by Ron Goulart
Settling into the drive seat, he sniffed at the air in the compartment. A vague frown touched his face. He shrugged and picked up a tokmike. “Hildy,” he said, “I’m putting this into our system so you can hear it when you’re through with the PKK louts.”
He cleared his throat away from the mike, and put his seat into a rest position. That session with Skullpopper this morning had left him feeling damned weary.
“Here’s part of what Palsy Hatchbacker was, I think, trying to tell me,” he dictated. “Dr. Dickens Barrel, financed mostly by grants from Foodopoly, was working on a new and inexpensive way to puff grain for breakfast cereals. He’s the guy who came up with the original method for making Bloaties, but that one, involving nuclear power and lasers, is somewhat expensive. What he’d dreamed up, while Palsy and some others I’ll get to in a moment were with him, was an incredible new way. One that involved a simple skull implant and the emerging of latent psi powers. Don’t chortle. It apparently worked.”
Shifting in his seat, Jake gazed up through the oneway seethru roof. He watched the Xmas Eve snow drifting down and speckling the parking dome.
“What Prof. Barrel did was train a group of the PKK undergrads to explode oats into puffed Bloaties. He reasoned that it would be quite economical to implant his gadget and then train workers who’d scored high on latent psi-powers to work in Foodopoly’s plants and puff tons of the stuff per day. No nuke power is required, not even much in the way of solar energy.” Jake grinned bleakly. “Trouble was, one of his undergrad groups had an accident, that was back in ’99, too. One spring afternoon an entire wing of the nutrition lab blew up. Blam! Just like that. Prof. Barrel was unsettled by that and seemed to shelve the whole project. He eventually, early in 2001, worked out a system somewhat less costly than his original one and sold the Foodopoly folks on that. It involves solar mirrors and no psi. That’s how they make Bloaties at the moment. A year ago the professor disappeared clean away. Also vanishing at the time was a pretty dark-haired young woman named Christina Parkerhouse. Better known to show business as Trina Twain.”
He paused, yawning.
Since climbing back into the skycar he’d been feeling increasingly drowsy.
“Hildy, this is what I think, at this stage of things anyhow,” Jake continued. “A—Professor Barrel and Trina have teamed up and are using his process to commit the Big Bang murders. If you can blow up a goodly part of a college campus, you can do the same for despots and tycoons. B—Trina made off with the prof and is herself the mastermind. I tend not to believe this one, maybe because I’d hate to accept a ventriloquist as a mastermind. C—The six students who made up the lab group that had the explosive accident are the Big Bang gang. Thus far I can not get a list of their names, but it’s likely that Palsy and Trina were among them. More on that anon. All of this, I have to admit, I got from a moderately goofy fellow that drunken sot Pilgrim put me in touch with.” He yawned again, slouching in his seat. “What I’m going to do, after checking in with Steranko the Siphoner again, is try to find Trina Twain first off. If I can’t, I’ll go for the professor and maybe the student group.”
He let the mike drop into his lap.
There were smells he should have identified earlier. One was the new plaz smell fresh made skycars always give off, the other was the faint lemony scent of sleepgas coming out of your entire aircirc system.
“Hildy … somebody pulled a switch on me … substituted a perfect replica of … damn skycar … like a sap … distracted … maybe by carolers … walked right in … our own secsystem won’t allow gas … so they switch …”
His chin tilted down, his eyelids fell shut. A moment passed, then the vehicle started itself and went rolling toward a takeoff ramp.
Reverend Gully Lomax took off his cape and hung it over a gargoyle. “No need to be shy, Miss Miller,” he said to Hildy.
They were alone in the chapel of the refurbished cathedral, late sunlight was knifing in through the stained glass windows and making kaleidoscopic patterns on the PKK chief’s white dictadesk and the stonewalled room’s six floating glaz chairs.
“Beg pardon?” She arranged herself, crossing her long tan legs, in the chair nearest to the one he was settling into.
“About my Xmas present I mean. You can give it to me now.”
Hildy put her left hand to her lips, blushing convincingly. “Hasn’t it arrived?”
Reverend Lomax moved to his feet, walked a small circle and then rested a broad, white-clad buttock on his white desk top. “Nope, it ain’t,” he forlornly informed her.
