Infinity One

by Robert Hoskins (Ed. )

  “He likes to be called Carnahan,” said the agency head. “We go along with our mechanicals. Little individual quirks are what make the Gores outfit superior to most. What’s the problem?”

  Hunzler dictated, “Emily Frazier’s mother and father are killed in India and she must fend for herself in the harsh competitive world of 19th Century London. It is, therefore, with a sigh of relief that Emily Frazier notes in the daily press of the period an advertisement seeking a governess for the two deranged sons of the lord of a mansion in the remote seaside town of Ledgemere.” “Well,” said Barry to the detective, “your Carnahan is getting too aggressive, Mr. Gores. You know, I only wanted him to, well, you know.”

  “See what your wife was up to while you’re in the city earning your livelihood," said Gores. “And that’s exactly what Carnahan has been doing and is doing. A damn competent job.”

  “I’m wondering if I really need such bulky equipment. Originally, you remember, I asked for something compact. Postage stamp size maybe.”

  “All that type of stuff can’t give you the details Carnahan can. It doesn’t have his judgement, nor his compassion. You get one of those bugging devices the size of a grain of sand and its got brains and heart to match.” Gores looked back over his shoulder. “There was a fad for that stuff in the early seventies, but most sensible operatives are back with the heavy hardware again.” “Maybe,” said Barry.

  “Carnahan, believe me, is ideally suited to sit out there at your house in Harborland Estates, Long Island, and keep track of your wife and her carrying on.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Barry softly. “But Carnahan keeps talking lately about taking a more active part in what’s going on. He may, I don’t know, speak up or do something physical.”

  “He does have those little hands and a concealed pistol built in for emergencies,” said Gores. “I’ll let you in on something, though. Carnahan is programmed to feel a little tougher than he really is. In these divorce cases you need an operative who thinks somewhat hard boiled.” “It’s not,” said Barry, “a divorce, Mr. Gores. I love Janey. I only wanted to find out what she was doing.” “You found out,” said Gores. “She’s sleeping with the top Mafia man on Long Island.”

  Barry winced, glanced over at Bernard Hunzler. Hun-zler, his eyes nearly closed, was saying into the mike, “What then is the dark secret of the third floor of the strange house at Ledgemere. Why are certain rooms shuttered and barred? Why does the Victorian plumbing work no better than it does?”

  “Naturally,” continued Gores, “Carnahan’s blood boils when he sees this Wally Rasmussen visiting your wife while you’re here toiling in the canyons of commerce.” “This guy Rasmussen,” said Barry, his lips hardly moving, “is not actually 'a top Mafia man, Mr. Gores. He’s associated with the Amateur Mafia, which is that new crime syndicate that started in the early seventies. They’re more liberal about who can join, take in non-Italians and so on.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I read it in Newsday.”

  “Yeah, well, Mafia or Amateur Mafia, he’s a punk; and a hood in any case.”

  Barry said, “I admit that. Still, I don’t want Carnahan doing something obtrusive. He just gets the facts and I take the action.”

  “What are you planning to do?”

  “I haven’t enough facts yet.”

  Gores head snapped suddenly to the left “There goes my pigeon. Looks like he just boosted four high priced coffee table books on Etruscan art. Don’t worry. Our chief computer is always in phone line contact with Carnahan. We’ll have a talk with him. Bye bye.” The screen blanked to its usual rose white.

  “Thus it is that Emily Frazier emerges from the shadows at long last,” Hunzler was dictating. “She can walk the proud halls of the mansion and be the true bride of Ledgemere for once and for all.” He waited for the machine to finish typing and punched it off. He grinned another sad grin over at Barry. “That’s worth more than SI500. The scene where the grave robbers bum down the grange hall is going to be terrific.”

  “Okay, I’ll try to get a check out to you by early next month. Still at your mother’s address?”

  “Where else?” Hunzler left and Barry went back to watching the bricks.

  Janey, a long lean girl with slim tan legs, dropped a servomechanism and said, “Damn. That’s the third servomechanism I’ve dropped since breakfast. Not my day, Barry.”

