I wondered if this solved my puzzle over Frank and Marvin not making noise over SOAPY’s warning. Maybe they hadn’t seen it! Maybe Prudence and Yuri planted it for my eyes only.
And what about the DATAPANTS file?
Prudence returned carrying wet fruit and vegetables. Someone should have painted her—Grinning Woman with Dripping Fruit and Vegetables.
Yuri pushed papers off my desk. “Put them here by the machine,” he said. “Parsley. The secret is parsley.”
He gathered a big bunch of parsley and poked it into the hopper at the top of the machine.
Prudence stooped and grabbed something Yuri had swept off my desk. “Here’s the manual,” she said.
Yuri looked at her like she’d lost her mind. I’ll bet my look was pretty much the same. Yuri hadn’t even tried the machine yet. This was no time for manuals.
“What?” Prudence looked from Yuri to me and then back again. “Well, I’m going to take a look.” She opened the manual.
“Give me a glass,” Yuri said to me.
I opened the bottom drawer and grabbed my scotch glass and handed it to him. He smelled it but didn’t comment. He put the glass under the spout at one end of the machine. “We push with a carrot,” he said. “I saw a guy do this on TV.” He switched on the machine and pushed the parsley into the hopper with a carrot. The machine made a lot of noise. Green juice dribbled into my glass.
“Boy, that sure looks good,” I said.
“You think so?”
“Green juice is in the index,” Prudence said.
“More,” Yuri said, “we need more.” He pushed more parsley into the hopper and tamped it down with his carrot. He did that a couple more times until my scotch tumbler was about half filled with green juice.
“Page twenty-seven,” Prudence said.
“Here you go.” Yuri handed me the glass.
“You expect me to drink this?”
“All in one go,” Yuri said. “That way it doesn’t matter how it tastes. You get the pure essence of green zapped directly into your system.”
“Hey, it smells pretty good,” I said.
“Wait a minute,” Prudence said.
I raised the glass of good smelling green stuff and chugged it down.
It was as if I’d swallowed a small, angry woodland creature—maybe a raccoon.
“It says here,” Prudence said, “you should never drink straight green juice.”
“Yack!” I said.
“Why not?” Yuri asked.
“It’s just too strong,” Prudence said.
“Too strong for a dude like Skylight? I don’t believe it!”
“Youch,” I said.
“His face is pretty red,” Prudence said.
“So how are you supposed to serve parsley juice?”
Prudence flipped through the pages of the manual. The raccoon in my stomach had died and now its spirit was moving through my bloodstream. I felt dizzy; I felt high; I felt like maybe I should bolt for the toilet.
“You’re supposed to mix it,” she said. “Here’s a recipe with carrots and apples.”
“Okay,” Yuri said, “we mix it. How much difference could it make if you mix it before or after you drink it?” He grabbed the glass and put it back under the spout and fed one carrot after another to the machine. When the glass was about half full, he handed it to me. “Drink this.”
I chugged the carrot juice. Didn’t help.
“He still doesn’t look so good,” Prudence said.
“Maybe the apples are necessary.” Yuri snatched the glass from my hand and put it back under the spout. “Give me your knife.”
Prudence dug into her purse and came up with a long folding knife of the kind you’d expect to see affixed to the belt of a guy in camouflage fatigues. Yuri opened the knife and cut up an apple.
“Maybe the key word was mix,” Prudence said. “Maybe we should get him to jump around some.”
“Good idea!” Yuri fed the machine another apple then gave me the glass.
What did I have to lose? I drank the apple juice. Yuri took one of my arms and Prudence took the other, and they guided me around the desk to the middle of the room.
“Jump,” Yuri said and he and Prudence jumped. I sort of stood up on my toes.
“We need to go higher,” Prudence said, and they jumped again and this time I jumped with them.
“Deep knee bends,” Yuri shouted and we did a couple of those.
“Let’s try some butt rotations,” Prudence said.
“Can I watch?” I asked.
“No, you do it, too.”
So we did some butt rotations.
“More jumping!” Yuri cried.
As we jumped around, I could feel the electric juice zinging and zapping though my system. My fingers tingled, my vision narrowed into a tunnel with sparkling light for walls. Energy flowed to my toes.
And I did a couple of steps.
“Hey! None of that!” Yuri said. “Get him back to his chair before this gets out of hand.”
They guided me back to my chair and dumped me into it. I tried to uncross my eyes. I needed to focus on something, on anything but the building bundle of energy threatening to explode from me in dance.
“So what’s up with Sadie?” I asked.
Yuri didn’t miss a beat. “Sadie Campbell,” he said, “of SplashDown Software. She was found murdered yesterday in her apartment.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“We just found out,” Prudence said. She dug into her purse and then slapped a green book down onto my desk. I could tell from the annoying size of the thing that it was a software manual. Prudence turned it my way so I could read the title. SplashDown NodeHoofer II: Installation and Interaction Guide. Boy, it looked like it was getting harder to find new names for Internet browsers.
“Sounds exciting,” I said. “Sadie Campbell?”
“Yes,” Prudence said. “She gets a credit on the inside cover. Did you know her?”
“Dennis did,” I said.
