(1961) The Chapman Report

by Irving Wallace

  Sarah Goldsmith became fully aware of the Dodge at Westwood Boulevard. Its grill, reflecting the sun, and the dark, sullen face behind the windshield filled her rear-view mirror with a pounding remembrance and fear, and after that, for twenty minutes, it did not leave her mirror.

  By the time she reached her street-with the safety of small children playing on someone’s lawn, and a gardener guiding a power mower over another-she saw that her rear-view mirror was free of M. Javert (she had seen the movie on Sam’s television, not read the book), and that only the placid, receding landscape was in sight. The choking fear was at once alleviated, and she began to feel that it was either a coincidence or a trick of hallucination.

  She swung into the carport, parked, found her purse, and stepped out. She realized that there was no grocery bag, that she had forgotten to shop, but decided that the freezer would serve them adequately. She had started across the paved area toward the door when she was aware of a sedan wheeling into the street. She stopped short, staring off, and the white needles of dread and calamity punctured her forearms and legs. The Dodge came to a halt three doors away, scraping the curb, and the engine idled. The face in the recess behind the glass was indistinct but pointed toward her. Even without seeing it plainly, she knew that it was dark and involuntarily, she gasped. Her legs were wooden, anchored. And then they moved. She stumbled, half running, to the door, shook frantically through her key ring, then opened the door, banged it behind her, and hysterically hooked the chain.

  Her first illogical instinct was to call Sam, preserver of home and property, and then the police, and then the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Pederson, or Kathleen Ballard around the corner, and finally she saw the absurdity of all these impossible collaborations. Although her body was chilled rigid, her mind, so practical, reasoned out an explanation of M. favert, and she knew that there was only one number she dared call.

  In the kitchen, after hastily checking the service porch door, she snatched the receiver of the wall phone, making communication operative and rescue imminent, and she dialed Fred Tauber’s number. After the first ring, she prayed that he was still on the bed. After the second ring, she was sure that he was in the bathroom. After the third ring, when her heart was sinking, he answered the phone.

  “Hello,” he said with incredible calmness.

  “Fred!”

  “Hello?”

  “Fred-it’s Sarah!”

  “Yes-it’s Fred-what’s the matter?”

  “I’m being followed,” she gasped; “someone’s following me-he’s outside.”

  “What do you mean, Sarah? What are you talking about?”

  “A man.”

  Fred’s voice was steady, steadying her, but tense. “What man? Do get hold of yourself. Are you in danger?”

  “No-I don’t know, but-“

  “Then calm down. Tell me as quickly as possible what is wrong.”

  She held the mouthpiece in one hand and drew closer to it. “When I left you, I noticed the car parked near, and then I started, and I guess it started. I was halfway home when I noticed it again, right behind, and then I kept watching, and it/was still behind. And now it’s two doors down-“

  “Who’s driving it? Did you see?”

  “I couldn’t tell very well. He’s got black hair and a cruel face.”

  “Have you seen him before?”

  “No-I mean, yes, I have. Saturday, I remember now. He was parked across from your apartment, the same car, and it came into

  the block here, but I didn’t pay any attention then. Fred, who is he?”

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Is he still outside?”

  “I suppose-“

  “Go and look. I’ll wait.”

  She let the receiver dangle and went into the living room. For a moment, alarm held her, but Fred was waiting, he was with her, and so she went out to the big window, the drapes partially drawn against the sun. She moved to the edge of the drapes and pulled one back slightly, and in this way hidden, she peered outside.

  The street was before her. The Dodge was gone. She exposed herself more fully, the drape covering her like a broken tent, and searched the street. No car was in sight.

  She freed herself of the drape and ran back into the kitchen.

  “Fred-“

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “He’s gone.”

  ‘You’re sure?”

  “I looked everywhere.”

  “Curious.”

  Threat was supplanted by mystery, and the anxiety in her voice was shaded by a subtle difference. “Fred, who can it be? Can it be about us?”

