Suicide Season (12 page)

Susan sighed and headed for one of the stomach-tightening machines. “I think that’s why I love you, Bunch. With you, there’s no possible worry about analysis.”

Bunch grinned at me. “She’s got a piece of the rock.”

Susan’s words stung enough to linger in my thoughts as I reached my new home, half of a remodeled townhouse near Washington Park. The affluence of Kirk and Associates had lifted me out of the small set of rooms I’d rented, and the tax break on home mortgage interest made it better to own than to lease. So I found a corner of Denver which was one of those quiet residential enclaves that had old homes and large trees and a scattering of corner businesses—mom-and-pop grocery stores, laundries, liquor stores, an occasional neighborhood tavern or restaurant—that gave it a sense of community. A number of the homes were being bought by people moving back into the city, and I felt lucky to find a nineteenth-century duplex that an architect had lived in and remodeled. He had planned to keep it for himself, but finally decided to sell. And when he did, I was there with the bank’s cash. As I pulled the 3000 up to the high stone curbing and walked to my side of the building, Mrs. Ottoboni’s stereo quavered an operatic tenor that filled the two quiet porches with an aching, yearning note. The sound did not carry through the walls, though. The original builders, generous with cheap brick, had put a thickness between the two townhouses that not even a hammer could violate, and the architect had added extra soundproofing to keep out the street noises. The result was a sanctuary of silence that, after the abrasion of the city’s constant bustle, felt like cool shade on a hot day. But through the peaceful quiet of the living room with its high, old-fashioned ceiling, the red alert light of the telephone answering machine gleamed a hot summons. I listened to the messages replay as I trimmed the shades and windows to the late afternoon sun: someone else’s machine offering my machine a fantastic and rare opportunity to invest in mountain property, a notice that the Disabled Veterans truck would be in the neighborhood next Saturday, and a voice that said, “This is Michael Loomis, Devlin. Could you telephone me at your earliest convenience?” followed by his number. I poured a mug of thick Belhaven ale before dialing, and my mouth was full of the first long swallow when Loomis answered.

“This is Devlin. I’m returning your call, Professor.”

“Your voice sounds a bit odd.”

“Curing a dry throat. How have you been?”

“The flesh is undeniably weak, Devlin. One would think that a sedentary occupation such as mine wouldn’t make demands on one’s physique, but I seem to have a touch of sciatica lately. However, I didn’t call to complain about my health. I understand from Owen McAllister that you’re once more looking into the Austin Haas thing.”

“Yes.”

“I knew Margaret before she married the man—she was one of my graduate students. A very bright girl and certainly undeserving of all that’s happened to her. She is the one initiating the inquiry, is she not?”

“She hired me, yes.”

“So Owen told me. He also told me that he’s worried her curiosity might stem from morbid causes. He thinks she may still be overwrought, and that any further trauma—whatever you might turn up—could induce some sort of irrational behavior.”

“She seems very stable to me. And very determined to know the truth.”

“Yes. The truth. Well, certainly it’s no business of mine or Owen’s and you’re well within your rights to tell us so. However, since I know the both of you rather well, Owen asked me as a favor if I wouldn’t inquire about her welfare. Not to inhibit your investigation, understand, but to ensure that her health, physically and especially mentally, would not be prejudiced by adverse findings concerning her husband. Owen hoped, in light of your past association with him—which I may say has been very fortuitous for you—that you wouldn’t mind his asking about her. He would have done it himself, but he’s off on another trip. You must know that he still feels some responsibility for the unfortunate results of the earlier investigation, though he doesn’t want to seem in any way presumptuous. I, on the other hand, have never suffered feelings of guilt for any of my various presumptions, ha ha.”

A touch of professorial humor there. “She’s been able to handle what I’ve turned up so far.”

“Oh? Then you did find a connection between Austin and the Aegis Group?”

“Nothing that would stand up in court, Professor. And nothing I feel free to discuss without Mrs. Haas’s permission.”

