Waiting (23 page)

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Authors: Frank M. Robinson

BOOK: Waiting
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They found Fritzi first, at the bottom of the stairs to the basement. The rottweiler was balled up in a corner, its eyes glazed. Both hind legs were broken, and it looked like its chest had been crushed.
Mitch knelt and ran his fingers lightly over the body. “Maybe muscle contractions could do this; but they’d have to be stronger than anything I know of.”
Artie knew.
Lyle was in the exercise room, lying flat on his workout bench, the barbell with its load of two hundred and twenty-five pounds on his chest where it had fallen and crushed his rib cage. His workout shirt was soaked in blood, and it took a moment for Artie to spot the several holes in his chest. He stared in silence for a long moment, once again feeling a wave of guilt. It really hadn’t been one for all and all for one—ever. That had been a happy bit of hypocrisy on his part. Would he have liked Lyle any more if he had known him better? Probably not. He was a valued member of the Club when they were younger, but that was because he could score a lid whenever you wanted one. Nobody had really been close to him. He had been too aggressive, too brash, and while they all liked what the vintner sold, nobody had cared much for the vintner himself. None of them had been perceptive enough to realize that Lyle probably knew it, and resented it and had used them as much as they had used him, though Jenny might have guessed.
“He was shot while he was working out,” Mitch said. “When he would have been helpless.”
“Any idea who shot him?”
“My guess is Anya. Ten to one her body’s around here someplace.”
They found her in Lyle’s office, slumped in the big, black leather chair behind his desk. She had put a gun to her head and blown blood and brains all over the books in the bookcase behind her. Artie felt sick and had to force himself to be as clinical as Mitch. She was dressed in a black see-through nightgown that Artie had absolutely no desire to see through. Lyle had taken her to one club meeting and Artie remembered the faint surge of lust that all the men had felt, the momentary envy of Lyle. God, that was another thing to feel guilty about.
Artie glanced around the floor, frowning. “Where’s the gun?”
“Not near her—at the instant of death she probably threw it across the room, again because of involuntary muscular contractions. Not the same as Fritzi’s, though.”
Artie found it near the door. Mitch picked it up with a pencil through the trigger guard and dropped it on the desk. There was a smear of red on the barrel and Artie bent down for a closer look, then jerked his head back. Lipstick.
Mitch studied the papers on the desk, then pushed one over to Artie with the eraser end of a pencil.
“She left a note.”
Artie glanced over the first few lines, then read them more carefully. She had been faithful to him but she knew Lyle was cheating on her and that after everything he had promised her, he deserved to die. After she had shot him, she had realized she couldn’t live without him, that life would be empty for her …
Soap-opera time.
“I didn’t know her very well,” Artie said when he had finished. “From the few times I met her, I got the impression that it was an open relationship—that she wasn’t the jealous type.”
Mitch looked dubious. “Maybe she wasn’t, maybe she was. She probably got a phone call that set her off and a few minutes later I suspect somebody was around to help her build up a jealous head of steam. Cut and dried, Artie. The police will have the weapon, they’ll have the motive, and there’s nobody left alive to contradict her suicide note.”
It had been the pattern all along, Artie thought. Plausible, open-and-shut, no loose ends. No real reason to investigate anything.
“Do you believe that letter, Mitch?”
“Of course not. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t think the police will look very far.”
Artie let his breath out, realizing for the first time how long he had been holding it. “Should we call them?”
Mitch shook his head.
“Somebody from Copeland’s will show up looking for Lyle. We’ll leave the door unlocked, just like we found it. If we call in the police, Schuler will be all over us. What do you want to tell him?”
“Nothing,” Artie said.
“Neither do I.”
Mitch hooked the gun with the pencil again and placed it back on the floor in the same position where it had fallen. They made sure nobody was around, then left the house. Once in his car, Mitch picked up the cellular phone and started dialing.
Artie looked at him, surprised. “Change your mind?”
“Calling the office. Getting my messages. Life goes on, Artie.” He listened for a few minutes, then snapped it off and turned to Artie, a bemused look on his face. “Got the report back from the chemist on the potato salad.”
Artie had almost forgotten about it.
“What did he find?”
“Red herring, Artie—better check with your neighbors as to who went out of their way to do Susan a favor. The only thing wrong with it was too much Miracle Whip.”
 
