The smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke wafted over her, and she looked up to see a man with thinning hair and a medium-sized paunch, a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He sank into the chair across from her and nodded at her notebook. “Who’re you covering it for?”
“I’m not a reporter.”
“Police?” The man put his cup down and pulled a ballpoint pen and a thin tan-colored notebook, spiral-bound at the top, out of the inside pocket of his corduroy jacket.
“No.”
“Then what— oh, right.” He pointed at the red-stitched “Breakdown, Inc.” on the pocket of her jumpsuit. “The disaster-mongers. Down on the waterfront. You on the job here?”
“I can’t say anything right now.”
The man clicked his pen. “You’re here, right? Looks to me like you’re working. Who’re you working for? Bobo? Get him off the hook?”
If she got into the papers without Sandy’s OK it would be a major misstep. “I can’t say anything.”
The man scribbled something. “Sure. What’s your name?”
“I said I can’t—”
“OK, OK. Who called you in?”
The tightness was starting in her forehead. It was the same tightness she sometimes felt when, as an expert witness, she was being cross-examined by a hostile attorney. “I absolutely am not going to say anything. I have to get on with what I’m doing, so—”
The man shrugged and closed his notebook. His mouth twisted in a sour little smile. “Grist for the mill to you people, I guess. It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody some good, right?”
Marina watched him wander off. Ill Winds, Inc. She had a Ph.D. in engineering. She could have been building bridges. In her mind, she saw buzzards, their wingspans huge, wheeling in a blazing blue sky. This kind of work was perfect for her. She bent back to her list.
3
A navy-blue Porsche with BRKDWN license plates was pulled up near the ticket booth. Sandy must have gotten the message she’d left with the service. She looked around and saw him in the shadow of Loopy Doop talking to the maintenance chief. The jeans, deck shoes, and fisherman’s sweater he was wearing meant he’d spent the afternoon on his sailboat, the Disaster-Pro.
Now, Marina would be relegated to supporting player. When Sandy was in a scene, he was the lead. He beckoned her over. With his lean body, his tan, his gray hair ruffling in the wind, he so outshone the maintenance chief that the other man might not have been there at all.
“Marina, I think you’ve already met Ed, here. I was just telling him how fortunate it is that he called us in so soon after the accident.” Sandy’s voice was somber, but managed to convey congratulations to Ed for his good sense.
“I didn’t even wait to get authorization,” Ed said. From his tone Marina guessed he was as dazed by that fact as by the tragedy itself.
“It makes all the difference in the world when we can get on the scene fast,” Sandy said.
What’s this we? It was good old Marina who was working on a Sunday afternoon and jumped into her Toyota to drive down to Redwood City and take care of business. I wasn’t out of touch on some boat with a cutesy name getting myself written up in the society columns.
Still, fair’s fair. If Sandy wants to play Dr. Alexander Drake, socialite engineer, it probably doesn’t hurt business. Nobody’s better than Sandy at soft-soaping people like Ed, or whatever his name is. Besides, if Patrick and I hadn’t broken up I wouldn’t have been at the office either.
Sandy, still talking, had clapped Ed on the shoulder, but Ed, who had first seemed enthralled, was letting his attention wander. His hand strayed to his tie as he gazed at a point beyond Marina’s shoulder. “Mr. Bolton is here,” he said.
***
The shrunken, frail-looking old man who got out of the limousine didn’t look at all like the jolly gent with the straw hat and red nose who did the Fun World television commercials. On television Bobo, the clown-turned-entrepreneur, bounced and mugged. This Bobo—Mr. Bolton, chairman of the board of the Bolton Amusement Group— leaned heavily on the arm of the tall, blond man at his side. As he shuffled forward, the television lights illuminated his flyaway white hair and then caught the gleam of tears on his cheeks.
The little man waved away shouted questions as he approached. He ignored Ed’s introduction and said, “My God, my God. Children. I love kids, and they love me. They always crowd around, and they say, ‘Bobo—’” Shaking his head and mumbling, he moved to one side, to be replaced by the man who had helped him out of the car.
