Strange Highways
Page 66

"It's the longest he's gone without calling."
Wallace nodded. "It's possible, you know, that he won't be calling at all, any more."
"You mean, since he passed judgment on me?"
Chase saw that Tuppinger was disconnecting wires and packing his equipment into the suitcase.
Wallace said, "I'm afraid you're right, Mr. Chase. The killer has passed his judgment—or lost interest in you, one or the other—and he isn't going to try to contact you again. We don't want to keep a man tied up here."
"You're leaving?" Chase asked.
"Well, yeah, it seems best."
"But another few hours might—"
"Might produce nothing," Wallace said. "What we're going to do, Mr. Chase, is we're going to rely on you to tell us what Judge says if, as seems unlikely now, he should call again." He smiled at Chase.
In that smile was all the explanation that Chase required. He said, "When Tuppinger sent me out for dinner, he called you, didn't he?" Not waiting for a response, he went on: "And he told you about the call from Dr. Fauvel's secretary—the word 'session' probably alarmed him. And now you've talked to the good doctor."
Tuppinger finished packing the equipment. He hefted the case and looked quickly around the room to be sure that he had not left anything behind.
"Judge is real," Chase told Wallace.
"I'm sure that he is," Wallace said. "That's why I want you to report any calls he might make to you." But his tone was that of an adult humoring a child.
"You stupid bastard, he is real!"
Wallace flushed with anger. When he spoke, there was tension in his voice, and his controlled tone was achieved with obvious effort. "Mr. Chase, you saved the girl. You deserve to be praised for that. But the fact remains, no one has called here in nearly twenty-four hours. And if you believed such a man as Judge existed, you surely would've contacted us before this, when he first called. It would've been natural for you to rush to us—especially a duty—conscious young man like yourself. All these things, examined in the light of your psychiatric record and Dr. Fauvel's explanations, make it clear that the expenditure of one of our best men isn't required. Tuppinger has other duties."
Chase saw how overwhelmingly the evidence seemed to point to Fauvel's thesis, just as he saw how his own behavior hadn't helped him. His fondness for whiskey in front of Tuppinger. His inability to carry on a simple conversation. Worst of all, his anxiety about publicity might have appeared to be the insincere protestations of a man who, in fact, wanted attention. Still, with his fists balled at his sides, he said, "Get out."
"Take it easy, son," Wallace said.
"Get out right now."
Wallace looked around the room and let his attention come to rest on the bottle of whiskey. "Tuppinger tells me you haven't any food on hand, but that there are five bottles in that cupboard." He did not look at Chase. He seemed to be embarrassed by Tuppinger's obvious spying. "You look thirty pounds underweight, son."
"Get out," Chase repeated.
Wallace was not ready to leave yet. He was searching for some way to soften the accusation implicit in their departure. But then he sighed and said, "Son, no matter what happened to you over there in Vietnam, you aren't going to forget about it with whiskey."
Before Chase, infuriated at the homespun psychoanalysis, could order him out again, Wallace finally left with Jim Tuppinger at his heels.
Chase closed the door after them. Quietly.
He locked it.
He poured a drink.
He was alone again. But he was accustomed to being alone.
6
THURSDAY EVENING AT SEVEN-THIRTY, HAVING SUCCESSFULLY EVADED Mrs. Fielding on his way out of the house, Chase drove his Mustang to Kanackaway Ridge Road, aware and yet unaware of his destination. He stayed within the speed limits through Ashside and the outlying districts, but floored the accelerator at the bottom of the mountain road, taking the wide curves on the far outside. The white guardrails slipped past so quickly and so close on the right that they blurred into a continuous wall of pale planking, the cables between them like black scrawls on the phantom boards.
On the top of the ridge, he parked where he had pulled off the road Monday night, killed the engine. He slouched in his seat, listening to the whispering breeze.
He should never have stopped, should have kept moving at all costs. As long as he was moving, he did not have to wonder what to do next. Stopped, he was perplexed, frustrated, restless.
He got out of the car, uncertain of what he expected to find here that would be of any help to him. A good hour of daylight remained in which to search the area where the Chevy had been parked. But, of course, the police would have combed and recombed it far more thoroughly than he ever could.
