A Time of Predators

Chapter 15

It was on the Fourth of July, when Ricky was driving her home to her folks’ place in San Leandro, that Debbie realized she was in love. Really for keeps, not just for the summer. He had picked her up at the dorm that afternoon about one o’clock, to take her up to San Francisco for the fireworks display. She had been wearing her new pink slacks, the tight ones that made her want to blush, and a white blouse and sandals.

“We’ll meet the gang over at Heavy’s place,” said Rick, “and—”

“The gang?” Something in her voice made him look over at her. She said defiantly, “I don’t like them very much. Any of them.”

“Well, they’re my friends, Deb. No chick tells me who my friends ought to be.”

Debbie bit back What about Paula Halstead? without saying it. She didn’t know that Ricky had been doing things with the older woman. Someday, of course, she would know — even if she had to ask him about it right out. She said, almost timidly, “I know I don’t own you or anything, Ricky...”

He broke the tension with a wide answering grin. “Don’t call me ‘Ricky’ in front of the guys, Deb, or I’ll belt you one in the mouth, I really will.”

Yes, she thought, it had been a good day, a lovely sunshine-filled day, even after they’d switched cars at Heavy’s place so she’d been riding between Heavy and Rick on the front seat of the old two-tone green station wagon. Champ and Julio were in back, and all the guys had beer cans down between their thighs, which they drank from after looking carefully about for possible “fuzz” who might “bust” them. She had a couple of guilty sips from Rick’s beer, which made her feel rather daring.

“What if your folks would see you doing that?” asked Julio.

“My dad drinks at parties and things,” she said almost defensively. Her folks were really cool, trusting her to never do anything she knew she shouldn’t. “Mom can’t, because of the doctor, so at parties she drinks this pink stuff with no alcohol in it—”

“A Shirley Temple,” supplied Rick.

“Hey, big man!” exclaimed Julio, drawing out the second word.

“He learns from all the older women he runs around with,” said Debbie with a giggle. The drive was turning out much more pleasant than she had expected.

Rick answered her with a wink, his voice casual. “Sure, kid, I drop you at the dorm and then go have a ball.”

As he spoke, he covertly studied her profile. Christ, had she heard something about that waitress, Mary Davies, that he’d been banging for almost three weeks? No. She’d say something to him alone, not in front of the rest of them. She was just kidding around, was all.

But watching the back of Debbie’s head, Julio Escobar felt his gut muscles knot up. She knew! Knew what had happened to the professor’s wife that night! But how could he make Rick see the danger that Debbie posed? Rick would not listen now, just because Julio knew; Rick would have to be given proof. Julio would have to get it. Look at her today, hanging all over Rick, wearing those tight pants that told the rest of them, see, see fellows, what you’re missing? Just as she’d done as a cheerleader, never let anyone touch her and then jumping around in those miniskirts and showing her legs all the way up on some of the yells she led. Well, she’d find out.

Heavy handled the station wagon like a scalpel, slicing from lane to lane through traffic at a steady eighty miles an hour. He left the freeway at Franklin, a one-way street which would take them up over Pacific Heights and down to the Marina green on the other side, where the fireworks display would be held.

“I’d love to live up here,” said Debbie. They were just at Broadway, where the houses were old and spacious, the apartment buildings new and dazzling. “Right here in Pacific Heights with a view of the Bay.”

“Ah... how’dya know this is Pacific Heights?” marveled Champ. He never said much to Debbie, since she was Rick’s woman, but when she turned and smiled at him he realized that he wanted to do some stuff to her no matter whose girl she was. Not that he would, of course.

“My dad used to bring me up here sometimes when we still lived on the Peninsula. He used to have some clients up here...”

Caliban, the blunt-nosed yellow cat her mom had named after a character in one of Shakespeare’s plays, jumped up on the bed beside her. She rubbed him absently under the chin, and he strained back his head and purred like a refrigerator.

A good day? The day. The best day of her entire life.

Fifty thousand people had been on the strip of greensward between Marina Boulevard and the yacht anchorage, someone said. Out beyond the breakwater and rows of gleaming moored yachts was the Bay, with hundreds of flitting sailboats heeled over by the breeze. To the left was the red-orange arc of Golden Gate Bridge, leading to Marin County and unknown adventures. Behind her were the whitely glistening hills of the city, like something you saw in the movies.

Yes, she would love to live in San Francisco. She slid under the covers, and Caliban immediately flopped beside her hip with his chin on her thigh, still purring wildly. Motorboating, her mom called it. San Francisco. She and Ricky. All right, she was only nineteen, and her folks wanted her to finish college before she got married, but still...

As the light faded, a majestic freighter had slipped blackly under the bridge. On Marin County’s sun-pinked bills the tiny fireflies had begun to gleam, as the residents had begun turning on their house lights.

She and Ricky sat on the seawall with the tide swirling a yard below their dangling feet. The fireworks were shot off from the end of the breakwater beyond the yacht anchorage. It had gotten chilly with dark, so they had a blanket around them, over their shoulders, and Ricky kept his arm around her waist with his hand cupped up under her breast. She hadn’t made him take it away; she found it harder and harder to say no to him. It seemed so right with him, somehow. Each time a rocket faded to darkness, he kissed her.

And the end of this fairy-tale day had brought realization of her love for him. Lying in bed with Caliban beside her, she could remember lying back against the leathery-smelling bucket seat of the Triumph, her eyes shut against the lights of oncoming traffic on San Mateo Bridge, her thoughts drifting, so that the question just popped out unbidden.

“Ricky, how well did you really know Paula Halstead?”

“How well...” He licked his lips. “Debbie, where did you get the idea that... that I... uh...”

So she told it all to him: about not thinking a brush of fenders in a parking lot was his real reason for wanting to see Paula Halstead alone; about wondering at his reaction to news of Paula’s death...

“...of course, you don’t have to tell me, Ricky, if the memories are too painful or... or anything...”

The oncoming lights cast his strong, handsome profile into bronze silhouette against the blackness flanking the bridge, and he didn’t say anything for the longest time. Until they were off the bridge, actually, on the road to the Nimitz freeway. Gaps in the traffic cast Rick’s face into alternate illumination and shadow here, and he spoke when no car was coming.

“I hadn’t ever meant to tell you about it, Deb; that’s why I made up that accident thing. It was just... something that happened. We... met in this fancy cocktail lounge, by accident, sort of, and—”

“I knew it!” she exclaimed in soft triumph. “I felt it!”

“She... wasn’t happy at home, her husband, that professor, he... didn’t satisfy her. She took me over to her motel room, and we...”

When he trailed off, Debbie said, “Did you... more than once...”

“Never again, Deb.” By the lights of an approaching car, his eyes were limpid with honesty. They took the on-ramp which shot them into the booming northbound traffic of the East Bay freeway. “But that wasn’t the end of it, see? She wouldn’t leave me alone. Kept calling me up at home, kept waiting around outside Jaycee... She was always after me to come over to her place on Friday nights when her husband was off teaching that seminar.”

Debbie’s face was tragic. “Then that Friday night you were going to go over there and—”

“—and tell her I didn’t want her to bother me again. Ever. But she didn’t know that’s why I was coming, and I guess that when I had that flat tire and didn’t show up, didn’t call, she just...”

And at that instant Debbie had known she was in love with Rick Dean. All the way in love, the marriage kind of love. He had been through so much pain. Parked in front of her folks’ place, he had held her so tight that she could hardly breathe, for a long time wouldn’t turn his face to her, so she bet that he’d been crying; and when he had raised his head, his eyes had been deadly serious.

“You’ve got to promise me, Deb, that you won’t tell anyone, what I’ve told you tonight — not ever. It would kill that professor to find out about her, I bet, and... I mean, she’s dead and all, so...”

“I understand, darling. And I promise.” She had turned toward him with her eyes shut and her face solemn. “And I love you, Ricky.”

Yes, she thought, the happiest, most important day of her life. With a contented sigh, Debbie slid lower and reached for the light switch.

As Debbie’s bedside lamp went out, Rick pulled up in front of his folks’ darkened house in Los Feliz. He cut lights and engine, sat behind the wheel without moving, going over it. He didn’t feel now like going down to the oceanside cabin with his folks tomorrow, as he’d promised; but at least it would give him time to get alone on the beach and think. He really had to think, now.

Had he been convincing? He had just followed his instincts in fashioning the story for Debbie, instincts which had saved him from spankings by his ma ever since he’d been a little kid. A chick like Debbie, romantic-like, she wanted you to be wiping away that old furtive tear of tragedy. I love you, Ricky. Only a guy needed more than words.

Rick moved restlessly behind the wheel, fished out a cigarette, pushed in the lighter as he stuck it in his mouth. He wished it was a joint. He was all strung out; pot really helped with that feeling. Christ, he wished they’d been on pot instead of beer that night they’d shoved around that goddamn queer. Or if somebody was going to kill himself, why didn’t that bastard do it? The lighter popped.

And just when everything seems safe, up comes Debbie. How well did you really know Paula Halstead? He didn’t want to be answering that question for a judge, and he still thought he’d done the smart thing to make up the affair with Paula. This way, she wouldn’t blurt out some dumb thing in front of somebody. Like Julio, for instance. That Julio, he was sort of paranoid about Debbie, or something, anyway. Julio didn’t understand chicks, didn’t know how to handle them like Rick did. Like he had handled Debbie, getting her to promise.

Rick grunted. Old Deb. Maybe she’d made another promise, to herself or something, about not letting Rick get into her pants. Damn her. She was such choice stuff, was the trouble; and now he couldn’t afford to just drop her. He hurled the half-smoked cigarette away.

Damnit, he needed... He looked at his watch. Mary Davies, the waitress, got off in an hour, at two-thirty. She’d put out for him that first time he’d picked her up. Taken him up to her apartment and let him start fooling around with her on the couch, with her roommate asleep in the bedroom just beyond, with the door wide open. After about twenty minutes she’d just stood up and said, “I must be nuts, with a kid your age,” and had stripped down right there and had climbed right on top of him like a goddamn jockey getting on a horse or something.

Rick twisted the keys, jerked the starter decisively. Old Mary, some of the things she’d wanted to do had embarrassed him at first, had made him scared he’d hurt her, even. But then he’d found out she didn’t care if he hurt her some, and he dug it all, now.

And she usually had pot at her place, too.

A few miles north, Julio Escobar was lying on the tattered sofa at his folks’ place and watching the late show. Some of these old movies were really dogs, but he even did his homework in front of the TV. The noise, the sense of movement, made it easier to concentrate or something. Made him feel more there, you know? More real, solider. And tonight he had to concentrate.

