Stalking Horse (The Lt. Hastings Mysteries)

by Collin Wilcox

  She broke off. Her breath was coming faster. Her dead eyes were coming dimly alive, as if a small spark of life were kindling deep in their depths. Now the hand was at her crotch. Her eyes were half closed. Her body was moving: rising, falling, beginning to copulate with itself—and with the incestuous memory of her father. Her lips drew back, exposing clenched teeth. Her little girl’s voice began moaning softly. I sat silently, looking away as her moaning became more rhythmical, more intense, more focused. Until, finally, she had her orgasm. She removed her hand decorously, readjusted her slip and leaned back in her chair. Her sigh was a deep, shuddering sound that shook her whole body. Her eyes were closed. Watching her, I remembered the furtiveness I’d felt as a boy the first time I’d gone to a dirty bookstore and looked at the pictures.

  I turned away until she began to speak again:

  “My daddy’s dead now. And my mommy’s dead, too. She came in my bedroom one night when Daddy was there. She was screaming. She’d kill us, she said. And maybe she did, because now my daddy’s dead. And my mother, she’s dead, too. I always hated her after that night. So she died. I hated Byron, too, because he pulled my hair, and stole my toys, and made me cry.”

  She stopped speaking. Her eyes were open now, staring vacantly off across the manicured lawns to the foggy hills beyond. Her hands were quiet in her lap, fingers loosely intertwined. Then she began speaking again. Her voice had coarsened, no longer a little girl’s voice but not yet a woman’s:

  “My mother died, but Byron didn’t. I hated him, but he didn’t die. So I went away. Far away, where no one would ever find me as long as I smiled at them, and let them touch me, and let them inside me, like Daddy. Because I was hiding, you see. I could always see them, but they could never see me. Not as long as I smiled and let them touch me. Because when you smile, you see, they never know you hate them. And they never know when you kill them, either. Not like Mother. She knew. When she was lying with her eyes closed, with white satin all around her and the organ music playing, I could hear her telling me that she knew. So I leaned over close, so no one could hear me, and I told her to be quiet and die again.” She nodded over the memory. The death’s head had returned to her face, her mask of insanity.

  Suddenly she turned to face me. Searching my face with her empty eyes, she whispered, “I know why you’re here.”

  I cleared my throat. “Do you?”

  She nodded. Once more, pale fire kindled deep in her eyes. “You’ve come from God. He sent you before, didn’t He?”

  “I—ah—”

  “Didn’t He,” she suddenly hissed. “I know He did. I know. I can tell.” Leaning forward, she spread her legs, saying, “Touch me, so I’ll know. Touch me, and I’ll tell you what you came to tell me, what Daddy told you to tell me when you came.”

  I realized that I was pressed back in my chair. Under my shirt, I was sweating. Irrationally, I was thinking that I should have sent Friedman to interrogate her. He understood the loonies that wandered constantly through the squad room. He could make sense of their ravings.

  Friedman would know how to answer. But I could only shake my head, saying, “No, I can’t touch you.” I almost added, It’s against regulations.

  “Then you didn’t come from God,” she answered promptly. Indignantly flouncing, she turned away. Her body went slack. She’d lost interest in me.

  “I came about Fred,” I said. “Your son, Fred. I came to ask about him.” I hesitated, then decided to say, “God sent me here to ask about Fred. He wants you to tell me where I can find him.”

  I saw her frown. “God? Sent you? For Fred?” She paused. Then: “Who’s Fred?”

  “Fred is your son, Juanita.”

  She shook her head. “No, Fred isn’t my son. And he’s not Daddy’s, either. I know. I could have felt it, inside, if he’d been Fred. Babies squirm, inside. And so did Daddy. But not Fred.”

