Chase: Roman

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 condition of occupancy.
        That was long before she knew that he was a hero. It was even before he knew it.
        For months the phone went unused, except when she called up from downstairs to tell him mail had been delivered or to invite him to dinner. Since the announcement by the White House, however, since all the excitement about the medal, he received two and three calls a day, most of them from perfect strangers who offered congratulations he did not want or sought interviews for various publications he had never read. He cut most of them short. Thus far, no one had gall enough to ring him up this late at night, but he supposed he could never regain the solitude he had grown used to in those first months after his discharge.
        He considered ignoring the phone, concentrating on his Jack Daniel's until it had stopped crying. But when it had rung for the sixteenth time, he realized the caller was a good bit more persistent than he, and he answered it. ‘Hello?’
        ‘Chase?’
        ‘Yes.’
        ‘Do you know me?’
        ‘No,’ he said, unable to place the voice. The man sounded tired - but aside from that one clue, he might have been anywhere between twenty and sixty years old, fat or thin, tall or short.
        ‘How's your leg, Chase?’ His voice contained a hint of humour, though the reason for it escaped Chase.
        ‘Good enough,’ Chase said. ‘Fine.’
        ‘You're very good with your hands.’
        Chase said nothing, could not bring himself to speak, for he had begun to understand just what the call was all about.
        ‘Very good with your hands,’ the stranger repeated. ‘I guess you learned that in the army.’
        ‘Yes,’ Chase said.
        ‘I guess you learned a lot of things in the army, and I guess you think you can take care of yourself pretty well.’
        Chase said, ‘Is this you?’
        The man laughed, momentarily shaking off the dull tone of exhaustion. ‘Yes, it's me,’ he said. ‘I've got a badly bruised throat,