He slowed, pulled into the white-lined parking area to the right of the café. His fear at the near-crash had begun melting into his lingering arousal from Debbie’s goodnight. The trouble with young stuff like Deb was that you had to play the game with them. The older ones, they wanted it and they admitted it, just like a guy would.
Older women.
He peered through the windshield and lighted square window of the little diner. Older women like that blond waitress here who’d tipped him the wink that night. Funny, he’d forgotten about her until right now, but there she was, just putting down a hamburger in front of some guy. Bleached blonde, twenty-five, maybe pushing thirty almost. The sort who’d let a guy try goddamn near anything he wanted with her. He checked his image in the mirror, ran a comb through his hair. Debbie, get him all turned on and then... goodnight, huh? Well, maybe this chick... just maybe...
Chapter 12
Curt awoke early on Friday morning with a profound feeling of depression, like a delayed hangover from the previous afternoon’s beer. But the depression was emotional, not physical, compounded in part from the nagging inadequacy he had felt the previous evening, standing in the downstairs room where the rape of Paula had taken place. Without classes, without his seminar to prepare, he walked through the household chores he had set himself; by two o’clock he was staring glumly out a window and through the trees to the dazzling green of the golf course.
Four men carrying their bags in little wheeled carts were trudging up the fairway, dwarfed by distance into plastic toy figures. Up that way on that Friday night would have come the predators, four of them, sheltered by darkness. One of Paula’s favorite Latin aphorisms came to mind: He who is bent on doing evil can never want occasion. Certainly, if those who had attacked Paula also had attacked Rockwell, they had come here bent on evil.
One of the toy figures swung a club; after a long moment, Curt heard the hollow slap of wood on golf ball, saw the tiny gleaming shape roll to a stop on the other side of the fourteenth green. A good shot.
Feeling suddenly stifled in the house, Curt went down to the VW, got in, slid back the sun roof. That had been Paula’s idea; she had thought the convertible ugly but had wanted the sun on bright days. He started the car, went down the drive and north of Linda Vista. As he had come home that night, past the Longacres intersection. Down there a passing boy had seen the four, getting from their car, while Curt had dispensed wisdom in a drive-in booth. No such thing as eviclass="underline" just poor, frustrated humanity occasionally snapping under the enormous impersonal pressures of society. While Paula’s life drained redly to the floor...
Stop it, damnit! There was nothing you could have done.
But what if certain maverick students of humanity like Dart and Leakey and Laurens were right: that in man there still stalked about an atavistic, unschooled self from the older, mindless days of his journey? And what if Curt should let his control of that self slip? Then what?
He took a right from Entrada into El Camino, then left into Brewer toward downtown Los Feliz. Time to stop indulging his Bogart fantasies: he was a middle-aged law-abiding university professor whose wife had killed herself and who was feeling guilty about her death. He tried to turn his mind outward, away from his compulsive scabpicking. The town was full of students whom Sunday’s commencement would release — from the university, from this town. Out they would go, sky-diving: it would all be free-fall for them then. You tried to prepare them for it, but you never knew whether you had succeeded; the surprise, really, was how well most of them landed.
He realized he was crossing the railroad tracks where Rockwell had been attacked. Some vague urge made him pull in and park across from the laundromat beyond the tracks, and walk back to the edge of the gravel-scattered planks. Right here Rockwell had fallen; here the faceless ones had struck. Kids, probably in a stolen car; kids, hopped-up or stoned or drunk, acting out some private fantasy projection. One read of it, the random violence, but never applied it to one’s own life.
But it happened. Into fashionable, quiet Los Feliz had come violence. An old green station wagon, driving south, squealing tires on the turn into Brewer. Slum kids from San Francisco, seeking kicks? Curt raised his head to look west at the Coast Range cupping the Peninsula cities against the Bay. Sparkling subdivisions massed the lower slopes. Slum kids? Or well cared-for kids from these shady streets and sleek ranch-style houses?
If this act of senseless violence had come from these homes, he thought, it became even more senseless, because these houses had been built as fortresses against economic want and personal frustration by a whole generation of parents grimly determined to give their kids everything they could. Under current theories, such homes should have been a quarantine against, not a culture for, the germs of violence.
Curt returned thoughtfully to his car, got in. I want that boy caught, and I want him punished. Now Paula was dead, and in turn her attackers also would go unpunished. Enforcers like Monty Worden, whose lives were intimately bound up with the swift and brutal collision of man with man, of man with society, seemed to push everyone around except the predators. In this society, they were the ones who struck and got away with it.
A pity, Curt thought, that just for a while he wasn’t a predator himself. As Worden had said, find them and get them alone long enough to make them hurt, hard, for the maimed and dead they had left behind. Render them unable to forget the magnitude of that hurt, that fear, so their sharp vicious edge would be gone and they would be lessened.
Curt realized that he was at the far edge of the brief Los Feliz business district. Ahead, on the right, was the old gray limestone building which housed the city library. Preston’s fight the day before must have turned his mind to the past again: to the old hectic days of the S.A.S., when you settled arguments in streets or bars with your hands, your heavy jump boots, and the lieutenant calmly ignored black eyes and puffy noses and swollen knuckles in morning parade. Yes, events in another life, to another person.
Certainly not to Curtis Halstead, Ph.D.
There was a free parking meter in midblock, and Curt parked. He went up the wide steps and into the library’s cool shadowed interior. Behind the desk was a teen-age girl, probably summer help, wearing a filmy white blouse which was blushed a pale flesh tint by her skin.
“Could you tell me where the newspaper files are, miss?”
“In the Periodical Room, sir. Go down that hallway...” She leaned across the desk to point out a corridor beyond the open stacks. “Third door on the right; you can’t miss it...”
As she leaned forward, Curt, without conscious volition, stared down the loose neck of her blouse to the shadowed curves of her swelling youthful unbrassiered breasts. He pulled his eyes away, met a face suddenly scornful of his momentary voyeurism, and backed hastily away even as he felt an almost horrifying stab of acute physical desire.
“I... thank you... miss...” he managed to say.
He fled clown the indicated corridor, paused only when he was out of sight of the desk. For God’s sake, she was truly young enough to be his daughter. Was he becoming some sort of dirty old man? He went on to the closed door marked Periodical Room in old-fashioned gilt letters. He could begin now to see the ludicrous elements of it: a forty-ish professor fleeing from a young girl’s half-glimpsed breasts as from some artful Circe’s abandoned sexual beckoning. It was, after all, a natural biological urge, and Paula had been gone for two months.