Everything but the Squeal sg-2

by Timothy Hallinan

  The tape was older and less sticky than I might have wanted it to be, but it, plus about two feet of copper wire out of Alice's trunk, did the job. With the alarm silenced, I opened the door in less time than it takes a twelve-year-old to shave. Stuffing my scarf under the door and feeling like I'd just won the lottery, I fumbled around in the darkness for the light switch and failed to find it. Using a flashlight instead, I went to Birdie's desk and pressed the button on its underside that opened the Flash Gordon door.

  No deal. No access to Mrs. Ming the Merciless.

  So why was it no deal? There had to be a master switch somewhere, and it had to be on my side of the door. Otherwise, Mrs. Brussels, whoever she might actually be, couldn't have gotten in in the morning.

  I looked everywhere. Squinting along the flashlight's beam, I lifted the cushions of the couch. I pried up the corners of the rug. I even risked going back outside and peeling up the doormat. Then I ran my hands over the wallpaper, looking for a little bulge. The one or two I found, I pressed without any payoff. Probably cockroaches caught in the glue.

  When you can't get what you want, I reasoned, settle for what you can get. I went to Birdie's desk and looked at his phone. It was a technological miracle, full of what the people who sell you phones like to refer to as “extra features.” Down its right-hand side were sixteen auto-redial buttons. In other words, jackpot.

  Touch-tone technology has turned the telephone system into music: every number that you press sounds a different note. A phone number is like a musical snowflake, in that no two are alike. I pressed a pocket tape recorder against the earpiece of the phone and pushed each of the redial buttons in turn. When the beep pattern had sounded, I hung up and went to the next button. After about a minute I had them all on tape. Then I turned my attention to the reason I had come in the first place.

  The computer was nothing special, an IBM clone. I pulled it around so I could fool with the keys and switched it on. A little bit late, I thought about disks, nonsystem disk or drive error, the screen signaled me. insert system disk

  AND PRESS ANY KEY.

  A disk holder was stashed in the third drawer down on the right. I pulled out the DOS diskette I'd bought and put it in. When the A Prompt blinked at me, I put another of the disks into the B drive, dir b: I typed.

  The machine whirred and the screen lit up with a long list of meaningless file names. I pulled the DOS disk out of drive A and inserted one of my own, one of the ones I'd bought at Computerland, in its place. Then I typed copy b:*.* a:. In human talk, that meant copy everything on the disk in the B drive onto the disk in the A drive.

  After some whirring and some beeping, the machine told me that the disk I'd inserted wasn't formatted. I should have known that. A computer disk is like a long-playing record without any grooves until you format it. Only then can it figure out into which grooves it should place the information you're copying onto it. I put the DOS diskette back into drive A and formatted all the disks I'd bought at Computer-land. Then I repeated the steps that told the machine to copy everything on disk A onto disk B.

  It took nine of the ten disks I'd bought to copy the contents of Birdie's diskette file. Then, just to make sure, I copied his DOS diskette, which I found in the back of the holder, as well. DOS doesn't take up an entire diskette, and who knew what else he had hidden there? I finished up by labeling all the diskettes. Birdie had just numbered them, one through nine plus DOS, so I copied his system. Then I put back everything I'd touched.

  With the diskettes tucked back into the box I'd bought them in, a thick square of cold hard cardboard pressing up against my stomach beneath the belt of my jeans, I went over the office again in search of the secret passkey to the Flash Gordon door. Still no deal. Feeling defeated, I went back out through the front and into the fog of the evening.

  L.A. glittered at me like the jewels in the Seven Dwarfs' mine as I drove back west toward the ocean. Somewhere out there, socked away among the semiprecious stones, was Aimee Sorrell. Or maybe not. What had Mrs. Brussels asked me about Jessica? Was she free to travel? Something like that. Travel how far? I wondered. Rio? Japan? Saudi Arabia? The white slave trade, I knew, extended into all the black, brown, yellow, and coffee-colored countries. And into the white countries as well.

