Death Qualified (49 page)

    Thank you."

    And Goddamn it! Barbara thought with a flash of anger;

    she, Barbara, was doing it too. Protecting Nell.

    "No answer," Barbara said slamming down the telephone in the courthouse lobby.

    "Where is that son of a bitch?" It was almost six; Mike should have put in his appearance by now.

    "Look," she said to Frank, "you call Brandywine and set up something for six-thirty. In the Hilton, the lounge there. Okay? I'll go out to Mike's house and leave him a note to meet us there when he gets back.

    I don't know what else we can do."

    "Stew, worry, fret, curse, stamp our feet, cast the yarrow stalks, put out an APB, hire a bloodhound...."

    Prank stopped at the look of wrath on her face.

    "Calm down, Bobby. You're tighter than a pregnant sow's belly at term. Go on and leave your note. See you at the Hilton."

    He waved her away and started to walk.

    She knew it was futile to speculate, but her mind refused to stop. Accidents, traffic snarls, out of gas. She gritted her teeth. Out of gas, caught up in running the disks on his computer, or someone's computer, involved in copying them.. .. His house was dark and empty. She turned on the light in the living room, walked past the garish rattan sofas, the cushions scattered on the floor, glanced in the bedroom, where the bed was neatly made, and went on to the kitchen, where all the dishes were washed and put away. He was neat, neater than she was.

    Finally she sat at the table to scrawl the note. She propped it up there and left.

    Ruth Brandywine and Frank were at a window table when Barbara entered the lounge. Frank had a scotch and soda, she saw with surprise. Ruth Brandywine had mineral water. Frank stood up and held a chair, questions in his eyes; she shook her head and sat down. The lounge was busy; at the far end a piano was going; waitresses were scurrying, people laughing, talking too loudly. Just right, Barbara decided. When the waitress paused in midnight, she ordered a bloody mary. She really wanted a good stiff straight bourbon, or something equally to the point, but she knew that would be a mistake. Frank had said it; she was too uptight. A quick surge of alcohol might act like a pinprick; she suppressed a giggle at an image of dozens of squealing piglets tumbling out.

    Ruth Brandywine was surveying her as if she were a specimen, she realized. No one spoke until Barbara's drink was placed on the table and the waitress had flown away again. The piano started a jazzy Scott Joplin. The bloody mary was just peppery enough.

    "Did that man lie about the disks?" Ruth Brandywine asked then.

    "How did anyone know about disks?"

    "I guess you're kidding," Barbara said.

    "I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, anyway."

    Ruth Brandywine shrugged.

    "You're right." She gazed out the window at the moving lights of the city. "I really did treat Lucas Kendricks. He was mad, paranoid schizophrenia;

    when he wasn't tranquilized and maintained in that state, he was out of control. A danger to himself and others, apparently, although that was not clear at the time.

    It was my treatment or institutional care. No alternatives would have sufficed."

    She looked at Barbara. Her black eyes reflected the colored lights of the lounge like bits of polished onyx. "It's really immaterial whether you believe me. Nothing can be proven at this late date. I just wanted to get that in. I had nothing whatever to do with his death, nor did any agents of mine. That needs to be stated, also. If I had wanted him dead, don't you think that over the years many opportunities existed to accomplish that? I did not want him dead at any time." She sipped her mineral water and narrowed her eyes in thought.

    "It seems very clear to me that his wife shot him. After killing that poor girl in the woods, he must have appeared totally out of control to his wife, and perhaps he was totally out of control. That surprised me, I admit, because I fully believed that his violence was directed inward, not toward another person. But that's be side the point now. I really don't care about any of that. I understand that you have a job to do, to protect your client. I can sympathize. However, Lucas took something that did not belong to him, and it is imperative that I recover that material."

    "You said disks," Barbara murmured. She knew it was irrational to be as angry as she felt; she had stated very nearly the same thing to herself, to her father: She had a job to do, to protect Nell from the heavyweight apparatus of the state. It sounded different when this woman said it.

    "Yes, disks. Computer disks. Either you know about them and told that man to mention them in order to lure me here, or you made a lucky guess. I don't believe in lucky guesses."

    Barbara glanced at her watch and bit back a curse that formed. Instead, she looked at Ruth Brandy wine coldly.

    "Exactly what do you want? We're simple folk here. You have to spell it out for us. If I find such disks you want me to hand them over, help you get your name in neon lights, win a prize, get on the cover of Timel What do you want? And why do you think I give a damn?"

    A wintry smile crossed Ruth Brandy wine's face and vanished again.

    "You should not care any more than I should care about you and your problems except for the fact that our fates have put us in a confrontation at this intersection, and neither of us can move until we satisfy certain conditions." She studied Barbara openly and frankly for a minute, then said, "You are a very clevel young woman with a great gift for discerning the truth.

    Body language, the ways in which eyes shift when a lie is being told, the odors given off by a person in stress, some thing else. Whatever it is you perceive you probably are unaware of, but you believe in your intuitive sense of truth, or lying, as the case might be. I know," she said, and the icy smile appeared again, just as fleetingly as before.

    "Look at me now, Barbara Holloway, and know that I am telling you the truth. I do not want the disks for myself. I would refuse to keep them longer than it would take to destroy them. If you produced them this instant, I would.

    take them to the parking lot and set fire to them. I would do it here at this table, except for the fact that I do not relish the thought of another cross-examination concerning my motives."

