by Rex Burns
“I knew Margaret before she married the man—she was one of my graduate students. A very bright girl and certainly undeserving of all that’s happened to her. She is the one initiating the inquiry, is she not?”
“She hired me, yes.”
“So Owen told me. He also told me that he’s worried her curiosity might stem from morbid causes. He thinks she may still be overwrought, and that any further trauma—whatever you might turn up—could induce some sort of irrational behavior.”
“She seems very stable to me. And very determined to know the truth.”
“Yes. The truth. Well, certainly it’s no business of mine or Owen’s and you’re well within your rights to tell us so. However, since I know the both of you rather well, Owen asked me as a favor if I wouldn’t inquire about her welfare. Not to inhibit your investigation, understand, but to ensure that her health, physically and especially mentally, would not be prejudiced by adverse findings concerning her husband. Owen hoped, in light of your past association with him—which I may say has been very fortuitous for you—that you wouldn’t mind his asking about her. He would have done it himself, but he’s off on another trip. You must know that he still feels some responsibility for the unfortunate results of the earlier investigation, though he doesn’t want to seem in any way presumptuous. I, on the other hand, have never suffered feelings of guilt for any of my various presumptions, ha ha.”
A touch of professorial humor there. “She’s been able to handle what I’ve turned up so far.”
“Oh? Then you did find a connection between Austin and the Aegis Group?”
“Nothing that would stand up in court, Professor. And nothing I feel free to discuss without Mrs. Haas’s permission.”
“Quite right, Devlin. And wrong of me to ask. Purely a spontaneous reaction on my part. Nonetheless, and strictly between us two, I do think Owen would feel a little less guilty if there were evidence that Austin Haas did, indeed, sell the trade secrets to Aegis. Right now, of course, he believes he may have pushed a possibly innocent man to his death.”
“I have no conclusive evidence of that. But if some does turn up, I’ll explain to Mrs. Haas how Mr. McAllister feels, and maybe she’ll tell him about anything we’ve found out.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you, Devlin. And very diplomatic as well. I’ll explain your stand to Owen. Thank you for returning my call, and please do come over and visit sometime—I’ve seen so little of you since Douglas passed away.”
He hadn’t seen much of me before my father’s death, either. He and my father were business partners rather than close friends, and I remembered my father telling me once, shortly before he shot himself, that he wished he had not teamed up with Loomis—that he was afraid he had gotten into a deal that was over his head. But their business investment, a small plant that manufactured a new chemical used in video display screens, had become highly profitable soon after my father killed himself—and after the tangle of claims from the death had caused the stock to revert to the surviving partner. It had all been legal; I studied every line of each document word by word. But there was a lingering flavor of unfairness about it, intensified by the grief and resentment I felt at the time, so I made no effort to stay in touch with my father’s ex-partner. In fact, I was surprised when Loomis asked me to visit Owen McAllister with him. But the results of that request had been very profitable for Kirk and Associates—as Loomis just reminded me.
Wandering across the living room with its dim ceiling brightened by plaster rosettes that caught and reflected the lingering daylight, I stood at one of the bay windows that reached out to the long light of late afternoon sun to bring it inside. As Bunch once told me, I tended to stare out windows whenever I turned something over in my mind. He was right, and the thing that drew me now to stare sightless over the outside strip of garden that separated my side of the duplex from the house next door, was the whole tangle of Loomis, McAllister, and Margaret.
I did not owe McAllister anything. I had been hired to do a couple of jobs for the man and had given fair work for the money received. Yet—and this was the itch that kept recurring—Loomis kept implying a debt. The recent good fortune of Kirk and Associates was due to the luck of working for someone like Owen McAllister. And that, in turn, was because Loomis had introduced me to the man. Now McAllister wanted information about a case that no longer concerned him. Except on humanitarian grounds. What objection could I have to that except a little nip of jealousy. Was that it? Did I resent someone else trying to look after Margaret? Was I covering that feeling by calling McAllister’s interest nosiness? The irony was, the woman had not asked anyone to look after her, not McAllister and certainly not Devlin Kirk.
