Killing Time td-50

by Warren Murphy

  "Right," the sergeant said. "At the Pink Pussycat. Who's your friend? The one that's missing."

  "Her name's irma Schwartz, same as it was last week," Doris said.

  "Okay, just a second." He leafed through a stack of papers on his desk. "Schwartz, Schwartz . . ."

  "What's in those?" Doris asked.

  "Homicides. Schwartz . . . Irma." The sergeant looked up from the paper. "Sorry, lady," he said. "Her name's down here."

  Doris stared at him, her mouth sprung open. "A homicide? Like in ... she was murdered?"

  "Looks that way, lady. Sorry. She had I.D. on her, but she hasn't been identified personally yet. Just came in this afternoon. Somebody from the morgue should have called you."

  "I ain't been home," Doris said numbly. "I didn't

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  think she'd be murdered, for pete's sake. Just maybe tied up with a fink,"

  "I guess she was," the sergeant said.

  Doris Dumbroski's eyes welled up. "Okay, so what do I do now?" she choked.

  The desk sergeant was solicitous. He'd seen a lot of this. "Well, if you don't mind, I'd like you to go down to the morgue with one of the police officers. If the de­ceased is your roommate, the officer'll fill out a homi­cide report. That okay with you?"

  "Sure," she said lamely. "Only I can't believe Irma's dead. I mean, like she was so full of life, you know?"

  "They all are," the sergeant said. "Hey, one of you guys want to take the lady to the morgue for an I.D.?"

  There were no volunteers. Just about everybody on the floor was on overtime, and nobody felt like hang­ing around in the morgue for a grief-stricken identifica­tion and then filling out an interminable report that would drag on into the next shift.

  "I mean, it was her lucky day," Doris went on.

  "Depends on how you look at things, I guess," the sergeant said.

  "I mean, there we was at the TV studio, and then all of a sudden Irma and Dr. Foxx were making eyes at each other, and then she was riding off in his limou­sine and everything. . . ."

  Patrolman MacArdle dropped the rubber stamp he was toying with. "Fox?" he shouted, jumping up. "What about a fox?"

  "Dr. Foxx, with two x's. The diet doctor. That's who Irma went off with.''

  "When?"

  "Monday. The last time I saw her."

  The desk sergeant wrote down the name.

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  "I'd like to take care of this, sir," MacArdle said.

  "Gonna have to take her down to the morgue, fill out the report," the sergeant said. "Your shift's al­most up. Sure you want this?"

  "I'm sure, sir. His name was Foxx, wasn't it?" he asked Doris.

  "With two x's. He had such cute buns and every­thing. I mean, like, there was this chemistry between them. . . ."

  "Patrolman MacArdle will take everything down," the sergeant said.

  "Yes, sir," MacArdle said. The stamp was in his pocket. "Come with me, ma'am."

  Doris Dumbroski sniffed and dabbed at the black smears around her eyes. "At least Irma wasn't in pain when she went," she said.

  "That's good," MacArdle said sympathetically. "Wait a second. How do you know that?"

  Doris sniffed. "Because she was never in pain. She was just one of those people. She never felt pain. Whoever killed her didn't hurt her. Poor irma."

  MacArdle led her out. Every last word Doris Dum­broski said was going to go into that report. It would be the fattest, fullest, best-typed report the CIA or the Ma­fia or whoever was handing out those checks had ever received. Happy days were here again.

  Chapter Seven

  The triple-zero mode was operating. Smith sat back at his console, while the Folcroft computers quietly sifted through the accumulated reports mentioning the name Foxx, from 257 police precincts around the country.

  The computer had arranged the material according to Smith's programming and took out most of the dross automatically: The foxes, Phochses, and one-x Foxes were eliminated with whirring efficiency. The rest-the Foxxes ticketed for traffic violations, ar­rested for juvenile crimes, or reported as accident fatalities-had to be scrupulously, tediously scruti­nized by Smith himself. He sat stone still at the con­sole, afraid to blink, while he scanned the screen for each entry, pressing the "discard" button for every Foxx with nothing to offer.

  His eyes burned. He took off his glasses for a mo­ment and rubbed his face with a handkerchief. Then he opened them and scanned the entry on the screen. He pressed "Hold" and read the entry again.

  "FOXX, FELIX, M.D. LAST SEEN WITH HOMICIDE VICTIM SCHWARTZ, IRMA L."

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  Smith keyed in the code. "PLEASE GIVE CAUSE OF DEATH."

