Gray Matter (7 page)

After staying under the hot shower until the bathroom was satisfying steamy, she toweled dry and dressed quickly. She said good-bye to her sulking son and promised to bring him a take-out meal. She made it to the real estate woman’s office in a remarkable fifty minutes after walking through the door of her motel room.

An hour and a half later she was on her way back to the room. She spotted a pizza place that was right next to a grocery store. She ordered a pizza to go, then picked up a few things in the grocery store while waiting for the pizza to be prepared. It had been time well spent with the real estate agent. The woman had told her that just that morning a house had come up for rent that was something special. The home was located on Magnolia Avenue in South St. Louis, close to PJ’s work so that she would not have to commute like she did today. There was easy access via Hampton Avenue to I-44 or Highway 40, or she could make her way into downtown by staying off the traffic-clogged highways and sticking to the city streets.

The first thing she had noticed when she stepped inside the door was that the home didn’t stink of stale cigarette smoke. That gave the place a leg up right away. It was a brick story-and-a-half, with wood floors, stained glass windows flanking the fireplace, a modern kitchen, and two huge bedrooms upstairs. Each bedroom had a little door inside the closet leading to an attic space under the eaves. The rooms were light and large, the yard was small, private, and edged with old-fashioned perennials, and there were two—count them, two—bathrooms, one upstairs and one down. The upstairs bathtub stood on tiger claws grasping marble spheres, and PJ claimed that one for herself instantly. Thomas could run up and down the steps whenever he needed to use the bathroom. Maybe he would burn off some of his antagonism.

PJ had signed the papers right then, leaning on the kitchen counter. Her heart was as light as it had been in the last several months, which was odd considering that just hours ago she had been to her very first murder scene.

The grocery store had yielded essentials such as root beer, cookies, more cat food, pet dishes, a litter pan, litter, an inadequate-looking scoop, and a cat shampoo that promised silky, shining fur. The pizza smelled great in the car, and it was all PJ could do not to lift the lid of the box and grab a piece.

When Thomas opened the door, she held out a can of root beer as a wordless apology. The can was snatched away and the top was popped before she could even say hello.

“Neat! My favorite kind. Thanks, Mom. Hey, what’s that smell?”

“Pizza.”

His eyes widened and he smacked his lips comically. PJ burst out laughing. It felt very good to smile at her son.

After pizza and cookies, they both sat around moaning melodramatically and holding their stomachs until practicality intervened. Thomas went to the car to bring up the rest of the supplies, and PJ screwed up her courage and went to the front desk. She had decided not to hide the presence of the cat, since they were going to have to stay in the motel for about a week. She was pleasantly surprised that all she had to do was pay a fifty dollar damage deposit.

She couldn’t put it off any longer. The cat had to be bathed. She went into the bathroom and locked the door. Then she rummaged in her cosmetic bag until she came up with a little-used nail clipper. She had decided to clip the cat’s nails first, to lessen the damage to her hands and arms when she plopped the feline into a sinkful of warm water. She closed the lid on the toilet and sat down. The cat jumped into her lap as soon as there was a lap. She pushed her over on one side, took a front paw in her hand, and gently squeezed to expose the claws. The cat didn’t protest; apparently this was familiar territory. Then she noticed the dark material which filled the grooves on the underside of the claws. It looked as if the cat had been digging in dark red, almost black, clay. PJ remembered that earlier in the day, the fur around the cat’s front paws had looked dirty. That was gone now; evidently, licking did accomplish something. With sudden clarity she knew what the substance under the claws was. It was blood. This cat had not only been terrified by the killer’s intrusion into Burton’s apartment, it had apparently fought tooth and nail, or rather tooth and claw, for its own life and that of its owner. At least there had been one success.

PJ shivered with the knowledge that she was most likely holding a witness to the murder on her lap.

It was definitely important enough to call Schultz at home. The phone was answered by a female voice. There was a loud background noise. A TV was playing a sitcom, and the phone must have been very close to it.