“Are you absolutely certain?”
He nodded his wave-rich head at the white computer terminal resting on the stone floor immediately below a tongue-out gargoyle. “Not unless it got here whiles I was on the air just now,” he said. “We log ever’ dang one in.” He rested his palm on his knee, leaning in her direction. “Can you give me a hint as to what it’s gonna be?”
“I’d rather it came as a complete surprise.”
“How ’bout at least tellin’ me how much you paid? Thataway, Miss Miller, I can better judge how much time I can spare you an’ your mag.”
Smiling up at him, she answered, “The price is a four-figure one.”
He fitted his fingers into the waves of his silvery hair and gazed up at the groined ceiling. “Four?”
“High four.”
“I can chat for seventeen minutes with you. Where’s your picture takin’ feller?”
“He’ll be out later in the week.”
“What’s he plannin’ to give me?”
“A digital cuckoo clock.”
“Shit, pardon my French, but I got over nine thousand of them buggers down in the crypt already,” he said. “He ain’t goin’ to be allowed to photograph my best side. Not for no cuckoo clock.”
“Is the crypt where you store all your business records, too?”
“Is the dang interview startin’?”
“It is.”
“Then my answer is, none of your dang business.”
“I know you have all the permanent data on the PlainKlothes Klan stored in your own computer system, but I was interested in bulk data, papers, physical mementoes, gifts, things—”
“What a dumb-ass, pardon my French, way to start an interview.”
“You’re right.” Hildy smiled and fluttered her eyelashes. “Suppose you tell me how you came to found the PKK.”
“That’s more like it,” chuckled the Reverend Lomax. “Well now, it were back in the last century. Around the late autumn of 1996 it was when the idea first hit me. I was nothin’ more than a local TV evangelist then, out in CalNorth, workin’ out of East Oakland. If you know CalNorth, you know they is mostly heathens, atheists and vegetarians thereabouts. Heck, my first Xmas on the air I pulled in less than $900,000 in gifts. I was, take it from me, scufflin’.” He lifted his other buttock up onto his wide, white desk. “I’d always been a fan of the old Ku Klux Klan an’ I doted on their philosophy. Thing was, Miss Miller, I got to thinkin’ that, for all their good ideas, the KKK was no longer thrivin’ as it should. Then the answer come to me.”
“Go on,” urged Hildy, pencil flying over note-paper.
“It was them goddamn sheets,” Lomax explained. “You can’t make a dignified impression with a bed-sheet over your head. Look back through history. Did Hitler wear a sheet? Did Mussolini? Did Napoleon? Nope. Now, Julius Caesar did, but not up over his noggin with eye holes poked in it. First off I thought of creatin’ a uniformed Klan. Give us all snappy paramilitary uniforms with lots of gold trimmin’. But that might’ve made trouble, since some folks don’t like armies.”
“A pity.”
“Right.” He indicated his white suit. “Why not, I asked myself on that fateful day, why not simply go around in civvies? Dress just like ever’body, but give yourself a catchy name. The PlainKlothes Klan. If you’re with the PKK, you can go anywheres. You can pass. That’s the key. You can be a bigot an’ a racist an’ nobod
y can tell the difference. PKK. Best damn idea I ever did have.”
“Fascinating.” Hildy closed her notebook and reached into her handbag. “Oh, how foolish. Here I have your present right in my purse after all and I forgot all about it.”
“You got somethin’ worth maybe $9000 in that bitty little thing?” He hopped from his desk.
“Just take a look,” she invited.
Lomax rested a beefy hand on the back of her chair and leaned to peek within the open purse she was holding up to him. “I don’t exactly see no …”
Hizzzzzzzz!
Invisible mindgas came nozzling up into the PKK leader’s face.
Hildy, who was wearing special nostril filters, waited until he’d had a full dose. Smiling, she shut the purse. “Isn’t it lovely,” she said aloud. Whispering, she added, “Say it’s terrific.”
“It is terrific,” he droned.
“Make your next reply more jovial,” she instructed. “Now, go sit behind your desk and tell your security people to turn all the monitors, audio and visual, off in here. Wink, indicating you and I are going to fool around for a spell.”
