The Complete Mystery Collection

by Michaela Thompson

  Yet as she watched the cloth swing and settle in front of the windows something exploded in her body— a blinding throb of pain or joy. Catherine. As beautiful, as impossible, as infuriating as ever. Marina heard with astonishment her own gasping, breathless laugh. Catherine again. She giggled, and pressed her hands against her mouth to cut off the absurd sound while her body continued to quiver. She had to bite down on her fingers before she could stop.

  Hiccuping, she sat on the couch. The couch felt different— the rough, nubby texture of its cover almost insupportable against the backs of her legs, the palms of her hands. If Catherine wrote, she doesn’t hate me. If Catherine wrote— The thing I keep forgetting is that Catherine’s dead.

  Marina was tired, almost too tired to move. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. If Catherine’s dead, then who wrote the letter? Catherine. No. If Catherine’s dead, who wrote the letter? Catherine. No.

  A joke or something. You couldn’t trace a letter like that. I don’t even know anybody in Bombay. Except Catherine. Except— except I do know somebody in Bombay. Joginder was in Bombay, or he had been ten years ago. She had had the taxi go there on the way to the airport, weaving through the narrow streets looking for Joginder’s brother’s house. Somehow, they had found the street in a warren of tin-roofed huts, and a teenaged boy, shorts flapping around his thin legs, had led them to Joginder. She had tried to thank him, tried to give him money.

  She didn’t know the address, or if she could find the place again.

  Find the place again.

  She sat up. The letter was still in her hand. She held it away from her body while she went to the hall closet. She stuffed it in a shoebox that contained paid bills from past years and slid the box to the back of the closet shelf. Now it was gone.

  12

  FAILURE

  Failures will occur. It’s inevitable. We can even calculate, by multiplying frequency and severity, the total risk— or cost, in the largest sense— of failure. On a continuum of severity of safety failures, at one end we would put a failure that resulted in no injury. At the other end, we would put a failure that resulted in death.

  Why Breakdown?

  Marina’s eyes slid from the sheet of specifications back to the screen. The specifications said Loopy Doop was made of heat-treated 4140 steel. The yield strength— the amount of pressure that would make the steel bend— was 125,000 pounds per square inch. The ultimate strength, the point where the steel would break under pressure, was 140,000 pounds per square inch.

  Plenty of safety margin, even with steel gondolas. Loads would be only a quarter to a fifth of the strength.

  Why, then, did she have a hardness number of sixty-five on the Rockwell B scale? No 4140 steel would give such a low reading. Something was strange.

  If the steel really was that soft, the weight of the gondolas could have been a factor in the break. She felt a spurt of elation. Sure. Weak steel, an extra load— it might work. She might have the loose thread she needed to unravel the case.

  First, she had to find out exactly what the steel was. Results of the other tests would tell her for sure. She dialed the testing division. The voice on the other end said, “The Loopy Doop tensile test? I know the specimens were made. I saw them around yesterday.”

  She spoke with exaggerated politeness. “If you happen to run across them again maybe you could run them for me and get them out of your way?”

  The voice was unrepentant. “Glad to. I’ll call you.”

  Next, she called Don. “Haven’t seen a thing,” he said when she asked about the chemical analysis. “I’ll get in touch with the lab and tell them to step it up.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You sound a little weird. Is anything wrong?”

  “Oh— I noticed something that doesn’t check out, that’s all.”

  “I’ll get back to you after I talk to them.”

  Marina hung up. Is anything wrong? Just a few nightmares. She had been standing in a gray fog, and Catherine’s ash-covered figure rose up in front of her. She’d awakened drenched with sweat, the way she used to in India— wet, thirsty, wrung out with needs she couldn’t understand or control. Is anything wrong? What a question.

  She told Clara. Of the dreams, Clara said, “The sleeping dragons have awakened.”

  “I didn’t think they were sleeping. I thought they were dead.”

