The Stalker

8

On Tuesday, the rains came down.

The storm which had been threatening the Bay Area since Saturday broke with vehemence at six o’clock of that morning, and by noon San Francisco and its surrounding counties lay sodden beneath the steady deluge of cold, dark, hard rain. The skies were limned with black threads on a dove-colored background—and the fog had evaporated, as if the downpour had magically triggered some huge and invisible suction machine. The sea wind blew the pungent smells of brine and wet pavement and damp leaves and gray loneliness. Winter, having arrived at last, had come with all its chattels; it would be staying on.

In the small town of Sebastopol, some fifteen miles inland and to the southeast of Bodega Bay, rain, like semi-translucent sheets of heavy plastic, slanted down on a low, modem redwood-and-brick building a few blocks from South Main Street. But the wide rectangular redwood sign on the fronting lawn was easily discernible through the downpour; it read: SPENCER AND SPENCER MEMORIAL CHAPEL.

Inside the mortuary, in a huge and high-ceilinged parlor, an unseen organist played soft dirge music and there was the almost cloying fragrance of chrysanthemum and gardenia. Ringed by variegated sprays and floral horseshoes, an unadorned casket rested on a bier of ferns and white carnations at the upper half of the parlor. The coffin’s lid had been closed and sealed.

To the immediate right, on a dais in a tiny alcove, Trina Conradin sat with her hands clasped tightly at her breast, her head bowed. Her dead husband’s mother wept softly, convulsively, agonizingly, on one of the brown folding chairs beside her; her own mother held Mrs. Conradin’s hand and whispered gentle, useless words in a tremulous voice. Trina’s eyes were dry, like those of her father and Jim’s father, both of whom sat stoically, like Oriental stone carvings, on her other side. She had done her crying in the cold darkness of Sunday night, when Jim hadn’t come home from his drive and the terrible premonition, the fear which had been rising within her, manifested itself and she had reported him missing; and throughout the somber opalescence of yesterday—after a Sonoma County Sheriffs Deputy had found him lying broken at the foot of the cliff at Blind Beach. She was purged now, empty, barren.

Trina lifted her head slowly, with an inaudible exhalation of breath, and looked upon the some two dozen folding chairs which had been set into neat, symmetrical rows on the deep-pile maroon carpet of the parlor. They were perhaps only a third occupied now, and the services were due to begin any moment.

Her eyes went from each man and woman who had thought enough of Jim Conradin—the man good and kind and gentle—to attend his funeral, to pay their last respects. Troy Gardner, who had been Jim’s best man at their wedding, and his wife; the owner of the processing plant where Jim sold most of his catches; their neighbors on Bodega Flat; the old man who had once been a sailing master and who was somewhat of an institution around the area; and—Trina studied the faces of the final two mourners, sitting at the rear of the parlor side by side. A tall, muscular man with thick black hair and hollow cheeks, wearing a charcoal suit and a starched white shirt and a muted tie; and a dark Latin man, who reminded her vaguely of some actor, dressed similarly but more expensively. She couldn’t recall ever having seen either of them before. Strangers? No, certainly not. They must have known Jim at one time or another, perhaps in the Air Force ...

The service was mercifully brief.

Eventually the mourners rose from their chairs and formed a single line at the far side of the parlor and began to file one by one past the closed coffin and past the family alcove, their hands clasped at their waists, avoiding the eyes of the family in deference to their grief. Finally they entered the vestibule for the momentary assemblage of the funeral cortege, which would take them first to the tiny hamlet of Bodega—inland and south of Bodega Bay—to a small white church on a hill there, and then to the old cemetery on Fallon Road, not far from the sea.

The two men whom Trina did not know drew by the coffin—the final links in the too-short chain of mourners—and the dark Latin man walked beyond the alcove rapidly, with his head held erect and his hands swinging free at his sides. The tall man lagged several steps behind him, and when he came parallel to the family he paused, hesitant, uncertain, and then raised his head, and his eyes touched Trina’s for a brief second. She saw in them compassion and sadness and—something else, an indefinable something which made them seem haunted.

