The woman was still standing in the doorway, watching, as they drove away in the battered Mustang.
* * *
All day, from Glenda’s apartment to the Allenby house to Hanover Park to the Karnes’s house, Ben had driven evasively, and both he and Glenda had looked for a tail. No one had followed them at any point in their rambling journey.
No one followed them from the Karnes’s house either. They drove until they found a service station with a pay phone.
On the floor of the booth, an army of ants was busy moving the carcass of a dead beetle.
Glenda stood at the open door while Ben searched for Richard Linski in the directory. He found a number. In Crescent Heights.
With change from Glenda’s purse, Ben made the call.
It rang twice. Then: “Hello?”
Ben said nothing.
“Hello?” Richard Linski said. “Is anyone there?”
Quietly, Ben hung up.
“Well?” Glenda asked.
“It’s him. Judge’s real name is Richard Linski.”
11
THE MOTEL ROOM WAS SMALL, FILLED WITH THE RUMBLE OF THE WINDOW-mounted air-conditioner.
Ben closed the door and checked the dead-bolt lock to be sure that it worked properly. He tested the security chain; it was well fitted.
“You’re safe enough if you stay here,” he said. “Linksi can’t know where you are.”
To avoid giving Judge a chance to find them, they hadn’t gone back to her apartment to pack a bag for her. They had checked in without luggage. If everything went well, they wouldn’t be staying the whole night anyway. This was just a way station between the loneliness of the past and whatever future fate might grant them.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, still childlike in her pink socks and twin ponytails, she said, “I should go with you.”
“I have combat training. You don’t. It’s that simple.”
She didn’t ask him why he hadn’t called the police. With what they had learned, even Detective Wallace would at least question Linski – and if Linski was the killer, then the evidence would fall into place. Anyone else would have asked him that tough question – but she was not like anyone else.
Night had fallen.
“I better go,” he said.
She got off the edge of the bed and came into his arms. For a while he held her.
By unspoken mutual consent, they didn’t kiss. A kiss would have been a promise. In spite of his combat training, however, he might not leave Linski’s house alive. He didn’t want to make a promise to her that he might be unable to fulfill.
He unlocked the door, took the chain off, and stepped outside onto the concrete promenade. He waited for her to close the door and engage the deadbolt.
The night was warm and humid. The sky was bottomless.
He left the motel in his Mustang.
* * *
At ten o’clock, Ben parked two blocks from Richard Linski’s house and put on a pair of gardening gloves that he had purchased earlier. He made the rest of the journey on foot, staying on the opposite side of the street from the house.
The well-kept house was the second from the corner: white brick with emerald-green trim and dark-green slate roof. It was set on two well-landscaped lots, and the entire property was ringed with waist-high hedges that were so even they might have been trimmed with the aid of a quality micrometer.
Some windows glowed. Linski was apparently at home.
Ben walked the street that ran perpendicular to the one on which the bungalow faced. He entered a narrow, deserted alleyway that led behind the property.
A wrought-iron gate punctuated the wall of hedges. It wasn’t locked. He opened it and went into Linski’s backyard.
The rear porch was not so deep as the one at the front. It was bracketed by large lilac bushes. The boards didn’t creak under his feet.
Lights were on in the kitchen, filtered through red-and-white-checkered curtains.
He waited a few minutes in the lilac-scented darkness, not thinking about anything, geared down and idling, preparing himself for confrontation as he had learned to do in Nam.
The back door was locked when he quietly tried it. But both kitchen windows were open to admit the night breeze.