The Man Who Wouldn't Die

by A. B. Jewell

  I told him: Do surveillance on the Deuce and his family. Check the whereabouts of Danny and Lester Wollop and the Shipper.

  “You’re asking a lot.” He paused. “Speaking of which, I did some checking about the Donogue kid, like you asked.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Squeaky-clean. Bit of a hole in his record for six months or so when it looks like he was off the grid. No credit requests, that sort of thing—about a year ago. But he’s young. May not mean much.”

  “Okay, thanks. Lieutenant, you help me find Terry and it’ll be only one-way favors from now on. You’ll have me by the balls.”

  “I’ll get back to you ASAP.”

  I turned my attention back to Floyd’s parents’ house and then looked down at my phone. I couldn’t pinpoint what nagged at me. A ghost idea, a whiff of clue that was too indistinct, too amorphous to name. I glanced at my call list. What was it?

  I looked back at Floyd’s parents’ house, dismounted the bike, and walked around to the back.

  I hopped a waist-high, chain-link fence without pausing to think whether I’d get dog-bit. Usually, that’s rule number one in the PI business: watch for dog. Luckily, it wasn’t relevant here. The only things taking up space in the small backyard were old electronics. It looked like a computer graveyard, which struck me as odd given that this was supposedly his parents’ house. I was starting to wonder. I stepped over and around the crap and made my way to the ratty back door. I peered through the top half into a kitchen that looked about as well kept as the backyard. I knocked. Nothing. I peeked at the neighboring houses, and seeing nothing, I put my elbow through the glass above the handle. The leather absorbed most of the sound and any risk to my person.

  I walked inside and nearly puked. I hadn’t inhaled something this noxious since breaking up the Garlic Boys’ hideout in the old sock factory. It screamed: bachelor engineer. Discarded cereal boxes, a piece of curled yellow cheese stuck to the fridge, something on the counter that might have once been sushi. I covered my nose with the inside of my elbow and knew at that point that Floyd definitely was not there. He’d have since appeared. After all, he should’ve been up. It was nearly . . . Hell! It was nearly eight. I was supposed to be meeting the Donogue lawyer in just a few minutes.

  With all the finesse of an elephant, I cruised through the cottage, skimming for anything useful. In a bedroom, at a desk, I rummaged through scribbled notes. Most of them had no meaning. They looked like code, unreadable by me. At the bottom of the pile, a manila folder caught my eye. On the front, a name: David Skellow.

  I’m not sure why but I opened it up, and there were more scribbled notes and an official document. It was a transcript from Colester College in Maine. It showed that this guy, David Skellow, had gotten four A’s and a B-plus in his first semester. Along the side of the transcript a handwritten note said Da Raj, and pay dirt.

  I stuffed the curious but meaningless transcript into my pocket. I glanced around for anything else obvious in the way of evidence and, finding none, decamped to the bike, hit El Camino No Real, and practically flew to Snozzwanger, Veruca and Gloop.

  In the lobby, I signed in and sat down and glanced at my phone. That number of Floyd’s that nagged at me. Then I pulled out the other phone, the one from the Tarantula, and started flipping around in it.

  Bingo. A hit.

  No sooner had I realized what was nagging me—a huge revelation at that—than there was an orchestral noise, beautiful, like something to accompany the descent of angels. Then the music turned to a thumping version of the already thumping rock song “Eye of the Lion.” It had been used in that boxing movie. Sure enough, the elevator door opened and a maroon carpet unfurled and there stood a tall woman in workout gear shadowboxing to the beat. She looked up. “Mr. Fitzgerald?”

  “Fitch.”

  “Come on in. I won’t bite.”

  Which clearly was not true. I put the phones away and followed.

