“Maybe I was wrong.”
“Dolores, it’s a great opportunity for me.”
She came over and leaned her cheek against my cravat. “I don’t like the idea of being away from you that long.”
I was about to lead her into the bedroom, when I heard the phone. I cursed and walked down the hall to answer it. I heard the refrigerator open behind me, then Dolores shouted, “Tell Bernie I think his idea stinks!”
It wasn’t Bernie. It was a middle-aged man with sweeping salt-and pepper sideburns. A roll of flesh under his jaw obscured his chin. His mouth, angry, and his eyes, glowering, startled me.
“Mr. Collins?”
I considered denying the accusation. “Yes.”
“My name is H. Winton Tuttle.” He waited. By his bearing, I knew I was supposed to react to his name, to exclaim, “Oh, Mr. Tuttle.” Presumably, to grovel. “Nice meeting you.” I started to hang up.
“I have tried, Mr. Collins, repeatedly, to contact Mr. Duff.”
“He isn’t here.”
“I’m aware of that.” His tone, a mincing sort of monotone, annoyed me. “After trying numerous times, I realized Mr. Duff did not wish to speak with me.”
I could see why. “What can help you with?”
“You visited my father-in-law this morning, did you not?”
Father-in-law? Other than Mr. Merryweather and Duff, I had visited only Smith. H. Winton Tuttle. “H”? It was Harold, the banker.
“Your father-in-law’s Smith?”
“Yes. I wanted to tell Mr. Duff, and I do tell you, I absolutely forbid you to hire him for this insane business. You know what happened the last time.”
“No.”
“Ask Duff. I forbid it! Mr. Smith is an old man. He—”
“He does look over eighteen.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“He can make his own decisions.”
“He is seventy-five years old, Mr. Collins …” It was still over eighteen. “And too old to be taking this kind of a job.”
I started to say that Smith seemed inclined to refuse our offer, but Harold cut me off, working himself up.
“Oh, I know about the past, Mr. Collins. Janet and I have worried ourselves sick about him. That time in Tangier—horrible—he came home with scars all over his back and a broken clavicle, he—”
“From what?”
“He wouldn’t say. He just shrugged and said, ‘You should have seen the other guy.’ And that trip to Hank’ou—”
“You worried.”
“We didn’t even know he was gone. Three broken fingers …” Harold held them up like a Boy Scout salute. I felt like returning it but restrained myself. “And a ruptured appendix.”
“A ruptured appendix?”
“He denied it had anything to do with the trip, but I know different.”
“You do.”
“Rice isn’t healthy, Mr. Collins. I tell you these things to impress upon you that I will not have it! If you and Duff persist, remember, I have lawyers, Mr. Collins, very good lawyers!”
He hung up. Dolores wandered into the living room with a casserole dish in one hand, packing vegetables into place.
“Who was that?”
“Crank call.” The phone hummed again. Dolores reached for it. I intervened. “I’ll get it. Busy day. What’s for dinner?”
“It’s a vegetable and rice casserole.”
“Rice’s unhealthy.”
She glanced at the dish, frowning. “Bobby, it is as healthy as—”
“Let me get the phone.” I answered it.
It was a big day for strangers. “Mr. Collins?”
The man’s face, as corpulent as Harold’s but somehow healthier, seemed calm. I knew who it was. First one stranger calls, irate, threatening me with his lawyer, then another stranger calls. Two plus two. The lawyer.
“You’re Tuttle’s lawyer,” I snarled.
“Who?”
That got me. He really was a stranger. “Pardon me. My mistake. What can I do for you?”
“My name’s Parry. I would like to talk to you. You are Robert Collins of Merryweather Enterprises?”
“Yes.”
“I had expected—” He shook his head. “Never mind.”
“You expected what?”
“Someone older.”
“Nope. Just me, the punk kid.” Having my chronological age impugned twice in one day angered me.
“I didn’t mean to upset you, Mr. Collins.”
“You didn’t. Talk away.”
“In private, personally, if that’s possible.” His tone was businesslike and efficient.
