Chase (3 page)

He undressed, washed his face and hands, studied the knife wound in his thigh, which he had neglected to mention to the police. It was shallow, already clotted and beginning to dry into a thin scab. He washed it, flushed it with alcohol, swabbed Merthiolate over it. In the main room, he completed the medication by pouring a glass of Jack Daniel's over two ice cubes, and sank down on the bed with the wonderful stuff. He usually consumed a fifth of it a day. Today, because of that damned banquet, he had been forced to stay off it. Drinking, he felt clean again. Alone with a bottle of good liquor was the only time he felt clean.

He was pouring his second glassful over the same half-melted ice cubes when the telephone rang.

When he first moved into the apartment, he had protested that he did not require a telephone, since no one would be calling him and since he had no wish to contact anyone else. Mrs Fiedling had not believed him, and envisioning a situation wherein she would become a messenger service for him, insisted on a telephone hook-up as a condition of occupancy.

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

For months the phone went unused, except when she called up from downstairs to tell him 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 two and three calls a day, most of them from perfect strangers who offered congratulations he did not want or sought interviews for various publications he had never read. He cut most of them short. Thus far, no one had gall enough to ring him up this late at night, but he supposed he could never regain the solitude he had grown used to in those first months after his discharge.

He considered ignoring the phone, concentrating on his Jack Daniel's until it had stopped crying. But when it had rung for the sixteenth time, he realized the caller was a good bit more persistent than he, 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 humour, 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 he had begun to understand just what the call was all about.

‘Very good with your hands,’ the stranger 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 the dull tone of exhaustion. ‘Yes, it's me,’ he said. ‘I've got a badly bruised throat, and I know my voice will be just awful by morning. Otherwise, I got away about as lightly as you did, Chase.’

Chase remembered, with a clarity his mind reserved for moments of danger, 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 not do any better for his own sake than for the police. He said, ‘How did you know that I was the one who stopped you?’

‘I saw your picture in the paper,’ the man said. ‘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.’

Chase said, ‘Who are you?’

‘Do you really expect me to say?’ There was a definite note of amusement in the man's voice.

Chase had forgotten his drink altogether. The alarms, the goddamned alarms in his head, were ringing at peak volume. It might have been a national holiday, judging by that mental clangor. Chase said. ‘What do you want?’

The stranger was silent for so long that Chase almost asked the same 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 deserved punishment. The young woman was left, and you saved her before I could perform my duty, saved a whore like that who had no right to be spared.’

‘You're not well,’ Chase said. He realized the absurdity of that statement the moment he had spoken, but the killer had reduced him to clichés.

‘I just wanted to tell you, Mr Chase, that it doesn't end here, not by a long shot.’ The killer either did not hear or pretended not to hear what Chase had said.

‘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 all the similar evasions of vocabulary he had grown accustomed to in Nam. He felt much older than he was, more tired than he had a moment earlier.

‘I'm going to kill you, Chase. I'm going to punish you for whatever sins are on your record, and because you've messed in where you had no right.’ He waited a moment. ‘Do you understand?’

‘Yes, but -’

‘I'll be talking to you again, Chase.’

‘Look, if-’

The man hung up.

Chase put his own receiver in the cradle of the phone and leaned back against the headboard of the bed. He felt something cold and awkward in his hand, looked down and was surprised to find the glass of whiskey. He raised it to his lips and took a taste. It was slightly bitter.

He had to decide what to do about the call.

The police would be interested, of course, for they would see it as their first solid lead to the man who had killed Michael Karnes. They would probably want to monitor the line in hopes the man would call again -especially since he had said that Chase would be hearing from him again. They might even station an officer in Chase's room, and they were certain to put a tail on him both for his own protection and for a chance to nab the murderer if he should try for a second victim. Yet . . .

The last few weeks, since the news about the Medal of Honor, Chase's day-to-day routines had been utterly destroyed. He had been accustomed to a deep solitude, disturbed only by his need to talk to store clerks and to Mrs Fiedling, 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 spent 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, and he turned on the small television set to watch the old movies he had almost memorized detail by detail. Around eleven o'clock at night he finished the day's bottle, having eaten little or nothing for supper, and then he slept.

It was not much, he supposed, certainly not what he had once thought would constitute a reasonable life style, but it was bearable. Because it was simple, it was also solid, easy to work within, empty of doubt and uncertainty, lacking in choices and decisions that might bring about another breakdown. Then, when the AP and UPI carried the story of the Vietnam hero who had declined to personally 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 was no time or opportunity for simplicity.

He had weathered the uproar, the sentiment and enthusiasm, somehow, granting as few interviews as possible, talking in monosyllables on the phone. The only thing for which he was forced 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 pick up the uneventful life that had so recently been wrenched away from him.

