Cole Perriman's Terminal Games (11 page)

But she couldn’t shake off her fear. It was as if she had gotten an obscene phone call last night—one so threatening that she suddenly felt suspicious of
everybody,
even total strangers she randomly passed on the sidewalk.

He touched her. He touched Sapphire.

Renee began to rock slightly in her chair. Why did the clown have such a powerful grip on her imagination? The conversations between Auggie and Sapphire had seldom amounted to anything more than standard exchanges of wisecracks, playful insults, and childish arguments.

It was true that Auggie had made occasional odd suggestions that she was ready to participate in something mysterious and wonderful. Renee had discounted those intimations, assuming that Auggie and Sapphire were merely playing games of seduction.

And she also had been startled by Auggie’s rather weird capacity for empathy. Renee felt a surge of discomfort well up as she remembered a scene from several nights ago in Ernie’s Bar. Sapphire had been delivering her usual facile lines. Then, out of the blue, Auggie had said, “You’re not alone.”

“You’re not alone.”

That was all. Why did the memory of those simple words disturb her? Because, she realized, it was as if Auggie had detected
her
inner loneliness—hers, not Sapphire’s. It was as if he had looked out of the computer and spoken directly to Renee.

*

The computer dealt the rows with blinding speed, from the single card on the left to the stack of seven cards on the right. It placed the remainder of the deck face down in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen. Four vacant, card-sized spaces across the top of the screen were ready and waiting for aces. A single seven of hearts blazed out among four spades and two clubs.

It was no good. Myron Stalnaker couldn’t play a thing.

He clicked his mouse to turn over three cards from the top of the remaining deck. He was able to play a three of hearts onto a four of clubs. He repeated the clicking action several times, without success. Then an eight of diamonds appeared near the bottom of the deck. He was able to play it atop a nine of spades. The rest of the deck turned itself over, inviting him to repeat the action again. He did so, listlessly.

The game always made him feel like he was standing outside his own body, watching himself play over his shoulder. It made him feel more mechanical than the computer itself—like some sort of volitionless, pattern-recognition gadget. It wasn’t a bad feeling, and it wasn’t a pleasant one either. The truth of it was, it didn’t feel like much of anything at all. That was the way he wanted it.

He’d been playing the game over and over again for two hours now, relegating himself to an escalating numbness until Insomnimania came on. He hadn’t won once. But that didn’t matter. He was a machine, and a good machine didn’t care if it won or lost. It only carried out its program.

That’s how it had been last night. He had felt Auggie’s rage rush through the passive circuitry of his nervous system en route to his obedient fingertips, where it continued on its way down into the keyboard and into the phone lines beyond.

Why did he have to be so cruel? Why did he have to say such heartless things?

She had seemed like a perfectly nice lady—if, indeed, she was a lady. That was an uncertain proposition, considering the likely number of cross dressers in Insomnimania. In any case, she certainly had a lively and entertaining personality. And her kind of banter didn’t usually provoke Auggie’s indignation. But Auggie exploded at inexplicable moments, suddenly and angrily giving up on blossoming friendships with other characters.

Why does he have to do that?

A vague notion flickered through Myron’s mind:
They disappoint him.

At the time, Myron had wanted to intercede. He had wanted to tell Sapphire of Auggie’s manifold services and kindnesses, his profound capacity for friendship.

“You just caught him at a bad time,” he wanted to tell her. “Come back tomorrow. You’ll see him in a better light.”

Myron himself had often experienced Auggie’s capacity for kindness and compassion. He remembered those gentle words Auggie had once spoken to him ...

“You’re not alone.”

How long had it been since anybody had offered him any such comfort? All it had taken was four simple syllables. What was so wrong with flesh and blood human beings that they couldn’t say something so plain but beautiful?

Auggie was nothing if not loving. But Myron had no way of telling Sapphire that. He could only keep his silence.

Life is unfair.

Myron’s eyes were tired from staring at the screen. He rested them for a moment by turning toward the window. A full scale Nebraska winter raged outside. Snow was falling furiously.

A good night to stay in.

Myron tried to replay the rest of last night’s events. But after the ugly scene with Sapphire, his memories became more and more vague until they slipped away into a void. What had happened in the Basement afterward? What did Auggie say there? What plans had been made?

Myron couldn’t remember. Had he fallen asleep at the computer? Memory lapses were typical in his encounters with Auggie, and he normally liked it that way. Life was too full of ugly things he could remember all too well. It was pleasant to have a few patches of benign oblivion here and there.

But he wished he knew what had happened last night. He wished he knew what had been said. It seemed very important to remember.

Why can’t I remember?

