“Address?” requested Jake.
Bosco flicked a toggle at the edge of his desk and a faxmemo came fluttering up out of a slot. “What do you know?—she lives in the Sherman Oaks Sector. That’s a high-rent part of town—especially for a gal who doesn’t even have an agent.”
Grinning, Jake took the memo. “Much obliged, Wolfe.” He got up. “Good luck to you and Jacko.”
“If this redhead kid doesn’t work out for you, Jake,” said Bosco as Jake took his leave, “I represent at least three dames who are ringers for her and sexier.”
12
THE PRETTY BLONDE android took Gomez by the arm. “If you’ll come with me, por favor,” she requested.
“You speak a little Spanish, I see.” He accompanied her toward an arched doorway at the far end of the huge, windowless Reception Room RD#2.
“I’m the latest model Mechanix International Customer Services android,” she explained, smiling politely. “Functioning as such in any part of California requires being able to communicate in Spanish.”
“Sí, I should have realized,” said the detective. “I thought the initial sight of my Latino charm had given you the gift of tongues.”
“You’re muy loco, Mr. Gomez.” She led him into a lengthy corridor with plastiglass walls. “I mean that in a positive sense, of course.”
The walls were illuminated and filled with pale blue water. Hundreds of small, bright tropical fish flickered and flashed within the walls.
“Nice aquarium,” he observed.
“Mr. Barragray collects fish.”
“Obviously.”
At the back door at corridor’s end, she stopped. “It’s been nice meeting you, Mr. Gomez,” she assured him. “Vaya con dios.”
“Gracias.”
She let go his arm, turned and walked back the way they’d come.
The door whispered open. Another pretty android, this one dark-haired, stood smiling just across the threshold. “Como esta?” she asked, smiling. “If you’ll come along with me, I’ll escort you to Mr. Barragray’s private office.”
“More fish,” he noticed.
The high plastiglass walls of this new corridor were also full of tiny flashing fish.
His android guide slowed, pointing. “Look! The little purple one just ate a silver one,” she said. “I find that amusing.”
“They built in a sense of humor along with your linguistic abilities.”
Barragray was a tall, broadshouldered man in his early forties. His blond hair was wavy and long and he had a checkered cloth napkin tied around his thick neck. “Buenas dias, Mr. Gomez,” he said, standing up behind his low wide lucite desk.
“I see they programmed you, too.”
“How’s that?”
“Nothing, a little android humor.”
“I’m human, I assure you, although some of the staff think I’ve got gears inside me instead of organs.” He gestured at a chair and sat down again. “I was having a little lunch. Too busy to get out today. Join me?”
“No, thanks.”
“We have an excellent galley on this floor, I saw to that. I can have them send in some enchiladas or tamales.”
“Actually, I eat only Hungarian food.” He settled into the indicated chair.
“How’s that? Oh, I see—more humor.”
Gomez smiled, then asked, “You and Peter Traynor were friends?”
Barragray set down the fork he’d picked up. “I certainly tried to be Pete’s friend,” he answered. “As I’m sure you know already, Amy St. Mars and I have been good friends since college days over in Europe. Pete, though—I made a real effort to get close to the guy, but without much luck, I’m afraid.”
“You were aware he was addicted to Tek?”
“Yes, it was obvious.” He paused to eat some of his brown rice. “There are, I’m afraid, a few other employees in this division who use the stuff regularly. But if they do their work—most of them are exceptionally bright, by the way—it’s my policy to let them stay on.” He set the fork to one side again and leaned back in his chair. “Pete had just about reached, I have to admit, the limits of toleration around here. I was trying to stay on his side and keep him on our payroll—he was a very gifted technician in spite of his habit—but I’ve been under increasing pressure of late to sever him.” He looked directly at Gomez. “There’s no possibility, I suppose, that his death was a suicide?”
“None. Why?”
