by Dean Koontz
Chase wrapped the grenade in the chamois waxing cloth that had come with the car and tucked it into the glove compartment, which he locked.
He got out of the car, unwound the wire from the window knob and pushed that under the seat, closed the door and walked to the steps. ‘It's all done.’
‘Where's the dynamite?’ she asked.
‘No dynamite, just a hand grenade. I wrapped it and locked it in the glove compartment.’
She looked ill, the colour gone from her face. ‘Is that safe?’
‘Perfectly safe. It can't go off unless someone yanks the pin loose.’
‘Where could he have gotten a hand grenade?’
‘I don't know,’ Chase said. ‘I guess there are a number of ways. I intend to find out some day.’
‘What do we do now?’ she asked.
‘We go see Louise Allenby, like we planned. Now it seems even more urgent to track down that bastard.’
In the car, as he started the engine, she said, ‘I must congratulate you on your good nerves. This hardly seems to have upset you at all.’
‘It did, though,’ he said. ‘I don't think I've ever been so upset in my life.’ He knew he had to conserve himself for hate, hate directed toward Judge, hate that would benefit him if he nurtured it.
Louise Allenby answered the door wearing the tops of blue-flowered pyjamas that barely covered her below the curve of her ass, and she had a very slick come-hither look for him. She said, ‘I knew you'd be back to get the reward -’ Then she saw Glenda and said, ‘Oh!’
‘May we come in?’ Chase said.
She stepped back, confused, closed the door after them.
Chase introduced Glenda as a close friend, though he felt that Louise saw instantly past the description. Her face soured into a pout that was not at all the woman but completely the child she was.
She said, ‘Will you have a drink this time?’
‘No,’ Chase said. ‘We've only got a couple of questions, and we'll be going.’
I'm drinking tonight,’ she said. She flounced across the room and made herself something Chase could not identify. She stood with her right hip cocked so that the pyjama tops pulled up slightly on her round, firm buttocks, soft and white against the tan of her legs. When she came back, she sat down in such a fashion that for a brief moment it was all there and visible and pretty, then swung one leg over the other and shut down the best part of the show. ‘What are your questions?’
Chase felt uncomfortable, but he could tell that Glenda was enjoying his embarrassment and the girl's anger. She sat on one of the stiff chairs, looking exceedingly delicious, her own legs crossed and much more fetching than Louise's legs for all the younger girl's nakedness.
Chase said, ‘You said you'd gone with Mike for a year before - before he was murdered.’
That's about right,’ she said. She looked at Glenda, looked down at her legs, frowned just the slightest, then returned her gaze to Chase and never took it from him until he got up to leave. ‘What about it?’
‘In that time, did you ever notice anyone following you - as if they were keeping a watch on you?’
‘Recently? No.’
‘Not just recently,’ he said. ‘Even weeks ago, or months ago.’
She hesitated, sipped her drink and said, ‘The beginning of the year, about February and March, there was something like that.’
Chase felt his throat catch, and he did not want to speak for fear that it would all prove to be nothing and would put them right back where they had been when they walked in the door. At last he said, ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, when Mike first said he was following us, I j ust laughed, you know?’ She frowned, remembering how she had laughed and wondering now if she had not been all wrong. ‘The idea was silly, right out of a movie. Mike was like that, too, always off on one fantasy or another. He was going to be a painter, did you know? At first he was going to work in a garret and become famous. Then he was going to be a paperback-book illustrator and then a very famous industrial designer. He never could decide - but he knew whatever it was he would be famous and rich. A dreamer.’ She shook her head, so wise with hindsight, knowing that dreams and plans don't work.
‘What about being followed?’ Chase asked. He did not want to anger her by prodding her the wrong way, for he knew she had the kind of temper that might make her clam right up. On the other hand, he didn't want to spend the rest of the night listening to a biography of Michael Karnes.
‘It was a man in a Volkswagen,’ she said. ‘A red Volkswagen. After a week or so of listening to Mike, I started watching myself, and I found out it wasn't another fantasy. There really was someone following us in a red Volkswagen.’
‘What did he look like?’ Chase asked.
‘I never saw him. He stayed far enough behind and always parked far along the kerb when we went in somewhere. But Mike knew him.’
Chase felt, for an instant, as if the top of his head were coming off, and he wanted to reach out and shake the rest of it out of her without having to go through this question-and-answer routine. Calmly he said, ‘Who was the man in the VW?’
‘I don't know,’ she said. ‘Mike wouldn't tell me.’
‘And you weren't curious?’ he asked.
‘Sure I was. But when Mike made up his mind about something, he wouldn't change it. One night, when we went to the Diamond Dell - that's a drive-in hamburger joint on Galasio - he got out of the car and went back and talked to the man in the VW. When he came back, he said he knew him and that we wouldn't have any more trouble with him. And he was right. The man drove away, and he didn't follow us any more. I never knew what it was about.’
‘But you must have had some idea,’ Chase insisted. ‘You can't have let it drop without finding out something more concrete.’
