Smart House (9 page)

“Partly. Partly. See you later.” He turned to Constance. “Let’s go unpack and wash our hands.”

Milton mentioned that dinner would be at seven, and Laura watched Charlie take Constance’s hand with a slight smile. She looked at him and wiggled her fingers in farewell.

Going up the stairs, Constance chuckled softy and Charlie made a snorting sound. “You won’t think it’s funny when I sling her over my shoulder and take off for Mexico.”

“No, dear,” she said.

In their room again, she unpacked while Charlie went through the contents of the envelope Milton had provided. He studied the beautifully drawn floor plans for a long time. The articles of incorporation looked intimidating, and the forensics reports chilled him too much to dwell on before dinner. He pursed his lips over the list of toys that had been designated murder weapons, then folded that paper and put it in his pocket. When he looked up from the papers on the desk, Constance was standing at the window gazing out at heavy fog that rose and fell, revealed, concealed, teased. He joined her and put his arm around her waist.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“They’re like passengers on a ship that was being tossed in a storm with a mad captain. Any of them might have wanted Gary overboard, I guess. Milton must want the company to be as stable as IBM or Ma Bell; he doesn’t like disorder. Jake is in line for power, money, prestige, whatever goes along with being head honcho now. Harry could be hiding a case of terminal jealousy under that Mount Rush-more exterior. Bruce? A nut, also jealous for other reasons, in debt. Beth wanted out from slavery. Laura? We’ll see. I don’t have a doubt in the world that she had a case, too.” He squeezed her shoulder. “How’m I doing?”

She laughed softly. “A-plus. They’re a strange group,” she said thoughtfully. “I don’t think they would do a thing about either death if it weren’t for company profits.”

“Want to bet that one of them will bring up the possibility that a stranger got in that night, and at least two of the others will back up the idea?”

“You know very well that I am morally opposed to gambling,” she said primly. “Besides, I already picked Bruce to raise the possibility, and his mother to back it. Charlie, don’t you think it’s strange that Alexander didn’t mention the little computers before? Of the three men who really worked on the house and understood the entire system, he’s the only one left. He probably can make the computers do whatever they’re capable of doing without any effort at all. Don’t you think so?”

“I think,” he said grimly, “the only way you’re going to get anything out of that twerp is by nailing him down and poking him with a sharp stick from time to time. Well, ready for another go round with them all?”

Bruce said at dinner, “You know, it’s quite possible that someone actually got in that night, someone not invited, I mean.”

Maddie nodded emphatically. “Of course, it’s possible. I never believed in that total security system.”

Constance looked at Charlie brightly; he sighed.

“Jake, Harry? Would it have been possible?” he asked, pretending to be unaware that Alexander had stopped his fork midway to his mouth, that he had started to speak.

Jake shook his head. “I doubt it. The police spent hours trying out the system, first at the gate on the hill, then at the various entrances to Smart House proper. You just couldn’t get in and out unregistered. There’s a log of every entrance and exit that was made. They tried to get around it, just to see if anyone could have done so.”

“How about the roof?” Bruce demanded.

“The balconies,” Maddie said. “All those balconies! Anyone could walk in!”

This time Alexander spoke before Charlie could interfere. “No way! That’s one of the systems we were ready to market, practically.”

“Practically?” Charlie asked. “You mean it wasn’t complete?”

“It was still too specific,” Alexander muttered. “We were in the process of generalizing it before we actually showed it. A few more months, that’s all it needed. It was working back in May for the specific conditions, though.”

“That’s the hitch,” Harry said angrily. “It would have to be custom tailored for each individual or company, and that means time and expense. A few months? I think a year or more.”

“Do you think it might have failed to register an intruder that night?” Charlie asked him.

“Sure. Especially since Gary had the override system. He could have turned the whole thing off. We’re talking about a system that controls this whole house, the grounds, the greenhouse, everything, and whatever the main system can do, the hand-held computer can start or stop.”

“Someone could have come up from the beach,” Maddie said with a touch of desperation in her voice.

“Maddie, stop it!” Milton said, but his voice was gentle. “We all know no one got in here that night!”

“Why not from the beach?” Charlie asked thoughtfully.

“Because we’re on a headland here, and at high tide you can’t get around it,” Milton said. “There’s a cove with rocky cliffs on the both ends, completely cut off at high tide. The police looked into that.”

