Good King Sauerkraut

by Barbara Paul

  Again, he only half believed her. “You know she’s senior partner of SmartSoft now.”

  Rae stared at him, unblinking. “Yes.”

  “Let me ask you this. If I’d not gone out that morning and had been killed along with Dennis and Gregory—would you have built a new design team from scratch? Or would Mimi now be in charge of the project?”

  She took her time answering. Finally she said, “Mimi would be in charge.”

  King nodded, as if to say I thought so, and let the subject drop. He didn’t want to make overt accusations, only to plant suspicion. “Warren seems to have abandoned the idea of a conference here with the Defense Department. You couldn’t reach all of them, was that it?”

  Once more she took her time, obviously choosing her words carefully. “That’s true, but there’s a little more involved than that. Unfortunately, there’s been a slight change of attitude in Washington. Defense knows that the New York police now believe the killer to be you or Mimi. This has, ah, put a damper on their enthusiasm, you might say.”

  King’s blood turned to ice. “We’re going to lose the contract.”

  “Not necessarily,” she said quickly. “If the police arrest one of you soon and we’re able to provide a satisfactory replacement, then there’s no problem.”

  “Replacement. I’ll bet you already have replacements picked out for both Mimi and me.”

  She didn’t even look embarrassed. “We have to be prepared for all contingencies.”

  He couldn’t believe it. “No. Warren wouldn’t just dump me like that.”

  A touch of something that might have been pity appeared on her face. “But it’s not Warren’s decision to make, don’t you see? He’s given me full authority over all these new Defense contracts—not just the EM gun platform but all the other projects as well. And I’ll tell you honestly, King, that I will jettison anything or anybody that endangers any one of the contracts.”

  “I see,” he said tightly.

  “So it really does depend upon how quickly the police act. If they arrest, ah, Mimi … before the boys at Defense get really antsy, that is, then we have nothing to worry about. I’ll simply call in her replacement and we’ll get on with the job.”

  “And if the police don’t make an arrest?”

  She spread her hands, said nothing.

  King felt as if he’d been hit in the mouth with a baseball bat. No arrest meant he and Mimi both would be out. All along he’d been hoping to create such a cloud of suspicion that the police would never know for certain who was responsible for Dennis’s and Gregory’s deaths. But obviously that wouldn’t do now. He was going to lose the opportunity of a lifetime if the police didn’t make an arrest, and he was going to lose it fairly soon. Oh Mimi, Mimi! He didn’t have much time.

  The talk between Rae and him was stiff after that, and they both gave a little sigh of relief when the waiter appeared with the check. Outside, the rain had started again. Rae had brought an umbrella with her, one of the big kind that came all the way down over the shoulders. King had to scrunch down to walk under it with her, but huddling together under an umbrella did a lot to ease the tension between them. He made a bad joke and she laughed, doing her part. Along with what seemed like hundreds of other people, they were trying to get a taxi.

  They’d stepped off the curb into the street, both of them waving an arm in a vain attempt to catch a cab driver’s attention. A car came barreling down First Avenue, too fast, hitting every puddle and spraying the taxi-hunters with dirty rainwater. “Look out!” Rae cried, and grabbed King’s arm.

  She caught him by surprise; he was still off balance when the speeding car sloshed him and another man, who knocked against King in his eagerness to get out of the way. King felt himself falling … directly into the line of traffic.

  A screech tore through the air as the driver of a green van stood on his brake pedal to stop in time. He missed King, but the rear end of the van slewed around on the wet street to bang into the front fender of a Porsche in the next lane. The crash was a real attention-getter; all the cars behind the two vehicles started honking their horns.

  Shaken by his close call, King examined himself for damage. Other than a tear in his trousers and a skinned knee, he seemed to be all right. Then the van driver was bending over him, breathing anxiously in his face. “Did I hitcha? Did I hitcha?”

  “No, no,” King assured him hastily. “You stopped in time.”

