They both looked at me and then got a coffee from Billie, who insisted on serving them. Then they sat down on the couch in front of the main window. Time check, ten twenty-eight.
Billie served me a cup, then went off with the tray to find Everet. The presence of Miss K. was a bit disconcerting, but we had to start somewhere, so I did.
“Well Midori. What brings you out this way today?”
She shifted forward on the couch, capturing our attention as she did. Looking me straight in the eye she said, “I want to see Therese.”
There was a certain pleasure to be taken in her directness, but I wasn’t buying it.
“Why?” She shifted on the couch again. Getting comfortable, or hiding her discomfort. I couldn’t tell.
“It was because of our conversation yesterday. I think that she might need a friendly face. I want to be that face.” She stopped there, and I could see that she was determined to follow through on this compulsion. Reaching over to the table she picked up her coffee and took a sip. As she did, the lace cuffs on her blouse trailed across the table.
Then she added, “I want to see what she’s like. I want to know what kind of woman John fell in love with.”
There was a silence in the room then. George broke it.
“This is going to be a police matter. Jeffry can’t give you permission to come.”
She turned to him with a stricken look. “Police? But she didn’t call the police. She said she couldn’t.” Then she turned to me with a look of disbelief. “You didn’t call them, did you?”
A slow smile crept across my face. “Meet George Belnor, Chief of Detectives for our fair city.” I waved my arm in George’s direction. George took the cue, making a little seated bow.
Midori’s self-assurance took a bit of a hit, and she sat back in her part of the couch. George followed up with flair, taking out his pocket phone and placing a call to Lenn, his driver.
“Lenn, George here.” There was a pause. “Yes.” Another pause. “Right, I’ll take care of it… … uh-huh.” Another pause. “Ok, take McMurtry and Boslowsky out to the SkyDome at 1:00 PM. I’ll meet you at gate seventeen, around the south side of the ‘dome. Right. See you then.” He hung up and nodded to me. “We’ll wait for her to make contact and then we’ll move in to take her into protective custody.”
Midori had a horrified look on her face, and her mouth was open.
“Close your mouth or you’ll catch some flies. Didn’t your mother tell you about that?”
Immediately she closed her mouth and gave me a dirty look. I stopped it quickly before it could get ugly.
“Don’t make faces. George is my brother-in-law. Family, got it? We can trust him implicitly. Therese needs more help than I can give her, that’s plain, and the only source of help I have that I can trust is George.”
Just then Billie walked into the room and announced that Everet wanted to see me. I got up and went. As I left the room, George and Midori were discussing the meeting with Therese. I had no doubt that if Midori really wanted to be there, she would be there. I left them to it.
When I got to the office I found Everet sitting at the system with a utility program, viewing the disk. When he heard me walk into the room, he got up out of the chair and offered it to me. I thanked him and sat down.
He was intensely involved in what he’d been doing. The cover was off of the machine, and I could see that he had added a disk drive to it. I figured it must be John’s.
“You brought the hard disk with you I see.”
“Yeah, I thought it would be faster than restoring it from tape.”
“Good work.” I looked at the screen Everet had been going over. The hex to decimal conversion didn’t show anything intelligible, so I killed the program. It was an intense graphic image all right, but what type? I copied it over to ‘Saphire’, and then I had two systems to work with.
“Get on out to the living room and entertain for me, will you Everet?”
“Ok.”
I didn’t turn around, but I could hear him as he left the room. I always worked better when I was alone with a system.
The first thing I did was to check the size of the file. It was fifty-five megabytes. It wasn’t a standard business file. Maybe a CAD file of some sort. It was hard to tell, because the file extension was missing. I tried putting it into all of the photo editing, paint, and CAD packages I could think of, and still no dice. I was getting desperate about the time Billie came in to freshen my coffee cup.
“Sorry to disturb you when you’re working, but I thought you might like a refill.”
“That’s fine Billie. I think I need it just now. I haven’t gotten anywhere with this so far. Maybe the coffee will help.”
