The Stalker

by Bill Pronzini

  He said, “Listen, is Andersson anything to you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Fiancé or boyfriend, like that?”

  “No, he’s just a fellow I work with. At Prudential Life, in Oakland. We came up last night as part of a group, on a chartered bus for the weekend; but Kjel drinks too much, he really does, even this early in the day, and—”

  He leaned forward. “Will you have dinner with me tonight?”

  She blinked. “Pardon me?”

  “Will you have dinner with me tonight?”

  “Well, I . . .”

  “There’s a roadhouse a couple of miles from here;” he said. “You buy your steaks by the pound and cook them yourself over wood charcoal. Do you like jazz? Gutbucket, with a lot of soul horn?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “We can go to Richie’s afterward, on Interstate 40. It’s a wild place. When you walk in, you feel like you’ve regressed forty years, to Bourbon Street in the twenties, if you know what I mean. What do you say, Andrea? Seven o’clock?”

  She touched the tip of her tongue to her lips, and held it there, as a cat will do sleeping, and her eyes locked with his, probing, touching, and after a very long time—unsmiling now, eyes still locked—she said softly, “Yes, seven o’clock, Steve.”

  They were married in San Francisco five weeks later . . .

  Kilduff lay on the unmade bed in the Twin Peaks apartment chainsmoking, with the hammered-bronze ashtray balanced on his chest, reliving it as vivid as yesterday, hearing her voice, seeing her so perfect and so innocent sitting there in the booth; and that night, all in soft blue ski clothes, and the touch of her lips for the first time—sweet, chaste, trusting, warm; and later, in San Francisco, at the Top of the Mark and the Venetian Room and that little place in the Russian colony on Clement, music soft and lights soft and the feel of her in his arms; and still later, the first whispered words from his lips under a so-corny gibbous moon, “I love you, Andrea,” and her reply, breathless, a little awed, “Yes, oh yes, Steve, and I love you!”

  Halcyon days, the days of wine and roses . . .

  Viciously, now, Kilduff ground out his cigarette in the bronze ashtray and swung his feet down and went into the kitchen. All gone, all dead, long dead—Jesus, why am I thinking about her like this? Why now, especially why now? He opened the refrigerator, a mechanical gesture, and looked inside: full larder, full to overflowing. She’d probably gone shopping before she left; that was the way Andrea was—walk out with a man’s guts in her hands, dripping, but make sure he has enough food in the refrigerator. He slammed the door, turning.

  Andrea, Andrea, I need you.

  He stopped. No! Goddamn it, Kilduff, no, it’s over, it’s finished; she ran out, didn’t she? The money ran out and she ran out, you don’t need her, she’s destroyed your love, you don’t need her, you—don’t—need—her.

  Into the living room. The drapes were drawn, and it was dark in there. The rain came down in a soft, steady cadence on the balcony outside, and the wind tugged gently at the weather stripping around the glass doors, calling out. He held his right hand up to his eyes, and the hand trembled; he let it fall and returned to the bedroom and lay on the bed again.

  What am I going to do? he asked of himself silently—the same question he had been asking of himself since yesterday morning, since Drexel had revealed to him in that coffee shop in Sebastopol what he was planning. But there was no answer now, either. He was caught in a vise, in one of those medieval iron maidens, caught in the middle with only two ways to go, with only two choices, no more and no less.

  The police.

  Or a party to murder.

  No middle road, no tightrope line—one or the other. But which one? Could he walk into the Hall of Justice and into the Detective Bureau and say, “I’m one of the six men who robbed the Smithfield Armored Car in Granite City, Illinois, eleven years ago,” could he walk in there and say that? But could he condone murder, passively allow Drexel to kill Helgerman in cold blood even though it was Helgerman’s life or theirs? Yet he had to do one of the two, he had to make the decision, and soon, soon...

