had been in the apartment after Jamie’s departure. If she had seen the disks on the floor, and she would have if she’d been thorough in her rummaging, she would have put them back in their proper place. Pamela’s motto had always been “tidying as you go is half the fun.”
That left my new best friend, Mike Rolland of Monaco.
Mike had been in Jamie’s library when I arrived, and he went out of the apartment wearing the face of a man unhappy with what he was leaving behind. Why was he unhappy? Because he’d been in the apartment on a search and hadn’t found the object of his search.
That was a surmise on my part, but not a bad surmise. Another pretty fair surmise: he was looking for a computer disk, one that fit into the NeXT.
I pulled open the drawers to Jamie’s desk. Time to launch my own search. The desk drawers didn’t hold much. Stacks of computer paper. The Toronto telephone directory. A guide book to Monaco. I flipped through it. The proper adjective wasn’t Monacan or Monesque. The book said it was Monégasque.
I got down on my hands and knees and rubbed my hands across the bottoms of the drawers. No disk was taped to the undersides.
I shook out the books in Jamie’s single-minded little library, removed the CDs from their plastic containers, lifted the pillows off the maroon leather sofa against the opposite wall and jammed my hand into its lining. No disk.
I rolled up the Indian rug and rolled it down again. I unscrewed the base of the lamp and re-screwed it. I spent thirty minutes in the den. The room, I would’ve sworn, was clean of concealed disks.
I gave the same treatment to the living room, the dining room, the undersized kitchen, and the bedroom that Dante Renzi must have once occupied. It was empty of Dante and his effects and of a disk. I had narrowed the search to Jamie’s bedroom. I made my way methodically through its closets, the two bedside tables, and a high bureau that held a few stray socks, some briefs in shocking shades, and nothing else. I pulled the drawers out of the bureau and turned them over. I patted the thick white carpeting for unnatural lumps. Nothing. I stuck my hand under the mattress. Nothing.
Had I exhausted all possibilities? All potential places of secrecy? Was there an ingenious hidey-hole somewhere in the apartment? Inspiration failed me.
I sat on the bed. It had a white satin spread. The pillows had satin covers. Seven pillows, one in mauve, two in silver, one in apple green … seven pillows? What practices did Pamela and Jamie get up to in bed?
I stretched out on the satin spread and dropped my head on a white satin pillow. From where my head was positioned, I was staring at the Dennis Burton garter-belt painting. The woman in the garter belt was bending to one side. She showed a lot of haunch.
I stared some more. And noted a flaw. Either the woman was bending at a very tricky angle or the painting was hanging crooked on the wall.
I skidded off the satin and walked over to the painting. The garter belt was black, the haunch was pink, and the painting was tilting an inch too much to the right.
I straightened it and stepped back.
Nah. I’d made it worse, a couple of inches too far left.
I put my fingers under the bottom of the frame and started to ease the picture back into line.
On the back of the painting, at the bottom, the fingers of my right hand were touching something that definitely wasn’t frame.
I unhooked the painting and turned it over.
Paydirt.
Layers of Scotch tape held something that looked remarkably like a disk to the back of the frame. I peeled off the Scotch tape. It was a disk under there, and it had a label with the familiar neat printing.
“Operation Freeload.”
I rehung the lady in the garter belt and backed off two steps. She looked straight to me.
In the den, a small liquor cabinet nestled into the panelled wall beside the desk. Bottles, glasses, an ice-making machine. Jamie kept Russian vodka on hand. Or Pamela kept it for him. Stolichnaya. I built a drink on the rocks, raised the glass in a toast to my own perspicacity, and sat in the chair behind the NeXT.
As a rule, I’ll take the quill pen over the computer any day. That isn’t a smart attitude in my profession and getting less smart awfully fast. Somewhere around fifty percent of my clients are charged with crimes of fraud, and lately too many of the people who beat a path to my door are accused of perpetrating their frauds with the accursed computer. I have to refer them to computer-friendly lawyers. It’s embarrassing, especially when the computer-friendly lawyers don’t send any quill-pen felons my way.
I had a stiff swallow of Stolichnaya and thought, what the hell. Take a flyer. Fire up the NeXT. Stick “Operation Freeload” into the thing. Maybe divine its contents. Solve the mystery right out of the box. Why not? What was the worst that could happen? I considered the question, but I didn’t know what the worst could be.
A button on the NeXT’s keyboard was labelled “Power.” A logical starting place. I pressed it, and the machine went into a mild convulsion of drones and quavers. When the dust cleared and silence reigned again, a box in the computer’s screen, black letters on an off-white background, seemed to require the answers to two questions. Name and Password.
Name.
Well, not mine.
Jamie’s.
I typed “Jamie” into the indicated space.
Password?
I typed in “Freeload.” It was worth a try.
Did the NeXT like what I’d fed it? I couldn’t tell. Maybe it needed to chew on a disk. I looked around for an appropriate slot and found one on another black box that seemed to be a partner to the main computer. I slid in “Operation Freeload.” The disk disappeared into the slot, making a polite slurping sound in the process, and right away, the screen blipped up a bunch of lines.
First, “Loading from disk.”
Then, “Checking disk.”
“Checking network.”
“Starting system services.”
Was this fun or what, a NeXT in high gear?
Something titled “Directory Browser” settled onto the screen. Under it, there was a long list of one-word titles. Browser? Jeez, computerspeak was turning mundane. Whatever happened to “interface” and “IBM-compatible”?
I gathered I was supposed to select something from the “Directory Browser,” and move on to the next step.
Uh huh. I tried tapping keys on the keyboard, but nothing happened.
Hovering in the corner of the screen was a tiny arrow. Intuition told me the arrow was the little devil that handled the selecting chore. But how did I make the damn thing move?
To the right of the computer, resting on the table, there was a small rectangular gizmo. It was in the usual black, and it fed into the computer through a cable arrangement. Something about
