Aranda Dost let loose a sound that combined the most poignant features of a sob and a gasp.
The set was tuned to Channel 4. I pushed the button for Channel 5 and got nothing. I pushed Channel 3 and got, you should pardon the expression, a ghost. I went back to Channel 4.
“Where the hell are you, boy?” the TV demanded.
And suddenly, there he was, in the doorway. He’d elbowed his way through the crowd and was staring at the TV set. I had never seen such rage on a human face. Aranda looked at him and turned so white it was apparent even in the dim light of the TV set.
It was justified, since most of Barry’s hate and rage seemed to be directed at her. If he’d had the shotgun with him, Aranda, and anybody who might have tried to stand between him and Aranda, would have been blasted to hamburger.
As it was, he went for her with his bare hands, diving for the bed, snarling, “You lying bitch.”
He didn’t make it. Ralph, assisted by Calvin Gowe, getting involved for once, wrapped him up and dragged him out into the hall. Barry was not quite frothing at the mouth, but he seemed to be just a few seconds away from it.
On the screen, Gabby Dost was scratching his head irritably. “Barry?” he said. “Barry?”
The picture broke up; the screen showed an electronic blizzard, and the stereo speakers produced a raucus howl. Exactly, I thought, what a TV set in a remote rural area, miles away from any transmissions, not hooked up to an antenna or cable, could be expected to be doing.
But I was disappointed. There hadn’t been much in the way of set or script to the Gabby Dost show, but it held my attention. I tried the other channels, all eighty-two of them. All I found on them was more snow, and we’d had enough of that this week, already.
“Turn on the light,” I said. Aranda was sitting as if in a trance. “Aranda!”
“Did you see?” she demanded. “Did you see?”
“I saw. Turn on the light, okay?”
As soon as she did, I turned off the TV. “Okay,” I began.
There was another scream, a man’s this time, from out in the hallway. I dove through the throng to see Calvin Gowe bent over Ralph Ingersoll, whose nose was showering blood on the hall carpet. Barry, once again, was scampering down the corridor.
“The little bastard head-butted him,” Gowe said.
“Brote by dose,” Ralph contributed.
That much was obvious. I’d save my sympathy for later. “Roxanne,” I called, and she appeared like a genie from a bottle. “Take care of Ralph. Cal, you go in that room and see that nobody touches that TV set.”
Cal grinned slightly, no doubt at the possibility that he’d be able to hit somebody in the near future.
Roxanne had knelt beside Ralph and was asking him if he could breathe all right. She looked up at me. “And you, I suppose, are going to try to keep Barry from disappearing again.”
I nodded and took off. In fact, I didn’t think he was going to disappear this time. I figured I knew exactly where he was going.
He was going to the kitchen to get that shotgun that was leaning against the sink.
I didn’t take off in Barry’s tracks, figuring that if he heard me behind him, he’d just increase his speed. Also, the side stairs were a slightly shorter route to the kitchen, and I might be able to head him off at the sink.
This route took me once again past Jack Bromhead’s room.
Jack’s voice rang out, filled with effort and impatience. “What the hell is going on out there?”
“No time!” I yelled back, and kept running. I hit the main hall, turned and sprinted for the kitchen. No sign of Barry. About ten feet from the swinging door, I put my arm out like Walter Payton, getting ready to stiff-arm the door out of the way.
There is a bit that recurs in a number of Bugs Bunny cartoons, wherein Bugs is blithely doing something incredibly stupid, then realizes it. He looks at the audience and screams, “WHAT AM I DOING?”
That’s what happened to me. My feet did not actually leave skid marks on the floor as I screeched to a stop, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had.
I was right to stop. The door swung open, and there was Barry Dost, shotgun at the ready, trigger finger at the ready, to blow somebody away. His face told me his heart and mind were ready, too.
“Don’t move,” he said.
Since I was already frozen solid, this was an easy order to follow. I wondered idly if my bowels counted.
“Get out of my way,” Barry ordered.
“Uh—I—uh have to move to do that, Barry.”
