“You’ve got time for a swim,” he said. “Then we could have some of that coffee, couldn’t we?”
“Why not? You’re the boss.”
“The boss?” he said, and then realized that this was so. He was the boss and it was time to think about what he was going to do about the Seabeach Motel. “Yes,” he said. “I’m the boss and you’re an heiress.”
“Let’s not talk about it. Ever.
He knew that the “it” she referred to meant the events of the past three days. He knew there would be times throughout the years when they would talk about them but they did not have to talk about them now.
He stood up and pulled her with him. For the second time he kissed her, lightly as before, without passion but with fondness and affection. When her hazel eyes smiled at him he told her to put her suit on; he said he would be waiting for her at the bungalow.
CARNAL PSYCHO, by Duane Rimel
Copyright © 1961 by Novel Books, Inc.
CHAPTER ONE
The telephone rang, and a familiar chill of apprehension, of accumulated hatred, flared inside me. Some things you can get used to, even unpleasant things—as long as they are known. It is the unknown that frightens and rasps your nerves, twisting emotions until you are ready to boil over.
Before the phone rang I had been having a better than usual afternoon—my coffee tasted right, my injured left leg had eased its infernal throbbing, and I had begun reading a new book my young friend Henry Dee had brought up. It was by Julian Huxley, that famous biologist. Sometimes the remote past is more fascinating than brush wars and mine cave-ins.
But the damn phone wouldn’t quit.
I swore and yanked the receiver out of its cradle, hoping the TT fanatic who had been pestering me for long weeks had got his fill. I growled hello.
A nicely-modulated feminine voice asked if this was Mark Jason. A voice that evoked rich fantasies, the kind a lonely man gets who has been out of circulation a while, like me.
I admitted that I was Mark Jason.
“I—I hope I’m not intruding, Mr. Jason. Henry’s told me so much about you—this is Louise Schmidt.”
“Oh—yes…” Henry Dee’s current ‘steady’ and my hunch about her voice had been correct. I hadn’t met her, but I’d seen a snapshot, and maybe the afternoon wasn’t going to be a bust, after all.
“I—shouldn’t bother you, I guess, but—”
“Try me, Louise.”
“I—got one of those—calls.”
I swallowed an oath. I’d told Henry about the spook calls I’d been receiving, and he’d evidently passed it on to her. It didn’t make much sense unless the TT artist was doing what he’d threatened to do—start in on my friends.
I heard her take a deep breath. “I—called Henry, and he’s coming up to see you…”
“Good enough, Louise. I’m really sorry. Well talk about it later.”
“Oh—thanks, Mark! I was so scared, I—”
“Take it easy, Louise.”
She thanked me again and cut the connection. I reached down and pulled the phone jack out of the wall. The telephone company had installed it after I’d reported getting anonymous pester calls. Telephone Tormenters they’re called, in company jargon. They usually pick on young, pretty girls, brides, just-marrieds. Sex-deviates, generally. In my case it wasn’t, however—I didn’t have the right kind of plumbing. And there was a definite, vicious purpose in those I had received…
Louise had got me edgy and impatient—now I’d have to wait for Henry to come up and give me the low-down.
Oh, I could have gotten out. My leg was much better than I let on, because I had been hatching up a little plan for this tormenter. Sure it ached and hurt, but I could use it, and I was much luckier than some hit-and-run victims. I was alive. The graveyards are full of a lot of them who aren’t, believe me.
For over a year I had lived in the same bungalow next door to a three-story frame monstrosity called an apartment house that was built shortly after the first steamboats hit Idaho, and hadn’t been changed much since. My bungalow appeared to be a kind of afterthought, the front door facing First Avenue, the back door connected by a covered ramp with its parent, the Hillview, and heated and watered and electrified through the parent. The landlord had hacked another unit into the side of the hill overlooking Layton and I got it.
