Brett Halliday - Last Seen Hitchhiking

Shayne sounded interested. “A hypo. That would explain why Frieda wasn’t able to use her gun. Our signal was a scarf. If he knocked her out and put her on the floor — yeah, he’d see the scarf and do something about it. All right, maybe we’re finally moving. Can you say something to give me a little confidence that this whole thing didn’t just occur to you a minute ago?”

“Don’t ask picky questions. How am I supposed to know that?”

The man on the bed was up on one elbow, listening to the radio voices. She had lived with him, off and on, for two months, and she was fairly sure of his name. It was Jake. He padded across and took the phone.

“Shayne? I don’t know what the hell’s going on. I just woke up. My name’s Jerry Ramsay. I’m the roommate.”

Jerry. Wrong again.

“A doctor’s office,” Jerry said. “I heard what you asked her. Did she dream that up this minute? She’s got a wonderful imagination, and the truth is, I didn’t believe it when she told me. But she told me last week. So that answers your question.” He added, “If you believe me.”

“We’d better get it firsthand,” Shayne said, his voice quickening, “if she’s not too zonked.”

“No more than usual. As a matter of fact, her name’s Sandy. She keeps changing, which isn’t a real bad idea, when you think about it. Here she is.”

She took the phone and let it lie in her hand, looking at it, until he said, “You were telling this cat about that rape-trip. Crazy fun, strapped to the table.”

Shayne’s voice said, “Do it any way you want, Sandy. Straight through or backward or upside down. But you’ve got a little selling to do. If this is the same man, he’s killed people. Why make you an exception?”

“That was all—” she said, “I mean, like part of the point. You’ve seen those Mad Doctor movies. Vincent Price. Part scary, part funny. I was there two days. But not really two days, he kept moving the clock when he didn’t think I was looking. That was so afterward I wouldn’t be sure it happened, and I wasn’t.”

Shayne didn’t push her.

“What is rape, anyway? That’s what he’s trying to find out. I was raped once, and I told him about it. I was thirteen. It hurt like hell. Oh, how I hated that guy. He was my uncle. I blacked it all out for years. And then it dawned on me, Mike! You know it was love? A kind of love. The poor guy wanted to make it with me but there’s a law against that. I mean, my uncle. So the only way he could do it was to act crazy… You have to be crazy to want sex with a thirteen-year-old niece. Everybody told him that afterward. I helped, too, I guess, by yelling and crying, so he did go crazy and he’s in a hospital today.”

“Sandy—”

“Natalie. Nat. Really. I think he was really interested. He took it all down. He’s going to write a book about it. The way he got started, he went to this sex research clinic, and he didn’t think they went about it the right way. He explained it. He showed me the records of his other cases. I was tied down on the table, understand. He finally put a pillow under my head, but most of the time he kept telling me he had to be cruel, or none of the work would stand up under criticism. And he was pretty damn cruel. He didn’t have to force himself that much.”

Her eyes filled, and she wasted a minute feeling sorry for herself. “Throw me that Kleenex, Jake.”

Jake brought the box, and everybody waited while she blew her nose. Then Jake did something very nice to her, not really in character. He scratched the nape of her neck under the hair and kissed her on the forehead. Nobody had done that to her in years.

“Natalie?” Shayne said.

“Yes. I mean, he made it sound sensible, but I knew all the time he was out of his skull. I’ve known nutty people and non-nutty people, and he was definitely nuts. He had all the clippings in an envelope, about those girls whose bodies were found. And he had the graphs of what happened to their insides when he raped them. You know I was scared! I was scared sick. He raped me, and not just once. Pretty continually. He did a lot of talking about how he didn’t have erections, but it didn’t seem to me that was much of a problem. It brought the whole thing back, with my uncle. That happened on the bathroom floor. I did some screaming, Mike, that day and the day it happened with Bruno. He said my electro-encephalogram was beautiful. That was the first time — later they weren’t so unusual, apparently.”

“Then he let you go?”

“It wasn’t that easy. We had to finish the movie. The Mad Doctor in love. I don’t think he killed those other girls. I think he read about them in the paper and that gave him the idea. He faked those graphs. All they were was a lot of up-and-down lines on a sheet of paper. He didn’t fall in love with me. No, no, no. He was too much of a scientist, he said. He fell in love with my tracings.”

“Hang on a minute,” Shayne said. “Tim Rourke’s waving at me.”

Rourke said, “I’ve got a call from somebody who thinks she knows the guy. Let’s take it.”

“All right?” Shayne asked Natalie.

“Sure. I’ve been wondering what he’s like.”

“Go ahead,” Shayne said, “you’re on.”

A woman’s voice, eagerly: “That has to be Bruno Lorenz. Ask her if he’s fat. I don’t mean really gross, just overweight.”

“Natalie?”

“He made a big point of it. He was such a slob physically, that made it worse being raped by him. There at the end, he sort of appealed to me. Crazy.”

The other: “I knew there couldn’t be two people with that name. We’re in the same co-op dorm. We all share the cooking.”

Shayne: “Do you know any gynecologist’s office he might be using?”

“No-o. It couldn’t be the University one, because somebody I know had an appointment there this afternoon.”

“Was he there for dinner?”

“I didn’t see him. Nobody comes to every dinner. You sign up a day ahead.”

“Do you keep the sign-up sheets?”

“That wouldn’t mean anything. You can change your mind at the last minute and miss dinner, and you have to pay for it anyway.”

“Then we can slow down,” Shayne said. “Do you know anything about the sex research project Natalie mentioned?”

“There’s been a lot of talk about it. But if Bruno applied — and I don’t think he did — they turned him down. This is a cool house, and people come and go, but Bruno has zero sex, as far as I know. He grinds. He got a couple of B’s last semester and he’s been at it hard ever since to get back to all A’s. Somebody else here wants to say something.”

Another girl’s voice: “He’s been having headaches and dizziness. He fell down one night washing dishes. I know he went to the Health Services shrink. The kind of advice you get there — take a couple of Valium and call next week if you don’t feel happier.”

“Do you like him?” Shayne said.

“Oh, he’s kind of a creep. He asked me to go to an X-rated movie once, and I thought to myself, better not. But he has some wild theories, and you have to dig somebody who gets that enthusiastic. Keeping pets is against the law here, and he has an illegal kitten. Maybe that’s not much of a reference.”

Shayne asked several more questions, talked briefly with the first girl, and came back to Natalie.

“A kitten,” she said. “That fits.”

“I think I’m beginning to believe this,” Shayne said. “Now tell me the end.”

“It got sort of emotional. He didn’t want to kill me but I could see he just about had to. I promised I wouldn’t tell anybody, but how could he trust me? We did sex once more, and this one was really fine. The myotonic contractions, if that’s the right word, were magnificent, he said, but he said I did it just to please him so he’d take pity. I went to sleep right afterward. I didn’t get sleepier and sleepier, everything turned off. Snap. I woke up in a motel off the interstate in Broward County. I was tripping. What he did, he fed me some tabs of very pure LSD, and when I came down naturally I didn’t know how much was trip, how much was Bruno. I called Jake to come and get me. I was wrecked for days. There were red marks on my wrists and ankles and I hurt in all the places you hurt if you’ve been raped that many times. But nobody believed me, and after I stopped hurting, I didn’t believe it myself.”