they gathered around, their eyes gradually adjusting to the semi-darkness of a first-quarter moon.

Rick gestured down the long alley of the fairway. “See the lights just showing through those trees? Not another place within half a mile of it. We’ll go right down the fairway, across the fourteenth green, and up the driveway to the house.”

“What if someone else is with her, Rick?” Julio’s question was not a challenge this time, but a request for tactical information.

“Then we get a signal to hold off.”

Before they could frame their questions, Rick went on. The soft, already dew-wet grass was springy under their shoes, muffling any sound of their passage. In Rick’s mind, he led a commando into enemy territory: for a moment, fleetingly, he wished they had blacked their faces. Five minutes later they crossed the green, skirted the sand trap, and then stopped at a strip of weeds, some fifteen feet wide, that separated the course from the edge of the Halsteads’ gravel driveway.

“Down!” hissed Rick suddenly.

They hit the dirt. There was the growing hum of an auto, the spreading aureole of its lights above their backs. Then it was by, with the oddly abrupt drop in decibel level that always accompanies a passing auto.

Heavy spoke in an urgent, frightened whisper. “Rick, there’s a girl, just sitting in that phone booth across the blacktop with the door open and the light out. I saw her when that car passed!”

“That’s Debbie. She’s our lookout. As long as she keeps the door open, so the light in the booth is out, we know no one is coming. If she shuts I he door like she’s making a phone call, we split.”

Julio had stiffened like a retriever finding the scent when he had heard Debbie’s name. She had been in Rick’s class, a senior when he’d been a junior, and had always been too good for Julio Escobar. She’d never worried about showing her legs to the crowd as a cheerleader, but she’d never even looked at Julio. Cheap goddamn tease.

“You should have told us that our safety would depend upon a woman.” In his excitement, Julio’s voice had taken on a Spanish singsong.

“Deb doesn’t know any of you are here,” Rick said. “Once I call her in that booth, she won’t even know I’ve been here.”

He led them across the wet shallow ditch and up the winding drive through the trees. The house, as they came up under its dark bulk, proved to be an old, rambling, two-story frame building from a more leisured era of California’s history. They-stopped at the foot of the wooden steps leading to the porch where Paula had stood shortly before.

“When I ring the bell, stay out of sight. She’ll open up, I’ll ask directions. If she doesn’t recognize me, we just leave. If she does, we go in, all except Heavy. He stays on the porch and watches in case Debbie gives the signal that someone’s coming.”

At the head of the wooden stairs, Rick peered through the foot-square glass panels in the heavy oak door. His heart pounded wildly. Paula’s back was to him as she moved slowly down the row of bookshelves in the far wall of the living room. To her left were broad oak stairs; between the stairs and the bookshelves was a passageway leading to the rear of the house.

The graceful line of her neck, partially hidden by her shimmering blond hair, flowed into the line of her back and flank and finally the taut curve of her thigh as she moved indolently along. For a giddy moment Rick thought she was being openly sensual, aware of his scrutiny; then he realized that it was just her natural grace. Her brown legs were bare under a flaring peasant skirt of some brocaded material, and he could see the taut straps of her brassiere through her cotton blouse.

Rick jabbed the bell. It was so simple, suddenly: just do what he had fought against all along. He ducked back as she turned, so she wouldn’t see his face through the glass.

Paula opened the door with a false briskness and the words, “Sally, I was hoping you’d drop by and...” She stopped at sight of the pale, handsome, boyish face just level with her own. “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were someone... else...”

Their eyes met and locked, as they had in Brewer Street the week before. Rick saw sudden recognition dawn in the piercing blue eyes. He took a short step forward and drove his right fist into her stomach. Her lungs emptied with a pneumatic whoosh that flecked spittle against his cheek, her eyes rolled up, and she crumpled. He caught her as she went down, grappling awkwardly at her dead weight.

“Champ!” he yelped. “Quick! Help me hold her, for Christ sake!”

Champ went by him, got an arm around her from behind, and they quickly shuffled her out of the doorway. Now Julio also was inside, pulling the door shut, while Heavy remained on the porch. Rick was very aware of Paula’s warm, heavy weight; his excitement was heightened rather than lessened by the beginnings of fine lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

“Have you got her okay?” he panted.

“Yeah.”

Champ’s heavy forearm, encircling Paula and pressing up under her breasts, had burst the top buttons of her blouse. Rick couldn’t keep his eyes from the deep cleavage above her bra. Champ held her full weight easily, with only one arm, without apparent strain.

“Just hold her for a second,” said Rick.

He crossed to the hallway, found an open door just to the right, and stuck his head inside. There was a rheostat control rather than a switch for the overhead light, set so the room was almost dark but not quite. Rick could see more bookshelves, a flimsy-looking straight-backed chair like the one his ma had next to the piano, a couch, a small three-legged stool covered with a bright woven slipcover, and a side table bearing an ornate lamp and an electric clock. An oblong rag rug covered the center of the floor.

“Bring her in here, Champ,” he called unevenly. He was going to do it. Do it, do it, do it kept echoing in his mind. He probably would have done it even if she hadn’t recognized him.

Paula was gasping, still not conscious enough to be struggling, but Champ dragged her across the living room one-armed so he could hold a hand over her mouth to muffle possible outcries.

“Dump her on the couch,” said Rick. “It doesn’t matter if she yells — I don’t think anyone can hear her in here anyway.”

“But... what are you gonna do, Rick?”

