A Borrowed Man (22 page)

“I have never…” I wanted to sit down, but there was no place to sit unless I sat in the ground car.

“Never what?”

“Never felt so utterly stupid. Never realized that I was such an idiot. She got away from them, just as I—” My watch struck one. “Well, never mind. May I tell you the whole story, Georges? I need to. I have to tell someone.”

“Sure. I'd like to hear it. What do you say we go inside? Maybe the 'bot could fix us some lunch.”

I followed him. When all three of us were sitting around the cheerful little table in the sunroom, I said, “Colette and I were together in Owenbright. I had no money—I have very little now, really—so she rented a suite for the two of us. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a common lounge. We weren't lovers, you understand. Simply friends.”

Georges nodded. “We've got it.”

“We were going to freshen up, change clothes, and go out for dinner. I took a shower, changed, and waited for her in the lounge. It almost always takes a woman longer than a man.”

Georges nodded. “Sure.”

“After a while I realized there were no sounds coming from her bedroom. No water running in her bathroom, nobody walking around, nothing. I knocked on the door and asked if she were all right. There was no answer. Frankly, I got frightened. I thought she might be dead in there, or unconscious.”

“This really bothers you, doesn't it?” Georges sounded sympathetic.

“I knew she had enemies, that people were spying on her. She had asked for my help. At first you think somebody's paranoid, but by then I knew she wasn't, that it was a fact.” I tried to keep my voice steady; that was something I just about always did. “Now she was gone,” I said.

The maid 'bot brought in a salad, lemonade for Mahala and me and a spritzer for Georges.

When the 'bot had gone, Georges said, “She couldn't have just walked out and left you?”

“No. A lamp had been knocked over and her shaping bag was still there. She would never have gone off without it. She kept everything in there, eephone, mad money, and makeup. All the things a woman carries.”

Mahala tapped my arm and held up a yellow scratch pad and a pen: MAY I?

Georges said, “She found those up in the lab. Is it all right for her to keep them?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.” I stopped for a moment to think. “What had happened seems to me reasonably clear. The people who'd been after Colette had entered our suite, subdued her, and abducted her, presumably while I was in the shower. You wouldn't have screened the police, I know. I did.”

Georges nodded. “And…?”

“They said they wouldn't even try to find her unless a relative had reported her missing and she'd been gone at least a full day. I tried to tell them that she had no family left, that her mother, her father, and her brother were all dead, but they wouldn't listen.”

“And you're not a relative.”

“Correct. If I'd known of a relative, I would have contacted that person and asked him or her to screen the police, but I didn't. Perhaps you took time out while you were searching the father's bedroom to do a screen search for the name Coldbrook.”

“Wrong but right. It was before I started looking. You were in the library and Mahala was busy upstairs, so I thought why not me?”

I nodded. “What did you find?”

“Financial stuff. There were three companies with Coldbrook in their names. There was that newsletter. It was mostly stock tips, only he wasn't writing it anymore. Somebody else had it. There was a family trust, and a bunch of bank accounts, brokerage accounts, and real estate holdings. Pretty good for a middle-management guy, I'd say.”

I nodded.

“But no people except him, now deceased, the wife, also deceased, the son—it said he'd been murdered—and the daughter, Colette Carole Coldbrook. She had two or three degrees, and she was teaching at a place called the Forest Glade Academy in Spice Grove.”

“No other relatives?”

Georges shook his head.

Mahala touched my arm and pointed to herself.

I said, “Yes, please look. If you find any, get in touch with them. Tell them I'm a friend and you're my secretary. Ask them to contact the police in Spice Grove. Tell them what I've just told you.”

Mahala nodded, and wrote. When she handed me her new tablet it read: WIFE'S NAME?

“You're right, and I should have thought of that.” I turned to Georges. “You must have come across it when you did your search. Do you remember it?”

“Yeah. I'm pretty good on that stuff. Joanne Rebecca Carole. That's ‘Carole' with an
e.
” He spelled it.

I said, “Meanwhile there's the ground car. Clearly Colette was able to escape her captors, probably without their realizing she was gone. She would have returned to our hotel, not only to reclaim her shaping bag but in the hope of finding me. Either her shaping bag was still in our suite, or it was in the hotel's lost and found. She had a leased flat in Spice Grove, but she also had an excellent reason not to return there. Perhaps there are commercial flights between Owenbright and New Delphi. I don't know.”

Georges said, “She'd have had to fly to Niagara and get a new flight from there. But she wouldn't go to the airport anyway if she was smart. As soon as they found out she was loose they'd have had somebody there. What she did was a lot smarter.”

“Perhaps. Still, they guessed where she'd gone, came here, and recaptured her. They may not have planted their devices in this house, but they knew of it.” I paused to consider. “Couldn't she have hired protection? Armed bodyguards?”

“Sure, if she had the money and the time.”

I nodded, mostly to myself. By then I was thinking of something else.

“Want us to go back to searching the house? Listening devices, money, or weapons?”

“I don't think so. I'd like Mahala to continue her screen search for Coldbrooks and Caroles here in New Delphi.”

Turning to her, I said, “Remember what I told you. I'm Colette's friend. You're my secretary. She's been missing for two days. We'd like the relative to call the police.”

Mahala nodded.

I stood, not the least bit hungry and anxious to get away. “Georges, I'd like you to search that ground car. You found the rental agreement in the dash box. Now see if there's anything else in there. Look in the trunk and under the seats—and in every other place you can think of.”

He may have said something then; if he did, I paid no attention to it. I left the sunroom as quickly as I could and went straight to the lift tube.
Murder on Mars
was in the lab, where I had parked it after Georges and I checked out the reactor. I had shut the door of the safe, but since I did not know the combination, I had not locked it.

