“You saw his face?” Wallace asked.
“Just a glimpse,” she said.
“Can you describe him?”
“Not really.”
“Try. ”
“He had brown eyes, I think.”
“No mustache or beard?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Long sideburns or short?”
“Short, I think.”
“Any scars?”
“No.”
“Anything at all memorable about him?”
“No.”
“The shape of his face-”
“No.”
“No what?”
“It was just a face, any shape.”
“His hair receding or full?”
“I can’t remember,” she said.
Chase said, “When I got to her, she was in a state of shock. I doubt she was registering anything.”
Instead of a grateful agreement, Louise scowled at him.
He realized, too late, that the worst embarrassment for someone Louise’s age was to lose her cool, to fail to cope. He had betrayed her momentary lapse to, of all people, a cop. She would have little gratitude for him now, even though he had saved her life.
Wallace got up. “Come on,” he said.
“Where?” Chase asked.
“We’ll go out there.”
“Is that really necessary? For me, anyway?” Chase asked.
“Well, I have to take statements from both of you, in more detail than this. It would help, Mr. Chase, to be on the scene when you’re describing it again. It’ll only take a short while. We’ll need the girl longer than we’ll need you.”
* * *
Chase was sitting in the rear of Wallace’s squad car, thirty feet from the scene of the murder, answering questions, when the staff car from the Press-Dispatch arrived. Two photographers and a reporter got out.
For the first time, Chase realized that there would be local newspaper and television coverage. They would make a reluctant hero of him. Again.
“Please,” he said to Wallace, “can we keep the reporters from learning who helped the girl?”
“Why?”
“I’m tired of reporters,” Chase said.
Wallace said, “But you did save her life. You ought to be proud of that.”
“I don’t want to talk to them,” Chase said.
“That’s up to you. But they’ll have to know who interrupted the killer. It’ll be in the report.”
Later, when Wallace was finished and Chase was getting out of the car to join another officer who would take him back to town, he felt the girl put a hand on his shoulder. He turned, and she said, “Thank you.”
Maybe he was imagining it, but he thought that her touch had the quality of a caress and that her hand lingered. Even the possibility sickened him.
He met her eyes. Looked away at once.
At the same instant, a photographer snapped a picture. The flashbulb sprayed light. The light was brief – but the photograph would haunt him forever.
In the car, on the way back to town, the uniformed officer behind the wheel said that his name was Don Jones, that he had read about Chase, and that he would like to have Chase’s autograph for his kids. Chase signed his name on the back of a blank homicide report, and at Jones’s urging, he prefaced it with “To Rick and Judy Jones.” The officer asked a lot of questions about Nam, which Chase answered as curtly as courtesy would allow.
In his prize Mustang, he drove more sedately than he had before. There was no anger in him now, only infinite weariness.
At a quarter past one in the morning, he parked in front of Mrs. Fielding’s house, relieved to see that no lights were on. He unlocked the front door as quietly as the ancient deadbolt would permit, stepped knowingly around most of the loose boards in the staircase, and made his way to his attic apartment: one large room that served as a kitchen, bedroom, and living room, plus one walk-in closet and a private bath.
He locked his door.
He felt safe now.
Of course, he knew that he would never be safe again. No one ever was. Safety was an illusion.
This night at least, he hadn’t been required to make polite conversation with Mrs. Fielding as she posed coyly in one of her half-unbuttoned housedresses, revealing the fish-belly-white curves of her breasts. He never understood why she chose to be so casually immodest at her age.