A Time of Predators

Chapter 8

When the phone rang in Curt’s office at the Sciences Building, he glanced at his watch: 4:30. He debated momentarily whether he shouldn’t already be gone. Doris Reeves, the Anthropology Department secretary, had a remarkable facility for catching him with a two-hour chore just when he finished for the day. But duty won, as usual.

“Halstead here.”

“Hi, Professor. Monty Worden, I was wondering could you drop around to the sheriff’s office. Few little things, easier to talk about in person than on the phone...”

Had they finally found Paula’s attackers? It had been eighteen days since her death. He was aware that he was trembling — not enough sleep, despite his thrice-weekly workouts. Those damned nightmares...

But no use giving Worden the satisfaction of knowing how hard it had been to wait. “Can it keep until tomorrow afternoon, Sergeant?”

“Huh? Oh, sure. No hurry. Say — three o’clock, county sheriff’s office, five-oh-nine Jefferson? I’m in the Detective Bureau.”

Five minutes later Curt went down the new cement walk to his VW in the faculty parking area. Less than a month to finals, then the empty summer stretching ahead. Before Paula’s... death, he had looked forward to it; now he dreaded it. How would he fill its endless hours?

The afternoon was cloudy, gray to match his mood, with a sky so indigo over the Coast Range to the west that it was nearly black. A gust of wind whipped at his hair and tipped up one lapel of his jacket like the edge of a lilypad in a pond. He went down University Way to Los Feliz, fed a parking meter, and climbed the long straight flight of stairs to Floyd Preston’s gymnasium. It was on the second floor above the Western Union office. Curt had signed up the Tuesday following Paula’s suicide; he hadn’t slept a moment since Worden’s Sunday visit, and had read somewhere that weight-lifting was so strenuous it could numb the mind as well as the body. It hadn’t worked, but at least he had been losing weight.

The gymnasium had once been a dance studio, a great boxy room with high ceilings and polished hardwood floor. The right-hand wall was windows, starting chest-high and extending upward; every few feet around the other walls were full-length mirrors. Between the mirrors on the left wall were racks of weight-graduated barbells; the racks of dumbbells were under the windows, at right angles to the wall. At either end of the gym were raised wooden platforms, mirror-backed, on which were the heavy- competition-style Olympic barbell sets. Scattered about were a dozen vinyl-covered benches and various chrome pulleys and other apparatus.

Curt ignored the dozen or so men working out, going by them to the locker and shower area in the rear, separated from the gym by a partition and curtained doorways. He didn’t see Preston, but he saw that the upper half of the office Dutch door was open, so the gym owner could check who was on the floor without leaving the office.

Curt got sweat pants and sweat shirt from his locker, then stripped and stepped on the scales: 209. Down thirteen pounds altogether, which was oddly satisfying. He sighed as he drew on the sweat clothes; so much in his life he would have done differently, if he had known that Paula... that Paula suddenly would be gone.

Curt followed Preston’s typed program of exercises with singular intensity, starting with three sets of sit-ups on the incline board — lowest rung — and then going on to the dumbbell clean and press. By the middle of the second set he was puffing; by the end of the third, red-faced and blowing.

“You handle yourself as if you used to know your body pretty well, Halstead.”

Curt started; Floyd Preston had approached as silently as a cat. He was like a cat in other ways: lithe, graceful, deceptively muscular and enormously strong. His face was broad, hard-chinned and angular under a thatch of thinning blond hair — a face that would have been Indian if it hadn’t been dominated by cold blue eyes. He was about thirty-five but moved like a teen-age athlete.

Curt wiped a forearm across his face. “At least I’m working up a good sweat.”

“Usually only body-builders preparing for a meet work out as hard as you’ve been going at it these past two weeks.”

“I... lost my wife recently, so I... some trouble sleeping...”

He ran down. He had come to hate the stock, pat condolences one invariably was offered, and had been pleased to keep his discussions with Preston limited to reps, sets, poundages, lats, pecs, delts, presses, curls, squats.

But the gym owner surprised him: no sympathy. He merely said, “Must be a hell of an adjustment to make.” His voice was very deep; he had thin lips and a broad sensitive mouth.

Curt finished his workout, stripped, weighed. Down three pounds — most of it, of course, merely water loss from sweating. Driving up El Camino in search of a bearable drive-in supper, he turned his thoughts to Worden for the first time since leaving the university. Would he be given faces to fit on the attackers tomorrow? Perhaps even names? The depth of his own emotion surprised him: he wanted to see them tried, and imprisoned, and the key thrown away. The society which had spawned such predators owed that much to Paula and to Harold Rockwell.

Curt parked on curving Jefferson Street, and walked back through bright May sunshine to the newly completed civic center complex. The sheriff’s office was in a pink stucco building with three floors and a large sign announcing it as the Hall of Justice and Records. A cement mall separated this building from the County Courthouse. Curt entered a glum and drafty hallway and saw a hand-lettered sign directing him to his left. The room had a wooden counter down the center, to Curt’s left, and more hand-painted signs indicating the elevators, the Criminal Division, Corrections, and the Comity Jail.

“Can you direct me to the Detective Bureau?” Curt asked.

Behind the counter was a very large red-headed man in a pale blue shirt with the Sheriff Department’s emblem on the shoulder. He had a two-way radio mike in a right hand that made the mike look small. His sunburned, craggy features wore a slight look of exasperation. At Curt’s question, he gestured toward the ceiling with the mike. “Third floor. Criminal Division.”

Curt thanked him and went on. The elevator was deliberate, moving with the slow majesty of the law; it had an outsized cage which Curt guessed was for the transporting of prisoners between the jail and the courthouse. At the third floor was a reception desk with a small switchboard directly in front of the elevator. The receptionist was a thirtyish blonde with heavy hips and go-to-hell eye make-up.

By contrast, her voice was very subdued. “Can I help you, sir?”

“I have an appointment with Detective-Sergeant Worden.”

“Certainly. If you’ll wait a moment, please, sir.”

The girl, who had a well-filled blue sweater and meaty dimpled knees under a flaring black skirt, took Curt’s card and went through a door directly behind her desk. She shut the door carefully behind her. DETECTIVE BUREAU was painted on the opaque glass.

She returned in less than a minute. “Tins way, Mr. Halstead.”

The Detective Bureau was brutally functional. There were three interrogation cubicles against the rear wall, windows along the right. The left wall was totally without ornament, the way a totally bald man is without hair. There was another door directly beside that through winch Curt had entered; Lieutenant Dorsey was painted in one corner of its glass panel. Inside the cubicle, a thick-bodied man was champing a dead cigar and bending over a littered desk, waiting.

Down the center of the main room was a double row of twelve gray metal desks with three-foot aisles between. On each desk was a telephone and beside each a typewriter stand. There were only four typewriters. Each desk bore an In and Out basket, and a plaque giving the name and rank of the desk’s occupant. Five desks were in use.

“Sergeant Worden is—”

“Yes, thank you, ma’am. I see him.”

Worden’s desk was the fourth one on the left-hand side; he rose as Curt started toward him. On the desk was a small framed photo of a work-faded woman and two towheaded kids. They shook hands and sat.

“Good of you to come, Professor.”

“I appreciate being put in the picture.”

Somehow the conventionally banal exchange was like the crossing of rapier blades. Worden grunted as if skeptical of Curt’s appreciation.

“You’ve lost some weight. Little trouble sleeping, maybe?”

“I’ve started working out at a gym in town,” said Curt.

“Well, we all oughta get more exercise.” He slapped a gut that sounded like an oak tree struck with a club. “Floyd Preston’s place, huh? One tough cookie, that Preston. I remember when he opened up ten, twelve years ago, a lot of the barroom boys tried to pick a fight with him. Not many of them do any more.”

It was the longest digression Curt had ever heard him make, and he wondered if Worden was having trouble getting started. “I see. I’d like to know what your investigation has uncovered to date, Sergeant.”

“Yeah. Well.” Worden’s eyes lost their momentary faraway look. “I checked with the local cops on this Rockwell thing. Blew one there; should of remembered that your wife was the witness. It’s messy, okay. The guy’s blinded for life. He saw the guys who jumped him, sure, but he’d never seen ’em before — and sure as hell won’t see ’em again.”

“Does he know why they attacked him, or—”

“Naw. Juveniles. The whole thing took one, maybe two minutes.” He paused to consult a folder. “Two-tone green Chevy station wagon, an older one — that’s from your wife to the Los Feliz cops, Rockwell can’t even give us that much. That’s all we got there. But on your wife’s thing, I got a little break. It seems a Mrs. Anderson called us about her kid. He’d been out to Sears Lake on his bike, and on the way home had the crap scared out of him by four guys near the golf course.”

