by Barbara Paul
Mr. Cox took the call. King expressed his condolences and told the older man he couldn’t come to the funeral because the police wouldn’t let him leave New York. Yes, Mr. Cox said, Mrs. Fredericks had already explained his situation.
That was all right, then.
Early in the afternoon Rae Borchard came to the apartment. By then King and Mimi were in a position to tell her some of what they’d be needing from MechoTech and its contractors. The conference table in the office was covered with papers, lists and graphs and schedules as well as a superb collection of creative doodling. King noticed that Mimi kept sneaking sideways glances at Rae when she thought the other woman wasn’t looking; then he remembered that Mimi suspected Rae of being out to kill them all. The best antidote to that nonsense was work.
“One thing, Rae,” he said. “I’ve been studying the specs the earlier design teams worked with, and the weapons systems are different in every case. And in every case the original designs were amended. The last team before us had twenty-seven different weapons modifications they had to accommodate.”
“Yes, alas. Defense is always trying to improve on what they’ve got,” Rae stated. “Some of those modifications were quite minor. But the weapons manufacturers are still hard at work building the absolutely perfect, no-fault, wearever electromagnetic gun.” Her tone indicated skepticism.
“Meaning they’ll be pulling a few switches on us?”
“Meaning exactly that. You’re going to have to be flexible.”
“Lovely,” Mimi said sarcastically. “How can I design a program for weapons that keep changing all the time? Rae, we can’t really get going on this until we interface with the people at Army Tactical Command and Control Systems. But they’re in Washington, and we can’t leave New York. You see the problem?”
Rae nodded, unperturbed by this first roadblock. “Let me see what I can do about getting the mountain to come to Muhammad. They ought to be willing to meet with you here, considering the circumstances.”
“And we’ll need to see the gun manufacturers as well,” King reminded her.
“Yes. If I can’t arrange a conference, I’ll have a word with our legal department. I don’t think the police can force you to stay in New York. MechoTech can always hire bodyguards to go with you.”
King leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head, staring up at a chandelier that bore a suspicious resemblance to the spaceship in Close Encounters. “Bodyguards, you say. Rae, we’re pretty much stalled until we can talk to those people in Washington. I don’t much like the idea of bodyguards, and here at least it’s not necessary. The police are keeping an eye on us.”
“Aren’t they, though?” Mimi told Rae how they’d been followed to JFK on Sunday.
“It’s just as well they are following us,” King pointed out. “Mimi and I are going batty cooped up like this. We’ve got to get out.”
Rae was adamantly opposed. “No—you mustn’t go out. Not yet. Put up with it a while longer. It won’t last forever.”
King grinned. “At home sometimes I virtually lived in my lab, trying to meet a deadline or working on some problem I couldn’t let go of. Talk about cooped up! And you know something? It didn’t bother me a bit. Because there I knew I could walk out any time I wanted to. It makes a difference.”
“I know it’s not pleasant. But surely the police are following you from a distance? How much protection can they give you that way? You can’t go out yet.”
“King went out yesterday and nothing happened,” Mimi said, a little too casually. “Maybe we’re making too much of a fuss.”
Good old Mimi, King laughed to himself. Count on her to tattle. With a show of great reluctance, he allowed Rae to drag it out of him that he’d been to see a lawyer about making his will. That little tidbit cast a satisfying pall on the conversation.
And that was the moment the police chose to arrive.
King let them in. Sergeant Marian Larch and Sergeant Ivan Malecki stood in the entryway, looking grim. “Where’s Mimi Hargrove?” Sergeant Larch asked.
“In the office, with Rae Borchard. Why? What’s happened?”
“We’ll follow you,” Sergeant Malecki said pointedly.
King shrugged and led the way. In the office, Malecki told him to sit down. The two police detectives remained standing.
“What is it?” Rae Borchard asked.