He strolled along the edge of the park to the bramble row where the Chevy had been. The sod was well trampled, littered with half-smoked cigarette butts, candy wrappers, and balled-up pages from a reporter's notepad. He kicked at the debris and scanned the mashed grass, feeling ridiculous. Too many morbid curiosity seekers had been here. He wouldn't find a clue in all this mess.
Next he went to the railing at the edge of the cliff, leaned against it, and stared down the wall of rock to the tangled patch of brambles and locust trees far below. When he raised his head, he could see the entire city spread along the valley. In the late-afternoon light, the green copper dome of the courthouse was like a structure out of a fairy tale.
He was still gazing at that corroded curve of metal when he heard a sharp whine. And again. The steel handrail shivered under his hands. An old war sound: a bullet slapping metal, ricocheting.
With a quickness honed in combat, he dropped to the ground, surveyed the park, and decided that the nearest row of shrubs was the best cover. He rolled toward that hedgerow and came up against the thorns so hard that he tore his cheek and forehead.
He lay motionless. Waiting.
A minute passed. Another. No sound but the wind.
Chase crawled on his stomach to the far end of the bramble row, which paralleled the highway. He eased into the open, looked to his right, and saw that the park appeared to be deserted.
He started to get up and turn toward the highway, then fell back again. Instinct. Where he'd been, the grass flew into the air, torn loose by a bullet. Judge had a pistol fitted with a sound suppressor.
No one in civilian life could have legal access to a silencer. Evidently, Judge had black-market resources.
Chase scrambled back along the shrubs, the way he had come, to the middle of the hedgerow. Swiftly he took off his shirt, tore it in two pieces, and wrapped his hands with the cloth. Lying on his stomach, he pressed the thorny vines apart until he opened a chink through which he could survey the land immediately beyond.
He saw Judge at once. The man was huddled by the front fender of Chase's Mustang, down on one knee, the pistol held at arm's length as he waited for his prey to appear. Two hundred feet away, in the weak light of the dusk, he was well shielded from Chase, little more than a dark figure; his face was but a blur in veils of shadow.
Chase let go of the brambles and stripped the cloth from his hands. He had minor nicks on the tips of three fingers, but he was for the most part unscathed.
To his right, no more than four feet away, a bullet snapped through the brambles, spraying chopped leaves. Another passed at the level of Chase's head, no more than two feet to his left, and then another still farther to the left.
Judge did not have the nerves of a professional killer. Tired of waiting, he had begun to fire blindly, wasting ammunition, hoping for a lucky hit.
Chase crawled back toward the right end of the row.
He peered out cautiously and saw Judge leaning against the car, attempting to reload his pistol. His head was bent over the gun, and although it should have been a simple task, he was fumbling nervously with the clip.
Chase went for the bastard.
He had covered only a third of the distance between them when Judge heard him coming. The killer looked up, still a cipher in the waning light, twisted around the end of the car, and sprinted along the highway.
Chase was underweight and out of shape, but he was gaining.
The road crested a rise and sloped so sharply that Chase was forced to put less effort into his pursuit lest he pitch forward and lose his balance.
Ahead, a red Volkswagen was parked along the shoulder of the highway. Judge reached the car, got behind the wheel, and swung the door shut. He had left the engine running. The Volkswagen instantly pulled away. Its tires hit the asphalt, spun briefly, shrieking and kicking up thick smoke; then the car shot down Kanackaway Ridge Road.
Chase didn't have a chance to catch even part of the license-plate number, because he was startled by an air horn frighteningly close behind.
He leaped sideways off the road, tripped, rolled on the gravel verge, hugging himself for protection from the stones.
Brakes barked just once, like the cry of a wounded man. A large moving van—with dark letters against its orange side: U-HAUL—boomed past, moving much too fast on the steep incline of Kanackaway Ridge Road, swaying slightly as its load shifted.
Then both the car and truck were out of sight.
7
A TWO-INCH SCRATCH ON HIS FOREHEAD AND A SMALLER SCRATCH ON his cheek, inflicted by the thorns in the bramble row, were already crusted with dried blood. The tips of three fingers also were scarred by the brambles, but with all his other pains, he didn't even feel these minor wounds. His ribs ached from the roll he'd taken on the gravel shoulder of Kanackaway Ridge Road—although none seemed broken when he pressed on them—and his chest, back, and arms were bruised where the largest stones had dug in as he tumbled over them. Both his knees were skinned. He had lost his shirt, of course, when he ripped it in two as protection from the thorns, and his trousers were fit only for the trash can.
