The Price of Innocence

by Lisa Black

  She had also, feeling generous, invited Leo to accompany her, since he had also graduated from Cleveland State at some point before she did. But he had turned her down, to her guilty relief (he was not good company inside the workplace, and she had no reason to think he would be any more pleasant outside of it), having ‘stuff to do’. What that might be, she couldn’t guess. If Leo had any more of a social life than she did, he hid all evidence of it with magnificent efficacy.

  The ruined horizon of the Bingham building sat just north of Lambert’s parking lot. It seemed that the large pile of rubble where the building sat had been moved, piece by piece, to a large pile of rubble in what used to be the parking lot. Progress of a sort. She wondered if it had gotten the Feds any closer to their bomber. Then she gave up thinking about it, stepping up to Entrance Number Two as expressly instructed via memo by Ginny Wilson, Futures Committee Vice Chairperson.

  Bruce Lambert’s mansion/workshop/factory loomed above the banks of the Cuyahoga, spanning an entire city block, and still seemed small for the amount of money it generated. One leaping advancement in technology after another had emerged, from mini-MP3 players to jet engines that used half the fuel of their predecessors, putting Bruce Lambert at or near the top of the Forbes 500 list in every year of the past ten. Theresa had toured his factory once; Rachael’s class had taken a field trip there, a rite of passage for every Ohio student as much as the art museum or the Schoenbrunn Indian village.

  Theresa remembered the factory, vaguely, as big, brightly lit and noisy, more of a think-tank than a factory since Lambert mostly produced designs for products rather than the products themselves. Prototypes were built, tinkered with, built again. Supposedly he recruited local talent to keep up Cleveland’s growing emergence in the high-tech field. Whatever – most Americans were simply glad he hadn’t moved his offices to China and most Clevelanders were thrilled he hadn’t taken himself to Silicon Valley or San Francisco or even Atlanta. He could be considered Cleveland’s answer to Bill Gates.

  Entrance Number Two led to a gleaming white hallway and a friendly security guard, who pointed her to the conference room, decorated in deep cherry panels and burgundy carpet and smelling of clean plastic. A SMART board covered one wall, opposite a podium filled with enough electronic equipment to stage a community theater. On one side of the room stood three huge and ungainly things; they put Theresa in mind of a small crane crossed with a mammogram machine and then fused with a copier. She half expected them to come to life and transform into killer robots, but suspected they had merely been stored in the room and forgotten, sitting at odd angles and collecting dust. Boxes sat in another corner. A conference room is often to an office what a guest room is to a home, a convenient place to stash unwanted items.

  At least twenty other alumni were already present and were, under the direction of Ginny Wilson, lining up the metal frame chairs in rows of ten with exactly six inches between each set of legs. Having left her water bottle in her car, Theresa made a beeline for the box of wine and the plastic glasses. It had been a long couple of days.

  She couldn’t stay unnoticed for long. Ginny eyed her outfit – in the dinky bathroom at the M.E.’s office Theresa had changed into a standard pair of black pants and a too-snug scoop neck top she’d grabbed by accident – but merely asked if she would stack the yearbooks on the table in a nice way. Once you’ve finished your drink, dear.

  Theresa dutifully opened the cardboard flaps and began to stack yearbooks. They were a gift to the host for his ‘museum’, a collection of informational displays that also served as the front lobby for the mansion/factory/workshop. Bruce Lambert himself would probably be hard-pressed to come up with a theory as to why he would want thirty years of college yearbooks, but they were large, weighty and, most importantly, since they had merely been accumulating dust in a storage room, free. Plus they would serve to remind people that the very impressive Bruce Lambert had attended CSU before he’d strayed off to that snooty MIT.

  Talk swirled around her, speculations upon and hysteria about the explosion next door. A few of her fellow alumni, finished with the chairs, asked Theresa what she knew. She told them: ‘Only what you’ve already read in the papers.’ They didn’t need to hear how it had nearly killed her. They could figure that out from the bruises on her face and hands.

