Farmer, Philip José - Traitor to the Living (3 page)

"Or he may have had nothing to do with it," Carfax said. "Your shadow, if any, may have been on your trail before you went to Hampton."

"If any?" she said. "I know he was following me. I saw him go to the desk and ask the clerk there about me. After he left, I asked the clerk if he'd been asking questions about me, and he said he had."

Carfax waved his hand and said, "Go on."

"I packed right away and was out of there in fifteen minutes. I took a taxi to a restaurant in Sherman Oaks and another from there to Tarzana. I rented a car, paid cash, and took off for Route 1.1 was going to stay with some friends in Carmel; I didn't think Western would know about them. And then, going down one of those steep hills on Route I... "

"I know," he said.

"I was almost killed! The brakes gave out. I rode the car all the way down and around the curves and the only reason I didn't run headlong into cars in the outside lane when I was going around the curves was that no one was coming the other way.

"I made the curve at the bottom, even though I went off on the shoulder, and then a tire blew and the car turned over. I got out without a scratch, but I was terribly scared. The car was completely wrecked. A police car stopped and took me back to the restaurant where I'd parked the car while I ate. Sure enough, there was a pool of brake fluid in my parking space.

"I refused medical aid. I didn't need it, except for a few shots of whiskey. Another policeman came in and said the master cylinder had been tampered with. No doubt of it. And it was done on the parking lot, because the brakes had been all right when I drove in, and there wasn't any traffic when I left so I just drove out without using the brakes. It wasn't until I started going down the hill that I used the brakes, and then it was too late."

"And nobody but Western would have any desire to kill you?"

"Nobody."

Fifty points out of a hundred in your favor now, he thought.

He said, "Tell it from the beginning, or we'll wander all over the place. I'll keep quiet and ask questions later."

"All right. You know my father was a professor of physics at the University of Big Sur, California?"

"I read it in the papers. By the way, all I know about the case is what I read in the New York Times. The local paper barely mentioned it."

"Before he went to Big Sur, he taught at UCLA. Even then he must've been working on MEDIUM. He spent a lot of his time at home on equations, schematics, diagrams, tiny models of something or other. I saw them now and then when I'd come into his study, and I asked him once what he was working on. He said, in a joking manner, that he was working on something that would be the biggest thing since creation."

"Western is supposed to have invented that phrase."

"MEDIUM wasn't the only thing he stole from my father. Dad always kept the papers in his safe. But, after we moved to Big Sur Center, he built an electronic device of some sort. It was small, compared to MEDIUM, but it ate up tremendous quantities of power. You should have seen our electric bills."

"Any of those bills survive the fire?" Carfax said. Then, hastily, "I know I said I'd keep quiet, but there are some things ... "

"No, they were all burned up. Of course, the power company had records. I say had, because when I asked for them, I was told that they had been destroyed. It was six months after the fire, and the company said it didn't keep records of paid bills any longer than that. It was part of their recycling policy.

"Anyway, I knew he was using a staggering amount of power. We were living together, and I was sharing expenses. I was secretary to the university president then, you know. No, you wouldn't know. I was making good money, but I couldn't afford to split the power bill. He said he'd take care of all of it. But I knew Dad couldn't afford it. And, after a few months, he said he was going to a man from whom he could borrow money at a very low rate of interest. Guess who that was."

Carfax was determined to say nothing.

"His nephew. My cousin. And yours. Dad got the money, but he must have been forced to tell Western what he was working on. Still, would anybody advance money for a crazy, far-out thing like MEDIUM? It'd be like lending money to build a perpetual-motion machine."

Which, Carfax thought, was now theoretically possible. MEDIUM had opened the gateway to more things than communication with the dead.

"Dad must've got his machine to the point where he could give a convincing demonstration. I don't know. I never saw Western at our house, nor did Dad ever say anything about his being there. But he could have come there while I was working or maybe when I was off to Europe during the summer."

