The Stalker

by Bill Pronzini

  Investigating officers responding to the report of a midair explosion by rancher Neil Simmons, found the smoking wreckage of the 35-year-old financial wizard’s Cessna in a fallow field on Simmons’ property three miles from the lake. Beauchamp was alone in the twin-engine craft at the time of the fatal plunge.

  He had taken off from Kirin Field in Philadelphia early yesterday morning on a planned flight to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, where he was to meet friends for a caribou-hunting expedition. He was in the habit of flying alone, a source close to the family said.

  Police could find no explanation for the apparent explosion of the aircraft. A complete investigation is being conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration.

  Beauchamp, whose uncanny knowledge of the stock market resulted in the accumulation of a fortune reported to exceed twenty million dollars, had devoted his time to world travel in the past few years. He was a well-known member of the fabled international jet set, and maintained homes in Côte d’Azur and on the island of Majorca, as well as in Philadelphia.

  Before wedding Miss Tanner in a lavish ceremony in fashionable Beacon Hill in September, Beauchamp’s name had been romantically linked with two international film starlets. His previous wives were Kelly Drew Beauchamp, an airline stewardess, and the socially prominent Maria Todd Andrews. Both marriages ended in divorce, the first in 1963 and the second in 1966.

  Yellow November 1970 Saturday and Sunday

  1

  Andrea was gone.

  Steve Kilduff knew that, intuitively, the moment he entered their apartment high on San Francisco’s Twin Peaks. He stood just inside the door, the cashmere overcoat he had shed in the elevator over his left arm, his eyes moving slowly over the neat, darkened living room—the magazines on the coffee table arranged just so, the freshly pressed drapes drawn carefully over the wide window-doors, the replace hearth swept clean and its steel screen placed with precise orderliness before the grate, the buff-colored shag carpet fluffy and well vacuumed, the expensive and ornate maple furnishings glistening with lemon-scented furniture polish. Everything was in its place, everything was spotlessly clean, everything was just as it always was, just as Andrea—warm, sweet, passionate, orderly Andrea—insisted it should be.

  But she was gone. There was a tangible feel of desertion, of emptiness, which lay on the air in that very tidy living room like stagnating water at the bottom of a forest pool.

  Kilduff shut the door quietly behind him, letting the overcoat fall to the carpet at his feet. Mechanically, he walked past the gleaming kitchen with its waxed linoleum floor and followed the short hallway into their bedroom. He saw, without seeing, that the wide double bed was neatly made, the white chenille spread free of even a single wrinkle, hanging exactly the same distance from the buff carpet on either side; that the toilet articles and jewelry cases on his dresser were schematically apportioned; that the hammered bronze ashtray on his night stand sparkled with a recent application of tarnish remover.

  He went to the walk-in closet to the left of the doorway and slid back the paneled door on Andrea’s half. He looked at a bare, scrubbed wall and two dozen empty hangers uniformly bunched on the round wooden rod. The floor was equally bare; there were no pumps or heels or puff-ball slippers in the wire shoe rack, and the matching pieces of Samsonite luggage he had given Andrea for an anniversary present three years before were not there.

  Kilduff returned to the living room. She hadn’t even bothered to leave a note, he thought, all the conspicuous surfaces where one might have been were barren; no note, no explanation or good-bye or kiss-my-ass or go-to-hell, nothing, nothing at all.

  He crossed to the closed drapes, drew them open, and unlocked the sliding glass window-doors. He stepped out onto the wide cement floor of the balcony—bare, save for the webbed aluminum summer furniture folded and stacked in one corner. A wind laced with ice particles numbed his face and neck almost immediately, but he stood with his hands on the cold metal of the welded iron railing.

