by Robert Bloch
“We don’t have a dining room here,” he told her. “Coffee shop’s open until nine.”
“Thank you.” Amy hung up without bothering to ask about room service; this being state-of-the-art she was willing to settle for the serendipity of a small supply of toilet paper instead of those little squares from the dispenser. Such are the hopes and dreams of the seasoned traveler.
In that capacity Amy had no great expectations of what she might encounter when she entered the downstairs coffee shop through a side entrance off the lobby. It proved to be the usual fast-food setup; stools closely aligning the three-sided counter so that each bite-grabber could get a good view of the fry-cook’s acitvities through the rectangular opening in the rear wall. Small booths offered imitation-leather seats, imitation comfort, and outside-window views. Tonight, however, the drapes were drawn; nobody wanted to look out at the rain. Apparently nobody wanted to eat either because when Amy entered she saw no other customers. Booths and stools were empty and so were the expressionless eyes of the waitress-cashier who plodded out from the kitchen area to plunk a glass of ice water down on the table mat of the corner booth that Amy selected.
“Evening.” The word could be construed either as a greeting or a statement of fact; the waitress’ voice was expressionless. “Menu?”
“Please.” Amy could be monosyllabic too. Not out of rudeness, but because she sensed that the weary woman with the wilted uniform and hairdo wasn’t in the mood for idle conversation; all she really wanted was nine o’clock closing and a chance to kick her shoes off.
So Amy gave her order—pot roast of beef w. choice of 2 vegs was usually a safe bet in light of previous experiences—and quickly added, “Coffee, now.”
Then she relaxed as the waitress headed kitchenward. At least fry-cooks can’t do too much damage to a pot roast, and when it came to coffee she’d learned that wherever you dined you’d just have to take a chance.
Amy sipped her water and settled back in her seat. Her feet didn’t hurt, but now, at the end of the long day’s driving, she could empathize with the waitress. At best, waiting on tables in a place like this must be a boring occupation, almost as boring as being a customer.
Outside the rain thudded down but here there was no source of sound, not even from the kitchen where the waitress and the fry-cook were presumably puzzling over the order, since Amy had forgotten to specify her choice of veggies. Oh well, sometimes you’ve got to resign yourself to living dangerously. Let it be their decision and her surprise. She just hoped they wouldn’t be trying to get rid of yesterday’s squash or creamed rutabagas.
A pity she couldn’t hear their conversation. At the moment she felt the need for some distraction, and gazing at the glass-coffined slices of embalmed pies and pastries really did nothing for her. Alone in the bleak, forlorn flare of the fluorescence she scanned the booths nearby, hoping to catch sight of a discarded newspaper. Fairvale wouldn’t have a daily, of course, but perhaps some salesman out of Springfield might have discarded one after his meal.
No such luck. Amy abandoned her efforts with a sigh of resignation. In cases like this there was nothing one could do except read the menu.
Two events spared her that fate. The first was the return of the waitress, coffeepot in one hand, cup and saucer in the other. The second was the arrival of additional customers, a male trio clad in rainwear. By the time Amy announced and received her choice of cream and sugar the three men had seated themselves on stools at the end of the counter. As the waitress departed to serve them, Amy creamed, sugared, and sipped her coffee. A trifle too hot, but the addition of an ice cube from her water glass solved that problem.
Satisfied, she turned her attention to the newcomers. From where she sat all she could see were two backs and a semiprofile. The backs were broad and burly, the heads above them surmounted by the inevitable baseball caps. The semiprofile sat beside them at the angle closest to Amy’s observation post. He was a small man, sharp-featured, his mustache a grey wisp beneath a beaked nose. His headgear was traditional, immediately identifying him as a lawman—a member of the local constabulary, the Sheriff’s Department, perhaps State Highway Patrol. Then Amy glanced down, saw the black boots with their pointed toes, and made her ID. Only the Sheriff’s Department would indulge in this form of foot-fetishism, and any man this small could bypass departmental qualifications solely through election. This had to be the Sheriff himself.