  “They don’t die. They will not leave you. But they may change their form.”

  “I want them dead.”

  “When you realize that they are you, I think you will prefer to have them live.”

  Clara seemed woozy, and acted as if speaking were an effort. Marina wondered what drugs she was taking.

  Sixty-five on the Rockwell B. She’d have to look up— The phone buzzed, and Don said, “The lab will messenger the report over tomorrow— the day after at the latest. And Eric’s on the phone. He wants to know if you’re free for lunch.”

  “Well— sure. I guess so.”

  “He said if you said yes, tell you he’d be by at twelve-thirty.”

  So she’d have the test results in a couple of days, and then everything would be squared away. In the meantime, she had to concentrate, sharpen up. She remembered Bobo asking one of his razor-cut flunkies to look into why Fun World had canceled their contract with Gonzales Manufacturing and switched to gondolas from Singapore. Probably nothing had been done, and Bobo had forgotten about it two minutes later. Still, if he hadn’t— She started to pick up the phone, then rested her hand on the receiver. Talking to Bobo in person was hard enough. Talking to him on the phone, she had discovered the couple of times she’d tried to avoid a personal meeting, was impossible. She checked her watch. She just had time to run to the Mark Hopkins and see him before lunch with Eric.

  When she called his room from the lobby, though, the smooth-sounding man who answered the phone stayed off the line a very long time. She heard his quiet voice, punctuated by querulous-sounding retorts from Bobo that finally got loud enough for her to hear, or to think she heard, “For God’s sake, what does she want?”

  Screw you too, she thought, not quite suppressing a flicker of dismay. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Bobo had wanted to see her, had insisted on it. He would have nobody but her in charge of the case. Maybe she hadn’t heard right. In any case, the volume of the conversation lowered and a moment later the smooth voice told her to come up.

  Bobo did not, as he always had, struggle to his feet when she entered the solarium. He remained slumped in his rattan chair, looking at her with red eyes that were almost lost in the wrinkles around them. He hadn’t shaved, and the late-morning light picked out every hair of the white stubble on his cheeks and chin. His stare seemed distracted and hostile at once, and she wondered if he knew exactly who she was. When he didn’t ask her to sit down, she balanced on the edge of a chair.

  She was deciding whether to broach the subject of Gonzales Manufacturing or give up and leave when he said, “Make a good thing out of this business, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “It’s how people are today. Professionalism, loyalty—” The hand with which he waved away the rest of his remark was shaking.

  Great idea to come here. Great move. “I don’t understand.”

  He muttered something in a tone so low she couldn’t make out the words.

  She stood up. “I’d better go.”

  “No, no, no.” He must’ve had one of his turnabouts from irrational to rational, because the glance he shot at her was keen. “What can I help you with, little lady?” The sarcastic tone wasn’t her imagination.

  By the time she explained about Gonzales and Singapore and the steel, he was drifting. “The steel might be too soft— much softer than it should’ve been. You’d asked somebody to investigate why the contract was canceled, so I thought…” She let her voice trail off, watching him rub his hands over his face in obvious confusion.

  “I’ll see about it,” he said distantl
y. As she left, she heard him ask, “Isn’t that Al Gonzales? With the margaritas?” She didn’t answer.

  She was losing ground, she thought as she drove back to the office. She watched the traffic intently, feeling that any moment a bus, a truck could demolish her. Bobo had acted angry, but it was impossible to know whether he was angry at something that had happened today or twenty years ago. It would’ve seemed simple enough, though, to keep at least this on the rails. At least this, if nothing else.

  Sondergard took her to an Italian place— all red tile, natural wood, and white walls— near the opera house. He looked thinner, and his blond hair was now more obviously shot through with silver. His appearance seemed refined, somehow. The edges were obvious, the angles barely hidden. They drank Bloody Marys and he said, “The first suit is about to be filed. Six million dollars on behalf of the little boy.”

