The Stalker (3 page)

At The Tides, inside the Wharf Bar and Restaurant, Jim Conradin sat in solitary silence at the short bar, drinking two fingers of bourbon from a water glass. All of the burnished copper-topped tables in the coffee shop area were empty. Sal, the bartender, was having an animated discussion with the lone waitress, a young girl named Dolly, with hair the color of wheat sheaves and very large breasts which Sal watched hungrily as he spoke. There was no one else present.

Conradin, dressed in a sheepskin jacket and blue denim trousers, turned on his stool to look out through the windows with deep-set, brooding gray eyes. The chiseled, weather-bronzed features of his lean face were grim. A storm was building somewhere out at sea—a day, perhaps two, away; the vague smell of dark rain had been in the air when he arrived at The Tides some two hours earlier. The bay was rough, an oily grayish-black color; whitecaps covered its surface, causing the red-and-white buoys that marked the crossing channel to bob and weave violently, and three or four high-masted fishing boats anchored downwind to rock heavily in the swells. He couldn’t see much of Bodega Head, across the bay, and the narrows that led into the Pacific at the southern end was completely obliterated by swirling fog. Old man Rushing, who had been a sailing master once and had come around Cape Horn in a two-masted schooner in 1923, sat dressed in his perennial faded blue mackinaw and leather deer-hunter’s cap on the edge of the wooden dock, fishing for crappies with a hand line, impervious to the cold and the fog and the wind. It seemed to Conradin, as it always did when he saw him, that the old man had been built, too, when they constructed the dock.

Conradin turned back to his bourbon, staring moodily into the glass. He hated winter, hated it with consummate vehemence. It was a sedentary time, a time of waiting, a time of thinking. God, that was the worst part—the thinking. When the salmon were running, it was a different story altogether. Then you could stand on the solid hardwood deck of your boat in a three-mile-per-hour troll, with the warm sea breeze fresh and heady in your nostrils and the sound of the big Gray Marine loud and vibrant in your ears; you could feel in your hands the power, the resiliency of a thirty-pound hickory-butted Hamell rod with a 4/o reel and a fifty-pound monofilament test line; you could see the big silvers close out on the green-glass ocean, coming out of the water in long graceful jumps to rid themselves of sea lice, the way marlin will do to shake the sucking fish from their gills; you could watch them, feel them hit the Gibbs-Stewart spoons or the live sardines, whichever you were using, leaping end over end and then turning and running toward the boat, broad tails lashing the water to foam, then sounding to take the line out again; you could play them, fight them, pit raw stamina against raw stamina, know the exhilaration of landing them, of winning, of taking them with their shining bluish-silver bellies onto the ice. There was no time for thinking, then, no time for dwelling on a past that refuses to stay buried. But in the winter...

Conradin drained the balance of the amber fluid. He debated having another drink; he had had four already, and he could feel them just a little. It was barely noon, and Trina would have lunch for him before long, in the big white house overlooking the bay from the northern flat. Still, there was time for one more; there was always time for one more.

He glanced toward Sal, the bartender, who now had his face very close to Dolly’s, whispering something in her ear. She giggled girlishly, her face reddening. Conradin said, “How about a refill.”

Grudgingly, Sal moved away from the girl to pour two more fingers of bourbon into the empty glass. When he took Conradin’s dollar, his eyes said that anybody who drank ten fingers of sour mash before noon was a goddamned lush, or something.

Trina might have agreed with that, in a way; Trina said he drank too much, and maybe she was right. But only in the winter, he thought, only when there was the time for thinking.

Silently, he raised the glass to his lips.

When Larry Drexel brought his sleek jade-green Porsche 912 SL to a stop in the driveway of his tile-roofed hacienda-style home in Los Gatos, he saw that Fran Varner was waiting for him on the rear patio. She was propped up on one of the chaise longues near the stone fountain in the patio’s center, reading a paperback book. A bulky-knit sweater was draped over her shoulders, and the short sky-blue skirt she wore had hiked up to expose her slender legs to a pale November sun which danced intermittently behind heavy clouds. Her rich seal-brown hair was carefully combed, curved under at the nape of her neck, the way he liked her to wear it.

