“Hiya, buddy boy. What’s for dinner?”
We fed Smith, watching him devour half the roast. He talked incessantly, stabbing carrots and dissecting beef, complimenting Dolores on the food, me on Dolores and himself on his appetite.
“Pretty good,” he said, sitting back from his empty plate, “for an old man. I can still put it away with the best of them.”
“Do you always eat like that?”
“Only when I’m working.”
“When you’re not working, you eat like a sparrow.”
“Actually, it just tastes better when I’m working.”
Dolores placed a scooner of butterscotch ice cream in front of him.
“Gracias.”
“De nada.”
“Why did you come by this afternoon?” I asked.
He puckered around the cold ice cream. “No stone unturned and all that.”
I started to protest. The idea of Smith investigating me was incredible. Robert Collins, shifty-eyed superspy. I have enough trouble just being a shifty-eyed engineer. Smith waved his spoon at me, stifling my protest until he could swallow his ice cream.
“You’re clean.”
“I am?”
“Yes.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Smith concentrated on his ice cream. Stuffed, I ate mine slowly, thinking about him. The more I thought, the less I understood. Seventy-five, retired, reluctant to accept this job, then suddenly eager. Mr. Merryweather thought him indispensable. Duff thought him a menace. What did I think? I didn’t know.
I asked him why he took the job.
“I told you. It’s better than feeding pigeons.”
“You don’t like pigeons?”
“Nope. Lazy birds.” He finished his ice cream and pulled out a cigar. “Mind if I smoke?”
“Go ahead. You weren’t going to take the job when ‘Duff and I talked to you.”
“Changed my mind.” He found a match, struck it, lit the cigar and puffed.
“Why?”
“Bobby,” said Dolores, sitting down and turning on the coffee pot, “it’s really none of, your business.”
“If he can go around sticking his nose in my business, I can ask a few questions, can’t I?”
“He,” answered Dolores, “gets paid to stick his nose in your business.”
“She’s got you there, buddy boy.”
I grunted. “Have you been sticking your nose in Duff’s business?”
“He’s clean, too.”
“You’re sure.”
“Other than a little fooling around with Sharon Norton, yes.”
I told him about Burgess’ accusation.
“That paranoid!”
“He’s only paranoid if no one’s actually after him.”
“True. But Duff’s still clean. The only stock Duff owns, other than Merryweather stock, is two shares of Pan Am he got from an aunt—worth, broadly speaking, a penny and a half. They say Pan Am’s going up, though. Souvenir value. Duffs persnickety—that may look subversive to a mind like Burgess’—but he’s loyal to Horace.”
“Duff once said something about you almost ‘getting’ him. He showed me a scar you gave him on his eyebrow. What was that all about?”
“Duff is a very cautious man. He got the scar because I told him to move and he asked why. Prudent men ask why. Sometimes fools ask why. If I’d been slower, we wouldn’t be worrying about old Duff at all.” He pulled up his left shirtsleeve. A half-inch scar creased the top of his forearm. “See this?”
“Yes.”
“The bullet would have been in Duff’s head.” Smith grinned. I imagined Smith’s arm outstretched, knocking Duff aside, the bullet cutting through Smith’s arm.
“He didn’t seem too grateful.”
“He thought I liked doing it.”
“Did you?”
“Enough of this nostalgia, my boy. Let’s adjourn to the living room.”
We adjourned. Smith sat in my easy-chair. I sat on the couch. Dolores brought coffee and sat next to me. Momentarily, watching Smith smoke, his long legs crossed on the ottoman, I felt I was visiting him.
“Can I ask you something, Scarlyn?”
“Sure.” He puffed. A cloud of smoke accumulated above his head.
“We’re glad to have you, but why did you—”
“Invite myself to dinner?”
“Yes.”
“One, I wanted to see if you dug up anything today.”
“You could have done that bye phone.”
