Chase (11 page)

She said, ‘May I help you?’

He had already decided on the tack that Judge most likely had used when he had come here researching Chase's life. He said, ‘I'm doing a family history, and I was wondering if I could be permitted to look up a few things in the city records.’

‘Certainly,’ the stout woman said, rising from her seat in one quick movement. The name on her deskplate was
MRS ONUFER;
her workmate,
MRS KLOU,
had not even looked up but was still battling away at her keyboard.

Mrs Onufer came around her desk, passed the gate in the railing and motioned him to follow her. She led him to the rear of the room, through a fire door and into a large concrete-walled chamber that was ringed with filing cabinets and lined with others in ten neat parallel rows in the middle of the floor. There was a worktable with three chairs at it, the table scarred and the chairs all unpadded.

‘You'll see stickers on the cabinets that tell you what's inside - that section to the right is birth certificates, the one further down being bar and restaurant licences, then health department records. Against the far wall are the selective service carbons which we keep for a nominal yearly rental, beside those are the minutes and budets of City Council going back thirty-seven years. You get the idea. Each drawer is labelled according to one of two filing systems, depending on the nature of the material, either alphabetically or by date. Whatever you remove from the files must be left on this table to be returned to its proper place later. Do not attempt to replace what you pull from the files; that is my job, and I do it far more accurately than you would.’ Here she flashed a quick, economical smile. ‘You may not take anything from this room. For a nominal fee, Mrs Klou will provide copies of whatever documents interest you. If anything should be removed from this room, you will be subjected to a possible fine of five thousand dollars and two years in prison.’

‘Thank you for your help,’ Chase said.

‘And no smoking,’ she said.

‘Of course not.’

She turned and walked out of the room, closing the door behind her, her tapping heels swiftly fading until he could hear nothing but his own lungs drawing in breath after breath.

It had been that simple for Judge. Chase had hoped, irrationally, that there was some procedure whereby those who used these files were identified. Now he saw that Mrs Onufer would not be bothered with such a time-consuming routine, for she could be more than certain that no one would slip by her with stolen papers under his coat. She would notice the look of guilt as swiftly as a nasty dog notices fear in the face of a potential opponent.

He looked up his own birth certificate, found the minutes of the council meeting in which the city fathers had voted an award in his honour. In the carbons of the selective service records, he found the pertinent facts concerning his own eligibility history, with only the confidential correspondence removed. When he felt he had passed enough time to keep from arousing Mrs Onufer's suspicions, he left the storage vaults.

‘Find what you were looking for?’ Mrs Onufer asked.

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘No trouble, Mr Chase,’ she said, turning back to her work.

That stopped him. He said, ‘You know me?’

She looked up, flashed a smile just a fraction of a second longer than her business smile and said, ‘I read the papers every evening.’

Instead of walking to the door, he crossed to her desk. ‘If you had not known me,’ he said, ‘would you have asked for a name before I went in there to root around?’

‘Why, of course,’ she said. ‘No one has ever taken any records in the twelve years I've been here, but I still see the need for some safety check.’

‘And you keep a list?’

She tapped a notebook on the edge of her desk. ‘I just put your name down, out of habit.’

He said, ‘This may sound like an odd request, but could you tell me who was here this past Tuesday?’

She looked at him, looked at the book, reached a quick decision. ‘I don't see why I should hesitate,’ she said. ‘There's nothing confidential in the list.’ She opened it, thumbed through several pages, then said, ‘Only three people all day.’ She showed him the names.

When he had them well in mind, he said, ‘Thank you. You see, I'm constantly being bothered by reporters who want stories, and I don't care for all the publicity. I think they've said everything about me there is to be said. But I've heard there's a local man working up a series for a national magazine, against my wishes, and I wondered if he'd been here Tuesday as I'd been told.’

Even he thought the lie sounded utterly absurd, and he had no hope of her believing him, until he realized that he would not have had to offer her any explanation whatsoever. She trusted him. Everyone trusted a hero. She nodded at his fabrication as if it were perfectly logical, and she commiserated - for a few brief moments - on the problems of unwanted publicity he must have to face. Then, conscious of the time she had been wasting, she bent her head to her work and thereby dismissed him.

