Chase (17 page)

Jerry Taylor was a thin, intense boy with hair that fell to his somewhat stooped shoulders. He was wearing bell-bottom jeans and a workshirt, and he assumed a posture of disinterest from the moment he walked in the door, though that was clearly against his very nature. He listened to Chase, answered his questions, provided nothing new and escorted them upstairs and into the night again. They might just as well have been ghosts passing through unnoticed. As they walked to the car, the stone house stood behind them like a fortress.

‘I wonder if all his friends are that outgoing,’ Glenda said.

‘Generational preoccupation.’

‘Boredom?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Chase said. ‘
Appearing
bored. They want to look as if they've seen and heard it all.’

‘You talk like you're forty years his senior.’

‘I feel like it, too.’

She patted his shoulder. ‘What next?’

‘How old are you?’ he asked.

‘My, good God, what tact the man has!’

‘I'm sorry,’ he said, putting his arm around her. ‘But I'm not being nosey, and I do have a reason.’

‘Twenty-one,’ she said.

‘Older than I thought,’ he said.

‘So throw me out of the car.’

He laughed. ‘I just wondered what the most popular local hang-outs for eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds were. I'm sure they changed in the years I've been away. And they probably aren't the same as they were when you were that age. A year or two is a long time for an “in” spot to stay “in”.’

‘The hamburger places out on Galasio are always popular. But I'd say the chances of your finding one of the two boys are phenomenally small.’

‘Agreed,’ he said. ‘We might as well go back to your place and wait. If I can't catch either of them tonight, by phone, we'll check them out in the morning.’

Tomorrow's Monday,’ Glenda said. ‘Work for me.’

He said, ‘Do you have any sick leave coming?’

‘Seven days-’

‘Take one.’

‘But-’

‘Otherwise, I'll have to come to work and sit with you to know you're safe, and I won't get anything done on this.’

She thought a moment, said, ‘Okay. Now let's go home; I feel all creepy sitting out here in the open.’

At her apartment, he made sure the door was locked and that the chain latch was also properly in place. He drew the drapes on all the windows and tested the sliding glass terrace doors, though it didn't seem likely that Judge would lasso one of the terrace railings and climb three floors on a rope. It was as simple as that in melodramas, but rarely in real life.

‘Scotch,’ she said, handing him a glass.

They turned out all the lights, turned on the light-boxes against the far wall and sat on the floor with their backs against the sofa, watching the changing patterns.

She said, ‘Maybe now you have enough to go to the police.’

‘The grenade?’

‘Yes.’

‘You forget that I was in the army. If they live up to their past performance, they'll say I brought it back to the States, illegally, and they'll slam me in jail for a few days.’

‘Without the grenade, then?’ she said. ‘Maybe you still have enough to give them.’

‘What? The fact that he wore a pinkie ring, that Mike's girl friend says she thinks he made a pass at Mike, that someone got a university report on me by using a false name?’ He tasted the Scotch. ‘We still haven't got a name.’

‘A description, though?’

‘They'll say it's something else, or that I'm making it up.’ He put his drink down on the coffee table at his side. ‘I won't give them the chance to treat me like that again. When I go back to them, it'll be to make them eat their own - own hats.’

Glenda laughed and drew up her knees. ‘Hats, huh?’

He smiled and said, ‘Look, we can't do anything more until we talk to those boys, and they're probably not home yet. Let's just take a little while to relax and talk about other things. For instance, I don't really know what books you read, what kind of music you like, whether or not you like to go dancing-’

‘Oh, brother,’ she said, ‘are you asking to be bored.’

But he was not bored as the evening went on, for he found a freshness in her outlook that lifted his own spirit and made his problems fade. Now and again they kissed, and he sat with his arm around her, but they did not begin necking. It was almost as if they had made a tacit agreement to forgo even that degree of serious contact at least until this affair had come to a conclusion and Judge had been located.

Forty-five minutes later the telephone rang.

Chase said, ‘Damn those persistent ex-suitors of yours!’

‘More likely my mother,’ she said.

She went to the phone and picked it up. ‘Hello . . . Yes?’ She was silent a moment, listening. ‘I don't like this.’ More silence. ‘Now it's your turn to listen to me-’ She stopped in mid-sentence, stared at the receiver for a moment and hung up.

