The Sweetman Curve

by Graham Masterton

  Mrs Daneman blinked. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I didn’t know your father at all, and I’m sure Charles never did. At least, he never mentioned anyone called – what was it?’

  ‘Cullen. William Cullen,’ John said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nobody by that name.’

  ‘Mrs Daneman,’ Mel said, ‘we don’t think that your husband knew Mr Cullen. But we do believe that they may have shared some interest in life. Some hobby, or some society. Maybe they were both fraternity members at college, or both in the Army.’

  Mrs Daneman looked at them, and then looked away across the sun-burned grass of her front lawn. There must have been a time when it was green, and the edges were trimmed. She said, ‘We weren’t even going any place special, you know. We just went out for a drive, to get some air. Then Charles suggested we go to Descanso Gardens, you know, up by La Canada. We were driving past Griffith Park on the Ventura Freeway, and Andy here was singing.’

  She sighed. Her hands, hanging loosely in front of her, twitched against each other like two sad squids.

  ‘I don’t even know what make of car it was,’ she whispered. ‘I never did know the makes. I know that ours was a Pontiac, but that was all. It was white, this car, and it came up alongside us, and the next thing I knew all our seats and windows were covered in Charles’s blood.’

  She almost smiled. ‘The police told us that Andy and I were lucky to be alive. We went down a bank, and stopped against a wire fence. I knew that Charles was dead, but I still waited at the hospital until they came out to tell me officially.’

  John said gently, ‘Do you mind if we go inside and talk? It seems kind of public out here on the step.’

  ‘Well, if you really want to,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to excuse the house. I find it difficult to manage since Charles went.’

  John glanced back at Mel as they entered the narrow hallway. It was dark and airless, and it smelled of disinterest, neglect, and soured milk. On the telephone table was an ashtray crowded with butts, a reminder of her husband’s recent death as graphic as a plateful of maggots. Vicki held on tight to John’s arm, and Mel stayed close behind. It was like walking into the family mausoleum to view the dead.

  The front parlour was dim and silent. There was criss-cross yellow wallpaper, and a reproduction of a Balinese girl with bare breasts. In a glass-fronted cabinet were three small tarnished golf trophies and a cheap tea service that had probably been a wedding present. On top of the television was a photograph of a balding man with an untidy moustache, smiling against the sun. In the wastebasket was the aluminium foil tray of a TV dinner, scraped clean.

  Mrs Daneman sat down first, in a frayed chair, and reached for a pack of cigarettes. She lit one up, and took a long, nervous drag from it.

  Mel lowered himself into an ugly armchair with black splayed legs, while John and Vicki sat side by side on the dull green settee.

  ‘I don’t know what I can tell you,’ said Mrs Daneman. ‘He was kind and loving, but he was a very ordinary man.’

  ‘Could you describe him?’ Mel asked. ‘I mean, can you describe what he was really like as a person?’

  She looked down at the red and grey rug. ‘I guess you could say he was mild and gentle. I don’t know what else to say. He was forty-six, and he sold insurance, and that was all. He loved me, and he loved Andy, and he hoped that one day Andy would grow up to be better off than he was.’

  ‘Where was he born?’ John asked.

  ‘In Acmetonia – that’s just outside of Pittsburgh.’

  ‘Did you ever meet his parents?’

  ‘Oh, sure. His parents came to the wedding. His father was a surgeon for the Miners’ Clinic. He did some wonderful work on silicosis, you know, that miners’ lung disease?’

  John nodded. He was beginning to realise how difficult it would be finding a common factor in the lives of twelve different people. Even the simplest and least controversial of them, like Charles Daneman, insurance agent, was made up of a thousand places, ten thousand names, a thousand thousand times of day. Here was Charles Daneman at high school, with his spotted bow-tie and his spotted cheeks to match. Here he was in the U.S. Marines, with his forage cap and his over-confident wink. Here he was on the beach at Las Tunas with Betty Daneman, his new bride, and here he was with his fresh-born son in a garden bright with washing.

