Switcheroo

by Robert Lewis Clark

  “Rust, how have you been?” She said, hugging me. “You look thinner than the last time I saw you.”

  Previously, jockeying a desk at the police station and all those donuts had worked their magic. I was now on the south side of two hundred again and feeling healthier.

  I thanked her as she stepped aside and I walked through the tall double doors into my mother’s high-ceilinged foyer. The cold marble floor was a reminder of the reception I would probably receive from mother.

  She came into the sitting room wearing a dress with a floral pattern. Mother rarely wore pants. Maybe only to garden, which she never did. She kissed my cheek and I sat down. I hadn’t sat down with her like this for several months even though I lived only two miles away.

  “Are you stilling detecting or have you switched again?” She asked.

  “Still detecting.” I went on to tell her about my missing truck case, leaving out the teleportation part, of course.

  “Listen, I know you still go out with Drew Chandler sometimes and I was wondering if you could arrange for me to meet with him.” At one point her being seen with this man in public had been a sore spot for me. I never said anything to her, but I think she sensed I did not like this man. It is silly to expect Mom to still be mourning my father four years later. At least they hadn’t moved in together.

  “Rust, this isn’t some kind of macho stunt, is it? Drew is very dear to me and I won’t have you bothering him,” she said, sharply.

  I told her no, I just wanted to ask him some questions about ORNL that involved a case. I would have to pretend to be nice in the meeting, which probably wouldn’t be to hard since he was actually a nice fellow.

  Mother picked up the phone, called, and had it all arranged. I would go over after lunch. Mother invited me to eat with her. We went into the sun room and ate a quiet lunch. I was supposed to be admiring her array of plants and flowers. The chicken salad sandwiches had the crust trimmed off. I hugged Mom good-bye when we were done and showed myself out, glancing at old photos of me and Mom and Dad along the way.

  I walked out to the car parked in mother’s circular drive and glanced over my shoulder. The only thing keeping the huge house from looking obscenely oversize were the giant oak trees in the yard.

  I left with the weight of prior disappointments working on my stomach; or maybe that was one too many chicken salad sandwiches. I cranked the LeBaron and rolled away, under the canopy of Oaks onto Cherokee Boulevard.

  I arrived at Lions Bend subdivision and pulled into Drew Chandler’s drive around two p.m. A large Georgian colonial house, nowhere near the size of Mom’s, but still a big stack of bricks. Himself a widower and a high-minded intellectual, Chandler answered the door himself when I rang. A skeleton of a man but dressed stylishly in an L.L. Bean fashion. He was about as dashing as a seventy-year old man could be. We had met a few times, but had never had what I would call a real conversation.

  “Hello, Mr. Chandler. Thanks for seeing me on short notice,” I shook the man’s bony hand. It was like holding a soft leather bag full of small sticks.

  “Please call me Drew,” he patted me on the shoulder as he ushered me into a den with dark red walls and leather furniture. I took a seat.

  “Russell, your mother told me you wanted to question me about a case. Am I a suspect?” He said, with a little chuckle. His voice had the smooth grit of finishing sandpaper.

  “You know, you can call me Rust, everybody does. Uh, I actually came across a reference to ORNL in one of my cases. I know you used to work in Oakridge and I was hoping you would give me a starting point. I also want your opinion on another matter involving this case. You are the only real scientist I know,” I said, beginning to get a little more comfortable with the old man, in spite of being disturbed by my mother’s attraction to him.

  “What do you know about teleportation? Is this something that can really happen?” I started in the middle to keep from playing all my cards at once.

  “Oh?” Mr. Chandler’s eyebrows moved up his skull like white caterpillars. “Well, that’s really too wide open a question, Rust. I can summarize some things for you, if you like?” he said.

  I nodded, leaning forward as he kept talking.

  “You see, there are two types of teleportation. One has been performed in a lab environment already, about nineteen years ago. These experiments, some of which were performed in our labs in Oakridge, utilized protons. These protons were in groups of three. One analyzed by the computer, one destroyed during the process and one teleported down a wire to a nearby chamber. This first method is called quantum teleportation. It’s interesting, but since the original subject is destroyed, quantum teleportation cannot be used on a living thing.”

  “The second method is called hole teleportation. The hole method uses a theoretical device to make a tear or hole in the space-time continuum. The object passes through the hole to come out a similar hole in another place or even another time. Most advocates of this method say that all points in space time touch each other or can be made to touch. Like folding the corners of a piece of paper together, for example. This concept is often used when talking about time travel as well. Oh, I must be boring you, rattling on so.” He waved his hand in apology.

  “No, no. Please continue,” I said, still leaning forward. Drew’s old, thin lips started talking again.

  “Well, there is another theory that states if quantum teleportation were used on humans what arrives at the new location is actually be a replica, almost a clone. If you were teleported you might not be you when you arrived,” Drew laughed thinly at his own joke. “To do this, a computer would need to be designed to digitize all the atoms in the human body. That’s about ten to the twenty-eighth power, or a trillion times a trillion atoms. Some place in this digital map would be your ‘soul’. Maybe too great a task even for future machines.”