“True. But I’m persona non grata“—he nodded his head in the general direction of Seal Beach, pointing over his shoulder with the butt of his cigar—“over there.”
“At your daughter’s.”
He grunted, his voice momentarily serious. “Yes. My daughter’s.”
“What happened?”
His smile returned, his expression that of an old imp. “You send children to their room when they’re bad, don’t you?”
“Yes, I guess you do.”
“What if they won’t go?”
“You make them go.”
“What if you can’t?”
“I don’t know. What?”
“You get mad at them, right?” I nodded.
“Persona non grata.”
“I can’t imagine anyone treating you like a child.”
“You don’t know Harold and my so-called daughter.” He thought a moment, looking at me. “I like you, buddy boy.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s true. Even if you do browbeat your girl friend.”
“Browbeat!”
“I could hear you all the way from the curb.”
Dolores blushed. I glanced out the window. Smith’s red Ferrari stood at the curb.
“Do you want to know why I took this job? I’ll have to give you a little background first.”
I nodded.
“When you and Duff came to see me on the beach, I was retired. I’ve been retired for ten years. I could have retired at forty. I had the money.” He looked at me, unsure if I thought he was bragging. I knew he was just stating facts. “I had the money, but what do you do then?”
“Feed pigeons?”
“Right. Looks a little silly, doesn’t it? Shuffleboard and cribbage at forty. So I kept at it.”
“At what?”
“This kind of thing I’m doing now. Special jobs. One of my first jobs was for Horace’s father. Back in 1970. Someone was systematically looting the Conquistador Hotel in Acapulco. Homer Merryweather hired me. I got a free trip to Acapulco, expense account, and one order—find the guy who was doing it. I found him. He just about found me first.” Smith laughed. “Mean devil, he was. Anyway, I got back to Los Angeles and I started thinking. Scar, I thought,” you’ve got to do something with yourself. Times are changing. Things are quieting down. This Acapulco business went pretty well. Why don’t you go into that line of work permanently? True, it couldn’t match the social significance of Berkeley, but—”
“You went to Berkeley.”
“Bachelor of Arts, ‘68, history. Master’s, ‘70, criminology. I got the job with Horace’s father because of the Master’s.” He leaned back in the chair, looking at the ceiling above our heads, remembering. “Berkeley in the Sixties was one hell of a place to be. We brought down governments and turned the world around. Good times. I met Molly there.”
“Molly?”
“My wife. Good old girl.” He shook his head from side to side. “Fifteen years since I lost her. It seems like only—” He looked at Dolores and me. His face had lost the hard old man quality. “Never mind. On with my tale. The times changed. I didn’t. The war was over—”
“Korea?”
“Vietnam. And I realized I liked all the action. I hated the war, mind you. At the time, I wanted it over and things back to ‘normal’. I was not doing it because I was having one hell of a good time, I told myself. Who, after all, likes being on the wrong end of tear gas and billy-clubs? It was all i
dealism, not kicks. A lot of it was idealism. But some of it was kicks. I liked the turmoil. Then things changed. There wasn’t much need for billy-club-scarred veterans of the peace movement. After Acapulco, I realized I liked the excitement. Wouldn’t you?”’
“I wasn’t there.”
“True. I was, buddy boy, and it was the best time in the world.”
“Everyone’s youth is.”
“True again. I had done the job for Horace’s father. Horace was just a kid at the time. I kept at it, that sort of job. It’s been”—he hesitated, searching for the right word—“interesting.”
“What does this have to do with—”
“Background. I told you we’d need a little background. I could have quit at forty. I collected what I thought was my last fee the day before my fortieth birthday. One million dollars. In 1985, that still meant something.”
“It still does.”
“I decided, to hell with it. I liked the work. It was the only thing I knew how to do anyway. If somebody nailed me, I’d leave a rich widow. Molly understood. She always understood. Even when I lost her, I kept working. I sold the house. Janet—that’s my alleged daughter—wanted me to live with them. Someplace along the line Molly and I went wrong with Janet. She’s got none of her mother in her and less of me. She married the banker—”
“Harold.”
