Chapter 2

I turned back to Mrs. Lang. Josie had returned to work. She pushed a hand up through the dark hair with that weary gesture she had, and she was still too pale. One of these days she was going to come apart like a dropped plate.

"They ever do anything about it at all?" I asked.

"The first time or two. They sent a deputy out to talk to me. But I'm not sure they even believed me."

That figured, I thought; it was about par for the course.

"He bother any other women, do you know?"

She shook her head. "I don't think so." Then the horror came back into her eyes for a moment, and she cried, "Why does he do it?"

"I don't know," I said. "Why do they jump out of the shrubbery in a park without their clothes on? But they're nearly always harmless."

It occurred to me I was almost as silly as that clown Magruder. Harmless? Well, in any physical sense they were.

She glanced up at me. "Why did you ask me to answer him?"

I shrugged. "Force of habit. I used to be a cop."

"Oh," she said. "You wanted to keep him talking, is that it?"

"Sure. That's your only connection with him, and once he hangs up, he might as well be in another universe. The longer he spews, the more chance there is he'll say something that'll give you a lead. Or that you'll hear something else in the background."

She looked at me with quickened interest. "And you did hear something?"

"That's right. He was calling from a pay phone. That doesn't mean much, of course; they nearly always do. But this one was in a beer joint or restaurant, and I think it could be identified."

"How?" she asked wonderingly. "I mean, how did you find out?"

"Dumb luck," I said. "You play for the breaks, and sometimes you get one. Most of those booths have little fans in 'em, you know; this one did, and the fan had a bad bearing. It was just noisy enough to hear. And I heard a jukebox start up."

I stopped, thinking about it. This creep was off his rocker, but still he was smart enough to hang up when that music started. Well, it didn't mean anything. A sexual psychopath didn't necessarily have to be stupid; he was just unbalanced.

She frowned. "Then they might have caught him? I mean, if they had listened to you?"

"I don't know," I said. "With luck, and enough men to cover all the places in town within a few minutes-" Her county police force was none of my business. Anyway, they could have been swamped, and short-handed. Police forces usually were.

"You say you were a policeman?" she asked. "Then you aren't anymore?"

"No," I said.

I put the bourbon back in the bag and closed it. The room key was on the desk where she'd dropped it. I put it in my pocket. She stood up. Instead of helping her, I watched to see how she handled it. She was a little shaky yet, but apparently all right.

"Thank you for everything," she said.

"How many times have you fainted lately?"

She smiled ruefully. "It was so ridiculous. I think this was only the second time in my life. But why?"

"You ought to see a doctor. You need a checkup."

"That's silly. I'm perfectly healthy." '

"You're running on your reserve tanks now. And when they're empty, you're going to crash. You don't weigh a hundred pounds."

"A hundred and ten. You don't know your own strength."

"Okay," I said. It was none of my business.

I went out and lifted the other bag from the station wagon. No. 12 was across the court in the opposite wing. It was in the corner, and there were three more doors between it and the end; fifteen units altogether. As I put down the bags and fished in my pocket for the key, I turned and looked back across the bleak areaway baking in the sun. A twenty by forty foot swimming pool right there, I thought, visualizing it; flagstones, deck chairs, umbrellas, shrubs, grass-it screamed for grass. It was a shame. I went on in.

The room was nicely furnished with green wall-to-wall carpet and twin beds with dark green spreads and a blond dresser with a big mirror above it. There were a couple of armchairs. On the left at the rear a door holding a full-length mirror opened into the bathroom that was finished in forest green tile. It was hot, but there was a room air-conditioner mounted in the wall near the closed and draped window at the rear. I turned it on. In a moment cool air began to flow out. I stripped off my sweaty clothes and took a shower. The towels, I noted, were cheap and threadbare, the type of thing you'd expect in a $2.50 hotel room. Contrasted with the good quality of the permanent furnishings, they told their story. She was probably going broke. I frowned thoughtfully, and then shrugged and poured a drink of the bourbon. Lighting a cigarette, I lay down naked on one of the beds.

It would be better when I had something to do. Some kind of hard work, I thought, maybe out in the sun, something I could get ahold of with my hands. Building something. That was it.

You made something with your hands and it was tangible. There were no people mixed up in it, no fouled-up emotions, no abstractions like right and wrong, and you couldn't throw away six years' work in five crazy minutes.

I thought of the house up there on the side of Twin Peaks with the fog coming in like a river of cotton across the city in the late afternoon, and I thought of Nan. There wasn't any particular feeling about it anymore, except possibly one of failure and aimlessness; we'd been divorced for over a year. The house was sold. The job was gone-the job she'd blamed our failure on.

