Killer in the Street (6 page)

“Are the bumpers locked?” Dee asked.

“No, there’s no damage. I’ll get out of your way.”

But he didn’t move. He continued to stare at her with those annoying eyes until Mike became impatient.

“We’ve got to go!” he cried. “My daddy said so!”

There might have been a flicker of interest behind the dark glasses. Dee couldn’t be sure.

“Your daddy?” he echoed. “Where is your daddy?”

“My daddy’s at work!” Mike said.

“Where did your daddy tell you to go?”

“To the mountains. To Uncle Sam’s cabin in the mountains where we always go to fish. Mommy …”

Mike began to bounce up and down on the rear seat, and that was what finally caused the man to leave. He smiled automatically, as if his lips were operated by a mechanism.

“He’s a lively one,” he observed. “Okay, sonny, I’ll move my car.”

Dee watched the man in the rear-view mirror. He walked back to a big Chrysler sedan—beige, like the color of his suit. He got inside the sedan and started the motor. She envied him the automatic shift when the car eased back along the curbing. The driveway cleared and she backed the convertible into the street and nosed it toward the mountains while Mike waved a gay good-bye out of the rear window. At the first intersection, she stopped and glanced in the rear-view mirror again. The Chrysler hadn’t moved. I was rude, she thought. I should have asked what house number he was looking for.

At twenty minutes past twelve, forty minutes before Dee Walker encountered a stranger in her driveway, Charley Evans picked up the telephone on her desk and dialed a number from her private collection: Renée’s Beauty Salon. Renée, who had been just plain Mavis when they were in high school together, answered immediately.

“Sweetie,” Charley said, “I have a big favor to ask. I know this is short notice and I haven’t been coming in regularly, but someone special’s coming in tomorrow—”

“What time?” Renée sighed. “And I warn you, no fancy rinses. I won’t stay in this shop one minute after five for anyone!”

“How about two-thirty?” Charley asked.

Renée was incredulous. “This afternoon?”

“This afternoon. I just got the rest of the day off. I’ll be free as soon as I get two letters in the mail. Can you find a spot for me?”

Renée hesitated. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked. “You sound funny.”

“Of course I’m all right! Well, maybe a little nervous. You know how I always said that a session under the dryer relaxes me.”

And then Renée laughed. “If you’re that nervous, he must be special! Come in at two-thirty. I’ll take you myself.”

Charley replaced the telephone in the cradle and sat for a moment with one hand held over her eyes. She heard Kyle’s door open behind her, straightened and faced him with a well-practiced smile. Kyle had showered and shaved. The bathroom in his office could refresh the outer man, but nothing could erase those tension lines. He now carried a black attaché and a narrow-brimmed straw hat, and his own smile was as forced as hers.

“If any calls come in, make a list of them,” he said. “I think I did tell you to cancel my appointments.”

“What about the Booster Club luncheon?” Charley asked.

Kyle scowled. “Not today?” he asked hopefully.

But it was today.

“One-thirty at the Country Club—and you’d better be there because they’re honoring Sam.”

Kyle was exceptionally solemn. He knew Charley was studying him and trying to understand what was wrong. If it had been a slight matter—trouble with Dee or a problem concerning the job—they would have talked it out together. Years ago—during the difficult transitional period when he was battling his own misgivings and Dee’s periodic bouts of homesickness—Charley had been, for a brief time, more than just a secretary and a friend. She was adult about it. She never used it as a club to get a favor or a wedge to open a door he didn’t want to open. But there was still, on occasion, a fragment of mystery. A sense of an almost intimacy that belongs to two people who have once needed one another and still retain, intangibly, the best of it.

But no one could share this trouble. There was too much at stake to risk human weakness.

“Thanks for reminding me,” Kyle said. “And, Charley, have fun. Get your hair done—or something.”

“You must be a mind reader,” Charley said. “Or do I look shaggy?”

“You look wonderful. You always look wonderful.”

