Killed on the Rocks

by William L. DeAndrea

  “Barry was good at stuff like that. I suppose he would have been happier as a science nerd, but there was a billion dollars hanging over his head, you know? That we all kind of envied and hated him for.”

  Bats looked into his glass. When he looked up, his eyes were wet.

  “And you know what?” he said. “I don’t suppose that poor son of a bitch ever drew a happy breath in his life. He probably stayed awake at night wishing he was me, with a middle-class father who had time for him every once in a while, and no legend to live up to.

  “And I never thought of it until this afternoon. After I stopped resenting him, I thought about him like a microscope slide. You heard me the other day, Matt. ‘I guess it would drive him crazy.’

  “And that, my friends, is why I’m a jerk. Because what drove him crazy was what I envied him for. What I used to curse God for giving him instead of me made him crazy, made him a killer, made him dead. Poor, poor Barry. Poor, poor everybody.”

  Roxanne spoke softly, comforting him, but I didn’t listen. I had a picture in my mind, a huge rectangle of wire hanging out of a dormitory window, defying the limits of ordinary TV. “Barry was good at stuff like that,” Bats had said.

  Barry, in the wire room, looking down at his father’s body.

  Barry in the hallway, just before he took the bullets.

  “I showed them! I fucking showed them!”

  I could go to the wire room anytime. I could go now. But what I really needed to see was the tree. The “coincidental” pine. I ran to the window and pulled a curtain aside. Too late. Pitch-black out there, and a strong wind was crying, on its way to screaming.

  Tomorrow would bring rain, the forecast said. But it would also bring daylight, however feeble.

  The morning, then. In the meantime, I had a lot to think about.

  21

  You’re right, that’s wrong!

  —Kay Kyser, “Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge” (NBC)

  THE RAIN CAME DOWN like a locker-room shower, cold and needle-hard. I was drenched before I even reached the tree.

  What I was doing seemed so stupid, I hadn’t told anyone except Roxanne what I was up to.

  She was disgusted with me. “You won’t ski, but you’ll do this! You must be nuts.”

  I tried to reason with her. “Now, Rox, I don’t deny it’s dangerous—”

  “Good!” she said. “Because if you did, you would be totally insane. Why can’t it wait? Have you looked out the window? It’s pouring, for God’s sake.”

  I knew it was pouring. If it weren’t raining so hard I could see what I needed to see from my bedroom window.

  “Please, Rox, I think I’ve got this figured out. I’ve got to go check. We could finish this up today.”

  “You could finish yourself up today.”

  “I’ve got to do this,” I told her.

  “You’re risking your life!”

  “But I’m not doing it for fun, okay? I promise I’ll be careful.”

  So I’d gone to the gun room, and I got the lumberjack’s strap and a pair of lace-up leather boots, the kind Jack Bromhead had been wearing. I grabbed the strap-on metal teeth that went with the boots, put on a short, hooded yellow slicker, and headed out into the rain.

  Trying to look at the bright side of things, I noticed that the wind had died down considerably from last night’s gale. And despite the chill of the rain, the air temperature was much higher than it had been. We’d be getting out of here by tomorrow, if this kept up.

  I cherished these facts. I hugged them close to myself in an effort to forget what the newly formed slush was doing to my feet. Snowshoes wouldn’t have worked on this crud—it was like trying to slog through half-melted sherbet.

  I squinted against the rain, keeping my eyes on my destination.

  There was something wrong with the tree. I looked at the graying but still unblemished snow at its base and tried to figure out what was bothering me.

  It took a few seconds, but I got there. The snow-becoming-slush was unblemished. And that didn’t make sense. If the blizzard knocked off one small branch of the tree, the windstorm last night should have knocked down dozens. There should be wet black boughs and twigs all around here. It was easy to believe a tree would have a lot of branches that wind and weather could snap off. It was easy to believe it might have none. That it would have one and only one was a little hard to swallow.

  I shook my head. Something else to waste time over. So this was the tree in a million that had one weak branch. Worrying about it now would only make me wetter.

  I strapped the cleats to my shoes. Then I threw the broad, rough belt around the tree and clipped it to the metal hooks on the harness around my own waist. Holding the belt by the chains at either end, I flipped my wrists to send it as high up the trunk of the tree as I could reach. Then I pulled my right foot free of the muck it was in, kicked the tree to clear the teeth, dug them into the side of the tree, and started up.

  It occurred to me when I was about ten feet off the ground that I should have told Roxanne that I had done this before. For some reason, the colonel who commanded my company decided that MPs should be able to fix their own telephone lines. So we did. Of course, we were going up telephone poles on an army base, which weren’t all that high, and which had been climbed so many times already you could almost go up them like a ladder. And we didn’t do it much in the cold or the rain.

  But we had done it, and I hadn’t been too bad. I’d been a whiz at going up. Going up, gravity is your friend. The weight of your body against the strap locks you in place while your feet catch up with your arms. It’s just flick and climb, flick and climb, as high up as you want to go.

  Coming down was different. You can’t really climb down a tall tree. You have to fall down it in a controlled manner, giving in to the great nothingness of space for eternal split seconds until you could use the belt and the cleats to stop yourself again.

