Blood Ties (23 page)

She didn't know how he felt, and she wasn't sure it would make any difference. He might be using her, and if that were true she wanted to be used. But she didn't think he was using her. This man was everything that Brad and her other lovers had never dreamed of being.

 

17

In the town of Half Moon Bay, some twenty-five miles down the coast road from San Francisco, stood a house set in the midst of fields that smelled of brussels sprouts. It had been left abandoned for nearly eight years, so the owner was happy to have it occupied even at a cheap rent, with only a one month deposit, particularly since the new tenant had offered to fix it up for just the cost of materials. He was a single man in his fifties, a pleasant sort and apparently very capable. After two days he had the well running again and after five the old wiring had been stripped out and replaced and it was safe to turn the electricity back on.

In that first week the landlord had come out nearly every day to see for himself how things were progressing. But after a while his tenant made it clear, without actually putting the thing into words, that he regarded these little visits as an intrusion and that he preferred his privacy, after which the landlord left him alone.

The tenant's name was Walter Stride.

And, aside from the landlord, hardly anyone in Half Moon Bay even knew of Mr. Stride's existence. He worked in San Francisco and did his shopping either there or in Pacifica, which was on his way home. He must have rented a post office box somewhere because he never got any mail, and no one ever saw him in the local restaurants and bars. The only signs of his existence were the rent payments, in cash, that were regularly delivered to his landlord's office and the house lights that could be seen from Highway 1.

*   *   *

Walter had quickly recovered from his pique at the landlord. After all, the guy was just trying to be friendly. Walter could appreciate that, although cultivating friendships was not very high among his priorities. The way he saw it, one friend was one too many. Friends were a nuisance and a danger.

But the landlord struck him as a good sort and had taken the hint. Walter would reward him in a way he could appreciate, by taking good care of the property. He himself preferred a tidy house. He had been careful to put a big plastic tarp down on the basement floor to keep Sally Wilkes' blood from ruining the linoleum.

Sally had been his guest for a pleasant evening at home. That was the sort of relationship he preferred to cultivate. She suffered so eloquently that it had been really a pity when he had to tape her mouth closed. The next one would be better because by then he would have the basement properly soundproofed.

He had the next one all picked out. He was looking forward to her because she would come of her own free will. It was more amusing when they chose their fate. Sally, for all her youth, had known better than to trust strange men. He had had to grab her as she walked to her car, which was both dangerous and unsatisfying.

It was a blessing that age made women foolish. Harriet Murdoch was a forty-something realtor who lived and worked across the hills in San Carlos. She was divorced and her son was safely distant in some college in Los Angeles. Walter had met her in a bar two weeks ago.

By comparison with a lot of places he had lived, the Peninsula seemed rich. In all of the towns following one another along that finger of land, with San Francisco at its tip, the general impression was of prosperity. You had to look to discover a real slum.

Under the circumstances, finding the right kind of bar had been a challenge. Women with comfortable incomes tended to be suspicious to begin with, and snobs. They wouldn't look at a man who didn't wear a suit, and Walter didn't even own a suit. He wanted someplace where he would fit in, where no one would notice him and where he would have a chance to work his charm.

The right kind of bar had been a place on El Camino Real, which was the main artery up and down the Peninsula. Pete's Tavern was on a corner, next to a discount furniture store. The neon signs in the window advertised Budweiser and Miller Lite.

Walter was on his second beer and on the verge of calling it a night, when this fake blonde came in and sat down on the next bar stool but one from him. She was clutching her purse in both hands as she ordered something called a Pink Lady that came in a martini glass and really was pink.

She glanced at him, just once, and then seemed absorbed in the bottle collection on the wall behind the bar. But she was interested.

Of course, she would be. That was why she was there.

Everything about her suggested she was on the prowl. She was just a little too well turned out to be anything else. The dress, the hair, the makeup—it was all too perfect. She might have just stopped in on her way to someone's wedding.

Taking his time, Walter watched the bartender make her drink, which seemed a major project, and waited until it had been served to her on a little scalloped coaster and she had had her first sip.

“What's in that thing?” he asked finally.

Very slowly, she turned her head to look at him. Then, without smiling, she answered, “Plymouth gin, grenadine, a teaspoon of cream and an egg white.”

“And then they shake it up?”

“Yes.”

Walter smiled at her in a way that suggested nothing except the sweetness of his nature.

“Well, it looks pretty.”

Then she smiled, and said, “Yes, it does.” And by then Walter knew he had her.

With the second Pink Lady, which Walter bought, they adjourned to a booth. It wasn't until they were sitting in the booth that he asked her name.

This was a license for the conversation to turn personal. On these occasions he always wore a wedding ring, which seemed to make women feel safer. This one he had bought in a pawnshop in Fort Worth.

He told Harriet he was a widower. Strictly speaking, this was the truth.

Then she told him about her divorce, and about her son away in college and about how much she missed him.

“I have a son,” he confessed. “I haven't seen him in years.”

She was very sympathetic, particularly since he didn't go into details. Doubtless she sensed the subject was painful for him, which was precisely the impression he wished to create.

It was eleven-fifteen, and Harriet had just finished her third drink, when he decided it was time to quit.

“I'd like to see you again,” Walter told her, and his eyes had that pleading expression women found so hard to resist. “If you give me your phone number, I'll call you tomorrow.”

It was amusing to watch the play of expression on her face. On the one hand she was disappointed, since she clearly had thought she was going to get laid this very night, but on the other hand she now saw before her the prospect of acquiring a gentleman friend, perhaps even a relationship that might last into the indefinite future.