  Suddenly, he sat upright on the bed with his heart plunging in his chest, and cold marrow fear, a different fear now, flowed through him like warm oil. Oh God! he thought, oh God! Because he didn’t know if he could choose, he wasn’t at all certain he could make that decision; because there was an added dimension now, you see, something he had refused to comprehend before; because he understood with cold, complete clarity why he had been thinking about Andrea and why he needed her in spite of his self-deception that he did not; because in that moment Steve Kilduff realized exactly what he had become.

  The single word echoed and re-echoed in his mind.

  Coward, coward, coward...

  10

  Four down.

  Blue and Gray and Red and Yellow.

  Two left.

  Green and Orange.

  Green.

  Yes—Green.

  Sitting at the small writing desk in his room at the Graceling Hotel, the limping man carefully replaced the orange folder in the second of the two ten-by-thirteen manila envelopes. He spread the green folder open on the glass surface of the desk and began to study its contents again. He took small sips from a glass of milk which one of the bellboys had brought up, and made marginal notes from time to time on the ruled sheets of paper, and consulted the Mobile Oil Travel and Street Map.

  A half hour passed, and it was almost noon. The limping man put the pen down, smiling a little. Very good, he thought, very, very good. He closed the green folder and put it into the envelope with the orange one, and then put both envelopes into the American Tourister briefcase. He stood and rubbed at his eyes with the backs of his hands, stretching. A sharp pain lanced along his left rib cage. Alice —lowering his arms—Alice of the soft moist melting eyes and the long, long carmine claws; Alice slut, Alice whore, but Alice had been oh-sogood. She had screamed for him, and she had earned her money.

  Just like Sonja, in Evanston.

  And Jocelyn, in Fargo.

  And Amy-Lynn, in Philadelphia.

  They had all earned their money.

  Damned right they had.

  The limping man locked the briefcase and placed it on the bed. He knew how he was going to handle Green. Yes, and Orange too. The methods were a little more dangerous, a little more daring, but the whole thing was almost finished now and time was becoming important. Green and Orange had to be dispatched quickly; if they learned of the deaths of the others, there was the chance that they would run. And then he would have to start all over again.

  He put his coat on and picked up the briefcase and rode the elevator downstairs. Outside, the wind blew a misty spray of clean, sweet rain in from the Bay, and swirled and eddied rubble in the swollen gutters. The sky was the color of steel. He walked into the face of the wind, thinking carefully, planning precisely.

  In a department store near Union Square, he bought two averagepriced cotton sheets. In a neighborhood grocery store, he bought a gallon of apple cider and a roll of cellophane food wrap. There was one other item he needed, but he would pick that up on the way tonight.

  He started back to the Graceling. Just before he reached it, he turned abruptly into a large restaurant. He ordered a ham steak with candied yams and pineapple; all the walking and all the thinking had made him ravenously hungry.

  Trina Conradin arrived shortly after two at the West Valley Savings and Loan, on Waycross Avenue in Santa Rosa. It was still raining, and the new wood and glass building looked sodden and cheerless against the gray backdrop of the sky.

  Trina went in and crossed the marble floor to the safe deposit section. She signed her name on a slip of paper, and the girl in charge verified the signature with the card the bank had on file. A uniformed guard escorted her through the vault area, used his master key to open one of the two locks on Box Number 2761, and then carried the box to one of the small private cubicles
along one wall. He put the box on the table inside, smiled pleasantly, and left her alone.

  Trina sat down in the single chair and inserted the key she had found in Jim’s desk into the second lock. She swung the hinged top upward, and looked inside.

  And looked at money.

  The box was jammed with it, in neat packets with a dun-colored currency wrapper around each one. There were packets of twenties, of fifties, of hundreds, crisp new bills, wilted old bills, filling the black metal container like a kind of wondrous and yet frightening green fungi.

  Trina sat absolutely motionless, as if she had suddenly gazed upon Medusa and been turned into stone, listening to the funereal silence of the vault surrounding her and staring at the money. At first, she was unable to think; her mind became totally blank. But then, grad ually, she began to come out of the mesmeric trance the money had momentarily put her in, and she thought: Dear God, where did it come from, and it’s real, it’s real money, but where, Jim, where, how did you, and she reached out to touch the top packet with the tips of her fingers. She pulled back again immediately, as if it were something unutterably alien.