“For the last five days,” Sergeant Larch told them, “we’ve been questioning the people who worked on this Defense project before you. We’ve had the police in four states helping us out. I’ve been to California myself, and my partner spent two days in Texas. And every single person we contacted said the same thing. They said this weapons platform you’re working on is a loser, that there’s no way to make it work within the specifications the Defense Department is insisting on.”
“Well, of course they’d say that,” King snickered. “They failed, after all. The platform’s going to be tricky, no question of that—but it’s do-able.”
“Whether the platform can be made to work or not isn’t the point. The point is that all four of the earlier design teams think it can’t work. Don’t you understand? They don’t want a second go at it.”
“And if they don’t want another chance,” Sergeant Malecki spelled it out for them, “they have no reason to kill off your design team. Got it?”
“They’re lying,” Mimi stated flatly. “Trying to save face.”
“We checked their books,” Sergeant Larch told her. “They all took a bath, without exception. The funding that looked so generous at first wasn’t enough to keep up with all the changes the government kept making. So every one of them put their own money into it, gambling on winning huge contracts if they could make the damned thing work. But they couldn’t.”
Malecki was reading from a notebook. “They all said Defense kept adding refinements to the weapons that took up space they needed for other things, like wheels and such. A couple of ’em got additional grant money, but it was never enough. A hell of a lot of money’s been wasted on this thing.”
His partner nodded. “One of the men I talked to told me his company got so badly stung the first time that now they wouldn’t touch the project with a ten-foot Bulgarian. Another company went bankrupt trying to keep up with all the changes and additions. Mrs. Hargrove, Mr. Sarcowicz—none of these people are out to kill you. They don’t want anything to do with your electromagnetic gun platform.”
King watched woodenly as Mimi and Rae exchanged puzzled looks. Mimi swallowed and said, “Then Gregory and Dennis … are you saying their deaths were accidents after all?”
Malecki snorted. “No way.”
“Then what—”
“Mrs. Hargrove,” Marian Larch said firmly. “Four people were staying in that apartment. Two of them died at the same time under circumstances that can only be called bizarre. The other two were ostensibly out of the apartment at the time, and both have alibis that have gaping holes in them. You say you were on your way back from the airport when the two deaths occurred, and there’s no way of proving that. Mr. Sarcowicz says he was wandering the streets until the muggers got him in the park. Since neither—”
“Now wait a minute!” Mimi cried, her voice high. “What exactly are you saying?”
The detective looked back and forth between Mimi and King. “I thought it was clear. What we’re saying is that Gregory Dillard and Dennis Cox were killed by one of you two.”
King sat at the poker table in the apartment’s games room, his chin sunk on his chest and his arms folded. The games room also had a billiards table, but right then it was in shadow. The room’s only illumination came from a lamp suspended from the ceiling, spilling a pool of light directly on to the poker table and him—just like an old-timey police station, King thought in irritation.
Across from him and just far enough back from the table to be out of the pool of light sat Marian Larch. Ivan Malecki had stayed in the office with Mimi, where he was
undoubtedly giving her the third degree or whatever it was called nowadays. Rae Borchard had delivered a blistering denunciation of police methods before rushing off to notify Warren Osterman and get them a lawyer and do whatever else she could think to do.
“Five days,” said Sergeant Larch out of the shadow, “we’ve wasted five whole days. Around here it’s a rule of thumb that if you don’t crack a homicide in three days, chances are good your perp will walk. And we just spent five days on a wild goose chase.”
King felt she was waiting for him to say something. “Is that my fault?” he asked in a tone of injured innocence.
“Yours or Mimi’s. You want Mimi to take the blame for something you did?”
“I never murdered anyone. And neither did Mimi—you’re on the wrong track.”
“With Dennis Cox out of the way, now you’ve got Keystone Robotics all to yourself. Was that your motive—plain old greed?”
“Dammit, Sergeant, you couldn’t be more wrong! I needed Dennis—I can’t run Keystone by myself! And I’m not even going to try. I’ve already got a new partner.”