“Pete had been getting worse lately. Jumpy, depressed, suspicious,” said the Gunsmiths, Ltd., First Vice President. “You’ve heard, I’m sure, of his completely unfounded suspicions about weapons being smuggled out of our San Andreas Arsenal facility?”
“Sí. Unfounded, huh?”
Barragray ate again. Eventually he said, “There is absolutely nothing going on at Gunsmiths—at any of our locations—that I don’t know about. That’s why I’ve been able to keep the position of First Vice President of the whole organization for over five years. And, I might add, why I’ll be President when Cullen Brozlin decides to step down.” He took up the fork and pointed it at the detective. “No, Mr. Gomez, if there were anything missing from the warehouse there, I’d be fully aware of it.”
“Did you go there and check?”
“Of course. Even though all our people there and the computers confirmed there had been no thefts of any sort.” He spread his hands wide. “There is nothing—nada, Mr. Gomez—that is missing.”
“Not even a batch of the Devlin Guns?”
“Not even one of them.”
Gomez rubbed at his moustache. “What exactly is the Devlin Gun?”
“A remarkable weapon. A pity it was outlawed.” He dropped the fork, undid the napkin and left his desk.
There was a large holo platform in front of the lefthand wall of his large office.
Crouching, Barragray punched out something on a keypad at the edge of the platform. “This is a demo we produced some years ago,” he explained. “At the time, of course, we had no idea that the UN was going to be so conservative about the Devlin Gun and forbid its use.” He chuckled. “A lot of them, the UN people, nicknamed it the Devil Gun.”
A field of grass came to bright life on the platform. Standing in the knee-high grass was a young man wearing only a pair of shorts. He was about two feet high.
“Oh, keep in mind that this is all simulation stuff, no matter how real it looks,” said Barragray. “We don’t, despite what our critics think, ever test our weapons on human guinea pigs.”
A second figure appeared, wearing a camouflage suit. She was holding an odd ivory-colored gun with a stubby barrel in her right hand.
“You’ll find this quite interesting,” predicted Barragray. Squatting on his heels, he watched the stage intently.
The young man had seen the woman soldier and he started to run from her.
Slowly, she raised the gun. She aimed and squeezed the trigger.
There was no sound, no projectile, no beam.
But all at once the running man began to collapse in on himself. His legs turned to flabby sacks of flesh and crumpled. His torso seemed to lose its skeletal structure and cave in. In less than sixty seconds there was only a sprawled sack of wrinkled skin spread across the grass. Blood and innards and yellow fluid were leaking out of it.
Gomez gave up his chair, turned his back on the holostage and walked away from it. “Quite a demonstration.”
“What the Devlin Gun accomplished is simple,” said Barragray to his back. “It disintegrates the bones of the body, all of them and very swiftly. You might say it causes a sort of incredibly accelerated form of osteoporosis. Without any skeleton inside, the body becomes, to put it bluntly, a sack of guts, Mr. Gomez.”
“This is a wonderful business you folks run here.”
“There’ll always be wars and a need for new, improved weapons,” Barragray informed him. “The side with the superior weapons wins. The Devlin Gun, in my opinion, is an excellent weapon. Recommended, becaus
e of its relatively short range, for guerrilla and commando operations.”
“And not one of those guns is missing?”
“As I’ve already assured you. I personally made certain of that.”
“What do you think gave Traynor the idea that a sizable quantity of the damned things had been stolen?”
Barragray tapped the side of his head and smiled sadly. “Tek,” he answered. “As I understand it, sometimes the hallucinations continue even after you unhook from the Brainbox. And, let me add, Mr. Gomez, even though I thought Peter Traynor was imagining things—I did make a very thorough, and personal, investigation of his allegations.”
“If nothing’s wrong at Gunsmiths and Traynor hadn’t stumbled onto any hijacking—why do you think he was killed?”
Barragray moved behind his desk again. “Tek,” he replied. “The whole trade is controlled by criminals.”