  The fog was coming in. It sat off to the west in great folding gray billows, like tainted cotton candy at a carnival. Kilduff watched it for a long moment—moving closer, inexorably closer, an advancing army with ephemeral wisps drifting ahead of it like the spirits of long-dead and long-forgotten generals. He moved his eyes slowly to look at what lay spread out before him: the gray close-set buildings of a big city, some hillside-clinging, some extending in long identical rows as if they had spewn forth from a gigantic duplicating machine, some jutting skyward with long, thin, beseeching spires; straight ahead to the Golden Gate Bridge, heavy with weekend traffic, the crests of its red spans already consumed by the approaching fog; across to Marin County and the brown and white and pastel cottages clinging to the side of the hill above Sausalito, where the would-be artists and the would-be writers and the hippies and the rebels and the fruiters lived; dipping lower, coming back to the ugly dead gray rock of Alcatraz, a toad’s wart in the leaden surface of the bay; to the right and the cantilever span of the Bay Bridge and along it, halfway to Oakland and the East Bay, where it touches Yerba Buena Island; down and over to the naval base on the long finger, obscene finger, of Treasure Island. A sweeping panorama, Kilduff thought, beautiful San Francisco, enchanting San Francisco, but only when the sun shines, baby, because when you saw it like this, on an overcast Saturday morning in early November with the vague promise of rain and the chill of winter and the smell of acrid brine in the air, when you saw it like this it was lonely and remote and hoary-old and not very beautiful or enchanting at all.

  He turned from the railing, then, and went back inside the apartment, relocking the window-doors and drawing the drapes closed again. He sank wearily onto the pliant cushions of one of the chairs and fumbled a cigarette from the pocket of his shirt. He was a big man, tall, muscular; at thirty-two, his belly was still washboard-taut and he still moved with the easy, natural grace of his youth. But his thick black hair had begun to gray prematurely at the temples, and his green and brown hawk’s eyes had an almost imperceptible dullness to them, as if the fires which had once burned there were now little more than rapidly cooling embers; his cheeks were sunken hollowly, giving him an anomalous, slightly satanic look. It was a strange face that stared back at him from the mirror in the bathroom every morning, a face he no longer felt at ease with after eight years of almost-but-not-quite, eight years of failure compounded upon failure, eight years of knowing that the money would run out some day and trying to look ahead to that time, trying to prepare for it in advance, and never accomplishing that objective—or any other.

  Like these past two days, he thought. Like what had happened with this Roy Bannerman, whom he had met at an incredibly sluggish party some friends of Andrea’s had given on Russian Hill. Bannerman was an executive with a large independent cannery in Monterey, and there was a managerial position opening up there shortly that paid twelve thousand per annum. Come on down, he had told Kilduff, I’ll have the brass over for dinner, give them a chance to look you over; hell, a few drinks and some thick steaks under their belts, and you’re in, Steve, I can practically guarantee it. So he had gone down there and met the brass, putting the charm on, smiling at the right time, laughing at the right time, speaking at the right time, lying at the right time, oh Jesus yes, he had impressed the crap out of them, they were calling him Steve and he was calling them Ned and Charley and Forry, and when the evening was over they had said to come around to the cannery in the morning and take a tour of the plant, see what you’ll be handling, eh, Steve, and he had called Andrea from his motel bursting like a goddamned kid with a straight-A report card. She had sounded pleased, in a subdued way, strange now that he thought of it, but he had put it down at the time to the late hour and the fact that he had gotten her out of bed. So he had gone around to the cannery yesterday, Friday, and a fat secretary with bad legs had taken his name and then informed him that Ned and Charley and Forry were all in conference, would he mind waiting for just a little while? He waite
d for three hours, and then Bannerman came into the anteroom looking very righteous, and said that it had all fallen through, they had run a personnel check into his background as a matter of policy and what the hell, Steve, why didn’t you tell me about all those screw-ups before I went through the trouble of setting everything up, we’ve got to have a solid man in this position, somebody who can step right in and take over, well, I hope you understand.

  He understood; he understood all too well.

  But it didn’t really matter now, because the money had finally run out—there was exactly three hundred and sixteen dollars in their joint checking account—and because Andrea had run out, too.

  Andrea, he thought. He stared blankly through the smoke curling upward from his cigarette. Andrea, why? Why? We had something, didn’t we? We had it all, didn’t we? We had a love that transcended all the failures, all the empty purposes, enduring, unshakable, unkillable, a veritable Rock of Gibraltar ...