  “It might be.” He did not try to conceal his concern. “You’re sure about the car shadowing you-Saturday and today?”

  “Positively. I mean, if he got out and went someplace, or pretended to do something else, why, maybe I wouldn’t be sure. But outside your apartment, and then right behind me, and parking here, just watching me, not pretending to be going anywhere else-“

  “Be careful, Sarah. And don’t use my name. The phone may be bugged.” Fred’s secret vice was television, after all.

  Sarah was impatient. “If it’s tapped, they’ve heard enough already. We have to talk. Maybe it’s your wife-“

  “My wife?”

  “She suspects us. She saw me. I bet the man’s a detective she hired.”

  “That could be. There’s another possibility. He may have been assigned by your husband.”

  Sam? Ridiculous. “That’s ridiculous,” she said, and the moment she said it, she wasn’t sure. Why not Sam? He wasn’t the utter fool.

  Perhaps she had slipped up somewhere; perhaps she had been seen; perhaps there was gossip. An anonymous letter to the store. It took only a phone call and fifty dollars a day, she’d read somewhere, to hire a private eye. They existed. They even advertised in the yellow section of the phone book. “Investigations discreetly made. Call day or night.” Sam. But no. If Sam even suspected, it would break out all over him like a rash, and there would be obvious innuendos or blunt accusations, and crying and turmoil. This wasn’t Sam at all. It was Fred’s wife. The juiceless one. Exactly what she would do. Yet it might be Sam. But if it was Mrs. Tauber-was that really her name?-was it so bad? Maybe she’d give him his divorce then. What was she thinking anyway?

  “… not so ridiculous,” he was saying. “I’m sure your husband is as capable of doing this as my wife. In fact, Sarah, knowing my wife as I do-or did-I would say that she’s less capable of this than your husband or anyone else.”

  “Why?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t think it would surprise her that I’d be interested in someone else. So I don’t think she’d spend a dime to confirm that. No, I’m inclined toward your husband. That bothers me. I gather from you, he’s not very sophisticated. Evidence about us might make him go haywire. He might behave badly. That’s what bothers me.”

  “What should we do, Fred?”

  “For one thing, keep a watchful eye for that same man and that car. See if he returns and hangs around. If he does, telephone me at once. Any hour. The other suggestion I’d make is that we stay away from each other for a little while.”

  “Fred, no-“

  “Honey, just a couple of days, until we see if this is really trouble or simply nothing at all.” “How long, Fred?”

  “A day or two. Let’s play it cool, see what happens. If the coast is clear, call me Thursday morning.”

  “Thursday morning. Fred, I’ll die.”

  “Honey, it’s just as hard for me.”

  “Fred, do you love me?”

  “You know I do. Now hang up, go about your work as if nothing’s happened, and keep watch. I’ll expect to hear from you Thursday morning. Goodbye, Sarah.”

  “Goodbye, darling.”

  Benita Selby’s journal. Tuesday, June 2: “… was lovely. After the concert, I told him it was so late I had better be taken right to the motel. But afterward we sat and talked until one in the morning, and th
en he took me to my door. He was such a gentleman. He asked if he could kiss me, and I agreed. I think I will see him once more before he leaves, and we leave. I look forward to Gerold’s arrival in Chicago. It could be interesting… . There was a letter from Mom this morning, obviously written in pain. It’s not a slipped disk but a dislocated hip. She’ll have to remain in bed a while-not that she isn’t anyway. I think we’ll all be glad when this is over. Four more days of interviews, and Dr. Chapman’s broadcast on ‘The Hot Seat,’ and then we leave Sunday night. Paul was as sleepy as I was this morning. He should be. I saw him come in late last night, while we were in the car talking. Cass is back at work. He came up behind me this morning and put his hands on my chest, the way he used to, and I was furious. He has such a nasty disposition. I amused Dr. Chapman when he came in an hour ago. I was reading the weekly newspaper they have in The Briars. It is called The Alert, and it is delivered door to door, free. Under ‘Social Activities’ I happened to see that a society woman named Teresa Harnish is giving a party Friday night for the elite of the community. If is a costume party, with buffet, and everyone is being told to dress as the person they would like to have been, or be, when Dr. Chapman interviewed them. Very clever. I clipped it and read it to Dr. Chapman. He laughed out loud. He has such a magnificent sense of humor, unlike most famous people. He also has a memorable memory, as I have already explained in this journal. After he laughed, he said that he remembered having personally interviewed Mrs. Harnish, and that she was a lovely lady and that he hoped her party would be a huge success… .”