That damned bitch, Debbie! He’d sat only two yards from her and Rick during the fireworks. He knew Rick had been getting tittie there, under the blanket; he probably was making it with her right now in that flashy Triumph. Hell, if Julio had a new car like that she’d put out for him, too, the same way. Probably the first time he got her alone.

And the hell of it was, she knew. About the Halstead woman, maybe even about Rockwell, too. Sure, they were safe as long as she was hot for Rick, but what happened to the rest of them if she and Rick had a fight? What then? He had to get enough on Debbie, enough proof that she couldn’t be trusted, to make Rick listen to him. Had to, even if it meant following her around.

Then Rick would have to go along with the plan Julio had. Oh, that would shut her up, all right. It had really worked the once, it would work again — especially with a young cluck like Debbie.

Just thinking about it made the TV movie fade, made him feel funny, made his palms get moist. He rubbed his hands along the fabric of the couch. Yes, when the time came, he would know what to do to her all right.

Cheap, teasing little bitch!

Chapter 16

Looking at his desk calendar, Curt realized disconsolately that July was half gone and he was no nearer to finding the predators than he had been a month before. Archie Matthews, the private investigator he had hired, had turned up nothing. Nothing at all.

Curt opened the center drawer, got out the folder containing a slim sheaf of reports that had taken five days of Matthews’ investigation time. The detective had gotten no cooperation from the sheriff’s office whatsoever, but despite that he had been thorough, damned thorough, Curt had to give him that. Checking the Los Feliz police department files for traffic citations issued on the night of the Rockwell assault to old Chevrolet station wagons. Negative. Negative also with the Highway Patrol. Negative on tows by the all-night garages.

Next, posting a reward notice in the all-night laundromat a short half-block from the railroad crossing. One woman had come forward; she had left the laundromat a bare five minutes before the attack had occurred. See nothing, hear nothing, left laundromat deserted.

Matthews had talked with the night people at the all-night restaurants and gas stations for ten miles north along El Camino: had four boys in a two-tone green Chevy stopped for food and/or gas that night? Nothing. Two months later, who remembered?

The night of Paula’s death had offered even less to go on. He had repeated with the police, Highway Patrol, drive-ins and gas stations for that night, also, although there was no certainty about the direction from which they had come to Curt’s isolated house. Negative. For those five evenings Matthews had drifted through the drive-ins, soda fountains, record stores, gas stations, and bars and beer halls which he knew were not too careful about checking ID’s. All the places where kids congregated. Looking (three station wagons observed that fit in color and age were unsuccessfully checked out), listening, talking, dropping the word which nobody, but nobody, had picked up.

When Curt had received, near the end of June, the detective’s bill for services and cover letter withdrawing from the case, Curt had driven over to Matthews’ office to talk to the man. It was a second floor suite of rooms in a new anonymous glass and aluminum and cement building four blocks from the Los Feliz Civic Center. Through his windows they could see traffic on University beyond a municipal parking lot. Matthews had no secretary, merely an answering service.

“I’d like to see you catch up with those bastards myself, Mr. Halstead.” He was a tall, well-built man with a stubby nose, cheerful blue eyes, curly hair, and a round face with a heavily cleft chin. He shrugged expressively. “But...”

“Then why are you quitting now? I’m willing to pay—”

“I’ve already cost you nearly three hundred dollars, counting expenses, and all I really did was go over what the police already have covered. I like a buck as well as the next man, but I not only can’t guarantee results in this case — I can almost guarantee no results.”

“Because Worden refuses to let us look into that file?”

Matthews took a turn around the room, oddly out of place in the starkly modem setting; he was an outdoorsy sort of person, with the weathered skin associated with yachtsmen. Perhaps, Curt thought, his six-two frame and guilelessly masculine good looks carried with them their own sort of anonymity.

“You’ve got Worden on the brain. There’ll be nothing in that file we don’t have, except for the name of that kid on the bicycle. Sure, I wish you could remember his name, and sure, I’d like to talk with him. But he was just a kid, ten years old or so, going by on his bike at night, in the dark, scared as hell and worried about a spanking from his ma for being late getting home.” He turned from the window. “Hell, Mr. Halstead, if there was a handle in that file, Worden would have used it — no matter what he said to you about the D.A. not being able to prosecute even if they did turn up the gang. He’s too good a cop not to use it.”

Curt stood up with a deep sense of frustration. “Then... that’s it? There’s nothing else we can do?”

“Not unless or until we turn up a new witness, introduce a new factor, shift the equation around some way so we can see it from a different direction. Otherwise you’re just wasting money and emotion.”

Remembering it now, three weeks later, Curt experienced again the sense of baffled helplessness he had carried from Matthews’ office. Turn up a new witness, introduce a new factor, shift the equation around...

What in the devil had that kid’s name been? He had been through his memory of the meeting in Worden’s office a thousand times, could see Worden as he said the kid’s mother had called — but he could not see the name. It was gone, totally.

With an abrupt convulsive movement, Curt skidded back his chair by standing up, and went downstairs to the phone. It was the only thing he hadn’t tried: going directly to the source. Well, indirectly, really.

He dialed, by chance caught Worden in the office and free.

“Curt Halstead here, Sergeant. I wondered if—”

“Curt who? Do I... oh. Yeah.” Curt could almost see the disgust on the square, tough face. “What can I do for you, Professor?”

Curt’s hand gripped the receiver, hard. “I was just wondering if you had heard anything about an accident happening to the boy on the bicycle.” His stress on “accident” altered the word’s meaning.

“Boy on the bicycle? I don’t—”

“The witness who saw the station wagon by the golf course.”

“Listen, Halstead,” the sergeant burst out angrily, “I thought that you would have quit when that trained seal you hired gave up. If you’ve been messing around with that Anderson kid, I’ll—”

Curt tried to keep the elation from his voice. “I’ve never laid eyes on the boy, Sergeant. It’s just that I heard a rumor...”

“You heard wrong,” Worden snapped. “Nothing happened to him and nothing will happen, because he doesn’t know anything. Get me, Professor? Nothing. We could stand those four up in front of him with name tags on and he wouldn’t be able to identify ’em.” He paused, as if shaking his head almost sadly. “Leave it to the professionals, Professor. Like I said before, you start pokin’ around teen-age hangouts and you’re liable to wake up in a garbage pail some morning.”

Curt hung up gently. Anderson. That was it, all right. It seems a Mrs. Anderson called about her kid. He could remember Worden saying it. Then his elation began draining away. The boy already was a dead lead as far as Worden and Matthews — the professionals — were concerned. And besides that, how did one go about finding a boy named Anderson?

Curt got out the telephone directory. A whole page, four columns, of ANDERSON listings for the county. So now what? Rehire Archie Matthews? Hell, if there was a handle in that file, Worden would have used it. All right, then, contact that hundred Andersons himself?

There had to be a way to narrow it down. State the problem.

Fine. Sears Lake was five miles away. The boy was late. He spotted the predators on Longacres Avenue Extension; at the Linda Vista T-junction, he would have had to turn either north or south.

South, he would have passed Curt’s house, and south the university lay as a large block before the subdivisions beyond it. Unless the boy was a son of some member of the university faculty who lived on the campus itself or, like Curt, on its fringes. Curt could check that himself that afternoon at the Personnel Office.

North, he would be going toward the maze of small residential streets twined around Entrada Way. North seemed more logical. More houses closer to Curt’s house. The boy had passed the predators at 8:00 P.M., the time he was supposed to be home. So, unless he had been very late, his home could not lie too far from that T-junction.

As Curt pulled on his shoes to head toward the university, he had to fight a sort of exhilaration. He had to keep telling himself that he had little hope either of finding the boy or of learning anything of value even if by some fluke he did find him.

But Curt also knew this was better than an endless, sterile, frustrating count of days marked only by inactivity.

The next day in training, Curt was successful for the first time in putting Preston on the mat with an over-the-shoulder throw. In the locker room, he found his weight was under 190 for the first time.

Preston, as they walked together down to the creamery for lunch, shook his head in mock wonderment. “You’re getting too tough for an old man like me, tiger. You been into the wheat-germ oil again?”

“I’m back on the hunt.” Curt was not aware of the strangeness in his image. “I have the name of the boy on the bicycle — tricked it out of Worden — and now...” Over sandwiches and milk, he outlined what he had done, finishing, “...and I think he went north, because the university lies between my place and any significant residential areas to the south.”

“I disagree. Remember, Curt, she called the sheriff’s office, not the city cops; but there’s no built-up county land north of you.”

“Maybe she called them because Sears Lake is on county land.”

“Would you? If you were worried about your kid, you wouldn’t sit down and figure out who has jurisdiction; you’d just call the law enforcement agency that serviced your home.” Preston thought of something else. “Unless the kid’s old man is on the university staff—”

“I spent yesterday checking that out. He isn’t.”

Preston nodded, and stood up. “That figures; on the campus she would have called the campus cops anyway. C’mon, I’ve got a big-scale county map up at the gym.”

Two hours later Curt had his initial list of most likely Andersons. They had estimated the maximum distance that the boy should logically be living from Curt’s house as five miles — unless he had been very late. So the list contained those Andersons in the phone book who lived south of Curt’s home on comity land.

There were four names.

Chapter 17

It was Friday, July 18th. Curt stopped in front of 5202 Seville Drive in Los Feliz county. It was the usual California ranch-style subdivision house: a curving drive flanked by shrubbery not watered enough, the surge, swish, and gurgle of a washing machine from the garage. A tricycle missing a wheel leaned in grumpy abandonment against the front of the house. Curt rang the bell.

After nearly a minute a very black woman who was a good two inches taller than Curt appeared. She wore bedroom slippers and a print dress stretched tight across her yard-wide hips.

“Woody ain’t home,” she said emphatically, in a true Dixie accent. She leaned forward to peer sharply at Curt. “This yere ’bout de car note?”

“Why...” Curt realized that ringing strange doorbells and talking to strangers was going to be like learning a new language. “Why, no. Are you Mrs. Anderson?”

She leaned against the door frame. Her laughter was rich. “I sho’ ain’t Mia Farrow, honey.”

Curt could not help laughing with her. “The Mrs. Anderson I want has a son about ten years old, who—”

“Not me, honey.” Then she roared with body-shaking laughter again. “Less’n dat Woody, he been messin’ ’round ’thout tellin’ me!”

Curt drove the VW into Josina Avenue before stopping to draw a line through Anderson, Woody, 5202 Seville Drive. He felt slightly guilty, because this was supposed to be a serious business and he had been vastly entertained by the ebullient Mrs. Anderson.

Anderson, Stanley, 2983 Montecito Court.

