by Dean Koontz
Once he began, Chase found the telling easy. In ten minutes he had related the events of the previous day and repeated, almost word for word, the conversations he had with Judge.
When he had finished, Cauvel asked, ‘What do you want of me, then?’
‘I want to know how to handle it, some advice. When he calls, it's more than just the threats that upset me. It's - a feeling of detachment from everything, like I was in the hospital.’
‘Another breakdown?’
‘I'm afraid there might be.’
Cauvel said, ‘My advice is to ignore him.’
‘I can't.’
‘You must,’ Cauvel said.
‘What if he's serious? What if he's really going to kill me?’
‘He won't.’
‘How can you be sure?’ Chase was perspiring heavily. Great dark circles stained the underarms of his shirt and plastered it to his back.
Cauvel smiled at the blue terrier, shifted his gaze to a greyhound blown in amber, that smug, self-assured look drifting over his face like a mask. ‘I can be so sure of that, because Judge does not exist.’
For a moment Chase did not understand the reply. When he grasped the import of it, he did not like it. He said, ‘How could I have hallucinated it? The part about the murder and the girl are in the papers.’
‘Oh, that was real enough,’ Cauvel said. ‘But these phone calls are all so much illusion.’
‘It can't be.’
Cauvel ignored that and said, ‘I've noticed for some time that you have begun to shake off this unnatural desire for privacy and that you're facing the world a little bit more squarely on, week by week. You've felt yourself growing curious about the rest of the world, and you've become restless to do something. Is that correct?’
‘I don't know,’ Chase said. But he did know, it was correct, and it bothered him that it was so.
‘Perhaps you even felt a renewal of your sexual urge, but perhaps not that much yet. A counter-reaction of guilt set in, because you had not yet been punished for the things that happened in that tunnel, and you didn't want to lead a normal life until you felt you'd suffered enough.’
Chase said nothing. He disliked the tone of smug complacency, of unquestioned self-assurance that Cauvel adopted for moments like this. Right now all he wanted was out of there, to get home and close the door and open the bottle. A new bottle.
Cauvel said, ‘You couldn't accept the fact that you wanted to taste the good things of life again, and you invented Judge because he represented the remaining possibility of punishment. You had to make some excuses for being forced into life again, and Judge worked well in this respect too. You would, sooner or later, have to take the initiative to stop him. You could pretend that you still wanted seclusion in which to mourn but were no longer being permitted that indulgence.’
‘All wrong,’ Chase said, ‘Judge is real.’
‘I think not.’ Cauvel smiled at the amber greyhound and said, ‘If you thought he was real, why not go to the police rather than your psychiatrist?’
Chase had no answer. He said, ‘You're twisting things.’
‘No. Just showing you the straight truth.’ He stood up, stretched, his too-long trousers rising on his unpolished shoes, falling when he finished his yawn. ‘I recommend you go home and forget Judge. You don't need an excuse to live like a normal human being. You have suffered enough, Ben, more than enough. For the lives you took, you saved others. Remember that.’
Chase stood, bewildered, no longer perfectly sure that he did know what was real and what was not. Cauvel put his arm around his shoulder and walked him to the door.
‘Friday at three,’ the doctor said. ‘Let's see how far out of your hole you've come by then. I think you're going to make it, Ben. Don't despair.’
Miss Pringle escorted him to the outer door of the waiting room and closed it after him, leaving him alone in the hallway.
‘Judge is real,’ Chase said to no one at all. ‘Isn't he?’
Four
Chase was sitting on the edge of his bed by the nightstand where the telephone stood, sipping at his second glass of Jack Daniel's, when six o'clock rolled around. He put the drink down and wiped his sweaty hands on his slacks, cleared his throat so that his voice would not catch when he tried to speak.
At 6:05 he began to feel uneasy. He thought of going downstairs to ask Mrs Fiedling what time her clocks read, in the event that his own was not functioning properly. He refrained from that only because he was afraid of missing the call if it should come while he was down there.
At 6:15 he picked up his drink again and sipped at it steadily, watching the phone as if it might try to move. His hands were damp again; beads of perspiration had appeared on his forehead.
At 6:30 he went to the cupboard, took down his whisky bottle of the day - which had barely been touched - and poured his third glass. He did not put it away again, but left it out on the waist-high cupboard counter where he could easily reach it. He read the label, which he had studied a hundred times before, then carried his drink back to the bed.
By seven o'clock he was feeling all the liquor in him. Everything had become softened, his movements lethargic. He settled back against the headboard and finally faced the truth: Cauvel had been correct. There was no Judge. Judge had been an illusion, a psychological mechanism for rationalization of his slowly lessening guilt complex. He tried to think about that, to study the meaning of it, but he could not be sure if this was a good or a bad development.