“Yes. She married him and got worse. Money, status, security—do you realize that no one uses the front room in that house? No one. She wants to keep it neat in case any of the Rotary wives drop by.” He shivered visibly. “Makes me sick just thinking about it.”
“Why did you move in?”
“Julia. She was following right in her mama’s footsteps. I thought maybe I could change her, give her some guts.”
“Did you?”
He shrugged, snuffing out his cigar butt in the ashtray next to him. “Maybe. Can’t tell yet. She’s eighteen. Freshman up at Berkeley. She was visiting that day Duff called but left before you two showed up. I won’t know if I did any good until she’s about your age, or until she gets married. Who people marry tells you a lot about them.” He smiled. “Or who they live with.”
He sipped at his coffee. “As soon as I moved in, they were after me. `Scar, why don’t you retire?’ `Daddy, you’re getting older. This kind of life isn’t good for you.’ What did they know about what was good for me?” His voice became intense. Instead of reciting dead memories, he was touching active feelings. He stared past us out the window. “After five years, I finally gave in. I retired. Worst mistake I ever made. Just after I retired, Simpson Autotec offered me a job. I turned it down. The guy who took it went up with twenty thousand gallons of crude oil. Janet used to remind me of it every time I brought up the subject of work. Look what a wonderful thing she’d done for me! Saved my life! I looked. Just because that other guy went up doesn’t mean I would have, does it?”
“I suppose not.”
“When I talked to you and Duff, I was retired. I had accepted my lot. Too old, anyway. Not good for much. Keep a little girl company, maybe, but the little girl had grown up. Big girl. Gone to college. What the hell. Feed the pigeons and forget it. Horace must be out of his mind to think of Scar Smith, I thought.” He sipped the coffee. “Cold.”
“Would you like some more?” asked Dolores.
“No, thanks.” He continued his story, looking past us. “When you and Duff left, I went in for lunch. I had no more intention of accepting Horace’s offer than going to the Moon. Harold was home from the bank for lunch. Janet asked what you two wanted. Since she was spying on me, I thought I’d needle her a little. I said you offered me a job. `You said no, of course,’ she said. Something about her tone of voice and that ‘of course’ stuck in my craw. She continued eating, almost oblivious to my presence, talking to Harold about the bank and listening to him expound on the Prime Interest Rate. Eventually, she realized I hadn’t answered. She looked at me. ‘You did tell them no?’
“In her face, that moment, I saw her picture of me. An incompetent old man, a burden on everyone, the sooner dead the better. In the meantime, keep him out of trouble. The world, after all, isn’t made for the sick or the old. I kept my temper. `I told them I’d think about it,’ I said.
“She dismissed the idea with a wave of her hand. `Don’t be silly, Daddy,’ she said. `You gave all that up a long time ago.’
“`Did I?’ I asked. Harold chimed in at that point. `Scarlyn, this is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘You’re not actually thinking of taking that job?’
” `I told them I’d think about it,’ I repeated, and then the son-of-a-bitch laughed. God damn it hurt! He laughed!
“I stood up. I felt like laying him out on the floor. Instead, I walked out. I slammed the door behind me. I think glass broke. I got in the car and drove to the Merryweather Building.”
Smith looked at me. “I haven’t been back.”
VIII
“Old men talk too much,” said Smith, searching for another cigar, patting his coat pockets and avoiding our eyes. I decided to change the subject, asking what he planned to do now.
“I rented a place in Newport Beach,” he answered. “I guess I’ll just live in it.”
“I mean about Norton.”
His face brightened, glad to turn attention away from his personal life. “Didn’t I tell you? They found most of him.” He discovered another cigar in his coat pocket and withdrew it, continuing to talk. Norton’s liver had been found in Pomona, his kidneys in the Long Beach-Compton area.