Montecito Court, despite the high house numbers, was a one-block street off Charleston Road. Curt could find no 2983. He finally settled for 2985, ringing the bell and then cupping his eyes to peer into the dim interior through a window. He was sweating from the bright sun.

A woman in her mid-fifties appeared, walking very carefully between the rather expensive pieces of living-room furniture.

“What can I do for you?” She spoke with care but clarity; her voice was golden with a very mellow Scotch.

“I’m looking for Stanley Anderson. He’s supposed to live at 2983 Montecito Court, but I can’t find that number. I wondered—”

“This’s...” She stopped, frowning intently at Curt. She had the heavy drinker’s blurred features. “This house b’longs to my daughter ’n’ her husban’, Frankie...” She belched, very delicately, said, “Shrimp cocktail,” then added obscurely, “I’m from Seattle.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Curt.

“Just visiting.” She made a sweeping gesture which nearly carried her down the steps. “Try Mish... Mrs. Pershin’ next door — 2979. Neighborhood gossip, tell you anything you wanna know. M’daughter Maggie says she can tell you how many pimples on th’ postman’s fanny.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Curt was backing off, nodding and smiling like one of those little dogs with delicately balanced heads which nod in amiable idiocy from the rear windows of many automobiles. “Thank you, ma’am.”

He paused to wipe his face before trying 2979, then realized that Mrs. Pershing already was on her front stoop, arms folded, head cocked toward 2985, her eyes glaring at the Seattle mother-in-law. She was in her sixties, with daintily coiffed bluish hair, a remarkably smooth complexion, and behind glasses her eyes were as bright and inquisitive as a mynah bird’s.

Catching Curt’s eye, she laughed. “Now that you’ve gotten the neighborhood bottleaxe report, come on up. Three weeks that woman’s been visiting Frank and Margaret, and I’ve yet to see her sober, Mr.—”

“Halstead. Curt Halstead. I’m trying to find 2983, and...”

“That’s Stanley. Actually, it’s a cottage right behind us here. I’m his landlady; I hope Stan isn’t in any trouble.”

“Nothing like that.” Curt remembered Worden’s tactics. “Just routine, Mrs. Pershing.”

“Come in and sit,” she urged. “I’ve got some nice iced tea.”

The living room was broad and spacious and cool, with a fireplace and a baby grand and a shelf of books which looked read. She bustled out to the kitchen, leaving Curt neatly immobilized in a comfortable chair. No doubt she would return to pick his brains with the skill of a Manchurian interrogator. She came back, he sipped tea.

“That’s delicious, Mrs. Pershing.”

She leaned forward with a quick and ruthless focusing of energies. “Must get tiring for a man out ringing doorbells on a hot day like this, Mr. Halstead...” Her delicate pause wore a question mark.

“Sure does. I’m... all... with the California education system.”

She nodded wisely. “Stanley’s mother is a professor down south, UCLA, one of those places. I suppose that’s why you’ve come. I look after Stan like he was one of my own, myself...”

Curt drew a mental line through Anderson, Stanley, asked his age.

“Oh, twenty-four, twenty-five. Has a very good job in electronics, but that little devil still makes me wait for my rent. Out chasing the girls in that little sports car of his...”

It took forty-five minutes, four evasions, and two outright lies before Curt could escape her inquisition to check on the next listed name.

Anderson, Kent, 438 San Benito Way.

The address was south and a bit west of the university, a long shot as far as Curt could see; there actually was a shorter way to the address, via Alicante Road, from Sears Lake than by Curt’s house. But...

It was a one-story, garage-attached house, merely a permutation on the others he had visited. Frightening how many people did live in ticky-tacky boxes on uniformly curving streets. A new Olds was parked in the driveway; the lawn reflected pride of ownership. A man’s home is his castle. The door was answered by a blond girl about seven, with straight-cut bangs and the hands of a mud-pie chef.

“Hello there. Is your mother home?”

“Mom ’n’ Dad,” she assured him seriously.

Curt waited until she returned with a small woman whose permanent frown suggested the need of new glasses.

“My name is Curt Halstead. I was wondering if you have a son about ten years old. I—”

“Why... yes, we do. Is... something the matter?”

“No, ma’am. I’d just like to talk to him for a minute or two.”

“Kenny’s around somewhere. I suppose it’d be all right it—”

“Talk to him about what?”

A short, pugnacious man had appeared behind her, wearing rumpled khakis, a white T-shirt, no shoes, and a two-day beard. He pushed his wife aside, roughly, and thrust his face into Curt’s with all the belligerence so often displayed by a certain type of short man. “I don’t like your looks, buddy. You tryna mix my kid up in a lawsuit or something? C wan, get to hell outta here.”

“Now, Kent...” his wife began as if it were a familiar scene.

“You, shut up. I know how to handle guys like this.” He swung back to Curt with a semi-leer. “You still here? G’wan. Blow.”

Anger boiled up sourly inside him, but Curt merely nodded grimly and turned away. It was the man’s house, alter all. Return the next day, or the one after, or whenever Mr. Kent Anderson might be gone, leaving only his gentle-faced wife to man the battlements.

Anderson, sensing victory, made a barefooted sortie down the walk behind him. “I gotta good mind to take a poke at you. I gotta good mind—”

“I doubt that,” said Curt. On public property, he turned back in the slight defensive crouch made automatic by the months of training with Preston.

Curt’s stance stopped Anderson’s advance like a wall. “Yeah, well, you come around bothering my family when I ain’t home,” he muttered, “I’ll have the sheriff on you.”

“Ask for Sergeant Worden,” Curt snapped without forethought.

The change in Anderson was remarkable. “You mean... well now, look, Sergeant, I didn’t realize. I thought...”

So. Anderson hadn’t heard Curt give his name. Was afraid of the cops, perhaps had a reputation as a troublemaker. Curt took advantage. “I want to know if your boy was riding his bike from Sears Lake past the university golf course on Friday evening, April twenty-third, at eight o’clock. Also, did your wife call the sheriff’s office—”

“Wasn’t Kenny,” Anderson cut in eagerly. “Hell, I can’t hardly get that kid offa his butt, let alone riding his bike all the hell way over to Sears Lake. Electronics, with him. Workshop’s so damned full of wires and tubes and old radios...”

Curt thanked him and drove swiftly away, before Kent Anderson might begin wondering what a deputy sheriff was doing on a field call in a powder-blue VW sedan, sun-roof model.

Stopping a block away to draw a line through Anderson, Kent, Curt reflected again on the rather frightening isolation his profession had given him from what educators delighted in calling the total community. His social contacts over the years, by choice, had been limited mainly to those associated with the intellectual community; his vocational contacts, by necessity, had been limited almost totally to highly intelligent, well-motivated youth. Only now, ringing doorbells of a random sampling of people, did he begin to comprehend the staggering complexity of what was lumped together as The American Way of Life.

Anderson, Barbara, 1791 Edgewood.

Pulled over on a side street inside the university grounds, Curt consulted his map again. Edgewood was in a pocket of county land between El Camino and Linda Vista Road near the university Medical Center. In direct distance it was the address closest to Curt’s house, separated only by the woods and San Luisa Creek; but the nearest access was all the way down University Way to the Medical Center, then cutting through from the rear of that facility to the subdivision. Almost beyond Curt’s arbitrary five-mile limit.

It was a curving blacktop street lined with middle-income homes and littered with children’s playthings. Down on El Camino the rush hour would be snarling like caged lions, but here the pre-supper hush of busy stoves and televisioned news prevailed. Curt rang the bell at 1791, looked about. Garage windows painted over, living-room drapes drawn; he could see nothing to indicate a child lived there. He rang again, was just turning away when a chain lock was withdrawn, a bolt was snapped, and the door was opened.

The woman had a mass of wavy brown hair with sun-lightened streaks, a pretty face as narrow as a fox’s, and clear greenish eyes. The face was flushed, the hair-tips steam-dampened; her terry-cloth robe was of pink and Chinese vermilion in intricate pattern, and huge fluffy pink slippers peeked from under the floor-length hem.

“I’m looking for Barbara Anderson, ma’am,” Curt began.

“I’m a Barbara Anderson,” she said and smiled. She was in her early thirties, old enough to have a son ten years old. Her mouth was small, with laughter dimples at the corners, and her chin was delicate and narrow.

“My name is Curt Halstead. I’m looking for a boy, named Anderson, who saw four men getting out of an old station wagon one evening last April. His mother reported the incident to the sheriff, and...” He stopped because Barbara Anderson was shaking her head. She drew the robe closer about her as if belatedly drilled from her bath. Her eyes were totally expressionless. Her hands, well-shaped yet strong-looking, were without rings. Her voice was high and a little flat. “I guess you want a different Barbara Anderson, Mr. Halstead. I’m not married and I have no son. I’m sorry.”

“Well, I’m sorry to interrupt your bath. I...”

He stopped again, this time because she had shut the door firmly in his face. He heard the bolt snap into place, and grimaced. No real need for her to be so abrupt. Not, of course, that he could really blame her, living there alone. Rather strange that she was, actually.

Curt started the VW with a little jerk because his mind was on things other than driving. Probably divorced, obviously childless, had gotten the house as part of the settlement, perhaps. He wondered if she worked, or lived on alimony, or what. A damned attractive woman.

After turning into Westpoint Drive, toward the Medical Center, Curt remembered and pulled over long enough to draw a line through Anderson, Barbara on his list of possibles.

Chapter 18

Curt ate a solitary Sunday breakfast, staring, without really seeing, out the kitchen window into the live oaks behind the house. In one tree was a vireo, in another a pair of wood warblers. Carrying his dishes to the sink, he saw the calendar. August 10th. Almost a month since he had begun looking for the Anderson boy, and summer vacation was drawing to a close. Fall term raised feelings of active distaste, probably because teaching meant a curtailment of his search.

But what further could he do? Advertise? He not only had exhausted all possible phone-book Andersons; he had, at Archie Matthews’ suggestion, gotten further names from the Polk Directory and the voter registration rolls at the County Courthouse. In all, sixty-seven Andersons.

Curt ran water over his dishes. To hell with it. Today he would try to forget it, the whole thing. Take a walk, maybe. This morning, right now, before the day got too hot. He thrust aside the insistent memory of planning a similar hike with Paula on the Friday night he had driven home to find her dead, and put on soft-soled shoes, sunglasses, a polo shirt. At the foot of the driveway, he paused: north or south? Had the boy on the bike gone north or... damnit, stop it. South he would go, toward the university.

He crossed Linda Vista to be facing traffic, started past the old green phone booth, which stood with open door, inviting confidences. Curt had none to impart, but he did stop, and in an untoward lightness of mood, pulled down the coin return. He chuckled aloud. A dime. He could buy two thirds of a cup of coffee with it somewhere.

