Strange Highways

Page 62

Chase said, "Why?"
"I can't very well pass judgment on you until I know what sort of transgressions you're guilty of, can I?" Under the pervading wheeze of protesting vocal cords lay a trace of the amusement that Chase had previously noticed. "You see, I didn't randomly select which fornicators I would punish up on Kanackaway."
"You didn't?"
"No, I researched the situation. I went up there every night for two weeks and copied license-plate numbers. Then I matched them until I found the one most often repeated."
"Why?"
"To discover the most deserving sinners," the stranger said. "In this state, for two dollars, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles will trace a license number for you. I had that done and learned the identity of the boy who owned the car. From there it was a simple matter to investigate his background and to learn the name of his partner in these activities." The formality of his speech led him into odd locutions—or evasions. "She wasn't the only young woman he entertained on Kanackaway, even though she thought he was seeing no one else. She had her own promiscuous affairs too. I followed her twice when other boys picked her up, and one of those times she gave herself to the date."
"Why don't you just stay home and watch old movies?" Chase wondered.
"What?"
"Or seek counseling."
"I'm not in need of counseling. This sick world is in need of counseling. The world, not me." His anger sent him into another coughing fit. Then: "They were both sluts, the boy as well as the girl. They deserved what they got—except she didn't get hers, thanks to you."
Chase waited.
The man said, "You see, I must research you as thoroughly as I did those two. Otherwise, I would never be sure if you deserved the judgment of death or whether I'd eliminated you simply because you'd interfered with my plans and I wanted revenge. In short, I'm not killing people. I'm executing those who deserve it."
Chase said, "I don't want you calling here again."
"Yes, you do."
Chase didn't reply.
"I'm your motivation," said the killer.
"My motivation?"
"There's a destiny here."
"My motivation to do what?"
"That," said the killer, "is for you to decide."
"I'll have the line bugged."
"That won't stop me," the stranger said, again amused. "I'll simply place the phone calls from various booths around the city, and I'll keep them too short to trace."
"If I refuse to answer my phone?"
"You'll answer it. Six o'clock this evening," he reminded Chase, and he hung up.
Chase dropped the receiver, uneasily aware that the killer knew him better than he knew himself. He would answer every time, of course. And for the same reasons that he had answered all the nuisance calls of the last few weeks rather than obtain an unlisted number. The only problem was that he didn't know just what those reasons were.
Impulsively, he lifted the receiver and placed a call to the police headquarters downtown. It was the first time in ten and a half months that he had initiated a call.
When the desk sergeant answered, Chase asked for Detective Wallace.
Wallace came on the line a moment later. "Yes, Mr. Chase, can I help you?"
Chase didn't mention the calls from the killer—which had been why he thought he'd phoned Wallace. Instead he asked, "How's the investigation coming along?"
Wallace was not averse to talking shop. "Slowly but surely. We found prints on the knife. If he's ever been arrested for a serious crime or worked for any branch of government, we'll have him soon."
"And if he's never been printed?"
Wallace said, "We'll get him anyway. We found a man's ring in the Chevy. It didn't belong to the dead boy, and it looks as if it would be too small for your fingers by a size or three. Didn't lose a ring, did you?"
"No," Chase said.
"I thought so. Should have called you on it, but I was pretty sure about it. It's his, right enough."
"Anything else besides the prints and ring?"
"We're keeping a constant watch on the girl and her parents, though I'd appreciate it if you didn't say anything about that to anyone."
"You think he might try for her?"
"Maybe. If he thinks she can identify him. You know, it's occurred to me that we wouldn't be far off if we gave you a tail as well. Have you thought of that?"
Alarmed out of proportion by the suggestion, Chase said, "No. I don't see what value that would have."
"Well, the story was in the papers this morning. He probably doesn't fear you identifying him as much as he does the girl, but he might bear a grudge against you."
"Grudge? He'd have to be nuts."
Wallace laughed. "Well, if not nuts, what is he?"