  The Futures Committee Vice Chairperson returned to re-stack Theresa’s artistically stacked yearbooks. Ginny Wilson didn’t give a crap about when or how or why the Bingham building had blown up, too busy hyperventilating that the alumni association would be getting a tour of the factory not from some flunkey but, unexpectedly, from the top dog himself. Theresa dutifully stood by when the man walked into the room, in case Ginny fainted.

  Bruce Lambert dressed the part of the hyper-intelligent nerd with so much flair it almost seemed put on. He lacked only a pocket protector and some tape on his glasses. But the slightly wrinkled plaid shirt gleamed with a pricey sheen, and the neatly cuffed trousers had to have been hand-tailored from the finest wool. He had fair skin and unruly chestnut-colored curls and no wedding ring (preferring to date an eclectic mix of women, from a Nobel Prize winner to a supermodel to a barmaid from his high school class). If a building blowing up only inches from his life’s work bothered him, he did not show it, speaking to the forty or so people in front of him without the slightest sign of discomfort. During the tour he would show them how cars powered by electrical energy were now the logical choice, and gasoline-powered engines an expensive, inefficient custom of the past.

  Theresa watched from beside one of the huge mutant robots. She could learn about electric cars or she could maintain access to the wine box and the baby carrots. Her choice seemed clear. It had been a really long couple of days.

  ‘Hello.’

  She turned, and found herself staring straight into the collarbone of David Madison.

  TEN

  Theresa promptly choked on the orange vegetable.

  He patted her back. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Um, yeah. Hi. Nice to see you again.’

  ‘Under slightly more pleasant circumstances,’ he pointed out, keeping his voice low.

  ‘You went to Cleveland State?’ she asked, stupidly, since his name tag sticker spelled out ‘Class of 1988’.

  ‘I’m the accountant for the alumni association.’

  Like Lambert, he dressed the part, in a white shirt, dress pants and a conservative but loosened tie. Unlike Lambert, none of his clothes had the sheen of money. ‘Is that what you do for a living? Accounting?’

  He nodded. ‘It’s exactly as exciting as it sounds.’

  She tried to think of a follow-up question that showed she knew something about accounting. ‘Do you have your own practice?’ Doh, not good. Sounded snobby.

  ‘No, I work for a company downtown. Gardner Supply. Hey, I think we’re going on the move.’

  The assembled group stood up, en masse, and followed the pied piper out into the hallway.

  ‘I’m going to stay in the back. I have to cut out early,’ Madison said. ‘But I don’t want to hold you up if you want to hear this.’

  She shook her head, as content as he to stay on the fringes, just as they had at the funeral. Had it become a habit with him, avoiding the crowd, staying under the radar? It wouldn’t be surprising behavior for the survivor of what must have been a media circus. Or maybe he had preferred to camp by the wine box too, who knew? ‘I thought your name sounded familiar.’ Her voice bounced off the gleaming hallway floor, and she modified the volume. The couple in front of them glanced back at her. At least Ginny would be all the way at the front, on the heels of her idol. ‘I probably saw it in the alumni newsletters.’

  He opened his mouth, seemed to think better of it, and then nodded. Perhaps he’d been about to say, ‘Or the newspapers.’

  Their first stop turned out to be a lab at least six times the size of Theresa’s, stocked with sinks, burners, fume hoods and what appeared to be welding torches. The cl
ean plastic smell of the conference room gave over to the scent of solvents and metal.

  ‘Two things have always kept electric vehicles from becoming a viable consumer alternative to the gas engine.’ Lambert proved to be an excellent tour guide, his voice reaching each corner of the room. He paced a bit as he talked, absently picking up a clamp and then dropping it on the next bench. ‘Range and speed. They can’t go too far and they can’t go too fast – well, they can, but then the price climbs so high that the average consumer can’t afford it. If you’re talking about a car that can’t exceed thirty-five or forty miles per hour, then what you have is basically a golf cart with a nice exterior. That’s annoying enough, but range is what really fills consumers with fear. No matter how far the vehicle can travel on a charge, fifty, one hundred or two hundred miles, if you get to the end of it and there’s no handy recharging station there, then you are as dead by the side of the road as if you tried to go from LA to Vegas on fumes.’