Huge kamikaze snowflakes splattered themselves against the windowpane like insects against a car windshield, a nearby streetlight illuminating their guts as they rolled down the glass and slowly refroze.

*

Marianne neared the downstairs elevator corridor. She was on her way back to her room to take a quick shower between conference events. She wondered if she’d have a message from Renee. She wondered when she and Renee would be able to get together.

Marianne rode the elevator to the sixth floor and stepped out into that fateful corridor. She paused and looked at the white-painted wall. It seemed to have lost its hold on her imagination. She found it easy, now, to accept its lie, to deny its hidden blood. She did not even consider turning up the corner of the throw rug to see the stain underneath.

How quickly we become immune.

But of course, she knew she wasn’t really impervious to what she had seen there. Sooner or later, the shape of that bloodstain would flash in her mind again. She was sure of that. Because if she were truly free of that image, she wouldn’t even pause to contemplate her own immunity. And she wouldn’t hear his name shudder across her brain ...

“Auggie,”
breathed Marianne.

*

“Auggie,”
whispered Renee.

*

“Auggie,”
cried Myron Stalnaker softly—and the world seemed a bit less cold.

00111
WASTELAND

The living room was vast and surprisingly barren. There were only a half-dozen or so carefully placed pieces of furniture about, all extremely plain. Even the two large paintings on the walls were pale, formal, and geometric. Two large, undecorative wool rugs covered only a small part of a hardwood floor. If Nolan didn’t know better, he might almost have guessed that the occupants were terribly poor.

But poor folks
would have gone to some trouble to make it look homey. Judson spent a lot of money to keep this place looking cold and sterile—a
hell
of a lot of money.

G. K. Judson’s apartment occupied one entire floor of a downtown Chicago skyscraper. Nolan guessed that the whole place covered almost as much space as the block he lived on back in Culver City. And every square foot of the apartment was undoubtedly as carefully composed, and as sparse and uninviting, as the living room.

It was late Saturday afternoon, Nolan’s second day in Chicago. He was accompanied by Chicago Police Lieutenant Paul Spiroff, a bookish-looking fellow with round rimmed glasses and a narrow, thoughtful face. Spiroff was standing in the doorway to the room, gazing off into the surrounding hallways. Nolan thought he looked more like a graduate student in philosophy than a police detective.

Nolan was talking with Claudia Judson, G. K. Judson’s widow. She was the last person he planned to interview before he flew back to L.A. tomorrow, and Nolan had actually asked her very few questions. His main purpose was to fill her in on how the investigation was going—to assure her that every effort was being made to find her husband’s killer. After all, someone this rich was surely more interested in answers than questions.

As he went over his notes with her, Nolan noticed how well she fit into her surroundings—a kind of minimalist woman. Wearing no jewelry at all, her straight but full sandy hair hanging over a simple yet presumably expensive sweater, she looked as austere as the room itself.

Nolan couldn’t help wondering how old she was. But she looked perfectly ageless. Her skin appeared to be made of some kind of elegant fabric—fine linen, perhaps, smooth and immaculately pressed. Her face showed no wrinkles. It showed creases, yes, but nothing one could rightly call a wrinkle. She didn’t look middle-aged, but she certainly didn’t look young, either. Nolan supposed that G. K. Judson wouldn’t have wanted her to look young. He had been too substantial a man to marry some callow, immature bimbo. After all, he could—and it appeared he did—have bimbos anywhere he went. Bimbos were too cheap, too tawdry, too frilly to keep as permanent fixtures in his home.

Nolan’s debriefing was now coming to an end. Throughout it all, Claudia Judson showed no trace of emotion, only a kind of respectful, dignified politeness. She was just now starting to ask questions.

“Exactly who did you talk to at the hotel?” she inquired.

“Mostly people on the staff,” Nolan said. “A few of the guests, too. But we checked through the hotel register and client credit card records, and we didn’t turn up any connections with your husband. And of course, there were no eyewitnesses that we know of.”

Claudia Judson studied Nolan’s face carefully, even skeptically. “Isn’t it true that my husband was killed on the sixth floor?” she asked.

“That’s right,” Nolan replied, a little uncomfortably. He knew what was coming next.

“And he was actually staying on the eighth floor?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any idea what he was doing on the sixth floor, Lieutenant?”

Nolan noticed that Spiroff shifted from one foot to the other. But the Chicago detective said nothing, and his face remained impassive. Until this moment, Nolan had appreciated Spiroff’s willingness to stay in the background. But now he would have appreciated a little help.

Nolan cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Ma’am, this is an issue I’d hoped not to go into,” he said.

“Well?”

“He spent the several hours before his murder in the ... company of a young woman.”

“In her room?”

“That’s right.”

