“You really believe that, Robby?”
“I’ve learned it. I know a secret that nations would sacrifice tens of thousands of men in order to share.”
“What—?”
“What I’m saying is that I don’t even have a license to operate here, and if I did it wouldn’t be worth the match it would take to burn it. I don’t have any contacts here, Janet, and the county sheriff isn’t exactly an old boyhood chum. Do you understand? In Peru County I was, and always will be, a freak. When I’m here, I think of myself as a freak. I wouldn’t exactly be taken seriously. I think you know I’d do anything for you and Tommy, but this is a situation where anything I might try to do would be counter productive. I don’t mind these people laughing at me, but I wouldn’t want them laughing at you and the rest of the family.”
“They’re already laughing, Robby; snickering behind their hands. When school starts in September, don’t you think it’s going to be hell for the other kids?”
Having nothing to say, I folded my hands in my lap and stared at them. I felt shriveled inside, but I knew I was right; the situation was far too delicate and serious to tolerate token gestures.
“They take you pretty seriously in New York,” Janet persisted.
“That’s because in New York you can’t tell the freaks from the straights without a very detailed score card.”
Janet looked at me for a long time. “Robby, I don’t think I like your sense of humor,” she said at last.
“You’ll get used to it,” I said with a smile. “I intend to see a lot more of you after this.” I waited for a response. Janet, stony-faced, simply continued to stare at me. “I’ll tell you what can be done,” I continued quietly. “You have serious questions about the scope of Jake Bolesh’s investigation, and that’s what I’m gong to tell the State Police. I’m going to find you a good lawyer. He or she will know a competent P.I. who knows the territory and can work here.”
Janet slowly, sadly, shook her head. “I can do that myself, and I don’t want to bring in strangers until I’ve had more time to think about it. I have to talk it over with John.”
“Of course,” I said, feeling like a trapped animal gnawing on its own leg. No matter how hard I chewed, I knew I wasn’t going to get free; if I went back to New York, I would just be carrying the trap with me.
“Are you and Garth leaving soon?”
“In an hour or so,” I said, glancing at my watch. “We have to catch a six-o’clock flight, and it’s a three-hour drive to the airport.” Janet said nothing, and it didn’t take me too long to realize what I was going to do. “Janet, if you’re certain it’s what you want, I’ll stick around for a few days and see what I can find out.”
Janet slowly raised her head. Tears filled her eyes, rolled down her cheeks. She smiled wanly, nodded.
“Mongo, you sure you don’t want me to stay?”
I shook my head, leaned back on the car fender, and crossed my arms over my chest. “There’s no sense in both of us wasting our time, and I know you’re anxious to get back on the Madden case. Besides, Jake Bolesh has your old job. He’ll remember me as the dwarf he pounded on, but he’ll remember you as the dwarf’s big brother who pounded on him. He’s a good man for you to stay away from.”
“He’s a good man for you to stay away from.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I replied with a shrug. “If Ben’s Country Kitchen still caters for the county jail, how bad can the food be?”
“I’m not concerned about Bolesh putting you in jail, Mongo,” Garth said seriously, “I’m worried that you’ll kill the son-of-a-bitch if he hassles you. The kid he used to beat up didn’t have a black belt in karate.”
“Your concern is touching.”
“Don’t forget, Robby,” Garth said, pinching my cheek, “I’m the one who loves you most.”
“Kiss my ass, Garth.”
My brother laughed. “Very good. I’d say you’re in the right frame of mind to do battle.”
“You think there’s going to be a battle?”
“Not really,” Garth said evenly. “If I thought so, I’d stick around. I’m glad you’re staying, though. It will make Janet feel better.”
“You think Jake handled this properly?”
Garth took some time to consider his answer. “Like it or not, I think you have to give Bolesh the benefit of the doubt. I’ve been back here a few times, and you haven’t. You were born here, but you’re a New Yorker through and through; for you, Peru County might as well be a foreign country. These are good people, Mongo. They keep on reelecting Bolesh, so he must be doing something right.”
“What about the speed of the investigation?”
Garth shrugged. “Here things like that tend to go the way the county sheriff wants them to. As much as it twists my guts to say so, Bolesh may have been doing the family a favor. It was a messy scene out there, Mongo, and Bolesh had enough sensitivity to keep the news photographers away. Tommy took a shotgun slug through the chest; the Lugmor kid put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”
“A shotgun?!”
“Guns—sometimes even shotguns—are as common with the kids out here as peashooters in New York. The gunstock had Rodney Lugmor’s prints all over it, and there were the letters. It looks like the kids had something hot and heavy going, and they couldn’t handle it. It had gotten completely out of hand. They were both afraid people were going to find out. At the end they got together to try and figure out what to do, and they decided that the answer was to die together. It’s a bitch, Mongo, but it looks like the straight dope.”
“You seem to know a hell of a lot.”
“I made some phone calls, Mongo. Naturally, I had some questions of my own.”
“Thanks for telling me.”
“I spent maybe forty-five minutes on the phone yesterday afternoon, talking to people I trust. I didn’t have a chance to get you alone, and I couldn’t see the sense in stirring up any more emotion by questioning the investigation. I didn’t know Janet had doubts.”
