Memories Can Be Murder: The Fifth Charlie Parker Mystery

by Connie Shelton

  Finally getting a grip on the tape, I pulled it off in one long piece. It came away with a whining sound. The lid was stubborn and the edges were sticky with tape residue. I tugged and wrestled with it until it finally lifted.

  A yellowed newspaper clipping fell into my lap. I carefully unfolded it. A photo. The caption noted that Jack Cudahy, Special Defense Project Coordinator for Sandia Labs, was receiving a Congressional Commendation for his work. Shaking his hand in the photo was the Speaker of the House. But that wasn't the interesting part. Beaming up at Cudahy like an admiring groupie was a younger but still voluptuous Kathleen Smathers.

  Inside the can was a reel that wasn't film. I could only guess that it was an old computer disk. I knew it wasn't going to be readable on any computer that I'd ever seen. Now what?

  Drake was already seated at our special table when Rusty and I entered Pedro's. Two margaritas waited, along with a basket of tortilla chips and a small bowl of Pedro's fiery salsa. Rusty assumed his position in the corner behind the table, ready to catch chips in mid-air.

  "Look what I found!" I glanced around the room to be sure no one was paying attention to us, then pulled the large disk out of my purse and showed it to Drake.

  He grinned. "Guess I don't have to ask how your day was. You're practically glowing."

  "I am? Well, maybe, compared to how I felt twenty-four hours ago."

  We kissed and toasted each other with our margaritas. I slurped a section of salt off the rim of my glass and mingled it with the tart lime drink on my tongue.

  "How do you suppose we could find out what's on this thing?" I asked, opening the metal can to show Drake the disk.

  "Boy, that's an oldie," he commented. "And pretty specialized. Probably only used in government offices twenty years ago."

  I told him about the phone call, the whispering voice that had tracked me down at the office. "Maybe this is `that file' that he mentioned.

  "It has to be someone from Sandia," I said. "Someone who knew about the existence of this disk . . . or maybe they don't know it's on a disk. Maybe they think there's still a paper file somewhere. And if it's the same person who set the fire, how do they know they didn't get everything already?"

  Drake scooped salsa onto a chip and held it out to me. "Well, the thing that worries me is that he seems to be watching your movements so closely. How did he know you'd be at the office this afternoon? How did he know that you weren't home yesterday afternoon?"

  I chomped on the chip and helped myself to another. There didn't seem to be an answer to his questions.

  "Please be careful, Charlie," he said. "I couldn't stand it if anything happened to you, hon."

  "I'll be on alert at all times, sir!"

  He swigged the rest of his drink and signaled Pedro to bring two more.

  "I didn't mean to be flippant, Drake. I really will be careful."

  Pedro brought the second round and I suggested that we better have some dinner. Forgetting lunch was probably the reason my margarita was suddenly going to my head.

  "So, I wonder how I'm going to find out what's on this disk," I mused.

  "My thought would be to contact the most computer-geekiest person you know. Ask their advice."

  "The computer-geekiest people I know probably weren't even born when this disk was made." My skepticism showed through.

  "Well, it was just a thought. You could always go out to Sandia, walk right into the department where your father used to work, and ask them to plug it in."

  And alert someone there as to the disk's existence. Hmmm. The chicken enchiladas arrived just then, saving me from making a decision. We dug into the wonderful concoction of tortillas, chicken, cheese, and green chile sauce. I belatedly remembered to ask Drake about his day, and was pleased for him that the prospect of further work from the customer looked good.

  We finished our dinner, visited briefly with Pedro and Concha, then headed toward our new sleeping quarters at the office. While Drake made the bed with the new linens I placed a couple of phone calls to computer freaks I knew. No answer either place, so I left messages on voice-mails. Drake had headed toward the bathroom to shower in the ancient claw-footed tub while I rummaged for the combination to Ron's small safe. I locked the computer disk, the two pages of blueprints, and Dad's small leather notebook safely away before joining him under the hot spray.

  Twenty minutes later, the hot water was well on its way to lukewarm and would soon become downright cold. And we were just getting started. Drake had just suggested christening the new bed when the phone rang.