“This was the Friday night that Paula...”

“Yeah. About eight o’clock. His ma made it sound like dicky-jerking — you know, child molestation — so we talked to the kid. He made most of it up, we find out, to explain gettin’ home late and to keep from gettin’ a spanking. But he did go by four guys just getting outta their car north of the golf course, little turn-around—”

“I know the place.” Curt was gripping the edge of the desk.

“It’s gravel, lots of eucalyptus leaves; no identifiable tire casts, no assurance that what marks we did find were made that Friday night. Interesting thing is, the interior light was on, and the kid says it was a fifty-five or fifty-six Chevy station wagon. He’s sure of that. No description of the guys, of course, just big guys — but to a ten-year-old, anybody over fourteen looks big. One of ’em fat, one of ’em short — like that.”

Curt said thoughtfully, “They would have parked just after dark, walked down the fairway, cut through the ditch to our drive...”

“Yeah. By the fourteenth green. Again, no usable casts, just a place where several guys went across — could of been four.” Worden leaned forward, gesturing with his big, thick hands. “Then we got lucky again. Just for the hell of it, I had the lab boys print that downstairs reading room where we figure the assault took place. Got three clear prints, plus a partial, plus half a palm print, all of the same hand. Not yours, not your wife’s — but we got enough for an ident if we ever have a hand to match ’em up with. Got ’em off the wall behind the sofa, where you might expect a guy to put his hand when he...”

Curt drew a deep ragged breath as Worden stopped. “Well, it sounds to me like you’ve made a good deal of progress, Sergeant. Where do we go from here?”

Worden shifted in his chair. Then he began playing with a ballpoint pen from the desk. When the silence had become oppressive, he looked up at Curt again.

“We don’t go nowhere, Professor.” Seeing the sudden darkening of Curt’s eyes, like the darkening of a pond when the first cat’s paw of wind touches it, he added hurriedly, “Oh, hell, we’ll keep it open. But for all practical purposes, our investigation is finished.”

Curt’s voice rose sharply, as if a knife had just been jammed through the back of his hand. “But you can’t just... just quit!”

Heads turned, but only briefly; raised voices were no novelty in the Detective Bureau.

Worden leaned forward, his eyes suddenly bleak. “Christ, do you think I like it? There’s just two kinds of people in my book, mister: the worms and the human beings. Law-breakers and law-keepers. These four snotty young bastards are worms. I’d like to get ’em alone in an alley for just five minutes, I’d wipe their noses for ’em so they’d never want to touch another woman again. But if I arrested ’em, Professor — then I couldn’t even hold ’em.”

Curt was spluttering. “What the devil do you mean? Why... why, they attacked and blinded a man. And then, because my wife had seen them, they invaded my home, did...” He choked off for a moment; the images flashing across his mental screen were too vivid. “...did some thing to her that was bad enough so she killed herself. And you say you couldn’t hold them if you did find and arrest them?”

“Okay, let’s take the Rockwell assault, Professor. The guy is blind. In court, just how the hell does he identify ’em? Braille?”

“But...”

“Remember, we’re talking about a smart defense attorney being present to cross-examine. Voices? Who the hell was ever convicted on the evidence of voices, except maybe that French dame — Joan of Arc?”

“But my wife was there. She—” Curt stopped abruptly.

“Yeah. She’s dead. The kid on the bike? Great. He saw four guys getting out of a car. Okay, so we got the fingerprints. Hard evidence — of sorts. If they were made by one of the gang, and if we ever catch up with him, and if we can get him to confess and name the others.” He snorted. “So the D.A. brings ’em to trial — for assault and rape, remember, neither one of ’em capital crimes in this state — and then whadda we have? Juveniles, that’s what. When the court psychiatrists and court-watchers and newspaper sob-sisters and A.C.L.U. lawyers got through, the D.A.’d be damned lucky to get ’em on probation and remanded to the custody of their parents for a year.” He hurled his pen down in sudden culminating frustration. “Juvies, for God sake!”

Curt stood up slowly, unmoved, barely aware of Worden’s tirade. His stomach was sour and his head ached. “You’re saying that there is damned little chance that they ever will be apprehended, even less chance that they will be prosecuted, and no chance at all that they will be convicted and punished for anything.”

Worden spread his huge paws in wry deprecation, once more in control of his reactions. “I’d be a liar if I told you anything else.” He stood up, stretched a hand across the desk. “No hard feelings? It’s just the facts of life, Professor.”

Curt looked at the hand, then into Worden’s once more hooded eyes; his own hands were fisted in his pockets. He ignored Worden’s hand, very deliberately, to turn and walk from the room. Behind him, Worden shook his head, sighed, then sat down and began thoughtfully worrying his lower lip.

Chapter 9

Through the floor of his room, faintly, Rick could feel the throb of the television set. His folks, watching some stupid program. How the hell was a guy supposed to study with all that going on, and finals only three weeks away? He had to do well, otherwise he might end up in the Army. Even his old man, who had flown a desk back in World War II, stud that the service was a waste of time.

QUESTIONS FOR STUDY: 1) What were the dominant features of the program advanced by the German liberals in 1884?

Had that kid on the bike seen them well enough to identify them?

2) What Christian philosopher wrote De Consolatione Philosophiae?

The newspapers, in telling of Paula’s suicide, hadn’t said anything about the kid. Did this mean the police didn’t know about him?

3) Name the Latin history of England completed by the Venerable...

Rick slammed shut the book impatiently. If the kid hadn’t gone to the police already, why would he go now? Maybe the police didn’t even know she’d made love before she killed herself. Maybe...

Why did she have to go and do that?

Dark thoughts pattered busily through the back of his mind, like rats in a cave, but he quickly closed them away. She had, that was the only important thing now, and that kid was their only danger now. If he got really scared some way, so he’d be too scared to identify them, they’d be safe. But how to scare him?

Rick drummed his fingers on the desk. A phone call was safest, because then if he couldn’t identify them, he wouldn’t have seen them. A really rank anonymous phone call, threatening... say, make the call to his ma. That would be better. Rick knew all about how protective mothers could be when they thought their children were in jeopardy.

He slipped from the room and down the front stairs to the carpeted front hall where the phone was. Lucky both his sisters were out and his folks glued to the television; they’d blow a gasket or something if they caught him not studying. His ma was really hysterical about him maybe flunking out and having to go into the Army.

Heavy Gander’s old man, who was a sheet-metal worker in Local 272, had moved to California from Ohio right after the war and had gotten an acre, cheap then, of weedy field just off Middlefield Road. He had built the garage well back from the bungalow, with the idea of maybe doing auto repair in his spare time. But after his wife had died, he had found that fishing took up most of his leisure hours. The garage, separated from the house by a weed-choked patch of ground, gradually had become Heavy’s domain. There he did auto repair, keeping the station wagon, his beat-up Rambler, and his old man’s Dodge in running order. He had bootlegged in a phone extension, using a set he’d bought from a mail order house, and had blacked out the windows so the gang could drink beer there and make all the noise they wanted.

On Saturday morning the four of them met in the garage.

“I told you we should of left when he went by on his bike,” Heavy said nervously. His cherubic face was distressed above his can of beer.

“How the hell could we know she was going to kill herself?” Rick, as leader, couldn’t let them see how the suicide had affected him. “So now all we gotta do is make sure that the kid keeps his mouth shut.”

“But we gotta find him first, Rick,” said Champ anxiously. He was sitting on a stool with his elbows on the edge of the workbench.

Julio cut in, “He is a paper boy, he will follow the same route every morning — and we already know one house he will go by. I will use the little green Rambler, and will find out his name and where he lives.”

“My car? Aw, now look, you guys...” Heavy belched suddenly, cueing a giggle from Julio.

Rick, however, growled angrily. “Shut up, Heavy. You’re the only guy with two cars.”

Rick made a point of leaving the garage with Julio. “How come you volunteered like that? You’ve still got classes for two weeks...”

“Champ is too dumb to do it, and Heavy is too damn chicken.” He paused for a moment, his liquid eyes gleaming. “But there is something I must say to you, Rick. We worry about this boy, who probably knows nothing of us, yet Debbie knows you were supposed to be there that night.”

Rick felt a surprising surge of anger. Who did this little bastard think he was? Now that Rick remembered, Julio hadn’t really helped much in beating up that goddamn queer that night. He hadn’t been slow to get his turn at Paula, though.

“Leave Debblie out of this, Julio! I told you: she doesn’t know any of us were there that night. She thinks I had a flat tire on the freeway on the way down from your house, and—”

“And if she hears the woman was raped?”

