Blood Ties (29 page)

“I am glad.” Dr. Ridley reached across and patted the back of his daughter's hand. “But only to have time with you.”

“Then you liked him?”

“Yes. Far better than most of your boyfriends I've met. What was the name of that one you brought home from Berkeley? Marvin?”

“Melvin.” She laughed at the recollection. “Melvin the Student Revolutionary. Steve isn't anything like that.”

“Well, he's certainly better educated. Where did he go to school?”

“Circleville High.” She paused, enjoying her mother's reaction—Mrs. Ridley was too shocked even to speak. “And he dropped out of that.”

“I think you're pulling my leg, Ellie,” her father said. “I don't believe you.”

“Believe me. He's led a very strange life.”

“Oh Ellie, who have you gotten yourself involved with now?” Mrs. Ridley, her face a mask of anguish, slowly shook her head. “Who doesn't go to college these days?”

Ellen reached across the table and took her mother's hand.

“I want you to understand, Mommy,” she said. “I really do. But there are things I can't tell you. Suffice it to say that, for reasons outside of his control, the usual opportunities were closed to him. And now it doesn't make any difference.”

“How can't it make any difference?”

Mrs. Ridley was exasperated, as if her daughter were talking gibberish.

“Mommy, why do most people go to college?” Ellen smiled, still holding her mother's hand. This once, she thought, it was important to make herself understood. “They do it to prove something—how smart they are or how much they know. But Steve doesn't have to prove anything. He doesn't need any mentors. He's taught himself everything from ancient Greek to string theory. He probably thinks that universities are for the lame and the halt.

“He doesn't fit into the familiar categories, Mommy. He's beyond any category. He's a very unusual man.”

“But then is he…?” Mrs. Ridley gasped.

“Normal? No.” Ellen shook her head. “Brilliant, considerate, sweet-natured, yes. Interesting? Oh yes. But never normal.”

Mrs. Ridley said nothing, merely shook her head and looked worried. She understood what Ellen was saying, but it frightened her. How could a man who was beyond any category be good for her daughter?

“What does he really do for the Navy?” her father asked.

Ellen allowed herself a syllable of laughter. “All I know is that it has to do with codes, Daddy. And if I knew more than that, they'd probably lock me up as a security risk. The Navy seems to regard him as some sort of secret weapon.”

“Well, I rather like him,” Dr. Ridley announced. “If fact, I like him very much. I'd like to know him better. Do you think I'll get the chance?”

“I don't know, Daddy. It isn't up to him and me.”

 

22

When he broke into Dr. Fairburn's office, Walter had had the presence of mind to look around for some Percocet. By then he hadn't taken a pill in about eight hours and he was in a lot of pain. He found a locked cabinet, which seemed a likely possibility, and had it open in about ten seconds. It was a junkie's wet dream. There were blister packs containing samples of probably thirty or forty different medications, including Percocet.

By the time he shot the doctor, Walter was feeling much better.

For years he had always kept a packed suitcase in his van. It was his escape kit, containing clothes, money, his considerable collection of false driver's licenses and social security cards, and a small, .32-caliber automatic in a plastic sandwich bag. It seemed a reasonable precaution, although this was the first time he had needed it.

This had been a close call.

It was already dark, and the doctor had been dead about an hour, when Walter checked into a motel in San Carlos. After an exciting day, he was asleep within minutes.

He dreamed about his son—about the boy, age nine or ten, who had loved him as abjectly as any woman. In his imagination, and therefore in his dreams, the boy and the man he had become were two separate people. The boy had become the man the day he ran away.

In his dream he was just waking up. Steve was at the foot of his bed.

“There's a dead lady in the back of the van, Dad. She's beginning to stink.”

“After a while they get that way, son.”

“What's she doing in the van?”

“I met her over in Memphis. I bought her a drink and she said she'd give me a blow job for fifty bucks, so I took her outside and beat her to death. Then I put her in the van.”

“Can I come next time?”

Then he really was awake and it was just shy of eight o'clock. He spent the rest of the morning watching TV. He didn't want to think about anything, and TV was good for that.

Around noon he took a shower and got dressed. Then he drove around until he found a diner, where he ordered pancakes and coffee.

He had bought a newspaper, which he read with his meal. There was nothing about Dr. Fairburn's murder, although there had been a mention on the TV news.

There was nothing, not one word, about yesterday's events in Half Moon Bay. The police apparently were keeping a lid on it. Walter felt vaguely cheated.

He decided it was time for a public performance, something the newspaper readers of San Francisco would really enjoy. Something to let Steve know that he hadn't heard the last of his old dad.

But not yet. Not for a few days. Walter decided he would give everybody time to get nice and comfortable.

*   *   *

Late that afternoon, Harriet Murdock was sitting at her desk in the realty offices of Wade & Bradley, wishing she had something to do. Business was slow. She had been to two open houses that morning, and she couldn't imagine why anyone would want to live in either one of them. She hated her job, she decided. But she was trapped in it, the way she was trapped in her life.

Thus she had no great expectations when her cell phone started ringing, not until she heard Walter's voice.

“You want to meet me after five for drinks? Then maybe dinner? Please say yes.”

There wasn't any doubt she was going to say yes.

“Where would you like to meet?” she asked, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice.

“Somewhere they serve Pink Ladies.”

She left work at three, which would give her two hours to pull herself together. She took a shower and shaved her legs, just in case, and then went to work on her makeup.

She finally chose a dress, white with diagonal zebra stripes and a flouncy collar, and then she had misgivings. Wasn't it perhaps just a little much? A little too come-hither? No. To hell with it. She put it on and looked at herself in the full-length mirror. If Walter got the idea she was available, so much the better.