They exchanged looks.
“Hey, don’t expect me to make sense,” I said. “You just poisoned me with parsley juice.”
“He must be feeling better,” Yuri said.
“He looks better,” Prudence said. “His face is not so red.”
“That’s not the way it looks from where I’m sitting,” I said. “So what were the words on the body this time?”
“The words weren’t on the body this time,” Yuri said.
“No?”
“The killer left a note,” Prudence said.
“Rolled up and stuck in her left ear,” Yuri said.
“‘Would it kill you to give me one lousy example?’” Prudence said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Those are the words on the note,” she said.
“But how can you know the words on the note?” I asked. The police wouldn’t have released such detailed information yet. “If Sadie Campbell was murdered just yesterday, how do you two know so much already?”
“I talked to Lieutenant Wallace,” Prudence said.
“Hold that thought.” I put my right hand on my stomach and groaned. I stood up. I snatched Sadie’s manual off my desk. “Excuse me.”
I ran to the washroom, got the door closed, dropped my pants and sat down just in time.
You’d think they would make phony conversation and laugh and move around, maybe sing campfire songs, to mask all the embarrassing noise I was making, but all was quiet in my office.
“Hey, Sadie Campbell was on the BOD list,” I yelled when things quieted down.
No reaction from Prudence and Yuri.
But speaking of the BOD list, it hit me then that the list wasn’t a list of suspects. It was a list of victims.
“Maybe the killer is systematically knocking off people on the BOD list,” I yelled.
Silence outside.
“Hey, maybe he didn’t write all over the body this time becaus
e he didn’t want anyone to think this was some kind of bizarre sex crime.”
So, if they weren’t some kind of bizarre sex crimes, what were they?
“So, what do you guys think?”
No answer. Some people just can’t talk through a closed bathroom door.
It looked like I was going to be in there for some time. I opened Sadie’s manual.
I felt myself slip into Dennis mode as I flipped through the pages. I found myself getting interested in the technical details in spite of myself. By the time we realized Dennis was hooked, it was too late. We didn’t need to be at a computer to imagine what it would be like to install NodeHoofer II.
When you go into a computer problem you can get frustrated and throw up your hands and give up or you can go deeper; you can scream obscenities or you can go still deeper; you can jump up and kick the wall; you can sweep everything off the top of your desk onto the floor or you can go deeper. Completely focused. The sounds and smells of the outside world disappear. The porcelain ring hugging your butt fades. You forget where you are. The stuff that’s always lurking in the corners of your eyes isn’t lurking anymore. All the bells in your ears stop ringing.
You see the shape of the thing; you see the beauty. Sure, it’s a lot better if you’re working at the computer, but if you’re good, you can do it all in your head. Sometimes when you get like this, your favorite computer is a Turing Machine, a paper computer, a pure mental construct.
Until you hit a bump in the road, a dead end in the tunnel, a fly in the ointment, a glitch, probably not a bug, but definitely a confusion.
Come on Sadie, for crying out loud.
If only the manual would give you one lousy example.
I almost leaped to my feet, which would have been a really big mistake.
The note!
Would it kill you to give me one lousy example?
“Eureka!” I shouted.
The killer wasn’t just killing documentalists; he was killing bad documentalists!
Oh, Sadie!
Gerald hadn’t mentioned the key concept ‘exceptions’ in his index. Randy had screwed up his index, probably throughout, but certainly on page sixty-six, and Sadie had produced garbled prose that could have been saved with an example or two at key points. Instead, hers were instructions that would turn the average computer user into a head-banging basket case.
The Russians still might have something to do with the big picture, but I was convinced the killer’s main motivation was revenge upon people who had frustrated him (or her) and wasted his (or her) valuable time.
“The killer’s mad as hell and not ready to take it anymore!” I yelled.
No response.
I figured it was time to stop pussyfooting around with these two. “I wasn’t asleep when you guys came in,” I yelled.
They had nothing to say to that.
I took a few more minutes to finish up my business. I didn’t delude myself that the parsley juice was through with me, but it did seem to be taking a break. I pulled up my pants and opened the door, ready to confront Yuri and Prudence.
They, of course, were no longer in my office.
nine
It was a little after three in the morning. I sat down behind my desk and looked at the pile of produce and the juicer, which proved I hadn’t made up the events of the evening. I picked up an apple. I put it down again.
I wondered if Prudence and Yuri had ducked out before they’d heard my revelation about why the killer was killing people.
I pulled up my keyboard and straightened my monitor and ambled on over to alt.dead.nerds. I posted a short note explaining my reasoning in regard to the killer killing bad documentalists.
Next, working on full automatic (maximum intuition), which is the way I work best, I tossed a question into cyberspace. People, I said, tell me if you’ve ever been irritated by bad documentation. Do any of you even read it? I was looking for some insight into the mind of a person who would kill over bad documentation. Sure, any one of us might feel like it, but what kind of person would really do it?
Finally, I posted a note consisting of nothing but the word DATAPANTS. I now believed that Yuri and Prudence had wanted me to find SOAPY’s warning to Gerald, but maybe they hadn’t expected me to find the DATAPANTS file, and they might not be the only ones who would get nervous thinking that I knew something I shouldn’t. I wanted to see what I could spook out of the woodwork.
