Smart House (12 page)

She nodded, surveying the pots through narrowed eyes. “He must have been putting something in, not taking it out, and depending on the size of the object, there could be dirt left over.”

“Why not digging something out?”

“Just wouldn’t make much sense. These are all portable, repotted often, I imagine, moved around. The gardener would have found anything left in them more than a few days, I imagine. The big ones are on casters. I expect they all spend part of the time in a greenhouse, maybe get rotated on a regular basis. They do better in a greenhouse,” she added, almost absently, not moving yet, considering the task before them.

Charlie began to mount the stone stairs, studying each one before he put his foot on it, searching for more loose dirt. Each riser was on a slant, not really noticeable unless he examined them closely, and there were drainage channels along the rear of each one, and, he cursed, even an automatic watering system, the kind people installed in lawns, with pipes that would emerge and spray water and then sink back out of sight. He was not quite certain why it infuriated him, but it did. Then he knew. If they didn’t find the right pot, the system might come on at dawn and wash away every trace, just as the little vacuum cleaners would pop out of the wall and clean up any dirt in the carpet.

He mounted another step, then another. A heavy perfume was cloying; white flowers and pink, then a bigger pot with a climbing vine, and a palm tree…. He grunted softly and squatted. Dirt.

Constance joined him and they looked at the scattering of dirt, then turned their attention to the pots. The gardenias were in bloom, with many buds that had not opened yet. Verbenas crowded them, and a dainty trailing lobelia covered with blue flowers. Charlie began to move the sphagnum moss out of the way. The soil in the first pots he uncovered looked untouched. But the dirt came from somewhere, he thought morosely, and reached out to take away more moss.

“Wait a second,” Constance said. She picked up a pot of gardenias and grasped the plant, tilted the pot, and was holding the plant, roots in a tight ball. She replaced it and lifted the next one. Charlie stared. He never had seen a pot-bound plant, she realized. “They like to fill the pot before they make buds,” she said, and turned the next pot over. And the next. He moved ahead of her to uncover the big pot that held the palm tree. That at least had room to dig in, he was thinking, when he heard her soft exclamation. “Charlie! Look.”

She was holding a plant in one hand, the pot in the other, and when he looked inside it he saw an object that might have been a calculator, but that he knew was the hand-held computer control. He lifted it out carefully, holding it by the narrow edge.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

They both looked up to see Bruce and Jake coming down the wide stone stairs. Jake was in his robe and slippers, Bruce in the disarray of clothing he had been wearing all night, the misshapen sweater, untied sneakers, jeans.

“Is this the gadget you were talking about before?” Charlie asked pleasantly, as he watched them both walk through the dirt on the stairs to join him and Constance.

Jake whistled and nodded. Bruce reached for it, but that, Charlie thought, was going too far. He drew it back. Now Jake looked down at the pots, the sphagnum moss that had been tossed out of the way. He frowned. “It was in the plants? How did you find it?”

“Wild guess. Let’s go to the kitchen. I can use a wash.”

“Is there just one? Maybe…” Jake looked over the nearby pots, then gazed around the room, and finally shrugged. “If there are more, they could be anywhere,” he said.

“If so, they’ll keep until tomorrow,” Charlie said. He waited until Constance returned the gardenia to its pot, and then led the way down and out of the garden.

In the kitchen Constance got another plastic bag out and they all watched Charlie put the computer control in it and fasten it.

“Shit!” Bruce cried. “Just like in the movies! You’re actually going to look for fingerprints? Don’t you think a smart killer would have wiped them all off?”

“What makes you think he’s smart?” Charlie asked as if he were really interested in a new and strange idea. He slipped the second bag into his pocket and went to the sink where Constance had already started to wash her hands.

“Up until today, everyone in this house was smart,” Bruce said.

Charlie nodded and grinned. “You both just happened to be up guarding the pool room?”

“I wasn’t up,” Jake said, and he yawned. “I heard someone on the balcony. I looked, of course, but didn’t see anything. I was good and awake by then, so I decided a drink was in order. Met him up in the hall. He was watching you and Constance.”

