Until You Are Dead

by John Lutz

  Tabber raised his head slightly from his pillow. "How did you know that Belfor Electronics stock would go up?"

  Again Siano smiled down at Tabber, and his dark eyes seemed to grow deeper and darker. "I am on the board of directors, sir." He turned then, still smiling, and strode silently from the room.

  From that day on Tabber struggled desperately to recover, but his heart had been severely damaged, irreparably damaged, and the chart at the foot of his bed showed a steady decline until death.

  Understanding Electricity

  Glistening with chrome and tinted glass, the headquarters of the Powacky Valley Light and Power Company soared needle-like fifty stories heavenward, as if taunting the lightning. In the building's top floor were the spacious ultramodern offices of the company's top executives, and in a tasteful outer office sat the moderately attractive, though impeccably groomed, Miss Knickelsworth. She smiled with her impeccably white teeth, lighting up her whole mouth if not her face and unchanging wide brown eyes, and said, "Mr. Appleton from out of town is already in the conference room, Mr. Bolt."

  B. Bainbridge Bolt, president of Powacky Valley Light and Power, revealed his own capped dentures, nodded, and strode briskly past her and through a tall doorway. He was the "human dynamo"-type executive in image and action, and was proud to think of himself as such.

  Behind Bolt, Elleson of Public Relations entered the office with a PR smile for Miss Knickelsworth as he strode through the tall doorway.

  Five minutes later young Ivers, regional vice president and renowned hard charger, went into the conference room. The smile he flashed on Miss Knickelsworth was his bachelor's best, but she responded with the blank expression that had earned her the company title of "Miss Resistor" two years running.

  Grossner of Advertising followed Ivers in, then old Stabler of Customer Relations, who was something of a fixture with the company. The tall doors were silently closed on the outer office wherein sat Miss Knickelsworth, and after orderly hellos and introductions the immaculately attired, somehow similar men all sat down at a long tinted-glass conference table with gleaming chrome legs and trim. The table matched the glass-and-metallic decor of the large room. Everyone had his accustomed place at the long table but for Appleton from out of town, who remained where he'd been sitting at ease in his chrome-armed chair at the opposite end of the table from B. Bainbridge Bolt, who cleared his throat and drew a slip of paper from his attaché case.

  With a nod to Appleton from out of town, Bolt said, "There is some business to be discussed before we get on to Mr. Appleton's investigation of yesterday's five o'clock power failure . . . if Mr. Appleton agrees."

  "Surely," Appleton said, nodding ever so slightly his handsome head of flawlessly combed graying hair.

  "We have something of a public relations problem," Bolt went on, "concerning our last raise in the rates for electricity. Let me read you this note that arrived in the morning mail."

  He placed gold-rimmed reading glasses on the narrow bridge of his nose and glanced commandingly at each man. The note read:

  Gentlemen:

  I was shocked by your letter stating that my monthly bill was ten days past due. At your current rates, I'm afraid that you find me a little short. However, I do believe ten days is rather a brief period of neglect and that it does not behoove a company of your stature to conduct yourself in such a negative manner. In farewell, I regretfully must fuse and refuse to send your requested remittance, and as another futile outlet for my frustration I have wired my congressman direct.

  Tired of plugging away,

  A. C. McCord

  Bolt lowered the slip of paper, sat back, and sipped on a glass of juice from the silver tray Miss Knickelsworth had left on the table.

  After a pause, Stabler of Customer Relations said, "The work of a madman in its phrasing, but other than that it seems the usual sort of letter we receive."

  "There's one other difference," Bolt said dramatically. "This is a suicide note."

  "That should solve part of our problem right there," young Ivers said. "Especially since this McCord was obviously unbalanced when he wrote such a letter."

  "How did he commit suicide?" Stabler asked.

  "He wrote and mailed this note yesterday," Bolt said, resting his large clean palms on the metal table trim. "He left a carbon copy in his home; then, during our Karl and Karla Killowatt commercial before the five o'clock news yesterday afternoon, he pulled his radio into the water in his bathtub with him."