  Barry bent and swept up the scattered cogs and springs from the kitchen floor with the side of his palm. He got all the parts of the broken coffee grinder gathered into his cupped hands and then dumped them into the repair chute. “Maybe you can join me for a martini. Relax before dinner.”

  “The martini mixer is one of the servos I broke,” said his tall blonde wife.

  “Oh,” said Barry. Above the whirrings of the kitchen he could hear the surf hit the beach far below Harborland Estates. “I guess then I’ll take a shower now, change.” “I could make you a drink by hand,” said Janey. “I’m good at things like that.”

  “If you’d like.”

  “Would you like me to?”

  “Sure, if it’s no trouble.”

  “There’s no trouble taking trouble for you.” Janey hugged herself and her breasts huddled closer together. “Honestly, Barry. Why can’t you be more direct? Assert yourself. You’re thirty-one.”

  “Thirty,” he corrected. “What do you want? Would you like me to come home and act like some wild Viking out of a Flash Books barbarian novel?”

  “Better that than some Bernie Hunzler heroine,” said his wife. “Better than moping around like poor little Emily Frazier going out to Briarcliff Manor to look after two deranged kids.”

  Barry said, “Wait. Say that again.”

  “You don’t have any balls.”

  “No, I don’t mean the essence. The specific words.” The slender blonde said, “I was referring to Bernie’s book before last that 1 proofread when you had the flu. The Shadow Bride of Briarcliff.”

  “Christ,” said Barry. “I just bought the same gothic novel twice.”

  Janey said, “Who’d know?”

  “I don’t want to have an argument.”

  “So don’t.”

  “I buy us this damn place where you can actually hear the Long Island Sound.” He waved in the direction of the beach. “You might as well face things, Janey. The Shadow Bride of Briarcliff helps pay for that ocean.” He rose up on his toes, sighed and spun around. He aimed himself at their bedroom and went in there.

  The bed said, “Dames are like jungle cats. You have to treat them rough.”

  “Shut up,” said Barry. He closed the room’s laminated door and shook his head at the kingsize bed. He noticed a wisp of smoke coming up from the rug. “Hey, are you on the fritz?”

  “Relax, sweetheart,” said the bed’s hidden speaker grid. “I’m enjoying a gasper.”

  “A what?”

  “A cigarette. Your pal Rasmussen left a pack of bootleg coffin nails behind and I just set fire to one and am having a drag. Sometimes when I’m alone here time can seem as lonely as a football stadium in the off season.”

  “Smoking in bed is dangerous.” Barry sat down, slumped, on a lemon yellow lounge chair. “I don’t know, Carnahan.”

  “I know,” replied the bed. “Knowing is my business, sweetheart. There’s not a dame alive you can trust.” “Keep your voice down.” Barry tilted and unfastened his shoes. Moving across the rug he reached into the bathroom and started the water roaring in the shower stall. “Was that guy here again today?”

  “You ought to read my reports more carefully,” said the bed. “Rasmussen is almost always here, sweetheart Unless she’s there.” A slight gurgling came from beneath the disguised listening mechanism.

  “What else have you got under there, Carnahan?” “Rasmussen also left the good part of a fifth of bourbon behind.”

  “You’re actually programmed to drink, too?”

  “I’m not a cop, sweetheart.
I can drink on duty.” His voice was taking on a bit of a brogue.

  “I thought Janey never liked bourbon.” Barry said, “I keep trying, Carnahan, to come up with some mutually satisfying solution to this situation.”

  “Sometimes,” said the surveillance device, “lead is the best solution.”

  “Lead?”

  “Bullets talk louder than words,” Carnahan told him. “Let’s get something straight. I’m more than just another bugging device. Sure, I can tape conversations, film assignations, collect data on adultery. But the New York State law is such at the moment that evidence collected by a bed is not admissible in a divorce action. So I give you the dope I gather and you have to decide what to do. I can have opinions, though, sweetheart.” He apparently took another drink.

  “You guys, you and Gores, are always talking about divorce.” Barry paced from the bed to the open bathroom. “I never said anything about separating from Janey.”

  “Don’t lump me with Gores,” said the bed. “He’s only my partner.”