All pretense of sophistication left him as he stared at the limp, sprawled woman on the couch. He was engulfed by adolescent fancies about this voluptuous woman laid out like a feast before him.

“I’m going to screw her.” His voice creaked on the verb as if it wanted to break into a higher register, and he felt blood shoot to his cheeks. Then he herded Champ to the door and shoved him from the room, ignoring the big man’s hungry stare as realization dawned.

In the gloom, Rick turned back toward the woman. Should he wait until she was fully awake? Or just take her now? Would she fight him? If he waited, maybe she would help him. Undress herself slowly, tantalizingly. Hell, in bull sessions the older guys always said that older women always were hot for it, no matter what they said.

As he bent over her, Paula picked up and swung the decorative three-legged milking stool at his head. Rick blocked the clumsy blow with a forearm, so the stool went around him and was wrenched from her grasp by its own weight.

Aroused by the attack, Rick slashed a fist at the side of her jaw with a fierce exultation. She fell back away from him in a sort of slow motion. He went in after her. Mouthing obscenities, he tore at the frail material of her panties. Now she would find out what it meant to oppose Rick Dean.

Chapter 4

They were gone. Paula, huddled on her side on the couch, kept her eyes tight shut and listened. Her legs were drawn up in the fetal position; her ripped panties were lying on the floor by the couch and the straps of the one sandal she still wore were hanging loose. Her ears were like separate little animals, independent of her, which listened and probed and evaluated sounds while the voice of the one called Rick bragged in her memory.

“She still doesn’t know who we are. And even if she finds out, she won’t tell. She won’t dare, because she knows we’ll be back then.”

Which should have been silly, because if she told, the police would make sure they never would be back. But they were lucky. For reasons that the one called Rick was, she was sure, incapable of understanding, Paula would not tell.

She listened to her memory again. The casual retreat of swaggering footsteps — jackbooted Nazis leaving a looted Jewish shop on Kristallnacht — then, oddly, the phone being dialed, Rick’s voice using words which made no sense to someone named Debbie, the front door closing.

Her listening ears probed the old house for reassurance. Creak of ancient timbers. Sigh of old and faithful joists. Outside, the rustle of oak leaves. Nothing else.

Paula explored split lips with a careful tongue. Blood-clotted. Teeth loose. Was this how a hibernating animal felt when the snow had melted and it began checking how it had come through the winter?

Poorly, thank you. I came through it poorly.

She groaned and pushed herself into a sitting position. The pit of her stomach ached, her face and neck were gritty enough for an involuntary grimace of distaste. It was the body which betrayed you.

Paula ran automatic fingers through her hair, found that the plastic clasp which had held it back against her skull had broken, so it was a blond flood around her shoulders. She looked at the clock.

9:40. That would be P.M.

Curt would be finishing his seminar soon, folding his papers and ramming them sloppily into the briefcase, talking all the while and not getting the papers in until he finally thought to look at his hands.

Curt, big frowning bearlike man.

“Please come home,” she said to him solemnly in the empty house.

But she knew deep inside that Curt wouldn’t, not in time. She sighed and got carefully to her feet. Not really too bad, physically. Just the sort of stiffness she would expect if she had played some hard sets of tennis after a winter layoff. How had it happened to her, when after Rick, the first time, she still had felt only revulsion? She still had been Paula Halstead then, had gasped “No!” when he had swaggered to the door, zipping up his Levi slim-fits, and opened it to call out “Next?” in a parody of a barber with an unoccupied chair.

Maybe it had started then? Realizing, then, that they were all going to do it, and that Rick was going to stay and watch them?

“I’m sorry, Curt,” she said aloud.

The clock’s bland electric face murmured 9:47 to her eyes. Curt still would be in the seminar room, with its long wooden table and tube steel chairs with plywood backs. And talking. Curt was good at talking.

This is in your half of the court, kiddo, not Curt’s. A sizzler. Up on the toes, swing the racquet, send a hot flat drive over the net...

9:51. Eleven minutes to get up off a couch. Rome was not built in one day. Good old John Heywood. You could always count on John for a platitude or two. The fat is in the fire. She picked up the ripped panties, found her other sandal in a corner as if hurled there by an explosion. She went out carrying both items.

At the foot of the stairs she paused. Seeing, really seeing, the living room. To her left, the windows which in daylight looked out across the drive and the fringe of woods to the golf course. Below the windows, the couch. Nearer, its back to Paula, Curt’s reading chair. Please, Curt, come home. The coffee table, Paula’s snide bottle of wine, her disordered stack of paperbacks. Dark wine-colored rug. To her right, through double doors, the dull sheen of dining-room oak.

Nowhere any sign of their predatory passage. Oh, fingerprints, probably. On the doorknob. Perhaps on the phone. And, of course, on her soul. Grimy ones, there, that wouldn’t wash off.

The skinny Spanish-looking one had been second. Hot eyes, hot hands to force her knees apart. She whimpering, then willing herself to relax, to watch the ceiling as she had hundreds of times beneath Curt, to forget that this indignity was happening to a complex and subtle being named Paula. Three minutes, perhaps, worrying her like a terrier. And then, when his moment arrived, crying out like a rabbit struck with a stick.

She’d still been safe, even then. Still unfeeling.

She mounted the stairs slowly, shoulders sagging, to run a tub full of steaming water. Her blouse was ruined but the skirt was still intact. She hadn’t been wearing a slip. Her bra was holding with one hook. She removed everything, chucked it all into the woven wicker clothes hamper they had bought one year during a Mexican vacation, dumped in more bath oil than she usually used.

