"What time did you see her with the basket?"
"I can't remember. I didn't look at my watch then. I didn't have any reason to."
The lieutenant turned to Beatrice. "Did you see Mrs. Vaughn any time during the day previous to the attack?"
"No."
"I remember," Rosina interrupted. "It must have been about a quarter of twelve. Because I watched the Lucy show from eleven to eleven-thirty. Then I went downstairs to put the clothes in the washer. By the time I came upstairs again and happened to look out a window and saw her, ten or fifteen minutes must have passed ... so it must have been about a quarter of twelve."
"You didn't notice anything unusual when you saw her going into the house?"
"No."
"So that means she was attacked between a quarter of twelve and one o'clock," Pete murmured thoughtfully. It was the first time he had spoken while the lieutenant had been there and everyone turned to look at him.
The lieutenant made a notation in his notebook. "That's all for now," he announced. "If any of you can add anything ... if you think of something else that might be a help, let me know."
Clark watched as his neighbors left. The policeman remained in the chair ó motionless ó but his gaze wandered slowly about the room as if seeking a clue that had previously eluded him. Clark felt some of the tension slide away from him. It wasn't the end of the world. Everything would be right again. Alma would soon be out of the hospital and home again. She would never forget the experience, and he would never forget the experience, but the horror of it would gradually diminish, the importance would gradually diminish, never vanish completely but dwindle down to comparative insignificance.
Helen Reardon had been raped, Clark recalled. By three men. Brutally beaten and left in a field to die. She had spent weeks in the hospital and there had been many months before she began to show any signs of emotional recovery. But, eventually, she had recovered almost completely. Both he and Alma had visited the Reardon's several months after the incident and it had been difficult to see any difference in Helen. She had laughed at jokes much the same way she had before, her appearance had hardly changed ...
The phone rang. The policeman answered, listened intently. When he hung up the phone there was a strange expression on his face and Clark listened with a new shock as the policeman explained Alma had ...
CHAPTER EIGHT
Alma rose slowly from the murkiness of the nightmare. She had gone through nightmares before but this was worse than any she had ever had before. This was pure horror, a running and falling with an unspeakable ugliness continually upon her. She rose slowly from the horror and the murkiness, with it slipping away from her, behind her, beneath her. At the last instant, she felt as if she had left a huge dark room echoing with screams.
The girl was pretty. White uniform. "Feel better now, Mrs. Vaughn?"
The girl stood there as if waiting for a reply but Alma could think of no reply. Where was she? What had happened? She closed her eyes and a mud of horror tugged at her ankles, a quicksand of horror grasping to pull her down into the huge dark room where her screams were still echoing ó distant now but still heard faintly.
She opened her eyes again and found her hands were clutching the white sheets, her fingernails aching as they pressed against the mattress beneath the sheets. Her body was covered with sweat, her heart racing ...
The pretty girl in the white uniform smiled. "Everything's going to be all right, Mrs. Vaughn. I'll find the doctor ... "
* * *
She was alone in the room. Her body felt strange, as if someone had sapped it of strength. She closed her eyes again and the quicksand of horror was stronger. The world tilted and spun crazily until she was dizzy with the blur of images.
The fat salesman was looking at her naked body again, his thick lips peeled across yellowed teeth. Here we go, the words hissed. She felt him press his prick into her, heard his sigh of satisfaction, and watched as he fucked her faster and faster ... The fat salesman vanished. She stared at the walls of the room, her hands on the bed.
What happened to me? She could remember nothing. She closed her eyes and tried to remember exactly what had happened. The fat salesman returned in the darkness and, once more, she felt his hands on her breasts, felt the warmth of his breath against her face as she lay beneath him while he ... Up from the horror to the nothingness and amnesia of reality, down again to the horror of memory ... He stood in the doorway and held the TV before her. The screen was bright, spinning, sucking her to a bright whirlpool that ended on the bed with the voice: Ah, honey, come on, look at my cock, his hands gripping her head, turning it ...
She struggled without moving, screamed without voice. Up from horror, down to horror, endlessly through timelessness, struggling to remember the horror, to examine it in reality, and know what had happened to her; with it always escaping her, something always drawing the memory away from her so it could be grasped and known no longer than an instant, endlessly dwindling to oblivion.
Alma moved across the room and out of the room, down the hall. She felt his cock in her cunt, thrusting, throbbing, spitting. Even while she ran, she was somehow on the bed again with his weight crushing her and his hard flesh ripping and tearing her cunt. His voice echoed from the corridor walls and reached her ears in a whispery hundredfold as if hearing him speak a hundred times at once: You got a good, tight little cunt. And now you're gonna be fucked harder than you ever been fucked before! She covered her ears with her hands but the voice came through the solid flesh and bone of her hands.
Suck it! Suck it real good! A voiceless pause in the nightmare but a pause filled with shifting sensations. His voice again, Suck it harder. Suck it harder! She felt the hard meaty mass of his cock in her mouth again and heard the faint slurping sounds as she sucked. He was shoving his cock into her mouth, hurting it, shouting, "Swallow it!" and she felt his warm come filling her mouth, sliding down her throat.
