Death Qualified (21 page)

    He entered then and. caught her up in a hard, fierce embrace. Their kiss was just as hard and fierce.

    "It's been so long," he said over and over.

    "My God, I've missed you!" His hands were trembling as he began to undress her.

    Their lovemaking had a quality of desperation that never had been there before. Afterward, Nell wept against his chest as he stroked her hair, her back. She had not realized until then exactly how tense she had become, that she had turned into one long raw nerve.

    "You've lost weight," he said softly.

    "Poor little Nell, you have to eat more. Are you sleeping?"

    "I'm fine," she said, and sniffed. He handed her a tis sue.

    "You're the one who's all bones. Hie thee to the closet, skeleton-man."

    He held her closer, and for minutes neither spoke. Finally she went to the bathroom. When she came back, wearing one of his dressing gowns, barefoot, she sat on the side of the bed. He was making coffee, naked.

    "You'll get a chill," she said. His shoulders were hunched as if he already was cold. She went to the closet and took out a robe, returned and draped it over his shoulders. He kept watching the coffee as if it needed his help.

    "Doc, what's wrong?"

    "Us. You. Me. This." His voice was strange, as if he were talking about an incident from his childhood that he was recalling with regret the loss of a pet, the death of a distant grandparent.. ..

    "Doc? Look at me, will you? What are you talking about? Why now?"

    "If they find out, the prosecutors, they'll smear you."

    He did not look at her but drew on the robe and tied the cord.

    "Doc, I love you."

    "And that's no good, either!" he cried, finally facing her.

    "I'm too old for you, and I've got a wife who probably will outlive both of us. And I told you I can't leave her."

    "I never asked you to. Or expected you to."

    He looked haggard.

    "I'm tired of it," he said faintly.

    "The sneaking around. Fooling everyone. Being starved for you and having you only a few minutes at a time. I'm just tired of it all."

    Nell hugged her arms about herself, chilled all the way through.

    "You never said anything like that before. You said a few minutes were a blessing, like drops of water to a man thirsting to death."

    "I said a lot of things. We both did. But, Nell, it's no good. You're young and you need a husband, a full-time husband."

    "You said I should go out with Clive, to prove some thing or other. I forget why. Tell me again, Doc. Why did you tell me I should go out with Clive? To prove what?"

    "Nothing," he said with a touch of irritation.

    "I don't know why I told you that. It doesn't look natural for some one so young and good-looking not to go out, I guess. I don't want any questions about you, speculation about us.

    I don't know."

    "I see," she said slowly, and for a moment she thought she did, but she could not have said what it was she saw;

    whatever it had been during that flash of insight was inexpressible in any words she knew. That desperation, she thought then, had not been the desperation of a man thirsting for a few drops of water, but the desperation of a parting, a good-bye. She picked up her clothes and walked to the bathroom, trailing her jeans on the floor. When she came out, dressed, neither of them spoke as she drew the key from her pocket and put it on the bedside table, and then left the room.

    There was no one she could talk to now, she was thinking as she walked the trail through the woods. She had not been back to the ledge since.. .. Even now she could not finish the thought, but the ledge had become forbidden territory; she would never go there again. There were so many things she had wanted to tell Doc, all the things Barbara was doing--taking people up to the ledge, trudging all over the property, asking question after question.

    Preparing her defense. And none of that had seemed important suddenly. Her life, her trial, her possible imprisonment, none of it had seemed relevant somehow.

    At lunch in one of the most exclusive restaurants in Denver, Herbert Margolis blinked his big cow eyes at Ruth Brandywine and said, "I don't have any reason to lie to them if they ask me anything."

    "And I have far too much at stake to risk getting involved in any investigation," Walter Schumaker said. The restaurant had been his choice; he maintained a table there for four days a week, to be readied instantly if he called or simply showed up with guests.

    He was cultivating the leonine look, Ruth thought bitterly.

    He had thick, dark gold hair that he wore long and full; it made his head seem even larger than it was. He looked very handsome, very impressive on the covers of magazines where he appeared with some regularity, always accompanied by the beautiful fractals, the incredibly colored Mandelbrot sets that seemed to have become his icons.

    She said softly, "I don't swing alone, boys. Believe me, I don't. Herbie, my love, your signature is on every single disk Lucas stole, and you know it. And Walter, your name is on the work, and your name is on a check for the detectives Stupid thing to do, pay with a check. But there it is.

    "All I did was help Emit set up a program. I had no idea what he planned to do with it. I never asked," Her bert Margolis said, nearly tripping over the rushing words.

    "That's what I do all the time, help others set up programs, make sure they run. I can prove it."

    "That might even work," she said icily, "but not if the disks turn up and anyone bothers to run them all."

    "They won't turn up. If they were still in existence, the detectives would have found them. If the police had them, they would have been around before now. Lucas either destroyed them, or Emil did before the end, or Lucas hid them somewhere and they'll stay there until the Second Coming."

    Herbert Margolis leaned back in his chair; although he was breathing fast, like a runner crossing a finish line, he looked smug, self-satisfied.

    "I examined every possible scenario with the new expert system I'm developing, and that's how it works out."

    "I don't swing alone. That's my scenario," Ruth Brandy wine said.

    "We're each approaching this from unique perspectives," Walter Schumaker said thoughtfully.

