Unplugged (6 page)

Well, all right, technically ten o’clock isn’t the middle of the night. But it was well after dark. What had Tiffany Georges been doing out there in her Barbie doll capris and gardening gloves?

Curious enough to abandon dessert, I wandered into the adjoining room. Its size suggested that it might once have served as a closet for an adolescent midget. I used it for my office. I squeezed inside. Turns out my cheesecake had accompanied me. Huh. Loyalty. I like that in a dessert.

Sitting down at my desk, I pulled the greater L.A. phone book from the bottom drawer and dragged it open.

Georges isn’t an uncommon name. But it just so happened I knew Tiffany’s address—or at least her next-door neighbor’s.

Her number was listed under “Jacob Georges.” Which probably meant that either little Tiffany was still living with her parents or she was married. Remembering her deplorable lack of fat molecules, I was betting on the latter.

So where was her husband, and how did he feel about his wife inviting the Geekster over for supper? Not that he’d have anything to worry about. After all, Solberg wasn’t exactly Pierce Brosnan . . . or human. But still, he might be considered competition if . . .
Nope,
I thought. He was an irritating little worm from every possible angle. Surely there wasn’t a husband alive who would approve of his presence. So where
was
the husband?

Firing up my PC, I did a Google search, but it soon became apparent that if Tiffany had buried her spouse in the backyard, it hadn’t hit the
Times
yet.

And what the hell was I doing? I dropped my forehead onto my desk and groaned. What was I doing? Protecting Laney? Maybe. But the question remained—what should I do next? Logic suggested that if I was idiotic enough to continue my foray into Solberg’s missing person status, I should ask Elaine for some pertinent information about her little geek beau. But truth be told, I wasn’t absolutely positive Solberg wasn’t doing the horizontal bop with some bimbo in Vegas, and I had no desire to upset Laney further until I had all the facts. So I’d have to garner information by some other clever means.

I ruminated on that for a moment, wondering who might know his whereabouts. No great brainstorms brewed in my mind. In fact, other than Solberg’s parents, I couldn’t think of anyone who might take an active interest in his life.

So I dialed 411 and asked for the number of any Solbergs in Schaumburg, Illinois, where I’d first met him. The woman on the other end of the line sounded less than ecstatic that I didn’t have a first name, but she looked it up, then duly informed me there were more than twenty such listings in the surrounding area. She could give me the first three. I wrote down the names and phone numbers. Amy, Brad and Joyce, and Brianna. I called all of them. On the first two tries, I got answering machines. I left messages, asking to have Jeen contact me, and tried Brianna. She hung up before I even got done with my spiel. Brianna was kind of rude.

Not knowing what else to do, I called Directory Assistance back and repeated the entire process. Whoever said third time’s the charm must have had more Irish luck than I do, because it wasn’t until my sixth trio of names that I hit the jackpot.

“Solberg residence, Teri speaking.”

I sat bolt upright in my chair. The woman’s voice sounded exactly like J.D.’s. If she had brayed like an ass, I would have been sure she was lying about her identity and was the Geekster himself. As it was, I cleared my throat and launched into “Hello. I’m looking for Jeen Solberg.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. I held my breath and scrambled to figure out how to handle the situa-tion. Maybe I should simply tell the truth.

But the truth had rarely garnered me more than a grinding headache and a pack-a-day smoking habit. And I had no idea what to expect from this conversation. Maybe the geekster had taken out a second mortgage and bribed a Vegas dancer into spending the week with him. Maybe his parents thought fraternizing with a professional fornicator was a dandy idea and wouldn’t appreciate me sticking my nose in their baby boy’s business.

“I’m sorry. He doesn’t live here anymore,” Teri said. “Can I take a message?”

My plans fell into place with a snick of insanity. “Oh, well . . . hope so. This is Frances Plant.” Mail theft having its advantages, I’d seen the name in the byline of a
Nerd Word
article. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized Frances might be a man’s name, but it was a little late to change the timbre of my voice, so I charged on like a demented rhino. “I do a column for a kickin’ techno mag.”

I tightened my fist on the receiver. Mom had once told me that liars go straight to hell. I had lied immediately thereafter and nothing had happened. I hadn’t felt a lick of flames. I hadn’t even gotten a glimpse of purgatory—unless you count my senior prom. I’ve been a doubter ever since.

