The Stalker

Conradin’s hands came together around the brandy snifter, squeezing it convulsively until Kilduff was certain the glass would shatter. He stood abruptly, went into the foyer, and opened the door. Larry Drexel said in his cold voice, “Good to see you again, Steve,” and came inside quickly.

After closing the door Kilduff said, “Jim’s already here.”

“Good,” Drexel said. He walked into the living room.

Conradin stood from the couch. “Hello, Larry,” he said.

“Jim.”

“Can I get you a drink, Larry?” Kilduff asked, thinking: The gracious host, performing all the proper social amenities—this whole thing is incongruous, unreal, like something from a particularly vivid dream. He was breathing through his mouth now, in short, silently asthmatic inhalations.

Drexel shook his head, moving toward the sofa, sitting on the opposite end from Conradin. He wore an expensive sports outfit—a hound’s-tooth jacket and knife-crease charcoal slacks and a tailored white shirt open at the throat; his Bally shoes glistened with black polish. Conradin and Kilduff—respectively dressed in a sheepskin jacket and a pair of blue denims, and an old alpaca golf sweater over a rumpled pair of tan trousers—looked shabby and subservient in comparison. Kilduff remembered that Drexel had always demonstrated the need to dominate, to be the focal point; he hadn’t changed at all.

Drexel’s eyes shifted to Kilduff. “The old school reunion,” he said with no trace of levity.

“Except that half of the class is missing,” Kilduff said in the same humorless tone. “What’s this all about?”

Conradin’s hands were still wrapped tightly around the brandy snifter. “Yes, let’s have it, Larry.”

“All right,” Drexel said. “Here it is, pure and simple; last month, in October, Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp were killed, all of them, in separate accidents. Cavalacci, when his car mysteriously blew up in a parking lot; Wykopf, in front of a truck that unaccountably slipped its hand brake in a garage he owned; Beauchamp, when his private plane suddenly exploded in midair.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Conradin said reverently. He drained the remaining brandy in the snifter.

Kilduff felt an odd coldness on the back of his neck, but that was all, really. Cavalacci and Wykopf and Beauchamp were men he had known eleven years ago; half-faceless men viewed with objective recollection, and he did not experience any real sense of loss at the news of their deaths. He said, “How do you know all this?”

Drexel’s lips pursed into a thin white line. “If it matters, I’ve kept tabs on all of you over the years. I’m careful, damned careful, and I never did approve of the idea of absolute separation. I knew where you all had come from originally, and I figured that you’d either return to your home towns or stay in Illinois after the Statute ran out. I checked telephone directories and city directories and made a few discreet inquiries here and there and took subscriptions to local newspapers; after a while I found out where each of you were and what you were doing.”

“I don’t like the idea of that,” Kilduff said. “The agreement—”

“To hell with the agreement,” Drexel said coldly. “You’d better be thankful I did it that way. It might save your life.”

“What does that mean?”

“For Christ’s sake, do you think it’s coincidence that three of us died in the same month, all in unexplained accidents?”

Kilduff moistened his lips. “What else could it be?”

“Murder,” Drexel said. “That’s what else it could be.”

The single word—murder—seemed to hang suspended in the nowsilent room, an embodied entity that held Conradin and Kilduff transfixed for a long moment. Finally Kilduff said very softly, “You’re crazy, Larry.”

“Am I?”

“You actually believe the three of them were murdered?”

“I’m damned if I can accept the coincidence of all three dying in the same month. Two of them, maybe; but not all three.”

“Is that why you called this meeting?”

“Yes.”

“Because you think the three of us are next? Because of Granite City?”

“Yes, that’s just what I think.”

Conradin stood and walked jerkily to the credenza. “Larry, there’s nobody who’d do a thing like you’re suggesting. A man would have to be insane. . .”

“That’s right,” Drexel said. “A man who is insane, a man who somehow found out we were the ones who robbed that armored car in Granite City, a man who’s decided in his twisted mind that we’re directly responsible for a lot of things that happened to him as a result of the holdup. A man like Leo Helgerman.”

“Who?” Kilduff asked.

“Helgerman, the goddamned Mannerling guard Jim hit when he blew his cool in that parking lot.”

“Oh Christ!” Conradin said. He poured his snifter full again and drank it off. He had begun to tremble noticeably. His face blanched.

Kilduff said, “Larry, you’re dreaming!”

“The hell I am,” Drexel said vehemently. “He was partially paralyzed with spinal damage for a while, wasn’t he? It was in the papers how bitter he was, how badly he wanted all of us caught.”

“That’s a natural reaction, after what happened.”

“Maybe it turned into an unnatural vendetta.”

Kilduff stared at him incredulously. “Are you saying Helgerman’s mind snapped and he’s become some kind of avenging angel who’s killing us off one by one eleven years later? Larry, you can’t expect us to accept an incredible fantasy like that.”

“Goddamn it, stranger things have happened.”

“So have stranger coincidences than three of us dying by accident in the same month.”

“Look, do you think I like the idea? It scares the hell out of me. But there’s the possibility that I’m right, and you’d better face up to it.”

Conradin came back to the couch with the snifter full again. He sat down and stared at the dark liquid as if it held some kind of hypnotic fascination for him. But Kilduff felt a subtle release of tension; all the melodrama on the phone and all the cold, frightened sweating of the afternoon and early evening had been unnecessary. The pressure in his chest had begun to abate. He said, “How could Helgerman have found out we were the ones? It’s been eleven years, Larry, eleven years. The entire state of Illinois hasn’t been able to find out in that time.”

“I don’t have any answers,” Drexel said. “I’m not psychic. I’m just telling you the way it is.”

“Well, all right. Suppose you’re right. Just suppose you are. What do you think we ought to do?”

“I’m not sure.”

“We can’t go to the police,” Kilduff said. “That’s obvious. And I’m not going to run on the strength of a monstrous improbability. I wouldn’t know how to run anyway.”

“You think we ought to just sit around and wait, is that it?” Drexel asked. “Until another one of us dies in an ‘accident’?”

“What the hell else is there for us to do?” Kilduff said. “We haven’t got any concrete reason to panic, no proof that the others died except by accident, no proof that Helgerman is insane and a murderer, or, for Christ’s sake, that he’s even still alive.”

“Then we’ve got to find out,” Drexel said. “One way or another.”

“How?” Kilduff asked. “Larry, we’re three guys pushing thirty-five who somehow managed to pull off a major crime when we were little more than kids. We’re no more experienced now than we were then; if anything, we’re less equipped today—we haven’t got that crazy, irrational, what-the-screw disregard for what happens tomorrow or next week or next month. Do you expect us to carry a .45 automatic in a shoulder holster like some Spillane character, peering furtively into shadows and asking veiled questions in dingy bars?”

Drexel put his hands flat on his knees, his cold eyes darkly flashing. “That’s a nice speech, Steve,” he said