“Who?”
“Gale Fredericks. You met her … ah, Saturday.”
“Uh-huh. So it’s all set, is it.” Not buying it.
“It’s in the works. I called my lawyer on Monday and instructed him to draw up new partnership papers. You can check with him.”
“Oh, that’s a good idea.” Only lightly sarcastic. Marian Larch leaned into the circle of light with a pen and notebook in her hands. “Name?”
King told her the lawyer’s name and watched her write it down.
“Not Howard J. M. Liebermann?”
Ah, so she did know about the will. “No, my lawyer in Pittsburgh,” he said, thinking this was as good an opening as any. “Gale’s going to be working on the project. I know she can handle that, I’m sure of it.”
The sergeant picked up her cue. “Meaning you’re not sure she can handle Keystone? Why’d you make her a partner if you’re unsure of her?”
King sighed, deeply. “Sergeant Larch, Gale Fredericks is the best young designer I know—she’s already better than Dennis Cox ever was, and I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have working with me. But she doesn’t have Dennis’s experience.” He went on to explain about Dennis’s unique combination of talents, his hands-on experience in robot design that meshed with a superior business sense to make him an ideal partner. He said it was a combination he knew of in no other person. “Gale and I may end up hiring someone to manage Keystone for us, but first we want to try it without having to rely on an outsider to keep us solvent. So you see, Sergeant, I don’t profit from my partner’s death. In fact, it’s going to work a hardship on me.”
She asked questions. She wanted to know financial details, and King gave them to her as fully and as honestly as he could. He knew once she checked into them, she’d find Dennis’s death was costing him money—the amount he had to put up to buy his dead partner’s share of the business before he signed it over to Gale for the token sum of one dollar. He would come out looking like a white knight valiantly struggling to save his business.
Or maybe not. “You and Gale Fredericks,” Sergeant Larch said, “you got something going, have you?”
King felt his face tighten up in annoyance. “No, we do not have ‘something going’.”
“You’re giving her half your business. Half of Keystone Robotics is going to a partner who can’t pay for it. You don’t run into that kind of generosity very often.”
“I need Gale—the same way I needed Dennis. Can’t you understand that?”
“Dennis might have been in the way. You get rid of him, there’s room for Gale.”
“Sergeant, you have a nasty and suspicious mind.”
“I’m paid to be suspicious. And nasty too, come to think of it.” The grilling went on—about his plans for Keystone, his plans for the weapons platform, about his movements on the day Dennis and Gregory had died. She asked what he thought of the other members of the team; in an only slightly exaggerated display of openness, King let her know that while he and Mimi had once been at odds in the past, he’d never had any reason to dislike Gregory Dillard. Or want him dead.
But it took a lot to satisfy Sergeant Marian Larch. She leaned on him hard, questioning every little remark he made. She hinted the police were unimpressed by the theory that Gregory had been lured into leaning out the window by a one-footed pigeon. She hinted at conspiracy, at the possibility that King and Mimi were in it together. She came back to Gale and told him that if they were lovers, the Pittsburgh police would find it out for her. Then she wanted to know if he and Mimi were lovers. And then, god help him, she wanted to know if he and Dennis had been lovers.
In two hours the only break she allowed him was five minutes to go to the bathroom. The interrogation ended only when Rae Borchard showed up with a MechoTech lawyer in tow. The lawyer, obviously comfortable only with corporate law, solemnly warned both King and Mimi not to talk to the police until they could get a criminal lawyer to advise them. Mimi and King exchanged a sour look; it was a little late for that. But neither Marian Larch nor Ivan Malecki argued the point; King had the feeling they’d accomplished what they came there to accomplish—which was the simple intimidating of their two suspects.
Sergeant Larch smiled sweetly at King as she left. “See you tomorrow,” she purred.
When they were gone, and the MechoTech lawyer as well, Rae Borchard said, “Don’t talk to her, King. Or to the other one, either. I don’t know what they could be thinking of—this is terrible.”