Striding along in the growing heat, Curt tried to feel enthusiasm for the resumption of classes. No use. Looked at coldly from the shoulder of a country road, the whole concept of graduate study seemed artificial somehow. Perhaps it was because you could never admit error: not to your department, nor to your students, nor, given enough years of enforced infallibility, to yourself. Curt had always stressed, for instance, that environment determined behavior; yet could he really swallow that the predators were merely determined puppets, no more responsible for the destruction strewn in their wake than a hurricane which savaged the Florida coast before swinging blindly back to sea? No. Curt knew he couldn’t buy that. Wouldn’t buy it. Unless men were responsible, all of their actions were without meaning.

A quarter of a mile beyond the phone booth, Curt came across a narrow footpath beaten down through the high weeds of the ditch. He turned off into it, after a few steps found his trousers dotted with the thistles from August-ripened weeds. The narrow path was iron-hard from lack of rain; it probably had been worn by venturesome small-fry on long school-less summer days.

San Luisa Creek was dry, raggedly edged with blackberry bushes, mugwort, and the telltale red leaves of poison oak. The path rose beyond it, plunged abruptly into a thicket of elderberries and ceanothus and then under the shade of a stand of sycamore. It was much cooler under the trees; a flash of white wing patch and a glimpse of iridescent tail marked the passage of a yellow-billed magpie, and a squirrel scolded from a low branch. Curt topped the slight rise, could see the white siding of a house through the thinning undergrowth.

Beyond the trees was a strip of dusty straggled weeds, a shallow ditch littered with paper, and a loop of blacktop. Across it were tract houses. Curt shook his head. A few years ago there had been no path, no subdivision at the end of it. He crossed the ditch, turned left, downhill toward an intersection a hundred yards away. The cross street was Westpoint, he found; he had been walking on Edgewood Drive.

Aptly named, Edgewood. Wait a minute. Edgewood. Was that...

It came back in a rush. Barbara Anderson, 1791 Edgewood Drive. One of his first four prime possibilities. An attractive brown-haired woman in a red robe whom he had disturbed in the middle of a bath. He lengthened his stride until he was nearly trotting. A boy living on Edgewood, late home, would have walked his bike through those woods, along that path. Five minutes.

But she had said she was unmarried, had no children.

Women had lied before. When Curt got to 1791, he was sure she had lied, and felt a little sick to the stomach with frustration. The lawn was shaggy and yellowing, the neighborhood shopping papers distributed free were yellowing in a messy heap on the porch. Planted in the middle of the sere grass was a small neat FOR SALE sign. She had been the one, unless he accepted it all — path, precipitous move from the neighborhood, proximity to Curt’s house — as a series of coincidences.

Curt looked about almost wildly. Neighbors. Find out if she had a son. Find out where she had gone if she did.

Directly across the street was an open garage door with a car parked in the drive. A man was dragging a green plastic garden hose from the garage. He wore a Giants baseball cap, a white T-shirt, and Bermuda shorts shoved down under his stomach, so the ends of the legs covered his knees.

Curt crossed the street. “I’m looking for Barbara Anderson, sir. Could you tell me if—”

“She moved.” He scratched his nose reflectively. “Just about three weeks ago, real sudden like. One week talking about her lawn, next week just... packed up and gone, bag and baggage.”

Three weeks. Almost immediately after Curt had talked with her. A three-week head start. “Is she a Mrs. Anderson, or a Miss?”

“Missus. Well, you know, divorced. Thought at first she’d gone back to Charlie, but the next week here comes the realtor’s sign up.”

Curt nodded. “Funny she’d just move out that way, with the boy and all... I guess he’d be about ten now, wouldn’t he?”

“Jimmy? Yep.”

The man started to turn away, when Curt had a sudden inspiration. “Say, do you remember if anyone else was around asking about her? Say... sometime last spring, maybe?”

“Nope.” Then he frowned, and rested a foot on the front bumper of his car. “But now you mention it, a kid about high school age come around one Sunday morning, musta been in May, just about this time of the day, right after Barb took the boy off to church. Said he was looking for some other Anderson, I disremember the name — remember the kid ’cause he looked sorta Mexican. You know, dark skin, black curly hair — oh, and a long nose. I remember that nose, all right.”

Somehow they find out where the boy lives, talk to the neighbors to get the right name, then make a threat, probably by phone. A virulent threat, Curt thought, if he was right: because it had made Barbara Anderson and her son disappear just because Curt had dropped around to ask a casual question. Yes, it fit. Door bolted, night chain on in the middle of the afternoon. A tottery theory on a shaky framework, but...

“You... don’t know where I could reach Barbara now, do you?”

“Sure don’t, mister. Like I said, just moved out sudden. She didn’t leave no new address, not even a phone number. Not that I guess you’ll have much trouble finding her.”

“How’s that?” asked Curt quickly.

The man jerked a calloused thumb. “Realtor. Or Charlie, even.”

Curt arrived home fifteen minutes later, sweaty-faced and branch-lashed from his hurried return through the woods. Before going up to shower and shave, he dialed the Heritage Realty Company, 2101 Armando Road, to see if they were open on Sunday. They were. When he came back downstairs in fresh slacks and sport shirt, he paused at the phone again. There was no listing for Barbara Anderson, but there was for Charles. Homestead Avenue, Mountain View. Curt dialed, got an answer on the sixth ring from a voice full of Sunday morning phlegm.

Curt said, “Sorry to disturb you this way, Mr. Anderson, but I’m trying to get in touch with Barbara. She—”

“It’s in the phone book, for Chrissake! 1791 Edgewood Drive...”

“She moved from there about a month ago, Mr. Anderson.”

“Look, buddy,” he said flatly, “we got divorced two goddamn years ago. She got the works: house, bank account, everything but my left nut, see? I don’t have anything to do with her, don’t wanna, beyond the support payments — which go to her P.O. box. I ain’t seen her or the kid, either of ’em, for half a year. She owes you money, look somewhere else for it.” He slammed down the receiver with a curse.

Heritage Realty was a small place sharing a new but cheaply constructed building with a doughnut shop. The walls were covered with diagrams, mocked-up house-plan blueprints, and faded Polaroids of uninspiring tract houses. Behind a redwood-faced counter were four desks littered with papers; at the second desk, on the telephone, was a rather suet-faced woman with dark hair. Her name plate announced MRS. PINNEO to a waiting world. When she hung up, Curt asked his question.

“1791 Edgewood Drive? A lovely property, sir. Three bedroom, two bath, patio, electric kitchen, built-in barbecue, new—”

“I’m just trying to get in touch with the owner.”

She had dark piercing eyes, her best feature, a small pursed mouth as if she were drinking cold coffee, and pads of flesh over her cheekbones which gave her a squirrel-faced look. Her smile got soft around the edges at Curt’s remark. “We are fully authorized to act as Mrs. Anderson’s agents.”

“Yes, I’m sure. This is personal, however. Her address would—”

“Quite impossible.” The smile had thawed, and a frown was freezing quickly into place. She tapped her pencil impatiently on the desk. “We cannot give you any information whatsoever regarding Mrs. Anderson.”

“Well, then, just a phone number. I can call—”

“That number is unlisted, sir. Good day.”

“But I—”

“I said good day, sir.”

Curt stopped outside the door, blinking in the glaring midday sunshine. So. No closer to Barbara Anderson, perhaps; but morally certain that she was the one he wanted. She was, after all, obviously secluding herself and her son from someone or something. Curt didn’t doubt for a moment that it was the predators by whom she felt threatened. And didn’t that mean there was a good chance that she, or her son, knew something Curt didn’t? Something the police didn’t? That Worden didn’t?

It was time for Archie Matthews again, because this was it: the new factor in the equation. Barbara Anderson. And Jimmy.

Chapter 19

“Floyd tells me you’re about ready to qualify for the private investigator’s exam,” Archie Matthews said with a grin.

“He oversold the product,” said Curt gloomily. “I’m pretty sure that Barbara Anderson is the mother of the boy I want, but it doesn’t do much good if I can’t find her. When your answering service said on Sunday that you wouldn’t be available until today, I got her P.O. box number from her husband and sent her a letter. But she didn’t answer.”

It was Wednesday, and Curt was in Matthews’ anonymously modem office again. The private investigator had been working a case in the East Bay, had just gotten off it two hours before, and was yawning.

“What about the realty office?” he asked Curt. “They have to be able to reach her in case they get a firm offer on the house.”

“I tried them Sunday. The woman wouldn’t tell me a damned thing.”

Matthews yawned again. “Sounds like this chick has covered herself pretty well. Probably took an apartment with utilities included — which means the connection still would be in the landlord’s name, and my contacts with the gas and electric people wouldn’t be able to help.” He sat down at the desk and reached for the phone book. “Let’s try it the easy way. What’s the name of the woman at the realty company?”

“A Mrs...” Curt squinted, thinking hard. “Mrs. Pinneo.”

Matthews dialed Heritage Realty, leaning back in his expensive leather swivel chair and gazing at the ceiling with bloodshot eyes. Curt got the feeling that countless hours of Matthews’ life had been spent in just this way, patiently, emptily — and a line from Eliot’s Prufrock popped into his head: I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. Or, in Matthews’ case, phone calls.

Matthews leaned forward abruptly. “Yes, Mrs. Pinneo, please.” His voice had thickened and harshened. “Mrs. Pinneo? This is Charles Anderson. I drove by to see Barbara today, and found your For Sale sign on the Edgewood Drive house.”

The phone made squawking noises. Although Matthews’ tired face remained bland, almost cherubic, his voice became positively biting. “And just why the hell wasn’t I contacted? If my ex- had bothered to show you a copy of the divorce decree, you’d know that I retain a one-fourth interest in... what? Don’t give me that crap, lady. I gave nobody any permission...”

He broke off for more squawks, caught Curt’s eye, winked, and then went on in a nearly apoplectic voice. “You go right ahead. I’d contact her myself if I had her new address and — say, you’d better give me that, now I think of it, I — what? What the hell do you mean, you don’t... oh. Well, address, phone number, what the hell’s the difference? After three o’clock, huh?”

He listened a final time, scribbled on the back of an envelope, dropped the receiver back on the hooks, and gave the envelope to Curt. “She can be reached there, 982-7764, any time after three P.M. It’s probably unlisted, but she might have gotten cute and given a work number. Just let me check...” He got the phone company service rep on the number, asked for the registration on it, and after thirty seconds of waiting, listened, nodded, and hung up. “What I thought. Unlisted. That makes it tougher, because Ma Bell is a bitch with employees who dish out unlisted numbers.” He shot a look at the wall clock. “We’ve got until three o’clock to wait.”

