Blood Ties

by Nicholas Guild

  They had been officially living together for only a few hours, but Tregear had given her a key to the front door. As soon as she was inside, she called his name and was greeted with a faint “I’m up here.” She found him in his work room. Gwendolyn was standing on his shoulder, her front paws in his hair as she peered over his head. They were both staring at the image of Tregear’s father on the computer screen.

  “That’s Walter,” he said, without looking at her. “Older and heavier, but it’s him. It’s him to the life.”

  “Steve, I want to ask you a favor.”

  Tregear tapped a key and the image collapsed.

  “Name it,” he said. He seemed almost to be defying her to think of something he wouldn’t do for her.

  “Will you have dinner with my parents tonight?”

  “Sure. Where?”

  Father and daughter had settled on Tarantino’s, a fish place on the Wharf. It was about a four-minute walk from Tregear’s apartment and Daddy liked crab. It was also socially neutral, so Ellen wouldn’t have to find out whether Steve knew which fork to use.

  It was only on occasions such as these that she realized how inescapably she was still her mommy’s girl.

  “I just need to go back to my apartment for a few minutes to get some clothes,” Ellen said.

  * * *

  Getting dressed was a revelation for both of them. Ellen had stopped by her apartment and picked up a black sleeveless dress and heels. It would be the first time Tregear had ever seen her in a dress, and this one fitted over her trim figure like a second skin. When she turned around she found him studying the change with obvious appreciation.

  Then he cocked his head a little to one side and his eyes narrowed speculatively.

  “You should wear that outfit with a pale gray shawl,” he said. “Besides, it gets cold up here at night. There’s a knit shop in the Cannery. Let’s stop there on the way and see what we can find.”

  “Okay.”

  He himself wore a white turtleneck shirt and a silk sport coat of indefinable color. The effect was decidedly but effortlessly patrician. He had a couple of expensive items in his wardrobe, probably because there was little enough else for him to spend his money on, but there was no display about him. He seemed indifferent to effect, as if it never crossed his mind that anyone would notice his clothes.

  You are a beautiful man, she said, nowhere but in her mind.

  The shop in the Cannery had exactly the right shawl, a silk fishnet, almost iridescent. Tregear took it off a peg and draped it over Ellen’s shoulders, his hands lingering briefly on her arms.

  “You were right,” she said, smiling at him in the full-length mirror. “It’s perfect.”

  “You’re perfect,” he answered. “Now let’s go eat.”

  Her parents had already arrived and were sitting at a table next to a window that opened out onto the Bay. Daddy was working on his customary predinner cocktail, and he stood up when he saw his daughter and her date approaching. Ellen made the introductions and the two men shook hands, Steve addressing her father as “Dr. Ridley.”

  Now how the hell did he know that? she wondered, but then she stopped wondering because she knew. By now he probably knew her great-grandmother’s maiden name.

  “And this is my mother.”

  Mrs. Ridley offered her hand and submitted to the briefest possible pressure from Steve’s. For the moment at least, she seemed prepared to suspend judgment.

  They sat down and the waiter came. Ellen decided to be extravagant and ordered a Pimm’s Cup, complete with cucumber, and Steve waved the man away, saying he was fine.

  Conversation got off to an awkward start. Daddy wanted to know about his little girl’s new guy. “So what is it you do?”

  “I work for the Navy,” Tregear said, smiling as if the admission embarrassed him. “At least, they sign my paychecks. I don’t know what I do to earn them.”

  “It’s classified, Daddy. Steve is a security specialist.”

  Daddy seemed prepared to hear more, but his wife raised her eyebrows, which meant she had chalked up at least one black mark against the new beau, who was something technical—like the man who fixed your sprinkler system. Ellen decided to steer the conversation in some safer direction.

  They talked about movies, and this drifted into a discussion of movies based on novels, and then somebody mentioned Pride and Prejudice, and the two men took up the question of which of the several movie versions would have been least offensive to Jane Austen. Ellen was content merely to listen because she sensed her father was having such a marvelous time.