  "I'm ignoring that," I mumbled into his lips.

  The answering machine on my desk clicked on. My voice, sounding stilted, came on to inform the caller of our office hours.

  "Uh, Charlie . . . I'd hoped to reach you tonight. I'm leaving at five in the morning for a hiking trip in Mexico. If you want me to look at that computer disk, it'll have to be tonight or else after I get back. I think I know what kind of disk you're talking about, and I could probably convert it . . . uh—"

  I groaned but leapt up to grab the phone.

  "Todd? Is that you? I'm here," I called out.

  "Oh, Charlie! Glad you're there. Did you—"

  "Yeah I heard what you were saying. Do you think you can read that disk?"

  "I can sure try. A buddy of mine rigged up a contraption for me, a . . ."

  "Never mind, I wouldn't understand it anyway," I interrupted. "I just need to know what information is on this disk."

  "Can you bring it over tonight? Like I said, I'm leaving real early in the morning."

  Tonight? I looked over at Drake and the inviting new bed.

  "Will it take long?" I asked Todd.

  "You never know with this stuff. Could take minutes, could take hours."

  Drake rolled his eyes, but nodded to me. "Go ahead," he whispered.

  It was still only nine o'clock. Maybe with any luck I'd be home and back in his arms by eleven. After a day at the stick though, I had a feeling his arms would be snuggled around a pillow by then.

  I covered the receiver with my hand. "Are you sure?" I asked.

  "Yeah, this might be your only chance to get your answers. I'm sleepy anyway. May just go ahead and doze off." He switched on the new TV set with the remote. "Or maybe I'll still be glued to this thing when you get back."

  "Okay, Todd, I'll be there right away. Tell me again how to get to your place," I said, reaching for a notepad.

  Todd's little duplex in the university area was only about ten minutes away. I'd grabbed my denim jacket, the warmest thing I'd moved to the office yet, and brought Rusty along for security. He waited in the car, ears cocked in concern, as I walked up the sidewalk.

  Compared with our quiet neighborhood, the university area was hopping like Times Square. Kids this age didn't sleep, at least not at the same hours we did. Rock music blared from the apartment next to Todd's. I pounded on his door in hopes he'd hear me, but he was apparently waiting because he opened it after just one knock.

  A huge backpack leaned against a Goodwill sofa just inside the front door, its zippered compartments gaping open, nearly filled with rolls of socks and bunched up T-shirts, along with packets of freeze-dried camp food. A giant-screened TV set played a cartoon show with foul-mouthed little characters mouthing obscenities at their equally foul-mouthed parent characters. I could picture myself as a cartoon girl splatted against the wall if I'd talked to my parents in that tone.

  "Hey, Charlie, howsit?"

  "Great, Todd. Here's the disk." I pulled out the round can and handed it to him.

  "You wanna watch the process? It won't look like much."

  "Sure." I followed him into what would have been the duplex's dining area, but looked more like the command center at NASA. Todd's chin-length blond hair swung in front of his face as he bent forward to open the metal box. At fifteen, the nephew of my doctor friend, Linda Casper, was the kind of kid most parents would love to have—too involved with computers and
hiking in the mountains to get into drugs, gangs, or crime. Unfortunately, his parents were into those things and he'd ended up in the custody of an uncle who was a university professor at thirty-one. Todd was already talking like the next Bill Gates.

  He pulled the old-fashioned disk from its container, murmured something including the word "relic," and pulled the cover off a machine at the far right end of his work table. The thing resembled an old reel-to-reel tape player with a clear hinged plastic cover over the reels. Todd snapped some kind of small adapter onto the disk and tested to see if it would fit the machine. It clicked into place and he pressed a couple of buttons, which set it spinning.

  Meanwhile, he pulled out a sliding keyboard drawer connected to his own modern computer setup. He tapped the keys so quickly I couldn't make any sense of the result, but soon his monitor screen was filled with zeros and ones.

  "Uh, oh," I said. "That doesn't look like anything."

  "Oh, no, it's just what we wanted. It means the new computer is reading the text on the old disk."

  "Really?"

