He undressed. He washed his face and hands. In fact, he washed his hands three times. He washed his hands a lot lately.
He studied the shallow knife wound in his thigh. It was already clotted and beginning to scab. He washed it, flushed it with alcohol, swabbed it with Merthiolate, and bandaged it.
In the main room, he completed the medication by pouring a glass of Jack Daniel’s over two ice cubes. He sank onto the bed with the whiskey. He usually consumed half a bottle a day, minimum. This day, because of the damn banquet, he’d tried to stay sober. No longer.
Drinking, he felt clean again. Alone with a bottle of good liquor – that was the only time he felt clean.
He was pouring his second glassful when the telephone rang.
When he had first moved into the apartment, he hadn’t wanted a telephone. No one would ever call. And he had no desire to make contact with anyone.
Mrs. Fielding had not believed that he could live without a phone. Envisioning herself becoming a messenger service for him, she had insisted that he have a telephone hooked up as a condition of occupancy.
That had been long before she knew that he was a war hero. It was even before he knew it.
For months the phone went unused except when she called from downstairs to tell him that mail had been delivered or to invite him to dinner.
Since the announcement by the White House, however, since all the excitement about the medal, he received calls every day, most of them from perfect strangers who offered congratulations that he did not deserve or sought interviews for publications that he had never read. He cut most of them short. Thus far, no one had ever had gall enough to ring him up this late at night, but he supposed he could never regain the solitude to which he had grown accustomed in those first months after his discharge.
He considered ignoring the phone and concentrating on his Jack Daniel’s. But when it had rung for the sixteenth time, he realized that the caller was too persistent to be ignored, and he answered it. “Hello?”
“Chase?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know me?”
“No,” he said, unable to place the voice. The man sounded tired – but aside from that one clue, he might have been anywhere between twenty and sixty years old, fat or thin, tall or short.
“How’s your leg, Chase?” His voice contained a hint of humor, though the reason for it escaped Chase.
“Good enough,” Chase said. “Fine.”
“You’re very good with your hands.”
Chase said nothing, could not bring himself to speak, for now he understood what the call was about.
“Very good with your hands,” the bird-dogger repeated. “I guess you learned that in the army.”
“Yes,” Chase said.
“I guess you learned a lot of things in the army, and I guess you think you can take care of yourself pretty well.”
Chase said, “Is this you?”
The man laughed, momentarily shaking off his dispirited tone. “Yes, it’s me. I am me. Exactly right. I’ve got a badly bruised throat, Chase, and I know my voice will be just awful by morning. Otherwise, I got away about as lightly as you did.”
With a clarity reserved for moments of danger, Chase recalled the struggle with the killer on the grass by the Chevrolet. He tried to get a clear picture of the man’s face but could do no better for his own sake than he had for the police. “How did you know I was the one who stopped you?”
“I saw your picture in the paper. You’re a war hero. Your picture was everywhere. When you were lying on your back, beside the knife, I recognized you and got out of there fast.”
“Who are you?”
“Do you really expect me to say?”
Chase had forgotten his drink altogether. The alarms, the goddamn alarms in his head, were ringing at peak volume. “What do you want?”
The stranger was silent for so long that Chase almost asked the question again. Suddenly, the amusement gone from his voice, the killer said, “You messed in where you had no right messing. You don’t know the trouble I went to, picking the proper targets out of all those young fornicators, the ones who most deserved to die. I planned it for weeks, Chase, and I had given that young sinner his just punishment. The slut was left, and you saved her before I could perform my duty, saved a whore like that who had no right to be spared. This is not a good thing.”