He left, and I sat back for a minute, thinking and sipping. What takes up fifty megs? A true colour image of almost anything, if it was poster size. But I had tried all of the photo image formats, with no juice.
Then it hit me. Satellite images. That was it! I pushed my roll chair across the room to ‘Ruby’. Then I spent a few minutes logging onto the Internet. You’re never alone when you’ve got a telephone line. It only took a few minutes to connect to Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and gather the info on satellite photos that I wanted. The news wasn’t good.
All of the formats utilized for satellite imagery were proprietary, which meant that you couldn’t view them if you didn’t have the right program viewer. And there were a lot of them. Worse than that, satellite images were typically larger than the files my geophysics buddies worked with. That meant even larger than I could contain or process with the computer power I had at my disposal, which was considerable. Back to square one.
Nothing else for it. I called up my pal Chris at Controlled Geophysics. He didn’t have any fast answers either. But he did have some advice for me. It seemed that the size of the file I had on hand was just right for a tight-shot geosurvey map image. A tight-shot was a focus area, small but interesting, that would have shown up on the main survey data imaging.
Like the kind that Ted Dawson had been making for the Brazilian Government. Damn!
I called for Billie, and sent him over to Chris’ place with the tape, to see if Chris would be able to make any sense out of the data file with the geophysical modeling software, then went to see how the gang was doing.
When I walked into the living room George was quietly writing notes to himself in the corner, and Midori and Everet had settled around my backgammon board. Midori was the only one who spoke up as sat in my chair.
“You can’t do that on a double.” Everet glowered at her as she picked up the dice, and casually rolled double fives. He turned in my direction, looking for sympathy.
“Don’t look at me, you chose your opponent. I’d think twice about playing a numbers-based game with someone who balances foreign exchange markets in her head for a living.” I picked up the morning paper I had brought up from breakfast, and spread it out at arm’s length, effectively cutting off any rebuttal. From behind the paper I heard the dice roll, and Everet saying, “Double five, again?” That seemed to end the play with Midori the apparent winner.
She cooed softly, and invited the next victim to the slaughter. Nobody made a move, so Everet put the board away.
I laid the paper down and checked my watch. Billie would be arriving at Chis’ place in about fifteen minutes or so. I had an obligation to pass the time for my assembled ‘group’, but I wasn’t sure I had the energy. There wasn’t anything I could think of that I hadn’t done already. I’d served coffee. They’d played games, and engaged in meaningful conversation. To hell with it. I had bigger issues to deal with than the etiquette of hosting. I got up from my chair and went back into the office. The time I picked up the phone and called Chris. Billie hadn’t arrived yet, maybe having hit traffic. Whatever the reason, he was behind schedule. I thanked Chris and asked him to have Billie call me when he got there.
Everet showed up at the door of the office. “I think I’l
l be going now Mr. Claxton. I hope I’ve been of some help.” He frowned a bit and hesitated before going on. “Miss Kuwabara seems to be getting a bit restless though… she doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere with George.” He smiled at the last bit.
I stood up and approached him holding out my hand to give him a shake. “Everet, you’ve been a great help. I thank you for being so attentive to the serious nature of this affair, and by the way, don’t worry about Midori. I’ll make sure that she gets what she wants. As long as it doesn’t put her in danger. Also I’d appreciate your keeping mum about the situation with the file you brought over, until we’ve had a chance to appraise its value and relevance.”
“No problem there Mr. Claxton. From my side, I’d appreciate a tip-off on what it was, when you find out. That is, if you can tell me, of course.”
“You’ve got a deal. I’ll get the hard drive back to you in a day or so, and I’ll let you know then.”
I saw him out and went back to the office. The telephone rang just as I sat down at ‘Saphire’. It was Billie. He’d hit some brand-new construction on the Q.E.W. highway and was extremely apologetic, like it had been his fault or something. I assured him that it was irrelevant, and to hang about until Chris had made an assessment of the file, and then get him to call me back. It would take Chris about a half hour to run the file through all of his filters, if he didn’t nail it at the start. That gave me a few minutes of down time, unless I fraternized with the quests. Which would have been the expected thing, I suppose. While I normally try not to do the expected thing on most occasions, this wasn’t one of them. I headed for the living room.
