Traitor to the Living Page 3

  She blew into her handkerchief and wiped her eyes with the tip of it. He went into the kitchen and came back with several kleenexes. The tears had ruined her makeup, and after she looked into a pocket mirror, she went upstairs to the bathroom to repair the damage.

  When she returned, she not only looked better, she managed a smile.

  "The wall safe was shut," she said, "but it was empty. So it was obvious that it had been opened, the papers removed, everything removed, in fact, including my jewelry, and then it was closed. Whoever took the stuff must have forced Dad to open it for him.

  "The police concluded that the explosion was caused by gas. The jets of the artificial log in the fireplace were shut tight, but the police thought that they must have been turned on until the house was filled with gas. The windows and doors were all shut, and there was some evidence that they had been taped. The tape would've burned up, of course, but they, the police, I mean, had some way of determining that tape had been used.

  "But Dad did not die from breathing in the gas. There wasn't any gas in his lungs. He had died of a blow on his head. At least, he had been hit on the head so hard that he should have died from the blow. But it couldn't be determined that he had been struck with some blunt instrument wielded by a man. It was possible that the explosion had driven some heavy object against his head. It didn't seem likely, however, for then he would have been breathing in the gas. So he must have been hit over the head before the gas was turned on.

  "Then the killer turned on the gas--he must have been wearing an oxygen mask--waited until the house was full of gas and then set some device to ignite after he left and so cause the gas to explode. The police didn't find anything they could identify as the igniting device, but that may have been, must've been, destroyed in the explosion.

  "The killer slipped out of the back door, closed it, and was gone by the time the gas exploded. The two models of MEDIUM were destroyed by the fire and the explosion. An electronics expert who examined them said that some circuits had been removed from them. He didn't know what the models were supposed to do; he'd never seen anything like them. And without the missing circuits installed, he would never be able to figure them out.

  "Since the killer must've forced Dad to open the safe for him so he could get the MEDIUM schematics. Dad must've recognized him."

  Carfax could not restrain himself.

  "Not if he wore a mask and disguised his voice."

  "I know. But he knew that there wasn't going to be any witnesses, so why should he bother concealing his identity? Anyway, whoever did it, Western was behind it, if Western didn't do it himself. He was the only one who could possibly have known what Dad was working on. It wasn't just a coincidence that Western announced he'd communicated with the dead only six months after my father died.

  "I knew that Western had stolen Dad's plans, but how could I prove it? I didn't have any evidence that could stand up in court. But I wasn't just going to fold my hands and let him get away with killing my Dad, not if I could possibly help it. So the first thing I did was to use my insurance money to move to Los Angeles and hire a detective agency to investigate Western.

  "The news media have reported a lot about him, so I suppose you know his general background. He's got a B.A. in business administration, and he inherited his father's seven electronic-radio-TV stores. He took a number of technical courses in college, and he's got a first-class radiotelephone operator's license. But he doesn't have the knowledge or the genius to invent..."

  "I'm sorry to interrupt again," Carfax said, "but you don't have to have a Ph.D. to be an inventor or a discoverer of new principles."

  "Yes," she said, her eyes widening as if she were angry, "but Western had apparently never done anything after he got out of college except run the business, play the stockmarket, and chase women. I'll tell you the type of man he is! The one time I was alone with him, after Dad's funeral, I went out on a date with him just to find out what he and Dad had been up to. In fact, I practically made sure he would ask me out. I called him and asked to talk to him about Dad. He took me to Scandia's to eat, and we had quite a few drinks. Then he said we could talk better in his apartment, quieter, you know, and I said that would be better. I hoped that, with enough drinks, and, I'll admit it, the tendency for a man to talk more if he's with a good-looking woman-- I have little false modesty--that he'd say something he shouldn't."

  Her eyes were even wider, and her voice was no longer thin with grief but was thick with anger.

