Blood Ties

by Nicholas Guild

  Walter was on his second beer and on the verge of calling it a night, when this fake blonde came in and sat down on the next bar stool but one from him. She was clutching her purse in both hands as she ordered something called a Pink Lady that came in a martini glass and really was pink.

  She glanced at him, just once, and then seemed absorbed in the bottle collection on the wall behind the bar. But she was interested.

  Of course, she would be. That was why she was there.

  Everything about her suggested she was on the prowl. She was just a little too well turned out to be anything else. The dress, the hair, the makeup—it was all too perfect. She might have just stopped in on her way to someone’s wedding.

  Taking his time, Walter watched the bartender make her drink, which seemed a major project, and waited until it had been served to her on a little scalloped coaster and she had had her first sip.

  “What’s in that thing?” he asked finally.

  Very slowly, she turned her head to look at him. Then, without smiling, she answered, “Plymouth gin, grenadine, a teaspoon of cream and an egg white.”

  “And then they shake it up?”

  “Yes.”

  Walter smiled at her in a way that suggested nothing except the sweetness of his nature.

  “Well, it looks pretty.”

  Then she smiled, and said, “Yes, it does.” And by then Walter knew he had her.

  With the second Pink Lady, which Walter bought, they adjourned to a booth. It wasn’t until they were sitting in the booth that he asked her name.

  This was a license for the conversation to turn personal. On these occasions he always wore a wedding ring, which seemed to make women feel safer. This one he had bought in a pawnshop in Fort Worth.

  He told Harriet he was a widower. Strictly speaking, this was the truth.

  Then she told him about her divorce, and about her son away in college and about how much she missed him.

  “I have a son,” he confessed. “I haven’t seen him in years.”

  She was very sympathetic, particularly since he didn’t go into details. Doubtless she sensed the subject was painful for him, which was precisely the impression he wished to create.

  It was eleven-fifteen, and Harriet had just finished her third drink, when he decided it was time to quit.

  “I’d like to see you again,” Walter told her, and his eyes had that pleading expression women found so hard to resist. “If you give me your phone number, I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  It was amusing to watch the play of expression on her face. On the one hand she was disappointed, since she clearly had thought she was going to get laid this very night, but on the other hand she now saw before her the prospect of acquiring a gentleman friend, perhaps even a relationship that might last into the indefinite future.

  It was a measure of her desperation when a woman started prowling the bars. Harriet was desperate. She took the bait. She fished a ballpoint pen out of her purse and wrote out two numbers on a cocktail napkin—one her home phone and the other her cell.

  Now it was her turn to make her eyes plead. Please, just phone me, she seemed to be begging. I’ll make you happy. I’ll give you my body and my love, and everything else you ever dreamed of.

  Of course, if she had known what Walter’s dreams were like, she might have thought better of it.

  They had had dinner together a few times, in restaurants where neither of them was known. He didn’t stint. He took her to nice places, places where he had to wear a sport coat. And she was drawing all the desired conclusions.

  “My wife’s been dead for a few years now, and I loved her dear. But a man has to move on or he dies inside himself.” All of which, of course, implied, I’m tired of being alone.

  Still, he avoided any definite proposals beyond another dinner. He didn’t even presume to a little necking at her front door, and after the second date it was all he could do to avoid being dragged inside and ravaged. This woman was so hungry to feel a man’s weight on her that all the way back to the van she kept brushing against him.

  But Walter was playing coy, and it was working. When, with beguilingly embarrassed hesitation, he finally asked her to come along to his place for a nightcap, she would dance all the way.

  But that was a little down the road, and in the meantime he had to stay focused. Police in the San Francisco Bay Area had had a lot of experience with serial killers and he needed to keep his wits about him.

  This new stuff the doctor in San Mateo had given him wasn’t helping. It eased the misery in his gut, but the tradeoff was an odd, detached feeling, an indifference that was scary.

  He had had abdominal pains for about five months and had gone to some quack in Seattle who wanted to run all kinds of tests and wrote him a prescription, something just to take the edge off. It wasn’t much better than aspirin—Walter had to take three times the dose to get any relief. He never went back. He didn’t need any tests because he knew what it was.

  Working on the house in Half Moon Bay, he would forget his pain, sometimes for hours at a time. Work took you out of yourself. You forgot to suffer the way you might forget to have lunch. Pain was just a habit. If you didn’t think about it, it wasn’t there.

  And for the times when it was there, he had a new prescription that seemed to do the job. He could sleep—better, in fact, than before he got sick, because the new stuff seemed to keep his dreams within acceptable limits of horror. But it also left him feeling blunted.

  His father’s preferred narcotics had been corn whiskey and the Bible, and in the end neither had worked. The old man had howled all the way to the grave. “The devil is come down onto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time,” he used to say, when he was sober enough to know that he was dying. He would shout the words at his fifteen-year-old son, never quite clarifying whether young Walter was the subject or the object of the verse.

