He went back to his seat at the rear of the screening theatre, and Daniel Kermak gave the signal for the projectionist to start the scene rolling. As the screen flickered and flashed into life, Anthony looked down towards Hilary Nestor Hunter and saw her staring back at him with a cold, thoughtful expression that strangely disturbed him.
On the screen, a jowly actor in a blue mohair suit said, ‘We have a problem here, Bradley. We have a problem and we have just twenty-four hours to solve it.’
*
Half an hour later, Hilary Nestor Hunter was sitting at the desk of a borrowed office. Her girls stood around her, adopting poses of studied indifference, and talked about the movie in tired Hollywood drawls.
She picked up the telephone, and dialled a a familiar number ‘Carl? It’s me. Can you talk?’
She paused, then she said, ‘I saw the cuts from the movie. It’s worse than you said. And Seiden’s going to promote it for all he’s worth. Well, sure. Absolutely. It’s the best thing you can do.’
She paused again, as she listened. Then she said, ‘I know. But you’ll never get him otherwise. He never goes out of the door without those two bodyguards. Well, sure. Sure. All right then, I’ll see you tomorrow night. Yes, and me too. You know I do. Goodbye, Carl.’
She set down he receiver, and then she picked it up again and dialled quickly. She was obviously put through to a recorded message, because she waited for a short while, and then she said, clearly and slowly, ‘Everything’s going as planned. He’s going to give the go-ahead. I’ll meet you on Sunday evening when it’s all over. Oh – and I’ve already paid off the cuckoo.’
She thought for a moment, in case there was anything else she wanted to add. But all she said was, ‘I love you,’ and then she set the phone down.
The girl with the dark close-cropped hair looked at her and gave a toothy, animal grin. Hilary reached for her cigarettes.
Twelve
Professor Sweetman invited them into his dark tiled hallway. Through a decorative grille at the far end of it, they could see into a courtyard overgrown with vines, where a dried-up stone fountain stood. There was a musty odour of tropical fungus, and a pervasive smell like cough-drops or camphor, as if there was an invalid in the house. Professor Sweetman led them through to a stale sitting-room, where two empty chairs in chintz covers stood facing a sadly worn settee. There were some watercolours of Egypt on the walls, both walls and paintings spotted with damp and neglect. On a roll-top bureau was a collection of brass crocodiles, engraved penholders, paperweights, chewed pencils and tobacco tins marked ‘paperclips’ or ‘thumbtacks’ or ‘?’ in magic marker.
‘You were lucky to catch me at home,’ said Professor Sweetman, patting his chest in search of his spectacles. I’m normally down at the laboratory these days. Very busy, you know. Big project.’
He found his spectacles on a circular copper table next to one of the chairs, and carefully wound them around his ears. He blinked first at John and then at Mel, and said, ‘Well, do sit down. Now you’ve caught me, you might as well take advantage of me.’
They sat side by side on the creaking settee. The hot sunlight from outside was filtered through slatted blinds of bamboo, and there was a timeless gloom about the room, as if they had found themselves in an old photograph. From another room in the house came the sound of a radio.
‘We’re sorry to come down here without an appointment,’ John said, ‘but we felt it was urgent, and we also felt it would be safer for all of us if we didn’t make any prior plans.’
‘Safer?’ asked Professor Sweetman vaguely. ‘Would you like a glass of Madeira wine?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Well, what do you mean by safer? I’m not sure that I understand.’
John took out his handkerchief and patted the sweat from his face. Professor Sweetman may have been a great scientist, but he didn’t seem to believe in new-fangled scientific equipment like air-conditioning. The air in the house was still, and uncomfortably warm.
‘I found out about the Sweetman Curve,’ said John. ‘I found out what it is, and what it’s being used for.’
He hoped he wasn’t overplaying his hand. For all he knew, Aaron Sweetman was the cold-blooded originator of the whole conspiracy. And if he wasn’t, the odds were high that he was deeply involved, and wouldn’t take kindly to interfering dog-walkers prying into his personal affairs.
