By the time I sat down behind my desk, the pink neon TOFU sign on the Baltimore building was blinking and reminding me that it was time to think about getting something to eat. Maybe Italian. I’d have to shop before I could make more juice. I’d tossed the last of the fruit and vegetables. There were limits on how long you could leave produce on your desk.
eleven
I spent the next few days on the edge of just drifting off and getting lost. Years later I might jerk my head up off the bar of some dance joint and the barkeep might say, “Welcome back. Hey, aren’t you the guy who was supposed to catch the Documentalist Killer but never did? The guy who for very personal reasons agreed to shadow a policeman for his wife? Whatever became of that case? Nothing? And did you ever wrap up that Dennis scam you had going? No? You don’t say.”
I opted not to drift away. At least not yet. I bought a new bunch of fruit to juice. I couldn’t find any of the weird bumpy yellow things with black spots, and the produce kid I’d asked gave me a funny look, so I didn’t push it. I worried that the rejuvenating jolt might depend on the precise mixture of fruits I’d stumbled on before, but that turned out not to be the case. All of the wild combinations I came up with made me feel pretty good.
I’d eaten most of the vitamins Yuri had left with the juicer, so I bought a book on vitamins and minerals, read it, and then dropped $143 at a health food store. Beta-carotene, E, C, zinc, selenium, coenzyme Q-10, you name it.
I followed Frank Wallace on two occasions back to the Quack Inn and the very same room. He must have booked the room on a long-term basis. I never saw anyone else there with him. The last time I waited a long time for his lover to come out and she never did. Frank was either doing something alone in that room or his monkey business buddy lived there.
Call me goofy, but I spent one day playing eighteen holes of golf and then celebrating my score in the clubhouse. Sure, people wondered what someone like me was doing at the country club, but then someone else remembered who my mother was and said, “Oh, yes, that explains everything.” I didn’t care.
The flame war I’d started over bad documentation still raged on alt.dead.docs. SOAPY had disappeared altogether.
One startling development was that a lot of people on alt.dead.docs thought that maybe knocking off the clowns who committed documentation wasn’t such a bad idea.
Such people make you wonder what kind of world we’re living in, and they make you feel pretty uneasy when you catch yourself nodding in agreement.
Lulu spent an afternoon sorting clothes into piles to wash and piles to dry-clean, grumbling the whole time about the way when we finally let our feminine side loose, we set her to work doing the laundry.
We told her, okay, so next time Dennis would do the laundry. She didn’t buy it.
Scarface spent some time looking at tropical fish and talking with the guy at the store about setting up a tank in my office. He was wearing the rest of us down on the matter of fish.
I called the number I had for Ramona Simmons hoping to alert her to the danger of being a known local on the BOD list, but all I got was a snippy phone message. She never called me back.
Dennis brooded over the fact that he probably never would get into the DATAPANTS file.
Dieter made a plate of enchiladas.
I spent another special “Sunday” afternoon with Mom. This time it really was Sunday. It’s spooky when the real and the somewhat less than real correspond. The staff treated me like a nutcase who might explode at any moment. Or maybe I was just being paranoid.
I did spend a lot of time looking over my shoulder. Being forced out on a ledge by a gunman will do that to a person.
We were all waiting for Prudence Deerfield to show up again.
No Prudence.
Elsie Wallace called, and I agreed to meet her for lunch. I was pretty sure I knew where Frank would be for lunch. He’d be eating at Maxwell’s Lunch Room. After that he’d either go back to work or he’d go to the Quack Inn. If he ate alone, he’d go on to the motel. If someone joined him for lunch, Marvin for example, he’d skip the motel. Frank was becoming predictable, which was making my job easier, but I really didn’t have anything to tell Elsie.
We agreed to meet at the Garden Party, a restaurant on the other side of the river. I was a little late, and I spent a few minutes in the entrance alcove scanning the shrubbery. She must have seen me come in, because she was already looking at me when I spotted her sitting at a table tucked in among the ferns and vines. She smiled at me, and I shrugged at a young man approaching me with a menu and walked into the foliage.
I hadn’t been this close to Elsie Wallace in years. That unfortunate shooting accident that made Frank so adamant about me not packing heat also made it unlikely I’d be a houseguest at the three-bedroom two-bath Wallace estate. Elsie still looked pretty good to me. She wore her pale blond hair very short these days, and that made her face look a little fuller, and maybe she’d put on a few pounds, but they looked good on her. Her lipstick was a lot redder than I remembered. She wore a tailored skirt and matching blouse of a strange brown and white streaked color combination that reminded me of peeling cottonwood bark. And a scarf. Had she picked those clothes so she’d blend in with the greenery of the Garden Party?
I gave her a peck on the cheek and had a momentary flash of sadness at the old woman smell of her powder; we were no longer in high school, and it really was too late to take her away from Frank. I put all of that out of my mind and sat down opposite her. There was a vine hanging down in front of my face and I pushed it aside. “Hello, Elsie,” I said.
The vine slowly crept back in front of my face. I pushed it away.
“Brian,” she said. “Will you have a drink?” She looked around for the server.
