Smart House (13 page)

“Just curious. I wondered if they were sleeping together. They aren’t.”

“How do you know?” He peered at her through narrowed eyes.

“I just do,” she said. “I guess he’s impotent. No pheromones at all.”

“Good Christ!”

“Now, Charlie,” she said kindly. “All the signs are there, you know. The way he talks about Beth, looks at her, the way he looks at me, the way he treats Laura. I thought at first maybe homosexual, but I don’t think so. Asexual is more like it. She plays the field and he knows it and doesn’t do anything about it. She rather taunts him with it, like bringing up again the fact that she and Milton met up on the roof, and deliberately choosing a weapon that meant close physical contact with Jake. If he tried to get rid of her, the threat is that she’ll tell and he’d rather die than have it known. All those mountains, you know.” She sighed. “Poor Harry. And she might have flown up in the company plane, but Gary ended their little affair, not her.”

Charlie sputtered on his coffee, and she looked surprised. “Well, it’s obvious. He held people by giving them shares of stock, didn’t he? And he never gave her any. And she’s rather mean-spirited about the way Gary treated her, considering her own actions, I mean. I believe he told her there was a divorce in the works soon, and then he told her of his plans to use Beth for his hostess, a role ideally suited for Laura but never for Beth. Oh, she’s angry. And of course she wouldn’t try to sneak up on a man from behind. She would have gone up to Jake openly, put her arms around his neck, and then said, ‘Gotcha!’ Don’t you think so?”

“You said no pheromones,” he said darkly. “Literally? How do you know?”

“You know, the green cloud of buzzes that most people carry around with them, a little shock here, there, a tingle in your toes when you get near them. Some are pink, of course, or blue, but green is common, too. His are missing. Laura’s cloud is puce, and very dense.”

Charlie had been listening seriously, intently. He began to laugh, his face crinkling the way it did, taking off many years. “That’ll teach her to give me the glad eye in front of you.”

Constance looked innocent.

The air was almost too cool when they walked out on their way to the greenhouse. Mist was still snagged in the tops of trees, still hid the horizon and lingered on the hills behind the house. The grass sparkled with droplets; even as they walked among them the rhododendrons seemed to shrug away the last of their burden of overnight moisture and straighten up for a new day.

“Nice,” Constance murmured. The rumble of ocean, the crash of an occasional breaker, the sharp sea air, it was all very nice, a perfect morning.

Mr. Ramos met them at the open doors of the greenhouse, a building large enough and with enough plants to pass for a commercial enterprise. Charlie whistled softly. No wonder the shareholders were griping about money down the tube, he thought. Gary had done things in a big way indeed. Mr. Ramos was wiry and sharp-faced. His muscles and sinews and bones all were of a piece, all alike, sharp. He was in his fifties, his hair gray, his eyes nearly black and too small. When he smiled, his teeth gleamed white, with gold inlays that flashed. He smiled at Charlie’s awe. “Good greenhouse,” he said. “You want to see it?” “Sure do. You finish going through the plants?” “All that’s been inside. Nothing. They haven’t been bothered. This here’s an experimental special environment room.” He pointed to one of the small glass-enclosed rooms within the big glass structure. There were six of the small rooms altogether, each with an assortment of plants, many in flower or fruiting. “We can keep different temperatures in them,” Ramos said. “And mix different air for them, more carbon dioxide, or not so much, things like that. Some like more oxygen than others. That’s the propagating room back there.”

They walked through the building with him as he explained the various areas. When he got to a maze of pipes, Charlie stopped him. The pesticides were stored in a separate room on the end of the garage; the carbon dioxide came through a pipe from the house. Water and fertilizer came through other pipes, and the whole could be run by the computer. “Except for now,” Ramos added, flashing his gold-edged smile. “Now we just do it the old-fashioned way, by guess and by God.”

“And the night of the deaths, insecticide was released in here,” Charlie murmured. “I’d think you’d be pretty happy to have the computer out of the picture.”

“Told the police, and I tell you now. Computer didn’t do it. Took a hand to open that valve, not a computer giving orders.”

