Death Check

by Warren Murphy

“Do I know you?”

  “No, but I know you. The chess game. You couldn’t see me. Magnificent move.”

  “Oh,” said Remo.

  “I’m Anna Stohrs. Dr. Stohrs’ daughter, the chess instructor. I’m also president of the daughters’ association of Brewster Forum.”

  “A lot of daughters here?”

  “Yes, but none like me.”

  “That’s nice,” Remo said.

  “I think you’re cute. Let’s.”

  “Let’s what?”

  “You know.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m a virgin.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Okay, I’m not a virgin,” Remo agreed.

  He could see her play her eyes down his body, lingering at his groin.

  “Would you do it for pay?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You think you’re cute, don’t you?”

  She smiled an even-toothed smile, an attractive but hard smile. She tilted her head back in arrogance. “I know I’m cute, copper.”

  She had switched tactics, to pricking the ego, setting herself as a tough prize, much like the heroine of a lovely little novel Remo had once read. He leaned into the car.

  “Not caring about someone,” he said, “is apologizing. I apologize. I have an appointment.”

  And he left for the circle of the Forum, to attempt to track down Doctor Hirshbloom, to finish the set-up on her before he took his wonderful day off.

  Strange about her. All the other scientists had sought him out after the incident with the cycle gang. Father Boyle had been the first interview and a surprisingly difficult fix. Like most Jesuits, he made a career of not seeming like a priest, while deeply acting out his faith.

  He sat with his big feet on his very little desk. Remo had learned to distrust people who sat with their feet on the desk. It was usually a come-on by ho, ho, ho, one-big-happy-family fakers trying to get a hustler’s edge.

  But Remo was willing to forgive and forget in Boyle’s case, especially since Boyle had been the only man at the chess tournament the first night to act like a human being.

  Now Remo found himself looking at the gargantuan soles of the mammoth shoes on the heroic feet of the Rev. Robert A. Boyle, S. J. The Sorbonne. M.I.T. Anthropologist. Classical Scholar. Mathematician. Director of Bio-cycle Analysis at Brewster Forum.

  Remo ran his mind back over the pornographic photos of Boyle. Yes, they had shown his giant feet. Remo had seen them, memorized them, but they had not registered. His perceptions were slipping. It was the three month peak. He was falling apart.

  “Well?” Boyle had sat up at the desk and was looking at Remo.

  “Well what?”

  “I was wondering what you thought of our looney bin.”

  “A great place to visit. I wouldn’t want to live here.”

  “Not much chance of that. Your presence here seems to have a deleterious effect on the quietude of our little rest home. First, making Ratchett look silly at the chess tournament. And then yesterday that show with those hooligans.”

  “It’s what I get paid for,” Remo answered laconically. Stop being a nice guy, he thought. Be a bastard. Then I can figure out a way to kill you, without any regrets.

  “I’ll have to ask you a lot of questions,” Boyle said.

  “Is there any reason I should answer them?”

  If he had heard, Boyle ignored him. “I’ll need to know where you were born and where you were brought up. Your native stock. All the usual dates and anniversaries. When you went to prison.”

  The alarm light flashed in Remo’s mind. Prison? What did Boyle know… what could he know… about Remo’s past? He forced himself into calmness. “Prison?” he asked casually. “What made you think I’d been in prison?”

  “It’s been my experience,” Boyle said, his cool blue eyes looking guilelessly into Remo’s hard face, “that people who are so quick tempered and so efficiently violent usually have seen the inside of a cage. At least in this country. In mine, we make them prime ministers.”

  “Well, that’s one against you,” Remo answered. “Never been in prison. At least, not in this life.” Which was technically true.

  Boyle made a note on a yellow pad with a stub of a pencil held in his big pink bricklayer’s hands. He looked up again. “Shall we go on?”

  “Can you give me a reason why we should?”

  Boyle walked to a small refrigerator in a corner of his office. Remo declined a drink and Boyle poured himself a water tumbler full of Irish whiskey. Alcohol abstinence was not one of his vows.

  “Sure. It’ll keep me on the job here and off the parish bingo circuit for another year.”

