Strange Highways
Page 67

Then again, Judge might not miss the next time.
He cursed everyone who had forced him out of his comfortable niche—the local press, the Merchants' Association, Judge, Fauvel, Wallace, Tuppinger—yet he knew that he had no choice but to get on with it. His sole consolation was the hope that their victory was only a temporary one: When this was all finished, he would come back to his room, close the door, and settle once more into the quiet and unchallenging life that he had established for himself during the past year.
Mrs. Fielding did not bother him on his way out of the house, and he chose to see this as a good omen.
* * *
The Allenbys, mother and daughter, lived in a two-story neo-Colonial brick home on a small lot in middle-class Ashside. Two matched maples were featured at the head of the short flagstone walk and two matched pines at the end of it. Two steps rose to a white door with a brass knocker.
Louise answered the door herself. She was wearing white shorts and a thin white halter top, and she looked as if she had spent the past thirty minutes putting on makeup and brushing her long hair.
"Come in," she said.
The living room was more or less what he had expected: matched Colonial furniture, a color television in a huge console cabinet, knotted rugs over polished pine floors. The house was not dirty but carelessly kept: magazines spilling out of a rack, a dried water ring on the coffee table, traces of dust here and there.
"Sit down," Louise said. "The sofa's comfortable, and so's that big chair with the flowered print."
He chose the sofa. "I'm sorry to bother you like this, so late at night—"
"Don't worry about that," she interrupted breezily. "You're no bother, never could be."
He hardly recognized her as the shaken, whimpering girl in Michael Karnes's car on Monday night.
She said, "Since I'm finished with school, I only go to bed when I feel like it, usually around three in the morning. College in the fall. Big girl now." She grinned as if she'd never had a boyfriend knifed to death in front of her. "Can I get you a drink?"
"No, thanks."
"Mind if I have something?"
"Go ahead."
He stared at her trim legs as she went to the wet bar in the wall of bookcases. "Sicilian Stinger. Sure you wouldn't like one? They're delicious."
"I'm fine."
As she mixed the drink with professional expertise, she stood with her back to him, her h*ps artfully canted, her round butt thrust toward him. It might have been the unconscious stance of a girl not yet fully aware of her womanliness, with only a partial understanding of the effect her pneumatic body could have on men. Or it might have been completely contrived.
When she returned to the sofa with her drink, Chase said, "Are you old enough to drink?"
"Seventeen," she said. "Almost eighteen. No longer a child, right? Maybe I'm not of legal age yet, but this is my own home, so who's going to stop me?"
"Of course."
Only seven years ago, when he'd been her age, seventeen-year-old girls seemed seventeen. They grew up faster now—or thought that they did.
Sipping her drink, she leaned back against the couch and crossed her bare legs.
He saw the hard tips of her br**sts against the thin halter.
He said, "It's just occurred to me that your mother may be in bed, if she gets up early for work. I didn't mean—"
"Mother's working now," Louise said. She looked at him coyly, her lashes lowered and her head tilted to one side. "She's a cocktail waitress. She goes on duty at seven, off at three, home about three-thirty in the morning."
"I see."
"Are you frightened?"
"Excuse me?"
She smiled mischievously. "Of being here alone with me?"
"No."
"Good. So ... where do we begin?" With another coy look, she tried to make the question seductive.
For the following half hour, he guided her through her memories of Monday night, augmenting them with his own, questioning her on details, urging her to question him, looking for some small thing that might be the key. They remembered nothing new, however, though the girl genuinely tried to help him. She was able to talk about Mike Karnes's murder with complete detachment, as though she had not been there when it happened but had only read about it in the papers.
"Mind if I have another one?" she asked, raising her glass.
"Go ahead."
"I'm feeling good. Want one this time?"
"No, thank you," he said, recognizing the need to keep his head clear.
She stood at the wet bar in the same provocative pose as before, and when she returned to the couch, she sat much closer to him than she had previously. "One thing I just thought of—he was wearing a special ring."
"Special in what way?"
"Silver, squarish, with a double lightning bolt. A guy Mom dated for a while wore one. I asked him about it once, and he told me it was a brotherhood ring, from this club he belonged to."