"You mean you've found no motives from questioning the girl, no old lovers who might have—"
"No," Wallace said. "Right now we're operating on the assumption there's no rational motive, that he's psychotic."
"I see."
"Well," Wallace said, "I'm sorry there isn't more solid news."
"And I'm sorry to have bothered you," Chase said.
He hung up without telling Wallace about the calls that he had received from the killer, though he had intended to spill it all. A twenty-four-hour guard on the girl. They would do the same to him, if they knew that he'd been contacted.
The walls seemed to sway, alternately closing in like the jaws of an immense vise and swinging away from him as if they were flat gray gates. The floor rose and fell—or seemed to.
A sense of extreme instability overcame him, a sense that the world was not a solid place but as fluid as a shimmering mirage: the very thing that had landed him in the hospital and had eventually led to his seventy-five-percent disability pension. He could not let it grip him again, and he knew that the best way to fight it was to constrict the perimeters of his world, take solace from solitude. He got another drink.
The telephone woke him from his nap just as the dead men touched him with soft, white, corrupted hands. He sat straight up in bed and cried out, his arms held before him to ward off their cold touch.
When he saw where he was and that he was alone, he sank back, exhausted, and listened to the phone. After thirty rings, he had no choice but to pick it up.
"Yes."
"I was about to come check on you," Mrs. Fielding said. "Are you all right?"
"I'm okay,"
"It took you so long to answer."
"I was asleep."
She hesitated, as if framing what she was about to say. "I'm having Swiss steak, mushrooms, baked corn, and mashed potatoes for supper. Would you like to come down? There's more than I can use."
"I don't think—"
"A strapping boy like you needs his regular meals."
"I've already eaten."
She was silent. Then she said, "All right. But I wish you'd waited, 'cause I got all this food."
"I'm sorry, but I'm stuffed," he said.
"Tomorrow night, maybe."
"Maybe," he said. He rang off before she could suggest a late-night snack together.
The ice melted in his glass, diluting what whiskey he had not drunk. He emptied the watered booze into the bathroom sink, got new ice and a new shot of liquor. It tasted as sour as a bite of lemon rind. He drank it anyway. The cupboard and refrigerator contained nothing else but a bag of Winesap apples.
He turned on the small black-and-white television again and slowly cycled through all the local channels. Nothing but news, news, news, and a cartoon program. He watched the cartoons.
None was amusing.
After the cartoons, he watched an old movie.
Except for the telephone call he'd been told to expect at six o'clock, he had the whole evening ahead of him.
At six o'clock on the nose, the phone rang.
"Hello?"
"Good evening, Chase," the killer said. His voice was still rough.
Chase sat on the bed.
"How are you tonight?" the killer asked.
"Okay. "
"You know what I've been up to all day?"
"Research."
"That's right."
"Tell me what you found," Chase said, as if it would be news to him even though he was the subject. And maybe it would be.
"First, you were born here a little over twenty-four years ago on June eleventh, 1947, in Mercy Hospital. Your parents died in an auto accident a couple of years ago. You went to school at State and graduated in a three-year accelerated program, having majored in business administration. You did well in all subjects except a few required courses, chiefly Basic Physical Sciences, Biology One and Two, Chemistry One, and Basic Composition." The killer whispered on for two or three minutes, reciting biographical facts that Chase had thought private. Courthouse records, college files, newspaper morgues, and half a dozen other sources had provided the killer with far more information about Chase's life than could have been gleaned merely from the recent articles in the Press-Dispatch.
"I think I've been on the line too long," the killer said. "It's time I went to another booth. Is your phone tapped, Chase?"
"No."
"Just the same, I'll hang up now and call you back in a few minutes." The line went dead.
Five minutes later the killer called again.
"What I gave you before was just so much dry grass, Chase. But let me add a few more things and do some speculating. Let's see if I can add a match to it."
"Whatever you have to do."
"For one thing," the man said, "you inherited a lot of money, but you haven't spent much of it."