  Twenty-Two

  SIXTEEN HUNDRED, ONE-EIGHTY, Harvard, Yale, JD, PhD in engineering, partner in name, and head of the new driverless division,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “SAT, LSAT, CV, honorifics, blah, blah. Just getting it out of the way. Most people want to know and we waste time as they dance around asking. Is that Naugahyde?” She glanced at my coat with pity she could not hide. She was lean in every facet, speedy metabolism incarnate. For just a second, I could imagine that she ate food and it burned instantly into muscle and then disappeared into the ether. We reached our floor and the elevator doors opened to an orchestral sound.

  On the third floor, a receptionist behind a desk stood. “At ease, Alfred. Please bring Fitch the drink selection on his profile. This way,” she said, and whisked to the left and I followed. Down the long corridor we walked until we reached the last door, the corner office, and she took four gulping strides and sat in a high-backed office chair behind the stately desk. Behind her, through corner-office windows, shone the Palo Alto Hills, and I ached for a second for Terry’s suffering and possible fate and stuffed the feeling away.

  “Your time is your time. I want to be respectful of that. What can I do for you?”

  I caught my breath and realized from her tone that I might like this no-nonsense woman. Intense, sure, but pretense, no. She wore her sentiments on her sleeve, which was made of some multicolored, stretch athletic-wear fabric. I glanced at her shelves, which were filled not with books but models of cars—in unusual shapes and sizes.

  “Driverless cars?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I’m happy to mention that, but each half minute here counts.”

  “Is that what those are—the cars of the future?” I didn’t really give a damn, but I also wasn’t planning on paying this woman a cent and I wanted to set the tone that we could hash things out, not rush them along.

  She nodded again, acknowledging that I’d permitted her to explain. “In a nutshell, it’s a patent frenzy. Everything, every single part of the twenty-first century car, is in play—from the sensors that read the road, obviously, to the engine and electronics that control every aspect of steering, braking, nuanced response to road and weather conditions, and all the ancillary aspects of the experience that computers will take over from the primates.” She smiled and shook her head. “You can only imagine the things people are coming up with.”

  “Such as?”

  “We just filed ten patents for a guy from MIT for something he calls EnRage. It’s a driverless road rage system, soup to nuts. If a car cuts off another car, the system can determine if the appropriate response is honking or flipping a middle finger or racing up ahead to cut off the other car. You don’t even need to use your own middle finger. The technology employs a projection system to simulate a bird-flipping so that the driver doesn’t have to do anything.”

  I shook my head, like: absurd.

  “Yeah, maybe. But this is the patent economy. Captain Don knew that, obviously.”

  “How so?”

  She studied me. “Listen, tell me why you’re here.”

  I nodded. “Indulge me for just one more second—on this patent thing. How do you mean that they are the economy?”

  For the first time, and just for an instant, a look of curiosity mixed with concern crossed her face. She wiped it off so quickly that most people wouldn’t have noticed, but that’s what they pay me for—noticing the small stuff.

  “You obviously know that a patent holder effectively controls a new innovation.”

  “Check.”

  “Which gives the patent holder the right to license technology, share in royalties, or extract revenue in any number of ways. That doesn’t mean all patents have value or, at least, immediate value. Sometimes, a patent gets filed and approved and sits fallow for a few years and then suddenly becomes relevant. Who knows, someone might actually want a driverless middle finger and then the patent becomes an ATM.”

  “Spitting out cash.”

  “So what can I do fo
r you? I do want to respect anything to do with the estate, but I’ve got an eight forty-two with a guy injured by a garage with a faulty disclaimer. Allegedly.”

  I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the three sheets of paper I’d found in The Selfish Gene. I laid them on the desk next to a photo of her with three kids and a husband and a large fish they’d nabbed on a boat called the Institution.

  “These are?”

  “A last offering from Captain Don.”

  “Offering?”

  “An idea. A new piece of . . . software code.”

  “Respectfully, what does that have to do with you?”

  “Let me turn the tables on that one. Why are you seeing me today?”