  “Gores is your partner now? Come on, you’re nothing but a monitoring device.”

  “I might even go into business on my own sometime," said Carnahan. “I’m getting tired of these divorce cases anyway. They leave a bad taste in my souL I’d like to work outside more.”

  “You’d look great trailing somebody up 53rd Street.” Carnahan exhaled cigarette smoke. “This caper may get cut off sooner than you think.’’

  Barry strode back to the bed. “What does that mean?” “There’s a contract out on Rasmussen,” said Carnahan. “The real Mafia doesn’t like the way the Amateur Mafia is cutting in on things here in Long Island. They’re going to hit Rasmussen.”

  “You mean kill him?”

  “Cancel him in lead,” said Carnahan. “Make him a candidate for the hoodoo wagon.”

  Barry said, “I hadn’t seen anything about the rivalry being that intense.”

  Carnahan said, “And you won’t read anything in the papers about the torpedoes who were parked across the street.”

  “Gangsters across the street?”

  “Most of this afternoon, sitting in one of those little electric sports cars,” the bed told him. “They’re not the boys who’ll make the hit, just a couple of gunsels staking Rasmussen out for Giacomo Maori’s Mafia family. Outside talent will be brought in for the real kill job.” Barry said, “You’re telling me that Mafia people are parking around outside our house in little electric sports cars and plotting to kill Wally Rasmussen?”

  “Little red electric sports car.”

  “No, they wouldn’t try to kill anybody in Harborland Estates.”

  “Death doesn’t have much class sense, sweetheart." Barry put his palms flat on his chest. “But Janey might get hurt.”

  Carnahan said, “She may not be the best dame in the world, but she’s a good kid at heart. Nothing’s going to happen to her while I’m around.”

  Barry wandered toward the bathroom. “I’ll do something.”

  “Yell copper?”

  “Not the police yet, no. They might make more of a mess than you and Gores have. I’ll have to talk to Janey.”

  The bed dropped the bourbon bottle. “Oops,” it said. “Okay, have it your way, sweetheart. You’re the client.”

  “Another thing,” said Barry. “My agreement with Gores states you’re supposed to turn yourself off and not record when Janey and I are here. And I don’t think you’re keeping all your mechanisms well enough hidden under there. Janey’s bound to notice you when she makes up the bed.”

  The bed chuckled. There was a faint click and Carnahan stopped talking.

  Walking into the bathroom, Barry stood around.

  The folding chair unfolded itself when Barry activated it, setting itself up on the sand. The copy of the weekend edition of Newsday flashed its headline when he tossed it into the chair. Prominent L.I. Hood Gunned Down, Barry had read the story already, found it wasn’t any of the prominent hoods he knew about. Gulls were sitting out on the buff colored rock near the shore. He turned from the headline and stood trying to concentrate on the brownish birds.

  At the waters edge Janey, in a one piece black jersey swimsuit, was rambling in the shallow water. Barry set his lips in a firm position and was about to stride to her when he heard something in the thick brush of the hillside behind him. He turned. A wide swath of twisted bushes and scrubby grass was being agitated as something low and wide descended from above. Barry checked on Janey and saw her bend and skim a white pebble across the quiet water. He walked up toward the rattling underbrush. He jogged when he got to the rough path leading back toward their sea-edge home.

  “The ocean looks like a great reservoir of sadness,” said Carnahan.

  “What in the hell are you doing out here?” He hopped off the path and into the bushes. Carnahan was in there, tilted way over to the left and smoking a cigar.

  “I just got a tip from a stoolie the Gores computer knows,” the bed told him. “This is a hot rip.”

  Barry looked up toward the backs of the other three houses sharing this stretch of beach. “Have you been drinking bourbon again? Coming out here in the middle of the morning. Somebody’s going to see you.” He put a hand against the footboard and gave a tentative push.

  “People are used to odd things in the suburbs, sweetheart,” said Carnahan. “Get this straight now. I just heard that Giacomo Macri has hired a couple of boys from Detroit to hit Rasmussen. It’s going to happen real soon.”

