Bill Pronzini - The Stalker

“She didn’t know us from a gnat’s ass,” Drexel said. “We were just faces at a funeral. But you had to go and wax emotional.”

“She’s not going to remember me.”

“You’d better hope not.”

“It’s not that important, Larry.”

“Everything’s important now.”

“Look, if it bothers you that much, why did you come to the funeral in the first place?”

“Because you insisted on coming,” Drexel said. “Because you’re emotional, and you react without thinking. Christ knows what you might have said to Conradin’s wife later on if I hadn’t gotten you away from there.”

“I wouldn’t have said anything to her.”

“No? How do I know that?”

“Do you think I’m still a kid?”

“You act like a kid sometimes.”

“Shit,” Kilduff said.

“Yes, shit,” Drexel said. He leaned across the table and put his face close to Kilduff’s. “You wouldn’t listen to me Saturday night. You wouldn’t even consider what I said. You tried to pass the whole thing off as some pipe dream, because you were too weak and too afraid to admit to yourself that the past has finally caught up with us, that somebody wants us dead. Now tell me that isn’t the way it was.”

“The whole idea is . . . fantastic,” Kilduff said slowly.

“That’s right. It’s fantastic. But what do you say now, baby? Do you think Conradin fell off that cliff accidentally Sunday night, like yesterday’s papers had it? Four of us now in less than a month. Do you still call it coincidence?”

No, Kilduff thought, and he knew that it wasn’t, that he’d known it wasn’t almost from the beginning. He’d been deluding himself, lying to himself that there was nothing wrong, nothing to worry about; he just hadn’t been able to face it. Too many things had happened at once, that was the reason—Andrea and the money and Granite City, all piling in on him at the same time. Was it any wonder he’d reacted the way he had? But he had to face it now, he had no choice but to face it now. Yes, it was true all right, it was murder all right; Jim hadn’t misjudged his footing in the fog and fallen accidentally off that cliff. Somebody had pushed him and somebody had deliberately murdered Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp—this Helgerman, this Mannerling guard who had suffered spinal damage as a result of Conradin’s blow to the base of his neck those thousand years past . . .

He said, “I don’t think it was coincidence, Larry. I don’t think Jim or any of the others died by accident.”

“You weren’t so sure on the phone last night. You wouldn’t talk about it.”

“I’m sure now.”

Drexel drew back against the red Leatherette of the booth and inhaled the cheroot and expelled twin streams of smoke through his nostrils. “Okay,” he said. “You’re sure now. What do you think we ought to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, of course you don’t

“Just what does that mean?”

Drexel smiled in his cold way. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to find Helgerman. That’s the only thing we can do.”

“Find him? How are we going to do that?”

“By starting at the source.”

“You mean Granite City?”

“That was where he lived, wasn’t it?”

“If he killed the others, and now Jim, he can’t have done it from Granite City. We won’t find him there.”

“No, he’s here now. In the Bay Area.”

“Then—?”

“It’s a place to start,” Drexel said. “He could be based almost anywhere around here, and we’d only be kidding ourselves if we think we can locate him by canvass. So we begin at the beginning and work our way forward and try to trace him that way. I had a flight scheduled to Chicago last night. I canceled it because of Conradin, but as soon as I get back I’m going to make another reservation. For tonight.”

“And me?”

“What about you?”

“Do you want me to go along?”

“You’d rather not, is that it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth.”

“Is that what I was doing?”

Kilduff rotated his cup slowly in its saucer, thinking: No, that’s not what you were doing at all. You were right, Larry: I’m afraid. Because with acceptance comes fear, and I’m afraid the same way I was before we held up that armored car—maybe more so now, because I had youth then and all I’ve got now are a lot of old memories and faded dreams and the prospect of a life alone. I don’t particularly want to die, but it’s not death itself that I’m frightened of; no, it’s . . . something else, something less simple, less basic, something else . . .

He said uneasily, “Listen, Larry. What can we do even if we find Helgerman? Buy him off? I don’t have a pot any more; my share is gone.”

Drexel was looking at him with incredulity. After a long moment he said softly, “Come on, baby. You’re not that goddamned naïve, are you?”

Outside the window, the sky irradiated for a brief instant with a fresh zig-zag of lightning, as if a gigantic match had been struck somewhere in the heavens, and then grew dark and ominous again. Kilduff’s eyes flicked there briefly, came back to Drexel’s. A chill began to flow through him.

“Naïve?” he said. “I don’t—”

“What do you think we’ve been talking about? Taking him to dinner and a movie?”

“Larry—”

“What the hell do you suppose we’re going to do when we find him?” Drexel said. “We’re going to kill the bastard. We’re going to kill him before he kills us.”

The Tenderloin by night, as seen through heavy rain.

San Francisco’s equivalent to New York’s West Forty-second Street, on a smaller scale but nonetheless squalid, nonetheless garish, hiding its pocked and ugly face beneath the veiling rain and the cosmetic darkness, dying by inches and without mourners. A whore under every street lamp and two behind every drawn shade; gay-boys with mascaraed eyes and codpieces and invitational glances more sultry than those of their female counterparts; con men with sad eyes and glib tongues and hearts of pure ebony; pushers selling furtive oblivion in white capsules or brown packages or dabbed lightly on sweet sugar cubes; winos with nowhere to go and a future as dead as the past, suffering the penultimate indignation of having to compete with bearded and buckskinned hippies for altruistic nickels from Des Moines or Miami or the Sunset District—and here and there, a man who wants nothing and takes nothing and asks only to be left alone.

On Ellis Street, neon flashes AUGIES PLACE, sans apostrophe, alternately with TOPLESS AND BOTTOMLESS REVUE above a black-façaded building situated between a Polish delicatessen and an empty storefront decorated with chalked obscenities. A thick-necked man with a Fu Manchu mustache and flat drugged eyes stands before the curtained entranceway, calling out inducements to the stream of passers-by, “No cover and no minimum, folks,” but he says nothing of the diluted bar whiskey which sells for a dollar fifty a shot and tastes like nothing so much as crude fuel oil.

Inside it is very dark, save for a single light above the back bar and a bright pink spotlight which illuminates a small, raised stage against the far wall. On the stage, a nude red-haired girl with pendulous white breasts and swollen nipples and a shaved, protruding abdomen makes lewd motions with fleshy hips, while an unintelligible masturbation of sound spews forth from a hidden jukebox. Before a chrome-barred cocktail slot stands a platinum-haired waitress wearing a brief sequinned halter and a short skirt with fringe ringing its bottom, and behind the otherwise empty bar a huge, light-skinned Negro sits on a high acmuntant’s stool and surveys the almost deserted interior with implacable eyes.