one was in a beer joint or a restaurant, and I think it could be identified—”
“How?” she asked wonderingly. “I mean, how did you find out?”
“Dumb luck,” I said. “You play for the breaks, and sometimes you get one. Most of those booths have fans in ‘em, you know; this one did, and the fan had a bad bearing. It was just noisy enough to hear. And I heard a jukebox start up.”
I stopped, thinking about it. This guy was off his rocker, but still he was smart enough to hang up when that music started. Well, it didn’t mean anything. A sexual psychopath didn’t necessarily have to be stupid; he was just unbalanced.
She frowned. “Then they might have caught him? I mean, if they had listened to you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “With luck, and enough men to cover all the places in town within a few minutes—” Her County police force was none of my business. And they could have been swamped and shorthanded. Police forces usually were.
“You say you were a policeman?” she asked. “Then you aren’t any more?”
“No,” I said.
I put the whisky back in the bag and closed it. The room key was on the desk where she’d dropped it. I put it in my pocket. She stood up. Instead of helping her, I watched to see how she handled it. She was still a little shaky, but apparently all right.
“Thank you for everything, Mr. Chatham,” she said.
“How many times have you fainted lately?”
She smiled ruefully. “It was so ridiculous. I think this was only the second time in my life. But why?”
“You ought to see a doctor. You need a check-up.”
“That’s silly. I’m perfectly healthy.”
“You’re running on your reserve tanks now. And when they’re empty you’re going to crash. You don’t weigh a hundred pounds.”
“A hundred and ten. You don’t know your own strength.”
“Okay,” I said. It was none of my business.
I went out and lifted the other bag from the station wagon. No. 12 was across in the opposite wing. It was in the corner, and there were three doors between it and the end; fifteen rooms altogether. As I put down the cases and fished in my pocket for the key, I turned and looked back across the bleak area baking in the sun. A twenty by forty foot swimming pool right there, I thought, visualizing it: flagstones, deck-chairs, umbrellas, shrubs, grass—It screamed for grass. It was a shame. I went on in.
The room was nicely furnished with a green wall-to-wall carpet and twin beds with dark green spreads and a chest of drawers with a big mirror above it. There were a couple of armchairs. On the left at the rear a door holding a full length mirror opened into the bathroom that was finished in forest-green tile. It was hot, but there was a room air-conditioner mounted in the wall near the closed and curtained window at the rear. I turned it on. In a moment cool air began to flow out. I stripped off my sweaty clothes and took a shower. The towels, I noted, were worn and threadbare, the type of thing you’d expect in a cheap hotel room. Contrasted with the good quality of the permanent furnishings, they told their story. She was probably going broke. I frowned thoughtfully, and then shrugged and poured out a whisky. Lighting a cigarette, I lay down naked on one of the beds.
It would be better when I had something to do. Some kind of hard work, I thought, maybe out in the sun, something I could get hold of with my hands. Building something. That was it. You made something with your hands and it was tangible. There were no people mixed up in it, no fouled-up emotions, no abstractions like right and wrong, and you couldn’t throw away six years’ work in five crazy minutes.
I thought of the house up there on the side of Twin Peaks with the fog coming in like a river of cotton across the city in the late afternoon, and I thought of Nan. There wasn’t any particular feeling about it any more, except possibly one of failure and aimlessness. We’d been divorced for over a year. The house was sold. The job was gone—the job she’d blamed our failure on.
I took a drag on the cigarette and gazed up at the ceiling, wondering if she’d read about it when it finally happened. She’d married again and moved to Santa Barbara, but some of