Yesterday's Thief: An Eric Beckman Paranormal Sci-Fi Thriller (3 page)

“The police won’t help me,” Ms. Winkel said. “They think I’m nutso.” She opened and closed the clasp of her purse, staring at the floor. <
I really need a hug.>

I got up, walked around my desk, and put my arm around her well-muscled shoulder. I was careful not to jerk back when the wave of alcohol breath hit me. Ten a.m., but who’s judging? “Please have a seat here, and let’s see how I can help you.”

“The police won’t—oops—listen to me.” The “oops” came when my wooden visitor’s chair lurched backward.

Peggy gave me a look. She’d suggested I fix that spring.

“Right.” I went back around my desk and sat down. I picked up the stylus, ready to make notes on my tablet. “Thanks, Peg, that will be all. So, what is it, Ms. Winkel, that the police won’t help you with?”

“My husband.”

I waited, but she didn’t continue. “You’re having some problems with your husband.” This was like pulling the words out of her mouth with a fork.

“He’s missing.” She took a handkerchief out of her purse and scrubbed her face; no dabbing for her.

Ah, now we were making progress. A missing-persons case.

“Why don’t we start at the beginning? When was the last time you saw your husband?”

She took a deep breath and rolled her head around like a prize fighter warming up for a bout. “Two nights ago. No, wait, what’s today? Is it …?” She looked at her cell phone. “No, that’s right, two nights ago.”

“You last saw him two nights ago. Was that at your home?”

“Yes.”

This felt like twenty questions. “Is your husband bigger than a breadbox?”

She frowned at me. <
What’s wrong with this guy? Is that some kind of joke?>

“I’m sorry, that was a silly joke. It would help if you could just tell me what has happened since Wednesday night. Would you like a cup of coffee or a glass of water?”

“Yes.”

“Which would you like?”

“Coffee.”

“Coffee it is.” I clicked the intercom switch three times, the signal for coffee.

Peggy opened the door and poked her head around it. “You rang, boss?”

That’s what she said, but she was thinking, <
Does he think I’m some kind of trained Pavlov dog, responding to a bell?>

Oof
. She hadn’t complained, or thought about complaining, when we set up the system. Women can be hard to understand even when you can read their thoughts. There was more to this private-eye stuff than just searching for clues. Maybe cheating at poker wasn’t so unethical after all.

“Thanks, Peg. Could we have two coffees?”

Ms. Winkel sat silently. One minute she looked attractive in a handsome way. Next minute, not so much. Her nose angled to one side.

She watched Peggy bring the coffees in, thinking: <
Nice biceps.>

If you don’t know Peggy’s real name is Fred, her muscles are indeed impressive.

Apparently coffee worked like WD-40 on Beatrix’s vocal cords, and I got the full story.

“Donnatello, everyone calls him Donny, left for his Monday-night poker game right after dinner, and that’s the last I saw him. He always comes home late but never later than three a.m. We’ve been married eight years, and he’s never stayed out all night.” <
Except for that time with what’s-her-name.>

“Does he play poker every Monday? And at the same place?”

“Yes.”

“Yes to both?” I made a mental note to stop asking two questions at once.

“That’s right. But he gambles other nights, too. He’s really into gambling. He wasn’t before.”

“Before?”

“Before he inherited the money. Back then he’d never even buy a lottery ticket, but now he plays poker, goes to the Indian casinos, goes to crap games.” She fluttered her hand as if shooing away a fly. “I don’t know what else.”

“How much—”

“And the men he hangs out with are total scum-ball lowlifes. He gambles in a bad area of town.”

“I see. And how much did he inherit … approximately?” I asked.

“I don’t know if I should tell you.” <
Four million.>

“It’s important for the investigation.”

“A million dollars. About. Over a million. He got it six months ago.”

“Do other people know about this—the inheritance?” I took a sip of coffee but kept my eyes on her.

“Well, not exactly, but he kind of flaunts that he has a lot of money. I wouldn’t be surprised if he told someone. Since he got the money, he’s had more friends. They come around. So, I’d say yes.”

“What about you, Ms. Winkel? Has your lifestyle changed since the improvement of your finances?”

“I guess.” She looked down at her purse. <
Not as much as it should.>

“Perhaps you feel your husband spends more money on gambling than he does on you.”

“Well, it’s his money.” She stared out the window. <
It’ll be my money when he dies.>

Interesting. I have to be careful when interpreting thoughts. People don’t have to express themselves clearly in their own minds—they know what they mean. “When he dies” could mean “when the air runs out in the box I put him in,” or “when he dies of old age.” And I can’t read the emotional content of thoughts. They are whispered to me in a monotone, as if spoken by a machine.

On the other hand, I’ve found thoughts are less fragmented than you’d expect. I hear complete phrases and often neat, grammatically correct sentences. Perhaps the thoughts are cleaned up somewhere along the line. Right, I don’t understand it either.

I went through all the questions I’d learned to ask in PI school. Does he have enemies, what places does he frequent, that kind of thing. The caffeine wore off and she reverted to twenty-questions mode, but I got what I needed. The other thing I got was a nice fat check. I needed that even more.

After Ms. Beatrix Winkel left, Peggy popped in to my office. “Well, boss, looks like maybe this sleuthing thing could actually work out for you.”

“Surprised?”

“And what did you think of Winkel’s bod? She must be into weightlifting. Or bodybuilding.”

“Roller derby. She said she’s in some amateur league.”

“Makes sense.”

“Listen, Peg, I’m sorry about that signaling thing I set up for the coffee. The three clicks. That probably seems pretty demeaning—”

“No problem, boss. Didn’t bother me at all.” She crossed her arms underneath her illegitimate boobs and leaned forward. “Just don’t do it again.”

