The Sweetman Curve

by Graham Masterton

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. The guy’s a psychopath, that’s all. He kills people because he feels like it. Anyone who happens to be passing.’

  Mel took off his spectacles and wiped the lenses. His eyes were pale blue and myopic. ‘I did a course, once, in analytical thinking,’ he said. ‘Some of it was kind of weird, but they did teach me one useful thing, and that was to stop making superficial assumptions.’

  ‘A guy shoots twelve totally unrelated people on the freeway, and it’s a superficial assumption that he’s a fruitcake?’

  ‘It’s a superficial assumption until you prove it. And it seems to me, from what you’ve said, that the cops aren’t doing very much to prove it.’

  ‘They’re looking for the killer. What else can they do?’

  ‘They could try a little analytical thinking, and look at the victims instead.’

  John turned the hamburger patties over with his skillet. He said quietly, ‘They won’t have much trouble finding my father. He’s lying in the funeral parlour right now.’

  Mel nodded, in quiet acceptance. ‘I know that, John. I’m not trying to rub salt in your wounds. But I’ve never believed in totally random events. I don’t believe that a guy goes around shooting people for no reason whatever. That’s why I think that the cops ought to take another look for what the victims were, and see whether they have anything in common.’

  John looked up. He looked sad and tired, but Mel knew how much he wanted to believe that his father hadn’t been killed for no purpose.

  ‘The first thing they have in common is that they were all shot by the same guy,’ John said.

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. There was a housewife, a notions salesman, a garage mechanic, an insurance salesman. All different ages, all different backgrounds.’

  ‘You’re talking like a cop,’ Mel said.

  ‘What the hell do you mean, I’m talking like a cop?’

  ‘You’re talking like a cop because you’re describing those people in terms of what they were on the outside, not what they were on the inside.’

  John went to the green enamel bread-bin to fetch the buns. ‘I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me. Talk plainer.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll talk plainer. You’re a dog-walker, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Okay,’ Mel said, ‘if you were filling out a computer-dating sheet to meet the lady of your dreams, would you describe yourself as a dog-walker?’

  John thought about it. Then he said, ‘Well, I guess not. I might wind up with some chick who likes dogs. I might even wind up with a dog.’

  ‘So what would you put down?’

  ‘Jesus, I don’t know. Something like “sensitive, liberal, charismatic male, with fondness for bizarre automobiles, Stravinsky, and balling on the beach.”’

  ‘Well, that’s precisely my point,’ said Mel. ‘A police description is completely superficial, having to do only with what a person is on the surface. So you’ve got a housewife and a notions salesman and a garage mechanic. But how do you know that they’re not all Stravinsky lovers, or Dodgers supporters, or bailers on the beach? How do you know that they don’t have something in common which made this guy want to kill them?’

  ‘Mel,’ John interrupted, ‘if my father and all these people were shot because they had something in common, then what you’re suggesting is that all their murders were premeditated, worked out, calculated. You’re suggesting that guy trailed us, and shot my father deliberately.’

  Mel helped himself to another glass of Chablis, and topped up John’s glass, too. ‘I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just saying that it’s a possibility. And so far, it’s a possibility that the police haven’t disproved.’

  John sat down on the stool next to Mel. He let out a long breath, and ran his hand tiredly through his hair.

  ‘I know this mood, Mel. It’s the same mood you were in when you tried to persuade me to join that nude UFO society.’

  ‘Well, that was a ball,’ Mel said with a wry smile. ‘I picked up that female wrestler there, you remember, Vivienne.’

  ‘Who could ever forget Vivienne? She couldn’t open a door without tearing the handle off.’

  Mel grunted, with remembered amusement. But then he said, ‘I’m not trying to pressgang you into doing something you don’t want, John. I hope you know me well enough for that. But ever since your father was killed, I’ve been thinking about this psychopath, and somehow he just doesn’t seem like a psychopath at all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that a psychopath wouldn’t go to all the trouble that this guy goes to. I’ve been checking back on all the cuttings in the Los Angeles Times. Here, I’ve brought most of them with me.’