“Coop Lugmor has doubts.”
“Lugmor’s a heavy drunk, Mongo, an alcoholic. He’s been going downhill for a decade—just not fast enough to finally put himself out of his misery. The guy had nothing to begin with, and now he’s gone out of his head worrying about people calling his dead brother queer. Our merry memories aside, I think Bolesh may have simply wanted to get it all out in the open fast so it could be done with.”
Annoyed, I pushed off the car and kicked at a clod of dirt. “You knew what Janet and I had talked about earlier. Why didn’t you tell her you were satisfied with the investigation? It would have put her mind at ease, and I’d be flying my ass out of Peru County.”
Garth stared at me for some time before he finally answered. “Janet came to you and I think that’s significant. It’s not going to hurt you to spend a few extra days around here, Mongo. You’ve got a lot of relatives you haven’t seen or spoken to since you were a kid. They’re very interested in you, but they’re also very sensitive about your feelings. You have to make the first move, show them you’re not as crazy or arrogant or whatever as everyone thinks you are.”
“Is this what the NYPD calls ‘sensitive social management’?”
“Classes at the university don’t start for a month, and I know you don’t have any big business pending because you’ve been goofing off for the past three weeks. Spend some time here. Ask some questions, satisfy yourself that everything’s been done that can be done. You put Janet’s mind at ease. While you’re at it, you’ll spend a lot of good time with Mom and Dad and get to know the rest of your family. They’re part of you, brother. Fill in your empty spaces.”
It should have been time for me to come up with something appropriately sarcastic. Instead, I said: “Okay.”
“Anything you want me to do for you when I get back to the city?”
“Yeah. Check with my answering service. If I’ve got any important calls, touch base for me. Tell them I�
��ll be back in a week.”
“Will do.” Garth smiled, tapped me on the shoulder with a big, meaty fist. “This is going to be good for you, Mongo. Now I’m going to sit with Mom and Dad for a few minutes.”
3.
A quote from Edward Teller was typed on a card taped to the door.
Science is a fable which has been made consistent.
Tommy Dernhelm’s “room” was half of a spacious farmhouse basement, and he’d used every inch of it. The walls were papered with fantasy posters and artwork from what looked like every Lord of the Rings calendar ever published. There were multiple copies of everything J. R. R. Tolkien had ever written. The three volumes of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit stacked next to a Radio Shack TR4100 computer terminal looked worn to a point just this side of dust. Attached to the computer terminal were a display screen, printer, and banks of arcane computer components.
“Expensive hobby,” I said.
Janet walked across the room to the computer terminal, caressed the back of the rickety swivel chair sitting in front of it. “He was so bright, Robby. He never wanted to spend money on the things other kids do, so John and I wanted to help him get everything he did want. Tommy did little odd jobs for neighbors to earn money, and for the past couple of years we’ve had extra money from the test plantings. We believed Tommy would be a great scientist one day.”
“What ‘test plantings’?”
“The Volsung Corporation,” Janet replied absently. “It’s a private company that’s trying to develop new disease-resistant strains of wheat, sorghum, corn, and soybeans. When they first started building they mailed out a brochure to everyone in the county explaining what they were doing, but I didn’t understand a lot of it. It talked about DNA, gene splicing, enzymes, things like that. They had a name for what they were doing, but I don’t recall what it was.”
“Agrigenetics?”
“That sounds like it. Anyway, they lease a certain amount of acreage from just about every farmer in the county, and they use the plots for test plantings. I must say they pay very well for the privilege—much more than we would have asked for if they’d asked what we wanted for the land instead of making an offer straight out.”
“Interesting. Where is this Volsung Corporation?”
“About twenty miles west of Duck Pond, out on the prairie. Why?”
“Just curious. What did the cops take out of here?”
“Nothing,” Janet said, a look of surprise on her face. “They never even looked down here.”
If Janet was surprised at the question, I was even more surprised at the answer; it was a little tidbit Garth obviously hadn’t picked up during the course of his phone conversations. “You’re sure they didn’t even look down here?”
My sister nodded. Her fair hair, drained of its usual brightness by fatigue and tension, bounced listlessly on her shoulders. “Jake came to tell me the bad news, but he never really asked me any questions.” She quickly put a hand to her mouth and stifled a sob. “I suppose he felt he’d found all the answers he needed out at Coop’s place.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Everything here is just the way it was when Tommy ran away. As you can see, he was very good about keeping his room clean, and he didn’t like anyone to touch anything. He stored a lot of books and magazines in a shed out back, but I think it would take you a year to go through it all.”
A year was a conservative estimate. Three-quarters of the shed was stacked to the ceiling with taped cartons. I opened a couple, found textbooks, magazines, computer journals, some science fiction novels and a lot more fantasy novels and comic books. There were two editions of the fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons, with half a dozen accompanying worn manuals. I thought I could safely presume that anything that might be connected with Tommy’s death was back in his room, and we returned there.