  “Fair enough.”

  By the time the tumbler of whiskey was drained, Remo had learned that bio-cycle analysis was the study of rhythms in men’s lives. Boyle contended that there were unconscious rhythms that determined behavior.

  “If we can isolate those individual rhythms, we can understand behavior. Maybe even predict or control it.”

  Boyle showed Remo a bar chart. “See this line?” he asked pointing to a vertical bar. “Accidents per 10,000 driving hours in a Tokyo cab company.”

  “Now this line,” he said, pointing to a shorter bar. “Accidents per 10,000 hours six months later. Why the difference?”

  “They probably hired German hackies. You ever see Japs drive?”

  An honest laugh fractured Boyle’s tomatoed face. “No. Same drivers. But the company analyzed their body cycles and notified them to be careful on days that we call ‘critical.’ Just that, and the accident rate’s cut in half. Follow me?”

  “Maybe. What kind of cycles are there? Do they really control people? Do you really believe in this horseshit?”

  Boyle went on to explain that after a half-century of study, scientists had isolated three cycles: a 23-day emotional cycle, a 28-day physical rhythm and a 33-day intellectual cycle. But now, with computers, science could absorb vast amounts of data on enormous numbers of people. “If we feed enough facts into the machinery, we may be able to detect totally new cycles and rhythms. Rhythms of love. Or hate.”

  “Why’d you want to talk to me?”

  “Our basic study around here is violence. You’re the first violent man we’ve had here in years. A rarity. Someone who doesn’t intellectualize everything to death.”

  “Did you study McCarthy? The man I replaced?”

  “Yes, I did. You know he was murdered, don’t you.”

  Boyle was the second man to tell Remo that McCarthy had been murdered. He looked blankly at the priest. “No, I didn’t know. I thought he committed suicide.”

  “Horseshit, to borrow your word. On the day he was killed, McCarthy was experiencing a very rare phenomenon. His emotional, physical and intellectual cycles all happened to coincide at a peak. It should have been the brightest day of his life. Men don’t commit suicide on days like that.”

  “Who’d want to kill him?” Remo asked, watching Boyle’s face carefully. “As far as I could find out, he wasn’t mixed up in anything. Not like blackmail… or a porno ring.”

  Boyle showed no reaction at all. “Damned if I know who did him in. But I hope you find out who it was. McCarthy was a decent sort.”

  Boyle began to ask Remo a string of long, generally harmless questions about his life. Remo stuck to the fake biography of the fake Remo Pelham. Whenever Boyle got close to Remo’s true past, to CURE, to his mission, Remo lied. It took over an hour.

  Remo found he was in the fourth day of his emotional cycle, 18th day of his intellectual cycle and 15th day of his physical cycle. “That explains yesterday,” Boyle said. “It was a day of physical crisis for you. Mid-cycle. You were passing from an up period to a down and were edgy. If the whole thing had happened tomorrow, you would have turned your back and walked away. Unfortunate for those poor hooligans.”

  “For them? I might have been
hurt.”

  “I rather doubt it,” Boyle said.

  Walking out into the courtyard from Boyle’s cottage office, Remo was puzzled. So they were studying violence at the Forum. Big deal. Maybe Brewster’s little plan to conquer the world involved talking your enemy to death. They sure as hell weren’t going to figure out everybody’s cycle and only fight when the rhythms were on our side.

  And the pornographic pictures. That was another riddle. Boyle’s blue eyes hadn’t wavered when Remo mentioned blackmail or dirty photos. Remo was convinced Boyle knew nothing about the pictures. Yet he had obviously posed for them. Really posed, because the pictures were professionally lighted and shot from a number of different angles. And now he knew nothing about it.

  If the word came, Boyle would have to be killed one-on-one. By hand. He had no repetitious habits, few hobbies, rarely left his cottage. It would have to be an accident in the house. Something with an electric cord perhaps. If the word came. Remo hoped it wouldn’t.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WHEN REMO WAS A BOY, he had a fantasy of growing up to become the great white hunter. Whatever was left of the fantasy vanished when the rhinoceros charged and crushed the chained jackal under his 3,000 pounds of weight. The jackal left hardly a smear.

