Chase: Roman

of thing Saturdays. I never knew his name, never saw him.’
        ‘And this was the man who made a pass at Mike?’
        ‘Yeah. I only heard about it a year later. Mike pulled his marks up and scraped into State as a day student, and I went away to Pitt. Neither of us wrote much, but we always got together when I came home over weekends or on holidays. In February we double-dated with these red-headed twins Mike knew from State, very nice stuff. On our way back to the city, after we'd let them off for the night, he told me about this character who was following him everywhere he went.’
        ‘His physics tutor?’
        ‘That's right.’
        ‘What did Mike tell you about him; even the smallest detail might be more important than it seems.’
        Cable squinted his eyes, licked his lips. He said, ‘He quit the Saturday morning tutoring sessions because this guy kept trying to convince him there would be nothing wrong in their going to bed together. That had been nearly a year earlier, when we were both seniors. Since then, Mike said, this guy kept bothering him, periodically, trying to talk to him. He always hung up when the guy called. So then he started following Mike everywhere he went, a real creep.’
        ‘But you don't remember his name?’
        ‘No.’
        ‘Not even first name.’
        ‘Not even that much.’
        ‘Nickname?’
        ‘Mike certainly wasn't on nickname terms with him!’
        ‘I suppose not.’
        That's it,’ Cable said. He laced his hands together and cracked his knuckles. ‘I wish there was more.’
        ‘I think that's enough, just what I needed,’ Chase said.
        ‘Good.’ Cable turned from Chase, tossed his head to flip his thick hair out of his face, smiled at Glenda. He said, ‘You've got fantastic legs.’
        ‘Thank you,’ she said.
        
        The sun made her seem like a mirage, heat waves rippling up from the pavement as she walked toward the car. She was beautiful, Chase thought, and Cable had been right about her legs. He wondered, suddenly, whether he would ever help her fulfil the promise of her body, be a man to her in bed. He quickly avoided further thoughts of that nature as she got into the car.
        ‘You're lovely,’ he said.
        ‘My God, a compliment!’ she said in mock surprise. ‘I thought I wouldn't hear one of those more than every other day or so.’
        ‘I don't verbalize well,’ he said. ‘But that boy made me jealous. I saw how your face lighted when he said he liked your legs.’
        ‘I may be a liberated woman, but I still have an ego.’
        ‘I'll try to do better by it,’ he said, touching her bare knee. The flesh was cool and firm. It generated such a powerful mixture of desire and guilt that he quickly let go of her. ‘Did you get it?’
        She opened an envelope and took out six mimeographed sheets. ‘A list of all the teachers in the system, high school and junior high schools and grade schools.’
        ‘Address and phone number for each name,’ he said. ‘How did you do it?’
        ‘A trick I learned from being around reporters too much.’ She leaned forward and punched the lighter in the dash, took a cigarette from her purse, started it smoking. She took one deep drag and then was content to hold it. ‘I met the Superintendent of Schools and passed myself off as the representative of a commercial mailing-list firm. He was so frustrated about having to work the summer while the teachers had off and so surprised to have a chance to talk to a nice young woman in a miniskirt, that he didn't question why we were doing business first-hand rather than by mail. I wrote a check on my personal account to pay for the list, and I didn't even have to explain that. Twenty-five dollars for name and address and telephone number of nearly three hundred employees - and they've probably sold the list half a dozen times so far this year, always for better money than that.’
        He shook his head admiringly. ‘With that sort of mind, you don't really need those legs.’
        ‘Wrong.’
        ‘Wrong?’
        ‘Without the legs to look at, he would have been thinking more clearly. There would have been a number of very embarrassing questions.’
        Chase gave the list back to her. ‘Thanks to your legs, we're getting closer to home base.’
        ‘You really think he's a physics teacher?’
        ‘It fits in a lot of ways. Including