Walkers (15 page)

Nancy began to feel shivery, and she
rubbed her arms to keep herself warm. It was almost completely dark now, and
she was beginning to think that she would have to leave the car and walk all
the way to La Jolla Village, to see if she could get a taxi to take her home.

She reached into the car for her
pocketbook, and was just about to lock the door when a white Lincoln slowed
down and pulled off the freeway only twenty yards in front of her. It waited
with its engine running, and with its brake lights still flaring bright,
indicating that the driver was holding the car in gear. Nancy hesitated for a
moment, and then began to walk towards the Lincoln, ducking her head a little
so that she could make out what kind of a person was sitting inside.

She drew level with the
passenger-door, and the driver wound down the window.

She looked in, her hand shading her
eyes from the glare of the traffic. White leather seating, expensive. The
driver was wearing a black leather designer jacket and black pants. His face
was thin, hollow cheeked, and swarthy, almost Mexican. The whites of his eyes
sparkled in the darkness.

‘Having trouble?’ he asked her.
Nancy could hear the soft tones of hymn-singing on the car tape-deck.
O Jesus,
I
have promised...
Perhaps he was a priest, Nancy thought to herself.
But then what kind of a priest wears a black leather designer jacket, and
drives around in a white late-model Lincoln?

‘My car died on me,’ she said,
anxiously. ‘The battery’s dead, I guess. Anyway it won’t start.’

‘Where are you headed?’

‘La Jolla. Right at the top of
Prospect Street.’

‘Is that far?’

‘If you take the next turn-off, it’s
about two miles towards the ocean.’

‘Can I offer you a ride?’

Nancy bit her lip. She remembered
her friend Carole, who had accepted a ride home from a Thanksgiving party in
Leucadia last November, and had been robbed and raped by three teenage boys.
She remembered a girl from the office, Linda, who had been attacked in Balboa
Park in broad daylight and almost killed. Just because this man was good
looking and well dressed and driving an expensive car, that didn’t mean anything
at all. Sex criminals came in every colour and size and every conceivable
variety, with optional extras.

The young man waited, with unusual
patience, while Nancy tried to make up her mind. At last she said, ‘Okay Thank
you. That’s very kind of you.’

The young man released the central
locking system, and Nancy opened the passenger-door and climbed in. Before he
started off, the young man looked at her appraisingly, without any pretence at
discretion, and said, ‘You’re a pretty girl. You ought to be careful, out on
the freeway.’

Nancy tried to smile. ‘I was scared
at first that nobody was going to stop. Then I was scared that somebody might.’

The young man glanced in his
rear-view mirror, and then steered the Lincoln out into the traffic. ‘You’re
not scared of me, are you?’

‘Do I have any reason to be?’ Nancy
asked him.

The young man pulled a face. ‘I
don’t think so. But you never can tell, can you, what evil lurks in the hearts
of men?’

He paused, steering the car with one
hand. Then he added, ‘Only The Shadow knows, ho-ho-ho.’

‘That dates you,’ said Nancy. ‘My
father used to know all those radio catchphrases.’

‘Like “Nobody home, I hope, I hope,
I hope,” ‘ the young man suggested.

‘That’s right! How did you know
that?’

‘That was Elmer Blurt, out of
Al Pearce and his Gang.’

Nancy shook her head in amusement.
‘You know, I never met anybody who knew all those catchphrases, except for my
father.’

The young man looked in his mirror
again. ‘Should I turn off here?’

‘That’s right. Just where it says La
Jolla Village Drive.’

The young man piloted the Lincoln
off the freeway and up the La Jolla exit ramp. At the top of the ramp, he took
a left, and headed uphill towards La Jolla itself.

‘I should introduce myself,’ he told
Nancy. ‘My name’s Ronald DeVries. ‘I’m Nancy Busch,’ said Nancy.

‘You might have gathered that I
don’t actually live around here,’ Ronald told her. ‘As a matter of fact, I just
came up from Mexico. I was living in San Hipolito for quite some time.’

‘I don’t know San Hipolito,’ Nancy
confessed. ‘Is that a nice place?’

