The Demolishers (28 page)

Reaching for my gun, I saw the gleam of something metallic inside the open window as the van stopped abreast of us. I slung Delgado around behind me and heard her stumble and fall. I took a long step to the side to draw any return fire away from her, and looked for a target as my weapon came up. The boy, Lester Leonard, stuck his head out the window and looked shocked when he realized he was looking into the muzzle of a .38 Special. I realized that what I’d seen gleaming in the darkness hadn’t been metallic after ail; it had been the glass of his spectacles.

He spoke apologetically: “I’m very sorry, sir, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

I drew a long breath, holstered my piece, and turned to Delgado. She was sitting on the sidewalk in a rather undignified manner, legs wide apart. They were nice legs. A wisp of dark hair had come loose and was falling over her left eye. She brushed it aside, checked her nylons for runs as she sat there, and let me help her to her feet. She reached around to rub herself behind, craning her neck to see if she’d incurred any damage back there.

“Damn you, Helm, I’m going to be black and blue for a week! And if you’ve made me ruin the only good dress I brought along, I’ll sue you!”

Well, you can’t win them all.

Although
its interior volume was greater than that of most sedans, Leonard’s van had only limited seating accommodations: two bucket seats up forward. There was considerable space between them, presumably so the driver could get through to the stuff he was hauling in back without walking clear around the outside of the vehicle and wrestling with the rear doors.

Being bigger, I got the outer two thirds of the right front seat; Delgado perched on the inner third and managed somehow to fit her legs past the console up forward that encroached badly on the footwell space. 1 had to hang on to her to keep her from sliding off into the walkway between the seats whenever Lester Leonard made a right-hand turn. She made no complaints although she must have been thinking ruefully that she’d put on a smart dress and sheer nylons and high heels to eat dinner in a good restaurant, not to take pratfalls on the street and get jounced around in a hippie van.

“It’s at my folks’ house, where I live,” Leonard had said, asking me to accompany him. “It’s some things I’ve been working on. That’s why I’ve been following you and trying to get in touch with you, Mr. Helm. I’d like you to see them. It’s only a little ways out of town. If she wants, we can drop Miss Delgado off at the hotel.”

But Miss Delgado would have none of that, even
216

though it was obvious that we were going to travel in something less than limousine luxury. The van was old enough that it must have turned the clock at least once, but I noticed that all the instruments worked and the motor sounded healthy enough. A couple of square buttons, black and red, a toggle switch, and a small keypad displaying numbers from one to six had been neatly installed on the dashboard. I couldn’t begin to guess what purpose they served.

However, the body metal was dented and the white paint had been touched up here and there with pigment that didn’t match, clearly not for cosmetic reasons, just to keep the body from rusting through in the damp New England climate. The vinyl upholstery was cracked and split. The dark rear of the van behind the seats seemed to house some kind of laboratory or workshop.

“Oh, that,” Lester Leonard said as we drove. “I just set up my old Atari back there when I got my new IBM-PC; that way I didn’t have to do all my work at home. There’s some other electronic stuff. . . . But you wouldn’t be interested in that.”

“Miss Delgado might be,” I said. “Those were computers you mentioned, weren’t they? She’s supposed to be a computer whiz, although you can’t prove it by me.

I have to take off my shoes to count to twenty. ’ ’

Leonard asked politely, ‘ ‘What kind of computer work do you do, Miss Delgado?”

“Just routine office stuff,” she said, clinging to me as [ we turned a comer. Again I tried not to let her nearness
I
bother me, without much success. She went on: “Not very interesting, I’m afraid. I’m just the girl who pushes the buttons. Is that what you’re going to show us, computers?”

“Oh, no. No, it’s something I’ve been working on ever since . . . ever since Linda was murdered in that horrible way. What kind of animals would . . .Oh, oh!”

The radio had suddenly le;t out a beep-beep sound and the tuning dial began to flash on and off. Leonard reduced speed hastily and glanced at a police car that appeared ahead, parked a little off the road. He drove past it at a discreet velocity and grinned. “Our friend the fuzz.”