‘Wasn't your mother, was it?’ Chase asked teasingly.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It was Judge. He wanted to tell me that he knows what we're probably doing in here. He said he'd kill me first, then you, then Louise Allenby. He congratulated you on finding and disarming the grenade, and he says it won't be so simple the next time. He told me to have a pleasant evening.’

Eleven

Norman Bates, Mike Karnes's friend whose name was first on Louise Allenby's list, was at home when Chase called him shortly after midnight, though he twice said he had been on his way to bed when the phone rang and was not even as cooperative as Jerry Taylor. In the end, it did not matter if he wanted to cooperate or not, because he had never heard Mike mention any homosexual advances or any man who had followed him around.

The last boy, Martin Cable, was in bed. His mother said, ‘He works six days a week during the summer, and he needs his sleep.’

‘I'd only take five minutes of his time,’ Chase said.

‘He's already asleep. I won't wake him now.’

He said, ‘Could you tell me where he works?’

She said, ‘You the same man who called here earlier?’ ‘Yes,’ he said.

She was silent a moment, then said, ‘He starts at eight in the morning at Governor's Place Apartments. He's one of the lifeguards at the pool.’

Thank you,’ he said, but he realized that she had already hung up.

‘No luck?’ Glenda asked.

‘We'll have to see him in the morning.’

She yawned. ‘To bed, then. What with my mother's visit and the little scene with the grenade, I can hardly keep my eyes open.’

In bed, they held each other for a while, but they both knew the night was only for sleeping. It was the first night in many months that Chase did not dream at all.

At eight-thirty there were two young men at the apartment complex pool, one of them polishing the metalwork above the waterline while the other scrubbed the white diving board preparatory to opening for business at ten o'clock. They watched Glenda with unconcealed interest, and Chase wondered if they shouldn't be taught some manners. When one of them whistled, however, Chase saw that Glenda only smiled, accepting as flattery what his mother would have called rudeness. It was another of the little differences of perspective between them that made Chase feel old and tired.

Chase went to the boy polishing the ladder at the shallow end of the pool. ‘Martin Cable?’

‘That's Marty,’ the boy said, pointing to the guard on the driving board.

Martin Cable was lean but muscular, his arms bulging modestly even when they weren't flexed, tighter and stringier than a weight lifter. He had a lot of dark hair that covered his ears and the nape of his neck, but his face still held no sign of a beard. He sat up on the board as they approached, slightly above them.

‘Martin Cable?’ Chase asked.

‘Yes?’ He had none of Jerry Taylor's attitude of boredom and appeared willing to be friendly, unlike Norman Bates. The sun, reflected by the water, made odd, shimmering spots on his face and chest.

‘I understand you were a friend of Mike Karnes.’

‘Of a sort.’

‘I've got some questions I'd like to ask, if you can spare a few minutes.’

The boy glanced at Glenda, let his gaze travel down to her slim ankles and then work its way leisurely back up again. While he enjoyed the view, he made up his mind and said, ‘Yeah, sure, ask away.’

‘How well did you know Mike?’

‘Close friends, shared his car sometimes for double dates.’

‘Same year in school?’

‘Yeah. Graduated together June a year ago.’

‘Was Mike a terror with the girls?’ Chase asked.

‘Was he ever!’ the boy said. ‘Christ!’

‘I had heard that besides Louise Allenby, he kept several other girls on the string.’

‘Not only on the string,’ Cable said. ‘But satisfied. He just couldn't get enough of it, maybe because it was still so new to him.’

‘New?’ Chase asked. He thought they were both talking about the same thing, but now he wasn't sure.

‘He got his first piece when he was a junior, the last day of school that year. Overnight he changed from a bashful, sportsminded teenage boy into - well, a stud. You know how that is, you ever see it happen to someone?’

‘Yes,’ Chase said.

‘We told him he'd wear it out if he didn't slow down.’

It seemed the proper moment to broach the main topic without forcing him to clam up, since they had already established Mike Karnes's claim to manhood. ‘Did he ever tell you about another man - making a pass at him?’

‘A queer?’

‘Yes.’

He looked at Glenda again, back at Chase, mulling over the possibilities. He said, ‘You haven't told me who you are.’