  "He asked me to go to bed with him! His own cousin! And he'd murdered my father! I'm afraid I acted stupidly then, but I was out of my mind! I slapped him, and I yelled at him that he had killed my father so he could steal the plans and that I was going to see that he paid for what he'd done. If the police didn't get him, I would.

  "I never saw such a change come over a man. For a minute, I thought he was going to kill me, too, right there. But no, he was too smart, that one. He got his temper back as quick as if he'd turned a cold shower on himself. He said I'd better get out at once, and he didn't ever want to see me again. And if I started talking to other people like I'd done to him, he'd see I was shut up.

  "He didn't say he'd kill me or anything like that. He just said he'd shut me up. I'm sure he didn't mean he'd do it in a legal manner. I got out of there as fast as I could.

  "I found out later, from my agency, that Western sometimes lets women use MEDIUM even though they don't have enough money to rent it. If they were beautiful, he took it out in trade. The filth of the man!"

  Carfax thought that it took two to make that sort of bargain.

  "I wonder where your agency got its information?" he said. "Those women wouldn't be likely to tell stories on themselves."

  "My agency has an inside man working for Western. He was told about those women by one of Western's secretaries. Western's staff is loyal, but she talked about him because she was in love with the agent and she thought it wouldn't go any further since he also claimed to be devoted to Western. The detective business is a dirty business, isn't it?"

  "Yes. But few things get done in any business with clean hands."

  "Anyway, the agency got information from women who'd turned him down. They didn't mind talking!

  "Now, I know you're wondering why, if Western is after me, he didn't get me long ago. It's been eight months since I told him what I suspected. If he wanted to kill me, he should have been able to do it by now. However, he must know that I've hired professionals to watch him. The two men who run the agency got anonymous phone calls telling them to drop me as a client. This was shortly after they found that my phone line was tapped and my house bugged. And the agency finally identified several men who'd been tailing me. They were from another agency, and that agency wouldn't, of course, tell who had hired it."

  "What was your agency? And the other one?

  "Fortune and Thomdyke was mine. Western's was the Magnum Security and Investigation Agency."

  Carfax nodded and said, "Fortune and Thomdyke are in West Hollywood. Magnum is in downtown Los Angeles, and it's owned by Vahnont. I know all three men quite well, since I've worked for them at one time or another."

  "Whatever made you decide to be a history professor?" Patricia said. "I can understand why you'd quit the private-eye business. It must be very sordid and depressing and only occasionally exciting. Of course, your breakdown.. ."

  He shrugged, and she continued, "Well, it was in Time. It said you had a nervous breakdown when you were working on a case and that it was aggravated, your breakdown, not the case, I mean, when you were almost killed by a mudslide during those awful rains, and.. ."

  "I was in a private sanitarium for a while and then at Mount Sinai in Beverly Hills. I was fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to get a psychotherapist who was a great artist in his profession."

  "Unfortunate?" A

  "Perhaps. Doctor Sloko convinced me, or got me to convince myself, that I really had been crazy and that I'd been suffering from a
series of extraordinary and extremely realistic hallucinations. From then on I recovered fairly rapidly. But I'm still not sure that. . ."

  "You must tell me about them some time. But I'm afraid that you have given Western a great advantage against you. If he chooses, he can refer to your breakdown and say, or at least hint, that you're undergoing another and so nobody should pay any attention to your science-fiction theory."

  Carfax made a face and said, "I was well aware of that and of what my opponents could do with it. Western may use that if the going gets too tough for him. You ..."

  He stopped. He did not want to say that one person who had definitely had mental trouble and another who might possibly be unbalanced would not make very good allies.

  "We'll talk about that later," she said. "I came to you because you are my cousin and because you are definitely not pro-Western. And because you have had detective experience. And ... "

  "All right, let's have it," he said. "No more bush-beating."

  "What?"

  "What are you going to ask me to do when I visit Western."

