by Mel Gilden
"Shit," Whipper said with disgust.
Mr. Will looked at me and said, "Perhaps you are speaking in something other than vulgarities today."
"I manage once in a while," I said.
Mr. Will smiled at that.
I said, "We're looking for Whipper's surfer friends and my grandfather. We thought they might be here."
"Why?"
Whipper said his vulgarity again and Mr. Will crinkled his nose.
I said, "You'll be delighted to hear that you are our number one suspect. We can't think of anybody else who would want them."
"Why would I want them?" His voice was as flat as the table at the end of the room.
"Well," I said as if explaining when to add the egg whites, "we figure you're holding the surfers to make sure that Whipper continues to work for you. Maybe you want my grandfather to make sure I stay off your back."
"If that was my object the abduction doesn't seem to have done any good."
"Whipper is here," I said.
"I wasn't aware that he needed the kind of pressure you describe."
"Be aware, dude," Whipper said.
Mr. Will walked across the room and put his glass on the table where it would probably make a ring. That didn't seem to bother him. He said, "I will say this once, and I hope you're listening. I didn't abduct your friends. I have no interest in your friends. If somebody did abduct them, I'm sorry, but I had nothing to do with it. Is that clear enough for you?"
"Is that clear enough for you?" I said to Whipper.
Whipper said a different vulgarity, but it caused the same reaction in Mr. Will as the other one had.
"I will tell you this," Mr. Will said. "I run a nice, smooth operation here. Anybody who buys a ticket is welcome regardless of religion, creed, or belief. Even you, Mr, Marlowe, and your hunk of SSR tin are welcome if you buy a ticket and come in through the front gate. Have a swell time. But if you start poking that impressive nose of yours into my private life again, I'll have a restraining order on you so fast your head will swim."
"I've been warned."
"Good-bye, Mr. Marlowe. Whipper, I believe you have work to do." He watched us as if he expected us to blossom.
Whipper helped me a little when I took him by the elbow and strong-armed him to his feet. "Come on. Bill," I said. I nodded to Mr. Will as we passed, but Whipper looked straight ahead. Whipper pushed a bump in the fancy carving around the elevator, and a moment later the car arrived with a soft musical note.
On our way down Whipper made a sickly smile and said, "That was better than some of the rides."
I said, "You still think your father is not the right kind of guy to get what he wants by holding people for ransom?"
"I wouldn't be here if I still thought that."
"Then I'm pretty much free to do what I have to do."
Whipper frowned and glanced at me sideways. The car stopped at the third floor and we walked out into the chrome corridor. He was so preoccupied with what I'd said, he didn't even bother to walk like a surfer.
I followed him to the door of his office, where he turned to me and said, "Just don't hurt him."
"No more than I have to."
He didn't like that, but it was the best answer I had and he knew it. He nodded and went into his office. Bill and I hurried back to the elevator and rode down to the first floor with a sleek fat man carrying a sample case. He tried to start a conversation with me about the weather; I agreed with everything he said, which seemed to be all he wanted.
At the bottom he wished me a nice day and walked off as if his pants were on fire. I came around to the receptionist and said, "Mr. Will told me to wait for him. He come down yet?"
"Not yet," she said, then bit her lip, thinking maybe she shouldn't have told me that and not knowing why not.
I thanked her and took up a position just outside the entrance where I could see the elevator doors. I knew I could wait for hours, maybe days. He lived up there, after all, and had no reason that I knew of to go out. Except one. I hoped that I had upset him enough that he might want to check on his captives, and that he might want to check on them pretty quick. It was the same impulse that made a man pat his coat pocket after being bumped by a stranger to make sure his wallet was still there.
Sherlock Holmes went by, trailing tourists the way a comet trails stardust. A very official-looking type in a blue hat like the thumb of a glove strolled past twirling his baton. He smiled at me and went on. He was nothing but law, all prettied up for the party, but law nevertheless. If I was still there when he came by again he would probably talk to me.
Mr. Will came out of the elevator like a bull out of a rodeo chute and did not bother to stop at the receptionist's desk. I saw her put up one hand, about to call him, but he stepped along pretty good, and by the time she decided to open her mouth he was gone. I was right behind him.
He marched out of Victorian London and skirted the maze. I was afraid he'd go in, but he didn't. He went between the marble columns and sort of strolled among rides with names like Slideway of Olympus, Ulysses' Boat Ride, and Pegasus's Carousel. He did not have a Hebe Cola or a Minotaur Burger.
He walked just fast enough to make the chase interesting for me but never so fast that Bill and I couldn't follow him with a little work. If he was just a brisk walker I might actually learn something. If he wanted me to follow him I was probably walking into a trap. That was all right. I was ready for a little honesty about now. I hadn't slept in a bed since night before last, and losing Zamp had been a lot of work. My eyes felt like birds' nests and my body was a leather sack full of bones and old rags.
Mr. Will walked down the Robin Hood street. I could keep closer now because of the crowds. He stopped at the entrance to the Castle of Android Progress and looked around. Did he want to make sure I was still following or just the opposite? Satisfied one way or the other, he ducked inside.
