The Puppet Master

by John Dalmas

  And that was the end of that persona. The original Misti had just walked into her apartment when the godawful headache hit her, and the torrent of memories "burst" into her skull. Burst; the same word Elena Marquez had used. But Innocenza didn't go psychotic. Kinky sex with strangers was no great shock for her, and behind that sweet innocent face was a hardbitten survivor, so after taking a handful of headache pills, brewing a pot of coffee, and burning herself pouring it, she'd sat up trying to sort things out on tablet paper. She failed, of course.

  There were three things she was positive of: one, it had really happened; two, she'd died there, been killed; and three, her captor was Ballenger, "who didn't have guts enough to kill me himself." Also, through the bathroom window she'd seen a sandy beach about a hundred yards away, and pine trees with really long needles. And Ballenger had said something about the mainland. I remembered a vacation tour with my dad and mom; Innocenza could have been describing the Sea Islands off the Georgia coast, and Ballenger was from Georgia. Later, checking an atlas, I found Marcellus only a few miles inland.

  Then she asked me if I knew someone she could hire to kill him. I told her I hoped she'd cool it long enough for me to get the evidence needed to pull him into court. Actually I didn't see a way in hell we'd ever get that kind of evidence, but there's always a chance.

  And now I knew absolutely that somehow, someone had done something really evil to all three women. Someone a lot more dangerous than Buddy Ballenger, or even Rashid ibn Muhammed.

  * * *

  That night I told Tuuli what I'd learned, hoping she'd have a suggestion. After all, she was "the Psychic of the Stars." But this time she didn't.

  4

  I spent the next morning learning all I could about Buddy Ballenger, the pride and embarrassment of Marcellus, Georgia. There was a lot, even leaving out the tabloid articles. Examples: He'd lost a patrimony suit, been badly beaten by an angry husband with a baseball bat, settled out of court in an embezzlement case. . . . He was big, blond, and apparently not very bright: a sort of caricature, more an over-sexed jerk than a menace. Though judging from Misti Innocenza's story, he could be dangerous. How a million or more born-again Christians could be his dedicated followers—his paying dedicated followers!—had to be a major mystery and a major human commentary.

  Tuuli had a two o'clock appointment to exorcise a ghost in Beverly Hills, and the office wasn't far out of her way, so we'd made a luncheon date. And arriving a few minutes early, she waited in my office while I finished reading some stuff I'd called up.

  Andy Lopez, from Properties, looked in. "Martti," he said, "any reason I should keep this? Joe wants me to cull the limbo files." He held an object out for my inspection.

  "What is it?" Tuuli asked. Which surprised me. Ordinarily she'd have said nothing while I was working.

  "Hi Tuuli," Andy said. "It's a torn Life-Tex mask."

  "Who is it of?"

  "Probably no one in particular. No one any of us recognized."

  She frowned. "Who was it made for then?"

  I answered this time, embarrassed that I hadn't wondered myself. Given the expert fitting necessary, a Life-Tex mask was expensive. "We don't know that, either," I said.

  "Find out," she told me.

  "Find out? Honey, that case is closed, and finding out would take time."

  "Try. It could be important."

  "Could be? You mean like, 'might possibly be'? Or do you think it is?"

  "I think it may be."

  "Leave it here, Andy," I said. She was, after all, a celebrity psychic and sometime crime consultant who got sizeable fees from her clients. "After lunch I'll talk to Skip," I told her, "and see what he can do with it."

  * * *

  She drove us to Mr. Ethel's, on North La Cienega. It wasn't far, and the food is excellent, even if the waiters are a bit overdone. I asked for a corner booth near the kitchen door: The noise would obscure our conversation if anyone sat down in the adjacent booth, and for the same reason, probably no one would. After we got our menus, she started on the questions, as I'd expected.

  "What theater?" she asked.

  "You mean where the mask was found? One of the Pussycat Theaters. On Hollywood, near Bronson."

  "What was the picture?"

  She was fishing. When she senses something psychically and can't come up with it, she'll try to get some real-world information to help it surface. "I've heard," I told her, "but I don't recall; it didn't mean anything to me. It'll be in the file though."