Mimi looked exhausted. “I’ve never had anyone say things to me like that in my life. That Sergeant Malecki accused me of sleeping with both Gregory and Dennis, of trying to get rid of my SmartSoft partners, of—”
“I don’t know what you’re worried about,” King snapped, his temper frayed. “They have eight witnesses who saw a man standing at the apartment window when it happened.”
“But only one of them thought to count the floors,” Mimi answered mournfully, “and now that one’s saying he’s not sure he counted right.”
“What?”
“That’s what Sergeant Malecki told me. There may not have been any third man in that apartment at all.”
“Oh … I didn’t know that. Somehow Sergeant Larch neglected to mention that little fact.”
Mimi sniffed disconsolately. “So now the police are thinking the killer could have been either a woman or a man. They’re thinking it could have been me.”
“Don’t talk to them,” Rae repeated. “Either of you.”
So the floor-counting witness was having second thoughts, King mused. Well, well … wasn’t that interesting. Now the police were thinking it could very well have been Mimi who killed Dennis and Gregory. Why not? King liked that.
It could have been Mimi.
10
King fully expected to find Marian Larch camped on his doorstep the next morning, but she wasn’t there. Nor was the other one, Ivan Malecki—much to Mimi’s relief. Rae Borchard had set up a ten o’clock appointment for them with a criminal lawyer; with luck, they could avoid the police all morning.
Since King’s and Mimi’s status had changed from potential victims to that of murder suspects, the police’s earlier instruction that they stay in the apartment for their own protection was tacitly lifted. Mimi was nervous about venturing away from the safety of the apartment building, though; King had to talk her into going out for breakfast. Their behavior had to be the same; it would set the police to wondering if she acted afraid and he didn’t.
“They’re bound to be following us,” Mimi said as they turned on to Fifth Avenue.
“I know.” King was counting on their following, on their seeing that neither of their suspects was afraid to be alone with the other.
They chose a coffee shop at random off Fifth Avenue and slid into the only empty booth. A waitress appeared, shooting covert glances at King’s face. His bruises had faded
considerably, but he was still marked up enough to attract attention; their waitress, who was very young, was having trouble not staring. King ordered fruit juice and coffee and pancakes and sausages, but Mimi wanted only tea and a glass of tonic water. “Queasy this morning,” she explained.
They sat in glum silence until the waitress brought their orders, determinedly not looking at King. King polished off his breakfast quickly and wiped his mouth. “Mimi, we have to talk.”
She just looked at him, not even trying to hide her depression.
“The police are wrong. I know I didn’t kill Dennis and Gregory—and I sure as hell don’t think you did. Larch and Malecki are way off base.”
“Rae Borchard.”
“She didn’t kill them either. Nobody killed them, Mimi. It was just two freak accidents—tragic and stupid, but still accidents. And if the police weren’t so conditioned to looking for homicides under every bush, they’d see both deaths were accidents.”
“Speaking of,” Mimi said, staring over his shoulder.
King turned to see their two police detectives approaching their table. He groaned as Marian Larch sat down next to him and said, “Move over, King—you’re taking up too much room.” Ivan Malecki slid in next to Mimi and asked the waitress to bring them coffee.
“Can’t we even have breakfast without being harassed?” King complained.
“What harrassed?” the woman next to him said. “We’re just having coffee with you.”
“We don’t have to talk to you!” Mimi said defiantly.
Sergeant Larch looked at her partner in mock resignation. “Why do they always say that?”
Sergeant Malecki made a face. “They hear it on TV alia time,” he answered with a long-suffering air.
“Well, she’s right,” King grumbled. “We don’t have to talk to you. In fact, we’re on our way to see our lawyer.”
“Howard J. M. Liebermann?” Sergeant Larch asked innocently.
That was the second time she’d mentioned him; she’d brought his name up yesterday as well. “No, a criminal lawyer. Why I went to see Liebermann is my own business.”