She was screaming now, the quicksand of horror always a step behind her no matter how fast she ran or how hard she screamed.
Men and women in white turned toward her, their faces pale and stretched as if they too saw the horror a step behind her. They moved toward her as if to seize her and hold her so the horror could step that one pace, reach her, engulf her, but they moved with the creeping slowness of snails on every side and she swept past them.
Doors with words, but the words were black against white, meaningless curvatures of black against white, and she placed every ounce of strength to flee the quicksand behind her. But it reached her and pulled her down to the horror. She was in the bedroom again, naked on the bed. The fat man was standing beside the bed and asking her where she kept all her money. She was telling him that there was some money in her purse and about the box on the top shelf in the closet. The box was out of sight and could only be reached by standing on a chair. She and Clark had thought of the hiding place and even while she told the man where the money was hidden, she wondered why she was telling him, as if she had been hypnotized and had to obey his every order ... The man was standing beside the bed, counting the money, more than five hundred dollars.
He was kneeling above her and laughing, shoving his penis into her mouth again. He said, "Give me another blow job, honey." She felt his cock swell as he slid it back and forth in her mouth, his thrusts becoming more and more vicious until her lips and tongue and the inside of her mouth were bruised and aching. The man grunted and she was strangling on his warm come ...
The quicksand of horror vanished and she was in the hallway again. She had run blindly and struck a wall. Running again to escape the quicksand, she passed through two rooms where more startled faces turned toward her and in the third room she saw the man in white, a young man who stared at her breasts because her white gown had parted and exposed her breasts, but the man stood before a metal box that hissed with steam ... Gleaming scalpels on a slotted platform, she had one of the scalpels in her hand,
burning her hand, burning her throat ...
She fell toward the floor and saw it rush toward her but, at the same time did not see it and did not feel the floor. As she fell toward the floor she found the never-ending white glow as soft and peaceful as a cloud in heaven.
CHAPTER NINE
He opened his eyes and the world came into focus. He saw the shadows of the living room furniture and heard the rain. He realized he'd been sleeping. He stretched his arms above his head and his knuckles grazed the ceramic lamp on the end table. He listened to the subsiding sound and knew the lamp would not fall to the floor. It was an incident that had occurred frequently in the past ó his height was such and the position of the lamp was such that when he lay on the sofa, stretched and accidentally struck the lamp, there was never enough force to send the lamp to the floor.
The rocking of ceramic against wood ceased. He listened to the faint sound of rain and heard the sound of a car's tires in a pool of street water. He strained for other sounds but there were none. He wondered where Alma was, thinking she might have fallen asleep in the bedroom, and immediately remembered she was dead. He had gone to the funeral and all their friends and relatives had been there ...
Clark yawned and stretched again, spreading his arms so he would not accidentally strike the lamp. His mouth tasted foul and he gradually recognized it as a stale taste of whisky, a deader staleness of too many cigarettes. What was it Hemingway said about cigarettes?" They leave your mouth tasting like the bottom of a bird cage. Exactly.
There was a numbness at the base of his skull but this wasn't a hangover.
He'd slept it off. And felt fairly good, except for the hollowness in his stomach. He'd have to eat something, but first he'd have to urinate. He slid into a sitting position on the sofa. His clothes were damp in those areas where they had been against the sofa beneath his body. He ran a hand over his face and felt the stubble of beard, but gave priority to the items ahead as he had always done: One) urinate; Two) eat; and Three) shave.
He went slowly up to the bathroom and urinated. An instant later he felt the desire to have a woman ó stronger than it had been in years; stronger than it had been since his bachelor days, and remembered he hadn't made love with a woman since Alma's death. How long ago had that been? A whole month. He went downstairs and turned on lights. He went to the door and glanced at the downpour, headlights of a car spotlighting the path of raindrops and glanced at the sky, then at his watch. It wasn't late. But the rain clouds had made the sky so dark it seemed as if night had arrived. He remembered that burst of desire to have a woman and decided to add another item to his agenda: Get a woman. The list was revised now: One) eat; Two) shave; and Three) get a woman. He moved into the kitchen, remembering how he had often been able to keep in his mind a continually shifting agenda of a dozen or more items. Now his life had dwindled down to basics. Three items. Previously there had been a need for a much larger agenda. Such items as remembering Alma's birthday, to buy a card, to buy a gift, to discuss a particular subject with her, to buy tickets for a play, shopping together for the household appliances and furnishings, visiting friends and relatives, the various items of household maintenance, and life.
Now it had all changed. No more Alma, no more anything associated with Alma.
No more shopping, no more visiting, no more household maintenance. Down to basics. Body functions. There were only five main ones, he realized: Eat, Sleep, Piss, Shit, Fuck. All animals had to indulge in the first four. Most animals indulged in the fifth also.
Clark ate slowly and thumbed through the pile of mail scattered on the kitchen table, separating them into bills, junk advertisements, and an "other" pile. He threw the advertisements into the trash can by the sink and thumbed through the mail order catalogue in the "other" pile while he ate.
