Man on a Leash - Charles Williams(4)

“Well, you’re pretty cool yourself, Hotshot,” Romstead said.
While he didn’t like any of it, he still didn’t want to scare her
over what so far was just a feeling. “But don’t let it go to your
head. If there are prowlers working those apartments, keep the
chain on your door the way I told you, and don’t let anybody in
until you’ve finished the first two volumes of his biography. I’ll
call you tomorrow, and I’ll be back early tomorrow night.”
They talked a few minutes more, and as soon as he’d hung up,
he put in a call to Murdock. His answering service said Mr.
Murdock wasn’t at his office or at home yet, but that he should
report in shortly. Romstead gave her the number of the motel.
“Ask him to call me as soon as he comes in.”
All he could do then was wait. And wonder about it. Too many
things were wrong with the picture, Naturally, any prowler
could get names off the mailboxes down below, but this guy
wasn’t some punk who’d wandered in off the street with a strip
Man on a Leash — 69

Man on a Leash - Charles Williams(3)

“There was never any question of marriage. I was in no hurry
to be married again, and certainly not to him, and he said from
the start he’d never try it again, that he wasn’t cut out for
domesticity—which I could see even then was probably the
understatement of the century.
“I have no doubt he had another girl, or perhaps several of
them at different times, in San Francisco, but whether she or
one of them was Jeri Bonner, I don’t think so. She was only
twenty-four, for one thing, and surprisingly, he didn’t go for
very young women. I know this is contrary to the classic pattern
of the aging stud, needing younger and younger girls to get it
off the runway, but maybe he was saving that phase for his
eighties and nineties; his theory was that no woman under thirty
even knew what it was all about. And there was the drugs; if she
was using heroin, he wouldn’t have had anything to do with her
at all.”
And still the stuff had been in the house, and she’d known it
was and just where to find it, Romstead thought. You never
came up with any answers, only more questions. And though he
liked her, the sexy Mrs.

Man on a Leash - Charles Williams(2)

“Oh, no, that wasn’t it. It was just that he took a dim view of
the whole overblown ritual and what he considered the funeral
industry’s exploitation of family grief. Said it’d do them good
now and then to have to deal with a hardheaded businessman
who was still alive. So he picked out the cheapest package they
had, beat them down to the rock-bottom price, and paid it and
gave me the receipt. I pointed out that since he’d probably live
to a hundred and ten, he was losing the interest on the money,
but he said with the chronic rate of inflation he wasn’t losing a
cent. And he was right, when you stop to think of it.”
“Yeah. And then the same man’s supposed to have gone
wandering around the streets of San Francisco like some kind of
nut with a suitcase full of money.”
Bolling spread his hands. “The same man.”
Romstead stood up. “Well, thanks for filling me in, Mr.
Bolling. I won’t take up any more of your time.”
“We’ll be in touch with you. Are you going back to San
Francisco right away?”

Man on a Leash by Charles Williams 1973(1)

1
Dawn was just breaking when he pulled into town after the latenight
drive from San Francisco, and it would be hours yet before
officialdom was astir. A boy in an all-night service station
worried the spattered insects off his windshield while the tank
was being filled and told him how to find the cemetery. It was
about two miles south of the city limits, he said, and if he
wondered why an out-of-state license wanted to visit Coleville’s
burying ground at this strange hour, he made no mention of it.
Romstead wasn’t sure himself, since he had no flowers to
deposit on the grave and would have felt too uncomfortable and
self-conscious in such a lavender gesture anyway, knowing the
Rabelaisian laughter this would have evoked in the departed.
Maybe he simply had to see the grave before he could accept it.
Certainly Sergeant Crowder’s few facts over the telephone
had sounded as improbable as a bad television script, and the
big stud was indestructible anyway. Nobody who’d survived
waterfront brawls, typhoons, picket-line battles, a lifetime of
exuberant and extramarital wenching, torpedoings, western
ocean gales, and fourteen months on the Murmansk run in
World War II could have got himself killed in this plastic desert
town on the edge of nowhere. And not merely killed, Crowder
had said, but executed.