  "Well, we can't read it, but this baby can." He lovingly patted the CPU on the floor beside his feet. "Just give it a few minutes."

  The rows of print on the monitor began to scroll so fast I couldn't look at it without getting woozy, so I stared around the room instead. Todd's uncle had indulged him with every conceivable piece of computer equipment. Besides the state of the art CPU and monitor, he had the latest in both color ink jet and laser printers, a top quality scanner, and several other pieces I didn't even recognize. It was all wired together with about twelve miles of cable, plugged into the old house's probably overloaded electrical circuits.

  "All done," he announced, like he was accustomed to doing this every day of the week. He popped a standard sized diskette out of his computer and handed it to me.

  "This is it?" I asked.

  "Yep, converted to ASCII text. You should be able to read it on any computer now."

  "Wow, I imagined it would be a lot more difficult than this."

  "It's all code. Just a matter of converting it to a new readable format."

  "What do I owe you, Todd?"

  "Well, at my usual consulting fee of four thousand dollars an hour . . ." he grinned. "How about a hot fudge sundae after I get back from my trip?"

  "It's a deal," I said, pulling two twenties from my purse. "Meanwhile, you might need some extra food during your travels. Take this. And you still get the sundae."

  He disconnected my old disk from the fancy contraption, placed it back in the can, and handed it back to me. I stuffed it, along with the new disk, down into my purse.

  Outside, the wind had picked up, taking on a wintry chill, signaling the end of our warm October days. Rusty greeted me through the car window, pawing at the door handle from the inside. I unlocked the door and had to shove at his chest to get him to move to his own seat. Finally, convinced that I hadn't brought food, he moved over. According to the dashboard clock, it was only a little past ten. Maybe I could get home before Drake was too sound asleep.

  I pulled into the well-lit heavily trafficked Central Avenue. Gradually the boom-box traffic noise dimmed as I traveled west and made the turn toward the old Victorian.

  Chapter 33

  The old house was dark except for the night lamp burning on Sally's desk downstairs, and quiet except for the low murmur of the television in our new bedroom accompanied by Drake's rhythmic soft snore. I held Rusty's collar so he wouldn't disturb Drake and pulled the bedroom door closed.

  Knowing that I wouldn't sleep now anyway, I made a mug of hot tea and carried it to Sally's desk. Turning on her computer, I sipped the soothing brew and leaned back in her chair. As soon as the computer had booted, I slipped the new diskette into the drive and looked at it. Todd had named the file TOPSECRET. Interesting.

  I started up the word processing program and retrieved the file.

  Here we go, I thought.

  The file began with some scientific notes. I read the words but didn't know what they were saying. A couple of the strange words that I'd encountered on the blueprints showed up, and I decided later I would retrieve the blueprints from the safe and compare the two.

  About ten pages down, there was a letter, addressed to the FBI. It was dated five days before my father's death.

  I read eagerly, skimming the paragraphs, until a sentence jumped out at me: "A supervisor in our sector, Jack Cudahy, is involved in the sellout scheme."

  Jack Cudahy. The senator who'd so smoothly tried to blow off my questions. The creep—all along he'd known exactly what I would find. And he was certainly in a position of power, in which he could manage to arrange all the disasters that had happened. Jim Williams' death, my house burning, maybe even Larry Sanchez's sudden downturn and death. I suddenly became aware that all the window blinds on the first floor were open and I felt highly visible sitting there in the small pool of light.

  I quickly skimmed the rest of the document, which went back into techno-speak, then went around and closed all the blinds. There wasn't anything I could do with the information tonight, I decided, so I shut down the computer and locked the old and new disks back in Ron's safe.

  Upstairs, I brushed my teeth in the old-fashioned bathroom, locked the bedroom door from the inside, then slipped out of my clothes and under the covers next to Drake's warm body. Rusty quickly adopted my Oriental rug as his new bed and was soon snoring away. I lay under the smooth new sheets with my eyes wide open.