The steaming water, touching abrasions and sore places, forced little cries from her; but she resolutely lowered herself into it. Her body flushed a bright pink. She began lathering with an intense and useless concentration.

It was no good. You couldn’t wash it off.

The fat one hadn’t even gotten his pants down before he was finished, was still standing in the middle of the floor. Rick had hooted with laughter and had gone to the door to tell the others about it.

Paula stood up, lathered her body until it was creamy with suds. It was the body which betrayed you. She looked involuntarily down at her breasts, sore to the touch and marked with angry red finger-marks which soon would be purple. The broken skin around the tooth-marks in her right shoulder already had turned red and puffy. Wasn’t a human’s bite supposed to be more septic than a dog’s?

If that one really had been human at all.

Curt, damn you, why weren’t you here? She sloshed away the soap, sighing. Who was she kidding? Curt had fought a good war once, a quarter of a century ago; but now, tonight, that big animal one would have taken care of Curt with one hand.

Yes, it had started with him, the big animal one who had hurt her. Started with his hateful empty grin, his hard breathing as he bent above her, the agony of iron fingers gripping her breasts almost impersonally. When she had screamed, then he had lunged forward to enter her. Twenty minutes, so they both had been slippery with sweat. No watching the ceiling that time. Then his oily face had been jammed down against her neck, forcing her head to one side; and then, when he had come, his teeth had sunk into her shoulder.

She still might have been all right, if she just had been given time. But Rick, aroused by watching the big animal one on her, had taken her again, immediately.

Paula carefully dried her brown, beautifully female body with a huge woolly towel, merely patting at her bruises. She pouffed an extravagant amount of powder over herself and then, still nude, went to listen at the head of the stairs like an insecure child suddenly convinced that its parents have abandoned it. Was there any more terrible feeling than that universal childhood terror? Yes. The knowledge of having abandoned oneself. Abandon all hope, ye that enter here.

10:39.

In the bedroom she brushed out her hair, then chose her frothiest negligee, one with a pale blue peignoir which fit over it and tied at the top with a blue nylon ribbon. She sat at her dressing table to carefully make up her face, applying eye shadow, mascara, and lipstick with calm, sure little strokes.

Just this once, Curt, leave them early. Come home and explain it to me, convince me that I couldn’t help it.

She turned her face from side to side, examining the effect. The lips had been a problem, but the splits were inside and the lipstick tended to minimize the puffiness. She put her tiny jeweled watch, an anniversary present from Curt, on her left wrist, pausing to admire its twinkling against her tanned flesh. Eleven o’clock.

Still at the dressing table, she smoked a cigarette part way down, knowing that her deadly calmness was not natural and stemmed at least partially from shock, but also knowing that the abyss which had opened inside her was too fetid to be tolerated.

11:06. Sorry, Curt darling. Too late now. Much too late.

Paula completed her penultimate chore quickly, with a classical allusion she was sure Curt would appreciate, and taped it to the mirror. To the bathroom medicine chest, return, sit down, examine the effect again. Not with a bang but a whimper. My, so literary tonight. First Master Heywood, then Signore Alighieri, then Citizen Tacitus in her own literary effort, finally Mr. Eliot. Hurry up, please, it’s time.

And past time. She might have supported even her partial sexual arousal by the animal one’s savaging, if it had stopped there. If she had stopped. But Rick had taken her that second time, immediately.

And she had reached her climax.

In fourteen years of marriage she had never had an orgasm. Where Curt’s blunt but deeply personal love-making had failed, where candlelight and verse had failed, a vicious gang of teen-age boys had succeeded. In the brutality of this mindless coupling she somehow had found fulfillment. So what sort of disgusting little beast crouched inside Paula Halstead to peer out with wild, beady eyes? What sort of perverted woman was she?

Paula shuddered with a bone-deep revulsion.

She laid her right hand, palm up, in her lap, with her left hand drew the razor blade across the wrist coolly and without qualm. It just stung a little. She dropped the blade, let her hand hang down to aid the flow. Then she sat motionless in front of the mirror and watched the subtle change flow into her face. Too bad, kiddo, she told her suddenly sleepy image. You were pretty good in there a time or two. But not tonight, when it counted. Not tonight. Sorry, Curt darling. At least you won’t ever know that I had to fake it with you, but that...

She fell face forward and a little to her left. Her face struck the glass table top and knocked off a bottle of hand cream. The bottle bounced on the rug and came to rest by the limp fingers of her left hand.

It was 11:33 P.M., four minutes after she had cut her wrist.

Chapter 5

Curt glanced at his watch and quickly drained the last of his coffee. Already 10:59, and Paula had been querulous.

“Warm up that coffee, sir?”

Curt hesitated. “I really should be going...”

Just then Belmont, who had delivered that evening’s paper, said from across the booth, “I understood you to imply tonight, Doctor, that the social sciences ought really to deny hereditary influences on the development of human personality, and stress environment instead.”

The waitress poured coffee. Curt leaned back with a sigh.

“Well, Chuck, I’d go even further than that. I would agree with Ashley Montagu that human nature is the result of gradually supplanting instinctual primate drives with intelligence. In man the instincts, through lack of use, have withered away.”

“Isn’t that implying an unbridged behavorial gap between us and our closest relatives?” Shirley Meier was short and overweight, but Curt knew there was nothing sloppy or undisciplined about her mind.