Charlie turned to Bruce. “You said the roof. How could anyone get up there?”

Bruce glanced at Harry, who collected mountains, then away quickly. “I examined that rock wall today. It’s climbable. A good climber could go right up the back wall to the roof.”

Harry nodded. “That’s true. I looked at it too, from a different angle, of course. Not just a good climber.

Anyone who wanted to go up could do it. But once on top, Bruce, you still have to pass through a scanner and a sensor in the floor.” His voice was vicious. “Okay, Gary or Rich, or someone else, could have turned off security, but they didn’t. There’s a record of movements that would show an intruder. And don’t even pretend an outsider could have got his hands on the system, and not just that, but have time to learn the system and reprogram it.”

“It’s been my experience,” Charlie said comfortably then, “that practically every action made by people in close quarters is noticed by someone, even in a house as big as this.”

“We were taken over that whole evening by the police several times,” Laura snapped. “I am sick to death of thinking about it all, who was where, when. No one saw anything!”

“I think people saw more than they realized then. The police accepted your statements because they had not been let in on the fact of the game, and I have been. You were all watching each other closely, I’ll bet. In fact, if you had admitted how closely to the police, it might have appeared suspicious. Now you can all admit it freely. What I propose is that you reenact the game as it developed back in May. Going through the movements probably will stimulate memories in a way that just talking didn’t do.”

“No!” Maddie said, and she started to get to her feet. She groped for the table and knocked over her glass of wine and sank down again staring at it in horror. “Look what I’ve done. Look what you made me do!”

Gently Constance said to her, “You didn’t play the game then and you certainly don’t have to play it this time.”

“No one has to play it,” Laura Westerman said. “If that damn computer is turned on again, I’m going home.” She glared at her husband. “I’m not even a shareholder. I don’t have to agree to anything.”

“But we need you,” Charlie protested. “You have to take Mrs. Elringer’s one vote. Isn’t that what you did before?”

“Gary insisted,” she said sharply. “He didn’t give anyone a choice, and another thing you might as well know is that no one here dared cross him in any way. No one! He wanted to play his insane game and everyone said good, let’s kill each other for fun! If I had turned him down, Harry would have bitched for months! Does that satisfy you? You, I’m afraid, don’t have that kind of power over us.”

“Of course not,” Charlie said in a placating way. “I wouldn’t want that kind of power.” He regarded them all broodingly. “I confess I’m still trying to figure out why you all went along with it, why you all played for votes.”

There was a lengthy silence. Finally Jake cleared his throat. “It was an important meeting. Gary and Rich, and Alexander, of course, and a few others in the company were researching artificial intelligence in their computer systems in Smart House. Making some real breakthroughs, apparently. But others among us saw it as a black hole that would suck the company dry in no time. It’s the sort of research that needs government grant money, big money, not a small company like ours to back it. It was an important meeting. The idea of gaining enough votes to have an influence was irresistible to many of us.”

“He was willing to risk so much?” Charlie asked. “Would he have gone along with a negative vote? One that forced him to stop his line of research?”

“It wasn’t a risk!” Alexander cried. “He knew that if they all just gave it a chance, they’d see what he had accomplished here. He had done most of the things he had set out to do, and that weekend would have proven he was on the right track. Whoever makes the breakthrough in linking a digital computer with an analog computer in a comprehensive, parallel system that is both logic-directed and goal-directed will be the intellectual hero of the century. Gary was doing it!”

“That sounds like big bucks,” Charlie murmured.

Jake laughed suddenly and tossed his napkin down on the table. “Charlie,” he said, “that must be the understatement of the century. And that’s why we never seriously considered that any of us could have murdered him. That’s what you’re talking about, of course. Murder. By one of us. But he was the goose who could produce the golden eggs, you see. And while the rest of us don’t match him in intellectual capacity, neither is there an idiot at this table. We’re in the process now of reviewing all the work he did here, trying to debug some of it with Alexander’s help, and the help of others who came in very skeptical and are true believers now. If we can stay afloat, the systems in this damn house right now will mean big bucks, very big bucks, and there wasn’t a one of us who didn’t know that by mid afternoon of that Saturday, many hours before Gary died. That’s our dilemma, Charlie, in a nutshell.”