“That’s a damn lie!” Bruce yelled. “You can’t hear anything on the balcony from inside. I was on my way down to get something to eat. I thought we had burglars. You’re lucky I didn’t go back and get a gun.”

Jake nearly choked. “My God!” he said incredulously. “
You
have a gun?” A shudder passed over him and he averted his face.

“Yeah! And I’m a damn good shot! So just be careful, you asshole!”

Jake faced round again, and it became apparent that he was laughing. He shook his head. “I’m getting that drink I came down for. There must be something in the kitchen. I certainly don’t intend to go to the bar in the garden, not until someone makes a search anyway.” He began to open cabinets, grinning widely now. He found a bottle of bourbon. “Charlie? Constance?”

Bruce began to rummage in the refrigerator. Jake poured drinks for Charlie and Constance and himself and went to the door with his. He raised it in a semi-salute, “Cheers. See you tomorrow. And, Bruce, you do know which end shoots, I hope.” He left.

Bruce’s mouth was more pouty than ever when he took out a plastic-wrapped platter of sliced ham and started to make a sandwich. Charlie joined him and picked up a piece of the meat. It was very good.

“Did you handle the computer control when your brother showed it to you?” he asked.

“No. No way would he let me get my hands on it. Mustard,” he said, and returned to the refrigerator.

“I’m just trying to get an idea of what it could do,” Charlie said. “Did he demonstrate it?”

Bruce looked at him with contempt. “You don’t know a goddamn thing about computers, do you?”

“Nope.” Charlie was being inhumanly cheerful and pleasant. Constance sat at the table and watched them both.

“Okay. Okay. Look, the main computer has the program, and the control is really like a radio signal that it can pick up. You looked at it? There’s a keyboard, and numbers. Say you program it to turn on lights when you press
A
. A signal goes to the main computer and it takes the command and carries it out. You don’t really program the little one to do anything except send a signal.” His voice had lost its petulance; there was the same underlying patience that Charlie himself could assume when he explained something to a naive student. “What that means,” Bruce went on, “is that you can use all the letters, the numbers, any combination of them to make it send the right signal, up to the limit of the main computer’s memory, anyway. So it can do whatever the main computer can do, if you programmed it in in advance.”

“Seems kind of risky,” Charlie said thoughtfully. “What if you touched the A accidentally?”

Bruce took a bite of his sandwich and shook his head. “You’d activate it first, some sequence of letters to tell the main computer you were going on line with it.” He talked with his mouth full; the words came out muffled.

Charlie reached for another piece of ham. “How long would it take to reprogram something once it was in the computer?”

Bruce shrugged. “Depends. The whole thing, a couple of minutes. One or two commands, seconds, if you knew the program to start with. None of us did, remember. That would make it a little longer.”

Charlie looked surprised. “You mean you could do it even though you didn’t know the program, the language, whatever?”

“You can’t keep a good hacker out of any program. Look, you know anything about music?”

“I can tell Wagner from Verdi,” Charlie said cautiously. “Why?” But from the blank expression on Bruce’s face, he knew the names were the wrong ones.

“Let’s pretend you know music,” Bruce said. “Like you recognize the style if it’s Springsteen. Or Simon. Or anyone. The good ones have a style you hear; you know who’s playing. Right? Same with programmers. The good ones have a style you get to recognize. They do the same things over and over. Maybe one’s succinct, someone else is wordy, someone else uses shortcuts that get familiar. Alexander’s maybe the best. And he’s got style that stands out. And he was the group leader for programming, see. So someone who knows his style knows what to look for, what he’s likely to do next. Anyone here with computer smarts could crack his software, anyone. And, like I said, until today everyone in this house was pretty damn smart.”

Charlie nodded absently. “I wonder,” he said, “why no one’s mentioned that before.”

Bruce shrugged and took more ham.

“If it was that easy, I wonder why your brother didn’t reprogram the computer to take your mother out of the game.”