As I walked through the archway from the hall I spotted George standing by the window, using his ‘cell phone. He had his back to Midori, who was still sitting on the couch. George looked all business-like, and Midori looked put out. It seemed that she hadn’t made the kind of progress she’d been hoping for. Well, it was George’s call now, and I could recommend, but I couldn’t dictate. I crossed the room and sat down next to her on the couch.
“So, are you coming?”
“No, I’m not. Your friend here has decided that I don’t have a serious enough reason to be there. So, I get to stay at home and wait for the six o’clock news.”
Skip from here to the stadium, picking up date on the way.
I took the van, promising to meet George and the crew at the south side, gate 17, thirty minutes before the contact time. From my place to Cynthia’s was only a short distance, but a world of difference. There were a lot of trees, everywhere you looked. In most cases, the closer I got to her address the more obscured the houses were by trees. And field stone walls. Some eight or ten feet high. The wrought iron gates were becoming prevalent as well by the time I found her address. There was a curving driveway leading up to the house, the kind that loops around the front door and folds back on itself. It was all crushed gravel, pressed and rolled so that it didn’t scatter much. I guess these people didn’t gun their engines much as they left the house for Sunday drive, or whatever.
When I got to the doorstep, my mood was in a funny state. Like funny peculiar. I couldn’t recall at that exact moment just when my last date had taken place. I also couldn’t find the doorbell, and I was picturing myself in someone else’s eyes, peering this way and that looking for it. The image added to my strange mood.
Having just decided to make a fist and pound on the big black double doors, the one on the right opened and a matronly woman in a maid’s uniform smiled briefly before starting up a doorstep type dialog with me. “Good afternoon sir, I believe Cynthia is expecting you…”, the pause extended, and it was apparent even to a boor such as myself that this point this would be the ‘me identifying myself’ portion of the dialog. I obliged.
“Yes, I believe she is, I would be Jeffry Claxton…”, this time it was my turn to pause. Apparently, I passed muster, as I was graced with another brief smile and the door opened wide as I heard a voice I recognized echoing from within the depths of ‘the house’. “Jen, if that’s Jeffry, just put him in the kitchen, I’ll be right down.” Put him in the kitchen?
Jen pulled back from the entrance and beckoned me to follow. So I did. I turned to close the door behind me, but it was already closing itself. Smart door.
Stepping smartly to keep up with Jen, we went straight to the kitchen, where I was offered a seat, a drink, and a snack to while away the time until my date was ready. Since I was feeling a bit peckish anyway, I accepted a small bowl of macadamia nuts, which I love, along with a cup of Irish Cream coffee to wash them down. I was driving or I would have asked for a Heineken beer. Jen placed everything within easy reach and left the room, which gave me a chance to ogle. I can’t think of any other way to put it. This ‘kitchen’ was about the size of my entire apartment, and much more lavishly appointed.
The section I was seated in was just off to the side of the breakfast nook, which was windowed on three sides, and had benches along the wall sides of the table. Where I was had to be a coffee and chat area. The chairs were low, padded and comfortable. The table was low too, the top made of what appeared to be imported tile, hand fitted into a mosaic of contrasting dark and bright colours portraying a village scene from an old time village. It had indentations built into it to hold a saucer and cup. Obviously not from the Sears catalogue. The macadamia nuts were good. Really good. I started feeling a little more comfortable, and I picked up today’s The Globe and Mail from the table. Just as I found the comics page Cynthia came bouncing into the room. Naturally. I quickly folded the paper to cover the comics and stood up to greet her.
Man, she looked good. Better than the last time I’d seen her, and that was saying a lot. My reaction must have been plain, because she stopped just inside the doorway, and holding one arm up like a ballerina, she twirled and bowed. What the hell, I clapped. “Encore, encore.”
