Finishing their drinks, they started back to the interstate. Frieda came closer, so their shoulders touched.
“Mike, I’ve been wanting to say something. Maybe I can say it now, with the help of a strong gin and tonic. About the late Harry Field. The vibrations are talking to me again. Do you feel” — she paused — “well, remotely responsible for giving him that job the day he was shot?” She hurried on. “The whole thing was accidental, and he should have checked to see if the man was carrying a gun. But still—”
“I did give him the job. I always liked Harry, and I’m sorry it happened.”
“Everybody liked Harry. That’s not the point. I just don’t want you to carry this around with you. To go out of your way to help Harry’s widow because you had something to do with the way he died.” She moved a hand. “This doesn’t sound as convincing as when I rehearsed it, and I’ve been rehearsing all day. Because damn it, Mike — I don’t see any earthly reason we shouldn’t share a room tonight, do you? And I want to get it settled right now. It would be embarrassing as hell to argue about it when we get there. Harry’s been dead ten months. Did you know he was drunk that day?”
“How drunk?”
“Coordination poor, reaction time far from normal. So will you stop feeling that it’s your fault?”
“I didn’t know Harry was that kind of drinker.”
“He wasn’t, for a long time. At the end it was two or three times a week, and the intervals between were getting shorter. I did most of the work. That’s why I’m so determined to keep the agency going. It seems silly to me that before anyone will give me a retainer I have to have a man’s name on the door, whether he’s functioning or not.”
“You grieved for him,” Shayne said. “You looked like hell for six weeks.”
“It broke me up! I’ll tell you about it sometime. But it’s over, is all I’m trying to say, and I thought it would be easier.”
At the foot of the northbound ramp, they really kissed for the first time.
“Take care of yourself,” Shayne said. “For everybody’s sake.”
Chapter 7
Bruno Lorenz was cruising the expressway at sixty-five, being overtaken by everybody. Passengers in the cars fleeing past him looked in at him with open contempt: a fat, dough-faced youth who didn’t regard interstate driving as a good way to prove his masculinity.
He knew this was a bad day to be out looking. It was much too soon, after Meri. The truth was… he was still in a state of shock as a result of that fiasco and the way it had happened. Theoretically, as part of the experimental design, he should remain aloof from his subjects, but it never proved possible. Their reactions were so interestingly various. Meri had been the prettiest, by fashion-magazine standards, the kind of girl who outside the laboratory had never given him a second glance. To face the facts — and Bruno had had to begin facing these facts rather early in life — he was a schmuck. He wished he exercised more, but a pattern of inactivity had been set when he was a child, and it was too late now to change. On the tennis court he was an embarrassment. On the beach, children kicked sand in his face. At the Reproductive Clinic, none of that had mattered, your looks, your intelligence, your previous history of sexual acceptance. The one thing they cared about was how you performed. To the machines, a schmuck was as good as a gold-medal diver, even better. The team of doctors who ran the experiments were rather schmucky-looking creatures themselves, and they tended to be suspicious of athletes, as being too narcissistic, too self-absorbed.
Unhappily for Bruno, he had a freakish IQ, in the low-genius range, and all the time he was producing some rather impressive orgasms, his mind was at work. There was no subject more compelling than sex. Children were interested, old folks were interested. The doctors’ findings were going to be believed, and not only believed but acted upon. And if the whole approach was wrong, if by watching and recording the experience they changed it beyond recognition, the treatment might turn out to be worse than the disease.
Bruno tried to tell this to the doctors. They gave him the stock response they gave everybody, and went merrily on.
So Bruno dropped out. He had persuaded a girl to volunteer with him. The doctors had brainwashed her, and she remained in that numb condition. Bruno’s objections had no scientific validity, she told him. She herself was lubricating well and getting some great contractions. When Bruno persisted, she asked him not to call her any more. That closed down his only sexual outlet. He tried to open others. All he got was rebuffs. In the sexual arena, people feel they have a right to be cruel.
In the dorm, he noticed that girls invariably left the common room a minute or so after he walked in. He had a bad period of a month of two, with psychiatrists and medicine and a short stay in the hospital, from which he was released into group therapy. That proved to be not for him. Groups were supposed to be hostile, as part of the therapeutic technique. In Bruno’s case, he thought, they overdid it.
He retreated into fantasies.
He kept a journal of these. It didn’t take him long to discern that whatever the circumstances, they were all rapes. He drew the obvious and necessary conclusion, and began hanging around breakwaters and poorly lighted parks, looking for somebody helpless. He fastened on one, finally, a frail middle-aged woman with psoriasis. Catastrophe! He refused to think about it now. To succeed as a park rapist, you have to be quick and strong, and if Bruno had been that kind of person he wouldn’t have had to go in for rape. Rapist? He was more of an exhibitionist. If he continued, he would end up making dirty phone calls.
It came to him in a dream, his big idea. When he woke up, he was pleasantly relaxed for the first time in weeks. He decided to do it, but nothing would have happened, obviously, if he hadn’t noticed a paragraph in some paper that a gynecologist had remarried and was taking his wife on a trip around the world. His office was attached to his house. Bruno broke in, after fortifying himself with nearly a full bottle of whiskey, and found that the set-up was ideal. He started the next morning, picking up hitchhikers and accumulating data. Then, with all the scare-talk on the air, all the scare-stories in the papers, it became harder to get subjects, and he had more or less made up his mind that Meri Gillespie would be the last. A jock, clearly, and athletes spend so much effort on their bodies that they can’t understand how other people might prefer to let themselves go to flab. How she would hate having Bruno inside her! It would profane the temple. His sleaziness and schmuckiness would be like a venereal disease, something she could catch.
She was lovely. Undressing her and strapping her to the table, he had been so carried away, almost awestruck, that he had nearly been premature, which had never been his problem. He managed to save it by thinking of something else. He inspected her carefully, touching her everywhere. To a future doctor — still a possibility although he had stopped going to classes — anatomical knowledge was important. She stayed unconscious so long, much longer than the others, that he became alarmed. What a waste if she failed to come out of it.
Then she opened her eyes and tried to sit up.
Of course no one believed it at first. There was a frozen period. He had timed these, and Meri’s wore off sooner than any of the others. She accepted her predicament and began to consider what could be done about it. He knew the look; he knew how her mind was working. She was one of the favored ones, and the ending had to be happy or the audience would come out of the theatre feeling confused. She forced herself to think about his mad story, to see if there was any way she could reach him. What was it he claimed to be doing? Isolating the physiological from everything else, establishing the baselines for an entirely new concept in the field, the involuntary cycle.