He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and then said, “Mrs. Conradin ... I’m sorry, Mrs. Conradin.” She was so surprised he had spoken to her that way, at that time of silence, that she nodded once: a single confirmation. He pivoted his head, and walked with swift, silent steps along the maroon carpet into the vestibule, and was gone.

Steve Kilduff sat staring out through the heat-vapored window of the coffee shop in downtown Sebastopol, watching the rain fall silver and heavy and then turn into flowing brown rivers, as if it had somehow become contaminated upon touching earth and concrete. To the west, over the roofs of the buildings, he could see an occasional jagged flash of lightning illuminate the leaden afternoon sky. Drum-rolls of thunder edged closer, grew louder, only moments apart now. When the gods are angry, mortals die, he thought foolishly; he shook himself and looked back to the cup of hot coffee which a pretty waitress had set before him. He began to stir a third cube of sugar into it.

Across the Formica-topped booth table, Larry Drexel set fire to a cheroot and watched him through the ensuing miasma of heavy smoke. He said at length, “That was a goddamned silly thing you did at the mortuary.”

Kilduff laid his spoon very carefully on the saucer. “I suppose it was.”

“Why, Steve?”

“I don’t know,” Kilduff answered. “Jim and I were ... oh Jesus, Larry, we were friends once, good friends—you know that. I had to say something to his wife. I felt... Well, I had to, that’s all.”

“She didn’t know us from a gnat’s ass,” Drexel said. “We were just faces at a funeral. But you had to go and wax emotional.”

“She’s not going to remember me.”

“You’d better hope not.”

“It’s not that important, Larry.”

“Everything’s important now.”

“Look, if it bothers you that much, why did you come to the funeral in the first place?”

“Because you insisted on coming,” Drexel said. “Because you’re emotional, and you react without thinking. Christ knows what you might have said to Conradin’s wife later on if I hadn’t gotten you away from there.”

“I wouldn’t have said anything to her.”

“No? How do I know that?”

“Do you think I’m still a kid?”

“You act like a kid sometimes.”

“Shit,” Kilduff said.

“Yes, shit,” Drexel said. He leaned across the table and put his face close to Kilduff’s. “You wouldn’t listen to me Saturday night. You wouldn’t even consider what I said. You tried to pass the whole thing off as some pipe dream, because you were too weak and too afraid to admit to yourself that the past has finally caught up with us, that somebody wants us dead. Now tell me that isn’t the way it was.”

“The whole idea is . . . fantastic,” Kilduff said slowly.

“That’s right. It’s fantastic. But what do you say now, baby? Do you think Conradin fell off that cliff accidentally Sunday night, like yesterday’s papers had it? Four of us now in less than a month. Do you still call it coincidence?”

No, Kilduff thought, and he knew that it wasn’t, that he’d known it wasn’t almost from the beginning. He’d been deluding himself, lying to himself that there was nothing wrong, nothing to worry about; he just hadn’t been able to face it. Too many things had happened at once, that was the reason—Andrea and the money and Granite City, all piling in on him at the same time. Was it any wonder he’d reacted the way he had? But he had to face it now, he had no choice but to face it now. Yes, it was true all right, it was murder all right; Jim hadn’t misjudged his footing in the fog and fallen accidentally off that cliff. Somebody had pushed him and somebody had deliberately murdered Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp—this Helgerman, this Mannerling guard who had suffered spinal damage as a result of Conradin’s blow to the base of his neck those thousand years past . . .

He said, “I don’t think it was coincidence, Larry. I don’t think Jim or any of the others died by accident.”

“You weren’t so sure on the phone last night. You wouldn’t talk about it.”

“I’m sure now.”

Drexel drew back against the red Leatherette of the booth and inhaled the cheroot and expelled twin streams of smoke through his nostrils. “Okay,” he said. “You’re sure now. What do you think we ought to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, of course you don’t

“Just what does that mean?”

Drexel smiled in his cold way. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to find Helgerman. That’s the only thing we can do.”

“Find him? How are we going to do that?”

“By starting at the source.”