  “Ohhhhh, will you look what you did to my cah!” a nasal voice lamented.

  The van driver stood up and jerked around to face the owner of the Porsche. “Jesus, buddy, what did you want me to do? Run the guy down?”

  Rae held her umbrella over King, her face chalk-white. “My god, King—I almost got you killed. Oh … can you get up?” He took the hand she offered and pulled himself creakily to his feet. She looked at his torn trousers and said, “Your knee is bleeding! Oh King—I’m so sorry!” Her face was tight and her voice high; she was more upset by what had happened than King was.

  “Don’t worry about it, Rae,” he said as calmly as he could, “it was just an accident.” As King looked at her anguished face, the thought suddenly came to him: But if it had been Mimi who’d caused it instead of you … Yes. Oh yes. He tried not to smile as the idea took hold.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  All the pedestrians around them were busy telling one another what had just happened, and the chorus of honking horns was growing louder as the traffic backed up behind the two stopped vehicles. The van driver and the owner of the Porsche were engaged in a spirited shouting match. “Let’s get out of here,” King muttered.

  He took Rae’s arm and they melted into the crowd. No one noticed when they went down into the first subway stop they came to and made their escape.

  Mimi was at the apartment. “What happened to you?” she demanded, staring at King’s rain-soaked clothing and the tear in his trousers.

  “An accident,” he said shortly and headed toward his room.

  She followed. “What kind of accident?”

  King told her what had happened and closed the bedroom door firmly in her face. He cleaned off his scraped knee and put on dry clothing. He glanced in the mirror; one good thing, the bruises on his face were faint now, almost unnoticeable. He flopped down on the bed to think.

  If he were the victim of an “accident” that Mimi seemed to have caused, would that be enough for the police to arrest her? It would have to be a near-fatal accident, and there couldn’t be any doubt as to Mimi’s involvement. How could he arrange that? And he’d need a witness. Marian Larch would be ideal.

  Rae Borchard was only partly right about him. Never before in his life had he set out to get someone; but he could learn to be a hunter if that’s what it took to survive. He had changed, and he could change even more. In a way he was lucky that the only other suspect was Mimi Hargrove; if it had been someone he liked, such as Gale Fredericks, he wasn’t at all sure he could go ahead with it no matter how much he’d changed. But it was Mimi, good old thorn-in-the-side, double-crossing Mimi. Mimi, who wanted his job so badly she could … kill for it?

  The police were still thinking in terms of deliberate murder, bless their one-track little minds. All right: if they wanted a murderer, he’d give them one. He was damned if he’d see his own life ruined because of two stupid mistakes he’d made. But whatever he was going to do, he’d better do it fast; the people in Washington weren’t going to wait forever.

  Mimi. He’d better find out if she was thinking of moving to a hotel or not. He found her in the media room, watching two movies. King put on a hearty air and asked, “Neither one interesting enough to hold your full attention?”

  Her face was unreadable as she turned down the sound of the one movie she was listening to as well as watching. “I called Michael,” she said expressionlessly. “As soon as his ship reaches port, he’s catching the next plane here.”

  Damn her—even less time now. “Y
ou’re afraid to stay in the apartment with me?”

  “Ivan says you won’t dare kill me now.”

  Ivan? “Well, Marian says the same about you.”

  Mimi switched off the two movies and stood up to face him. “King, you’re not going to kill me. I’m going to be watching you, every minute. And when Michael gets here, we’ll both be watching you. Knowing you, I think you’ll give yourself away sooner or later. I’m not going to jail for you.”

  He didn’t like the sound of that. “Give myself away? Is that what you said?”

  “Just remember—I’m watching. Don’t do anything out of the ordinary and you must might get out of this intact.” She stared at him, unblinking.

  It didn’t make sense; if she accepted the police’s theory and believed him to be a murderer, why the hell was she still here? Play it out. “If you think the police are going to arrest me for murder, you’re wrong. There’s no way they can prove I did something I didn’t do.”

