Strange Highways (64 page)

Wallace’s tone toward her changed too. He said, “You want to tell me about it, just how it happened?”

She told him, losing some of her eerie composure in the process. Twice Chase thought that she was going to cry, and he wished that she would. Her cold manner, so soon after all the blood, gave him the creeps. Maybe she
was
still in denial. She repressed the tears, and by the time she had finished her story, she was calm again.

“You saw his face?” Wallace asked.

“Just a glimpse,” she said.

“Can you describe him?”

“Not really.”

“Try. “

“He had brown eyes, I think.”

“No mustache or beard?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Long sideburns or short?”

“Short, I think.”

“Any scars?”

“No.”

“Anything at all memorable about him?”

“No.”

“The shape of his face-“

“No.”

“No what?”

“It was just a face, any shape.”

“His hair receding or full?”

“I can’t remember,” she said.

Chase said, “When I got to her, she was in a state of shock. I doubt she was registering anything.”

Instead of a grateful agreement, Louise scowled at him.

He realized, too late, that the worst embarrassment for someone Louise’s age was to lose her cool, to fail to cope. He had betrayed her momentary lapse to, of all people, a cop. She would have little gratitude for him now, even though he had saved her life.

Wallace got up. “Come on,” he said.

“Where?” Chase asked.

“We’ll go out there.”

“Is that really necessary? For me, anyway?” Chase asked.

“Well, I have to take statements from both of you, in more detail than this. It would help, Mr. Chase, to be on the scene when you’re describing it again. It’ll only take a short while. We’ll need the girl longer than we’ll need you.”

* * *

Chase was sitting in the rear of Wallace’s squad car, thirty feet from the scene of the murder, answering questions, when the staff car from the
Press-Dispatch
arrived. Two photographers and a reporter got out.

For the first time, Chase realized that there would be local newspaper and television coverage. They would make a reluctant hero of him. Again.

“Please,” he said to Wallace, “can we keep the reporters from learning who helped the girl?”

“Why?”

“I’m tired of reporters,” Chase said.

Wallace said, “But you did save her life. You ought to be proud of that.”

“I don’t want to talk to them,” Chase said.

“That’s up to you. But they’ll have to know who interrupted the killer. It’ll be in the report.”

Later, when Wallace was finished and Chase was getting out of the car to join another officer who would take him back to town, he felt the girl put a hand on his shoulder. He turned, and she said, “Thank you.”

Maybe he was imagining it, but he thought that her touch had the quality of a caress and that her hand lingered. Even the possibility sickened him.

He met her eyes. Looked away at once.

At the same instant, a photographer snapped a picture. The flashbulb sprayed light. The light was brief—but the photograph would haunt him forever.

In the car, on the way back to town, the uniformed officer behind the wheel said that his name was Don Jones, that he had read about Chase, and that he would like to have Chase’s autograph for his kids. Chase signed his name on the back of a blank homicide report, and at Jones’s urging, he prefaced it with “To Rick and Judy Jones.” The officer asked a lot of questions about Nam, which Chase answered as curtly as courtesy would allow.

In his prize Mustang, he drove more sedately than he had before. There was no anger in him now, only infinite weariness.

At a quarter past one in the morning, he parked in front of Mrs. Fielding’s house, relieved to see that no lights were on. He unlocked the front door as quietly as the ancient deadbolt would permit, stepped knowingly around most of the loose boards in the staircase, and made his way to his attic apartment: one large room that served as a kitchen, bedroom, and living room, plus one walk-in closet and a private bath.

He locked his door.

He felt safe now.

Of course, he knew that he would never be safe again. No one ever was. Safety was an illusion.

This night at least, he hadn’t been required to make polite conversation with Mrs. Fielding as she posed coyly in one of her half-unbuttoned housedresses, revealing the fish-belly-white curves of her breasts. He never understood why she chose to be so casually immodest at her age.