  Her eyes went unfocused—I notice things like that—and I kept my mouth shut to avoid disturbing her. Then the waiter came and took our orders, and we turned to other subjects. The mask didn't come up again until we'd finished our sandwiches.

  "In Hiding," I said.

  "What?"

  "That's the name of the movie. In Hiding."

  I hadn't realized it, but the waiter had just come out with our desserts, and overheard me. "You see that flick?" he asked.

  I looked up. "No," I told him, "but I heard about it."

  "Some show! I mean . . ." He looked at Tuuli then, embarrassed. "That Misti Innocenza is something else." He paused defensively. "She can act, too. Good enough, she could be in big-time flicks."

  I decided I'd misjudged Mr. Ethel's waiters; this one anyway.

  "I'm sure she could," Tuuli told him. He put down our sundaes and hurried away. "My next question," she said, "was who's the actress. And we've got the answer."

  Misti Innocenza. Okay, but so what? Still, I felt a stir of excitement.

  5

  Life-Tex masks are carefully molded to the wearer's face, otherwise they're useless. This one had thickened the brow ridge, and given the face a broad, high-bridged nose and neat, reddish blond beard. So the wearer's hair was probably more or less blond. And the mask had a well-tanned complexion, which suggested the original didn't. For the camouflage effect.

  At the lab I told Skip what I wanted, and left the mask with him. An hour later he buzzed me, and I went over. Using the computer, he'd developed a facsimile of the wearer's own face, and had tried three hair styles with it, printing off each of the versions.

  I knew it at once, from my recent research.

  "I've seen this guy," Skip said, "but I don't recall who he is. Someone on a magazine cover." He paused. "Or a tabloid."

  I nodded. "Buddy Ballenger."

  "That's it." Reaching, he touched a key on his intercom. "Fidela," he said, "could you come to the lab a minute? This is Skip." Fidela, who read the tabloids, confirmed the identification at once. When she'd left, Skip looked curiously at me. "What's this all about?"

  I shook my head. It looked like Ballenger might have had a sexual fixation on Misti Innocenza, a fixation strong enough, he'd gone to a porn theater to watch her perform. He could have called up the flick at home, if he'd wanted to. Maybe he liked the vibes and smell of a porn theater. And the mask would keep anyone from recognizing him. But why would he take it off before ducking out when the police arrived?

  I'd been thinking out loud, and Skip answered. Life-Tex masks aren't as convincing in reality as they seem on the screen. In extreme close shots—shots that show little more than the face—even Life-Tex masks don't look lifelike when the actor is talking. In films and holos this is dealt with by a computer process, but live that doesn't help.

  So apparently Ballenger, fearing he'd be questioned, got rid of the mask. His face wasn't that well known, except to people who watched his show or read the tabloids, and hopefully any cop who might stop him wouldn't be one of them. Of course, the odds of his being questioned had been next to zero—the police were looking for a small wiry Asian, not a big blond Caucasian—but Ballenger hadn't known that. He'd panicked, and left his mask behind.

  Interesting. But being horny over Misti Innocenza wouldn't mean a thing in court, any more than her story would. Not by themselves. What I needed to learn was how it was done.

  6

  Back in my office, I phoned
Ole Sigurdsson. He was tied up that afternoon, but as a personal friend, I got an appointment for eight that evening. Tuuli went with me.

  We were having an early April rain, unusually hard, with thunder and lightning. Ole's place is on top of a steep ridge between two canyons in Bel Air, and the goat-trail street that zigzagged up the side flowed like a shallow creek, between ivy-covered banks that glistened wetly in the streetlights.

  From the front, his house looks small for Bel Air—one story high and not particularly wide—but that's the uphill side. Seen from downhill, it's the second floor. It contains a large room with bar for entertaining, along with a small kitchen and one and a half baths. And Ole's office—a kind of smallish sitting room actually, with a long sofa where he naps when he feels like it. He's in his eighties, and doesn't take as many clients as he used to. Downstairs are their living quarters, and Laura's offices. His wife is Laura Wayne Walker, a producer of theater and TV films and holos. She's a lot younger than Ole—maybe sixty-five—but they suit each other. Besides being compatible and highly competent, they have a lot of mutual admiration.