  She laughed unpleasantly. “I can’t believe how naive you are. Those two detectives can make a case against either of us anytime they feel like it. They can argue we each had motive and we each had opportunity, and neither of us can prove them wrong. Once they get tired of playing these games with us, they can just flip a coin to decide which of us to arrest.”

  Uh-huh, so that was it; she didn’t trust the police to get it right. That meant she was up to no good, that she had something definite in mind. But what? Ask her. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to watch you,” she replied.

  “I see. Well, if you think I won’t be keeping an eye on you, better think again. I’m not going to be done in by some programmer from California.”

  Mimi’s upper lip lifted. “You’re a prince, King,” she said without realizing how silly that sounded. “Now we both know where we stand.”

  They were glaring at each other without speaking when the doorbell rang. And rang again. Finally Mimi broke away and went to answer the door. “Oh no,” he heard her groan.

  King took his time getting to the entryway, where he saw the two people he fully expected to see. “Sergeants Larch and Malecki. What a surprise.”

  “We didn’t want you to think we were neglecting you,” Marian Larch said with unnecessary heartiness.

  “Never,” King replied somberly.

  “We had something to attend to or we woulda been here earlier,” Ivan Malecki explained to Mimi, as if she wanted to know.

  “Well, Mimi, you can relax,” King said sarcastically. “Now you won’t have to watch me by yourself.”

  She ignored him, superbly. “What do you want this time, Ivan? I’m not answering any more questions. My lawyer told me not to talk to you at all.”

  My lawyer, King noted.

  “Oh, I thought we’d just sit and talk for a while,” the detective answered amiably. “King and my partner have an errand to run.”

  “We do?” King said.

  “We do,” Marian answered firmly. “Got a raincoat? It’s still pouring down outside.”

  King looked in the entryway closet. No guest raincoats, but a couple of umbrellas. He took one and asked, “Where are we going?”

  “I want you to meet some people.”

  You don’t have to go with her, he told himself. “On second thought, I don’t think so. I don’t have to go trotting along after you every time you—”

  “You can either come with me to meet these people or I take you down to the station and hold you as a material witness. Well? Which is it going to be?”

  He glared at her. “Oh, shit. All right. Who are these people?”

  “You’ll see. Come along.” She turned and went out, not looking back to see if he followed.

  He followed.

  On the street, King folded himself into the passenger seat of the car Marian was driving, a different one from yesterday’s. He felt more curiosity than nervousness. A couple of weeks ago, being dragged off to god-knows-where by a police detective would have reduced him to a twittering wreck; but now he simply felt a healthy tenseness, ready to take on whatever it was. The rain was beginning to slack off.

  “This morning the reports from your credit card companies came in,” Marian said conversationally. “Copies of receipts, like that. We were interested in the ones that were dated after you were mugged. And you know what we found? We found a whole bunch of receipts for that same day.”

  King had halfway expected this to happen. “A few of them are bound to be mine,” he said coolly. “I made some charges right before the muggers took my billfold.”

  “That’s what we figured. But it’s the damnedest thing—you know what your muggers used your cards for that day? Food! Not expensive clothes or televisions or high-tech toys, but food. They went down to Fifty-seventh Street and gorged themselves. Isn’t that strange?”

  King shrugged. “What did they charge after that day?”

  “Nothing. Probably keeping the cards out of circulation for a while. But after they mugged you, they evidently spent the rest of the day eating. At least, that’s what we thought. My partner and I checked them out—that’s what we’ve been doing today. It was a long shot, at best. Cashiers and waiters don’t even look at the customers half the time. But guess what? We found a couple who did.”

  King’s skin began to itch.

  Marian went on, “One of them looked at the receipt and said, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s the dude who’s fifteen feet tall—I remember him.’ Well, you can imagine our surprise. You said kids mugged you, so it was kids we were looking for. But the description we got was of a middle-aged man, kind of messy, and tall. Extremely tall. Easy to notice, easy to remember.”