  "It's logical, isn't it?" she said, leaning even closer to him. "But I realize I haven't any right to ask you, since you'll get just one session with MEDIUM. You'll probably want to talk to your wife or your parents or somebody dear to you. Or, since you're a history teacher, you might want to find out, oh, say, if Secretary of War Stanton really was behind Lincoln's assassination."

  "Lasalle of Chicago University is already working on that. He has a federal grant."

  He paused and then said, "But finding out whether or not your father was murdered, and who did it, is far more important than the Lincoln assassination. In fact, this could be the most important murder case ever."

  She let out a deep breath and said, "You'll do it!"

  "I'll think about it."

  The insidious effect of this conversation, he told himself, was that he had been eased into contradicting his own theory. Instead of firmly keeping in mind that the entities were nonhuman but living, he had started to think of them as dead human beings. Patricia was appealing to him for help, yet she believed Western's claims.

  5.

  Gordon Carfax had intended never to see Los Ange- les again. Here he was, aboard a jet lowering on the flight path into the new Riverside International Airport. Below, over western Arizona, the air was a thick gray-green. The mountains under them looked like a subterranean range seen through a glass-bottom submarine. Down there was the Kofa Game Reserve, where, it was reported, the last of the wild North American pumas still roamed, though coughing and watery-eyed.

  There were also some saguaro cacti, which had died out except in a few small areas. The polluted air, however, was only partially responsible for the near-extinction of the giant cactus.

  The president of the United States had promised that within ten years, no matter what the cost, the smog would be back to the 1973 level.

  The plane landed and taxied to its appointed station and was presently joined by a telescoping umbilical to the terminal. Carfax walked into the cavernous air-conditioned building. He recognized at once the tall thin man with the broad face and short gray hair. He had met Edward Tours over the viewphone when he had called Western back.

  They shook hands and spoke briefly of the smog. However undesirable smog was, it did provide something to talk about. And to curse.

  They continued to speak of such things as increasing taxes, beaches which turned away anybody who could not pass a beauty test, the Philadelphia Massacre, the Iranian crisis, and the declining literacy rate. By the time they had covered these subjects--or at least skimmed over them--Carfax's two suitcases dropped out of the slot. A little four-wheeled turtle moved under the cases as the steel arms lifted them in the air; the cases settled down on the flat back; it rolled up to Carfax and stopped a foot from him. Carfax dropped his plastic tag into its slot as two young men picked up the baggage. The turtle spun around and rolled away.

  Tours and his two companions were dressed in bright orange summer afternoon business suits. They wore large silvery ankhs at the ends of silvery chains around their necks. The circles on top of the ankhs contained golden Ms (for MEDIUM).

  About half the crowd in the terminal was wearing the ankhs.

  Tours said, "We'll have to take the INTO, Doctor Carfax. Sorry about that, but we can't give VIP treatment any more. Not out of an airport, anyway. Besides being listed by the media as ecojerks, we'd be subjected to a fine. But you know..."

  "I didn't expect a chauffeured limousine nor do I want one," Carfax said. "Besides, the INTO is a hell of a lot faster than the freeway."

  They walked to the INTO waiting room. A minute later, the Hollywood express entered with a shushing and squeaking noise. They got into one of the eggshaped cars of the train. A few minutes later, they were traveling at 250 kilometers' an hour. Carfax, seated at the window, watched the countryside between the great white arches that supported the overhead rail.

  The smog didn't look as thick as it had from twelve thousand kilometers. And, so far, it hadn't bothered him, since he had not left a filtered air-conditioned environment.

  The metropolis had pushed eastward about thirty-five kilometers, so that the former semi-desert was now solid buildings, houses, and streets. In the older part, there were more high-rises, and some of the streets were now double-decked and multi-ramped. Some of the streets he had once traveled had disappeared under buildings. Many pedestrians carried emergency oxygen masks and tiny cylinders. Otherwise, Los Angeles had not changed much.

