Chase

by Dean Koontz

  ‘Martin Cable?’ Chase asked.

  ‘Yes?’ He had none of Jerry Taylor's attitude of boredom and appeared willing to be friendly, unlike Norman Bates. The sun, reflected by the water, made odd, shimmering spots on his face and chest.

  ‘I understand you were a friend of Mike Karnes.’

  ‘Of a sort.’

  ‘I've got some questions I'd like to ask, if you can spare a few minutes.’

  The boy glanced at Glenda, let his gaze travel down to her slim ankles and then work its way leisurely back up again. While he enjoyed the view, he made up his mind and said, ‘Yeah, sure, ask away.’

  ‘How well did you know Mike?’

  ‘Close friends, shared his car sometimes for double dates.’

  ‘Same year in school?’

  ‘Yeah. Graduated together June a year ago.’

  ‘Was Mike a terror with the girls?’ Chase asked.

  ‘Was he ever!’ the boy said. ‘Christ!’

  ‘I had heard that besides Louise Allenby, he kept several other girls on the string.’

  ‘Not only on the string,’ Cable said. ‘But satisfied. He just couldn't get enough of it, maybe because it was still so new to him.’

  ‘New?’ Chase asked. He thought they were both talking about the same thing, but now he wasn't sure.

  ‘He got his first piece when he was a junior, the last day of school that year. Overnight he changed from a bashful, sportsminded teenage boy into - well, a stud. You know how that is, you ever see it happen to someone?’

  ‘Yes,’ Chase said.

  ‘We told him he'd wear it out if he didn't slow down.’

  It seemed the proper moment to broach the main topic without forcing him to clam up, since they had already established Mike Karnes's claim to manhood. ‘Did he ever tell you about another man - making a pass at him?’

  ‘A queer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He looked at Glenda again, back at Chase, mulling over the possibilities. He said, ‘You haven't told me who you are.’

  Chase told him, introduced Glenda.

  ‘That doesn't explain this sudden interest in Mike.’

  Chase said, ‘I don't think the police are doing anything on the case. You know my connection with it. I don't relish having a madman running around loose with a grudge against me.’

  Cable nodded. When he spoke, a moment later, his words were quick and run together, as if he were betraying a trust and wanted to get it over with as quickly as he could. ‘Two years ago Mike got laid for the first time, and everything slipped a little for him after that. If you know his parents, you understand how it could happen. They'd never let on to him that there was anything fun in life, let alone something like sex. He just sort of broke loose, all at once. After that, his grades dropped.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Just past the middle of the second semester of our senior year. He wanted to get into State, but he wasn't going to make it if he showed as poorly in the second term as in the first. Physics was his worst subject, and when it got really bad, he started taking sessions with a tutor.’

  ‘And who was that?’ Chase asked.

  ‘A teacher who did that kind of thing Saturdays. I never knew his name, never saw him.’

  ‘And this was the man who made a pass at Mike?’

  ‘Yeah. I only heard about it a year later. Mike pulled his marks up and scraped into State as a day student, and I went away to Pitt. Neither of us wrote much, but we always got together when I came home over weekends or on holidays. In February we double-dated with these red-headed twins Mike knew from State, very nice stuff. On our way back to the city, after we'd let them off for the night, he told me about this character who was following him everywhere he went.’

  ‘His physics tutor?’

  ‘That's right.’

  ‘What did Mike tell you about him; even the smallest detail might be more important than it seems.’

  Cable squinted his eyes, licked his lips. He said, ‘He quit the Saturday morning tutoring sessions because this guy kept trying to convince him there would be nothing wrong in their going to bed together. That had been nearly a year earlier, when we were both seniors. Since then, Mike said, this guy kept bothering him, periodically, trying to talk to him. He always hung up when the guy called. So then he started following Mike everywhere he went, a real creep.’

  ‘But you don't remember his name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even first name.’

  ‘Not even that much.’

  ‘Nickname?’

  ‘Mike certainly wasn't on nickname terms with him!’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  That's it,’ Cable said. He laced his hands together and cracked his knuckles. ‘I wish there was more.’