  He tried to sound casual. “Those are two places I went, obviously.”

  “Obviously. But what has us puzzled is the time stamps. One receipt says three-forty-five and the other six-oh-five. Hours after you were supposed to have been mugged. Well, here we are.”

  Here was the Russian Tea Room. King numbly followed her inside. He hadn’t even known that the time appeared on credit card receipts; he’d never looked at them that closely. Immediately he recognized the sad-eyed Polish waiter who’d cleaned up some wine King had spilled; King stood there uneasily as the waiter unsmilingly identified him. Then Marian took him to Tony Roma’s, where it was the cashier who made the identification. King didn’t remember her at all.

  The rain had stopped. Marian had parked illegally, but when they got in she made no move to start the car. She looked at King and said, “Want to tell me about it?”

  “Obviously I got the time confused.” He let a trace of irritation creep into his voice.

  “Obviously. You confused high noon with seven o’clock in the evening—a common mistake. All the time you were supposed to be lying unconscious in Central Park, you were down here stuffing your gut. Why did you tell us you were attacked at noon?”

  Be friendly, be reasonable. “Marian, I’d just suffered a head injury. Had you forgotten that? I don’t really remember what I told the investigating officers. I’m not sure about the times even now.”

  She cocked an eyebrow at him. “Good answer. It might just play in a courtroom.” Abruptly she started the car. “I need a beer.”

  So did King.

  Marian headed back toward the western half of Fifty-seventh, parked illegally again, and led King into a bar called Desmond’s. One of the places he’d missed. King felt as if he’d stepped into another era, a time usually thought of as the age of innocence. The old-fashioned wooden bar, the total absence of steel and plastic, the unhurried pace, the quiet. If the barman had been a soda jerk, the scene could have been painted by Norman Rockwell.

  They sat at the bar to drink their beers. King watched the barman polishing already gleaming glasses and said a little prayer that Marian Larch would let him off the hook.

  She didn’t. “There were receipts from ten different restaurants, you know. All the same day. Ten! Why were you eating so much?”

/>   He gave a little laugh, trying to sound mildly embarrassed. “A childhood habit, I’m afraid. I go on eating binges when I’m uptight.”

  “What were you uptight about?”

  “I was about to start on the project that could make me or break me and you want to know what I was uptight about? Come on.”

  A silence fell. The barman started placing his newly polished glasses on a shelf behind the bar, aligning them just so. Each one separated from its neighbor by the exact same amount of space, each one back from the edge of the shelf the same distance. Marian said, “You couldn’t have been mugged before six-thirty, seven o’clock, because you left the last restaurant at five after six. But the time on the first credit card receipt is only a few minutes after noon. What were you doing all morning?”

  “Eating. I paid cash until I ran low and then started charging.”

  “Uh-huh. So you spent the entire day eating?”

  “Yeah, I guess I did.”

  “You were so uptight about the project that could make you or break you—your words—that you spent the day eating … when you should have been at MechoTech?”

  “What?”

  “You had a meeting at two o’clock, but you didn’t show. Because you were too busy eating?”

  “A meeting?” King stalled.

  “Rae Borchard says all four of you were expected at two. She’d wanted to reschedule for an hour earlier, but her secretary couldn’t get any of you on the phone. The secretary had started calling a little after nine and kept calling all morning.”

  A picture flashed into King’s head: his own hands struggling to hold up the heavy window while Gregory fed his one-footed pigeon, the ringing of the telephone distracting him for one crucial moment, the feeling of helplessless as the window began to slip out of his grasp … “Are you sure about the day? I thought the meeting was for the next day, Friday.”

  The police detective looked at him with disgust. “You didn’t show up for that meeting because you knew there wasn’t going to be any meeting. And you knew there wasn’t going to be any meeting because you knew half the design team was dead. What happened in that apartment?”