Good King Sauerkraut (26 page)

He went to the office door and banged on it once with his fist. “All right?”

“All right,” Mimi's voice said.

Back to the media room. King replaced the burned-out wires in the video control unit and rigged his false weapon the exact way he'd done it the first time. The lights flickered once while he was working but didn't go out.
The wiring in this whole apartment needs to be checked
, he thought absently. Then he slipped a videocassette into one of the VCRs and played a little of it, just enough to make sure his electronic equivalent of a smoke bomb didn't interfere with the normal operation of the equipment. He left the cassette in the player, ready for viewing tomorrow morning when Marian Larch would be there to act as his eyewitness. Then he gathered up his tools and leftover wires and parts, tied them all together, and tossed the bundle down the apartment's trash-disposal chute.

Everything was ready.

It was only ten o'clock, but King's body was telling him to go to bed. He passed the office door without calling out goodnight to Mimi and locked himself into his bedroom. A quick shower made him even more conscious of the fatigue that had been creeping up on him for some time now; it had been an event-filled day. King reset the clock radio by his bed and crawled under the comforter, relishing its soft warmth.

He thought briefly of Gale Fredericks. He'd lost her, irrevocably. He'd lost both the people he'd worked most closely with, but Dennis Cox would leave no unfillable gap in his life. Gale, however, had been more than a co-worker; she was the only woman he'd really wanted, for a long time. And now she was gone. She'd run out on him when he needed her the most; that must surely be the ugliest kind of betrayal there was. King wondered what he had ever seen in her.

He was calm. Sleep came easily.

The clock radio woke him early the next morning; he didn't know what time the police would show up and he didn't want to rush. He stared at his face in the bathroom mirror. The bruises were almost gone.

He made coffee and ate a bowl of cereal; there was no sign of Mimi. When he'd finished breakfast, he looked in her room. The bed was made. She must have gotten an even earlier start than he did or else the bed hadn't been slept in. Was she
sleeping
in the office? How uncomfortable.

King went into the media room and started the movie. It was a spy thriller he'd already seen, so he let it run as he wandered restlessly around the apartment. He went out on the living room balcony and glanced down at the street, twenty-two stories away, trying to spot a car pulling up to the front of the building.
Come on, Sergeant Larch
.

Mimi's behavior was peculiar, to say the least; King didn't even know whether she was in the apartment or not. Maybe she didn't think he was the killer at all; it could be that was just a defensive posture she'd decided it would be smart to adopt. So what was she up to? When he couldn't stand it any longer, he went to the office door and knocked. “Mimi!” he called. “Are you in there?”

There was no answer. He tried the knob; the door was still locked. “Come on, Mimi, answer me! I know you're there.”

He stood listening for some sound from behind the locked door. The only noise in the apartment came from the soundtrack of the movie he'd left playing in the media room; from all the racket it was making, the bad guys must be blowing something up. King began to get uneasy. Mimi had spoken to him through the door last night—why wouldn't she answer now? Was this some sort of trap she'd set for him?

He examined the doorknob. It was the kind with a small insert hole in the middle, a safety precaution for rescuing small children who accidentally locked themselves into bathrooms and the like. All he needed was something small enough to fit into the hole and he'd have the door open in no time. King straightened up and thought; among the tools he'd tossed the night before was a tiny screwdriver that would have done the job admirably, but he wasn't about to go down to the basement and rummage through the trash looking for it.

A wire coat hanger. But every closet he looked in had only wooden and plastic hangers. What else would fit in the hole? A knitting needle. An ice pick? Too big. A meat skewer, one of the thin ones used for kabobs. A quick search through the kitchen drawers turned up a dozen metal skewers of just the right size.

King took one and hurried back to the office. He poked the skewer into the hole and heard the lock click open. He opened the door cautiously, in case Mimi was standing there ready to brain him with some conveniently heavy object.