  Grossner of Advertising looked concerned.

  Bolt sat unnaturally still, as if waiting for something. "Wait a minute!" young Ivers said. "Is this McCord —"

  "Still alive." Bolt finished the sentence without a question mark.

  "Of course!" Elleson said. "The power failure at five yesterday! It must have coincided with his pulling the radio into the tub with him."

  "Almost," Bolt said. "McCord was found stunned, in a state of shock, but still alive. He'd also left a message for a reporter friend, explaining what he was going to do, and his story was written up in the papers for tonight's late edition."

  "But the man's obviously a maniac," Ivers said.

  "Remember," Grossner cautioned, "our last rate increase was legal but not what an uneducated public would call ethical."

  "They were notified of the public hearings," Ivers said, referring to the public notices in the newspapers that Elleson and Grossner had cleverly worded for maximum confusion.

  "There were the necessary three people at the meeting," Elleson said. "The vote constituted a majority."

  "No one is arguing the legality of the last increase," Bolt said sharply, to stop that area of discussion. "That and the subject of this meeting are poles apart. What we have here is a problem in maintaining some rapport with the public, and I've taken some steps to insulate us from any critical comment."

  "If the story will be printed showing us in an unfavorable light," Ivers said, "it seems that the cat is already out of the bag."

  "What I have done," B. Bainbridge Bolt said, "is change the nature of the cat."

  Elleson the PR man nodded approvingly, though he resented not being consulted on the matter. Appleton from out of town chuckled softly.

  "We have taken space in both daily newspapers to remark on the silver-lining-in-every-cloud aspect of a power failure saving a life." Bolt paused.

  "There's a switch," Ivers said brightly.

  "Excellent," Elleson said admiringly, but he wondered if it was.

  "Agreed," Grossner said, "but won't it also draw further attention to the incident?"

  "To continue," Bolt cut them off reprovingly, having successfully sprung one of his little conversational traps, "we will then explain how Powacky Valley Light and Power is generously paying for the would-be suicide victim's complete recovery."

  "Great!" Grossner said. "Really sock it to 'em!"

  "I believe we will have gone full circuit," Bolt said smugly, "transformed a lemon into lemonade."

  Everyone laughed as always at the familiar lemon analogy.

  "But how do we know he will recover?" Ivers asked. "People who unsuccessfully attempt suicide usually try again."

  Bolt shrugged. "Doesn't matter. The whole thing will be out of the public's collective mind in a week or so. This McCord ought to stay alive that long. Right now he's confined in the psychiatric ward at State Hospital at our expense, undergoing electrotherapy treatment."

  "Can you be sure of that?" Appleton from out of town said.

  "Of course," B. Bainbridge Bolt said.

  Appleton smiled indulgently. "I mean, what if he escaped? What if he somehow made his way here, to Powacky Valley Headquarters?"

  "I get it," Grossner said. "He could do something drastic generate some tremendous adverse publicity."

  "Not only drastic," Appleton said, "but fantastically daring and grand."

  Bolt squinted at Appleton.

  Several throats were cleared.

  "Security isn't
very tight here," Appleton said. "An imaginative man could find out things, make his way to the top.,'

  Bolt leaned forward in his chair and cocked his head. "You're not -"

  "Correct," Appleton from out of town said. "A. C. McCord, at your service."

  Ivers' eyes widened. "But . . . where's Appleton?"

  "Tangled up in some high-voltage lines, actually," McCord said, placing a small black box on the table. He smiled. "I took the liberty of attaching some wires to the table and chairs," he said, "so together you can all experience with me, one of your many customers, the unpleasant sensation of being overcharged," and he pressed a button on the box.

  "Watt now?" Miss Knickelsworth asked herself in the outer office, as her electric typewriter suddenly went dead.

  The Man in the Morgue

  It was a big house, with enough gables, dormers, and cupolas to resemble a maniac's chessboard. I smoothly braked and curbed my beige Volkswagen Beetle in the semicircular driveway, conscious of the car's faded paint and character-forming dents in contrast to the symmetrically bricked and shrubbed entranceway to the house. The engine turned over a few times after I'd killed the ignition.

