The Complete Mystery Collection

by Michaela Thompson

  He had surprised her, too, by his cordial, even friendly, manner. She had expected at least coldness, if not outright hostility, but ever since she had walked into Sandy’s office to find him chatting with Don while Sandy took a phone call, Sondergard had been extremely nice. There were deep lines from his nose to his mouth, and light blue circles under his eyes, but these were the only evidence of strain. He had listened seriously while she explained, over dinner, the shape the investigation would take, and had asked questions that probed but didn’t bully. He had even volunteered a few remarks about his wife and two teenaged children and had asked Marina why she’d wanted to be an engineer. As dinners with clients went it merited a pretty good rating. When the coffee came, she leaned back, feeling her performance to be over, and started to relax.

  Sondergard stirred his coffee, gazing into his cup. “I have to confess something to you.”

  Marina was instantly wary. She hated it when people said things like that. “Confess?”

  He raised his eyes to hers and she felt a slight jolt of attraction. Watch out. “I’m afraid of what you might find,” he said. “Scared to death.”

  She was speechless. He wasn’t going to tell her how everything had been done by the book and he had nothing to hide? Didn’t he know how the game was played? When she thought she could sound casual she said, “What are you talking about?”

  He leaned forward. “You met my boss.”

  “You mean Bobo—Mr. Bolton?”

  “I mean Mr. Bolton. Do you have an idea of what I’m bucking?”

  “I don’t quite—”

  “Let me explain. There are a hundred and fifty Fun Worlds in the country. I’m supposed to be in charge of them. Only I’m not, because nominally he is. Mr. Bolton is a wonderful old gentleman, and he started the company and God knows he should have a say, but— do you see what I’m getting at?”

  “I think so.”

  “Hell, Marina— I hope I can call you Marina?— I spend half my time trying to uncover what he’s done and fix it. He countermands my orders, wants to make sure cronies of his from way back stay on the payroll, goes over requisitions and decides five thousand of something will do instead of ten. I try to catch everything, but some of it’s bound to slip by. And then—” He opened his long-fingered hands, palms upward.

  “You mean he might’ve done something that led to the Loopy Doop collapse?”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “But what?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Marina stared at the few golden crumbs of sourdough crust littering the tablecloth.

  “Listen.” Sondergard’s voice was husky. “I wouldn’t let the old man take the blame. If the company’s at fault, put it on me. That’s how it should be. But still— I’m not anxious to go down the tubes for somebody else’s mistake. Do you understand?”

  His face was slightly flushed now, making his pale eyes and the shadows beneath them bluer. Marina nodded. “Sure.”

  “I don’t know why I’m bringing it up, except to ask you to keep me closely informed. I know you’ll be reporting to him, but I’d like you to stay in touch with me, too.”

  “I will.”

  Trying to digest what he’d said, Marina gazed at him. Instead of thinking about his remarks, though, she thought how good he looked. Spare and elegant, like Loopy Doop. No indication of need in his demeanor, nor of sloppy over-generosity. Exactly enough of everything.

  Nothing could be easier, really, than for him to stop at her place and stay with her a while before going back to his wife and kids on the Peninsula. It might be pleasant, and it would be so much less draining and irritating than dealing with somebody like Patrick. She wondered briefly what Sondergard would say if she suggested it, then realized that he’d certainly say yes. Regretting that it wasn’t going to happen, she sipped her coffee and found that it had gotten cold.

  7

  STRESS

  Parts break for one reason only: stress. That’s an easy diagnosis and in the end an uninformative one, because there are many different kinds of stress. In metals, for example, a torn surface means overload. Wavy marks mean fatigue. Grains indicate corrosion. The way to identify the kind of stress a material has been under is to study the break closely.

  Why Breakdown?

  Marina curbed the wheels and got out of her car into a pool of brightness from the street light. The narrow, winding street in the Berkeley hills was deserted. A light burned on the front porch of Clara’s big brown-shingled house. Marina stood for a moment, breathing the cold, foggy, eucalyptus-scented air, trying to clear her head before she crossed and rang the bell.