“Show me,” Charlie said.

Ramos led them to the end of the wall with the spaghetti tangle of pipes. “See that one,” he said, pointing to a narrow steel pipe. “Goes to the malathion in the storage shed. From the unit it goes to a mixer and then gets mixed with water and pressurized and comes out like a spray. I turned it off early that day because we were out of malathion and had to install a new unit. Didn’t need the stuff right away and never got around to opening the valve again. Told the police that, too. They chose not to believe me, I guess. Thought I might have forgotten.”

“Which valve opens and closes that pipe?”

Ramos pointed again. One valve among dozens. “The idea is that they stay open all the time and the computer regulates what goes through them. But when something runs out, I’m in charge. Me or one of the boys. Bring in more fungicide and set it up, or more pesticide, fertilizer. And when we run out, we shut the valve, or it messes up the readings, pressure, that sort of thing. Stuff might be forced through the wrong way, or not enough of whatever would get sprayed. I don’t forget stuff like that.”

“Who would have known about it?” Charlie asked, trying to follow the network of tubing that spread throughout the large greenhouse. It was futile; he couldn’t do it.

“Mr. Schoen or Dr. McDowd, the horticulturist. He’s a consultant, comes in two, three times a week now. Me. One of my men. He wasn’t here that weekend, though.”

“Gary Elringer?”

“Not to my knowledge. Not his department. Didn’t care to know what went on in here.”

“How did you get rid of the poison once it was in the air?”

“We can exhaust the air in here in four minutes flat. Just about all of it. Takes just a couple of seconds for the experimental rooms. That’s what the police wanted to hear about, not the valve.”

Charlie studied him curiously. “They thought Rich Schoen might have been suffocated in here and moved?”

“Course, they didn’t tell me what they thought, but they sure looked over the experimental rooms and asked questions about how we could exhaust the atmosphere in them.”

“Was any other valve turned the wrong way? Off or on?”

“Nope, not that I could see. The alarm went off and some damn idiot broke the glass to let the air out. By the time I got here and got things organized, the exhaust system working, there was glass everywhere, and they broke the water pipe somehow, so there was water underfoot. A mess! They sure made a mess.”

“They all trooped out here?”

Ramos looked toward the big house and shrugged. “They must have had a dozen or more cops up there. The computer flashed the alert about poison, and Alexander and Bruce Elringer led the whole pack out here. Bruce, I guess, was the one who began banging away on the glass with a spade.”

They continued the tour, Charlie feeling more and more frustrated. Too many ways it could have been done, he thought grumpily. The cold-storage room, in here, the vacuum system in the elevator, God alone knew what else. They paused when a tractor with a grader blade started up. It was moving a pile of bark mulch; two men shoveled the stuff into big plastic bags.

“Buy it by the truckload,” Ramos said over the noise of the machine. “Some of the plants don’t like sphagnum. We dress them up with bark mulch.” He looked at Charlie shrewdly then. “The police wanted to see the wheelbarrows, the garden cart.”

Almost helplessly, Charlie nodded. “I might as well see whatever interested them.”

Two wheelbarrows, one large-wheeled cart that was piled with sphagnum moss in burlap sacks. Charlie regarded them, feeling nothing but blank, and then took Constance by the arm. “Thank you, Mr. Ramos. You’ve been helpful.”

“Be damned if I have,” Ramos said.

Chapter 12

Looking for Alexander
they found Beth instead. She was pale and nearly in tears. “I just can’t stand much more,” she said wearily. “They’re all driving me batty.” She had a sweat shirt over her arm, and was dressed in jeans, a plaid shirt, and sneakers. “I’m going down to the beach.”

“What happened?” Constance asked.

At the concern in her voice, Beth nearly wept. She shook her head dumbly.

“Have you eaten anything yet? Come on, let’s get something in you before you go out. It’s pretty cool, and everything’s still wet from the fog. I’ll catch up with you, Charlie.”