Anyway, I had a good view of the wide valley and the juncture of the Snake and Clearwater rivers. Today the barren, dun-colored hills, rising two thousand feet above the city, were streaked with snow. A sharp, cold upriver wind had been whining around my castle, reminding me too vividly of my river home, fifteen miles up the Snake, the cabin and creek and sandbar I missed so much.
A year and a half before, I had come to the city, as I do occasionally, to earn enough money to buy necessities for my wilderness existence. I didn’t exactly hate the city, but I felt much more comfortable away from it. This time I had been trapped here much too long.
At the bottom of a steep and unusable incline on the West, and facing River Avenue, stood Henry’s small rented house. In summer it was nearly hidden by towering locust trees, but now I could almost count the shingles on the roof.
About five-thirty I heard Dee’s footfalls on the Hillview stair far below—he’d decided to come up here before driving home. My ears have always been good, and while I’d lain around recuperating, I’d practiced identifying different Hillview inhabitants from the way they walked. I knew most of them by sight, but I’d met very few of them.
Now he crossed the ramp. He burst into my cluttered living room, breathless and rather pale. “Mark—now I got a call!”
I felt a familiar twinge. “What’s that?”
“Yeah! Now he’s picking on me—Laughed and tittered. Said if he couldn’t get at you, he’d start in on me!”
I swallowed a curse and motioned him into a chair. “And take off your coat.”
He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply. A shudder went through his lean frame. He threw his car coat over a chair, sat down gingerly.
“And that ain’t all, Mark. Louise got a call, too…”
“She phoned me.”
“Oh—” For an instant his agitation seemed less overt. He glanced out of my ‘view’ window, his hands not so unsteady. “Glad she did, Mark. It really got her upset.”
But why had she called me? Probably because Henry and I were friends, and I was older than he.
Henry stood up and began roaming around, a habit of his. How he found room among my stacks of books, magazines and other junk, I never could figure out. His long legs were admirable—he’d been outstanding in basketball and track. Right then I envied him his mobility very much.
“Now, what about this call,” I said.
“This—fiend threatened me, said I’d better watch out—”
“Calm down and sit down.”
He did neither. I sighed and waited. Finally he halted in front of me, staring down, dark brown eyes intense. “It went something like the stuff you been getting on the phone. ‘Well, the mighty athlete, Henry Dee! If I can’t get at Jason, I’ll start working on you. Ha-ha-ha-ha.’”
The imitation was quite good, except Henry’s voice had personality. The TT maniac had developed a high-pitched falsetto that reminded me of nothing except maybe Mickey Mouse. The telephone company said they had ways of tracing these tormenters, but it wasn’t easy. The dial system in Layton, with service into outlying small towns that did not go through their long distance switchboard, made it even more difficult. They said they were working on it.
So far I hadn’t called the police, and if the telephone company had, I wasn’t aware of it. Since the phone-jack installation I’d had less trouble, but what had gone on before, when I was in rough shape after my accident, I would never forget.
“What did the voice tell your girl, Louise?”
“I guess it was rough—and sexy. She wouldn’t say much—”
“Could be a different character.”
“No—s
he said it was high and squeaky, like your calls and mine.”
I turned and glanced out of the window. The wind had faded, and a pall of smog, politely called industrial fumes by the local daily newspaper, had settled over the valley, drifting in from the pulp mill east of town. Frosty, stinking air sneaked around the not-so-snug window frame.
“Will you talk to her, Mark?”
I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it. A snapshot isn’t like the real thing, and my curiosity had been tickled. And since there might be a connection here—
“Please, Mark.” And I got the idea that he was up here talking for her, as well as himself. What could I do? The guy was going with this girl, and he was my friend.
I said I would talk to her. Any kind of lead was better than nothing. I wanted this spook real bad. He’d threatened, bragged about what he’d done, ruined a lot of sleep, raised my blood pressure and built a fierce hatred inside me.
“Maybe the caller was one of your Jolly Poets,” I suggested.
He halted, suddenly. “Can’t you leave them alone?”