Bruce wiped his hands on his jeans.

“Or if he didn’t do that, why he thought he could get her to confirm his killing you, if she had said she wouldn’t play.” He glanced at Bruce who had become very still; his mouth was sullen again, his eyes narrowed.

“What does that mean?” he demanded. “What are you getting at?”

“Damned if I know. Didn’t you think it was curious at the time that he’d make such a big thing of it when he knew she wasn’t in the game?”

“He was an asshole.”

“Did he rig the game to get you for his first victim?”

“Probably. It would have been like him.”

“But then you knew he had your name, even if the first attempt wasn’t recorded, didn’t you? Seems you might have tried to avoid him after that try. When did he show you the control computer?”

Bruce’s face went slack, then it wrinkled, like the face of a child about to throw a tantrum. Charlie remembered how he had treated his daughter Jessica when she was small and her face changed that way. “Storm front moving south,” he would say then, and she always had turned suspicious eyes on him, scowled, and most often refused to weep simply because it was expected. The memory was very sharp. How like Constance she was, more so every day. He blinked and focused on Bruce.

“He didn’t tell me,” Bruce muttered. “I overheard him telling someone else.”

Charlie raised both eyebrows and said nothing.

“I thought he was going around telling everyone but me. That’s why I… Anyway I thought everyone else knew. I was looking over the stuff in the basement, the automatic pool stuff, the vacuum systems, all that. I went behind the elevator to look at the vacuum intake and exhaust, and I heard him. On the elevator, I thought. Must have been for me to have heard him. Anyway, I don’t know who was with him. I didn’t see them, and the other one didn’t say anything. Gary laughed and said, ‘Don’t be stupid. Of course, I have a safety backup system. In my pocket. Look.’ And I knew what it had to be, and about how big it was. Nothing else made any sense. And it would have been stupid not to have a control.”

Charlie nodded. “Then?”

“Then nothing. They stopped talking, or the elevator went up, or they left it. I went up the back stairs, the ones that go to the Jacuzzi area, the outside door.”

“That’s the space where all the pipes are, the wires, tubing to the greenhouse and the cold-storage room?”

Bruce shrugged. “You’d need access to all that stuff. I figured that out and went back there to examine the system.”

“What time did you hear them?”

“How the fuck do I know? Sometime in the afternoon. If I’d known it was going to be a federal case, I’d have made notes! I’m going to bed.”

He stamped out of the kitchen, and now Constance left the table and joined Charlie at the counter where he was picking at the ham absently. She moved it out of reach. “You’ll have nightmares.”

“Probably. What do you make of him?”

“Being eaten alive by jealousy. If it’s this bad now with his brother dead, what must it have been when he was still alive? That poor man.”

“Remember, that ‘poor man’ has a gun, and he’s something of a nut.”

She looked at him in surprise. “You believed it about the gun?”

“You didn’t?”

“Of course not. It was a typical, my father’s-bigger-than-your-father kind of little-boy threat. It never occurred to me to take it as literal truth.”

And it had not occurred to him, Charlie thought darkly, not to accept it as true. “Where are you taking that?”

Constance had picked up the platter of ham. “To the refrigerator. And then I’m taking you to bed. You know, the more of all these other men I see, the better you keep looking.”

“And you,” he said, “are a proper sort of wife.”

Chapter 11

The next morning the
fog swirled outside the window wall, was lifted by the offshore breeze, dissipated, then formed again. Charlie watched it broodingly as he and Constance waited for their breakfast.

“Problems?” Constance asked.

He nodded. “Time problems. Not enough at the right time. Look, let’s place people and set them in time as if they were cherries being plopped in whipped cream. First, we know Rich was alive at ten-forty-five, and we can assume he was alive at eleven when Maddie used the elevator. And Gary was alive at eleven-ten or eleven-fifteen. But by then everyone’s pretty much accounted for. We have to make another assumption, that Rich died first, simply because the others were all together from eleven-fifteen on. See what I mean by not enough time at the right time?”