  Here was his life, in faded Kodak photographs and clippings from small-town newspapers. But what possible connection could it have to the life of William Cullen, of Trenton, New Jersey, a man who had lived three thousand miles away and whose days were recorded in completely different albums, in completely other memories?

  As the afternoon wore on, Mel’s stamina outlasted them all, and he was exhaustively thorough. He noted down details of Charles Daneman’s school, college, frat house, favourite subjects; his athletics record, service record, best friends, favourite songs, and his preferred breakfast cereal (Force). He found out where the Danemans had been on vacation for the past twenty-three years. He jotted down the titles of Charles Daneman’s best-loved books, movies, magazines and TV programmes. He learned that Charles Daneman liked Jackie Coogan, angel-food cake, drank three pop-top cans of Coors every evening, filled his car with Getty gas, and attended Baptist church.

  Then, when John was suffocated by the airless room and wearied by the dreary task of dredging up the life of the balding man on top of the television; when Vicki had already gone out on to the verandah to smoke a little grass and pull herself back together again, that was when Mel asked Mrs Daneman: ‘What did Charles think of the world? I mean, the world in general? Where did he stand politically?’

  Mrs Daneman shrugged. Fifteen cigarette butts lay in the ashtray beside her, and the room was stiff with smoke.

  ‘He didn’t stand any place at all,’ she said. ‘Not politically. He wasn’t a political man. But he did have his views. He was a great upholder of human dignity. He believed that all men were created equal, like it says in the Constitution, but of course his father taught him that.’

  ‘His father?’

  ‘Well, his father used to have to work with miners who were dying of silicosis and emphysema. It used to make him so angry, watching those men die, when all the time they could have been saved. He used to say that if the mine-owners donated half the money they spent on their own private medical bills to research into lung disease, then they’d probably save more miners in a year than had ever been killed in all the mine disasters in American history.’

  ‘And Charles agreed with that?’ Mel asked.

  ‘He wasn’t fanatical about it. But when his father died last year, I think he felt that he should try and carry on with some of the work that his father did for social equality. He wrote some letters to the papers, which never got printed, and he held a garage sale in aid of civil rights.’

  ‘He didn’t belong to any kind of political society?’ Mel asked her.

  She shook her head. ‘He didn’t want to set the world on fire. He just felt that the bosses and the government and the TV stations had taken ordinary people for granted for too long. He thought they were too cynical. He said it was about time that everybody who swore allegiance to the flag got a little bit of allegiance back in return. A little bit of respect.’

  John could almost picture his father’s face in the car beside him, almost reach out and touch that lined cheek. Like the tiny voice from an old-time victrola, he could hear his father saying: ‘We’re working towards what we call a society of mutual respect. That is, we want individuals to be respected by their government, legally and morally.’

  John said, ‘Mel, that’s enough now.’

  Mel turned. ‘Something’s clicked?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I need to talk about it.’

  Mrs Daneman looked from Mel to John and back again, bemused and uncertain. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ she asked them. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have any beer. Although I might have root beer. Andy likes root bee
r.’

  John shook his head. ‘I think we know everything we need to know, Mrs Daneman. You’ve been really helpful. I just hope this hasn’t upset you too much, talking about your husband this way.’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said, with half a smile. ‘I think it probably does me good, to talk.’

  John and Mel stood up, and Mrs Daneman followed them out into the hall. At the door, she said: ‘I loved him, you know, but he really wasn’t anybody very exceptional. He liked people to think of him as a good man, and a good husband. He was very proud of being just what he was.’

  Mel took her hand, and squeezed it. ‘For most people, the finest people, that’s usually enough, Mrs Daneman. Thank you for talking to us.’

  Mrs Daneman looked at them vaguely, as if she had already forgotten who they were. Vicki was sitting on the verandah rail, talking to Andy, and the day was growing cool and shadowy.

  John said: ‘Take care, Mrs Daneman. That’s a fine son you’ve got there.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Daneman, in a tone which seemed to mean, fine, yes, but fatherless.