She put her drink down. She said, ‘Mike didn't want to talk about it, and I thought I knew why. He never said directly, but I think the man in the VW had made a pass at him.’
‘A homosexual,’ Chase said.
‘I only think so,’ she said. ‘I couldn't prove it.’ She started to pick up her drink, then brightened. ‘Hey, do you think it was the same man Monday night, the one with the ring?’
‘Maybe,’ Chase said.
‘Who is he?’
‘I don't know yet. But I'm going to find out.’ He stood up, and Glenda stood up beside him.
Louise said, ‘I'll just bet that's who it was!’
‘One more thing,’ Chase said. ‘I'd like a list of Mike's friends, anyone his own age that he was close to.’
‘Girl friends too?’ she asked, just the slightest bit tart about it.
He thought a moment and decided that this was not something a boy Mike's age would discuss with girls he was dating, for fear the very idea of having been approached by a homosexual would call his own masculinity into question. With boys his own age, however, he might be inclined to bring it up as a joke, for laughs. ‘Just boys,’ he said.
‘How many?’
‘Five or six.’
‘That would probably be a waste. Mike wasn't close to very many people. I can only think of three guys, actually.’
That'll do.’
She got a piece of paper at the desk, sat down and printed the three names. She got up, put the pen away and brought the list back to him. All the getting up and sitting down was designed, he was sure, to give him a few more little glimpses of what she must have considered paradise.
‘Thanks,’ he said, seeing addresses below the names and wondering how many of Mike's best friends had been to bed with her.
At the door, Louise brushed against him, all plastic promise and manufactured musk. She whispered, ‘You know, it could have been very nice indeed.’
Glenda was in front of Chase with her back to them, and she should not have been able to hear, but she turned and smiled pleasantly at the younger girl. She said, not pleasantly, ‘But the problem is that you try too hard, Louise, really you do.’
‘She's just a girl, after all,’ Chase said, looking sideways at her. But Glenda showed no sign of understanding his point. ‘Did you have to be like that with her?’
‘She doesn't act like a young girl,’ Glenda snapped. ‘Not one bit like.’
He realized that she was jealous, and if circumstances had not been so tense, he might have taken the time to enjoy that.
In the car again, she seemed to have calmed down. She said, ‘What's next, Detective Chase?’
Chase sat behind the wheel, staring at the dark street and thinking about Judge. He had taken pains to be certain no one had followed them from Glenda's apartment, but he could not escape the feeling that there was a gun trained on the back of his head - or on the back of hers. The ordeal with the grenade had put him on a keen edge.
He said, ‘Let's see if any of these boys are home.’
‘At eleven of a Sunday evening?’
‘I guess not,’ Chase said. ‘But it can't hurt to try.’ He drove away, glancing repeatedly in the rear-view mirror. There was no one following them, at least not in the physical sense.
Jerry Taylor, the third boy on the list, was at home. He lived with his parents in the Braddock Heights part of the city, in a two-storey stone house set on a luxuriously planted full-acre lot. Braddock Heights provided ‘gracious’ living for professional people and their families, doctors and lawyers and the more successful businessmen. The man who answered the door, tall and greying, dressed in casual slacks, a white shirt and a tattered sweater, did not seem surprised that his son should be visited by two adults at that hour of the night. He asked if Jerry was in trouble, nodded when they said it was nothing like that, escorted them downstairs to the game room and said Jerry would be along in a few minutes. He left, and he did not return with his son.
Jerry Taylor was a thin, intense boy with hair that fell to his somewhat stooped shoulders. He was wearing bell-bottom jeans and a workshirt, and he assumed a posture of disinterest from the moment he walked in the door, though that was clearly against his very nature. He listened to Chase, answered his questions, provided nothing new and escorted them upstairs and into the night again. They might just as well have been ghosts passing through unnoticed. As they walked to the car, the stone house stood behind them like a fortress.
‘I wonder if all his friends are that outgoing,’ Glenda said.
‘Generational preoccupation.’
‘Boredom?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Chase said. ‘Appearing bored. They want to look as if they've seen and heard it all.’
‘You talk like you're forty years his senior.’
‘I feel like it, too.’
She patted his shoulder. ‘What next?’
‘How old are you?’ he asked.
‘My, good God, what tact the man has!’
‘I'm sorry,’ he said, putting his arm around her. ‘But I'm not being nosey, and I do have a reason.’
‘Twenty-one,’ she said.
‘Older than I thought,’ he said.
‘So throw me out of the car.’
He laughed. ‘I just wondered what the most popular local hang-outs for eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds were. I'm sure they changed in the years I've been away. And they probably aren't the same as they were when you were that age. A year or two is a long time for an “in” spot to stay “in”.’
‘The hamburger places out on Galasio are always popular. But I'd say the chances of your finding one of the two boys are phenomenally small.’
‘Agreed,’ he said. ‘We might as well go back to your place and wait. If I can't catch either of them tonight, by phone, we'll check them out in the morning.’
Tomorrow's Monday,’ Glenda said. ‘Work for me.’
He said, ‘Do you have any sick leave coming?’