  She continued to stare at the money, and as she did she became aware of a yellowed edge of newsprint which was visible along one of the inner sides of the safe deposit box. She stared at that for a time, and then finally she reached out again and pulled it free.

  It was a portion of the front page of the Chicago Tribune, folded in half, with the masthead showing and a date: March 16, 1959. She unfolded it and a black banner headline assailed her eyes:

  $750,000 ARMORED CAR HOLDUP

  And below that, over a three-column lead story, another black head line :

  BANDITS MAKE SUCCESSFUL GETAWAY IN DARING DAYLIGHT ROBBERY

  And the story, prefaced by the words Granite City, Illinois (AP):

  Three masked men—half of what authorities believe to be a six-man gang—executed a daring daylight holdup of a Smithfield armored car near this western Illinois community early yesterday morning, eluding subsequent police roadblocks with more than $750,000 in cash...

  Trina’s hands began to tremble. A liquid opaqueness filmed her eyes and blurred the faded print. She blinked rapidly several times and read on with a kind of compulsive horror, her gaze moving slowly along the columns on the yellowed paper.

  Eyewitness observations lead police to believe that the two men who were responsible for planting the corrosive on the armored car’s tire, and later assaulting Helgerman, were wearing theatrical make-up to alter their appearance in small ways. Inspector Yamell stated, however, that such physical characteristics as height, weight, general build and eye color had not likely been changed.

  He described Bandit Number One as being a male Caucasian, 6’1, 180-190 pounds, in his early twenties, muscular build, medium complexion, greenish-brown eyes, soft-spoken. Bandit Number Two, the actual parking lot attacker of Helgerman, is also a male Caucasian, 5’10, 160-165 pounds, approximately the same age, lean build, deep-set gray eyes and long, thin nose...

  Jim, Trina thought, that second man fits Jim’s general description—and in that moment the full impact, all the implications, of what she was reading struck her and she pushed her chair back and came onto her feet, her eyes bulging wide and her mouth open and a terrible sick empty feeling in the core of her stomach.

  “No,” she whispered very softly, “no, no,” and her eyes went back to the page section still held in her left hand. “No, please God, no,” and another paragraph gathered and held her vision.

  Helgerman is reportedly in serious condition at Sisters of Mercy Hospital. The vicious blow which felled him, delivered to the base of the neck, might possibly have caused permanent spinal damage, according to the attending physician, Dr. Leonard Vacenti. “It’s too early to tell, of course,” Dr. Vacenti said, “but there exists the definite possibility that Mr. Helgerman may suffer mobility impairment of one type or another, ranging from minor locomotion difficulties to total paralysis . . . ”

  “No,” Trina said, “no,” and she flung the clipping from her. It fluttered down slowly, like a leaf in a gentle autumn breeze, oscillating to and fro until it touched the linoleumed floor; and then it lay still against one leg of the table. Not Jim, she thought, not Jim, not Jim; but the money stared up at her from the black metal box and the section of newspaper stared up at her from the floor, and they were both saying yes Jim, yes Jim, yes Jim.

  She sank onto the chair again and stared at the door without seeing it. Armed robbery, vicious attack, a man possibly paralyzed for life— and he had come home to her with enough money to marry, and to buy the big white house on Bodega Flat and the salmon fishing troller he had always dreamed of owning. Good man, kind man. Killer? Thief? No, no—but the time was right: March, 1959, and the place was right: Granite City, Illinois, just a few miles from Bellevue Air Force Station, and something had changed him, something had slowly taken him apart inside with a million cancerous teeth. Had that something been guilt? Was that the reason all this money—what was left after the house and the boat and the luxuries and the incidentals—had been allowed to lie dormant in the safe deposit box all these years? Had he been unable any longer to spend the blood spoils when the guilt became too strong? Wouldn’t his complicity in this terrible crime explain why he had never been able to tell her what was troubling him, why he had kept it all bottled up inside him these long past years? Wouldn’t it explain why he had refused to leave Bodega Bay, except when it was absolutely necessary, why he drank so much during the winter months when there wasn’t the fishing to keep him occupied? Wouldn’t it explain—

  Why he had died?

