Chase: Roman

school?’
        ‘I graduated in June,’ she said. ‘I'm going to college in the fall, to Penn State.’
        Wallace said. ‘Who was the boy?’
        ‘Mike. Michael Karnes.’
        ‘Just a boyfriend, or you engaged?’
        ‘Boyfriend,’ she said. ‘We'd been going together for about a year, kind of steady.’
        ‘What were you doing on Kanackaway Ridge Road?’ Wallace asked.
        She looked at him, levelly this time. ‘What do you think?’
        ‘Look,’ Chase interjected, ‘is this really necessary? The girl wasn't involved in it. I think the man with the knife might have tried for her next if I - hadn't stopped him.’
        Wallace turned more toward Chase. He said, ‘How'd you happen to be there in the first place?’
        ‘Just out driving,’ Chase said.
        Wallace looked at him a long moment, then said, ‘What's your name?’
        ‘Benjamin Chase.’
        ‘I thought I'd seen you before,’ the detective said. His manner softened immediately. ‘Your picture was in the papers today.’
        Chase nodded.
        ‘That-was really something you did over there,’ Wallace said. ‘That really took guts.’
        ‘It wasn't as much as they make out,’ Chase said.
        ‘I'll bet it wasn't!’ Wallace said, though it was clear that he thought it must even have been more than the papers had made it. He turned to the girl, who had taken a new interest in Chase, studying him from the corners of her eyes. His tone toward her had changed too. He said, ‘You want to tell me about it, just how it happened?’
        She did, losing some of her composure in the process. Twice Chase thought that she was going to cry, and he wished that she would have. Her cold manner, so soon afterward, made him uneasy. Maybe she was still trying to deny the existence of death. She held the tears back, and by the time she had finished she was herself again.
        ‘You saw his face?’ Wallace asked.
        ‘Yes.’
        ‘Can you describe him?’
        ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘He had brown eyes, I think.’
        ‘No moustache or beard?’
        ‘I don't think so.’
        ‘Long sideburns or short?’
        ‘Short, I think.’
        ‘Any scars?’
        ‘No.’
        ‘Anything at all memorable about him, the shape of his face, whether his hair was receding or full, anything?’
        ‘I can't remember,’ she said.
        Chase said, ‘When I got to her, she was in a state of shock. I doubt that she was seeing anything and registering it properly.’
        Instead of a grateful agreement, Louise turned an angry look at him. He remembered, too late, that the worst thing for someone Louise's age was to lose your cool, to fail to cope. He had betrayed her momentary lapse to, of all people, a policeman. 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