  “What about hole teleportation? Could a person teleport that way?”

  “They certainly could, Rust. But opening and closing the ‘hole’ has never been done, except on Star Trek,” again he laughed at his own joke, a real comedian.

  Well, here goes. For the first time I tried telling someone this whole story from the beginning, including two mysterious trucks and their ability to switch places. This took quite some time and Mr. Chandler had a few questions. Finally, I brought him up to date through Monday night’s meeting with Mr. Glasses.

  “Well, now I have confirmed that these two trucks were formerly leased to ORNL and I had a close call with a man driving a vehicle which is also leased to ORNL. The key to this whole thing is that lab. I need a name, someone out there that has access to their systems that I can use to get my foot in the door.”

  “Oh dear,” Drew raised his eyebrows, “I can do you one better than that. I think I know who has your truck.”

  “Who is that?” I asked, hoping this old man really knew.

  “A fellow named Kendrick, Randall Kendrick,” he sounded pretty sure of himself.

  “Kendrick, huh? Never heard of him. Is he dangerous?” I asked.

  Thoughtfully, a bit amused, he said, “I think mostly to himself.”

  After a bit more awkward chitchat, I got in my heap and split. The rest of the day was a blur of mobile home inspections and a bunch of smells that formed an olfactory blur of bacon grease, cigarette smoke and poop.

  Chapter 12

  Randall Kendrick was a man who had started life at the top and worked his way down. I sympathized since I had endured that slide myself. He seemed to have had everything going for him and then over the last twenty years he had pissed it all away. If he had an eye patch and a bottle of rum he could have been a Buffet song. Sadly, he had a bottle of Tums and a nicotine patch.

  He was now fifty-five years old and having a mid life crisis. Kendrick lived in a large expensive house in a suburb of Oakridge. He had a short commute to his laboratory and office at Oakridge National Labs (ORNL) where he was director of special research. His adoring wife was a socie
ty belle in Oakridge and Knoxville, heading committees for charitable organizations and tending to their beautiful home. Everything was seemed rosy from the outside.

  On the inside, it stank. Some days, Kendrick really questioned whether he wanted to go on living. He was deep in debt. The house payment and his wife’s maxed out credit cards were killing him. He was paying college tuition for two daughters. His third daughter was in a pricey private high school in Oakridge and he hadn’t been laid in about two years. If he did not come through with a major scientific break through by the end of the budget year in December, his department was going to be dissolved, as dead and gone as an eight track cassette player. He would be reassigned, probably to a lesser position with less pay. Then, in short order, a flood of angry creditors would be followed by bankruptcy and a costly divorce.

  Randall Kendrick had been voted most likely to succeed in his class at Knoxville’s West High School. A talented baseball player, he attended Georgia Tech in Atlanta and graduated in engineering in the top five percent of his class. He moved back to Tennessee where he interned at and was eventually hired by ORNL. He worked in the labs as he continued college at UT and earned a masters degree.

  At the time, the Lab was shifting its focus from nuclear research to other forms of science. Kendrick drew plans for and was integral in perfecting a lens that was part of a missile guidance system we know today as ‘smart bombs.’ This technology created great revenue for ORNL and propelled Kendrick to “made man’ status in the lab’s organization. He was given a fat budget, title of director and commissioned to do research in defense and other areas that could create more revenue for the labs.

  There was only one problem. After several months, Randall found that the missile guidance system was a bit of a fluke. He did not seem to have another invention in him. He was not stupid, but he was no Einstein.

  Realizing this, he knew he had to hire some engineering talent. He began going to colleges and recruiting young physicists and engineers right out of school. He looked for genius types with no social skills, the real nerds. They would do the inventing; he would take the credit and keep the ball rolling.

  Along the way, he had moved three times to successively larger houses which tripled his mortgage. Now he had three daughters to support. His wife found little to occupy herself except shopping each day. After twenty years of marriage he had built a huge debt on a house, furnishings, a pool and pool house, a new Land Cruiser, a BMW, and a Corvette.

  The Corvette especially upset him because he had purchased it more to piss off his wife than for his own enjoyment. She was only mad for one day and now he was stuck with an eleven-hundred-dollar monthly car payment for seven years. The car was painfully small and folding himself into the seat made his bones ache like a bad yoga class. Plus she punished him the next week by signing a thirty thousand dollar landscaping contract for their home and the pool grounds.

  Kendrick was working like crazy and did not have much time for family. This was good, because it kept him from killing his wife. He was pretty sure his two girls in college were doing well. His youngest daughter- still living at home- was dating a kid who had attended a public school (graduation uncertain), was way too old for her. A complete loser. Kendrick was positive the boy did drugs or sold them, or both. This kid ate at the table with his hat on and his jeans hung low, bagging down to his knees. He went by the name Dink or Slink, Randall couldn’t remember.

  Here’s where it gets sticky. Randal Kendrick’s new recruits at Special Research were not cutting the mustard. They had been going for the big prize, teleportation. Kendrick’s star player, William Madison, was the smartest and the nerdiest of them all. Madison had built a small black box that supposed to be able to move objects, maybe even living things instantly, without regard for space and time. Wow.

