Chase (8 page)

At noon Tuppinger had two more apples and cajoled Chase into eating most of one. It was decided that Chase would go out for some fried chicken and slaw to bring back for supper.

At 12:30 Chase had his first drink.

Tuppinger watched, but he did not say anything.

Chase didn't offer him a drink this time.

At three in the afternoon the telephone rang. Although this was what they had been waiting for since the night before, Chase did not want to answer it. Because Tuppinger was there, urging him to pick it up while he adjusted his own earphones, he finally lifted the receiver.

‘Hello?’ His voice sounded cracked, strained.

‘Mr Chase?’

‘Yes,’ he said, immediately recognizing the voice. It was not Judge.

‘This is Miss Pringle, calling for Dr Cauvel, to remind you of your appointment tomorrow at three. You have a fifty-minute session scheduled, as usual.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. This double-check was a strict routine with Miss Pringle, though he had forgotten about it.

‘Tomorrow at three,’ she repeated, then hung up.

At four o'clock Tuppinger complained of hunger and of a reluctance to consume a fifth Winesap apple in order to stave it off. Chase did not object to an early supper, accepted Tuppinger's money, which, the cop said, would be paid him from the petty-cash account at headquarters, and went out to buy the chicken, French fries and slaw. He purchased a large Coca-Cola for Tuppinger but nothing for himself. He would drink his usual.

They ate at twenty minutes to five, not bothering with dinner conversation, watching the silent phone.

Two hours later Wallace arrived, looking thoroughly weary though he had only come on duty at six, less than an hour earlier. He said, ‘Mr Chase, do you think I might have a word, alone, with Jim?’

‘Sure,’ Chase said. He stepped into the bathroom and closed the door. As an afterthought, he turned on the water in the sink and listened to the dead men whisper, though the noise put him on edge. He lowered the lid of the commode and sat down facing the empty bathtub, and he saw that it needed to be scrubbed out. He wondered if Tuppinger had noticed.

Less than five minutes passed before Wallace knocked on the door. He said, ‘Sorry to have pushed you out of your own place like that.’ He smiled as if they were being very conspiratorial, and said, ‘Police business.’

Chase said, ‘We haven't been lucky, as Tuppinger may have told you.’

Wallace nodded. He looked peculiarly sheepish, and for the first time he could not meet Chase's gaze. ‘I've heard,’ he said.

‘It's the longest he's gone without calling.’

Wallace nodded. ‘It's possible, you know, that he won't be calling at all, now.’

‘You mean, since he passed judgment on me?’

Wallace said nothing, backed into the living room and turned to look at Tuppinger. When Chase followed, he saw that the other man was disconnecting wires and packing his equipment into the suitcase. Wallace said, ‘I'm afraid you're right, Mr Chase. The killer has passed his judgment, and he isn't going to try to contact you again. We don't want to keep a man tied up -’

‘You're leaving?’ Chase asked.

Wallace did not even look in his direction. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘But another few hours might -’

‘Might produce nothing,’ Wallace said. ‘What we're going to do, Mr Chase, is we're going to rely on you to tell us what Judge says if, as seems unlikely now, he should call again.’ He smiled at Chase.

In that smile was all the explanation that Chase required. He said, ‘When Tuppinger sent me out for supper, he called you, didn't he?’ Not waiting for a response, he went on: ‘And he told you about the call from Dr Cauvel's secretary - the word “session” probably sparked him. And now you've talked to the good doctor.’

Tuppinger finished packing the equipment and stood up. He hefted the case and looked quickly about the room to be sure he had not left anything behind.

‘Judge is real,’ Chase told Wallace.

‘I'm sure that he is,’ Wallace said. ‘That's why I want you to report any calls he might make to you.’ But his tone was that of an adult pretending with an adolescent.

‘You stupid bastard, he is real!’