Curt said, “You’re damned tired, Archie; I didn’t mean that you should do this today, without sleep...”

Matthews yawned again, rasped his hand over his stubbled chin. “Yeah, I just came in today to check the mail; was just on my way to the gym when you caught me. What say you meet me there at three o’clock and—”

“Only if you let me pay you for a full day’s work.”

The detective shook his head. “To hell with that, Curt. I cost you three yards without turning a damned thing, and here you find the kid all by yourself. For my professional pride I’ve got to do you some good. Tell you what. Buy me and the mirror athlete a good lunch, and we’ll call it square.”

Over lunch with Preston and the detective, Curt realized that Matthews, like Preston, was another of a type which was coming to interest him more and more. A doer, not a talker. Not a cynic, but a bleakly hard-nosed realist, accepting human nature as he found it, not attempting to explain evil, merely accepting its existence. Hell, Curt, my profession is the dead-beats, the drop-outs, and the cop-outs. Those who aren’t making it or want to make it all at once. He sounded remarkably like Monty Worden, that professional prober in the soft underbelly of society. There’s just two kinds of people in my book, mister: the worms and the human beings. Law-breakers and law-keepers. Even Preston, whom Curt had come to regard as a professional man, lived by the philosophy: If a guy wants trouble, hit him first.

And were they so wrong? If Curt found the predators, would it make any difference to him if they were products of slums or broken homes or racial minorities? Had it made any difference to Paula? Or to Rockwell? The only difference between a “disadvantaged” boy and a Yale student swinging a tire chain was that the disadvantaged boy would probably be a hell of a lot more accurate.

They got back to the gym at 2:55, and Matthews sat down at the desk to begin laboring over a sheet of scratch paper. “Working out my cover story,” he explained. “The most important part of skip-tracing is to never let them ask a question you can’t answer.”

When he finally dialed the phone, Curt found himself taut as a cable; he had come to feel that Barbara Anderson and her son somehow would furnish the key to all his questions.

“Yeah, hello,” said Matthews in a bored voice, “are you still having trouble with your phone?” He listened then, nodding unconsciously. “I see. Still humming sometimes, huh? And this is 982-7764? Mmm-hmm. Thought so. You see, I dialed 362-4872. That’s right. It’s what we call at the phone company an ‘electronic inversion’ — caused by faulty wiring, insulation rubbing away, or sometimes just by a mis-connected circuit. Beg pardon? No, not all the time, that’s what makes it so rough. That means we have to trace it all through each time it happens...”

Despite his offhanded tone of voice, a sheen of sweat had appeared on Matthews’ face; he was working, and working hard.

“Yes, ma’am, that’s right, Lineman Chester Drumm, ID card 384, Telephone Repair Service. Yes. What I’ll have to do is trace right through from your main relay box.” A drop of sweat fell from the end of his nose with the strain of keeping all strain out of his voice. “Do you have a one-family dwelling or an apartment? And what’s that number? Twelve? That’s fine ma’am, I’ll be out in an hour if that’s convenient for... oh, I almost forgot, I’d better get the street address, hadn’t I?” He chuckled. “No, ma’am, in repair service we’re never given more than just the phone numbers themselves, as a safeguard for the subscribers. Some people have unlisted phones, and...”

Curt held his breath as Matthews broke off, but the detective was nodding again and writing on his scratch paper. He finally thanked the woman and hung up and expelled a long whistling breath.

“It’s always damned touchy when they’re on the run,” he said. “Let’s hope she’s not just ducking a hill collector.”

“The only thing that bothers me,” said Preston, “is how the hell you knew she’d been having phone trouble?”

Matthews laughed and stood up. “I didn’t — and I doubt if she has been having phone trouble. It’s just that everyone always thinks there’s something wrong with his phone, if he’s asked about it.” He handed the paper to Curt. “Arroyo Towers, apartment twelve, 1482 Robles Drive in San Mateo. She says that if a white Ford is parked in her stall, she’s home. If the car’s gone, she’ll be down at the supermarket and you should wait. I’d make sure the car is there before you ring her bell, just on the off-chance she’d be coming back and get a look at you before you want her to.”

Chapter 20

Because of the rush hour, Curt’s fourteen-mile drive to the Arroyo Towers took until 4:35 P.M. He noted the white Ford in the correct stall, checked mailboxes, and found Occupied in the name slot for apartment twelve. When he pushed the plastic button above the box, the gleaming aluminum-and-glass door clicked open to admit him to the lobby of the modernistic apartment building.

The elevator moved with maddening deliberation; in the carpeted hallway, Curt paused to wipe his palms down his trouser legs. It was like staring from the jump door of the Lockheed, with empty sky whipping by outside at 120 miles an hour, your hands gripping the metal edges of the door, knowing that when the lights flashed red and then green, and the jump master bellowed in your ear, you could only go forward.

Curt rang the bell of apartment twelve.

Barbara Anderson opened the door. “Mr. Drumm? I... oh!”

“Curt Halstead. I wrote you a letter earlier this week...”

She had started to slam the door, but had paused indecisively when Curt made no move to stop her. Her orange dress had a starched white apron over it which couldn’t conceal the excellence of her figure; the smell of baking brownies had followed her to the door.

“I... got your letter.” Her clear greenish eyes held his, but her voice shook just a little. “I didn’t answer it because I... because my son is not the boy you are trying to get in touch with. He...”

“We both know that isn’t so, Mrs. Anderson,” said Curt reasonably.

Then he stepped forward, through the still-open door, so she had to give way before him in a parody of hospitality. Joe Louis once said that if he saw the opening in another fighter’s guard, it already was too late to exploit it. Before Curt really registered that the woman was staring blindly at his face with true terror in her eyes, and was going to scream, he already was flopping down in the nearest easy chair.

“I could do with a cup of tea” he said conversationally. As if on cue, a sharp ding! came from the archway to the kitchen. “And I think your brownies are ready to come out for cooling.”

“I...” The blindness was fading from her eyes; the muscles along her delicate jaw were relaxing. She had a fine-boned face, a wide generous mouth, without lipstick, heavy eyebrows and lashes. She ducked her head under his relaxed scrutiny. “I... of course. Brownies.”

From his easy chair, Curt watched her disappear into the kitchen, then prowled the room with his eyes. The apartment was new, soulless, its rug a pale acrylic fiber, its walls prefabricated, its glass sliding door in the far wall opening on an iron-railed balcony all of three feet wide. Even the picture over the sofa had come with the apartment. Instant decorating, like instant coffee; quick, but obviously ersatz.

“What sort of work do you do, Mrs. Anderson?” he called through to the kitchen.

“I’m a... I work in a hospital. A registered nurse.”

That explained the three o’clock return: shift work, probably arranged so she could pick Jimmy up after classes during the school year.

Five minutes later Barbara Anderson reappeared with a tray of tea things. She also had renewed lipstick and rouge on a face that had gone pallid when she had seen him in the hallway. Curt decided that she was probably a self-reliant woman, as Paula had been — which would have helped destroy her marriage if her husband was actually as weak as he had sounded on the phone. Curt got started.

“As I explained in my letter, Mrs. Anderson, I am a professor at Los Feliz University and live off Linda Vista Road — just across the golf course from where your son saw the four men in the station wagon.”

Barbara Anderson made a small impatient gesture. “I know — now — who you are; I called the university after receiving your letter. But who were those men? And if they’re so important, why did the sheriff’s investigators say it was just a ‘routine investigation’?” She gestured again, again impatiently. “They didn’t molest Jimmy in any way, you know; he barely saw them as anything more than shadows. He overdramatized it because... well, because he’s good at that, Mr. Halstead.”

Curt poured tea, was pleased that it was very strong and black. Adding his usual milk and sugar, he was reminded of Alice’s mad tea party. Their polite sparring over whether he would, or would not, get to speak with Jimmy Anderson observed the social amenities — like colonial administrators dressing for dinner in the bush while their empires crashed in ruins about their ears — but did little to relax tensions.

He said mildly, “Could we make that ‘Curt’?”

After a moment’s hesitation she nodded. “All right. And Barbara. And you still haven’t answered any of my questions, Curt.”

“I’ll have to start by asking another. Do you remember, last April, when a man named Rockwell was attacked by a teen-age gang?”

“I don’t really... Oh, of course!” she suddenly exclaimed. “I wasn’t working up here at County General then, but...” A look of disquiet darkened her face. “Wasn’t he disfigured or... or blinded?”

“Blinded. By accident, I think, I’ll give them that much. Anyway, my wife had been up to the San Francisco Spring Opera and so had Rockwell. They got off the bus together and...” By the time he led her up to Matthews’ call that afternoon, Curt was sweating. The necessity of putting the whole sequence together in logical order had evoked memories more bitter than he had been prepared for. Barbara’s face was ashen when he stopped talking and reached for his teacup.

“So if Jimmy could identify those men he saw...” She shook her head. “And of course that explains the terrible phone call I got. When my husband and I were divorced, two years ago, I went back to work at the Los Feliz Med Center — just a few blocks from home. After the phone call I made Jimmy quit his paper route, and got a job up here at County General because I couldn’t get a shift at the Med Center that would let me pick Jimmy up after school. When you came around asking questions, I was afraid you were one of them, so I put the house up for sale and got this apartment right close to County General Hospital.”

“I should think I’d be pretty hard to mistake for a teen-ager.”

“The one who called sounded like a mature man, not a boy. Except for what he said...” She paused, and a shudder ran through her, raising gooseflesh on her bare arms. “My dad was a longshoreman on the San Francisco docks, and I’ve been a nurse for years — I thought I’d heard all the obscenities. But that call... It was a Tuesday — May twenty-seventh. The call was worse than obscene, it was... moronic.”

“Do you think he was serious, or just... fantasizing?”

A look of true revulsion made her face momentarily ugly. “He meant them.” She gave a rueful little laugh, half-giggle, that Curt found somehow enchanting. “That’s why, when you rang the bell here...”

Curt thought back over the long weeks of careful chipping — like a paleontologist chipping stone from the fossil of a pithecoid jawbone — that had brought him to this place at this moment in time.

“I don’t think you have to worry about the predators finding you,” he said.

“Predators?”

Curt heard his voice become slightly defensive. “It’s... just a tag I’ve used for them, the gang, in my own mind.”

“It’s a good one. It... They sound so dangerous, and sick, and totally vicious. Are you sure you want to...”

The doorbell rang. She looked at her watch, and stood up. “That’ll be Jimmy; he’s been down by the pool.”