  Her head wouldn’t clear. When she blinked, she saw green numbers jumping on the insides of her eyelids— the numbers she’d been staring at on her computer terminal before she left the office. She tried not to blink, but her eyes burned and she blinked anyway.

  The call from the boy’s uncle hadn’t helped— a stammering, embarrassing monologue about how she had to find the guilty party because when she did, the uncle would— well, he wouldn’t say exactly what he was going to do, but— she wanted to scream at him to leave her alone, stop wasting her time. Not that she was doing much except wasting it herself.

  Or Bobo was wasting it for her. He insisted on daily reports in person, and in order to be nearby he had taken a suite at the Mark Hopkins on Nob Hill instead of staying at home in Hillsborough. Every afternoon he had tea served for her in his little glass-walled, bubble-like solarium, and as she talked Marina had the sensation that she was floating over San Francisco, seeing the high rises of downtown, the hills, the bridges, the bay, from a detached, hermetically sealed height.

  Bobo looked ravaged— his eyes red, his face doughy. Sometimes he seemed to be listening to what she said, but more often he was distracted. Occasionally he told her anecdotes about his early days with the circus, and Marina, thinking of the work waiting for her back at the office, bit down hard on the inside of her cheek as she nodded at him.

  The little boy would live, a quadriplegic. The newspapers had printed a school picture showing a kid with floppy hair, a gap-toothed smile. She kept drawing a blank on his name, but it might be Tommy, or Ronnie. Agit. There was no reason to think about Agit More, the Indian boy, and only somebody like Patrick, who understood nothing, would imagine there was. The uncle had been drinking, she thought. “Sweetest kid,” he had said, “sister’s little boy,” and if he found out whose fault— When she closed her eyes this time she saw, instead of green numbers, smoke and flames.

  Forget it. Forget it. Go talk to Clara. She started across the street toward the porch light.

  Clara was sometimes Marina’s therapist. The relationship had continued off and on since Marina had returned from India. When Marina felt she loathed and resented Clara to the point that she couldn’t bear to look at her wizened little face, her ever-so-exquisite clothes, couldn’t stand her superior, patronizing attitude any longer, she would stop seeing her for months or years. Eventually, Marina would call Clara and Clara would take her back with what seemed to Marina perfect indifference.

  Now Clara had almost given up her practice. Marina’s sessions with her these days were more in the nature of visits. Each time Marina saw Clara, Clara looked more feeble. Marina resented that more than anything else— more than Clara’s pushing and pushing her to talk about Halapur, and insisting that she say Catherine’s name. When Marina saw Clara’s hand quiver as she picked up a teacup, heard the fatigue in her low voice, she felt furious.

  A few moments after she rang the bell, the door opened a crack, and Mrs. Daughtry, Clara’s nurse, peered out. Marina saw the glint of a security chain that hadn’t been there before. “It is you,” Mrs. Daughtry said, and unhooked the chain and stood back to let her in. As Marina walked down the polished hallway she heard the chain tinkle as Mrs. Daughtry slid it back into place.

  Clara sat in front of the fire, tiny and gray, wearing a quilted jacket of printed yellow si
lk, an afghan tucked around her knees. The firelight was reflected in the beveled glass fronts of the bookcases, and flickered on the teapot and cups on the end table. When Clara poured, Marina saw the tremor and wondered if it was worse.

  “I saw you on the news,” Clara said.

  “It’s a big case. The biggest I’ve ever had.” As always when she was with Clara, Marina felt herself starting to talk fast, rushing to get everything said. Usually, Clara’s attention was obviously focused on Marina. Tonight, though, Marina thought Clara’s mind was on something else.

  When Marina finished talking about Loopy Doop, Clara leaned her head against the back of her chair and closed her eyes. Disconcerted, Marina said nothing. After a few moments, Clara said, “I had a shock. It has left me feeling— very bad. Someone broke into my house.”

