"You'll have to come around and see me," she said coquettishly. "My mom's away for the weekend with this guy. Got the place all to myself."
When Louise answered the bell, she was wearing a yellow bikini, and she smelled of coconut tanning lotion. Opening the door, she said, "I knew you'd be back to get the reward-"
When she saw Glenda, she fell silent.
"May we come in?" Ben asked.
Louise stepped back, confused, and closed the door behind them.
Ben introduced Glenda as a close friend, and Louise's face soured into a pout.
Heading to the living room, rolling her hips to show off her tight butt, the girl said, "Will you have a drink this time?"
"Early, isn't it?"
"Noon."
"No, thanks," Ben said. "We've only got a couple of questions, and we'll be going."
At the wet bar, Louise stood with her right hip cocked, mixing her drink.
Ben and Glenda sat on the sofa, and Louise carried her drink to an armchair opposite them. The girl slouched in the chair, with her legs spread. The crotch of her skimpy swimsuit conformed to the folds of flesh that it was supposed to conceal, leaving nothing to the imagination.
Chase felt uncomfortable, but Glenda seemed as serene as ever.
"The name you wanted," Louise said, "is Tom Deekin. The guy who dated my mom, the guy with the ring. He sells insurance. Has an office over on Canby Street by the firehouse. But he isn't the guy who knifed Mike."
"I know. Still… he might be able to give us the names of other people in the brotherhood."
"Fat chance." She was holding her drink in one hand and lightly caressing one well-tanned thigh with the other, trying to make her self-appreciation seem unconscious but being too blatant by half. "These guys are committed to something, you know, they have ideals — and you're an outsider. Why're they going to tell you anything?"
"They might."
She smiled and shook her head. "You think maybe you can squeeze a few names out of Tom Deekin? Listen, these guys have steel balls. They have to be tough, getting ready to defend against the nappy-heads and the kikes and the rest of them."
Ben supposed that some members of the Aryan Alliance might be dangerous — but most of them were probably playing at this master-race stuff, drinking beer and gassing about racial Armageddon instead of watching football games on the tube.
Glenda said, "Louise, as I understand it, you'd gone with Mike for a year before…"
"Before that fruitcake gutted him?" Louise said, as if to prove that she was as tough as anyone. Or maybe the coldness in her was as real as it seemed. "A year — yeah, that's about right. Why?"
"Did you ever notice anyone following you — as if they were keeping a watch on you?"
"No."
Ben knew what Glenda was after. Judge researched his potential victims to discover their sins, to attempt to justify his murderous urges as righteous judgments. He had followed Mike and Louise; he'd told Ben as much; therefore, they might have noticed him.
"You answered too fast, without thinking," Ben said. "Glenda doesn't mean was someone following you recently. Maybe it was even weeks ago, even months ago."
Louise hesitated, sipping her drink. Her free hand slid from her thigh to the crotch of her bikini. Her fingertips moved in slow circles over the yellow fabric.
Though she stared mostly at Ben, the girl occasionally glanced assessingly at Glenda. She clearly felt that they were engaged in a competition.
Glenda, in her serenity, had won all the necessary races years ago — and had never run against anyone but herself.
Louise said, "The beginning of the year, about February and March, there was something like that. Some creep hanging around — but it never amounted to anything. It turned out not to be any mysterious stranger."
"Not a stranger? Then who?"
"Well, when Mike first said he was following us, I just laughed, you know? Mike was like that, always off on one fantasy or another. He was going to be an artist, did you know? First he was going to work in a garret and become world famous. Jesus. Then he was going to be a paperback-book illustrator. Then a film director, paint with the camera. He never could decide — but he knew whatever it was he would be famous and rich. A dreamer."
"And he thought someone was watching you together?" Ben asked.
"It was this guy in a Volkswagen. A red Volkswagen. After a week or so I saw it wasn't another fantasy. There really was this guy in the VW."
"What did he look like?" Ben asked.
"I never saw him. He stayed far enough away. But he wasn't dangerous. Mike knew him."
Ben felt as if the top of his head were coming off, and he wanted to shake the rest of the story out of her without having to go through this question-and-answer routine. Calmly he said, "Who was the guy?"
"I don't know," she said. "Mike wouldn't tell me."
"And you weren't curious?" he asked.
"Sure I was. But when Mike made up his mind about something, he wouldn't change it. One night, when we went to the Diamond Dell — that's a drive-in hamburger joint on Galasio — he got out of the car and went back and talked to the guy in the VW. When he came back, he said he knew him and that we wouldn't have any more trouble with him. And he was right. The guy drove away, and he didn't follow us any more. I never knew what it was about, and I forgot about it till you asked."
"But you must have had some idea," Ben insisted. "You can't have let it drop without having found out something more concrete."
She put down her drink. "Mike didn't want to talk about it, and I thought I knew why. He never said directly, but I think maybe the weasel in the VW made a pass at him once."
"A pass?" Ben said.
"I only think so," she said. "Couldn't prove it. Anyway, it couldn't be the same guy that killed him, the guy with the ring."
"Why not?" Glenda asked.
"These Aryan Alliance guys, they hate fags every bit as much as they hate all the coloreds. No way they're ever going to let some pansy-ass wear the ring."
"One more thing," Ben said. "I'd really like a list of Mike's friends, five or six guys his own age that he was close to. Someone he might have told about this guy in the red Volkswagen."
"Five or six — you're wasting your time. Mike wasn't close to very many people. Fact is, Marty Cable was his one best friend."
"Then we'll need to talk to Cable."
"He's probably at Hanover Park. Summers, he works as a lifeguard at the municipal pool." She looked more directly at Glenda than she had since they'd entered the house. "You think Ben here is ever going to screw me?"
"Probably not," Glenda said, evincing no surprise whatsoever at the question.
"Am I a package or not?" Louise asked.
Glenda said, "You are a package, all right."
"Then he must be nuts."
"Oh, he's okay," Glenda said.
"You think so?" the girl asked.
"Yeah," Glenda said. "He's a good guy."
"If you say so, then he must be."
The two women smiled at each other.
Then Louise took her hand from her crotch, looked at Ben, and sighed. "Too bad."
In the car, driving away from the house, Ben said, "Is the world going to hell or what?"
"You mean Louise?"
"Are girls like that now?"
"Some. But there have always been some like her. She's nothing new. She's just a child."
"She's almost eighteen, going to college in the fall, old enough to have some sense."
"No, that's not what I mean. She's just a child, and she always will be. Perpetually immature, always needing to be the center of attention. Don't waste your time disliking her, Ben. What she needs is sympathy, and lots of it, because she's going to have a bad life, a load of pain. When her looks eventually start to go, she won't know what to be."