Claudia Judson’s face showed no trace of surprise or alarm. But her steady gaze told Nolan that she expected a fuller explanation.

“We checked the woman out thoroughly,” Nolan said. “We’re absolutely sure that she had nothing to do with your husband’s murder.” He paused and added, “If it’s all the same to you, I’d really rather not get more specific about her.”

Claudia Judson smiled blandly. “Of course,” she said. “Forgive me if I seem overly preoccupied with details.”

She then went on to ask about more commonplace matters. Nolan guessed that she was fully aware of her husband’s infidelities. If that was the case, why had she pressed him about the woman at the hotel? She hadn’t seemed to be motivated by morbid curiosity.

She doesn’t like loose ends. She likes life to be tidy. That’s just her way. Apparently it was his way, too. It would probably be
my
way if I had their money.

As a cold blast of Chicago winter wind howled past the room’s enormous plate glass windows, Nolan realized that he didn’t envy the extremely wealthy as much as he had imagined.

*

At about four o’clock L.A. time, Clayton was sitting at his desk in the detective bay area writing a report of today’s activities. There was painfully little to put into the computer. Clayton had talked to everybody he could locally about the Judson killing, and the rest of his time had been devoted to going over the lame and insignificant findings of the forensics team.

Clayton was in the middle of a yawn when his desk phone rang. It was Nolan.

“Hey,” Clayton said. “How d’you like Chicago?”

“How do you think?”

“So, you talked to a lot of distraught friends and loved ones?”

“Ha! Most of the people here are tickled to death that he got croaked. His son and daughter—spoiled brats, both of them—were only interested in how the estate would be divided up. And his wife doesn’t seem to have any feelings whatsoever. I got introduced to one of his stockholders—a rival, apparently. When I asked him if anybody wanted Judson dead, the guy actually laughed. ‘You can start with me,’ he said. ‘I’d be honored to be considered a suspect.’ He seemed really bummed out to have a solid alibi. I could tell you more. I talked to lots of people. But it’s all pretty much the same story.”

“Must’ve been a pretty sparse funeral,” Clayton remarked.

“No, it was grand. Hundreds of black-clad mourners crying the most pearly crocodile tears you ever saw. Real swank and majestic. I figure Judson made arrangements in his will to pay lots of people to grieve.”

“Sounds like that murder mystery—which one was it?—where everybody did it.”

“Except I’ve never worked a homicide everybody wanted to take credit for,” Nolan replied. “Hell, I met folks who would’ve cheerfully been convicted and executed just so everybody’d
believe
they’d done it.”

“But you don’t think any of them did.”

“Nope. Not any of the ones I talked to.”

“So we still ain’t got a laugh.”

“Not here. Not unless you’ve got something there.”

Clayton groaned. “Not a chance,” he said. “Things’re going to hell in a hand basket on this end. It might be smart of you to just hang around there.”

“Hey, where do you think I am, the Bahamas? I’ll see you Monday.”

“Yeah, Monday.”

Clayton hung up the phone and looked around. As always, the detective bay area was a blur of activity, rather like a stock exchange. Even on a Saturday, detectives were coming and going and jabbering at one another. Clayton turned and stared at his computer screen, trying to concentrate on the three or four more sentences he had left to write. The noises around him blended into a uniform background sound. He rubbed his eyes and yawned deeply. He was dog-tired. He’d barely gotten any sleep since the case started.

His eyes closed. He couldn’t help it. He felt his consciousness cut its moorings. He felt himself drifting off to sleep.

Then a sharp exclamation punched through his drowsiness ...

“Snap out of it!”

Clayton’s head jerked up. He opened his eyes. The voice had been spoken in a forceful, aggressive, nearby whisper. He spun around in his chair to see who was standing there. But the next cop was over at the next desk—and Clayton was sure the words had been spoken directly in his ear.

Damn it, you’re just hearing things.

It wasn’t the first time this had happened. It was weird—but natural in times of stress and exhaustion.

He remembered his Aunt Patty back in South Carolina—a mental patient who spent much of her adult life in institutions. Aunt Patty heard voices calling her names like bitch, slut, whore, and still viler things she couldn’t even bring herself to repeat to others. These ghastly names were always spoken behind her back in the voices of her friends and family, so poor Aunt Patty came to believe that all her loved ones hated her.

After a number of years, Aunt Patty seemed perfectly well and was able to live at home. Clayton once asked her how it felt to be finally free of her awful voices.

“Oh, but I still hear them,” Aunt Patty said with a smile. “I hear them all the time.”

“But you seem just fine,” Clayton said with surprise.