    Looking at her in the silence that followed, Barbara thought simply, Yes. She was startled when her father made a strangled sound and leaned forward at the small table to demand, "What the hell's on those disks? What were you people up to?"

    "They," Ruth Brandywine said firmly.

    "What were they up to?" She finished her mineral water and made water rings on the table, overlapping them again and again.

    "There's a famous experiment in which the subjects are given eyeglasses that invert the world they see. Have you read about it?" She didn't look up from her rings within rings to see how they reacted.

    "It's strange, but within forty-eight hours people adapt to existing in a world that's completely upside down. Nothing changes for them after the initial period of adjustment. No one on the outside can tell what they see, because they behave normally. When the experiment ends and they stop using the inversion spectacles, there is another period of adjustment, like the first. They have to relearn how to see the world the way the rest of us see it." Now she looked up at Frank, then Barbara.

    "I wish I knew how much you have already learned."

    "More than you've told us so far," Barbara said evenly.

    Ruth Brandywine hesitated only a moment, then said, "Good. Emil was trying to train people to see the world in a particular way, and the images he put together to be run on a computer were designed to help toward that end."

    She spoke deliberately, as if choosing each word, deciding as she went how much to say.

    "And what difference would that make to you, me, any one other than the person being experimented on?" Frank demanded.

    "So people see the world upside down, or crossways, or in black and white. So what?"

    She looked old and bitter suddenly; the fire in her eyes seemed dampened so that they became black holes that reflected nothing.

    "I wish I knew," she said in a low, intense voice.

    "I wish I knew." She raised her glass and appeared surprised to find it empty.

    "I'll have that drink now, if you can get the waitress over."

    She ordered a double Jack Daniels on the rocks. Barbara shook her head, as did her father. Barbara's drink was watery with melted ice; she had hardly touched it, after all. While they waited, Ruth Brandywine said, "Let me tell you about another classic experiment. There is a hallucinogenic plant in' Peru that the Indians use to concoct a potent drink that gives them hallucinations that involve black panthers, leopards, flying snakes, the typical images that keep turning up in their art. Someone began to wonder what outsiders would see if they ingested this drug, and they tried it on naive North American students, people who knew nothing about it and its effects and the images. They saw black panthers, leopards, flying snakes."

    The waitress brought her drink; after she was gone again, Ruth Brandywine lifted the glass and said, "Many hypotheses have been suggested, but no explanation that satisfies has come yet. Cheers." She drank.

    "You can't make me believe that just looking at images on a computer monitor can have any lasting effect," Frank said harshly.

    "What are you leaving out?"

    "You're partly right," she said after a moment.

    "There was no effect whatever with me. Emil was unaffected, as were Walter and Herbert. But Lucas Kendricks became psychotic, and at least three other boys did also. There's no way to predict who will be affected, and to what extent, by the training sequence of those disks. And that's why we, not just I, but also Walter and Herbert, want them absolutely and totally destroyed without ever being run again. I don't know what all is on them. No one does, I suspect. They were Emil's work, of course, and he continued to modify them right up to the end. But they are potentially dangerous to anyone who tries to run them."

    Frank was not even trying to mask his disbelief.

    "We've got a client on trial for murder. Do you honestly think that we'd turn over anything that might possibly be of help? Or burn them unseen? Dr. Brandywine, I ask you again, what are you leaving out?"

    "No, I don't believe that," she said softly.

    "But consider, Mr. Holloway. Worldwide nationality aside, religion aside, belief systems aside the same images turn up in the art of children. The same images turn up in the art of psychopaths. Would you see snakes and large cats under the influence of that Peruvian drug? Probably. We have the same latent images in our psyches, archetypes, if you prefer, the same pattern of behavior under certain conditions, all of us share them, and there's something in Emil's work that is psychoactive, that triggers behavior that is indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenia. But you are correct, not everyone is influenced. If you find the disks, Mr. Holloway, if you decide to investigate them more thoroughly, let me suggest that you be the one to view them.

    Not her," she said, indicating Barbara.

    "But you. You see, Mr. Holloway, you know what you believe and you are less likely to suffer consequences. If they affect you at all, you probably will simply suffer a bit of amnesia, the way Lucas did, and the other boys, until I hypnotized them to find out what they were experiencing, why they were going mad. That was why they asked me to participate in the studies, to find out what was happening in the heads of those boys. That was my only part in the project. What I told them put an end to the research, all but Emil's. I stopped it, Mr. Holloway, just as soon as I fully realized how dangerous it was. But I predict that you will see only a series of beautiful pictures, and the world has enough beautiful pictures, it doesn't need these. Destroy the disks, Mr. Holloway. Look at them and then burn them. Or give them to me and watch me burn them."

    Her voice was low, but she had lost the hard control she had shown earlier; she spoke with a passion that was unmistakable, a passion that demanded belief. Abruptly she stood up and nodded, then left them at the table.

    "I'll be damned," Frank said fervently.

    "What the hell was that all about?"

    Barbara pushed her glass back.

    "Dad, I'm scared.

    Where's Mike with those disks? I'm going back to his house, see if he's come home yet."

    "Me too, I guess," her father said.

    "Murk, murk! By God, I hate murk!"

    At first Barbara thought he had returned, but when they entered the house she realized the light was from the lamp she had left on. Her note was still on the table; the house was empty. Wordlessly she searched her purse for her address book and then called his office at the university. After twelve rings she hung up.

    "Okay, sit down while I make a call or two," Frank said. She went to the kitchen, where she sat at the table staring at her note, listening to his voice in the living room.