The Stalker

5

The doorbell rang at seven-fifty.

Conscious of a painful tightness in his chest, as if some unknown pressure was slowly constricting his lungs, Steve Kilduff opened the door. The lean, solemn man who stood there said, “Hello, Steve,” without expression.

Kilduff nodded wordlessly, and the two men studied each other for a long moment, appraising the effect of the passage of eight years’ time. Kilduff thought: He’s changed, he’s really changed, you can see it in his eyes. He moved aside, swinging the door open wider. Jim Conradin came in past him, walking stiffly, hands held in regimental immobility at his sides. Kilduff closed the door and led the way into the living room, turning when he reached the center to look again at the man who had been his closest friend in the Air Force.

Conradin asked, “Drexel?”

“He’s not here yet.”

“It’s almost eight.”

“Yes.”

Conradin walked in his stiff way to the sofa and sat down slowly, like an old man seating himself on a park bench. Without looking up, he said, “Have you got a drink, Steve?” and Kilduff realized for the first time that Conradin was drunk. His gaunt-cheeked face was flushed, and there was a vague filminess to his eyes; the effort he was making to appear natural was obvious now, and he was holding himself in check by sheer will.

I am not my brother’s keeper, Kilduff thought. He said, “Brandy all right?”

“Fine.”

Kilduff took a bottle of Napoleon brandy from the credenza and poured a drink into a small snifter. He carried the glass to Conradin, who accepted it with a steady hand, raising it to his lips, drinking with measured, care, his eyes almost closed, trying to bring it off oh-so-casually, and failing, failing badly. Kilduff looked away.

“Well,” Conradin said, “some funny thing, isn’t it, Steve?”

“What is?”

“The three of us living so close to one another and not knowing it all these years.”

“Not so funny,” Kilduff said. “You and I are natives of this area, Jim. And Larry was always talking about moving to California.”

“Sure, that’s right.” Conradin drank nervously from his glass. “Listen, what did Drexel tell you? About this meeting tonight?”

“Not much. You?”

“Just that it was important.”

“What did he say about the others?”

“They won’t be here, that’s all.”

Kilduff sat down and looked at his hands. “I don’t like this, Jim.”

“What do you think it-means?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s been more than eleven years.”

“Yes,” Kilduff said.

“Nobody could have found out after eleven years, could they?” Conradin said. “It has to be something else.”

Kilduff said nothing.

Conradin sipped slowly at the brandy. It was very quiet in the shadowed apartment; the only light came from a brass curio lamp next to the couch, bathing one side of Conradin’s face in soft white and leaving the other darkly in shadow. After a time he said, “Do you think much about it, Steve? What we did, I mean?”

“Sometimes.”

“I can’t bury it,” Conradin said. “Nothing helps. The guilt keeps eating at me like a cancer. I keep seeing that guard’s face—the one I hit. I wake up sweating in the middle of the night, seeing it.”

Kilduff did not say anything.

“It bothers you, too, doesn’t it?”

“No,” Kilduff said.

“Why did we do it, Steve?”

“Why do you suppose? We did it for the money.”

“Yes, the money. But I mean, what made us go through with it? It started out as a game, a way to pass the time while we were waiting for our discharge papers, one of those let’s plot the perfect crime’ things that hundreds of people must play every day. What made us go through with it?”

“It was foolproof,” Kilduff answered. “We realized it would work not only in theory but in actuality, that we could get away with it.”

“Do you remember the newspaper accounts?”

“I remember them.”

“They said we were incredibly lucky. They said dozens of things could have gone wrong.”

“But nothing did, Jim.”

“No, nothing did.”

“It was a good plan,” Kilduff said. The pressure in his chest had increased somewhat, now. “No matter what the papers said.”

“We could have been caught so damned easily,” Conradin said. “We could have been rotting away in a prison cell all these years.”

“Jim,” Kilduff said quietly, “Jim, you voted in, just like the rest of us. If there’d been one abstention, we wouldn’t have gone through with it, that was the agreement. You knew the risks then; we’d been over them time and again, and you voted in.”

