Good King Sauerkraut

by Barbara Paul

  His bedroom was huge. Double bureau, a wall-mounted mirror that ran from floor to ceiling, two bookshelves, three chairs, a separate dressing room that led to a bathroom. A thick black carpet that seemed to proclaim Take your shoes off, enjoy! Cable television, with a thirty-inch screen this time. In one corner a computer work station had been set up. But best of all, to King’s eye, was the room-dominating presence of—aha!—a King-sized bed. He had to sleep on the diagonal of most beds; he was fully comfortable only in his own king-sized bed at home. And now this one. “Oh yes,” King murmured before Rae could ask him if everything was all right.

  “Is there anything you need?” she asked instead.

  He shook his head, and aggravated the pain that had been thumping dully beneath the surface. “I’m going to take a pill and lie down.”

  “I’ll get you some water.” She headed off toward the bathroom.

  King flushed with pleasure. Attractive, efficient women didn’t usually fetch and carry for him. He fumbled a pain pill out of the vial and took the glass of water Rae brought him.

  He felt the effects of the medication almost immediately. Rae was talking about tomorrow’s plans, and she said something about Warren Osterman that King didn’t get; his head was growing woozier by the second. He flapped a hand vaguely in her direction. “I’m sorry, Rae.”

  She understood. “I’ll leave you alone. Get some sleep.”

  He didn’t hear her leave. He pulled off as much of his clothing as he could manage before collapsing on to the big, long, wide, comfortable bed.

  Mimi ordered them something to eat. When she’d seen King stumble out of his bedroom after a three-hour nap, she’d said: “There’s lots of stuff in the fridge, but I don’t feel like fixing anything and I’m sure you don’t either. Is Chinese all right? Or would you rather have an omelet?”

  “Chinese is fine.”

  “I don’t know how easy that is to digest—how’s your stomach?”

  King placed one hand over his midsection. “It seems to be okay,” he said, thinking of all the food he’d consumed the day before—and suddenly realized his hand was pressing against bare skin. He glanced down and saw he was wearing nothing but shorts and one black sock. “I’m standing here talking to you in my underwear,” he said.

  The corner of Mimi’s mouth twitched. “Does that embarrass you?”

  He thought about it. “No.”

  “Good. It doesn’t bother me, so don’t worry about it.”

  When their food was delivered, they didn’t talk much at first; they were both hungry. The spicy Szechuan meal hit the spot, and King got a little boy’s kick out of sitting in the formal dining room in his underwear and eating food out of paper cartons. He and Mimi both relaxed once their hunger was blunted. The double tragedy of Dennis Cox’s and Gregory Dillard’s deaths was having the effect of drawing the two survivors closer together, a not unusual circumstance. King was enjoying the casual, noncompetitive atmosphere that was developing between the two of them. And he rather liked the idea of playing house with Mimi Hargrove.

  Unfortunately, she wanted to talk about her husband. “I called him in Vienna,” she said. “I caught him right before he left for the Indian Ocean. He wanted to come back.”

  “Understandable.”

  “But I wouldn’t let him. His work is important too. It’s just that Michael is so committed to our marriage that sometimes he loses his sense of proportion.”

  “Did you tell him the police think you might be in danger?”

  “Oh, no! Then he would come back. But what could he do that the police can’t do better? Besides, I don’t want him to worry. Michael doesn’t always handle stress as well as he should—he’s very sensitive, you know. And he does tend to be overprotective.”

  King made a noncommittal noise. So Mimi was the strong one in the marriage—was that the message he was supposed to get? Obviously she wasn’t above paying herself compliments when the opportunity arose. King felt a perverse urge to take Michael’s side. “How would you feel if he kept something like that from you?”

  She was silent a moment. “I should hate it,” she finally replied. “Because it would imply that he didn’t think I was strong enough to handle it … is that what you’re getting at? Don’t misunderstand, King—Michael is strong, very strong, in most circumstances. There are just a few areas where his defense systems aren’t quite a hundred percent. I’m one of those areas. I don’t know what he’d do if anything happened to me. But that’s what you have to expect, I suppose, when you have a marriage in which both partners are as committed as Michael and I are.”