“Cool it, for Christ sake!” Rick shot nervous glances up and down the street. Two women were washing a car in a driveway across the street; half a block up, a black man was getting into an old pickup truck. “How’s she ever going to find out? You think that creep professor’s going to spread it around? Besides, old Debbie’ll believe anything I tell her.”

Julio shrugged. “Okay, Rick. Debbie is your concern — note. But if she becomes a danger, she becomes a danger to all of us.”

Julio Escobar was parked on curving Edgewood Drive, just as far from the boy’s house as he could and still see the front door. It was a pleasant subdivision on a slanting hillside, with winding streets with such names as Hillcrest, Glenwood, Cedar, and Sycamore. Ranch-style homes, saplings planted in front yards, lawns green from daily waterings. Since finding out, on Wednesday, where the boy lived, Julio had tried unsuccessfully to find out the name of the woman who lived there. Divorced from her husband, or something, and raising her kid alone. That was good. A woman without a man to protect her or her son.

Julio checked the rear-view mirror, slid lower in his seat. Finding and following the kid had been easy, had taken three days to get the right house. But he still didn’t have the name. That was why he was here on Sunday morning, waiting for the woman to take her son to church. If she didn’t, he’d have to think of something else.

It had made much trouble for them when Paula Halstead had killed herself; but in a way, he was pleased that she had. They had used her like a whore, but in death she had regained her honor. His father talked a great deal of honor, and it was important, even if it did not put any beans or tortillas in the belly.

Thirty-six years old she had been. Only a year younger than Julio’s mother. What would he, Julio, do if someone did to his mother what they had done to the Halstead woman? With no conscious action of his own, the switchblade suddenly was open in his hand. He tapped the blade against the Rambler’s steering post. Julio would take vengeance then. He was not like this college professor who had been Paula’s husband. Such a man was soft, would flutter away like a little bird, or perhaps hide under his desk when trouble came, like a little rabbit.

Julio was not like him. A knife, if you knew how to use it, made you nearly invincible against ordinary men. And Julio knew how to use his knife.

The front door opened and the boy came out, dressed in Sunday clothes. Julio tensed, slid the knife away. The boy tugged at the overhead door of the garage; it slid up easily. In a moment a white Ford Fairlane was backed out, with the woman behind the wheel.

She turned downhill, away from Julio. He sauntered down toward the house, turned in and went up the walk, his heart beating rapidly. Suddenly he was afraid. What if someone else was there, to remember his high narrow shoulders, his beak of a nose?

He faltered, almost stopped, then made himself ring the bell. He could hear it inside, an empty, heartening sound. He rang it again, to show himself he was not afraid, to make the dumb show convincing for the neighbors. He hoped one of them was watching, because...

“Hey you — kid.”

The man had come out of the garage of the house directly across the narrow subdivision street. He stood on the lawn, with a green plastic garden hose drooping from one hand.

“Ye...” Julio cleared his throat. This was what he had wanted, wasn’t it? “Yes, sir?”

The face relaxed a little at the “sir”; Julio had learned in school that politeness paid off.

“You looking for Miz Anderson?”

Anderson! As easy as that! “I... well, a Mr. Anderson, sir.”

“Hasn’t been a mister there for near two years.” He had a round pleasant face, weekend-stubbled, and wore a windbreaker, a white T-shirt, jeans worn under a respectable beer belly, a black baseball cap with SF intertwined on it in orange. “Just Barb and the boy live there...”

“l wanted a... Frank Anderson, sir.”

“Naw. His name was Charlie before they split up. Guess his name still is Charlie, come to think of it.”

Julio left him chuckling at his own wit, and returned to the Rambler. He U-turned away from the house of his informant, drove down looping residential streets to El Camino, and went south until he came to a shopping center. It was Sunday-deserted, its white-lined lot so lightly dusted with cars that he could drive diagonally across to the phone booths. He riffled through the county directory. Yes. There was the listing. He carefully copied down the phone number.

“Lemme call her, Rick,” begged Champ. He worked his muscular hands, making the cords jump and quiver in his forearms.

“Cutting cards is the only fair way,” Julio objected. Like Rick, he was afraid that Champ would foul up the call if he made it. It was Tuesday night, and they were back in Heavy’s garage again, with its grease-stained floor and mingled odors of metal and oil and gasoline.

Heavy was sweating profusely; the shirt was plastered over his seal-like body. “I don’t see why we gotta cut cards,” he whined, watching Rick shuffle. Then, seeing the look in the others’ eyes, he went on lamely, “Well, I mean, Champ wants to and all, and...”

“And you’re chicken. We cut cards, like I said. Low man.”

“I’ll go first,” said Champ eagerly.

Rick put the deck on the workbench, under the extension light that hung from a nail in the rafter above. Their hands, arms, and chests were in the glaring light as Champ cut; their faces were just pale blobs in the dimness outside the circle of illumination.

“Aw, hell, a seven. That ain’t very low, is it?”

Rick shuffled again without answering. His fingers were smeary when he touched the deck, and he knew he didn’t want to make the call. There was something... well, uncool, in threatening a little kid. Even when it was necessary. So he blew out a breath of silent relief when he got a jack of clubs; but he turned to Heavy with only sarcasm in his voice. “Let’s see what the crybaby gets.”

It was a ten. Heavy, who had been eating a candy bar, left smears of chocolate on the cards. He didn’t bother to hide his relief. Julio, in his turn, cut an eight.

“Wow!” exclaimed Champ, “that means I win, huh, fellows?”

Rick said carefully, “Ah, Champ, maybe we ought to, ah, like make it three out of five, or...”

Champ’s face puckered like that of a baby about to cry. The thick muscles swelled in his throat. He looked from Julio to Rick and back again; they were the ones he had to convince. Heavy, he knew, wanted him to have the fun of calling.

“I know you think I ain’t smart enough to do it right,” he said earnestly, “But I can do it. I know I can. Why, I already...”

He already had made those other two calls, the ones to Nancy Ellington. She was seventeen or something, and went to one of those fancy Catholic girls’ schools run by the nuns or somebody. This long black hair, see, and a round real serious face, and sometimes she would talk to him when he was working in the garden at her folk’s place.

One morning she was off from school for a saint’s birthday or something, and he was going by her bedroom window, real early it was, and there she was bare-ass, so he saw her tits and everything.

“You already what, Champ?” prompted Julio.

“I... ah... nothin’. I just... I got a right to do it...”

That Saturday he’d called up with his handkerchief over the phone like he’d seen on the TV, just to tell her what he wanted to do to her but she’d busted out crying. He’d called the next day, too, but old Mr. Ellington answered and said the police were tracing the call, so he’d hung up, real quick, and hadn’t ever called again.

Rick sighed. “Okay, Champ, you got a right to do it. We’ll call right now, while Heavy’s old man isn’t home.”

“Aw, Christ, Rick, from here?” Heavy’s chins trembled. “What if they trace the call or something, and—”

“They can’t trace through all the electronic equipment they use now,” Rick scoffed. “Not unless they’re all set up ahead of time.”

So they clustered around the bootlegged phone extension while Champ dialed. The woman picked up on the third ring. Not even Rick could find any fault with Champ’s performance; in fact, at the end of the two minutes he was sweating. Some of the things Champ said would happen, not only to the boy but to the woman herself, if anybody talked to the police about that night by the golf course, made him, in fact, feel sort of sick. When he glanced over, Julio looked the same way.

But Heavy, once the phone was back in its hook, seemed to feel only a slightly lascivious excitement and sense of power. “What’d she say, Champ, huh? What’d she say when—”

“She started to cry there at the last,” said Champ happily.

Chapter 10

Curt came from the tin-lined shower in the locker room, his skin flushed red from the needle spray of water, and began toweling off vigorously. He felt better than he had for a long time, at least physically. The scales told him he had broken two hundred pounds for the first time in several years, and the mirror told him that the workouts were beginning to make a difference in his appearance, also. It was just a little after noon of a Thursday — June 12th — and the warm summer air brought the minor rumble and squeal of Los Feliz traffic in through the locker room windows. Summer. There was the real trouble. Commencement was on Sunday; what in God’s name would he do with his time from now on? There was not even the hope of arrests of the members of the gang to carry him along any more.

Dressed, he started across the gym floor. Preston was just locking up the Dutch doors of the office. His face lighted up when he saw Curt. Sometime in the seven weeks Curt had been coming to the gym, they had graduated to first names.

“Hey, old buddy, you got time for a sandwich and a beer?”

Curt hesitated. He had been worried about filling up his days; this was one way. “Sure, why not, Floyd? We can even use my car.”

Preston directed him to the Pigskin Club, a small bar and restaurant which faced an access road off Bayshore Freeway. Only one car was parked in front.