He undressed. He washed his face and hands. In fact, he washed his hands three times. He washed his hands a lot lately.

He studied the shallow knife wound in his thigh. It was already clotted and beginning to scab. He washed it, flushed it with alcohol, swabbed it with Merthiolate, and bandaged it.

In the main room, he completed the medication by pouring a glass of Jack Daniel’s over two ice cubes. He sank onto the bed with the whiskey. He usually consumed half a bottle a day, minimum. This day, because of the damn banquet, he’d tried to stay sober. No longer.

Drinking, he felt clean again. Alone with a bottle of good liquor—that was the
only
time he felt clean.

He was pouring his second glassful when the telephone rang.

When he had first moved into the apartment, he hadn’t wanted a telephone. No one would ever call. And he had no desire to make contact with anyone.

Mrs. Fielding had not believed that he could live without a phone. Envisioning herself becoming a messenger service for him, she had insisted that he have a telephone hooked up as a condition of occupancy.

That had been long before she knew that he was a war hero. It was even before
he
knew it.

For months the phone went unused except when she called from downstairs to tell him that mail had been delivered or to invite him to dinner.

Since the announcement by the White House, however, since all the excitement about the medal, he received calls every day, most of them from perfect strangers who offered congratulations that he did not deserve or sought interviews for publications that he had never read. He cut most of them short. Thus far, no one had ever had gall enough to ring him up this late at night, but he supposed he could never regain the solitude to which he had grown accustomed in those first months after his discharge.

He considered ignoring the phone and concentrating on his Jack Daniel’s. But when it had rung for the sixteenth time, he realized that the caller was too persistent to be ignored, and he answered it. “Hello?”

“Chase?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know me?”

“No,” he said, unable to place the voice. The man sounded tired—but aside from that one clue, he might have been anywhere between twenty and sixty years old, fat or thin, tall or short.

“How’s your leg, Chase?” His voice contained a hint of humor, though the reason for it escaped Chase.

“Good enough,” Chase said. “Fine.”

“You’re very good with your hands.”

Chase said nothing, could not bring himself to speak, for now he understood what the call was about.

“Very good with your hands,” the bird-dogger repeated. “I guess you learned that in the army.”

“Yes,” Chase said.

“I guess you learned a lot of things in the army, and I guess you think you can take care of yourself pretty well.”

Chase said, “Is this
you?”

The man laughed, momentarily shaking off his dispirited tone. “Yes, it’s me. I am me. Exactly right. I’ve got a badly bruised throat, Chase, and I know my voice will be just awful by morning. Otherwise, I got away about as lightly as you did.”

With a clarity reserved for moments of danger, Chase recalled the struggle with the killer on the grass by the Chevrolet. He tried to get a clear picture of the man’s face but could do no better for his own sake than he had for the police. “How did you know I was the one who stopped you?”

“I saw your picture in the paper. You’re a war hero. Your picture was everywhere. When you were lying on your back, beside the knife, I recognized you and got out of there fast.”

“Who are you?”

“Do you really expect me to say?”

Chase had forgotten his drink altogether. The alarms, the goddamn alarms in his head, were ringing at peak volume. “What do you want?”

The stranger was silent for so long that Chase almost asked the question again. Suddenly, the amusement gone from his voice, the killer said, “You messed in where you had no right messing. You don’t know the trouble I went to, picking the proper targets out of all those young fornicators, the ones who most deserved to die. I planned it for weeks, Chase, and I had given that young sinner his just punishment. The slut was left, and you saved her before I could perform my duty, saved a whore like that who had no right to be spared. This is not a good thing.”

“You’re not well.” Chase realized the absurd inadequacy of that statement, but the killer—like all else in the modern world—had reduced him to clichés.

The killer either did not hear or pretended not to hear what Chase had said. “I just wanted to tell you, Mr. Chase, that it doesn’t end here. You are not a facilitator of justice.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll deal with you, Chase, once I’ve researched your background and have weighed a proper judgment on you. Then, when you’ve been made to pay, I’ll deal with the whore, that girl.”