“No hurry.” I reached across the table and lightly touched her hand.
She smiled at me again and took a sip of her wine. She glanced away and then looked back at me. “You’re looking good. I couldn’t tell those times on the phone.”
“It’s not like it’s been all that long since we’ve seen each other, Elsie.”
“It’s been a long time,” she said, “since I’ve seen you up this close.”
“Yes, I guess you’re right.”
“It’s like old times.”
The vine was in my face again. “What is with this vine?” I pushed it away.
“Have you found out what Frank’s up to yet?”
So we were getting down to business already. I was tempted to make something up. My Psychic Sidekick said Frank wasn’t guilty, but my goal in taking the case in the first place was just to get back at him. Bring a little misery into his rotten life.
I couldn’t do it. Elsie sounded so angry and looked so bewildered when she said his name. Something had gone wrong. She didn’t know what it was, and she didn’t know how to fix it.
“You may be wrong about him fooling around,” I said.
“May be?”
“I haven’t seen him do anything with anyone,” I said. “If he is, I don’t see where he’s finding the time.”
“But there is something,” she said. “I can tell from the way you said that. Something is going on.”
Our server came by. I asked him about the available fruit and vegetable juices. The selection was surprisingly small—or maybe I was becoming a juice snob. I asked him to put a shot of vodka in a glass of pear nectar. He didn’t bat an eye. Elsie ordered a fruit plate. I decided to go with the spinach quiche.
“So what is it?” she asked when we were alone again.
That pesky vine was in front of my face again. I glanced around to see if anyone was watching me. No one seemed to be, so I took hold of the vine and gave it a good yank.
It didn’t break loose. Instead, somewhere back in the foliage I heard a heavy crunching crash. Anyone who could see us was now looking at us. I tossed the vine over the side of the table.
“Is this your way of avoiding the question?” Elsie asked.
&
nbsp; I parted the shrubbery to my left and peered in. The vine had been attached to a plant in a terra-cotta pot on a shelf. The broken pot was now on the floor.
The server brought my pear nectar and vodka. If he noticed the modified arrangement of plants, he pretended that he didn’t.
“So back to Frank,” Elsie said when he’d gone. “You think he’s up to no good.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Tell me.”
“I can’t just report my feelings and hunches, and then ask you to pay for them, Elsie. Give it some time. When I know something definite, I’ll tell you.”
“At least it’s not my imagination,” she said.
“How do you mean?”
“If other people are noticing he’s acting weird, then it’s not just my imagination when I think he’s acting weird.”
“It’s probably not my place to ask,” I said, “but have you just asked him about it?”
“That’s the worst part,” she said, and tears came to her eyes. “We’ve always talked about everything. Now he’s just shutting me out.”
I reached across the table and squeezed her hand. I couldn’t think of anything that might make her feel better, so I kept my mouth shut.
The food arrived. Elsie pulled her hand away and patted her eyes with her napkin.
Elsie’s fruit plate looked like it had a tiny piece of every fruit on earth. If I’d dumped such a plate in my juicer (and I was thinking of it as my juicer now; Yuri would have to fight me for it), I’d probably be jumping around the room for days.
The best part of my quiche was the way it looked on the white plate: the perfect yellow triangle veined with green, the several leaves of fresh spinach spread like a fan, the silver fork.
We ate lunch mostly in silence. How’s the fruit? Good. How’s the quiche? Tasty. Yum.
When the coffee had been poured, Elsie said, “I know you have other cases, Brian, but I hope you can put a little time in on this. It’s really important to me.”
“Funny,” I said, “one of my other cases is one Frank is working on, too. Those computer people murders. If you ignore one that’s almost done, all my cases involve Frank. One way or another I’m looking at him a lot.”
We’d said about all we were going to say, so before she could start looking at her watch and thinking up excuses, I signaled for the check. “I’ve got to get back to work, Elsie,” I said.
We parted in the parking lot. She kissed my cheek and climbed into her car and drove away.
I drove back across the river and then south on Willamette to Spencer Butte, a big green bump from the top of which you can see everything for miles around—a magnificent view and a fully aerobic climb. Maybe it was the juice; I was feeling like maybe I should get more exercise. A climb to the top of Spencer Butte would make me feel like I was in high school again. Actually, I’d need to take beer if I was going to feel like I was in high school again. Maybe I should have asked Elsie to come along.
I huffed and puffed my way to the top. By the time I got there my head was swimming and I was seeing fuzzy black dots everywhere I looked. I found a place to collapse where I could see the view that had brought me here in the first place. When I could breathe again, I decided the hike had been worth it.
The city was a big Monopoly board where I played the game I called my life. This view reminded me how much I loved this place. I doubted I would ever go anywhere else. I’d seen a little of the rest of the world and then I’d come home.
I could see the top of my building from here. I could scan west and see the Gotta Dance, too, or at least the blurry clump of lots and streets and buildings where it lurked. A place for everything and everything in its place. Sure, there were parts of the city I had used up down there, places that for all practical purposes might as well be on the moon insofar as my revisiting them went, but there was still enough left to last a long time.
