The Stalker

17

Inspectors Neal Commac and Pat Flagg arrived at the Caveat Way, Twin Peaks, address of Steven Kilduff a few minutes past eight-thirty. Flagg parked the plain black departmental sedan directly opposite the building, and they hurried across the rain-flooded width of the street and through the single glass-and-wood door in the glassed entranceway.

Commac took off his hat and brushed the beaded droplets of water from the crown. He said, “I wish this goddamned rain would let up. It puts me in a mood.”

“Yeah,” Flagg said. “I know.”

They climbed the inside stairs and walked down the hallway and stopped before the door to Kilduff’s apartment. Commac put his right forefinger on the ivory button of the doorbell, opening his suit coat with his left hand and pushing the tail back over the service revolver at his side belt. Flagg did the same. They had talked about it driving over in the sedan, and even though they didn’t anticipate any trouble, they were being occupationally cautious.

They waited in the quiet hallway. There was no response, and no sound from within the apartment. They looked at one another, and then Commac shrugged lightly and depressed the bell button again.

Nothing.

Flagg said, “He’s not home.”

“Looks that way.”

“Do you think he’s flown?”

“Maybe,” Commac said. “Let’s see if the building manager knows where he is.”

They walked downstairs again and looked at the redwood-framed bank of mailboxes set into the stucco-and-mica wall of the vestibule. Then they went back up one flight and knocked on the door of Apartment 204.

After a moment, a tall, handsome woman with reddish-brown hair opened the door and looked out at them quizzically. “Yes?” she said. “May I help you?”

“You’re Mrs. Yarborough, the manager?” Commac asked.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“We’re police officer,” he said. “We’d like to ask you a couple of questions about one of the apartment holders.”

She blinked at the badge pinned to the inside of the leather case in Commac’s hand. Then she said “Which one?” a little breathlessly.

“Steven Kilduff.”

“I knew it!” Mrs. Yarborough said. Her eyes were brightly sparkling. “I just knew it, the way he ran out of here a little while ago, acting so peculiarly, it just had to be something else beside the fact that Andrea was—”

Commac said, “Andrea? That would be Mr. Kilduff’s wife, is that right?”

“Yes, well she’s his wife now but she left him, you know, last Saturday although I didn’t find out about it until last night when she called me, but just the mere fact that Andrea was spending a few days at their fishing cabin, poor thing, to think things over wasn’t why he was acting so peculiarly, of course I don’t exactly know what it was but since you’re here I imagine it must be something very important?” She stopped, looking at them expectantly.

Commac touched the lobe of his right ear. “You said something about a fishing cabin, Mrs. Yarborough. Is that where Mr. Kilduff went, to the best of your knowledge?”

“Well, I suppose it is,” Mrs. Yarborough said. “Of course, he didn’t say, you understand he was acting so peculiarly and I make it a practice never to pry into the affairs of my neighbors but I just had to tell him about Andrea, poor thing, all alone and simply pining away for him, now you understand she’s not involved in this police business, whatever it is, I can vouch for her character she’s such a sweet girl, but if you could just tell me what it is Mr. Kilduff has done perhaps I—”

“Would you happen to know where this fishing cabin is, ma’am?” Flagg asked patiently.

“Well, not exactly, it’s in Marin County somewhere, on that little river that runs into San Pablo Bay—”

“Petaluma River?” Commac asked.

“Yes, I think so, but now—”

“You don’t know the exact location of the cabin?”

“In some slough or other, I think, Andrea mentioned it but I can’t seem to recall, now really, Officers, don’t you think I’m entitled to know why you want to talk to Mr. Kilduff, I’ve been cooperative, haven’t I? and I think as the manager of the building that I’m—”

“What exactly did Mr. Kilduff say to you prior to his leaving, ma’am?” Flagg asked.

“What did he say?” Mrs. Yarborough put her hands on her hips and looked at them in an exasperated way. “Well, I was telling him about Andrea and all of a sudden he grabbed me by the shoulders, very roughly, and he demanded to know what time she had called and I told him it was after eleven sometime, and that was when he got this very peculiar look in his eyes and ran out of here, now if you don’t mind, Officers, I’d like to know just what it is—”

“Thank you, Mrs. Yarborough,” Commac said quietly. “We appreciate your assistance.”

He nodded to Flagg and they turned and started for the stairs. Just as they reached the landing, there was the sound of a door slamming, very loudly, behind them. As they started down, Flagg said, “What do you make of it?”

“I’m not sure,” Commac said.

“Do we follow it up?”

“I think we’d better.”

“So do I.”

“I don’t see why Boccalou won’t give us the okay, as long as the duty roster’s clear enough,” Commac said. “There’s something more to this whole thing than just an eleven-year-old armored-car robbery, we both agree to that. I think he sees it that way, too.”

Flagg nodded.