I took a drag on the cigarette and gazed up at the ceiling, wondering if she had read about it when it finally happened. She'd married again and moved to Santa Barbara, but some of her friends in the Bay area might have written her about it or sent her the clippings. There'd been no word from her, but there was no reason she should write. She wasn't the kind for that "I told you so" routine, and there wasn't much else to say. I hoped they hadn't sent her that picture, the one they'd run in the Call-Bulletin. It was a little rough. So was the simple caption. Victim of Police Brutality.

I crushed out the cigarette, and sat up. If I spent the whole afternoon cooped up in a room with my thoughts, I'd be walking up the walls. I thought of Mrs. Lang, and that telephoning creep who had her headed for a crack-up. The Galicia phone directory was over on the dresser. No, I thought sourly, the hell with it. It was nothing to me, was it?

He'd be gone, anyway, by this time, so what good would it do?

But the idea persisted, and I went over and picked up the small phone book. It presented a challenge, and it would kill the afternoon, wouldn't it? I grabbed up my pen and a sheet of stationery from the top dresser drawer, and flipped through the yellow pages.

Cafes ... there were eight listed, three of them on one street, Springer. That was probably the main drag. I wrote down the addresses.

Taverns ... nine listed.

Beer Gardens ... one, a duplicate listing for one of the taverns.

That made a total of seventeen places, with the possibility of some duplications. I called a cab, and dressed quickly in sport shirt and slacks. As we drove out I noted one of the places on my list was right across the highway. The neon sign bore the outline of a leaping fish, and said, SILVER KING INN. Well, I'd stop there on the way back.

I watched the street signs as we came into town. The main drag was Springer, all right. I got out of the cab in the second block, before one of the cafes, paid the driver, and went in. There was a pay phone, but it wasn't in a booth. The next one was on the other side of the street in the next block. The phone was in a booth near the back, and there was a jukebox not too far from it. When I closed the door the fan came on, but it wasn't the one. It made no noise at all. I dropped in a dime, dialed four or five digits at random, pretended to listen for a minute, and hung up, retrieving the coin.

Inside a half hour I'd hit nine places, ranging from the glass and chrome and upholstered booths of the KC Steak House to a greasy hamburger and chili dive backed up to the river on Front Street, and from the one good cocktail lounge to dingy beer joints. I had a fairly good picture of the layout of the town. The river and Front Street ran along the west side. South of Springer was another street of business establishments, and then the railroad and a weatherbeaten station, with a colored section beyond the tracks. North of the wide main street were two more paralleling it, with the courthouse on one and a small post-office and Federal Building on the other, and beyond them a school or two and the principal residential area. There were four cross streets, beginning with Front. Springer, which was of course also the highway, was the only east-west street that continued across the river; the others terminated at Front.

But I still hadn't found it. I went on. Most of the places were air-conditioned, and stepping out of them was like walking into an oven. The blacktop paving in the street bubbled and sucked at the soles of my shoes. My shirt was wet with sweat. An hour later, I ground to a halt, baffled. There wasn't a public telephone booth in town that had a noisy fan.

I still had two places on my list, however. One was the Flamingo, the nightclub, with an address on West Highway. But the chances were it wouldn't even have been open at the time he called, around two-fifteen. The other was the Silver King Inn, across the highway from the motel. He wouldn't have called from there, would he? Practically in her lap? But who could guess what a creep would do? I'd go back and hit it. There was a cab stand around the next corner, by the bus station.

I climbed in one, and when we came out on Springer and stopped for the first light, the driver turned and glanced at me over his shoulder. He was a middle-aged man with a pinched-up face, sad brown eyes, and a badly made set of false teeth that were too big and too symmetrical. He looked like a toothpaste commercial.

"Say," he asked, "ain't you the man that had the run-in with Frankie?"

"I wouldn't call it a run-in," I said. "A little fender-gnashing."

"I thought I recognized you. Man, you sure been lookin' the town over, haven't you? I bet I seen you three or four times."

I'd lived all my life in a city, and that hadn't occurred to me. It was a small town. I was a stranger in it, and a pretty big one at that. Add a dark red face, spikey red hair, and you'd never go anywhere unobserved.

"Just wandering around," I said. "Killing time while they fix the car."

"Where you staying?"

"Magnolia Lodge motel."

"Oh," he said.

I frowned at the back of his neck. There it was again, that same strange reaction you couldn't quite put a finger on. I thought of the bystanders at the accident, and that shop foreman at the garage. The light changed. We went on.

"What's wrong with it?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Nothing wrong with the motel, I reckon. Little run-down."

"Well, it's a big job for a woman alone. I understand her husband's dead."

"Oh, he's dead, all right."

Maybe I'd run across something new here. Varying degrees of being dead. "What's that mean?"

