His hands emerged from the beard and waved me off. “No, no, no. You can’t access it. From outside. I can access anything.” He led me through the hallway toward the computer room. “I have to be able to read it all,” he said. “Do you know who the bulletin-board cops are? The fucking Secret Service, that’s who. You’d think they’d have their hands full protecting the president, but no, they’ve got lots of time to sneak around on boards. All the time in the world. First they lurk—”
“Lurk?” We were in the bedroom.
“That’s what we call people who just read the stuff and don’t post anything, lurkers. There are lots of them, shy geeks afraid to write anything. So the computer cops lurk a while until they stub their toes on the adult part of the board and then they like to try a little entrapment. Some of the filthiest, most lurid stuff I’ve ever read was posted by the Secret Service, just seeing who’ll answer. Wetware at its worst. They love gay boards.”
He rolled his chair to the big desk, hit the keyboard three or four times, and watched the screen. “Oh, well, it keeps them off the streets,” he said. “Shame we can’t run over a couple of them with a local bus. Computer joke.”
“Local bus,” I said, mystified.
He made a disapproving clucking noise and shook his head at the clutter on the display. “The whole world is online today. This always happens before Halloween. Something about Halloween just brings them out of the woodwork. Let’s just disconnect a couple of lines, speed things up, or we’ll be here all day.” He reached up and turned off five modems, killing their little red lights and stranding people all over the information highway.
“Can you put something online for me?” I asked, watching him. “An invitation to a wake for Max?”
“No problem. All levels?”
“What’s that mean?”
He gave me a look that said are you kidding! and decided I wasn’t. “All levels means anyone who logs on can read it. If you don’t want that, we can restrict it to certain levels of membership.”
“All levels,” I said. “Wakes shouldn’t be restrictive.”
“Library,” he announced, peering at the screen. “Let’s go down a subdirectory, to the archives.”
“Let’s.” I’d rarely felt so useless.
“Why, the little dickens,” Jack said. “Look here.”
I looked there. The screen held a list of subdirectories, and Jack’s finger underlined one in a swift cutting motion. The type said MAXPVT.
“PVT?”
“Private. Not very subtle, is it?” I withheld comment. It had been subtle enough for me.
Jack brought up the contents of the MAXPVT subdirectory. It read:
LETTER.ONE
LETTER.TWO
LETTER.THR
“Three,” I guessed.
He turned to me, his beard brushing the keyboard. “You sure you haven’t done this before?”
“I’m okay with applications,” I said defensively. “It’s computers I don’t understand. Can you bring the documents up?”
“I think I can manage that. Which one do you want to start with?”
“Three. It’ll be the most recent.”
“Three it is.” He smacked the keyboard, sure-fingered as Arthur Rubinstein, and we were looking at this:
“Um,” I said.
“He was being a very bad boy.” Jack was back to ripping knots from his beard. “Just not like Max at all.”
“Are they all like that?”
Ten keystrokes later we had an answer. They were. Max had apparently been corresponding with a geometrical figure.
“I’ll fool around with these,” Jack said. “It shouldn’t take too long.”
“Can you give me a copy? On disk?”
He slid a diskette into a slot. “Trade you,” he said, “for the info on Max’s wake.”
My computer at home ate the disk.
It accepted it eagerly, like a drunk popping an aspirin, sent it whirling, and then burped. I pulled the diskette out, turned off the computer, slapped it on the side a couple of times, and reinserted the diskette. Same result. Pushing the envelope of my technological expertise, I pulled out the diskette again, slapped it a couple of times, and fed it to the computer again. Three was the charm; the machine accepted the diskette without gastric distress and sat there, waiting for me to do something with it.
Do what? I keyed in type a:letter.thr and hit the ENTER key. Greek, literally Greek, spooled by, followed by a self-satisfied little beep. I brought up WordPerfect and asked it to retrieve the document. After some grumbling about the letter being in the wrong format, the program put its shoulder to the wheel and delivered the same geometric scramble I’d seen at Jack’s. Progress.
I knew how to use the phone, so I called Schultz at home. Without bothering to sound patient, he told me that he’d done all he could on a Sunday; he’d used his personal federal crime-busting connections to get the military working on the dog tags, but I knew how the military was. Some of them might like to take Sundays off. They might regard defending the country as a higher priority. We failed to identify the enemy against whom they might be defending it.
“Not that that will hamper them,” Schultz said.
“We have met the enemy,” I suggested, “and he is missing.”
“A call to the police might speed them up.”
“From me? I thought you were the one with clout.”
“Get married,” he advised soothingly. “Settle down.”
“Norbert,” I said, “have you been talking to my mother?”
He turned shrink on me. “Should I?”
Eleanor wasn’t home yet, so she and Christy and Alan were presumably still at the West Hollywood Sheriff’s station. My mother would be out in the courtyard of her apartment house, having cocktails with her cronies, a group of women she calls the cacklers. My father regards the telephone as a small and noisy piece of furniture and generally refuses to answer it. When my mother comes in, he usually says, “Phone rang,” as if that were helpful information.
