by Dean Koontz
‘What's that?’
‘You asked me if he was wearing a ring, and I said he was. But I forgot to say how he was wearing it.’
Chase leaned away from the back of the couch, eager for anything, no matter how unimportant it seemed at the moment. ‘I don't understand what you mean,’ he said.
‘It was a pinkie ring,’ she said.
‘A what?’
She wiggled the smallest finger on her free hand. ‘A pinkie ring, for your pinkie, your littlest finger. Haven't you ever seen one?’
‘Of course,’ he admitted. ‘But I really don't understand where it tells us anything new or important.’
‘Well,’ she said, making a face that seemed divorced from any possible human emotion, ‘I've only seen them on girls - or on fairies.’
He considered that for a moment and decided that they might be onto something after all. ‘Then you think the killer might be a - homosexual?’
‘I don't know,’ she said. ‘But it was a pinkie ring.’
‘Did you tell Wallace about this?’
‘I just now thought of it. You loosened me up, and it just came back to me in a flash.’
He liked that. He could not think of anything more personally gratifying than slowly establishing a body of information about Judge - working outward from this first essential bit of data - and then presenting it to the police with just the proper note of disdain after they had written him off as a borderline mental case with complex delusions. If that was childish, so be it. A long time had passed since he had indulged himself in anything childish.
‘It may be a help,’ he said.
She slid next to him with all the oiled smoothness of a machine made especially for seduction, all soft lines and golden tan. ‘Do you think so, Mr Chase?’
He nodded, trying to decide how best to excuse himself without hurting her feelings. He could feel her thigh pressuring his.
She put her drink down and looked at him sideways, though she made certain that he saw her glance.
He stood up abruptly and said, ‘I ought to be going. This has given me something concrete to consider, more than I had hoped for.’ That was only a small lie, since he'd really not expected anything.
She stood up too, very close to him. ‘Oh, it's early,’ she said. ‘I wish you'd stay and keep me company.’
Close to her, he could smell the combination of womanly scents - perfume, soap, freshly washed hair, the hint of sex - that usually intrigued a man, but he was not the least bit intrigued. Aroused, yes. Amazingly aroused over a woman for the first time in many months. But arousal was something separate from intrigue. Though she was lithe and quite lovely, he could not seem to want her to any extent further than his erection, never a particularly reliable device for measuring the quality of any relationship between a man and a woman.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I've other people to see.’
‘At this hour?’
‘One or two other people,’ he insisted, aware that he was losing the initiative.
She moved against him, leaned up and licked his lips. No kiss. Just the maddeningly quick flicking of her pink tongue.
Then he knew why he couldn't let his erection guide him. Though Louise looked like a woman and proceeded like a woman, she was something far less. Not a child, surely, and not a girl. But she lacked a roughened surface, the burnish of contact with life and the problems of life. She had always been protected, and the result was a sensuous polish that would take them both the whole way in one sleek, gliding explosion of sensation - but leave him feeling hollow and bitter afterward. What on earth would they talk about once he had fucked her?
‘We've got the house for several hours yet,’ she said. ‘We don't even have to use the couch. I've got a great big white bed with a white canopy and gold-ringed posts.’
I can't,’ he said. ‘I really can't, because these people are waiting for me.’
She was enough of a woman to know when she had lost a point. She stepped back and smiled at him. ‘But I do want to thank you. For saving my life. That's something that deserves a big reward.’
‘You don't owe me anything,’ he said.
‘I do. Some other night, when you don't have plans?’
Because there was nothing to be gained from angering her, and because he might require her cooperation later, he leaned to her and kissed her on the lips. He said, ‘Definitely some other night.’
That's fine,’ she said. ‘I know we'll be good together.’
All polish, fast and easy, no jagged edges to get hung up on. Chase wondered if, afterward, her lovers could remember whom they'd been inside of.
He said, ‘If Detective Wallace questions you again, do you think you could sort of - forget about the ring?’
She said that she could. ‘But why are you carrying on with this on your own? I never did ask.’
‘Personal,’ he said. ‘For personal reasons.’
At home again, he thought about what he had learned, and he was no longer sure that it was at all important. The fact that Judge wore a pinkie ring was not conclusive proof of any sexual aberration - just as long hair was no proof of revolutionary tendencies and violent desires, as a skimpy miniskirt in no way indicated that the girl wearing it was available because she showed a lot of leg. And even if Judge were a homosexual, his hang-up did not make him particularly more easy to find. Of course, there were places in the city where the gay crowd congregated, and Chase knew most of them, if they had not gone out of fashion. But there were bound to be hundreds at such watering spots - with no guarantee that Judge would be found frequenting such places. As with every sexual minority in America, there were ten closet queens for every liberated man who stepped forward to be counted.
He undressed, feeling gloomy again, and got a glass from the cupboard. He carried it to the refrigerator and put two ice cubes in it, but when he picked up the whisky bottle, he realized he did not need another drink to get to sleep. He crawled beneath the covers, bone-weary, leaving the ice to melt, reached over and turned out the bedside lamp. The darkness was heavy and warm and, for the first time in longer than he could remember, comforting.