“Al doesn’t serve lunches,” Preston explained. “But he’ll make us a couple of salami sandwiches.”

The heavy front door was leather-padded and brass-studded on the inside; Curt paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the interior dimness. Directly in front was a small dining room with a dozen white-clothed square tables set for the supper trade; to the right was an archway leading into the taproom. The bar had red vinyl fronting and red-topped stools with chromium legs.

“Curt, I’d like you to meet Al Ferrano. Al, Curt Halstead.”

Ferrano was a short dapper man with bright eyes in a swarthy face. At first glance he was forty; a closer look suggested a very well-kept fifty. He wore a white apron over his shirt and slacks.

“You must work out at the gym,” he said as they shook hands.

“I just started a few weeks ago.”

Ferrano shook his head; he had a quick ready smile. “This bar keeps me too dimmed busy. I only get up there twice a week, so all I do is arm and shoulder work.”

He had flipped the caps from three bottles of icy beer while he talked; he set them, beaded and glistening, on the bar, and busied himself with French rolls and mayonnaise. He had singularly heavy forearms.

“I gotta work out for arm-wrestling, would you believe it? My main trade in here is working guys, and after a few beers the construction boys always wanna arm-wrestle.” He gestured expansively with the broad-bladed French chef’s knife. “Well, what the hell could I do? You don’t wrestle ’em, you’re a shit-heel and they don’t come back. You do, you lose all the time, you’re giving the house away. So I started working out at Floyd’s gym.”

Three men came in, nodded to Ferrano, and settled at the back end of the bar. Ferrano set the sandwiches in front of Curt and Preston.

“Now, thanks to Floyd, guys come in just to try and beat me. Win or lose, they’re good for a few drinks, so it’s done wonders for business. Excuse me, huh, fellows?”

As he was serving the three men, a blond girl arrived, and then another pair of men. Someone fed the juke box. Curt munched salami sandwich, drank beer. For the first time since Paula’s death he felt an inner spring of tension begin gradually to unwind. Preston asked what he taught at the university, and Curt realized that they really knew nothing at all of each other’s backgrounds. Which struck him as somehow intriguing, since the gym had become a major focal point in his life during the past weeks.

“Anthropology, Floyd. Mainly upper-level courses these days, which is rather a pity. One becomes gradually isolated from the undergraduates, the ones on whom you can most easily see your fingermarks.”

Preston turned his empty bottle with a muscle-thickened hand that looked capable of crushing the glass to brown powder. “I never finished high school — was in the eleventh grade when Korea started, so I quit to join the Army. After Korea, I never went back.” His marvelous grin suddenly quirked at the corners of his mouth and made his blue eyes light up almost impishly. “I figured there wasn’t enough in my head to live on anyway, so I decided to depend on my back.” He slid off his stool. “Why don’t you order us a couple of more, Curt? I’ll be right back — my kidneys are floating.”

Curt caught Ferrano’s eye, nodded for two more beers, and then caught his own reflection in the back-bar mirror. What did they call it? Fighting the mirror. Odd, Ferrano had spotted him as a body-builder — unless it just had been a guess based on the fact that he was with Preston. That seemed more likely.

His elbow was jostled; the place was filling up. How many years had it been since he’d drunk beer in a workingman’s bar? Ferrano brought the beers. He had a good thing going here, and knew it. Curt glanced around, saw Preston returning with his catlike tread. In his form-fitting T-shirt and tight slacks, he was a living advertisement for his own gymnasium. Curt also saw that the man who had jostled his elbow had taken Preston’s stool despite the weight-lifter’s change, cigarettes, glass, and newly opened beer on the bar in front of it.

“That’s okay,” Preston said, coming up as Curt was reaching out to tap the other man on the shoulder. “I’d just as soon stand for a bit.” He edged up to the bar between Curt and the other man, and began pouring out his beer.

The man on the stool turned abruptly. “Hey, watch who you’re shoving, mac,” he said.

Preston eyed him pleasantly. “Sorry. I didn’t know you’d bought the place from Al.”

He turned back to Curt, but the other man laid a heavy hand on his shoulder from behind. The shoulder quivered under the touch, Curt saw, exactly like the shoulder of a horse quivering under a fly, but Preston allowed himself to be swung around.

“I said watch who you’re shoving, mac.” He was stocky and dark, with a tough belligerent face hazed with the day’s whiskers. A pair of stained and tattered leather work gloves was on the bar beside him. “If I want any crap from you, mister, I’ll beat it out.”

“Are you looking for trouble?” asked Preston pleasantly.

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I—”

Preston hit him.

The blow traveled a bare six inches, but man and stool went over backwards and sideways with a crash that froze conversation along the bar. The fallen warrior, sprawled on the rug, shook his head as if to clear it. The action had been so much like a television fight that Curt almost expected a huckster to appear selling cigarettes. None did.

Instead. Preston poked a finger at the other man. “If you want to fight, get up and fight. Otherwise, I owe you a beer.”

Ferrano set them up, bustling noisily, making jokes, slapping shoulders, as the man got up and moved down the bar, muttering, with his companion.

Preston sent two beers down to them, righted his stool, and calmly sat down. “If a guy wants trouble, hit him first,” he remarked. “But if he has a thick neck and isn’t fat, watch out. And if he doesn’t fall down — run.”

Curt shook his head in amazement. “Does this sort of thing happen to you very often?”

“It used to when I first opened the gym. Guys then still used to think that weight-lifters and body-builders were so musclebound that they’d tear something if they lifted an arm above their shoulder.” He shook his head and grinned. “I suppose I used to think the same thing, before I started lifting. That was while I was in the Army — cadre in the infantry in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Little Korea, we called it.”

“You sounded like an anthropologist yourself there for a minute,” Curt said. Then he added, seeing Preston’s blank expression, “That thing about watching out for men with thick necks who aren’t fat. You are a student of the physical man — and in the broadest terms, anthropology is a study of man and his works.”

Curt meant to stop there, but he had drunk several beers, had eaten only a light lunch after a heavy workout, and had been having a rotten time sleeping at night. He went on to social anthropology, his own discipline in the field, and found he was talking almost compulsively. It was a strange performance, with part of him sitting back and shaking its head while he rocketed on ineluctably toward Paula’s suicide. The ease with which Preston had handled the random violence in the bar had loosened some inner brake; he was like a truck left unattended on top of a hill, taking a long time to get started but impossible to stop once he was rolling.

It was nearly three o’clock when he finally ran down, ending with, “...and Sergeant Worden says there’s no legal way to touch them, even if the police ever would catch up with the ones who did it.”

Preston gave him an odd look. “Yeah, it’s the old squeeze. The difference between what you satisy yourself with, and what you have to have to satisfy a judge and jury.” He paused for a moment, said offhandedly, “You almost sound as if you’d like to go after them yourself.”

“Me?” Curt was truly startled. “Lord no, not me, Floyd. I wouldn’t have the slightest idea of how to go about it, and I wouldn’t know what to do with them if I would find them. I... I guess I’m not a very good hater.”

“Yeah? I would have thought...” Preston stopped, stretched, and slid off the stool. “I’d better get on back to the gym, Curt. Even on Thursdays the guys start coming in around four o’clock.”

After dropping Preston off, Curt tried to hang on to the rather sleepy, euphoric, beery feeling he’d had in the bar; but by the time he had arrived home, it was completely dissipated. He felt singularly useless, somehow dislocated in time. He had always prided himself on his involvement in modem American life: he approved of change, of new directions, new methods at the university. He approved of student involvement in protest marches and civil rights and antiwar agitation. Because of these attitudes, he had always felt himself deeply involved in the goals and aspirations and everyday life of the country.

Yet that afternoon he had felt a gulf separating him from the others in the bar — not a feeling of superiority, just a feeling of apartness. An uncomfortable feeling that his thoughts, actions, reactions to any given situation would not be theirs. How many of his colleagues at the university would dismiss Floyd Preston with witty, cutting, erudite jokes because he ran a muscle emporium? Yet Preston was decisive in everyday situations in a way that Curt desperately wished he could be. If a guy wants trouble, hit him first. Preston saw nothing wrong in the idea of taking vengeance into one’s own hands.

Curt went into the room where the rape had happened. The weekly cleaning lady had been in there every Monday with her vacuum sweeper and dustrag, but Curt had not opened the door since that night. Now, standing in the middle of the room made dim by drawn shades, he remembered vividly the rumpled daybed, the accordioned rug, the overturned stool. He shivered.

Paula, facing it alone, no way to turn, no hope at all of aid...

Paula, whom he had never seen with her head bowed in fourteen years of marriage, defeated, broken, destroyed...

God, why hadn’t he come home early that night? He drew a long shuddering breath and walked out into the hall.