“Don’t you use my name. I almost trusted you. But you’re in it with them, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”
“I’m not in anything with anybody,” I said.
He wasn’t paying attention to me. “How stupid can you get?” he asked the world at large, which at this point consisted mostly of himself. “I showed them. I fucking showed them.
“And you helped!” I was back in his world again. “Getting me there, so—”
He lifted the shotgun to his shoulder. If he’d shot from the hip, he would have cut me in half. He couldn’t have missed at that range. But Barry had apparently been taken bird hunting and taught how to use a shotgun, so he took a split second to raise the thing to his shoulder and aim.
In that split second, a voice behind me said, “Cobb! Down!”
I dropped. Gunshots rang out behind me. Barry staggered back, fired the shotgun into the ceiling, and fell.
I took a breath, then turned around to see Jack Bromhead, in an ancient purple bathrobe, limping down the hallway carrying a silvery Colt .45 revolver, the Gun That Won the West.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.” I walked over to Barry Dost. I was careful, even though I could see the glassy eyes and the two holes in the middle of the chest. I kicked the shotgun out of reach. As I did, I thought of something we should have done as soon as there was any evidence of foul play. We should have put a lock on the gun-room door.
17
I’m going to take you apart like a clock.
—William Conrad, “Jake and the Fatman” (CBS)
MY HANDS WERE SHAKING as I undid the last screw.
I admit it might have been nerves—being that close to the receiving end of a shotgun blast isn’t an experience I’m eager to repeat. I wasn’t crazy about watching Barry Dost breathe his last, either, but since it had come down to him or me, I’m just as glad it was him.
“What’s the matter, boy?” Jack Bromhead asked.
Jack was lying on the bed recently occupied by Aranda Dost, his bad foot propped up on a pillow. Aranda had been led back to her old room, in the suite she’d shared with her husband. After what had happened tonight, she’d decided she could face it after all.
“Nothing,” I lied. I took a deep breath and put the screwdriver in the screw head again.
My hands still wanted to shake, but I wouldn’t let them. I decided I hoped it was nerves. I really and truly hoped my hands weren’t shaking because I was afraid of what I might find inside this TV set. Or rather, of what I might not find.
Things would have been better if I’d been able to tackle the TV set as soon as the lead stopped flying, when the adrenaline of near death would have carried me through without giving me time to think too much. Unfortunately, of all the millions of things G. B. Dost had owned, the thousands of them under the gabled roof of Rocky Point, the hardest one to find was a Phillips screwdriver.
A lot of things had happened while Fred Norman and Cal Gowe scoured the house for the necessary tool. Aranda Dost had been led away, alternately muttering and screaming at me that she had told me not to scoff at what I didn’t understand. Barry Dost had been deposited in the outdoor deep freeze alongside his father. Roxanne, who along with countless academic degrees had somewhere picked up an expert knowledge of first aid, had taken charge of Ralph Ingersoll’s nose. Ralph was sleeping now, courtesy of some of Jack Bromhead’s codeine tablets.
“Where the hell do you get all this codeine?” I asked in an idle moment. “Did Dost own a pharmaceutical company or something?”
“No, but he owns—owned—the biggest distributor—legal distributor—in the Pacific Northwest. Which, with gas prices back up, has been giving us a royal pain, to tell you the truth.”
He laughed. “Drugs, giving us a pain. It’s supposed to be the other way around. Anyway, that doesn’t have anything to do with it. This stuff is all legal. This isn’t the first time this place has ever been snowbound, you know.”
“Just the worst.”
“You got that right. But with the place being inaccessible sometimes, and folks skiing, and doing other foolish things”—he pointed at his own sprained ankle—“we knew we’d have to be set up better than just having a first-aid kit around. So we got a local doctor to prescribe everything we might need for us to take care of an emergency, ourselves. We all had to go through first-aid training, too, though I don’t think I’d be as good as that Schick gal.”
I got the screw out at last. It felt hot in my hand. I put it in my pocket, and reached to remove the black plastic back of the set.