Constance raised her eyebrows questioningly, but he was gazing at the restless fog. “Around eleven,” he said unhappily, “Harry hears Bruce and Maddie fighting in the kitchen, and the elevator is clear. Rich must be alive somewhere. Harry goes to chat with Alexander. Milton and Laura take off for the roof.

Maddie and Beth watch the movie until Beth goes to her room. Bruce is alone, wandering about. Then at ten after eleven, Milton and Laura rejoin others either in the television room, or the library. Beth and Jake come downstairs together. Bruce is with others in the TV room when they all hear Gary laugh, and smell popcorn. Meanwhile Harry has gone upstairs. So he’s free now, but he wasn’t free earlier. So it seems that almost anyone could have found time to get Rich, but not Gary. He’s a problem.”

She said in a low voice, “Alexander was alone from the time Harry left him until after the body was found in the elevator.”

“Yeah,” he said gloomily. “And he’s probably the only one who really needed to keep Gary and Rich, and the project, alive and well and funded.”

“And,” Constance added thoughtfully, “we really only have Harry’s word for it that he looked in on the people watching the movie before he went upstairs after talking with Alexander. It’s possible that he was free from then on, too.”

“Milton saw him,” Charlie said. He sounded disgusted. “He didn’t mention it, but it’s in his notes of his own movements. Harry looked in seconds after Milton got down from the roof rendezvous. It’s not the sort of thing he would be likely to want to talk about, I guess, but he did make a note of it.”

“But that still left him time…”

Charlie was shaking his head. “There’s the problem of Rich, though. And damn, I don’t want to think about two killers, a conspiracy—” He stopped when Mrs. Ramos entered with the breakfast tray.

While she was placing soft-boiled eggs before Constance, and then pancakes and eggs for him, he asked, “When Gary made popcorn at night, what did he use? An automatic gadget, a pan, what?”

She raised her eyebrows a fraction of an inch; her idea of a surprised expression, he assumed.

“A popper. Automatic.”

“Did he have a special bowl he used?”

“Yes. A stainless steel bowl.”

“And the day after his death, after the police had gone, where did you find the bowl?”

She finished serving them and paused thoughtfully. “In the cupboard where we always keep it. But the popcorn popper was in the garden, the pool room.”

“Had it been used?”

She studied Charlie for a lengthy moment, then nodded. “It was filled with popped corn.”

He asked her about the blueprints and the handheld computers and drew a blank. Then Laura and Harry Westerman joined them and Mrs. Ramos left.

Laura’s gaze swept over Constance; she nodded slightly and inspected Charlie more leisurely with a hint of a smile, as if they shared a secret. Reflex, he thought; was she even aware of it? He grinned at her and Harry. He was wearing a sweat shirt and pants. “You’ve been running?”

“Yes.” Harry poured coffee for himself. Laura poured her own, and neither of them looked at the other. He tasted his, set his cup down hard, and asked bluntly, “What the hell is going on in the garden?”

Charlie shrugged, but did not explain. He had caught Mrs. Ramos before seven, had spoken with her husband a few minutes later, and now Ramos and a helper were searching pots. It didn’t surprise him, he reflected, that Harry had been out running. He didn’t keep that muscular physique sitting all day in an office adding up columns of figures. Ignoring the question, he commented, “I noticed, during the recital of killers and victims last night, you weren’t a very active player.”

Harry drank his coffee. When he spoke again, his voice was frigid, “You noticed right. Damn stupid game. I did not participate.”

“Oh? But you took a weapon, and you were witness to two murders. What weapon did you choose, by the way?”

“A water gun. A plastic water gun. And the day after the deaths, the real deaths, I went to the edge of the point out there and I heaved it as far as I could into the ocean. I never even put water in it.”

“Why did you take it if you didn’t intend to play?”

Harry finished his coffee, poured more, and did not answer.