“Quite right, Devlin. And wrong of me to ask. Purely a spontaneous reaction on my part. Nonetheless, and strictly between us two, I do think Owen would feel a little less guilty if there were evidence that Austin Haas did, indeed, sell the trade secrets to Aegis. Right now, of course, he believes he may have pushed a possibly innocent man to his death.”

“I have no conclusive evidence of that. But if some does turn up, I’ll explain to Mrs. Haas how Mr. McAllister feels, and maybe she’ll tell him about anything we’ve found out.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you, Devlin. And very diplomatic as well. I’ll explain your stand to Owen. Thank you for returning my call, and please do come over and visit sometime—I’ve seen so little of you since Douglas passed away.”

He hadn’t seen much of me before my father’s death, either. He and my father were business partners rather than close friends, and I remembered my father telling me once, shortly before he shot himself, that he wished he had not teamed up with Loomis—that he was afraid he had gotten into a deal that was over his head. But their business investment, a small plant that manufactured a new chemical used in video display screens, had become highly profitable soon after my father killed himself—and after the tangle of claims from the death had caused the stock to revert to the surviving partner. It had all been legal; I studied every line of each document word by word. But there was a lingering flavor of unfairness about it, intensified by the grief and resentment I felt at the time, so I made no effort to stay in touch with my father’s ex-partner. In fact, I was surprised when Loomis asked me to visit Owen McAllister with him. But the results of that request had been very profitable for Kirk and Associates—as Loomis just reminded me.

Wandering across the living room with its dim ceiling brightened by plaster rosettes that caught and reflected the lingering daylight, I stood at one of the bay windows that reached out to the long light of late afternoon sun to bring it inside. As Bunch once told me, I tended to stare out windows whenever I turned something over in my mind. He was right, and the thing that drew me now to stare sightless over the outside strip of garden that separated my side of the duplex from the house next door, was the whole tangle of Loomis, McAllister, and Margaret.

I did not owe McAllister anything. I had been hired to do a couple of jobs for the man and had given fair work for the money received. Yet—and this was the itch that kept recurring—Loomis kept implying a debt. The recent good fortune of Kirk and Associates was due to the luck of working for someone like Owen McAllister. And that, in turn, was because Loomis had introduced me to the man. Now McAllister wanted information about a case that no longer concerned him. Except on humanitarian grounds. What objection could I have to that except a little nip of jealousy. Was that it? Did I resent someone else trying to look after Margaret? Was I covering that feeling by calling McAllister’s interest nosiness? The irony was, the woman had not asked anyone to look after her, not McAllister and certainly not Devlin Kirk.

The small tiled fireplace was laid and I wandered over to light the kindling and shavings that I preferred to use instead of newspaper with its acrid smoke and thick ash. The remnant of winter’s chill would return with the shadows, and the fire, yellow and dancing through the glass doors, could hold it off for a few more hours. The temptation to call Renee crossed my mind, but it was faint and fleeting and better that way. The break had been made and for both of us there was more relief than regret. Besides, the eyes that hovered in my imagination weren’t dark but a sea green that verged on blue, and the voice playing over in memory was not Renee’s.

Irritably, I began mixing the vegetable sauce for tonight’s halibut steak and covered the fish to steam in its juices. Then I poured the rest of the Belhaven into a mug and turned on the television to catch the last half of the news. It was easier on the mind to listen to the long litany of other people’s problems than to poke around the ill-defined boundaries of my own.

The worry lay in the back of my mind like a dog sleeping in a corner and was roused a couple of days later when Bunch came into the office with several rolls of blueprints tucked under his arm. “What the hell’s the matter with you, Dev? You’ve been looking out that window since I left. Here—look at these AeroLabs designs for a change.” He spread one of the blueprints across the desk and smoothed it with the side of a wide hand. We had landed the AeroLabs contract to evaluate and update the electronic surveillance and detection systems in a plant that had just received a Department of Defense contract. The job was another of those that had turned up as a result of the initial work with McAllister.

“We got the go-ahead to put sensors in these corridors here. Government specs leave it open to what kind should be installed. I say pressure sensors. What do you think?”

