A Time of Predators

But it happened. Into fashionable, quiet Los Feliz had come violence. An old green station wagon, driving south, squealing tires on the turn into Brewer. Slum kids from San Francisco, seeking kicks? Curt raised his head to look west at the Coast Range cupping the Peninsula cities against the Bay. Sparkling subdivisions massed the lower slopes. Slum kids? Or well cared-for kids from these shady streets and sleek ranch-style houses?

If this act of senseless violence had come from these homes, he thought, it became even more senseless, because these houses had been built as fortresses against economic want and personal frustration by a whole generation of parents grimly determined to give their kids everything they could. Under current theories, such homes should have been a quarantine against, not a culture for, the germs of violence.

Curt returned thoughtfully to his car, got in. I want that boy caught, and I want him punished. Now Paula was dead, and in turn her attackers also would go unpunished. Enforcers like Monty Worden, whose lives were intimately bound up with the swift and brutal collision of man with man, of man with society, seemed to push everyone around except the predators. In this society, they were the ones who struck and got away with it.

A pity, Curt thought, that just for a while he wasn’t a predator himself. As Worden had said, find them and get them alone long enough to make them hurt, hard, for the maimed and dead they had left behind. Render them unable to forget the magnitude of that hurt, that fear, so their sharp vicious edge would be gone and they would be lessened.

Curt realized that he was at the far edge of the brief Los Feliz business district. Ahead, on the right, was the old gray limestone building which housed the city library. Preston’s fight the day before must have turned his mind to the past again: to the old hectic days of the S.A.S., when you settled arguments in streets or bars with your hands, your heavy jump boots, and the lieutenant calmly ignored black eyes and puffy noses and swollen knuckles in morning parade. Yes, events in another life, to another person.

Certainly not to Curtis Halstead, Ph.D.

There was a free parking meter in midblock, and Curt parked. He went up the wide steps and into the library’s cool shadowed interior. Behind the desk was a teen-age girl, probably summer help, wearing a filmy white blouse which was blushed a pale flesh tint by her skin.

“Could you tell me where the newspaper files are, miss?”

“In the Periodical Room, sir. Go down that hallway...” She leaned across the desk to point out a corridor beyond the open stacks. “Third door on the right; you can’t miss it...”

As she leaned forward, Curt, without conscious volition, stared down the loose neck of her blouse to the shadowed curves of her swelling youthful unbrassiered breasts. He pulled his eyes away, met a face suddenly scornful of his momentary voyeurism, and backed hastily away even as he felt an almost horrifying stab of acute physical desire.

“I... thank you... miss...” he managed to say.

He fled clown the indicated corridor, paused only when he was out of sight of the desk. For God’s sake, she was truly young enough to be his daughter. Was he becoming some sort of dirty old man? He went on to the closed door marked Periodical Room in old-fashioned gilt letters. He could begin now to see the ludicrous elements of it: a forty-ish professor fleeing from a young girl’s half-glimpsed breasts as from some artful Circe’s abandoned sexual beckoning. It was, after all, a natural biological urge, and Paula had been gone for two months.

The periodical attendant was safely gray-haired, with new teeth that obviously did not fit her well. She seemed glad of a customer in the stuffy room. “Yes, sir” — she beamed — “we have the April numbers of the local papers. January through March aren’t available. They’re out being microfilmed, you see.”

“April is all I need,” Curt assured her.

He paged through the Los Feliz Daily Times for Saturday, April 26th, the day after Paula’s death. Sergeant Worden was quoted as saying that Mrs. Halstead had died of self-inflicted wounds. Period. Curt was grateful for the restrained tones. The only Monday followup was the obituary notice, for which he had supplied the material himself. The San Francisco Sunday papers carried only a very brief Woman Slays Self.

What masochistic impulse had brought him here to paw through the painful dust of memory? There was nothing he could do, damnit. But still, since he was here...