“Traynor annoyed somebody in the Tek business and they had him killed, huh?”
“That’s about it, yes. He aroused someone’s ire and he suffered the consequences. Whatever is behind his death, it has absolutely nothing to do with Gunsmiths, Ltd.”
“Well, that’s all for now. I appreciate your help,” said Gomez. “Now, if you’ll summon one of those Spanish-speaking andies to guide me out of here, I’ll bid you adíos.”
13
JAKE REPEATED, “LANDING permission requested.”
In response the fuzzy squawking noise came again out of the voxbox on the dash of his skycar.
It was late afternoon and he was circling the grounds of the large Sherman Oaks Sector home where the actress Janet Mavity was supposed to live. Next to the neoredwood and plastiglass house was a small landing area.
Twice now Jake, having noticed the red secsystem box next to the landing square, had asked to be cleared to set down.
After the second series of static-filled squawks, he said aloud, “Must be on the fritz.”
He tapped out a landing pattern and the car dropped down and landed unhindered.
First easing his stungun out of its shoulder holster, Jake stepped out in to the hazy afternoon.
Suddenly from his right came a sputtering, popping sound. Bringing up the gun, he spun, in time to see the high thick hedge of hydrangeas vanish. Only the long narrow holoplatform remained.
Then, a few yards beyond the landing square, a decorative sundial began to flicker. It vanished completely in about fifteen seconds.
Alert, gun ready, Jake, cautiously, approached the house.
A side door stood open. Immediately inside a body lay, facedown, in the shadowy corridor.
Carefully, Jake moved to it. “Android butler,” he realized while kneeling down next to it.
Someone had used a heavy instrument on the mechanical man’s skull. It was dented, broken open in two places. Curls of colored wire and tiny plastiglass tubes had spilled out onto the plaztiles, along with a growing pool of thin ocean-blue lubricant.
The big house was silent, and as Jake walked farther along the corridor the silence closed in around him.
He found another dead android, a maid this time, sprawled in the highdomed living room. Otherwise, though, everything was in place. No furniture was overturned, not a single holovase had been knocked to the thermorug.
The entire house was like that, all in order. Except for the central control computer on the basement level. There the entire house management and security system had been shut down. But unobtrusively and deftly, so that no alarm was given and no backup system took over.
There was one other unusual thing about the dead house. Jake couldn’t find a trace of anyone’s having lived there. No personal effects at all. In one of the three second-level bedrooms he thought he noticed a faint trace of floral perfume, a scent he vaguely associated with the woman who’d told him she was Traynor’s sister.
“That’s not evidence of a damn thing,” he told himself.
He made another slow circuit of the room, but there was nothing at all to be found.
When he looked toward the doorway, he saw a thin young man, not quite twenty, standing timidly there and smiling at him. “I followed you here, Jake,” he explained in a mild, quiet voice. “I hope you don’t mind.” He held a battered black briefcase pressed close to his narrow chest.
“Depends on who you are.” He still had his stungun in his hand.
“Well, you don’t know my name. I’ve been careful about that.” The young man took a step into the bedroom. “After what happened today, though—I’m darned scared, Jake. They’re going to kill me next.”
“And what happened today?”
“You don’t need that gun, Jake,” the young man told him. “You and I have worked together a lot over the past few years, but you never knew what I looked like. I’m Frank Bannett, Jr.”
“Don’t know you.”
“That’s right, you were saying that just today out in the Palm Springs Sector.” He slid a hand inside the briefcase. “I’m the one who built Dillinger. We just did that tracing of Wes Flanders’s activities for you.”
“Oh, I see, yeah.”
“But this is getting too dangerous. They destroyed Dillinger and I’m afraid I’m next.” The young man came closer. “Here, let me show you something.” His hand went deeper into the briefcase.
Jake grinned at him. He swung the stungun up and shot him square in the head.
