by Barbara Paul
It was only ten o’clock, but King’s body was telling him to go to bed. He passed the office door without calling out goodnight to Mimi and locked himself into his bedroom. A quick shower made him even more conscious of the fatigue that had been creeping up on him for some time now; it had been an event-filled day. King reset the clock radio by his bed and crawled under the comforter, relishing its soft warmth.
He thought briefly of Gale Fredericks. He’d lost her, irrevocably. He’d lost both the people he’d worked most closely with, but Dennis Cox would leave no unfillable gap in his life. Gale, however, had been more than a co-worker; she was the only woman he’d really wanted, for a long time. And now she was gone. She’d run out on him when he needed her the most; that must surely be the ugliest kind of betrayal there was. King wondered what he had ever seen in her.
He was calm. Sleep came easily.
The clock radio woke him early the next morning; he didn’t know what time the police would show up and he didn’t want to rush. He stared at his face in the bathroom mirror. The bruises were almost gone.
He made coffee and ate a bowl of cereal; there was no sign of Mimi. When he’d finished breakfast, he looked in her room. The bed was made. She must have gotten an even earlier start than he did or else the bed hadn’t been slept in. Was she sleeping in the office? How uncomfortable.
King went into the media room and started the movie. It was a spy thriller he’d already seen, so he let it run as he wandered restlessly around the apartment. He went out on the living room balcony and glanced down at the street, twenty-two stories away, trying to spot a car pulling up to the front of the building. Come on, Sergeant Larch.
Mimi’s behavior was peculiar, to say the least; King didn’t even know whether she was in the apartment or not. Maybe she didn’t think he was the killer at all; it could be that was just a defensive posture she’d decided it would be smart to adopt. So what was she up to? When he couldn’t stand it any longer, he went to the office door and knocked. “Mimi!” he called. “Are you in there?”
There was no answer. He tried the knob; the door was still locked. “Come on, Mimi, answer me! I know you’re there.”
He stood listening for some sound from behind the locked door. The only noise in the apartment came from the soundtrack of the movie he’d left playing in the media room; from all the racket it was making, the bad guys must be blowing something up. King began to get uneasy. Mimi had spoken to him through the door last night—why wouldn’t she answer now? Was this some sort of trap she’d set for him?
He examined the doorknob. It was the kind with a small insert hole in the middle, a safety precaution for rescuing small children who accidentally locked themselves into bathrooms and the like. All he needed was something small enough to fit into the hole and he’d have the door open in no time. King straightened up and thought; among the tools he’d tossed the night before was a tiny screwdriver that would have done the job admirably, but he wasn’t about to go down to the basement and rummage through the trash looking for it.
A wire coat hanger. But every closet he looked in had only wooden and plastic hangers. What else would fit in the hole? A knitting needle. An ice pick? Too big. A meat skewer, one of the thin ones used for kabobs. A quick search through the kitchen drawers turned up a dozen metal skewers of just the right size.
King took one and hurried back to the office. He poked the skewer into the hole and heard the lock click open. He opened the door cautiously, in case Mimi was standing there ready to brain him with some conveniently heavy object.
She wasn’t. In fact, she wasn’t standing at all; she was slumped over the conference table as if asleep. But King didn’t have to go into the room to know she wasn’t asleep. Even from the doorway he could tell that of all the senseless things that had been happening, the most senseless had now taken place. Mimi was dead.
Quietly he closed the door on the sight and leaned his forehead against the panel, his heart pounding and his pulse racing. First Gregory. Then Dennis. And now … Mimi. He himself was the sole survivor of that ill-fated design team; and if there was any one thing in the world that would convince the police that King Sarcowicz was a bloodthirsty killer who ought to be locked away for ten thousand years, this was it. Mimi was dead.
Mimi was dead!
How? When? How? King fought down the beginnings of panic and tried to think. The other time this had happened, he’d bolted; but the new King would have to react more rationally if he was going to have any chance of getting out of this. First things first. Go inside, try to figure out what happened. Then decide what to do.