“Culture fills the gap.” He leaned forward across the narrow booth; some three hours before, Rick and Champ had shared a similar booth in the same drive-in. “Modern man’s uniqueness is that he has been freed from instinctual behavorial determinants.”

Belmont nodded raptly, but the Meier girl’s face was stubborn. “Instinctual influences, Dr. Halstead, are not determinants. I think man has an inborn hostility, for instance, which urges him to—”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Shirl,” said Belmont complacently. “No kid is born aggressive; his hostilities arise from frustration, every time.” His thin, intelligent face was self-satisfied as his dark eyes turned to Curt for approbation. “Wouldn’t you agree, Doctor?”

Curt nodded. “John Dollard’s classic, titled Frustration and Aggression and first published in 1939, points out that aggression is an inescapable consequence of frustration — i.e., the ghetto, where Negro frustration explodes like an unvented gas heater bursting from a buildup of fumes. More important, however, is Dollard’s point that the opposite also is true: aggression always presupposes frustration. Without frustration in the environment, there would be no hostility.”

“You said that was published in 1939.” Shirley Meier remarked flatly. “Wasn’t that the year that Hitler invaded Poland?”

“Come on, Shirk” hooted Belmont. “That’s ancient history.”

Curt surreptitiously checked his watch. 11:17. He really had to leave. With an apologetic little cough, he slid from the booth. “I’d best get along, or my wife will display some aggressive behavior of her own.” He shook hands with Belmont. “A terrific job on the paper, Chuck.” And then he smiled at Shirley. “Young lady, I’m afraid some of your ideas need rethinking before you carry them out into the world.”

It was a pleasantly tough smile on a face itself pleasantly tough, despite the blurring of line that overweight and the passing years had brought, and Shirley’s answering smile lit up the corners of her personality. “I’m sorry, Professor, but I think it’s a jungle out there and I think that man, by nature, is the chief predator.”

Curt drew in a deep breath on the way to his car. The air, even at night, had the faintest tinge of industrial haze. Thank God for the universities, last enclaves of sanity in a hurried, pushy, grinding America. With tenure at Los Feliz, Curt was secure from it all. He would spend the summer thinking through his book on man’s nature.

He turned the VW left into Entrada Way, which cut through a presubdivision residential area to Linda Vista Road. The streets were deserted and dark except for the glow of televisioned living rooms and an occasional porch light left burning by a watchful parent.

That Shirley Meier, bringing up Hitler’s naked aggression against Poland as a subtle refutation of the argument that hostility presupposed frustration! Belmont hadn’t even caught her point. Curt’s grin faded. He had caught it. 1939. He’d been fourteen then, attending secondary school in England because his father was a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, and the shadow of war, despite Chamberlain’s “peace in our times” return from Munich, had hung heavy.

Ancient history, Chuck Belmont had called it.

To a generation which found nothing distressing in swastikas, iron crosses, or Nazi helmets, it probably was. Certainly Curt’s three years in the British military were something he seldom recalled himself, these days. The desert war in 1942, the clandestine landings in Sicily, these seemed to belong to a different Curtis Halstead.

He turned left onto Linda Vista Road, putting the bug through its sprightly gears. Just five weeks until finals; then, the book. No summer classes this year, nothing whatsoever to interfere.

He passed Longacres Avenue Extension, glancing off to his right across the dark expanse of golf course. Pity he didn’t play, living where he did. Perhaps this Sunday he and Paula, who used tennis to stay in condition, could start taking a bit of a hike again. He hadn’t taken a ramble through the heavily wooden strip beyond Linda Vista, which marked the meanderings of San Luisa Creek, for over two years.

Curt braked, swung into his drive, made the switchback and sent the VW chuffing up the grade in second to the darkness below the porch. He sat in the car for a few moments after killing the engine, listening to the creak of cooling metal and the chorus of frogs from the ditch by the golf course. Shirley Meier had brought the past drifting back to him in shreds and tatters. Not a bad thing, actually. Dealing habitually with students, it was easy to forget the past’s validity: for youth always saw its current problems as unique in man’s history, and thus as susceptible only to newly formulated solutions.

Curt checked his watch — nearly midnight — sighed, fumbled out his keys, and climbed to the porch. In the deserted living room, an unopened bottle of dago red waited on the coffee table for his disapproving head-shake. Paula was becoming a nuisance about his evening glass of wine. He crossed to the hall, stuck his head into the reading room, where the overhead light still glowed. The couch was rumpled, the throw pillows bashed out of shape. He had reached for the rheostat control before he saw the rag rug bunched up in accordion pleats as if a runner had used it as a starting block, and the Swiss milking stool on its side in the center of the room.

Well, now, that was damned odd. What...

Curt whirled and went to the foot of the stairs, moving silently on the balls of his feet, before he stopped. Reflexes honed a quarter-century before apparently were not totally forgotten. But really, now, tire rug and stool would have a perfectly simple explanation; and meanwhile, he was glad Paula hadn’t witnessed his ludicrous thirty seconds as an overweight James Bond creeping about his own home on tiptoe.

He clumped stolidly up the stairs and into their bedroom. Paula was at her dressing table, just in the act of bending over to pick up a fallen bottle of hand cream.

“What the devil happened downstairs? What...”

Blood. Ten pints of blood in a woman Paula’s size, and half of it on the floor. More blood, it seemed, than a human being possibly could hold.