She straightened up and gave me a wink that said so much that couldn’t be put into words, I just accepted it. She was dressed in denim jeans, not designer jeans, but worn-in Levi’s, faded from washing and just slightly frayed at the cuffs from being used, not kept in a drawer. Her Nike Airs had the same sort of look, and she had a white cotton blouse on, covered by a Number 99 hockey shirt, and not the L.A. Kings one, but the Calgary Flames version. All topped off by a suede Blue Jays road cap. The thick blonde hair was braided and the braid was tucked through the hole in the back of the cap.
“You are absolutely, stunningly, beautiful. I don’t know what else to say.” The words just came out, for a moment I wasn’t sure where they had come from, but only for a moment. At that point I think I blushed. She was smiling all the while. A smile that drew me in, like a starship on the edge of the gravity well of a black hole, still under control, but the calculations for the time until crossing the event horizon were already made, that part was history. Still in the future, but history nonetheless.
She walked up to me and reached out to touch my face softly with the back of her fingers, and all the while I stood there looking into her eyes. Green. Deep. The event horizon was right there. I could feel the pull.
“That was a very sweet thing to say.” Her voice wouldn’t have carried past us to someone standing three feet away, even though we alone. Flashes of our previous encounter were flitting out of deep memory storage and into the light of day. This is what had happened to me the last time we had met, but I had been on neutral ground, at Sarah’s place. There was no protection of that kind here today. Sink or swim. I tried swimming. “Nice dress code you’ve got there.” The fact that we were both wearing almost the same thing had escaped us until that moment, and we looked each other up and down and started to laugh. Her laugh made me want to hold her close, and absorb it. I had to dig deep to pull out.
“Hey,” I flicked a quick glance at my watch, “if we hit the trail right away, we can stop off in the village and get a frozen yogurt on the way.” Frozen yogurt? My mind was racing furiously, trying to determine if the momentary
loss of cool was something a bit more sinister, like total insanity, and whether or not it might be permanent, or if it was just when I was this close to Cynthia. She tipped back her head and looked me right in the eye. “I love frozen yogurt, let’s go.” Her smile was good. She took me by the arm and we left the house, talking about how the team had been doing so far this year, and about how hard it was to regain the glory of championship once you’ve had it and then let it slip through your fingers. Stuff like that.
I wondered if there were any messages embedded between the lines there, but only for an instant. There was a more pressing issue to discuss with Cynthia at this stage, and that related to our ‘date’, and what was really going on today. I held the door for her and then went around to the driver’s side, got in and started the engine. Then I let it idle while I turned to face her, and explain what was happening. I apologized for bringing my work into our day, but under the circumstances, it was either that, or cancel. I hadn’t wanted to cancel, but I told her I would understand if she didn’t want to come along after finding out the truth.
As it turned out, her fear was all for Therese, not herself. She also found the whole thing much more interesting than a baseball game. It seemed that she did enjoy sports, but in the limited format of hockey. Which was pretty astounding, given the level of violence in hockey today, and the fact that I felt pretty much the same. After explaining that she would have to stay out of the way while the meet took place, unless she explicitly requested permission from George to be there, which I held in proxy, considering George’s absence. A bit of belligerence crept into her tone of voice.
“From what you’ve told me, George and his flying squad, or swat team or whatever, are going to have this thing all sown up, safety-wise, right?”
“Well…, that’s fairly true, but you never know with this sort of thing. We’re not totally convinced at this point, that anyone is actually trying to, or even wants to harm her. On the other hand, her fiancé has been murdered. If this is as serious as she’s letting on, then we have to take all necessary precautions. There’s already been one confirmed murder in this case. It’s not as simple as it sounds, and I’m not trying to talk down to you. If I thought that I was going to be in danger of losing my life over this, I’d hand the whole thing over to George in a split-second.”
The Diamond Dust on Dragonfly Wings: A Jeffry Claxton Mystery Novel Page 15