In the bathroom, he drew a tub of warm water and tested it with his hand until it was just right. He folded a damp washcloth over the wide porcelain rim of the tub and placed his drink on that, stripped, stepped into the tub and settled down until, seated, the water came partway up his chest. It was very nice, comforting. The whisky and the water and the steam rising around him had all conspired to make him feel as if he were floating, falling up into a stream of soft clouds. He leaned back until his head touched the wall, closed his eyes and tried not to think about anything -especially about Judge and the Medal of Honor and the nine months he had spent on active duty in Nam.
Unfortunately, he began to think of Louise Allenby, the girl whose life he had saved, and his mind was filled with a vision of her small, trembling, bare breasts which had looked so inviting in the weak light of the car in lover's lane. The thought, though pleasant enough, was unfortunate because it contributed to his first erection in nearly a year. That development, while desirable, was both startling and familiar enough to make him recall all the barren months when he had harboured no desire. It also brought back the reasons for his previous inability to function as a man, and those reasons were still so huge and formidable that he could not face them alone. The erection was short-lived, and when it was gone altogether, he could not be certain if it indicated an end to his psychological impotency or whether it had stemmed only from the warm water, a reaction of dumb nerves rather than sensitive emotions.
He only got out of the water when there was no more whisky in his glass, and he was drying himself when the telephone rang.
The electric clock read 8:00.
Naked, he sat down and picked up the phone.
‘Sorry I'm late,’ Judge said.
Dr Cauvel had been wrong.
‘I thought you weren't going to call,’ Chase said.
‘Would I let you down?’ Judge asked, mock hurt in his tone. ‘It was just that I required a little more time to locate some information on you.’
‘What information?’
Judge ignored the question, intent on proceeding in his own fashion. ‘So you see a psychiatrist once a week, do you? That alone is fairly good proof that the accusation I made yesterday is true - that your disability pension is for mental injuries, not physical ones.’
Chase wished that he had a drink with him, but he could not ask Judge to hold on while he poured himself one. For some reason he could not explain, he did not want Judge to know that he drank heavily.
‘Followed you this afternoon,’ Judge said.
‘You don't have the right to -’
Judge laughed. He said, ‘I saw you going into the Kaine Building, and I got into the lobby fast enough to see what elevator you took and which floor you got off at. On the eighth floor, besides Dr Cauvel's offices, there are two dentists, three insurance companies and a tax collection office. It was simple enough to look in the waiting rooms of those other places or to inquire after you, like a friend, with the secretaries and receptionists. I left the head doctor's place for last, because I just knew that's where you were. When no one knew of you in the other offices, I didn't even have to risk looking in Cauvel's waiting room. I knew.’
Chase said, ‘So what?’
He hoped that he sounded more nonchalant than he felt, for it was somehow important to make the right impression on Judge. He was sweating again. He would need to take another bath by the time this conversation was concluded. And he would need a drink, a cold drink.
‘Let me tell you why I was late calling,’ Judge said.
‘Go on.’
‘As soon as I knew for sure you were in the psychiatrist's office, I was aware of the necessity to obtain copies of his personal files on you. I decided to remain in the building, out of sight, until all the offices were closed and the employees had gone home.’
‘I don't believe you,’ Chase said, aware of what was coming, dreading to hear it.
‘You don't want to believe me, but you do. Now let me explain how it was.’ Judge took a long, slow breath before he continued: ‘The eighth floor was clear by six o'clock. By six-thirty I managed to get the door open into Dr Cauvel's suite. I know a little about such things, and I was careful; I did not damage the lock, and I didn't trip any alarms because there were none. I required an additional half an hour to locate his files and to secure your records, which I copied on his own photocopier.’
‘Breaking and entering - then theft,’ Chase said.
‘But it hardly matters on top of what the authorities would consider murder, does it?’
Chase had no reply.
‘You'll receive in the mail, probably the day after tomorrow, complete copies of Dr Cauvel's notes on you, along with copies of several articles he had written for various medical journals. You're mentioned in all these and are, in some of them, the sole subject of discussion.’
Chase said, ‘I didn't know he'd done that.’
They're interesting articles, Chase. They'll give you some idea of what he thinks of you.’ Judge's tone changed then, became far more haughty and was touched with contempt. ‘Reading those records, Chase, I found more than enough to permit me to pass judgment on you.’
‘Oh?’
‘I read all about how you got your Medal of Honor.’
Chase waited.
‘And I read about the tunnels and what you did in those - and how you helped Lieutenant Zacharia to cover the evidence and falsify the eventual report. Do you think the Congress would have voted you the Medal of Honor if they had known you killed civilians, Chase?’
‘Stop it.’
‘You killed women, didn't you?’
‘I said stop it.’
‘You killed women and children, Chase, noncombatants.’
‘You son of a bitch.’
‘Children, Chase. You killed children. What kind of animal are you, Chase?’
‘Shut up!’ Chase had come to his feet as if something had exploded close behind him. ‘What would you know about it? Were you ever over there, did you ever have to serve in that stinking country?’
‘Some patriotic paean to duty won't change my mind, Chase. We all love this country, but most of us realize there are limits to -’
‘Bullshit,’ Chase said.