When he left the office, he realized that Mrs Klou had never once looked up and had not paused even for a moment in the furious pace she set at the typewriter.

It was a quarter to twelve when he stepped out of the courthouse, and he was surprisingly hungry. He got his Mustang out of the lot after paying a dollar ransom to the man in the ticket booth, then drove out Galasio Boulevard to the string of drive-in eateries that had sprung up like glass-and-aluminium mushrooms since he had gone away to war. He parked in a slot at the Diamond Dell and ordered more food than he thought he could eat. A cute redhead in tight hotpants brought his food, accepted his money and said she hoped he'd like everything. By a quarter to one he had consumed everything on the tray, more than he had eaten in any three meals during the last year.

At a nearby gas station, he used the telephone booth directory to find numbers for two of the three people who had browsed through city files on Tuesday, and called them. Both were women, rather elderly, and both did exist. The third name, Howard Devore, was a phony. It did not appear in the telephone book, and when he looked later, was not in the city directory. The man might be from out of town, of course. But Chase didn't think that was the answer. Howard Devore, he felt certain, was an alias that Judge had used.

Because he did not trust himself to store his knowledge logically and to notice links between bits of diverse data, Chase purchased a small ring-bound notebook and an inexpensive plastic pen, and he carefully listed the following:

1.  Alias-Judge

2.  Alias - Howard Devore

3.  Possible homosexual

4.  No criminal record, prints not on file

5.  Has knowledge of lock-picking,  broke into Cauvel's office

6.  Owns a red Volkswagen

7.  Owns a silenced pistol, probably a .32 calibre

Chase looked over the list when he was finished with it, thought a moment, then added an eighth fact, one which struck him, somehow, as important: ‘8. May be either unemployed, on vacation or on a leave of absence.’ That seemed the only way to explain how he had been able to call Chase at any hour of the day, follow him in the middle of the afternoon and waste two days ‘researching’ Chase's life. He neither sounded nor acted old enough to be retired. Unemployed, then. Or on a vacation. If the former were the case, his field of suspects could be drastically narrowed, though the resultant group would still be quite large. If it were the latter, and if Judge were on vacation, the number of hours a day that Chase was endangered would be reduced in a week or two when Judge was back on the job.

He closed the notebook and started the car, aware that the last thought had been a dangerous slipping back, wishful thinking that could do nothing more than weaken his resolve.

The girl who was in charge of the
Press-Dispatch
morgue room was only two inches under six feet, and nearly six in her low heels, almost as tall as Chase, with yellow hair to the middle of her back, a skirt to the middle of her thighs, and legs that just went on forever. Her name was Glenda Kleaver, and she spoke with an anachronistically small, soft, feminine voice that was yet strangely at home in her fine, big body.

She demonstrated the use of microfilm viewers to Chase and explained that all editions prior to January 1, 1966, were now stored on film to conserve space. She explained the procedure for ordering the proper spools and for obtaining the mint editions that had not yet been transferred to film.

Several reporters were sitting at the machines, twisting the control knobs and staring into the viewers, jotting on note pads beside them.

Chase said, ‘Do you get many outsiders here?’

The girl smiled at him, and he decided she could not be more than nineteen or twenty, though she had that burnish of life which Louise Allenby lacked. She leaned back against the edge of her desk, crossing her slim legs, fished a cigarette from a pack on the desk and lighted it. She said, ‘I'm trying to quit these things, so don't be surprised if I only hold it and don't smoke it.’ She crossed her arms under her large breasts and said, ‘A newspaper morgue is chiefly for the use of the staff and for the police. But we keep it open to the public without charge. We get maybe a dozen people a week.’

‘What are they looking for here?’

‘What are
you
looking for?’ she asked.

He hesitated only a moment, then gave her the same story he had first given Mrs Onufer at the Metropolitan Bureau of Vital Statistics. He said, ‘I'm gathering facts for a family history.’

Glenda Kleaver nodded, raised the cigarette to her lips, then put it down without drawing on it. She said, That's what most outsiders come here for. You'd be surprised how many people are tracking down their ancestors with an idea of immortalizing them.’

There was a distinct note of sarcasm in her voice, and he felt that he had to justify the lie he'd told her. ‘I don't want to immortalize anyone,’ he said. ‘My family history will go unwritten.’