Artie sat at his
desk going over Connie’s script and jotting down notes. It was an uneasy balance between documentary and propaganda, and Connie had fallen off the high wire. It was a matter of emphasis more than anything else. The world was as dark as you cared to paint it, and Connie had deliberately chosen a black palette. And yet …
He scribbled another note, then tore the pages from his notepad, crumpled them up, and tossed them in the wastebasket. The problem was not that she was right or wrong—he knew she was right—but how the hell did you sell it? People would watch the bad news only if you told them somebody was doing something about it, that there was progress, that the water was safer to drink, the air safer to breathe, and a number 50 sunblock would take care of the hole in the ozone layer.
“Did you hear anything from Mark?” Connie had come up behind him and was looking over his shoulder at the script.
It took an effort to keep from jumping.
“Don’t do that, Connie—I’m not in the best of moods. And no, I haven’t heard anything from Mark.” He wished to hell she hadn’t asked. He had tried to wall it off in his mind and had almost succeeded. “I called the cops this morning—they don’t know anything. They’re not too excited about it.”
“Susan?”
“Called our lawyer. He hasn’t heard from her. She’ll undoubtedly, want her own lawyer anyway.” He waved at the pages of the script spread out on the desk. “I was wrong: It needs work but it’s honest and it’s something people need to know. Trying to market it will be something else. Our ratings will suck—we’ll only hold the PBS crowd—but what the hell, we’ll have done our bit. As you put it, maybe we’ll make a difference, and God forgive me the cliché.”
Mary would be proud of him, wherever she was. Then he wondered if she would even see it.
For one of the few times he could remember, Connie leaned back in her chair and lit a cigarette. “I’m afraid we’ve got a problem.”
Artie couldn’t possibly think of any problem more serious than those he already had.
“Like what? We can always cut it if we have to, juggle sequences to make it more linear … .”
“I’m talking about Adrienne—who turns out to have been a prize bitch.”
He looked at her, suddenly wary. “What about her?”
“You may have noticed she wasn’t here yesterday. She didn’t come in today. We called, nobody home. I sent Jerry over to check her apartment, expecting God knows what. The apartment was clean. She wasn’t there and neither was anything else. No furniture, no dishes, no rugs, no books, no nothing. Jerry talked to the landlord and it seems she moved in with a futon and a hot plate and a telephone and that was it. That woman really traveled light.”
“Surprise,” Artie muttered. Which was no surprise at all. After the fight in the parking lot, nobody was ever going to see Adrienne again. “Anything else?”
“Oh, yes. I went over her resume. She claimed she’d gotten her bachelor’s in communications at McMurphy University in some little town in Nebraska. It doesn’t exist. I called previous stations where she said she’d worked. Half of those don’t exist either, and the other half never heard of her.”
“She
did
work in Sacramento, right?” Artie sensed where all of this was going and wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it.
“Right. But the news director who hired her left three months ago and seems to have disappeared. He didn’t leave a forwarding address.”
Artie definitely didn’t want to hear it. “So? What do we do now?”
“You haven’t asked me what her last assignment was.”
He already knew. “Let me guess.”
“You’ve got it—she was working on a series about the environment. I asked if anybody had seen her tape and they had so I asked them to describe it.”
“And ours is the same as hers.”
“Down to the same exact examples. Cookie-cutter time.” She shook her head. “How the hell is that possible?”
Artie knew how it was possible: Adrienne had orchestrated the series from the very beginning. And how many other Adriennes were scattered about the country, all of them pushing the same special?
He felt as if somebody had just opened up a window and a cold draft had blown in. There were the Hounds and the bystanders like Mary, and now a different branch of the Old People. One devoted to a last-ditch effort to convince
Homo sapiens
of the errors of its ways. In one sense, not dangerous. A lot of people would agree with them. But it was an indication that there was a conspiracy, and it might be more tightly organized than he’d thpught.
“I don’t know, Connie. I haven’t the foggiest. Did you talk to Hirschfield about her?”
“He said he was shocked. I’m not so sure. I checked and it turns out he’d interviewed her for only about five minutes and decided the station couldn’t get along without her. Maybe he banged her after all.”
Artie waved at the pages on the desk.
“Did you show this to him?”
“This morning, before you came in.”
“And?”
“He loved it. He thought it was great.”
Artie suddenly realized he had to go to the bathroom, bad. Maybe not all the Old People were lawyers or Hounds or TV news reporters after all. Maybe some of them were news directors.
Connie shook her head in disbelief.
“What the hell’s going on, Artie? There’s no way in the world two different people could think this much alike. Adrienne and I never had a conversation all the time she was here; we barely nodded to each other when we passed in the hallway. I always considered her an ice queen.”
“So let’s change the script.”
Connie snuffed out her cigarette. “You’re right. She’s good, we’re better.”
They worked on the script for the next few hours, rearranging segments and rewriting Connie’s voice-over. Adrienne’s Sacramento tape was being held for the same after-the-holidays doldrums. Theirs had to be different, which meant drastic shifting and cutting. It was two in the afternoon before Connie called a break.
“You want lunch, Artie? My treat.”
He shook his head. “Go finish your Christmas shopping while you’re at it. I’m going to grab a cameraman and go to the zoo.”
“What for?”
“The zoo’s part of a nationwide cooperative breeding program to preserve endangered species. Some species you can only find in zoos nowadays—they’ve disappeared completely from the wild. A lot of the specimens we’ve got—here, in the San Diego, the Brookfield and the Berlin Zoos, and a couple of dozen others around the world—are all there are; there ain’t no more.”
She looked surprised. “How come you know all this?”
“The Grub knows everything, Connie. I had him print me out a list of the different endangered species; it’s as thick as a small phone directory.”
He was slipping into his raincoat when Connie said, “Artie? I hear they’ve got a Siberian tiger out there—shoot some tape of it for me, will you? I’m kind of fond of tigers.”
 