Delgado said, “That radio. It’s really a radar detector?”

“Yes, I don’t drive very fast, myself; but a friend who’s into souped-up cars kept complaining about the laws they were passing against those devices, so I made him one they wouldn’t spot. That’s the pilot model; his was much more elegant, you could actually get AM stations on it.” He shrugged. “Of course I never listened to it anyway. Just the tape deck. Classical music. Strictly a square.” He came back to the previous subject of conversation. “What kind of ... of animals would do a pointless and vicious thing like bombing a restaurant full of people thousands of miles from the country they’re trying to change?”

“Vicious but not exactly pointless,” Delgado said. “There are a lot of wild beasts out there these days, who don’t care who they destroy if it brings them a little closer to their political goals.”

“Well, it’s time somebody turned the tables on them! That’s what I’ve been working on, but I’d rather show you than tell you about it, if you don’t mind. Otherwise you might think I’m some kind of a kook. Lots of people do.”

I said, “I can’t imagine why.”

He grinned boyishly. “I guess I am a bit abnormal, at that, Mr. Helm. I never know who won the World Series, and I can’t ever tell you who’s playing in any of those bowl games. But I do have a B.S. in physics with a minor in chemistry, and I’m pretty good with computers if I do say so myself.” He laughed self-consciously. “They were just a hobby until . . . Well, they kind of took over and now I’m with CCI, that’s Computer Communications, Incorporated, up in Providence. I’m kind of their resident brain, junior grade, if you know what I mean; and they’re going to send me back to school for some advanced work pretty soon. Just about every company in the field has its tame juvenile genius nowadays, ever since it was discovered that kids seem to catch on to the stuff faster than adults, maybe because they aren’t hung up on traditional ways of thinking. It’s an entirely new field and I it demands entirely new thought patterns. . . . Well, of ' course you know all about it, Miss Delgado. Sorry. Didn’t mean to run on like that. Here we are. The old homestead.”

Deja vu
is the term, I believe, that describes the feeling you get when you’ve played the same scene before. Less than a week ago, a thousand miles south of here,

I’d accompanied another young person through the gates of the drive leading to her old family residence, to which she’d referred with the same self-conscious mixture of embarrassment and pride. Here there were no guards.

The ornate iron gates stood open. The lighted drive curved up across the wide lawns to the massive three-story gray-stone house, with lights at many of the lower windows. The structure was as impressive in its way as the late Homer Ganson’s sprawling Palm Beach confection, now the retirement retreat of his mobster son-inlaw.

“That is quite a mansion, Lester,” said Delgado.

“Yes, isn’t it a monstrosity? I keep trying to live it down.” He glanced at me. “I see my folks are home.

I ... I’d rather not have to explain you to them, if you don’t mind, sir. I often bring friends to the stables to discuss computers and stuff; they don’t expect me to touch base with them every time.”

Delgado said, surprised, “The stables? Surely you didn’t bring us here to admire your horses!”

He grinned. “No horses have been kept here since the horseless carriage came along, Miss Delgado. When 1 got a job and started looking for a place where I could, well, spread out my work a little, my folks had the old stables remodeled for me. They said it was a shame to waste all the space they had here. I pay them rent. . . . Yes, both cars are there.”

We drove past a sporty Mercedes and a brand-new Ford station wagon, the kind with phony wood paneling. As we followed the driveway around the corner of the house we could see the lawns sloping down to the rocky shore beyond. If I remembered my geography correctly, the water was technically Rhode Island Sound, but the demarcation line between that and the Atlantic Ocean seems to be pretty fuzzy. I figured that if you headed straight out over the dark horizon you’d eventually hit Bermuda, six hundred miles away on the far side of the Gulf Stream. A moving cluster of lights, white and colored, not too far out, indicated a boat of some kind.

“Commercial fisherman,” Leonard said, deciphering the light pattern with the casual glance of an expert.

“Do you have a boat?” I asked.