John Dernhelm was waiting for us. Janet’s husband was in his mid-forties and, like most farmers, in good shape from clean air and hard, clean work. I’d met him for the first time three days before, and it hadn’t taken me long to see that we weren’t going to find many interests in common. Still, in light of the fact that Janet had seen fit to marry him, I assumed he had something going for him. He was a nice enough fellow, but I had a strong feeling that my dwarfism, combined with Tommy’s eerie, incandescent brilliance, had confirmed his suspicion that he’d married into a family with more funny genes that the Volsung Corporation.
He was carrying a large glass tumbler filled to the brim with a delicious-looking amber fluid and lots of ice; Dernhelm was looking better and better to me.
“Janet told me you like Scotch,” Dernhelm said with a thin smile, “so I went out and bought some. I meant to offer you a drink before dinner, but I forgot. I thought you might like one now.”
“Thanks,” I said, reaching for the glass like a drowning man clutching at a life preserver, downing a quick swallow. It was good Scotch, smooth and mellow but with just enough bite to remind you that it wasn’t iced tea. My throat was still raw from the firewater my father had given me in the afternoon. I took a second sip, looked at him. He was staring at me with an expression on his face that was very difficult to read. “John, I understand you lease out some land to the Volsung Corporation?”
Dernhelm shot a quick, irritated look at his wife. His dark brown eyes flashed, and some of the color went out of his sun-scorched flesh. “I guess that’s so, Robby,” he said, obviously annoyed. “Just about every farmer in the county leases out acreage. They tell me there are differences in the soil throughout the county, and they like to check every variable.”
“Does each farmer tend the crop that’s planted on his land?”
Dernhelm’s jaw muscles clenched; he was a man who didn’t like answering questions, personal or otherwise. “No,” he said at last. “We sign a contract that says we won’t interfere with the crops in any way. We’re not even allowed to look at them. They’re all important scientists connected with the place, and I guess they have their own way of doing things.”
“Do you mind my asking how much they pay you to lease the land?”
He flushed, jammed his hands into his pockets. “What does this have to do with Tommy’s death?”
“Probably nothing,” I replied evenly.
“Then I guess I do mind, Robby,” he said tightly.
“Okay, John. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“If you don’t mean to pry, how come you ask so many questions about my business?”
I considered telling him what Coop Lugmor had said about Jake Bolesh’s financial connection with Volsung, but decided it wasn’t the time to repeat what, at the moment, amounted to nothing more than mere gossip from the lips of a frenzied alcoholic—especially when that gossip involved an old enemy I was probably going to have to deal with eventually. “I apologize, John,” I said quietly.
Janet came across the room, touched her husband’s arm. “John? Robby didn’t mean any harm.”
But John Dernhelm was worked up. “I’ve got something I want to get out of my craw,” he said through clenched teeth. “Robby, I know you’re supposed to be some hot-shot college professor and private detective; I also know that Janet asked you to poke around. I’m opposed to it, and I’ve told her so. We know what’s happened, and it’s better to just let it be. Excuse me. I’m going to watch television.”
Dernhelm turned and wearily, like a man carrying a very heavy bag of sorrow, trudged back up the steps. Janet and I stood in silence for a few moments, then Janet said: “I’m sorry, Robby. I’ll get you any information you need.”
“No, don’t go against your husband. I can get the information someplace else. And don’t be sorry. John’s feelings are perfectly understandable. John’s not going to be the only member of our family upset if I continue.”
Janet thought about it. Shadows of doubt moved in her eyes as she absently chewed at her lower lip. “I wonder if I’m doing the right thing,” she said at last. I waited, suddenly finding it d
ifficult to breathe. “What do you think, Robby?”
“From what I’ve learned in the past hour, I don’t think you could characterize this as a lousy investigation—there hasn’t been an investigation. Tommy and Rodney Lugmor were found early Wednesday morning; this is Sunday, and it’s all over. The cops didn’t even look through Tommy’s things. The least they should have done was to question you, and check out what Tommy put on that computer.”
Janet uttered a strange, hollow laugh that was at once tinged with bitterness and burnished with pride. “I suspect they’d have had one heck of a time doing that.”
“Why?”
“That computer was Tommy’s pride and joy. He built a lot of the components himself. In some ways he was very open and childlike, but he was very secretive in other ways. He used the computer for all sorts of things.”
“Like maybe keeping a diary in it?”
Janet stared at me hard. “Yes,” she breathed. “It’s possible. But I don’t know how anyone can get at it. Tommy was fascinated with the problem of computer security—and how to break it. I’m pretty sure he encoded everything, and you’d have to know the code to get into the memory banks. Knowing Tommy, that would be some code.” She sighed, glanced toward the steps. “Robby, what should I do?”
“You’re Tommy’s mother, Janet. Also, you have to live with whatever dirt I may dig up or bitterness I may cause. In a few days I’ll be back in New York and just an afterthought to these people.”
“You can advise me. What would you do if you were me?”
“I’d want to make sure I wasn’t haunted for the rest of my life by doubts or unanswered questions,” I replied evenly. “No matter what the cost, I’d want to satisfy myself that I knew as much of the truth as there was to know.”
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