But then I wondered why I should even bother. I was pretty much at a dead end. Not to mention the fact that my client was lying to me. I told myself I should get smart; I should quit following Frank, drop the Documentalists Murders case, come clean with Lucus Betty about Dennis, and spend the next few weeks going to meetings maybe three or four times a day—get my head screwed back on straight. But if I were smart I’d be some other person living some other life in some other place and time. The truth was that if I stopped being a detective, I’d disappear. I’d simply cease to be. You ask me what I’d do if I couldn’t be a detective and I tell you I’d rock and hum.
Instead of dwelling on that, I decided to do something. Doing something is almost always better than thinking about doing something. But what would it be?
Just then something from my middle desk drawer, the drawer where I toss things I know I’ll get around to needing sooner or later, called out in the persistent mouse voice of memory, “Try me, try me!”
I pulled open the drawer to see what was trying to get my attention, and it didn’t take me long to find the scrap of paper containing my list of 900 numbers for psychic services. Oddly, I’d never called any of the numbers. I’d meant to. I’d talked to my therapist Roger about it, wondering if my collecting these numbers might mean anything, and he’d said it probably did mean something, and I’d asked if it were a good idea to call one of the numbers, and he’d guided me to the conclusion that if I thought it was okay, it probably couldn’t hurt to give them a try sometime, but I’d never gotten around to it until now.
YOUR PERSONAL PSYCHIC
UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL PSYCHICS
PSYCHIC AMIGOS
YOUR OTHER EYE
PSYCHIC SIDEKICKS
WE KNOW
AND SO ON
Go on, I told myself, just pick one and see what happens. I could try for a Psychic Amigo, for example, and when someone answered they’d say, “Hola” and I’d say, “No hablo … er…” and Dieter would mutter, “Jeeze Louise, hola on the phone?”, already deconstructing my daydream and getting into a fight with my new psychic amiga, who would say to him, “What? You expected bueno?”, but who to me would simply say, “No problema!” The truth of the matter being that neither Dieter nor I really know much Spanish.
If there were conspiracies afoot (and who could doubt that there were) maybe the people to call would be the people at We Know. But if they were really the people in the know, they probably wouldn’t come right out and say so.
Okay, I would leave it to the same luck that had led me to the numbers in the first place. I closed my eyes and turned the list around and around until I’d lost track of which end was up. Then I ran my finger down the numbers hoping for a little tingle to tell me I was on the right spot, but I felt nothing, so finally I just stopped and opened my eyes and looked at what I’d chosen. Psychic Sidekicks. Upside down. Well, I already had all the Watsons I needed. In fact everyone in my head took a turn being Watson, but maybe someone out of the loop altogether would bring a fresh viewpoint to the problem. I grabbed the phone and dialed the number before I could come to my senses.
Would the fact that the list was upside down influence my Psychic Sidekick? Maybe I should believe just the opposite of what I was told? How did that work with the tarot?
There was a welcoming message, then a very businesslike exchange about my credit card and then a pause and then a woman came on the line and told me her name was Greta and asked how she could help me. The voice was strangely familiar. Did she sound like my mother in the old days?
No, that wasn’t it.
“Are you there?” she asked, and I realized my Psychic Sidekick sounded just like the voice in my head when I was Lulu.
I took the phone away from my ear and looked at it, counted my fingers wrapped around the receiver, counted to ten, blinked my eyes a couple of times.
“Hello, hello?” Greta said when I put the phone back to my ear. She’d probably been saying that for some time. She was probably ready to hang up.
“I’m here,” I said. I was no longer sure this exchange was external, and that uncertainty made me feel suddenly loose and fancy-free.
“How can I help you?” she asked.
“What are you wearing?”
“I don’t think you quite have the concept here, gumchew,” she said.
Show me an edge and I’ll go over it, but this time I had to be hearing things. Look at my logic. I pick a number at random from a list of psychic hot lines that’s been in my desk for months and I get Prudence Deerfield pretending to be Greta, my Psychic Sidekick, who is actually Lulu? I didn’t think so.
“What did you call me?”
“Sir,” she said. “I called you sir. Now can we get down to business?”
“Sorry,” I said. “What I meant to ask before was what will you be wearing?”
She laughed and her laugh was nice. Just that laugh would be worth the lousy $3.99 a minute.
“So are we looking into the area of romance?”
“Probably not,” I said.
“Fame and fortune?”
“Maybe,” I said. “The thing is I’m a detective and I have several puzzling cases I hoped you could give me some insight on.”
I was pretty sure I had the killer’s motivation pinned down. My new theory explained the words on the first two bodies and the note found with Sadie Campbell, but I didn’t know who he was, and I didn’t know what Yuri and Prudence were up to. I didn’t know what had happened to Pablo. Not to mention the fact that I didn’t have a clue what Frank Wallace was up to at the Quack Inn.
“Well, I don’t know,” she said.
“It’ll be fun,” I said. “We’ve got the Evil Empire and the Russians and the Secret Society of Mexican Food Cooks.”
The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces Page 9
