The Stalker (2 page)

From the Fargo, North Dakota, Forum, October II, 1970:

Paul Wykopf, 34, owner of the X-Cel Trucking Company of Fargo, was crushed to death shortly past 7 p.m. last night in the company’s truck garage at 1149 State Street. A failing hand brake on one of the General Motors diesel cabs parked in the garage was blamed for the tragedy. The vehicle apparently rolled forward after the hand brake slipped, pinning Wykopf against one of the concrete walls. Death was instantaneous, police said.

Gordon Jellicoe, head mechanic at X-Cel, discovered his employer’s body when Wykopf failed to meet him as promised at a local tavern, and he returned to find out why. He said that Wykopf was in the habit of working late on the company books three nights each week, and that he always made a check of the premises before leaving on those evenings. “That’s when it must have happened,” he told police.

Wykopf was graduated from Fargo High School in 1953, where he received statewide prominence in both football and baseball. He purchased X-Cel Trucking, then called Martin’s Freight Lines, from Pete Martin in 1962. The company specialized in the hauling of perishable goods.

There are no survivors.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer, October 20, 1970:

Eugene Beauchamp, the wealthy Philadelphia jet-setter who last month took his third bride, steel heiress Gloria Mayes Tanner, was killed yesterday in the crash of his private plane near Lake Wallenpaupack.

Investigating officers responding to the report of a midair explosion by rancher Neil Simmons, found the smoking wreckage of the 35-year-old financial wizard’s Cessna in a fallow field on Simmons’ property three miles from the lake. Beauchamp was alone in the twin-engine craft at the time of the fatal plunge.

He had taken off from Kirin Field in Philadelphia early yesterday morning on a planned flight to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, where he was to meet friends for a caribou-hunting expedition. He was in the habit of flying alone, a source close to the family said.

Police could find no explanation for the apparent explosion of the aircraft. A complete investigation is being conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Beauchamp, whose uncanny knowledge of the stock market resulted in the accumulation of a fortune reported to exceed twenty million dollars, had devoted his time to world travel in the past few years. He was a well-known member of the fabled international jet set, and maintained homes in Côte d’Azur and on the island of Majorca, as well as in Philadelphia.

Before wedding Miss Tanner in a lavish ceremony in fashionable Beacon Hill in September, Beauchamp’s name had been romantically linked with two international film starlets. His previous wives were Kelly Drew Beauchamp, an airline stewardess, and the socially prominent Maria Todd Andrews. Both marriages ended in divorce, the first in 1963 and the second in 1966.

Andrea was gone.

Steve Kilduff knew that, intuitively, the moment he entered their apartment high on San Francisco’s Twin Peaks. He stood just inside the door, the cashmere overcoat he had shed in the elevator over his left arm, his eyes moving slowly over the neat, darkened living room—the magazines on the coffee table arranged just so, the freshly pressed drapes drawn carefully over the wide window-doors, the replace hearth swept clean and its steel screen placed with precise orderliness before the grate, the buff-colored shag carpet fluffy and well vacuumed, the expensive and ornate maple furnishings glistening with lemon-scented furniture polish. Everything was in its place, everything was spotlessly clean, everything was just as it always was, just as Andrea—warm, sweet, passionate, orderly Andrea—insisted it should be.

But she was gone. There was a tangible feel of desertion, of emptiness, which lay on the air in that very tidy living room like stagnating water at the bottom of a forest pool.

Kilduff shut the door quietly behind him, letting the overcoat fall to the carpet at his feet. Mechanically, he walked past the gleaming kitchen with its waxed linoleum floor and followed the short hallway into their bedroom. He saw, without seeing, that the wide double bed was neatly made, the white chenille spread free of even a single wrinkle, hanging exactly the same distance from the buff carpet on either side; that the toilet articles and jewelry cases on his dresser were schematically apportioned; that the hammered bronze ashtray on his night stand sparkled with a recent application of tarnish remover.

He went to the walk-in closet to the left of the doorway and slid back the paneled door on Andrea’s half. He looked at a bare, scrubbed wall and two dozen empty hangers uniformly bunched on the round wooden rod. The floor was equally bare; there were no pumps or heels or puff-ball slippers in the wire shoe rack, and the matching pieces of Samsonite luggage he had given Andrea for an anniversary present three years before were not there.

Kilduff returned to the living room. She hadn’t even bothered to leave a note, he thought, all the conspicuous surfaces where one might have been were barren; no note, no explanation or good-bye or kiss-my-ass or go-to-hell, nothing, nothing at all.

He crossed to the closed drapes, drew them open, and unlocked the sliding glass window-doors. He stepped out onto the wide cement floor of the balcony—bare, save for the webbed aluminum summer furniture folded and stacked in one corner. A wind laced with ice particles numbed his face and neck almost immediately, but he stood with his hands on the cold metal of the welded iron railing.