It was a measure of her desperation when a woman started prowling the bars. Harriet was desperate. She took the bait. She fished a ballpoint pen out of her purse and wrote out two numbers on a cocktail napkin—one her home phone and the other her cell.

Now it was her turn to make her eyes plead.
Please, just phone me,
she seemed to be begging.
I'll make you happy. I'll give you my body and my love, and everything else you ever dreamed of.

Of course, if she had known what Walter's dreams were like, she might have thought better of it.

They had had dinner together a few times, in restaurants where neither of them was known. He didn't stint. He took her to nice places, places where he had to wear a sport coat. And she was drawing all the desired conclusions.

“My wife's been dead for a few years now, and I loved her dear. But a man has to move on or he dies inside himself.” All of which, of course, implied,
I'm tired of being alone.

Still, he avoided any definite proposals beyond another dinner. He didn't even presume to a little necking at her front door, and after the second date it was all he could do to avoid being dragged inside and ravaged. This woman was so hungry to feel a man's weight on her that all the way back to the van she kept brushing against him.

But Walter was playing coy, and it was working. When, with beguilingly embarrassed hesitation, he finally asked her to come along to his place for a nightcap, she would dance all the way.

But that was a little down the road, and in the meantime he had to stay focused. Police in the San Francisco Bay Area had had a lot of experience with serial killers and he needed to keep his wits about him.

This new stuff the doctor in San Mateo had given him wasn't helping. It eased the misery in his gut, but the tradeoff was an odd, detached feeling, an indifference that was scary.

He had had abdominal pains for about five months and had gone to some quack in Seattle who wanted to run all kinds of tests and wrote him a prescription, something just to take the edge off. It wasn't much better than aspirin—Walter had to take three times the dose to get any relief. He never went back. He didn't need any tests because he knew what it was.

Working on the house in Half Moon Bay, he would forget his pain, sometimes for hours at a time. Work took you out of yourself. You forgot to suffer the way you might forget to have lunch. Pain was just a habit. If you didn't think about it, it wasn't there.

And for the times when it was there, he had a new prescription that seemed to do the job. He could sleep—better, in fact, than before he got sick, because the new stuff seemed to keep his dreams within acceptable limits of horror. But it also left him feeling blunted.

His father's preferred narcotics had been corn whiskey and the Bible, and in the end neither had worked. The old man had howled all the way to the grave. “The devil is come down onto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time,” he used to say, when he was sober enough to know that he was dying. He would shout the words at his fifteen-year-old son, never quite clarifying whether young Walter was the subject or the object of the verse.

Because, of course, he had long since acquired an understanding of his only child's dark ways.

Yet any son born to that wicked old man would have been stamped in his cradle as the devil's own. Walter's father had seen evil in everyone except himself, and he had taken great and obvious pleasure in contemplating the torments of the damned.

He styled himself a man of God, a preacher, an apostle of the Word. And from time to time, when he needed money, he would set up a storefront church and scratch together a congregation. Then, after a while, when nobody came anymore, the reverend would take to the road again.

“Many are called, few are chosen,” he would say.

And when his flocks disappointed him, which was often, in compensation the shepherd would beat his son.

At last, in the extremity of his final illness, God's holy apostle ended up in the charity ward of the county hospital, just another emaciated old man lying under a thin blanket, waiting for death.

The year before, Walter had quit school and was working as an apprentice, helping to build yet one more strip mall. He lived in a boardinghouse and took a city bus to the construction site, and every evening he stopped off to see his father. His reasons had nothing to do with love or respect. Walter just wanted to see the old man die.

One night he arrived, just at sunset, and the nurse, who felt compassion for his youth and what she interpreted as his filial affection, took him aside and told him, “If you have anything you need to tell him before he goes, this is the time. He's stopped speaking. When he's conscious he seems to understand what you say to him, but he goes in and out. I don't give it more than another day before he slips into a coma.”

So Walter sat down beside his father's bed, in that long room with its rows and rows of the dying, and he smiled when the apostle at last opened his eyes. He waited patiently until he was sure his dad recognized him.

“They tell me it won't be long before you go under for good and all,” he said quietly. “Personally, I'll be sorry. I've enjoyed watching you die.”

Yes, Daddy heard him. You could see it in his eyes.

“For years I've thought about killing you myself, but now I'm glad I didn't. I couldn't have made you suffer the way God has. It's what He does best.”

His father's mouth opened, but nothing came out except a faint wheezing sound.

“You know, I never agreed with you about hell,” Walter went on, his voice low and soothing, as if he were talking to a sick child. “I don't think it waits for us after death. I think it's here and now. So I guess you're safe. You'll just die, and crumble into unfeeling dust. God has punished you in this world.

“And you'd be wise to hope I'm right, because if anyone ever deserved the everlasting fire, it's you. God hates you, you old bastard. God hates us all, and He's right.”

Hatred, Walter always believed, was the most durable of the emotions, the one dearest to God. And in that instant, at the very threshold of death, his father was consumed with hatred for his son. There was no room for anything else.

And that was just the way Walter wanted it.

“Your Bible is full of fairy tales,” he said, smiling, stroking his father's hair with the tips of his fingers. “There is no redemption. There is only the horror He has created for us as our just punishment. I'm glad your death has been hard.”

The nurse was wrong, and the apostle hung on a little longer. A second evening, and then a third, he was alert enough to understand everything his son had to tell him.

“You remember the girl who said I tried to rape her? You thought she was lying—or maybe just hoped it. She was telling the truth. And I've done worse since, much worse. I've taken life, just like God. And I'll go on doing God's work for Him. Maybe that way I'll become like God Himself and inherit from Him the curse of immortality. What do you think?