The Stalker

by Bill Pronzini

  Home, she thought ruefully, looking with disrelish at the accumulation of dust and grit which covered the wooden floor. She rubbed her hands together briskly, passing through the doorway into the bedroom alcove. There were two closed doors side by side in the right-hand wall; the nearest, the door to the bathroom (bathroom, now that was really very funny, she thought, a john with a high wooden tank and a long pull-chain, for God’s sake, not to mention a cracked enamel sink and an exposed shower that sprayed water almost as muddy as that from the slough, even though the piping was supposed to connect with a county supply line). The other door was padlocked through a hasp: the storage closet.

  Andrea unlocked it with another key. From the shelves inside she removed several wool blankets, an old Coleman pressure lantern and a tin of kerosene. She put the blankets on the cot and carried the lantern and kerosene into the other room. Then she found the box of kitchen matches she had bought and took them to the stove and began to build a fire inside, remembering how Steve had done it with bits of kindling from the pile and some of the newspapers. Before long, she had one of the redwood blocks burning; she closed the iron door and stood with her back to the stove, trying to warm herself.

  This week alone here was going to be very good for her in a lot of ways, she reflected; she was going to be on her own for a long, long time, having to fend for herself, and there was nothing like disciplining right from the beginning.

  When the fire began to crackle hotly inside the potbelly, Andrea found a broom and a mop in the storage closet and began systematically to clean the interior of the shack.

  In the bedroom of her small three-room apartment in Santa Clara, Fran Vamer sat moodily sorting her week’s laundry and thinking of Larry Drexel.

  He could be so strange at times, she thought, putting an orange bath towel into one of the two wicker baskets on the floor at her feet. Like this afternoon, like the way he had yelled at her, practically chased her out of his house, for no reason at all that she could see. She was almost frightened of him at times like that—of course, he’d never hit her or anything, but he had such a violent temper, he’d fly off the handle like a little boy having a tantrum when everything didn’t go his way. And he could be so cold and distant, too, as if nothing ever reached him deep inside, as if nothing ever moved him. The only time he was truly warm, truly demonstrative, the only time she really felt spiritually close to him, was when they were making love; when he was inside her, moving, his lips on her breast . . .

  Fran’s cheeks burned furiously. Oh, you’re terrible, she told herself; you’re really a wanton, immoral thing. Abruptly, she stood and went to the bedroom window, staring past the frilly curtains at the rear courtyard of the apartment complex. A group of laughing teen-agers, voices raised in shrill merriment, were swimming in the oblong pool beyond the parking area. She watched them for a time, ducking one another in the chill water, making cannonball dives off the low board at one end, oblivious to the cold and the overcast sky, to all but them selves and the very present, the wonderful immediacy of youth.

  She had been that way once. A good girl—God, such a meaningless term!—playing good-girl games, thinking good-girl thoughts, pure and innocent, knowing in her heart that when she gave herself to a man it would be on her wedding night ...

  With the carefree incorruption of the young, knowing a foolish lie. Because she had met Larry Drexel.

  And fallen blindly in love with him.

  Whatever he was, whatever he felt for her, whatever he said and did to her, she loved him and she would go on loving him.

  Fran turned from the window to look toward the near bedroom wall, to where a small calendar hung. There were lines drawn with a red felt pen, through the dates starting with August 28th and running to the present.

  Two months and six days.

  She was still waiting.

  She couldn’t put off going to a doctor much longer, she knew that. And if it were true, if the reason she had not had her period in two months and six days was because she was pregnant, it was better to know it for certain—wasn’t it?—than to keep falsely hoping she was late because of some hormone imbalance or simple nervousness.

  The thing that was bothering her most, of course, the real reason she had put off seeing a doctor for this long, was not the mere fact that she might be pregnant. No, it was having to tell Larry that she had lied about taking the birth control pills, that she had foolishly succumbed to an inbred religious belief that you did not prevent the conception of human life, that she had been going to his bed for the past year on irrational faith alone. It was having to see his face when she told him that, and about the child, having to hear his reply when she asked him not to allow the baby to be born out of wedlock.

  She was almost certain what he would say.

  He would say that she had done it on purpose, to get him to marry her. And he would refuse.

  Fran returned to the bed and sat down again, lighting a cigarette from the pack on the nightstand. No, now no, she couldn’t think about such things, she had to put it out of her mind. Maybe she wasn’t pregnant after all, maybe everything would be all right given enough time; things always worked out, didn’t they?

  At five-thirty, the limping man walked to O’Farrell Street and entered a small coffee shop. He sat in an ersatz-leather booth at the rear. A chubby waitress with eyes like slick black buttons took his order: a fried ham sandwich and coffee, no cream.

  When the coffee came, the limping man sat watching the steam spiral upward in thin wisps. At the booth across the aisle from him, a young man in a bright blue blazer was talking in low tones to a pretty flame-haired girl. They were holding hands under the table, their knees pressed tightly together. The girl laughed loudly and happily at something the young man said, showing even white teeth and the long slender column of her throat.