He sat in the Mustang by the edge of the park, assessing the damage, and he was so angry that he wanted to strike at something, anything. Instead, he waited, cooled off, settled down.
Already, in the early darkness, a few cars had arrived at lovers' lane, driving over the sod to the hedges. Chase was amazed that all these young lovers were returning unfazed to the scene of the murder, apparently unconcerned that the man who had knifed Michael Karnes was still on the loose. He wondered if they would bother to lock their car doors.
Since police patrols might be out along Kanackaway, hoping for the killer to return to the scene as well, a man sitting alone in a car would be highly suspicious. Chase started the engine and headed back into the city.
As he drove, he tried to recall everything that he had seen, so no clue to Judge's identity would slip by. The guy owned a silencer-equipped pistol and a red Volkswagen. He was a bad shot, but a good driver. And that was about the sum of it.
What next? The police?
No. To hell with the cops. He had sought help from Fauvel and received nothing but bad advice. The cops had been even less help.
He would have to handle the whole business himself. Track Judge down before Judge killed him.
* * *
Mrs. Fielding met him at the door but stepped backward in surprise when she saw his condition. "What happened to you?"
"I fell down," Chase said. "It's nothing."
"But there's blood on your face. You're all skinned up!"
"Really, Mrs. Fielding, I'm perfectly all right now. I had a little accident, but I'm on my feet and breathing."
She looked him over more carefully. "Have you been drinking, Mr. Chase?" Her tone had gone swiftly from concern to disapproval.
"No drinks at all," Chase said.
"You know I don't approve."
"I know." He went past her, heading for the stairs. They appeared to be a long way off.
"You didn't wreck your car?" she called after him.
"No."
He climbed the stairs, looking anxiously ahead toward the turn at the landing-blessed escape. Strangely, he did not feel nearly as oppressed by Mrs. Fielding as usual.
"That's good news," she said. "As long as you have your car, you'll be able to look for jobs better than before."
After a glass of whiskey over ice, he drew a tub of water as hot as he could tolerate it, and he settled in as though he were an old man with arthritis. Water slopped over his open wounds and made him sigh with both pleasure and pain.
Later, he dressed the worst abrasions with Merthiolate, then put on lightweight slacks, a sports shirt, socks, and loafers. With a second glass of whiskey, he sat in the easy chair to contemplate his next move.
He looked forward to action with a mixture of excitement and apprehension.
First, he should speak with Louise Allenby, the girl who had been with Michael Karnes the night he was killed. She and Chase had been questioned separately by the police, but brooding on the event together, they might be able to remember something useful.
The telephone book listed eighteen Allenbys, but Chase recalled Louise telling Detective Wallace that her father was dead and that her mother had not remarried. Only one of the Allenbys in the book was listed as a woman: Cleta Allenby on Pine Street, an address in the Ashside district.
He dialed the number and waited through ten rings before Louise answered. Her voice was recognizable, although more womanly than he remembered.
"This is Ben Chase, Louise. Do you remember me?"
"Of course," she said. She sounded genuinely pleased to hear from him. "How are you?"
"Coping."
"What's wrong? Is there anything I can do to help?"
"I'd like to talk to you, if possible," Chase said. "About what happened Monday night."
"Well, sure, all right."
"It won't upset you?"
"Why should it?" Her hardness continued to amaze him. "Can you come over now?"
"If it's convenient."
"Fine," she said. "It's ten o'clock now—in half an hour, at ten-thirty? Will that be all right?"
"Just right," Chase said.
"I'll be expecting you."
She put the phone down so gently that for seconds Chase did not realize that she had hung up.
He was beginning to stiffen from his injuries. He stood and stretched, found his car keys, and quickly finished his drink.
When it was time to go, he did not want to begin. Suddenly he realized how completely this assumption of responsibility would destroy the simple routines by which he had survived in the months since his discharge from the army and the hospital. He would have no more leisurely mornings in town, no more afternoons watching old movies on television, no more evenings reading and drinking until he could sleep—at least not until this mess was straightened out. If he just stayed here in his room, however, if he took his chances, he might remain alive until Judge was caught in a few weeks or, at most, in a few months.