Wallace coloured from the neck up. When he spoke, there was tension in his voice, and the even tone was false. He said, ‘Mr Chase, you saved the girl, and you deserve to be praised for that. But the fact remains that no one has called here in nearly twenty-four hours. Also fact: if you believed such a man as Judge existed, you would have contacted us before this, after he first called. It was only natural to respond that way - especially for a duty-conscious young man like yourself. These things, examined in the light of your psychiatric record and Dr Cauvel's explanations, make it clear that the expenditure of one of our best men is not now required. Tuppinger has other duties.’

Chase could see how overwhelmingly the evidence seemed to point to Dr Cauvel's thesis, just as he could see how his own behaviour - his fondness for whisky in front of Tuppinger, his inability to carry on a conversation, his anxiety to avoid publicity that might have appeared the protestation of a man who wanted just the opposite - could have reinforced it. Still, with his fists balled at his sides, he said, ‘Get out.’

‘Take it easy, son,’ Wallace said.

‘Get out, now.’

Wallace looked around the room and let his eyes stop on the bottle of whisky. He said, ‘Tuppinger tells me you haven't any food on hand, but that there are five bottles in that cupboard.’ He did not look at Chase; he seemed to be embarrassed both by

Tuppinger's obvious spying and by his own inability to sympathize properly with another human being. He said, ‘You look thirty pounds underweight, son.’

‘Get out,’ Chase said. He did not want to shout and draw Mrs Fiedling's attention, but he could not think of any other way to make Wallace listen to him.

Wallace was not ready to leave yet. He was searching for some way to make his departure seem more warranted, and he looked as if he might tell Chase how understaffed they were down at police headquarters. He avoided that cliché, though, and said, ‘No matter what happened to you over there, in Vietnam, you aren't going to forget about it with whisky. Don't drink so much.’ Before Chase, infuriated at the homespun psychoanalysis, could order him out again, Wallace left with Tuppinger at his heels.

Chase slammed the door after them, went to the cupboard and poured himself a drink. He was alone again. But he was used to that.

Five

Thursday evening at seven-thirty, having successfully evaded Mrs Fiedling on his way out of the house, Chase got in his Mustang and drove toward Kanackaway Ridge Road, aware and yet unaware of his destination. He drove well within the speed limits through Ashside and the outlying districts, but floored the accelerator at the bottom of the mountain road, taking the wide curves on the far outside, the white guardrails slipping past so quickly and so close on the right that they blurred into one continuous wall of pale planking, the cables between them like black scrawls on the phantom boards.

On the top of the ridge highway, he parked at the same spot he had been on Monday night, shut off the motor and leaned back in his seat, listening to the soft wind. He realized at once that he should never have stopped, that he should have kept moving at all costs. As long as he was moving, he did not have to wonder what he was going to do next, for he could easily lose himself in the pace of his driving. Stopped, he was perplexed, frustrated.

He opened the door and got out of the car, uncertain what he expected to find out here that would be of any help to him. A good hour or so of daylight remained in which to search the area where the Chevy had been parked. Even so, the police would have combed and recombed it far more thoroughly than he ever could. At least, out of the car, he could walk about, move, and therefore stop thinking unpleasant thoughts.

He strolled along the park edge and then across to the row of brambles where the Chevy had sat. The sod was well tramped, littered with half-smoked cigarette butts, candy wrappers and balled-up pages from a reporter's note pad. He kicked at the debris, scanning the mashed grass, and he felt silly. He might just as well attempt to estimate the number of sightseers who had flocked to the murder scene as to try hunting for a clue in all this mess. The results would probably be more rewarding, if esoteric.

Next, he walked to the railing at the cliff's edge and leaned against it, staring down the jumbled wall of rock at the tangled patch of brambles and locust trees below. When he raised his head, he could see the entire city spread along the valley, but especially the green copper plating of the courthouse dome.

He was still looking at that corroded curve of metal when he heard a peculiar whining sound and felt the rail beneath his hands shiver. Looking to either side, seeing no one, he was about to dismiss it when he heard and felt the same thing again. This time, leaning over the precipice, he recognized the source: a bullet slapping the iron pipe and ricocheting away.

With a quickness honed in combat, he whirled and fell back from the rail and the rim of the cliff. As he dropped to the ground, he evaluated the parkland nearby and chose the nearest decorative wall of brambles as the most likely point of safety. He rolled toward them and came up against the thorns so hard he tore his cheek and forehead on them. Then he lay quite still, waiting.