“Concerning what?”
“I may be able to offer you certain technical assistance.”
Suddenly, it hit me. I was, after all, the Merryweather Enterprize’s new chief project engineer. Project engineers order material. Parry was a salesman, the first of how many?
“I’m not interested, Mr. Parry. At least not now. You can leave any literature you have for me at the Merryweather Building. I have to get my feet on the ground before—”
“Off the ground,” corrected Dolores, listening to the conversation.
“You misunderstand, Mr. Collins. I’m not selling, I’m giving.”
“What?”
“That’s what I warded to talk to you about.”
“Fishy,” said Dolores.
“Pardon me?” said Parry.
“This casserole dish smells fishy.”
“Mr. Collins,” continued Parry, “this will take very little of your time. Perhaps, lunch, tomorrow.”
“Actually, I have quite a few things to do tomorrow, it—”
“It will be, I promise, to our mutual benefit. Do you know the Civic Center Shopping Mall in Newport Beach?”
“Yes.”
“I will be at the Vier Jahreszeiten—you do like German food?”
“I prefer Mexican,” I said. Dolores smiled.
“I will be there after twelve o’clock. I hope you will come.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Can I come, too?” asked Dolores. I flapped my hand at her out of camera range, trying to get her to shut up. I had no intention of eating sauerkraut and Schwarzwalder Rehrikken for lunch, much less talking to Parry.
“Bobby,” insisted Dolores. “I like German food.”
“You’re certainly welcome to come, Miss Gomez,” said Parry.
That stopped me. He knew Dolores’ name. I had heard of salesmen researching potential customers, but Dolores was none of his business.
“How did you—”
“I’m looking forward to seeing you, Mr. Collins.” He hung up.
Dolores walked back down the hall, singing something that would probably have passed for “Ich hab’ mein Hertz in Heidelberg verloren.” Cocky. Undergraduate language major—Spanish, German. I started after her, deciding how to explain. Lunch tomorrow was out. The phone hummed again.
“If that’s Bernie,” shouted Dolores from the kitchen, “invite him to lunch tomorrow. With Connie and the kids. We’ll make your man Parry’s expense account work for its living.”
“You think he was a salesman?”
“What else?”
I answered the phone. It was Smith.
V
“This is what I want you to do between now and Tuesday,” began Smith, talking even before his face settled on the screen. “Find out everything you can about Norton’s work. I want to be able to pinpoint where he was on any given problem—”
“Smith.”
“Don’t interrupt—at any given time. I want to know who he talked to, when he talked to them and what about. I want—”
“Smith.”
He stopped, staring at me, annoyed at the interruption, “What is it?”
“Norton kept everything in his head.”
“I know. I want you to take those progress reports and correlate them with the security recordings of his phone calls from the Mer
ryweather Enterprize.”
“What you need is a clerk, not an engineer.”
“Then—”
“Wait a minute.”
“Then I want—”
“Wait a minute!”
“What?”
“First of all, Norton worked up there”—I jabbed my thumb at the ceiling—“for fourteen months. Say he made ten calls a day. That’s over four thousand calls. Second—”
“Use the computer at the Merryweather Building. I cleared two hours on it for you tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”
“With what they’re paying you, you don’t have any Saturdays.”
He had me there. “But why me?”
“It’s got to be you. No one else would understand the conversations.”
“You’re assuming I would. Second,” I said before he could rumble over me. I paused to see if he would interrupt.
“Go on.”
“Second, I thought you were retired.”
His intense expression broke, replaced by a wide grin, deep crow’s-feet corrugating his temples. He leaned back in his chair, cradling his head in his hands, grinning at me between his elbows, a man with all the time in the world. When he spoke, his voice was folksy and languid. “I am, my boy. Us retired folks got plenty of time on our hands. Them pigeons can only eat so many cee-gars. I told Horace—good ol’ boy, that Horace—I told him I’d look around. Nothing like a missing cadaver to perk up a man’s interest.”
“What’s so important about Tuesday?”