And his name was Engstrom. Milt Engstrom, to be exact. This information was relayed in the conversation between the counter customers, along with the announcement that they too wanted coffee and yeah, it sure as hell was coming down cats and dogs outside.
It was at this point that the waitress returned with Amy’s dinner platter and set it down on the mat before her. The 2 vegs. turned out to be peas and carrots, neither of them fried, creamed, scalloped, or the victims of any other unnatural practices. And the pot roast was good.
So was the distraction. Like many of those accustomed to solitary dining, Amy had consciously or unconsciously perfected the art of people-watching and eavesdropping. And while in this instance the watching was nothing to write home about, what she was hearing might definitely be worth putting down on paper. In the absence of pen and pad she made a mental note of the conversation at the counter.
Reduced to its essenitals, the Sheriff and his two anonymous companions were talking about Terry Dowson’s murder last week and Mick Sontag’s alibi.
Amy paid little heed to the exact phrasing of the questions but she paid strict attention to Sheriff Engstrom’s answers.
No, he didn’t mind talking, now that the goddamned reporters had cleared out. Hank would be running most of the stuff in this week’s paper anyhow.
Way it added up, Joe Sontag went out to the garage for something and found out his keys were missing. According to him, he guessed right away where his kid must have gone and went after her in his pickup. When he got to the Bates place she was already running up the road. He pulled up alongside her and she was just climbing in when they both heard what sounded like screams coming from the house. Not all that loud and clear, understand, because when he backed up to park and started running to the porch he saw that the front door was closed.
“The kid didn’t come with him?” one of the baseball caps asked.
“He told her to stay in the truck, and a damn good thing he did too, considering what he found in the hall when he yanked that door open.”
“Pretty bad,” said the other baseball cap.
The Sheriff nodded. That in itself told Amy nothing, but the way he nodded was eloquent.
“You say he didn’t see anybody?”
“He says.” Again the Sheriff nodded. “And I believe him. According to his story he went straight back to the pickup and drove down to the Fawcett place, which was the closest he could find a phone. Irene took the call and got hold of me just as I was heading out to check Crosby Corners. Only took me another three, four minutes to get there, but by then young Mick was really having hysterics—which was only natural after that damfool father of hers blabbed about what he’d found up at the house. When the ambulance from Montrose Hospital got there, Mick was the one who needed attention. It was too late to do anything for Terry.”
“You don’t think—”
“That Mick could have had anything to do with it?” The Sheriff shook his head quickly. “No way either she or Joe Sontag could have pulled off something like that. No way, no motive, no weapon that we could locate.”
“Suppose they stashed the knife someplace first before Sontag went to call you?”
Engstrom shrugged. “Just doing that wouldn’t have gotten them off the hook. They’d both need a complete change of clothing. The way Terry was put down, whoever did the job was bound to get splashed. Neither Mick or her father had a drop of blood on their clothes or shoes, even though there was a big pool around the body. Just to make sure we sent what they were wearing that night over to Montrose for labwork.”
“If they didn’t do it, then who did? Don’t you have any clues?”
“Just what I put out in the press statements. The only fingerprints we came up with were the girls’. The killer didn’t touch anything inside the house and motel, or else he or she was wearing gloves.”
One of the Sheriff’s companions glanced toward him quickly. “He or she?”
“Who knows? Besides, I don’t want any of those women’s libbers to feel left out.”
“Come on, level with us. You must have some kind of theory.”
“I don’t have much use for theories.” The Sheriff paused long enough to swallow the remaining contents of his coffee cup. “Captain Banning put two of his men from the State Highway Patrol on full-time duty, just to see if they could come up with anything. Main thing they looked for was someplace nearby where a car might have been parked on the night of the murder. Couldn’t locate so much as a tire tread to show for it. Which means that whoever committed the murder was probably a transient.”