‘Seven days-’
‘Take one.’
‘But-’
‘Otherwise, I'll have to come to work and sit with you to know you're safe, and I won't get anything done on this.’
She thought a moment, said, ‘Okay. Now let's go home; I feel all creepy sitting out here in the open.’
At her apartment, he made sure the door was locked and that the chain latch was also properly in place. He drew the drapes on all the windows and tested the sliding glass terrace doors, though it didn't seem likely that Judge would lasso one of the terrace railings and climb three floors on a rope. It was as simple as that in melodramas, but rarely in real life.
‘Scotch,’ she said, handing him a glass.
They turned out all the lights, turned on the light-boxes against the far wall and sat on the floor with their backs against the sofa, watching the changing patterns.
She said, ‘Maybe now you have enough to go to the police.’
‘The grenade?’
‘Yes.’
‘You forget that I was in the army. If they live up to their past performance, they'll say I brought it back to the States, illegally, and they'll slam me in jail for a few days.’
‘Without the grenade, then?’ she said. ‘Maybe you still have enough to give them.’
‘What? The fact that he wore a pinkie ring, that Mike's girl friend says she thinks he made a pass at Mike, that someone got a university report on me by using a false name?’ He tasted the Scotch. ‘We still haven't got a name.’
‘A description, though?’
‘They'll say it's something else, or that I'm making it up.’ He put his drink down on the coffee table at his side. ‘I won't give them the chance to treat me like that again. When I go back to them, it'll be to make them eat their own - own hats.’
Glenda laughed and drew up her knees. ‘Hats, huh?’
He smiled and said, ‘Look, we can't do anything more until we talk to those boys, and they're probably not home yet. Let's just take a little while to relax and talk about other things. For instance, I don't really know what books you read, what kind of music you like, whether or not you like to go dancing-’
‘Oh, brother,’ she said, ‘are you asking to be bored.’
But he was not bored as the evening went on, for he found a freshness in her outlook that lifted his own spirit and made his problems fade. Now and again they kissed, and he sat with his arm around her, but they did not begin necking. It was almost as if they had made a tacit agreement to forgo even that degree of serious contact at least until this affair had come to a conclusion and Judge had been located.
Forty-five minutes later the telephone rang.
Chase said, ‘Damn those persistent ex-suitors of yours!’
‘More likely my mother,’ she said.
She went to the phone and picked it up. ‘Hello . . . Yes?’ She was silent a moment, listening. ‘I don't like this.’ More silence. ‘Now it's your turn to listen to me-’ She stopped in mid-sentence, stared at the receiver for a moment and hung up.
‘Wasn't your mother, was it?’ Chase asked teasingly.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It was Judge. He wanted to tell me that he knows what we're probably doing in here. He said he'd kill me first, then you, then Louise Allenby. He congratulated you on finding and disarming the grenade, and he says it won't be so simple the next time. He told me to have a pleasant evening.’
Eleven
Norman Bates, Mike Karnes's friend whose name was first on Louise Allenby's list, was at home when Chase called him shortly after midnight, though he twice said he had been on his way to bed when the phone rang and was not even as cooperative as Jerry Taylor. In the end, it did not matter if he wanted to cooperate or not, because he had never heard Mike mention any homosexual advances or any man who had followed him around.
The last boy, Martin Cable, was in bed. His mother said, ‘He works six days a week during the summer, and he needs his sleep.’
‘I'd only take five minutes of his time,’ Chase said.
&n
bsp; ‘He's already asleep. I won't wake him now.’
He said, ‘Could you tell me where he works?’
She said, ‘You the same man who called here earlier?’ ‘Yes,’ he said.
She was silent a moment, then said, ‘He starts at eight in the morning at Governor's Place Apartments. He's one of the lifeguards at the pool.’
Thank you,’ he said, but he realized that she had already hung up.
‘No luck?’ Glenda asked.
‘We'll have to see him in the morning.’
She yawned. ‘To bed, then. What with my mother's visit and the little scene with the grenade, I can hardly keep my eyes open.’
In bed, they held each other for a while, but they both knew the night was only for sleeping. It was the first night in many months that Chase did not dream at all.
At eight-thirty there were two young men at the apartment complex pool, one of them polishing the metalwork above the waterline while the other scrubbed the white diving board preparatory to opening for business at ten o'clock. They watched Glenda with unconcealed interest, and Chase wondered if they shouldn't be taught some manners. When one of them whistled, however, Chase saw that Glenda only smiled, accepting as flattery what his mother would have called rudeness. It was another of the little differences of perspective between them that made Chase feel old and tired.
Chase went to the boy polishing the ladder at the shallow end of the pool. ‘Martin Cable?’
‘That's Marty,’ the boy said, pointing to the guard on the driving board.
Martin Cable was lean but muscular, his arms bulging modestly even when they weren't flexed, tighter and stringier than a weight lifter. He had a lot of dark hair that covered his ears and the nape of his neck, but his face still held no sign of a beard. He sat up on the board as they approached, slightly above them.