Curt was across the room in three strides to lift her by the shoulders away from the dressing table. Her body was still warm, but her head flopped back inertly against his supporting arm. Her lower jaw gaped idiotically. One front tooth was dripped, and there was a puddle of saliva on the starred glass where her face had rested.

Very slowly and gently Curt laid her down again. The eyes had not been Paula’s eyes; they had been those of a corpse. His one-time long familiarity with death had taught him that “mortal remains” is a very precise concept: with the act of dying, every shred of glory flees from every human corpse.

He put his hands over his face and rubbed them slowly up and down, feeling it now like a gunshot wound when the air gets at it.

How? Why?

Curt turned back, raised Paula’s flaccid forearm and twisted it so the wrist was up. He regarded the rubber-lipped gash for a long moment. That was how. A ragged sob torn from his chest surprised him. But why? Would he ever come to any understanding of why?

He turned away without even seeing the note taped to the mirror, and went stiffly down the stairs again without any awareness of making bloody footprints in the hall and on the risers. In the living room, his hand closed over the phone receiver, blotting out the prints left by Rick while phoning Debbie in the booth across Linda Vista Road.

Curt dialed the operator to ask for the sheriff’s office.

Chapter 6

The room where the actual killing took place was slippery with blood. Flies buzzed everywhere, and the hot North African air seemed almost septic. The goats were sent crowding and bleating down a wooden ramp to the gate which was raised to let one animal through at a time. The goats had no other direction in which to go.

“Show one more time,” promised the head slaughterer. He was an Arab with a seamed, gentle, knowing face.

He seized the goat’s topknot with his left hand and twisted the hard bony head up and to the left. This presented the jugular to the view of the half-dozen uniformed men who were his audience. The goat returned their gaze with totally expressionless eyes.

“The throat... so,” he said. “Then the knife... so!”

The broad, double-edged knife flashed once, the animal gave a convulsive start; its hoofs drummed briefly on the floor. The Arab stepped hack with the slightest suggestion of a flourish, extending the knife handle-first to his audience. The goat’s eyes had not changed, yet somehow now they were dead eyes, unspeakably so.

No one moved to take the knife. The lieutenant, like the rest of them heavily sweat-splotched under the arms of his uniform jersey, cleared his throat. His voice was too high-pitched for effective command. “Cutting a man’s throat is the quickest way of finishing him. We’ve all been extremely, ah, efficient in practice; this is a good opportunity to... um... for the real thing, actually.”

The enlisted men remained silent; only the flies responded. Something gurgled dismally inside the dead goat. Curt, at seventeen the youngest of the lot, made a sudden impatient gesture. It couldn’t be all that bad; the effing wog did it for an effing living, didn’t he?

“Give me the knife.”

Another goat was led into the enclosure. Curt looked into its calmly omniscient eyes, and looked quickly away. He seized the rough top-knot, twisting up and to the left as the Arab had done.

“Good... good...” murmured the slaughterer in approval.

Curt slashed. The goat, its throat half severed, tore from Curt’s grasp to whirl about like the Rifiya dervishes they had seen in the meidan at Alexandria. Blood from the gushing jugular splashed over all of them, and a hot salty spray of it hit Curt in the mouth.

The goat stopped and stiffened, head lowered, legs braced against the unseen foe which sought to upset it. Then it began a burring noise, which seemed to issue from the gaping throat rather than its mouth...

Curt moaned and rolled over and scrubbed at his mouth with the back of his hand. He was soaked with sweat. His eyes opened and were staring at the old-fashioned beamed ceiling of his study.

The goat’s burring began again, only now it was the doorbell. Thank God. He hadn’t dreamed about the war in years. Why didn’t Paula answer the damned door? Why didn’t...

It all rushed back.

He swung his legs off the rumpled couch and sat up, gripping the edge fiercely with his hands until the urge to throw up had passed. His shoe skidded an empty wine bottle across the floor, bringing the rest of it back. Drinking steadily all day; must have passed out finally.

The doorbell burred again, patiently. Curt lurched to his feet, forked shaky fingers through his hair while the dizziness passed. Hadn’t undressed, hadn’t even removed his shoes. Passed out. Paula was dead.

Paula was dead. Goddamned doorbell again. Ought to...

He went unsteadily down the stairs and crossed to the front door. It opened to let spring into the house like the voice of a friend long absent. He stared at the man on the porch, a tall stranger.

“Maybe you remember me, Professor. Monty Worden. I was in charge of the men from the sheriff’s office on Friday night.”

“Of course.” Curt stood aside, searching impressions blurred by shock, by the interim drinking, by his incredibly pounding head. “That is, a... Detective-Sergeant Worden, isn’t it?”

Worden, he decided, must have stopped on his way home from Sunday services. The policeman’s suit was a dark blue with a wicked gray stripe in it, and his tie was tasteful enough to have been picked by his wife. He was a good four inches taller than Curt’s five-ten, with thick-fingered hands and the bull neck of a wrestler. By his presence in the middle of the living room, he made it a position he was defending. The busy gray eyes were a cop’s eyes, full of sadly won wisdom and totally observant. All of the exceptional combat officers Curt had known in the military had regarded life through similar hard and wary eyes.

“Sit down, Sergeant. I drank too much yesterday and last night...”

“That dago red really puts the blast on you, all right.”

So those observant eyes had noted and catalogued the bottle Paula had put out on Friday night. Curt said, “There’s coffee or tea...”

“Tea’s fine.” Relaxed on the couch, Worden brought out and extended a manila envelope. “Her note. The lab boys are through with it.”