“Dad keeps a thirty-five-footer at the yacht club; he likes to wrestle with tuna and such. I run it for him when I can—Mom’s a pretty good sailor, too—but I don’t fish much myself, except to please him. He likes to think there’s
some
sport I’m not too awful at.” He glanced at us quickly, clearly afraid that we’d take the remark wrong. “Oh, he’s not compulsive about it like the dads of some boys I used to know in school, who were always after them to make the team, any old team, and raised hell when they didn’t.” Leonard guided the car around a sharp curve that took us away from the ocean. He brought us to rest in front of a long, low building that showed black against some dark trees. “Wait while 1 turn on the lights and cut off the alarm.”

He pushed the square black button on the dashboard and illumination flooded the area. Then he touched the toggle switch. The red button lighted up. He pressed it and, holding it down, punched a combination on the nearby keypad. When he released the button, its light went out. He hit the little switch again, and nodded to us.

“All clear. It makes a terrible racket when I forget.”

I got out and helped Delgado disembark. It was a long step down and she couldn’t make it without a nice display of stockings and lingerie—I noticed that there was pretty lace around the hem of her slip. She went through the usual feminine routine of smoothing her dress and patting her hair. Leonard came around the van to join us.

“Do you really need that much security?” I asked.

He laughed. “The lights? I’m always hauling stuff in and out of here I wouldn’t want to trip and fall with. The other’s just a system I worked out for one of Mom’s friends whose husband died. She was petrified of coming home alone; she was always sure a rapist was waiting in her bedroom. A simple burglar alarm wouldn’t do; somebody could have outwitted it and turned it off in her absence; she wanted to be able to check it from her car. If the red light doesn’t come on, that means the system has been tampered with. I wouldn’t call her a promising candidate for sexual molestation, she’s over seventy, but I guess rapists aren’t much more selective than terrorists.”

He shrugged as we walked towards the door. “Actually, I’m kind of glad to have it. Not that I’m afraid anybody’s going to steal things, but it guarantees that nobody’ll enter the lab when I’m gone, even with the best intentions in the world. As long as I was just working on the electronic projects it didn’t matter, but when I started on this other stuff . . . Well, some of it was pretty sensitive in the early experimental stages. I wouldn’t want Mom to get hurt, for instance, because she happened to bump into something in the lab when she was just looking for a beaker to use for a vase to put some surprise flowers in my apartment.” He laughed again. “She’s used to it, of course; they both are. I was a secretive kid. When I lived in the main house, I always locked my rooms when I went out so nobody’d disturb my important experiments. My folks were nice about it, once I convinced them I wasn’t doing drugs in there; but they’ve been wondering ever since how a nice normal stockbroker and a nice normal debutante managed to beget a nut like me.”

There was a kind of tolerant affection in the way he spoke of his parents; clearly he considered them okay people but not really very bright. Still, the affection was there; pleasant to encounter these days when the battle of the generations is often pretty savage—witness Sandra and her parent. Leonard unlocked the door for us and turned on the light inside; we entered what seemed to be the living room of a small apartment. It looked as if his mother had furnished it with the advice of her interior decorator, all pale wood and light upholstery and beige carpet; but he had it cluttered up with computer readouts and piles of books. Mysterious odds and ends of equipment were parked in various corners. A picture of Linda Anson in living color hung on one wall; as I came closer I realized that it was a magazine page, carefully framed.

Leonard went over to a small, pale bar on which stood a tapering Pyrex flask of the kind my college chemistry teacher called an Erlenmeyer—and don’t ask me how I remember that after all these years. The flask, plugged with a black rubber stopper, was filled with a pale green liquid that looked like something nasty out of a sci-fi movie that would kill you if it touched you or turn you into a zombie or werewolf.

“Would either of you care for a drink?” he asked. “I’m a Gatorade man myself; but there’s some stuff Dad brought over. He said the booze I’d been serving my drinking friends was a disgrace and gave the place a bad name. He gave me a funny-looking bottle of Scotch he said was okay. Pinch?”