A Time of Predators

In his restlessness, Rick didn’t think of Debbie, lying awake in her bed at the dorm a few miles south. Lying awake and wondering about Rick’s odd sudden sickness, just when she was giving him the really rather prosaic news that Mrs. Halstead had killed herself. Not that his illness had anything to do with her death.

After all, hadn’t Rick only met the woman once, when they’d chanced to scrape fenders in the parking lot of an El Camino bar?

Hadn’t he?

Curt Tuesday, May 13th — Tuesday, June 17th

Chapter 8

When the phone rang in Curt’s office at the Sciences Building, he glanced at his watch: 4:30. He debated momentarily whether he shouldn’t already be gone. Doris Reeves, the Anthropology Department secretary, had a remarkable facility for catching him with a two-hour chore just when he finished for the day. But duty won, as usual.

“Halstead here.”

“Hi, Professor. Monty Worden, I was wondering could you drop around to the sheriff’s office. Few little things, easier to talk about in person than on the phone...”

Had they finally found Paula’s attackers? It had been eighteen days since her death. He was aware that he was trembling — not enough sleep, despite his thrice-weekly workouts. Those damned nightmares...

But no use giving Worden the satisfaction of knowing how hard it had been to wait. “Can it keep until tomorrow afternoon, Sergeant?”

“Huh? Oh, sure. No hurry. Say — three o’clock, county sheriff’s office, five-oh-nine Jefferson? I’m in the Detective Bureau.”

Five minutes later Curt went down the new cement walk to his VW in the faculty parking area. Less than a month to finals, then the empty summer stretching ahead. Before Paula’s... death, he had looked forward to it; now he dreaded it. How would he fill its endless hours?

The afternoon was cloudy, gray to match his mood, with a sky so indigo over the Coast Range to the west that it was nearly black. A gust of wind whipped at his hair and tipped up one lapel of his jacket like the edge of a lilypad in a pond. He went down University Way to Los Feliz, fed a parking meter, and climbed the long straight flight of stairs to Floyd Preston’s gymnasium. It was on the second floor above the Western Union office. Curt had signed up the Tuesday following Paula’s suicide; he hadn’t slept a moment since Worden’s Sunday visit, and had read somewhere that weight-lifting was so strenuous it could numb the mind as well as the body. It hadn’t worked, but at least he had been losing weight.

The gymnasium had once been a dance studio, a great boxy room with high ceilings and polished hardwood floor. The right-hand wall was windows, starting chest-high and extending upward; every few feet around the other walls were full-length mirrors. Between the mirrors on the left wall were racks of weight-graduated barbells; the racks of dumbbells were under the windows, at right angles to the wall. At either end of the gym were raised wooden platforms, mirror-backed, on which were the heavy- competition-style Olympic barbell sets. Scattered about were a dozen vinyl-covered benches and various chrome pulleys and other apparatus.

Curt ignored the dozen or so men working out, going by them to the locker and shower area in the rear, separated from the gym by a partition and curtained doorways. He didn’t see Preston, but he saw that the upper half of the office Dutch door was open, so the gym owner could check who was on the floor without leaving the office.

Curt got sweat pants and sweat shirt from his locker, then stripped and stepped on the scales: 209. Down thirteen pounds altogether, which was oddly satisfying. He sighed as he drew on the sweat clothes; so much in his life he would have done differently, if he had known that Paula... that Paula suddenly would be gone.

Curt followed Preston’s typed program of exercises with singular intensity, starting with three sets of sit-ups on the incline board — lowest rung — and then going on to the dumbbell clean and press. By the middle of the second set he was puffing; by the end of the third, red-faced and blowing.

“You handle yourself as if you used to know your body pretty well, Halstead.”

Curt started; Floyd Preston had approached as silently as a cat. He was like a cat in other ways: lithe, graceful, deceptively muscular and enormously strong. His face was broad, hard-chinned and angular under a thatch of thinning blond hair — a face that would have been Indian if it hadn’t been dominated by cold blue eyes. He was about thirty-five but moved like a teen-age athlete.

Curt wiped a forearm across his face. “At least I’m working up a good sweat.”

“Usually only body-builders preparing for a meet work out as hard as you’ve been going at it these past two weeks.”

“I... lost my wife recently, so I... some trouble sleeping...”