Curt carried the note down to the kitchen, ran the teapot full of tap water, hot, filled the kettle with cold and put it on a burner, and then smoothed the note on the counter top. He had not been allowed to handle it on Friday night. It was a measure of Paula, he thought, that her writing had not been at all shaky.

Something intolerable in myself. What? What could she have discovered in those few hours that would explain such a terminal act? He shook his head, set cups, sugar, spoons, milk, napkins, and lemon slices on a TV tray to carry into the living room.

“The water will be hot in just a few minutes.” His mind was clearer now, but his head ached abominably; perhaps he would lace his tea with brandy. He measured his next words to the detective. “You mentioned that your criminology lab was ‘through’ with the note. Might I ask what they were doing with it?”

“Paper often takes good fingerprint impressions, so we checked. We found only your wife’s on the note and on the pen which was used.”

Curt was stirred by a breath of emotion almost too slight to be identified as anger. “What other prints were you expecting to find?”

“You said you hadn’t seen the note.” He shrugged. “Routine.”

“What about the razor blade?” Curt demanded sarcastically. “Why didn’t you check that for prints, too, see if I—”

“Too much blood for impressions.”

“You mean that you actually—”

“Just routine, Professor. Like I said.” Worden’s apologetic tone did not reach his eyes. “A suicide is a crime against the person, so it comes under the jurisdiction of the Criminal Division. The investigation is carried out by the Detective Bureau, Homicide Detail. Since I was in the barrel on Friday night, I got the case.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you fingerprinted Paula’s note.”

Worden shrugged heavy shoulders. “Since I’m in charge, Professor, subject to review, and one or two little points bothered me — we checked fingerprints.”

The teakettle’s mournful whistling brought Curt to his feet. Out in the kitchen, he emptied the pot, spooned in strong black Keeman, covered it with boiling water. His hands were shaking: Worden was probing wounds which still were bleeding, and Curt didn’t know why. He carried a bottle of Korbel into the living room along with the tea.

“Would you like some brandy in yours, Sergeant?”

Worden shook his head. His gray eyes watched Curt with such a pitiless and avid concentration that it was almost contempt, and Curt paused with the cap halfway screwed off. The spark of anger glowed more brightly. To hell with you, Worden. Plain tea for me, then, too. Then a new thought struck him with the force of a bucket of ice water dashed in the face.

“Paula’s suicide was a suicide, wasn’t it, Sergeant?”

Worden sipped his tea tentatively. “Say, this is good; you’ll have to tell me what kind you use.” Without waiting for Curt’s reply, he went on, “Yeah, it was suicide. I been in the Detective Bureau for ten years, Professor, and I’ve found that pills are the usual for a woman unless she’s spiting — then they’ll use the damndest things. But your wife chose the razor blade instead.” Then he rapped out, “Why?”

“Why... why because... Her note explained it, she didn’t want to be brought back when she was halfway... was halfway there...”

Curt stopped; the hand holding the teacup was shaking again. His face felt like carved stone. Was this why criminals so often broke down under police questioning? Because of the steady relentless pressure that only a cop knew how to exert? But Curt wasn’t a criminal. Paula had killed herself, so why was Worden pressuring him?

“Okay,” conceded the detective, “say that explains the razor blade. But what about this, ah... the consul of something...”

Curt found himself answering almost eagerly, for the ground was less painful here and he felt an absurd urge to justify himself. “Consul of Bithynia. Paula is — was — the daughter of a professor in classics. The reference is to the Annals of Tacitus, I can’t remember which book — anyway, where he mentioned Caius Petronius, consul of Bithynia and Nero’s Master of Orgies. When Petronius fell from favor, he chose to kill himself by bleeding to death a little bit at a time, conversing with his friends meanwhile, eating, drinking — even sleeping — and being entertained by frivolous poetry and light verse until he died. Paula... the passage always appealed to her as sort of epitomizing the civilized man, so I suppose... when she wanted...”

“Yeah.” Worden’s eyes were flat and gray as stagnant water. “But there’s one other little thing, Professor. No hesitation nicks. Usually suicides, they got dozens of little cuts near the veins where they were getting up the nerve to do it. Your wife didn’t have any.”

“But I told you, Paula was very... very strong-willed.”

“Yeah. You know, Professor, we performed an autopsy on her.”

Curt was out of his chair. “Autopsy? You mean that you... Paula? But goddamnit, man, I didn’t give any permission—”

“It ain’t necessary in deaths by violence, Professor.”

Curt started to speak again, then stopped. Something in Worden’s tone had turned his rage to ice. The detective had hit him with the fact of the autopsy in a purposely brutal way, just so he could study Curt’s reaction to it. And Curt had been playing Worden’s game, giving him the initiative, unconsciously seeking the detective’s approbation or at least sympathy.

Well, he wasn’t going to do that any more. Paula was gone, his personal life was now a bewildering shambles, all right; but there had been a time when Curt had of necessity been pretty bloody-minded, to survive. Maybe he still could be. At least, he wasn’t going to let this sadistic cop trample around through his emotions. He sat back down, slowly, and poured out more tea for both of them. He was pleased that when he spoke, all emotion had been denatured from his voice.

“I see. And what did the pathologist’s report show, Sergeant?” Worden had begun frowning at the tone of Curt’s voice. He almost snapped, “How long had it been since you’d had sexual relations with your wife?”

“How long...” Curt heard his voice rising, and just quit speaking, completely.