  King thought of Dennis Cox’s hand in her lap and said nothing. Letting yourself get felt up during a business conference evidently didn’t count.

  “I’ve thought about going back to California,” she went on. “but I think we’re both safer here, where the police already know what’s going on.”

  “I’ve thought of going home too,” King lied. “But after seeing this fortress we’re staying in …”

  “Yes, it does make you feel safe, doesn’t it?”

  King felt a twinge of conscience. This woman was in fear of her life, and all because of him. He longed to tell her she was safe, that no conglomerate of competitors was out to bump them off. He got no pleasure from worrying her. “You know, Mimi, maybe everything has been just a series of accidents after all. Even my mugging.”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “The police don’t know what happened. They’re only guessing.”

  “No, King. Three of us are attacked the same day, and it would have been four if I’d stayed in the apartment Wednesday night. Let’s not kid ourselves. Somebody wants us dead—all of us.”

  King shrugged and let it go.

  Mimi told him she’d been the one to walk unsuspecting into the other apartment and discover what had happened there. “You were lucky, King—you didn’t have to see that ugly sight. Gregory’s body on the floor under the window, blood all over the place and his head missing. I thought I was going to pass out. I barely made it to my bathroom to throw up.” She’d used the phone in her room to call the police, and then had stayed there until the police arrived. She’d had to pass through the living room to let them in; she told King she’d kept her eyes on her feet so as not to have to look at what was left of Gregory.

  There’d been two uniformed officers at the door, a young one and a not-so-young one. The young one had had the same reaction as Mimi’s; he’d taken one look at the headless body and started gagging. Mimi had quickly directed him not to her bathroom but to the nearest one, the one at the end of the hall. The unfortunate young officer had stumbled into the bathroom—and found another dead man in the tub.

  “All that time,” Mimi said wide-eyed, “all that time I was waiting for the police to get there—I just sat there, totally unaware that there was another corpse in the apartment.”

  King winced at her way of referring to Dennis. “Mimi, you don’t know how much I wish you could have been spared that.” He meant it.

  “I wish I could have too. You certainly were no help. Getting yourself mugged at a time like that—and in Central Park, too! Couldn’t you have picked something more original?” Only half joking. “What hospital did they take you to?”

  King blinked. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “It just never occurred to me.”

  Anyone else would have laughed at his absentmindedness, but not Mimi. “It never occurred to you. You know, Sauerkraut, sometimes I can’t believe you’re real.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  She made a hand gesture that could have meant anything. The tension lasted only a minute, though; they cleared away the remains of their meal and by mutual unspoken agreement headed toward the apartment’s office, which was a great deal larger than the office in the other apartment.

  They spent the next few hours going over the weapons platform specification
s—asking each other questions, getting organized, trying to spot potential trouble areas. They lost themselves in the work until they reached what looked like a reasonable stopping point; at twelve o’clock King took another pain pill and told Mimi good night.

  It was only after he’d showered and crawled back into the big bed that a possible explanation occurred to him as to why Mimi was so adamant about their being in danger … a rather warped explanation that he didn’t care for at all. Maybe she likes being thought important enough to kill. King shuddered; the idea was uncharitable even for him, and he resolutely put it out of his mind.

  The following morning an army of strangers descended upon them. For an hour and a half the army dusted, vacuumed, cleaned up the kitchen, scoured out the bathrooms, changed the bed linen and towels, emptied the wastebaskets, smiled incessantly, and refused to accept money. Then, in an eye-blink, they were gone.

  “Do you know,” King said wonderingly, “that is the first time in my life I’ve ever known anyone in New York to turn down money when it was offered.”

  Mimi considered his remark literally, as she did everything. “It’s probably in their contract that they can’t accept tips from guests,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’m sure the fee MechoTech pays them is outrageous.”