“Meaning you don’t think you’re going to find anyone?”
“Don’t be too sure of that. We’re still working on it.” The Sheriff’s coffee cup rattled down into the cradle of its saucer. “Now, if you boys will excuse me, I’m heading out for a little fresh air and sunshine.”
That was when Amy tuned out; she didn’t wait to hear which of the trio was paying for the coffee or whether they were going Dutch. In the end the three men left together and Amy did her best to down the rest of her pot roast before it got any colder. The waitress appeared to warm the coffee and stoically endured rejection of her dessert offers. When Amy paid, tipped, and left, the pie slices still lay in state, awaiting either a further viewing or decent burial tomorrow.
The clerk at the reception counter was obviously not into speed reading; his eyes and lips were still moving over the final pages of his comic as Amy crossed the lobby. But as she entered the elevator he must have glanced up, because she sensed his eyeballs boring into her back.
Or was she just edgy? The chance conversation she had overheard could be a godsend, but there was a hint of the diabolic in its details. Lack of details, rather; it was Amy’s own imagination that had supplied them and was still going about its grisly business now. Pool of blood. It was all too easy to expand that simple phrase into a full and explicitly gory story.
But was the story complete in itself, or merely a continuation? As Amy left the lonely elevator, moved down the lonely hall, and unlocked the door of her lonely room, questions were her only companions.
Once she switched on the lights she settled down in a chair and eased her feet out of their shoes. Had that weary waitress downstairs been able to kick off her shoes yet?
Amy shrugged the question off. It was the other questions that demanded an answer. Questions about connections. Somewhere in her yet-to-be-unpacked overnight bag was the collection of notes and data she’d carefully prepared and assembled but there was no need to consult them for details. All she needed now were the links in the chain of events.
It was more than thirty years ago that Norman Bates had been confined in the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and it was almost a decade ago that he’d murdered two visiting nuns and escaped, only to be killed in a struggle with a hitchhiker he’d picked up in a van stolen from the nuns. The charred body found in the burned van was mistakenly identified as that of the hitchhiker and Norman Bates was still sought as an escapee.
There were more killings, Mary Crane’s sister Lila and her husband, Sam Loomis, died in Fairvale on the night following Norman Bates’ escape. His physician at State Hospital, Dr. Adam Claiborne, undertook a search on his own that led him all the way to Hollywood where a film about Norman was being prepared. Both the film’s producer and its director died violent deaths and the actress playing Mary Crane narrowly averted the same fate.
Dr. Claiborne returned to State Hospital as an inmate rather than an attending physician. When his prized personal patient crashed out he’d apparently flipped in a similar fashion—Norman’s other persona was his mother, and Claiborne’s was Norman Bates.
Obviously Claiborne had not gone over the wall of the asylum to kill poor Terry Dowson so there was no connection there; at least none that would be obvious. On the other hand people had not suspected the connection between Norman and his dead mother. And years later, after all that continuing intensive therapy, no one at the hospital seemed to have realized he was still potenitally dangerous. Certainly Dr. Claiborne didn’t recognize his own schizoid disorder. And the murder victims out in California had no inkling that death was traveling in their direction from almost two thousand miles away.
But there was an overall connection, the apparently unrelated events did form a continuing chain, and somehow Amy sensed that last week’s tragedy was the last link.
At least she fervently hoped it was the last—although there was always a possibility that it was only the latest.
Latest. Amy glanced at her watch. Almost nine, so there was probably still time. Reluctantly abandoning her cushioned comfort she rose and crossed to the bedstand on which the telephone rested. Reaching down into the shelf opening below, her fingers groped empty air. They repeated the exercise, when, one by one, she opened the drawers of the bureau. Either the hotel didn’t provide guests with the local phone directory or there was no such animal.