  I half expected a butler to answer my ring. Instead, a large cop in a sweat-stained blue uniform opened the door and stared at me. He was about fifty with shrewd gray eyes, a shaggy gray moustache that turned town at the corners, a bulging stomach that dictated he shop in the big men's department.

  "Mr. Aloysius Nudger to see Mrs. Emily Stein," I told him.

  "If you had a hat and a coat," he said, "I could take them for you and hang them up." He stepped back so I could enter. "She's expecting you, Nudger. I'm Chief Gladstone, Marlville Police."

  I followed him down a tile-floored hall into a large room furnished in dainty French provincial. The carpet was the same deep pearl color as the grip of the revolver in Glad-stone's leather hip holster, and ceiling-to-floor powder-blue drapes were opened to admit soft light through white sheer curtains. The walls were papered in light gold patterned in darker gold fleurs-de-lis. It struck me as the sort of place where it might be difficult to read the menu.

  Emily Stein rose from a fragile-looking sofa and smiled a strained smile at me. She was more beautiful now than twenty years ago when her name was Emily Goiter and she was still single and chasing a modeling career. I couldn't understand how she'd failed to catch that career. She was tall and slender but curvaceous, and she had angular faintly oriental cheekbones and oversized compassionate blue eyes. I'd been in love with her once, back in Plainton, Missouri. But that was over twenty years ago, and she'd considered us only good friends even then. She had phoned me at my office yesterday and said she'd found herself in trouble, would I drive out and talk with her about it. I said yes, what were friends for?

  "Thank you for coming, Alo," she said, simply. There were circles of worry beneath her large eyes. "This is Chief Fred Gladstone of the Marlville Police Department."

  I nodded and we all sat down politely, Gladstone and I on silkily upholstered, breakable-looking matching chairs that were too well bred to creak.

  "Chief Gladstone agreed it might be a good idea to call you in on this," Emily said, "when I told him we were old friends and you're a private detective in the city."

  When I glanced over at Gladstone's gone-to-fat craggy features, my impression was that he hadn't had much choice.

  "Larry's been kidnapped," Emily said.

  I waited while she paused for what they call in drama circles "a beat." Emily had always been stagy in an appealing way. Larry Stein was the man she married five years ago, a wealthy importer of leather goods, dark-haired, handsome, in his thirties. I'd been at the wedding.

  "Or do you use the term 'kidnapped' for a grown man?" Emily asked.

  "You do," I told her. "When was Larry kidnapped?"

  "Yesterday at three P.M., by the statue of Admiral Farragut in the park."

  "Was there a ransom demand?"

  "Even before the kidnapping," Gladstone cut in.

  "Three days ago," Emily said, "Larry got a letter in the mail here at home. It was to the point and unsigned. If he didn't deliver five thousand dollars to the sender at three yesterday afternoon near the Farragut statue, I would be killed."

  Gladstone stood up from his chair, moved to a secretary near the window, and handed me a white envelope. "It's already been checked for prints," he said. "Nothing there. Postmarked locally, widely sold cheap typing paper, typed on a Royal electric portable."

  The folded note inside the envelope was as Emily had described short, direct, neat, and grammatically correct.

  I asked her, "Did Larry follow these instructions?"

  Emily nodded. "And he told me to call you if anything happened to him. He thinks a lot of you professionally."

  I found it odd that he'd think of me at all, since I'd only met him twice. But then I'm sure he knew, in that instinctive way husbands have, that I greatly admired Emily.

  "Larry knew something wasn't right about it, even as a straight extortion demand," Emily went on. "He said the amount of money they demanded was too small and what they really might want was an opportunity to grab him with enough money on him for them to be able to hold out while they waited for a huge ransom."

  "It turns out Larry was right," Gladstone said. "Emily got this in this morning's mail." He handed me another envelope, identical to the first — same paper, same typing — but this time with a demand for $100,000. Otherwise dead Larry. The kidnappers ended the note by assuring Emily they'd stay in touch.

