Killer in the Street (4 page)

The Plainsman Hotel was old enough to be a landmark, but the interior had been transformed into an air-conditioned sanctuary lavishly furnished and decorated in keeping with the new prosperity. At the same time Donaldson left the car wash and started walking toward the hotel, a group of businessmen were breaking up a breakfast meeting in the new coffee shop—wholly oblivious of the floating abstract light fixtures and earth-toned murals which depicted the saga of the Old West in a style reminiscent of Paleolithic cave drawings. Sam Stevens was sixty-odd, ranch-born and still accustomed to wearing a string tie with his hand-tailored shirts and a Stetson with his lounge suits. He was a huge man—body, hands, head. He wore his thick, steel-gray hair long—crowding the edge of his coat collar, and he still had the stride of a man accustomed to the weight of a hand gun on his hip. Slow of speech but certain of the weight of what he said when he did say it, Stevens projected a certainty of his place in life: a good place hewn out of a resisting world with the blunt weapons of hard work and the love of a good gamble. He folded the sheaf of construction specs he had been studying over coffee and eggs and handed them across the table to Kyle Walker.

“All right, you go get your permits,” he said. “Get the bulldozers going.”

Kyle had put on weight in five years. Success and the desert agreed with him. The shaggy-dog look had been traded for the close-cropped, well-groomed air of the busy executive. His suits and shirts were hand-tailored now, and there was nothing timid in the hand he extended to accept Sam’s hearty grip.

“We’re in business!” Kyle said. “Van, you have a piece of this deal. Can’t you at least try to look happy?”

Physically, the years hadn’t touched Van. The sun had browned his face to a shade indistinguishable from a Papago’s and bleached his hair orange-pink, but he hadn’t gained an ounce of flesh or lost an iota of vitality. But his smile was rare now, and the frown lines on his forehead were as permanent as his cowlick.

“I never look happy,” he said, “but my heart leaps with joy when I think of all that nice money we’re going to make.”

“If we’re lucky,” Sam said.

“I’ve stopped believing in luck where Sam Stevens is concerned,” Van added. “Other businessmen take chances. Sometimes they win; sometimes they lose. But Sam Stevens never loses. His apartment units always go up where the new industries are coming in. His business properties always turn out to be on the new superhighway. If he buys bare desert the lowliest Indian wouldn’t use for a burial ground, the government has to have it for a missile site. No, Sam, I don’t believe you’re lucky. I think you have a cave up in the mountains where some local version of the Delphic oracle gives you private instructions.”

Van’s nerves weren’t as strong as Sam’s or Kyle’s, but his imagination was keener. Because of that, and certain personal habits, he kept his morning repast to a minimum of two Bloody Mary’s and a maximum of one black coffee. He had reached the coffee stage now.

Sam looked uncomfortable. “That vocabulary of yours is a mite too much for me, Van,” he drawled. “I just never know when you’re jestin’.” And then Sam glanced at his watch. “But I do know when I’ve got to get back to the office. No, you two stay and finish your breakfasts—and, Kyle, when you do leave here I want you to get on home and hit the sack. You’ve been at this for twenty-four hours without a break.”

Sam got up from the table, removed his Stetson from the vacant seat beside him and grabbed the check before Kyle could reach it.

“This goes on the expense account,” he added.

For a man with a slow drawl, Sam moved fast. As he stalked toward the cashier’s desk, where he would pass a few pleasantries with the pretty cashier no matter how great the pressure, Kyle gathered up a roll of specs and blueprints and came to his feet. He was excited. The twenty-four hours Sam had mentioned was a little short of the actual time spent in the final check of the plan, but the dynamo was still running and the thrill of organizing an idea into a working project was still greater than the physical need for rest. He was like a boy who had heard a fire engine and was on his way.

“Wait for me,” Van said, putting down his coffee cup. “I have a deathly fear of uncleaned breakfast tables.”