  Remo continued to watch the film in fascination as the camera lens was changed and the rhino receded in the distance. Then, stepping into the film came Dr. Abram Schulter, his long, sparse black hair stringing down from a pith helmet. He carried a small black box, but it looked large in his birdlike hands.

  He began to walk toward the rhino, shouting as he went. Occasionally he stopped and waved his helmet to try to attract the near-sighted beast’s attention. When he was no more than thirty yards away, he stopped and began yelling again.

  Finally, the rhinoceros charged. His hooves made the ground beneath the camera vibrate as he thundered from the right side of the screen toward the puny figure of Schulter standing defenseless on the left side of the screen. Schulter looked up, seemed to watch the rhino for a split second, then flicked a switch on top of the box. The rhino stopped as if he’d run into an invisible wall.

  He stopped dead and stood there, ten yards away from Schulter. Not moving. The film faded; the next frames showed the rhino lying down eating grass and Schulter sitting on its back. The beast couldn’t have cared less.

  Remo was impressed, but he couldn’t resist a grin and the thought, this screwball will mount anything, toy giraffes, rhinoceroses, anything. Mothers in the neighborhood should lock up their rubber duckies.

  The lights came on. Wearing a doctor’s gown, Abram Schulter, M.D., Ph.D., Fellow of, Diplomate of, pioneer of this and that and everything else, came paddling toward Remo on ripple-soled shoes and began lifting the blinds to let sunlight into the darkened office.

  “And so that’s what we do,” he said, as if the film explained everything.

  “You mean, you’re a rhinoceros trainer?”

  “A rhinoceros trainer? No, why should I be? Oh yes, I see. A little joke. Yes, yes. Very good. Very good indeed.”

  He went on: “No, no. Electronic brain stimulation. The box in my hand was a radio. It sent a signal that stimulated alpha waves in the brain of the rhino. Such a brain as it has, that is. Alpha rhythms bring inner peace. Don’t suppose you’d be interested?”

  Schulter walked from the window and sat down on the other side of the coffee table facing Remo. He took a cigarette from a wooden box on the table and lit it. His hands were deeply nicotine stained, and like all compulsive smokers, he didn’t offer Remo one.

  Remo leaned forward and took one anyway, even though it was a violation of his rules at peak. He lit it with a lighter on the table, and then put the lighter and the box back on Schulter’s side of the table. He inhaled deeply, careful not to let the smoke change his breathing rhythm, exhaled for exactly two beats, and then looked at Schulter.

  “I’m no rhinoceros. I’m not even a toy giraffe. What do you want with me?”

  “Well, you know. I saw you in the yard with those silly-looking putzes. I mean. Such violence. I thought you might like to find inner peace. Would you?”

  “Could I?”

  “Certainly. All I would need to do is plant electrodes inside your skull. Very simple really.”

  “Has anyone ever offered to plant his foot up your ass?”

  Schulter sighed. “Very common response. Not unusual at all.” He puffed rapidly on his cigarette, then leaned forward, picked up the cigarette box, turned it in his hand as if examining it and then replaced it precisely in the center of the table. He did the same with the lighter.

  “Well, at any rate,” he said. “I just thought I’d ask. What I’d really like is to get the flow of your brain waves under stimulation. Very simple really.”

  “What kind of stimulation?” Remo asked.

  “Just photos flashed on a screen,” Schulter said.

  “Why me?” Remo asked.

  “Why not? You’re new here. I’ve done everybody else.” Schulter vanished into a large cabinet at the other end of the room, and came out bearing a metal half-helmet and a film cartridge that he placed in the movie projector.

  The metal helmet had a long cord attached to it, which Schulter plugged into a console panel on the other side of the room.

  He nicked two switches and the round eye of an oscilloscope lit up with a hum at the top of the console.

  “Helmet’s an induction microphone really,” Schulter said, handing it to Remo. “Instead of , it picks up tiny electrical impulses from your brain. They’re visible on the scope,” he said, pointing to the console, “and also on a paper tape. For record keeping.”