The small tiled fireplace was laid and I wandered over to light the kindling and shavings that I preferred to use instead of newspaper with its acrid smoke and thick ash. The remnant of winter’s chill would return with the shadows, and the fire, yellow and dancing through the glass doors, could hold it off for a few more hours. The temptation to call Renee crossed my mind, but it was faint and fleeting and better that way. The break had been made and for both of us there was more relief than regret. Besides, the eyes that hovered in my imagination weren’t dark but a sea green that verged on blue, and the voice playing over in memory was not Renee’s.
Irritably, I began mixing the vegetable sauce for tonight’s halibut steak and covered the fish to steam in its juices. Then I poured the rest of the Belhaven into a mug and turned on the television to catch the last half of the news. It was easier on the mind to listen to the long litany of other people’s problems than to poke around the ill-defined boundaries of my own.
The worry lay in the back of my mind like a dog sleeping in a corner and was roused a couple of days later when Bunch came into the office with several rolls of blueprints tucked under his arm. “What the hell’s the matter with you, Dev? You’ve been looking out that window since I left. Here—look at these AeroLabs designs for a change.” He spread one of the blueprints across the desk and smoothed it with the side of a wide hand. We had landed the AeroLabs contract to evaluate and update the electronic surveillance and detection systems in a plant that had just received a Department of Defense contract. The job was another of those that had turned up as a result of the initial work with McAllister.
“We got the go-ahead to put sensors in these corridors here. Government specs leave it open to what kind should be installed. I say pressure sensors. What do you think?”
We discussed the merits and shortcomings of heat sensors versus pressure sensors versus motion sensors that would help form a barrier around the wing that housed classified operations. As usual, Bunch made his argument and then waited for me to pick holes in it. Then we would trade positions, me offering alternative defenses, while Bunch would invent ways to defeat them. But this morning the process went slowly and finally Bunch said, “Why do I get this feeling that I don’t have your undivided attention, partner?”
“I was thinking about Vinny Landrum.”
“You were thinking about the widow Haas, you mean. And what Landrum might spill about her hubby and his secretary.”
That was a big part of it. The rest was what other harm Landrum might do to Margaret and her children while he scurried around trying to prove that she murdered her husband.
“Have you talked to her? Told her about Vinny?”
“No. He’s not going to find a damn thing, and there’s no sense worrying her over nothing. I hope he’ll just blow away like the rest of the trash.”
“Good luck.”
“What’s that mean?”
Bunch took a deep breath and held it a second or two while he tried to frame the words. “He won’t find anything on Mrs. Haas. But he might come up with something on hubby.”
“Something like what?”
“I—we—got an appointment with a guy this afternoon. It’s something I’ve been working on with those tapes from the Haas surveillance.”
“What kind of guy?”
“This guy I know over at Tramway Tech.”
A few blocks away, that was the downtown campus of one of the state universities. “Want to tell me what it’s about?”
Bunch tapped the blueprints. “After we go over this. These people are paying us and paying us good, so first things first, partner. And remember: if we do the work right, people tell other people. And so far we’ve been doing good. Let’s keep it that way.”
“And it all started with McAllister. And Loomis.”
“It sure did.”
“Do you ever feel that we owe them anything?”
“Hell, yeah—they gave us our start. Why?”
“I don’t know. I get the feeling McAllister’s looking over my shoulder.” I told Bunch about the call from Loomis. “He has reason to ask, I guess—he’s concerned about Margaret. But the way Loomis put it made it seem as if we owed McAllister.”
“We owe him thanks, but that’s about it. You told him the right thing. Even if the McAllister job was our big break, the rest has been up to us. And right now we’ve got this one to worry about if we want to keep the string going.”