  “That’s just the beginning.”

  “Sure. They’ll be flying thick and fast now.” He consulted the menu. “Pasta? The linguine with clams is pretty good here.”

  The suits would come in and the insurance companies would scream and Fun World would be looking for a scapegoat in its turn. “There’s one thing I’m looking into— a chance you’ve been sold inferior steel.”

  He put his glass down. “What are you talking about?”

  “A test I did indicates that Loopy Doop may have been made out of steel much softer than it should be. I’m waiting for confirmation now. If it turns out to be true, you might have a case against Singapore Metal Works.”

  His fingers felt cool against the back of her hand. “Do you mean it? Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I mean it. No, I’m not sure.”

  His fingers tightened. “Do you realize this could get us off the hook? If it turns out Singapore was screwing us—”

  She felt warm, almost too warm. After her unpleasant encounter with Bobo, Sondergard’s intimacy was working on her body like a balm. “Look. I shouldn’t have said anything. The tests—”

  He turned her hand over and kissed her palm. When his lips touched her skin she felt a ripple of shock. “Thank you,” he said.

  There was another thing, something she hadn’t thought of until now. “If it turns out the steel was substituted and somebody in the company knew—”

  “Oh God. You mean Bobo.”

  “It just occurred to me. I had a very strange meeting with him this morning. Something seemed to be wrong, and I can’t figure out what it is.”

  “Now you see what it’s like to work for him. That’s the story of my life.”

  “Actually, when I talked to him about it before, he said he didn’t know anything about Singapore Metal. He was really surprised when I told him Gonzales Manufacturing had lost the contract for the gondolas.”

  Sondergard shook his head. “That was the story when he told it to you, sure. And if you talked to him today, he might tell you the opposite. Believe me. You haven’t dealt with him as much as I have.”

  The palm of her hand seemed to be pulsing. She was intensely aware that his fingers were still laced with hers. “Anyway,” he was saying, “the specifications haven’t been changed, have they?”

  When she shook her head he said, “We may be out of the woods then, anyway, if we specified hard steel and they gave us some lousy alloy.”

  “But listen, Eric. I may be wrong. The tests aren’t complete.”

  “Not you, Marina. You wouldn’t ever be wrong.” He smiled exultantly. “I know you wouldn’t.”

  Marina never went to bed with clients, and it was with a kind of vertigo that, in his car after lunch, she found herself clinging to Eric Sondergard, returning his kisses, burning. Dazed with shock and desire, she told him how to get to her apartment. In bed, she held him tightly, fervently, as if she could never get close enough.

  She watched him dress later, in the fading light of approaching evening, watched him tie his tie, shake out his jacket, comb his silvery-blond hair. Her hair and the sheet beneath her were damp with sweat. She was thirsty.

  He bent over her and kissed her. “Let me know about those tests, OK?” he said, and when she nodded, he left.

  In the first moments after he was gone she lay still, barely breathing, waiting for the first lash of self-contempt.

  13

  It was a bad night. Marina lay wide-eyed in the darkness, unable even to hope for sleep, unable to connect a train of thought. Sometimes she would forget her episode with Sondergard, then remember it suddenly, her stomach clenching each time. Toward daybreak she dozed, and woke convinced that Nagarajan was in the room. His spicy smell still in her nostrils, she sat up and looked around, terrified. The feeling persisted so strongly that she put on her bathrobe and walked through the apartment, searching. Slightly calmed by its bland, everyday emptiness, she took a shower and got ready for work.

  She was shakily sipping coffee at her desk when Don buzzed. “I wanted to tell you I picked up a call for you yesterday afternoon. Haven’t had a chance to run a message down there.”

  “Thanks. What was it?”

  “It was a hell of a bad connection, so I’m not sure I got it right. I think the operator said— wait a minute. Someone calling on behalf of Miss, um— would it be Cloud? Calling from Bombay, India. Worst connection I ever had.”