“You mean Granite City?”

“That was where he lived, wasn’t it?”

“If he killed the others, and now Jim, he can’t have done it from Granite City. We won’t find him there.”

“No, he’s here now. In the Bay Area.”

“Then—?”

“It’s a place to start,” Drexel said. “He could be based almost anywhere around here, and we’d only be kidding ourselves if we think we can locate him by canvass. So we begin at the beginning and work our way forward and try to trace him that way. I had a flight scheduled to Chicago last night. I canceled it because of Conradin, but as soon as I get back I’m going to make another reservation. For tonight.”

“And me?”

“What about you?”

“Do you want me to go along?”

“You’d rather not, is that it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth.”

“Is that what I was doing?”

Kilduff rotated his cup slowly in its saucer, thinking: No, that’s not what you were doing at all. You were right, Larry: I’m afraid. Because with acceptance comes fear, and I’m afraid the same way I was before we held up that armored car—maybe more so now, because I had youth then and all I’ve got now are a lot of old memories and faded dreams and the prospect of a life alone. I don’t particularly want to die, but it’s not death itself that I’m frightened of; no, it’s . . . something else, something less simple, less basic, something else . . .

He said uneasily, “Listen, Larry. What can we do even if we find Helgerman? Buy him off? I don’t have a pot any more; my share is gone.”

Drexel was looking at him with incredulity. After a long moment he said softly, “Come on, baby. You’re not that goddamned naïve, are you?”

Outside the window, the sky irradiated for a brief instant with a fresh zig-zag of lightning, as if a gigantic match had been struck somewhere in the heavens, and then grew dark and ominous again. Kilduff’s eyes flicked there briefly, came back to Drexel’s. A chill began to flow through him.

“Naïve?” he said. “I don’t—”

“What do you think we’ve been talking about? Taking him to dinner and a movie?”

“Larry—”

“What the hell do you suppose we’re going to do when we find him?” Drexel said. “We’re going to kill the bastard. We’re going to kill him before he kills us.”

The Tenderloin by night, as seen through heavy rain.

San Francisco’s equivalent to New York’s West Forty-second Street, on a smaller scale but nonetheless squalid, nonetheless garish, hiding its pocked and ugly face beneath the veiling rain and the cosmetic darkness, dying by inches and without mourners. A whore under every street lamp and two behind every drawn shade; gay-boys with mascaraed eyes and codpieces and invitational glances more sultry than those of their female counterparts; con men with sad eyes and glib tongues and hearts of pure ebony; pushers selling furtive oblivion in white capsules or brown packages or dabbed lightly on sweet sugar cubes; winos with nowhere to go and a future as dead as the past, suffering the penultimate indignation of having to compete with bearded and buckskinned hippies for altruistic nickels from Des Moines or Miami or the Sunset District—and here and there, a man who wants nothing and takes nothing and asks only to be left alone.

On Ellis Street, neon flashes AUGIES PLACE, sans apostrophe, alternately with TOPLESS AND BOTTOMLESS REVUE above a black-façaded building situated between a Polish delicatessen and an empty storefront decorated with chalked obscenities. A thick-necked man with a Fu Manchu mustache and flat drugged eyes stands before the curtained entranceway, calling out inducements to the stream of passers-by, “No cover and no minimum, folks,” but he says nothing of the diluted bar whiskey which sells for a dollar fifty a shot and tastes like nothing so much as crude fuel oil.

Inside it is very dark, save for a single light above the back bar and a bright pink spotlight which illuminates a small, raised stage against the far wall. On the stage, a nude red-haired girl with pendulous white breasts and swollen nipples and a shaved, protruding abdomen makes lewd motions with fleshy hips, while an unintelligible masturbation of sound spews forth from a hidden jukebox. Before a chrome-barred cocktail slot stands a platinum-haired waitress wearing a brief sequinned halter and a short skirt with fringe ringing its bottom, and behind the otherwise empty bar a huge, light-skinned Negro sits on a high acmuntant’s stool and surveys the almost deserted interior with implacable eyes.