“Ill tell you something,” Conradin said. He was staring into the brandy snifter. “I was so goddamned scared after I hit that guard that I lost control and shit in my pants. I just sat there in it while we were driving, and I wasn’t ashamed.”

Jesus, Kilduff thought. He said, “We were all scared.”

“I don’t think Drexel was. Or Wykopf or Beauchamp.”

“Why? Because they did the actual holdup? We drew straws for that, Jim.”

“Sure,” Conradin said. “Sure, that’s right.”

The doorbell rang again.

Conradin’s hands came together around the brandy snifter, squeezing it convulsively until Kilduff was certain the glass would shatter. He stood abruptly, went into the foyer, and opened the door. Larry Drexel said in his cold voice, “Good to see you again, Steve,” and came inside quickly.

After closing the door Kilduff said, “Jim’s already here.”

“Good,” Drexel said. He walked into the living room.

Conradin stood from the couch. “Hello, Larry,” he said.

“Jim.”

“Can I get you a drink, Larry?” Kilduff asked, thinking: The gracious host, performing all the proper social amenities—this whole thing is incongruous, unreal, like something from a particularly vivid dream. He was breathing through his mouth now, in short, silently asthmatic inhalations.

Drexel shook his head, moving toward the sofa, sitting on the opposite end from Conradin. He wore an expensive sports outfit—a hound’s-tooth jacket and knife-crease charcoal slacks and a tailored white shirt open at the throat; his Bally shoes glistened with black polish. Conradin and Kilduff—respectively dressed in a sheepskin jacket and a pair of blue denims, and an old alpaca golf sweater over a rumpled pair of tan trousers—looked shabby and subservient in comparison. Kilduff remembered that Drexel had always demonstrated the need to dominate, to be the focal point; he hadn’t changed at all.

Drexel’s eyes shifted to Kilduff. “The old school reunion,” he said with no trace of levity.

“Except that half of the class is missing,” Kilduff said in the same humorless tone. “What’s this all about?”

Conradin’s hands were still wrapped tightly around the brandy snifter. “Yes, let’s have it, Larry.”

“All right,” Drexel said. “Here it is, pure and simple; last month, in October, Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp were killed, all of them, in separate accidents. Cavalacci, when his car mysteriously blew up in a parking lot; Wykopf, in front of a truck that unaccountably slipped its hand brake in a garage he owned; Beauchamp, when his private plane suddenly exploded in midair.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Conradin said reverently. He drained the remaining brandy in the snifter.

Kilduff felt an odd coldness on the back of his neck, but that was all, really. Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp were men he had known eleven years ago; half-faceless men viewed with objective recollection, and he did not experience any real sense of loss at the news of their deaths. He said, “How do you know all this?”

Drexel’s lips pursed into a thin white line. “If it matters, I’ve kept tabs on all of you over the years. I’m careful, damned careful, and I never did approve of the idea of absolute separation. I knew where you all had come from originally, and I figured that you’d either return to your home towns or stay in Illinois after the Statute ran out. I checked telephone directories and city directories and made a few discreet inquiries here and there and took subscriptions to local newspapers; after a while I found out where each of you were and what you were doing.”

“I don’t like the idea of that,” Kilduff said. “The agreement—”

“To hell with the agreement,” Drexel said coldly. “You’d better be thankful I did it that way. It might save your life.”

“What does that mean?”

“For Christ’s sake, do you think it’s coincidence that three of us died in the same month, all in unexplained accidents?”

Kilduff moistened his lips. “What else could it be?”

“Murder,” Drexel said. “That’s what else it could be.”

The single word—murder—seemed to hang suspended in the nowsilent room, an embodied entity that held Conradin and Kilduff transfixed for a long moment. Finally Kilduff said very softly, “You’re crazy, Larry.”

“Am I?”

“You actually believe the three of them were murdered?”

“I’m damned if I can accept the coincidence of all three dying in the same month. Two of them, maybe; but not all three.”

“Is that why you called this meeting?”

“Yes.”

“Because you think the three of us are next? Because of Granite City?”

“Yes, that’s just what I think.”

Conradin stood and walked jerkily to the credenza. “Larry, there’s nobody who’d do a thing like you’re suggesting. A man would have to be insane. . .”