There was a short silence. Professor Sweetman was pacing up and down the room now, searching for something else. He looked under magazines, and in drawers, and didn’t seem to be able to find it at all, whatever it was.
‘Go on, go on,’ he said.
John glanced at Mel and frowned. Mel shrugged, and looked as if he could do with a long cold beer.
‘That’s it. I know what’s going on.’
Professor Sweetman smiled. ‘In that case, I’m very glad for you. It’s a very interesting subject, isn’t it? The possibilities are quite endless. Did you know that, with the right data, we can now predict the rise and fall of most of the world’s stock markets?’
He sniffed. ‘I don’t suppose I ought to have told you that. It’s extremely secret. But it doesn’t really matter. Unless you know how to plot a predictive curve, it’s no use to you at all, that information. No use whatsoever. Do you know how to plot a predictive curve, Mr – er—?’
‘Cullen,’ said John. ‘John Cullen. And this is my friend Mel Walters. And I’m afraid that neither of us has much idea of how to plot a predictive curve.’
‘Oh,’ said Professor Sweetman. ‘Pity.’
He sat down opposite, and crossed one leg over the other, revealing a bony white ankle and a white tennis sock with perished elastic. He laced his fingers together, and beamed at his visitors. ‘Well, what can I do for you?’ he said.
John took a deep breath. ‘It’s hard to put this into words, Professor Sweetman. When it comes down to it, it doesn’t amount to very much more than a series of educated guesses, and we may be way ofE beam. The trouble is, we’ve been thinking about it so hard over the past week that it’s become very convincing to us. Whether or not we’ve convinced ourselves mistakenly is something that nobody can tell us but you. That’s why we’re here.’
Professor Sweetman nodded slowly. ‘I see,’ he said.
‘We’re not here on any kind of frivolous errand. Professor Sweetman,’ Mel put in. ‘John here lost his father last week in a shooting on the Los Angeles freeway, and his girlfriend died earlier this week in a fire.’
‘I see,’ said the professor. ‘Well, you must accept my condolences. You must be feeling very upset.’
‘What upsets me most of all, professor, is the reason why they died,’ John said. He looked at Sweetman as hard as he could. But all the old professor did in return was sadly shake his head, as if he was very sorry to hear the news, but quite innocent of any knowledge of killings or fires.
‘Can you think of a reason why they might have died?’ John asked him. ‘I mean, can you think of any reason at all?’
Professor Sweetman took off his spectacles. ‘Why, no. Of course not. I wasn’t even aware that they were alive, I’m afraid, let alone that they might have died.’
‘Oh, they were alive all right,’ said John. Mel touched his arm, warning him. This wasn’t the time for bitterness or anger or sarcasm. John said, ‘Sure, it doesn’t seem like your problem, professor. Not on the face of it. But Mel and I believe that somehow the Sweetman Curve was involved in my father’s death and in my girlfriends’ death, and in the deaths of a great many more people besides. In fact, we believe that the Sweetman Curve has been used to kill off hundreds of innocent people all over the United States.’
There was a stuffy, sweaty, and very awkward silence. Professor Sweetman coughed, and recrossed his legs. Upstairs, the radio burbled, and there was the added noise of someone vacuum cleaning.
At length. Professor Sweetman coughed again, and said, ‘That, Mr Cullen, all that, is a most extraordinary al
legation.’
‘I know,’ said John. ‘But some pretty extraordinary things have been happening. It isn’t every week you lose the two people most dear to you in all the whole damned world.’
‘Yes, I understand that, Mr Cullen, but you must appreciate that the Sweetman Curve is not a weapon. It can never be considered to be dangerous, in any way. It is simply a means of drawing a line on a graph which will closely predict the physiological and psychological development of a human being during most of his life. That is all it is. Only that, and nothing more, as Poe would have it.’
‘We know that,’ Mel said. ‘What we’re saying is that someone is using the curve to pick out people to kill.’
‘We’re not trying to suggest that you’ve killed anybody, professor,’ John quickly explained. ‘We’re simply saying that someone, somewhere, is using the Sweetman Curve as their plan of assassination. What we wanted to find out is if you could tell us how it was being done, and if you had any ideas who it could be.’
