The Stalker (11 page)

“The whole idea is . . . fantastic,” Kilduff said slowly.

“That’s right. It’s fantastic. But what do you say now, baby? Do you think Conradin fell off that cliff accidentally Sunday night, like yesterday’s papers had it? Four of us now in less than a month. Do you still call it coincidence?”

No, Kilduff thought, and he knew that it wasn’t, that he’d known it wasn’t almost from the beginning. He’d been deluding himself, lying to himself that there was nothing wrong, nothing to worry about; he just hadn’t been able to face it. Too many things had happened at once, that was the reason—Andrea and the money and Granite City, all piling in on him at the same time. Was it any wonder he’d reacted the way he had? But he had to face it now, he had no choice but to face it now. Yes, it was true all right, it was murder all right; Jim hadn’t misjudged his footing in the fog and fallen accidentally off that cliff. Somebody had pushed him and somebody had deliberately murdered Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp—this Helgerman, this Mannerling guard who had suffered spinal damage as a result of Conradin’s blow to the base of his neck those thousand years past . . .

He said, “I don’t think it was coincidence, Larry. I don’t think Jim or any of the others died by accident.”

“You weren’t so sure on the phone last night. You wouldn’t talk about it.”

“I’m sure now.”

Drexel drew back against the red Leatherette of the booth and inhaled the cheroot and expelled twin streams of smoke through his nostrils. “Okay,” he said. “You’re sure now. What do you think we ought to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, of course you don’t

“Just what does that mean?”

Drexel smiled in his cold way. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to find Helgerman. That’s the only thing we
can
do.”

“Find him? How are we going to do that?”

“By starting at the source.”

“You mean Granite City?”

“That was where he lived, wasn’t it?”

“If he killed the others, and now Jim, he can’t have done it from Granite City. We won’t find him there.”

“No, he’s here now. In the Bay Area.”

“Then—?”

“It’s a place to start,” Drexel said. “He could be based almost anywhere around here, and we’d only be kidding ourselves if we think we can locate him by canvass. So we begin at the beginning and work our way forward and try to trace him that way. I had a flight scheduled to Chicago last night. I canceled it because of Conradin, but as soon as I get back I’m going to make another reservation. For tonight.”

“And me?”

“What about you?”

“Do you want me to go along?”

“You’d rather not, is that it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth.”

“Is that what I was doing?”

Kilduff rotated his cup slowly in its saucer, thinking: No, that’s not what you were doing at all. You were right, Larry: I’m afraid. Because with acceptance comes fear, and I’m afraid the same way I was before we held up that armored car—maybe more so now, because I had youth then and all I’ve got now are a lot of old memories and faded dreams and the prospect of a life alone. I don’t particularly want to die, but it’s not death itself that I’m frightened of; no, it’s . . . something else, something less simple, less basic, something else . . .

He said uneasily, “Listen, Larry. What can we do even if we find Helgerman? Buy him off? I don’t have a pot any more; my share is gone.”

Drexel was looking at him with incredulity. After a long moment he said softly, “Come on, baby. You’re not that goddamned naïve, are you?”

Outside the window, the sky irradiated for a brief instant with a fresh zig-zag of lightning, as if a gigantic match had been struck somewhere in the heavens, and then grew dark and ominous again. Kilduff’s eyes flicked there briefly, came back to Drexel’s. A chill began to flow through him.

“Naïve?” he said. “I don’t—”

“What do you think we’ve been talking about? Taking him to dinner and a movie?”

“Larry—”

“What the hell do you
suppose
we’re going to do when we find him?” Drexel said. “We’re going to kill the bastard. We’re going to kill him before he kills us.”

The Tenderloin by night, as seen through heavy rain.

