Back to the ice cap voice.
Looking out the window at the wet and gray, I said, “Well, Loralee, I’ll keep digging. Still no guarantee I can come up with anything, but my curiosity is aroused. I’ll let you know.”
We said our polite good-byes.
I stood up to stretch, yawn, and watch more rain. I had some vague suspicions based on some flimsy vanished records and some general observations about human nature. The rain couldn’t add much to that.
I got the phone book, looked up O-My-Micron. The sales office was only a few blocks away, to be close to all the government action. I called. Waldsten was a manager, and managers as a rule stick close to the base. It was not a nice day for a walk. Maybe I could get him on the phone.
“Good afternoon, O-My-Micron,” said the cheery receptionist. No better day to buy a computer, her tone implied.
“Hello,” I said, trying to match her cheeriness. “Could I please speak with Bobby Waldsten?”
“I’ll connect you to his office, sir.” And as perkily as she said it, she did it.
“Mr. Waldsten’s office.” The secretary spoke in a voice that had no time for perky—not unfriendly, but certainly laden with awareness of the valued treasure she guarded.
“Good afternoon,” I said, trying to match her sense of guarding gold, but also to add a sense of authority—as if I had an entitlement to partake of said treasure. “My name is Marvin Kent. I’m a private investigator looking into the affairs of Mr. Waldsten’s late associate, Mr. Aaron Carlisle. Is Mr. Waldsten available, please?”
“Mr. Waldsten’s with clients right now, Mr. Kent.” Her voice let me know she did not consider private detectives to be even close to deserving part of the prized treasure. “I’ll take your number and give it to him.”
“I’d appreciate that. And since I’m not calling on company business, I’ll give you my after-hours number as well.”
There wasn’t much more I could do: keep bothering his voice mail and his secretary, both of which were impervious.
It was close to quitting time. I don’t work eight-to-five, but I had a pretty good idea I was done. I flipped off the radio, made sure the coffee maker was off, got my coat and umbrella, and left work.
I stopped at Uptown Market for a TV dinner and a carton of chocolate milk. I also got a box of cinnamon graham crackers to dip in the chocolate milk. I went home, heated up the TV dinner, watched TV. Most of the programs had been pre-empted to show news of the local flooding. But not all. Flipping through the channels I noticed some stations were showing their regular programming without any bothersome interruptions about other peoples’ troubles—and I didn’t even have cable. Maybe that perfect drug, the one that short-circuited reality without detriment to a minimal ability to function in society, was already here.
I flipped back and forth, ate, and philosophized. It would take a major event, like North American slipping into the ocean, to truly interrupt TV, and maybe not even then. Satellites could keep broadcasting the regular shows to whatever continents were still above water.
I woke up on my couch—it’s a foldaway bed and I often don’t bother—in the first blink of morning light with a vague hint that I needed to do something. I made a pot of coffee and took a shower, acting like a human being, even though I didn’t really feel like one. For breakfast I had more graham crackers dipped in chocolate milk. I got dressed—casual, slacks and sport shirt, this being after all California—and opened the blinds to look at the rain.
I opened the window. It wasn’t cold outside. Sacramento was getting Panama’s weather. You could take a trip without moving. A couple years before, we were getting Baja’s weather. The sun shone, and shone. Sacramento is not only close to everything, it moves around, too. This year we’d been moving from the Olympic Peninsula down to the Panamanian jungle and back. This year a stop in Baja would be nice. Back in the drought years, when we got all that Baja sunshine, we moped, worried, and missed the rain.
Whenever the weather strays from the average we start worrying. The problem is, it’s almost never average. It’s either too wet or too dry, with the average in between. Normal is abnormal. Wait around, the sun will shine. Wait around, it will rain. You learn that as you get older.
So here we are, in a world where the only thing we know for sure is that events rarely go our way. Still, we’re all looking for a loophole. There’s the problem. What we want is an average, normal day, day after day, which is exactly what we probably won’t get. And if we do get it, we get so bored we start to do insane things. Then we overstep the bounds of law, or common decency (sometimes both) and make trouble.
That’s where I come in. I carry a private investigator’s license.
A rich man died suddenly. A little later I met his widow, who I once had known, who hired me to investigate his death because it didn’t smell right to her. I didn’t think the job could be done, but she really looked good, so I took the job…made some calls…got a call back telling me the man was not in the record book. I looked around some more and found out he had been fascinated by chemical enhancements for the human mind.
Then he died. And I found that interesting. But it’s amazing the amount of trivial sludge that interests me. I have A.D.D.
Had somebody, trying to beat the natural system, committed outrages against the law? Common decency? Both? I could see where that might have happened. But that was a long way from proving that it had.
The rain was coming down, hard. It was a warm rain that was melting a lot of snow up in the mountains, so floods and chaos were happening all over. Nature was all-powerful. We humans were still quite puny.
Those were the facts I had.
The phone interrupted my meditations. I looked at the clock. 8:01 A.M. Someone was right on duty.
“Marvin Kent.”
“Hello, Eight Ball. Bill Farley here.” Loud and jocular.
“Spill the beans.”
“Boy, you sure keep banker’s hours. I tried to call you half an hour ago. You self-employed bastards have it made.”
“I know, that’s why so many government employees are quitting in droves for the independence of working for themselves.”
“Yeah, come to work when you feel like it, take super long lunch breaks, knock off early. What a life.” He laughed curtly, then his voice was hushed. “Listen, your friend, Carlisle?”
“What about him?” I found myself whispering.
“He’s back on the record. Dead, just like you said he was. And I know who took him off and put him back on. It was Boscombe.”
“The tall guy out front by the alley there?”
“Yeah. I figured if there was anything, he’d have something to do with it. As soon as something fishy happens, you suspect the psycho, right?”
“It’s a good place to start.”
“Okay. So I start following him around yesterday. Nothing obvious, just keeping an eye on him. He’s so friggin’ paranoid, he suspects