  Tuuli was my in-house psychic, but Ole has a different spectrum of talents, so I turn to him from time to time. What I wanted now was his viewpoint, which sometimes picks out things both Tuuli and I have missed.

  I summarized the case for him, which didn't take long, then asked: "What actually happened, do you think? How did these assaults take place? Assuming it wasn't some kind of hypnosis."

  He showed no sign of uncertainty. "They are real enough," he said. "Each of them lived two lives at vunce for a v'ile, as if they had parallel existences. Then something happened and vun of them died—and the memories of that self snapped back into the first vun."

  "But how? How could something like that happen?"

  He grunted. "That's your yob to find out. You're the detective. But these veren't no freaks of nature. Somevun made them happen, that's vun thing I'm sure of."

  He had a small wood-burning brick stove, and had put on the same old-fashioned orange-red coffeepot I'd seen the first time I'd been there. It began to perk.

  "Do you have any idea what kind of connection Ballenger might have with whoever—made these things happen?"

  He shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe they both belong to a Misti Innocenza fan club on the Veb."

  A fan club? I shuddered at the amount of work it would be to attack the case from that angle, though I might have to.

  Ole got up and poured us coffee. He knew we took ours black, but he stirred cream and sugar into his until it had enough calories to feed the starving Sudanese. Then we sipped and talked some more. It was hard for me to accept parallel existences, even as part of quantum theory, and Ole had no more idea than I did how anyone could split a time line. Not at the level of particle integration that humans experience. But on the other hand, the breakthrough that produced the geogravitic power converter had given and continued to give rise to a whole spray of new developments, in both basic science and technology. A lot of us aren't as sure of what we know as people used to be.

  Tuuli and I drove home without saying much. I didn't know whether the trip had been worthwhile or not.

  7

  I woke up in the morning with a decision, and when I got to the office, phoned Vic Merlin in Arizona. Vic and his wife were old friends of Ole's, that I got to know on the Puppetmaster Case. Vic is undoubtedly a higher powered psychic even than Ole. I gave him a rundown on what I was up against, then asked: "Can you think of any way someone could split a time line?"

  Education, and decades spent away from rural west Texas, hadn't entirely erased his accent. "Not and transfer memories across like that," he said, then added what seemed like a total non sequitur. "But there's a guy named C.K.F. Linyetski in England, at the University of Birmingham, built an operating teleport a couple years ago. The only problem was, the block of iron he teleported arrived at the receiving plate as a little mound of fine dust—atoms of iron and assorted impurities in the same ratios as in the block."

  I frowned. "What's the connection between that and splitting a time line?" I asked.

  "I sure don't know; it just came to me." That definitely sounded like Vic. "I've got something else you might be interested in," he added.

  * * * * * *

  Vic's mainly a psychic researcher, but like Ole Sigurdsson, he's also a healer. He'd just treated an old friend named William Harford, who'd had a severe psychotic seizure and heart attack at his home in Los Alamos, New Mexico. When her husband's condition was upgraded to stable, Harford's wife had phoned Vic, and he'd flown to Los Alamos the next day. Vic had worked his way beneath the sedatives and Harford's severe confusion, and gotten a story that in important respects was like the others I'd heard. Harford worked for the government in weapons research—he did basic theoretical work in matrix physics—and his intrusive memories were of waking up in a clinic at a foreign laboratory, in India or Pakistan he thought. There he'd been grilled about his own research and related work. When he'd refused to cooperate, they'd tried drugs and psychological stress, and having a pre-existing heart condition, he'd had a coronary attack. And died. He was sure about that: as the duplicate Harford, he'd died.

  And when the memories hit the original, he'd had a coronary of his own. But the "real" Harford didn't die.

  * * *

  It was an interesting report, but it didn't have the sort of information I needed. So I went to Gold's and worked out on the Nautilus equipment, then sat in the sauna and cooked out what remained of the tension. When I left, I knew what I was going to do next. I called Buddy Ballenger from a pay phone outside Morey's. I doubted he had a program he could trace the call with through our deadwall, but why take a chance?