  ‘I think that's enough, just what I needed,’ Chase said.

  ‘Good.’ Cable turned from Chase, tossed his head to flip his thick hair out of his face, smiled at Glenda. He said, ‘You've got fantastic legs.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  The sun made her seem like a mirage, heat waves rippling up from the pavement as she walked toward the car. She was beautiful, Chase thought, and Cable had been right about her legs. He wondered, suddenly, whether he would ever help her fulfil the promise of her body, be a man to her in bed. He quickly avoided further thoughts of that nature as she got into the car.

  ‘You're lovely,’ he said.

  ‘My God, a compliment!’ she said in mock surprise. ‘I thought I wouldn't hear one of those more than every other day or so.’

  ‘I don't verbalize well,’ he said. ‘But that boy made me jealous. I saw how your face lighted when he said he liked your legs.’

  ‘I may be a liberated woman, but I still have an ego.’

  ‘I'll try to do better by it,’ he said, touching her bare knee. The flesh was cool and firm. It generated such a powerful mixture of desire and guilt that he quickly let go of her. ‘Did you get it?’

  She opened an envelope and took out six mimeographed sheets. ‘A list of all the teachers in the system, high school and junior high schools and grade schools.’

  ‘Address and phone number for each name,’ he said. ‘How did you do it?’

  ‘A trick I learned from being around reporters too much.’ She leaned forward and punched the lighter in the dash, took a cigarette from her purse, started it smoking. She took one deep drag and then was content to hold it. ‘I met the Superintendent of Schools and passed myself off as the representative of a commercial mailing-list firm. He was so frustrated about having to work the summer while the teachers had off and so surprised to have a chance to talk to a nice young woman in a miniskirt, that he didn't question why we were doing business first-hand rather than by mail. I wrote a check on my personal account to pay for the list, and I didn't even have to explain that. Twenty-five dollars for name and address and telephone number of nearly three hundred employees - and they've probably sold the list half a dozen times so far this year, always for better money than that.’

  He shook his head admiringly. ‘With that sort of mind, you don't really need those legs.’

  ‘Wrong.’

  ‘Wrong?’

  ‘Without the legs to look at, he would have been thinking more clearly. There would have been a number of very embarrassing questions.’

  Chase gave the list back to her. ‘Thanks to your legs, we're getting closer to home base.’

  ‘You really think he's a physics teacher?’

  ‘It fits in a lot of ways. Including the fact that it explains how he might possess a silencer for a pistol. He could have machined it himself, with a bit of patience and the application of his own special knowledge. I remember him blaming his bad aim on the bore of the silencer.’

  Chase drove back to her apartment. Together they went over the list, circling the names of the physics instructors - three in all. He dialled all of them inside of ten minutes and managed to speak a few words with each. None of them soun
ded like Judge.

  On the off chance that a physics tutor might not necessarily teach the subject in his regular job, they circled the names of senior and junior high school science teachers and phoned all thirty-nine of them. Twelve did not answer their phones, and four others were not at home but were expected back before dinner. None of the other twenty-three sounded like Judge.

  By six-thirty they were satisfied with all but one man: Charles Shienbluth, a junior high school general science instructor. When Chase dialed his number for the seventh time, however, the man answered. ‘Shienbluth speaking.’

  ‘Is this the Mr Shienbluth who teaches science at Walterson Junior High School?’ Chase asked.

  ‘Yes, that's me.’

  ‘Charles Shienbluth?’

  ‘Yes. Who is this?’

  Chase hung up.

  ‘Well?’ she asked.

  He said, ‘It wasn't Judge. It's all been another false lead.’

  Twelve

  Anne and Harry Karnes lived in a modest white frame house on Winkler Street, one of the older middle-class residential developments on the north side of the city. There was a three-year-old Rambler parked in the gravelled drive, and lights shone in the front room downstairs. Gauzy yellow curtains kept Chase from seeing anything of the room beyond the windows, but he supposed it would be as plain as the house and the block the house was set in. The only sounds were those made by trucks on the super-highway three blocks west and by a television set turned too loud in one of the nearby houses.