  Mrs. Ridley remained silent, apparently not even listening. It was one of her unconscious biases that intellectual conversation at dinner was vulgar.

  “Laurence Olivier was the best Darcy,” Dr. Ridley announced, “but the 1940 film was hopelessly sentimental. Jane Austen was never sentimental.”

  Steve pursed his lips slightly, suggesting that he was unconvinced.

  “You wouldn’t call Persuasion sentimental?” he asked, as if merely soliciting an opinion.

  “No.” Dr. Ridley shook his head, perhaps a little too vehemently. “Persuasion is romantic, which is not the same thing.”

  “I remember once hearing a definition of Romanticism as ‘the struggle to maintain an illusioned view of life.’ On that basis, aren’t ‘romantic’ and ‘sentimental’ virtually synonymous?”

  “That’s an interesting definition. Where did you read it?”

  Tregear merely shrugged. “I didn’t say I read it. I said I heard it. I don’t even remember where.”

  Dr. Ridley seemed disappointed, but he recovered quickly.

  By the time dinner was served, they had achieved a wary truce about Jane Austen. The waiter brought Dr. Ridley his crab, along with a nutcracker to use on the claws. Mrs. Ridley had ordered sole, her habitual choice, and studiously avoided noticing her husband’s careful dissection of the crab.

  Ellen and Steve, refusing to take sides, had both ordered abalone steaks.

  While they ate, Dr. Ridley described a seminar he had recently attended at UC Medical, which had been titled “The Neurology of Decision Making.” A small discussion had arisen over the concept of free will, which the panel members had seemed to regard as tasteless and beside the point.

  “What do you think, Steve? Is there such a thing as free will?”

  It was less a question than a challenge, another move in the intellectual game, and Tregear smiled to show that he understood it as such.

  “For me, and for most people, free will is doing what I want to do. By that reckoning the will is more or less free depending on the circumstances. But we don’t choose what to want. We just want it, and then we build a belief structure to justify wanting it. Desire is a cause, and action is an effect. We aren’t free of that. As Kant pointed out, experience isn’t intelligible without the idea of cause and effect. So it becomes a question of definition.”

  “Like the definition of ‘Romanticism’?”

  “Something like that.”

  No one was interested in dessert, but Dr. Ridley wanted a cup of tea. When it came, Tregear pushed his chair back a little.

  “I’ll leave you three now,” he said, standing up. “Ellie, I’m sure you’d like a little time alone with your parents, and I’m sure they would with you. I’ll see you later.”

  The two men shook hands and mumbled the usual assurances about what a pleasure it had been. And then Tregear was gone.

  “Well, that was abrupt,” Mrs. Ridley said, virtually the first words she had uttered through the whole meal.

  “But well meant.” Ellen smiled. “Don’t tell me you’re not glad, or you’ll hurt my feelings.”

  “I am glad.” Dr. Ridley reached across and patted the back of his daughter’s hand. “But only to have time with you.”

  “Then you liked him?”

  “Yes. Far better than most of your boyfriends I’ve met. What was the name of that one you brought home fr
om Berkeley? Marvin?”

  “Melvin.” She laughed at the recollection. “Melvin the Student Revolutionary. Steve isn’t anything like that.”

  “Well, he’s certainly better educated. Where did he go to school?”

  “Circleville High.” She paused, enjoying her mother’s reaction—Mrs. Ridley was too shocked even to speak. “And he dropped out of that.”

  “I think you’re pulling my leg, Ellie,” her father said. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe me. He’s led a very strange life.”

  “Oh Ellie, who have you gotten yourself involved with now?” Mrs. Ridley, her face a mask of anguish, slowly shook her head. “Who doesn’t go to college these days?”

  Ellen reached across the table and took her mother’s hand.

