The Complete Mystery Collection

by Michaela Thompson

  She tilted her head back a little. Sandy was saying, “Give you every assurance—”

  “We’ve always been so careful. Never a black mark, never. What happened?”

  If Bobo got ticked off because she hadn’t paid attention to him, Sandy wouldn’t be pleased. “We’ll find out.”

  “We?”

  “The company I work for. Breakdown, Inc.”

  “What kind of company is that?”

  So much for Sandy’s publicity efforts. Give him the cocktail-party explanation. “We’re engineers who investigate why things go wrong— plane crashes, nuclear power plant failures, why the gearshift lever knob comes off your car, anything.”

  He looked more alert. “How do you do that?”

  On automatic pilot, she said, “Everything obeys physical laws— laws about speed, tension, impact, fatigue, things like that. We figure out which laws apply and why. Then we can figure out what caused the failure.” And determine, she added silently, who was to blame for whatever smashed and should pay for it through the nose.

  Straining to hear what Sondergard was saying about “results,” she missed Bobo’s next question. When she asked him to repeat it he said, “How will you find out what happened to Loopy Doop?”

  His eyes were pleading. He wanted reassurance, but she wasn’t about to spend half the night explaining Breakdown’s procedures. She chose something relatively easy. “I might start by doing a fault tree.”

  “A fault tree?”

  “It’s a way of making sure the possibilities are covered.”

  “A tree? Like a family tree?”

  She got out her notebook and pen and looked around. Better not talk about Loopy Doop. A Styrofoam cup lay at their feet. She pointed to it and said, “Here’s an example. Suppose you pour hot coffee into that cup, and the coffee leaks out the bottom and scalds you badly. If I were making a fault tree, I’d put that at the top and we would call it the Most Undesired Event.” She drew a rectangle at the top of the page and wrote in it “Leaky Cup.”

  He nodded. “What happened here tonight is the Most Undesired Event.”

  Keep him off Loopy Doop. “Right. Under the Most Undesired Event, I’d figure out what could have gone wrong with the cup. Maybe it’s defective. Maybe it wasn’t meant to hold hot liquid in the first place. Maybe it was damaged in shipping and there’s a hole in the bottom. See?” She sketched in other rectangles. “Now, only one of those things has to go wrong to result in my Most Undesired Event, so I’ll put a half a bullet here. We call that an Or gate. If it took more than one, I’d put an And gate— a dome shape.”

  He took a pair of Ben Franklin glasses from his pocket, put them on his nose, and gazed at her sketch. “Then what would you do?”

  “I’d spread out from there, and put possible contributing factors under each possible cause. If the cup was damaged, was it damaged in shipping, or somewhere else? If it was the wrong kind of cup, was the order filled incorrectly, or was the wrong cup ordered? I’d go on until all the possibilities I could think of were exhausted. A single fault tree for a nuclear power plant could cover the floor of a room.”

  “When you finished, you’d know why I got scalded?”

  “I’d know where to start looking.”

  “You could do that for the accident tonight?”

  “Sure. I expect somebody will do one.”

  They were silent. Bobo took his glasses off and put them away. He drew a shuddering breath. “I’m an old man,” he said. “In eighty-three years, this is the worst thing that has happened to me. My wife died of cancer. For that I could blame God. For this, I can only blame myself.”

  Marina closed her notebook..

  He twisted the handkerchief in his knobby hands. “Marina, I must know. How can I rest in my grave if I don’t know? You must find out for me.”

  “The company—”

  “No, you. You.” Abruptly, he pulled her forward, interrupting Sandy and Sondergard. “I want Marina to investigate this accident,” he said.

  Marina saw displeasure on Sondergard’s face, and she knew Sandy saw it too. “Mr. Bolton, many people work on an investigation of this magnitude,” Sandy said. “I can assure you—”

  “She is the one who is to report to me,” said Bobo. When he spoke in that tone, Marina thought, you could see traces of the whip-cracking executive he once must have been. “Is that understood?” He was looking at Sondergard.

  Sondergard inclined his head.