  If you were a Real Tree Climbing Soldier, by God, you never did stop yourself. You just sort of let the belt slide with enough friction to take you smoothly to the ground without serious bodily harm, kicking the trunk with your cleats every now and then to keep you far enough from the surface to keep from erasing your face against the bark. Or shredding it with splinters against the pole, in our case.

  I was sorry I thought that. I dug in the toe cleats and kept climbing. I kept my gaze upward, into the rain. Even when I leaned back against the belt, let go with one hand, and wiped a glove across my eyes to clear my vision, I didn’t stop looking into the rain. There’s a reason they tell you not to look down.

  Flick and climb. Flick and climb.

  One of the reasons I was so determined to do this was that for the first time since I’d come to this nuthouse, I actually knew what I was looking for: a piece of cable that stopped at the tree.

  Bats’s story of the wire-hanger antenna had gotten me thinking, last night. A TV picture (sound, too) was nothing more than the decoding of an electronic signal. As I’d said myself, the playing of a videotape is exactly the same, the decoding of exactly the same signal. The only difference is, it’s put directly from the tape machine into the TV set, instead of over the air, to be dragged home by an antenna ... or even a mesh of coat hangers.

  Could you somehow put the signals from a videotape over the air?

  You’re damned right you could. The Network does it constantly, almost exclusively. All the networks do. Except for sports, news, and some special events, everything you see on television is the output of some videotape machine. Even the filmed shows are transferred to tape before being broadcast.

  So it could be done. Could it be done here? Halfway up a snowed-in mountain, with no broadcasting facilities within range?

  I’d leaned out the window, looking at the wind, and thought about it. Finally, I thought, yeah. Why the hell not?

  To hell with broadcasting facilities. To hell with any science-fictional ideas like transmission from a satelli
te, or anything like that. Hell, satellites are good, but they’re not that good. If the Ghost of Dost had come to us via direct satellite transmission, he would have haunted all of northeastern New York and most of western New England.

  But none of that was necessary. All it took was one little VCR machine. A VCR machine puts out its signal to your TV with enough juice to overcome electrical resistance in the cable, and to override any interference that might be coming in on the channel you’re using for it. In fact, I was sure there was a margin of extra power, because a TV set likes a good strong signal.

  But, I told myself, a VCR is just a machine. It doesn’t give a damn where it’s outputting its power to. You press a button that says “play,” and the machine says, “Yes, boss,” and does its number.

  Suppose you didn’t hook that output to a TV set? Suppose you hooked it up to some kind of antenna? The signals would still go out, only now they would go out over the air, just the way the Network does it. You would have created for yourself your own private, ultra-low-power, extremely illegal, TV station.

  Illegal because you need a license to broadcast TV signals. If you hooked your VCR to the antenna on your suburban roof, say, your tape could be picked up by every TV in your house—and probably by every TV in the houses of the neighbors on either side of you, and possibly by your friends across the street.

  In the case of a mansion like Rocky Point, you might cover a quarter of the house—a floor or two up or down, and maybe halfway down the corridor. If you planned really well, you’d probably be able to be picked up, hazily, but recognizably, on a TV set that wasn’t hooked up to anything at all—its own internal wiring would be enough of an antenna, if you were close enough to the signal.

  But then, who cared if the reception was bad? How much could people expect from a ghost?

  As soon as I had that all worked out, I knew that Aranda was up to something. Her performance was much too good. Those well-rounded, melodic screams to get me to the scene in time to hear Dost “accuse” his son, the convenient collapse, the glib explanations the next morning. Phooey.

  The trouble was, try to prove it. Hell, I even knew where the tape of Dost had come from. It was a recorded roll-in to one of those calming-the-animals tapes Barry had finally convinced his old man to make for stockholders and employees. Barry’s proudest achievement. The poor bastard.

  Once I’d thought of it, it had been undeniable. Dost’s attitude hadn’t been that of a tormented soul Piercing the Veil, it had been a proud man with stage fright trying to get someone to hold his hand without saying anything that could be construed as weakness.

  That was the reason for all the “Why is this taking so long?” business. That explained why he kept calling Barry’s name. He wanted his son to reassure him, to tell the big billionaire he wasn’t about to make a fool of himself in front of these hot lights and unblinking lenses.

  And just try to prove that. That tape had been burned, buried, or thrown off the mountain at the first opportunity. That was one thing I could be sure of.

  Flip and climb.

  But there was one thing I could find. I could find an antenna.

  I’d checked this morning. There were twelve cables coming into Rocky Point by the window in the cable room. Even for the kinds of communication a busy businessman needed available, that was a lot of cables. One for TV; one for phone, telex, and fax would do it. Add a couple of back-up cables for each, and you still don’t need twelve.

  But thirty yards of cable or so would make a dandy antenna for a private, ultra-low-power, extremely illegal TV station.

  So I was going to look for a cable that came into the branches and didn’t leave them.

  Flip and climb.

  Now I had reached the first branches. Now I had to do something else I didn’t much want to think about. I took a tight grip of one wet bough with my left hand, and threw my right leg over another. Then, with my right hand, I unhooked one end of the tree strap from my harness. I had to go from branch to branch, now. No margin for error.