  The idea of an intruder here, among the books, the lemon-scented wood, the ceramic vases, was unsettling. “Was anything stolen?”

  “Nothing at all. I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to know anyone had been here. I was asleep upstairs, and Mrs. Daughtry had gone out for the afternoon.”

  “What happened? Did you hear somebody?”

  “I heard nothing. I only realized someone had been here because, as you know, I lead an extremely orderly life. I recognize it as an obsession, of course.” Clara smiled self-deprecatingly. “You probably remember that on the desk in my office there is a crystal paperweight on an ebony stand. The stand is really a box, where I keep the keys to my desk and my filing cabinet. When I came down later in the afternoon, I saw immediately that the paperweight and stand had been moved. They weren’t moved far, you understand. But moved.”

  “But couldn’t Mrs.—”

  “She never goes into my office, and besides, she says not. She was away, in any case, and had it been disturbed earlier I would have noticed. Once I did notice, I saw other things as well. Some disarrangement of the materials in my desk drawers. Scratches where someone forced the lock to get into the room through the sliding glass doors.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “I called the police, and I called the locksmith. The police came, they looked, but there is nothing they can do. Nothing was stolen, after all. The Berkeley police have worse crimes to think about.

  “The locksmith accomplished more. He put on new locks, and chains, and some sort of bar device on the glass doors to make it more difficult the next time someone wants to intrude.”

  The bitterness in Clara’s voice was evident. She sighed. “It’s the times, I suppose. I’m not the only one. There’s talk of forming some sort of block association. I’m lucky I didn’t lose anything.”

  “Why do you suppose nothing was taken?”

  “Perhaps the person was frightened off. Or perhaps it was an estranged husband, snooping in his wife’s file for ammunition to use in a divorce, and he found what he needed. Perhaps anything.”

  When Marina left Clara’s the fog had come down through the eucalyptus trees and settled around the house. The street lamps were smudges of light that illuminated nothing. The neighborhood— a neighborhood of teenagers, and well-fed cats, and Berkeley professors, and little girls who took dancing lessons— seemed alien, peopled by beings who came and went without invitation or warning and left disquiet behind them. Clara would lie in her bed tonight wondering if they would return. Marina slammed her car door hard, because she wanted to make a noise.

  8

  “Hold on,” the attendant said, and the safety bar descended over Marina’s knees and then over Eric Sondergard’s knees next to hers. Across the empty park Marina could see “Season’s Greetings” spelled out in colored lights over the entrance. The manager of the Seattle Fun World, hunched in his raincoat by the ticket booth, was gazing at the sky, which looked as if another drizzle might start any minute. Marina had always heard that it rained all the time in Seattle, and nothing in the several hours she’d been here had disproved it. On the drive from the airport, half-listening to the Seattle manager chatting nervously with Sondergard— Eric, he’d insisted she call him— she had watched the magnificent green of the landscape through a haze of droplets.

  Maybe a trip to Seattle hadn’t been strictly necessary. Certainly it hadn’t been necessary for Sondergard— Eric— to accompany her. His decision to do so had thrown her off a little, but on the other hand he was paying for the tickets.

  “I’ve looked over the records. Loopy Doops have to be inspected annually for cracks and flaws,” she had told Sandy and Sondergard at their most recent meeting in Sandy’s office. “What I don’t understand is,” —she ran her finger down the list—” the older machines, the ones that have been in service longest, have perfect records. No fatigue failures, no bends, not even a hint. On the other hand, the Redwood City Loopy Doop, which was so new it hadn’t even been through an annual inspection yet—”

  The phone buzzed and Don, who had been taking notes, said “Dammit” and went to answer.

  Sondergard leaned forward. “You’re saying—”

  “I’m saying I think the Loopy Doop leg broke because of low-cycle fatigue, yet there’s no initial flaw, and it had been operating less than a year. The older machines not only haven’t broken, they don’t show any danger signals. It’s strange.”

  Don returned and said, “The kid’s uncle again, for Marina. I told him she was out.”

  “Christ,” said Sandy.