Ronald lifted a hand, as if to say,
San Hipolito? What can I tell you?

‘You didn’t like it too much, then?’
asked Nancy.

‘It’s okay, if you don’t
have to
stay there. I
had to.’

‘I love La Jolla,’ Nancy told him.
‘I’ve lived here for eleven years now. It’s much more commercialised than it
used to be, but it still has charm. You can sit right out on the rocks in the
winter, when there’s nobody around, and you might just as well be the only
person in the whole darn world.’

‘You’ll have to direct me,’ said
Ronald, as they reached the top of a La Jolla Drive.

‘A left here. A left.’

As he steered the car around the
corner with exaggerated care, Ronald said, ‘You look as if you were going out
someplace tonight.’

‘I was. I had a slight disagreement
with my boyfriend. Well, ex-boyfriend, from now on.’

‘That’s too bad,’ said Ronald, and
lapsed into silence.

Nancy said, ‘Are you a priest, or
anything like that?’

‘A priest?’ Ronald laughed.

‘Well, those are hymns, aren’t they,
on your tape-deck?’

Ronald reached over and immediately
switched the tape-deck off. ‘It was just something I was listening to, to pass
the time.’

‘Are you going far?’

‘I was planning on getting to Santa
Barbara.’

‘That’s a real long drive. I hope I
haven’t delayed you.’

Ronald overtook a toiling
cement-truck, and then pulled over to the inside lane again to let a red
Porsche blare past them. ‘As a matter of fact, I was thinking of giving up on
Santa Barbara and inviting you out for dinner.’

Nancy immediately shook her head
vigorously. ‘Oh, no, I can’t expect you to do that, not after giving me a ride
and everything. Besides, I have to arrange for somebody to go collect my car. I
don’t want to wind up with no wheels and no engine.’

‘Listen,’ said Ronald, ‘Call the
emergency services and arrange for them to collect your car. They won’t need
your keys. Then come out to dinner.’

‘I’m sorry, Ronald,’ Nancy told him.
‘That’s real generous of you, I mean it. But I hardly know you, and I’m not at
all sure that I feel in the mood for it anymore.’

Ronald turned the Lincoln into
Prospect Street, without Nancy directing him, and then parked on the slope
outside her house.

‘How did you know I lived here?’ she
asked him, in amazement.

‘You told me. Right at the top of
Prospect Street, that’s what you said. Now, how about dinner? I’ve really gone
cold on the idea of driving all the way to Santa Barbara, and I’m going to have
to eat somewhere.’

‘But you’re right
here,
right outside the exact house.’

‘Coincidence,’ Ronald told her,
off-handedly. Then, ‘Come on, Nancy, how about it?

A friendly
diner a deux,
no strings attached, no complications. All I’m
looking for is company. I hate to eat alone.’

‘Well... all right,’ said Nancy.
‘But I’m going to have to call the tow-truck first. Do you want to come
inside?’

‘I’ll wait in the car, if you want
me to.’

‘Of course not. Come along in.’

The house in which Nancy lived was
large and secluded. It had been built in 1936 in the red-brick style of an
English country villa, although it was difficult to see much of the brickwork
now because of the thickly overhanging ivy. Fifteen years ago, the owner of the
house had gone back East, and ordered that the property should be divided into
apartments, for long-term lets. Nancy had sub-let the second-floor apartment at
the back of the house, from an oceanologist who had been sent to work in Kyoto
for four years.

Nancy opened the front door and led
the way inside. The hallway was gloomy and smelled of lavender-polish and
Chinese cooking. There was a dark long-case clock opposite the stairs, which
ticked with infinite weariness, and whose half-seen pendulum always reminded
Nancy of something written by Edgar Alien Poe.

She climbed the stairs, Ronald
following her. ‘Do you know who to call to pick up your car?’ asked Ronald, as
she unlocked the front door of her apartment.

‘Don’t worry, it’s happened before,’
she told him, as she switched on the lights.