“Then there shouldn’t be any real objection to going through the motions of playing the game again, just to see if someone spots something not quite in line with what memory serves up.”

Bruce shoved his chair back. “Okay. Now we go to the living room for coffee and hear the game rules, just like we did then. You going to chicken out, Laura?”

She raked him with a contemptuous look. “I meant it. If that computer is turned on, I leave.”

“We won’t use the game program,” Charlie said. “What I propose, actually, is that I’ll take the part of the computer. Coffee, you said? In the living room? I’ll tell you what I have in mind over coffee.”

Chapter 8

The coffee service was on
a sideboard in the living room; this time they all helped themselves. Charlie waited until they were settled and then said, “I asked Mrs. Ramos to bring out the conference notebooks and pencils, and here they are.” A stack of yellow legal pads and a pewter mug of pencils were on an end table. He picked them all up and began to hand them out. As he moved along, he asked pleasantly, “Whose idea was it to erase the game from disk, by the way?” No one spoke. “Let’s try it this way,” he said. “Was it before the cops came, during, or after?” “After,” Alexander said. “They were gone by then.” “I see. So while they were here, you simply kept mum about the game and the record of movements.” He finished giving out the note pads and sat in a deep chair the color of midnight; it was so soft, so comfortable, it was almost too sensuous. He resisted the impulse to stroke the arm. “Where were you when the decision was made to erase everything having to do with the game?”

“The library,” Alexander said. “They said they would send someone down from Portland, a special detective, and we should all stay here until he came and asked questions. We had a meeting. We didn’t know where we stood legally, the company and all, I mean.”

Charlie nodded sympathetically. “I can imagine. So you were at the long conference table. Where Mrs. Ramos got the note pads, I understand. And someone said, let’s get rid of evidence of any game. Is that how it was?”

“You know it wasn’t like that!” Laura Westerman cried shrilly. “No one thought of it as evidence of anything except stupidity. I said we’d be on every front page of every tabloid in the country. They’d make us all look utterly ridiculous.”

“So they would,” Charlie agreed, and waited.

Jake shrugged. “I could have been the first to voice the suggestion. I simply don’t remember. I do remember that suddenly we were all talking about it. The police had the disk with our movements, remember, from the Smart House security program, a totally different system. But we all thought all our movements were on it. At least,” he added flatly, “that’s what I thought. And, at our meeting concerning you, we agreed to provide you with a printout of the record the police took.” He looked questioningly at Milton, who nodded.

“I have it,” Charlie admitted. “But if Gary had an override system, I wonder how accurate it can be. Anyway, to get to our reenactment of the game, what I want you to do is try to retrace your movements that had anything to do with the game. When you found out who your victim was, when you got your weapon, what it was, when and if you used it.”

“Starting when?” Harry demanded. “I for one can’t provide you with a minute-by-minute account of my movements for the whole twenty-four hours. Who could?”

“Just the highlights for now,” Charlie said soothingly. “Victim, witness, weapon, time. You’ll be surprised how much you recall once you actually start something like this.”

“What difference does it make?” Harry insisted. “This is more damn nonsense!”

Charlie regarded him soberly. “Someone was playing the game for very high stakes. Someone found out about the override gadgets and used them. Do you know who that was, Harry? One of you knows for sure, and others know more than you realize. If there was a murderer here, someone, or more than one of you, saw enough to point at that person.”

“My God!” Beth said with a moan. “We were paranoid then, but this… this is monstrous!”

“Murder is monstrous,” Charlie agreed. He surveyed them coldly. Maddie’s face was chalky, her hands shaking too hard to hold the pencil, coffee, anything else. At Charlie’s words Laura had put her hand on her husband’s arm, and Harry had shrugged it off again and was contemplating his shoes with a distant hard look. Jake was watching Charlie closely, his expression remote and unreadable. Alexander twisted his pencil, bit the eraser, twisted it again and again. Only Milton Sweetwater looked resigned. He broke the silence.

“Charlie, what do you suspect? What do you know already?” he asked.