  “Juanita—Mrs. Tharp. I’d like you to think. I’d like you to remember that—”

  “Think?” she suddenly shrieked. “Think? You come spying on me. You sit here signaling to them, and you want me to think.” She flung herself to her feet and ran to the farthest corner. Crouched down, cowering, hands thrown up over her head for protection, she began to rave: “You came from him. You didn’t come from God. You came from the Devil. I can smell smoke in your hair. I can hear flesh sizzling. You say Fred. But God knows better. And the Devil does, too. Because the Devil is Fred’s father. The Devil, and no one else. He’s sent you, just like he sends all the rest of them. But I can see through your clothes. You’ve got—”

  The door came open. The orderly was in the room, gesturing angrily for me to leave as he approached her warily, hands outstretched, as if he were cornering a frightened animal.

  I shrugged apologetically and left the room.

  Sixteen

  AS I WALKED DOWN the sanitarium’s stately curved driveway toward my car, I saw the driver’s door swing open. His face anxious, Canelli clambered out of the car—then saw me. Relieved, he waited for me beside the cruiser, saying, “Lieutenant Friedman just got off the radio. He wants you to call him right away. He says to use a phone.”

  “Let’s go.” I got in the cruiser and braced myself while Canelli jerked the car through a series of sharp, badly timed turns. Probably because Canelli had a long-standing disagreement with machinery, his driving was a series of skirmishes with the car, most of which he lost.

  “There—” I pointed. “There’s a booth.”

  “Oh. Right.” He cut to the curb, muttering darkly when the driver of a white pickup truck leaned angrily on his horn.

  I found a dime and dialed Friedman’s private line.

  “It sounds,” he said, “like Frederick Tharp may have surfaced again. Susan Ryan just called. She’s been attacked.”

  “Attacked?”

  “Roughed up, I guess. I don’t know whether it’s any more serious than that. I told her we’d be right out. I decided to see if I could get you, since you’ve already talked to her.”

  “Where is she?”

  “At home.”

  “How’s she sound?”

  “Terrible.”

  She took the photograph, glanced at it once, then threw it down on the coffee table. I could see her head and shoulders shake as she shuddered.

  “That’s him,” she said. She reached for a dark-colored highball, gulped shakily and returned the glass to the table. Staring down at the half-empty glass, she said, “I’m glad they found you, Lieutenant. I—I know I’m going to have to tell you what happened if you’re going to catch him. And I’m glad that I’ll be talking to someone I know and like.”

  “Thank you.”

  She was sitting hunched forward in her chair, still staring down at the table. Her eyes were fixed. Her body was rigid. With her arms crossing her breasts, as if to protect herself, or warm herself, she was stroking each upper arm and shoulder with stiff fingers.

  Finally, speaking in a low, cowed voice, she said, “Nothing like that’s ever happened to me. I—I guess it’s the penalty for living the kind of life I’ve always led. That’s what I’ve been thinking about, sitting here and waiting for you. I’ve seen my whole life pass in front of me, as the saying goes. And—” She shook her head. “And it’s not really much of a life. I mean, when you consider that my grandfather practically owned California, and my father practically owns the President, and when you consider that I spent most of my life reading about myself in the papers, then you’d think, wouldn’t you, that when something like this happened to me, there’d be someone I could call besides the police.” She raised her head, looking at me with a kind of timid entreaty. “I don’t mean that to sound ungrateful, Lieutenant.”

  I nodded, saying quietly, “I know.”

  “What I mean is,” she said, “that I don’t really have any friends. Not anyone that I could call, and say, ‘Come over, something terrible has happened to me.’ And even if I knew where my husband is, which I don’t, I proba
bly wouldn’t call him.”

  “What about your father?” I asked, probing.

  Her smile was a bitter twisting of her mouth, painful to see. “I tried that once, when I knew I would be getting divorced. I went to Dad’s office and sat down and started to tell him that Charles and I were going to split. But his super-private line rang. And that was that.”

  “Couldn’t you tell your mother?” I asked, still probing. “Couldn’t you tell her what happened today?”

  “At the moment,” she said sadly, “my mother happens to be drunk. The reason I know, I just came from a family dinner, so-called, at the old family mansion. Usually she paces herself to get through the afternoon. But today—” She shrugged.

  “Is that when it happened? When you came home afterward?”

