Chase

by Dean Koontz

  When he had them well in mind, he said, ‘Thank you. You see, I'm constantly being bothered by reporters who want stories, and I don't care for all the publicity. I think they've said everything about me there is to be said. But I've heard there's a local man working up a series for a national magazine, against my wishes, and I wondered if he'd been here Tuesday as I'd been told.’

  Even he thought the lie sounded utterly absurd, and he had no hope of her believing him, until he realized that he would not have had to offer her any explanation whatsoever. She trusted him. Everyone trusted a hero. She nodded at his fabrication as if it were perfectly logical, and she commiserated - for a few brief moments - on the problems of unwanted publicity he must have to face. Then, conscious of the time she had been wasting, she bent her head to her work and thereby dismissed him.

  When he left the office, he realized that Mrs Klou had never once looked up and had not paused even for a moment in the furious pace she set at the typewriter.

  It was a quarter to twelve when he stepped out of the courthouse, and he was surprisingly hungry. He got his Mustang out of the lot after paying a dollar ransom to the man in the ticket booth, then drove out Galasio Boulevard to the string of drive-in eateries that had sprung up like glass-and-aluminium mushrooms since he had gone away to war. He parked in a slot at the Diamond Dell and ordered more food than he thought he could eat. A cute redhead in tight hotpants brought his food, accepted his money and said she hoped he'd like everything. By a quarter to one he had consumed everything on the tray, more than he had eaten in any three meals during the last year.

  At a nearby gas station, he used the telephone booth directory to find numbers for two of the three people who had browsed through city files on Tuesday, and called them. Both were women, rather elderly, and both did exist. The third name, Howard Devore, was a phony. It did not appear in the telephone book, and when he looked later, was not in the city directory. The man might be from out of town, of course. But Chase didn't think that was the answer. Howard Devore, he felt certain, was an alias that Judge had used.

  Because he did not trust himself to store his knowledge logically and to notice links between bits of diverse data, Chase purchased a small ring-bound notebook and an inexpensive plastic pen, and he carefully listed the following:

  1. Alias-Judge

  2. Alias - Howard Devore

  3. Possible homosexual

  4. No criminal record, prints not on file

  5. Has knowledge of lock-picking, broke into Cauvel's office

  6. Owns a red Volkswagen

  7. Owns a silenced pistol, probably a .32 calibre

  Chase looked over the list when he was finished with it, thought a moment, then added an eighth fact, one which struck him, somehow, as important: ‘8. May be either unemployed, on vacation or on a leave of absence.’ That seemed the only way to explain how he had been able to call Chase at any hour of the day, follow him in the middle of the afternoon and waste two days ‘researching’ Chase's life. He neither sounded nor acted old enough to be retired. Unemployed, then. Or on a vacation. If the former were the case, his field of suspects could be drastically narrowed, though the resultant group would still be quite large. If it were the latter, and if Judge were on vacation, the number of hours a day that Chase was endangered would be reduced in a week or two when Judge was back on the job.

  He closed the notebook and started the car, aware that the last thought had been a dangerous slipping back, wishful thinking that could do nothing more than weaken his resolve.

  The girl who was in charge of the Press-Dispatch morgue room was only two inches under six feet, and nearly six in her low heels, almost as tall as Chase, with yellow hair to the middle of her back, a skirt to the middle of her thighs, and legs that just went on forever. Her name was Glenda Kleaver, and she spoke with an anachronistically small, soft, feminine voice that was yet strangely at home in her fine, big body.

  She demonstrated the use of microfilm viewers to Chase and explained that all editions prior to January 1, 1966, were now stored on film to conserve space. She explained the procedure for ordering the proper spools and for obtaining the mint editions that had not yet been transferred to film.

  Several reporters were sitting at the machines, twisting the control knobs and staring into the viewers, jotting on note pads beside them.

  Chase said, ‘Do you get many outsiders here?’

  The girl smiled at him, and he decided she could not be more than nineteen or twenty, though she had that burnish of life which Louise Allenby lacked. She leaned back against the edge of her desk, crossing her slim legs, fished a cigarette from a pack on the desk and lighted it. She said, ‘I'm trying to quit these things, so don't be surprised if I only hold it and don't smoke it.’ She crossed her arms under her large breasts and said, ‘A newspaper morgue is chiefly for the use of the staff and for the police. But we keep it open to the public without charge. We get maybe a dozen people a week.’

  ‘What are they looking for here?’

  ‘What are you looking for?’ she asked.

  He hesitated only a moment, then gave her the same story he had first given Mrs Onufer at the Metropolitan Bureau of Vital Statistics. He said, ‘I'm gathering facts for a family history.’

  Glenda Kleaver nodded, raised the cigarette to her lips, then put it down without drawing on it. She said, That's what most outsiders come here for. You'd be surprised how many people are tracking down their ancestors with an idea of immortalizing them.’

  There was a distinct note of sarcasm in her voice, and he felt that he had to justify the lie he'd told her. ‘I don't want to immortalize anyone,’ he said. ‘My family history will go unwritten.’