Drexel smiled a little as he set the parking brake, thinking that if he had somehow been crazy enough to marry her, as she had been after him for six months to do, then she would be greeting him when he came home from El Peyote—wrapped in a shapeless housecoat, with her hair up in rollers. This way, with the arrangement, she was always at her best for him—even when they were in bed, especially then, putting that cream sachet he liked in all the secret little places and sleeping in the nude instead of in the old flannel nightgown he knew she wore at her apartment.

Dark-haired and dark-complected, looking somewhat like the actor Ricardo Montalban though he was not of Latin descent, Drexel stepped onto the flagstone walk that paralleled the house. He moved with almost feline fluidity inside his two-hundred-dollar sharkskin suit, following the path past the bottle brush and barrel cactus in the landscaped borders. When he reached the patio, his eyes—black, expressive, sharply watchful—moved approvingly over the rows of
macetas
with their potted desert plants, the four asymmetrical Joshua trees like miniature Briareuses, the six-foot stone and mortar wall separating the patio from the narrow creek that wound its way past the rear of his property. It had an Old-Mexico feel which never failed to please him; he had a thing about Mexican-Spanish architecture and motif.

Fran stood as he approached, smoothing her skirt and touching her hair with that almost self-conscious movement women seem to affect. “Hi, honey,” she said, kissing him.

He held her for a moment, his hand moving in a familiar way along the gentle curve of her hip. “A little cool for the patio, isn’t it?”

“Well, it got to be stuffy inside.”

“Been waiting long?”

“Since noon.”

“Any mail?”

“A couple of things,” she said. “I put them on the hall table.” She slipped her arm about his waist. “Have you eaten lunch yet? It’s past one.

“Juano brought me a sandwich,” Drexel said. “Listen, Fran, you’re going to have to work half a day tomorrow, noon till five. Elena’s brother is getting married in Watsonville.”

“Okay.” She sighed wistfully. “It must be a lovely feeling to know you’re about to become a bride or a groom in twenty-four hours.”

“You’re not going to start in again, are you?”

“No, honey. I was just thinking about Elena’s brother.”

“Sure,” Drexel said. “Come on, let’s go inside and do it on the kitchen table.”

She blushed crimson, poking his arm. He grinned. This kid was something else, that was a fact. She couldn’t get enough of it, Christ she wore him out sometimes, but when you came right out and talked about it in the light of day, without the sun having set and the shades having been drawn and the lamp having been put out, she acted as if she’d never before seen or heard of a hard-on. Maybe it was that blushing schoolgirl innocence that had made him keep her around as long as he had; it was like making it with a virgin every time.

They entered the house through the glass-enclosed archway off the patio, stepping into the parlor. It was dark in there, shadowed and with very little color. The furniture was old and heavy and ponderous and expensive. An imposing scrolled desk sat on one side of the room, and on the rear wall, in close proximity to one another, were a religious mural and an oblong painting of a nude girl on blue velvet; a few people had been shocked by the impact of
that
juxtaposition, Drexel thought amusedly.

He went to the hall table and retrieved his mail. There was a telephone bill, and an advertisement for some real estate development called Whispering Echoes in Southern Oregon, and a two-week-old copy of the Philadelphia
Inquirer
. He put the phone bill in a slot marked PAYABLE in the wooden back of the desk, and the advertisement in the fieldstone fireplace; he took the newspaper to a brocade couch and began to peel off the mailing wrapper.

Fran said, “Why do you take newspapers from all over the country? Have you got relatives or something in Illinois and North Dakota and Pennsylvania?”

If only you knew, sweets. But he said, “No, it’s just a hobby. Some people collect stamps or coins or old rubbers. I collect newspapers.”

She blushed again. “Want some coffee?”

“Fine.”