  “If he calls again,” Marina said, her eyes still on the inspection list, “tell him I’ve gone to— to Seattle.”

  Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to ride Loopy Doop either, but it had seemed a natural outgrowth of looking at it, poking around in its engine, and running her hand along the cold, damp steel legs that showed no sign of bending.

  Sitting in the gondola, though, with Sondergard’s shoulder pressing against hers, waiting for the attendant to start the engine, she needed to swallow several times. This ride has operated three years without anyone getting even a scraped knuckle, she told herself, and swallowed again.

  The jangly music was starting, and she could feel the effect of having the legs so thin. It gave the ride a wavery, springy feel that was already making her hands clammy, and as the gondola started to swoop upward she had to stifle a scream. She glanced sideways at Sondergard, and although he looked impassive she saw that he was clutching the bar convulsively.

  The gondola descended again, fast, and her nose started to run. She dug in her jacket pocket, hoping for a tissue, and luckily found one. When had she felt like this? She squeezed her eyes shut as the gondola reared upward as if to fling them into the grove of evergreens at the edge of the park. Maybe this was how they had felt, the two chubby teenagers who’d gone plummeting down into the ticket booth. The music loud like this, a tune that pulled at her nerves with every jagged bar. She pressed the tissue to her streaming nose, then wiped her eyes on her sleeve. She had to stop acting so outrageously stupid. She blew her nose and glanced at Sondergard again, just catching him shifting his eyes away from her.

  That was enough to put her back in control. For the rest of the ride she clung to the bar and managed, she thought, to look calm as the world tossed around her and Loopy Doop performed perfectly. When she climbed out of the gondola, though, her legs wobbled and nearly gave, and she clutched the edge of the car to steady herself. Holding onto it, she noticed something. She studied a scratch on the gondola’s metal side, pulled a pencil-like magnet from her “doctor bag,” then turned to Sondergard. “This is aluminum.”

  Sondergard’s face was very white. He shrugged slightly. “Oh?”

  “The gondolas for the Redwood City Loopy Doop are steel.”

  He was patting his brow with a handkerchief. “What’s the difference?”

  “Well— weight for one thing— the main thing. Steel is a lot heavier.”

  “You mean the gondolas on the other ride—”

  “Were heavier, that’s all. Maybe a hundred pounds.”

  “Could that have made the difference
—”

  “I doubt it. It’s funny that it was changed, though. You don’t know anything about it?”

  She watched a crease deepen between his brows. “I can’t swear I hadn’t heard about it, but right now— I don’t think so.”

  “I’ll take another look at the specifications when I get back.”

  The drizzle started. She felt Sondergard’s hand on her back as he guided her toward the waiting limousine, where the Seattle manager had already taken shelter. The Loopy Doop attendant, standing nearby, said, “What did you think, Mr. Sondergard?”

  Sondergard shook his head. “Too much for me.”

  “Just as well you shut that one down. Nobody would ride it anyway, now. Except on a dare.”

  They got into the limousine, and Sondergard told the driver to take them to the airport. The Loopy Doop ride had silenced everybody, even the Seattle manager. Marina gazed out the window at the darkening landscape and listened to the click of the windshield wipers and the hiss of the tires on the freeway. By the time they reached the airport, she had almost stopped shaking.

  9

  Bobo patted his mouth with a napkin printed with a sprig of holly. His eyes were vague. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  Marina cleared her throat. “What I was asking,” she said, raising her voice and speaking slowly, “was whether you knew anything about this decision to change from aluminum to steel gondolas in the Loopy Doop rides.”

  She waited. Bobo patted his mouth a few more times. She plowed on. “The specifications say that a little over a year ago Fun World didn’t renew a contract for aluminum gondolas that you had with Gonzales Manufacturing in Fremont. You now get steel gondolas, and all your specialty steel, from Singapore Metal Works, in Singapore.” She was practically yelling. Out near Alcatraz, a barge wallowed laboriously, slowly, through choppy green water. That was what it was like to deal with Bobo.