“Got it. And, uh …” I checked my calendar app. “I won’t be in tomorrow morning; I have an appointment over in Berkeley.”

“Power outages tomorrow.”

“Oh, shoot, I’d forgotten.” I pulled out my tablet and opened PG&E’s blackout app. The energy crisis was getting worse, with rolling blackouts scheduled almost daily.

Peggy already had the blackout app running on her device. “We’ll be blacked out between eight and nine a.m. here in San Fran, and the East Bay will be out from three thirty till five.”

“Okay, good, I’m clear. My appointment is for ten. On the case of the newly existent dame.”

“Remind me again how much you’re making—we’re making—on that case?” <
And why you’re not leaving it to the FBI?>

I evaded the question by handing her Ms. Winkel’s check, and Peg’s neatly trimmed, feminine eyebrows popped up. “Nice.”

I leaned back and looked forward to my appointment with the world’s foremost authority on time machines.

* * *

I stood outside Dr. Simone Diallo’s office and checked my watch. The appointment was for ten a.m., and she was twenty minutes late. A professor at UC Berkeley, she was also affiliated with the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics. For someone whose research was space-time, she’d messed up on one of those dimensions.

A pert coed with spiral curls in her blonde hair came down the hall focused on me. She wore a short lab coat over an even shorter miniskirt.

“Eric Beckman?” She raised one eyebrow. <
Older but definitely doable.>

“Yes, that’s me,” I said. “I take it you’re not Professor Diallo.”

“She says she’s sorry, but something came up. She had to cancel at the last minute.”

“I’m willing to wait. Will she be back soon?”

“Hard to say.”

I put on my best definitely-doable smile. “I won’t take much of her time.”

She hesitated and tapped her pen against her cute little nose. “You could go see her in her lab. Maybe. Don’t tell her I sent you. Okay? You’re a reporter?”

I gave an exaggerated humph. “Certainly not.” I leaned down and whispered in her ear, close enough to tickle it. “I’m a private investigator.” I didn’t say “private dick.” That would have been too crude. Not my style. But it would have worked. Flirting is easy when you know the door is already open.

“Well … okay. The lab is in the basement.” She pointed to the stairwell. “Room thirty-six. Don’t tell her I told you. My name’s Robin.”

“So I’ll know who not to tell her told me.” What a mouthful.

She blushed, hesitated once more, and headed off down the hall. She looked back and I almost called out after her.

I appreciated her pert walk.
No.
No more short relationships.
That one would definitely not last. Or would it? An image flashed into my mind: the two of us having breakfast in our home. Her cascading hair more gray than blonde.

I turned away from my future wife, took the stairs to the basement, and found a room with “036” by the door. The door was mostly glass and gave me a good view of the laboratory.

It was the size of a two-car garage, with an unfinished, open ceiling. Wires, pipes, and heating ducts filled the space. Bundles of multicolored cables dropped down to racks and tables of electronic equipment. A few cabinets displayed “Danger High Voltage” signs.

A massive cabinet dominated the center of the room. A cluster of heavy-duty cylinders, like stainless steel pipes, radiated out from the center of the enclosure. They converged on a tiny gold sphere.

I knocked and went in. A few students glanced up but went right back to work.

“Mr. Eric Beckman, I presume?”

I turned to see a wrinkled face that could have been the cover photo for
National Geographic
. I recognized Dr. Diallo from an internet article. “Yes, that’s me, and I apologize for coming down here. I hope it’s okay.”

She was the blackest person I’d ever encountered and was dressed in the simple, drab clothing you might see in drawings of slaves in the 1700s. She wore a head wrap that constrained a massive Afro. I stared.

“Are you enjoying the cognitive dissonance?” She smiled. “Don’t worry, you needn’t feel like a racist. I’m as far as one can get from anyone’s concept of the appearance of a physicist. I know I look more like a washerwoman in 1900 Selma than a theoretical physicist.” <
Or like a slave.>

“Or like a slave,” I said.

She looked at me sharply and laughed. “Most people don’t want to go that far, but yes.”

She said everything rapidly and with perfect diction in an upper-class British accent. It was as if someone carefully edited her words, printed them out, and asked her to speak them as quickly as possible. Her thinking was fast, too. I couldn’t keep up, though I caught enough to know she liked me—<
interesting fellow>—
but wanted to get the interview over quickly.

She moved over to the central chamber and started fiddling with dials. “And what have you come about, as if I didn’t know?”

“I’d like to speak with you about time travel.”

“You and every news organization in the country. So, you’re a private eye, and I assume you are investigating the appearance of the materialized girl. What’s in it for you? Is someone paying you?”

“Hard to say. No, no one’s paying me. It landed in my lap, and I want to see it through. I’m
going
to see it through. Of course, if I figure anything out, it wouldn’t hurt business.”

She stopped in mid-dial-twist and looked me in the eye. “I sense a bit more education than your normal divorce chaser, but I can’t help you. Time travel from the future isn’t possible. You’re all done. That was quick. It was nice to meet you. Bye-bye.”

“I thought it was possible in theory but impractical. Wormholes or something.”

“Right. Blah blah blah. Are you familiar with what I’m working on?”

“Only what I saw in Wikipedia. Space-time crystals.”

She chuckled. “That’s right. And you’re looking at one right now. Maybe.” She pointed to the tiny sphere that was the center of attention of all the hardware in the chamber.

She stood up and with a heavy Southern accent, said, “We all gonna cool this mo fo crystal here downa juss ‘bout zero fuckin’ kelvin, and dem dere beryllium crystals gonna be in four dimensions, rotating in space and time at da same damn time.”

We both laughed.