  He took out of his back pocket an untidily-folded collection of torn-out pieces of newspaper, and spread them on the breakfast bar.

  ‘You see this one here. This was a housewife. She was shot by a bullet from an M-16 while she was travelling home on the Hollywood Freeway after taking her daughter to riding class. She joined the freeway at Buffside Drive, and she was only going as far as the next exit at Primera Avenue. The sniper who shot her had to get into Universal City Studios with an M-16, escape supervision long enough to reach a point overlooking the freeway, shoot the woman, and escape. He did it all, according to what the police said here, in less than fifteen minutes. It may have been quicker. In other words, he must have worked out what he was going to do, where he was going to do it from, and how he was going to do it, all in advance. Would a man who works all that out, and goes to that much trouble, just shoot any passing driver for the hell of it?’

  John picked up the cutting, and read it silently.

  ‘Here’s another. This is the garage mechanic. He was shot on the Ventura Freeway from a red Chevy which had trailed him all the way from Pasadena to Sherman Oaks. The interesting thing here is that eyewitnesses saw the Chevy behind him in Pasadena, and more eyewitnesses saw the Chevy behind him at Sherman Oaks. But right here it says that he left the freeway for a while at North Hollywood to buy some gas. So the killer must have followed him off the freeway, waited for him to tank up, and followed him back on to the freeway again.’

  John went back to the stove, and gave the hamburgers a final flip.

  ‘That still doesn’t prove that the killings were planned,’ he said. ‘It might just show that the guy’s even more psychopathic than anyone imagined. Maybe he just picks someone out at random, and trails them.’

  Mel shook his head. ‘Uh-huh. If he gets psychopathic kicks from picking someone out at random and trailing them, then that’s what he’d do all the time. But he doesn’t. He chops and changes his method according to the person he wants to kill. If the victims have a behaviour pattern of passing a particular spot on a particular freeway at the same time every day, then he tends to snipe at them from a fixed position. But if they have irregular habits, then he tends to trail them and shoot them car-to-car. Like, I’m sorry to say, your father.’ John took the sesame buns out of the toaster and set them on Chinese bird-patterned plates. Then he dished up the hamburgers, sliced up an onion for garnish, and handed one to Mel.

  ‘You’ve really been thinking about this, haven’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Thinking is my hobby. Especially thinking about my friends.’

  John looked at him for a long, serious moment. ‘Do you really believe that any of this could be true? That any of these twelve people do have something in common?’

  Mel bit into his hamburger, and munched it. ‘Mmm. This is terrific. If God ever made hamburgers, this is what they’d taste like.’

  John said, ‘Your evidence is pretty thin on the ground. Just because this guy takes a lot of trouble, that doesn’t prove that he wanted to kill anybody in particular.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t. But it’s worth checking out, right?’

  John nodded. It gave him a peculiar kind of pain, thinking that h
is father may have been killed because of some affinity with eleven other people he didn’t even know, all extinct now, and stiff in their strangers’ graves. But it was a more acceptable pain than the agony of believing that his father had died because of some lunatic chance, for no reason except to thrill briefly the hypothalamus of a homicidal madman.

  They walked through to the living room. Vicki had just come downstairs from washing her hair, and she sat on the sofa in a black silk dressing gown that clung to her body with static. A red towel was wrapped around her head, and she looked strikingly pale.

  They drew chairs up to the coffee table, which was too low for eating, and bent themselves over their hamburgers.

  Vicki said, ‘I didn’t think I’d be hungry. But I could eat about five of these.’

  ‘I always knew you should have lived with someone like J. Wellington Wimpy,’ John smiled. ‘I’m just too ascetic for you.’

  ‘Do you think we might go talk to a couple of people?’ Mel asked.

  ‘What people?’ John wanted to know.

  ‘Well, the survivors. Relatives, friends, whatever.’

  Vicki looked at John, worried and uncomprehending.

  ‘The survivors?’ she asked.