The fog was coming in. It sat off to the west in great folding gray billows, like tainted cotton candy at a carnival. Kilduff watched it for a long moment—moving closer, inexorably closer, an advancing army with ephemeral wisps drifting ahead of it like the spirits of long-dead and long-forgotten generals. He moved his eyes slowly to look at what lay spread out before him: the gray close-set buildings of a big city, some hillside-clinging, some extending in long identical rows as if they had spewn forth from a gigantic duplicating machine, some jutting skyward with long, thin, beseeching spires; straight ahead to the Golden Gate Bridge, heavy with weekend traffic, the crests of its red spans already consumed by the approaching fog; across to Marin County and the brown and white and pastel cottages clinging to the side of the hill above Sausalito, where the would-be artists and the would-be writers and the hippies and the rebels and the fruiters lived; dipping lower, coming back to the ugly dead gray rock of Alcatraz, a toad’s wart in the leaden surface of the bay; to the right and the cantilever span of the Bay Bridge and along it, halfway to Oakland and the East Bay, where it touches Yerba Buena Island; down and over to the naval base on the long finger, obscene finger, of Treasure Island. A sweeping panorama, Kilduff thought, beautiful San Francisco, enchanting San Francisco, but only when the sun shines, baby, because when you saw it like this, on an overcast Saturday morning in early November with the vague promise of rain and the chill of winter and the smell of acrid brine in the air, when you saw it like this it was lonely and remote and hoary-old and not very beautiful or enchanting at all.

He turned from the railing, then, and went back inside the apartment, relocking the window-doors and drawing the drapes closed again. He sank wearily onto the pliant cushions of one of the chairs and fumbled a cigarette from the pocket of his shirt. He was a big man, tall, muscular; at thirty-two, his belly was still washboard-taut and he still moved with the easy, natural grace of his youth. But his thick black hair had begun to gray prematurely at the temples, and his green and brown hawk’s eyes had an almost imperceptible dullness to them, as if the fires which had once burned there were now little more than rapidly cooling embers; his cheeks were sunken hollowly, giving him an anomalous, slightly satanic look. It was a strange face that stared back at him from the mirror in the bathroom every morning, a face he no longer felt at ease with after eight years of almost-but-not-quite, eight years of failure compounded upon failure, eight years of knowing that the money would run out some day and trying to look ahead to that time, trying to prepare for it in advance, and never accomplishing that objective—or any other.

Like these past two days, he thought. Like what had happened with this Roy Bannerman, whom he had met at an incredibly sluggish party some friends of Andrea’s had given on Russian Hill. Bannerman was an executive with a large independent cannery in Monterey, and there was a managerial position opening up there shortly that paid twelve thousand per annum. Come on down, he had told Kilduff, I’ll have the brass over for dinner, give them a chance to look you over; hell, a few drinks and some thick steaks under their belts, and you’re in, Steve, I can practically guarantee it. So he had gone down there and met the brass, putting the charm on, smiling at the right time, laughing at the right time, speaking at the right time, lying at the right time, oh Jesus yes, he had impressed the crap out of them, they were calling him Steve and he was calling them Ned and Charley and Forry, and when the evening was over they had said to come around to the cannery in the morning and take a tour of the plant, see what you’ll be handling, eh, Steve, and he had called Andrea from his motel bursting like a goddamned kid with a straight-A report card. She had sounded pleased, in a subdued way, strange now that he thought of it, but he had put it down at the time to the late hour and the fact that he had gotten her out of bed. So he had gone around to the cannery yesterday, Friday, and a fat secretary with bad legs had taken his name and then informed him that Ned and Charley and Forry were all in conference, would he mind waiting for just a little while? He waited for three hours, and then Bannerman came into the anteroom looking very righteous, and said that it had all fallen through, they had run a personnel check into his background as a matter of policy and what the hell, Steve, why didn’t you tell me about all those screw-ups before I went through the trouble of setting everything up, we’ve got to have a solid man in this position, somebody who can step right in and take over, well, I hope you understand.

He understood; he understood all too well.

But it didn’t really matter now, because the money had finally run out—there was exactly three hundred and sixteen dollars in their joint checking account—and because Andrea had run out, too.

Andrea, he thought. He stared blankly through the smoke curling upward from his cigarette. Andrea,
why? Why?
We had something, didn’t we? We had it all, didn’t we? We had a love that transcended all the failures, all the empty purposes, enduring, unshakable, unkillable, a veritable Rock of Gibraltar ...

Bullshit

It was the money, of course.

Face the truth, Kilduff—no more money, no more Andrea; simple enough, painfully simple enough. He should have seen that, even though they had never discussed the money by tacit agreement; he had told her in the beginning that it was an inheritance from a non-existent granduncle Andrew in Cedar Rapids; Iowa, and she had accepted that. That was where he had made his mistake, taking her unquestioning acceptance of the money and her silence on the subject to mean that it carried no real import for her. But all the time she had been waiting, biding her time, squeezing all but the very last little drop.

And then: Good-bye, Steve.
In absentia.
It was nice while the money lasted.

Bodega Bay is a small fishing village on the Northern California coast, some sixty-five miles above San Francisco. The village, the goodsized inlet of the same name, and a complex of several buildings called The Tides, achieved a kind of national prominence some years ago when Alfred Hitchcock filmed his suspense movie
The Birds
there. Since that time, they get a good percentage of tourist business in the spring and summer months—sightseers, vacationers, visitors from outlying towns, self-styled fishermen who boast to the bored party-boat captains about the record king salmon they are going to land but never do. But during the winter, the natives usually have the place pretty much to themselves, and it takes on—falsely—the atmosphere of one of those staid, aloof New England-seacoast hamlets.