  “That’s right. Actually, it was a combination dinner and lunch, which is a family tradition going back to my grandfather’s time. Every Sunday afternoon, we were required to assemble around my grandfather’s table. It was a kind of state occasion, I guess you’d say. Grandfather talked and we listened. He told us what he expected of us during the coming week—and the years to follow, actually.” She broke off, shaking her head at the memory. Then, drawing a deep, unsteady breath, she said, “So, anyhow, that was the occasion today. Except that it was a pretty pitiful imitation of my grandfather’s dinners. My father was so pale and so sick that it was all he could do to keep his facade in place for the servants. And mother was drunk. Ladylike, as always, but still drunk. And James and I hardly said anything to each other—because we don’t talk to each other much, not really. So, as soon as I could, I left. I excused myself and got in my car and came home. That was about five o’clock. For once, the sun was shining through the fog. When I got within a couple of doors of the house, I pressed the garage door opener. This man was waiting for me. He was on the sidewalk, just beyond the house. He looked like anyone else, walking down the sidewalk. I looked at him—saw him—but I didn’t pay any attention to him. I just waited for the garage door to go up, and I drove inside. As soon as I switched off the engine, he—he materialized beside the car. He had a—a gun. That’s all I saw: that face, pressed against the window, with the gun just below it.”

  “So he has a gun,” I said softly, speaking more to myself than to her. So far, Frederick Tharp had been nothing worse than a threatening voice on the phone and some words typed on white paper. Now he was flesh and blood: a man with a gun.

  “Yes,” she said, “he has a gun. And I—I’ll never forget it, pointing straight at my face. The gun—the barrel—and his eyes, that’s all I could see. It was as if they filled the whole world. His eyes, they were terrible. They were murderer’s eyes. A madman’s eyes. They were—” She broke off again, helplessly shaking her head. “They were terrible.” Still shaking her head, she sat silently for a moment. Listening to her, I was remembering how she’d seemed when I’d first seen her: calm, assured, even a little haughty. Since then, since Friday, she’d changed. Violence and terror and a glimpse of utter evil had changed her. I’d seen it happen before, often. I could recognize the symptoms: that special shadow behind the eyes. Sometimes, eventually, the shadow disappeared. Sometimes it didn’t.

  “Did he say anything?” I asked.

  She released a deep, tremulous exhalation. Then, painfully, she said, “He told me to get out of the car. And I—I did. I didn’t have a choice. I got out of the car. Then he—he told me to go upstairs. And I—I did that, too.” As she spoke, her eyes strayed to a small hallway that opened off the living room. Without doubt, they’d emerged into the hallway from the garage. In her mind, she was reliving the moment.

  I watched her eyes as they moved from the hallway to the living room. “We came in here,” she said. “He closed the hallway door behind us, very carefully. Then we came in here, in the living room. We—we stopped right there—” She pointed to a spot in front of the big fieldstone fireplace. “We stood right there, side by side, facing this way—” She gestured to the huge picture window that looked out over the city to the east. Glancing momentarily at the view, I saw a typical summertime scene, with fog rolling in over Twin Peaks and blowing down the slope to the flatlands of the Mission District, where it dissipated, letting the sun shine through.

  “He began talking,” she said. “He—he spoke very well, very articulately. It—it was as if he’d been invited, and he was being polite, telling me how much he liked the house, how impressed he was with the furniture, and the paintings, and the view. He talked for a long time. Or at least it seemed like a long time. And the longer he talked, the more—more normal it all seemed. And I thought that, maybe, after all, it would be all right. But then he said—” The sudden pain of memory made her stop for a moment.

