A Time of Predators

After...

Curt locked his car and started up the echoing stairs to the gym. In another week the streets of Los Feliz would be jammed with students returning to the university, but now it all seemed damned remote. Even the gym, the chromed bars and black orderly ranks of weights, seemed remote, as if his last visit had been years rather than days before.

The top half of the office Dutch door was open. Preston, at the desk, looked up and his cold blue eyes met Curt’s — again, like a stranger’s. But then he was on his feet, grinning his wide infectious grin, sticking out his hand. “Well, well, the prodigal returns.”

After a moment’s hesitation Cart shook with him. “I’m sorry about the skin-diving gear, Floyd.”

“Somebody from the sheriff’s office brought it back yesterday.” He gestured Curt to the couch. “Going to take a workout?”

“I... can’t. I’ve got a couple of ribs that...”

Curt stopped there; he had come intending to pick up his workout gear, break entirely with Preston. During that long night below the bluffs, he had traveled such distances, probed such depths, that a return to normal life seemed impossible. It was like what Hemingway had said somewhere about men coming of age: it was not always a matter of their twenty-first birthdays.

Into the pause, Preston said, “Your girl friend has been calling here twice a day, leaving messages. Says you weren’t answering your phone over the weekend, and that she’d been worried.”

“I... haven’t felt like talking to anyone...”

“Why don’t you hang your head?” demanded Preston abruptly.

“I... what?”

The big weight-lifter sat down on the front edge of his desk. “Do you think you’re the only guy who ever woke up in the morning and wanted to puke into the face looking at him from the bathroom mirror? How do you think I felt after I realized that I didn’t have the guts to go down there with you?”

“That’s different,” said Curt coldly. “It wasn’t your fight. Floyd, I wanted to kill. Do you know what my first thought was when I looked down at that poor dead Mexican kid the papers talked about? That I hadn’t lost my speed with a knife. How’s that, huh? All the time I was after them, I was no better than they. Just as vicious, just as sick...”

Preston merely grunted. “You know, Curt, when I was a kid my dad was a circuit preacher — they still had them in Missouri, places like that, in the thirties. I was in and out of a dozen rural schools by the time I was ten, which for a skinny little runt like me meant fighting. All the time, because I was the new kid in town. I got so that my first day in a new school I’d find the school bully and I’d whup him... I’d whup him because I had to whup him.”

“But what’s that got to do with—”

“Then I grew up and went into the Army and started getting regular meals and exercise, and working with the weights, and I ended up as a big guy. Big enough so I could punch a guy in the snot-locker one minute and buy him a beer the next. Bat... Let me feel that I’ve been cornered, and suddenly I’m that little guy again, fighting hard and dirty to beat the school bully.”

Curt looked at him strangely. “Then you’re saying that—”

“I’m saying that whatever happened down there last Friday night, you didn’t have any choice. But you did have the training. And I’m saying that if a bunch of guys push another guy off a window ledge, they can’t blame him for whatever he does on the way down.”

“You bother me, Professor.” Detective-Sergeant Monty Worden reached for a cigarette. “I underestimated you, and that can be fatal for a cop.”

When Curt had come home from Floyd Preston’s gym, he had found Worden’s dark sedan parked in the driveway, and Worden parked on the couch in the living room. He was glad he’d talked with Preston first; it had somehow braced him for this ordeal.

“I gave your men my statement at San Conrado on Saturday morning.”

Worden feathered smoke through his nostrils. “The university gave me the background, Professor. Enlisted 1942 in the British military at the age of seventeen. Volunteered for an irregular warfare group called the Special Air Services which was being set up by a guy named David Sterling. Trained in parachute and rubber-boat landings, skilled in killing with the knife, the pistol, and the hand. Awarded the George Cross in 1943 after a desert operation against some German airfields.”

Curt shrugged. “Did you come to hear my war stories?”

“I came to admit that I goofed in checking you out. I should have realized it then.”

“Realized what, Sergeant?”

“That you’re a born killer, baby. It’s in your blood, you like to see ’em die. This little exercise against these kids must have been manna from heaven to you, huh, Halstead?”

For a vivid moment Curt could see Champ’s contorted face pleading up at him from the cliff; Julio’s sightless eyes in the little clearing below the cliffs. A born killer? Or a man, as Preston had said, who had been pushed off a window ledge and who was not responsible for his actions on the way down? Or someone in between the two? An amalgam of college professor and wild-eyed seventeen-year-old in the desert?

“You’re doing the talking, Sergeant,” he said.

Worden nodded. “Sure. Tough man, played it cool right down the line. Three of ’em dead and one crippled for life with a broken back — probably worse than being dead for a simple, gentle guy like him...”

“Did you talk to Barbara Anderson about the gentle phone call he made to her?”

“Okay, okay,” Worden said, irritably brushing it aside. “So maybe this Champ character should have been put in a rubber room years ago. But then what about that Debbie Marsden, huh? Feel good about her?”

Curt felt the sweat start out between his shoulder blades. Poor broken Debbie, used and abused and thrown away. It was so tempting to admit to Worden his stabbing guilt about Debbie; if, after all, he bad quit seeking the predators... But Worden acted as if it was such an admission he sought, and Curt would be damned if he’d give the detective the satisfaction.

“I didn’t know the Los Feliz police blamed me for that.”

“Sure, okay, the punks did it, all right — after her boyfriend handed her over like a fistful of pocket change. But a blue VW was seen in the Gander driveway; and the ambulance was summoned anonymously.”