  Great, I thought as I killed Alice at the foot of my driveway and climbed up the hill, I'd eliminated none of the world's continents except Antarctica. And if anyone lived on Antarctica, it would still be on my list. Good work.

  When I opened the door of my house, it was just as I'd left it, only colder. I pulled a sixteen-ounce bottle of Singha out of the refrigerator, and sat down in my only chair, feeling sorry for Aimee, and a little sorry for myself. Coyotes howled in the distance, and I went out onto the deck and howled back. The clouds had cleared briefly and the full moon shone down like a cue for Lon Chaney Jr. to appear and start mumbling. I was absolutely getting a little old for all this, I thought. I'd gone back inside to put the diskettes into the computer when I noticed that the light on the answering machine was blinking. If Eleanor had been in America, or anyplace closer than Nanjing, China, I would have noticed it earlier. I always checked the machine when Eleanor was around.

  I pushed the button marked Replay. First came some garbage: a tape-recorded voice asking me whether I had ever thought about gold futures, followed by a kid who asked me if my refrigerator were running. I skipped the part where he (or she) told me that I'd better go out into the street and chase it, and got Mrs. Sorrell's voice.

  “Mr. Grist?” it said. “Are you home?” The voice waited, and in the background I could hear horns honking. “If not,” she said, “just listen to me. Stop looking for Aimee. Don't do anything more. Just forget it. Send me a bill. If you have to talk to me about this, don't call at night. And don't do anything, do you hear me? It's all going to be all right. I've paid the ransom, and it's all going to be all right.”

  She hung up. I took the plastic box of diskettes out of the front of my pants and tossed it onto the floor, next to the wadded-up motel stationery. So she'd paid the ransom, I thought, knocking back about three inches of Singha. So it's going to be all right.

  Somehow, I didn't think so.

  15

  Perfect Pitch

  “Don't you listen?” she snapped, long-distance from Kansas City. She sounded like Aurora's imitation of an adult talking to a child. “I said that you weren't to do anything.” I'd awakened late, but even in Kansas it was only noon, so it was safe for me to call: the Pork King couldn't be home.

  “You paid the ransom,” I said. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that I mailed the money. Please, Mr. Grist, just send me a bill and forget about it.”

  “Mailed it?” I asked. I was pretty sure that she was speaking English, but to me it didn't make any more cognitive sense than running water. “Mailed it where?”

  “To an address he gave me. In Los Angeles. Now, please, leave us alone.”

  “Hold it, hold it,” I said. “Park and idle for a minute. He gave you an address?”

  “Yes.”

  “In Los Angeles.”

  “I believe I just said so.”

  “Mrs. Sorrell,” I said. I was developing a headache. “Kidnappers don't give out their addresses.”

  “This one did,” she said in the tone of a threatened child. “Ask Aurora.”

  “I don't want to ask Aurora. Aurora's a kid and Aimee's her sister. What do you mean, he gave you an address? Was it a he?” I asked, backtracking.

  “You heard him on the tape. And when I say he gave me an address, I mean a number and a street and a zip code, all the things that usually make up an address.”

  “What is it?”

  “I'm not going to tell you that,” she said. “Just send me a bill.”

  “How long are you supposed to wait?”

  “Four days. Aimee will be home in four days.”

  “She won't,” I said, without thinking.

  “Oh, ye
s she will. And listen, you, don't do anything. This is my daughter's life you're fooling around with.” She hung up. When I called back there was no answer. I noodled around with the phone for a few minutes, dialing numbers at random and hanging up when they started to ring. I didn't like any of it, and I needed to do something meaningless while my subconscious sorted it out and came up with something for me to do.

  So I didn't have a client anymore. So bill the client. I made out a bill for a few days' work, addressed it, remembered to add the receipts from the Sleep-Eze, and slogged down the unpaved muddy driveway to the mailbox. I raised the red flag to get the attention of my brain-damaged mailman. Then I stuck the letter halfway out and closed the mailbox on it to get a little more of his attention. After twenty years of sizzling his neurons with anything he could buy cheap, his attention needed a lot of getting.

  So, there. I'd done something.