  The computer whirred for a moment, then flashed its version of Irma Schwartz's demise onto the screen. "SCHWARTZ, IRMA L. DEATH CAUSED BY AD­MINISTRATION OF HCN THROUGH NASAL CA­NAL."

  "EXPAND."

  "HCN = HYDROCYANIC ACID, I.E. PRUSSiC ACID. LIQUID OR GASEOUS STATES. UNSTABLE. MOLECULAR CONFIGURATION. . ,"

  "HOLD." The computer would expand the subject forever untii every scrap of available information on it was exhausted, if he let it. Smith keyed out the "Ex­pand" function. The screen reverted to the details of Irma Schwartz's death, listing blood levels of known substances arranged by quantity. At the bottom of the list was PROCAINE. . .00001, followed by a footnote: "ALL LEVELS NORMAL EXCLUDING FINAL EN­TRY."

  "PROCAINE: EXPAND"

  "PROCAINE = NOVOCAINE, GENERIC TERM. FOUND IN CACAO PLANT. FREQUENTLY REFINED INTO COCAINE. ALSO FOUND IN HIGHLY PURE FORM BUT SMALL QUANTITIES IN HUMAN ENDO­CRINE SYSTEM. . . .

  "RELATION TO SCHWARTZ, IRMA L."

  "NEAR ABSENCE OF PROCAINE IN SUBJECT'S BLOOD AT TIME OF DEATH. . . DISCREPANCY WITH 000 REPORT. . . DISCREPANCY. . ."

  "EXPAND DISCREPANCY."

  The screen flashed back to the police report. "SUB­JECT FELT NO PAIN PRIOR TO DEATH."

  "What?" Smith said aloud. He asked the computer to explain.

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  "POLICE REPORT 000315219 QUOTE SUBJECT IS REPORTED TO HAVE FELT NO PAIN . . . DIS­CREPANCY WITH LOW PROCAINE LEVEL. . . ."

  Smith was interested. He keyed in "PROCAINE" again and pressed the "Expand" button. The com­puter picked up where it had left off and spewed out volumes of information on procaine for the next twenty minutes. Among other things, Smith discovered that a body's procaine level controlled in some measure that body's tolerance for pain.

  If irma Schwartz's procaine content was nearly nil, then the strange footnote that she had suffered no pain didn't make sense. On top of it all, Felix Foxx had been with her on the day she died. It still didn't shed any light on Admiral Ives's murder, unless. . .

  "UNUSUAL PROCAINE LEVELS IN AUTOPSY REPORTS FOR WATSON, HOMER G., AND IVES, THORNTON?" Smith asked.

  "PROCAINE LEVELS NORMAL," the computer answered.

  No connection.

  Smith readjusted the program back to its former po­sition.

  The computer expanded into historical references to the drug, including various published accounts. Smith dutifully read each entry as it appeared on the screen, sifting through decades of data, working back­ward. In 1979 there were 165 entries on procaine, comprising the whole of the printed word worldwide, including tabloids from Sri Lanka and encyclopedias. At this rate, Smith realized, it was going to take for­ever.

  "AMERICAN PERIODICALS ONLY," he keyed in. "WORD COUNT ONLY."

  There were twelve mentions of the word procaine in

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  1978, all in one issue of the Journal of American Den­tistry. Foxx's name was not mentioned. Nor was it mentioned through the entire decade of the sixties. Or the fifties. Or the forties. Smith blinked back a blinding headache.

  !n 1938, American newspapers and magazines printed the word procaine more than 51,000 times.

  "HOLD. EXPAND."

  The articles appeared one after the other on the screen. All of them concerned a drug scandal involv­ing a now defunct research facility in Enwood,
Penn­sylvania, from which a staggering quantity of endocri-nal procaine, extracted from human cadavers, was found missing. The research was being conducted, as later reports revealed, as a military experiment to in­crease the pain tolerances of combat soldiers.

  A public outcry against scientists' fiddling around with pain experiments on Our Boys in Uniform far overshadowed any objection to the theft of the drug. As a result, the Pennsylvania facility was abandoned, the experiments aborted, and the project's head re­searcher quietly expatriated. His name was Vaux.

  Felix Vaux.

  "Vaux," Smith said, reprogramming the computer with new energy.

  "EXPAND VAUX, FELIX. HEAD RESEARCHER AT ENWOOD, PA. FACILITY 416, CA. 1938," he keyed.