San Francisco’s equivalent to New York’s West Forty-second Street, on a smaller scale but nonetheless squalid, nonetheless garish, hiding its pocked and ugly face beneath the veiling rain and the cosmetic darkness, dying by inches and without mourners. A whore under every street lamp and two behind every drawn shade; gay-boys with mascaraed eyes and codpieces and invitational glances more sultry than those of their female counterparts; con men with sad eyes and glib tongues and hearts of pure ebony; pushers selling furtive oblivion in white capsules or brown packages or dabbed lightly on sweet sugar cubes; winos with nowhere to go and a future as dead as the past, suffering the penultimate indignation of having to compete with bearded and buckskinned hippies for altruistic nickels from Des Moines or Miami or the Sunset District—and here and there, a man who wants nothing and takes nothing and asks only to be left alone.

On Ellis Street, neon flashes AUGIES PLACE, sans apostrophe, alternately with TOPLESS AND BOTTOMLESS REVUE above a black-façaded building situated between a Polish delicatessen and an empty storefront decorated with chalked obscenities. A thick-necked man with a Fu Manchu mustache and flat drugged eyes stands before the curtained entranceway, calling out inducements to the stream of passers-by, “No cover and no minimum, folks,” but he says nothing of the diluted bar whiskey which sells for a dollar fifty a shot and tastes like nothing so much as crude fuel oil.

Inside it is very dark, save for a single light above the back bar and a bright pink spotlight which illuminates a small, raised stage against the far wall. On the stage, a nude red-haired girl with pendulous white breasts and swollen nipples and a shaved, protruding abdomen makes lewd motions with fleshy hips, while an unintelligible masturbation of sound spews forth from a hidden jukebox. Before a chrome-barred cocktail slot stands a platinum-haired waitress wearing a brief sequinned halter and a short skirt with fringe ringing its bottom, and behind the otherwise empty bar a huge, light-skinned Negro sits on a high acmuntant’s stool and surveys the almost deserted interior with implacable eyes.

Only three of the two dozen tiny round tables—which cover with their chairs every available inch of floor space—are occupied. At one, a sailor in dress blues and a hooker in a green lamé dress sit holding hands and whispering; at a second, two more hookers in shimmering black, waiting, silent.

At the third table sits the limping man.

He holds a glass of draft beer tightly between his two hands, and stares with hot brightness at the red-haired girl on the stage. He watches her hips undulate in time to the pagan music, simulating the act of love, her eyes squeezed shut and her lips half-parted in an expression of abandonment, and while he watches he thinks of Sunday night and Yellow.

So simple it had been, so very simple, simpler even than Red and Blue and Gray. Yellow, Yellow, true to form, the habitual animal: a walk along Blind Beach, like so many walks before. So simple. He had known Yellow’s destination from the moment he turned onto Highway I, and he had slowed down then and driven leisurely, for there was no need to remain near, and when he had finally taken the rented car onto the turn-out high above the ocean, Yellow’s car had been parked there where it always was. So simple. So simple to hide in the fog on the ledge, to blend into the roiling eddies of mist and wait for Yellow to climb back up the face of the cliff after his walk and pause there, unsuspecting, so simple to reach out and very quickly thrust him into nothingness ...

A movement, a thin rustling sibilance, diverts the limping man from his thoughts. He takes his eyes reluctantly from the girl on the stage. One of the hookers in shimmering black has come to his table, and she stands now above him, smiling, tall and willowy and young, with black hair piled high on her head, with breasts that spill like white iridescent cream over the tight bodice of her dress. “Do you mind if I sit down, honey?” she asks in a voice as sibilant as the rustle of her garment.

The limping man looks up at her for a long moment. A whore, a cheap whore; but he feels hunger in his loins. “No,” he answers slowly, “I don’t mind.”

The girl sits down and crosses her legs, and the short skirt of the dress pulls up on her thighs: more iridescent white cream. His eyes linger there, and he can smell her perfume dark and musky. “I’m Alice,” she says.

“Hello, Alice.”

“Would you like to buy me a drink?”

“All right.”

“Well, groovy.”

“What would you like?”

“Bourbon and water.”

The limping man signals and the yellow-haired waitress moves toward them, her heavy thighs rippling beneath the dancing fringe of her skirt. She takes his order and returns to the bar, and Alice says, “What’s your name, honey?”

