Chase Read Free Page A

She would have little gratitude for him now, whether or not he saved her life.
    Wallace got up. ‘Come on,’ he said.
    ‘Where?’ Chase asked.
    ‘We'll go out there, with some of the lab boys.’
    ‘Is that really necessary?’ Chase asked.
    ‘Well, I have to take statements from you, both of you, in more detail than this. It would help, Mr Chase, to be on the scene when you're describing it again.’ He smiled, as if again impressed with Chase's identity, and said, ‘It'll only take a short while. We'll need the girl longer than we will 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 what they were going to do with the story. They were going to make him a hero. Again.
    ‘Please,’ he said to Wallace, ‘can we keep the reporters from knowing 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,’ Wallace said. ‘But I'm afraid they'll have to know who interrupted the killer. It'll be in the report, and the report is open to the press.’
    Later, when Wallace was finished with him and he was getting out of the car to join another officer who would take him back to town, the girl put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
    At the same instant a photographer snapped a picture, the flashbulb spraying light that lasted for what seemed an eternity.
    In the car, on the way back to town, the uniformed officer behind the wheel said 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 homicide report blank, and at Jones's urging, prefaced it with To Rick and Judy Jones.’ The officer asked a lot of questions about Nam which Chase answered as shortly as courtesy would allow.
    In his Mustang, he drove more sedately than he had before. There was no anger in him now, nothing but an infinite weariness.
    At a quarter past one in the morning he parked in front of Mrs Fiedling's house, relieved that there were no lights burning. He unlocked the front door as quietly as the ancient lock would permit, stepped knowingly around most of the loose boards in the staircase, and finally made his way to his attic apartment - one large room which served as a kitchen, bedroom and living room, a walk-in closet and a private bath. He locked his door. He felt safe now. He did not have to talk to Mrs Fiedling or, against his will, look down her perpetually unbuttoned housedress at the fish-belly curves of her sagging and altogether unerotic breasts, wondering why she had to be so casually immodest at her age.
    He undressed, washed his face and hands, studied the knife wound in his thigh, which he had neglected to mention to the police. It was shallow, already clotted and beginning to dry into a thin scab. He washed it, flushed it with alcohol, swabbed Merthiolate over it. In the main room, he completed the medication by pouring a glass of Jack Daniel's over two ice cubes, and sank down on the bed with the wonderful stuff. He usually consumed a fifth of it a day. Today, because of that damned banquet, he had been forced to stay off it. Drinking, he felt clean again. Alone with a bottle of good liquor was the only time he felt clean.
    He was pouring his second glassful over the same half-melted ice cubes when the telephone rang.
    When he first moved into the apartment, he had protested that he did not require a telephone, since no one would be calling him and since he had no wish to contact anyone else. Mrs Fiedling had not believed him, and envisioning a situation wherein she would become a messenger service for him, insisted on a telephone hook-up as a