Worden seemed pleased by this. “Oh, come on now, Professor.” There was a wink and a nudge in his voice. “That ain’t a real hard question to answer, is it, just between us men, like?”

“I don’t know how long, Sergeant. Some weeks, probably.”

“Yeah. How about a lover? Did your wife have a lover?”

Curt squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. This couldn’t really be happening. Paula dead in a pool of her own blood two days before, and now this sadistic bastard was... He made himself open his eyes. “Isn’t the husband supposed to be the last to know?”

Worden, momentarily baffled, said, “Yeah, that’s the truth, ain’t it?” Then he leaned into his swing, trying for the fence. “Did you have a fight with your wife on Friday night before you left?”

“Fight? No, there was a bit of acid on each side, but—”

“You didn’t hit her? Kick her? Knock her down?”

“Now see here, Sergeant,” Curt began in cold fury, “I won’t lis—”

Worden’s voice cut through his like a torch through foil. “Your wife had three loose teeth — not counting one chipped by hitting her face on the table top — and split lips on the same side of her face. Probably done with a fist. A deep bruise on the lower abdomen, again from a fist — some internal bleeding there. Secondary bruises on her forearms, breasts, upper belly, inner thighs. Abrasions on her back. On her right shoulder, a damned nasty bite.”

“But...” Curt felt a terrible bewilderment. “But...she...”

“The pathologist also took vaginal smears and found abnormally large deposits of spermatozoa. Suggest anything to you, Professor?”

Curt was reminded of one of his own lectures on the fossil bones of some Australopithecine hominid dug up in a dusty African gorge a thousand millennia after its death; but this man was talking about Paula. He saw that his knuckles were white, absently returned his teacup to the coffee table. “I finally understand what they mean by police brutality, Worden. Not rubber hoses in back rooms — oh, no, it’s more subtle than that these days. I hurt, down in my guts, because Paula is gone. I’m confused and bewildered as to why she’s gone. But...”

“You’ll live through it,” said Worden bluntly. “Somebody staged a gangbang here Friday night. I want to know who, and I want to know why. As far as why your wife killed herself, I don’t really give a damn, since the physical evidence confirms suicide. Maybe when they got done with her, she found out she’d enjoyed it, I don’t know. But—”

“Goddamn you, Worden!” Curt came erect in a rush, his sleeve catching the rim of his saucer and flipping his teacup upside down on the rug. Worden, his cup still balanced on his crossed knees, didn’t bother to move at all. Curt wanted to lash out, destroy the big detective, but twenty years of conventional living inhibited the impulse. All he could use were words. “I’m not going to take...”

His voice ran down as a sudden realization struck him. Paula, name and photo in the newspapers, returning time and again to look at police mug shots. Paula, determined to find Rockwell’s attackers. Why do you insist on words like “vicious”? Sick maybe... Well, Paula had been right. Vicious. Paula, facing them alone while he...

In a cold and deadly voice he said, “If you weren’t a sadistic incompetent who couldn’t investigate an overtime parking meter, you’d know who assaulted Paula.”

“Any facts, Professor?” Worden seemed singularly unmoved.

“A week ago Friday a man named Harold Rockwell was attacked on Brewer Street in Los Feliz. He—”

“Brewer Street ain’t in our jurisdiction,” said Worden quickly. “City cops handle it.” But his face had become thoughtful.

“Paula was the witness — the only witness — to that attack. It was carried out by four juveniles. Suggest anything to you, Sergeant?”

Worden nodded in disgust. “Yeah. Damnit, I knew there was something I should of remembered. You wouldn’t know which police sergeant is handling the Rockwell investigation, would you?”

“Why don’t you go to hell, Sergeant?” Curt asked, suddenly weary.

When he was halfway up the stairs, he heard the front door shut behind the departing detective. By turning quickly, he caught a glimpse of the tall, hard man just disappearing briskly down the front steps. Monty Worden, Curt thought hotly, was not at all like the television cops. Worden, in fact, acted as if he would be reduced in rank and would lose his seniority if he ever apologized to anyone for harboring mistaken ideas about them.

That was the trouble, of course. Curt’s reaction to Worden’s probing was at least in part a result of the secret feeling that his loss should have made him immune. He was enraged because Worden had refused to observe the proper hushed tones, the cast-down eyes, the murmured condolences. Worden had been a cop, doing a cop’s job, and no matter what his shortcomings as a human being, Curt had an idea that he probably was a damned good policeman.

Which said something very sobering about the society which Worden was hired to police.

Chapter 7

“Thank you, sir,” said Debbie Marsden gaily.

She slid into the Triumph with a quick flash of thigh, and smiled at Rick as he closed the door behind her. When he had called the dorm she had agreed to a drive immediately; Rick wasn’t a boy you could stay mad at for very long.

He got in under the wheel. “Whither away, fair lady?”

“Just someplace on El Camino for a soda. Tomorrow’s Tuesday, and I have heavy classes.”

“El Camino it is.”

The flashing red Triumph dug out of the semicircular drive in front of Forrest Hall, which had been named after the frosty-chinned old lady whose portrait hung over the fireplace in the common room.

“I was really sore at you last Friday, Rick.”

“I’m sorry, kid.” He looked sideways at her from dark, heavy-browed eyes, seeming properly shamefaced in the momentary illumination of a campus streetlight. “But I told you on the phone that night what had happened. I was up to Julio’s for some help with my Spanish, and on the way down to the Halsteads’ I had a flat on the freeway. I called you as quick as I could get to a phone...”