Carfax wanted to ask her if she knew for certain that Western had advanced the money to her father. As if reading his mind, she said, "Dad suddenly started paying the power bills and buying more equipment. I knew he'd deposited twenty thousand dollars at one time and ten thousand at another."

Carfax mouthed silently, "Thirty thousand?"

"A good part went for electronic components and consoles and cabinets. Dad wouldn't tell me where he got the money or what the thing was he was working on. He said it'd all come out in good time, and meantime I wasn't to worry. The deposits were in cash, and receipts never did turn up. If there were any, they were burned. Or taken.

"I don't know why Dad wouldn't tell me what he was doing. I wouldn't have laughed at him- or thought he was crazy. At least, I wouldn't have told him so."

She stopped, frowned, and said, "I must be honest. Yes, I would have thought he was losing his mind, and I probably would have been unable to keep quiet about it. I would have told him what I thought. And I might have tried to get psychiatric help for him. I didn't believe in survival after death or, in fact, in anything of a supernatural nature. That's a redundancy, isn't it? Supernatural nature.

"But neither did Dad. Not as far as I knew. But my mother had died four years before, and he took it very hard. .That's why I went to live with him. I was afraid he'd grieve himself to death or maybe even kill himself.

And, well, I said I'd be honest. I needed him almost as much as he needed me. I loved my mother very much, and I'd just been divorced. I went to him so he could give me comfort and so I could give him comfort."

She opened her purse, removed a delicate handkerchief, and dabbed at her eyes.

"It's possible that his desire to make sure she wasn't dead, that she did live, that he would see her again some day, be with her . , . didn't A. Conan Doyle take up spiritualism after his son died?"

"I think it was somebody in his family."

"But, Dad, I'm certain, would want to approach the problem scientifically. He wouldn't go to a medium. And it's possible that Mom's death had little to do with his project. He may have serendipitously stumbled across the principles of MEDIUM. Only it wasn't such a happy discovery, as it turned out."

Looking at the grass, still dew-wet, and at the birds, Carfax felt no intimations of immortality. If he felt anything, it was an intimation of continuity of life in this world. The dead were dead, and they would never come back unless it was in the form of food for soil.

And man's burial customs often assured that he wouldn't even do that.

Now, he doubted even the continuity of life. Man was doing his best to kill off all life, himself included.

"It was the evening of March 17," she said. "I had driven up to Santa Cruz to visit some college friends, and I got back to the university about one that morning. I was tired but not unhappy, because I'd had a good time. The tank was almost empty, and Dad would need the car in the morning because his was in the garage.

He had to go to a department meeting in the morning, he said, but he didn't say why. So I decided to get a new tank before I went to bed. That probably saved my life. And then, just as I drove away from the service station ... " She swallowed audibly and, when she resumed, her voice was tight.

"I heard an explosion. The whole town heard it. The house was five blocks away from the station, but the noise sounded as if it were right beside me. The windows were blown out for blocks around, you know, and the neighbors were thrown out of bed..

"I... I had to stop for a couple of minutes. I was so shaken up. Then I drove home, very fast. Somehow, I knew whose house it was.

"The house was blown apart and burning; it was just one great bonfire. The firemen got there a few minutes after I did, and they spent the first hour trying to keep the houses next door from catching on fire, too. I just sat there, unable to move or speak, unable to do anything except watch the flames and the firemen and police and the mob that had gathered. Then one of the neighbors pointed me out to a policeman, or so she told me later, and the next I knew, I was being taken off in an ambulance. The doctor there gave me a sedative, and I woke up the evening of the next day. But I still wasn't thinking very well, and I was weak.

"They told me later what they found. Dad's body was blown out into the backyard, but a mass of flaming wood fell on him, and so he was not only ... mangled, torn apart, really ... he was burned beyond recognition. He was identified by his teeth only; our dentist had the records. And... and..."