“I know that something’s wonky with the printout of movements starting with the opening gambit. If you hadn’t withheld evidence from the police, they would know it, too. Gary had you all in here Friday evening and outlined the game rules, then he left. The printout shows him going up in the elevator, then into his room. It does not show him leaving it again that night, and yet I know he was on the first floor later, playing the game, trying to kill Bruce.” He laughed harshly. “A magic act. The printout shows him entering his room a second time that night.” He looked them all over again. No one had moved. “Unless you people have secret clones that you haven’t bothered to tell me about yet, either the system didn’t register all his movements, or else he pulled off an impossible stunt. Didn’t the police ask to see the entire printout?”

Alexander shook his head. Suddenly the pencil snapped in his fingers, making a cracking sound that was too loud. He cleared his throat. “I didn’t look at the entire printout a single time. No one thought of going back to Friday. What for? The police wanted it from Saturday from after dinner until they arrived. No one asked about any movements before that evening. Why would anyone?”

“Exactly,” Charlie said dryly.

Harry jumped to his feet, flung down his note pad, and glared at Jake. “The whole thing’s a fucking lie! That record doesn’t mean a goddamn thing! Proving that no one was on the elevator with Rich, that no one went into the Jacuzzi with Gary! All a fucking lie! See what keeping our mouths shut about the goddamn game got us!”

“The program’s full of bugs,” Bruce said murderously. “I knew it! That bastard! That goddamn bastard! All that money down the drain! You can’t trust any of it! I knew it from the start.”

“It isn’t!” Alexander yelled and leaped to his feet, his hands clenched. “If Gary turned it off, that’s one thing, but the program didn’t make a mistake or lie. It works, damn it!” His voice was shrill.

Constance was watching them all. When Maddie took a deep breath and got up, she stood up also.

“I don’t feel very well,” Maddie said faintly. “I’ll just go lie down a bit.”

“Let me go with you,” Constance said. “I want to go up for a few minutes, too.”

The voices continued to shout as they left the room. As Laura’s high-pitched voice chimed in, Constance wondered if Charlie had pushed them too hard. She had flashed him a message—she would try to get Maddie to talk—and had been acknowledged by such a brief, tiny nod that it would have passed unnoticed by anyone else, she knew. All those geniuses, she thought then, had performed exactly as Charlie had planned, and now he would sit back and watch and listen and when the time was right, he would prod them again. And one of them would say something meaningful. At the stairs Maddie turned without hesitation and started up. No one appeared to want to take the elevator in this house.

Halfway up the stairs, out of sight and hearing of the others, Constance said, “Mrs. Elringer, you can stop acting now.”

Maddie paused and looked at her sharply.

“I mean the drinking act,” Constance said, and took her arm. They started up again. “I’ve been watching you all evening. You haven’t had as much alcohol as I’ve had, I’d say.”

“They all keep wanting me to take sides,” Maddie said in a low voice. “Gary’s been dead for under three months, and they’re fighting like dogs. Like dogs.”

Constance nodded. “As long as they think you’re feeling the alcohol, they leave you alone, is that it?”

“I guess so,” Maddie admitted.

“Can we talk a few minutes?”

“I really am tired,” she said. They stopped outside a door; she reached for the knob.

“And you’re terrified, too,” Constance said gently. “Perhaps you should talk a little.”

Maddie’s face crinkled and tears welled in her eyes. Constance leaned past her to open the door and they went inside the bedroom.

“He should have been an only child,” Maddie said a few minutes later. She had gone to the bathroom and washed her face and was in one of the chairs at the table before the windows. Constance was seated in the opposite chair. The drapes were drawn, the room lighted only by a dim wall lamp. “He was a difficult child. Very difficult. So precocious, of course, but Bruce… He was only six and didn’t understand. A bad age to bring in a new baby, they tell me. He had been the baby of the family so long, and he was brilliant, of course, but suddenly there was someone new who was even more brilliant. There wasn’t a thing Bruce could do that Gary couldn’t do better, from the time he was three or four. He was Bruce’s equal at first, and then surpassed him. In all ways. They fought so much. Car trips were hellish, staying home with them was worse.” She shook her head, her eyes closed, her forehead furrowed.

“He didn’t realize how much he could hurt people,” she said. “His father, me, Bruce, then Beth, everyone eventually. It wasn’t malice. He wasn’t evil. He just didn’t know. He took what he needed from people and when he had all there was, he turned his back on them without another thought.”

She sighed deeply and became still now, wrapped in memories that twisted her face in pain. After a moment, Constance said, “Yet you all remained loyal to him. You all went into business with him, kept protecting him even after he was grown up.”