  Teresa Harnish sat on the blanket at the perimeter of Constable’s Cove, her shapely legs straight out before her, and for what seemed the hundredth time she adjusted the strap of her new bathing suit. She had been pleased when she purchased the white suit. The saleslady had said that it was ravishing (not that she listened to them), and had thought it might be exactly what she wanted, that is, if she didn’t mind something so daring (for it was a deeply cut maillot, drawn high against her thighs), but Teresa hadn’t

  minded, and was satisfied that the suit showed off her trim figure in the best manner possible, and subtracted ten years from her thirty-six.

  She had shopped for the bathing suit yesterday morning, after dropping Geoffrey off at the shop especially early, since he was making frantic last-minute preparations for the Boris Introsky show. She had kept the suit on, upon leaving the store, and driven directly to the beach. But the beach was devoid of life, and after a half hour of disappointment, she bad driven home and puttered away the rest of the endless day in wretchedness.

  Determined to continue her vigil until Ed Krasowski would appear again, she had hastened to the beach this morning. Again, it was desolate. She had been at her post ten minutes now, bookless and umbrellaless, for she did not intend to linger, once she had spoken to him. Since her brief encounter with him exactly one week ago, her mind had dwelled on almost nothing else.

  Purposely, she had avoided the beach until yesterday, trying to sort out and examine each of her separate feelings. She was a reasonable, sensible girl-her family had always been prideful and boastful of this-and though now obsessed, she was not unreasonable, insensible. Byron had always disdainfully referred to his hapless wife, Annabella Milbanke, as the Princess of Parallelograms, meaning apparently that she was of a precise and mathematical turn, and implying some lack of emotion. Teresa had always regarded Byron with disgust, and, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, had sided with the admirable Princess Annabella. Over the long week end, Teresa had tried to review the situation coolly, as Byron’s judicious wife might have done, but she perceived soon enough that this was impossible, for she was not a remote English lady, constricted and strait-laced, but a modern product, superior albeit, of a generation and time far advanced and considerably liberated. Still, constraint and sensibility and common sense were the proper words.

  After hours of soul-searching, Teresa broke down her situation and problem satisfactorily. She “had: (a) been married a decade to a gentleman, and had been the best of wives, and would continue to be so considered; (b) she was a female of special endowments, intelligence, wit, and a certain physical attractiveness, and the narrow boundaries of monogamy gave no room for further development and enjoyment of these gifts; (c) she was thirty-six, and had much to offer, and much to share, and much capacity to enjoy, and

  it would be wasteful and an insult to the Divine Creator if she used her best years poorly because of bourgeois guilts that imprisoned so many; (d) she had no sentimental attachment for Ed Krasowski, who represented only a symbol of her goal of full attainment, but she felt that each of them, he and she, deserved more of the miracle of life; (e) she could accomplish true fulfillment of the life force by giving herself to a primitive, for there was an inexpressible Biblical beauty in this, the mating of the best product of civilization, the patrician wife of Hellas, with the barbarian of the north so recently removed from cave and club; (f) rather like Isadora and Essenine; and, finally, (g) her life would be richer, more meaningful, for it, and Geoffrey’s, too.