“We didn’t have much choice,” Laura said. “Gary had it in his head that we’d play the game, and we had to go along, or risk having him in a tantrum all weekend. He could have done that, stormed around for days, you know. Others were doing it too, going along with him just to keep him happy. Taking weapons, tossing them. We were talking about it last night while you were out with Alexander. Bruce found a pea shooter at the bar in the garden, Milton picked up a water gun on the roof when we were up there, I found two balloons in the television room. We had to take them but we didn’t have to use them.”

“And you thought Gary would be able to check up on all of you? Cheat?”

She tilted her head and her smile deepened. “Wouldn’t you have thought so? I mean, he made the rules, provided the weapons, programmed it all in; of course, we assumed he’d supervise.”

Charlie nodded. “What weapon did you take?”

“The garrote. A pretty blue ribbon with Velcro on the ends.”

“And did you toss your weapon out into the ocean, too?”

“I don’t have an idea about what happened to it. I never gave it another thought,” she said with elaborate disinterest.

Charlie turned back to her husband, aware suddenly of the amusement in Constance’s eyes that to anyone else might simply look bright with interest. “Can you tell me exactly what happened when Rich Schoen killed Gary? In the game, of course.”

Mrs. Ramos appeared with their breakfasts before Harry could speak. She put half a grapefruit down for Laura, and a bowl of what looked like straw before Harry. Charlie stared at it. Shredded wheat, he thought in astonishment. He had not seen shredded wheat in more than twenty years.

After Mrs. Ramos was gone again, Harry said, “I was talking to Rich, about Smart House, of course. That’s what we were all doing, finding out as much about it as possible. He spotted Gary and motioned for me to go with him. In the garden, by the bar, he unrolled the blueprints he was carrying and pulled out a foam bat of some sort and touched Gary with it. It counted as a kill. We went to the computer around the bar and recorded it and had it confirmed. Rich left, and I followed him. I didn’t want to hang around with Gary mad, and he was mad. He was not a good loser.”

Charlie held up his hand. “Slower. What about the bat? The blueprints?”

He munched on his straw, frowning. “I don’t know. He put the blueprints down on one of those tables in there. Maybe he put the bat on the counter at the bar. I didn’t pay any attention. Beth came up while we were recording the kill. Ask her.”

“Okay. You left with Rich, but then you went back, and this time you witnessed Jake murdering Beth. Why’d you go back?”

Harry sighed in an exaggerated manner. “Look, try to get the picture of that goddamn weekend. We were not happy, none of us. It was a stupid game, and we had serious business. Okay, the house is a miracle of innovations, but it’s a black hole, too. And Gary was being childish. No one knew when he’d blow hot or cold. I was fed up with him, with the goddamn game, with his tantrums, just about the whole damn show. Even this hideaway. Stuck out here for a whole weekend. He never gave a thought to how inconvenient it would be for us, for prospective clients, for staff, everyone. I sure as hell wasn’t planning out every step, keeping track of every minute. Most of us were simply trying to learn what we could, and keep out of Gary’s path. I didn’t have a reason to go back. I just did it.”

“Why did he build the house here? Why not down in California?” Charlie asked when Harry paused.

“Because he was a goddamn maniac!”

Laura said coldly, “Because he knew the industry was full of spies. He told me the reason. He had a contract with a private airline to bring him and his crew up here, and actually it’s only a couple of hours out of Palo Alto. And he knew no spy could get in.”

Charlie nodded. “Did you fly up when you came to visit?”

If he had wanted to shake her, he did not succeed. She shrugged. “A couple of times.”

He turned back to Harry. “The day of the game, when you went back to the garden, was Jake already there?”

“Jesus Christ!” He rubbed his hand over his eyes. “Yeah, I think so. I just wandered in. He motioned for me to come with him. Beth was standing by the bar. We weren’t even trying to keep quiet, just walking, and she didn’t notice. She’d been fighting with Gary, obviously. She spent the whole weekend in a rage. She wanted a divorce; that’s all that was on her mind apparently, and he, for God knows what reason, wasn’t letting go. Ego, I guess.”