“We’ll have to have the Marin County Sheriff’s Department run a check on property owners, to find out where this fishing cabin of Kilduff’s is located. They could have the information for us by the time we pulled into San Rafael to pick up one of their boys.”

They reached the vestibule. “It’s still raining, for Christ’s sake,” Commac said rhetorically, a little sourly, and they went out and ran across the street to the unmarked departmental sedan.

I still love her, Steve Kilduff thought.

I never stopped loving her at all.

He had just come down off Waldo Grade, and was approaching Richardson’s Bay Bridge. Traffic was relatively light northbound, although the always-heavy southbound commuter traffic was predictably snarled by the rain and the attendant poor visibility. He was driving very fast for conditions, upwards of seventy-five, passing cars and changing lanes automatically, praying with a small part of him that he wouldn’t encounter a Highway Patrolman, praying with the rest of him that Andrea was still alive. That was when he realized consciously what he had felt and known deep within him all along—that Andrea was an integral, inseparable part of his mind and of his soul; that a portion of his being had died when he believed she had died, and been reborn with the fervent chance that she was still alive, and would die again if this were not to be so; that he loved her as much now as he had that first day in Sugar Pine Valley.

And he knew other things then, just as certainly.

He knew that Andrea had not left him because of the money, that it had been, instead, because of Steve Kilduff—his weaknesses, the long endless string of failures. He had leaned on her, fed on her like a parasite, and she had dutifully carried him, loving him, never complaining, carried the weight of him on her shoulders all these years, the incredible weight of him, and finally the weight had simply become unbearable; what else could she do then but leave, leave quickly and quietly, sparing him the truth but unable to lie. And all along, he had blamed her in his mind, blamed her because of the money—and she was blameless, really; all along it was the man he had become, the man he had never known existed, the man the coward the weakling he had discovered and been appalled by for the first time just two days ago.

He knew that what had happened eleven years ago, the crime he had committed eleven years ago, had been the cause of it all, of what had happened to the man Steve Kilduff. He had been certain, so certain, that the incident had never affected him at all, when in reality it had been dragging him down by inexorable inches, destroying him, sapping his strength and his will and his initiative and his guts; latent guilt, hidden guilt, more deadly and more terrible than the kind which had been tearing Jim Conradin apart inside, because he had never known it was there, had thought he was free of it for those eleven long years. He had been living with guilt and with fear and he had never even so much as suspected it.

He knew all of these things, one after the other, like links in a chain being slowly drawn across his mind’s eye; knew them to be true and factual without dwelling on them, as if his brain, a faulty computer, had somehow been reprogrammed, redirected. He knew them, and they were important, vital, feeding his desperate need to reach Duckblind Slough as quickly as possible, effectively blocking the doubts that lingered peripherally in his mind—doubts of the wisdom of this headlong flight, alone, without the police, into what was surely intended to be a trap; doubts of his own manhood, his ability to function, to make decisions in moments of crisis.

Andrea was all that mattered now.

And time was running out.

He passed through San Rafael, and his luck was holding. There had been no sign of a black and white Highway Patrol car. He controlled the big Pontiac—with its unpredictable power steering, its too-binding power brakes—as if the machine was a sports car built for speed and maneuverability and bad road conditions; deftly, with a skill born of purpose and desperation. Ahead, through the arc-sweeps of the rhythmic wiper blades, he could see one of the suspended freeway signs gleaming dully in the now-heavy rain: VALLEJO NAPA EXIT I MILE.

Black Point, Kilduff thought, Black Point. He couldn’t use the county and private roads into Duckblind Slough—the only set of roads—because it was inevitably a trap and he would walk directly into it. If Andrea was still unharmed, what good could he do her dead, foolishly dead? His mind had not been calculating, weighing, coldly reasoning; he had allowed emotional reaction to rule. But it wasn’t too late, not yet; the idea had grown and taken shape and it was an answer.

Maybe.

If there was enough time.

There had to be enough time ...

He reached the Vallejo-Napa exit, just north of Ignacio. He left 101 east, oblivious to the red speedometer needle hovering near eighty now. When he had gone some eight miles by the odometer, he began to reduce his speed, looking for the Lakeville Highway turnoff. He saw it finally, the green and white freeway sign: PETALUMA and an arrow pointing due north, to his left.