Ronald came in, and looked around
her living-room with approval. It was sparsely but tastefully furnished with
plain modern furniture, glass-topped tables, Italian lamps with necks like
futuristic giraffes, and Red Indian blankets on the walls. While Nancy went to
the phone, Ronald walked over to the window, and drew back the plain woven
curtains.

‘You have an excellent view of the
neighbours,’ he complimented her. ‘Are those two having a fight over there?
They certainly look like they’re shouting.’

There was a painting on the wall
beside the telephone. It was a nude, in oils, and at first glance it was
obviously Nancy. Ronald came closer, and made a deliberate play of comparing
the portrait and the model, turning his head from one to the other as if he
were watching tennis. The likeness was unmistakable: the pale-skinned, slightly
squarish face, with the short straight nose and the sudden splash of freckles,
the bright red hair; the tall, angular figure, with small but well-rounded
breasts.

Nancy watched him as he made his
comparison, the phone still held to her ear.

‘One of my boyfriends was an art
student,’ she commented.

‘He was good,’ Ronald acknowledged.

She looked round at the portrait.
‘You’re the first man who’s ever said that. Usually, they say that they prefer
the original. You know, flattery, and jealousy, too, that some other man has
seen me with nothing on. My girlfriends don’t like it, either. They think it’s
an upwardly mobile way of streaking.”

Ronald shrugged. ‘I’m not like other
men. Do you mind if I smoke?

‘Go ahead. There’s a Sheraton
ashtray over on the bookcase.’

Ronald went over to the other side
of the room and picked up the ashtray. As he did so, he inspected Nancy’s
collection of books.
Advertising Art. The
100 Greatest
Advertisements. The
Techniques of Persuasion.
Then he came back across the room, tucking a
Russian
papirosi
cigarette between
his lips, and lighting it one-handed with a folded-over matchbook. The tricky
technique of a man who thinks that appearances are all-important. The kind of a
man who can toss peanuts up into the air and catch them in his mouth.

‘So, you’re in advertising?’ he
asked, as Nancy completed her call to the tow-truck company, and put down the
phone. ‘The second-oldest profession.’

‘I’m a designer,’ said Nancy. ‘I
paste eentsy little bits of lettering on to slippery sheets of overlay, and
draw a lot of lines, and get paid for it.’

She was obviously waiting for him to
tell her what
he
did, but he stood
there silent with his hands in his pockets, puffing at his cigarette and
looking at her unblinkingly.

‘Shall we have some dinner?’ she
suggested.

‘Sure. What do you like to eat?’

‘Could you bear Mexican?’ Nancy
asked him. ‘Manuelo’s is good.’

‘I could bear Mexican,’ said Ronald.

They drove down to Manuelo’s, even
though it wasn’t more than five minutes’ walk away, down on the tourist stretch
of Prospect, with its fashionable boutiques and its high-priced restaurants and
its art galleries and realty offices. The sidewalks were crowded with evening
promenaders and there were no free parking spaces, so in the end Ronald parked
the Lincoln outside La Galeria art gallery. As he locked the car, he nodded
towards the art gallery window. ‘How about that?’ he asked Nancy.

They crossed the sidewalk and stood
close to the window. On a blue hessian-covered stand, under a single spotlight,
stood a bronze statuette of the Great God Pan, cloven-hoofed, goat’s horned,
dancing and playing his pipes. His face was sly and sharp and infinitely
wicked.

‘It’s terrific,’ said Nancy. ‘A
classic.’ She was being sarcastic. She thought it was awful. She wouldn’t have
bought it even as a doorstop.

Ronald said nothing, but nodded, and
stood staring at the statuette with his hands down by his sides, as if it
somehow mesmerised him. Nancy waited patiently. She didn’t like to urge him on
too much, since he was buying.

Eventually, without explaining what
it was about the statuette that had interested him so much, Ronald turned away
from the art gallery window and offered Nancy his arm. They walked together
along the noisy, brightly lit sidewalk, and Nancy found herself feeling
unexpectedly cheerful. Perhaps fate had been taking care of her, after all,
when she had argued with John, and when her car had broken down on the freeway.
Perhaps at last
(please,
fate!) she
had found herself someone special; because there was no doubt about it, Ronald
DeVries was special.