  "VAUX, FELIX. B. AUG. 10,1888. . . B.S. UNIVER­SITY OF CHICAGO. . ."

  "HOLD."

  1888? That would make him ninety-four years old.

  It was the wrong man. Six hours at the most power­ful, omnipotent computer complex in the world, and he'd ended up with the wrong man.

  Disgustedly he switched off the console. It was

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  going nowhere. Undoubtedly, Remo had the wrong man, too. If Smith were an ordinary computer analyst working with ordinary computers, he would have put on his twenty-year-old tweed coat at that point, and his thirty-year-old brown felt hat, and locked the catches on the attache case containing his emergency tele­phone, and left for the night.

  But Harold W. Smith was not ordinary. He was pre­cise. Precise to the point where, if his peas were not positioned exactly at 9 o'clock on his plate, he would suffer with indigestion throughout the meal. So pre­cise that he trusted almost nothing-not words, not people, not clocks. Nothing except the four items on earth that Smith considered to be adequately accurate to deserve his trust: the Folcroft computers.

  And the four Folcroft computers had said, categorially, that Felix Foxx, M.D., was somehow living with­out a date of birth. Given that much as a premise, any­thing else was possible.

  With fresh determination he switched on the con­sole.

  "COORDINATES, ENWOOD, PA. RESEARCH FA­CILITY, CA. 1938?" he asked. The coordinates came up on the screen. They matched exactly those Remo had given him for Shangri La.

  "Hmmm," he said. A coincidence, perhaps.

  "PROBABILITY VAUX, FELIX = FOXX, FELIX?" he queried next.

  "PROBABILITY FOXX = VAUX 53%, came the an­swer from the four things Harold W. Smith trusted alone among all beings on earth.

  A better than even chance! The computers had con­sidered the ridiculous proposition that Dr. Felix Foxx, best-selling author and eminent authority on fitness and diet, TV personality and general celebrity whose

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  youthful face was known to millions, could be a ninety-four-year-old man named Vaux who had left the coun­try fifty years ago in disgrace after a nationwide drug scandal, and the computers had said fifty-three per­cent!

  It was the equivalent of a surgeon checking out the remains of a man burned beyond recognition, his hands and feet curled into little charred bails, his teeth no more than melted stubs sticking out of crisp-fried lips, and saying, "The odds are better than even that he'll be back on the job in a couple of weeks."

  Smith was ecstatic. For no surgeon on earth could match the predictability, the surety, the breathtaking precision of the Folcroft computers. If they said fifty-three percent, then procaine could be the whole key. And Foxx the holder of that key. And Remo was on his way to someplace cailld Shangri-la to talk to Foxx.

  "THANK YOU," he keyed in, as he always did when his work with the sublime four creatures had come to an end.

  "YOU'RE WELCOME," they responded as they al­ways did.

  The precision!

  Of course, there was another possibility, one un­known even to the computers, which were unique in all the universe, infallible in all properly programmed matters. The possibility that they were wrong.

  Harold Smith's brow creased into a deep furrow. He felt his breath come quickly and shallowly and his heartbeat step up. Dots of perspiration formed on his brow.

  Wrong? The Folcroft Four?

  And then he took a deep breath, as Remo had once shown him would alleviate momentary stress, and he

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  picked up the phone to begin the Song routing connec­tions that would lead eventually to Remo.

  There was no point in considering whether or not the Folcroft computers were wrong. If they were wrong, then, as Harold Smith saw it, there would be no reason for living. The world would be thrust back into an abyss of guesswork, hypotheses, hunches, sug­gestions, half-truths, loopholes, double entendres, wishes, hopes, spells, incantations, and instincts. A world where being on time could mean anything within the boundaries of a geological age; where peas were not only not presented at 9 o'clock, but scattered at random all over the plate, spilling haphazardly into the mashed potatoes and canned gravy.

  He shuddered.

  When Smith was a young boy growing up in Ver­mont, his mother had introduced him, one winter day, to the feasibility of the impossible. She had taken young Harold through this quantum leap of learning with one sentence. What she said was, "It's not snow­ing today because it's too cold to snow."

  Too cold to snow? Was she kidding? What could be colder than snow? It was practically ice, only fluffy. When it gets cold, it snows. Any colder than that, and . . .

  It would be too cold to snow.

  The concept had intrigued the precise young Harold W. Smith beyond description. Later, he would come to group the thought of unsnowable cold with other such mystifying paradoxes as liquid oxygen and dry ice. How do you breathe a liquid? Doesn't it clog up your nose? When you put dry ice in a glass of water, does it suck it all up like a sponge?