Only three of the two dozen tiny round tables—which cover with their chairs every available inch of floor space—are occupied. At one, a sailor in dress blues and a hooker in a green lamé dress sit holding hands and whispering; at a second, two more hookers in shimmering black, waiting, silent.

At the third table sits the limping man.

He holds a glass of draft beer tightly between his two hands, and stares with hot brightness at the red-haired girl on the stage. He watches her hips undulate in time to the pagan music, simulating the act of love, her eyes squeezed shut and her lips half-parted in an expression of abandonment, and while he watches he thinks of Sunday night and Yellow.

So simple it had been, so very simple, simpler even than Red and Blue and Gray. Yellow, Yellow, true to form, the habitual animal: a walk along Blind Beach, like so many walks before. So simple. He had known Yellow’s destination from the moment he turned onto Highway I, and he had slowed down then and driven leisurely, for there was no need to remain near, and when he had finally taken the rented car onto the turn-out high above the ocean, Yellow’s car had been parked there where it always was. So simple. So simple to hide in the fog on the ledge, to blend into the roiling eddies of mist and wait for Yellow to climb back up the face of the cliff after his walk and pause there, unsuspecting, so simple to reach out and very quickly thrust him into nothingness ...

A movement, a thin rustling sibilance, diverts the limping man from his thoughts. He takes his eyes reluctantly from the girl on the stage. One of the hookers in shimmering black has come to his table, and she stands now above him, smiling, tall and willowy and young, with black hair piled high on her head, with breasts that spill like white iridescent cream over the tight bodice of her dress. “Do you mind if I sit down, honey?” she asks in a voice as sibilant as the rustle of her garment.

The limping man looks up at her for a long moment. A whore, a cheap whore; but he feels hunger in his loins. “No,” he answers slowly, “I don’t mind.”

The girl sits down and crosses her legs, and the short skirt of the dress pulls up on her thighs: more iridescent white cream. His eyes linger there, and he can smell her perfume dark and musky. “I’m Alice,” she says.

“Hello, Alice.”

“Would you like to buy me a drink?”

“All right.”

“Well, groovy.”

“What would you like?”

“Bourbon and water.”

The limping man signals and the yellow-haired waitress moves toward them, her heavy thighs rippling beneath the dancing fringe of her skirt. She takes his order and returns to the bar, and Alice says, “What’s your name, honey?”

“Smith,” the limping man answers, and Alice laughs. A cheap whore, he thinks, but she’s almost pretty when she laughs.

“Where you from, old Smith?” Alice asks.

“Everywhere,” the limping man says. “And nowhere.”

Alice laughs again. “My, how poetic.” She puts her hand on his thigh very lightly and leans close to him and presses her white spilling breasts against his arm. “You wouldn’t be a poet, would you?”

Her hand is like hot fire on his leg. “No, I wouldn’t.”

“What would you be then?”

The limping man does not answer, and the yellow-haired waitress comes back with a tray containing a draft beer and a glass of tea. The limping man gives her three dollars. She nods, retreating. Alice sips the tea, and then puts the glass down and presses her breasts tighter against his arm. He feels them spongy-soft there and looks down into the shadowed valley between them and begins to breathe unevenly. The music builds to a crescendo from within the walls of the room, and the red-haired girl moves faster and faster on the stage, until her nude hips are a blur of motion. Alice strokes the limping man’s thigh, drawing her hand higher. “Do you like me?” she asks.

“Yes,” he answers, “I like you,” and he is thinking of Yellow again, Yellow screaming through the gray, damp fog.

“I’ve got a room down the street, honey,” Alice says softly. “We could go there if you like.”

Yellow screams and screams, but rhythmically now, in time with the beat of the music. The limping man breathes rapidly, irregularly, and her hand sets fire to his trouser leg.

“I’m very good, you know,” she says.

“Are you?”

“I’m very, very good.”

“How much?”

“Fifty dollars.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“I’m a lot of woman, honey.”

“I’ll give you twenty-five.”

“Compromise time,” she says. “Thirty-five.”

“Twenty-five or nothing.”

“Thirty-five or nothing.”