She disappeared into the kitchen. Drexel lighted one of the thin black cheroots he affected, and spread the paper open. He began to scan it with practiced expertise, chuckling a little at Fran’s reaction to the idea of anyone collecting old rubbers. But the smile left his face abruptly when his eyes fell on the headline in the upper left-hand corner of Page Four: EUGENE BEAUCHAMP DIES IN PRIVATE PLANE CRASH. Holy Jesus, he thought. He put out the cheroot and read the accompanying story carefully; then he refolded the paper and laid it on the cushion beside him.

He stood and began to pace the muted Navajo rug, his mind working coldly, methodically, weighing and considering.

Fran came in a moment later. “Honey, there isn’t any cream. Do you want—?”

“Shut up,” Drexel said without looking at her. “Shut the hell up.”

“But I—”

“I told you to shut up. Get out of here. I’ll call you later.”

“Larry, what is it? What’s the matter?”

“Damn you, do what I say!”

A mixture of hurt and confusion made liquid form at the corners of her amber-colored eyes. She stood rigidly for almost ten seconds, and then she said, “All right, then!” and ran toward the hallway that led to the front entrance. The sound of the thick, arched wooden door slamming behind her caused faint reverberations to drift through the dark house.

Drexel continued to pace, still weighing, still considering. Finally, having made a decision, he went to the scrolled desk and unlocked the bottom drawer on the right side with a key from his pocket case. Inside, there was an old ersatz-leather scrapbook and a smaller, clothbound address book. He took the address book out and opened it and studied the facing page.

After a moment, he turned and went to where the telephone sat on an oddly shaped driftwood stand near the arched patio entrance.

United Airlines Flight 69, non-stop from Philadelphia, arrived at San Francisco International Airport at 1:26 P.M., four minutes ahead of schedule. One of the first passengers to disembark—when the mobile exit ramp had been locked into place at the fore and aft doors—was a small, rather nondescript man who walked with a noticeable limp. He had ridden the blue-carpet coach, and had slept through a technicolor movie with Gregory Peck and the passage of the two-limit cocktail cart and the distribution of chicken cordon bleu by two blonde stewardesses with portrait smiles; but as soon as the wheels of the DC-8 had touched the approach runway, he had been instantly alert, piercing sand-colored eyes peering intently through the window on his left, fingers drumming impatiently on a thin leather American Tourister briefcase which had never left his lap.

He passed through the railed observation area at Gate 30, and moved with surprising speed for a limping man along the north wing of the terminal. Outside the glassed outer wall, fog eddied in gray waves, like mounds of steel wool, across the pattern of concrete runways—but he took little notice of it.

In the main lobby, a blue and white sign above a set of escalators read: BAGGAGE CLAIM. He rode down to the lower level and waited by the huge revolving baggage carousel which was designated by his flight number. Some of the other passengers began to arrive, and a fat woman wearing an incongruous plumed hat came over to stand beside him. She had sat across the aisle on the plane.

“This takes forever,” she said in a strident voice. “You’d think the airlines would be more efficient. Things haven’t changed a bit since my first flight to San Francisco in 1947. Not a bit, mind you.”

The limping man glanced at her briefly, and then looked away. The first pieces of luggage began to flow out of the conveyor chute in the center of the sloping chrome carousel.

“Look at that,” the fat woman said, pursing her lips and pointing one huge arm at the chute. “They come out of there so fast, they get all banged up when they hit the sides. My best overnight bag has a crease on one end because of that. Why can’t they find another way to get the luggage out of the plane, some way that doesn’t damage everything you own.”

The limping man unwound two fingers from the handle of the briefcase and began to tap them irritably against the leather. He said nothing.

“If there’s another crease in any of my bags, I’m going to demand the terminal replace it with a new one,” the fat woman said. “They’re responsible, after all.”

A dun-colored pasteboard suitcase with a cracked plastic handle came out of the chute. It slid down to the rubberized bumper ringing the bottom sides of the carousel. When it had revolved to where he was standing, the limping man lifted it out quickly. The woman said, “You’d better examine the end of it. It probably has a crease in it, just like my—”