"What club?"
"Just for white guys. No blacks, Japs, Jews, or anybody else welcome, just white guys."
Chase waited as she sipped her drink.
"Bunch of guys who're willing to stand up for themselves, if it ever comes to that, guys who aren't going to let the nappy-heads or the Jew bankers or anybody else push them around and take what they have." She clearly approved of any such organization. Then she frowned. "Did I just screw up my chances?"
"Chances?"
"Are you maybe a Jew?"
"No."
"You don't look like a Jew."
"I'm not."
"Listen, even if you were a Jew, it wouldn't matter much to me. I find you real attractive. You know?"
"So the killer might be a white supremacist?"
"They're just guys who won't take any crap the way everyone else will. That's all. You have to admire that."
"This guy who dated your mother—did he tell you the name of this club?"
"The Aryan Alliance."
"You remember his name?"
"Vic. Victor. Don't remember his last name."
"Could you ask your mom for me?"
"Okay. When she gets home. Listen, you're absolutely sure you're not a Jew?"
"I'm sure."
"Because ever since I said it, you've been looking at me sort of funny."
As he might have looked at something pale and squirming that he'd discovered under an overturned rock.
He said, "Did you tell Wallace about this?"
"No, I just now thought of it. You loosened me up, and it just came back to me in a flash."
Chase imagined nothing more gratifying than establishing a body of information about Judge—working from this essential bit of data—and then presenting it to the detective.
"It may be helpful," he said.
She slid next to him with the oiled smoothness of a machine made for seduction, all sleek lines and golden tan. "Do you think so, Ben?"
He nodded, trying to decide how best to excuse himself without hurting her feelings. He had to keep on the good side of her until she got that name from her mother.
Her thigh was pressed against his. She put her drink down and turned to him, expecting to be embraced.
Chase stood abruptly. "I ought to be going. This has given me something concrete to consider, more than I had hoped for."
She rose too, remaining close to him. "It's early. Not even midnight. Mom won't be home for hours."
She smelled of soap, shampoo, a pleasant perfume. It was such a clean smell—but he knew now that she was corrupted in her heart.
He was fiercely aroused—and sickened by his arousal. This cheap, coldhearted, hate-filled girl reached him in a way that no woman had reached him in longer than a year, and he despised himself for wanting her so intensely. At that moment, of course, virtually any attractive woman might have affected him the same way. Perhaps the pent-up sexual energy of many lonely months had become too great to repress, and perhaps the reawakening of sexual desire was the result of being forced out of his self-imposed isolation. Once he admitted to a healthy survival instinct, once he decided not to stand still and be a target for Judge, he was able to admit to all the desires and needs that were the essence of life. Nevertheless, he despised himself.
"No," he said, edging away from her. "I have other people to see."
"At this hour?"
"One or two other people."
She pressed against him, pulled his face down to hers, and licked his lips. No kiss. Just the maddeningly quick flicking of her warm tongue—an exquisitely erotic promise.
"We've got the house for several hours yet," she said. "We don't even have to use the couch. I've got a great big white bed with a white canopy."
"You're something else," he said, meaning something other than what she thought he meant.
"You don't know the half of it," she said.
"But I can't. I really can't, because these people are waiting for me."
She was experienced enough to know when the moment for seduction had passed. She stepped back and smiled. "But I do want to thank you. For saving my life. That deserves a big reward."
"You don't owe me anything," he said.
"I do. Some other night, when you don't have plans?"
He kissed her, telling himself that he did so only to remain in her good graces. "Definitely some other night."
"Mmmmm. And we'll be good together."
She was all polish, fast and easy, no jagged edges to get hung up on.
He said, "If Detective Wallace questions you again, do you think you could sort of ... forget about the ring"
"Sure. I don't like cops. They're the ones who put the guns to our heads, make us kiss the asses of the nappy-heads and the Jews and all of them. They're part of the problem. But why are you carrying on with this by yourself? I never did ask."
"Personal," he said. "For personal reasons."
* * *
At home again, he undressed and went directly to bed. The darkness was heavy and warm and, for the first time in longer than he could remember, comforting.