The music continues, but the scream ends abruptly and is replaced by a faint, faraway sound, the sound of a pebble tumbling down a mountainside. But then that sound, too, dies, and there is silence, and in his mind the limping man sees Yellow lying dead and broken and bloodied at the bottom of the cliff. Alice’s hand brands his thigh and she breathes into his ear, “I know a lot of things, old Smith honey, I know a lot of ways to make a man happy. Thirty-five dollars is a bargain price.”

“All right!” the limping man says urgently, standing. “All right, let’s go!”

Alice smiles. “You won’t be sorry.”

“Let’s go!” he says again, and pulls her to her feet. They make their way quickly toward the curtained entranceway.

Behind the bar, the light-skinned Negro watches them with his implacable stare, and smiles very faintly, and on the stage the nude girl dancer sinks to her knees with her head hanging down and her long red hair shielding her body like a gossamer cloak as the music terminates and the pink spotlight winks out.

Chicago lay cold and bright and aloof under a darkly overcast sky when Larry Drexel’s flight from San Francisco arrived at O’Hare Airport a few minutes past ten Tuesday night.

Immediately after claiming his single suitcase, Drexel entered a cab in front of the main terminal and instructed the driver to take him to one of the larger downtown hotels, where he had made telephone reservations that afternoon. He settled back against the rear seat as the cab began to make its way out of the airport, removed a cheroot from his suit pocket, and lit it carefully.

He thought: Who would have figured Kilduff to turn out the way he did? Crap-yellow, and running scared. He came undone at the seams this morning at Sebastopol; I shouldn’t have said anything to him at all about killing Helgerman, but how could you predict a reaction like that?

It turned his stomach remembering how he had had to patronize Kilduff: “It’s nothing as relatively unimportant as exposure, or even a prison sentence, facing us now, Steve. It’s life and death, kill or be killed—the law of the jungle. No judgments, no great moral decisions, Steve; kill or be killed, pure and simple.” But he’d finally gotten him calmed down on the drive back to San Francisco, telling him that they would talk it all out again when he got back from Chicago; but there was no figuring how long it would be before Kilduff got to thinking on the thing and made some damned-fool move that would blow the whole scene—like going to the police, spilling his guts . . .

He couldn’t let that happen. He had too many things going for him—El Peyote and Cantina del Flores, which he now owned one hundred percent as of Monday morning at 10:43—too many avenues opening up, each of them leading to golden rainbows, to allow one son of a bitch who didn’t have the balls for justifiable homicide to queer it all. He had thought it all out very carefully on the plane, and the way he saw it, he had just one way to go. The idea of tracing Helgerman back to San Francisco really wasn’t feasible, and he’d just be kidding himself if he actually thought he could determine his whereabouts that way; but if he could learn where Helgerman lived, where he called home now, then there was a good chance he could reverse the entire situation. Helgerman would have to come home eventually, wouldn’t he? And when he did, then he would become the hunted and Larry Drexel would become the hunter.

As for Kilduff . . . well, he had made his goddamned bed, hadn’t he? He was approaching the deep end, no mistake, and it was a certainty that he was going over the edge before too long. There was the distinct possibility that. Helgerman would get him before then, because he had gotten Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp and Conradin; but there wasn’t any assurance of that. And suppose Helgerman made a try and failed? Kilduff—straight to the fuzz for sure.

So he couldn’t afford to take the risk—he couldn’t afford to wait. The thing to do was fly back to San Francisco tomorrow sometime, whether or not he located Helgerman’s address, because he could always return to Chicago and Granite City again. Get Kilduff alone somewhere, like he should have done before he left. Just the two of them.

And then hit him on the head.

Eliminate the threat once and for all.

Drexel moistened his lips, staring out at the flickering lights of the Windy City. He didn’t much care for the idea of that, not really; they had been friends once and there was the chance Kilduff would straighten up, you never knew. But the odds were all wrong, and friendships meant nothing when it came to your own ass. He would do it, all right; there was no other choice in the matter. You had to protect yourself, didn’t you?

Well, didn’t you?