She blew into her handkerchief and wiped her eyes with the tip of it. He went into the kitchen and came back with several kleenexes. The tears had ruined her makeup, and after she looked into a pocket mirror, she went upstairs to the bathroom to repair the damage.

When she returned, she not only looked better, she managed a smile.

"The wall safe was shut," she said, "but it was empty. So it was obvious that it had been opened, the papers removed, everything removed, in fact, including my jewelry, and then it was closed. Whoever took the stuff must have forced Dad to open it for him.

"The police concluded that the explosion was caused by gas. The jets of the artificial log in the fireplace were shut tight, but the police thought that they must have been turned on until the house was filled with gas. The windows and doors were all shut, and there was some evidence that they had been taped. The tape would've burned up, of course, but they, the police, I mean, had some way of determining that tape had been used.

"But Dad did not die from breathing in the gas. There wasn't any gas in his lungs. He had died of a blow on his head. At least, he had been hit on the head so hard that he should have died from the blow. But it couldn't be determined that he had been struck with some blunt instrument wielded by a man. It was possible that the explosion had driven some heavy object against his head. It didn't seem likely, however, for then he would have been breathing in the gas. So he must have been hit over the head before the gas was turned on.

"Then the killer turned on the gas--he must have been wearing an oxygen mask--waited until the house was full of gas and then set some device to ignite after he left and so cause the gas to explode. The police didn't find anything they could identify as the igniting device, but that may have been, must've been, destroyed in the explosion.

"The killer slipped out of the back door, closed it, and was gone by the time the gas exploded. The two models of MEDIUM were destroyed by the fire and the explosion. An electronics expert who examined them said that some circuits had been removed from them. He didn't know what the models were supposed to do; he'd never seen anything like them. And without the missing circuits installed, he would never be able to figure them out.

"Since the killer must've forced Dad to open the safe for him so he could get the MEDIUM schematics. Dad must've recognized him."

Carfax could not restrain himself.

"Not if he wore a mask and disguised his voice."

"I know. But he knew that there wasn't going to be any witnesses, so why should he bother concealing his identity? Anyway, whoever did it, Western was behind it, if Western didn't do it himself. He was the only one who could possibly have known what Dad was working on. It wasn't just a coincidence that Western announced he'd communicated with the dead only six months after my father died.

"I knew that Western had stolen Dad's plans, but how could I prove it? I didn't have any evidence that could stand up in court. But I wasn't just going to fold my hands and let him get away with killing my Dad, not if I could possibly help it. So the first thing I did was to use my insurance money to move to Los Angeles and hire a detective agency to investigate Western.

"The news media have reported a lot about him, so I suppose you know his general background. He's got a B.A. in business administration, and he inherited his father's seven electronic-radio-TV stores. He took a number of technical courses in college, and he's got a first-class radiotelephone operator's license. But he doesn't have the knowledge or the genius to invent..."

"I'm sorry to interrupt again," Carfax said, "but you don't have to have a Ph.D. to be an inventor or a discoverer of new principles."

"Yes," she said, her eyes widening as if she were angry, "but Western had apparently never done anything after he got out of college except run the business, play the stockmarket, and chase women. I'll tell you the type of man he is! The one time I was alone with him, after Dad's funeral, I went out on a date with him just to find out what he and Dad had been up to. In fact, I practically made sure he would ask me out. I called him and asked to talk to him about Dad. He took me to Scandia's to eat, and we had quite a few drinks. Then he said we could talk better in his apartment, quieter, you know, and I said that would be better. I hoped that, with enough drinks, and, I'll admit it, the tendency for a man to talk more if he's with a good-looking woman-- I have little false modesty--that he'd say something he shouldn't."

Her eyes were even wider, and her voice was no longer thin with grief but was thick with anger.

"He asked me to go to bed with him! His own cousin! And he'd murdered my father! I'm afraid I acted stupidly then, but I was out of my mind! I slapped him, and I yelled at him that he had killed my father so he could steal the plans and that I was going to see that he paid for what he'd done. If the police didn't get him, I would.