“That’s right,” Drexel said. “A man who is insane, a man who somehow found out we were the ones who robbed that armored car in Granite City, a man who’s decided in his twisted mind that we’re directly responsible for a lot of things that happened to him as a result of the holdup. A man like Leo Helgerman.”

“Who?” Kilduff asked.

“Helgerman, the goddamned Mannerling guard Jim hit when he blew his cool in that parking lot.”

“Oh Christ!” Conradin said. He poured his snifter full again and drank it off. He had begun to tremble noticeably. His face blanched.

Kilduff said, “Larry, you’re dreaming!”

“The hell I am,” Drexel said vehemently. “He was partially paralyzed with spinal damage for a while, wasn’t he? It was in the papers how bitter he was, how badly he wanted all of us caught.”

“That’s a natural reaction, after what happened.”

“Maybe it turned into an unnatural vendetta.”

Kilduff stared at him incredulously. “Are you saying Helgerman’s mind snapped and he’s become some kind of avenging angel who’s killing us off one by one eleven years later? Larry, you can’t expect us to accept an incredible fantasy like that.”

“Goddamn it, stranger things have happened.”

“So have stranger coincidences than three of us dying by accident in the same month.”

“Look, do you think I like the idea? It scares the hell out of me. But there’s the possibility that I’m right, and you’d better face up to it.”

Conradin came back to the couch with the snifter full again. He sat down and stared at the dark liquid as if it held some kind of hypnotic fascination for him. But Kilduff felt a subtle release of tension; all the melodrama on the phone and all the cold, frightened sweating of the afternoon and early evening had been unnecessary. The pressure in his chest had begun to abate. He said, “How could Helgerman have found out we were the ones? It’s been eleven years, Larry, eleven years. The entire state of Illinois hasn’t been able to find out in that time.”

“I don’t have any answers,” Drexel said. “I’m not psychic. I’m just telling you the way it is.”

“Well, all right. Suppose you’re right. Just suppose you are. What do you think we ought to do?”

“I’m not sure.”

“We can’t go to the police,” Kilduff said. “That’s obvious. And I’m not going to run on the strength of a monstrous improbability. I wouldn’t know how to run anyway.”

“You think we ought to just sit around and wait, is that it?” Drexel asked. “Until another one of us dies in an ‘accident’?”

“What the hell else is there for us to do?” Kilduff said. “We haven’t got any concrete reason to panic, no proof that the others died except by accident, no proof that Helgerman is insane and a murderer, or, for Christ’s sake, that he’s even still alive.”

“Then we’ve got to find out,” Drexel said. “One way or another.”

“How?” Kilduff asked. “Larry, we’re three guys pushing thirty-five who somehow managed to pull off a major crime when we were little more than kids. We’re no more experienced now than we were then; if anything, we’re less equipped today—we haven’t got that crazy, irrational, what-the-screw disregard for what happens tomorrow or next week or next month. Do you expect us to carry a .45 automatic in a shoulder holster like some Spillane character, peering furtively into shadows and asking veiled questions in dingy bars?”

Drexel put his hands flat on his knees, his cold eyes darkly flashing. “That’s a nice speech, Steve,” he said tonelessly.

“Listen,” Kilduff said, “all I’m trying to say is that I can’t accept the idea that Helgerman is going around picking us off one by one because we robbed an armored car eleven years ago and he ended up on disability. If you believe it, then you can do what you want.”

“But you’re not going to do anything.”

“No,” Kilduff said. “I’m not.”

Without looking at him, Drexel said to Conradin, “And what about you, Jim? Is that your position, too?”

“I don’t know,” Conradin answered slowly. “I don’t know what my position is.”

“All right, then,” Drexel said. Abruptly, he got on his feet. “You’re both damned fools, curled up in your secure, complacent little worlds like a couple of foetuses and you think you’re inviolate, you think nothing out of the past can reach you any more. Well, all right. I don’t much care what happens to either one of you, but I care about my own neck and I’m going to do something.” He took two small white business cards from the inside pocket of his jacket and threw them on the coffee table. “If you decide to face reality, you can reach me at either of the numbers on those cards.”