They crossed the restaurant together and passed through a pair of plate-glass doors into an air-cooled pavilion-like lobby. Inoffensive strains of a string ensemble floated thinly on the sterilized atmosphere. Sam was already out of sight. A few steps short of the exit to the street they stopped before a scale model of a projected new shopping center—rectangular, and crowned with a revolving spire. A printed card advised that the model was another Sam Stevens Development—Kyle Walker, Architect. Van watched Kyle’s paternal pride with amused detachment.

“It’s not in a class with the Parthenon,” he observed.

“It wasn’t meant to be,” Kyle said. “It’s contemporary commercial without illusions.”

“Without illusions,” Van sighed. “Yes, that is contemporary. How’s Dee?”

Puzzled, Kyle looked up from the object of his affection.

“You remember,” Van prodded. “Dee—your wife.”

Kyle grinned wearily. “Glad you reminded me. I have to telephone the girl. I didn’t get home last night.”

“And the night before that.”

“And the night before that.”

“I didn’t spend the last two nights at home either,” Van reflected, “but not for the same reasons, I hope.”

They passed on through the lobby and through the main entrance to the street. It was early but the city already wore a silver skein of heat. At the sight of Kyle, the doorman signaled to a parking attendant, and, while he waited, Kyle patted the fat roll of blueprints under his arm and answered Van’s needling.

“These are my reasons,” he said. “I rechecked every line and figure in the plans and specs last night. If this job doesn’t come in within the estimates, it won’t be the fault of engineering.”

A long blue station wagon pulled to a stop at the curb and the parking attendant stepped out. Kyle tipped him and tossed the prints into the back seat.

“Kyle, why do you do it?” Van asked. There were times when Van’s eyes compelled attention. He was part satyr—the seventh son of a seventh son. He saw through masks the wearers didn’t know they wore. “You’ve got it made. Why push your luck? How many nights have you missed being home this month?”

“Dee understands business,” Kyle answered curtly. “She hasn’t complained.”

“She hasn’t? Then it’s even worse than I thought. If I had a beautiful wife like Dee, I’d be a little worried if she didn’t complain when I stayed away so much.”

“She’s busy,” Kyle said. “She has the house and Mike—”

“Dee didn’t marry a house, Kyle.”

Van was a nuisance. Kyle started to get in the car—then paused and looked back at him.

“Why all this tender concern for my wife?” he asked. “Are you getting bored with your little playmates on the campus? Are you thinking of trying a married woman for variety?”

“I thought of that the first time I saw Dee,” Van admitted, “and the motivation wasn’t variety. But Dee wouldn’t cooperate then. If it’s still of any importance to you, she still won’t. But thanks for reminding me.” Van glanced at the watch on his wrist and grimaced. “I have to leave you now, Horatio Alger. Bright young people are gathering in a laboratory to await my superior wisdom. Together we will plot ways to destroy by nuclear fission the world you and Sam are working so hard to create. Who’s going to win, Kyle? The builders or the bombers? Or are the builders and the bombers the same?”

“I don’t think I’m qualified to answer that question,” Kyle said. “I know that I won’t design a successor to the Parthenon, and I doubt if you will win the Nobel Prize for Peace. I just try to do my job. Can I drop you off?”

Van smiled a pixie smile. “Not this morning, thanks. I feel the need of exercise and fresh air. All that breakfast chatter about percentages and profits makes my proletarian head swim. I may develop a guilt complex.”

Kyle got into the station wagon and slammed the door. He had too much on his mind to worry about Van’s moods. It was becoming more and more difficult to know the difference between Van drunk and Van sober. Someday he would have to have a talk with Van about that. Alcohol was no way to preserve a first-class brain. But a part of what Van had said did make sense. Catching a red light at the corner, Kyle picked up the radiophone and placed a call to Dee.

The voice that answered was Dee’s but it was noticeably strained. “Kyle, where are you?” she asked. “How did it go?”