Aunt Patty laughed proudly. “I
am
just fine. I’m as fine as you. Better, maybe. You see, those voices always talk behind my back. They ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of cowards. The way I come to see it, I don’t have to listen to nobody who can’t insult me to my face. It don’t matter if they’re real or not.”

Pretty good thinking for a crazy woman.

Clayton shrugged off his exhaustion and laboriously typed the rest of his report.

*

Early Sunday afternoon, Nolan was sitting in a vinyl upholstered booth of a dark, chintzy bar at O’Hare International Airport with Detective Spiroff. Nolan was waiting for his flight back to L.A. Spiroff had driven him to the airport and waited to see him off. They had worked closely together during the last couple of days on the Judson murder. Even though they had turned up nothing helpful to the case, Nolan was surprised at how amiable their working relationship had been.

“Sorry I couldn’t have been more help,” Nolan said.

“Sorry we dragged you out here for no reason,” Spiroff replied with a shrug.

“We’ll keep hammering away at it back in L.A. Maybe we’ll turn up something.”

Spiroff shook his head. “You won’t,” he said with a smile.

Nolan sighed. “Yeah, I reckon you’re right,” he said. “Wish you’d explain that to my captain—to say nothing of the L.A. newspapers and TV stations.”

“Anyway, it’s been nice having you around,” Spiroff said. “Hey, if going back to L.A. is gonna be a hassle, stick around here and we’ll put you to work on some of our local stuff.”

“For example?”

“Well, you could give us a hand with the Miles Braxton case.”

Nolan looked at Spiroff with surprise. Miles Braxton had been a Chicago-based magazine publisher who took a nasty, thirty-three-story nosedive from his penthouse apartment two or three weeks back. That one had been widely publicized, too.

“I thought the Braxton thing was open and shut,” Nolan said. “Everybody figured suicide.”

“The media thought so. We never saw fit to contradict them. It’s always gratifying when those vultures get things wrong. The truth is, we found signs of a break-in and a few indications of violence that we just didn’t get around to mentioning. And the coroner never called it a murder
or
a suicide.”

“Didn’t he have some problem with drugs and alcohol?”

“So they say. But he was clean and sober the night he fell.”

“No suicide note?”

“Nothing of the kind. His computer was on, too—logged into one of those top-of-the-line networks with lots of hip and sexy fun. He’d been playing canasta in some kind of online casino.”

“Was he losing a lot of money?”

“This game wasn’t for cash, just fun. As near as we can figure, he was just having a nice, quiet evening at home playing computer games when suddenly—splat!—he got himself abruptly transfigured into a resplendent masterpiece of sidewalk art.”

“You don’t figure the killing had anything to do with the computer game?” Nolan asked.

Spiroff laughed. “Come on, Grobowski,” he said. “Do you guess he accused somebody of cheating at canasta, making the bozo angry enough to crawl out of the computer screen and toss Braxton off the building?”

Nolan felt slightly embarrassed. He knew next to nothing about computer networks, but he had to admit it did sound like a stupid question.

“So two of your wealthiest citizens get offed in less than a month,” Nolan mused. “Interesting, huh?”

“Interesting but coincidental,” Spiroff said resignedly. “It would be nice to think there
was
some connection. Smacks just a little of class warfare, doesn’t it? Maybe the downtrodden proletariat have stopped killing their own and are now taking their anger to the penthouses and luxury hotels.”

Nolan chuckled. “Kind of makes you want to turn in your badge and join the revolution.”

Spiroff grinned and raised his beer in a toast. “I’ll drink to that,” he said.

*

Renee had nearly finished building a fragile pastry structure in the cookie pan, and her fingers were pleasantly tired and tacky. The heroic struggle with the crushed walnuts and the wet, tissue-thin sheaths of phyllo dough was coming to an end. Now she was ready to carve precise, inch-wide diamond shapes in the upper layers of phyllo and put the pan in the oven. Then would come the making of the gooey syrup—an almost unbearably rich blend of sugar, water, and honey, with cinnamon sticks and slices of orange and lemon thrown in for good measure.

Not for the faint of heart.

Renee had been baking since yesterday. During that time, she had made a mess of herself and her kitchen—and was having a wonderful time.

All six units in the new condominium would be open later that night, and the owners had agreed that they would each contribute one course of an elaborate feast. They had drawn lots, and Renee was assigned dessert.

She was sure that all the other neighbors would do their own cooking, so hiring a caterer would be inappropriate. Renee had resigned herself to making every dish on her table. And now she was glad of it. A lot of dough and sugar and diverse sticky substances were just the medicine she needed.

Nothing like getting all messy and icky to drive away those cybernetic blues!

Little by little, her table was being laden with homemade pies, cheesecakes, and pastries. She would serve espresso and liqueurs and magnums of a fairly expensive champagne.