Paula was dead: dead, dead, bloody dead, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Was there?

Chapter 11

Debbie drew a deep shuddering breath and pulled back from Rick’s embrace. “Darling — please. We mustn’t. I have to go in now.”

“Just a little while longer,” he pleaded. His hand again sought her breast through its protective cup of brassiere.

“No, please, Rick. I just... you know, it’s just...”

Rick sighed in mock resignation and removed his hand. Debbie, her face flushed, quickly closed the top three buttons his agile fingers had undone. Her hands were shaking slightly. Rick smiled his special smile, and hopped out of the driver’s side of the Triumph. Then, as Debbie quickly smoothed down her rumpled skirt, he stuck his head in under the canvas top on his side. “Just so long as you aren’t sore,” he said.

When he got around the back of the car to open her door, she said, “You know I’m not, darling.”

The smile she flashed was so full of future delights that Rick caught his breath sharply. When she slid out, he enjoyed an exciting glimpse of her legs well beyond her stocking tops. That was one thing about the old Triumph, all right. It made them show what they had. He put his arm around her waist as they went up the walk together to Forrest Hall.

He started up the steps with her, but Debbie drew him along the front of the porch into the shadows cast by the supporting columns. “So you won’t forget me before next time, Ricky,” she said.

She raised her face to his; when their lips met, her tongue darted into his mouth for a moment. Her breathing was short and quick when she finally drew away. Rick said, “Tomorrow night, Deb?”

“I’ve got to spend the weekend with my folks,” she said. “They don’t even know I signed up for summer school yet. Classes start next week, so we’d better wait until Friday — a week from tomorrow.”

“Week from today, actually,” said Rick. “Eight o’clock. Here.”

“Okay.” She pecked him quickly on the mouth, slid from his automatic attempt to embrace her, and trotted up the steps. On the porch she stopped to blow him a kiss, then went in quickly, catching the screen door so it wouldn’t slam. Safely out of sight inside, she leaned against the wall to get her breath. Wow! Even her legs felt weak!

Friday. She’d made it a whole week as a sort of self-discipline. She went quickly to the door again, and looked out. Rick, erect and clean-limbed, was climbing into the Triumph. This was going to be some summer! She couldn’t tell her folks, of course, that she’d signed up for summer school because she’d suddenly realized that she didn’t want to spend the whole summer on the other side of the Bay, in San Leandro. Where Ricky wasn’t.

Debbie floated up the stairs to her room. The dorm was nearly deserted, except for the senior girls who would be graduating on Sunday, because the summer session classes didn’t begin until Wednesday.

She started to undress. It really would be a fight not to let Ricky do whatever he wanted to her; just his touch seemed to make fears and inhibitions and hesitations melt. She was glad she was going to be attending classes, because she always studied hard and that would help keep it from getting out of hand. She’d almost given in to him last July, out by Sear’s Lake that time when he’d gotten her blouse off and her bra pushed up and everything, and had almost lost him because of it. He’d dropped her completely for nine months, until he’d called in April about getting Professor Halstead’s address. She was glad, really, because it showed he wasn’t just interested in what he could get from her.

Funny. It had started over again with Professor Halstead, and now his wife was dead and the professor was living all alone out in that big house by the golf course. She remembered Paula from that faculty-student tea: a mature blond woman with a really marvelous figure despite her age. Debbie bet the professor really missed her. Look at the way Ricky, who had hardly known her, had reacted to her suicide.

Debbie stopped with her dress halfway over her head. Paula Halstead and... Ricky? That was silly, of course, but... But it would explain so many things that had bothered her in the past weeks. Like that sort of flimsy reason he’d had for wanting to see her alone. How broken up Ricky had been at her death.

He could have met her downtown, sometime... or in a bar. She knew he sometimes went into bars, because he had shown her the false ID that Heavy Gander had gotten for him somewhere.

She finished undressing very quickly, and got into her flannel pajamas. What if... She bounced into bed, sat with her arms clasping her up-drawn knees. What if Paula had killed herself because... because Rick hadn’t shown up that Friday? That would explain so much.

Debbie’s lips thinned and her eyes became calculating. Was she in competition for Rick with the dead woman? A mature, exciting woman who could have wrapped an inexperienced boy like Rick around her... well, around her finger?

Debbie might not be a mysterious, slinky, smoldering blonde: but she had a good figure if she did admit it herself, and she was right here, right now. Alive and warm and... yes, available, if that was going to be what it took to erase the image of the older woman.

Driving away from the dorm in his flashing red car, Rick pressed the cigarette lighter and turned the radio to a San Francisco pops station. His cigarette canted up at a jaunty angle as he approved his image in the rear-view mirror.

That Debbie, she was something else! Insipid, had he thought? Wow. When she’d Frenched him there, by the porch, he’d thought he was going to cream his jeans. Somehow he was going to get into her pants. A motel? She wouldn’t go to one with him. Not now, not yet. Maybe his folks’ cabin down by the ocean? Take it slow, talk her around to it? He shouldn’t have dropped her last summer, but she hadn’t been much then.

The lighter popped, he steered one-handed to light up, sending the car in squealing playful sweeps down the deserted drive. She really turned him on, old Deb; not like Paula Halstead had, of course, but...

His mood dissolved. He shrieked the car into the down-ramp to El Camino. Now, at nearly midnight, there were great black gaps in the traffic. The beat pounded out sure and strong from the radio. Paula Halstead. He still could remember that second time, her throwing her head back and forth while he’d been doing it. No other chick in his admittedly limited experience had come on that way with him.

Goddamn it, it wasn’t his fault, what she’d done afterward. At least now, with the ma of that kid on the bike scared shitless, they were safe. If only he could forget about what had happened afterward, to Paula. It shouldn’t have been that way. Shouldn’t have been at all. He should have met her someplace nice, alone, in a bar, maybe. Streaking down the highway, he let his imagination roam.

Sure, a fancy cocktail place with thick rugs and soft indirect light-would see her, send a drink down to her, she would move over and start talking with him. Her husband couldn’t satisfy her, she’d saying, where they put a little napkin down under each woman’s drink. He and then she’d invite him over to her motel room. In the room they’d...

Rick slammed on the brakes, shrieked sideways down a hundred feet of concrete, watching with almost clinical detachment the on-rushing rear of the car he’d almost tailgated. He straightened her out, got into the right lane. Goddamn old creep, barely moving! His hands were shaking a little. Cup of coffee? Sure. Relax a minute. Ahead was the little café where Debbie first had told him about Paula’s suicide. That had really been a shock. But as far as he was concerned, Paula had never happened. He’d never laid eyes on her. Safer that way.

He slowed, pulled into the white-lined parking area to the right of the café. His fear at the near-crash had begun melting into his lingering arousal from Debbie’s goodnight. The trouble with young stuff like Deb was that you had to play the game with them. The older ones, they wanted it and they admitted it, just like a guy would.

Older women.

He peered through the windshield and lighted square window of the little diner. Older women like that blond waitress here who’d tipped him the wink that night. Funny, he’d forgotten about her until right now, but there she was, just putting down a hamburger in front of some guy. Bleached blonde, twenty-five, maybe pushing thirty almost. The sort who’d let a guy try goddamn near anything he wanted with her. He checked his image in the mirror, ran a comb through his hair. Debbie, get him all turned on and then... goodnight, huh? Well, maybe this chick... just maybe...

Chapter 12

Curt awoke early on Friday morning with a profound feeling of depression, like a delayed hangover from the previous afternoon’s beer. But the depression was emotional, not physical, compounded in part from the nagging inadequacy he had felt the previous evening, standing in the downstairs room where the rape of Paula had taken place. Without classes, without his seminar to prepare, he walked through the household chores he had set himself; by two o’clock he was staring glumly out a window and through the trees to the dazzling green of the golf course.

Four men carrying their bags in little wheeled carts were trudging up the fairway, dwarfed by distance into plastic toy figures. Up that way on that Friday night would have come the predators, four of them, sheltered by darkness. One of Paula’s favorite Latin aphorisms came to mind: He who is bent on doing evil can never want occasion. Certainly, if those who had attacked Paula also had attacked Rockwell, they had come here bent on evil.

One of the toy figures swung a club; after a long moment, Curt heard the hollow slap of wood on golf ball, saw the tiny gleaming shape roll to a stop on the other side of the fourteenth green. A good shot.

Feeling suddenly stifled in the house, Curt went down to the VW, got in, slid back the sun roof. That had been Paula’s idea; she had thought the convertible ugly but had wanted the sun on bright days. He started the car, went down the drive and north of Linda Vista. As he had come home that night, past the Longacres intersection. Down there a passing boy had seen the four, getting from their car, while Curt had dispensed wisdom in a drive-in booth. No such thing as evil: just poor, frustrated humanity occasionally snapping under the enormous impersonal pressures of society. While Paula’s life drained redly to the floor...