  Bobo seemed spent. Neither Sandy nor Sondergard looked at Marina. Marina wondered what Sandy would say later, when they were alone.

  4

  Marina’s eyes watered from yawning as she adjusted the cross-section of Loopy Doop’s leg in the hardness tester. Sandy had managed to get somebody out with a band saw, but she’d had to wait for the guy to show up and cut the tubing. After that, there had been the boring drive north on the freeway from Redwood City to San Francisco, a garish neon procession of motels, restaurants built of pseudowood or pseudostone and surrounded by vast parking lots, the airport, Candlestick Park on its gusty ocean promontory. At last the hills and the city— billboards advertising tequila, the Bank of America, the current show at Harrah’s Tahoe, and beyond the billboards the angular, glittering high rises overlooking empty streets down which the wind, funneled between the glass-and-concrete sides of the buildings, blew fast and cold.

  By the time she had taken the exit for the waterfront, the Bay Bridge looming ahead of her, it was nearly midnight. She drove past the Ferry Building with its clock tower, a serene survivor of the 1906 quake now half-hidden by the Embarcadero Freeway, and parked her car a few hundred yards beyond.

  The bay was rough. Water slopped against the pilings supporting the cavernous converted pier that housed the Breakdown offices. Carrying her chunks of round steel tubing in a plastic bag decorated with Bobo’s laughing face, she let herself into the building.

  She yawned again and wiped the corners of her eyes. Footsteps echoed across the pier’s vast, open interior. Fernando, the security guard, making his rounds. She had already greeted him when she signed in at the front door, where he sat eating an apple and reading Psychology Today.

  She elevated the platform until the steel touched a small penetrator attached to the gauge. Loopy Doop was hers— at least for the moment. So far, that had meant having to wait for the mechanic at Fun World while Sandy and Sondergard decamped in the Porsche and Bobo was trundled back to his Hillsborough estate in the limousine. It meant she was here doing a hardness test instead of at home getting some sleep.

  Pushing the crank that would apply the load and cause the penetrator to dent the steel, she focused on the pointer. The hardness test was usually done first because it was quick and easy and didn’t require a technician. Zip, zip, zip. Get the sample in, make the dent, take the load off, read the number, which was— she squinted— sixty-five on the Rockwell B scale. She wrote the figure in her notebook. The tensile strength test would have to wait until machined specimens could be made from the Loopy Doop sample and the chemical analysis would be sent to an outside lab, but at least this one was out of the way. Stifling yet another yawn, she took the specimen from the machine and tagged it for the evidence room.

  The key to the evidence room was in its little magnetized box stuck under the overhang of the testing division secretary’s desktop. She slid it out and, after making a notation on the sign-out sheet on the door, deposited Loopy Doop’s fractured leg in one of the bins that lined the shelves inside.

  As she was relocking the door the phone buzzed. She answered, and Sandy’s voice said, “Thought I’d find you there. Listen. The teenagers— Wilson their name was, brother and sister— didn’t make it. The ticket-booth lady and the mother probably will. It’s touch and go with the little boy, but if he pulls through he’ll be a quad.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Yeah. Some other kids in line were hurt too, but he’s the worst. This is going to be a hot little number.”

>   “Looks like it.”

  “I don’t need to tell you to keep your ass covered, do I?”

  “Nope.”

  “Eric Sondergard isn’t jumping for joy at what Bobo pulled on him. I’m a little surprised at the way you played that one.”

  “I didn’t play anything. The old guy is just gaga.”

  “Right, right. We’ll talk tomorrow. Sweet dreams.”

  Marina hung up. The stakes were rising. You couldn’t collect more than a few hundred thousand for wrongful death, but a quadriplegic, especially a young one, was a different story. With a quad case, you were talking millions. And the insurance companies and Fun World and everybody else involved would be scrapping to make sure the millions didn’t come out of their particular hides. They were all going to be very interested in what the investigation— her investigation— turned up. She switched off the overhead light and headed for home.

  5

  The man on the screen said, “Fun World is bankrolling the Loopy Doop investigation. Doesn’t that make it more likely that you’ll clear Fun World of blame?”

