Authors: Allen Steele
Marianne blinked, not quite comprehending the question at first. “Yes,” she said at last, “I did. I wanted to preserve the disk. This was the last video we made of him and—”
“And do you still leave the computer on all day?”
She shrugged. “Of course I do. My clients have to talk to the expert system when I’m gone. You know that.” She peered more closely at me. “What’s going on here, Gerard? Why were you editing the—?”
“Never mind. Go ahead and restore the video.” I withdrew my hands from the keyboard and pushed the chair back from the desk. Marianne gave me one last look of distrustful confusion, then she bent over the keyboard, using the trackball to undo the work I had just done. It didn’t matter; I had all the answers I needed.
Some of them, rather. Just as I had managed to piece together a message in Jamie’s own words, so had someone else. The video was stored on the computer’s hard drive and Marianne left the computer switched on during the day, so that her clients could ask questions of the computer’s expert system. It was therefore possible for a good hacker to access the
JAMIE.6
file through the root directory and edit together the phone message I had heard earlier that night. By the same means, it was also possible for them to recreate my own voice; a good hacker with the right equipment would be able to mimic my voice, since my vocal tracks were recorded on this and many other CD-OP files Marianne had stored in the computer.
But why go to such extremes? If the culprit had been trying to get my attention, why imitate the voice of my dead son … or my own, for that matter? If anything, it was a sick prank, tantamount to calling up a grieving widow and pretending to be the ghost of her late spouse. Yet this was the second time in as many days someone had used a computer to send mysterious messages to me, and the technical sophistication necessary to do this went far beyond the capability of some twisted little cyberpunk trying to spook me.
In fact, now that I thought about it, how would some pimplehead even know to call into Marianne’s computer? Its modem line was listed under her company’s name, not hers or mine, and very few people were aware that Gerry Rosen even had an estranged wife.
It made no sense …
Or it made perfect sense, but I was unable to perceive the logic.
“You miss him, don’t you?”
Marianne’s question broke my concentration. She had finished saving the file and was exiting from the program. I looked at her as she switched off the computer, ejected the disk from its drive, and slipped it back in its box.
“Yeah, I miss him.” I stuck my hands in my jacket pockets, suddenly feeling very old. “He was the best thing that happened to us … and I still can’t believe he’s gone.”
“Yeah. Me, too.” Marianne put the box away, then leaned against the shelf next to the desk. For the first time since she had let me into the house, she wasn’t playing the queen bitch of the universe; she was my wife, commiserating the passage of our son from our lives. “God, I’ve even kept his room the same, thinking somehow there’s just been some awful mistake, that he wasn’t on that train after all …”
The train. Always the train …
“He’s gone, Mari,” I said softly. “There’s no mistake. There was an accident, and he died … and that’s all there is to it.”
She slowly nodded her head. “Yeah. That’s all there is to it.” She stared at the floor. “Tell me you just wanted to look at him again, Gerry. Tell me he isn’t mixed up in whatever trouble you’re in.”
She raised her eyes and stared straight at me. “This isn’t part of some story, is it?”
I knew what she meant. I had lost one newspaper job because I had been trying to stop kids from dying; I had thrown myself on the sword in order to save some youngsters I had never really known, the children of complete strangers, because that had been part of a story. Yet when the time had come for me to protect my own child, I had not been available. Jamie had perished without ever seeing his father’s face again because Daddy had been too busy with his career to do anything but buy him a train ticket to eternity.
The accusation in her eyes wasn’t fair, but neither is the timing of earthquakes against MetroLink schedules. Or death itself, for that matter.
When I didn’t answer her question, Marianne lowered her head and began to walk out of the office. “I’ve made up the living room couch and told the house to wake you up at eight,” she said. “That’s when the coffeemaker comes on. There’s some sweet rolls in the fridge, if you want ’em …”
“Okay, babe. Thanks for everything.”
She nodded again and began to head for the stairs. Then she stopped and turned back again. “And by the way … there’s nobody else upstairs, if that’s what you were wondering. G’night.”
And then she left, heading back to her bedroom before I got a chance to ask her how she managed to pick up that mind-reading trick of hers.