"Come on, Bill," I said, "now's your big chance."
"It's later?"
"It won't get any more so."
"Cousins," he cried, and waddled in through the entrance.
Bill and I walked into a dim hallway that pretended to be made of big rocks. The hallway was lit by torches held out from the walls by horizontal arms. The head of each torch was not on fire but held an orange electric flickering. Between the torches were windows through which the customers could view scenes from the history of artificial men. Bill trotted from one to the next, his eyes glowing a little in the semidarkness.
One window showed a big creature made of dirt menacing a guy wearing a small round hat. The plaque said the dirt creature was a golem. We saw Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, and Isaac Asimov inventing the positronic brain. The invention of the android was accompanied by soft pink light and angelic singing. I saw no mention of Mr. Knighten Daise or of Surfing Samurai Robots.
The hallway twisted and curved, as uncertain as a kid choosing an ice-cream flavor. I hustled Bill along pretty fast, but I still lost Mr. Will more than once as he went around a corner.
He disappeared and I pulled Bill away from a window showing the golden Maria robot from Metropolis shaking hands with Robby from Forbidden Planet. Beyond the corner was a straight corridor lined by androids on pedestals, each of them looking noble and just about to move in the dappled light. The corridor was empty. Unless he'd run faster than a human can run, Mr. Will had not entered it.
To one side was a small room lit by one of those cockamamy electric torches. There were no windows in this room. No nothing. Just a single flickering torch that made nervous shadows against the smooth stone walls.
There was no place for Mr. Will to hide. He had gone up in nothing, like one of his evaporating cars.
Chapter 14
Private Parts
I STARED at the empty room glumly, knowing what I would have to do next. I didn't want to do it. I was no less tired than I had been when Mr. Will had begun his constitutional across Willville. I felt as if I were wearing a diving suit. I wante
d to curl up on the nice soft flagstones and sleep for a day or two.
But that wouldn't find Zamp and the others. And I was convinced that was about to happen. Where better for Mr. Will to hide them than in some secret room in his very own personal castle?
Bill and I stood in a wing of shadow between two show windows and watched the entrance to the side room. Most people passed us as if we weren't there. A lanky woman in white short-shorts and a piece of blue elastic across her top stopped when she saw me. I didn't move. She came closer and, probably thinking I was one of the exhibits, poked me gently in the cheek with one finger. I smiled. She yelped and hurried down the long straight hallway where Mr. Will had not gone.
The entire population of Los Angeles County went by in small groups, goggling at the mechanical wonders. A suspicion grew like a strangling weed that Mr. Will either wasn't coming out or had gone out another way. I was about to risk meeting him on his own turf when I blinked and he was standing at the threshold between the small empty room and the dark corridor. How long had he been there? Had I fallen asleep on my feet?
Mr. Will strolled out the long hall in no hurry—like a man who knew he was important and that other important people would wait for him if they wanted him. I watched him walk out through a fan of sunshine at a doorway at the far end.
Still watching the place where I'd last seen Mr. Will, I ran across the dark corridor with Bill and went into the small bare room, glaring at it as if it had personally done me harm. I said, "We're looking for a way out of here other than the way we came in. One of these stones will probably trip open a door if we tap it or push it just right."
"Tapping and pushing. Got it. Boss," Bill said, but didn't move.
"Start pushing and tapping," I said.
Bill started at one side of the room and I started at the other. I stopped us a few times when paying customers went by, and once, a round-faced kid with a bush of red hair looked around the corner. I told him we were fixing the bricks. He nodded and went away. Nobody else bothered us.
Half an hour later I had put fingerprints on every stone as high as I could reach, and all I had to show for it was calluses on my fingertips and a kink in my neck. Above me was a good two feet of wall that Mr. Will was tall enough to reach.
I would have stood on Bill's shoulders, but he didn't have any, so I had him stand on mine. He did not manage to get aboard the first time. At last I pulled and he jumped at the right moment and landed on my shoulders with the weight of a locomotive. I grunted, then half-turned and propped myself against the wall with both hands.
"Push and tap," I said.
We danced like drunken acrobats all around the room. Bill pushing and tapping, me grunting as we went. When we found nothing, I took Bill around again. Still nothing. We stopped and Bill reached out for the torch to keep his balance.
"It's loose," Bill said, and wobbled it a little.
Of course it was loose. If my brain had been brighter than the underside of a theater seat, shaking the torch would have occurred to me first. I yelled up at him, "Can you work a four-speed stick shift?"
"Sure, Boss. I just can't see over the dashboard."
He thought that was pretty funny, and maybe it was. I had Bill run through the gears with the torch. When he got to third, something in the end wall clicked and a straight floor-to-ceiling crack appeared.
I ordered Bill back to the floor, where he landed with surprising grace and bobbed on his springs. I looked at the opening for a moment, enjoying the feeling of triumph. Then I pushed the door open to see if I deserved to feel it.
The door was perfectly balanced. It fell open at my touch without a squeak. On the other side, three steps descended along a short brown hallway; at the other end was an intricately carved wooden door that looked as if it had been liberated from an old church.