He watched her lead the young woman into the breakfast room, and continued on his way to find Alexander. Whatever was bugging Beth, Constance would learn within five minutes, he thought, and he would have bet on it if there had been anyone around to steal money from.

Charlie had turned toward the basement stairs when he saw Harry and Bruce in the wide corridor outside the library door. They seemed to be arguing. Abruptly Harry took Bruce’s arm and steered him to the nearest garden door and they entered. Charlie changed his goal and trotted up the stairs to the hall, on around the curve, and entered the garden on the upper level, moving quietly now. He knew that no one below could see through the greenery to this area. It’s a jungle out there, he thought, and began to make his way around the garden cautiously, ducking when he had to keep out of sight in case one of them happened to look up.

He had gone two-thirds of the way around before their voices floated up to him. They were at the bar, one on each side of it. Now he could see the tops of their heads. Moving with even more caution, he edged his way down the steps closest to the bar until the blur of their voices cleared enough to catch the words, and then he stopped moving altogether. A luxuriant banana plant screened him from them. A large red protuberance indicated that the plant was going to bear fruit. It looked strangely obscene. He listened.

Bruce had been cursing steadily for nearly a minute already, a monotone of filthy words; Harry hit the bar top with a hard slap.

“Just stow it for Christ’s sake, and listen. There’s no time for that now. Can you get her in line?”

“I told you already. Sure. I’ll get Mom on it. Don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry! Right. I’ll remember that. Look, we need to float a rumor. I want the word out that BOS and BOS Two make UNIX look like a child’s game. And that we’ll announce in the fall and show in the spring. That’s all.”

“Fuck you! We never went for vapor ware before!”

“Will you shut up! Grollier would be good to start the leak. Who can we get to spill it?”

“Not Beth, even if we had her already. She knows too much to spill, and Grollier knows that. One of Alexander’s team?”

“No. Same reason.”

“But why vapor ware? Why now? What the fuck are you digging in that shit for?”

“Christ!” Harry moaned in a despairing voice. “Use your head! We need cash, lots of it, and we need it soon. Or it’s bottom’s up for us. We can’t go for DOD money, but what if they come to us? Our terms? They all know what Gary was working on. Good Christ, the whole world knows what he was after. Now a rumor that says he did it. They come to us. You have to keep Beth in line, keep her trap shut, don’t rock the boat for the next three, four months at least. That’ll give us time for the rumor to come back home to roost. And then, fuck her!”

“It’s too vague,” Bruce said after a pause. “BOS they know, but they’ll see BOS Two as a series boost, no more than that.”

“Wrong,” Harry said. “We want this leak phrased very carefully; that’s why it has to be someone who isn’t aware of the significance. That’s why Beth wouldn’t do. BOS 3.7 and BOS Two 2.4, say. That should do it, don’t you think?”

There was a longer pause and then Bruce spoke again, his voice more guarded now. “It wouldn’t have to be Grollier. There are a couple of others who’d work out just as well. Sal Vinton, for example. Laura could do it, Harry. With Sal Vinton Laura would do great.”

Charlie had been content just to hear the voices; now he wished he could see the two men as well. He moved the branch in front of his face slightly, and caught another movement from the corner of his eye. He looked harder and saw Jake eavesdropping exactly as he was, from the upper level, hidden by foliage. Jake obviously had been aware of Charlie for some time. He nodded slightly and made no other motion, made no sound.

“The next item is when,” Harry said finally, without a change in his voice at all. “As soon as possible. This weekend will be a bust, naturally. Monday she can get it started. Two weeks, three should be time enough…”

Jake was moving now, easing himself back up the steps. He made his way to the nearest sliding door and pushed it open, then stepped before it, as if he had only then entered the atrium. He called out, “Beth, are you in here?”

Charlie watched the two heads below as Bruce and Harry quickly left the bar, and then the garden altogether. He turned to Jake. “Thanks. I was getting a lesson in computer ethics, I think.”

“If we wanted to save souls, we’d have joined the ministry,” Jake said sharply; he turned and went through the doorway.