  ‘Just curiosity, then?’ she asked. She picked up her cigarette from the ashtray and held it.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘I haven't the least bit of curiosity about dead relatives. I don't even like the living relatives very much.’

  He laughed. ‘No sense of pride in your name, your lineage?’

  ‘None. It's probably more mutt than thoroughbred, anyway.’ She put her cigarette down now, her slim fingers holding it like a precise surgical instrument.

  Chase would have liked to go on talking about anything but Judge, because he felt terribly at ease with her, more at ease than he had felt in the presence of a woman since . . . Since Jules Verne, the underground operation in Nam. But he recognized his urge to be garrulous as a further evasion of the issue at hand. He said, ‘So I don't have to sign anything to use the files?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have to get everything for you, and you have to return it to me before you leave.’

  He tried to think of some way he could ask her about any outsiders who had used the morgue this past Tuesday, but no convenient cover story came to mind. He could not employ the same device he had used with Mrs Onufer, the tale of the nosy reporter, for he would not find any sympathy with that routine, not here of all places. If he told her the truth or a portion of the truth, she might or might not believe him, and if she did not, he would feel like a prize ass. Oddly enough, though he had only just met her, he did not want to be embarrassed in front of her. In the end, he could say nothing.

  Besides, another ugly possibility had occurred to him. There were two reporters in the room just then, and one of them was quite likely to learn who he was and what he was doing there if he said anything to the girl. He could not escape, then, seeing his picture on the front page and reading all about this latest development in his life. They might treat the story either straight or tongue-in-cheek (probably the latter if they talked to the police and then to Cauvel), but either way it would be an intolerable development.

  ‘Now,’ Glenda said, ‘what would you like to have first?’

  Before he could respond, one of the reporters at the microfilm machines looked up from his work and said, ‘Glenda, could I have all the dailies between May 15, 1952, and September 15 of that same year?’

  ‘
In a moment,’ she said, grinding out her unsmoked cigarette. ‘This gentleman was first.’

  ‘That's okay,’ Chase said, grasping the opportunity. ‘I've got plenty of time.’

  ‘You sure?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah. Get him what he needs.’

  ‘I'll be back in five minutes,’ she said.

  As she walked the length of the small room and through the wide arch into the filing room, both Chase and the reporter watched her. She was tall but not clumsy, moving with a sensuous, feline grace that actually made her seem fragile.

  When she had gone, the reporter said, ‘Thanks for waiting.’

  That's okay.’

  ‘I've got an eleven o'clock deadline on this piece, and I haven't even begun to get my sources together.’ He turned back to his viewer and scanned the last article, so engrossed in his work that he had not, apparently, recognized Chase.

  Chase used the opportunity to leave the room. He had been afraid, before the fortunate interruption, that he was going to have to request materials and waste an hour or more going through them in order to play out the role he had established for himself.

  Back in his Mustang, he opened his notebook and looked at the list, but he had absolutely nothing to add to it, and he could not see any pertinent connections between the familiar eight items. He closed the book, started the car and drove out into the traffic on John F. Kennedy Throughway.

  Fifteen minutes later he was on the four-lane interstate beyond city limits, the speedometer steady at seventy miles an hour, wind whistling at the open windows and rustling through his hair. As he drove, he thought about Glenda Kleaver, and he hardly noticed the miles going by.

  After high school Chase had gone to State because it was just over forty miles from home and, therefore, offered several advantages not to be had at more distant universities. For one thing, his mother was pleased that he could come home more often than at Christmas and spring holidays, though that was only a minor sales point to Chase. He was sold on State because it meant he could still use his father's completely equipped garage for an engine tune-up for his Dodge every month. He had inherited his love of automobiles from his father and would have experienced a deal of anxiety at being long away from proper mechanic facilities. (In the war, when all machines came to mean something totally different to Chase, he lose his enthusiasm for such tinkering.) Also, being so close to home, he could continue to maintain contact with the girls he had dated who were a year or two years behind him in high school. If he should find the girls at State too sophisticated to pay him much mind, he knew there were several still-willing young ladies at home, easily accessible, every weekend if he needed them that often. (In the war, Chase had been bleached of his male chauvinism, though that had been replaced with something far worse - with a complete lack of interest, a boredom so profound that even he was disturbed by it.)

  Now, as he parked before the administration building, he felt like a stranger to the place, as if he had not spent nearly four years of his life in and about these buildings, on these flagstone paths and under the rich canopies of willows and elms. That part of his life had been divorced from this moment by the war, and to recapture the essence of those memories and moods would entail crossing again through the stream of the war to the shores of the past, an act he could not indulge in simply for the sake of sentimentality. He was a stranger to this place, then, and would remain so.

  He found the Student Records Office where it had been for fifty-odd years, and he recognized most of the people who worked there, though he had never known any of their names. This time, when he was approached by the office manager, he decided that the simple truth was the best key to a proper response. He gave his name and sketchily explained his purpose.

  ‘I should have recognized you, but I didn't,’ the manager said. He was a small, pale, nervous man who wore a neatly clipped moustache and an old-fashioned, floppy-collared white dress shirt. He kept picking things up and putting them down to no end. His name was Brown, and he said he was pleased to meet such a distinguished alumnus. ‘But there have been dozens of requests for your files in recent months, ever since the medal was announced. You must have been contacted for a number of excellent jobs.’