He felt the metallic pressure in his pocket and removed the .22 nickle-plated automatic he'd bought, holding it in his right hand while he alternately used his left hand to eat with and to thumb through the catalogue pages. He paused to hold the gun at arm's length, familiarizing himself with the weight and feel of it. He realized there would always be a top priority to any agenda he might form in his mind from now on ó find the man and kill him. It was of such a top priority that he would never assign it a number. Its importance precluded the assigning of a number. It was why he hadn't killed himself after Alma's death and why he hadn't joined her. It was the only thing he had left to live for ó then he could kill himself because then life would be totally devoid of reason.
Thumbing through the pages of the catalogue once more, he saw a model in lacy pink panties and a matching lacy pink bra. There were other models on the two pages spread before him but his eyes focused on that one particular model, the shape of her breasts, the softness of her smooth thighs, the bare smile of her red lips. The desire for a woman came again, much stronger than before, a painful hardening of his cock and a shortness of breath. For a moment there were pinpoints of light dancing before his eyes, a darkness somewhere in his skull that threatened to engulf him but gradually receded.
He laughed.
In the middle of a conversation about women and sex, Sam Raisner had once said jokingly to someone, "You better get a piece of ass. You got to watch out for that stuff or it'll back up on you." Perhaps there was some truth in it, although some doctors claimed there were no harmful effects from sexual abstinence. Perhaps those particular doctors were either undersexed or crazy. Since puberty he had never been forced to go very long without a woman. He had never gone more than a month in his whole life without a woman. With the maturing of his body, the growing of the sexual drive, he had married Alma and Alma had sufficiently administered to his sexual needs ó three or four times every week, except for the period when she had been ill for two weeks and he had not touched her. Near the end of those two weeks, he remembered suddenly, he had experienced that same shortness of breath and pinpoints of light, sensation of approaching darkness. Perhaps he was more sexed than the average man; perhaps not, but the need for a woman was now clearly defined. He would fulfill it not because he wanted a woman but because it would be another bodily function to be taken care of the way he had urinated not long ago and the way he was now eating. He had to take care of his body and keep it healthy, alert. He had to take care of his body and all its needs until he found the man who had killed Alma ...
The front door chimes broke the silence.
Wally Stephenson. He wore a raincoat but it was unbuttoned. "How's that for timing? I get out of my car and it stops raining. Just like that." The smile faded. "How are you, Clark? How have things been going?"
"Fine. Come in." The sky had lightened some; the rain clouds as a mass were scurrying on the horizon he could glimpse above neighboring rooftops.
"We need you at the office, Clark. That's why I've come to see you ó to make sure you'll be back with us Monday morning. We've saved a pile of work for you ... Oh, nothing monumental or back breaking, but some new and interesting projects." He sat on the sofa without bothering to remove his raincoat. He obviously didn't intend to stay long.
Clark stood before the sofa and stared at a point in the air above Stephenson's head. He fumbled in his pockets until he found a pack of cigarettes and placed one in the corner of his mouth. He groped in his pants pockets for his lighter and felt the .22 in his right pocket. He found a pack of matches and lit the cigarette. The matches had a bright orange cover, a cocktail glass tilted at an angle with bubbles in the glass's contents. Keenan's Cafe, curlicue script said beneath the glass. His mind turned sluggishly. He couldn't recall having been in Keenan's Cafe, but he could recall a heavy drinking period the past three or four days ó a blur of memories of bars and nameless faces ... To hell with it. He slipped his hand in his pocket and touched the comforting metallic surface of the gun. What he'd done the past few days wasn't important. Nothing was important except finding the man ... and he'd have to phone Sid Weinman, arrange for a private talk with him ...
>
" ... I assumed you'd be back Monday," Stephenson was saying, "but they wanted me to check and make sure you hadn't forgotten."
"Hadn't forgotten what?"
Stephenson frowned. "Your leave of absence expires then."
"I ... won't be back Monday. I want my leave of absence extended."
Stephenson rose from the sofa. The raincoat rustled as he moved across the room. "It's your decision, Clark, but we need you."
"I appreciate that. If my absence is too much of an inconvenience, replace me. I'll understand your doing so is because of necessity." He was still staring at that spot in the air above the sofa although Stephenson had moved from the sofa. He felt Stephenson's hand on his shoulder but did not look in that direction.
"Come to work Monday, Clark. Your job is waiting. We've kept it open for you and, as I said, we've lined up some interesting projects. Everyone misses you ... they're all anxious for you to come back. I want you to come back. I need you. God Almighty. You know how you made those model plants? And Maclary got so damned fond of them? Because you weren't there, I had to make up one for Maclary myself. The new hydrofluoric plant in Richmond. Guess what? I left out one of the acid mix tanks and left out stairways from the third floor to the fourth floor. I think Maclary spotted it soon as I gave him the model, but he saved it until a meeting when Ozzie and everybody else from New York were standing around looking at it and then he said, 'Oh, Wally, by the way, how are the operators going to get from the third floor to the fourth floor? Fly?' He made me look like an ass in front of all the brass from New York. If you'd been there ... "
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