Chase told him, introduced Glenda.

‘That doesn't explain this sudden interest in Mike.’

Chase said, ‘I don't think the police are doing anything on the case. You know my connection with it. I don't relish having a madman running around loose with a grudge against me.’

Cable nodded. When he spoke, a moment later, his words were quick and run together, as if he were betraying a trust and wanted to get it over with as quickly as he could. ‘Two years ago Mike got laid for the first time, and everything slipped a little for him after that. If you know his parents, you understand how it could happen. They'd never let on to him that there was anything fun in life, let alone something like sex. He just sort of broke loose, all at once. After that, his grades dropped.’

‘When was this?’

‘Just past the middle of the second semester of our senior year. He wanted to get into State, but he wasn't going to make it if he showed as poorly in the second term as in the first. Physics was his worst subject, and when it got really bad, he started taking sessions with a tutor.’

‘And who was that?’ Chase asked.

‘A teacher who did that kind of thing Saturdays. I never knew his name, never saw him.’

‘And this was the man who made a pass at Mike?’

‘Yeah. I only heard about it a year later. Mike pulled his marks up and scraped into State as a day student, and I went away to Pitt. Neither of us wrote much, but we always got together when I came home over weekends or on holidays. In February we double-dated with these red-headed twins Mike knew from State, very nice stuff. On our way back to the city, after we'd let them off for the night, he told me about this character who was following him everywhere he went.’

‘His physics tutor?’

‘That's right.’

‘What did Mike tell you about him; even the smallest detail might be more important than it seems.’

Cable squinted his eyes, licked his lips. He said, ‘He quit the Saturday morning tutoring sessions because this guy kept trying to convince him there would be nothing wrong in their going to bed together. That had been nearly a year earlier, when we were both seniors. Since then, Mike said, this guy kept bothering him, periodically, trying to talk to him. He always hung up when the guy called. So then he started following Mike everywhere he went, a real creep.’

‘But you don't remember his name?’

‘No.’

‘Not even first name.’

‘Not even that much.’

‘Nickname?’

‘Mike certainly wasn't on nickname terms with him!’

‘I suppose not.’

That's it,’ Cable said. He laced his hands together and cracked his knuckles. ‘I wish there was more.’

‘I think that's enough, just what I needed,’ Chase said.

‘Good.’ Cable turned from Chase, tossed his head to flip his thick hair out of his face, smiled at Glenda. He said, ‘You've got fantastic legs.’

‘Thank you,’ she said.

The sun made her seem like a mirage, heat waves rippling up from the pavement as she walked toward the car. She was beautiful, Chase thought, and Cable had been right about her legs. He wondered, suddenly, whether he would ever help her fulfil the promise of her body, be a man to her in bed. He quickly avoided further thoughts of that nature as she got into the car.

‘You're lovely,’ he said.

‘My God, a compliment!’ she said in mock surprise. ‘I thought I wouldn't hear one of those more than every other day or so.’

‘I don't verbalize well,’ he said. ‘But that boy made me jealous. I saw how your face lighted when he said he liked your legs.’

‘I may be a liberated woman, but I still have an ego.’

‘I'll try to do better by it,’ he said, touching her bare knee. The flesh was cool and firm. It generated such a powerful mixture of desire and guilt that he quickly let go of her. ‘Did you get it?’

She opened an envelope and took out six mimeographed sheets. ‘A list of all the teachers in the system, high school and junior high schools and grade schools.’

‘Address and phone number for each name,’ he said. ‘How did you do it?’

‘A trick I learned from being around reporters too much.’ She leaned forward and punched the lighter in the dash, took a cigarette from her purse, started it smoking. She took one deep drag and then was content to hold it. ‘I met the Superintendent of Schools and passed myself off as the representative of a commercial mailing-list firm. He was so frustrated about having to work the summer while the teachers had off and so surprised to have a chance to talk to a nice young woman in a miniskirt, that he didn't question why we were doing business first-hand rather than by mail. I wrote a check on my personal account to pay for the list, and I didn't even have to explain that. Twenty-five dollars for name and address and telephone number of nearly three hundred employees - and they've probably sold the list half a dozen times so far this year, always for better money than that.’