Bunch was right about priorities, anyway. I pushed everything back into that corner of my mind where the dog stirred uneasily, and forced my attention to the sets of blueprints and the various options and their advantages. When, after a quick lunch of sandwiches that left a few grease spots on the diagrams, we had finally agreed on the system of warning and detection devices to recommend to AeroLabs, Bunch rolled the blueprints into a bundle and grunted, “What time is it?”
He never wore a watch. Those with the leather bands were tight enough to cut circulation, and the stretch kind tended to spring into fragments when he flexed his forearm.
“A little after two.”
“Crap—we’re late. Come on.”
The old red-brick building that housed this corner of the university had once been the headquarters and maintenance buildings of the Tramway Corporation when Denver had street cars. But the office tower had become administration offices for the school and the car barn behind had been cut up and converted into cramped and windowless classrooms. A swarm of people, not all of them young but most wearing Levi’s and carrying books, stirred around the entrance to the office tower, and Bunch led me up a creaky elevator and through a warren of musty hallways into some adjoining new addition.
“Is this another gadget freak you’ve found?”
“Yeah, kinda. But, Dev, it’s a whole new world. Wait’ll you see what he’s got. I met the guy once when he was testifying for the DA on voice identification.”
“An expert witness? What’s this going to cost us?”
“Well if he had to testify, it would be expensive, yeah. But right now, it’s only a couple bottles of Scotch.” Bunch shook his head. “Talk about your heavy drinkers, these college teachers are pros.”
We turned into a pair of doors marked PHONETIC SCIENCE LABORATORIES. The room reminded me of every science lab I’d been in from high school through college. But instead of glass beakers and retorts and mazes of hoses and clamps, the long benches in the room held a bewildering variety of electronic equipment and enough dials and gauges to keep Bunch fascinated for a year. I understood the big man’s enthusiasm.
“Dev, this is Harry Goodman. Devlin Kirk.”
Goodman, about my age and a head shorter, had a mustache and goatee that framed pink, fleshy lips. “Hi. You want to see the tapes?”
Bunch answered for both of us, “Yeah, Doc.”
“Certainly. This made a fine project for a couple of my graduate students, by the way. We’ve all learned a lot from it.”
We followed the white lab coat down one aisle between a series of dusty black consoles faced by needle gauges and past a large steel-and-glass rectangle labeled SOUND BOOTH. On one end of a cleared bench, a series of paper strips was laid flat and anchored at each curling corner by pieces of stray electronic equipment. “The first set of readouts is voice number one, the second is number two, and—no great surprise—the third voice is three, the control voice. The voice whose identity we know,” he added for my benefit.
“I understand.”
“Fine. The top sheet is the sonograph record; that longer tape on the bottom is the oscillograph. Now you have to remember, all three of these voices were taken over the telephone, so they’re not a hundred percent accurate. The telephone transmitter screens out certain frequencies at both ends of the scale.”
“This sonograph”—Bunch had to show off a little—”it makes a graph of how sound is made in the mouth, right, Doc?”
“Sound production in the entire vocal tract including the larynx, that’s right.”
I looked at the first sheet that was slightly larger than a page of typing paper. Its color was a gray white, and an irregular pattern of dark smudges seemed to be burned into it.
“The relative light and dark etching corresponds to the pitch and intensity of the sound production. Where the sound is weak, we get a light burn. Where it’s strong, the burn is heavy. Now here’s the phrase whose sound production we’ve looked at.” Goodman pointed to lightly penciled letters spread along the lower edge of the sheet. They spelled “Yeah? Who? No. You got the wrong number.”
“That’s the voice from the number I called—the Aegis number.”
“Right,” said Bunch. “And we’re only just beginning.”
“This, you see, is the lingual-velar plosive—the g sound in ‘got.’” He pointed to a smudge. “It’s quite hard, an intensity of production that’s much stronger than many people make, and most likely generated with more force. This pale mark here is another diagnostic mark, the final r in ‘number.’ Or at least it should be. The speaker almost drops it off. My guess is that he substitutes a schwa sound for the retracted r in final position. Instead of making the sound with his tongue lifted like this—’r’—he just does it with his lips: ‘uh.’”