  I looked at the postmark. Yesterday's date, time 11:00 A.M., local.

  "Right," Gladstone said, following my thoughts. "Mailed before Larry was snatched. So it was planned, not spontaneous."

  "How about the F.B.I.?" I said.

  Emily shook her head no, her lips a firm, thin line.

  "She refused," Gladstone told me. "She wants you instead."

  I sat back in my chair, digesting what I'd learned. It gave me a stomach ache. Extortion, kidnapping, threatened murder, a ransom demand from someone or some group that seemed to know what moves to make. I didn't have the nerves for my profession. Automatically, I reached into my shirt pocket, peeled back some tinfoil, and popped a thin white antacid tablet into my mouth.

  "Call the F.B.I., Emily," I said. "The odds are better that way."

  "Larry told me not to do that. He said it would be a sure way to get him killed. The F.B.I. has a file on him. In the sixties he was what you might call a student radical nothing serious, but his photograph was taken with the wrong people and he was in the wrong spot when a building burned down. It's all behind him, but they might not believe that."

  From student radical to Larry the capitalist.

  "What now?" Emily asked in a lost voice.

  "We wait for instructions and take it from there. It wouldn't be a bad idea to get a recorder on the phone in case they decide to stop using the mail."

  "That's been taken care of," Gladstone said.

  "Can you get the hundred thousand?" I asked Emily.

  "I can." No hesitation.

  "Do you have any idea who might be doing this? Sometimes a kidnapping is a personal matter."

  "No one I can think of." Outside a jay started a shrill chatter on the patio. The strident notes seemed to set Emily more on edge. "Larry never told me much about his business; he knows people I don't know. But he was — is — the type who never made enemies."

  "Except for the F.B.I.," I said, rising from my fragile chair. The sheer curtains were parted slightly, and beyond the brick patio I could see a tilled garden about twelve by nine feet, lined with cabbage, lettuce, and staked tomato plants. Near the center of the garden were two rows of young tomato vines that would mature toward the end of summer and keep the Stems in tomatoes all season long. The garden was neglected now and needed weeding. Still, it was a garden. I smiled. Plainton, Missouri. A part of Emily would always remain a country girl.

  "Maybe somebody ought to stay
here with you nights," Gladstone said.

  "No," Emily said, "I'll be fine. The house is equipped with dead bolt locks and has a burglar-alarm system. And I have Bruno."

  I raised my eyebrows. "Bruno?"

  Emily got up and walked to the door at the other end of the room. When she opened the door, a huge black and tan German shepherd ambled in and sat, his white teeth glinting against his black lips and lolling pink tongue. Bruno was a factor.

  Before I left, I gave Emily and Gladstone each one of my printed cards with my home and office phone numbers. I told Emily to try to keep occupied and worry as little as possible. Hollow advice but my best under the circumstances.

  The Volkswagen's oil-starved engine beat like a busy machine shop as I drove past Marlville's exclusive shopping area of boutiques, service stations bordered by artificial green grass and shrubbery that would fool you at a thousand feet, and a red-brick and yellow-plastic McDonald's harboring half a dozen scraggly teenagers with nothing better to do on a sunny June day in swank suburbia.

  I turned onto the cloverleaf and headed east toward the city, glad to be away from all that manicured spaciousness.

  From a phone booth on Davis Avenue, I checked with my answering service. No one had called, and I didn't feel like returning to my desolate office to reread my mail.

  My apartment was also a lonely place, but the loneliness was in me, wherever I went. I phoned a colleague at police headquarters who had an F.B.I. connection and promised to get me information on Larry Stein in a hurry and call back. Then I took a quick shower, leaving the bathroom door open so I could hear the phone.

  It rang while I was toweling myself dry.

  Larry Stein had been a member of a short-lived left-wing student organization called LIFT, Leftist Insurgents For Tomorrow. He had attended some demonstrations that turned violent and had been photographed near the R.O.T.C. building at Washington University when it burned down. He was never formally charged with arson, and someone else eventually was convicted of the crime. This was in 1966. Who cared now? Probably no one.