He opened the door again and forced himself to go up to where Mimi lay slumped over the table. Her lips were blue and her body was rigid; she’d been dead for hours. One hand still gripped a soldering iron tightly. A soldering iron? Only then did King notice that the tabletop was littered with tiny electronic parts. Slowly he walked around the table, taking inventory.
Capacitors. Switching diodes. Transistors. Trim pots. Resistors. Toggle switches. NAND gates. Infrared proximity sensors. IC sockets. Circuitry boards. And in the middle of it all, a radio-controlled toy car.
King’s mouth fell open. “Why, you bitch!” he said aloud.
She’d been building a robot. A robot! The one thing that the police would leap on as carrying King’s signature. Mimi Hargrove had been planning the same thing he’d been planning, to stage a fake accident that would bear all the earmarks of having been engineered by the other suspect. She was manufacturing evidence to incriminate him.
King sank down in a chair across the table from Mimi’s body. He knew she hadn’t trusted the police to solve the case on their own, but it never occurred to him that she’d go this far to make sure she was not the one they arrested. But that’s what she’d been doing; and that’s why she’d locked herself into this room—she needed the big table to work on. Morbidly curious, King examined the work she’d completed. Goddam. She was getting it right.
His stomach did a flipflop as he realized what a close call he’d had. If she’d finished … if she’d finished, his own carefully staged “accident” wouldn’t convince anybody of anything. At best, the two accidents would cancel each other out and the police would remain equally suspicious of both of them. He stared up at the chandelier that had been burning all night and wondered how Mimi had been planning to work it. She could have used the robot to trip herself and cause a bad fall, and then she’d have just handed the toy car to the police.
No, that was too vague, too clumsy. Idly he picked up a pack of adhesive strips from the table. What did she need adhesive strips for? Holds up to 25 pounds, the package lettering declared. King thought about that. If Mimi had fitted the adhesive strips around the wheels of the toy car, then the robot might possibly have been able to climb walls. Or … the side of a bathtub? She could have filled the tub with water and simply tossed the robot car in; since one of their team had already died that way, that would add a nice note of consistency. Then Mimi would have told the police that she’d seen the robot coming and was able to get out of the tub in time. The toy car would have to be a real, functioning robot for her story to hold up; so she’d been building the one prop her little drama required when she’d died.
Pretty good, Mimi. King raised an eyebrow at her corpse in silent salute. And to think how narrowly he’d escaped all that. If she hadn’t died just when she did, before finishing … but how did that happen? Why did she die, what killed her?
King went over to take a closer look at the body. Mimi had died while working on some soldering; that much was clear. He peered at the soldering iron she was gripping with such intensity, but could see nothing wrong there. His eyes traveled down the soldering iron’s cable—and there it was: a big hole in the top side of the cable, with burn marks around the edges. The cable’s casing had been seared away and the wires exposed, now fused and blackened. Mimi had electrocuted herself.
God god in heaven, how could that have happe
ned? Obviously she’d put the soldering iron down right on the cable and burned the protective casing away. But didn’t she see what she was doing? Mimi was not a careless woman, she didn’t make dumb mistakes—
Oh. Oh no. She didn’t see what she was doing. And the reason she didn’t see was that the lights were out. She’d put the iron down in the dark, and when she picked it up again after the lights came back on …
“It’s not my fault!” King brayed, shocked and horrified. How was he to know his puny little booby trap would short-circuit the apartment’s entire lighting system? And how was he to know Mimi was in here fucking around with a soldering iron? If she hadn’t been so busy trying to incriminate him, she’d be alive right now! It was her own doing, she’d brought it on herself, if she’d just left it to the police and not meddled …
King sank to the floor beside Mimi’s chair and buried his face in his hands. Oh god. God. He’d done it again.