Stop it, damnit! There was nothing you could have done.

But what if certain maverick students of humanity like Dart and Leakey and Laurens were right: that in man there still stalked about an atavistic, unschooled self from the older, mindless days of his journey? And what if Curt should let his control of that self slip? Then what?

He took a right from Entrada into El Camino, then left into Brewer toward downtown Los Feliz. Time to stop indulging his Bogart fantasies: he was a middle-aged law-abiding university professor whose wife had killed herself and who was feeling guilty about her death. He tried to turn his mind outward, away from his compulsive scabpicking. The town was full of students whom Sunday’s commencement would release — from the university, from this town. Out they would go, sky-diving: it would all be free-fall for them then. You tried to prepare them for it, but you never knew whether you had succeeded; the surprise, really, was how well most of them landed.

He realized he was crossing the railroad tracks where Rockwell had been attacked. Some vague urge made him pull in and park across from the laundromat beyond the tracks, and walk back to the edge of the gravel-scattered planks. Right here Rockwell had fallen; here the faceless ones had struck. Kids, probably in a stolen car; kids, hopped-up or stoned or drunk, acting out some private fantasy projection. One read of it, the random violence, but never applied it to one’s own life.

But it happened. Into fashionable, quiet Los Feliz had come violence. An old green station wagon, driving south, squealing tires on the turn into Brewer. Slum kids from San Francisco, seeking kicks? Curt raised his head to look west at the Coast Range cupping the Peninsula cities against the Bay. Sparkling subdivisions massed the lower slopes. Slum kids? Or well cared-for kids from these shady streets and sleek ranch-style houses?

If this act of senseless violence had come from these homes, he thought, it became even more senseless, because these houses had been built as fortresses against economic want and personal frustration by a whole generation of parents grimly determined to give their kids everything they could. Under current theories, such homes should have been a quarantine against, not a culture for, the germs of violence.

Curt returned thoughtfully to his car, got in. I want that boy caught, and I want him punished. Now Paula was dead, and in turn her attackers also would go unpunished. Enforcers like Monty Worden, whose lives were intimately bound up with the swift and brutal collision of man with man, of man with society, seemed to push everyone around except the predators. In this society, they were the ones who struck and got away with it.

A pity, Curt thought, that just for a while he wasn’t a predator himself. As Worden had said, find them and get them alone long enough to make them hurt, hard, for the maimed and dead they had left behind. Render them unable to forget the magnitude of that hurt, that fear, so their sharp vicious edge would be gone and they would be lessened.

Curt realized that he was at the far edge of the brief Los Feliz business district. Ahead, on the right, was the old gray limestone building which housed the city library. Preston’s fight the day before must have turned his mind to the past again: to the old hectic days of the S.A.S., when you settled arguments in streets or bars with your hands, your heavy jump boots, and the lieutenant calmly ignored black eyes and puffy noses and swollen knuckles in morning parade. Yes, events in another life, to another person.

Certainly not to Curtis Halstead, Ph.D.

There was a free parking meter in midblock, and Curt parked. He went up the wide steps and into the library’s cool shadowed interior. Behind the desk was a teen-age girl, probably summer help, wearing a filmy white blouse which was blushed a pale flesh tint by her skin.

“Could you tell me where the newspaper files are, miss?”

“In the Periodical Room, sir. Go down that hallway...” She leaned across the desk to point out a corridor beyond the open stacks. “Third door on the right; you can’t miss it...”

As she leaned forward, Curt, without conscious volition, stared down the loose neck of her blouse to the shadowed curves of her swelling youthful unbrassiered breasts. He pulled his eyes away, met a face suddenly scornful of his momentary voyeurism, and backed hastily away even as he felt an almost horrifying stab of acute physical desire.

“I... thank you... miss...” he managed to say.

He fled clown the indicated corridor, paused only when he was out of sight of the desk. For God’s sake, she was truly young enough to be his daughter. Was he becoming some sort of dirty old man? He went on to the closed door marked Periodical Room in old-fashioned gilt letters. He could begin now to see the ludicrous elements of it: a forty-ish professor fleeing from a young girl’s half-glimpsed breasts as from some artful Circe’s abandoned sexual beckoning. It was, after all, a natural biological urge, and Paula had been gone for two months.

The periodical attendant was safely gray-haired, with new teeth that obviously did not fit her well. She seemed glad of a customer in the stuffy room. “Yes, sir” — she beamed — “we have the April numbers of the local papers. January through March aren’t available. They’re out being microfilmed, you see.”

“April is all I need,” Curt assured her.

He paged through the Los Feliz Daily Times for Saturday, April 26th, the day after Paula’s death. Sergeant Worden was quoted as saying that Mrs. Halstead had died of self-inflicted wounds. Period. Curt was grateful for the restrained tones. The only Monday followup was the obituary notice, for which he had supplied the material himself. The San Francisco Sunday papers carried only a very brief Woman Slays Self.

What masochistic impulse had brought him here to paw through the painful dust of memory? There was nothing he could do, damnit. But still, since he was here...

He returned to the Daily Times, checking Saturday, April 19th. The attack on Harold Rockwell, unlike Paula’s suicide, had been News. There was a front-page photo of Rockwell, obviously from a high school yearbook, a newspaper picture of Rockwell’s wife, Katherine, and one of Paula blown up from a sports section photo which had appeared when Paula and another faculty wife had won the faculty tennis doubles. On an inside page was a cut of the Brewer Street railroad crossing with an artist’s X marking the spot where Rockwell had fallen. Paula had merely been listed as “cooperating with the police” in their attempts to identify the assailants.

That didn’t really seem enough to trigger the four assailants into their second attack, a week later, on Paula. Could he be wrong? Could the assault and rape in his home be unconnected with the attack on Rockwell? Could it just after all have been random violence?

He returned to the newspaper. On Monday the editorial had been about Crime in the Streets. The police investigation, though not headlined, still had been front page. Rockwell was blind, probably permanently. This time Paula was mentioned as being sure she could identify one of the attackers if she saw him again, and was said to have gotten “a very good look” at the automobile driven by the gang.

Yes. That might have been enough. The obsession could have begun, and deepened: the need to see if she could identify the leading attacker. If she could, the necessity to silence her would loom very large in his thoughts. So it could have started as a simple assault, a beating, to assure her silence; but then, physically handling her, wrestling with her... Paula’s tennis-player’s body had been almost calculated to arouse desire...

Curt folded up the newspaper wearily. The society which had produced the predators had a good deal to answer for. Or did it? He was suddenly impatient with all the sociological muck he was used to reeling off glibly to his students. Society had not blinded Rockwell. Society had not raped Paula. No matter what pressures they may have been subject to — if any — the predators were the ones who had acted.

And what was needed was another predator, as violent as they.

Curt returned the papers, went back down the corridor and through the main library. His teen-age temptress was still at the desk; but now she was just an immature girl whose idea of being chic and daring was to sneak out of the house without wearing a bra under her blouse. As Curt went down the front steps and toward the VW, his mind was elsewhere.

What was needed was a predator, but there was none. So Paula’s agony would go unavenged, and the same thing might happen to others.

Curt wished that he hadn’t stopped at the railroad crossing, hadn’t come here to the library to burn the details of it all into his brain anew. Because of it, he was going to have a lousy time sleeping for the next couple of nights.

Chapter 13

“It’s a piece of bloody cake,” said the sergeant-major.

They were in the back of a Long Range Desert Group jeep, bouncing through the darkness toward a Jerry airdrome near the coast. It was Curt’s first mission. The jeep, key to this sort of hit-and-run operation, had no top or windscreen. On the back, on the sides, even on the hood were jerrycans of gasoline and water. Coupled twin Vickers K machine guns jutted up into the star-spattered desert night from both front and rear, their interlocking fields of fire covering the entire 360° radius about the jeep.

They were moving rapidly across open ground, without lights; whenever the jeep lurched, curses lashed the air.

“I’d rather make an effing air drop.” In the dark, faces were mere pasty smears. “A piece of bloody cake,” repeated the sergeant-major. “I’ve hit these desert airfields before, laddie. A few guards, a few patrols, a bit of wire, the odd machine-gun nest...”

They would slip through the wire in the dark, avoiding the patrols and sentries, to fix their high explosives on the planes. The nitro was mixed with incendiary material to make better fires, and would be detonated by half-hour time pencils which were designed to give them a mile or two of desert before the planes went up.

A piece of cake.