“I don’t like that Julio very much,” said Debbie irrelevantly.

Rick smiled to himself. Nothing to be scared of, now. Paula Halstead wouldn’t dare tell on them, especially not after the way he’d turned her on that second time. Hell, if he could get alone with her he bet she’d let him do it again, because those old chicks really dug the young studs like him. Everybody said so.

He looked over at Debbie’s clear, fresh profile. He’d like to get her into the pad, too, but after somebody like Paula Halstead she’d probably be — what was the word? — insipid. Then, on an impulse which surprised him, he reached over and gave her hand a squeeze. Old Debbie. She’d really grown up since the last time he’d dated her.

“Hi, doll,” he said softly.

Surprised also, and a little startled, Debbie said, “Hi, yourself, Rick Dean.” She laughed with the sheer joy of living; the wind of their quick passage down palm-lined University Way ruffled her hair. She almost timidly returned the pressure of his hand. “I’m going to have the biggest, gooiest sundae you’ve ever seen.”

Rick took the Triumph across El Camino on the overpass, to join the northbound traffic. After a couple of miles he spotted a little café on the right-hand side where he could pull in without crossing lanes.

Inside, in a booth, Debbie returned to the previous Friday. “It was creepy, sitting there in the dark and waiting for you to call or something. And then seeing my folks’ old paper boy...”

Rick caught himself just starting to ask if she meant the boy on the bike, which really would have been stupid. “Paper boy?”

“He came right up to the booth like he wanted to use the phone.” Looking at Rick, she felt her heart quicken. Even as kids growing up in the same subdivision with him, she’d had a sort of thing about Rick. Her folks had waited until after her graduation last June to move across the Bay to San Leandro, so she wouldn’t have to switch high schools her senior year. “It was just as a car passed and I could see him real plain. And then when I heard what happened later...”

If Debbie only knew what really happened later! Anyway, now they didn’t have to worry about the kid on the bike, because Paula wouldn’t ever go to the police about them. He felt so good that when the waitress, who was old, about twenty-five, brought their orders, he winked at her. Cheeseburger and chocolate malt for Rick, something called the Awful Delight for Debbie, with three kinds of ice cream and nuts and sauces.

“Will there be anything else, kids?” asked the waitress, pencil poised over her book of stubs. Her blond hair, he saw, was dyed.

“That’ll be it, ma’am, I guess,” Rick said politely.

She wrote, totaled, tore out the check and laid it face-down on the table. As she turned away, with her back to Debbie, she very deliberately returned Rick’s wink.

Feeling great about that, he tore into his cheeseburger and said around it, “So what happened later, Deb?”

“It’s all over the campus, with Professor Halstead teaching at the U and everything, but there was just a paragraph in the papers...”

Rick felt something freeze inside him. Slowly he lowered the ravaged cheeseburger to the plate, mustard diluted with beef juice running unnoticed over his fingers. “What... happened to the professor?”

Debbie was enjoying herself. “Oh, nothing to him. It was Mrs. Halstead.” Rick had stopped chewing; he was afraid the skin over his temples would burst. “She killed herself. On Friday night, it couldn’t have been very long after I left the booth...” Her voice trailed off. “Rick, what’s the matter? Are you sick or something? What...”

Rick clamped his teeth together in a desperate effort to keep back the surge of bile. Killed herself? But she... the way she’d been with him that second time, she couldn’t have... couldn’t...

“What is it, Ricky?” Debbie’s face was stiff and frightened. “Rick, you’re just white! What...”

“I... ah... just felt awful sick all of a sudden. I...”

“I bet you’re getting the flu, honey.” She used the term of endearment automatically; he had been so vulnerable there for a moment, the look on his face wrenched at her heart. “You ought to go right home and get into bed.”

In a sort of sleepwalking, Rick paid the cashier and took Debbie out to the Triumph. She just couldn’t have. Maybe the professor had come home and she’d told him and... Maybe he’d killed her, made it look like suicide.

But then, after he’d handed Debbie into the squatty sports car and had started around to the driver’s side, he had a flashing vision, compellingly clear, of Paula’s face: the high cheekbones, the wounded mouth, the eyes so startlingly blue against her tawny skin, and so filled with sick knowledge and with self-loathing. Not loathing for Rick, not even contempt for him. Seeing him as nothing more than the almost impersonal object which had caused her degradation.

No. His mind rejected the image. He personally, he, Rick Dean, had aroused her. She’d dug him, really dug him. She had killed herself for some other reason. She had cancer or something.

He forced himself to move on, get into the car, drive Debbie back to the dorm. No goodnight kiss; barely aware that she had expected one. Later, at home, he was hours getting to sleep; hours of turning and tossing, watching restless leaf shadow-patterns cast on his window shade by the streetlight outside. Suddenly he sat bolt upright in bed.

The paper hoy! He had seen them, had seen the wagon, had seen Rick. What if the cops found out that Paula had been with a man — his mind already rejected rape — and started looking, and found that kid...

In his restlessness, Rick didn’t think of Debbie, lying awake in her bed at the dorm a few miles south. Lying awake and wondering about Rick’s odd sudden sickness, just when she was giving him the really rather prosaic news that Mrs. Halstead had killed herself. Not that his illness had anything to do with her death.

After all, hadn’t Rick only met the woman once, when they’d chanced to scrape fenders in the parking lot of an El Camino bar?

Hadn’t he?