  While the army was in the midst of waging its war on dirt, Rae Borchard’s secretary had stopped by with a new watch and briefcase for King. The watch was beautiful, and far more expensive than what King would have bought for himself. Not a Rolex; that would have been too obvious. Dennis Cox would have admired it, though; he’d owned at least a dozen watches, all of them of status-symbol level of expensiveness.

  King remembered something he should have taken care of the day before. He went to his room and put in a call to Gale Fredericks in Pittsburgh. Normally she didn’t make a practice of going in to the lab on Saturdays, but under the present circumstances …

  She was there. “Oh, King—I tried to reach you all day yesterday! Are you all right?”

  “Well, yes, I guess so. I was mugged.”

  She gave a little cry and ordered him to return to Pittsburgh immediately.

  It took some doing, but he managed to convince her that his mugging had no connection with Dennis’s accident—he stressed the word accident. They exchanged expressions of anguish over Dennis’s death, heartfelt on both sides. Gale had learned what had happened from a local news reporter who’d shown up at Keystone Robotics seeking “reactions” from those who knew him. Gale had not been especially fond of Dennis, but she was shocked by both the suddenness of his death and the means of it. Now she was clearly more worried about what King was going through, a misplaced concern he did nothing to dispel.

  Gale had never met Gregory Dillard, but his death both disturbed and frightened her. “Two fatal accidents at the same time? Doesn’t that strike you as odd?” she asked.

  “It strikes me as very odd. But that’s what happened, Gale.” He asked her to look in Dennis’s office for the list of credit card numbers and notify the appropriate people that King’s cards had been stolen.

  She said she’d take care of it. “Oh, I almost forgot. A woman named Shawna Wallace called here asking for a King Sarsowitch—that’s the way she pronounced it. She said you’d given her your card but you forgot to tell her your New York phone number.”

  King had to think a moment before he remembered who she was. Ah, yes—Shawna of the elegant height and the vampire-bite tattoo. So her last name was Wallace, and she wanted his New York phone number. “Did you give it to her?”

  “No, but I took down hers in case you wanted to call her back. Got a pencil?”

  “Yes,” he lied. “Go ahead.” King barely listened as Gale read off the number. He’d liked Shawna, but he had no intention of calling her. Because Shawna could tell anyone who was interested, such as the police, that one King Sarcowicz was healthy and unmugged at a time he was supposed to be lying helpless in Central Park.

  “Want to read that back?” Gale asked.

  “No, I got it. But speaking of phone numbers, do you have a pencil?” He told her his new number and the address of the building where he was now staying. “Gale, try not to worry. We’ll come through this, you’ll see. Just hold the fort until I get back.”

  She said she would and they both hung up. King still had his hand on the receiver when the phone rang. It was Rae Borchard, saying she’d set up a dental appointment for King and a limousine would pick him up and wait to bring him back. She made it quite clear that he was not to go wandering about the streets.

  King meekly followed instructions. It was so unncessary, all these precautions, but he could hardly say so. He kept the appointment; the dentist inserted an appliance to hold his two wobbly teeth immobile until the damaged bone that held them had time to regenerate. King returned to the apartment to find Warren Osterman waiting for him, sitting regally in the middle of one of the living room’s two white sofas. Mimi was out on a balcony that opened off the living room, enjoying the sun.

  “Howya feeling, King?” the older man wanted to know. “Up to tackling a problem? You look like hell.”

  The bruise on King’s face had turned a bilious greenish-yellow overnight. That morning he’d taken off the gauze bandage, which was starting to get dirty, and replaced it with a couple of Band-Aids. “I’m feeling a lot better today,” he said truthfully. “My head’s stopped hurting—that was the worst thing. What’s the problem that needs tackling?”

  “The Defense Department. I sold the four of you as a team, and now they’re wondering who’s going to take Dennis’s and Gregory’s places. Wait a minute,” he said as King started to protest, “I know you think you and Mimi can handle it, and maybe you can. But we don’t have the final say. It’s weird, but these two murders convinced the boys in Defense that your team had to have something special going for it if a competitor’s out to get you. But they want the team back at full strength.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “I know. How do you replace Dennis Cox?” Osterman took a deep breath. “Believe it or not, I’d come to like Dennis. Gregory Dillard I could take or leave alone, but Dennis I liked. And I think he was coming around to my way of thinking—about the merger, I mean.”