‘It couldn’t be anyone,’ asserted Professor Sweetman, in a sere voice.
‘Can you be sure of that?’
‘Of course I can. I have written several articles on the curve in specialized magazines, and I have presented some of my reasearch papers to the University of California at San Diago. But there is nobody on the entire planet who knows, apart from myself, how to programme a computer to plot out a Sweetman Curve. If anybody is guilty of your murders, Mr Cullen, then it is I, and that, of course, is patently ridiculous.’
‘You don’t have any research assistants who might have gotten hold of the details and passed them outside of your laboratory? Maybe by accident?’ John asked.
‘I have a team of five working in the university computer laboratory. All of them are exceptionally trustworthy, but quite apart from that there isn’t one of them who can prepare the necessary formulae without my guidance. This is rare stuff, Mr Cullen, highly progressive mathematics. It took an exceptional brain to work it out, if you don’t mind my saying so, and it will be quite a few years before anything but exceptional brains will be able to use it.’
John sat back on the old settee. He was beginning to feel very tired and strained. He had been able to keep down most of his exhaustion and his emotional pain while he felt there was something to go for, something to hunt, but now it looked as if he may have been wrong. The problem was: if the killings hadn’t been planned on a Sweetman Curve, then what on earth were they all for?
Professor Sweetman said, ‘I can see the temptation you’ve been feeling to blame something unusual and scientific for your father’s death, Mr Cullen. But I swear to you that I have never prepared a curve for the purpose of decimating the American people, and none of my clients’ curves could be used in that fashion. Besides that, every one of them is reputable to a fault.’
‘Clients?’ asked John. ‘I’m afraid that I don’t understand.’
‘Clients are clients. People who come here and ask for a service to be given, and who pay for it when they get it.’
‘What kind of service?’
‘Sweetman Curves, of course. What other service could I possibly provide?’ the professor said with some exasperation. ‘When I first published my articles in Analytical Medicine, I had one or two approaches from industry and other organisations, asking me to plot curves to help out their sales programmes, or whatever it was they were interested in. I said yes, of course. It means that I get a large quantity of interesting data to work with, and apart from that they pay me a considerable amount of money. It’s all tax-deductible to them, so they don’t stint. I’ve bought two new computers on the proceeds.’
John looked at Mel. In the closeness of the sitting-room, Mel was very red-faced and hot.
‘You’d be surprised at some of the household names I can count among my clients,’ the professor went on. ‘An automobile manufacturer, for instance, who wants to plan car designs for the next ten years. A cosmetic company. Two drug corporations, who want to know which illnesses are most likely to strike us down in the next twenty years. That kind of thing.’
‘Are there any – political clients?’ John asked, carefully.
Professor Sweetman slowly shook his head. ‘I really couldn’t divulge that. I’m not supposed to tell anybody anything, as a matter of fact. My clients do expect secrecy.’
‘You can’t even tell me if you have one client connected with politics, or with political sociology?’
‘Well, no, I couldn’t really.’
John said, as evenly as he could, ‘Has it occurred to you that if you do have a political client, this might be the person we’re looking for? Or have you carefully evaded any idea that you could be responsible for some of the most brutal killings this country has ever seen?’
Professor Sweetman pursed his lips. ‘All of my clients are reputable. That’s all I intend to say. Why, you can’t expect—’
‘I expect you to face up to what you could be doing, that’s all,’ insisted John. ‘If you do have a politician for a client, then for Christ’s sake tell us. You may not think that your curve is dangerous, but then you’re a nice professor from San Diego whose mind doesn’t work the way that politicians’ minds do. What looks to you like nice, clean, useful information can look like a blacklist to someone else. Or even worse, a deathlist.’
Professor Sweetman stood up awkwardly. His face was pale, and he tugged off his spectacles in annoyance.
‘Mr Cullen, you’ve abused my hospitality,’ he said. ‘When you came in here, I expected a discussion of my work and my progress, not this trumped-up harangue. You’re talking absolute nonsense, and offensive nonsense, too. I must ask you to leave.’