“I’m driving in the wagon,” Kyle said, “and everything went fine! No, no problems at all. I had breakfast with Sam and he okayed the whole package. If the foreman can get his crew together, we’ll break ground this week. Listen, honey, if you have any free time this afternoon—”

The request wasn’t important. There was a small errand he had in mind for Dee to do for him but it vanished from thought an instant later. The traffic light was still red, but now, coming toward him across the pedestrian crossing, was a man who stepped out of the past and became, for a few seconds, the only reality in the world. Some things were never forgotten. A scene could be deliberately pushed away—repressed and buried under five years of frantic activity—but never forgotten. It was always there waiting for the moment to trigger awareness.

Five years disappeared. It was the garage of the Cecil Arms. It was a rainy night when a riot of percussions made the background music for murder. The man passed in front of the station wagon, reached the sidewalk and paused to verify directions. He stood less than three feet away. His eyes were concealed behind dark glasses, but the rest of his face was illumined by the stark light of memory. The face of the man who had strangled Bernie Chapman.

The blast of a horn behind him pulled Kyle back to the instant. The traffic light was green. He released the brake and the station wagon nosed ahead. Halfway up the block a thruway cut off to the next parallel street. Kyle swung the station wagon into the narrow passageway, turned back on the street and made a full circle of the hotel. The second time the station wagon approached the entrance, the man who called himself R. R. Donaldson had reached the plate-glass doors leading into the coffee shop. He hesitated, glanced at the menu mounted on the window and then removed the dark glasses for closer scrutiny. There was no possible mistake. It was the strangler—and so far from the city of New York!

Kyle drove on. He was several blocks farther down the street before his shocked mind could respond to the voice on the radiophone.

“Kyle,” Dee was saying, “—what is it? Why did you stop talking?”

Kyle didn’t answer. The hand attached to his right wrist, which, strangely, now seemed a mechanical thing that was no longer a part of him, reached out and broke the connection by replacing the instrument on its hook—and then tightened like a claw on the steering wheel.

Terror doesn’t think. It plunges through a black abyss; it writhes; it twists in the descent and then, gradually, small bits of reason perforate the chaos like tiny lights in the darkness. Kyle’s foot eased off the accelerator; he pulled to the curb and stopped. He began to gather thoughts and assemble them one after another like a child working with a set of blocks. A killer was in town—why? Five years was a long time to look for a witness to murder and Kyle had been careful. From that first night—from the moment he took the elevator to the fourth floor—all of his defense mechanisms had been working overtime. He had watched the van that parked each night across from the apartment house and said nothing to Dee. As much as he needed her confidence and support, he wouldn’t have endangered her life by sharing his deadly knowledge. He had planned to leave the country quickly and quietly, and then Van had arrived with an opportune offer of a new job and the door closed on a nightmare. Tucson was a new life. There were no dark figures lurking in the streets, real or imagined, and bad memories faded with the passage of time. Work had driven Bernie Chapman’s murder into a dark corner of his mind, but now a stranger had come to town and a ghost was beginning to walk.

The killer needed no name. Strangler was enough. Murder was his profession, and if he had traveled so far from New York it had to be on business. A man who stalked his own species for a living didn’t retire until it came his turn to occupy a slab in the morgue. Kyle’s hands began to loosen on the steering wheel when the knuckles turned white. He looked about to get his bearings and realized that he had driven almost two miles from the Plainsman Hotel. Such flight had to be impelled by guilt, but he didn’t want to accept that. He wasn’t responsible for Bernie’s death, and one man couldn’t fight a system. He had sold himself that story five years ago, and it was still good. He sat quietly in the station wagon until the last of the shock had worn off. He had to clean out the mental clutter of fear and get back to absolutes. An out-of-town killer was walking the streets of Tucson—but that didn’t mean he was looking for Kyle Walker. There had been muted rumbles for sometime that the syndicate was trying to move in. After all, Vegas wasn’t too far away and crime always came with prosperity.