  King frowned, not following. “What merger is that?”

  Osterman stared at him. “The merger of MechoTech and Keystone, of course,” he said patiently.

  King stared back. “I never heard anything about any merger.”

  The two men realized the truth at the same time. Osterman laughed. “That sly son of a bitch—he never told you, did he? Ha! I had no idea. Well, to put it simply, I want Keystone to be part of the MechoTech family, and I think Dennis did too. He was playing the game, holding out for the best terms he could get.”

  “And when you two reached agreement, he’d present it to me as a fait accompli, is that it?”

  “I suppose so. You usually followed his recommendations on financial matters, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. That’s what I did.” Dammit. King was thunderstruck. A merger with MechoTech? Dennis had known King wouldn’t go for it; that’s why he’d put off telling him. “Warren, I can’t deal with this now.”

  “I don’t expect you to. I’ll send another copy of the proposal around in a few weeks—we’ll talk about it then. You know, Dennis must have been planning to tell you this weekend. He couldn’t count on my not mentioning the merger to you. It would all have been straightened out in a few days.”

  Never speak ill of the dead? King walked over to the glass doors that opened on to the balcony and looked out at Mimi. She’d taken some papers and a legal pad out with her, but now she just lay back in her chair with her eyes closed. Dennis Cox wouldn’t have minded seeing their company’s individuality swallowed up by the MechoTech giant if it meant a chance for him to get ahead. Perhaps he saw himself as Warren Osterman’s eventual successor? His partner had never cared shit about Keystone; all he’d cared about was Dennis Cox.<
br />
  “King, you’ve got to get a replacement,” Warren Osterman was saying from behind him. “Not only for the project but for your company as well. You need a money man, a manager. Mimi’s in pretty good shape—she’s got three other partners she can draw on. But you …?”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Don’t wait too long, King.” Something in Osterman’s tone made King look a question at him. “The first time I talked to Mimi after Dennis and Gregory were killed,” the older man said, “she was quick to point out that all the work Dennis would have done on the project was now going to fall on your shoulders. And she made no bones about saying you couldn’t handle it. She wants me to make her project leader.”

  Jesus. Stab-in-the-back time. But King had to admire her chutzpah, even while resenting it. “She doesn’t miss a bet, does she? What did you tell her?”

  “I told her her request was premature. King, I want you running this project, not Mimi or any other software designer. But she has a point. You need somebody like Dennis to take care of the organizational details for you.”

  King went back and sat down on the sofa beside him. “I may have someone.”

  Osterman’s eyebrows went up. “That’s great. Who—”

  “Not yet. I’m going to have to do some fast talking and it may take a few days. But I’m not going to try to run the project by myself, I promise you. Let me talk to my first choice, and if that doesn’t work out … well, then I’ll get somebody else.”

  A faint smile appeared on Osterman’s face. “You seem very sure of yourself.”

  “It’s a solvable problem, Warren. We’re not going to lose the contract, take my word for it.”

  Osterman studied him a minute and then said, “All right! You get a replacement for Dennis, Mimi calls in one of her other partners, and we proceed as planned. In the meantime, the two of you stay put. We don’t want ’em getting another shot at you.”

  King laughed shortly, irritated anew by all the unnecessary precautions. “Warren, this morning a whole platoon of cleaning people invaded this apartment. Couldn’t the guy with the vacuum cleaner or the lady with the Glass-Plus have been paid to do a little extra job? Do you know for a fact that none of those people can be gotten to? And they’re not the only ones who were here. Rae Borchard’s secretary stopped by … and don’t forget the limo driver who took me to get my teeth fixed—what about him? Then I walk into the office of a dentist I never heard of before and I’m surrounded by a fleet of assistants, not to mention a couple of other patients waiting their turn. That’s over twenty people who could have had ‘another shot’ at me today if they’d wanted to.”