“Smith,” the limping man answers, and Alice laughs. A cheap whore, he thinks, but she’s almost pretty when she laughs.

“Where you from, old Smith?” Alice asks.

“Everywhere,” the limping man says. “And nowhere.”

Alice laughs again. “My, how poetic.” She puts her hand on his thigh very lightly and leans close to him and presses her white spilling breasts against his arm. “You wouldn’t be a poet, would you?”

Her hand is like hot fire on his leg. “No, I wouldn’t.”

“What would you be then?”

The limping man does not answer, and the yellow-haired waitress comes back with a tray containing a draft beer and a glass of tea. The limping man gives her three dollars. She nods, retreating. Alice sips the tea, and then puts the glass down and presses her breasts tighter against his arm. He feels them spongy-soft there and looks down into the shadowed valley between them and begins to breathe unevenly. The music builds to a crescendo from within the walls of the room, and the red-haired girl moves faster and faster on the stage, until her nude hips are a blur of motion. Alice strokes the limping man’s thigh, drawing her hand higher. “Do you like me?” she asks.

“Yes,” he answers, “I like you,” and he is thinking of Yellow again, Yellow screaming through the gray, damp fog.

“I’ve got a room down the street, honey,” Alice says softly. “We could go there if you like.”

Yellow screams and screams, but rhythmically now, in time with the beat of the music. The limping man breathes rapidly, irregularly, and her hand sets fire to his trouser leg.

“I’m very good, you know,” she says.

“Are you?”

“I’m very,
very
good.”

“How much?”

“Fifty dollars.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“I’m a lot of woman, honey.”

“I’ll give you twenty-five.”

“Compromise time,” she says. “Thirty-five.”

“Twenty-five or nothing.”

“Thirty-five or nothing.”

The music continues, but the scream ends abruptly and is replaced by a faint, faraway sound, the sound of a pebble tumbling down a mountainside. But then that sound, too, dies, and there is silence, and in his mind the limping man sees Yellow lying dead and broken and bloodied at the bottom of the cliff. Alice’s hand brands his thigh and she breathes into his ear, “I know a lot of things, old Smith honey, I know a lot of ways to make a man happy. Thirty-five dollars is a bargain price.”

“All right!” the limping man says urgently, standing. “All right, let’s go!”

Alice smiles. “You won’t be sorry.”

“Let’s go!” he says again, and pulls her to her feet. They make their way quickly toward the curtained entranceway.

Behind the bar, the light-skinned Negro watches them with his implacable stare, and smiles very faintly, and on the stage the nude girl dancer sinks to her knees with her head hanging down and her long red hair shielding her body like a gossamer cloak as the music terminates and the pink spotlight winks out.

Chicago lay cold and bright and aloof under a darkly overcast sky when Larry Drexel’s flight from San Francisco arrived at O’Hare Airport a few minutes past ten Tuesday night.

Immediately after claiming his single suitcase, Drexel entered a cab in front of the main terminal and instructed the driver to take him to one of the larger downtown hotels, where he had made telephone reservations that afternoon. He settled back against the rear seat as the cab began to make its way out of the airport, removed a cheroot from his suit pocket, and lit it carefully.

He thought: Who would have figured Kilduff to turn out the way he did? Crap-yellow, and running scared. He came undone at the seams this morning at Sebastopol; I shouldn’t have said anything to him at all about killing Helgerman, but how could you predict a reaction like that?

It turned his stomach remembering how he had had to patronize Kilduff: “It’s nothing as relatively unimportant as exposure, or even a prison sentence, facing us now, Steve. It’s life and death, kill or be killed—the law of the jungle. No judgments, no great moral decisions, Steve; kill or be killed, pure and simple.” But he’d finally gotten him calmed down on the drive back to San Francisco, telling him that they would talk it all out again when he got back from Chicago; but there was no figuring how long it would be before Kilduff got to thinking on the thing and made some damned-fool move that would blow the whole scene—like going to the police, spilling his guts . . .