Bill Pronzini - The Stalker

She had cleaned the shack from top to bottom the previous day, going over everything with mop and broom and dustcloth and soapy water at least twice, putting herself into the chore with an almost mechanized fervency, making it last until day had receded into night. As a result, the two-room interior was spotlessly fastidious—almost, she thought, surveying now her labor in the light of morning, comfortably livable. Almost.

Andrea finished her coffee and carried the cup to the tin sink and washed it out carefully, turning it upside down on the wood drainboard. She looked briefly out of the window above the sink, at the wind-swept grasses covering the inland area within her vision, at the leaden sky with its promise soon of rain, and then she turned away and sat down again at the table. She lifted the ostentatiously dust-jacketed novel she had brought with her (four hundred pages, very erotic—makes you ever so terribly horny, dear, a friend of hers had told her), but she put it down almost immediately. She didn’t feel like reading—not that she felt like sitting either, because she didn’t. Well, she was a fine one; she’d been out on her own for less than one day and already her own company bored her to tears. But there was nothing to do, nothing to keep her mind occupied the way the house-cleaning had done yesterday; at home, she had been able to call one of her friends on the telephone or go out shopping or driving or visiting if she became bored; but here, there was just nothing to do. . .

Well, I’m certainly not chained here, am I? she asked herself. I can leave, can’t I? Well, of course I can; I’m not a prisoner in this shack, after all. There’s nothing that says I can’t leave for the day any time I want to.

The thoughts became a firm resolution in her mind, and she stood and reached for her purse. Yes, a drive was just the thing, into San Rafael, she decided; there was one large shopping center which remained open on Sundays. She could browse leisurely there, have lunch, perhaps even go to a movie tonight. That was certainly better than just sitting here in this now-comfortable, now-livable little shack in the middle of nowhere that she knew she was a darned fool for coming to in the first place, in spite of all her nice rationalizations.

Buttoning the wool jacket to her throat, Andrea went to the door and stepped outside.

To escape momentarily from all the hundreds of little things that had begun to remind her of Steve from the moment she first set foot inside the shack, from all the memories that a thousand cleanings could never remove from its omniscient walls.

Standing at the edge of a small, grassy slope in Golden Gate Park, his hands pressed deep into the pockets of his topcoat, Steve Kilduff looked out over the flat, shallow water of Lloyd Lake. What I’ve got to do, he told himself, is be practical; I’ve got to put yesterday out of my mind, blank it out—Andrea and Drexel and Granite City—blank it all out with cold clear calculation and think about what I’m going to do now, now that the money’s almost gone and I’m about to be faced with the prospect of starvation. So it looks like a job, eight-to-five or equivalent, because I sure as hell don’t qualify for welfare; digging ditches or pumping gas or clerking in an office, brown-nosing the boss’s ass for that Christmas bonus and that ten-dollar semi-annual raise—why not? The trouble before was I wanted too much, expected too much; once you’ve got money, you acquire a taste for luxury, for money, and you can’t reconcile yourself to menial labor for menial wages. That was the trouble, all right, that was exactly what the trouble was, so the thing to do is go down to one of the employment agencies tomorrow and tell them I’ll take anything so long as it’s honest, tell them . . . well, now, that was pretty funny, wasn’t it? Take anything so long as it’s honest. Oh, Lord, that was really pretty damned funny, old Public Enemy Number One, The Man Who Helped Pull Off One Of The Few Really Big Unsolved Crimes In The Country, why, yes sir, I’ll take anything you have open just so long as it’s honest . . .

El Peyote was a combination cocktail lounge and Mexican restaurant on South First Street in San Jose—a low, stucco, Spanish-architected building with a center patio replete with fountain and heavy tables and strolling mariachis for outdoor summer dining. It catered to a varied clientele, from the surrounding suburban elite to the pachuco of San Jose’s large Mexican population. Five men had been knifed—two of them, fatally—in El Peyote’s dark interior lounge in the six years since Larry Drexel had opened it, and instead of harming business, it brought out the crowds.

As far as Drexel was concerned, if people wanted to pay for the prospect of seeing some spic with his belly ripped away, holding in his entrails with one bloody hand, then that was all right with him. He had raised his prices ten percent after the last incident, three months previously; with a winking smile, he had told Juano—his three-hundred pound headwaiter-cum-bouncer—that the increase was a kind of entertainment tax, what the hell.

At five o’clock Sunday afternoon, Drexel was sitting in his darkly furnished office upstairs above the lounge, drinking aquardiente, and staring broodingly at a large reproduction in oil of a portion of a mural by Diego Rivera, which covered the wall immediately behind his desk. He felt edgy and restless, had felt that way ever since learning of Beauchamp’s death, and spending the better part of the day in his office hadn’t helped matters any. And then there was the meeting last night—that had been a mistake right down the line. Conradin and Kilduff were a pair of spineless bastards and he should have known better than to expect anything from them, not after so many years had elapsed. Well, if they wanted to sit around and pretend that their goddamn lives weren’t in danger, then that was rum-dandy; but he was damned if he would do the same thing. The both of them could go screw off. He’d take care of Number One and only Number One from now on.

Driving back to Los Gatos from Kilduff’s apartment last night, he had decided on a direct course of action—and that meant locating Leo Helgerman, which in turn meant returning to Illinois for the first time since 1962. He had debated leaving immediately—today, Sunday—but there was the fact of a certain contract meeting in Wade Cosgreave’s law offices Monday morning at ten sharp. Drexel had spent three months negotiating with a stubborn old fart named Esteban Martinez for purchase of Cantina del Flores, a restaurant-and-lounge combine in Campbell, similar to El Peyote, and Cosgreave had all but clinched the deal just last week; there remained only the formalities of signing the contract and working out financial arrangements with banking representatives. But there were other interested parties besides himself, and he knew that if he canceled the meeting tomorrow, he would run the risk of ruffling Martinez’s feathers enough to make him sell to one of the other bidders—and Cantina del Flores was too juicy a plum (the first such plum in a carefully mapped plan for expansion), to risk losing out on.

Drexel had called the airlines reservations desk at San Francisco International that morning, reserving passage on the three-thirty flight for Chicago on Monday afternoon. One more day wouldn’t make any difference, not so long as he was watchful and—

A knock sounded on the door, soft, almost hesitant. Drexel swiveled reflexively toward the door, his hands gripping the lacquered edge of his desk just above the center drawer, his body tensing. “Who is it?” he called out sharply.

“It’s Fran, Larry,” a quiet, familiar voice said from the other side of the door.