We discussed the merits and shortcomings of heat sensors versus pressure sensors versus motion sensors that would help form a barrier around the wing that housed classified operations. As usual, Bunch made his argument and then waited for me to pick holes in it. Then we would trade positions, me offering alternative defenses, while Bunch would invent ways to defeat them. But this morning the process went slowly and finally Bunch said, “Why do I get this feeling that I don’t have your undivided attention, partner?”

“I was thinking about Vinny Landrum.”

“You were thinking about the widow Haas, you mean. And what Landrum might spill about her hubby and his secretary.”

That was a big part of it. The rest was what other harm Landrum might do to Margaret and her children while he scurried around trying to prove that she murdered her husband.

“Have you talked to her? Told her about Vinny?”

“No. He’s not going to find a damn thing, and there’s no sense worrying her over nothing. I hope he’ll just blow away like the rest of the trash.”

“Good luck.”

“What’s that mean?”

Bunch took a deep breath and held it a second or two while he tried to frame the words. “He won’t find anything on Mrs. Haas. But he might come up with something on hubby.”

“Something like what?”

“I—we—got an appointment with a guy this afternoon. It’s something I’ve been working on with those tapes from the Haas surveillance.”

“What kind of guy?”

“This guy I know over at Tramway Tech.”

A few blocks away, that was the downtown campus of one of the state universities. “Want to tell me what it’s about?”

Bunch tapped the blueprints. “After we go over this. These people are paying us and paying us good, so first things first, partner. And remember: if we do the work right, people tell other people. And so far we’ve been doing good. Let’s keep it that way.”

“And it all started with McAllister. And Loomis.”

“It sure did.”

“Do you ever feel that we owe them anything?”

“Hell, yeah—they gave us our start. Why?”

“I don’t know. I get the feeling McAllister’s looking over my shoulder.” I told Bunch about the call from Loomis. “He has reason to ask, I guess—he’s concerned about Margaret. But the way Loomis put it made it seem as if we owed McAllister.”

“We owe him thanks, but that’s about it. You told him the right thing. Even if the McAllister job was our big break, the rest has been up to us. And right now we’ve got this one to worry about if we want to keep the string going.”

Bunch was right about priorities, anyway. I pushed everything back into that corner of my mind where the dog stirred uneasily, and forced my attention to the sets of blueprints and the various options and their advantages. When, after a quick lunch of sandwiches that left a few grease spots on the diagrams, we had finally agreed on the system of warning and detection devices to recommend to AeroLabs, Bunch rolled the blueprints into a bundle and grunted, “What time is it?”

He never wore a watch. Those with the leather bands were tight enough to cut circulation, and the stretch kind tended to spring into fragments when he flexed his forearm.

“A little after two.”

“Crap—we’re late. Come on.”

The old red-brick building that housed this corner of the university had once been the headquarters and maintenance buildings of the Tramway Corporation when Denver had street cars. But the office tower had become administration offices for the school and the car barn behind had been cut up and converted into cramped and windowless classrooms. A swarm of people, not all of them young but most wearing Levi’s and carrying books, stirred around the entrance to the office tower, and Bunch led me up a creaky elevator and through a warren of musty hallways into some adjoining new addition.

“Is this another gadget freak you’ve found?”

“Yeah, kinda. But, Dev, it’s a whole new world. Wait’ll you see what he’s got. I met the guy once when he was testifying for the DA on voice identification.”

“An expert witness? What’s this going to cost us?”

“Well if he had to testify, it would be expensive, yeah. But right now, it’s only a couple bottles of Scotch.” Bunch shook his head. “Talk about your heavy drinkers, these college teachers are pros.”

We turned into a pair of doors marked
PHONETIC SCIENCE LABORATORIES
. The room reminded me of every science lab I’d been in from high school through college. But instead of glass beakers and retorts and mazes of hoses and clamps, the long benches in the room held a bewildering variety of electronic equipment and enough dials and gauges to keep Bunch fascinated for a year. I understood the big man’s enthusiasm.

“Dev, this is Harry Goodman. Devlin Kirk.”