A minute passed, then another, with no sound but the wind.

Chase crawled on his stomach, working his way to the far end of the bramble row that paralleled the highway at this point. When he got there, he moved slowly into the open, scanning the ground toward the highway for some sign of the man who had shot at him. The park seemed deserted.

He started to get up, then fell back again, more out of instinct than cunning. Where he had been, the grass was parted by a bullet that kicked up a puff of earth. Whoever was after him had a pistol with a silencer attached.

For a moment he considered the implausibility of anyone in civilian life having access to a silencer. Even in Nam, where officers requisitioned unnecessary weapons for black market sale and for shipping home to their own addresses for sale after the war, silencers were not that common. For one thing, most soldiers who carried handguns much preferred the revolver for its higher degree of accuracy and the lesser likelihood that it would jam at a crucial moment. Revolvers could not be silenced effectively, but no one in Nam much cared about the noise of a shot. To own a silenced pistol in civilian life was testament to illegal activity of some sort, and one could not purchase the fixture in just any gunshop.

He took no time at all to wonder who could be firing at him, for he had known at once who was out there. Judge, of course.

Turning, he scrambled back along the twisting brambles to a point midway in the length of the row. Swiftly he unbuttoned his shirt and took it off, tore it into two pieces and wrapped his hands with the cloth. Lying on his stomach, he carefully pressed the thorny vines apart until he had opened a chink through which he could survey the immediate land beyond.

He saw Judge almost at once. The man was huddled by the front fender of Chase's Mustang, down on one knee, the pistol held out at arm's length as he waited for his prey to appear. Two hundred feet away, in the weak, last light of the evening, he was fairly well shielded from Chase, little more than a dark figure with a blur of a face, cut over with confusing swaths of shadow.

Chase let the brambles go and stripped the cloth from his hands. He had nicked the tips of his fingers in a few places, but he was for the most part unscathed.

To his right, no more than four feet away, a bullet snapped through the brambles, spraying pieces of vinery, and went on, hissing once as it skipped on the concrete walkway by the cliff railing. Another passed at the level of Chase's head, no more than two feet on his left, and then another still farther along the row. Judge did not have the nerves of a professional killer, and obviously tired of waiting, had begun to fire blindly in hopes of making a lucky hit.

Chase smiled and began to crawl slowly back toward the right-hand end of the row.

When he got there, he peered cautiously out and saw Judge standing up, leaning against the car, attempting to reload his pistol. His head was bent over his task, and though it should have been a simple matter, he was fumbling nervously with the magazine.

Chase stood and ran.

He had covered only a third of the distance between them when Judge heard him coming. The man looked up, twisted around the edge of the car and started down the highway, running for all he had.

Still smiling, Chase put his head down, gritted his teeth and made a little more effort. Though he was severely underweight and had not exercised or trained for a year, his muscles responded like well-trained animals. He was gaining on Judge.

The road began to slope as they went over the crest of the rise, then seemed to plummet, so that its angle forced Chase to put less effort into his pursuit lest he pitch forward and lose his balance. Up ahead, a red Volkswagen was parked along the berm, though there was no one to be seen about it. In a moment it was clear that the VW was Judge's car, for he made after it with a renewed burst of speed.

‘No!’ Chase shouted.

But his voice was weak, nothing more than the soft gasp of dry air escaping from a punctured paper bag, and even he outran the sound of it.

Judge reached the car, flung the door open and piled inside behind the wheel, swinging the door shut after him in one quick, smooth move. He had either left the keys in the ignition or, possibly, had kept the motor running while he went about passing his ‘judgment,’ for now the Volkswagen pulled away from the edge of the road, screeched as its spinning tyres hit the asphalt and kicked thick smoke out from under them like clouds of white dusting powder. In this one instance, at least, Judge had prepared the way far better than any amateur might be expected to.

Chase did not even have the opportunity to catch part of the licence number, because he was startled out of his wits by the sound of an air horn close behind him, frighteningly close behind.