“Good evening. This is Penny…er, Dr. Gray. I work with Leo Schultz. May I speak to him, please?”

“Yeah, hold on. He’s taking a crap. I’ll get him.” The voice sounded as if interrupting Schultz from this personal function would be a source of satisfaction. Several minutes passed. PJ couldn’t quite make out what the TV program was, but judging by the escalating laughter, it must have been reaching its predictable comedic climax.

“Schultz. Just a minute.” The receiver was muffled, but she heard him yell anyway. “Julia, turn that fucking thing down! I couldn’t hear a goddamned freight train in here, for Christ’s sake!” The background sound level dropped marginally.

“Sorry about that. Wife’s a little hard of hearing, or maybe she just likes to make me think she is. That way, I might say things around her I might not otherwise.”

“Leo, this is PJ. I’m sorry to bother you at home.”

“No problem.”

“Remember that cat I found at Burton’s place today? I was getting ready to clip her claws when I found something dark stuck under them. I think it’s blood. I think it’s the killer’s blood.”

“How do you know it didn’t scratch Burton himself or some guest of his?”

“Because of the way she held still and purred when I was going to clip her claws.”

“Say again?”

“The cat is very gentle. She had been kindly treated by Burton, or she wouldn’t just lie quietly and let me squeeze her claws to clip them. I don’t think she would scratch anyone unless her life depended on it.”

There was a pause as Schultz digested this. She knew he was trying to decide how much credence to place in her story. PJ smelled the used pizza box, and she asked Thomas if he would please take it out and find a trash can someplace else. She didn’t want to wake up to that smell.

“OK, Doc, we’ll roll with it. I’ll have a tech come over and get a sample, if I can roust someone at this time of the night. Or do you think we need a vet? But you know it wouldn’t hold up in court anyway because there’s been a lousy chain of custody. That sample should have been taken before the cat left the apartment.”

“I didn’t know about it until now. And no, I don’t think a vet is needed.”

“Also, that cleaver with the smudge on it turned out to be a dead end. It was blood, all right, but it was chicken’s blood. Nice try, though.”

As they waited for the technician to show up, Thomas drifted off and flicked on the TV. After a few minutes of channel surfing, he settled down with a science fiction movie, definitely grade B judging by the glimpses PJ got. PJ checked the telephone to make sure it had modular connections, then brought out her PowerBook, a laptop computer. She connected the internal modem to the phone line and dialed into an intentionally obscure bulletin board for hard-core VR—Virtual Reality—enthusiasts.

She skipped lightly over unsecured online conversations just like Thomas surfed cable stations, relaxing as she settled into an old routine. Nothing that she saw bore the ID she was looking for, but she was certain that he would be monitoring, if not actively participating, at this time of night. Finally, she selected a heated discussion on the merits of molecular wire technology, and joined the round-robin commentary. After a few appropriate responses, she entered a phrase with agreed-upon code words.

Planetary alignment Mercury/Jupiter. RSVP secure PVT1.

Other participants, realizing she was requesting a secured conversation, deftly wove her out of the exchange, but not without flaming her for using them as a vehicle. She chuckled as her screen lit up with an animated hand giving her the finger. Then she switched to the path which had been designated
PVT1
, entered her password, and waited. After about five minutes, words appeared on her screen.

Merlin here. What’s the buzz. Keypunch?

It was the same greeting she had been getting for the past twenty years, and it fit like a comfortable old bathrobe. She had met Merlin during her college years, at a time when online communication was an arcane field, a computer backwater treaded by teenies with no dates on Saturday night. She suspected then (and still did) that Merlin was one of the professors from her computer science courses. They had fit together like two halves of a friendship necklace, the kind preteen girls wore with the heart broken in two with a jagged edge. Merlin had been a mentor, and more, a good friend, for half of PJ’s life. Their relationship was conducted entirely by computer communication, an easier task now in the days of bulletin boards and public online services.