  Because, of course, he had long since acquired an understanding of his only child’s dark ways.

  Yet any son born to that wicked old man would have been stamped in his cradle as the devil’s own. Walter’s father had seen evil in everyone except himself, and he had taken great and obvious pleasure in contemplating the torments of the damned.

  He styled himself a man of God, a preacher, an apostle of the Word. And from time to time, when he needed money, he would set up a storefront church and scratch together a congregation. Then, after a while, when nobody came anymore, the reverend would take to the road again.

  “Many are called, few are chosen,” he would say.

  And when his flocks disappointed him, which was often, in compensation the shepherd would beat his son.

  At last, in the extremity of his final illness, God’s holy apostle ended up in the charity ward of the county hospital, just another emaciated old man lying under a thin blanket, waiting for death.

  The year before, Walter had quit school and was working as an apprentice, helping to build yet one more strip mall. He lived in a boardinghouse and took a city bus to the construction site, and every evening he stopped off to see his father. His reasons had nothing to do with love or respect. Walter just wanted to see the old man die.

  One night he arrived, just at sunset, and the nurse, who felt compassion for his youth and what she interpreted as his filial affection, took him aside and told him, “If you have anything you need to tell him before he goes, this is the time. He’s stopped speaking. When he’s conscious he seems to understand what you say to him, but he goes in and out. I don’t give it more than another day before he slips into a coma.”

  So Walter sat down beside his father’s bed, in that long room with its rows and rows of the dying, and he smiled when the apostle at last opened his eyes. He waited patiently until he was sure his dad recognized him.

  “They tell me it won’t be long before you go under for good and all,” he said quietly. “Personally, I’ll be sorry. I’ve enjoyed watching you die.”


  Yes, Daddy heard him. You could see it in his eyes.

  “For years I’ve thought about killing you myself, but now I’m glad I didn’t. I couldn’t have made you suffer the way God has. It’s what He does best.”

  His father’s mouth opened, but nothing came out except a faint wheezing sound.

  “You know, I never agreed with you about hell,” Walter went on, his voice low and soothing, as if he were talking to a sick child. “I don’t think it waits for us after death. I think it’s here and now. So I guess you’re safe. You’ll just die, and crumble into unfeeling dust. God has punished you in this world.

  “And you’d be wise to hope I’m right, because if anyone ever deserved the everlasting fire, it’s you. God hates you, you old bastard. God hates us all, and He’s right.”

  Hatred, Walter always believed, was the most durable of the emotions, the one dearest to God. And in that instant, at the very threshold of death, his father was consumed with hatred for his son. There was no room for anything else.

  And that was just the way Walter wanted it.

  “Your Bible is full of fairy tales,” he said, smiling, stroking his father’s hair with the tips of his fingers. “There is no redemption. There is only the horror He has created for us as our just punishment. I’m glad your death has been hard.”

  The nurse was wrong, and the apostle hung on a little longer. A second evening, and then a third, he was alert enough to understand everything his son had to tell him.

  “You remember the girl who said I tried to rape her? You thought she was lying—or maybe just hoped it. She was telling the truth. And I’ve done worse since, much worse. I’ve taken life, just like God. And I’ll go on doing God’s work for Him. Maybe that way I’ll become like God Himself and inherit from Him the curse of immortality. What do you think?

  “‘And in those days men shall seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.’ What do you think, Daddy? Was the prophet talking about me?”

  Finally, on the fourth evening, he came and was told that his father was in a coma. His heartbeat was erratic, and they didn’t expect him to last more than a few more hours.

  Walter sat beside his bed, watching and waiting. And at two-seventeen in the morning the apostle breathed his last. Walter waited until he was sure his father’s heart had stopped, then he got up and left, without a word to anyone.

  Now, whenever he thought of God, he imagined Him with his father’s face.

  “… because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”

  18

  At four in the morning Ellen found herself broad awake. She was in Tregear’s bed and he was asleep beside her. The light from the street lamps filtered vaguely in through the bedroom blinds. She could just make out the curve of his back and she was filled with longing.

  Yet what had awakened her was not lust but guilt. She felt she had betrayed him.

  Either him or the department—she couldn’t be true to both. So she had been a good cop. She had eaten dinner with Tregear, made love to him, and never told him that she knew where Walter was working.

  It hadn’t been a question of knowledge but of faith. Tregear knew more about this murderer than anyone living. He was probably the one human being on earth who would know Walter on sight. He understood his habits and his methods. If he said Walter would know if they sent a cop to his office, he was probably right.

  He had been right about the secretary. Before leaving the Marriott, Ellen had looked up Allied Heating and Cooling in the yellow pages and given them a call. She had pretended to be a housewife with a furnace that wouldn’t light and had had a brief conversation with the woman who answered the phone. Her voice sounded middle-aged, but there was a kind of brassiness to it that somehow managed to suggest that when her workday was over she would be going home to an empty space.