Kyle stepped to the door.

“Mr. Boss—”

He looked back at Charley.

“I wish I could say the same for you, but I can’t. You look terrible. Can’t you get the monkey off your back and get some rest? Take a trip somewhere.”

“That’s what I’m planning to do,” Kyle said. “Just as soon as I possibly can.”

He opened the door and stepped out into the hall. The electrician had completed his work and departed, and the speakers were emitting a silky Latin beat that reminded him, as he pressed the down button and waited at the elevator, of another kind of jazz accompaniment while he waited for another elevator five years ago. But that had been different: loud, savage, frenzied while the driving sound of rain held constant behind it. The elevator door opened and Kyle stepped inside. He pushed the lobby button and watched the doors glide shut. The cage began to move downward while that same silky music sifted from a concealed speaker. But it was the temple-block obbligato that Kyle heard. The elevator stopped and the doors opened silently. Kyle started to step out, but he couldn’t. An elevator was a box, and he had stood in that box once before. The imagery was too strong. He had to force it out of his mind before he could move.

The lobby was empty. Remobilized, Kyle stepped into the hall and walked briskly toward the street. Fear heightened the senses. The commonplace became important. Kyle passed the lobby shops several times a day, but now he passed warily. The customer near the window in the bookstore was a young man: no glasses, no beige suit. The bank was too recently opened to have acquired a large clientele. None of them resembled the strangler. The florist shop was impenetrable with a dense display of tropical plants in the window. Kyle had almost reached the street.

“Mr. Walker, wait—”

Kyle stopped. It was a man’s voice. And it was his own blood pounding the obbligato in his ears. He turned slowly.

Ephraim Taylor owned the florist shop. He was fifty, slightly bald, pink-faced above a light blue smock. He came forward holding a large bunch of talisman roses in his hands.

“Mr. Walker, these are a little stale but not too stale. If you want to take them to your wife, I would be happy.”

Kyle relaxed. “That’s very thoughtful of you, Mr. Taylor,” he said, “but my wife’s gone to the mountains for a few days.”

Ephraim Taylor’s face broke into a smile of sheer bliss. The happiness of other people delighted him. He made every scrap of it his own. “Gone up to Mr. Stevens ranch, I’ll bet. I was up there once—for a whole week.”

“That’s fine,” Kyle said.

“After my operation for appendix. That’s what kind of man Sam Stevens is—generous. Thoughtful and generous. But I’m keeping you from something important. I’ll put these roses back in the refrigerator. Maybe they’ll keep until your wife gets back.”

Kyle nodded absently and walked on. He left Ephraim Taylor’s not-too-stale roses behind and stepped out on the sidewalk of a street that had now become hostile territory. But it was daylight. Noonday. Downtown. A professional man wouldn’t shoot a man down in a peak traffic hour and endanger his own escape. Besides, the man who had killed Bernie Chapman was a strangler. He might be a one-method man. But he would be completely briefed on his contract. He would know about the penthouse office. He would know about the underground garage where Kyle now went for his station wagon. With so few tenants, the garage was almost empty. But again, it was daylight and Bernie Chapman had been strangled in an underground garage at night.

He got into the station wagon and drove away from the area. He was beginning to be acutely aware of his rear-view mirror. In a country where the sun bleached out color, a beige sedan wasn’t a rarity. It might be following him now, because the driver would not only know where Kyle Walker lived and where he worked; he would know where he got his hair cut, where he had his dental work done, where his suits were made and where he played with his son on holidays. He would know to what clubs he belonged, and who his golfing partners were. The odds were all on the side of a professional killer—except for the streak of luck that had sent him walking across an intersection while Kyle waited for a traffic signal to change—because the man who had killed Bernie Chapman belonged to an organization that couldn’t afford to make mistakes.