  Fifteen

  He was parked across the street, on the junction with La Jolla, in a tan Firebird, rented from Avis. He wore a green golfing cap with a long peak and a buckle at the back, and sunglasses with lenses like mirrors. He was feeling impatient and edgy, and he kept checking his digital watch. The early evening showing of Swedish Ecstasy started at a quarter after six, and he didn’t want to miss it.

  He could see them talking on the verandah – Mrs Daneman, the young Cullen guy, that dark-haired girl with the big boobs, and the fat schmuck with the beard. Every now and then it seemed as if they were going to make a move, and he’d reach towards the ignition key, but then they’d step back in the shadows again. He couldn’t understand why they were taking so long, or what was so goddamned interesting about Mrs Daneman.

  Resting on the tan vinyl seat beside him, loosely concealed under a swimming towel, was his M-16, fully loaded. The radio was turned on very low, and he could barely hear the whispers of ‘The Girl from Ipanema.’ His fingers drummed on the steering-wheel, a light tattoo of impatience.

  At last, as the sun was beginning to sink behind the palms, the three of them left the verandah, with a wave to Mrs Daneman and Andy, and began to cross the front lawn towards their beaten-up orange Beetle. He couldn’t hear what they were talking about, their voices were only slight smudges of sound on the wind, but whatever it was they seemed in no hurry. He was parked on a red line, and it would only take a black-and-white to cruise past and they’d move him along; or worse, ticket him.

  He checked his digital watch. It was 5:17. The girl from Ipanema went walking and when she walked she just didn’t see…

  He saw Cullen open the passenger door and help the girl into the back of the car. The fat guy with the beard walked around, laughing about something, and climbed into the driver’s seat. As the sun disappeared, the street was clotted with shadows, and there was that curious Los Angeles smell of exhaust fumes and tropical vegetation.

  The Volkswagen’s motor sputtered into life, and its headlights lit up. At once, the man twisted the key in the Firebird’s ignition, shifted the car into drive, and waited for his quarry to pull away.

  The Volkswagen moved off from the kerb, tooted its horn once, and drove towards San Vicente. The man U-turned the Firebird in the middle of the street, and followed it. He drove with his left hand, and reached across with his right for the M-16.

  As they drew up to the traffic signals at the corner of San Vicente, he pulled up so close behind them that he could see the girl’s head in the Volkswagen’s rear window, and a side profile of Cullen. He could have taken the three of them out with three shots, and that would have been a finish to it.

  The signals changed from red to green, and the Volkswagen moved away in a cloud of oily black smoke that came straight in through the Firebird’s fresh-air ventilators and almost choked him. He laid down his rifle and wiped at his mouth with the swimming towel as he followed them north. They bugged him, these three. They were too goddamned holy and cheerful; like the three goddamned musketeers. He had never had a friend himself, not a friend to trust, and signs of friendship in other people irritated him in a way that he could hardly describe.

  He trailed the Volkswagen’s tail-lights northwards as far as Burton Way, where they turned off westwards towards Santa Monica and (he guessed) the San Diego Freeway. A couple of quick shots on the freeway and that would finish it off for good. He wished he was able to get hold of incendiary bullets, because then he could hit them once in the gas tank and nobody would ever know what the hell had happened. He had seen a woman burn to death in a crashed car on the freeway once, and he had never forgotten how fifteen or twenty people had stood around watching, only a few yards away, but unable to reach her because of the heat.

  Only fifty feet apart, the orange Volkswagen and the tan Firebird drove slowly through the rush-hour traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard, stopping within inches of each other at red lights, starting up together, accelerating together. By the time they reached the ramp to the San Diego Freeway, it was almost dark, and the tall man had taken off his sunglasses.

  He followed the Volkswagen as it noisily drove up the northbound ramp, and signalled that it was merging left. The tall man put his foot down on the Firebird’s gas pedal, checked his mirror, and pulled across to the outside lane. He lifted the M-16 in his right hand, and rested the muzzle on the sill of the open passenger window, steadying his elbow against the passenger seat. He gradually began to overtake the orange Beetle.