She wasn't. In fact, she wasn't standing at all; she was slumped over the conference table as if asleep. But King didn't have to go into the room to know she wasn't asleep. Even from the doorway he could tell that of all the senseless things that had been happening, the most senseless had now taken place. Mimi was dead.

Quietly he closed the door on the sight and leaned his forehead against the panel, his heart pounding and his pulse racing. First Gregory. Then Dennis. And now … Mimi. He himself was the sole survivor of that ill-fated design team; and if there was any one thing in the world that would convince the police that King Sarcowicz was a bloodthirsty killer who ought to be locked away for ten thousand years, this was it. Mimi was dead.

Mimi was dead!

How? When? How? King fought down the beginnings of panic and tried to think. The other time this had happened, he'd bolted; but the new King would have to react more rationally if he was going to have any chance of getting out of this. First things first. Go inside, try to figure out what happened.
Then
decide what to do.

He opened the door again and forced himself to go up to where Mimi lay slumped over the table. Her lips were blue and her body was rigid; she'd been dead for hours. One hand still gripped a soldering iron tightly. A soldering iron? Only then did King notice that the tabletop was littered with tiny electronic parts. Slowly he walked around the table, taking inventory.

Capacitors. Switching diodes. Transistors. Trim pots. Resistors. Toggle switches. NAND gates. Infrared proximity sensors. IC sockets. Circuitry boards. And in the middle of it all, a radio-controlled toy car.

King's mouth fell open. “Why, you bitch!” he said aloud.

She'd been building a robot. A robot! The one thing that the police would leap on as carrying King's signature. Mimi Hargrove had been planning the same thing he'd been planning, to stage a fake accident that would bear all the earmarks of having been engineered by the
other
suspect. She was manufacturing evidence to incriminate him.

King sank down in a chair across the table from Mimi's body. He knew she hadn't trusted the police to solve the case on their own, but it never occurred to him that she'd go this far to make sure
she
was not the one they arrested. But that's what she'd been doing; and that's why she'd locked herself into this room—she needed the big table to work on. Morbidly curious, King examined the work she'd completed. Goddam. She was getting it right.

His stomach did a flipflop as he realized what a close call he'd had. If she'd finished … if she'd finished, his own carefully staged “accident” wouldn't convince anybody of anything. At best, the two accidents would cancel each other out and the police would remain equally suspicious of both of them. He stared up at the chandelier that had been burning all night and wondered how Mimi had been planning to work it. She could have used the robot to trip herself and cause a bad fall, and then she'd have just handed the toy car to the police.

No, that was too vague, too clumsy. Idly he picked up a pack of adhesive strips from the table. What did she need adhesive strips for?
Holds up to 25 pounds
, the package lettering declared. King thought about that. If Mimi had fitted the adhesive strips around the wheels of the toy car, then the robot might possibly have been able to climb walls. Or … the side of a bathtub? She could have filled the tub with water and simply tossed the robot car in; since one of their team had already died that way, that would add a nice note of consistency. Then Mimi would have told the police that she'd seen the robot coming and was able to get out of the tub in time. The toy car would have to be a real, functioning robot for her story to hold up; so she'd been building the one prop her little drama required when she'd died.

Pretty good, Mimi. King raised an eyebrow at her corpse in silent salute. And to think how narrowly he'd escaped all that. If she hadn't died just when she did, before finishing … but how did that happen?
Why
did she die, what killed her?

King went over to take a closer look at the body. Mimi had died while working on some soldering; that much was clear. He peered at the soldering iron she was gripping with such intensity, but could see nothing wrong there. His eyes traveled down the soldering iron's cable—and there it was: a big hole in the top side of the cable, with burn marks around the edges. The cable's casing had been seared away and the wires exposed, now fused and blackened. Mimi had electrocuted herself.