  “You made an appointment.” She leaned back in her chair, settling in for some low-grade verbal sparring she had no intention of losing. She was in her element.

  “Sure I did. I’m sure the great Veruca Sap makes time for every dick on the planet.”

  “You’ve got a checkbook just like everyone else.”

  “I doubt that. I assume you checked with Tess Donogue.”

  She twirled in her chair ever so slightly, a tiny tell, then said: “I’m not at liberty to disclose but, yes, off the record, we checked with her after you made the appointment. And, in case you’re wondering, she’s agreed to pay the tab should you malinger.”

  So Captain Don’s daughter knew I was here and approved of it.

  “Back to the matter at hand,” I said, gesturing to the three sheets of paper.

  Veruca picked them up and smoothed them out in front of her on the desk and sat looking, muttering “mm-hmm” and “aha” and “yes.” She looked up. “Interesting,” she said. “This appears to be—”

  She was interrupted by a loud buzzing. It came from her phone. She looked so exasperated I thought she might smash the thing, and then paved over the look. She pressed a button. “I thought I asked not to be disturbed.”

  “I know, I’m sorry, Ms. Sap. It’s important, um, an important call.”

  “Who is it?” She looked at me and mouthed, Sorry.

  “Bono,” said her receptionist.

  She shook her head. “Put him through.” She picked up her handset and held it to her ear. “Darling,” she said, and smiled. Then she seemed to look perplexed. She pulled the headset from her ear and looked at it. She pushed the button on the phone on her desk. “There’s no one on the line,” she said to her receptionist.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry, Ms. Sap. I think it was one of those automated programs that makes sure our phone is ringing and that you can be reached.”

  “Are you serious?!”

  “It’s quite useful, Ms. Sap. What if our phones weren’t ringing and we didn’t know it?”

  Sap shook her head and then slammed the phone down so hard that pens flew from the desk. Then she regained her composure.

  “You won’t be billed for that. Where were we?”

  “You were telling me what that is.”

  “At first blush, there are a few things here,” she said. She explained that the first part of the document—the part that was in English and I could read—mentioned this law firm as trustee of the Donogue estate.

  “That has already been established,” she said. “Nothing new there.”

  “Can you read it?”

  “More or less.”

  “You can?” I was surprised because Floyd had told me that he needed hours to figure it out. Then again, I had just realized about ten minutes ago in the lobby that Floyd was a whopping fat liar and maybe much more dangerous than I realized.

  “Of course I can read it. I’m an engineer and part borg”—she smiled as if telling a joke but I wasn’t sure—“and this isn’t that complex, I mean, in general terms. It’s from the mind of Captain Don, so I’m sure it’s more nuanced than I’m giving it credit for.”

  “So . . .”

  “So it’s code, obviously. It’s a messaging system of some kind, a way to send secure messages, is what it looks like. If you’re wondering how I know that it’s because, as an intellectual property specialist, I look at a million pieces of code and start to see patterns. Not because I’m a borg”—she smiled—“or is it?” Another smile, then she got serious again and continued to explain that she’d need to run the code to get the details.

  “How long would that take?”

  She shrugged. “Couple of hours, tops. We do this stuff all the time so that we can tell if something is original enough to patent.”

  “Do it.”

  She blinked, put off momentarily by my command. “Of course.”

  At this moment of standstill, a natural pause, I found myself wondering what was so important about this innovation—this not particularly fancy piece of code—that it would be hidden away.

  “At that point, you can decide what you, or the family, want to do with the code. If it’s patentable, then, of course, we can file for you.”

  “Uh-huh.” I just had this feeling I wasn’t getting anywhere.

  “I’m not sure to what extent you’re working on behalf of the family, but we may want to consider putting it in a trust.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Whatever.

  “That’s really the only way for the family to benefit—at this point.”

  “At what point?”

  “Well, you know, presuming that the Captain is . . . y’know, well, that Mr. Donogue, our wonderful innovator, passed.”