“Eric Sondergard, president of Fun World,” the man said, extending his hand to Sandy. Sondergard looked about fifty. His face was thin, his blond hair graying. A nerve jumped near his eye but his voice was firm, and when he shook Marina’s hand his palm was dry. After the handshake, his eyes flicked over the top of Marina’s head as he devoted his attention to Sandy.
Closed out, Marina found herself standing next to Bobo, who was wiping his face with a handkerchief. She edged away from him. The last thing I need is to be trapped by an old guy who isn’t only senile but slobbering, even if he is the famous Bobo the Clown.
She had put an additional foot of distance between them before Bobo looked up and his faded brown eyes focused on her. “You’re a lovely child,” he said.
Caught. Maybe he’d rebury his face in his handkerchief. He didn’t. “A lovely child,” he repeated.
She stifled the impulse to tell him that thirty-two didn’t qualify as a child in anybody’s book. And as for lovely— well, Catherine had been lovely, with her rippling yellow hair and big blue eyes. Marina’s eyes were blue, but her hair was dark. She looked like an ordinary person instead of an angel in a Renaissance painting. “Thanks,” she said.
Bobo took a step toward her. “What’s your name?”
She sighed. He thinks I’m one of his kiddie fans. I’ll tell him my name, and he’ll tell me it’s a very pretty name and ask me what grade I’m in. “Marina.”
The old man didn’t say what a pretty name it was. He swayed toward her with an air of confidentiality, putting a hand on her arm. “I knew a woman named Marina once. Knew her very well. We were on the road together back— my God, it must’ve been the twenties. She was an equestrienne. You know what an equestrienne is?”
“A bareback rider?”
“Very good. Marina Valdez. She had a silver-gray horse. Prince something. She wore blue, with silver spangles.” His grip tightened. “We were close, Marina and I. Close. My God, she could ride.”
Marina didn’t answer. She was trying to catch the drift of the conversation between Sandy and Eric Sondergard. She heard Sondergard say something about “your top people.”
“Do you like the circus, Marina?”
“Yes,” she answered absently. “When we were kids, my sister and I—” She stopped, her face burning.
“What’s your sister’s name?”
How long had it been since she’d done that? Stupid, stupid. “Catherine.”
Thank God he seemed to lose interest. She breathed deeply, willing her face to stop radiating heat, feeling a drop of perspiration sliding down between her breasts.
Tears began to trickle from his eyes again, and he dabbed at them with his handkerchief. “Children have been hurt, and it’s my fault,” he said.
She tilted her head back a little. Sandy was saying, “Give you every assurance—”
“We’ve always been so careful. Never a black mark, never. What happened?”
If Bobo got ticked off because she hadn’t paid attention to him, Sandy wouldn’t be pleased. “We’ll find out.”
“We?”
“The company I work for. Breakdown, Inc.”
“What kind of company is that?”
So much for Sandy’s publicity efforts. Give him the cocktail-party explanation. “We’re engineers who investigate why things go wrong— plane crashes, nuclear power plant failures, why the gearshift lever knob comes off your car, anyt
hing.”
He looked more alert. “How do you do that?”
On automatic pilot, she said, “Everything obeys physical laws— laws about speed, tension, impact, fatigue, things like that. We figure out which laws apply and why. Then we can figure out what caused the failure.” And determine, she added silently, who was to blame for whatever smashed and should pay for it through the nose.
Straining to hear what Sondergard was saying about “results,” she missed Bobo’s next question. When she asked him to repeat it he said, “How will you find out what happened to Loopy Doop?”
His eyes were pleading. He wanted reassurance, but she wasn’t about to spend half the night explaining Breakdown’s procedures. She chose something relatively easy. “I might start by doing a fault tree.”
“A fault tree?”
“It’s a way of making sure the possibilities are covered.”
“A tree? Like a family tree?”