"Not a lot."
"Forty thousand after taxes, but you live frugally."
"How would you know that?"
"I drove by your house today and discovered that you live in a furnished apartment on the third floor. When I saw you coming home, it was apparent that you don't spend much on clothes. Until that pretty new Mustang, you didn't have a car. It follows, then, that you must have a great deal of your inheritance left, what with the monthly disability pension from the government to pay most or all of your bills."
"I want you to stop checking on me."
The man laughed. "Can't stop. Remember the necessity to evaluate your moral content before passing judgment, Mr. Chase."
Chase hung up this time. Having taken the initiative cheered him a little. When the phone began to ring again, he summoned the will not to answer it. After thirty rings, it stopped.
When the ringing began again, ten minutes later, he finally picked it up and said hello.
The killer was furious, straining his damaged throat to the limit. "If you ever do that to me again, then I'll make sure it isn't a quick, clean kill. I'll see to that. You understand me?"
Chase was silent.
"Mr. Chase?" A beat. "What's wrong with you?"
"Wish I knew," Chase said.
The stranger decided to let his anger go, and he fell into his previous tone of forced irony: "That 'wounded in action' bit excites me, Mr. Chase. That part of your biography. Because you don't appear disabled enough to deserve a pension, and you more than held your own in our fight. That gives me ideas, makes me think your most serious wounds aren't physical at all."
"Whose are?"
"I think you had psychological problems that put you in that army hospital and got you a discharge."
Chase said nothing.
"And you tell me that I need counseling. I'll have to take more time to check in to this. Very interesting. Well, rest easy tonight, Mr. Chase. You're not scheduled to die yet."
"Wait."
"Yes?"
"I have to have a name for you. I can't go on thinking of you in totally impersonal terms like 'the man' and 'the stranger' and 'the killer.' Do you see how that is?"
"Yes," the man admitted.
"A name?"
He considered. Then he said, "You can call me Judge."
"Judge?"
"Yes, as in 'judge, jury, and executioner.'" He laughed until he coughed, and then he hung up as if he were just an anonymous prankster who had phoned to ask if Chase had Prince Albert in a can.
Chase went to the refrigerator and got an apple. He peeled it and cut it into eight sections, chewing each thoroughly. It wasn't much of a dinner. But there were a lot of energy-giving calories in a glass of whiskey, so he poured a few ounces over ice, for dessert.
He washed his hands, which had become sticky with apple juice.
He would have washed them even if they hadn't been sticky. He washed his hands frequently. Ever since Nam. Sometimes he washed them so often in a single day that they became red and chapped.
With another drink, he went to the bed and watched a movie on TV. He tried not to think about anything except the satisfying daily routines to which he was accustomed: breakfast at Woolworth's, paperback novels, old movies on television, the forty thousand of go-to-hell money in his savings account, his pension check, and the good folks in Tennessee who made Jack Daniel's. Those were the things that counted, that made his small world satisfying and safe.
Again, he refrained from calling the police.
4
THE NIGHTMARES WERE SO BAD THAT CHASE SLEPT FITFULLY, WAKING repeatedly at the penultimate moment of horror, as he was surrounded by the tight circle of dead men, as their silent accusations began, as they closed in on him with their hands outstretched.
He rose early, abandoning any hope of rest. He bathed, shaved, and washed his hands with special attention to the dirt under his fingernails.
He sat at the table and peeled an apple for breakfast. He did not want to face the regular customers at Woolworth's lunch counter now that he was more than just another face to them, yet he couldn't think of any place where he might go unrecognized.
It was nine-thirty-five, much too early to begin drinking. He observed few rules, but never drinking before lunch was one of them. He seldom broke that one. Afternoons and evenings were for drinking. Mornings were for remorse, regret, and silent repentance.
But what could he do with the long hours until noon? Filling time without drinking was increasingly difficult.
He turned on the television but couldn't find any old movies. Turned it off.