The Stalker

3

It was a voice out of the past, dimly remembered in that first groping effort at placement but then becoming violently, jarringly, familiar; an insinuating, phlegmatic voice saying very distinctly over a telephone wire, “Steve? Steve Kilduff?”

Standing in the hallway, between the kitchen and the bedroom, Kilduff gripped the receiver so tightly that the tendons in his wrist began to ache. The back of his neck had suddenly grown cold.

“Steve?” Drexel asked again. “Is that you?”

“Yes,” he answered finally. “Hello, Larry.”

“A long time, baby.”

“Not long enough.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no.”

“Our agreement is still binding.”

“Not now, it isn’t ”

“What makes now special?”

“I think we’d better get together, Steve.”

“Why?”

“I can’t go into it over the phone.”

“Granite City?”

“Granite City.”

“How important?”

“Damned important.”

“Discovery?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure.”

Dear God, Kilduff thought.

Drexel said, “But not the way you’re thinking.”

Steve transferred the receiver from his left hand to his right, wiping the moist palm on the leg of his trousers. There was a dry, lacquered taste in his mouth. “All right,” he said slowly. “When?”

“Tonight.”

“Where?”

“We’d better make it your place,” Drexel said. “Can you get rid of your wife for the evening?”

“She’s already gone,” Kilduff said, a trace of bitterness coming into his tone. He didn’t offer to elaborate. “Why does it have to be here?”

“Halfway house.”

“I don’t get you.”

“Between Bodega Bay and Los Gatos.”

“Where are you?”

“Los Gatos.”

“And Bodega Bay?”

“Jim Conradin.”

“Will he be here, too?”

“If I can reach him.”

“What about the others?”

“No, just the three of us.”

“If it’s Granite City, it concerns them, too.”

“Not any more, it doesn’t ”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Drexel said, “Eight o’clock.”

There was a soft click from the other end of the line.

Kilduff stood holding the phone for a long moment, and then, carefully, replaced it in its cradle. He returned to the living room and stood in the middle of the buff-colored carpet. Discovery? he had asked. Maybe, Drexel had said; but not the way you’re thinking. What had he meant by that? Was it possible, after eleven years, eleven years, that somebody could have tied them to Granite City? No, that was completely inconceivable; the investigation had been dropped long ago, the Statute of Limitations had long since run its course. And even if it were somehow incredibly true, there was nothing the authorities could do, was there? Oh, they could bring it all out into the open, expose them all to the publicity, but that was really all, wasn’t it? Unless they would be able to demand repayment of the money, in spite of the fact that there was no chance of actual criminal prosecution. He couldn’t remember. Gene Beauchamp had been the legal expert, he had figured all the angles, all the probabilities and potentialities; he had been the one who told them that they had to remain in Illinois until the Statute ran out—three years. If you left the state during that time, and you were ever caught, you were still liable to Federal indictment for interstate flight to avoid prosecution for armed robbery.

What about Beauchamp? he wondered. And Cavalacci and Wykopf? Why had Drexel said it didn’t concern them any more? Had something already happened, had the others somehow been taken into custody? Christ, if ... No, no, no. If the authorities had learned of three, they would have learned of all six; if they had gotten three, they would have gotten all six. It was something else then, something else ...

Kilduff went into the bathroom on rubbery legs and ran some cold water into the shell-pink basin and splashed it over his face and neck. He looked at himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. His face had a grayish, unhealthy cast; fear, the old fear, the trapped fear, had replaced the dullness in his eyes. He looked away, reaching mechanically for one of the velour towels on the rack next to the shower bath. Another thought came into his mind, then: How had Drexel known where to find him? How had he known he lived in San Francisco? After the Statute of Limitations had run out, and they were able to leave Illinois, they had all gone their separate ways, none of them telling the others what their plans were, what their eventual destinations were. That had been an integral part of their agreement, just as their pledge never to contact one another had been an integral part. Since Drexel lived so near him—in Los Gatos, hadn’t he said? less than fifty miles away—it could be that he had somehow run across Kilduff during the past eight years. Still, the telephone was listed in Andrea’s name, he had insisted upon that, and he hadn’t been married, hadn’t even known Andrea, in Illinois. And there was the fact, too, that Drexel knew about Jim Conradin living in Bodega Bay ...