  Barry stopped and put a shoulder to the redwood footboard. “Okay. Now go back uphill.”

  “That’s a real Maxfield Parrish sky today, isn’t it?" remarked the big bed. “I’ve got to get more outside work.”

  “When are these guys going to do it?”

  “All I know is soon.”

  Barry said, “I’m going to talk to Janey right now.”

  “Okay, sweetheart. I won’t take the play away from you yet.” Carnahan grunted, made a high pitched whirring sound.

  “They’re going to hear that, somebody is. What’s wrong?”

  “It’s tough to get traction in this sandy ground.”

  Barry put his shoulder to the bed and after a moment of straining Carnahan’s wheels took hold and he shot forward and began rolling, rattling, uphill and away.

  The gulls on the rock all took off when Barry neared Janey. “You scared the birds,” she said.

  “Janey,” he said.

  “Now what?”

  “Sometimes,” he said, “we’re judged by the company we keep.”

  “True.” She ran two fingers of her left hand along her thigh, then picked up a pale orange pebble with the toes

  of her left foot and flicked it into the foam of the ocean.

  “What I mean is, sometimes when we play with fire, if you’ll forgive the cliche, we sort of get burned, as they say, I guess.”

  “Also true. So?”

  “Well,” said Barry, glancing at Connecticut across the water. “There’s a lot of crime around these days and it’s a problem.”

  Janey frowned, her lips parted. “Listen, Barry.” “Yes?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing, never mind.” She walked away from him, out into the water.

  He hesitated, didn’t follow.

  The doctor’s face faded from the phone screen on the living room coffee table. “Dr. Lupoffsky says it isn’t,” Barry called toward the kitchen.

  Janey brought him a container of self brewing tea and placed it on the table. “Isn’t the Brazilian flu again?”

  "I thought I had a relapse. But this is the Argentine flu.”

  “At least it’s still South American. What are you supposed to do?”

  “Same as with Brazilian flu. Stay home from work a couple of days, drink fluids,” Barry said. “Do I look particularly green to you, by the way?”

  “No,” said his wife. “Should you?”

  “Dr. Lupoffsky said the only thing that worried him was the green ti
nge to my face.”

  “He says that to all his patients,” said Janey. “The color reception on his phone is out of adjustment.”

  The phone sounded and Janey flicked it on. Bernard Hunzler appeared on the screen. “Barry there, he’s not in his office they told me?”

  “Barry is sick today, Bernie.”

  “Only take a minute, Jane,” said the gothic writer. “Hey, Barry, can you hear me?”

  “I’ll take it,” Barry said, gently pushing Janey. away from in front of the phone screen. “Yes, Bernard?”

  “Can’t we salvage The Shadow Bride of Ledgemere, Barry? Make it a series. The gothic adventures of Emily Frazier.” Hunzler grinned and his eyebrows drooped.

  “No, we don’t want a new series at Flash Books right now. Just change the names and the plot and resubmit the outline.”

  “I was hoping to get the $1500 right away. I’ve got to buy mother the electric blanket.”

  “I thought it was a rabbit coat.”

  “She broke her hip over the weekend and she’s confined to bed.”

  Janey pulled the red cellophane tag on the tea cup and the tea began to steam. Barry said, “Change the names and the title, Bernard.”

  “The Shadow Towers of Woodville” said Hunzler. “How’s that sound?”

  The front door of the house was pushed in and two men in tan jumpsuits stepped over the threshold. They had net stockings with paisley patterns pulled over their faces. One aluminum revolver was in the gloved right hand of each man. “Okay, Big Wally,” said the man moving into the room. His stocking mask was sky blue.

  Into the phone Barry said, “Call the police.”

  “What kind of title is that for a gothic?”

  The other gunman, the backup man, jerked the phone cord from its baseboard slot. “We got no orders on the dame. Just you, Rasmussen. We hit here after ten, when the schmuck who lives here is at work.”

  Janey swallowed. “He’s not Wally Rasmussen. He’s my husband.”

  “Into the bedroom, lady,” said the man with the sky blue mask.

  “I’m not Rasmussen,” said Barry. “Her husband is home sick today. It’s me.”