  “Then he said that he wanted to see the rest of the house. So I—I took him into the dining room, and then the kitchen. But I couldn’t keep him there, in those rooms. Because he—” Once more, she shook her head. But, doggedly, she went on:

  “Because he—he wanted to see the—the bedrooms. He—he made me go into my bedroom. And he told me to open the drapes. And then he told me to sit on the bed. I—I did. And then he stepped close to me. Very close. And he told me to—to open my mouth. I did. He raised his gun, and he put the barrel in my mouth. I could taste it—the metal and the oil. It—it seemed like forever, with that taste in my mouth. And all the while, he kept talking to me. And then—” She broke off. I saw her swallowing repeatedly. Her eyes were hollow and haunted, unfocused. “And then, he—he took the gun out of my mouth, and stepped back, and—and told me to get undressed.” She spoke very softly, very precisely, as if an impersonal voice could make the scene she was remembering less horrible. “And I—I did. I stood up and got undressed. And then he told me to sit down again on the bed. And then he—he put the gun in my mouth again. He held the gun with one hand. It—it was in his left hand, I remember that. Because, with his right hand, he was unzipping his pants and unfastening his belt. And then he—”

  “Mrs. Robinson. That—that’s all right. You don’t have to go on. I understand what you’re telling me.”

  She shook her head slowly from side to side. “No, Lieutenant, I don’t think you understand. I don’t think you’ll ever understand.”

  “I—yes—I know what you mean. But I—I don’t want to put you through the—the embarrassment of telling me. There are—procedures that we have, for this kind of thing. We have people for you to talk to when you make your formal statement.”

  “People?”

  “Psychiatrists. And—and women. Social workers.”

  Suddenly she released a harsh, bitter laugh. “Social workers are for the poor, Lieutenant. You seem to forget that I’m rich. And famous. And—” Abruptly she sobbed, a shattering convulsion of her whole body. “Oh, Jesus,” she moaned. “Jesus Christ. It was so—so ugly. So terribly, unbelievably ugly.” She cried harshly, hopelessly, helplessly. Feeling like a cheap voyeur, I sat motionless, watching her cry, head bowed, hunched over her hands that were now clasped across her stomach. She looked as if she were desperately trying to hold herself together after receiving a mortal wound.

  Without conscious thought, I began speaking in a meaningless ramble intended to distract her from her desperate sobbing. “It’s terrible, what can happen. I see it every day, every week, all year long. Someone goes through his whole life without any trouble. Then, one day, some lunatic who should never have been paroled, or some addict who needs a fix, he comes up on you. And before you know what’s happened, you’re lying on the ground, bleeding. You wake up in the hospital. Or maybe—” I paused for emphasis. “Or maybe you don’t wake up. Just last week, a seventy-five-year-old woman was opening her front door when some junkie came up behind her and hit her over the head and took her purse. She fell backward down some stairs, and she’s been in a coma ever since. All her family can hope for is that she dies before they go bankrupt.”

  As I’d talked, the sobbing had stopped. She wiped at her eyes
with the back of her hand, as a little girl might. Now, almost timidly, she peeked at me from lowered eyes. She sniffled, swallowed hard and finally said, “What you’re doing—what you’re trying to tell me—is that it could’ve been worse.”

  I shook my head. “No. That’s not what I’m doing. If it happens to you, then that’s the worst.” I ventured a smile. “What I’m trying to do, I guess, is just—just keep talking, until you get it all cried out.” I paused a moment, looking for a reaction. My reward was a small, sad smile.

  “You’re a very considerate man, Lieutenant. A very nice man. Somehow that—that isn’t the image that a policeman has. Of being nice, I mean.”

  “I know. That’s probably why I’ll never make it to captain. In police work, nice only goes so far.”

  Now, almost without realizing it, we were smiling into each other’s eyes. For a brief moment, I wondered whether her smile was an invitation: a declaration of desperation from a lost, lonely woman with too much money to have many friends.

  I looked away as I cleared my throat before saying, “I’d like you to tell me what he said. Not the—the obscene things. But other things. For instance, you described him as speaking very well. Do you remember anything he said that could help me?”

  “I—I’m not sure,” she answered hesitantly. Then, frowning, she continued, “Except, as I said, it seemed at first as if he’d come on a social visit. As if he was a friend, or someone in the family. That’s the way he acted. He was very urbane. Very—very pleasant, in an eerie sort of way.”

  “Why do you say he acted like a relative?”

  She looked puzzled. “I’m not sure that I know what you mean.”

  “When he phoned you, I recall your saying that he talked like there was some connection between the two of you. Do you remember?”