  Traffic noises filtered in from the street outside in a regular, almost monotonous, rhythm. The limping man lifted his coffee cup, wondering: How am I going to do it this time?

  The first one—Blue, in Evanston—had taken the cleverest planning thus far. Blue always went to the Urban Betterment League meeting on Thursday nights, the limping man had discovered; and invariably, he parked his car at the rear of the lot adjacent to the Elks Club, where the meetings were held. The lot was shadowed, unattended during that time, and the limping man had been able to slip quietly and unobtrusively through the parked cars to Blue’s new Camaro.

  He had waited there for some time, to make sure the lot was completely deserted; then, using a small pipe wrench, he had reached beneath the car and removed the drain plug at the bottom of the gas tank. The resultant flood of gasoline—only six or seven gallons—had been greatly absorbed by the dry, gravelly surface of the lot; the spreading stain was hidden almost completely beneath the Camaro and in the deep shadows. When only a few drops remained in the tank, he had replaced the drain plug. Then, with a Phillips screwdriver, he had extricated the left rear taillight and carefully broken the stop-light bulb with the blade of the screwdriver, to expose the filaments. From his pocket, he had taken a three-foot length of lamp cord, slit on both ends, and, with an alligator clip, attached one side of one end of the cord to the positive portion of the filament in the broken bulb. Using another alligator clip, he had grounded the second side of the cord to the metal taillight frame, first having bent it slightly inward so as to take the clip. The opposite ends of the cord had been stripped bare, and he taped those ends together with electrician’s plastic tape, so that the exposed wire tips almost, but not quite, touched—like a spark gap. Then he had removed the gas cap and inserted the cord inside the tank until the wire tips touched bottom, lifted them perhaps a half-inch above it, and then taped the cord in that position with more of the electrician’s tape. The entire operation had taken less than ten minutes.

  He had been waiting on a side street when Blue and the others came out of the Urban Betterment League meeting. As was usually the case when a man got into his car, simul
taneous with starting it, Blue had depressed the brake pedal. The resultant spark from the stop-light filament to the exposed ends of the cord had ignited the fumes in the tank—and the gasoline puddled under the car—and the ensuing explosion had eliminated all traces of the rigging.

  The limping man smiled thinly, thinking about the brilliant orange flash which had illuminated the Illinois sky that night, and the booming concussion of the blast. The chubby waitress brought his fried ham sandwich and departed silently. He chewed thoughtfully on the sandwich, his eyes bright and clear as he visualized the violence.

  Gray and Red had offered no real challenge. Gray, for example, had been in the habit of working late at his trucking concern three nights each week. The limping man simply waited in the shadows of the garage, having gained entrance through a rear window with a simple spring catch, until Gray made his usual cursory night check of the premises before leaving. Then he had slipped up behind him and wielded a sand-filled stocking. Propping the unconscious Gray against the concrete wall in front of one of the trucks, he had then released the vehicle’s hand brake; he had already begun climbing through the rear window again when the loud, satisfying sound of truck and Gray and wall fusing into one reached his ears.

  Red had kept his private plane at a small airport on the outskirts of Philadelphia, in a hangar which a child could have gained access to. The small cold-expander bomb, which had taken the limping man no time at all to construct in his motel room, had fit neatly out of sight beneath one of the wings. When Red had taken the plane up to a certain altitude, when a pre-set atmospheric temperature had been reached, the bomb—and the aircraft—had exploded. There had been, of course, no trace of the small device in the subsequent wreckage.

  The limping man finished his sandwich and coffee. Now at hand was the problem of Yellow. How would he do it this time? Perhaps the solution lay with Yellow himself. Yes, there was one particular habit which Yellow had, one that he had noted during the careful surveillance he had made on his previous trip to California. There was little, if any, risk involved if he proceeded along that particular line. Yes. Yes, of course.

  Hurriedly, he dabbed at his mouth with a cloth napkin and stepped out of the booth. The man in the blue blazer and the flame-haired girl were still holding hands beneath the table in the booth opposite, eyes smiling warmly at one another.

  A slut and her pimp, the limping man thought. He walked quickly to the cash register.

  5

  The doorbell rang at seven-fifty.

  Conscious of a painful tightness in his chest, as if some unknown pressure was slowly constricting his lungs, Steve Kilduff opened the door. The lean, solemn man who stood there said, “Hello, Steve,” without expression.

  Kilduff nodded wordlessly, and the two men studied each other for a long moment, appraising the effect of the passage of eight years’ time. Kilduff thought: He’s changed, he’s really changed, you can see it in his eyes. He moved aside, swinging the door open wider. Jim Conradin came in past him, walking stiffly, hands held in regimental immobility at his sides. Kilduff closed the door and led the way into the living room, turning when he reached the center to look again at the man who had been his closest friend in the Air Force.

  Conradin asked, “Drexel?”

  “He’s not here yet.”

  “It’s almost eight.”

  “Yes.”