Alone now, on the edge of sleep, he began to wonder if he had been a fool not to respond to Louise Allenby's blatant sexual offerings. He had been months without a woman and without a desire for one. She had been game and, in the physical department anyway, she would most likely have been perfect, sure and thrilling in her movements. Why had he thought there must be more than a swift coupling, an orgasm?
Had he retreated from the prospect because he feared it would draw him even further into the world, further away from his precious routines than ever? A relationship with a woman, no matter how transitory, would definitely be an admission of one more breakdown in his carefully mortared walls.
He turned and burrowed into the pillow, for he did not want to think about that any longer. However, he had no choice; the thoughts came unbidden. And, shortly, he had a realization whose import he could not immediately assess, not even to the extent of assigning it a positive or negative value. He had rejected Louise Allenby to preserve his sexual routine - but had immediately afterward broken an equally important ritual that was an integral part of his hermit's existence, his penitence: he had foregone his glass of whisky.
Seven
For a split second when he woke the following morning, he thought he was suffering from the grandfather of all hangovers, and then he realized it was only the aftereffect of the falls he had taken Thursday evening. Each contusion and laceration seemed to have swelled and grown darker, filled up with pain so pure that he felt he ought to be able to squeeze it out in a steady stream of liquid the colour of, say, fine brandy. His eyes felt sunken and served as twin focuses for a headache that ranged all over his scalp. When he sat up and tried to get out of bed, his muscles protested like rusted bands of steel working against each other without benefit of lubrication.
He felt so bad, in fact, that he was not even frightened by t
he usual array of nightmares, dismissing them in order to pay more elaborate attention to the ache that was everywhere in him.
In the bathroom, his hands gripping the sink as he leaned toward the spotted mirror, he saw that his face was drawn and much paler than it should have been, dark rings nesting under his eyes. His chest and back were dotted with bruises, most of them about as large as a thumbprint and painful out of all proportion to their size.
He convinced himself that a hot bath would soothe him, but he found it only made things worse. Back in the main room, he began to walk and to swing his arms, biting down on the pain as if he might be able to kill it if he didn't give voice to it. He forced himself through a dozen push-ups and countless deep-knee bends until he was dizzy and felt as if he might faint. Where the bath had failed, the exercises helped, though only to a minute degree. He knew the only cure was activity, and he dressed to begin the day.
In the light of the day, with his pain about him like a cloak, he thought his plan was stupid and doomed to failure from the moment of conception, but he also knew that he could not yet stop his investigation. He was still driven by a combination of fear and the desire to prove himself to Cauvel, Wallace and the rest of them. Until one or the other of those motivations disappeared, the mix was an effective spur to keep him going. Taking each step like an octogenarian, he went downstairs.
‘Mail for you,’ Mrs Fiedling said, slapping her mules as she shuffled out from the living room. She picked up a plain brown envelope from the pine table in the hall and handed it to him. She said, ‘As you can see, there isn't any return address.’
‘Probably advertisements,’ Chase said. He took a step toward the front door, hoping that she would not notice his stiffness and inquire about his health.
He need not have worried, for she was more interested in the contents of the envelope than in him. ‘It can't be ads in a plain envelope. The only things that come in plain envelopes without return addresses are wedding invitations - of which that doesn't look like one - and dirty literature.’ She looked at him and said, ‘I won't tolerate dirty literature in my house.’
‘And I don't blame you,’ Chase said.
Then it isn't?’
‘No,’ he said, slitting it open with his finger and withdrawing the Xeroxed psychiatric file and journal articles. ‘A friend of mine who knows my interest in psychology and psychiatry sends me interesting articles on the subject when he find them.’
‘Oh,’ Mrs Fiedling said, obviously surprised that Chase harboured such intellectual and hitherto unknown interests. ‘Well, I hope I didn't embarrass you, but I couldn't tolerate having pornography in my home.’
Chase only barely refrained from commenting on her unbuttoned dress. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to be going.’
‘Job interview?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Then I won't be the one to hold you up!’
He went out to his car and sank into the bucket seat behind the wheel, taking a moment to draw several deep breaths of fresh air. He started the car and drove far enough down the street to be out of sight of the house, kerbed, let the engine idle as he examined the Xeroxed pages which Judge had sent him.
If he had hoped to find something in these papers to further convince him that his present attitudes were foolish and that he should go back to his room and forget the private investigation he had begun, he was disappointed. Instead, Cauvel's records engendered even a greater stubbornness, a more fierce anger and a stronger desire to prove himself. The pages of handwritten notes that had been made during their sessions were so difficult to read that he passed over them for the time being, but he studied the three published and two as yet unpublished articles that concerned him. In all of them, Cauvel's high self-esteem was evident, and his egotism had subtly distorted everything which he had reported to his colleagues. Though he never used Chase's real name, Chase knew himself in the articles - but as if he were looking at himself and the history of his mental condition through a curiously distorting glass. Every annoying symptom he suffered had been exaggerated to make their eventual amelioration seem more of an achievement on Cauvel's part. All the clumsy probes that Cauvel had initiated went unmentioned while he claimed credit for techniques he had never employed but had apparently developed through hindsight. And when Cauvel referred to him, it was with an unfair summation of the man-boy he had been before Nam, with a disdain completely unjustified. It was this, in the end, that brought Chase's growing irritation to a burst of anger: he jammed the sheets back into the envelope, put the Mustang in gear and drove away from there, more intent on amassing a body of information about Judge than he had ever been.