“Yes, miss.” He arranged himself back of the desk. Turning toward a gargoyle high up on the wall behind him, Reverend Lomax ordered, “Blank out ever’thin’ for an hour, boys. Looks like I got me a hot one.”
Hildy asked, “Who controls Newoyl?”
“Novem, Ltd.”
“That much I knew before sitting through the Hour of Supremacy and your colorful autobiography,” she told him. “Who is Novem? Who are the people behind it?”
“I spent near sixteen million bucks tryin’ to find out.”
“And?”
“Best we got so far is a list of seventy-four folks who may or may not be part of Novem,” the mind-controlled reverend replied. “Got data, pictures, even personal effects in some instances. All stored down in the crypt, an’ I got a crew of intelligence agents asortin’ an asiftin’, tryin’ to get at the truth. Those Novem buggers are damn tough to run to ground.”
“Your crew down below now?”
“Nope, I give ’em the afternoon off ’cause it’s Xmas Eve.”
Hildy left her chair, circled the big white desk and took him by the arm. “Come along, Gully.”
“Where we goin’?”
“Into the crypt,” she said.
CHAPTER 12
JAKE WOKE UP.
He was in a room full of smog and the glaz walls all around him were shaking and shuddering. A mighty rumbling sounded beneath him and everything in the big hazy tower, including his teeth, rattled wildly.
“Landsakes, look after the body! Golly whiz!”
Jake decided he was still alive and, therefore, was not the body being talked about. He remained sprawled on the spunglaz Persian carpet, his body bouncing and undulating in time to the hearty earth tremors.
Smog got in his eyes and nose. He sneezed and sat up. “CalSouth,” he muttered, recognizing the smell of the foul air.
The earthquake had, obviously, futzed the aircirc system and some of Greater Los Angeles’s foul air was seeping in from outside this business tower.
The walls were chattering less, the wide floor was whumping at less frequent intervals.
Jake tried standing and succeeded.
He found himself in a vast meeting room, up some fifty or sixty floors above the late afternoon heat of the Santa Monica Sector of GLA.
A huge licorice-shade plaz oval meeting table floated at the center of the room, surrounded by thirteen lime-green bizchairs. At the head of the table there was, instead of a chair, a glaz coffin mounted on two neowood sawhorses. Inside you could see the portly body of a white-haired man of sixty-four. He wore a conservative two-piece grey bizsuit and his hands were folded across his middle.
Seated nearest the coffin, with one sharp elbow resting on the table, was a lean, dark woman decked out in bright Gypsy garb and laden with massive golden earrings and many bright glittering bracelets.
A handsome, deeply tanned man in a one-piece tennisuit stood near to the slightly swaying coffin, seemingly listening to it with a highly polished stethoscope.
“Golly whiskers, I can’t get this darn aircirc to work at all.” A pudgy young man of forty was flicking toggles on a wall panel near the far doorway. “Oh, hello, Mr. Pace. Mercy me, forgive us for being at sixes and sevens. These darned quakes play hob with everything.”
Pace took a few steps in his direction. “Who might you be?”
“Well, golly, I might be the Chairman of the Board or I might be the Chairwoman,” he answered with a boyish smile. “It depends on several variables.”
Jake sneezed once again. “Well, who are you as of this afternoon?”
“Bunny’s what you call a switchsexual,” said the handsome man beside the coffin. “He is always Bunny Thrasher, heir to the entire Foodopoly empire. I’m Dr. Collin Willbarrow, sixth seeded Medical Tennis Player in the West.”
“Congratulations,” said Jake. “Who kidnapped me and had me teleported westward?”
“Oh, golly willikers.” Bunny gave up on trying to clean up the smudgy brown air. “We only want to consult you, my daddy and me.”
Jake seated himself at the table. Being knocked out so much on this case was taking its toll. “That’d be your pop in the glaz box?”
Bunny made his way over to the big table. “He’s D.W. Thrasher.” He pointed proudly at the contents of the coffin. “One of the great business brains.”
“D.W. died seven years ago,” said Jake. “How come he’s still above the ground?”
“He runs the company.” Dr. Willbarrow dropped his instrument into a pocket. “You must’ve read about it in Fortune, Barron’s or BizWeek.”
