Chase: Roman

The barmaid who waited on him said that Blentz was expected in at two o'clock. Chase sat in a corner booth, watching the door, and nursed his drink while he waited.
        It was all for nothing. When Blentz arrived at a quarter to three, wearing a white linen suit and a blue shirt that looked slept-in, he was quite willing to accept a drink from Chase and to talk, but he had never employed anyone who fit Judge's description and could not, offhand, think of a friend or regular customer who might be Chase's man.
        ‘You know how it is,’ he said. ‘Different people every night. Even the regulars change every six months or so.’
        ‘I guess,’ Chase said, unable to hide his disappointment. He finished his drink and got up.
        ‘What do you want him for?’ Blentz asked. ‘He owe you some money?’
        ‘Just the opposite,’ Chase said. ‘I owe him.’
        ‘How much?’
        Twenty bucks,’ Chase lied. ‘You still don't know him?’
        ‘I said I didn't.’ Blentz turned around on his stool. He said, ‘How did you go about borrowing twenty bucks from him without learning his name?’
        Chase said, ‘We were both drunk. If either of us had been a bit more sober, I wouldn't have forgotten that.’
        ‘And if he'd been sober, maybe he wouldn't have loaned the money,’ Blentz said. He laughed at his own joke and picked his drink up from the bar.
        ‘Perhaps,’ Chase said.
        As he walked across the tavern and out the door into the mall, he knew that Eric Blentz was still twisted away from the bar on his stool and was watching him.
        He supposed that Blentz might know someone who matched the description but was simply not going to talk about it until he understood a bit more of the situation. Whatever Blentz's background was prior to his ownership of the tavern, it was not the sort of mundane existence most people had. He was not naive and gullible like everyone else Chase had questioned, and he had a canny sense of the law. However, even if Blentz were concealing something, there was no way for Chase to squeeze the information out of him, for Blentz was a private citizen, and Chase was in no way a licenced authority.
        He started the car and drove home.
        He was not shot at.
        In his room, he turned on the television, watched it for fifteen minutes, turned it off before the programme was finished, opened a paperback book, which he found he could not concentrate on, and spent a good deal of time pacing from one wall to the other. Instinctively, he stayed away from his window.
        
        At six-thirty Chase left the house to keep his date with Glenda Kleaver. When he unlocked the door of the Mustang, he discovered that Judge had been around and had left a message behind for him. The content of the message was clear, though it was wordless. Judge had taken a knife to the smooth vinyl upholstery of the driver's seat, had slashed it so many times that the white stuffing poured out like foam.
        He would have liked to believe that the vandalism was completely unrelated to Judge and that he had merely been the innocent victim of some neighbourhood juvenile delinquent with a batch of unbearable frustrations to work out of his system. You heard about that kind of thing nearly every day, after all. They smashed car windows for nothing more than the sound the safety glass made when it splintered. They broke off radio antennae for fun, let the air out of tyres and then slashed them to pieces, poured sand and sugar in the gas tank. Besides, this was something much more readily explained as the pointless protest of some acned adolescent full of misdirected energy than as the carefully considered act of a grown man. An unrepentant murderer would hardy get any thrill out of destruction of property like this.
        Yet he knew it was Judge, despite his unvoiced protestations to the contrary.
        The delinquent would have slashed all the seats once he had taken the risk of ruining one of them, and he would surely have carried off the stereo tape deck that lay just under the dash, the favourite booty of the young criminal. The delinquent would never have taken the time to lock the door again before leaving. That had been a touch meant to explain the exact conditions of the situation. This had been Judge's work. He had braved the early evening light to use a coat hangar to pop the lock, had worked over the single seat as thoroughly