  Once the situation had been rationalized in an orderly fashion, Teresa was satisfied that she could proceed to the next step. The approach she had prepared absorbed and stimulated her more than any single activity since that occasion, several years back, when she had become engrossed in bonsai, and had spent an entire summer studying the Japanese art of dwarfing trees from its origin in the Ashikaga era to the present. Because she was emancipated beyond her sex-emancipated sufficiently to have been entirely truthful in her Chapman interview, which the other women had not been, she was sure-there was no need, she felt, to practice the degrading ceremonials of coquetry and seduction with Ed Krasowski. He would want to possess her, it was obvious, like the aboriginal that be was, and it would debase nature not to give herself in the same spirit.

  The procedure was as simple as the object visited: go to the beach, wait for him, address him straightforwardly, and, finally, arrange the meeting that would enrich both their lives with added depth and breadth. Of spirit, she hastened to remind herself, breadth of spirit.

  Her gaze picketed the beach, and, from time to time, she squinted out at the foaming whitecaps hurtling and breaking upon the wet sand. The ocean stretched endlessly to Cathay, and once, in their majesty, the lines from Keats climbed above the swelling breakers. “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken;/ Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes/ He star’d at the Pacific-and all his men/ Look’d at each other with a wild surmise-/ Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” In a most casual way, they appeared far to her left, three of •hem, clad in bulky sweat suits, trudging down to the sand from

  the highway slope, and striding along the harder packed sand near the water. Closer, they came and closer, and Teresa’s heart thumped. When they reached their game area, and spread apart until they had formed a triangle, and began tossing the football around, their faces became distinguishable to Teresa. Dismay pressed her heart. Ed Krasowski was not among them.

  Her carefully arranged procedure was a shambles, but she did not panic. So single-minded was she about her necessary goal that she remained composed and imperturbable. She examined and evaluated possible actions. She might simply depart, and continue to return until she found Ed Krasowski present. She might seek out a telephone book and telephone him directly. She might write a note and leave it with his three companions. But none of these methods would immediately solve what was bothering her the most: what had happened to Ed Krasowski? Actually, two of her approaches would answer the question soon enough, but that would not be soon enough for her. She wanted no more daydreaming, no more fitful nights. She must know at once.

  Emboldened by a desire that she had not known she possessed, she rose to her feet. By the direct approach, she was exposing herself to them, but her need surpassed human frailty and false modesty. No rationalization made the task easier. She felt her stiff, bare legs, one before the other, carrying her thro
ugh the sand. She was within a few yards of the nearest of the three. He was squat and chunky, exerting himself with great exhalations, and his ridged back was to her.

  In restaurants, she remembered, when she was still single and dining with women, she had always found it difficult to summon the waiter. Did you snap your fingers? Unladylike. Did you tap fork on glass? Autocratic and European. Did you call “Waiter!” as in “Fidoi”? Or “Mister”? Or clear your throat loudly? The problem had been solved, at last, by marriage. Geoffrey snapped his fingers. But now this athlete, just ahead, unknown to her-here was another waiter. “Oh, Mister,” she called.

  He had gone up into the air to catch the football on his chest. She waited until he had thrown it back. “Mister!” she called loudly.

  He looked over his shoulder, surprised. His hairline and brow were low, and his countenance resembled a pumpkin that someone had sat upon. “You calling me, Ma’am?”

  “Yes, please-“

  He came toward her, puzzled.

  “I had hoped to see your friend here today,” she said quickly. “Mr. Krasowski.”

  “Ed? He’s working.”

  “Regularly? Or will he be back?”

  “He just got the job day before yesterday. Guess he’ll be on it all summer, until we’re back in uniform. Though he’ll have some time off for workouts. But not here. He’s through with the beach.”

  “Do you know where I can … can reach him?”

  “Paradise Park.”

  “Paradise Park?”

  He looked at her as if she were a Martian. “The big amusement park-you know-between Santa Monica and Venice. He’s got one of the booths.”

  “Will he be there tomorrow?”

  “What’s tomorrow-Wednesday? Yeah, sure. And Thursday. Friday and Saturday he’s off, but he’s got to work Sundays.”

  “I really appreciate this. Do you see him at all?”

  “Every night, practically. We got an apartment together not far from here.”

  “I wonder-could you give him a message for me?” “Sure thing.”