‘Just curiosity, then?’ she asked. She picked up her cigarette from the ashtray and held it.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I haven't the least bit of curiosity about dead relatives. I don't even like the living relatives very much.’

He laughed. ‘No sense of pride in your name, your lineage?’

‘None. It's probably more mutt than thoroughbred, anyway.’ She put her cigarette down now, her slim fingers holding it like a precise surgical instrument.

Chase would have liked to go on talking about anything but Judge, because he felt terribly at ease with her, more at ease than he had felt in the presence of a woman since . . . Since Jules Verne, the underground operation in Nam. But he recognized his urge to be garrulous as a further evasion of the issue at hand. He said, ‘So I don't have to sign anything to use the files?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I have to get everything for you, and you have to return it to me before you leave.’

He tried to think of some way he could ask her about any outsiders who had used the morgue this past Tuesday, but no convenient cover story came to mind. He could not employ the same device he had used with Mrs Onufer, the tale of the nosy reporter, for he would not find any sympathy with that routine, not here of all places. If he told her the truth or a portion of the truth, she might or might not believe him, and if she did not, he would feel like a prize ass. Oddly enough, though he had only just met her, he did not want to be embarrassed in front of her. In the end, he could say nothing.

Besides, another ugly possibility had occurred to him. There were two reporters in the room just then, and one of them was quite likely to learn who he was and what he was doing there if he said anything to the girl. He could not escape, then, seeing his picture on the front page and reading all about this latest development in his life. They might treat the story either straight or tongue-in-cheek (probably the latter if they talked to the police and then to Cauvel), but either way it would be an intolerable development.

‘Now,’ Glenda said, ‘what would you like to have first?’

Before he could respond, one of the reporters at the microfilm machines looked up from his work and said, ‘Glenda, could I have all the dailies between May 15, 1952, and September 15 of that same year?’

‘In a moment,’ she said, grinding out her unsmoked cigarette. ‘This gentleman was first.’

‘That's okay,’ Chase said, grasping the opportunity. ‘I've got plenty of time.’

‘You sure?’ she asked.

‘Yeah. Get him what he needs.’

‘I'll be back in five minutes,’ she said.

As she walked the length of the small room and through the wide arch into the filing room, both Chase and the reporter watched her. She was tall but not clumsy, moving with a sensuous, feline grace that actually made her seem fragile.

When she had gone, the reporter said, ‘Thanks for waiting.’

That's okay.’

‘I've got an eleven o'clock deadline on this piece, and I haven't even begun to get my sources together.’ He turned back to his viewer and scanned the last article, so engrossed in his work that he had not, apparently, recognized Chase.

Chase used the opportunity to leave the room. He had been afraid, before the fortunate interruption, that he was going to have to request materials and waste an hour or more going through them in order to play out the role he had established for himself.

Back in his Mustang, he opened his notebook and looked at the list, but he had absolutely nothing to add to it, and he could not see any pertinent connections between the familiar eight items. He closed the book, started the car and drove out into the traffic on John F. Kennedy Throughway.

Fifteen minutes later he was on the four-lane interstate beyond city limits, the speedometer steady at seventy miles an hour, wind whistling at the open windows and rustling through his hair. As he drove, he thought about Glenda Kleaver, and he hardly noticed the miles going by.

After high school Chase had gone to State because it was just over forty miles from home and, therefore, offered several advantages not to be had at more distant universities. For one thing, his mother was pleased that he could come home more often than at Christmas and spring holidays, though that was only a minor sales point to Chase. He was sold on State because it meant he could still use his father's completely equipped garage for an engine tune-up for his Dodge every month. He had inherited his love of automobiles from his father and would have experienced a deal of anxiety at being long away from proper mechanic facilities. (In the war, when all machines came to mean something totally different to Chase, he lose his enthusiasm for such tinkering.) Also, being so close to home, he could continue to maintain contact with the girls he had dated who were a year or two years behind him in high school. If he should find the girls at State too sophisticated to pay him much mind, he knew there were several still-willing young ladies at home, easily accessible, every weekend if he needed them that often. (In the war, Chase had been bleached of his male chauvinism, though that had been replaced with something far worse - with a complete lack of interest, a boredom so profound that even he was disturbed by it.)