Without waiting for either of the others to say anything, he crossed to the door and went out, slamming it shut behind him.

Kilduff and Conradin sat in unbroken silence for several moments, a pair of sculpted figures in some impressionistic museum exhibit. At length, Kilduff said quietly, “It’s impossible. You know that, too, don’t you, Jim? The whole idea of it is inconceivable.”

Conradin gave a slow, tremulous sigh. “Is it?” he asked. “Is it really, Steve? Or are we too afraid to admit the chance of it to ourselves, like Drexel said? Are we too afraid that we wouldn’t be able to cope with it if it were somehow true?”

“No,” Kilduff said emphatically.

Conradin picked up one of the white cards from the coffee table and put it into the pocket of his sheepskin jacket. “I’d better be going now.”

“What are you planning to do?”

“Nothing,” Conradin answered. He started toward the door, and Kilduff stood and followed him there. “Except maybe say a prayer that Drexel is wrong and you’re right.”

“I’m right,” Kilduff said.

“I hope to God you are.”

“We don’t have anything to worry about.”

“Don’t we?” Conradin asked, opening the door.

“No, nothing.”

“Except maybe ourselves,” Conradin said. “Good night, Steve.” And he was gone.

Except maybe ourselves.

Kilduff shut the door and returned to the living room and sat in the chair again, he seemed to be doing a lot of sitting in that chair. He sat there and stared at nothing and thought about Drexel and what he had said, and Conradin and what he had said, and about Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp lying in cold dark boxes beneath the cold dark earth; he thought about them for a long, long time ...

... And Andrea came to him in the darkness of the tiny cottage bedroom, nude and unashamed, an alabaster naiad haloed in sweet innocence, diminutive and Elysian and proud in the so very pale honeymoon-shine drifting in through the minute apertures in the bamboo blinds. She came to him with her arms held wide and her mouth scrubbed free of rouge, her eyes lidded with unaffected, loving sensuality, her breasts small-white and tense, the nipples and aureoles fine exquisite black diamonds, the melanoid triangle of her pubic hair a swath of the softest velvet demurely hiding the pure still waters beneath. She came to him with his name on her lips and lay beside him on the conjugal bed, breathing warm honey against his neck, warm honey, and there was the taste of her, feel of her, an aching of acute pleasure in his genitals. He was moving within her now—strange, there seemed to have been no virginal obstruction, no innocence, strange. And then he was saying her name over and over, “Andreal Andrea! Andrea!” moving faster and faster and faster but she began to dissolve beside him, no no no, began to fade into a nebulous shadow, no no, and then she was gone, no, gone, and he was alone again, alone not in the tiny cottage bedroom with its honeymoon-shine but alone in a dank, fetid cave, so very dark, and the smell of millenniums of decay was in his nostrils. He shrank into a corner and felt the viscid slime of subterranean stone against his nude body, and then from across that malefic cavern there came a movement, a slithering of something unimaginable, a foul sucking, crawling sound, and he shrank deeper into the corner, terrified, seeing a fulvous pinpoint of light appear before him, gradually expanding, illuminating a shape within the hazy glow, a shape which became a faceless, monstrous thing of such unspeakable horror that he opened his mouth and began to scream with his very soul, for the nameless faceless thing was coming nearer, coming closer, reaching for him with an extremity that dripped putrefaction . . .

Kilduff came up out of the chair in a single convulsive leap, standing with his heart plunging impossibly in his chest and the length of his body encased in a thick mucilaginous sweat. At first he was still in that cave, still cowering just beyond the reach of the horror in his dream; but then his mind began to clear and the trembling of his body ceased and he realized it had been only that: a dream. His eyes moved upward to the sunburst clock on the wall: twelve-fifteen. He had mesmerized himself, sitting in the chair, into the nether world of the subconscious.

He went into the kitchen and drank a glass of ice water from the refrigerator; his throat was raw and parched. In the bedroom he undressed and slid between the clean, cool sheets of the bed and closed his eyes. And when fatigue brought sleep flooding over him finally—

Andrea came to him in the darkness of the tiny cottage bedroom ...