Kyle drove directly to the City Hall. He had legitimate business in the Department of Public Safety concerning the permits Sam had ordered; but that wasn’t the reason for the trip. The reason was one of those golfing partners about whom the strangler might or might not know. He was a man who kept shop in the Bureau of Detectives and was listed officially as Captain Jimmy Jameson on the city payroll. Jimmy was forty and hadn’t added an inch to his waistline since he had been mustered out of the Marines twelve years before. One reason for that might have been the habit Kyle now interrupted—solitary lunch in his office. One pint of milk and two vitamin pills.

“I’m working on an ulcer,” Jameson said. “If I get a good one going, maybe I can qualify for the Booster Club.”

“I’ll give you my membership for free,” Kyle said. “How’s business?”

Jameson grinned. He had a white ring of milk on his upper lip like a prop moustache, and a faceful of freckles that had been holding their own since his grammar school days.

“The Chief wants me to lecture the kids at the high school on juvenile delinquency. I told him they should lecture me. They know more about police methods than my own men. Too much TV. Then I’ve got trouble with what the Interracial Cultural Society likes to call our Spanish-speaking people. Too much speaking with cheap wine and switch blades. And I’ve just solved the problem of who has been stealing my desk erasers. We have pack-rats in the building.”

“I heard you had trouble with another kind of rat that deals in slot machines and happy pills.”

Jimmy’s eyes narrowed. They were steel blue and hard as the barrel of the service pistol he wore on his hip. “Who told you that?” he asked.

“Rumorsville.”

Jimmy relaxed. “We run a clean city here, Walker. You know that. Some things don’t get into the newspapers because they don’t develop far enough.”

“But suppose somebody big got in the way of somebody else’s concept of progress,” Kyle suggested, “and had to be removed?”

“Like who?” Jimmy asked.

Kyle couldn’t answer. There would have been no problem if he could have told Jimmy Jameson about the strangler and the killing he had witnessed five years ago in New York. But Jimmy was a plainsman. The city was only beginning to grow up around Jimmy, bringing with it both the creators and the parasites. It was still a place where people called one another by their first names—from the banker to the shoeshine boy. Jimmy simply wouldn’t have believed Kyle’s story. He would attribute the whole incident to overwork and a distorted memory. Worse, he would try to pacify a friend’s shattered nerves by making some clumsy inquiry that would get back to the strangler and destroy the one advantage Kyle had. No, it was too risky to tell Jimmy Jameson who was walking the streets of his bright, clean town.

And so Kyle lied. “The question was theoretical,” he said. “That’s not why I dropped in. I have a favor to ask—if it’s not too much trouble.”

“What is it?”

Kyle dug into his pocket and brought out a scrap of memo paper. On it he had written a crytic message: “Beige Chrysler … 1964 sedan. License # Arizona SXO 617.” He handed the memo to Jimmy and waited for a reaction.

Jimmy glanced at the paper and looked up questioningly. “Somebody hit you?”

“No,” Kyle said. “That’s the description of a car I saw on the street in front of the Plainsman Hotel this morning. I recognized the driver. A friend I haven’t seen in years.”

“So?”

“He’s from Prescott. I checked at the Plainsman but he’s not registered there.”

Jameson took a long pull on the bottle of milk—never once taking his eyes from Kyle’s face.

“All right,” he said, “what is it you want me to do on the taxpayers’ time?”

“I’m a taxpayer,” Kyle reminded him. “Don’t the police ever check hotel and motel registrations?”

Jimmy grinned. “You’re thinking of the vice squad. Why don’t you just telephone—?”

Charley had inadvertently prepared Kyle for that question.

“The Booster Club luncheon,” he said. “I’ll be tied up all afternoon. Jimmy, when was the last time I asked a favor of you?”

“The last time your wife ran a red light,” Jameson said, “and you didn’t get it. But if it’s so damned important you have to chase downtown in the noonday sun to tell me about it—” He paused and checked the watch on his wrist. “It’s been a dull morning; maybe I should get off my rump for a while. Okay, I’ll be your errand boy. What’s your friend’s name?”