“Which magazine is that?” she asked.

“Nerd Word,”
I said. “You heard of it?”

“Oh.” She sounded breathless at the mere mention of the magazine. Maybe geekiness is genetic, passed down through the maternal line like hemophilia or male-pattern baldness. Or, more to the point, like impetuous stupidity in the McMullen clan. “Well, I most certainly have,” she said. “You did that lovely article about Jeen last summer.”

“Absolutetomoto,” I said. “That article was screamin’.” I had no idea what I was saying, but it suddenly seemed to me that being branded with a name like “Frances” would have caused some lasting emotional damage to my character. “Anyways, we were just ’bout ready to put the January issue beddy-bye. I’d done a bang-up piece about a guy making robotic mousetraps, but turns out he was a droid, so I need a new line quick. Thought maybe I could do a follow-up on J.D.”

I let my lunacy soak in for a moment.

“Another article?” Teri said. “That’d be swell. But, like I said, Jeen doesn’t live here anymore. He’s got a nice big house in L.A. now.”

“At 13240 Amsonia Lane,” I said. Clever, see, because that would make her think the Geekster and I were buds and she could trust me with anything from his Social Security number to his ring size. “I called him at his pad this
A.M.
, but it was a no go, and I need some info ASAP. You don’t know his present loci, do you?”

She was silent for a moment. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to decipher my gibberish or decide if she could trust me with her little angel’s whereabouts. “Well, no,” she said finally.

I felt my shoulders droop.

“But . . . wait a minute.” I heard her cup the phone. “Steven, when was Jeen going to that big convention?”

“I don’t know,” came the answer.

I assumed the voice was Solberg’s father’s, because, by the sound of it, he couldn’t have cared less if J.D. had been conferring on Ursa Minor. The tone reminded me of the first twenty-odd years of my life. Schaumburg men are solid citizens: They have fifty-hour workweeks, high cholesterol, and belly fat. Give them three solid meals and a remote and they don’t complain. But mess with their evenings in front of the tube and there would be hell to pay.

“Yes, you do.” Teri’s voice suggested that she might already be contemplating a battle for the revered remote. “He told us about it.”

There was a mumbled response.

“Remember, he was doing that presentation. He and that Hilary girl were working on it together.”

My ears perked up. Hilary? A woman? Solberg had found a woman who was willing to work with him? Was every female in L.A. on the skids? And could it possibly be that Elaine had been right? Might Solberg have actually fallen for someone else? Someone female? Someone with an opposable thumb?

I shook my head.

Teri came back on the phone. “I think he may be at that big convention. The one in Las Vegas.”

“Oh, yeah!” I said it like it was an epiphany, and didn’t bother to tell her that the convention had been caput for several days now and Jeeno still hadn’t turned up. It was, after all, entirely possible that maternal instinct was stronger than the instinctual desire to stamp out mutants, and that she would, therefore, worry about Solberg’s absence. “The con. He and Hilary are doing that gig together, huh?”

“Yes. I believe they are.”

“She seemed like a cool chick. Maybe I can do a piece on her sometime, too. What was her last name again? Meine, wasn’t it? Or—”

“No, no,” she said. “It started with a
P
. Patnode. No, that’s . . . Sheila’s married name. Pierce. Pershing! It’s Pershing.”

“Righto,” I said. “Pershing. Good job.” I scribbled the name in the margin of
Nerd Word
. “Hey, you don’t happen to know where they bedded down while in the big V, do you?”

There was another pause as she considered my odd verbiage. What the hell was wrong with me? “I think they were staying right at the hotel where the event was held.”

They.
Not
he
. Damn him to purgatory! “Spectacular,” I said. “I’ll try him at those digs. Oh, but . . . hey, when was he expected back in L.A.? Phone interviews are okey-doke, but face-to-face with the Geekster himself . . .” I let the sentence hang as if the idea gave me goose bumps. In a way it did.

“I’m not exactly certain.”

“Sure hope he doesn’t get caught up in the slots there,” I said, trolling madly for some kind of feedback.

“Jeen? Oh, no, he wouldn’t. He’s very responsible. They love him at NeoTech.”