“Deal with?” Chase asked.

The euphemism reminded him of the similar evasions of vocabulary to which he had grown accustomed in Nam. He felt much older than he was, more tired than he had been a moment earlier.

“I’m going to kill you, Chase. I’m going to punish you for whatever sins are on your record, because you’ve interfered with the intended pattern. You are not a facilitator of justice.” He was silent. Then: “Do you understand?”

“As much as I understand anything.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

“What more?” Chase wondered.

“I’ll be talking to you again.”

“What’s the point of this?”

“Facilitation,” the killer said—and disconnected.

Chase hung up and leaned back against the headboard of the bed. He felt something cold in his hand, looked down, and was surprised to see the glass of whiskey. He raised it to his lips and took a taste. It was slightly bitter.

He closed his eyes.

So easy not to care.

Or maybe not so easy. If it had been as easy as he wanted it to be, he could have put the whiskey aside and gone to sleep. Or, instead of waiting for the bird-dogger to come after him, he could have blown out his own brains.

Too easy to care. He opened his eyes.

He had to decide what to do about the call.

The police would be interested, of course, because it was a solid lead to the man who had killed Michael Karnes. They would probably want to monitor the telephone line in hope that the killer would call again—especially since he had said that Chase would be hearing from him. They might even station an officer in Chase’s room, and they might put a tail on him both for his own protection and to try to nab the murderer.

Yet he hesitated to call Detective Wallace.

The past few weeks, since the news about the Medal of Honor, Chase’s daily routine had been destroyed. He loathed the change.

He had been accustomed to deep solitude, disturbed only by his need to talk to store clerks and to Mrs. Fielding, his landlady. In the mornings he went downtown and had breakfast at Woolworth’s. He bought a paperback, occasionally a magazine—but never a newspaper—picked up what incidentals he required, stopped twice a week at the liquor store, spent the noon hour in the park watching the girls in their short skirts as they walked to and from their jobs, then went home and passed the rest of the day in his room. He read during the long afternoons, and he drank. By evening he could not clearly see the print on the pages of his book, and he turned on the small television to watch old movies that he had memorized virtually scene by scene. Around eleven o’clock, he finished the day’s bottle or portion thereof, after having eaten little or nothing for dinner—and then he slept as long as he could.

It was not much of a life, certainly not what he had once expected, but it was bearable. Because it was simple, it was also solid, safe, empty of doubt and uncertainty, lacking in choices and decisions that might bring about another breakdown.

Then, after the AP and UPI had carried the story of the Vietnam hero who had declined to attend a White House ceremony for the awarding of the Congressional Medal of Honor (though he had not declined the medal itself, since he felt that would bring more publicity than he could handle), there had been no hope of simplicity.

He had weathered the uproar, granting as few interviews as possible, talking is monosyllables on the phone. The only thing for which he had been required to leave his room was the banquet, and he had been able to cope with that only because he knew that once it was over, he could return to his attic apartment and resume the uneventful life that had been wrenched from him.

The incident in lovers’ lane had changed his plans, postponed a return to stability. The papers would carry the Medal of Honor story again, with pictures, along with the report of his latest act of foolish interference. There would be more calls, congratulations, interviewers to be turned down.

Then it would die out. In a week or two—if he could tolerate the spotlight that long—things would be as they had once been, quiet and manageable.

He took another swallow of whiskey. It tasted better than it had a short while ago.

There were limits to what he could endure. Two more weeks of newspaper stories, phone calls, job offers, and marriage proposals would take him to the end of his meager resources. During that same time, if he had to share his room with an officer of the law and be followed everywhere he went, he would not hold up.

Already he felt the same vague emptiness arising in him that had filled him so completely in the hospital. It was that profound lack of purpose that he must stave off at all costs. Even if it meant withholding information from the authorities.