I hung around on top until it looked like I’d have to hurry to get down before dark.
I had dinner at a Japanese restaurant where the chef does knife tricks with your food right in front of your face. I decided such places were a lot more fun when you weren’t eating alone.
After dinner, I drove back to the office.
I wasn’t there long before the phone rang. First Elsie and now this. I would have to be careful not to let this new popularity go to my head. I hoped it would be Prudence calling. Or maybe Yuri Kost. I put down my glass of guava and grape juice and picked up the phone.
“Skylight Howells,” I said.
“Hi, this is your so-called Documentalist Killer speaking.” The voice sounded like s/he was using one of those expensive voice-disguising devices. I used to have one of those myself until I realized it was mostly redundant in my case. In any case, s/he probably didn’t quite have the hang of the device yet, since the voice was high and squeaky and the words were sometimes interrupted by weird whooshing and slurping sounds.
“Really?” I flipped on the tape to record our conversation.
“I hate that label,” the caller said. “Where did you come up with ‘Documentalist’?”
“On-line,” I said. “I don’t remember exactly where.”
“It’s dumb, but you’re wondering why I called.”
“You’re a very perceptive man,” I said.
“Thank you.”
He didn’t correct me or chuckle, and his thank you seemed without irony. I decided I could at least tentatively assume he was a man. This is, of course, reconstructed; I did not think and decide all of that in the time the killer said, “Thank you” and I said, “So you’re calling to tell me about killing people over software documentation?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “And I’m not killing people over any old documentation. It’s bad documentation, like you said.” Whoosh/slurp. “The kind that wastes your time and drives you crazy. It took you long enough. I had faith there was a detective buried somewhere inside of you, but if you hadn’t figured it out soon, I would have had to make an announcement.”
“Speaking of announcements,” I said, “are you Pablo Deerfield?”
“Boy, are you ever off there,” he said. “Maybe I’ve made a mistake. Maybe I should just hang up.”
“So, are you SOAPY?”
“Bingo,” he said. “Your powers of deduction amaze me. What tipped you off? Maybe the fact that I’ve been telling the world that on-line from the very beginning?”
“I notice you’re not on-line these days,” I said. “How would you have made the announcement if I hadn’t figured it out?”
“They cut me off!” His was the voice of an angry cartoon—maybe like something you’d hear if you grabbed the nuts of a chipmunk. “Can you believe that? The Russians just cut me off. All that stuff about complete freedom on the net. What a load of crap.”
“You were going to tell me why you called?”
“You’re hoping I’ll slip up and give you a clue.”
“A clue would be nice,” I said. I wondered if he had pushed the right buttons to prevent caller ID. Since I didn’t have caller ID it wouldn’t do me any good, but he wouldn’t know I didn’t have it. On the other hand, if I reminded him of such things, he might panic and hang up on me.
“I’ve called to confess,” he said. “I want to turn myself in.”
What I felt was disappointment, sudden and sharp. He couldn’t do that! I hadn’t figured it out yet. But then he was laughing. A moment later there was the whoosh and slurp of his device.
“Just kidding!” he said.
“You’re a riot.”
“Okay, here’s the deal,” he said. “It’s not quite that I’m going to let you watch me work, but I am going to give you the chance to be the first on the scene. That is, if you can figure it out. Who knows?” Whoosh/slurp. “There is a nonzero probability that you could figure it out in time to stop me from doing it.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Tradition,” he said. “You and I were
matching wits on the net and now we’re going to try it on the phone.”
“Do you know you sound like a cartoon?” I couldn’t help it. I had to snap something at him and that just popped up. It was a mistake. He could have just hung up on me.
“Of course I do,” he said. “I’m sucking on helium. Did you think this was my natural voice?”
Well, so much for my voice-changing machine theory. Sometimes the obvious is the answer. Low tech. I should have recognized the sound of someone sucking helium.
“Can we get back to the matter at hand?” he asked.
“Shoot.”
“Funny you should say that,” the killer said. “I’ll be going out immediately after we finish here to do number four. Do you want to know why?”
“Of course I want to know why,” I said. “I’d like to know who, too, while you’re at it.”
“You puzzle out the who,” he said, “that’s mostly what this call is all about. The why is that this particular bozo has written a manual for a particular piece of software. The utter mediocrity of this particular piece of documentation is disgusting, but it’s probably not enough to attract my attention. After all I’d have to do away with most of the idiots doing this particular kind of thing if that was enough.”
His repetition of the word “particular” was driving me crazy. “So what was it about this particular documentation that has gotten your goat?” I asked.
“The fatal flaw,” he said, “the thing that simply cannot be tolerated, the thing that makes me go white hot with anger, that’s the thing you’re wondering about?”
“That’s it,” I said.
“Our guy has told you how to start the program, and you’ll excuse me if I’m a little vague on the details. We don’t want to make your job too easy.”
“Perish the thought,” I said.
“So number four has told us how to do this with the program and how to do that with the program. If you follow the instructions you can spend hours and hours wandering around. But what the bozo doesn’t tell you how to do is quit.”
“That is irritating,” I said.
The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces Page 12