Beth had felt too awkward to ask Mrs. Ramos for breakfast, and too much in the way to go to the kitchen and make something for herself. Now she admired how matter-of-factly Constance asked for scrambled eggs, toast, and fresh coffee for her. “It’s the idea of so much money,” she said suddenly, and felt as if she had only then learned something important. But that was it. The money was turning everyone into a stranger, and she was a stranger to herself. “I just blew up at Mad-die,” she said in a small voice. “Funny. All the years I was with Gary, all the times when I might have found excuses to blow up at her, I never did, but now…”

“What does she want you to do?”

“Be nicer to Bruce, for one thing,” she said bitterly. “It’s like saying be nice to a rattlesnake.”

Mrs. Ramos brought in dishes and coffee and left again without a sound. Constance poured for them both, although she felt afloat in coffee already. Somehow, she thought, sharing coffee, sharing food made conversation easier. Made self-revelation easier, she corrected herself.

“She’s treading awfully close to hysteria,” Constance said when Beth seemed disinclined to continue. “People in that state do and say things they might not ordinarily.”

“I suppose. We never had money before. My family never did. My father worked for the state government; my mother was a nurse for a time and quit as soon as we were in college. My brother and me, I mean. We had scholarships, but he dropped out. Too rough financially for him, and he wanted to get married. Even when Gary began making money, we didn’t really have money. You know what I mean? He would get a check for a thousand dollars and spend it on something that cost two thousand, instantly. Then the company came along and everyone was on salary, and we still didn’t have money. Always a bigger or better something to be bought, more work space to rent, more help to be hired. On and on. It was just starting to get better when I went back to school. I really thought all the scrimping was over with by then. I think they all thought so. None of them had real money, either. Ideas, schemes, dreams, hopes, but no cash. Except Milton, I guess. But not the rest of us.”

All this was beside the point, Constance realized. This was not what Beth and Maddie had fought about. She waited. When the door handle started to move, she got up and very pleasantly took the tray from Mrs. Ramos, murmured something, and returned to the table with it. Beth was still gazing out the window, oblivious.

“She’s saying if I had been nicer to Gary, if I hadn’t walked out on him, none of this would have happened. He turned mean because of me. And now everyone’s being so terrible to Bruce that he’ll be hurt, he’ll turn mean or something. She wants me to be nicer to him, tell him I don’t want any money for the shares of stock, that I’ll wait until it’s convenient, until the trouble here blows over.”

“Eat your breakfast,” Constance said when she fell silent again.

Beth took a bite, then another, without looking at the food. Then she put her fork down and drank more coffee. “She said Bruce agreed to awful settlement terms with his wife. His ex-wife. Because he thought there would be money. If I’d been with Gary he wouldn’t have thought of that stupid game. Grown men skulking around with balloons, water guns, brother against brother. All my fault! If I’d stayed with him and we’d had children, he wouldn’t have got involved with Smart House!” Her chin was quivering again, and her eyes were glassy with unshed tears.

Constance put her hand on Beth’s arm and said firmly, “Beth, she’s very frightened, you know. Why is she so frightened?”

“Her world’s ending. Gary dead. Bruce a… She thinks Bruce killed his brother, I suppose. Gary was the sun, Bruce is the moon, and that’s all she ever had. It scares her to death.”

Charlie and Alexander were in Gary’s suite. Charlie was in the chair before the computer, hating it fiercely; Alexander was in a second chair at his side.

“You don’t have to know how I know,” Charlie said murderously. “He had a separate set of commands, or something, that he could get to through this damn machine. Take my word for it. You knew him. Put yourself in his head. If you had a secret room, for instance, how would you open and close the door?”

Alexander chewed his fingers and looked here and there nervously and refused to put himself in Gary’s head for even a second. “Anything. He could have programmed in anything he wanted. How should I know?”

Charlie sucked in his breath. “Okay. Okay. Let’s play a game. We can talk to the main computer through this machine. Right?”

Alexander nodded warily.

“Let’s pretend I want to lock that door and I don’t want to get up to do it. What could I do instead?”