She got out her notebook and pen and looked around. Better not talk about Loopy Doop. A Styrofoam cup lay at their feet. She pointed to it and said, “Here’s an example. Suppose you pour hot coffee into that cup, and the coffee leaks out the bottom and scalds you badly. If I were making a fault tree, I’d put that at the top and we would call it the Most Undesired Event.” She drew a rectangle at the top of the page and wrote in it “Leaky Cup.”
He nodded. “What happened here tonight is the Most Undesired Event.”
Keep him off Loopy Doop. “Right. Under the Most Undesired Event, I’d figure out what could have gone wrong with the cup. Maybe it’s defective. Maybe it wasn’t meant to hold hot liquid in the first place. Maybe it was damaged in shipping and there’s a hole in the bottom. See?” She sketched in other rectangles. “Now, only one of those things has to go wrong to result in my Most Undesired Event, so I’ll put a half a bullet here. We call that an Or gate. If it took more than one, I’d put an And gate— a dome shape.”
He took a pair of Ben Franklin glasses from his pocket, put them on his nose, and gazed at her sketch. “Then what would you do?”
“I’d spread out from there, and put possible contributing factors under each possible cause. If the cup was damaged, was it damaged in shipping, or somewhere else? If it was the wrong kind of cup, was the order filled incorrectly, or was the wrong cup ordered? I’d go on until all the possibilities I could think of were exhausted. A single fault tree for a nuclear power plant could cover the floor of a room.”
“When you finished, you’d know why I got scalded?”
“I’d know where to start looking.”
“You could do that for the accident tonight?”
“Sure. I expect somebody will do one.”
They were silent. Bobo took his glasses off and put them away. He drew a shuddering breath. “I’m an old man,” he said. “In eighty-three years, this is the worst thing that has happened to me. My wife died of cancer. For that I could blame God. For this, I can only blame myself.”
Marina closed her notebook..
He twisted the handkerchief in his knobby hands. “Marina, I must know. How can I rest in my grave if I don’t know? You must find out for me.”
“The company—”
“No, you. You.” Abruptly, he pulled her forward, interrupting Sandy and Sondergard. “I want Marina to investigate this accident,” he said.
Marina saw displeasure on Sondergard’s face, and she knew Sandy saw it too. “Mr. Bolton, many people work on an investigation of this magnitude,” Sandy said. “I can assure you—”
“She is the one who is to report to me,” said Bobo. When he spoke in that tone, Marina thought, you could see traces of the whip-cracking executive he once must have been. “Is that understood?” He was looking at Sondergard.
Sondergard inclined his head.
Bobo seemed spent. Neither Sandy nor Sondergard looked at Marina. Marina wondered what Sandy would say later, when they were alone.
4
Marina’s eyes watered from yawning as she adjusted the cross-section of Loopy Doop’s leg in the hardness tester. Sandy had managed to get somebody out with a band saw, but she’d had to wait for the guy to show up and cut the tubing. After that, there had been the boring drive north on the freeway from Redwood City to San Francisco, a garish neon procession of motels, restaurants built of pseudowood or pseudostone and surrounded by vast parking lots, the airport, Candlestick Park on its gusty ocean promontory. At last the hills and the city— billboards advertising tequila, the Bank of America, the current show at Harrah’s Tahoe, and beyond the billboards the angular, glittering high rises overlooking empty streets down which the wind, funneled between the glass-and-concrete sides of the buildings, blew fast and cold.
By the time she had taken the exit for the waterfront, the Bay Bridge looming ahead of her, it was nearly midnight. She drove past the Ferry Building with its clock tower, a serene survivor of the 1906 quake now half-hidden by the Embarcadero Freeway, and parked her car a few hundred yards beyond.
The bay was rough. Water slopped against the pilings supporting the cavernous converted pier that housed the Breakdown offices. Carrying her chunks of round steel tubing in a plastic bag decorated with Bobo’s laughing face, she let herself into the building.