Then her clear jade eyes sought Curt’s brown ones; their gazes, their wills met and locked. They stared at one another wordlessly. Curt cursed himself, his weakness, silently. He shouldn’t have seen her first, shouldn’t have talked it all through with her. Now he knew he really couldn’t ask her to let him question the boy; she had been through too much already, too much fear, too many sleepless nights. And Curt knew himself too soft to question the boy without telling her.

Barbara finally lowered her gaze. The bell rang again. She said, “I’d like you to stay for supper, Curt. Just pot luck, but then you can bring up that night casually, in conversation — which might make him remember something he forgot to tell the sheriff’s deputies.”

Curt released an unconsciously long-pent breath, and wondered if his silly fatuous relief and gratitude showed on his face.

The supper was indeed potluck: the end of a canned ham butt, eggs scrambled with canned mushrooms, fried potatoes. But Curt hadn’t enjoyed a meal so thoroughly in months; in fact, since...

Jimmy was a slender boy with straight dark hair always in his eyes, his mother’s enchanting smile, and fey, slightly tilted eyes of the same greenish color as hers. He had come in with the rush and flurry which belongs so peculiarly to youth, had gone shy at the presence of a stranger, then had expanded, during supper, under the male attention. Curt introduced the four men by the golf course casually, easily.

“Those guys?” Jimmy was scornful. “I wasn’t scared of ’em, not really. I just said I was, ’cause... ’cause...” His voice slowed as he realized where his tongue was leading him, and he cast a quick sideways glance at his mother.

“Go right ahead, young man,” Barbara said. “I know perfectly well that you wanted to make me think that they had made you late.”

“Ma can’t spank hard enough to hurt me anyway,” Jimmy bragged, recovering. “I didn’t see anything, really, ’cept the Chevy wagon.”

That was all until dessert, which was ice cream and the freshly baked brownies. Curt described the “Mexican-looking” boy who had been seen on Edgewood Drive, but Jimmy didn’t react. Worden had been right; it was hopeless. They went into the living room, leaving Barbara to stack the dishes, and Jimmy leaned forward confidentially.

“I was gonna call Ma from that phone booth there by the golf course an’ tell her my bike had a flat tire,” he admitted. “You won’t tell her, will ya? I know that woulda been lyin’, but I didn’t really do it...”

“Between us men, strictly,” said Curt with a straight face. The phone booth, he decided, must have been the one across Linda Vista, where he had found his lucky dime. “Why didn’t you call, Jimmy?”

Barbara called from the kitchen, “Dish washer or dish dryer, Curt?”

“Uh? Washer, I guess.” He stood up.

Jimmy was going on. “I couldn’t call ’cause there was this girl sittin’ in the booth.”

Something in what the boy said stopped Curt dead; he felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck. But what? What was so odd about a girl making a phone call? Then he realized that the oddness was in Jimmy’s phrase. Not making a phone call; sitting in a phone booth.

“You mean that the girl was using the phone, Jimmy?”

The boy shook his head. “She didn’t even have the receiver off the hook or nothing. Just sittin’ in there with the door open an’ her feet sorta stickin’ out—”

“But it was dark, Jimmy. How could you see that clearly?”

“I’d walked right up to the booth, see, wheeling my bike, and this car was coming by and I seen — saw her, plain as anything.”

“And you didn’t tell the man from the sheriff’s office about her?”

“Him? He acted like I was eight years old or somethin’,” the boy said scornfully.

Eight. Instead of ten. That figured; boys straining for those fabulous teens resented being called younger than they were. And Curt had his fact that Worden didn’t have. Why would a girl be merely sitting in that particular phonebooth on that particular night, in the dark, not using the phone, not doing anything? Like a lookout, or something.

A lookout.

Almost not daring to breathe for fear of tensing the boy up, hoping desperately that Barbara would not choose that instant to call again from the kitchen, he said, “Ah... you wouldn’t remember anything much about this girl, I guess, huh, Jimmy?”

“She was just a... uh, girl, you know. Older, sorta. Not real old, like Ma, but, uh, nineteen or twenty or somethin’.” He chewed his lip, then brightened suddenly. “Her dad’s name is Marsden, ’cause I used to deliver papers to him before they moved away.” His mouth was hanging slightly open as he looked into his own brief past. “Big white house with a stone front on it, on the right-hand side of Glenn Way. The daily an’ the Sunday, both. Her dad gave me a baseball once.”

Curt’s drive home was a kaleidoscopic whirl of half-formed questions and bits of sensual image: the faint remembered fragrance of Barbara’s perfume, the way she had seemed to bend toward him as she had said goodnight, the fervor of her demand that he call her with whatever he might uncover about the predators. And the questions. A lookout? But how? Why? What sort of girl helped a gang rape an innocent woman?

He walked across the road to the booth, sat in the little metal seat, leaned out to stare up and down Linda Vista. Yes. Across the road he could see the dull gleam of his VW’s chrome at the bottom of his drive; higher, he could see fragments of light from his own house gleaming through the foliage.

A lookout. They would have set sentries — a sentry, anyway. And even on a black night such as this he could have seen anyone walking up the driveway toward the house. Or driving, of course.

From the front porch, he stared down toward the invisible booth. How would such a lookout communicate with those inside the house? A phone call? Feasible, of course, but subject to dialing error...

A car whipped by down on Linda Vista, its headlights showing for a moment the empty booth, the open door, even the metal seat inside.

Of course. A lookout clown below, a relay on the porch.

Curt walked down the drive, crossed the blacktop, shut the door of the booth, and returned to the porch. Perfect. And in April the foliage would not have been as full as it was now, in high summer. In April a relay lookout couldn’t help seeing the girl in the booth if she stood up, pulled shut the door to make the light go on, and pretended to dial. The relay merely opened the front door, shouted...

But... a girl?

There were such women, of course, consorts of motorcycle gangs in leather jackets and stomping boots and Nazi helmets, but...

But who cared what sort? Not an individual girl, a human being at all, to Curt. Just... one of the predators. Tomorrow it would begin. The new search. No need of Archie Matthews now. Just find Glenn Way, start looking. Asking questions. Her folks had moved away previous to last April? Well, she hadn’t. Not just a street, not just a stone-faced house he had, but a name. Marsden. No first name, but again, who cared? He would learn it, would find her, would ask questions.

As he started up the stairs toward the bedroom, a momentary worry stopped him. What if she were innocent, not one of the gang, just a girl who had been out with a fresh date, had slapped a face, had begun walking home and had stopped at the phone booth to sit down and rest?

Curt shook it off. Too much coincidence. And besides, how had the predators known where to find Jimmy Anderson, if not through the girl in the phone booth? He had recognized her, it was reasonable to assume that she also had recognized him. Tomorrow...

Only when he was in bed with the lights out did Curt think again of Barbara Anderson, and then she returned to his memory with a warm rush of vaguely realized excitement. Sun-frosted brown hair, steady jade eyes, rounded mature curve of breast and hip and thigh as she moved between sink and cabinet with the dried dishes.

And she had asked him to call her — had almost demanded that he call her, in fact. Nothing more than a very natural desire to know about the predators who had threatened her and her child; and yet...

Perhaps just some tiny part of it personal, also? Some tiny part of it just between her and Curt? Some spark of emotion, perhaps?

Chapter 21

Debbie left her French exam and started back toward the dorm. As of right now, summer school was over; and summer itself rapidly was drawing to a close. But Debbie felt none of the sadness attributed by pops songwriters to that passing, because a path of joy, beginning tonight, stretched down the years for her and Rick. In half an hour he would pick her up and they would drive down to his folks’ cabin on the coast for the weekend. Just the two of them. It bothered her a little that she’d had to lie to her parents, tell them she was going to be staying at Cynthia’s place in San Jose — but it was so right with Rick!

Walking along she felt flushed, almost feverish, but knew that it was just excitement. Tonight... Cynthia said it wasn’t too bad, even the first time, if the boy was gentle. And Ricky would be gentle.

Up in her room, drifting on her dream, Debbie packed her Lady Baltimore train case with cosmetics and swim suit and the half-used card of C-Quens she had gotten from Cynthia, whose father was a druggist. She had been taking them for ten days, ever since deciding that she would give in to Rick’s entreaties and go to the cabin with him.

She snapped down the catches on the train case, picked it up, and saw for the first time a note that the house mother had put on her pillow. Debbie caught her breath. What if Ricky couldn’t... If she didn’t go through with it now, she wasn’t sure she could ever get herself steeled to say yes again.

But it was a university extension number. Whew. Probably just something to do with the French exam, or the glee club during the upcoming fall term, or maybe even with the student newspaper. It could wait until Monday when she got back and...

But she’d be rushed on Monday, clearing out her room to go stay with her folks until the new term started. Better call now, Ricky wasn’t here yet anyway. She went downstairs to the pay phone in the little alcove off the wood-paneled common room, dialed the university central switchboard and asked for the proper extension.

“Anthropology Department, Miss Reeves.”

Anthropology? She didn’t have any anthropology courses. “This is Debbie Marsden. I’m returning a call to your number that—”

“Oh yes,” said the flatly efficient voice, “I’ll connect you.”

“But...” But the key already was flicked. Anthropology? Who...

The line opened, a heavy voice said, “There you are, Miss Marsden. Curt Halstead here. I’m sorry I left no name on my message, but I wasn’t sure you would return my call in that case.”

“Not... return your call?” Debbie asked faintly. Professor Halstead? Whose wife had slept with Ricky and then had killed herself when Ricky didn’t show up that Friday night? But he couldn’t want to talk to her about that. He just couldn’t. She’d just die if he said anything...

He didn’t. “Why, yes, Miss Marsden, you don’t know me, never had me for a class, I was afraid you would just ignore the call.” The voice seemed heavy, faintly sarcastic, not at all like the man she vaguely remembered from the faculty-freshman tea as big and loosely built and with a lice smile. “You see. I recently lost my wife...”

“I... yes, I heard, I...” Debbie clung to the receiver, pressing her shoulder hard against the wall to keep from sitting down suddenly. Her face felt chalky.

“Well, then,” said the voice, with heavy joviality that was somehow menacing, “can I expect you at my house this afternoon? I checked your schedule, your last exam is finished—”

To his house? Why? How? This afternoon? “But I... Professor, I... this weekend, I...”

“Tied up? All right then, Miss Marsden, I’ll expect you for tea on Monday afternoon. But... let’s make it early, say... two P. M.?”

“But I... I don’t...”

“That’s fine, Miss Marsden. I expect you know the way.”