He swung into the left-tum lane, waiting tensely for an opening in the westbound traffic. He saw an opportunity and took it, feeding gas to the Pontiac; the heavy rear end slewed a little on the rain-slippery macadam as he came onto the Lakeville Highway, but he fought the nose straight and bore down again on the accelerator. He was forced by the narrow expanse of the two-lane road to keep his speed under sixty, and it seemed as if time was at once, ambivalently, racing and sluggishly crawling. One mile passed, two, and finally three—and then he saw the black-lettered white sign, mounted on a tall silver-metal pole, looming against the dark morning sky:

Boat Launching Boat Rentals

TALBERT’S-ON-THE-RIVER

Winter Storage Live Bait

He touched the brake pedal, slowing, sweeping off Lakeville onto a wide, smooth asphalt parking area that fronted a weathered clapboard building with a railed and slant-roofed side porch. Beyond the building, there was a wide, steep concrete launching site with a chain winch at the top; and a long narrow T-dock with two Richfield gasoline pumps, extending some fifty feet into the blackly moving waters of the Petaluma River. There were boat slips on either side of the dock, between a slender, shell-and gravel-dotted beach and the parallel T-bar; small power boats and skiffs and rowboats, each bundled in heavy tarpaulin and protected by rubber or styrofoam floats, oscillated in the wind-swept swells. On the left, past a marsh growth of tule grass and cattails, were several storage sheds with corrugated roofs for larger boats.

Kilduff brought the Pontiac to a sharp halt, nose-up to the side of the weathered building. He threw open the door and ran across the wet asphalt, up onto the side porch. He pulled open the front door, the screen door behind it.

The interior was wide but not particularly deep, poorly lit, with a low beamed ceiling. The warped, unpainted walls were covered with shelves containing canned goods, fishing gear and equipment, boat repair and necessity items, dusty jars, bottles, tins of miscellany. A unit heater suspended above a short, bisecting wooden counter gave off waves of shimmering heat. There were two men at the counter, one behind it and one in front, both wearing heavy flannel shirts and faded blue Levis, the one behind the counter chewing on a long greenishblack cigar and sporting a thick dapple-gray mustache; they were arguing about the feasibility of dredging the river for the traffic of small freighters between Petaluma and the Port of San Francisco.

Kilduff let the screen door slam behind him, and both men turned to look at him. He went toward them, taking his wallet from his trouser pocket, fanning it open. His eyes were flashing and his mouth was grim.

He said, “Listen, I want to rent a skiff for a couple of hours, you can name your own price . . .”

The limping man had fashioned a sniper’s nest.

A few yards from the wide clearing and the tan Volkswagen belonging to Orange’s wife, just to the right of the entrance road, he had matted a section of cord grass and milkweed directly behind a thick clump of tall rushes. On either side, the tule grass grew densely to a height of three feet or more. Kneeling in the flattened area, hunkered low, he was certain that he could not be seen from the road or from the clearing.

Until it was too late.

He had been in the nest for perhaps fifteen minutes now Immediately after he had called Orange from a motel-and-restaurant complex near Novato, he had returned here and parked the rented Mustang in a concealing grove of eucalyptus, well beyond the entrance to the second private road leading to Duckblind Slough. He had then walked back to this point, taking with him a tire iron from the Mustang’s trunk; he had used that to snap the padlock on the wooden gate. Then he had swung the gate parallel to the road and walked the half-mile to the clearing, not hurrying particularly, despite the increasing velocity of the downpour, paying no heed to his sodden clothing—and set about constructing the sniper’s nest. He had briefly debated waiting in the shack, but even though he knew almost exactly how long it would take Orange to reach Duckblind Slough from San Francisco, it would have been foolish to take even the remotest chance now, when it was almost over.

He shifted his weight, and his knees made wet slithering sounds on the matted grass. He had the .44 Ruger Magnum in his gloved right hand, pressed against his rib cage just below the left armpit. His palm was sweating inside the glove, and he could feel a certain expectant excitement building inside him. Just a few more minutes, he thought. Just a few more minutes and Orange will be dead, Orange will be dead, Red and Blue and Gray and Yellow and Green and Orange, all dead, all gone.

He wiped wetness from his face with the left sleeve of his overcoat, smiling a little now, thinking about how beautifully it had turned out. Orange had come home after all—no real matter where he had been all night—he had come home to answer his phone this morning. And he had suspected nothing wrong, nothing sinister; the news of his wife’s death had sent him into shock, despite the fact they had separated—that had been apparent; no hesitations, no suspicions, he was on his way.

Beautiful, beautiful.

Of course, it was too bad about the woman. It really was, even though she was a whore like all the rest. She had fit so perfectly into the scheme of things, being here at the fishing shack—the perfect lever with which to lure Orange to Duckblind Slough. Without her, things might have been much more difficult. Yes, it was too bad about the woman.

He would have to kill her, nevertheless.

But not until he had made her scream for him the way he had made Alice-slut scream for him on Tuesday night.

It was only right, only fitting—his just reward—after all he had been through. But only after Orange was dead, only when it was all over. That was why he hadn’t killed her before, that was why he had only tied her up without touching her, and put her in that closet.

The limping man looked at his wristwatch, listening to the rain falling on the morass, the wind howling, listening for the sound of an automobile. It wouldn’t be long now, no it wouldn’t be long now. Just a few more minutes, that was all.

And his finger caressed the Magnum’s trigger as if it was the nipple on the breast of Orange’s wife.