  John put down his hamburger. ‘Mel thinks that these killings on the freeway may not be random. He thinks all the victims may have had something in common, something which led this maniac to shoot them.’

  Vicki was silent for a while, shocked. Then she asked John, ‘And what do you think?’

  He shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. I can’t understand what my father could have had in common with any of those other people, but as Mel rightly says, we don’t know what they were like.’

  ‘They were just innocent people, weren’t they?’ said Vicki.

  Mel nodded. ‘Innocent, sure, as far as sanity and logic goes. But they might all have been guilty of some imagined crime in the mind of this psychopath. And if they were, then they were probably all guilty of the same crime.’

  ‘Crime? What kind of crime?’ Vicki persisted. ‘Psychopaths can turn anything into a crime,’ Mel said. ‘I read about a case where a woman went around trying to kill anyone who looked like one of her high school classmates, because she always felt her classmates had borne her a grudge. And there was a guy in Medellin, Colombia, who stabbed eight people because their names came before his in the telephone book.’

  ‘But surely the police know all this? Why do we have to get involved?’

  ‘The police are too busy with conventional thinking,’ John said. ‘That’s what Mel believes, anyway. And I guess I kind of agree with him.’

  ‘So you’re going to play detective?’

  ‘It’s no worse than walking dogs.’

  ‘It’s a damned sight more dangerous. What if this psychopath finds out what you’re doing?’

  ‘How could he?’

  ‘How did he track us down and shoot your father?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I think I’d like to find out.’ Vicki set down her plate and reached across the table to hold John’s hands.

  ‘John,’ she said quietly.

  He lowered his eyes.

  ‘Why don’t you leave it alone, John? Why don’t you just bury your father with dignity, and let the police deal with the rest of it? They know what they’re doing. They must have dealt with hundreds of cases like this before.’

  ‘They don’t think analytically,’ said Mel.

  Vicki didn’t answer. She just repeated huskily, ‘Why don’t you leave it alone, John? Please. For my sake.’ John paused, and then squeezed her hands. ‘Let me go see just one. I have to know if there’s a germ of truth in it, Vicki. I have to know that he didn’t get killed for some totally inane reason.’

  She let her hands drop. Mel looked at her, and then back to John. Outside the window, in the leafy garden, the sun came out again, and lit the quiet room in flickering shades of green and yellow.

  Vicki put her hand to her mouth, and the tears began to slide silently down her cheeks.

  Thirteen

  He sat on a wooden chair in his room on San Juan Avenue, with the dismantled M-14 across his knees. He had tied the stained net curtain back so that he could look out over the flaking window-ledge down to the street, and watch the mid-morning traffic. The sun was still hazed by smog, but it was growing warmer, and the weather report had advised of temperatures up to the high 70s.

  He knew and loved the M-14. For the particular task he was preparing it, the M-14 was the perfect weapon. An angled shot of about ninety feet through a very narrow aperture. Up in the mountains, practising, he had been able to snip single blades of grass with it, shoot petals off flowers.

  On the television, in black and white, Clark Gable was saying something serious and passionate in The Homecoming. The tall man with the slicked-back hair had seen The Homecoming four times already, but he found repetition comforting rather than boring. On the edge of his bed beside him, there was a copy of Hustler open at the centre-spread, and it occurred to him that it might be amusing to take it out with him next target practice, and see how many bullets he could shoot through that wide-apart, unnaturally pink pussy.

  He began to re-assemble the M-14 with care and skill. He had modified the sights slightly to help him with a downward shot, and he had eased the trigger tension so that a light brush of his fingertip would fire it. According to his information, the aperture through which he was going to have to shoot was less than three inches wide, and the rifle was going to have to stay as steady as humanly possible.

  He was going to take the M-16 with him, in case he needed power at close range. But he didn’t like the M-i6’s horizontal drift, and he found the pistol-grip clumsy and awkward. He only used it for quick freeway sniping when muzzle velocity was more important than finesse.