  Even after he understood the workings of these mi­raculous phenomena, Smith continued to remember

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  them with vestigial traces of awe. It was part of the grand scheme of things. Some things just were. Dry ice was one of them, and the immutable correctness and utter truth of the Folcroft computers was another, and that was all there was to it.

  No, the computers weren't wrong. There was a fifty-three percent chance that Foxx was Vaux and was consequently ninety-four years old and perhaps in­volved with a drug named procaine to such an extent that he was willing to murder an unknown woman for the minuscule amount in her body; and that somehow this series of possibilities would lead to the combat-type killings of two military leaders, spaced one day apart.

  The phone at the Shangri-la address kept ringing.

  There was a fifty-three percent chance that Remo was in the middle of something even the Folcroft com­puters would have called strange.

  Chapter Eight

  "You're how old?" Remo gasped, switching on the lamp with its pink light bulb.

  It had been great sex. Perfect sex. Hot, inventive, passionate, tender, first-time-in-a-car sex. Only this was in a bed, and the spectacular blonde beside him had just shattered the women's record for duration and frequency. She was not only fast, she was super­sonic. And good, really good. There hadn't been any romance to sweeten the pie, as it were, either. No meaningful talks, no outpouring of private dreams. Just plain old jump-on-the-bones sex, and it had been the best he'd known since Roseanne Ziewiecki let him have it in the baseball field behind the orphanage when he was fourteen.

  Roseanne knew what she was doing, but the pale blonde with the kitten face and the ocean-blue eyes had to be the most experienced sexual partner ever placed on the planet. And now Remo knew why.

  "I'm seventy," she purred, stroking his thigh. "And a half."

  "Seventy?" He had already withered beyond re­demption. That had happened the first time she told

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  him her age. Now, with the second blast of the same bad news, his stomach churned as he was swept by a wave of oedipal guilt trimmed around the edges with a border of pure absurdity. "Seventy?"

  "There's no need for pret
ense here," she cooed. She cradled Remo's hand expertly in her own. At sev­enty, Remo thought, she'd had her share of hand holding. "We're all young here. That's what we pay for." She laughed softly. "Go on, admit it. You're up there, too, aren't you?"

  "No, no part of me is up there," Remo said truth-. fully. "Down. Very down."

  She stood up in a huff, her perfect flanks glistening without a hint of a stretch mark in the moonlit bed­room. Remo tried to piece together the events that had brought him here to this bed, where a seventy-year-old woman was undulating before him with the healthy abandon of a young colt.

  He and Chiun had arrived at Shangri-la less than an hour before. Getting into the place had presented no problem after he ditched the car he'd rented at the En-wood train depot. No cars were permitted on the grounds. "They detract from the timeless ambience of Shangri-la," the guide had said haughtily.

  The guide-a chauffeur, as it turned out-drove the guests through the snow-covered hills, along narrow roads, and into a huge landscaped clearing in the mid­dle of nowhere, surrounded by a high wrought-iron fence with an even higher electronically controlled gate.

  "Welcome to Shangri-la," the guide said in the midst of the vast snow-capped greenery where the road stopped.

  Chiun speculated unpleasantly that Shangri-la was an expensive version of KOA Kampgrounds, with the

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  lot of them getting their massages and carrot cock­tails, while building igloos for the night. But as they walked, the place, the Shangri-la, mecca of dreams, giver of youth, refueling station for Bobby Jay's BPs en route to the rigors of life on the Mediterranean, ap­peared.

  It was a monstrous place, a mansion of Victorian di­mensions, but with the requisite Hollywood touches of an Olympic-sized swimming pool and kiieg lights call­ing to the illustrious guests like beacons in the dark. Still, despite the elegant trappings, there was some­thing sinister about Shangri-la. A word out of old vam­pire novels kept springing into Remo's mind. Un­wholesome. The place had an unwholesome air about it. Remo could almost smell it. Chiun said he did smell it.

  "Or maybe it is just the smell of so many whites," he said.

  The guests themselves were no longer any surprise to Remo. Many were famous names, which Remo could dimly pick out from among his early memories. All were robust, attractive, stylish, rich, and young. Senator Spangler and his wife stood by the fireplace inside the sprawling parlor of the house, chatting with a group of handsome young people dressed in their expensive best. Bobby Jay was standing by the grand piano in the corner snapping his fingers and singing an off-key version of "I Love the Boy I'm Near."