She also wore perfume, which she hardly ever did. Shalimar. Like the dress, it was obvious. She put it on behind her ears and between her breasts—again, just in case.

Now. What did she have in the house to eat?

*   *   *

They met where they had first met, in the bar on El Camino Real. The instant he saw the dress, Walter knew that everything was going to work out as planned.

He was sitting in their booth, and he rose to meet her. He took her hand and, for the first time, kissed her on the cheek.

“You look lovely,” he told her. “You look just lovely.”

When she was seated, he went to the bar and ordered a Coors and a Pink Lady. The bartender had been forewarned, so the Pink Lady was already put together and just needed another turn with the electric drink mixer. He brought them back to the table.

“I can't get over how nice you look,” he said. “You look a treat.”

It didn't take very much of this before Harriet was blushing down to the roots of her dyed hair.

They talked for a while, about the weather and the lousy real estate market, and how glad they were to see each other. And somewhere Walter slipped in that he was living in a motel for the next few days. His rented house, it seemed, had turned out to be alive with vermin and was being fumigated.

It was almost immediately after receiving this bit of news that Harriet suggested, “Why don't we have dinner at my place?”

Why not, indeed.

“And maybe you could leave your van at the motel. I'll follow you there in my car and then drive you back to my place. I have nosy neighbors.”

Walter, he thought to himself, you've just been invited to spend the night.

Harriet owned a house, which was convenient. She had lived there with her husband until the divorce and now she lived there alone, without enjoying it much.

Dinner was steak and a baked potato and salad, and Harriet was the dessert. She practically crawled to him on her hands and knees. He pulled down the zipper of her dress while she was unbuttoning his fly.

And she wasn't bad at it. She knew that, after a certain age, gentlemen needed some encouragement. By the time she was done he was nice and hard, and then she straddled his lap and guided him in. She enjoyed herself so much that, by the time they were finished, she was pink as a lobster all the way down to her nipples.

They slept that night in her double bed. She went to sleep holding his member, which was about half-erect. She was a very happy girl.

He was awake a little longer, trying to decide when and how he should kill her.

It would have to be here in the house. That was sure. The basement in Half Moon Bay would have allowed for a proper send-off, but right now it was probably crawling with police technicians, scraping up blood samples. So the house would have to do.

And the house was a little tract cracker box, where the neighbors were twenty feet away. So it wouldn't suit if Harriet started screaming. That was a pity. Walter always enjoyed the screaming. But she would have to suffer, so he would tape her mouth shut and do her in the bathtub.

But not tonight. And probably not tomorrow. Harriet would have a few days of unblemished bliss before she paid the debt she owed to God.

About two in the morning, she woke up and wanted him to make love to her again. He was happy to oblige. He gave the preliminaries lots of attention, and by the time he pushed into her she was shuddering with pleasure. Ten minutes later she was damp with sweat and couldn't do anything except cling to him and whisper, “I love you,” over and over again. She fell asleep like that.

The next morning she got up, took a shower and announced that she had to go to work. She asked if he needed a ride back to the motel, but her eyes were pleading,
Please stay, please be here when I come home.

“I'll take the day off,” he told her.

“I'll come home for lunch,” was her answer.

Walter went back to sleep. He was tired.

Usually his dreams were terrible, but this morning he dreamed about his wife, whom he remembered from the days of their courtship as easy and sweet, surrendering her virginity to him without so much as a pretense of resistance. He had taken intense pleasure in her, which in the innocence of his youth he confused with love. He had thought she might lead him away from his wicked ways, but then, after about two months, she became pregnant and things changed. Even before it was born, she loved the baby more than him. So he killed a woman in Kansas, stabbing her in the throat with a pair of scissors, to celebrate the birth of his son.

The boy became his consolation prize. Stephen, whom Walter had named after his own hated father, was a nice baby who, the day after he was born, had wrapped his hand around Walter's little finger and looked into his face with the most amazed expression.

Stephen kept his mother alive for seven years. Walter spared her until his son was old enough to get by without her, and then Betty had filled a shallow grave in North Carolina, to be dug up a year later by somebody's hunting dog.

Walter, sitting in a coffee shop in Norfolk, Virginia, had read about it in the newspaper and had laughed.

And for a while the boy was only his.

He woke up thinking about his son. He remembered standing in a classroom with some math teacher who thought Steve had been cheating on an exam because he didn't write down all the steps of his solution.

“Nobody can solve a problem like that in his head,” the man had said.

“Just because you can't doesn't mean that he can't. That boy is smarter than either one of us. Why don't you set him a test? Give him a problem, cold, and see if he can solve it.”

The outcome had been a foregone conclusion. The poor bastard had had to apologize to a ten-year-old boy and had quit teaching at the end of the year.

Steve was a smart son of a bitch. It was a pleasure to teach him things. You only had to show something to him once and it was his forever. Walter had taught him many skills.

And then, finally, he had learned too much.

Walter shook his head, smiling to himself. Nobody else could have tracked him this far, nobody but his baby boy. He was a stranger now, working with the police, hunting his father the way a Labrador retriever hunts a pheasant, but you had to admire him.

Walter was intensely proud of his son, even as he tried to figure a way to kill him.

*   *   *

When Harriet came back at noon, she was eager again. She wanted to be bent over the living-room sofa. But Walter explained to her that, after a certain age, the desire is there but the capacity is not, and that she should have patience and wait until this evening.

She accepted this, because what she really wanted was not so much penetration as attention. This Walter gave her, feeding her lunch and caressing her hair. She went back to the real estate agency happy and full of hope.

But Walter had no sympathy for her because he had never known that longing for love. Harriet's need for affection struck him as merely a silly and shameful weakness. He prided himself on loving no one. What were other people except shadows? They hardly existed. Their pain and their suffering meant nothing.