“Not just that,” Laura said coldly. “He was going to make use of her, let her be his hostess in this place. He liked to use people he knew.”

“Everyone seems to be aware that she wanted a divorce even before she had made up her mind about it,” Charlie said. “Did Gary mention it to you two?”

“He told me,” Laura said, and suddenly her voice was hard and bitter, her face strained.

Harry looked at her with surprise, then deliberately stared at his cereal again.

“You were Rich’s last victim, weren’t you?” Charlie asked.

“I don’t know,” Harry replied. “The rules stated that no one tell anyone things like that. How the hell would I know?”

“Oh yes. I forgot. But if Bruce had your name, and he did, and if Rich killed him, then Rich inherited you.”

“You’ve got a good memory,” Harry said in a tight voice.

“Just fair to middling,” Charlie said modestly.

“Well, remember this. Whoever had that goddamn hand-held computer could get a weapon any time he wanted one. That’s one of the things it could have done without any trouble at all.”

Charlie glanced at Constance. She appeared to be so placid, so removed and distant, that she might have been off in her own reverie. She felt the look and came back, and her own glance at him said
wait a second
.

She looked at Harry and said, “You knew Gary for a long time, didn’t you? Why do you think he insisted on a game like this at that particular time?”

Harry put his spoon down and poured coffee, watching his own motions, as if considering if he would even bother to answer, or considering what kind of answer would satisfy—or, she thought, perhaps he had not asked himself the question until this moment.

Finally he said, “I think he intended to keep us apart as much as possible, and still make us switch our position, those of us opposed to sinking more money into this project. He and Rich were working on Jake, getting his support, most of Saturday. If they had lived, I would have been next to be won over. I think every single move had been planned in advance.”

“Were you won over by the house itself?”

“No. Remember, I’m the company treasurer. I knew better than anyone what it was costing, what it would continue to cost.” His voice had gone very flat again. He picked up his spoon, but did not use it; this time he examined it. “Sterling,” he said in that flat hard voice, and tossed it down.

“I see,” Constance said thoughtfully. “I can understand why a tall man like Jake would choose a garrote for a shorter woman like Beth. Did you see the ribbon?” she asked Harry, who was regarding her with dislike, possibly even contempt. Charlie blinked at the sudden change of direction.

“No. He had it palmed, and then her hands went up to it the way people would do if they’re being strangled.”

“Oh, of course. That’s a reflex, isn’t it?”

Charlie was watching her closely. God help the guy who tries to strangle her, he thought. She was a black belt in aikido, had given demonstrations for years. Her hands would go to places and do things a would-be killer would not like.

“Did you learn who your victims were before you picked weapons?” Constance asked.

Laura and Harry exchanged irritated glances. Laura looked at her watch and said, “Either way. I don’t know about the others, but I did. What are you getting at?”

“Just curious,” Constance said brightly. “A garrote is such a strange weapon for a woman to pick when her victim is so much larger than she is. You’re what, five seven, five eight? And Jake is six one at least, isn’t he? I just wondered if you tried to use the weapon and failed, if you gave him the idea of using it on Beth later.”

“I couldn’t even find him all day!” Laura said furiously. “He kept himself holed up with Rich or Gary or Alexander all day long.”

Harry jerked his chair away from the table. “If you two are finished,” he said roughly, “I have some work to take care of.” He stalked from the room.

Constance turned back to Laura, who was glaring at her.

“I planned to sneak up on him when he was sitting down. I never had a chance to get behind him.”

“How long have you and Harry been married?”

Charlie blinked again, and Laura flushed an angry red; her lips tightened.

“That’s none of your damn business!”

“Of course not,” Constance said pleasantly. She held Laura’s gaze with her own clear-eyed, cool look, the unanswered question hanging between them until Laura jumped up and ran out of the room.

“What the hell was that all about?” Charlie said softly, impressed that she had been able to rattle Laura’s cage so effectively. His own attempts had been water on the proverbial duck.