  The woman on the screen looked disheveled, Marina thought, and tense in a twitchy, rabbity way. Why act so intimidated by that cut-rate Mike Wallace, she asked herself as the woman said, “Absolutely not. We’ve been hired to look for the truth. If our investigation shows that Fun World was negligent we’ll not only tell them, we’ll tell the world. We can’t change the facts to favor one side over the other.”

  Sandy reached for his hamburger as the commercial started. “Fantastic, Marina. Perfect.”

  “I looked awful.”

  Sandy shook his head vigorously, his mouth full. When he’d swallowed, he said, “It’s just like when you go on the witness stand. You don’t want to look ultra-glamorous. People won’t trust you.” He turned to Don, his assistant, and said, “Isn’t that right?”

  Don was a marathon runner, with the runner’s stringy, muscular body. He had green eyes and his head was covered with tight blond curls. He wore an aviator jacket and a narrow raspberry-colored tie and his feet, in battered running shoes, were propped on his desk. “I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “I think the white lab coat was a mistake. It made her look too pale.”

  “She was perfect.”

  Marina ran her hands through her hair. She had probably done the same thing, she realized, just before the interview, which was why it had been standing up like that. I did look pale. And rabbity. “I’ve got enough to do without worrying about looking like Miss America on the six o’clock news.”

  “That’s what I just said.” Sandy’s tone was exaggeratedly patient. Turning to Don, he said in a mock-whisper, “Don’t ever tell Marina she looks pale. Anything but pale.”

  “Got it,” said Don. He proffered’a greasy white bag to Marina. “Want a fry?”

  “No thanks. Spoil my big dinner with Sondergard.”

  Sandy crumpled his napkin. “God. I forgot that was tonight. You’ll have to talk to him, Don. I ate onions.” He checked his watch. “When’s he supposed to be here?”

  “I told him about the news thing, and he said he’d stop by afterward to pick me up.”

  “Time enough to gargle.”

  As Sandy, straightening his tie, disappeared into the bathroom adjoining his office, Marina wondered again at how easily he seemed to have accepted Bobo’s capricious insistence that she be given the Loopy Doop case. It was she, after all, who’d been on the news, her picture— wearing the lab coat, staring through a microscope at nothing— that had been in the paper. When People magazine called, they’d asked for Marina Robinson. So had the wire services. It was the kind of attention Sandy loved, but he’d made no effort to do anything but coach from the sidelines. His attitude had given Marina some uneasy moments of wondering whether there was some reason he didn’t want to be more closely involved himself.

  On the other hand, it was opera season, the busiest time of his year, when he spent most evenings squiring this or that society grande dame or ingenue around to performances and parties. Despite the pictures that ran in the papers of Sandy with various women, both the women and anyone else who cared to know knew that Sandy’s serious love for the past few years had been Don. Don hated opera, and refused to attend.

  The phone buzzed, and Don sat up. “Your line, Marina.” He answered, and raised his eyebrows at her as he punched the “hold” button. “It’s Patrick.”

  “I’ll go take it on my phone.”

  “But of course.”

  Marina stepped out of Sandy’s office onto the open metal catwalk that surrounded it. Sandy’s office was raised above the floor of the pier on metal supports and was accessible by a fire-escape staircase. As Marina descended to the main floor and walked past the glass-fronted office cubicles on the way to her own, she felt a headache forming behind her eyes. She and Patrick had agreed not to communicate. It had been his choice.

  The red blink of the phone button was the only light in her dim office. She sat down at her desk, picked up the receiver, and punched the button. “Patrick?”

  “Hi.” Music in the background, of course. A piece she couldn’t quite recognize. He hesitated, then said, “I wanted to be sure you were all right.”

  “All right?”

  “I’ve seen the stories in the papers. I just saw you on TV. There has to be a lot of pressure.”

  Just like Patrick. “I’m fine.”

  She heard him draw a long breath. “I was worried that this might be too much like— it might be too much.”

  “Too much like Palika Road?”

  “That’s what I meant, I guess.”