  Chase ignored the indirect question. He said, ‘Do you keep names and addresses of people requesting records?’

  ‘Of course!’ Brown said. ‘We only give information to businessmen.’

  ‘Fine,’ Chase said. ‘Then I'm looking for the man who came in on a Tuesday, this past Tuesday.’

  ‘Just a moment,’ Brown said. He fetched a ledger and brought it to the counter, put it down, then picked it up again and thumbed through it. ‘There was just one gentleman,’ he said.

  ‘Who was he?’

  Brown showed Chase the address as he read it. ‘Eric Blentz, Gateway Mall Tavern. It's in the city.’

  ‘I know where it's at,’ Chase said.

  ‘Has he offered you a position?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I thought you said he was bothering you,’ Brown said. He picked up a fountain pen lying on the counter, twisted it in his fingers and put it down again.

  ‘He is, but not to take a job with him.’

  Brown looked at the ledger, still not comprehending that anyone would use privileged information for anything but what it was meant for. ‘If I were you, Mr Chase, I wouldn't accept anything he offered, no matter what the salary.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I don't believe he'd be a pleasant man to work for.’

  ‘You remember him, then?’

  Brown lifted the pen again, replaced it. ‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘We do most of our work by mail. It isn't often that a prospective employer comes here for a report.’

  ‘Do you remember what Blentz looked like?’

  ‘Certainly,’ Brown said. ‘Nearly your height, though not robust at all, very thin, in fact, and with a stoop to his shoulders.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Thirty-eight, thirty-nine?’

  ‘His face? Do you remember that?’

  ‘Very ascetic features,’ Brown said. ‘Very quick eyes. He kept looking from one of my girls to the other, then at me, as if he didn't trust us. His cheeks were rather drawn, and he had an unhealthy complexion. A large but not Mediterranean nose, a thin nose, in fact, so thin that the nostrils were like extended ovals.’

  ‘Brown hair?’

  ‘Blond,’ the manager said.

  ‘You said he wouldn't be very pleasant to work for. Why do you think that?’

  Brown said, ‘He was quite sharp with me, and he didn't look like he could be pleasant if he tried. He was always scowling. He was dressed very neatly, with a high polish to his shoes. I don't think there was a hair out of place on his head, as if he used spray or something. And when I asked for his name and business address, he took the pen out of my hand, turned the ledger around and wrote it down because, as he said, everyone always spelled his name wrong, and he wanted it right this time.’

  ‘A perfectionist?’

  ‘He seemed to be.’

  Chase said, ‘How is it that you remember him in such detail?’

  Brown smiled and picked up the pen, put it down, toyed with the ledger for a moment. He said, ‘Evenings and weekends, and especially during the summer, my wife and I run The Footlight, a legitimate theatre in town. I take a role in most of our productions, and I'm always studying people to build a reference of expressions and mannerisms.’

  ‘You must be very good onstage, by now,’ Chase said.

  Brown blushed slightly. ‘Not particularly,’ he admitted. ‘But that kind of thing gets in your blood. We don't make much money on the theatre, but as long as it breaks even, I can indulge myself a little.’

  On his way back to his car, Chase tried to picture Brown on the stage, before an audience, his hands trembling, his face paler than ever, his urge to handle things amplified by the circumstances . . . He thought he knew the chief reason The Footlight didn't show
much profit.

  In the car, Chase opened his notebook and looked over the list of facts, trying to find something that supported the possibility that Judge was Eric Blentz, the saloon owner. To the contrary, he found several things that appeared to conflict. First of all, didn't a man who owned a liquor licence have to be finger-printed as a matter of course? And a man who owned a thriving business like the Gateway Mall Tavern would hardly be driving a Volkswagen. Of course, he could be all wrong about the first thing. And perhaps the VW was Blentz's second car, or even a rented model.

  There was one way to find out for sure. He started the car and drove back toward the city, wondering what sort of reception he would get at the Gateway Mall Tavern. . .

  Eight

  The tavern was a jaded reproduction of a German inn, with low, beamed ceilings and white plaster walls X-ed across with dark wooden supports. The six large windows which faced onto the mall promenade were leaded glass the colour of burgundy and only slightly translucent. Around the walls were large, darkly upholstered booths, some designed for a couple by themselves and some for four patrons. Chase took a seat in one of the smaller booths toward the rear of the place and sat facing the bar and the front entrance.

  A cheerful, apple-cheeked blonde in a short brown skirt and low-cut white peasant blouse, breasts like overinflated balloons peeking over the lace top, came over and lighted the lantern on his table, then took his order for a whisky sour and departed, swinging her plump little ass in a most unmaidenly manner.

  The bar was not especially busy at six o'clock, since it was priced more for the supper-hour crowd; only seven other patrons shared the place, three couples and a lone woman who sat at the bar. None of the young men fit the description Brown had given Chase, and he disregarded them. The bartender was the only other man in the place, aging and bald, with a pot of a stomach, but quick and expert with the bottles and obviously a favourite with the barmaids.