After a while he began to feel an irresistible desire to giggle. Don’t mess with me, man—I’ll “accident” you to death! Mimi’s last words had been “All right”—in response to his query after he got the lights back on. Then she was all right. Later, he’d passed the office door without saying goodnight. She wouldn’t have answered even if he had spoken. He remembered the lights flickering while he was working on his own booby trap; that must have been when it happened. His giggle climbed higher and then broke off sharply, as King struggled to get a grip on himself. This was no time to revert to the old King, not with … he jerked himself up to his feet. He’d just remembered the police; they, or she, could be on the way right now. Get moving.
What to do? He couldn’t be found in the apartment with Mimi’s body. And he couldn’t just leave and claim to know nothing about it, the way he’d done last time; that hadn’t worked too well then and it sure as hell wouldn’t work now. So the logical thing was to get rid of the body; if Mimi Hargrove simply disappeared from the face of the earth, they couldn’t blame him for that, could they?
But how? How do you dispose of a body with the police watching you and security guards checking off your name every time you go in and out of the building? King still had enough composure left to realize that was too big a problem to solve in the time he had left before Marian Larch put in her daily appearance. So the only thing to do was hide the body for now and figure out how to dispose of it later. He’d tell Marian that Mimi had gone out earlier and didn’t say when she’d be back … yes, that would do.
He’d hide Mimi in her bedroom closet; Marian Larch would have no reason to go poking around in there. Or better still, in the closet in the unused bedroom. The first thing he did was unplug the soldering iron. Then he braced himself for something he’d been dreading: he had to touch Mimi. He tried to work the soldering iron free of the death grip Mimi had on it but couldn’t manage it, and he couldn’t bring himself to break her fingers to pry it loose. Didn’t matter; just leave it there.
Fighting down a feeling of nausea, King grasped Mimi’s body around the waist and lifted her out of her chair—and got an unpleasant shock. Mimi had stiffened into her seated, slumped-over posture, a posture the body maintained even as King lifted her up. This is grotesque, he thought, struggling to get a better grip on the nearly folded-double corpse. He almost dropped her, put off as he was by the bizarreness of what he was doing. He used one foot to push the door open a little wider, and after much maneuvering succeeded in getting Mimi’s body out into the hallway.
Where he froze. Because from the direction of the apartment’s entryway came the sound of voices. He heard a clank of buckets, a woman’s laugh, and the noise a vacuum cleaner makes when it starts up. The cleaning crew! It was the goddam cleaning crew! King was paralyzed by the racket they were making, standing there as stiff and unbending as the burden he carried.
“Thanks for letting us in,” said a familiar voice.
And then Marian Larch and Ivan Melecki were at the other end of the hallway, staring at him in shock, horror, and just plain disgust. No one said anything, no one moved; the sound of the vacuum cleaner roared in the background. Sergeant Malecki was the first to find his voice. “Put her down,” he said tightly.
Slowly King lowered Mimi’s body to the floor. Then he stepped back as the two detectives rushed forward.
“Rigor’s well advanced,” Marian Larch murmured, bending over the body. “She must have died during the night. Ivan …?”
“I’ll call it in,” he said. “And I’ll get rid of those cleaning people.” He headed toward the living room.
Marian straightened up and looked King in the eye. “You just couldn’t let it go, could you? You just had to get rid of this one last obstacle, didn’t you? Whatever made you think you could get away with it? Maybe we can’t nail you for the first two—but this time we’ve got you dead to rights, buddy! You have the right to remain silent—”
“In case you’re interested,” King said tiredly, “I didn’t kill Mimi. She electrocuted herself.”
“Oh? You’re telling me this is a suicide?”
“Of course it’s not a suicide! It was an accident. Look at the soldering iron cable.” He explained about the lights going out the night before.
“Uh-huh.” Utter disbelief. But she examined the cable; King could hear the vacuum cleaner noise die out as the cleaning crew packed up its things to leave. The detective said, “So it was all an unfortunate accident which you, once again, had nothing to do with. Why were you moving her body?”