14
SHE WAS SLIM and pretty and her hair was a glowing golden blonde. Wearing a black skirtsuit, she was standing in the exact center of the high-domed living room, a glass of white wine in her left hand. “You’re home early, darling,” she said.
All up above the clear oneway plastiglass ceiling of the beachside villa scores of white gulls were wheeling and turning in the oncoming dusk.
Dennis Barragray hesitated in the doorway. “I’m worried, Jean.”
Jean McCrea shrugged. “You’re always worried lately, darling.”
He came into the room. “You’ve called me darling twice already.”
She laughed. “And how do you interpret that?”
“I don’t know,” said Barragray. “It doesn’t, somehow, sound like affection.”
“What else could it be?”
He didn’t answer immediately. Finally he asked her, “You do still like me, don’t you, Jean?”
“Who wouldn’t like you? The man who’s in line to head Gunsmiths, Ltd.” She took a small sip of her wine. “What, exactly, has put you in this lousy mood, dear?”
“Do you like this house?”
“Of course. Otherwise I wouldn’t stay. I’d move out and you could spend more time with your wife.”
“I want you to stay here, Jean.”
“But you?”
He crossed to the low white sofa but didn’t sit on it. “The Cosmos Detective Agency sent a man to talk to me today.”
“Did you actually talk to him? You don’t, a man in your position, have to do that, do you?”
“A man, even in my position, with nothing to hide always talks to them.” He frowned up at the circling gulls. “What do you suppose all those damn birds are so excited about?”
“Garbage. Which operative did you talk to?”
“Some flippant Mexican.” He sat down, stood up.
“Were you hoping for Jake Cardigan?”
“What do you know about Jake Cardigan?”
“He’s probably their most famous op,” Jean said, rubbing the rim of the glass across her chin. “I’ve seen him on the vidnews lots of times.”
“Well, the one I got was named Gomez.”
“Cardigan’s partner.”
“Yes, that’s right. It was all in the report our people gave me on Cosmos.”
“Sit down, darling,” she suggested. “We can talk this all out.”
Barragray remained on his feet, watching the gliding seagulls overhead. “Killing someone, even when it doesn’t go smoothly, usually doesn’t bother me,” he said. “But getting rid of Peter Tray
nor—it’s not that we were especially close. And—I don’t know—the way it was done.”
“Not very subtle.” She smiled up at him over her wineglass. “It couldn’t be that at your advanced age you’re developing a conscience, dear?”
“I’m not that old—not all that much older than you.”
“Only twenty-some years older,” said Jean, sitting on the couch and crossing her legs. “What were you referring to when you said you wanted me to stay here?”
“I’m thinking of going away for a while. Short vacation.”
“Alone?”
“Yes, completely alone,” he said. “And, you know, the money I’ve been setting aside—I might just take that along.”
“In case you don’t come back?”
“Oh, I’ll come back. But I’d feel better with that along with me.”
“It’s only about—how much is it now?—a million dollars.”
“Closer to two,” he answered. “I can get along on that for a while if I have to.”
“But I thought it was a collection,” said Jean. “Paper currency from the twentieth century.”
“It’s a collection, but it happens to be worth nearly two million dollars.”
“All the things you’ve done, dear, all the arms deals and the bribes and the quiet assassinations you’ve okayed,” she said. “How come this one upsets you so?”
“I don’t know.” He came over and sat beside her on the low sofa. “It was while I was talking to that damned detective. I seemed to detach from everything for a minute or two. It was like dying, and it scared the hell out of me.”
“A vacation will fix you up.” She put her hand over his.
He moved his hand. “Your hand is cold.”
“Chilled wine does that. When do you figure to go?”
“Soon. In a day or so.”
“It’s a good idea, darling.” She leaned closer to him and kissed him, once, on the cheek.
The robot in the shabby green tuxedo said, “You don’t want the blintzes.”
Gomez gave him an inquiring look. “Milt’s Delicatessen is noted throughout the West for its blintzes.”
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