“That, buddy boy, is when we’re visiting your little floating junk-box.” He jerked his thumb at the top of the screen, mimicking me. “Up there.”
“Tuesday.”
“Yep. That is, if you can pass the physical Monday.” He beamed almost childishly. “I can.”
“So can I, Smith. You said ‘we’.”
“I did, Roberto.” I smiled. Somewhere he had picked up my first name. Probably from Duff. He leaned forward, lowering his arms to the table in front of him. The old man pose disappeared, his voice returning to normal. “I want to know everything about Norton. I want to know him better than his wife.”
“That shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Oh?”
“Talk to Duff about it.”
“Duff?” He paused, thought and grinned. “That old devil.”
“It’s just a rumor.”
Smith chuckled. “OK, and tell me anything unusual that happens to you, too. You’re Norton’s successor.”
“Lately, that covers most things. But there was—”
“What?”
“Probably not important.”
“Who knows what’s important? Try me.”
“Someone named Parry called and wanted to make a lunch appointment with me.”
“Parry.” He said the name in a flat tone, thinking. “Never heard of him.”
“Neither have I.”
“I’ll see what I can turn up.”
“And—”
“And what?”
“Harold called.”
Smith exploded, this time playing neither the retired old man nor the cranky old man. “That meddling son-of-a-bitch! If he calls you again, hang up!”
“Sorry I mentioned it.”
Smith churned a few moments, trying to control himself, then calmed down. “Excuse me. Get that correlation done as quick as you can.”
He hung up.
I called Duff, verified Smith’s authority to give orders and my access to the Merryweather computer. A technician would be getting overtime to help me lay in the program. When I got off the phone, Dolores was dressed to go out.
“I thought we were having that casserole?”
“No. We’re celebrating.”
Any excuse to avoid cooking. She led me out the front door. Behind me, I thought I heard the phone hum.
Saturday morning at nine, I was inside the Merryweather computer center. The day outside—what I saw of it hurrying from the mono station to the building—invited anything but mental work. I had expected a dreary morning, the technician and I, alone in a silent building. Instead, I had trouble finding her among all the people. Merryweather Enterprises functions twenty-four hours a day. The sun, they tell me, never sets on the empire.
I found the technician, a middle-aged woman with frizzy hair and the face of a Pekingese, watching a comic viewer, chortling when the quick-witted rabbit thumped the dull-witted dog. She proved brighter than she looked. She converted Norton’s phone calls to a program in half an hour: “to,” “from,” and with my help, “subject.” She seemed to think the task was a laughable waste of valuable computer time. I admitted it was a borderline case. Too long to do by hand, too short to do by computer. Norton made 7.23 calls per day in fourteen months, she informed me proudly. I thanked her. I didn’t care, but I thanked her.
The progress reports were harder. Summaries, they had to be broken into a chronological table of events for each report, then programmed. I tried various ways of cross-indexing—people, subject, time of day—anything. Graphed, little knots of people clustered around each step in development, names dropping out with each problem solved, names being added with each new problem. Only when I asked for random associations—calls deviating from the cluster pattern—did anything startling appear. Toward the end of the period on the timeline marked “Interface Phase Shift,” one item stood out,—“lone” is always random—a name, Parry.
“Get me this tape, will you?”
Hilda, the technician, grumbled about not being an errand girl and disappeared. She returned with the tape. I dropped it into the playback slot on the phone. A split screen showed Parry and someone I had never seen.
“Norton,” I said, adjusting to his gaunt face. Somehow, I had pictured Norton as healthy. His mind—incisive, sharp, brilliant—suggested a sound body. His appearance on the tape—haggard, dark circles under his eyes, a nervous habit of pinching his lower lip between his teeth and chewing it—suggested overwork and neurosis. Would I look like that in a year?
“What do you want, Parry?” said
Norton, his tone condescending. “Mr. Norton. I — “
“Dr, Norton.”
Parry nodded, tolerant. “I just called, Doctor, to remind you of our appointment.”