“Wait a minute,” Jack Bromhead said. “Don’t do that yet. You probably want another witness.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me is that I’m counting on you to be my witness about shooting poor Barry. If you’re my only witness for that, and I’m your only witness for what’s inside this TV set, it might wind up looking to the authorities like a real case of logrolling.”
He had a point. I supposed I ought to get one of the Network people in here. I stuck my head out into the hallway. Bats Blefary and Carol Coretti had been keeping lookout. Actually, Bats had been flirting with Carol, and she had been being civil back. I would, I decided, be doing Bats a favor by interrupting things.
I called them over.
Bats had thrown on jeans and a T-shirt. Carol was wearing the same outfit she’d worn last night. This thing was turning into one long, horrifying pajama party.
“What’s up, Matt?” Bats wanted to know.
I looked at him and Carol. “Did you both see what was on this screen earlier tonight ... I mean, this morning?”
“Please, Matt,” Carol said. “Stick with tonight, or you’ll confuse me terribly. I wasn’t asleep long enough for it to be tomorrow yet. But yes, I saw it.”
“What did you think?”
“Videotape,” Bats said. “I wondered what all the screaming was about.”
“But then you found out there was no input hooked up to the set,” Carol said. “I didn’t know what to think.”
“Wait a minute,” Jack Bromhead said. “Cobb, I thought you were fixing to explain how it was done. Maybe even do it again. I didn’t get to see it, first time around.”
“I’m fixing to do just that. I hope.”
“Well, get on with it.”
“Okay. You suggested more witnesses. I’m just bringing them—and you—up to speed on my thinking.”
Jack Bromhead laughed. “Hell, after what you been through tonight, I’m surprised you can be thinking anything.”
I looked at him. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful or anything, but for someone who’s just recently blown away somebody who called you ‘Uncle Jack,’ you seem pretty chipper yourself.”
Jack Bromhead gave me a look that made me glad the Colt was out of reach. Then his face softened. “The place and time I grew up, men were taught not to show if they were hurting. Shake it off, shrug it off, laugh it off. Get on with it. It might not be the way to be, but it’s the only way I know. But don’t think I ain’t busted up inside. I played cowboys with Barry when he could hardly walk. He was a good boy. It was just that as a man he couldn’t ... I don’t know, he just couldn’t make the pieces fit. He was off the deep end, and he probably killed his daddy, and for sure he was gonna kill you. So I did what I had to do, all right?”
Jack clapped his hands together sharply. I jumped. So did Bats and Carol.
“All right!” he said. “Educate this ignorant old man. What were you saying?”
“My first thought was videotape, too. The fact that Dost’s picture only came in on Channel 4, with a subimage on Channel 3, was suggestive.”
“Why?”
“Because videotape players in this country are built to send their output through Channel 3 or Channel 4. Look at any of them, you’ll find a switch. You just pick the one in your area that doesn’t have a broadcasting station on it, and let it go.”
“What difference does a broadcasting station make?” Carol wanted to know. I was embarrassed for her for a second, until I remembered that she was a lawyer who happened to work for the Network, not a broadcasting person.
“Interference,” Bats said.
“Right. In principle, a VCR is a broadcast station, in miniature. It feeds the same kind of signals, and your TV interprets them the same way it interprets what it gets over the air, or from a cable system. In fact, you run the cable from the machine to the TV; you’ve set up your own mini cable system.”
“Okay, I follow you. If you’ve got some Channel 3 coming into your TV set from the air, you don’t want to fight it with your machine.”
“Right. Which is exactly the case here. So you set your VCR to Channel 4.”
“But there was no VCR,” Carol insisted. “You established that yourself.”
“Not quite,” I told her. “What I established was that there was no tape being fed into the TV from the outside.”
“Ahh,” Jack Bromhead said. “And that’s why you—”
“That’s why I’ve unscrewed the back. I want to see what there is on the inside.”
“A VCR wouldn’t fit in there,” Bats said. “Mine sure wouldn’t.”