When PJ first studied computer science, programs were entered into mainframe or minicomputers using punched cards. Students wrote their programs on green and white coding sheets, then keypunched them on noisy machines with unwieldy keyboards that punched combinations of holes into sturdy cards. The cards were fed into a special reader and digested by the computer. Students carried around large boxes of the cards, eyeing each other’s productivity and ogling at the complexity of another’s program based on the size of the card deck. PJ’s flying fingers, trained on her father’s manual typewriter, were the envy of her fellows, and she acquired the nickname of Keypunch Kid. She was so accurate that she never bothered to verify her work. Verification was done by typing the contents of each card twice. The keypuncher was rewarded with a satisfying “kerCHUNCK” sound as the machine matched the two versions, pronounced them exactly the same, and punched a small extra rectangle in the upper right corner of the card. Her card decks didn’t bear the telltale verification notch, but they worked anyway. Then microcomputers came along with their onscreen programming and editing, and keypunch machines faded away, a chapter of computer history which rarely evoked fond memories.

But the nickname stuck.

For a moment PJ closed her eyes and let comfort seep in. She used mental imaging, a quick method of relaxation that Merlin had suggested years ago:
picture your forehead smooth and wrinkle-free, and tension melts away.

With her forehead wrinkle-free for the first time since she woke up this morning, she began to type.

Nice to hear from you. Don’t you have anything better to do than check keywords waiting for me to show up?

Merlin’s response was immediate, and the conversation was off and running.

You
know that’s background monitoring. I wasn’t holding my breath. But I did think you’d be on tonight. Isn’t this your first week of work on your new job?

My new job wasn’t supposed to start until next week, but you’re right. Today was the first day, and I feel like I’ve been hit with a wrecker ball

All of PJ’s frustrations came rushing back, and she tried to fend them off.

There, there. Tell Merlin all about it.

Don’t patronize me, you old fart. I’ve had enough games for one day.

Sorry. You can cry on my cyber-shoulder if you want to.

Everything I try to do seems so hard, it’s like walking in molasses just to get dressed and face the day. I miss Steven, and then the next minute I hate the bastard. He’s really screwed up my life, but it’s still my life, and I have to make the best of it. And then there’s Thomas. He can be such a little prick sometimes, and he knows just how to get under my skin. My job pays a lot less and Steven’s salary is gone, my boss is a rubber-stamp for the captain, and my group that I’m supposed to be forming only has one guy in it and he’s a male chauvinist pig. Tomorrow the pig gets a couple of people assigned to help him out with the field work, trainees or something, he calls them lowlifes. What help do I get? Nada.

Is that all?

No. I was supposed to have a few months to get the project going. Instead I’ve gotten assigned a horrible murder case on my first day. I had to go to the victim’s apartment and I almost lost my breakfast in front of the pig.

PJ’s screen went blank. A moment later, a large violin filled the screen. The bow scraped across the strings and sad squeaky music emanated from the PowerBooks speakers. PJ chuckled. Merlin rarely let her get away with self-pity, and it seemed that this was not one of the times.

Whoa, there, Keypunch. Sounds like you need some fatherly advice from old Merlin. Not that you’ll listen.

1. Of course being a divorced mom is difficult. But remember this: it’s a very rare divorce where there isn’t blame on both sides. And yours was as common as a dandelion.

2. Thomas has a lot of the same pressures that you do, translated into a twelve-year-old’s world. Plus the simple curse of being twelve years old. Why don’t you try being the adult in the relationship and let him be the child?

3. Money is the curse of the proletariat. Or was it the salvation?

4. Ditto for bosses.

5. Male chauvinist pigs make good bacon and you’re an old pro with the butcher’s ax. If all else fails, put a curse on ’im.

6. You have my sympathy on the last point. I never could stand the smell of blood.

7. The word for the day is “curse.”

By the time PJ finished reading the list, she was laughing out loud. Thomas looked up from his movie, but she shook her head in his direction and he resubmerged. A conversation with Merlin always went like this, with his wonderful combination of sympathy, humor, and a bucket of cold water in the face, in just the right proportions. He loved making numbered lists, and she hardly ever got out of a conversation without one.

Thanks. I feel better already. I think.