“One each,” I said.
“Right. But one thing never showed up.”
“What?”
Smith sat back in the chair, the cigar between his teeth. “The brain.”
“The what?”
“Brain.” Smith tapped his temple. “In here.”
Norton’s brain. It was worth something alive, but dead, as Smith had said, it was meat. Why would anyone want it? Frowning, I asked Smith.
“Who knows? Maybe Norton wasn’t the only joker in town.”
“That’s sort of a grim joke. Maybe it just hasn’t turned up.”
“Maybe.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“Everything else has turned up.”
“How about the possibility of a transplant?” suggested Dolores.
“It’s never been done,” answered Smith.
“There’s always a first time.”
“I checked around,” responded Smith, lighting his cigar. Dolores opened a window. “No one’s even close to being able to do it. Besides, if you transplant a dead brain into a live body, what do you have?”
“Two dead men.”
“Right. It’s something else.”
“What?” I asked.
“That, Robert, is what we have to find out.” He puffed on the cigar, thinking. “There are two ways to get information,” he mused, “direct and indirect. You can snoop around, putting two and two together, or—” He puffed, wanting me to ask, “Or what?” As a boy—if Smith ever was a boy—he probably rode his bike with no hands, showing off. He enjoyed showing off. I resisted as long as I could.
“Or what?”
“Or get it from the horse’s mouth.”
“Which do you prefer?”
“Little of both. Let’s assume Spieler’s involved. We can’t just walk up to him and say, ‘What did you do with Norton’s brain?’ then throw him against a wall and frisk him for it, can we?”
“I suppose not.”
“But if we had some idea what he wanted with it, we could ask about that. Take the transplant idea. If he wanted it for a transplant, we could ask about that. We could, perhaps, suggest that you needed one.”
“Me?”
“Hypothetical situation only. But we know the transplant’s probably out. So what now?”
“A rite of some kind?” asked Dolores.
I looked at her. What sort of rite did she think would require Norton’s brain? Smith took the suggestion
seriously.
“No. The only thing Spieler believes in is profit.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“Did you happen to see Horace’s list of current Spieler projects?”
I faintly remembered looking at a list in Mr. Merryweather’s office. I nodded.
“Do you remember an item near the end labeled Giant Molecule Reconstitution, Organic?”
“Vaguely. Biology’s not my field.”
“The work’s being done by Dr. A. Perkov at the Golden Years Geriatric Center in Glendale. Spieler owns it.”
“So?”
“So how would you like to be my grandson tomorrow morning?”
I saw it coining. Smith wanted me to play grandson and go traipsing around some old people’s home. I had too much work to do. The thought of a day off, even a morning off, panicked me. I had not even started to decipher where Norton left the Big Gate. Smith noticed my contorted expression.
“Something wrong?”
“No.”
“You don’t like Glendale?”
“I like Glendale just fine, but—”
“You don’t like me?”
“I like you just fine, too, but—”
“Then what is it?”
“I would like to get a little work done. They pay me to be an engineer, not some kind of skulking cloak-and-dagger man.”
“You’re getting in a rut. You need a break.”
“Rut! I’ve only worked one day! I can’t do it, Smith.”
He looked at Dolores. “He’s a very responsible young man, isn’t he?”
“Very.”
“Don’t you get in on this,” I told Dolores.
“Like the man said, Robert,” said Smith, “when Smith says spit, you spit.”
On the way to Glendale the next morning, gripping my seatbelts every time Smith took a corner, I asked what I was supposed to do, other than the things he had briefed me on the night before. The briefing had covered very little.
“Just act natural, buddy boy.” “That’s a big help.”
“I had Pamela make an appointment for me at nine.”
“Who’s Pamela?”
“Horace’s receptionist.”
I remembered the blond at the Merryweather Building. “Oh.”
“Not bad.”
Stargate Page 9