Going through the wire, Curt saw a red glow as a sentry drew on his cigarette a bare dozen yards from their entry point. All the man had to do was turn, see the moving shadows, fire his rifle or cry out...

Hand-to-Hand Manual was very firm about silencing a sentry. You went in from the rear, thrusting your knife into his right kidney while smothering any outcry; then you withdrew your knife, slashing as you did, and cut his throat. In the Manual, your opponent reacted to this silent, swift, tidy slaughter very much like a hundredweight of grain.

Curt touched the sergeant-major on the shoulder and slid away toward the sentry without further signal. He moved silently and without haste, his mind safely blank, concentrating only on the red glow as the sentry drew on his cigarette again.

Eight yards to go. In the clear desert air he could smell the burning tobacco. Five yards. The knife was in his right hand, point forward, guard against the tip of his thumb and edge of his forefinger.

The glowing dot moved erratically, then showered sparks in being snubbed out against the stock of the sentry’s rifle. Curt, motionless, now could see his dim silhouette. The sentry sighed, took his rifle from his shoulder, grounded the butt in the sand by his right boot, and muttered something under his breath in German. Curt went in fast under the cover of the man’s own movements.

His left hand closed over mouth and nose and pulled up and to the left, fingers digging into the flesh. He could feel the hard line of jawbone under his third finger; the edge of his thumb was pressed deeply against the sentry’s left eyeball, so he could feel the frantic rolling beneath the shielding lid. His legs, intertwined with the sentry’s, upset their balance so they started down.

The sentry instinctively put out his hands to break the fall, and Curt put his knife in. It went with a terrible ease, to the guard, with a slight ripping noise as it tore the shirt. All according to the Manual.

But then the sentry made a muffled grating noise, all of his scream that got through Curt’s fingers. He tried to bite, butt, jerk his face free from Curt’s terrible clutching strength. The body under Curt tensed to iron, trembled like a retriever coming from an icy lake. The sentry dug in toes, fingers, reached far above his head, dragged their coupled bodies forward even through the yielding sand.

Finally the rock-hard, straining muscles went flaccid. The toes stopped digging, the clenched hands opened. His strap hadn’t been fastened, so his helmet had flipped off, and Curt’s jaw was gouged hard against the short-clipped hair. The breathing stopped below him, but Curt didn’t move. He listened as the rest of the band fanned out across the airfield, but his moment of fierce exultation had turned to lassitude, to a drained, almost sick feeling.

Five minutes passed.

He had been nearly asleep. He rolled off Paula’s nude, sated body in the dark, then groped back again toward heavy melon of breast, silken hollow of hip, warm swell of pubic mound.

“Paula!” he whispered softly.

She didn’t move, playing dead. Curt chuckled and reached across to her far shoulder, tipped her toward him.

Her head flopped solidly on the pillow and she stared at him in the semi-dark, slack-jawed, with the sentry’s dead sand-gritted eyes.

Curt uttered a hoarse, jaw-creaking shriek of terror, his eyes strained so wide open that the whites showed all the way around. He hurled himself back, twisting in midair, and struck the varnished hardwood floor of the study with his chin, hard enough to jar his teeth.

He sprawled there for a moment in his pajama pants, then rolled over and sat up. His eyes still were wild and his jaw ached. A shudder of revulsion passed through him: he still had an erection.

Not bothering with a light, he staggered down the hall to the bathroom and threw cold water into his face. His luminous watch showed it was just a little after four. Monday morning. He straightened up from the washbasin, cold water dripping down his chest.

He knew it then, for the first time, with an icy certainty.

He was going to find the boys who had raped Paula. Find them, break them, physically and spiritually. Make them crawl and grovel, mew with terror and pain. If the law couldn’t touch them, he would be his own predator. Why would he do it, for himself or Paula? Who could unscramble it? Who cared? To hell with motivations.

He padded down the hall, opened the door, was halfway into the bedroom before he realized where he was. It was the first time he had entered the room, except to move his clothes, since the night of Paula’s death. The cleaning lady kept it tidy, the king-size bed made up.

Curt didn’t even pause. He crossed the room, tossed back the spread, climbed between the sheets. Could his continuing agony of spirit merely have been an agony of indecision? He didn’t know; but he slept right through until nine o’clock.

Okay, you want them. You’ve made your decision. Now where do you start?

Sixteenth Avenue was in the old section of town near the tracks, two miles north of the business district. The street was straight, not curving; the curbs were high, angular, not shallow dips for the convenience of trike-trundling kids. Two-storied houses: prewar, Midwestern in flavor. On these streets it still might have been 1938.

Curt parked in front of 1248 16th Avenue and looked it over. The rambling two-story house had white siding which would soon peel, and a lawn that needed mowing. The old-fashioned black iron gate was rusty. He went around in back, and found 1248B underneath the wooden steps leading up to the kitchen of the owner’s flat. It would be an apartment, here on ground level, that wouldn’t get much light during the day.

Not that Harold Rockwell would be worried much about light or darkness any more. The girl who answered his rap was at first glance very pretty; at second glance, almost emaciated. Her baggy cotton dress had been cut to be tight; her hair was mousy, her eyes, large and brown and begging to be lustrous, were as lifeless as her hair.

When Curt said he was looking for Mr. Rockwell, she didn’t react in any way; so he added, almost as a question, “Mr. Harold Rockwell, is he home?”

She finally heaved a long-suffering, where-else-would-he-be sigh. Even the thin gold wedding band was loose enough to slip off her finger. Love winch might be proof against cataclysm is often vulnerable to the slow erosion of a continuing, day-to-day tragedy. “I’m his wife, Katie. He... if you could tell me why you want to see him, he... hasn’t been very well...”

“My name is Curt Halstead. My wife—”

Her face suddenly was animated. She turned, called into the tiny apartment, “Harry, Mrs. Halstead’s husband is here!” Without waiting for his reply, she caught Curt’s arm and almost dragged him inside. “Come in, come in, he’ll be so glad to see you!”

The kitchen had walls daubed bright yellow. As if Katie Rockwell had made a vain attempt to brighten the drab apartment. The fridge was ancient, the gas stove the same, the linoleum curling at the corners. The sort of furnished apartment almost every young couple pass through on their way toward the style of life they will live together; but the Rockwells were frozen here now, rocks in a glacier, without much hope of a thaw.

“Don’t mind the place, Mr. Halstead. These old apartments...”

“I’ve got the same problem.” To Curt, his own voice was falsely and offensively hearty. “My house is very old...”

The living room was more of the same: a portable TV on a corner of the coffee table, a couch, an easy chair like those lugged into dorms by students following a visit to the Salvation Army salesroom. Rockwell, in the easy chair, in slacks and tattered cardigan, might have been remaindered himself. Smoked glasses concealed his ruined eyes but could not disguise the petulance in his pale, sensitive face. He had a great shock of blond hair fringing out thickly above the ears.

“I just dropped around...” Curt began, when Rockwell bleated to cut him off.

The blind man jerked like a moth impaled on a pin. He had a sharp reedy voice like an heirloom hand-crank victrola. “Well? What do you want? Why did you come here?”

The self-pity stifled Curt’s own pity; he had seen too many maimed by battle to sympathize with the self-destructiveness of one who wasn’t coping. He was moved by the man’s plight, but not by the man. “I came after information. My wife is dead. Before she died—”

“We heard,” broke in Katie Rockwell. “We’re both terribly sorry. She... came to see Harry in the hospital the week after he... he...”

“Don’t say I’m sorry!” cried Rockwell shrilly. He pounded his knee in futile rage. “Why me? I’m blind! Blind! At least your wife is dead! At least—”

“Harry!” she cried, aghast. “Harry, don’t you dare say—”

“It’s all right, Mrs. Rockwell,” said Curt. “I understand...”

“Do you?” yelled Rockwell. He jerked and writhed in his chair, fumbled at his glasses, hurled them across the room, where they struck an arm of the sofa and fell on the rug, unbroken. “Do you understand? Look at my face! Get a good look! Get—”

Curt picked up the glasses and handed them to Katie Rockwell. The scarred, sightless, milky eyes did not shock or repulse him; all they did was make him angry. With himself, for coming here. With Rockwell, for destroying himself, his marriage, his wife. But blazingly with the predators, for the destruction they had left behind them. The blind man had slumped down in his chair and, behind the glasses his wife had replaced, had begun to sob.

“I don’t know anything about them. I hadn’t seen them before, they just... came at me...” He raised his sightless face. “Go away. Just... go away...”