  Five minutes after leaving Riverside, the INTO stopped at the Highland-Sunset Station. The area around here had changed considerably. Many buildings had been torn down, and Sunset and Hollywood were double-decked.

  The four men. Tours in the lead, went down the moving steps inside a plastic tunnel to the upper street level. Inside a small airhouse, one of the new taricabs waited for them. It was equipped with fuel cells, electric motors for each wheel, and a driver with a shaven head and wearing only electric-blue shorts and a scarlet neckerchief.

  They moved slowly through the traffic west to the Nicholls Canyon outlet ramp. The new Nicholls Canyon Via took them directly to the private sideroad that ran along the hillside to Western's mansion. Half a kilometer up, a guardhouse and a drawbridge stopped them. The guardhouse swung out of the way after Tours had presented a coded tag and stuck his right thumb into a hole in an ID box. The drawbridge moved up, and they drove over it.

  Massive pylons supported the road, which ran alongside the steep hill, branching out into other avenues which ended in ramps leading to various mansions set into cutbacks in the hillside. The entire hill had been manicured, terraced, and corseted with plastic, metal, and concrete, but the surface was mostly covered with ivy.

  Through the heavy railing on the side of the road, Carfax could see a large parking lot at the bottom of the hill. This was beside a tall white apartment building.

  The many people on the lot seemed to be divided into about four groups, most of which were holding up large signs. A number of police cars were parked around the edge of the lot.

  Westernites and anti-Westemites," Tours said. "The large group is Westernite. The others are anti, but they don't like each other. One's Catholic, one's Southern Baptist, one's Church of Scientology, and the other, if I am not mistaken, is Carfaxite, if you'll pardon the term."

  "I haven't authorized any society to use my name," Carfax said. "Not yet, anyway."

  "You'd better tell them that, then," Tours said.

  Western's house was on the highest point of the hill.

  It was a three-story wooden and brick building in antebellum style. Five blacks in all-white clothes were working on the lawn and the flowering bushes by the great porch. Carfax almost expected a goatee-ed colonel and his hoop-skirted lady to come out on the porch.

  "The gardeners are really security guards," Tours said. "The vegetation looks so green and healthy because it's plastic."

&nb
sp; "The mowers and the clippers?"

  "No blades in the mowers; dull edges on the clippers.

  Mr. Western doesn't like a police-type atmosphere, but he has to have guards. Too many misguided people, like Phillips, for instance, you must have read about him, have tried to kill Mr. Western.

  Some fanatics think they can keep their religion from being discredited if they kill Mr. Western. They're crazy, of course."

  "I understand that Mr. Western talked to Phillips only six hours after he died."

  "Yes, Phillips was located and queried briefly. He hadn't recovered yet from the shock of becoming a semb and so wasn't a good contact. Mr. Western does plan to interview him again, though. He thinks Phillips's testimony now might convince others of Phillips's religion that he isn't a fake."

  The taxi stopped before a heavy metal gate at the end of the ramp. A few seconds later, the gate swung open. The taxi drove around to the side of the house and entered a downramp into the basement. The flexibie doors swung shut behind them. The passengers got out, Tours gave his credit card to the driver, who stuck it in the meter slot and then returned it. The taxi drove off through the swinging doors. The gray-green smog was blown back from the entrance by the airblast as >the doors opened.

  Tours led Carfax up a staircase of twenty steps into an enormous and beautifully decorated room. The four men there seemed to have nothing else to do but lounge around and look tough. Carfax was ready to submit to a frisking, but nobody suggested it. He must have passed metal detectors on the way up, he thought.

  They went down a high-ceilinged hall with murals which he recognized as copies of Etruscan frescoes. At its end was a small elevator. He and Tours entered and were taken up to the third floor. Tours did not touch the controls. They were probably dummies, and a man was probably watching them through closed-circuit TV while he operated the controls. Carfax wondered if the elevator went down into the garage.