I managed a grin. The Jolly Verse Guild was one of Henry’s vagaries. The Jollies, as they were called, consisted of a group of amateur and semi-amateur ‘poets’ who, in my opinion, had attracted as members all the loose screwballs in Layton. Relly & Relly, Henry’s employers, printed their monthly ‘organ’ called Jasmine & Lace. Henry had the dubious job of steering it through the various ‘editors’ and subeditors’ until finally it saw the glorious light of print.
I’d kidded him off and on for months about the Jollies, and it always made him bristle. But, after all, business is business.
“Maybe you’d better cool off and get something to eat,” I said.
After more ranting and arm-waving, he went out, leaving me with a headache. Maybe I’d been too rough on him. Despite my cynicism and moodiness, and the memory of something ugly and monstrous, he’d been very understanding and congenial.
The memory I hadn’t been able to shake, what I call the first incident, which had landed me in this poor man’s penthouse in the beginning, had happened shortly after my most recent and longest visit to the city, eight months before.
I’d been driving home from a date along a winding country road, late at night. It was early June, and a bit of ground mist floated along the roadway. I’d driven this road before, maybe three or four times, and since I had seen no car lights between me and the highway nearly a mile away, the ground was slipping under the car at a good clip.
I came around this sharp corner not far from the highway and my headlights caught a slim gray figure poised in the haze. A young girl, I learned later. What do you do in a situation like this? I yanked the steering wheel to the left, toward the ditch, but the car’s momentum was too great. It skidded sharply in the gravel, I felt a grisly thud, then I spun…
I regained consciousness temporarily with a thin, high scream probing my ear drums. I hung upside down, pinned inside my car, something warm and wet running across my face, the reek of gasoline in my nostrils. No pain, at first. Numbness, dizziness, a sensation of panic boiling inside me. The terrible screaming faded, mercifully…
Somewhere above me lights flickered, I heard voices. Time seemed to pass too slowly.
When I came around again I was in the Layton General Hospital. I had been cut and bruised, but nothing had broken. They told me the girl I had struck, the one who had cried so pitifully, had died. Her name was Angela Stein, and she had lived at a small farmhouse near the scene of the accident. Her parents made a meager living raising produce and selling it at a roadside stand nearby.
Fortunately, I was well insured. The parents didn’t appear to blame me particularly, and accepted the insurance company settlement. They seemed very beaten down and upset, but they didn’t give me any trouble. Again I was fortunate. But what goes on inside you after a thing like that? Have you ever killed?
You are absolved by the law of any criminal intent, but still you are a murderer. You have destroyed a human being, ended its existence. This goes through your mind, again and again.
The nightmares began even before I was released from the hospital. A pinched white face rushing out of the gloom, horror in the eyes…while I kept fighting and clawing the wheel, trying to miss her…
About a month later the second incident occurred.
It was a dark rainy night in early August—very unusual weather for that time of year—and I’d been walking home from work after drinking some beer in a tavern, walking uphill on Fifth Street, below the park. Fifth at this point is very steep, built into a deep ravine that drops from what is known as the Hill down to Main Street at a very sharp angle. The early-day car salesmen used to test their rigs on this grade, but of course these new crates have no trouble at all.
I was on the east side of the street, and I had to cross Fifth to reach the concrete steps that climb up to Hill level, or First Avenue. White lines marked the pedestrian lane.
My head was down to keep the rain out of my eyes—I never wear a hat except in sub-zero weather—and no traffic in sight. I was halfway across when I was aware that a parked car above me had started. Its lights caught me full on. I kept walking, as I knew the driver had surely seen me. I had now reached the lane the driver wouldn’t use coming downhill toward me. I took my time.
Suddenly the car’s lights went out and the motor roared. I glanced up to see blearily that the hulk was coming right at me. My reflexes are good, and I moved—but not in time. I remember hearing the screech of tires and the motor’s whine. Then the car was on top of me.