As if on cue, the sudden full-bodied cry of an infant just awakened from its sleep came from beyond the closed bedroom door. Rockwell’s bony hands stopped moving in his lap; his face behind the dark glasses became attentive and still. In mid-word he stood up and went across the living room, familiar territory, to the door. He opened it. “Just leave me alone,” he repeated flatly, and went inside. After a moment the crying changed in tone and intensity, then died away to comforted abstract whimpering.

Katie Rockwell made empty gestures. “Harry isn’t... he didn’t mean... I... eventually he’ll make an adjustment, you know, to things...”

“I’m sure he will, Mrs. Rockwell.” Curt didn’t believe it for a minute; neither did she. “I can find my own way out.”

Only when he was back outside did he realize that the apartment had smelled, with the same indefinable defeated odor which clings to the rooms in pensioners’ hotels. The smell of men spending their sedentary hours without hope of redeeming this lost portion of their lives.

Chapter 14

“No,” said Detective-Sergeant Monty Worden pleasantly.

“What do you mean ‘no’?” demanded Curt.

A dull anger grew in him as he looked into the bland gray eyes across the desk. When he had called the previous day, after his abortive visit to Harold Rockwell, he had been told that Worden was out on an investigation. Then today he had waited over an hour, dividing his attention between the very female knees visible under the blond receptionist’s desk and the facts on Paula’s suicide he would want to review, while Worden had been in conference with the lieutenant. And now...

“What good would it do to open the file for you?” continued Worden reasonably. “It is now official; since our investigation has confirmed death by suicide, we have no further interest in your wife’s death. So that’s all there is to that, Professor.”

“Isn’t there just a little more?” demanded Curt savagely. “Such as a rape, and a vicious assault on a harmless man, and—”

“Professor, at this time we have no — I repeat, no, — legally admissible evidence of a felony having been committed against your wife. As for Rockwell — oh, hell, Professor, we’ve been all through this already.”

Curt tried to keep his voice reasonable; he had to find some starting place in his search for the predators. “If the file is closed, Sergeant, then surely there’s no harm in letting me see it.”

Worden spread powerful hands, then dropped them to the desk. “We do seem not to get on, don’t we, Professor? I officially don’t give a damn what went on before, during, or after your wife’s act of suicide, because she, killed, her, self.” He slapped an open palm lightly on the desk to emphasize each syllable. “Officially, that is. But—”

“I do give a damn what went on before, during, and after.”

“Your privilege. But let’s just say that our function is to get information in this office, not give it, and leave it go at that.” He smiled nastily. “Of course, you can complain to the lieutenant...”

Curt thought about it for a moment. He couldn’t really see himself getting much satisfaction out of Lieutenant Dorsey, who was built like an oil drum and looked just about as unyielding. Curt stood up, sighing. His question was only partially sarcastic. “I suppose there’s no law against looking around on my own?”

“You mean hire a private man? It’s your money, my friend — but don’t expect this department’s cooperation.” He stood up then, too, with an odd look of distaste in his eyes. “You know, Professor, I ran your prints through Washington and Sacramento when I took ’em for elimination purposes; and you weren’t on file anywhere. Not even with the FBI. That means you’ve never served in the military...”

“You’re being obstructive because I wasn’t in the service?”

Worden didn’t bother to deny being obstructive. “It ain’t that, Professor; it’s because I got a feeling about you. I think you’ve decided you’re gonna be a hero and find these punks, and take ’em on. Teach ’em a lesson.” He jabbed a blunt forefinger at Curt’s chest. “But you ain’t even served in the Army — ain’t had even that much training in taking care of yourself. You won’t find this gang, I know that, but you go suckin’ around teen-age hangouts lookin’ for information, and you’re gonna find out that a bunch of punks swinging tire chains ain’t funny. Believe me, they ain’t.”

“Thanks for the advice, Sergeant,” Curt snarled.

He stomped belligerently up the stairs to the gym fifteen minutes later, his sustained anger at Worden thickening in his throat like phlegm. Damn him! Of course, he had made one inadvertent suggestion to Curt: that he get professional help in his search.

At the head of the stairs were four weight-lifters, joking and laughing and shoving each other, and also blocking the hallway. They were some of the “big boys” who specialized in the three Olympic competition lifts, and in such power lifts as heavy knee bends, bench presses, and deadlifts. In their street clothes they were chunky and graceless; only when they were stripped were the square, smooth blocks of muscle apparent.

“...the guy had a chest he coulda eaten lunch off of...”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Arms so big they looked like they had a heart and lungs of their own. He—”

“Could I get through, please? Could I... Look, I want by, I—”

Damn them! First Worden refused any help, now these lumbering mountains of muscle acted as if...

And just then one of them grabbed another around the middle from behind, the muscles of his arms ballooning with effort, and heaved the 250-pound man off the floor as if he were a ten-pound chair. With a great shout of laughter, he threw the other lifter right across the hall.

Right into Curt.

“Hey! Goddamn it, what are you—”

The momentarily vanquished warrior was not laughing. With a roar, he seized the nearest handy object to hurl back at the other man. This object chanced to be Curt.

But as the hamlike hands closed about his sport-jacket lapels, Curt’s mind registered choke hold and his body already was responding as it had done thousands of times during hand-to-hand combat training. Reflexes, once highly conditioned at the First S.A.S. Camp at Kabrit on the Bitter Lakes in the Egyptian Sinai, and now stimulated by weeks of grueling weight-training, responded automatically.

His locked hands drove up between the opponent’s oak-branch arms, tearing loose the iron grip on his lapels, then crashed back down at the bridge of the other’s nose. Curt’s timing was rusty enough so he smashed the lips and hit the upper plane of the chin instead, but it still brought the man’s face down within knee-lift range.

Before he could connect, an arm of awesome power locked around his throat and jerked him back. Curt snapped his left arm across to clutch cloth at his attacker’s right elbow, pulled down so his right hand could grip the other’s right shoulder. At the same time he rammed his butt back, hard, into the other’s belly, and jackknifed at the waist.

The man should have sailed over Curt’s head, but instead twisted, spun about on Curt’s back to break the hand holds, and came down on his feet facing Curt. “Halstead!” he yelled. “Cool it!”

Curt realized that it was Preston, and suddenly came back. “I’m sorry, Floyd, I... Christ, for a minute there I...”

A very large man with curly hair and a blood-smeared T-shirt was leaning against the wall with his hands over his mouth. When his eyes met Curt’s, they were filled with respect instead of anger. “Hey, man,” he mumbled, “you really did me.”

Preston chuckled. “Vanucci, you’d better put cold water on that lip before you bleed all over the floor. I just waxed Sunday.” He clapped a hand to Curt’s shoulder. “C’mon inside, tiger, take a rest.” In the office, sharing the couch with stacked cans of protein powder which Preston had been unpacking, Curt tried to apologize again.

Preston cut him off with a wave of the hand. “Man, it was beautiful! Where in hell did you get the training?”

Curt rubbed his face with his hands; his head ached in reaction to the sharp, hard action. “It was... well, during the Second World War, I was in one of those irregular warfare groups. Just... just a kid then, actually, you think you’ve forgotten it all and then something sets you off, triggers those reflexes...” He switched directions abruptly. “How about you, Floyd? You didn’t learn that shoulder-throw counter in any weight gym.”

Preston grinned. “Same place you learned it — the service. I told you the other day that I’d been training cadre at Fort Leonard Wood during Korea. I showed aptitude during basic, so they made me a physed instructor first, and then a hand-to-hand combat instructor later. I trained guys in the techniques for over two years.”

“Is that right...” Curt was getting the nucleus of an idea. “Say, then, I wonder if we couldn’t start doing a little hand-to-hand practice at the end of my regular workouts? Nothing much, just a bit of fooling around over in the ladies’ gym, say — since it isn’t used in the afternoons and there are mats over there...”

Preston, leaning against the edge of his desk with his massive arms folded, was utterly still for a moment. Then he moved his arms. “So you’ve decided to go after them,” he said softly.

“Not really,” Curt began, then shrugged. “Yes.”

Surprisingly, Preston remained thoughtful, almost quizzical. “Are you sure that’s what you want to do, Curt?”

“Oh, I know that gangs like that can be damned dangerous,” said Curt, remembering Worden’s warning about punks with tire chains. “So I think if I can get some of my reflexes back, just for self-defense if I would catch up with them, I’d have a lot better chance.”

“I was thinking of it the other way around,” said Preston. “I...” Then he shrugged. “Okay, Curt, we’ll start with a Little session today.”

At the Dutch doors, Curt was struck by another thought. “I almost forgot, Floyd. Do you know any private investigators?”

“Sure. Archie Matthews. He works out here at the gym, as a matter of fact. He’s supposed to be good — at least he has all the work he can handle at fifty bucks a day. Why, do you want to—”

“Tell him I think I’ve a job for him,” said Curt.