  Maybe that was part of Walter’s pattern, to pick a business where he knew he could win over the secretary. To women he’s like catnip.

  But she was loyal to procedure. Sam was right. A cop lives and dies by the rules because a cop serves the law.

  Still, if they played by the rules Walter might disappear. And, eventually, Tregear would follow him. She wasn’t sure she could bear that.

  All at once Tregear began to stir. He rolled over and opened his eyes. He was smiling at her.

  “Can’t you sleep?” he asked. Under the covers, he touched her belly with the tips of his fingers. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right. Let’s get up and take a shower together.”

  It was an interesting experience to have a man put his arms behind your knees and just slide you up the tile wall like you weighed nothing. And to be all covered with soap and have that man enter you while he held you helpless was deeply stirring.

  The shower lasted about forty-five minutes, and when they came out they were both really clean.

  If it wasn’t love, it would do. And she sensed it was love—at least for her.

  Last night in bed, while her conscience was troubling her about her little secret, she had asked if it bothered him that she was a cop. He thought this was very funny.

  “You’re the only kind of lady friend I can have,” he had said. “One who carries a nine-millimeter and knows how to use it.”

  After their shower together, they toweled each other off and went downstairs naked to have breakfast. Breakfast, it seemed, was the only meal Tregear knew how to make from scratch. For the rest, he ate out or lived on prepared food.

  “I should make you dinner sometime,” she said, as she sat at the kitchen table and watched him scramble eggs. “I’m not a bad cook. It’s the only one of the feminine arts I’ve ever mastered.”

  “The only one? Making love doesn’t count?”

  He laughed at his own joke, but Ellen was already thinking of something else.

  “I’ve been holding out on you.” She shook her head. She hadn’t meant to tell him, but now she couldn’t help herself.

  “What? You’ve got a husband and six kids?”

  “No. I know where Walter is working.”

  He had his back to her as he was facing the stove. There was an almost imperceptible change in the slant of his shoulders, but no other sign that he had heard her. He went right on stirring the eggs.

  For perhaps a minute he said nothing.

  “Do you hate me for it?” she asked finally, desperate to hear his voice, even if he cursed her.

  “No, I don’t hate you,” he answered, still keeping his back to her. “I’m not angry or even disappointed. You were doing your job.”

  He turned around, holding his egg pan in one hand and a spatula in the other, and smiled at her. Then he began to shovel eggs onto the two plates he had set out on the table.

  “I’ll tell you if you ask me to. Do you want me to tell you?”

  When he was finished serving breakfast, he put the egg pan and spatula in the sink. Then he came to the table, kissed her and sat down.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “If you tell me, and I use it, I’ll have destroyed your career.”

  “And if you don’t, Walter will get away and the body count will keep going up.”

  “Yes, it will.” He hadn’t touched his eggs yet. He seemed to have forgotten they were there. “I’m wondering if we can’t work out a compromise.”

  Then he turned his attention to breakfast.

  “Eat your eggs,” he commanded, pointing to her plate with his fork. “They’ll get cold.”

  They both ate in silence and when they were both finished, Tregear picked up the plates and carried them over to his sink.

  “What kind of a compromise?” Ellen asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  He brought over their tea. Tregear used two bags of Irish Breakfast in each mug and he thought tea should be allowed to steep until it was the approximate color of molasses. It was dreadful stuff, almost as bad as police station coffee.

  “You checked wi
th the apartment managers?” he asked, sitting down. “You found out from them?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you haven’t filed your report yet?”

  “No.”

  “When would you normally do that?”

  “This morning, first thing.”

  “Then I’d have found out anyway. This morning, second thing. But I’m glad you at least told me you knew.”

  “What will you do?”

  “You mean, how will I get inside their system?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll send them an e-mail with a little something attached. It’s a code of my own devising that none of the commercial antivirus companies know anything about. They’ll open the e-mail because it’ll look like a service request, and the code will install itself. I’ll know in about two minutes if I’ve scored, when it starts downloading their database files.”

  “And they’ll never know?”

  “They’ll never know.”

  “And what will you do when you know?”

  “I’ll send you an e-mail with his name and address.”

  “That’s it? No vigilante stuff?”

  Tregear smiled and reached across the table to touch her naked breast with his index finger.

  “I swear, by your right nipple, I won’t get involved.”

  Suddenly both of them were laughing.

  * * *

  “Mercy me, you certainly look chipper this morning.”

  It was eight-fifteen and Sam had just come into the duty room with two cups of coffee, one of which he set on Ellen’s desk. He sat down on the chair he was currently torturing and shook his head.

  “And how was your date with Mr. Tregear last night?”

  Ellen hit the “enter” key on her computer, which sent the report on her inquiries yesterday into the department database. Tregear would be reading it in five minutes.

  “Sam, you’re a dirty old man. By the way, I have the name of the company our very own Walter has been working for. Their office is on Gaven Street. What do you say we go roust them.”