Kilduff’s temples began to throb rhythmically, achingly, and there was the distant half-realized sound of surf in his ears. Robot-like, he went into the living room again and sat on the chair he had occupied earlier. It’s all beginning to crumble, his mind said; first the money running out, and then Andrea leaving, and now Drexel coming impossibly out of the past—it’s finally beginning to crumble.

He sat with his hands gripping the cushioned side of the chair, staring at the closed drapes. After a while, some of the tautness left his body and the pressure at his temples abated. He took several deep, tremulous breaths, looking up to the sunburst clock on the near wall. It was a little past two.

Six hours. He knew he couldn’t sit there, waiting, alone, in the neat, empty, antiseptic apartment. He had to get out; a walk, a drive, anything, he had to get out.

Trina Conradin stood at the sitting room window, staring past the shimmering sea of vermilion and pink and lavender ice plants in the front yard. It was one of those old-fashioned, multi-paned windows, with a dome-shaped, lead stained-glass rosetta above it, and the imperfectness of the panes and the ebbing gray tendrils of fog made the retreating figure of her husband seem frighteningly surrealistic.

She watched him get into their eight-year-old Dodge, and a moment later heard the sound of the starter and a sharp, metallic rending as the automatic transmission was jerked out of neutral. The rear tires spun on the crushed-shell drive, and the car shot ahead, going too fast, its red brake lights coming on like twin demon’s eyes in the fog as he slowed momentarily to negotiate the sharp turn at the bottom of the inclined drive; then the car disappeared onto Shoreline Highway, east around the curve of the northern flat of Bodega Bay, toward Highway i.

Trina stood at the window for a long moment, and then, with her long thin hands hugging her shoulders, she turned to face the dark sitting room. There had been a time when she took pleasure in that room, in the ponderously heavy oak paneling of the walls, the tarnished-brass floor and table lamps with their tasseled shades, the dated wing chairs with their tufted velvet seats and heavy black lacquered arms that had begun to spider-web with thousands of tiny age cracks; there had been a time when the old white house, which had been built by a wealthy Irishman when the area around Bodega Bay produced great quantities of potatoes in the early 1900’s, had evoked from her happy comments of “quaint” and “picturesque.” But now the house, and this room, seemed only somber and somehow faintly foreboding, harboring ghosts and faded memories that were as musty as the sometimes intangible, sometimes pronounced odor which seemed to permeate the dwelling.

Slowly, Trina moved through the sitting room to the spacious hallway leading to the rear of the house. She paused there, looking at the telephone on its eagle-claw stand. She worried her lower lip, still hugging herself, thinking of the call only a few short minutes earlier—a man’s voice she had never heard before, asking for Jim Conradin. She had called him out of the kitchen, where he had been eating the Crab Louis she had prepared for lunch, his face red from the whiskey she knew he had been drinking at The Tides that morning. At the sink in the kitchen, she had heard him say hello. There had been an instant of silence, and then Jim’s voice, strange and breathless in her ears, saying, “Sweet Mother of God!” A short, sibilant, unintelligible conversation followed, and she was aware that he had lowered his voice to prevent her from hearing. When he came into the kitchen moments later, his face had chameleoned from red to bone-white, and his eyes were veiled.

“Jim, what is it?” she had asked, alarmed.

“I have to go out now.”

“But you haven’t finished your lunch.”

“I don’t have time for it,” he had told her, pulling his sheepskin jacket off the chair back.

“Is it that important?”

“Business. Something’s come up.”

“Well, where are you going?”

“San Francisco.”

“San Francisco? Whatever for?”

“It’s nothing that concerns you.”

“Jim ...” she had begun, but he was already moving toward the front of the house, taking the car keys from the pocket of his jacket, slamming the door on his way out to cut off her words as she called after him again.

Trina passed a hand through her long dark hair, sighing tremulously now. She was thirty-one years old, with the slim, athletic figure of a girl; but the tiny crow’s feet at the corners of her brownish-gold eyes, the rather stem set of a mouth that had not had occasion to smile or laugh often in the past few years, made her seem even older than her years. She sighed again, pulling Jim’s old brown sweater tightly about her shoulders, and entered the kitchen. She began to clear off the table, thinking of her husband, as she always did when she was alone.