Opening the big steel door we'd been so anxious to seal took me fifteen or twenty minutes. I pulled off tape as fast as I could, scared that Georges or Mahala—or both together—would step out of the lift tube any minute. They did not, and I walked into the new world that Conrad Coldbrook had discovered, retched and nearly fell, took a deep breath, and looked around knowing I was going to pull it off.

After that, I tried the lever on the jungle side of the door. As I had pretty much expected, it was locked. When I had tested the book the first time, that door had been locked, both sides. I had waved the back of the book first, and heard the soft click of the lock on the back unlocking. I had unlocked it by accident when we dashed up to it, and it had locked again while Georges stood there holding the lever. We could have saved ourselves an hour or more of running around and taping just by thinking a little.

The steep path I had noticed earlier took me up to the dark hole in the cliff face. The little light from the kitchen was still in my pocket; I slapped it onto my forehead and switched it on and off a few times before I went inside.

The rocky ceiling was low, so low at first that a tall man like Conrad Coldbrook must have had to stoop. I did not. There was a permasteel fence about a dozen steps in, close-set bars as sharp as so many knives at the top; but
Murder on Mars
unlocked the gate, and I strolled in as if I owned the place. By then I had seen the rifle leaning against an old wooden table inside. That was the first thing I found in Conrad Coldbrook's mine, but not the last.

Not by a long shot.

 

14

M
AXETTE
, M
ONEY
, M
ONSTERS
,
AND
A
M
OON

When Mahala came up, I was in the lab poking around and had just decided not to show Georges what I had found there. I expected her to show me her pad, but she used the screen to talk for her instead: “I found an Alice Carole. She was Joanne Carole Coldbrook's mother. I told her about her granddaughter Colette, and she promised to screen the police.”

I gave her my best smile. “Good work!”

Mahala smiled back, and her fingers flew over the keys. “If you want her address, I have it.”

“Not now. We may need it later, though.”

“I found the housekeeper, too.” The voice from the screen's speakers was brisk but sweet. “Her name's Judy Peters, and she'll come out so you can talk to her. All you have to do is set a time.”

“More good work.” I hesitated, trying to decide whether it would be better for us to question Judy Peters in her home or for her to come to this one. “Don't get back to her yet. We've got other things to take care of first. Do you know whether Georges has found anything in that ground car?”

Mahala did not, so we went downstairs to find out. He was still working on it, looking at the undersides of the floor mats. “I know you can drive,” I said. “What about Mahala?”

She shook her head, and Georges told me that she could not and did not want to learn.

“In that case, you're going to have to teach me to do it.” Naturally, I did not tell him the first me had driven twenty-first-century hybrid cars. I had not known how much of that would carry over; but it turned out a lot had, and modern ground cars were easier.

When I was sitting in the driver's seat holding the little wheel, Georges said, “The main thing is that you've got two parallel systems. It's just like a flitter. You know about flitters?”

I told him I knew a little.

“Same deal. You can drive by spoken command, or you can work the controls yourself. I like doing that, and so do quite a few other people. Then if you get tired, the car can take over. Some people go to sleep then, but I wouldn't advise it.”

“I understand.”

“Thing is, anybody can do voice commands. If you want to get a license, you've got to know manual. They figure you're not safe to drive if you can't do that.”

I said, “Fine. How do I start it?”

“With a voice command or that switch next to the screen.”

“All right, let's start.”

“Look straight ahead and talk to the ground car, not to me. Loud voice, and clear, just like you were talking to a screen. I haven't found this car's name, if it's got one; but it's a Maxette, so ‘Maxette' ought to work.”

Facing straight ahead I said, “Maxette, start!”

There was no engine noise, but the screen came on, the sim a business-like guy in some sort of uniform.

“Now say ‘manual.'”

I did.

“All right, you've got two foot pedals. The one on the right makes it go forward. The harder you push on that, the faster it goes. The one on the left makes it stop. The harder you push, the faster it stops. You already know about the wheel, right? Clockwise for right, counterclockwise for left.”

I drove down to the road, stopped to look both ways, made a right onto the road, and drove down it for two or three kilometers until I found a good place to turn around. By that time I had seen a switch on the steering column that put Maxette into reverse, only you had to be at a dead stop or it would not move. When the road was clear both ways, I backed onto it and drove us back to the Coldbrook house.

“You were fine,” Georges told me. “Just don't get too confident and you'll be all right.”

I promised I would not, and told him that I wanted to try voice—only we ought to pick up Mahala first, if she wanted to come.

So we did, and after that she and Georges sat in back with him looking over my shoulder. There was a lot of that at first, then not much at all when he saw that I was not going to get into trouble. I kept the speed at fifty-five or under, and did not try to show off. One thing that surprised me and that I really liked a lot was that I could tell Maxette to go about as fast as the other cars on the road and it would do it. Then I saw what I had been watching for the whole time, a floating sign for one of those rest-stop places. Loud and clear I said, “Pull into that rest stop and park, Maxette,” and it worked like a charm.

Georges asked if I needed to go. They had restrooms there and some really advanced vending machines, plus four or five picnic tables under some trees. I said no, and got him and Mahala to go over to one of the picnic tables and sit down.

He said, “I get it. You're still afraid they might be listening.”

I nodded. “Or looking. Or both. They knew about the Coldbrook house, and they knew pretty quickly when Colette got there, or that's what it seems like. I had the screen looking behind us. Probably you noticed.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“If we were being followed, I never identified them, but that doesn't mean they weren't there.” I took the stones I had found in Conrad Coldbrook's mine out of my pocket and laid them on the table. There were seven of them; I said, “Look at these.”

They did. Mahala nodded, and Georges picked up the biggest and held it up to the light. Finally he said, “Are these what I think they are?”