  “I want you to understand, Mommy,” she said. “I really do. But there are things I can’t tell you. Suffice it to say that, for reasons outside of his control, the usual opportunities were closed to him. And now it doesn’t make any difference.”

  “How can’t it make any difference?”

  Mrs. Ridley was exasperated, as if her daughter were talking gibberish.

  “Mommy, why do most people go to college?” Ellen smiled, still holding her mother’s hand. This once, she thought, it was important to make herself understood. “They do it to prove something—how smart they are or how much they know. But Steve doesn’t have to prove anything. He doesn’t need any mentors. He’s taught himself everything from ancient Greek to string theory. He probably thinks that universities are for the lame and the halt.

  “He doesn’t fit into the familiar categories, Mommy. He’s beyond any category. He’s a very unusual man.”

  “But then is he…?” Mrs. Ridley gasped.

  “Normal? No.” Ellen shook her head. “Brilliant, considerate, sweet-natured, yes. Interesting? Oh yes. But never normal.”

  Mrs. Ridley said nothing, merely shook her head and looked worried. She understood what Ellen was saying, but it frightened her. How could a man who was beyond any category be good for her daughter?

  “What does he really do for the Navy?” her father asked.

  Ellen allowed herself a syllable of laughter. “All I know is that it has to do with codes, Daddy. And if I knew more than that, they’d probably lock me up as a security risk. The Navy seems to regard him as some sort of secret weapon.”

  “Well, I rather like him,” Dr. Ridley announced. “If fact, I like him very much. I’d like to know him better. Do you think I’ll get the chance?”

  “I don’t know, Daddy. It isn’t up to him and me.”

  22

  When he broke into Dr. Fairburn’s office, Walter had had the presence of mind to look around for some Percocet. By then he hadn’t taken a pill in about eight hours and he was in a lot of pain. He found a locked cabinet, which seemed a likely possibility, and had it open in about ten seconds. It was a junkie’s wet dream. There were blister packs containing samples of probably thirty or forty different medications, including Percocet.

  By the time he shot the doctor, Walter was feeling much better.

  For years he had always kept a packed suitcase in his van. It was his escape kit, containing clothes, money, his considerable collection of false driver’s licenses and social security cards, and a small, .32-caliber automatic in a plastic sandwich bag. It seemed a reasonable precaution, although this was the first time he had needed it.

  This had been a close call.

  It was already dark, and the doctor had been dead about an hour, when Walter checked into a motel in San Carlos. After an exciting day, he was asleep within minutes.

  He dreamed about his son—about the boy, age nine or ten, who had loved him as abjectly as any woman. In his imagination, and therefore in his dreams, the boy and the man he had become were two separate people. The boy had become the man the day he ran away.

  In his dream he was just waking up. Steve was at the foot of his bed.

  “There’s a dead lady in the back of the van, Dad. She’s beginning to stink.”

  “After a while they get that way, son.”

  “What’s she doing in the van?”

  “I met her over in Memphis. I bought her a drink and she said she’d give me a blow job for fifty bucks, so I took her outside and beat her to death. Then I put her in the van.”

  “Can I come next time?”

  Then he really was awake and it was just shy of eight o’clock. He spent the rest of the morning watching TV. He didn’t want to think about anything, and TV was good for that.

  Around noon he took a shower and got dressed. Then he drove around until he found a diner, where he ordered pancakes and coffee.

  He had bought a newspaper, which he read with his meal. There was nothing about Dr. Fairburn’s murder, although there had been a mention on the TV news.

  There was nothing, not one word, about yesterday’s events in Half Moon Bay. The police apparently were keeping a lid on it. Walter felt vaguely cheated.

  He decided it was time for a public performance, something the newspaper readers of San Francisco would really enjoy. Something to let Steve know that he hadn’t heard the last of his old dad.

  But not yet. Not for a few days. Walter decided he would give everybody time to get nice and comfortable.