When she had first met him, when he was a senior and she a junior at Healdsburg High School in 1955, he had been such an outgoing person, fun to be with and to know, always ready to embark on some new adventure, always the first to suggest a picnic or a beach party or a hiking trip through the redwoods. She remembered the time they had driven to Mt. Lassen for the weekend, just the two of them, one summer when she was staying with her permissive Aunt Jocelyn; they had slept under the stars in two old sleeping bags he had borrowed from a friend, close together, by a stone-ringed fire in an isolated clearing, and she had known she was in love with him then because he had only kissed her once, gently, in the moonlight, and hadn’t tried to take advantage of her or of the situation. She remembered the week before he left to enter the Army, when he had given her the gold band engagement ring with its thin circle of tiny diamonds, a very expensive ring that he had bought with money he’d saved from his summer job in the apple orchards near Sebastopol; and how she had said she would wait for him, wouldn’t even go to a movie with another boy, and how she had been faithful to that promise. She remembered the letters, love letters—she still had them tied with a faded blue ribbon in the bottom drawer of her dresser—that he had written to her, one each week, faithfully, and the ones she had written to him. She remembered when he had called her after his discharge to say that he was going into some kind of business venture in Illinois for a while, he wouldn’t tell her what it was, very hush-hush, and that he would return to California when he had saved enough money for them to be married and to buy that salmon fishing boat he had always talked about having. She remembered how she had pleaded with him to allow her to come out to Illinois, they could be married there, but he had said that the business venture would be taking up all of his time, he couldn’t be with her the way a husband should, and that was no way to start a marriage; she had acquiesced, finally, and had written to him every day and he to her twice a week.

And then, three years later, he had come home with all the money he had saved—he wouldn’t tell her how much, just that it was considerable and they wouldn’t have to worry about anything for a long while to come—and they had been married in the little white church near her home in Healdsburg. He had bought the salmon boat and this house in Bodega Bay, and she had never been happier.

But she had begun to sense that something was wrong almost immediately. Jim had changed—in small ways at first, hardly noticeable, and then as the years passed, in progressively larger ways until he became a different man. Where he had always been outgoing, warmly laughing, making new friends, he became introverted, reticent, almost rude at times to neighbors and acquaintances; where he had always been ready to investigate new things and new places, constantly on the move, he became almost a recluse, leaving Bodega Bay only on the rarest of occasions—what was the use of having a home and a business someplace if you were going to be running around the country all the time? They had talked about children before, in their letters and when they were together, and Jim had said he wanted a large family, four boys and four girls; laughingly, “I’m going to keep you barefoot and pregnant, woman.” But when Trina had suggested having a child right away, he had said he’d changed his mind, they should wait for a while longer, and it was the same answer every time she broached the subject to him. Also, there was the fact that he had begun drinking. She couldn’t understand that; he had never been one for liquor, even in high school—when the other boys had gone out on weekend beer busts, he had usually begged off, or if he did go, he was the one who invariably ended up driving the others home. Now he drank heavily, almost habitually, in the winter months, when the salmon weren’t running; in the summer, he put himself into the fishing with a fervor that she thought bordered on the fanatical.

Trina couldn’t understand any of it. Could it have been her? She had asked herself that question an incalculable number of times, and had unfailingly given it the same answer: No. She had been everything a good wife should be, she was certain of that—she loved him, she was interested in him, in what he did and said and felt, she was passionate, trusting, undemanding. No, it wasn’t her; it was something else, something, possibly, that had happened while he was in the Air Force or when he was involved in that business venture in Illinois. But she could never get him to talk about that; he always managed to change the subject when she brought it up. Perhaps that call today had had something to do with it, perhaps ...

An involuntary shudder moved across her shoulders. She wished Jim had not gone to San Francisco, she wished that call had never come. There was something ... something sinister about it—melodramatic as that sounded—something dangerous and alien and incomprehensible.

Suddenly, intuitively, Trina Conradin was more frightened than she had ever been in her life.