“He was always so vulnerable,” Maddie said. “He just didn’t know what effect he had on people. That night when he talked about the game, he was sincere. To him it was a game. I had a premonition,” she said nearly in a whisper. “I don’t even believe in premonitions, but suddenly I knew there would be a tragedy because of the game. I just knew it. Everyone had so much hurt, I just knew they’d all want Gary to be their victim. But it was more than that. I had the feeling of horror. I said I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I wouldn’t. Tonight when your husband began talking about the game again, it came back, that awful feeling of horror, of terror.”

When Constance went down to the living room again, Charlie looked up at her questioningly.

“She’s resting.”

His look said, you did fine; hers asked how it was going. He nodded slightly and she went to the sideboard for coffee. Apparently no one else had left yet. There were sheets of the yellow note pads on tables, on the floor by chairs, several on the coffee table Charlie was using as a work surface. It did not surprise her at all to find them doing it Charlie’s way.

“Okay,” he said, consulting his own notes. “It’s after one. Gary has just tried to kill you, but your mother can’t witness since she’s not in the game. Right?”

Bruce’s expression was petulant, his voice a whine when he said that was right. Constance watched him, wondered if he had developed that attitude in reaction to a genius brother. Was this the real Bruce, or the man who shouted and cursed and screamed obscenities almost randomly?

“Jake didn’t cooperate,” Bruce went on. “He ducked out when he saw what Gary was up to.”

Jake nodded at his account and made a note on his paper. Beth wrote briefly on hers. Bruce finished writing something and they all handed the sheets to Charlie, who added them to the growing stack.

“Anyone else?” When no one spoke, he asked Jake, “Why didn’t you witness for Gary?”

“By then I’d begun to get a feeling about the magnitude of his accomplishment in Smart House and I wanted to talk to him, but seriously, not with the game in the way. I thought we were heading for a talk, but at the door to the television room, he said something like ‘Gotcha’ when he saw Bruce. I realized I’d be witness, and, frankly, I decided not to help Gary win the game if I could help it. I ducked out.”

“Where did you go?”

“To the garden for a nightcap, then up to my room with my drink.”

“You didn’t see him again that night?”

Jake shook his head.

Charlie turned to Bruce again. “Where did you go?”

“I was going to go to the kitchen for a snack, but he kept following me, yelling, and I got on the elevator instead and went up to my room and stayed. I think he turned and went on into the kitchen.”

Charlie frowned at the printout he had opened on the table. He tapped his eraser on it absently and said, “According to the official printout, Gary went into his room on the second floor at ten-ten Friday night and never came out again. And he went into the kitchen at one-twenty-five and never came out of it again, either. Maybe the rules he had were different from the ones the rest of you were using.”

“How about when he got that damn dagger?” Bruce demanded and got up to look at the printout over Charlie’s shoulder.

Charlie shook his head. “Nothing.” He looked at Alexander thoughtfully. “Could he have programmed the computer to erase selected activities and still allow him to open doors?”

Miserably Alexander said yes.

“All right. Could he have programmed it not to record his movements when he was with another person? Jake here, for example.”

Alexander nodded.

“I doubt that,” Jake protested. “I mean, even if he’d been able to do it, why? It was a game, for God’s sake! You just don’t understand about him and games! What in God’s name would be the point in programming a game like that and then cheating?”

“Don’t know,” Charlie said. “Could someone else have programmed in the same instructions, Alexander?”

The young man blanched, then flushed brightly. “I could have done it, or Rich. No one else knew the system yet. No one here, anyway. There were a couple of others back in Palo Alto who worked on it and could have done it.”

“Okay,” Charlie said then in his most pleasant voice, the voice that sometimes gave Constance a chill. What had he just learned? she wondered. “So you’re all safely inside your rooms now. We don’t know where Gary was. What came next?”

“Are you really going to make us go through every minute?” Laura asked in disbelief. “This is crazy. What possible difference can it make?”

“Don’t know that either,” Charlie said easily. “You get the picture of what I’m doing, you could shorten all this by trying to fill in the time before we drag it out second by second. When and where you got killed, who you killed, and who witnessed it; then backtrack, and go forward. If there wasn’t any more activity that night, let’s move on. Now, it’s morning.”