She leaned against the wall, thankful for the cold steel of the partition against her forehead, idiotically clutching the dead receiver to her ear as if it would tell her more. Her heart was pounding. What in God’s name could he want? She made herself straighten up. More pertinently, what was the matter with her? What had she to feel guilty about? Granted, it had been an odd conversation, but... not a conversation where phone booths, or Friday nights, or even suicide had come up. The trouble, of course, was that she knew of Paula Halstead’s infidelity and Professor Halstead didn’t. And now that Paula was dead, wouldn’t he be happier with his memories of his wife intact?

Up in her room, Debbie sat down on her bed to await Rick’s arrival. She would tell him of the phone call; he would know what she should do. He... but no. This was her problem, she wouldn’t say anything until after she had seen the professor. She would feel really silly if she got there on Monday and it was something about the newspaper or fall classes or something like that. She wasn’t going to let it ruin her weekend with Rick. Not this weekend, when everything belonged just to the two of them. Nothing must intrude, and most especially nothing which might remind Ricky of Paula Halstead.

She realized the red Triumph was stopped at the end of the walk, horn tootling. She picked up her train case and went out. Downstairs, she tossed it into the back of the car, hopped in beside Rick, and shyly stretched over to kiss him. The butterflies were back in her stomach. As they pulled out, neither noticed the green Rambler, parked a short block down Dormitory Row, which started up behind them.

At the wheel, grim-faced, was Julio Escobar.

The cabin was perched at the bottom V of a deep wooded ravine, enclosed by jagged coastal bluffs and backed by a thick stand of Douglas fir and tideland spruce. There were two small bedrooms, a living room dominated by a cast-iron wood stove, and a tiny kitchen with a butane cook stove. On the roof was a rain-filled water tank to gravity-feed the kitchen sink, toilet, and shower. The front of the cabin, the living room, looked out over the beach, and the front door opened on a flight of fifteen rough wooden steps terminating on the sand dunes which rimmed the beach. This was a V of white sand, not over a hundred yards wide at the water’s edge, which faced a mirror-image V of water. It foamed in from the open sea between enclosing black blades of granite which dropped down from the bluffs flanking the ravine.

Debbie clapped her hands in excitement. “Oh, Ricky, we’ve got our own private beach!”

Rick came up behind her and put his arms around her waist. She turned in the circle of his arms and kissed him briefly, then broke loose with a nervous little laugh.

“Whoa!” she exclaimed. For an instant she had felt a giddy touch of near-terror: in a few hours, when darkness came, she was committed to surrender everything to him. “Can... we go swimming, Ricky?”

“Sure, nude if you want to!” he mock-leered. But she heard his voice quaver a little, and then it was all right. He was nervous too! “They can’t even see this cove from the highway; in all the years my old man’s had this place, nobody’s ever come down here.”

“I’ll wear my suit, thanks. What if your folks came down?”

“I told you, Deb, they won’t. Hell, they think the other guys are down here with me. They know we wouldn’t want ’em hanging around.”

His slap across her backside made her yelp. “Let’s get our suits.”

Debbie stripped in the left-hand bedroom. She had shut the door behind her, and the window was filled with the dark green branches of a fir tree close behind the house, so she studied her nude body in the full-length mirror on the inside of the door. Long and slender legs, without any excess flesh inside the thighs, where so many girls jiggled when they walked. Waist tight and firm, breasts thrusting and well-formed, without a woman’s mature fullness yet to draw them down.

A tiny scratching from the window made her spin about with a muffled yip, trying ineffectually to cover her groin and both breasts with only two hands; then she giggled and sank down on the bed. A chipmunk peered in at her intently, one paw up with a single tiny claw hooked through the screen. He jerked his head twice, a comic’s double-take, and was gone with a flirt of the tail, so instantaneously that Debbie could not be totally sure he ever had been there at all.

What a cutie he was! She’d put out nut meats for him later.

She got into her bikini quickly, the funny hollow feeling back from having seen herself nude; in a few hours Ricky would have explored every secret place of that body...

“Hey, quit gawking in the mirror and c’mon,” he called.

“I wasn’t gawking,” she said as she emerged. “This chipmunk...”

Her voice trailed off. She wore just the skimpy halter and abbreviated trunks of the most daring bikini she’d been able to find in Los Feliz, and Rick’s avid stare, hot and frank and wanting, made her blush furiously. He’d never even seen her in shorts before, and now he could see almost all of her.

“I... I’ll race you to the water!” she exclaimed, avoiding his gaze, frightened again by his nearly nude, very male body.

They splashed in almost together, with yells from Rick and squeals of despair from Debbie at the fifty-degree temperature; then it was a water fight and finally a thorough ducking despite Debbie’s pleadings and shrieks. Rick finally desisted; they kissed hurriedly, then ran back up the sand to the dry, sun-warmed beach below the dunes, where they flopped out on their towels out of the wind.

Julio, no longer able to see them from his place of concealment in the conifers by the foot of the gravel drive, gritted his teeth and turned away. He climbed up the narrow track, went over the locked gate, and trudged back to the Rambler parked in the view-area two hundred yards beyond.

Lying bastard, pretending he wasn’t making it with Debbie! For all Julio knew, he was balling her right there on the beach right now. He’d go make sure, if he could be sure they wouldn’t see him. It was all right that he’d been following Debbie, off and on, since the Fourth of July, looking for proof that she might betray their identity to someone as the attackers of Paula Halstead; but he had no excuse for having followed her and Rick today.

He got in the Rambler, U-turned back toward San Conrado, the nearest town, some ten miles north. Yeah, it was a sort of sick scene, following them today. Especially when he knew he would come back after dark, try to actually see them making out. It was like a goddamn fever or something, which had gotten worse the more he followed her. He had seen no signs of treachery, but he had learned every turn of her head, every expression of her face, all the movements and graces and occasional coltish awkwardness of her body. He had fed upon her, had even considered picking her up and just taking what she was giving to Rick.

Anything, in fact, to put out the fire which raged in his guts.

At sundown they went in and shut the windows and got a fire started in the wood stove. Debbie made steaks and baked potatoes and salad and warmed the French bread; they sat cross-legged on the living-room rug to eat, facing one another.

Debbie felt herself getting tense again whenever Rick, dark and handsome and intense by the reddish flickering glow from the stove, caught her eye. Finally they were finished eating, and then Rick took her Coke out of her hand, set it aside, and gently pushed her down on her back. They were still in their swim suits. He started kissing her, then put his hand in the hot V between her breasts, his fingers curving around her breast under the halter.

She tore loose suddenly, and started sobbing. “I’m sor... sorry, Ricky. I just... I... please, be patient...”

“Patient? What the hell...” He was sitting up, panting, his eyes glowing angrily. Then he took a deep breath and nodded. He stood up. “Okay, Deb,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

In the kitchen he poured out orange juice from the old refrigerator into two glasses, then added vodka from the bottle his old man kept under the sink. He saw his hands were shirking. Goddamn her! Then he told himself to take it easy. She was a goddamn virgin, had to remember that. Big deal for her. Mustn’t blow it by coming on too hard, scaring her so she froze up. He’d never gotten a virgin, and he wanted to, real bad. Like one of those old kings or something in history class, take any one in the kingdom they wanted. Always a virgin.

He went back in with their drinks, and made his voice cheerful. “Screwdrivers, they call them, kid. Just orange juice and vodka. You won’t even taste it, but it’ll make you relax.”

“I’m sorry,” she said humbly. “I tried, I really did, I—”

“That’s okay, baby.” His eyes gleamed. “Just relax...”

And with three screwdrivers warming her stomach, revolving in her head, she did, letting her body take over, make its own responses to his mouth and hands. She kissed the back of his neck a little dizzily as he unsnapped her halter, and clung to his brown, muscular back as his mouth sought her bared breasts.

Then they were in the bedroom, and for the first time in her life she was gripped by that ancient urgency far older than the brief human species of which she was but a momentary spark. Her legs parted; when he entered her she cried out once, sharply, then moaned, and whispered his name again and again, fiercely, a talisman to carry her beyond the pain to the pleasure that sex education courses had promised her.

As she clung to him, whispering her love to him, Rick, above her, grunted and thrust and finally pumped, careless of her stifled outcries, the biggest man in the world, making it, balling a virgin, getting his.

When it was over they lay side by side, Debbie crying proudly into the hollow of his neck, by some miracle knowing that the strange urgency would grip her again in a few minutes’ time, and Rick, staring up into the darkness, complacent at having made his first virgin. Old Deb, she hadn’t been much this first time, but he dug being the first one, dug knowing he had hurt her and had made her like it. A whole different thing than with Mary, who you couldn’t get to even by hurting because she dug every sort of weird scene you could dream up.

But it had been sort of like getting Paula Halstead, all over again. Goddamn her! He wished that it was her next to him, not Debbie. He’d show her some things that would take that pitiless contempt from her eyes — that look he’d never been able to change or forget.

Thinking of Paula got him going again, and he turned toward Debbie as the chipmunk, that she’d seen outside the window earlier, scrabbled getting those silly damned walnuts or whatever the hell it was that she’d left out for him. Debbie heard it, too, but didn’t react. There was nothing in the world for her just then but Ricky.

Outside, Julio slipped off through the darkened woods, unaware of the city-bred noises he was making. Not that he would have cared even if he had been aware of his clumsiness in the undergrowth. He was half-blind with frustration and desire and hatred.

Dirty goddamn whorish bitch. Oh, she’d get hers. When the time came, and it wasn’t far off, she’d get plenty.

CHAPTER 22

It was 2:03 on Monday afternoon when Debbie rang Curt’s doorbell. Waiting, she straightened to draw in her already flat stomach and thus thrust her breasts a little more noticeably forward. I’m a woman now, she thought a little complacently. Ricky has made me a woman. As a woman, she knew, with a woman’s weapons, she had nothing to fear from Professor Curtis Halstead, even if it would be something about his wife.

The door opened, and Curt was looking at her.

“Miss Marsden? Come in, please.” He shut the door behind her; she was totally unlike anything he might have imagined. “Would you like some tea, or coffee?”

“I... tea would be fine.”

She’s nervous as a cat, Curt thought. He said, “I’ll just be a moment, Miss Marsden. Or may I call you Debbie?”

“Debbie is fine, sir.”

She sat primly on the couch, feet in their flat shoes flat on the floor, knees held tightly together. She watched him disappear through the double doors into the dark-paneled dining room. He was nothing at all like her vague remembrance from the faculty tea; he must be as old as her dad, maybe, but he moved the way that Ricky moved. She felt a momentary stab of uneasiness; he looked like a man who might be proof against the woman’s weapons she had thought to rely on.

Curt returned with the tea service on a tray, and was reminded vividly of that first morning with Monty Worden. But this girl was so young, so pathetically young. But he had to gel those names from her. The names of the predators.