She yawned again and wiped the corners of her eyes. Footsteps echoed across the pier’s vast, open interior. Fernando, the security guard, making his rounds. She had already greeted him when she signed in at the front door, where he sat eating an apple and reading Psychology Today.
She elevated the platform until the steel touched a small penetrator attached to the gauge. Loopy Doop was hers— at least for the moment. So far, that had meant having to wait for the mechanic at Fun World while Sandy and Sondergard decamped in the Porsche and Bobo was trundled back to his Hillsborough estate in the limousine. It meant she was here doing a hardness test instead of at home getting some sleep.
Pushing the crank that would apply the load and cause the penetrator to dent the steel, she focused on the pointer. The hardness test was usually done first because it was quick and easy and didn’t require a technician. Zip, zip, zip. Get the sample in, make the dent, take the load off, read the number, which was— she squinted— sixty-five on the Rockwell B scale. She wrote the figure in her notebook. The tensile strength test would have to wait until machined specimens could be made from the Loopy Doop sample and the chemical analysis would be sent to an outside lab, but at least this one was out of the way. Stifling yet another yawn, she took the specimen from the machine and tagged it for the evidence room.
The key to the evidence room was in its little magnetized box stuck under the overhang of the testing division secretary’s desktop. She slid it out and, after making a notation on the sign-out sheet on the door, deposited Loopy Doop’s fractured leg in one of the bins that lined the shelves inside.
As she was relocking the door the phone buzzed. She answered, and Sandy’s voice said, “Thought I’d find you there. Listen. The teenagers— Wilson their name was, brother and sister— didn’t make it. The ticket-booth lady and the mother probably will. It’s touch and go with the little boy, but if he pulls through he’ll be a quad.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yeah. Some other kids in line were hurt too, but he’s the worst. This is going to be a hot little number.”
“Looks like it.”
“I don’t need to tell you to keep your ass covered, do I?”
“Nope.”
“Eric Sondergard isn’t jumping for joy at what Bobo pulled on him. I’m a little surprised at the way you played that one.”
“I didn’t play anything. The old guy is just gaga.”
“Right, right. We’ll talk tomorrow. Sweet dreams.”
Marina hung up. The stakes were rising. You couldn’t collect more than a few hundred thousand for wrongful death, but a quadriplegic, especially a young one, was a different story. With a quad case, you were talking millions. And the insurance companies and Fun World and everybody el
se involved would be scrapping to make sure the millions didn’t come out of their particular hides. They were all going to be very interested in what the investigation— her investigation— turned up. She switched off the overhead light and headed for home.
5
The man on the screen said, “Fun World is bankrolling the Loopy Doop investigation. Doesn’t that make it more likely that you’ll clear Fun World of blame?”
The woman on the screen looked disheveled, Marina thought, and tense in a twitchy, rabbity way. Why act so intimidated by that cut-rate Mike Wallace, she asked herself as the woman said, “Absolutely not. We’ve been hired to look for the truth. If our investigation shows that Fun World was negligent we’ll not only tell them, we’ll tell the world. We can’t change the facts to favor one side over the other.”
Sandy reached for his hamburger as the commercial started. “Fantastic, Marina. Perfect.”
“I looked awful.”
Sandy shook his head vigorously, his mouth full. When he’d swallowed, he said, “It’s just like when you go on the witness stand. You don’t want to look ultra-glamorous. People won’t trust you.” He turned to Don, his assistant, and said, “Isn’t that right?”
Don was a marathon runner, with the runner’s stringy, muscular body. He had green eyes and his head was covered with tight blond curls. He wore an aviator jacket and a narrow raspberry-colored tie and his feet, in battered running shoes, were propped on his desk. “I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “I think the white lab coat was a mistake. It made her look too pale.”
“She was perfect.”
Marina ran her hands through her hair. She had probably done the same thing, she realized, just before the interview, which was why it had been standing up like that. I did look pale. And rabbity. “I’ve got enough to do without worrying about looking like Miss America on the six o’clock news.”
The Grand Tour: Four International Mysteries Page 66