Unexpectedly, a buzzer sounded in the hallway outside. Professor Sweetman turned towards it, and then turned back to John and Mel.
‘I don’t know what you’re trying to prove against me, but I warn you that it’s all quite ridiculous, and if you persist in this slander I’ll have you in court.’
The buzzer sounded again. Professor Sweetman took a step towards the door, but then John said, ‘Listen, Professor Sweetman, I don’t think you realise how serious this is. I don’t think you understand just how many people are dying. It isn’t just my father and my girl-friend. It’s hundreds of innocent people in towns all over America. People who don’t even know that they’ve done anything wrong.’
‘I haven’t heard about wholesale killing in America, Mr Cullen, so I don’t even know if you’re telling the truth. Perhaps you’re just trying to wring the name of my political client out of me. You could be anyone. I haven’t even seen any proof of your identity.’
‘So you do have a political client?’
‘What?’ blinked Professor Sweetman.
‘You said I was just trying to wring the name of your political client out of you. You said it as if you actually had one.’
The buzzer sounded again, twice. Professor Sweetman said, flustered, ‘This is all quite ridiculous, Mr Cullen. You’ll have to go. My wife—’
‘Professor,’ threatened John, ‘if you don’t tell me the name of your political client right now, I’m going straight to the San Diego police to make complaints that you’re involved in a murder conspiracy.’
Professor Sweetman said desperately, ‘This is a nightmare! You can’t go around saying things like that! I believe you’re mad!’
Mel shook his head, slow and easy. ‘He’s not mad. Professor. He’s just trying to find the truth in a pretty horrifying situation. Don’t you think it’s better to tell us?’
At that moment, a slight figure in white appeared in the doorway. It was a woman of at least sixty, in a floor-length nightdress. Her white hair was tied back in a white ribbon, which emphasised the waxy appearance of her skin and the unhealthy prominence of her cheekbones. Her blue eyes were faded, as if they had been bleached for years by the sun.
‘Mima, you shouldn’t have come down,’ said Professor Sweetman, going to her side and taking her arm. ‘Y
ou could have fallen.’
The woman gave a faint smile. ‘I’m sure you would have picked me up, Aaron. I heard voices. Were you having an argument?’
‘These gentlemen were on the point of leaving,’ said Professor Sweetman. ‘They came here under a misapprehension. They mistook me for someone else.’
‘It sounded like a very loud misapprehension,’ said Mrs Sweetman. ‘Did you offer them a glass of wine?’
‘They’re leaving,’ insisted Professor Sweetman.
John turned to him. He didn’t know for sure that Professor Sweetman had a political client, but it seemed like a sure bet. He said, in a low and level voice, ‘A lot of people are counting on you for their lives, professor. Are you going to change your mind?’
Professor Sweetman lifted his head obstinately. ‘No, Mr Cullen, I am not. Now, you must leave. My wife is seriously ill, and her doctors say that she has to rest.’
‘All right,’ John nodded. ‘But don’t think it ends here. And if you do change your mind, here’s my telephone number in L.A.’
Professor Sweetman took the hotel card and tore it up into small pieces. Mima Sweetman looked at him with a concerned frown, but said nothing. She had obviously trusted him all her life, and her trust wasn’t going to fail her now. She linked her arm through his, and watched John and Mel walk out of the sitting-room and back down the corridor.
*
From a green Buick Regal on the corner of Fairmount and University Avenue, T.F. watched them leave the Sweetman house and pause for a moment on the lawn. He cursed softly under his breath. It had been a lousy day all round. First he’d messed up the hit on the highway, and now Cullen and Walters had chosen the exact moment a cop was giving them a parking ticket to walk out of the house.
He glanced across at the passenger seat where his Colt .45 automatic was hidden under a pale grey cardigan he’d found in the car when he stole it from a parking lot not far from Miramar Naval Air Station. He’d been lucky to hitch a ride off the highway, at least. But he was going to take great pleasure in blowing a hole in that fat bearded Walters. Nobody made T.F. look like an asshole and got away with it.
The Sweetman Curve Page 28