“They come a lot smaller than yours,” I said. “What have you got, a VHS? I thought so. Beta is smaller than that, eight millimeter smaller still. All we’d need is a play deck, maybe the size of a kid’s lunch box.”
“Even so,” Carol said.
“These are big TV sets,” I went on. “The size is dictated by the picture tube, which is not only big, but oddly shaped. The transistors don’t take up much room at all. Most of the inside of a TV set is empty space.”
I grabbed the black plastic again. “So,” I said. “Let’s just see.” I rocked it a little to get it out of the groove it sat in, then pulled it away.
And inside, there it was. The picture tube. A few micro-circuits.
And empty space.
A whole lot of empty space. No VCR. Nothing.
I sat there looking at it. I spun the set around so everyone could see.
Jack Bromhead broke the silence. “I guess we owe Aranda an apology, boy.”
I only knew I could move my lips because I heard myself talking. “Yeah. I guess so.”
Bats had the TV set now. He was waving his hand around inside the thing as though the VCR were in there, invisible, and he was going to find it by touch.
“What happens now?” Carol asked.
“We go to bed and try to sleep. Tackle this again in the morning.” I turned to Jack Bromhead. “Come on, Bats and I will help you back to your room.”
“Nah,” he said. “My damn ankle’s had enough of going up and down these stairs, with or without help.”
Carol was shocked. “You’re going to stay here?”
“Sure. Maybe I’ll even leave on the TV. Maybe Gabby will come back again, tell me what the hell to do about PharmaKing.”
We left the room with the sound of Jack’s not-quite-healthy laughter behind us.
18
“If” is a very special word.
—Judy Graubart, “The Electric Company” (PBS)
I SHUDDERED AS ROXANNE and I walked through the downstairs hallway on the way to breakfast. Fred Norman had cleaned up the blood, but there was nothing he could have done about the shotgun blast in the ceiling. I looked at it, deliberately. I knew I was in for a
long series of dreams in which I failed to stop myself outside the kitchen door, or Jack Bromhead didn’t show up in time, and I figured I might as well give my subconscious accurate details to work with.
We learned at table that Aranda Drost had prepared breakfast this morning (scrambled eggs, grilled ham, biscuits) with her own soft hands, Agnes Norman being too broken up over the death of Mr. Barry to cook.
“The Normans have given notice,” she said, sadly. “If it turns out to be up to me, I think I’d close this place up.”
“Not sell it?” Haskell Freed asked. He punctuated the question by putting a big yellow wad of egg in his mouth.
“Oh, no,” Aranda said. “Not until I’m absolutely sure Gabriel is at rest.”
Ralph Ingersoll said, “How could it possibly be up to you?” He sounded irritable, and I couldn’t blame him. He had a bandage strapped over his nose and two black eyes. He was facing the prospect of plastic surgery when (if?) we finally got out of here. And he still didn’t have any idea what the hell was going on.
“The prenuptial agreement, and all that,” Ralph went on.
Aranda didn’t look at him; she seemed to be involved in stirring her coffee.
“I think it’s quite possible,” Wilberforce said, “that Mrs. Dost might have quite a bit to say about the disposition of the late Mr. Dost’s property.”
Ralph said, “How?”
“Well, estate law is not my field,” he said.
“Nor mine, unfortunately,” Carol Coretti put in.
“But,” Wilberforce went on, “there are some interesting possibilities. In some states, such as Connecticut, where I reside, prenuptial agreements are recognized only in cases of divorce, not survivorship. A widow must get one third of her late husband’s net worth. But that can vary by state.”
“We weren’t married in Connecticut, anyway,” Aranda said. I tried to hear something wistful in her tone, but didn’t.
“Well, one possibility is that if, as seems likely now, young Dost killed his father, he would be ineligible to take possession of his legacy. And, of course, he couldn’t pass it on in turn. As far as I know—and as you must know, the Network researched Mr. Dost, and those associated with him, very thoroughly—he has no other surviving relatives. Is that correct, Mr. Bromhead?”
Killed on the Rocks Page 14