  Remo felt the helmet. He had seen one like it before. It had been lowered over his head when he was strapped into the electric chair at the New Jersey State Prison.

  Schulter was still explaining. “You put the helmet on and watch the screen. Pictures appear, at prescribed intervals, and the tape records the change in brain pattern from the stimulus. Quite harmless.”

  Remo shrugged and sat in the chair. Gingerly, he lowered the helmet over his head and looked up at the screen. Flashing through his mind was a ritual of Chiun’s. Chiun would sit in the lotus position and hum, a single steady low pitched note, that he claimed drained the brain and body of tension. Remo suspected that it simulated the frequency of brain-calming alpha waves, perhaps through the direct vibration of the jawbone against the brain cavity, forcing the brain into producing them.

  Schulter sat down at the console with his back to Remo. The oscilloscope was fully warmed now and its hum echoed through the room. Schulter flicked another switch and the film engaged. Remo cleared his brain of distractions and tried to emulate the low, humming note that he had heard Chiun emit many times.

  A picture lit up the screen. A field of flowers gentled by the breeze, birds flying overhead in the sky. A control film probably to get a typical rested reaction from the subject against which the others could be compared.

  Remo hummed, his sound masked by the oscilloscope.

  After twenty seconds, the flower scene gave way to a splash of red. The camera faded back and the red turned out to be a blotch of blood on the white-shirted chest of a dead man, his eyes open, his face grinning idiotically.

  Remo hummed.

  The next picture showed Communist Chinese methodically gunning down Korean villagers standing against a wall.

  Remo hummed.

  The fourth scene showed a child cringing and then a burly man slapping the little child, hard, hard enough to make the child’s head snap back and forth.

  Remo hummed.

  Schulter flipped a switch and the projector stopped. Other switches turned off the console. The scientist stood up and looked at the long string of paper tape in his hands. Remo stood up and took the helmet off.

  “Did I pass?”

  Startled, Schulter looked up. “Oh, yes. Yes. Quite good, really. Highly stable.”

  Remo tried to leer.
“Maybe you should have showed me some pornography. Whips and boots. You know. That might have helped.”

  Schulter’s reaction was none at all. If the helmet had been on his head, there would have been no change. Pornography was just a word to him. He knew nothing. Nothing about pornography. Nothing about toy giraffes. Nothing about a wild-eyed, black-haired woman with boots and a whip.

  “Perhaps we’ll do the test again. Most often, it’s best.”

  “Well, perhaps some other time, Doctor.”

  Schulter waved Remo out of the cottage, absently, still studying the paper tape. He looked up as Remo left, staring at the broad back of the chief of security. Remo was smiling. And humming.

  If the time came, he thought, Schulter would be easy. A wiring switch on the helmet and a tragic laboratory accident. A quite different sort of accident from the one which almost befell another Brewster Forum scientist, five minutes later, at the hands of Remo Pelham.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ONE INCH AND ONE-FIFTIETH OF a second. Death had come that close to Anthony J. Ferrante, director of bio-feedback research at Brewster Forum.

  Remo had knocked at the white cottage door bearing Ferrante’s name and pushed the door open when a voice called “Come in.”

  The desk facing the door was empty when Remo entered. His eyes scanned the room looking for Ferrante.

  Did he hear the sound? Or did he sense the infinitesimal change in pressure as an air mass moved toward his left ear?

  Remo pivoted to the left on the ball of his left foot. His right foot extended behind him and his body dropped into a deep crouch, in time to see a hand flashing down toward him in a karate slash.

  There was no time to think, no need to think. Thousands of hours of training and practice had made defense automatic and retaliation instinctive. Remo’s left hand flashed up to the side of his head to catch and deflect the blow on his wrist. His right hand had already retracted to his hip, and without stopping had fashioned itself into the classical hand spear and was moving forward toward the left kidney of the man Remo had not yet seen.

  Remo’s breath exploded in a violent cry of “ai-ee” as his iron hand flashed on toward its target. As it finished its deadly course, Remo felt, rather than saw, his opponent’s hand stop on its downward path before making contact. The man had pulled his punch.