  Bullshit

  It was the money, of course.

  Face the truth, Kilduff—no more money, no more Andrea; simple enough, painfully simple enough. He should have seen that, even though they had never discussed the money by tacit agreement; he had told her in the beginning that it was an inheritance from a non-existent granduncle Andrew in Cedar Rapids; Iowa, and she had accepted that. That was where he had made his mistake, taking her unquestioning acceptance of the money and her silence on the subject to mean that it carried no real import for her. But all the time she had been waiting, biding her time, squeezing all but the very last little drop.

  And then: Good-bye, Steve. In absentia. It was nice while the money lasted.

  Bodega Bay is a small fishing village on the Northern California coast, some sixty-five miles above San Francisco. The village, the goodsized inlet of the same name, and a complex of several buildings called The Tides, achieved a kind of national prominence some years ago when Alfred Hitchcock filmed his suspense movie The Birds there. Since that time, they get a good percentage of tourist business in the spring and summer months—sightseers, vacationers, visitors from outlying towns, self-styled fishermen who boast to the bored party-boat captains about the record king salmon they are going to land but never do. But during the winter, the natives usually have the place pretty much to themselves, and it takes on—falsely—the atmosphere of one of those staid, aloof New England-seacoast hamlets.

  At The Tides, inside the Wharf Bar and Restaurant, Jim Conradin sat in solitary silence at the short bar, drinking two fingers of bourbon from a water glass. All of the burnished copper-topped tables in the coffee shop area were empty. Sal, the bartender, was having an animated discussion with the lone waitress, a young girl named Dolly, with hair the color of wheat sheaves and very large breasts which Sal watched hungrily as he spoke. There was no one else present.

  Conradin, dressed in a sheepskin jacket and blue denim trousers, turned on his stool to look out through the windows with deep-set, brooding gray eyes. The chiseled, weather-bronzed features of his lean face were grim. A storm was building somewhere out at sea—a day, perhaps two, away; the vague smell of dark rain had been in the air when he arrived at The Tides some two hours earlier. The bay was rough, an oily grayish-black color; whitecaps covered its surface, causing the red-and-white buoys that marked the crossing channel to bob and weave violently, and three or four high-masted fishing boats anchored downwind to rock heavily in the swells. He couldn’t see much of Bodega Head, across the bay, and the narrows that led into the Pacific at the southern end was completely obliterated by swirling fog. Old man Rushing, who had been a sailing master once and had come around Cape Horn in a two-masted schooner in 1923, sat dressed in his perennial faded blue mackinaw and leather deer-hunter’s cap on the edge of the wooden dock, fishing for crappies with a hand line, impervious to the cold and the fog and the wind. It seemed to Conradin, as it always did when he saw him, that the old man had been built, too, when they constructed the dock.

  Conradin turned back to his bourbon, staring moodily into the glass. He hated winter, hated it with consummate vehemence. It was a sedentary time, a time of waiting, a time of thinking. God, that was the worst part—the thinking. When the salmon were running, it was a different story altogether. Then you could stand on the solid hardwood deck of your boat in a three-mile-per-hour troll, with the warm sea breeze fresh and heady in your nostrils and the sound of the big Gray Marine loud and vibrant in your ears; you could feel in your hands the power, the resiliency of a thirty-pound hickory-butted Hamell rod with a 4/o reel and a fifty-pound monofilament test line; you could see the big silvers close out on the green-glass ocean, coming out of the water in long graceful jumps to rid themselves of sea lice, the way marlin will do to shake the sucking fish from their gills; you could watch them, feel them hit the Gibbs-Stewart spoons or the live sardines, whichever you were using, leaping end over end and then turning and running toward the boat, broad tails lashing the water to foam, then sounding to take the line out again; you could play them, fight them, pit raw stamina against raw stamina, know the exhilaration of landing them, of winning, of taking them with their shining bluish-silver bellies onto the ice. There was no time for thinking, then, no time for dwelling on a past that refuses to stay buried. But in the winter...