  Marina could hardly move her lips. “Are you sure?”

  “Not at all. I couldn’t hear. I kept yelling at the operator to spell it, but she just kept saying something like Cloud. Was it important?”

  “I don’t— I don’t know what to say.”

  “God, Marina, you sound like you’re in shock. If I blew something important, I’m really sorry.”

  “No. No. Did she leave a number?”

  “Not that I could hear. I don’t think she tried. In fact, the call kind of got cut off. One minute it’s all this static and a tiny voice saying ‘Cloud,’ the next minute nothing.”

  “She asked for me?”

  “I thought so. That’s what I understood. That, Bombay, and Cloud. Is it bad news? You sound awful.”

  “It’s OK. Really.”

  Marina put down the phone. Of course Catherine wouldn’t let me off the hook with one letter. She and Nagarajan between them. She writes and calls, he comes into my apartment— but listen, he wasn’t there. It was that spicy smell of his. That’s how I knew.

  It was Eric Sondergard, not Nagarajan, but Eric’s smell wasn’t the same at all. It was soapier, with lime in it somewhere. In India, she had drunk fresh lime juice mixed with soda water. The thought of its tartness made her nose prickle.

  The woman at the telephone company said that even though it was an emergency the call would be very difficult to trace. Her tone of voice said it was probably impossible. Marina left her name and number and hung up.

  She couldn’t sit here. She paced her office. Catherine and Nagarajan had died years ago. Marina had to figure out— she had to figure out what caused the Loopy Doop disaster, that’s what she had to figure out.

  She rushed out of her office and half-ran across the pier to the testing division. When she walked in a young man in a smudged white coat said, “You’re late. I thought you’d be storming in yesterday afternoon.”

  She didn’t smile. “What about the tensile test?”

  “To tell you the truth, I had a little trouble locating the specimens, but it’s almost done. I’m about to load the last one now.”

  She followed him to the tensile testing machine, an apparatus that looked like two columns with steel crossbars holding grips shaped like metal bells, one upended a few inches above the other. He picked up the specimen, a piece of machined steel about two inches long, from a plastic tray. The specimen was threaded at both ends and very thin in the middle. He screwed one threaded end into the top bell grip, the other into the bottom one.

  As he worked Marina studied the graph lying beside the tray. “What do the results look like?”

  “Checks out fine so far,” he responded absently as he adjus
ted the specimen.

  Why couldn’t she breathe? “Fine?”

  “It’s supposed to be 4140, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Looks to me like that’s exactly what it is.”

  Before she could stop herself she burst out, “How could it be? The hardness test—”

  He turned to her, raising his eyebrows, and she cut herself off. Of course hardness was just a guide. The tensile test was the definitive measure of alloy strength. “Let’s see how this one does,” she said, and he nodded.

  He turned on the motor that would draw the crossbars in opposite directions and pull the specimen apart. If Loopy Doop had been made out of soft steel, that would’ve explained everything. If the steel checked out, then what? Then Eric couldn’t blame Singapore, for one thing. For another, she’d be back to square one. Watching the thin steel being pulled inexorably to the breaking point, she felt the stretch in her own body.

  The specimen snapped in the middle. “There she goes,” the technician said. He studied the settings on the computer that controlled the machine and wrote down numbers on the chart. He shrugged. “Looks like 4140 to me.”

  Oh God. “OK.”

  “I don’t know what hardness results you got, but it should’ve come in at about thirty-five on Rockwell C.”

  “I got sixty-five on Rockwell B.”

  “Jeez, you know what I bet?” A smile flashed across his face. “I bet you had the C penetrator in the hardness tester. It’s so easy to screw that up. And then you read the B scale instead of the C scale.”

  How stupid. How incredibly, unutterably stupid, but it was possible. A sixty-five on the B scale would be right above thirty-five on the C scale. What an idiotic, bush-league mistake. Her face felt scalded. “Maybe so,” she said.