  * * *

  Late that afternoon, Harriet Murdock was sitting at her desk in the realty offices of Wade & Bradley, wishing she had something to do. Business was slow. She had been to two open houses that morning, and she couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to live in either one of them. She hated her job, she decided. But she was trapped in it, the way she was trapped in her life.

  Thus she had no great expectations when her cell phone started ringing, not until she heard Walter’s voice.

  “You want to meet me after five for drinks? Then maybe dinner? Please say yes.”

  There wasn’t any doubt she was going to say yes.

  “Where would you like to meet?” she asked, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice.

  “Somewhere they serve Pink Ladies.”

  She left work at three, which would give her two hours to pull herself together. She took a shower and shaved her legs, just in case, and then went to work on her makeup.

  She finally chose a dress, white with diagonal zebra stripes and a flouncy collar, and then she had misgivings. Wasn’t it perhaps just a little much? A little too come-hither? No. To hell with it. She put it on and looked at herself in the full-length mirror. If Walter got the idea she was available, so much the better.

  She also wore perfume, which she hardly ever did. Shalimar. Like the dress, it was obvious. She put it on behind her ears and between her breasts—again, just in case.

  Now. What did she have in the house to eat?

  * * *

  They met where they had first met, in the bar on El Camino Real. The instant he saw the dress, Walter knew that everything was going to work out as planned.

  He was sitting in their booth, and he rose to meet her. He took her hand and, for the first time, kissed her on the cheek.

  “You look lovely,” he told her. “You look just lovely.”

  When she was seated, he went to the bar and ordered a Coors and a Pink Lady. The bartender had been forewarned, so the Pink Lady was already put together and just needed another turn with the electric drink mixer. He brought them back to the table.

  “I can’t get over how nice you look,” he said. “You look a treat.”

  It didn’t take very much of this before Harriet was blushing down to the roots of her dyed hair.

  They talked for a while, about the weather and the lousy real estate market, and how glad they were to see each other. And somewhere Walter slipped in that he was living in a motel for the next few days. His rented house, it seemed, had turned out to be alive with vermin and was being fumigated.

  It was almost immediately after receiving this bit of news that Harriet suggested, “Why don’t we have dinner
at my place?”

  Why not, indeed.

  “And maybe you could leave your van at the motel. I’ll follow you there in my car and then drive you back to my place. I have nosy neighbors.”

  Walter, he thought to himself, you’ve just been invited to spend the night.

  Harriet owned a house, which was convenient. She had lived there with her husband until the divorce and now she lived there alone, without enjoying it much.

  Dinner was steak and a baked potato and salad, and Harriet was the dessert. She practically crawled to him on her hands and knees. He pulled down the zipper of her dress while she was unbuttoning his fly.

  And she wasn’t bad at it. She knew that, after a certain age, gentlemen needed some encouragement. By the time she was done he was nice and hard, and then she straddled his lap and guided him in. She enjoyed herself so much that, by the time they were finished, she was pink as a lobster all the way down to her nipples.

  They slept that night in her double bed. She went to sleep holding his member, which was about half-erect. She was a very happy girl.

  He was awake a little longer, trying to decide when and how he should kill her.

  It would have to be here in the house. That was sure. The basement in Half Moon Bay would have allowed for a proper send-off, but right now it was probably crawling with police technicians, scraping up blood samples. So the house would have to do.

  And the house was a little tract cracker box, where the neighbors were twenty feet away. So it wouldn’t suit if Harriet started screaming. That was a pity. Walter always enjoyed the screaming. But she would have to suffer, so he would tape her mouth shut and do her in the bathtub.

  But not tonight. And probably not tomorrow. Harriet would have a few days of unblemished bliss before she paid the debt she owed to God.

  About two in the morning, she woke up and wanted him to make love to her again. He was happy to oblige. He gave the preliminaries lots of attention, and by the time he pushed into her she was shuddering with pleasure. Ten minutes later she was damp with sweat and couldn’t do anything except cling to him and whisper, “I love you,” over and over again. She fell asleep like that.