  I had about fifteen more feet to go, which I took about one foot per minute, testing each foothold and concentrating on my grip. One consolation was that it was a little drier up here surrounded by the thick needles.

  I only slipped once. “Only.” Ha! A branchload of snow, which had managed to hold on through last night’s wind, had soaked up enough rain to come loose now. It splattered down through the branches, and hit me with a stinging faceful of slush.

  I was startled. I jumped. Big mistake. My cleated feet came away from the tree, and I swiped wildly at my face to clear my eyes. When I could see again, what I was looking at was my boots, and one little tiny broken branch lying on the slush below me. Only then did it occur to me that I was dangling some three and a half stories above the ground by one hand. I found new holds for my hands and feet before that thought even had a chance to register, and stood there in space, hugging the tree as if it were my mother.

  Finally, I stopped shaking and clambered up the last few feet to where the wires went through the branches. I got into a position where I could reach them, then reattached the tree strap. Now, not only was the tree my mother, I even had an umbilical attachment to her. It was very comforting.

  It didn’t take long to spot. Ten wires went right through, barely brushing branches. An eleventh wire, somewhat closer to the tree than the others, was wrapped twice around a branch, then shot back smartly to the house. Which explained the twelfth fitting near the window at Rocky Point—one going, and one coming.

  As I looked at it, though, I wondered why someone had gone through all the trouble to string it back to the house. Not only did that mean you’d have to go to the extra trouble of hauling the returning end up to the window somehow, it wouldn’t even help with the TV broadcasting. Signals that get too close together tend to interfere with each other.

  It might have made sense if the cable had just been tied around the branch with a half-hitch, or even wrapped loosely around, so that it could just be pulled back through the window when it was no longer useful.

  But this was wrapped tight, and pulled tight. Looking more closely, I saw that the loops had been lashed together, tied with ...

  I looked again. Tied with fishing line.

  I started to laugh. In spite of being cold and wet and one more slip from being crippled or killed, I laughed.

  Because climbing this tree had been the right thing to do, all right. No doubt about that. I’d just climbed it for the wrong reason.

  I stopped and worked it through in my mind, looking for flaws. Nope. It had to be that way. It even explained Barry Dost’s dry sleeves against my neck as he choked me. His sleeves had been dry even though he’d been leaning on the windowsill, while everyone else had been soaked, brushing enough snow away to see outside. That sill had already been cleaned and now I knew why.

  I shook my head. I had risked life and limb in the pouring rain to climb the tree to find evidence of the Great Haunted TV Hoax. But there wasn’t any.

  What was up here instead was the solution to how G. B. Dost had managed to wind up so extremely dead up against the rocks that lined his driveway without leaving any tracks. It was as if Columbus had set off looking for America, but had discovered penicillin instead.

  It was a messy way to do things, but I was willing to take things any way I got them.

  I climbed down to where the branches stopped. Then I carefully lowered myself, arms and legs hugging the tree like a baby bear making his first climb. I worked the tree strap around, and fastened it.

  There was a cracking noise. Bark chunked out of the tree and stung my face.

  Like an idiot I looked around, but saw nothing.

  Two more cracks, and the news sank in—no matter what I could see, somebody saw me.

  Somebody with a gun.

  22

  Try not to fall too fast, dear.

  —Barbara Luddy, “Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, Too” (Walt Disney Home Video)

>   THE FIRST THING TO do was to get the tree between me and the house. I scooted sideways like a squirrel. Fine. It’s always nice to have a couple of feet of wood between you and a rifle.

  The only thing I had to worry about now was that he’d shoot the tree strap loose from the chain. Intellectually, I knew that was a long shot. After all, my whole body’d been exposed as a target hung from a branch, and he hadn’t managed to hit me. In situations like this, though, your survival instinct tells your intellect to shut the hell up about odds and get us out of this.

  The best my intellect could come up with at the moment was a simple proposition: The closer to the ground I was when the belt went, the shorter distance I’d have to fall.

  And by God, I’d no sooner thought that than I went down the tree like the best little Tree-Climbing Soldier you ever saw. My sergeant would have been proud. I may have jammed a toe or two in kicking off the tree too hard, and I may have misjudged the distance at the end slightly and plopped down in a heap into the mud and slush, but at least I was a heap with no extra holes in it. And I had no more dangerous distances to fall.

  I felt the cold seeping through my pants, but I didn’t care. I threw my head back against the tree and caught my breath. It would have been a good opportunity to think, but there was nothing left to think about.

  I knew who was shooting at me. I knew how he’d killed Dost and gotten his body where we’d found it. I knew where Barry fit in. I knew every goddam thing about this case except why anybody was murdered in the first place, and how a DA could possibly make anybody pay for it.

  Of course, I could always ask why the murder was committed. Assuming, of course, I could get back to the house.

  I took a peek around the tree. Nothing happened. I saw that the window of the twelve wires was now closed.

  None of which meant anything. A corner of my head made a lousy target. And the window could be closed to make me think I was safe and lure me out in the open for a good shot. How long did it take to open a window?