  I perked up. “What are you saying?”

  “Nothing. He was a great man, that’s all. I’m looking for the right honorific.”

  “Not that part—the part about him dying, and the family benefiting. What was that part?”

  “Just the obvious. If he’s dead, clearly, he no longer holds the patents. To put it in crass fashion: he expires and his patent rights expire with him. Unless they get put in a trust. There are ways.”

  “So . . .” I paused, realizing what she’d said. “You hang on to your patents as long as you’re alive.”

  “Yep.” She nodded as if to say this went without saying.

  “May I ask just two more questions?”

  She looked at the clock. Our time was up. “Sure. You can have the seconds Bono took up. That guy . . .” She smiled as if talking about an old friend who could nag.

  “Captain Don’s estate, all his patents, are they held in a trust—the kind you’re describing?”

  “That’s the family’s business, Fitch. Your other question?”

  “You represent Lester Wollop—in his divorce proceedings?”

  “Same answer, family business. In general, I can say that we often represent both sides in a transaction, but when we do that, the lawyers are segregated into different cages . . . Not cages, did I say cages? I meant: parts of the building. On such matters, we have a Chinese wall. In this case, I do mean Chinese wall, built in China, yes, I’m sure you saw those stories in the Post. It’s ridiculous, the accusations.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing. We took heat for being early to have our Chinese wall made in China. Of course it was made in China. It was a Chinese wall. But some of the workers spent too many hours in the factory and there was a fire. We knew nothing about it. Nothing. And as soon as we learned about it, we took very firm steps and now our entire supply chain and all manufacturers have been vetted as humanitarian by Amnesty International.”

  “You’re doing it,” I said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Talking like these people. Sounding nuts.”

  “When in Rome. And I’m Caesar,” she said, and smiled, in on the joke. “See your own way out. We’ll be in touch about the program.”

  Twenty-Three

  OUTSIDE, IN FRONT of the building, a guy wearing a suit and tie stood with a sign hanging around his neck that said: Smoker. I took out my phone. “No pictures,” he said. “No Instacharm. Please. I’ve humiliated my family enough.”

  I wasn’t intending to take a photo, never c
rossed my mind.

  He pleaded: “It was pot. I swear it. But they didn’t believe me. It only looked like a cigarette.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m doing public penance, for smoking. The Scarlet Letter C.”

  Cigarette. I walked past him and used the phone for what I’d intended to do in the first place: look up the two things that were bugging me about Floyd. One was his phone number. I glanced at it, and then looked at the burner phone I’d picked up from the dead Tarantula—the guy we’d found in the alley frothing at the mouth.

  It was what I thought: the Tarantula had used his phone to call Floyd. It was a number in the 408 area code, the very same number that I’d called and texted when I’d called Floyd myself.

  But there was more. A day earlier, I’d used the Tarantula’s phone to check the very same 408 number. When I’d called it, I’d gotten a voice mail saying it was Danny Donogue’s phone. So who did the phone belong to—Floyd or Danny?

  I hit the number from the Tarantula’s phone and it rang once and a voice-mail message came on: “Hello, you’ve reached Danny, at the beep, you know what to do.”

  I hung up.

  Then I called the same number, but this time I called from my phone (not the Tarantula’s). After one ring, voice mail picked up. “It’s Floyd, you know what to do.”

  What the hell?

  “Hey, pal,” a voice said behind me.

  I turned and there on the sidewalk stood the guy with the smoking sign around his neck. He leaned in close.

  “Can I bum a cigarette?”

  “Get lost.”

  “Wait, listen, being out here is so stressful. I’ve never smoked before. I was framed. I just want one, y’know, to take the edge off.”

  “Lemme ask you a question,” I said.

  “Yeah, sure.” I could see he thought this might get him some tobacco.

  “Is it possible to program your phone so that different people calling get different voice mails?”

  “So your wife gets one response and your mistress gets another?”