The wall opened from this side with a standard door lever. I made sure it would work for me, and I closed the wall to keep out the riffraff. Bill and I walked down the three steps and I licked my lips before I pulled open the carved wooden door.
I knew what I expected to find: row after row of cages, each containing someone I knew; or all of my friends in a deep pit, or stretched out on instruments of torture, or hanging by their thumbs. I did not expect what I actually found behind that door.
It was a square room that rose in rugged gray stone on four sides to a skylight three or four floors above. In the center of the room, a small fountain chuckled and sparkled into a square pool in which big orange fish swam without care. About half a mile beyond the pool was a wide desk with a high-backed black leather chair behind it. Papers were stacked on long, low tables around the desk. On the wall behind the desk were some framed documents written in fancy script to make them look more important. To one side was a door that was three-quarters shut. It was an office. It was a very nice office, but that's all it was.
I told Bill to stay where he was and without sound I crossed the stone courtyard and looked in at the partly opened door. Inside was a neatly kept bedroom and beyond that a bathroom. This was Mr. Will's retreat. He probably had a freezer full of pizza around somewhere and a microwave oven.
The papers on the long, low tables were business reports of some kind, full of tall columns with big amounts at the bottoms. Even up close the framed documents didn't seem to mean anything.
The desk belonged to a man who did his work elsewhere, or had somebody else do it. On one corner was a rocking horse made of thick silver wire. On another was a statue of an android. A framed photograph stood on the desk where Mr. Will could see it. It showed himself and Whipper and the strong pleasant woman. The drawers of the desk were not locked. One contained a bottle of brewski. Another contained a magazine with pictures of women who seemed happy to mostly not be wearing any clothes and a paperback novel called Guns of the Pecos.
In the center of the desk, its edges lined up with the edges of the blotter, was a single sheet of notepaper under a brass paperweight in the shape of a goldfish. On the paper was a list of names you would definitely want to consider for your next brewski bust. There was the mayor of Los Angeles, the guy who owned the local baseball team, Knighten Daise, Max Toodemax, a woman who hosted an early morning TV show, and a few more. Daise and Toodemax and a few of the others had checkmarks against them. Others did not.
I tried to make something out of this, but I couldn't. A man in Mr. Will's position would want a place where nobody could find him—a private place where he could work, relax, and indulge in his manly vices. As far as the list went, it was not difficult for me to believe that Iron Will would mix with people like this. Maybe he was just throwing a party.
At the top of the desk was a calendar that showed the entire month. The square three days hence was circled in red. In the same red ink it said, "The lab—10:30 a.m."
I used the phone on Mr. Will's desk to call the Willville operator. I asked for Whipper Will. When he came on the line, I asked him if anything important was happening at his lab in three days.
"Not that I know of."
"What about at another lab?"
"Not that I know of."
"Would you know of it if there was?"
"If it was a Will Industries lab, of course. I'm the big kahuna and the boss's son. Why do you ask?"
"A breeze just went by, that's all. I'll tell you about it when I see you."
I hung up, and while I absentmindedly wiped my fingerprints off the telephone with my handkerchief I wondered if another secret door existed somewhere, maybe back through the bedroom—one that led to the lab. Sure. And another secret door behind that and another behind that. That way lay therapeutic basket weaving and a reserved room with walls done in designer rubber.
"Come on. Bill," I said. "We have a stop to make before we go back to Malibu."
"The excitement never stops," said Bill.
"No," I said as I pushed open the wall. "That would make things too easy."
Chapter 15
He's Only Human
Bill and I rode the tram back out into the parking lot, where drivers still circled like vultures looking for a place to stash their heaps. Bill knew right where the car was. Inside it was an oven. We rolled down both windows to let out the hot air and would have waited for the temperature to drop below boiling if it had not been for a Venusian-purple sporty model that was making a lot of noise about wanting the spot.
The drive back to Hollywood was long and I had plenty of time to think. I might as well have concentrated on my driving.
Despite the lack of hard evidence I was still convinced that Iron Will had kidnapped Zamp and the surfers. ID Advertising truck number eighty-two had taken Zamp away and had arrived at ID Advertising about an hour after I had. An hour would have just given the truck time to drop a bundle off at Willville and return to ID Advertising. Of course, there were a lot of places the truck could have dropped Zamp. It was possible the driver had been caught in traffic—it happens even in the middle of the night when Caltrans is out repairing the freeway—and that the time meant nothing at all.
Darken Stormy seemed to hang around an awful lot, but that may have had less to do with a sinister plot than it had to do with her fixation on Whipper. Still, it was obvious from her actions at the trade show that she was working for Mr. Will in a fashion that was more than casual. Darken and Mr. Will were into each other for plenty. But plenty of what?
Something important was happening at a lab at ten-thirty in the morning in three days. The event had something to do with the list on Mr. Will's desk, or not. It had something to do with Zamp and the gang, or not. Or none of it may have had anything to do with anything.
I had clues, all right, but they wouldn't connect. I might as well have kept them rattling around in a shoe box.
It was midafternoon by the time I drove up Franklin Avenue