  Glenda said, ‘Are we going in or not?’

  ‘I've been thinking,’ Chase said, ‘that maybe the homosexual angle doesn't have anything to do with this.’

  ‘But the man following them drove a red Volkswagen, according to Louise Allenby. And you said he overreacted when you confronted him with the accusation on the telephone.’

  ‘But gay people are supposedly less violent than straights. And the ones I've known bear that out. I can't picture any of the gay men I've met picking up a knife and killing.’

  ‘The lover scorned,’ she said.

  ‘That's too trite to be acceptable.’

  She slid closer to him, ignoring the console between the bucket seats. ‘What's the matter, Ben? You're just making excuses to keep from going in and talking to Mike's parents.’

  He looked at the lighted windows and sighed. ‘They're going to want to thank me for trying to save their son's life, and it's going to be the hero thing all over again. I'm tired of that.’

  ‘Maybe it'll be different,’ she said. ‘Anyway, if you want, I can go in alone.’

  ‘It'd seem odd,’ he said. ‘They don't know you, who you are.’ He opened the car door and put a foot on the kerb. ‘Come on, let's get this over with.’

  Anne Karnes answered the door, a grey-haired woman who wore no make-up and would not have benefitted by it very much even if she had. Her face was harsh, all angles and flat planes, her eyes set too close together by a fraction, her mouth too prim and thin-lipped. She was wearing a shapeless housedress that fell to the middle of her stocky calves, not out of any consciousness of fad styles, but because it was the kind of thing she had, apparently, always worn.

  ‘Please come in,’ she said. ‘I've very glad to meet you.’

  Grey. The inside of the house was grey, sad, quiet. The living-room furniture was heavy and dark, the arms of the chairs and sofas overlaid with white antimacassars. Two lamps burned, both shedding pale light, colourless light. The television was on, but one had the feeling that it was always on and that no one really watched it. The walls were the same tan colour of the walls in public institutions like schools and city hall corridors. Half a dozen motto plaques dressed the walls to conform with the styling of their tenants.

  Harry Karnes was as grey as his wife and the room, a short man, slight of build. His hands shook when they were not resting on the arms of his easy chair, and he could not look directly at Chase, but stared slightly over his left shoulder.

  Chase and Glenda sat on the sofa, leaning away from the back, distinctly uncomfortable in a room of slipcovers, antimacassars and prominently displayed Bibles. Mrs Karnes kept casting disapproving glances at the expanse of bare legs showing from beneath Glenda's miniskirt, while Mr Karnes studiously pretended that he didn't even know Glenda was a woman. The whole mood was vaguely similar to that in a funeral parlour.

  When they were finally done with the thank-yous and Chase could change the course of the conversation , he said, ‘The reason I came by was to ask you a few questions about Mike. You see, I don't believe the police are looking into this very thoroughly, and I'm anxious to see it settled - seeing as how the killer might well have a grudge against me.’

  ‘What sort of questions?’ Mrs Karnes asked.

  Somewhere in an upstairs hallway a grandfather clock chimed, the brass notes hollow and faint, like scraps of an agonizing nightmare.

  ‘Mostly about his schoolwork,’ Chase said.

  ‘He was a good boy,’ Mr Karnes said. ‘He was good in school, and he was going to college too.’

  ‘Let's not lie to Mr Chase,’ Anne said, speaking twice as forcefully as her husband. ‘We know that isn't right.’

  ‘But he was a good boy,’ the old man said, but sounded as if he were trying to convince himself as much as her.

  ‘He went wild,’ Mrs Karnes said. ‘He went wild, and you'd not have thought he was the same boy from one year to the next.’

  ‘How did he go wild?’ Chase asked.

  ‘Running around,’ Mrs Karnes said. ‘Out later than he should be, and usually with a girl. You know where he was killed, in that sinful place they call a park.’

  Not wanting to pursue that line, Chase said, ‘I came mainly to ask you about a tutor Mike had in physics during his senior year in high school.’