“The water will boil in a moment.” Then he added, in the same conversational voice, “What time did you leave the phone booth that night? The night that Paula killed herself?”

“I... what do you mean, I... don’t understand...”

“The paper boy has identified you, Debbie. You must recall him.”

Debbie realized that she had half risen, made herself sit back down. Then she realized she was staring at her fingers, intertwined in her lap, so she quickly dropped her hands to the sofa. The paper boy! She remembered him, all right. But how had the professor found out about him? And... And... She mustn’t admit being there; she had promised Ricky she would never tell about him and Paula Halstead and...

She heard her own voice, like the voice of a stranger speaking from a great distance, saying, “I... about nine-thirty. I...”

“Paula killed herself just a few minutes before my return at about eleven forty-live. If I had returned directly following the end of my seminar, she still would be alive.” He said it entirely without visible emotion. The teapot began whistling thinly, and Curt stood up. He started for the kitchen, then whirled abruptly: Worden had taught him the value of shock tactics. “What were you doing in the phone booth?”

Startled, Debbie tried to counter weakly with, “What... does one usually do in a phone booth?”

“One usually makes a phone call — which you didn’t.”

Then he was gone, leaving her staring numbly after him. She fought an urge to bolt out the front door. She mustn’t tell. Mustn’t mustn’t mustn’t. Remember: if his old wife had left Ricky alone, none of this would have happened. It was her fault, not Debbie’s or Rick’s.

Curt returned, poured tea, added milk and sugar to his as Debbie added lemon and sugar to hers. Was it possible, just barely possible, that she had been there innocently? But her hands, holding the cup, were shaking slightly, and her eyes would not meet his.

He snapped at her, “Well? What were you doing in that booth?”

Debbie’s hands jerked, spilling tea; she felt her control slipping, knew she would start sniveling in a moment like a high school kid. He was watching her as if she were something from under a stone.

“I... Ri... a friend asked me to... to... Please, don’t look at me like that, I... it was... your wife’s fault. If she’d left... left him alone...”

Curt dropped, “Indeed?” into the silence. He moved over to the fireplace, leaned an elbow on the mantle. From here he could see the clean even line of her hair parting. “Left whom alone?”

Debbie just shook her head, eyes squeezed tight shut to keep the tears inside. She mustn’t tell.

Curt, sensing the resistance in that direction, swung off at right angles. “Here. Use my handkerchief. What did Paula do to him?”

“All right!” she flared, red-eyed and hating it, but now able to hide her face behind his handkerchief, at least. “All right! Your precious wife picked him up in a motel bar and took him to her room and... seduced him! He’s not even twenty yet and she was... was...”

“Thirty-six.” All right, old, to nineteen. He said, “What motel was it? What month? What day?”

“I don’t know any of that.” Debbie found herself a little put out, through her tears, that she didn’t. Ricky had left her woefully unprepared to defend herself against this hateful accusing man who hadn’t really accused anyone of anything yet; but then, she thought, it wasn’t Ricky’s fault. She hadn’t told him about Professor Halstead’s call. She went on, controlling her tears now, “But that wasn’t all. She kept calling him at home, waiting around for him outside Jay... outside where he... works. She wouldn’t leave him alone. She was... was insatiable.”

As she used the damning word she watched his face, waiting for it to crumble under the impact of his wife’s infidelity; but he just stood there quietly, gravely attentive. None of the wrenching pain that she would feel if Ricky were to... But maybe when you got old, your emotions didn’t touch you anymore. Or maybe it was no surprise to him.

“You were in the phone booth because of your friend?”

Now that the bad part was past, Debbie didn’t mind talking. She nodded almost eagerly. “Ri... he planned to see her that Friday night and tell her to leave him alone, but then he had a flat tire and...”

“And so Paula, in despair, killed herself.”

Curt supplied the ending almost absently. Unless this girl was a consummate actress, she knew nothing at all about the vicious attack on Paula. Her boyfriend, call him X, had been damned clever, using Debbie’s love — whatever love meant at nineteen — by telling her a story she would want to believe, a tragic story that would give him stature in her eyes. Too sophisticated for nineteen? No. Not if you assume a doting mother, say, to spend a boyhood practicing on, a sister or two, perhaps, to study and observe as he grew up.

“You were his lookout, right, Debbie? So he wouldn’t be surprised here with her, and be... compromised?”

She nodded eagerly. “Except he was worried about her reputation, not his own.”

Curt nodded almost benignly, as an icy anger began to grip him. “One little thing that puzzles me, Debbie. If he was here because Paula wanted him to be, why would he need a lookout? If anyone rang the bell, she needed only not answer it.”

“I... don’t...” Debbie was momentarily stricken by the implications of the question. “Maybe... he was afraid you’d come home...”

“Have you ever heard of a man named Harold Rockwell?”

“I... no, sir.” She seemed genuinely confused. “Is he another of her... I mean...”

“Another of Paula’s lovers?” Curt felt grimly amused and a bit sick at the same time. X had done his work well. “No. Harold Rockwell was assaulted on a downtown street and beaten so viciously that he went blind, one week before my wile’s suicide. Four teen-agers did it, Debbie. Driving a two-tone green Chevrolet station wagon, a fifty-five or fifty-six model.”

He was watching her closely; the station wagon had sunk in, all right. It had meant something to her. But she tossed her head almost nervously, like a thoroughbred mare; still spirit in her.

“I don’t see what this has to do with... with anything.”

“Paula was a witness to that assault — the only witness. Because Rockwell was blind, only she could identify the attackers. One week later, on the Friday night Paula killed herself, my home was invaded by four teen-agers. Four predators, if you will. Just at eight o’clock, when you were in that phone booth, they parked a two-tone green fifty-five or fifty-six Chevrolet station wagon north of the golf course, walked down the fairway to the fourteenth green. You had the phone booth door open, the all-clear signal, so they came up to the house—”

“No!” she exclaimed, catching the implications for the first time.

“When Paula opened the door they hit her in the stomach, and then dragged her into the reading room...” He pointed toward the back hall. “Through there, just a few steps. There’s a daybed in there.”

Debbie was drawing her face from side to side in negation, eyes tight shut, as if already aware of what was coming. Curt knew he should stop now, but he couldn’t; he had reconstructed it too often in the silence of his mind to stop now.

“And then they raped her, one after the other. Maybe they even had seconds because she was such prime stuff. But always one of them would be on the porch to watch the phone booth through the trees.”

“Stop it,” she sobbed. “Please stop...”

“An hour, two hours after they left — we aren’t sure just what time that was — Paula went upstairs and very carefully and almost ceremoniously slit her wrist and bled to death.” He moved in on her, haunted by Worden’s coarse, unfeeling remark four months before. “Why do you think she did that, Debbie? Do you suppose she found out she liked it?”

He had come to a stop standing over her, breathing hard, sweat pouring down his face, shirt sodden. Debbie was huddled on the couch with her arms folded under her breasts, each white-fingered hand gripping the opposite elbow.

When she raised her face there was true horror and revulsion in it. “And you think that I... that I would help somebody... do...”

Curt backed off, shook his head; he felt sick. He said gently, “No, Debbie, I don’t think that. I think you were used, unwittingly.”

But he had lost her. He had lost control, pushed too hard, put her into a corner she had to get out of at any cost to logic or thought.

“I...” Her lips were so dry that she had to stop and wet them, but her chin thrust stubbornly and her eyes were almost transfigured. “Do you really expect me to believe that Ri... that my... that he would do something like that to anyone? I... know him. I...”

Curt knew she was just fighting back, that her mind was simply refusing the monstrous, the unacceptable, but it still momentarily shook him. What if he was wrong? What if it all just had been a series of grotesque and terrible coincidences? What if Paula had been having an affair with Debbie’s nineteen-year-old boyfriend?

He sighed. “It happened, Debbie, pretty much as I’ve told it. If you’re so convinced that your friend isn’t involved, give me his name. Let me talk with him, let me be convinced, too.” Even as he said it, he knew it was useless.

Debbie stood up on legs which she seemed to find tottery. “I want to go away now, please.”

“I’ll drive you back to school.”

“I’d rather walk.”

As she started for the door, Curt, on sudden impulse, picked up from the mantlepiece the envelope with Paula’s suicide note in it. The words had long since been burned indelibly into his brain. At the door, he thrust it into her hands. She met his eyes almost blindly, not understanding, still bewildered by lingering shock and emotion.

“Read it,” he said. “It’s her suicide note — Paula’s note. If it raises any questions in your mind, call me. Give me a name. Just one name is all I need. And tell your friend that he doesn’t have to worry about trouble with the police; the law can’t touch him if he had anything to do with it or not.”

Debbie somehow got away, down the steps, down the driveway, the envelope clutched in one hand. Walking jerkily back toward school on Linda Vista, she took out the note and read it. It shook her.

I am doing this because of something intolerable in myself...

Debbie’s steps slowed, then quickened triumphantly again. Of course. Paula had been an old woman; she hadn’t been able to face life without Ricky. Something intolerable in myself. Yes, shame had driven her on. You read about it all the time. The older women, seeking the younger and younger lovers, finally killing themselves from shame.

As for the rest of it, that Harold Rockwell thing, she was sure that had happened the way the professor had said it had, but that didn’t mean Rick or any of the others were mixed up in it — even though it was the sort of thing it wouldn’t surprise her to hear about that icky Julio doing. Julio, whose eyes always undressed her when he looked at her. She felt a faint disgust with herself. To have even for an instant felt any doubt of Ricky, after this past weekend together! She wouldn’t say anything to him about today; it would be too much like questioning his actions. Their love was still too new, too fragile and wonderful, to risk that way.

Curt stood on the front porch, watching the girl go down the driveway toward the blacktop. She soon was lost to his view behind the trees and undergrowth, but he continued to stand there abstractedly. So it went on. Talking with her dormitory house mother, talking with her parents — not that they necessarily would know who Debbie’s special boyfriend was. Parents or school authorities seldom did these days. Failing there, talking with her special girl friends among the students. Maybe, if necessary, putting Archie Matthews back on it.

He stared unseeingly at a green Rambler which dawdled on Linda Vista toward the university, in the direction Debbie had gone. In his brief glimpses through the foliage, Curt could not see the driver.

The trouble was he had handled it wrong. Pushed too hard, too fast. Left her no way to turn, so she had to deny to herself that her boyfriend could be involved. It also bothered him that she had believed so strongly. Maybe he was wrong; he had to be sure before he moved against anyone. At least he had the threat against Jimmy Anderson; he hadn’t told Debbie about that. He still had that as a lever.