“The fact didn’t stick,” Jake said, shrugging. “Why was I snatched?”
Bunny smacked his lips, annoyed. “We want to hire you. I didn’t want to, golly whiz, make you mad or anything.”
“So you built a complete simulacrum of my skycar, rigged it to gas me and fly me to some private teleport pad in the Boston area,” he said. “Roundabout. Plus expensive.”
Bunny spread his hands wide. “Tell daddy that,” he said, dipping his boyish head in the direction of the coffin. “Anyway, the point is we want to hire you.”
“Hire me for what? I’m already working on a case.”
“This may be the same case,” Dr. Willbarrow told him, taking a seat at the opposite side of the floating table.
“I already have a client.”
“We’ll pay you $500.000.” Bunny sat, gingerly, next to the old woman in Gypsy clothes. “Golly sakes, I forgot to introduce you to Madame Batota here.”
“A pleasure,” said Jake.
“For you maybe,” she said in a dry ancient voice.
“I don’t usually like to play one client against another,” Jake explained. “Make the fee $750,000.”
“How about $500,000 and all you can eat,” countered Bunny.
“Hum?”
“A lifetime supply of Foodopoly products. Start the day with plenty of sinmilk, sewdofruit and Bloaties. For that midmorn snack a steaming cup of No Java and a packet of Snax, the belligerent little nuggets of—”
“$750,000 in cash money.”
Bunny eyed the Gypsy. “Well?”
“Keep your pants on,” she advised, gripping the table edge with both bony hands.
She began to shake violently, earrings and other baubles clinking and clattering. A droning hum issued from her mouth and nose.
She jerked upright in her chair, eyes clamping shut.
“$600,000 and that’s it,” she said in a new voice, deep and masculine with a faint New England twang.
“$750,000,” reiterated Jake. “I could sue you all for more than that just on the abduction.”
“Bull pucky,” said the Gypsy’s mouth.
“Oh, golly whizzers, I haven’t introduced you yet. Mr. Jake Pace, my late daddy.”
“I’ll understand if you can’t
shake hands,” said Jake, slouching in his chair. “$750,000.”
“I don’t believe in too much dickering, sir. We’ll accept your charges. Bunny, sit up in your chair and explain to Mr. Pace what he’s getting into.”
“Yes, sir, daddy.” From an inner pocket of his bizsuit he produced a sheet of pinkish faxpaper. “This is a list of private investigators who preceded you on this assignment, Mr. Pace. Ahum. Rex Sadder, Luther McGavock, Ed Jenkins—”
“By the way, Dr. Willbarrow,” said the voice of the dead food tycoon, “as long as I have you here. There’s a cockroach in my coffin.”
“Unlikely, D.W.”
“Don’t I know when I have a cockroach pitter pattering all over me? Sliding down my snoz, tap-dancing in my belly button—”
“Daddy, please.”
“Go on, Bunny.”
“… Race Williams, Max Latin, Cash Wale, Cellini Smith, John Dalmas—”
“I’ve guessed what all these lads have in common,” cut in Jake. “Besides their private-eye careers. They, each and every one, are recently deceased.”
“We feel badly about them, Mr. Pace, and—”
“They were well paid,” said D.W. Thrasher via the old Gypsy. “Their associates and next of kin are being looked after in a most generous fashion.”
“That is true,” said Bunny. “Now then, Mr. Pace. About the time the tenth or eleventh private investigator working for us met a mysterious and fatal end, it became darned tough to hire new ones.”
“Why not use your own security people?”
Bunny folded his list. “We lost eleven of them before we went outside Foodopoly,” he answered. “Since then, as a matter of fact, there have been considerable resignations in the security area. Right now we’re down to nothing more than seventy-eight night watchmen named Pop.”
Jake grinned. “You hired all those unfortunate colleagues of mine to find Professor Barrel for you?”
“We did,” answered Bunny. “The—”
“Anything that SOB developed while working with Foodopoly grant money,” said the Gypsy in D.W. Thrasher’s voice, “belongs to Foodopoly. I want that psi process of his. He told us it was too dangerous for puffing oats and other grains, but I no longer believe that guff.”