“Go through security. It’s a separate program. Under
security
. Just type it in.”

“Good. He’d use regular words like that? No secret codes or anything?”

“It depends on what he was doing.”

Charlie muttered a curse under his breath and faced the young man. “Would he have a record of a secret code, if that’s what he used?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do know!” Charlie yelled at him. Alexander looked as if he might bolt for the door, and Charlie got up and grabbed his arm, pulled him to the chair before the keyboard. “You know, and you’re going to find it for me. Not security. Anyone could find it in the main computer that way. A different program? A signal? An access code or command? What would it have been?”

Alexander looked terrified. He shook his head.

“You’re not getting up until you give it to me. You hear that?”

Miserably Alexander tapped the keys. He was a two-finger typist. He watched the monitor as text began to scroll. He did something to clear it, and typed again, and then again, and again. He looked up with hope a few minutes later when there was a knock on the door.

“Don’t you move!” Charlie opened the door a few inches, saw Constance, and admitted her.

She looked past him to Alexander, back to Charlie with questions in her eyes. He was scowling ferociously.

“Alexander is searching for the code Gary used,” he said darkly.

“It’s no use,” Alexander said, appealing now to Constance. “He can’t make me tell something I don’t even know.”

“What about the directory?” she asked.

“I know all the items on it. He thinks there’s something in addition to those things.”

Constance nodded. If Charlie thought so, there probably was. “Maybe not in addition to, but buried in one of the files you know about?”

“That’s what I’m trying to check out,” he said miserably.

Constance watched him for several seconds and then said, “What was he least interested in? The greenhouse? Kitchen? Something out of the house? The garage?”

Alexander shot a fearful glance at Charlie and keyed in a new command. Another. He was scrolling inventories of various rooms, the music room, library, and had just touched the key for kitchen, when suddenly he started at the sound of Charlie’s voice, this time as soft and low and soothing as a fond parent’s. “That’s enough, Alexander. You may go now. I know you have work of your own to do.”

He glanced from Charlie to Constance and then jumped up and nearly ran from the room.

“Did you see?” Charlie asked. She nodded, and he sat down at the keyboard and typed in:
TV Room
. A whole new screen appeared, with subcategories of furnishings, and then video cassettes. This list had caught his eye, and hers also. The first item listed was
Sesame
. Charlie moved the cursor to it and pressed Enter. Constance made a low noise, and they both turned and watched as a piece of the wall moved to reveal a door.

“I knew the son of a bitch could do it,” Charlie muttered. Constance grinned.

He began to hum, a low droning sound that was more like a cat’s purr than a human noise. He did not touch the door, but leaned forward to examine it, and then returned to the desk and picked up a pencil. He pressed the eraser against the first of three dots on the door facing. The door opened. They were looking at another elevator, this one no more than three feet by three, and on the floor there was a roll of blueprints and two of the hand-held computer controls, exactly like the one they had recovered from the gardenia pot.

“Well, well,” Charlie said softly, very pleased. “Now, how about that!”

Beth stood at the top of the long trail that led to the beach two hundred feet down. The day was calm now, and even warm, a rarity for the Oregon coast. In the distance she could see tide pools left by the receding tide; no one else was in sight. She started down. The trail had been carved into the rock in places, paved in some places with a black topping, stairs added where the trail was too steep for safety, a railing here and there. Going down was simple, she had learned the last time she had been here; coming up again was not. Ever since talking to Constance in the breakfast room she had felt curiously blank, empty, and what thoughts had come had fled again too fast to consider. Yet she knew she had to think through the various things Maddie had babbled about that morning. It wasn’t fair, she found herself thinking again and again, and this time she seized the thought and went forward and back with it. If she agreed to a deferred payment for her share of stock, she would stay broke for months, years even, and that certainly wasn’t fair. But if she demanded her rights now, they would have to sell the company at less than market value, and that wasn’t fair either. And she had left Gary’s bed and board because of what he had become; he hadn’t become that because she’d walked away. It wasn’t fair! Bruce wasn’t her responsibility. Nor Maddie.