    "Prom mine, it seems that some work I was involved in many years ago was placed on disks without my knowledge. The originator of the work died in a sordid manner, and I put all thoughts of the work and his demise out of mind and continued with my own projects. If this person who has recently been murdered was involved in that old work, I had forgotten it entirely. He was an aide, a student, a hireling of no more consequence than the person who cleaned the lavatories. When I learned that someone had broken into your garage and vandalized your automobile during your trip abroad, out of personal friendship I hired an agency to try to find him, to bring him to justice because the police were doing nothing." He nodded as he finished, as if he had mentally ticked off one point after another and found them all satisfactory.

    "You're both assuming that the disks will never be found and played," Ruth said. She noticed a waiter hovering and waved him away. It was after three; the restaurant was nearly empty now.

    "No, Ruth," Walter Schumaker said, "I make no such assumption. But I do assume that if those disks turned up tomorrow, no one except one of us could possibly make any sense from them. A lot of pretty pictures, Julia sets, Mandelbrot sets, fractals, abstract images, and the ravings of a madman, that's all those disks would reveal to an outsider. No one questioned that Emil was quite mad at the end, no one. And the disks would simply confirm that opinion. That's our insurance, Ruth, and I am comfortable with it. Old work, history, of no significance to anyone."

    After several seconds she nodded.

    "And you'll both say you had no idea that Tom the maintenance man was Lucas Kendricks, Emil's assistant?"

    "Come now, Ruth. Who notices maintenance people?

    I was only on campus one day a week and I certainly did not inspect the workers."

    Herbert Margolis was nodding like a drinking bird.

    "Same for me. Exactly like that. Who would have noticed him?"

    "Ruth," Walter Schumaker said, "who can say differently He's dead, isn't he? I told you to get rid of him. I told you he knew, but that's history, too. The salient point is that he is dead and he can't deny anything you say. Now, can we drop this, put it behind us, and get on with other things?" He did not wait for her response but signaled to the waiter to bring the check.

    "Yes," she said very softly, "by all means, let us put it behind us, but pray, Walter. Pray that the investigation doesn't get real."

    In her mind a disk appeared, cut into four wedges, four pieces of a tempting pie; then Emil had gone, and it had crumbled to dust. They had withdrawn into their separate orbits again, the three who remained, but there were aftereffects of the perturbation of a wild player who hadn't known his orbit, his rightful place, who had swung erratically back and forth, first into this orbit, then that, and even though he was gone, his tracks remained, distorting the hard lines of separation everywhere he had been, and there were no clean boundaries, no sharp divisions. Where he had been there was chaos.

    Barbara walked along the lava trail on McKenzie Pass;

    here the lava had run like a river, scouring everything before it, creating rough riverbanks for the river of molten rock. In another section the lava had been more sluggish;

    it had piled up higher and higher, then tumbled down, creating a mini-mountain of razor-sharp edges that still retained lethal cutting power. Lava gargoyles hung over the lava riverbed, eternally on guard. The lava was black, brown, encrusted here and there with lichen, pale gray-green like something out of a witch's trade catalog. A pocket of soil held a miniature fir tree, nature's bonsai.

    Another such pocket held a single daisy whipping in the wind, tenaciously defiant.

    She looked at her watch for the fourth time; finally it was approaching two o'clock. She retraced her steps, around the lava-rock observatory where teenagers were shrieking at one another about the various volcanic mountains they were viewing. On all sides the peaks rose, each named, each one a volcano that was not dead, just resting.

    The thought made her uneasy as she crossed the road and went to the guard rail near her car. She was carrying her father's binoculars. At a minute before two she began to study the scene below, trees and more trees, lava flows and more lava flows. The day was clear, a tingle of cold in the air, the sun hot. Good ozone, good air, good vibes, good something, a perfect day in the mountains. Visibility was fine; more lava flows, more trees. She glanced at her watch, thirty seconds past two, and concentrated again on the view. At last she saw a red flag snap back and forth.

    The flag waved and snapped for another minute, then started to inch westward and was lost in the trees. In a few seconds it reappeared, flapping, moving the other way, and this time she could make out a human figure, and then a glint of sunlight on metal his truck. In the wrong place at the wrong time, it would attract attention if a knowledgeable person happened to be looking and knew it did not belong there. Then flag, figure, and truck all vanished among the trees.

    She drove back the tortuous road so preoccupied with her thoughts that she had none left to frighten her as she negotiated Deadman's Grade. But it was better to be the driver than the passenger, she decided, when she realized that she was down, turning onto the private road, nearly home again.

    Lonnie's old Dodge was in the driveway; it was her day to clean Frank's house. When Barbara went inside, her father came from his study to meet her.

    "How's it going?"

    "Fine. Beautiful day again."

    "You had a call. A Mike Dinesen."

    "Oh, good. Did he leave a number?"

    "I took it down. Here."

    "I'll call him from upstairs. Thanks, Dad. Oh, before I forget again, I won't be here for dinner."

    "Oh. Dinesen?"

    Before she could answer, Lonnie said from the kitchen, "Clive and Nell. I'm baby-sitting for her."

    Barbara shrugged and started up the stairs. And that's how home life was going, she thought, as if she were not aware of the hurt on Frank's face and the stubbornness that made him set his mouth in a way that would not allow him to express that hurt, or to back up and say he had been wrong. Or even to admit that he had called for her to come to do his dirty work. She stopped midway up the stairs, however, when Lonnie came from the kitchen talking.

    "That Clive, he's like a boy these days. Such a cut in pay that he took and he's grinning like a baboon. His heart wasn't in it anymore. Money doesn't mean a thing if your heart's not in it. Best thing that ever happened for Travis, having him around. Get his nose away from that computer, out in the open air, in the woods."