The Metropolitan Bureau of Vital Statistics, in the basement of the courthouse, was a model of efficiency. The office itself, fronting the long, well-lighted data storage vaults, was small and neat, containing four filing cabinets, three typewriters, a copying machine, a long worktable, a tiny refrigerator-hotplate combination, two huge square desks with matching, sturdy chairs - and two equally study elderly women who banged away at their typewriters with a rhythmic swiftness that seemed almost arranged and conducted. The only open space was a railed foyer inside the door and aisles that led directly from each desk to each piece of essential equipment. Chase stood in the foyer and cleared his throat, though he was sure they had both seen him come in. The stoutest of the two women typed to the end of the page, pulled the form out of the carriage and placed it neatly in a box full of similar forms. She looked up at Chase then, and she smiled. It was an efficient smile, showing just enough teeth and turning up just far enough at the corners to be identifiable in any catalogue of human expressions. When she had held it a second or two, long enough to convey a minimum of professional courtesy and friendliness, she let it go. Her lips settled into a straight line which was neither smile nor frown but which, Chase supposed, saved a good deal of energy and kept her face as relatively free of age lines as it was.
She said, ‘May I help you?’
He had already decided on the tack that Judge most likely had used when he had come here researching Chase's life. He said, ‘I'm doing a family history, and I was wondering if I could be permitted to look up a few things in the city records.’
‘Certainly,’ the stout woman said, rising from her seat in one quick movement. The name on her deskplate was MRS ONUFER; her workmate, MRS KLOU, had not even looked up but was still battling away at her keyboard.
Mrs Onufer came around her desk, passed the gate in the railing and motioned him to follow her. She led him to the rear of the room, through a fire door and into a large concrete-walled chamber that was ringed with filing cabinets and lined with others in ten neat parallel rows in the middle of the floor. There was a worktable with three chairs at it, the table scarred and the chairs all unpadded.
‘You'll see stickers on the cabinets that tell you what's inside - that section to the right is birth certificates, the one further down being bar and restaurant licences, then health department records. Against the far wall are the selective service carbons which we keep for a nominal yearly rental, beside those are the minutes and budets of City Council going back thirty-seven years. You get the idea. Each drawer is labelled according to one of two filing systems, depending on the nature of the material, either alphabetically or by date. Whatever you remove from the files must be left on this table to be returned to its proper place later. Do not attempt to replace what you pull from the files; that is my job, and I do it far more accurately than you would.’ Here she flashed a quick, economical smile. ‘You may not take anything from this room. For a nominal fee, Mrs Klou will provide copies of whatever documents interest you. If anything should be removed from this room, you will be subjected to a possible fine of five thousand dollars and two years in prison.’
‘Thank you for your help,’ Chase said.
‘And no smoking,’ she said.
‘Of course not.’
She turned and w
alked out of the room, closing the door behind her, her tapping heels swiftly fading until he could hear nothing but his own lungs drawing in breath after breath.
It had been that simple for Judge. Chase had hoped, irrationally, that there was some procedure whereby those who used these files were identified. Now he saw that Mrs Onufer would not be bothered with such a time-consuming routine, for she could be more than certain that no one would slip by her with stolen papers under his coat. She would notice the look of guilt as swiftly as a nasty dog notices fear in the face of a potential opponent.
He looked up his own birth certificate, found the minutes of the council meeting in which the city fathers had voted an award in his honour. In the carbons of the selective service records, he found the pertinent facts concerning his own eligibility history, with only the confidential correspondence removed. When he felt he had passed enough time to keep from arousing Mrs Onufer's suspicions, he left the storage vaults.
‘Find what you were looking for?’ Mrs Onufer asked.
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘No trouble, Mr Chase,’ she said, turning back to her work.
That stopped him. He said, ‘You know me?’
She looked up, flashed a smile just a fraction of a second longer than her business smile and said, ‘I read the papers every evening.’
Instead of walking to the door, he crossed to her desk. ‘If you had not known me,’ he said, ‘would you have asked for a name before I went in there to root around?’
‘Why, of course,’ she said. ‘No one has ever taken any records in the twelve years I've been here, but I still see the need for some safety check.’
‘And you keep a list?’
She tapped a notebook on the edge of her desk. ‘I just put your name down, out of habit.’
He said, ‘This may sound like an odd request, but could you tell me who was here this past Tuesday?’
She looked at him, looked at the book, reached a quick decision. ‘I don't see why I should hesitate,’ she said. ‘There's nothing confidential in the list.’ She opened it, thumbed through several pages, then said, ‘Only three people all day.’ She showed him the names.