  A receptionist answered. "I need to speak with Reverend Ballenger personally," I told her.

  Her sweetie-pie voice dripped Georgia honeysuckle. "Whom may I say is calling?"

  "Mr. Smith." It wasn't a complete lie. In Finnish, a seppanen is a smith.

  "And what may I tell him this concerns?"

  "It concerns a young woman named Misti. And a Life-Tex mask in a Pussycat Theater. He'll know what I'm talking about."

  She didn't answer, just put me on hold. The recorded music was of the McArdle family singing something about letting Jesus hold you in his loving arms. Love was foreign to the arms that had held Misti Innocenza. After a minute or so, Ballenger's appointments secretary came on the line, his voice challenging. I repeated what I'd told the receptionist, which got me Ballenger. I repeated myself again.

  "I'm sorry," Ballenger said, "but I don't know anything about any Life-Tex mask, or anyone named Misti. If you're an attorney, I recommend you get in touch with my lawyer."

  He didn't hang up though, which validated that he was our masked man. "Interesting," I said. "I have the mask. It was found in the Pussycat Theater on Hollywood Boulevard last October. The feature was In Hiding, starring Misti Innocenza. And I have a computer reconstruction of the face the mask was made for. Your face." I paused, then added, "Masks always pick up epidermal cells when they're worn; handy for DNA matches.

  "But more important, I've spoken to Ms. Innocenza, and she knows you very well. Better than she wanted to."

  There was a long lag before he answered. "That's impossible."

  "You mean because she's dead? You're a religious man, reverend. You believe in souls. And some souls come back, looking for vengeance. If you're smart, you'll meet with me, and we'll talk about what it'll take to square things with her."

  For about a minute, all I could hear was breathing. I think he hyperventilated. Finally he spoke again. "There's a restaurant at Marina del Rey, called Leon's, on Eton just west of the yacht club. We could meet there."

  "What time?"

  "I don't know your name."

  "You don't need to. Not now, anyway. I'm six-one, 235 pounds, mean face, sandy hair. Thirty-two years old. You'll recognize me. What time?"

  "Eight this evening," he said.


  I told him fine, then hung up, walked to our building, and took the stairs to our floor, the ninth. It's a good leg/lung/heart workout, if you don't mind a damp tee shirt. I half expected Ballenger to unknowingly give me a lead that afternoon. If he did, I'd probably stand him up that evening. Let him sweat a little. He'd earned it.

  8

  I waited a bit, then used our case access to get into the Data Center's statewide phone records. It seemed to me Ballenger would have phoned someone after my call, asking for advice. At least. And sure as hell, immediately after we'd talked, he'd phoned someone named Charles A. Scheele.

  The name meant nothing to me, but that was correctable. The California Data Center is Prudential's major information source, but its data are mostly in-state governmental and utilities records; stuff you don't find in libraries. Beyond that, virtually everything in paper libraries worldwide, along with an enormous amount of government and university information never otherwise published, has been scanned into the huge interlibrary public "Data Ocean." Some of it's restricted, requiring various authorizations and often cross-requirements for access, depending on the nature and degree of confidentiality. But a lot of what I found on Scheele was open—in newspapers for instance, and his high school and college yearbooks.

  He was the son of a wealthy Bay Area corporate executive and his socialite wife, and like Ballenger, Scheele had grown up a caricature. In his case a caricature of a nerd. His IQ was 179, he'd gotten his BS in physics from Cal Tech at age eighteen, summa cum laude, and at twenty his MS from Stanford in electronics. Two years later he'd completed most of his work toward a Ph.D. in physics at Stanford, when he was accused of injecting a coed with an illegal aphrodisiac, Take Me. The drug hadn't worked as intended. Instead, interacting with psychological factors, it had filled the young woman with rage and strength, and she'd clawed, punched, and kicked the snot out of him—then knocked him unconscious with a heavy vase, and called 911. While waiting for the police, she'd trashed Scheele's living room.