I felt a horrible, jarring shock. I was twisting and rolling. Then my head seemed to explode.
The police didn’t find the driver. It was labeled hit-and-run.
My insurance company took it in the neck again, but they settled. They even paid for my medical and hospital expenses. During my long stay at the hospital the doctors threw a lot of long words at me—like paraplegia dolorosa and hysterical amnesia. They took a mess of X-rays.
But all I was interested in was whether I’d get on my feet again.
After the cast came off my left leg, they finally decided I would walk again—if I was lucky. At first my left leg was paralyzed from the hip down, the right from the knee down—but after a few months, I started coming out of it. Dr. Schiller gave me exercises to perform.
They talked for a while about braces, but I wanted it all the way or nothing. I had to get back up the river and live the way I was used to living.
I was lucky—or maybe just tough.
Even before I’d quit taking pain-killer the phone calls began. First it was just long silences. Ever pick up a phone and hear someone breathing at the other end, ask who is calling, then have the party hang up?
Then it got worse. ‘I didn’t get you this time, Jason—but I will the next! An eye for an eye, Jason. You killed with a car, and you’re gonna get killed by one—get it?’
Or strings of wild curses.
Apparently it was someone who had been close to Angela Stein, a relative of some sort. Or maybe just a crank who had read about it in the papers and was venting hatred on a careless driver.
I had met the Stein family at the funeral. The remaining children had all been younger than Angela, just kids. It couldn’t be one of them. Besides, the Steins has sold out and moved away to the Coast, near Portland. I didn’t have their address, but I had decided if the tormenting continued I’d have the police get in touch for possible leads. But I didn’t want to bother the Steins. I’d caused them enough grief already. They had seemed a deeply religious family—quiet, introverted.
The phone jack had worked for a while. Now the calls were starting on my friends. A real psycho. And, if it was the one who had run me down, a dangerous one.
Naturally the police had quizzed me about my own accident, incident number two. What kind of car was it? Did I see the driver? And so on. Lieutenant Angus Alonzo Riley made an honest attempt to locate the man or woman who ha
d run me down. But nothing ever came of it. Traffic injuries are so commonplace, you know.
And one of these days I was going to get out and do a little injuring myself.
CHAPTER TWO
Waiting for Henry and Louise to show, I began to consider the Jollies in a different sort of way. Maybe my odd one was a ‘poet,’ a longhair. A few of them lived beneath me in the Hillview, and—with one or two exceptions—that was close enough, believe me.
One was Lewis Cable, who had the apartment directly across the ramp, and tampered with every radio and TV set he could get his grimy paws onto. During the last summer, when I’d had my window open to catch some air, the night would often be shattered with the screech of an overloaded speaker or enlivened with bursts of TV commercials. He had a panel truck and a little shop downtown where he repaired all kinds of electrical gadgets.
Another dandy was a Mrs. Teresa Snark, widow of a very wealthy gold-mine operator who had scraped off plenty of cream in the early days of expansion in northern Idaho. I’d never seen her, but Henry had given me some lowdown, and of course she was President of the ‘club.’ Her name in type on the masthead of Jasmine & Lace was no larger than the others, but it was first. Every member knew who ran the show; without her their ‘organ’ would have folded overnight, and they didn’t want this to happen, even when Mrs. Snark’s poems appeared in a box on page one. No, never!
The typography and presswork were above average, however—the whole thing was done offset—and it fostered the illusion of being rather important. Perhaps it was. But I had my doubts.
About seven-thirty I heard footfalls on the covered ramp between my cubicle and the Hillview. Henry’s and another pair—light, clicky and feminine.
I had cleaned up a little, as a man will who is expecting female company—even somebody else’s girl. In keeping up my disguise of being crippled I had denied myself a number of things, all pleasant. I had thought that if I stayed here long enough I’d lure my tormenter in close enough to beat his brains out, but it hadn’t worked.
Henry knocked and I said, come in. They did.
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