  The house, as usual, was a mess. I sort of cleaned it, wondering how Eleanor was, all those watery miles away in China. Then I went outside and sort of weeded my root garden. The radishes looked good; you can't discourage a radish. The onions were up, and the potatoes were probably rotting after the cold snap and the rain. I dug one out, and it looked fine. Little, but fine. It wasn't something you could put back, so I went inside and washed and sliced it. Then I fried it in butter for a few minutes and wrapped it into the center of a nice breakfast omelet. Then I threw the omelet away. I hate breakfast.

  So now what was I supposed to do? I made some more coffee that I didn't want and sat around, counting my toes through my shoes. When I got to ten for the second time, I remembered that I was scheduled to see Mrs. Brussels at ten, or tennish, or something. I called to cancel.

  “We've been trying and trying to reach you at the motel,” Birdie said waspishly. “They said you weren't there.”

  “And we're not,” I said. “We're at the Free Clinic. Jewel has the flu.”

  “Oh, my God,” Birdie gasped, “and she was in here only yesterday.”

  “She's okay,” I said.

  “Who cares about her?” Birdie said. “She was probably absolutely redolent with germs. That's why the flu spreads, you know, because you're most contagious before the symptoms appear. I hope it's not one that dogs can get.”

  “In fact,” I said spitefully, “it is. It's called the Bowser flu. It's decimated the canine population of Hong Kong.”

  “Oh, heavens. Poor Woofers. I'll have to wear a surgical mask when I get home. That will upset her. She loves to see me smile.”

  “Whatever you do, don't smile. This virus coats the surface of the teeth. A smile could be lethal. You'll know she's got it if her tail starts to droop.”

  “My baby,” he said. “I'll tell Mrs. B. that you won't be in.” He hung up.

  The moment I hung up, Jessica called. I told her nothing was doing. She sounded disappointed, but she mastered it. Youth is resilient. I'm not sure what's supposed to be so great about being resilient.

  There was a time in my life when I enjoyed having nothing to do. There was also a time in my life when I smoked two packs a day and my idea of exercise was reading a digital watch. It was the only thing I did that took two hands. In those days, I'd weighed more than two hundred pounds. Eleanor had changed all that. She'd gotten my beer consumption under control, helped me to cut out the cigarettes, and gotten me running. My first quarter of a mile had been sheer agony, wheezing and limping behind her while she encouraged me in a bright and completely stress-less voice. “Positive reinforcement,” she called it. It was only the view of the back of her gym shorts that kept me going. Six months later I weighed one-eighty and was doing six or seven miles at a time. I had actual muscles. I bought new clothes. Women smiled at me on the street.

  Unfortunately, with health came energy. I could no longer sit still. So here I was with a day, or four, on my hands. An hour in, and both my feet were tapping.

  Jessica called again. “Maybe we could make something happen,” she said brightly.

  “No way. We're on hold for four days.”

  “There must be something I can do. I'm going crazy sitting here. Simeon, if we don't do something, this is going to be the longest Easter vacation of my life.”

  “Can you vacuum?”

  “What's that, a joke?”

  “We can clean house,” I said. “They didn't say anything about cleaning house.”

  “Heck,” she said before she hung up. “I'd rather do my math.”

  I sort of washed the dishes. Then, probably in order to avoid sort of drying them, I realized that there was actually quite a lot I could do, without Aimee's kidnapper knowing anything about it.

  I cleared a space on the living-room floor and went through Mr. Kale's files, a sheet of paper at a time, without much hope. My pessimism was rewarded. There were many good reasons why he should never be elected president of the Girls' Club of America, but there wasn't anything that linked him to Aimee. I made a note to turn the files over to Hammond and then dumped them into a box.

  Okay, concentrate on Mrs. Brussels. I got the little tape recorder I'd taken with me when I broke into her office and played back the tones of the phone numbers I'd lifted off Birdie's auto-redial telephone. I listened to all of them about ten times but they went by too fast to do anything about, so I scrounged around in a closet until I came up with an old semiprofessional reel-to-reel that an aspiring rock singer had left there after she and I stopped seeing each other and she decided that being a secretary was steadier. I recorded the tones at three and three-quarters inches per second and played them back at seven and a half. They still went by too fast, but at least now there was some tape space between them.