King twitched. “I was going to hide it until I could figure out what to do. I knew you’d jump to conclusions, you’d think I did it. And you did!” King was starting to feel indignant. “You’re so eager to catch a murderer, you can’t wait to arrest me! Don’t you understand? There is no murderer. There’s been no murder.”
“No murder, just three convenient accidents.” The distaste on Marian Larch’s face spoke volumes. “What was Mimi Hargrove doing with a soldering iron?”
King gestured toward the office with his head. “I’ll show you.” They went inside, where King pointed toward the table. “She was building a robot.”
Marian slowly examined the tabletop without touching anything. “That’s a toy, that car.”
“It can be adapted into a robot.”
“But you’re the robot-builder here. What did you do, talk her into helping you and then rig it to electrocute her?”
“No!”
“She wouldn’t have been working on a robot if it weren’t for you. Or maybe she wasn’t working on it at all. Why should I believe anything you tell me?”
She wouldn’t have been working on a robot, the words rang in his head, if it weren’t for you. “This was Mimi’s doing. You can see—”
“You know what I think?” Marian asked rhetorically. “I think you were building a robot to go after Mimi and she caught you at it. Then you electrocuted her somehow, and staged all this to make it look as if she were the one building the robot. You burned a place in the cable and put the soldering iron in her hand. Then you waited until her body had time to stiffen so we’d find her gripping the soldering iron. But you waited too long.”
“That’s crazy!” King cried. “If I did all that, why would I want to hide the body?”
“I don’t know—second thoughts, maybe? But I do know this is no simple accident, and that you’re involved in what happened here.”
King was thinking what had happened there was at least half Mimi’s fault. But: She wouldn’t have been working on a robot if it weren’t for you. “You really think I’m stupid enough to murder Mimi?”
Marian Larch hesitated. “It would be a stupid thing to do, true—since you knew you were already under suspicion. But if all three of these deaths were accidents, they were accidents you caused. You and I both know you’re responsible.” Her body was starting to slump, as if she were depressed.
What the hell did she have to be depressed about? “I know you think I’m a clumsy lout—and at one time I was
. But I’ve changed, Marian. I’m a different person now.”
“So what? It doesn’t alter the fact that we caught you with the body, King. Hands on the wall.”
“What?”
“Put your hands against the wall and spread your feet. You’re under arrest.”
“Oh, for—haven’t you been listening?”
“I’m not going to tell you again.”
Disgusted, King did as she ordered and Marian patted him down. “You think I’m carrying guns and knives? Or maybe a bomb?”
She felt something in his jacket pocket. She reached in and took out the remote control. “What’s this do?” she asked—and pressed the button.
From another part of the apartment came an unexpected and loud “YOW!” The voice was male, startled, and indignant. The chandelier in the office went out.
Marian stepped to the doorway. “Ivan?” she called. “What’s the matter?”
“Bad shock!” Ivan called back. He came into the hallway shaking his right hand. “I went into the media room to turn off a movie and the damned thing near electrocuted me!”
Marian looked at the remote control in her hand and her eyes grew wide. She turned her head slowly toward King. “And still it goes on! Are you crazy, man?” She stepped toward him. “What was this? A back-up plan? Or is this how you got Mimi? You could have killed my partner!” Ivan followed her into the office, astonished at her words.
“No!” King hastened to say. “He was in no danger. Look at him—he’s not hurt!”
“No thanks to you. What went wrong? Didn’t you wire it up right?”
Ivan took the remote control from Marian’s hand. “This is what did it?”
“Yep, that’s it. King—what else have you got rigged in this place? Now do we add assault on a police officer to the charges?”
Sweating, King blurted, “You pushed the button!”
She looked disgusted. “Then we’ll make it reckless endangerment,” she snapped. “You ought to be locked away forever, someplace where you can’t go on hurting people!”