I
AWAKENED TO THE
faint sound of church bells striking eight times as if tolling from a distant country steeple, although neither of the two churches within a block of the house had bells.
The sound came from the ceiling; Marianne had programmed the house to wake me at this time, just as she had instructed it to start brewing coffee in the kitchen. Although I could have used another hour of sleep, I was grateful that she hadn’t selected another noise from the alarm menu; if she had wanted to be a real bitch, she could have jolted me with an eight-gun salute, or worse.
Nonetheless, I lay on the rattan couch for a couple of minutes, curled up in a lambswool blanket, caught somewhere between sleep and wakefulness. I heard the shower running in the upstairs bathroom, smelled the dark aroma of hot coffee brewing in the kitchen, heard songbirds just outside the windows. Everything was warm and comfortable and orderly, much as it had once been a long time ago when I had lived in this house …
Then my mind’s eye flashed to John, the way I had seen him as he lay on the porch floor at Clancy’s with cops and paramedics standing all around him. Dead, with a hole burned through his forehead … and I knew that, if I didn’t find out why, I could never find any peace again, and all my mornings would be haunted for the rest of my life.
The buzz of the telephone interrupted my train of thought. I almost got off the couch until I remembered that I had taken the handset and put it on the floor next to the couch before I had turned in for the night. Marianne was still in the shower, so I picked it up and thumbed the button. “Hello … um, Rosen residence,” I said self-consciously.
“Where the hell are you?”
Bailey. The son of a bitch had an innate talent for rude awakenings. “Well, Pearl,” I said as I sat up on the couch, “if you called here, then you must already know where I am.”
“Process of elimination. If you’re not in your apartment, then you must be somewhere else.”
“Hey, give the man a kewpie doll—”
“Don’t gimme no shit, Rosen. We just found out John’s been killed and that you were seen at Clancy’s with the cops, and when I go upstairs to get you, I find the place ransacked. Word on the street is that a couple of ERA tanks were here last night. Now what the fuck’s going on?”
“Earl—”
“This is a helluva time for you to go shacking up with your old lady. Now you tell me what the
…”
I sighed as I peered out the living room window. There were no cars parked on the street in front of the house, but that didn’t mean anything. “Look, Earl—”
“
I ain’t looking at anything, Rosen, except for a pink slip with your name written on it unless you tell me right now what the
—”
“Earl, shut the fuck up.”
That did the trick, at least for a moment. I took a deep breath. “I know what’s going on,” I continued, “but this phone isn’t plugged in, y’know what I mean?”
There was silence from the other end of the line. Pearl had a bad temper, and he sometimes ate more brains than he seemed to carry between his ears, but he knew how to take a hint. He knew that anyone with a two-bit scanner could eavesdrop on a conversation carried out on a cordless phone. Even if my neighbors didn’t indulge in such skulduggery, there was no guarantee that the police or ERA would not.
“I know what’s going on,” I repeated. “We can’t talk about it right now, but a big load of shit hit the fan last night. John’s getting killed is only part of it.”
I heard a slow exhalation.
“Are you serious?”
“Like a heart attack,” I said as another thought occurred to me. “Have you heard from Sandy Tiernan yet?”
“Yeah. She’s pretty shook. She called me at around six, said that she got the call from some guy at homicide
—”
“Mike Farrentino?”
“Yeah, that’s him, and when I phoned his office, he said that he’d seen you last night at Clancy’s.”
His tone of voice had changed from belligerence to confusion.
“What’s the scoop here, Ger?”
“I’ll tell you when I get downtown,” I said. “I’ll be there soon as I can swing a ride. But for right now …”
I hesitated, trying to think of a way I could phrase the notion that had just occurred to me. “Umm … you think you could call an exterminator this morning?”
“Huh? An exterminator?”
“Yeah.” I rubbed at the knot left in the back of my neck from sleeping on the narrow couch. I could no longer hear running water from the upstairs bathroom. “Those roaches up in the loft are getting pretty hairy, pal. Might have crawled downstairs into the office. I think you should check it out real soon.”