  On the street below, a police car passed, and he watched it until it had turned the corner into Electric Avenue. Then he raised the rifle and gave it a final inspection. It was immaculately clean, exquisitely balanced. Someone had once told him that all guns smell of death, but this one smelled of nothing but metal and light oil.

  He began to think of food and sex. This was Tuesday, and he usually went up to Hollywood Boulevard on Tuesday, to see a blue movie. He liked the movies where girls were hurt, or tied up. He was also fascinated by golden rain movies, although his interest in them sometimes made him feel guilty. Afterwards, he would cross the street and have a chili dog and a cup of coffee, and then see what young girls were cruising the sidewalks. He wondered if one of the girls would do the golden rain bit for an extra ten. He coughed.

  Upstairs, across the creaking floorboards of Mrs Santini’s apartment, he heard the heavy high-heeled rhythms of the samba, accompanied by a kind of hesitant shuffling. The shuffling was Mrs Santini’s pupil, as she tried to teach Spanish dancing. Mrs Santini had a face like an angry buzzard, and long decorative pins through her greasy black hair. Samba was five dollars, rhumba six-fifty, complete flamenco course fifteen-oh-five, with tax; a tussle on the groaning springs of her bed, with her red skirt pulled up to her waist and her hairpins stuck into the side of tire mattress for safety, eight-sixty-five.

  The tall man stood up, and untied the net curtain so that it fell back across the window. He stayed unmoving for two or three minutes, as if he was trying to come to an important decision. Then the telephone rang, and the sound of it unexpectedly evoked the taste of salt in his mouth.

  Fourteen

  It was one of those orderly, white-painted, one-storey houses on 6th Street between San Vicente and Fairfax. A slightly worn beige Cutlass was parked in the driveway, and a small boy with a serious face was playing on the verandah with a pull-along Fisher-Price toy dog. They drew up in Mel’s dilapidated Volkswagen, and climbed out. It was just after three, and the afternoon was stuffy and warm.

  John and Vicki walked up to the house hand-in-hand, with Mel a little way behind them. The boy watched them curiously as they came up the steps of the verandah,
one of his eyes screwed up against the sunshine.

  ‘Is your mother home?’ asked John.

  The boy nodded.

  ‘That’s a nice dog you have there,’ Mel remarked, as John went up to the front door to press the bell.

  The boy nodded again.

  ‘Does he sit up and beg?’ asked Mel.

  The boy shook his head. ‘Nope. But if you come too close, he’ll bite your leg off.’

  Mel chuckled. He was still chuckling as the front door opened, and a pale-faced woman with greying hair and a washed-out print dress stepped out on to the verandah. Her expression was one of such defeat and tiredness that his chuckling died in his throat.

  ‘Mrs Daneman?’ John asked.

  The woman looked at them, her chin held high. She could never have been particularly pretty. Her hair was too coarse and her nose too large. But now she seemed to have been pressed between the pages of a heavy book, like a wild flower, and lost all of her colour and all of her substance. A dried memory of what she once was.

  ‘I don’t know you, do I?’ she said.

  John cleared his throat, embarrassed. ‘We didn’t mean to intrude. But we were hoping you could help us.’

  Mrs Daneman’s eyes squinted against the light as if she were used to rooms where the blinds were always drawn, or as if her evenings were filled with nothing but reading and watching television.

  She said, ‘Is this religious? You’re not Mormons, are you?’

  ‘We’re just folks, ma’am, like you,’ Mel said. ‘Mr Cullen here has just lost his father the same way you lost your husband.’

  Mrs Daneman looked at John with vague comprehension. ‘In a shooting?’ she asked.

  ‘It happened on Friday. It was in the newspapers.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs Daneman. ‘I think I remember reading about it. Your father was a teacher, wasn’t he? I think I remember now.’

  There was an awkward silence, and then Mrs Daneman said, ‘Well, I’m very sorry. It’s the hardest thing in the world, to lose a loved one.’

  Mel said, ‘The truth is, Mrs Daneman, we were hoping you could tell us a little about what happened in your case. You see, we think there might be some kind of connection between all of these shootings on the freeway, some kind of link.’