  Why couldn’t he stay out of it? “Palika Road wasn’t exactly an amusement-park ride.”

  Several bars of the music came through clearly, but she still didn’t recognize it. Then he said, “I can’t believe you didn’t understand what I meant, so I guess you’re being deliberately snotty.”

  Her cheeks were hot. “Listen. Catastrophes are my living. I can’t afford to run screaming into the night when one happens.” She swallowed. “You know that.”

  “Actually, I do know that. It was a feeble excuse to call you.”

  Neither of them spoke. Then she said, “How are things?”

  “Not bad. At the store we’re in the middle of the Christmas madness, selling lots of ‘Jingle Bells’ and the Messiah. The Sidewalk Symphony is making beautiful music except in the horn section. Lucy has dropped out.”

  “Not again.”

  “Yeah. She’s doing some kind of bodywork, and her bodywork guy told her playing the horn was getting her spine out of alignment.”

  “That’s Lucy, all right.”

  “It’s really bad in the Vivaldi. Tanner’s just not up to it. And speaking of bad news, it looks like the IRS or the FBI or somebody has finally caught up with me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Guys calling the store to verify that I work there. And Mrs. Dobson told me she’d gotten a call to check that my address is really my address.”

  “They said they were from the IRS?”

  “No. But what else?”

  “Your taxes are OK, aren’t they?”

  “Except for my secret Swiss accounts, I am simply a record-and-tape-store manager and sometime orchestra conductor whose meager taxes are paid up to date.”

  “Once they crack your American account they’ll realize they’re wasting their time.”

  He chuckled. “No doubt.”

  The music had stopped. “I’d better go,” she said.

  “I love you, Marina.”

  She took a deep breath. “See you.” She hung up.

  She sat in her darkening cubicle, drumming her fingers on her desk. She could just make out, on the opposite wall, the photograph that looked like a lunar landscape but was really an electron-microscope view of corroded steel.

  Patrick knew what was important to him. He might wear frayed sweaters and cords most of the time, but when his orchestra had a perfo
rmance he showed up in a tux, and insisted that his musicians dress formally too. His Berkeley apartment, in the flatlands off College Avenue, had almost no furniture, but was equipped with an elaborate stereo system and tape deck on which to play his huge collection of recorded music. He decided what was important to him, and he committed himself to it. It shouldn’t have surprised her, then, that he had wanted to commit himself to her.

  Which was the last thing she wanted. When he talked about living together, maybe getting married sometime, she felt numb. Worn out with it, pushed to the wall, she had compared her feelings to an alloy of metals: “Say this particular alloy is made to hold ten pounds of weight, OK? Its nature is to hold ten pounds. Put eleven pounds on it, and it breaks. It isn’t made to hold eleven pounds.”

  “So what we’ve had together is ten pounds, and what I want is eleven pounds.”

  “Something like that.”

  “No matter how much I want it to, it won’t hold eleven pounds.”

  “It can’t hold eleven pounds, Patrick. It can’t do it. It isn’t made to do it. Don’t you understand?”

  “I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t believe it.”

  “Believe it.”

  Patrick was an optimist. He thought things could change. She was— not a pessimist, but a realist. Eric Sondergard was probably here by now. She’d take a minute to brush her hair and then she’d go.

  6

  “Dessert?” Sondergard looked inquiringly at her as the waiter hovered.

  She shook her head. “Just coffee.”

  “Two coffees.” As the waiter moved off, Sondergard drank the last of his wine and said, “Delicious.”

  Somewhat to Marina’s surprise it had been delicious, and not all that unpleasant. She hadn’t been sure what to expect when Sondergard invited her to dinner to discuss Loopy Doop, but had imagined the best she could hope for was an indifferent meal in a dim, half-empty hotel restaurant. Instead, Sondergard had brought her to one of San Francisco’s best fish places, where the lights were bright, the bar loud, smoky, and crowded with people drinking liquor instead of white wine, the booths dark wood and taller than head-height, the waiters middle-aged, and the menus printed every day. Sondergard had surprised her.