“What does the girl say?”

“She doesn’t.” Then Worden grunted in disgust. “If the damn doctor hadn’t been so quick with his needle on Friday afternoon, we wouldn’t have been finding corpses on Saturday morning. As for the girl, she’s okay physically — but it’s my bet she’ll be psyched for life. Probably the first guy tries to kiss her will get a hatpin in the chest.” He leered through the smoke of another cigarette. “Not that what happened is your fault, Professor. The D. A. is buying your story, all the way down the line. Self-defense.”

When he stopped, Curt said, “But you disagree.”

“You bet your fanny I do.” He stood up, towered over Curt, his hands fisted in his trouser pockets as if that was the only way he could be sure of not using them. “I think you lured the dummy up on the cliff, and then shoved him off. I think you conned the spic into the knife fight, and then killed him. Slashing his wrist, so he’d die the way your wife did. So damned cute it makes me want to puke.”

Curt stood up also, went to the windows to look unseeingly out over the golf course. The funny thing was that if Worden had come here the day before, Curt would have agreed with him, on all of it. Even the born killer part. Now he wouldn’t. Part of it was the talk with Preston, but more than that...

More than that, mere survival sometimes dictated bloody-mindedness, in the British sense of the word. He turned back to the detective. “And I suppose I pushed the Dean boy in front of the truck?”

“I can’t fit you in there,” Worden admitted grudgingly. “The driver and the time element both exclude you — you were calling our office from the rill-night greasy spoon in San Conrado just about the time he got it. Funny, too — since it was his fingerprints I had lifted off that wall above the couch in the other room.”

Debbie’s boyfriend. It figured. The planner, the one who pushed or conned the others into it. Good family, the newspapers said, the father in insurance, $50,000-a-year class. A persuasive boy, he would have been, and a clever one. But then, if he was clever, what had brought him to the middle of that highway in the shrouding mantle of fog?

“So that just leaves Gander,” said Curt. “The one who’s missing.”

“Missing?” Then Worden nodded again. “Yeah, you would, all right. Only I don’t buy your story about walking all the way to San Conrado. I think you left the cove a lot later than your statement says, and that you hitched a ride with someone we haven’t found yet.”

He stopped, dug in his trouser pocket, and then dropped something on the coffee table. Curt picked it up curiously: a blackened silver skull-and-crossbones ring, very heavy and made for a large finger. He looked up, surprised an almost erotic expression on Worden’s face. “This is supposed to mean something to me?”

“Some fishermen down the coast hooked into a ten-foot white shark yesterday — one of the man-eaters. They sliced him open, just for the hell of it, and found a partially digested human arm in his belly. Wearing this ring on one of the fingers.”

“You mean that Heavy Gander—”

“His old man has identified it. Funny thing, Halstead, tough old guy like that, you’d think he wouldn’t give a damn. But he busted down an’ cried like a baby when we showed him that ring.”

“Yes,” said Curt. “Well.” He felt as if he had been bludgeoned, but he knew now that he would be all right. He realized that Worden had come hoping for a confession, and he knew that Worden wasn’t going to get one. Even if he had been guilty, anyone but Worden. He looked at his watch. “I suppose you’ve got to be going. Sergeant...”

Worden stared at him for a long moment, then heaved a deep sigh. “Yeah, you’re a tough cookie, Halstead. One of the worms. I spent the morning with the D.A., tryna convince him we had enough to prosecute. He said no; he was right, of course. On what we got, no jury would convict — not with a smart defense attorney to drag your dead wife into court by the guts whenever you needed her. So you’re gonna get away with it...”

“Just like they would have gotten away with it, Sergeant,” said Curt. He let the detective get to the front door with his hand on the knob before calling his name; trying to match his tone to Worden’s, when the detective had told him almost casually that the predators would never be found or punished.

Worden turned, eyes hard and wary. “Yeah?”

“No hard feelings?” said Curt. “It’s just the facts of life, Sergeant.”

He stood by the open door, watching the tail of the angry detective’s car disappear down the driveway between the trees. One of the worms, Worden had said. Perhaps he could operate in his world only by seeing everyone and everything in two dimensions only; perhaps police work demanded a clear-cut choice between the good and the evil. Because Curt still thought that Worden was a damned good cop.

He went upstairs to his study, sat down at his desk. The time of predators was past — at least for now — but the time had left behind a need for decisions. For endings, in fact.

Curt wrote out his resignation from Los Feliz University in long-hand on his letterhead, read it through once, and sealed it in an envelope for delivery to the university. Preston had been right: the whole man was involved, you could not change your nature, you could only control it. Until Curt was more sure of what he was controlling, of just who and what he was, he knew that he no longer could teach.

Then he went downstairs to the phone, dialed a number, was aware of a tingling in his fingertips when the receiver was raised.

“Barbara? Curt Halstead here. I’m sorry I didn’t call before, but... I had some things to work out. I... this evening I’m going over to the hospital to see Debbie Marsden, and I wondered if you would like to go along. And I thought that maybe afterward...”

His suggestion hung in the electronic limbo between them for a long time; and when Barbara answered, she seemed to have made a decision about far more than just how she might spend her evening.

“I’d like that, Curt,” she said evenly. “I’d like that very much.”

Curt Halstead stood for a long time beside the phone, before finally replacing it in its cradle. Yes, he thought, a time for decisions, a time for endings.

But perhaps, also, a time for beginnings.