  Using a pair of rusty scissors and the roll of Scotch tape I'd bought to silence Mrs. Brussels' alarm, I cut into each of the spaces between the tones and inserted a few inches of blank recording tape. Manual dexterity is not my strong point, but eventually I had a nice long pause after each tone. I had also invented a few profane expressions that I could use later to please and impress my friends. Hauling the contraption over to the phone, I went to work.

  The procedure was simple: One, crank the recorder back down to three and three-quarters, then play a tone and stop the recorder. Two, hit a number on the touch-pad of the phone. Three, when it didn't sound right, rewind, play the tone again, and hit the next number. When I found the matching tone on the telephone at last, I wrote down the number on a pad and went on to the next tone on the tape. After three or four hours of mind-numbing boredom, I'd developed perfect pitch for all the tones from one to zero, I had a blister on my index finger, and sixteen phone numbers were scribbled on my pad. Three of them were outside the 213 area code. Hot damn, I thought, I really am a detective.

  By then I was on my eighth cup of coffee and more wired than a marionette. I switched to beer to calm down and dialed the first of the numbers.

  “Doggies Do,” said a fey voice on the other end of the line.

  I coughed a little beer onto the mouthpiece of the phone. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Doggies Do,” the voice said, sounding a tad peevish. I'd have been peevish too, if I'd had to say it twice.

  I took a wild conjectural leap. “I'm calling about a dog,” I said.

  “I certainly hope so. If you're not, I'm wasting my time. What is it you want?”

  “Well, I was hoping you'd tell me about your services.”

  “Wash, dry, curl, manicure, dip,” he said automatically. “Perms require advance notice.”

  “Perms.”

  “Permanents, you know? Permanent waves, silly. If your dog needs a permanets, you've got to call forty-eight hours in advance. Got it?”

  “Thanks,” I said. “She's a Mexican hairless, but I'll keep it in mind.” I hung up. The next number on the pad was a veterinarian's office. The one after that was a dog hotel, the Bark ’n Wag. Woofers had more appointments than a producer's wife. What I had burgled, apparently, was a Yorkshire terrier's Rolodex.


  The fourth number rang forever. The fifth was a disconnect. The sixth was Birdie's colonic therapist. I was not on a hot streak. I worked on the beer for a while and then went back to the phone.

  The seventh, just maybe, was something. It rang twice and then a gruff male voice said, “Cap’n’s.”

  For lack of anything better, I asked, “Is the captain there?”

  There was a long pause, and then the man said, “You've got the wrong number,” and hung up. When I called back, the phone was off the hook. On the whole, I thought, a very odd exchange.

  One more disconnect. Then no answer. Then, on number ten, one of the ones with an out-of-state area code, I got a different man, but the same greeting.

  “Cap’n’s,” he said.

  “Which captain?”

  I listened to the cosmic whistle of long distance. “Who is this, anyway?” the man asked.

  This time I was ready. “I'm calling for the National Naval Census. We've gotten up to captains.”

  “How did you get this number?”

  “I told you, I'm calling-”

  He disconnected. I tried another out-of-state number. “Cap’n’s,” a new man said. This time I hung up. A small revenge, but mine own.

  My, my, my, I thought. I may even have said it out loud. Captains, or, rather, Cap'ns, all over the landscape. Where were all the people who answered the phones when I punched up these numbers? Hammond could have given me addresses, but I figured that calling the cops was out of bounds until Mrs. Sorrell said it was okay. However remote I thought Aimee's chances of getting home standing up might be, I didn't want to do anything to jeopardize them.

  What I could do, though, was check the area codes with the operator. One of the Captains was in Arizona, one was in Idaho, and the third was in L.A. It was beginning to sound like the First Interstate Bank.

  “Your phone has been busy forever,” Jessica complained when I picked it up on the third ring. “Are you working?” She sounded aggrieved and suspicious.