I found my own mouth following Goodman’s demonstrations.
“Show him the oscillograph, Doc.”
“That’s the tape down here.” An ink line traced down the strip of paper in a variety of flowing and spiky patterns. “Any sound production raises the line. This graph doesn’t indicate the locus of production, but it does measure the sound after it’s produced: the volume, duration, aspirations, and any kind of stutter or quirk in the sound itself.”
On the tape a sharp spike of ink marked the g sound and corroborated the explosive quality indicated by the sonograph. Goodman also pointed out the slightly longer duration of the final r sounds, a duration that partially compensated, he said, for the loss of the retracted r. Other critical diagnostic marks were found in the duration of the vowel production in relation to a consonant in the word “wrong,” and in something he called a “slight integrated schwa” that he pointed out on the graph but which I hadn’t heard following the final t in “got.”
“These are the kinds of idiosyncratic things we look for, especially since the voices don’t repeat exactly the same sentences. As I said, my students had a real challenge. So did I.”
“A sound gets changed if the sounds around it change, right, Doc?”
“Usually, yes. Ideally you want the same environment for the sounds you’re comparing. We came pretty close, though.”
“Show him the other tapes. Here, Dev—here’s voice two.”
Another set of papers showed the same kinds of marking, and along their bottom margins, I made out “Hello, Austin, it’s me. I got a tee-off at four on Thursday.” I looked at the graphs that analyzed the sounds but they didn’t tell me much. “Is it the same voice?”
Goodman shook his head. “I can’t be certain from just that. The ‘hello’ is the same. But more indicative is that almost silent schwa behind ‘got’ and the characteristic final r in ‘four.’ If he’d repeated the same phrasing as in voice one, I could be more definite.”
“This here’s voice three, Dev. It ties these two together.”
This set of tapes measured the known control voice saying “Hello? A what? A tee-off? Who is this? Yeah, you got the wrong number!”
“I tried to make him repeat as many key words as possible,” said Bunch proudly. “Doc says I did all right.”
“It wouldn’t stand up in court, but I think it’s adequate to establish a highly probable similarity,” said Goodman.
“So all three voices are probably the same?”
“And all three,” smiled Bunch, “belong to that Aegis number you called. That’s who I called for voice three.”
I remembered the scattered notations in Haas’s appointment book calling for tee-offs and stating various times. “So it wasn’t just golf that Haas was playing.”
Bunch shook his head. “It was footsie.”
CHAPTER 9
AT THIS TIME of night, Seventeenth Street was more canyonlike than ever. The orange glare of sodium lights pooled on sidewalks and curbs and empty asphalt, and drained color from the silent store fronts and sharply etched clusters of garbage cans waiting for the morning pickup. A drying streak of wet marked the passage of the street sweeper; from the distance and faint through the narrow slits of side canyons, we heard the occasional moan of a train blowing crossings along the west side of the city. Above, banks of unlit windows rose into darkness and the black pinched together over our heads. Bunch glanced at my watch. “It’s about that time.”
Time for the routine coffee break of the police patrols on a quiet midweek night. Time for the building’s single night watchman to sleep behind his desk or be somewhere on his rounds. Time for me to follow Bunch from the dim recess of the stark patio at the base of the Action West building. During the day—at lunch hour in warm weather, anyway—the concrete walls and benches were softened by people. Empty at night, they loomed unnatural and sterile and emphasized the lifelessness of an area that devoted everything to the pocketbook and nothing to the soul.
Bunch strode quickly to the brightly lit glass doors and probed a thin sensor into the joint between the two panels of glass. A few seconds later I heard him grunt with satisfaction and the man’s large finger began to work with surprising delicacy at the tumblers in the lock.