  ‘He was out every night, and his grades went bad,’ Mrs Karnes said. ‘We tried everything we knew. What he needed was a good whipping, but he was bigger than either me or his father. When a boy grows up and loses respect for his elders, what can you do? He'd worked, and he had money for the car. Once he had that, there was no holding him down.’

  Mr Karnes said nothing, but turned and stared at the television set, where a dog act was progressing in tediously predictable fashion.

  ‘Who was his physics tutor?’ Chase asked.

  Mrs Karnes looked at the television as a dog leaped through a hoop and as another poodle did a back flip. As the unseen audience applauded, she said, ‘I can't remember his name. Do you, Dad?’

  Her husband looked away from the set and stared over Chase's shoulder. ‘I never met him,’ he said.

  ‘Did you pay by cheque? You'd have had to make out the cheques to someone.’

  ‘Paid in cash,’ Mrs Karnes said. ‘It was eight dollars for a two-hour session every Saturday morning, and Mike took the money with him. After a while the tutor got interested in Mike's physics ability and offered to teach him free.’

  ‘Mike was a smart boy,’ the old man said. ‘He could have been something someday.’

  ‘If he hadn't gone wild,’ his wife half agreed. ‘But he did go wild, and he wouldn't have settled down enough to accomplish beans.’

  Chase felt Glenda's foot brush against his, and he knew that she was as bothered as he was by the low-key, continuing argument between the husband and wife - and by their unsympathetic approach to their only child's weaknesses, if weaknesses they were.

  He said, ‘How did you go about locating a private instructor - or was he someone from Mike's high school?’

  ‘We got his name from the high school,’ she said. ‘They have a list of recommended tutors. But he didn't teach there. I think he taught in a Catholic school.’

  ‘It was a private school,’ Harry Karnes said, rallying a bit, ‘not a Catholic school. One of the academies in the city.’

  ‘A boys’ school?’ Chase asked.

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘I'm still sure it was a parochial school,’ hi
s wife said.

  She stared at the old man as if to force him to retract his statement.

  ‘You don't, by chance, remember the name of the school, do you?’ Chase asked the old man, the tired old man.

  ‘No,’ Harry Karnes said. ‘But it wasn't parochial. I remember, at the time, how Anne was afraid he might be Catholic. She didn't want Mike taking any kinds of lessons from a Catholic, in private.’

  ‘You have to be careful,’ the old woman said. :I always tried to be careful where he was concerned. You were the one didn't keep close enough eye on him. Maybe if we'd both watched out, he wouldn't have gone wild like he did.’

  ‘One last thing,’ Chase said. ‘And this might be kind of upsetting. If you don't feel like thinking about it, just say so.’

  Anne Karnes looked at Glenda's bare legs, frowned, looked back at Chase. Harry stared over Chase's shoulder, like a glass-eyed mannequin.

  Chase said, ‘The funeral was Thursday, I believe. Did you notice anyone at the service whom you'd never seen before?’

  ‘A lot of people,’ Anne said.

  ‘His friends mostly,’ Harry said.

  The old woman said, ‘We hadn't met most of his friends. Once or twice he had someone here for an evening or overnight, but they were always giddy young men. I told him not to bring any more of them around if they couldn't sober themselves and act adult. And, of course, there were the girls that he -he'd known, girls from school and college.’

  Chase described Judge as Brown had summed him up. ‘Was there anyone like that?’

  ‘I wouldn't remember,’ Anne said. ‘There were so many.’

  ‘Mr Karnes?’

  ‘I don't recall him, no.’

  The old man was crying. The tears hadn't come out of the corners of his eyes yet, but they hung there in fat droplets.

  His wife saw his state and said, ‘I guess I blame the boy too much. He wasn't a wicked boy. And you can't blame a child for its faults, can you? You have to go back to the parents, to us. If there was anything bad about Mikey, if he wasn't perfect, then it's because we weren't perfect ourselves. You can't raise a godly child when you have done wicked things yourself. It was us. Wasn't it, Dad?’