He could not remember having been this angry in all the time since his breakdown. Now and then he had been irritated by something or someone, but never driven to the extremes of emotion.
‘Chase -’
‘I bet you were all for the war. I'll bet you're one of the hawks that made it possible for me to be there in the first place. It's easy to set standards of performance, select limits of right and wrong, when you never get closer than ten thousand miles to the place where it's all coming down!’
Judge attempted to comment but could not break in.
Chase said, ‘I didn't even want to be there. I didn't believe in it, and I was scared shitless the whole time. Mostly, all I thought about was staying alive. In that tunnel, I couldn't think of anything else. I wasn't me. I was a textbook case of paranoia. And now, dammit, I won't let you or anyone else blame me for what a textbook example did!’
‘You do feel guilty, though,’ Judge observed.
That doesn't matter.’
‘I think it does.’
‘It doesn't matter, because no matter how guilty I feel you haven't the right to pass judgment on me. You're sitting there with your little list of commandments, but you've never been anywhere that made a list seem pointless, anywhere that the environment forced you into reacting in a manner you loathed.’ Chase found, amazingly, that he was crying. He had not cried in a long time.
‘You're rationalizing,’ Judge began, trying to regain control of the conversation.
Chase would not permit that. He said, ‘And remember that you've not followed that commandment yourself. You killed that boy, that Michael Karnes.’
‘There was a difference,’ Judge said. Some of the hoarseness had returned to his voice.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes,’ Judge said, on the defensive now. ‘I studied his situation carefully, collected evidence against him, and only then passed judgment. You didn't do any of that, Chase. You killed perfect strangers, and you very likely murdered innocents who had no black marks on their souls.’
Chase slammed the phone down.
When it rang at four different times during the following hour, he was able to ignore it completely. His anger remained sharp, the strongest emotion he had experienced in long months of near-catatonia.
He drank three more glasses of whisky before he began to feel a bit mellow again. His anger had burned up all traces of the drunkenness which his first few drinks had brought. The tremors slowly stilled in his hands.
At ten o'clock he dialled the number of the police headquarters and asked for Detective Wallace, who at that moment was out. He dressed, drank another glass of Jack Daniel's and tried again at 10:40. This time Wallace was in and willing to speak to him.
‘Nothing's going as well as we hoped,’ Wallace said. ‘He doesn't seem to have been printed. At least, the prints on that knife don't match up with anything in federal or state files.’
‘They could have checked the files this quickly?’
‘Yeah,’ Wallace said. ‘They have computers that scan and compare much faster than a team of investigators could - something like the computers that read handwriting and sort mail at post offices.’
‘What about the ring?’
‘Turns out to be a cheap accessory that sells at under fifteen bucks retail in about every store in the state. Impossible to keep track of where and when and to whom a certain ring might be sold.’
Chase committed himself reluctantly. ‘Then I have something for you,’ he said. In a few short sentences he told the detective about Judge's calls.
Wallace was plainly angry, though he made an effort not to shout. ‘Why in the hell didn't you let us know about his before?’
‘I thought, with the prints, you'd be sure to get him.’
‘Prints hardly ever make a difference in a situation like this,’ Wallace said. There was still a bite in his voice, though it was muted now. He had evidently taken a moment to consider the stature of his informant.
‘Besides,’ Chase said, ‘the killer realized the chance of the line being tapped. He's been calling from pay phones and keeping the calls under five minutes.’
Wallace said, ‘Just the same, I'd
like to hear him. I'll be over with a man in fifteen minutes.’
‘Just one man?’
Wallace said, ‘We'll try not to upset your routine too much.’
Chase almost laughed at that. He said, ‘I'll be waiting.’
The man who came with Wallace was introduced as James Tuppinger, and he was not said to have any rank with the police department, though Chase figured him as Wallace's equal. He was six inches taller than the detective and not so grey and ordinary-looking. He wore his blond hair in such a short crew cut that he appeared almost bald from a distance. His eyes were blue and moved from object to object with the swift, penetrating glance of an accountant itemizing an inventory. He carried a large suitcase in his right hand and didn't put it down when he offered Chase his left.
Mrs Fiedling watched from the living room, where she pretended to be engrossed in a television programme, but she did not come out to see what was going on. Chase got the two of them upstairs before she could learn who they were.
‘Cozy little place you have,’ Wallace said.
‘It's enough for me,’ Chase said.
Tuppinger's eyes flicked about, catching the unmade bed, the couple of dirty whisky glasses on the cupboard, the bottle of liquor which was nearly half empty. He did not say anything. He took his suitcase full of tools to the phone, put it down, and began examining the lead-in wires that came through the wall near the base of the single window.
While Tuppinger worked, Wallace questioned Chase. ‘What did he sound like on the phone?’
‘Hard to say.’
‘Old? Young?’
‘In between.’
‘Accent?’
‘No.’
‘Speech impediment?’
‘No,’ Chase said. ‘At first, though, he was hoarse -apparently from the strangling I gave him.’