“Listen, Parry… I’m perfectly capable of remembering my appointments. I am not some doddering old imbecile.”
“No one suggested you were.”
“Saturday. Noon. Four Seasons. Right?”
“Yes. Vier Jahreszeiten. You will be there?”
“I’ll be there.” Norton hung up. I withdrew the tape. I sent Hilda home and waited for Smith.
He arrived in red and white houndstooth slacks and an off-white shirt. Spiffy. He threaded his way through the computer center crowd, waving and smiling when he saw me.
“What ya got there, buddy boy?” he asked, noticing the tape disk in my hand.
“Maybe nothing.”
“Play it.”
I played it. Smith watched, studying Norton as much as Parry. Concentrating, he puffed out his cheeks, slowly releasing the air, musing. I watched over his shoulder. Parry reminded Norton of the appointment. Norton chewed out Parry. The tape ended.
“Play it again,” said Smith.
“Again?”
“It takes a while for us doddering old imbeciles to absorb things.”
I played it. Smith watched, cheeks puffing. The tape stopped. Smith looked up at me.
“How about lunch?”
“OK. Where?”
“Vier Jahreszeiten.”
“You’re sure Parry will pick up the tab for both of us.”
“I can’t make it.”
“But—”
He rested one brown hand on the phone. “I’ve got to stay here and get to know Norton.”
“Don’t you think you’d do better to find out where Norton’s body went?”
Smith shrugged. “What’s in a body? It’s the
man I want to know. First things first. First, we find out why they snatched him—assuming he wasn’t just mislaid—then we know where and who.” He pulled the tape disk from the phone and began tossing it in the air like a coin. It hopped in front of my eyes, spinning, and fell into his palm.
“Did you know,” he began, flipping the disk, relaxing and watching it, “that Fenton Laser Products employs Parry?”
“No.”
“Did you know that Golden Star Hotels owns the controlling interest in Fenton?”
“No.”
“It does.”
“Good for them.”
“Did you know that Wentworth Foundry, Inc. owns Golden Star?”
“Ducky.”
He named several more companies, each owning the next, working his way up the pyramid. I began to lose both track and interest.
“And Farmer Electronics owns Palmer Tantalum, did you know that?”
“Smith.”
“Hm-m-m?” He flipped the disk. “How long do these begats go on?”
“A far piece, buddy boy. It kept me up till past an old man’s bedtime. I want you to appreciate that.”
“Did your teddy bear get cold without you?”
“Nope. And Farmer Electronics is owned, predominantly, by Rosecrantz Boatyard.”
“A boatyard?”
“It’s a holding company. And Rosecrantz—”
“OK, OK.” I flapped my hands at him, trying to silence him. “Enough. I’m going to lunch, since that’s what you seem to want me to do.”
“Yep. You’ll like it as long as—” He flipped the disk, watched it spin, and caught it.
“As long as what?”
“As long as they don’t have that damn oom-pah band going. That fat burgher on the tuba can deafen at a quarter mile.”
I started across the computer center toward the door, beginning to doubt Mr. Merryweather’s wisdom in hiring Smith. Norton’s body was out there someplace. Smith was supposed to find it. Instead, he was climbing some meaningless corporate family tree. The tree grew without bearing fruit. At the door, I heard my name being called over the din of voices and footsteps. I looked back. Smith was standing on his chair, hands cupped around his mouth, shouting at me.
“What?” I yelled, holding my hand to my ear, and feeling foolish. Smith’s voice reached me.
“And Rosecrantz is owned by Spieler Interstellar!”
The tuba oom-pahed. I looked around the restaurant for Parry, hoping enough wax remained in my ears to protect the drums. I checked the beerhall attached to the restaurant, looking from face to face at the long tables of swaying bodies. Someone whooped, stood, poured beer on his neighbor’s head. Neither one was Parry. Steins, held aloft, sloshed to the music. Groups of people, arms interlocked, rocked from side to side. A noon beerbust is something less than my ideal spot to talk business.
Stargate Page 5