  The names and faces kept racing through my mind. If Jack Cudahy was behind the plane crash, why? What did he get out of it? And who helped him, because certainly one man would have a hard time pulling off the crash, covering up the investigation, and then following all my movements over the past days and weeks. I pictured George Myers with his arrogant attitude, Harvey Taylor with his polished good looks, or Wendel Patterson—retired now and seemingly harmless, but what had he been doing fifteen years ago?

  Gradually, I drifted into a light sleep, but the new bed was harder than the old comfy one, and I kept being aware of tinking sounds in the radiator pipes and creaking noises in the old house. A digital clock on the front of the new television set told me it was now after midnight. At two I awoke, sure that I'd heard creaking on the old stairs leading up from the reception area. By three I'd become convinced that it was my imagination, and at five I awoke to the sounds of tree branches scraping in the wind against the window panes. Groaning, I rolled over into Drake's arms and we managed to keep each other occupied for the next hour.

  "Why don't you snuggle in and sleep a couple more hours?" he mumbled into my hair.

  "Ummm, tempting. But I'm too wide awake. I think I'll make some coffee and read the rest of that disk." I kissed him soundly. "But you stay in if you'd like. Make some noise when you want me to bring you coffee."

  The hardwood floor was icy when my bare feet touched it. I pulled on my socks from yesterday and reminded myself that a pair of slippers might be a good purchase. I pulled on sweat pants and shirt and ran a brush through my hair. Rusty followed me downstairs and I opened the back door for him.

  The kitchen linoleum was even colder than the wood floors so, after putting the coffee brewer to work, I searched out the automatic thermostat we'd installed a few years ago. It was fine to keep the place minimally heated at night when we didn't come in until nine o'clock, but living here, the situation was different. I located the gadget and reset it so the old heater in the basement would fire up earlier in the mornings.

  Back at Sally's desk, coffee and a roll at my side, I re-inserted the TOPSECRET diskette. Again, my father's words filled the screen. After the letter to the FBI director, there were pages of notes. Evidence that he'd gathered proving Cudahy's culpability. Evidence that showed how Jack Cudahy, as department supervisor, had taken the research done by his co-workers and subversively channeled it to our enemies.

  Dad had, as always been meticulous in his own research. He'd named Cudahy's
contacts and outlined the chain of espionage, showing just how the documents had moved from one person to another within the spy ring. All this was spelled out in the ten-page letter to the FBI.

  My stomach rose to my throat as I read the names. Some were unknown to me, at least by their Russian names, but many were household names here in New Mexico. Wasn't this one a city councilor about ten years back? Killed in a car accident, as I remembered. And there was the prominent Santa Fe family that regularly made headlines with its charitable contributions. One of their daughters had been kidnapped and murdered in the early '70s I thought. A sharp pain twisted at my gut.

  Conspiracy? Those things really only happen in the movies, don't they?

  My mind raced back over the events of the past few weeks. Jim Williams' murder. The break-ins at Hannah's house, our house, this office. The fire that nearly destroyed our home. It all pointed toward this disk. Cudahy knew he'd never be absolutely safe until this evidence was gone. But how did he know he hadn't already gotten it? How did he know it didn't burn up in the fire? A crawling feeling crept up my legs. I rubbed my hands vigorously over my thighs to make it go away.

  I glanced over at the closed mini-blinds at the windows. Was someone watching my every move? I thought of the others who might be in danger now—Elsa, Todd . . . Drake! Oh my God, they'd already sabotaged one aircraft. I couldn't lose the most important person in my life to this . . . this. . . plot.

  Rusty! I dashed back to the kitchen and flung open the back door, relief flooding over me as my red-brown buddy pushed his way in and headed straight for his food bowl.

  Unable to sit still, I poured another cup of coffee. I held its warmth between my frigid hands and paced the hallway. What to do? Think, Charlie. Obviously, my scrawny neck and the people I cared about meant nothing to these guys.

  Think. Think.

  I'm still gonna get that file, the telephone voice had said.

  Okay, that means he knows there's a file out here. Probably thinks there's a printed version of what's on this disk. Probably thought he'd destroyed the evidence, along with a planeload of people, fifteen years ago, and it was only when Jim Williams began poking around again that he realized that some evidence still exists.