  Theresa worked a piece of carrot out of her teeth and wondered about weight. Not her weight but the car’s, because if electric cars were anything like those electric wheelchairs, those things were as dense as a block of lead and impossible to move once the engine quit—

  ‘Well, limits are a personal affront to me. My brother Carl and I always found it difficult to observe limits – just ask my parents! I believe human beings are limited only by themselves, so it may be just as well that I didn’t become a physician like my mother wanted. People refer to me as an inventor. If they want me to pick up the check, they’ll refer to me as a genius inventor, but I’ll tell you the truth – I have never invented a thing in my life.

  ‘What I do is take something that someone else invented, look at its end point, and say, why did you stop there? Completely electric cars come with too many limits. I took another look at the situation. What are we really trying to do? Electric cars might be better for the environment but they’re still not great for it since that electricity has to come from somewhere. What we need is gasoline without the side effects.’

  The group began to move again. The climate control, Theresa had to admit, seemed flawless. Not freeze-dried, but not too warm even with the crowd of people. Good for Theresa as she tried to remember how to make polite conversation with someone who did not work in law enforcement. She kept her voice low though she couldn’t even see Lambert from their position at the back of the line. Happily, Madison helped out, asking for her connection to the association and what the Futures Committee had been up to lately. The group shuffled past Lambert’s office, furnished with a massive cherry desk; its owner joked that he never sat there, merely kept the room set up to convince his mother he had a real job. On the wall behind it spread a window which overlooked Cleveland from the east bank of the river to Tower City. A large print of the Vitruvian man hung on the wall. At least Theresa assumed it to be a print; with Lambert’s money she couldn’t be sure.

  ‘I believe I’ve found that substitute in the much more convenient form of dry crystals,’ the man was saying.

  ‘What is it you do again?’ Madison asked. ‘The papers said you weren’t a cop.’

  Theresa said she worked as a forensic scientist and then explained how her job in no way resembled the glamorous activities seen on popular TV shows.

  ‘I don’t have that problem,’ David said. ‘Hollywood has yet to glamorize accountants.’

  ‘Give them time. So, how do you really feel about electric cars?’

  Ambient light bounced off every surface in the white hallways and intensified the blue in his eyes. ‘When they have a recharging station on every corner, then I’ll consider it.’

  ‘If the price of gas gets high enough, I’ll consider anything,’ she said. The woman in front of them turned around again, this time with an actual frown, which only made Theresa drop back a few more feet. As the alumni strolled through the ergonomics section, she and Madison compared notes about their time spent at Cleveland State and how steadily college tuitions had risen across the country. She whined about the fees she had to pay for Rachael and he said he had two to go yet. Gazing at an automobile seat in some early stage of construction or assault – it was difficult to tell which – Madison complained, ‘My older boy is fourteen and has already picked his place: the esteemed University of Hawaii.’

  ‘Hawaii?’

  ‘He doesn’t believe in thinking small, and regards shoveling snow as equivalent to waterboarding.’

  Bruce Lambert guided the quivering Ginny into the prototype car seat, calling the inch-thick foam covering something that sounded like ‘eva’. It didn’t look too cushy to Theresa but Lambert sounded convincing as he made eye contact with every person in the crowd. He even caught Theresa’s gaze at one point, the warm color of his brown eyes evident from across the room. It silenced her until he finished and the tour group moved on.

  ‘Has he picked a major too?’ she asked David Madison.

  ‘Bovine science. Since they have all those ranches in Hawaii. That way he’ll have a job there as well, and need never return to the forty-eight contiguous. He did graciously agree to call me on my birthday.’