The incident in lovers’ lane had changed his plans, postponed a return to stability. The papers would carry it again, front page and with pictures. There would be more calls, more congratulations, more interviewers to be turned down. Then it would die out, in a week or two - if he could tolerate it that long - and things would be as they had once been, quiet and manageable.

He took another sip of his drink. It tasted better than it had a short while ago.

There were limits to what he could endure, however. Two more weeks of newspaper stories, telephone calls, job offers and marriage proposals would take him to the end of his meagre resources. If, during that same time, 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 filling him that had filled him so completely in the hospital. It was that lack of purpose, that loss of desire to go on that he must stave off at all costs. Even if it meant withholding information from the authorities.

He wouldn't tell the police about the call.

He took more of his drink, went to the cupboard and refreshed it with another slug from the dark bottle.

After all, it was unlikely that the killer was serious. He had to be a madman, for no sane person would attack a couple in a parked car and hack one of them nearly to pieces with a long-bladed butcher knife. Madmen were dangerous, to be sure, but they rarely ever did what they promised to do. Or, at least, that was what Chase thought.

He understood that he was keeping a lead from the police, a contact they might make good use of. But the police were clever. They would find the man without Chase's aid. They must have fingerprints from the door handle of the Chevrolet, from the handle of the murder weapon. They had already thought to issue a statement that the killer would be suffering from a badly bruised throat and the resultant laryngitis. What he was keeping from them would do little to speed up their efficient system of detection and apprehension.

He finished his drink. It had gone down quickly, smoothly.

It was decided.

He poured more whiskey and went back to bed, slid beneath the covers and stared at the blank eye of the television set. In a few days everything would be back to normal. He could settle into old routines, living comfortably on his disability pension and the moderately ample inheritance from his parents’ estate. There would be no need to get a job or to talk to anyone or to make decisions. His only task would be to consume enough whiskey to be able to sleep despite the nightmares.

He finished his glassful. He slept.

Two

Chase rose early the next morning, frightened awake by nightmares full of dead men who were trying to talk to him. After that, the day deteriorated.

His mistake was in trying to go on with it in a manner that denied anything unusual had happened. He rose, bathed, shaved, dressed and went downstairs to see if there was any mail on the hall table for him. There was none, but Mrs Fiedling heard him and hurried out of the perpetually darkened living room to show him the first edition of the
Press-Dispatch.
His picture was on the front page, turned half toward Louise Allenby getting out of the squad car. She looked as if she was crying, one hand gripping his arm, far more full of grief than she had actually been.

‘I'm so proud of you,’ Mrs Fiedling said. She sounded like his mother. Indeed, she was old enough for the post, in her mid-fifties. Her hair was curled tightly in an old-fashioned style and shot through with grey. Her doughy face had been rouged and lipsticked and had, peculiarly, been made to look ten years older by those cosmetic tricks. She was twenty or thirty pounds too heavy and carried nearly all of it in her hips.

‘It wasn't anything like they said, not as exciting as that,’ Chase told her.

‘How do you know? You haven't read it.’

‘They always overwrite. I know, because they did it the last time.’

‘Oh, you're just too modest,’ Mrs Fiedling said. She was wearing a blue and yellow housedress with the two top buttons opened. He could see not only the pallid bulge of her breasts, but the edge of a yellowed brassiere as well.

Though he was much larger and much younger than Mrs Fiedling, with three times her strength, she frightened him. It was, he had once decided, because he did not know what she wanted from him.

She said, ‘I bet this brings twice the job offers that the last article brought!’

Mrs Fiedling was much more interested in Chase's eventual employment than was Chase himself. At first he had thought that she was afraid he would fall in arrears on the rent, but he eventually decided that she believed him about his inheritance and that her concern went deeper than that.

She said, ‘As I've often told you, you're young and strong, and you have a lifetime ahead of you. The thing for a fellow like you is work, hard work, a chance to make something of yourself. Not that you haven't done all right so far. But this lounging around, not working - it hasn't been good for you. You must have lost fifteen pounds since you first moved in.’

Chase did not respond.

Mrs Fiedling moved closer to him and took the morning paper out of his hands. She looked at the picture in the centre of the front page and sighed.

‘I have to be going,’ Chase said.

She looked up from the paper. ‘I
saw
your car.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘It tells about it in the paper. Wasn't that nice of them, though?’

‘Yes.’

‘They hardly ever do anything for the boys who serve and don't make a big protest of it. You read all about the bad ones, but no one lifts a hand for good boys like you. It's about time, and I hope you enjoy the car.’

‘I will,’ he said, opening the front door and stepping outside before she could carry on any further.