That left the computer.
From the layout of the document, it was a letter. That confirmed what its name, letter.thr, might have led even a nonprofessional to suspect. The four short lines at the top suggested that Max might be the kind of old-fashioned correspondent who put an internal address even in private correspondence, and wouldn’t that be nice?
Detective fiction just crawls with skilled cryptographers who can take one look at a slate of characters in Mayan knot writing or Linear B, snort once or twice in a superior fashion, and read it aloud. I suppose such people exist in real life, too, but they don’t seem to get out much. Still, a code is a code. Max’s letters had to be based on the alphabet, and the alphabet has its own rules of internal consistency. The one everyone always seizes on is the fact that E is the letter that gets the most use. Unless, of course, the writer of the code is intentionally avoiding words with an E in them, or is allergic to the letter E, or belongs to a religion that regards the letter E as the devil’s work, or has a keyboard with a broken E key, or is writing in a language in which E is the least common letter, or can’t spell and doesn’t know about the silent E, or…
The phone broke in on this productive train of thought, although “broke in” might be putting it a trifle strongly. So might “thought.” I practically flew across the room to answer it.
“Your Sergeant Spurrier is a piece of work,” Eleanor said without preface. “Never again will I wonder where the concentration camp guards came from, or the Albanian secret police, or the men who poured the hemlock into Socrates’ mouth.”
“He drank it himself,” I said.
“Well, if the Athenian cops were anything like Spurrier, it was the wisest course of action. He browbeat poor Christy until it was a wonder Christy had any brow left. Every question got asked thirty-two times, one for each tooth, like it was some sort of chewing rule. And he kept smiling at me and calling me ‘little lady,’ as though we were on the same side in some loathsom
e conspiracy.”
“How’d Christy take it?”
“He’ll survive. He tires so easily, though. If it hadn’t been for Alan, I don’t think he would have made it. Alan, as Wayde might say, is way cool. He treated Spurrier like something that had just crawled onto land and needed a good kick back into the drink.”
“Where’s Christy going to stay?”
“With Alan and his friend tonight. Tomorrow, he said he might check into a hotel. I told him what you said about staying away from the house.”
“He can go back tomorrow,” I said. “Tomorrow’s Monday, the day Nite Line will hit the streets—
“What vivid language.”
“—and our killer will know Christy doesn’t have his damn tags.”
“Our killer,” she said dryly. “Spurrier made Christy look at pictures of Max.”
“He’s a gob of phlegm,” I said. “Write about it.”
“I can’t. They’re giving it to someone on the police beat. Thank you very much, now butt out. How does someone turn into Spurrier?”
“Bitterness,” I said. “He’s only got one sport coat.”
“I’m serious.”
“How do I know? Some cops get like that. Some people become cops because they’re already like that. As Harry Golden once said about an anti-Semite, maybe his teeth hurt.”
“Well, I’m going to shower him off.”
“I tried that once,” I said. “It took a lot of water. What are you doing after your shower?”
“I don’t know. Get dirty, I guess.”
“Want to have dinner?”
She paused. I pictured her curling the phone cord around her index ringer, something she doesn’t know she does. She’s always wondering why the cord gets knots in it. “I’d considered it.”
“With me.”
“A girl lives clean for months,” she said, “deferring worldly pleasures in the pure faith that saintly conduct will be rewarded, and the world does not disappoint.”
“Is that a yes?”
“What language do you think in?” she asked. “Of course it’s a yes.”
“We can work on my English,” I said.
“You have more pressing problems. Eight o’clock?”
“Eight’s great, mate,” I said.
“I’ve got to learn to hang up earlier,” she said, hanging up.
The phone rang again immediately. “Listen to this,” Jack said. Then he read me Max’s letters. They were even better than I’d hoped.
“How did you do it?”
“Have you got Microsoft Word?”
“No. WordPerfect.”
“Well,” he said with leaden patience, “import the document.”
“I’ve got it on my screen.” I carried the phone to the computer and sat down.
“Okay, go into fonts. Wait, wait, highlight the document first. Do you know how to do that?”
“Yes, Jack,” I said through my teeth, “I know how to do that.”
“Got it?”
“Hold it. Okay.”
“Go into fonts. Choose roman, choose anything. Nah, choose roman. That’s all Max did, the old codger. He wrote his letter, printed it, mailed it, and then saved a file copy in a nonalphabetic font called Monotype Sorts. Talk about transparent codes.”
We shared a hearty laugh over how transparent the code was. I picked roman from the menu, and when the menu box cleared, I was looking at Max Grover’s last letter.
Mr. Phillip Crenshaw
P.O. Box 332
Kearney, NE 68849
Dear Phillip:
You’re a brave young man and a sweet one. I’m enclosing the cash for your ticket to a new life. I only hope I can help you find your feet here in the big city.
It’s not as bad as you’ve heard, especially if you have friends. I’m an old man, but I have a lifetime’s worth of friends. I know they’ll want to help you as much as I do.
Godspeed,
Max
P.S.