"That's right, you're from California, ain't you? I reckon the papers didn't play it up so big over there." He had to skid to a stop at the next intersection as the light went red. Then he looked back over his shoulder.

"Lang was murdered," he said.

I didn't say anything for a moment. I was thinking of a soft and filthy laugh, and a whisper. We know you killed him, don't we?

I snapped out of it then. "Well, did they catch the party that did it?"

"Hmmm. Yes, and no."

That was the kind of answer you liked. I sighed, lighted a cigarette, and tried again. "Did they, or didn't they?"

"They got one of 'em," he said. "The man. But they ain't found out to this day who the other one was. Or so they say."

The light came up green then, and he shifted gears and shot ahead in the afternoon traffic. It made no sense at all, of course. I waited for him to go on.

But the driver began talking about one of his buddies and I decided not to push it. He'd come back to the story when he decided to, and any untoward interest from me would probably dry him up.

I let him drone on. I fished out a smoke and fired it up, thinking about the cool evening fog in San Francisco. It's funny what weather can do to you. I felt like I was on Mars, what with the hot humid air in Florida. I didn't understand how the people who lived there could stand it, day in and day out.

Was I lonely for San Francisco? I smiled. It was a helluva town, all right. Crude, yet sophisticated. You could get whatever you wanted in San Francisco. And I had gotten quite a bit in my days there.

There are so many gays in San Francisco that a straight guy pretty much has his pick of some of the most beautiful, stylish women in the world.

Don't think that I didn't abuse that one. I remembered one afternoon, coming out of the St. Francis Hotel after having a couple of drinks. There was a blonde in the lobby, and when she saw me leave the bar, she fell in step behind me and followed me outside.

Just as I was about to cross the street into Union Square, she grabbed my arm and said, "Excuse me-do you live here in San Francisco?"

"Sure do," I said. She was about five-eight, and stacked.

She grinned at my response. "Well," she said, "good for you!"

I wasn't sure what the game was, but she was so damned attractive that I didn't care. "I'm just here on a visit," she said. "But I'm not having a very good time."

"Really?"

"I can't seem to find an escort."

I grinned. "There are services," I said. "You can give them a call, and-"

"That wasn't what I had in mind," she said. "My name's Lori. What's yours?"

I introduced myself and she let me in on it over a few drinks back in the hotel. She was from Spokane, and she had flown to San Francisco after discovering that her husband, a young and prominent executive with an aircraft company, had been carrying on with his secretary for the past year.

She was determined to have a fling on her own, and she had always heard how beautiful and romantic and all the rest of it San Francisco was.

Only nobody told her that half the men are gay and the other half are married.

So when she saw me, a big lunk who, if gay, couldn't be very successful at it, she couldn't resist. "What tipped you off?" I asked. "There are some pretty big, mean-looking guys here."

"Your clothing," she said.

My clothing? I looked down. I was wearing a Brooks Brothers gray wool suit that I'd bought a few years ago. Just a suit.

"No gay in this town would be caught dead in that outfit," she said. "They dress better than the women do!"

Fifteen minutes later we were in her room and she was stripping, casually unconcerned about nudity. I like that in a woman. She acted as if we were sharing a locker in some gym.

She had a body that made my eyes bug. Long, slender legs, with excellent muscle tone-maybe she was a jogger or a tennis player back home.

Lori had the tits of a movie queen, so big that they didn't look real. But best of all, there wasn't a trace of sag in those magnificent orbs. Her pink nipples only added to my growing hunger.

She eyed me with interest. I felt a bit like a bull on parade, because she even went so far as to walk around me, checking me out from all angles. "Do I pass?" I asked.

She nodded, a bright smile on her face. "Best I've seen in a long time," she said. She gripped my prick and quickly jerked it to hardness, then knelt in front of me and jabbed the root into her mouth.

As she knelt there, she fingered herself furiously. This was a girl with a real strong desire, I thought. That secretary of her husband's must be something else, if he's passing this one up for her.

Then she began cupping my balls in her hand and a few seconds later she withdrew my prick from her mouth and lowered her head.

She sucked on my balls gently, knowing full well that it's best to be careful around eggs. It felt wonderful, hot and wet, and her tongue traced its way on my scrotum and made my own tongue beat on the roof of my mouth with delight.

"I don't want to stop," I said, "but there's a nice big bed over there...."

Within seconds she was on her back and I was atop her, my head between her legs and my prick jabbing down into her wet, warm mouth.

She was gasping with pleasure as I licked a groove in her frothy slit. She was all for it, wrapping those thighs of hers around my head, pushing her hot center into my face. I tongued as well as I could, and I felt more and more of my cock disappearing down her throat.