  Conradin walked in his stiff way to the sofa and sat down slowly, like an old man seating himself on a park bench. Without looking up, he said, “Have you got a drink, Steve?” and Kilduff realized for the first time that Conradin was drunk. His gaunt-cheeked face was flushed, and there was a vague filminess to his eyes; the effort he was making to appear natural was obvious now, and he was holding himself in check by sheer will.

  I am not my brother’s keeper, Kilduff thought. He said, “Brandy all right?”

  “Fine.”

  Kilduff took a bottle of Napoleon brandy from the credenza and poured a drink into a small snifter. He carried the glass to Conradin, who accepted it with a steady hand, raising it to his lips, drinking with measured, care, his eyes almost closed, trying to bring it off oh-so-casually, and failing, failing badly. Kilduff looked away.

  “Well,” Conradin said, “some funny thing, isn’t it, Steve?”

  “What is?”

  “The three of us living so close to one another and not knowing it all these years.”

  “Not so funny,” Kilduff said. “You and I are natives of this area, Jim. And Larry was always talking about moving to California.”

  “Sure, that’s right.” Conradin drank nervously from his glass. “Listen, what did Drexel tell you? About this meeting tonight?”

  “Not much. You?”

  “Just that it was important.”

  “What did he say about the others?”

  “They won’t be here, that’s all.”

  Kilduff sat down and looked at his hands. “I don’t like this, Jim.”

  “What do you think it-means?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s been more than eleven years.”

  “Yes,” Kilduff said.

  “Nobody could have found out after eleven years, could they?” Conradin said. “It has to be something else.”

  Kilduff said nothing.

  Conradin sipped slowly at the brandy. It was very quiet in the shadowed apartment; the only light came from a brass curio lamp next to the couch, bathing one side of Conradin’s face in soft white and leaving the other darkly in shadow. After a time he said, “Do you think much about it, Steve? What we did, I mean?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I can’t bury it,” Conradin said. “Nothing helps. The guilt keeps eating at me like a cancer. I keep seeing that guard’s face—the one I hit. I wake up sweating in the middle of the night, seeing it.”

  Kilduff did not say anything.

  “It bothers you, too, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” Kilduff said.

  “Why did we do it, Steve?”

  “Why do you suppose? We did it for the money.”

  “Yes, the money. But I mean, what made us go through with it? It started out as a game, a way to pass the time while we were waiting for our discharge papers, one of those let’s plot the perfect crime’ things that hundreds of people must play every day. What made us go through with it?”

  “It was foolproof,” Kilduff answered. “We realized it would work not only in theory but in actuality, that we could get away with it.”

  “Do you remember the newspaper accounts?”

  “I remember them.”

  “They said we were incredibly lucky. They said dozens of things could have gone wrong.”

  “But nothing did, Jim.”

  “No, nothing did.”

  “It was a good plan,” Kilduff said. The pressure in his chest had increased somewhat, now. “No matter what the papers said.”

  “We could have been caught so damned easily,” Conradin said. “We could have been rotting away in a prison cell all these years.”

  “Jim,” Kilduff said quietly, “Jim, you voted in, just like the rest of us. If there’d been one abstention, we wouldn’t have gone through with it, that was the agreement. You knew the risks then; we’d been over them time and again, and you voted in.”

  “Ill tell you something,” Conradin said. He was staring into the brandy snifter. “I was so goddamned scared after I hit that guard that I lost control and shit in my pants. I just sat there in it while we were driving, and I wasn’t ashamed.”

  Jesus, Kilduff thought. He said, “We were all scared.”

  “I don’t think Drexel was. Or Wykopf or Beauchamp.”

  “Why? Because they did the actual holdup? We drew straws for that, Jim.”

  “Sure,” Conradin said. “Sure, that’s right.”

  The doorbell rang again.

  Conradin’s hands came together around the brandy snifter, squeezing it convulsively until Kilduff was certain the gl
ass would shatter. He stood abruptly, went into the foyer, and opened the door. Larry Drexel said in his cold voice, “Good to see you again, Steve,” and came inside quickly.

  After closing the door Kilduff said, “Jim’s already here.”

  “Good,” Drexel said. He walked into the living room.

  Conradin stood from the couch. “Hello, Larry,” he said.

  “Jim.”

  “Can I get you a drink, Larry?” Kilduff asked, thinking: The gracious host, performing all the proper social amenities—this whole thing is incongruous, unreal, like something from a particularly vivid dream. He was breathing through his mouth now, in short, silently asthmatic inhalations.

  Drexel shook his head, moving toward the sofa, sitting on the opposite end from Conradin. He wore an expensive sports outfit—a hound’s-tooth jacket and knife-crease charcoal slacks and a tailored white shirt open at the throat; his Bally shoes glistened with black polish. Conradin and Kilduff—respectively dressed in a sheepskin jacket and a pair of blue denims, and an old alpaca golf sweater over a rumpled pair of tan trousers—looked shabby and subservient in comparison. Kilduff remembered that Drexel had always demonstrated the need to dominate, to be the focal point; he hadn’t changed at all.