  ‘Don’t despair. Rachael insisted on the Sorbonne until she got a D on her first French test. What about your other son?’

  ‘I get a break with him. He won’t need a degree to go directly on to the NASCAR circuit.’

  ‘Good to know.’

  They paused as those ahead stopped to watch two men molding plastic headlights and taillights into the shapes they desired. The plastic pieces were held by clamps as the men applied heated pliers equipped with their own fan. Madison faced her over the gleaming linoleum, all smiles having left the smooth skin over his cheeks. ‘Theresa … my boys have been through a lot.’

  Why is he telling me this? Because he’s interested in me and, in the interests of honesty, wants to get the baggage out right up front? To explain why he can’t be interested because he’s too traumatized ever to trust again? To show how he doesn’t have time to be interested because his boys are a full-time concern? Because whenever he does talk about it, women start falling over themselves with sympathy? Because he’d rather talk about anything other than electric cars? She kept her voice low, but the noise from the fan helped cover their conversation anyway. ‘My cousin told me about your wife.’

  ‘So you know. My life has been a little – unusual.’

  ‘I can imagine. No, actually I can’t. Rachael’s father cheated on me, but at least it wasn’t with—’

  A child. He gave that same sad, gentle smile she’d seen at the funeral. She resisted the urge to put her hand on his arm as they wound past the overpowering smell of melted plastic. ‘It’s the boys I worry about. It was bad enough at the time, but the older they get, the more those hormones start pushing, the more questions they have. I considered moving but I knew I’d need help with the boys, and I have a mother and two siblings here.’

  They followed the other alumni back into the hallway, pausing outside a set of windows as the plastic smell receded. The windows turned out to be an observation spot, looking down on a two-story-high room about thirty by fifty feet, as brilliantly lit as an operating room even without the skylight windows in the opposite wall. A suspended track bisected the length, and Theresa saw the shell of an automobile dangling from its pulley. In the center of the room, mobile robots surrounded another frame, also resembling a small vehicle, with all its parts scattered about it on the floor like an unmade jigsaw puzzle: wheels, seats, axle, engine.

  Rimmed with workbenches, cabinets, the walls and floors of the fishbowl-like room were white but everything else stood out in color: books, models, drawing boards with sketches, phones, even a leftover bowl of popcorn. One desk held both a collection of fluorescent Post-it notes and a four-foot-long pipe cutter that looked too heavy to lift, much less use. Abandoned Tyvek jumpsuits had been thrown over chairs and desks like shed skins. It reminded her of an amusement park tour ride. It only needed a caption: ‘Geni
us at work’.

  They watched the slightly hypnotic process as a crane on a suspended track ushered the shell across the room to be lowered on to a waiting chassis, tended by the waiting robots. Lambert explained that the process could be reversed as well; anything that didn’t work would be disassembled down to the problem, or down to its bolts if necessary. A man in the audience asked if he’d be opening any future assembly plants in Cleveland. Lambert’s reply was lost to her as Madison leaned down to speak quietly in her ear, ‘Look, the reason I’m dumping all this on you is … I wanted to explain …’

  ‘Why you hide from the crowd?’

  ‘Yeah, well. I don’t hide, exactly, more like avoid. But I also wanted to be straight about it, in case we … run into each other again.’

  ‘I’d love to run into you again.’ She choked, coughed, and added, ‘Wait – did I say that out loud?’

  He laughed.

  ‘Really, this isn’t like me.’ It would be impossible to describe just how unlike her it was. She hadn’t chased a man since she’d been, well, a student at CSU, and then made the mistake of catching him. She’d been interested in her late fiancé from the moment they met, but hadn’t let on for months. How did this particular man get past her defenses, and in such record time?

  This was dangerous.

  She stared at the robots.

  ‘I’d like that,’ Madison said. ‘Right now, though, I have to go pick up Jake. His judo class will be over in ten minutes. The lobby’s right here, so I’m going to take this opportunity to slip out.’