This sure beat returning to my small apartment and watching Hollywood Squares. I gripped each of her legs and ran my tongue along her tan thigh and felt her fingers poking into places they shouldn't be, but it felt good, so what the hell.

Then I sat up and turned around. She was breathless with excitement, her legs open and inviting. "It was sure worth the trip down here," she said softly.

I was about to stick it to her-that was the way I felt, randy and mean-when she turned over and looked at me over her shoulder. "I really like it from behind," she said, wagging the most delicious set of asscheeks at me that I'd seen in a long time.

"Sure," I said. "Here we go!" I worked it between those creamy pillows, loving the feel of her hot, soft flesh as I eased my hardness through to her cunt.

As soon as I touched her hot lips she shivered and raised up on her knees and her legs came apart, and I shot right in, buried to the hilt, and she was working that ass on me so nicely that I felt I was going to come on the first stroke.

But I handled it and reached around her body until my hands were full of those giant, pillow-tits of hers. They were hanging due to her position and they flowed into my cupped hands and the nipples began to harden as soon as I touched them.

She was groaning, her head moving from side to side as I plunged into her. She knew that her other little hole was a tempting target and I don't think she would have minded a bit if I finished her off that way, but all I could think of was the wonderful wet, warm softness that I was feeling. It was good enough for me.

When we hit it, it sounded like the circus had come to town. Sitting in the back of a hot Florida cab, I grinned in memory.

The cabbie was talking again. I listened.

"Course, now, they could have a pretty good idea, what with one thing and another, if you know what I mean. But they just ain't sayin'."

I read him even less. "Wait a minute. It is against the law to kill people around here, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir, it sure is. But the law also says you got to have evidence before you arrest anybody and go to court."

We'd left the business district behind now and were passing the box factory and ice plant at the edge of town. I wished he'd slow down; there were a dozen questions I wanted to ask. "You mean they got one of them," I said, "and he admits there was somebody else, but won't say who? They can't get anything out of him?"

He tossed the words back over his shoulder. "Mister, they won't never get anything out of that feller. He tried to pull a gun on Calhoun, and he was dead before he hit the ground."

"Who's Calhoun?"

"Town cop. Mr. Big that stopped you from clobberin' Frankie."

"Hell, I wasn't going to hit him-" I stopped. Of all the idiotic things to waste time on.

"You look like a man that could take care of hisself just about anywhere, but let me give you a tip. Don't start nothin' with Calhoun."

"I'm not about to," I said impatiently. I was sorry I'd asked.

"You think that's fat. Mister, I got one word for you. It's not fat. You know, I seen that man do things-" He sighed, and shook his head. "Salty. What I mean, he's salty."

I wished he'd shut up about Calhoun and get on with it. "All right," I prodded, "you say one was killed instantly, resisting arrest. So he didn't say anything. Then how do they know there was another one? Did Calhoun catch them in the act?"

"No. That is, not exactly-"

We pulled to a stop before the Silver King. Heat shimmered off the highway, and the glare from the white gravel of the parking area was dazzling. I could hear a jukebox inside, and through the big window opposite us I could see some men drinking coffee at a counter. The driver put his arm up on the back of the seat and turned to look at me.

"What do you mean, not exactly?" I asked.

"Well, it was like this," he said. "When Calhoun jumped this man-Strader, his name was-he was down there in the river bottom about four-thirty in the morning tryin' to get rid of the body. Strader was drivin' Lang's car, and Lang hisself was in the back wrapped in a tarp with his head caved in."

"Yes, I can see where that might look a little suspicious." I said. "But was there anybody else in the car with Strader?"

"No. But there was another car, maybe fifty yards back up the road. It got away. Calhoun heard it start up and saw the lights come on, and he ran for it, but he couldn't catch it. He was just going to put a shot through it, when he stumbled in the dark and fell down. By the time he could find his gun and get up, it had gone around a bend in the road. But he'd already got the license number. They got them little lights, you know, that shine on the back plate-"

"Sure, sure," I said impatiently. "So they know whose car it was?"

"Yeah. It was Strader's"

"Oh," I said. "And where did they find it?"

He jerked his head toward the highway. "Right over there in front of Strader's room in that motel. And the only thing they ever found out for sure was that it was a woman drivin' it."

I said nothing for a moment. Even with this little of it, you could see the ugliness emerging, the stain of suspicion that was all over the town, on everything you touched.

"When did all this happen?" I asked.

"Last November."

Seven months of it, I thought. No wonder you sensed that gray ocean of weariness in back of the eyes when you looked at her, and had the feeling she was running along the edge of nervous breakdown.

"That'll be one dollar," he said. "Outside the city limits."

I handed him two. "Come on. I'll buy you a beer."