It was after three
by the time they got to the zoo and the daylight was already fading. It was cloudy and misting by the ocean; they wouldn’t be able to shoot outside for much more than an hour and Artie wasn’t sure whatever they got would be usable; the zoo had insisted they not shine lights on the animals. But at least it would serve as a guide if they had to come back another day.
Almost all the big cats were inside, and Artie watched while the cameraman shot tape of them moving around inside the large cages, then angled for what might be used as a head shot. The King of Beasts, with the background out of focus behind him, looking majestic. It was humid and, as usual in the cat house, it stank. After ten minutes Artie was ready for fresh air, even if it was chilly.
The Siberian tiger was in a special outdoor display, a large moat and high iron fence separating it from the curious spectators. It would make for better tape if it were spring and there were dozens of people around staring and pointing. As it was, the only people there besides himself were a middle-aged woman in a heavy cloth coat with the collar up around her ears and a teenager with a colorful scarf half wrapped around his face, the ends trailing in the stiff breeze. They were a good ten feet apart, obviously not a family group; not much in the way of human interest when it came to an interview.
Artie watched the tiger for a few minutes, letting the cameraman shoot as much tape as he wanted. It was a gift from the Cincinnati Zoo, and Artie wondered what they’d gotten in return. A dozen buffalo? Maybe a couple of Kodiak bears—that might be more fitting for a zoo in the heartland. But if he were a zookeeper and had to choose between them, he’d pick the tiger, a good five hundred pounds with long, pale fur and sheer grace to its movements.
How many were left in the world now? he wondered. Less than five hundred, at best? Less than fifty? Connie would make a copy of the tape for her home library and her kids would show it to their kids and by that time wild Siberian tigers would be long gone, a fading memory along with their original habitat, probably destined to be a collection of resort towns, fancy hotels, and upscale restaurants in a distant, crowded future. The tigers would be nothing more than photographs in encyclopedias and “Mammals of the Twentieth Century,” or creatures captured for a moment in time on scratchy videotape. With luck some natural history museums would have animatronic versions, and a few zoos would be desperately trying to breed them back.
Connie would have an odd sort of memento. Or maybe memorial, and that might be a line he should use.
Artie squinted at the sky. Not much more than half an hour of light left; they’d have to come back in the morning or preferably on a day when it was sunny.
He walked into the Primate Discovery Center, the new monkey house, stopping at a small cage complete with waterfall, rocks, and trees. The plaque on the railing identified the monkeys as macaques, the most widely ranging primate genus outside of man. You could find them in almost every country in Africa and Asia, from Morocco to the Philippines.
There were three white-faced monkeys inside the enclosure, all lined up behind the glass, staring at him. Artie stared back, feeling vaguely uneasy. There was rope netting inside the cage on which they could swing and climb: why the hell weren’t they? He moved on to another cage to stare at more monkeys staring back. He was the only visitor on a chill and windy day and apparently the prime attraction.
He shivered and went back outside, stopping at the small island of rocks surrounded by a deep moat that was home to the chimpanzees. How long ago was it that several of the chimps had escaped from the island and scared the hell out of a dozen housewives who reported prowlers in the backyard? Years now—it had been a different, low-tech zoo back then.
He leaned against the railing and watched the few chimps shivering on top of the pile of artificial rocks, searching for any scraps of food they might have missed earlier in the day. One patriarch with graying fur sat at the edge of the moat and glared back at him.
A moment in time, Artie thought. A moat, five million years, and less than two percent of encoded genes separated them. How surprised the chimp’s ancestors must have been when they saw the first primitive hominids venture out of the forest, creatures not that much different from themselves but swaying awkwardly from side to side as they tried to walk upright on two legs. Larger heads, flatter faces, and less fur. Ugly creatures who didn’t have sense enough to stay in the forest where they at least had a chance of escaping the big cats and the other predators.
And how shocked a similar patriarch and his fellow chimps must have been to see the hominids make fires outside their caves to keep them safe during the long night Artie imagined the years rolling past and the upright creatures becoming taller and heavier, shedding more of their hair while their heads grew ever larger and their faces flatter and their noses more defined. About the same time something curious must have started to appear in their eyes, something that frightened that early patriarch when he first saw it. Something that made it difficult for him to look the new creatures in the eyes for any length of time before he had to drop his own.
That patriarch was undoubtedly familiar with tools; he probably used sticks that he thrust into termite mounds and pulled out with a dozen juicy termites sticking to it. And he probably knew how to use logs and rocks to crack nuts and how to drive away predators by throwing rocks at them from the safety of a tree limb. But the new creatures did something else with the stones: They struck them together and used the chips that cracked off to cut meat and clean bloody skins so they could wrap them around their waists to take the place of the hair they no longer had.
That ancient ape might even have tried to imitate them and struck two. rocks together and watched the sparks fly, but that was all that happened. There was probably a dim thought in the back of his mind that perhaps the other creatures used different rocks, but it was a difficult thought to grab hold of and he probably couldn’t tell the difference between the rocks anyway.

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