  Conradin drained the balance of the amber fluid. He debated having another drink; he had had four already, and he could feel them just a little. It was barely noon, and Trina would have lunch for him before long, in the big white house overlooking the bay from the northern flat. Still, there was time for one more; there was always time for one more.

  He glanced toward Sal, the bartender, who now had his face very close to Dolly’s, whispering something in her ear. She giggled girlishly, her face reddening. Conradin said, “How about a refill.”

  Grudgingly, Sal moved away from the girl to pour two more fingers of bourbon into the empty glass. When he took Conradin’s dollar, his eyes said that anybody who drank ten fingers of sour mash before noon was a goddamned lush, or something.

  Trina might have agreed with that, in a way; Trina said he drank too much, and maybe she was right. But only in the winter, he thought, only when there was the time for thinking.

  Silently, he raised the glass to his lips.

  When Larry Drexel brought his sleek jade-green Porsche 912 SL to a stop in the driveway of his tile-roofed hacienda-style home in Los Gatos, he saw that Fran Varner was waiting for him on the rear patio. She was propped up on one of the chaise longues near the stone fountain in the patio’s center, reading a paperback book. A bulky-knit sweater was draped over her shoulders, and the short sky-blue skirt she wore had hiked up to expose her slender legs to a pale November sun which danced intermittently behind heavy clouds. Her rich seal-brown hair was carefully combed, curved under at the nape of her neck, the way he liked her to wear it.

  Drexel smiled a little as he set the parking brake, thinking that if he had somehow been crazy enough to marry her, as she had been after him for six months to do, then she would be greeting him when he came home from El Peyote—wrapped in a shapeless housecoat, with her hair up in rollers. This way, with the arrangement, she was always at her best for him—even when they were in bed, especially then, putting that cream sachet he liked in all the secret little places and sleeping in the nude instead of in the old flannel nightgown he knew she wore at her apartment.

  Dark-haired and dark-complected, looking somewhat like the actor Ricardo Montalban though he was not of Latin descent, Drexel stepped onto the flagstone walk that paralleled the house. He moved with almost feline fluidity inside his two-hundred-dollar sharkskin suit, following the path past the bottle brush and barrel cactus in the landscaped borders. When he reached the patio, his eyes—black, expressive, sharply watchful—moved approvingly over the rows of macetas with their potted desert plants, the four asymmetrical Joshua trees like miniature Briareuses, the six-foot stone and mortar wall separating the patio from the narrow creek that wound its way past the r
ear of his property. It had an Old-Mexico feel which never failed to please him; he had a thing about Mexican-Spanish architecture and motif.

  Fran stood as he approached, smoothing her skirt and touching her hair with that almost self-conscious movement women seem to affect. “Hi, honey,” she said, kissing him.

  He held her for a moment, his hand moving in a familiar way along the gentle curve of her hip. “A little cool for the patio, isn’t it?”

  “Well, it got to be stuffy inside.”

  “Been waiting long?”

  “Since noon.”

  “Any mail?”

  “A couple of things,” she said. “I put them on the hall table.” She slipped her arm about his waist. “Have you eaten lunch yet? It’s past one.

  “Juano brought me a sandwich,” Drexel said. “Listen, Fran, you’re going to have to work half a day tomorrow, noon till five. Elena’s brother is getting married in Watsonville.”

  “Okay.” She sighed wistfully. “It must be a lovely feeling to know you’re about to become a bride or a groom in twenty-four hours.”

  “You’re not going to start in again, are you?”

  “No, honey. I was just thinking about Elena’s brother.”

  “Sure,” Drexel said. “Come on, let’s go inside and do it on the kitchen table.”

  She blushed crimson, poking his arm. He grinned. This kid was something else, that was a fact. She couldn’t get enough of it, Christ she wore him out sometimes, but when you came right out and talked about it in the light of day, without the sun having set and the shades having been drawn and the lamp having been put out, she acted as if she’d never before seen or heard of a hard-on. Maybe it was that blushing schoolgirl innocence that had made him keep her around as long as he had; it was like making it with a virgin every time.