God god in heaven, how could that have happened? Obviously she'd put the soldering iron down right on the cable and burned the protective casing away. But didn't she
see
what she was doing? Mimi was not a careless woman, she didn't make dumb mistakes—

Oh. Oh no. She
didn't
see what she was doing. And the reason she didn't see was that the lights were out. She'd put the iron down in the dark, and when she picked it up again after the lights came back on …

“
It's not my fault!
” King brayed, shocked and horrified. How was he to know his puny little booby trap would short-circuit the apartment's entire lighting system? And how was he to know Mimi was in here fucking around with a soldering iron? If she hadn't been so busy trying to incriminate
him
, she'd be alive right now! It was her own doing, she'd brought it on herself, if she'd just left it to the police and not meddled …

King sank to the floor beside Mimi's chair and buried his face in his hands. Oh god. God. He'd done it again.

After a while he began to feel an irresistible desire to giggle.
Don't mess with me, man—I'll “accident” you to death!
Mimi's last words had been “All right”—in response to his query after he got the lights back on.
Then
she was all right. Later, he'd passed the office door without saying goodnight. She wouldn't have answered even if he had spoken. He remembered the lights flickering while he was working on his own booby trap; that must have been when it happened. His giggle climbed higher and then broke off sharply, as King struggled to get a grip on himself. This was no time to revert to the old King, not with … he jerked himself up to his feet. He'd just remembered the police; they, or she, could be on the way right now. Get moving.

What to do? He couldn't be found in the apartment with Mimi's body. And he couldn't just leave and claim to know nothing about it, the way he'd done last time; that hadn't worked too well then and it sure as hell wouldn't work now. So the logical thing was to get rid of the body; if Mimi Hargrove simply disappeared from the face of the earth, they couldn't blame him for that, could they?

But how? How do you dispose of a body with the police watching you and security guards checking off your name every time you go in and out of the building? King still had enough composure left to realize that was too big a problem to solve in the time he had left before Marian Larch put in her daily appearance. So the only thing to do was hide the body for now and figure out how to dispose of it later. He'd tell Marian that Mimi had gone out earlier and didn't say when she'd be back … yes, that would do.

He'd hide Mimi in her bedroom closet; Marian Larch would have no reason to go poking around in there. Or better still, in the closet in the unused bedroom. The first thing he did was unplug the soldering iron. Then he braced himself for something he'd been dreading: he had to touch Mimi. He tried to work the soldering iron free of the death grip Mimi had on it but couldn't manage it, and he couldn't bring himself to break her fingers to pry it loose. Didn't matter; just leave it there.

Fighting down a feeling of nausea, King grasped Mimi's body around the waist and lifted her out of her chair—and got an unpleasant shock. Mimi had stiffened into her seated, slumped-over posture, a posture the body maintained even as King lifted her up.
This is grotesque
, he thought, struggling to get a better grip on the nearly folded-double corpse. He almost dropped her, put off as he was by the bizarreness of what he was doing. He used one foot to push the door open a little wider, and after much maneuvering succeeded in getting Mimi's body out into the hallway.

Where he froze. Because from the direction of the apartment's entryway came the sound of voices. He heard a clank of buckets, a woman's laugh, and the noise a vacuum cleaner makes when it starts up. The cleaning crew! It was the goddam cleaning crew! King was paralyzed by the racket they were making, standing there as stiff and unbending as the burden he carried.

“Thanks for letting us in,” said a familiar voice.

And then Marian Larch and Ivan Melecki were at the other end of the hallway, staring at him in shock, horror, and just plain disgust. No one said anything, no one moved; the sound of the vacuum cleaner roared in the background. Sergeant Malecki was the first to find his voice. “Put her down,” he said tightly.

Slowly King lowered Mimi's body to the floor. Then he stepped back as the two detectives rushed forward.

“Rigor's well advanced,” Marian Larch murmured, bending over the body. “She must have died during the night. Ivan …?”

“I'll call it in,” he said. “And I'll get rid of those cleaning people.” He headed toward the living room.