  God, God! Why had he died? Had his death really been an accident? Or—had it been something else?

  Suicide? Had the guilt become too much for him to bear? Had he finally reached the breaking point Sunday night—and thrown himself off that high, fog-shrouded cliff at Goat Rock?

  Or—

  Murder ?

  No, not that, not that! Who would want to murder Jim? Unless ... His partners? The other five men? But why would they want him dead? Why after eleven years? Who were they? Who—?

  The two men at the funeral.

  The two men sitting in the very last row at the mortuary!

  Trina sat up very straight on the chair, and it was as if her body were encased in a block of glacier ice. The two men, one dark and Latin-appearing, the other tall and muscular. Tall and muscular. Greenish-brown eyes. Stopping to look toward her in the family alcove, soft-spoken—“Mrs. Conradin ... I’m sorry, Mrs. Conradin”—Bandit Number One.

  Steven Kilduff, San Francisco.

  She stood up convulsively. The police. She had to go to the police. She had to tell them—

  Tell them Jim Conradin had been a thief?

  Tell them the man she loved had been a vicious criminal?

  Hurt his family, hurt her family, destroy his name?

  But she had to. If he had been murdered, his killers couldn’t be allowed to go unpunished. And even if his death had been accidental, or suicidal, she couldn’t live with the knowledge of his crime—she knew that—she couldn’t live with it for one single day as he lived with it for eleven long years. She had to go to the police, she had to.

  Jim, I have to, she thought, and she picked up the newspaper section from the floor and put it into the safe deposit box and swung the hinged lid closed. Jim, I have to, and may God have mercy on your soul and on mine for what I have to do; there’s no other way.

  She picked up the box—frightened, trembling, crying—and ran out of the cubicle.

  11

  Late Wednesday afternoon.

  The phone rang at 4:55.

  Kilduff came out of the kitchen where he had been making coffee and caught up the receiver on the second ring. There was the taste of chalk in his mouth. “Hello?”

  “Steve? Larry.”

  “Yes?” tensely.

  “I’ve got something.”

  Kilduff let bre
ath spray almost inaudibly between his teeth. “Go ahead.”

  “Not on the phone.”

  “Christ, Larry—”

  “Later,” Drexel said. “Tonight.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Chicago. I’m booked onto the seven-thirty flight to San Francisco.”

  “Are you coming here?”

  “No. My place. San Amaron Road in Los Gatos, Number 547. Can you find it?”

  “I’ll find it,” Kilduff said. “What time?”

  “The plane gets in at ten, Coast time. Give me better than an hour to get home. Say eleven-thirty.”

  “All fright.”

  “Listen, Steve, is everything okay with you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve been sticking close to your apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “You haven’t talked to anyone?”

  “Who would I talk to?”

  “What about your wife?”

  “I told you about her,” Kilduff said. “She’s gone.”

  “Okay, just stay cool.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll see you tonight.”

  “Larry, what is it you’ve got?”

  “Tonight,” Drexel said. “Make sure you’re there, Steve.”

  “Larry—” Kilduff began, but he was talking to a dead line.

  He put the phone down and returned to the kitchen and looked at the coffee maker. The same painful constriction he had known on Saturday night was back in his chest, and his breathing had a nasal, labored quality. Well, what now? Had Drexel located Helgerman somehow? He’d sounded uptight on the phone, almost apprehensive, and that wasn’t like him—always steady, always in command. Something was bugging him, bugging him heavy . . . Christ, Kilduff thought, suppose he’s already found Helgerman? Suppose for some inexplicable reason Helgerman went home after he killed Conradin, and Drexel found him and . . .