I’ll be at the gate with bells on (and your uncle’s dog tags, too).
“Think that’s the guy?” Jack asked.
“I know it is,” I said. Phillip Crenshaw.
Kearney, Nebraska. Farm boy territory.
19 ~ Typhoon
“Do you honestly think he’ll come?” Eleanor was wearing a scoop-necked sleeveless silk top the color of fresh salmon, an antique necklace of silver, marcasites, and jet, and four thin black bracelets that kept sliding up her arm like designer shackles. Those bracelets had prompted a number of perverse fantasies in the past, and from the way I kept drifting away from the topic, they hadn’t lost their power.
“Will he dare not to come?” I asked. “Maybe. But look what he’s done already. He risked his life to go back to the house to get the tags, and he went crazy when he couldn’t find them. He called me at home and actually left his number on my machine.”
“A number in an empty apartment.”
“Still, there were other people around, tenants, the manager. The sheriffs have a description now. Whatever information is on the tags, it’s more dangerous to him than a physical description. Max’s letter says they belonged to his uncle, but of course the kid told him that, and I don’t think we should put too much credence in anything the kid says. Whoever they belonged to, though, there’s a connection, a big look here sign that points right at him. He needs to get them back.”
“You don’t think they were his?”
“I don’t think he’s old enough to have been in the military. And I think they belong to someone he hates.”
Eleanor had decided on Typhoon, a modishly upscale pan-Asian restaurant that occupied the old control tower of a private airport and drew an unnaturally good-looking, semicelebrity clientele. It had been crowded when we arrived, full of people who were certain they’d be better known tomorrow and had decided to pick at sashimi and Burmese chicken while they watched the planes glide in and waited for a segment on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. We didn’t have a reservation, but the manager had taken one look at Eleanor and led us straight to the best table in the house, overlooking the runway and far enough away from the semifamous to allow conversation. Eleanor always gets tables like that. She thinks everybody does.
“If the tags are so dangerous, why would he fool around with them in the first place?” She was really tucking into a plateful of steamed vegetables, which the restaurant insisted on calling Buddha’s Delight; she’d wolfed down two forkfuls in only fifteen minutes.
“Schultz says they’re a totem of some sort.”
“Schultz,” she said, making what she probably thought was an ugly face. She hadn’t liked him the first time they’d met, and he hadn’t much opportunity since to exercise his dreadful charm on her.
“He knows his stuff, although I wish he’d speak English. He says they’re ‘imprinted objects.’ ”
She interrupted her feeding frenzy, suspending in midair a fork containing a single snow pea. “I know about imprinted objects. They’re superreal, like objects in a dream, usually associated with a trauma of some kind. They attain a kind of ritualistic importance.”
“You should be eating with Schultz,” I said.
She batted her lashes at me. “He didn’t ask me.”
“ ‘Ritual’ is the word he used. He also used ‘fetish.’ Those are the ones I can pronounce.”
“Why do you enjoy acting stupid?”
I poked through the shredded remains of my Filipino Beef Strings or whatever it was, looking for something I could chew. “I’m good at it. We all like to do things we’re good at.”
“Fetishes enable some people sexually,” she said. “I wonder if he means that these dog tags enable your kid from Nebraska to commit murder.”
“They are,” I said, paraphrasing Schultz, “essential accessories to the act.”
“Dog tags are a kind of identification. They probably turn his victim into the person he really wants to kill.”
I looked under the ta
ble for Schultz. “You know,” I said, “you could make small amounts of money and work unreasonable hours assisting the police.”
“And put up with people like Spurrier? Thanks anyway.”
I stole a forkful of her vegetables. “You like Al and Sonia.”
She watched her vegetables all the way to my mouth. “They’re different.”
“No,” I said. “Spurrier’s different.”
Eleanor caught a man at a nearby table staring, and gave him a smile that made him drop his spoon into his soup. “What are you doing about Nebraska?”
“Nothing yet. Post office is closed on Sunday. I’ll call tomorrow and see what I can find out. For all we know, though, he sets up shop in a new town every time he decides to go back into business.”
“What a life. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for him.”
“Spend it on someone who deserves it,” I said. “Are you going to finish those?”
“Give me your plate.” I passed it to her, and she slid most of the vegetables onto it and handed it back. “You’re not drinking,” she observed.
“Only in secret.”
“It wouldn’t do you any harm to cut down.”
“Right,” I said. This was familiar territory.
“For heaven’s sake. You should see yourself. Your face is all squinched shut. You look like you’re chewing an aspirin.”
“I’ve quit aspirin. It leads to Anacin, and eventually to Excedrin.”
“Be that way,” she said. I was good at stupid, but she was superlative at indifferent. I probably bore some of the responsibility for that.
I stabbed my fork into the center of the mound of vegetables and left it standing there. “After he scared the shit out of me,” I said, “I got drunk, and it made things worse. I was half-drunk when he phoned me, and he scared me then, too. Somehow, getting drunk doesn’t appeal to me.”
The Bone Polisher Page 20