Alone, he began to wonder if he had been a fool not to respond to Louise Allenby's offer. He had been a long time without a woman, without even a desire for one.
He had told himself that he'd rejected Louise because he'd found her as personally repulsive as she was physically attractive. But he wondered if, instead, he'd retreated from the prospect because he feared it would draw him even further into the world, further away from his precious routines. A relationship with a woman, regardless of how transitory, would be one more crack in his carefully mortared walls.
On the edge of sleep, he realized that something had happened that was far more important than either his strong physical response to Louise or his rejection of her. For the first time in longer than Chase could recall, he hadn't needed whiskey before bed. A natural sleep claimed him—although it was still populated by the grasping dead.
8
WHEN HE WOKE IN THE MORNING, CHASE WAS RACKED WITH PAIN FROM the fall that he had taken the previous evening on Kanackaway Ridge Road. Each contusion and laceration throbbed. His eyes felt sunken, and his headache was as intense as if he'd been fitted with an exotic torture device—an iron helmet—that would be slowly tightened until his skull imploded. When he tried to get out of bed, his muscles cramped and spasmed.
In the bathroom, when he leaned toward the mirror above the sink, he saw that he was drawn and pale. His chest and back were spotted with bruises, most about as large as a thumbprint, from the gravel over which he'd rolled to avoid the hurtling truck.
A hot bath didn't soothe him, so he forced himself to do a couple of dozen situps, pushups, and deep knee bends until he was dizzy. The exercises proved more therapeutic than the bath.
The only cure for his misery was activity—which, he supposed, was a prescription for his emotional and spiritual miseries as well.
Wincing at the pain in his legs, he went downstairs.
"Maul for you," said Mrs. Fielding as she shuffled out of the gameshow-audience laughter in the living room. She took a plain brown envelope from the table in the hall and gave it to him. "As you can see, there's no return address."
"Probably advertisements," Chase said. He took a step toward the front door, hoping that she wouldn't notice his stiffness and inquire about his health.
He need not have worried, because she was more interested in the contents of the envelope than in him. "It can't be an ad in a plain envelope. The only things that come in plain envelopes without return addresses are wedding invitations—which this isn't—and dirty literature." Her expression was uncharacteristically stern. "I won't tolerate dirty literature in my house."
"And I don't blame you," Chase said.
"Then it isn't?"
"No." He opened the envelope and withdrew the psychiatric file and journal articles that Judge had promised to send to him. "I'm interested in psychology, and this friend of mine sometimes sends me particularly interesting articles on the subject when he comes across them."
"Oh." Mrs. Fielding was obviously surprised that Chase harbored such intellectual and hitherto unknown interests. "Well ... I hope I didn't embarrass you—"
"Not at all."
"—but I couldn't tolerate having pornography in my home."
Barely refraining from commenting on the half-undone bodice of her housedress, he said, "I understand."
He went out to his car and drove three blocks before pulling to the curb. Letting the engine idle, he examined the Xeroxes.
The extensive handwritten notes that Dr. Fauvel had made during their sessions were so difficult to read that Chase passed over them for the time being, but he studied the five articles—three in the form of magazine tearsheets, two in typescript. In all five pieces, Fauvel's high self-esteem was evident, his egotism unrelenting. The doctor referred to the subject as "Patient C"; however, Chase recognized himself—even though he was portrayed through a radically distorting lens. Every symptom that he suffered had been exaggerated to make its eventual amelioration appear to be a greater achievement on Fauvel's part. All
the clumsy probes that Fauvel had initiated were never mentioned, and he claimed to have succeeded with strategies of therapy that he had never employed but that he'd apparently developed through hindsight. Chase was, according to Fauvel: one of those young men who go to war with no well-formed moral beliefs and who, therefore, are clay in the hands of manipulative superiors, capable of being induced to commit any atrocities without questioning their orders. Elsewhere, he observed that Patient C: came to me from a military hospital, where he had recovered sufficiently from a total nervous breakdown to attempt social reintegration. The cause of his breakdown had been not a sense of guilt but extreme terror at the prospect of his own death, not a concern for others but a crippling recognition—and fear—of his own mortality.