  Kendrick told him that he had until Christmas to get it working or they were through. He had received notice that the Special Research Unit would be slashed from the budget unless it could pay for itself, which it was not even close to doing now. Kendrick began drinking. Drinking led to hangovers. Hangovers led to Kendrick verbally abusing his staff.

  During the summer, he pushed William Madison to perfect the teleportation device. Kendrick was like a rabid college basketball coach, he even threw a chair across Madison’s lab. Unable to handle the strain, Madison had failed to report for work. Kendrick could not locate any of Madison’s notes, experiments, or the prototype black boxes. He couldn’t even find Madison. He called the FBI and reported Madison missing and told them it as a matter of national security.

  It didn’t take long for the FBI to locate Madison at his mother’s house in Mt. Gideon, Ohio. Kendrick made contact with him and eventually he verbally beat the location of the black boxes out of him. Madison said that all of his experiments had shown that the boxes should work, but he had been monitoring them day and night for quite some time and had not been able to make them switch.

  Madison had since realized that an error in the programming code made teleportation possible only once a day. Just a little more work on the programming and the box should do its trick on command. Where were these black boxes, Kendrick wanted to know? Madison told him they were in two of the security trucks. He had used the old trucks from the fleet as guinea pigs. A blue one and a black one.

  class=Section2> Great, thought Kendrick, because all he had to do was find those trucks. Easy. He went to the security motor pool and found that he had a new problem. About a month previously ORNL had liquidated its aging security fleet and leased new small trucks for the security officers. No old trucks left.

  Kendrick became physically ill at this development. He had been barely hanging in there while he hunted down Madison. Now there was going to be more waiting and he had zero time. If he could not produce a working teleportation device by Christmas, January would bring bankruptcy, probably divorce and certainly ruin.

  This is when Randall Kendrick met Darrin Mosley, the day security officer for his building at the lab. Darin had blonde hair, a little too long, but neatly kept. He had round glasses that were at a contrast with his bulging biceps and chest. He used his gym membership and it showed. A classic case of a nerd who had gotten sand kicked in his face. Now this nerd had two hundred pounds on his small frame and could bench-press three fifty.

  Darin was not an engineer, he was borderline intelligent enough for the security job at ORNL. Kendrick did not need smarts right now. He needed a man of action to find those missing trucks. He made a deal with Darin. After his ORNL day job, Darin would work nights for Kendrick. Searching. Kendrick would pay him five hundred dollars a week until the trucks were found, with a five thousand dollar bonus for each truck at the time of recovery.

  But Kendrick could not control Darin. Macho man that Darin was, he started a fight with Travis McHenry. The plan had been to offer Travis twenty thousand cash for both trucks, not to fight him for them. Travis ended up with a pool cue run through him. Darin hitched the stolen truck to his roll-back and hauled it back to the lab.

  Darin Mosley was paid the five grand bonus for the first truck. When Kendrick read in the paper a few days later that Travis McHenry had been killed, he confronted Mosley. Darin told the truth, stating that McHenry had it coming and that it was the only way. Besides, what was Kendrick worried about? He was one truck away from a huge scientific breakthrough. He also pointed out that Kendrick had saved the twenty grand he was prepared to pay McHenry.

  Numb at this point, Kendrick looked the other way and became party to murder.

  Although Kendrick felt the tail was wagging the dog, he believed Mosley could get his other truck for him. He tried not to think about the dead man, as though waking nightmares would summon police to take him away. And now it seemed they had. He had a six-foot tall detective in his office with a note pad and a devil beard.

  Kendrick told me this after I had introduced myself simply as an investigator and had given him a quick glance at my PI license. I was being as vag
ue as possible with any information I gave him. After I asked a few brief questions, he began what sounded like a confession. I stopped talking and listened as he told me the whole thing. Damn strange.

  Chapter 13

  After Randall Kendrick finished telling me he was an accessory to murder and grand theft auto, there was an awkward silence that lasted maybe thirty seconds, but felt like an hour.

  “Those are nice shoes,” he was looking at my loafers. A strange comment after confessing to crimes of this magnitude. He seemed to be a trance now.

  “Yes, thank you, I’ve always wanted a pair of Cole-Hahn’s,” I said.

  “Ah, they’re Cole-Hahn’s?”

  “No, I’m just saying I’ve always wanted some. These are Bostonians,” I admitted.

  Perhaps now would be a good time to call the police, but I didn’t know what I would say. ‘Officer, I just figured out that the security guard who works for this mad scientist had my client’s dead-beat husband killed so he could steal their truck that teleports. Now he’s really sorry. He didn’t mean to have anyone killed at all.’

  I decided just to try to collect the truck and then let this guy self-destruct by himself. Maybe I could get him to call the cops and tell his own story.

  “Mr. Kendrick, can you take me to the truck so I can recover it?” I said calmly, speaking as if to a child.

  “Uh, do you have a gun, Mr. Stover?” He said, dazed.

  “Oh, yes, definitely,” I said, lying.

  “I see,” Kendrick stood up abruptly from behind his desk, ready to leave.