Another long silence, then:
“Yeah, I think so too. Maybe it’s time to call Orkin, see if they can send someone down here this morning.”
Bailey had gotten the hint. Cockroaches in the loft, bugs in the office: he knew what I was talking about. If anyone was indeed eavesdropping on our conversation, it would be painfully obvious what we were discussing, but it was better that he was forewarned of the threat before he made any more phone calls or put anything sensitive into the office computers.
The only misunderstanding between us was that he thought I was hinting at the feds or the police as being the prime suspects. I wasn’t so sure if ERA or the SLPD were the only ones we had to worry about. Somebody out there was capable of hacking into even encrypted PTs like Joker; they had put the voodoo on me with that faux Jamie phone call last night. Until I had a clue as to who they were, I wasn’t taking any chances.
“Good deal,” I said. “I’ll get downtown as soon as I can.”
I clicked off, pushed away the blanket, and swung my legs off the couch. No time for sweet rolls and coffee; all I wanted to do now was get dressed and get out of here. I was reaching for where I had dumped my trousers on the floor when I heard the familiar creak of the stairs.
I looked up to see Marianne sitting on the landing, wearing her robe again, her hair pulled up in a damp towel. No telling how long she had been there, listening to my side of the conversation.
“Hi,” I said. “How’re you doing?”
Lame question. She didn’t bother to answer. Mari simply stared at me, her chin cupped in her hands. “You’re going to want a ride downtown, right?”
I hesitated, then slowly nodded my head. It was a long walk from here to the nearest MetroLink station, and despite last night’s promise to call a cab first thing in the morning, she knew I didn’t have enough cash on me to cover the fare all the way down to Soulard.
She briefly closed her eyes. “And you’re going to want money, too, right?”
“Hey, I didn’t say—”
“I can spare you fifty dollars,” she replied, “and if you’ll let me get dressed, I can get you down to the paper in about a half-hour. Okay?”
I nodded again. We gazed at each other for a few moments, each of us remembering all the shit we had put the other through during our years as a couple. Moving in together for the first time. Burned breakfasts, forgotten dinners. Underwear on the floor, unpaid bills. Two or three lost jobs, bouts of morning sickness announcing the arrival of a child neither of us had planned on raising but decided to have anyway. Engagement and marriage. Death and insecurity. Separation on its way to becoming formalized as a divorce.
An old TV commercial had a punch line that had enraged feminists:
my wife … I think I’ll keep her.
Mari should have written a comeback:
my husband … I think I’ll ditch him.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’ll be great.”
Marianne stood up, absently running her hand down the front of her robe so that I couldn’t catch a glimpse of her thighs. “Sure,” she said. “If it’ll get you out of here, I’d be happy to do it.”
“Mari—”
“Whatever you’re mixed up in,” she said, “I hope it works out … but I don’t want to get involved. You’ve done enough to me already.”
Then she trod upstairs to the bedroom and slammed the door.
Marianne dropped me off in front of the newspaper office; I was almost as glad to be rid of her as she was of me.
The trip downtown had been taken without any words spoken between us; only the morning news on NPR had broken the cold silence in her car. U.S. Army troops were still being airlifted to the Oregon border as Cascadia continued its Mexican standoff with the White House, and the crew of the
Endeavour
had succeeded in rendezvousing with
Sentinel 1
and linking the final module to the antimissile satellite. And some lady in Atlanta was attracting massive crowds to her house after she claimed to have seen the face of Jesus in a pot roast.
Whoopee. I would rather have been in Birmingham, Seattle, outer space … anywhere, in fact, but St. Louis.
Everyone stared as I entered the newsroom, but no one said anything to me as I walked straight to Bailey’s office. Not surprisingly, he had already taken the cover off his IBM and was peering into its electronic guts with a penlight; Pearl was nothing if not paranoid.
“Close the door and sit down,” he said without glancing up from his work. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
I shut the door and found a chair that wasn’t buried beneath galley proofs and contact sheets. He patiently continued to poke through the breadboards and chips until he was satisfied, then he slid the cover shut and turned around in his swivel chair to gaze at me.