Uh-huh. Well, life was just damned weird, wasn’t it? Had I not known better, I would have expected a guy like Solberg to be flipping burgers at the Dew Drop Inn, not buzzing his way up the technological ladder of success while the rest of us scraped by, cursing and sweating. The idea made me feel cranky and mean. Sometimes I can feel good about other people’s triumphs, but sometimes generosity’s not in my fifty best attributes.

“And he loves them,” she added. “Or at least . . .” She laughed. “He loves all that crazy new technology. When he was home here he couldn’t stay off the computer for more than an hour at a time. I used to get kind of angry with him. I swear, the boy forgot to take out the garbage every single night of the week. But now I’m glad he took such an interest, because it’s really given him a leg up at NeoTech. His colleagues think the world of him.”

“I’m certain they worship the ground he walks on,” I said. There might have been just a tinge of sarcasm in my tone. “When was the last time you heard from him exactly?”

The phone went silent, then, “What did you say your name was?”

Shit! I’d lost my fictionalized persona. In fact, I seemed to have spoken in what Elaine calls my nose voice. And now I couldn’t remember my imaginary name.

I glanced frantically at
Nerd Word,
and realized with electrifying abruptness that I had closed it. A chubby-faced geek holding a silver sphere I couldn’t hope to identify smiled at me from the cover. I flipped through the magazine frantically, but the appropriate byline failed to pop up before my idiotic eyes.

I croaked a laugh. “My apologies, Mrs. S., you probably think I’m J.D.’s stalker or something.”

She didn’t seem to find such lunacy amusing, which made me wonder if the whole world had gone mad. Who would stalk J. D. Solberg? Certainly not a woman who had a Ph.D. and . . . walks erect.

And, oh, crap, she was still waiting for an answer.

I skimmed the table of contents and finally spotted the name.

“Frances Plant,” I spouted, then cleared my throat and slowed my tone. “I’m super sorry to bother you, but my edi-tor’s a first-class papilloma sometimes.” I made my voice go whiny. It wasn’t that hard. “I’m crunchin’ deadlines. You know? Sweatin’ twenty-four-seven. And I gotta get ahold of the Geekster, stat. You know of any friends he might be hangin’ with?”

“Well . . .” Her voice trailed off. “I’m not certain. Jeen was always popular. Even in high school. Especially with the girls.”

I blinked stupidly. Could it be that I had contacted the wrong Solbergs? I removed the receiver from my ear and stared at it, then placed it tentatively back against my lobe, lest it explode into a thousand plastic shards. “Uh-huh,” I said.

“Seems like he was calling a different young woman every night of the week.”

I relaxed a little, wondering if she had noticed that their names were in alphabetical order and that he was working his way down the columns of the phone book.

“You know if there’s one particular chick he’s diggin’ on?” I asked.

She paused. I laughed with embarrassment. It wasn’t completely manufactured. It was entirely possible that a sane person would have just called the woman up, said her son was missing, and asked for information.

“I wouldn’t ask,” I said, “but the Mag Mag Awards is coming up and this edition is humungo important.”

“The what?”

I tightened my fingers in the telephone cord and tested my mother’s hell theory once again. “The Mag Mag Awards,” I lied. “It’s a big whoop in the techno magazine industry, and I thought, if I could get another explosive interview with J.D. . . .” I let the statement hang in the air.

“Well . . .” She sighed. “I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful, but I don’t think Jeenie’s seeing anyone special.”

My jaw dropped. Not seeing anyone? No one special! What the hell was she talking about? Maybe in her eyes Oprah was no one special. Maybe Cher was of no particular interest. But Elaine, Elaine was goddamn special!

T
hat conversation haunted me for the rest of the day.

Where was the Geekster? Why hadn’t he called? And who the hell was Hilary Pershing?

Devoid of better ideas, I checked the Internet again. After a few slow starts, a photo of Hilary popped up on my screen. She was by no means a raving beauty, but when I saw the shot of her and Solberg accepting an award together at a banquet in San Francisco, I had to admit they looked comfortable together. Were they an item?
Had
they been an item? Had she been dreaming of rings and roses and gallumping down the aisle with Geek Boy?

Maybe. Anything was possible. Someone had agreed to marry Michael Jackson.
Several
someones, if I remembered correctly.