  He couldn’t overtake as quickly as he wanted to because there was a Cadillac in front of him, travelling at a sedate pace. But yard by yard, he crept up alongside the Volkswagen, until his nearside front wheel was spinning inches away from the Volkswagen’s dented offside rear wheel. He could see the girl in the back window now, talking to the fat guy in the driver’s seat, although he couldn’t yet see Cullen properly. He released the M-i6’s safety catch, and carefully licked his lips.

  The Cadillac slowed a little, and he was forced to slow down too, and lose ground. He glanced quickly from the Cadillac’s tail-lights over to the Volkswagen, and back again, trying to assess if he could get a quick shot in, but the Cadillac slowed even more, and in desperation he saw the orange Beetle gain fifty or sixty feet, and disappear up ahead of him.

  He tried to pull across into the Volkswagen’s lane, so that he could switch his approach and overtake it on the inside, but an intolerant Buick blasted its horn at him, and he had to stay where he was, boxed in behind the Cadillac.

  They were rising up the long curving gradients into the Santa Monica mountains now, and traffic in the outside lane was slowing down even more. On the radio, the disc jockey said, ‘We’ve had all kinds of phone calls on the subject of crash diets, and we have one lady in Encino on the line who believes that you can go without food for two weeks and still feel great.’

  Unexpectedly, traffic in the next lane began to lose speed too, and the tall man saw the Volkswagen only three cars away now, and coming closer. He raised his rifle again, flicking his eyes from the car in front to the orange Beetle, judging distance, speed, time. Once he’d shot into the Beetle, he wanted to cut across in front of it, because it would inevitably veer sideways and collide with whatever car was travelling next to it.

  Now it was only two cars away, and he was making up distance faster. He put his foot down and nudged a little closer to the tail of the Cadillac, gaining two or three more feet.

  He could see the fat guy now, and Cullen. The fat guy’s elbow was resting on the window, and his pudgy fingers were tapping on the Beetle’s roof. Cullen’s head was silhouetted against the light grey rhomboid shape of the passenger window, and he was talking about something and waving his hand.

  The tall man’s Firebird was almost alongside the Volkswagen now. He was already in a position to let off a shot into the back seat, but it was the front he was aiming f
or. In traffic as heavy as this, the girl probably wouldn’t survive anyway.

  Gradually, inch by unsteady inch, the sights of the M-16 crept along the side of the Volkswagen, past the rear window, past the door pillar, past the seats, until they hovered in line with Mel’s bearded face.

  On the radio, someone was singing: ‘A day of happiness was all we knew, and then I lost my baby blue…’

  In a split-second, just as he squeezed the trigger, the Cadillac’s brake lights brightened, and his foot jabbed for the brake pedal out of sheer nervous response. The rifle punched in his hand, and the Firebird slewed towards the median strip as he almost lost control of it.

  For a few jumbled moments, he couldn’t work out what had happened, but then the Beetle suddenly blared its horn, and swung away into the next lane. The tall man twisted the Firebird’s wheel and swung after it, arousing an angry chorus of hoots and honks from the traffic all around him.

  He lost sight of the Volkswagen for a moment, but then he saw it over on the inside lane, accelerating fast to overtake a heavy truck, with clouds of oily smoke billowing out of its exhausts.

  The rental Firebird wasn’t tuned up, but it still had the edge on Mel’s ‘62 Beetle. It came nosing close up behind, alongside the truck, and as the Beetle pulled out again, trying to dodge into the densest clusters of traffic, the tall man pressed his foot on the gas pedal again, and overtook the Beetle on the inside.

  He saw Cullen’s face at the window, his arm raised to shield himself. He could see the girl, too, her head down against the back of Cullen’s seat. He picked up the M-16, and awkwardly lifted it across his chest so that the barrel rested on the driver’s window.

  The Beetle braked hard. Behind it, the heavy truck let out a bellow of air horns. The tall man fired one shot, but it went totally wild across the freeway. The truck bellowed again.