Amy picked up the phone and informed the desk clerk of her predicament. He must have finished his pursuit of literature for the evening, because he sounded a bit more friendly.
“I can get the number for you from down here,” he said. “Who do you wanta call?”
When she told him his voice did a double take.
“State Hospital?”
“That’s right,” Amy said. “Person-to-person, for Dr. Nicholas Steiner.”
There was momentary hesitation at the other end of the line. “Pretty late.”
Doing her good deed for the day, Amy resisted the impulse to inform him that she wasn’t calling for a time signal. “He’s expecting to hear from me.”
“Okay, lady. Just hang on and I’ll get him for you.”
A few minutes later she was talking to a nurse, and after another minute or so to Steiner himself.
“Dr. Steiner speaking.” The voice of an elderly man resonating through well-worn vocal cords. “I take it you’re calling from town?”
“That’s right. I’ll be staying here at the Fairvale Motel.
“Please—it’s hotel. They don’t like to mention motels in Fairvale.”
“Sorry,” Amy said. “It must have been a Freudian slip.”
His response was a dry chuckle and as she listened it seemed to have an echo. Either the rain was creating problems with the connection or there was somebody else on the line.
Amy chose her words carefully. “I was hoping it might be convenient for me to come out sometime tomorrow.”
Steiner cleared his throat. “I’ll have to ask.”
“You haven’t told him? Or shown him my letter?”
“Not yet. In view of what happened, I thought it best to wait for a more opportune moment.”
“Are you saying there might be a problem?”
“I hope not. I’ll know more after I talk to him tomorrow morning.”
“I was planning to spend a little time at the courthouse before noon, but I can get out to the hospital by two o’clock if you’re available. Of course I’ll give you a call first.”
“That won’t be necessary. If he refuses to allow you to invade his privacy, feel free to invade mine.”
His chuckle, her thanks, and the click of the receiver sounded simultaneously. All three conveyed a hollow quality and once again. Amy wondered about the possibility of eavesdropping.
But who was she to talk—wasn’t that what she was doing at dinner? It was something to think about, one consideration among many. But right now the priority was to unpack the overnight bag and distribute its contents wherever appropria
te in the room, its closet, or the adjoining bath.
As she solved these problems in logistics Amy found herself stifling a yawn. Kicking off her shoes had eased foot-fatigue, but her body felt tired all over, and its encasement of skin and sinew could not be as easily removed.
Not that Amy really wanted to part with her body under any circumstances. She surveyed it with a touch of pride as she removed her makeup and stripped in the bathroom; for someone who would never see twenty-six again there really weren’t too many grounds for complaint. At least her legs were good and as long as she took it easy on the french fries her hips didn’t constitute a problem. She noted a tiny sag in her left breast, but in a way it only contributed to the natural look. Nobody would mistake her cleavage for Silicon Valley.
No one had been in a position to make such a mistake recently, worse luck. She dismissed the thought; this was neither the time nor the place for such activity. Outside, the cold rain was still coming down. But here in the shower stall the water was warm. The only chill came from a sudden, unexpected comparison of what she was presently doing and what Mary Crane had done those many long years ago or, more precisely, what had been done to her under the same circumstances.
How old was the Crane girl when she died? Amy withdrew a number from her memory-bank. Twenty-nine. In order to reach that age she’d have to stay here under the spray for an additional two years. In any case, enough of this shower-stalling.
Time to towel-dry her hair—there just wasn’t enough room to bring everything, which meant either she needed a larger bag or a smaller hair dryer. Time for powder, deodorant, and a fresh nightie for a wilted bod. Time to snuggle under the sheets and cast a final sidelong glance at the face of the wristwatch resting on the nightstand. Time to tell time.
It was exactly ten P.M. No need to ask for a wakeup call; her eyes would open automatically at seven A.M.
Amy switched the lamp off. Somehow the rain sounded louder in the darkness. Perhaps it would stop before morning. Sunshine makes no sound.
