Smart House (4 page)

“We can’t find Gary,” he said. He was pale and so somber it was like another mask. They all had masks, Beth thought almost wildly. Milton turned to Alexander and said, “Get on that computer and unlock his door.”

Alexander Randall was biting his fingernails as he faced Milton. “He’ll kill me if I unlock his door,” he protested.

“And I’ll kill you if you don’t.”

Alexander looked at the others beseechingly, then seated himself at the computer terminal in the living room and started to key in something. He stopped and looked up at Milton. “There’s a better way, through security. At least I can find out if he went to his room.”

They all watched the screen as Alexander typed in instructions. No one moved. Finally Milton said, “In the Jacuzzi.”

They started out together and, without volition on her part, Beth followed. They went around the atrium, to a narrow hallway backed by obsidian, through another short hall to a closed door. It opened at a touch. The insulating cover was over the Jacuzzi pool. The room was hot, the air foul with chlorine, dense with steam, more like a steam bath than a Jacuzzi room. For a moment no one moved, then Milton found a control panel on the wall and studied it for a moment; he pushed a button. The cover of the pool slid open, releasing clouds of steam, and there in the water, face down, was the fully clothed body of Gary Elringer.

Chapter 4

Charlie Meiklejohn brooded
about the weather. The end of August, two more weeks of hell before they could expect real relief. And what the devil caused the haze that hung between the trees and followed the contours of the hill out back like a London fog? Not rain. The grass was browning nicely and he’d be damned if he would water it. There was too much. Constance watered a patch surrounding the terrace behind the house, but that was because it bordered her flowers, and no drought would be allowed to detract from the riot of colors. They had a green backdrop, and then the grass turned brown. So much the better. It might not need mowing again this season, and if there was anything Charlie disliked more than shoveling snow, it was mowing grass. You water it, and fertilize it, and then you cut it down, he thought, and shook his head. Dumb.

“Dead cat,” Constance murmured, joining him on the back terrace, shaded by purple clematis and wisteria. She pointed to Brutus, on his back under the lilac bush, his head twisted to one side, his feet splayed out in what looked like a joint-breaking position.

“We should put in air conditioning,” Charlie said in a grumbling way. It wasn’t fair, he thought aggrievedly; Constance always looked cool. She was ivory pale and never looked flushed, never tanned very dark, and always seemed to have the right sort of thing to put on for whatever weather they were having. Now she wore a loose cottony dress that touched her at the shoulders and nowhere else and was exactly the color of her eyes, light blue, cool blue. She was slender, with long legs the color of honey, just enough color to be interesting. Charlie was dark, with unruly black hair speckled with gray, and he was thickly built, heavy in the chest, thick arms and legs. He was very muscular, but he knew he could lose ten, fifteen pounds and maybe take the heat better for it. Thin people didn’t know what it was to suffer from the heat, he decided, and it wasn’t fair.

Constance smiled and sat down in a chaise lounge. She did not say, “Yes, dear,” about the air conditioning, but her look said it almost as clearly as words. They had talked about it last summer, and the summer before that. They had talked about it years ago when they bought this place in upstate New York, while they were still living in New York City and could only make it up here on weekends and holidays. And they would talk about it next summer, she knew. Her smile was contented. They had a window unit in the bedroom, and a fan that they moved from living room to kitchen to dining room. Always before when they talked about it, when they had reached the point of actually doing something about it, a cold front had come through bringing cooling rains, or autumn had come along, or they had had to leave for something or other.

“Those poor bastards,” Charlie sighed, and she knew he was thinking of people in the city.

“Rather be here,” she said.

If it had not been so hot, he would have turned to give her one of his looks, but he didn’t bother. That’s what came of living together so long, he thought. They could speak in code by now, speak by number, and have perfect understanding. Sometimes he missed the city. He had lived there all his life until retiring after twenty-five years of service, first with the fire department, later as a city police detective. Constance had taught psychology at Columbia for most of those years. On days like this they used to meet after work, both of them exhausted and wan, and plan for the time when they could chuck it all, move to the country where it was cool and fresh. Hah! But he knew what it was like in the city now. His memory of Manhattan during an August heat wave was clear in his mind—hot buildings, hot pavement, hot metal smells, hot tempers. God, those tenements! He stirred restlessly, willing the memories away. He did not miss New York in August.

“After what’s-his-name leaves, let’s go to Spirelli’s and eat.”

“Maybe we should talk out here,” she said. “It’s better than inside.”

He nodded. “Probably won’t take long. Look.” He pointed. Another cat, Ashcan, had spotted Brutus playing dead and was sneaking up on him. Brutus would slaughter him, Charlie thought. But Brutus opened his yellow eyes when Ashcan got close, glared at the meeker gray cat, and closed his eyes again. Ashcan began to clean his tail.

“Have you read through all that stuff he sent?”

“There’s not that much. A computerized house went bananas and killed a couple of people. Case closed. Evidently the house is guilty as hell.”

And Milton Sweetwater had asked for an appointment to discuss it, she thought, and almost felt sorry for Mr. Sweetwater, although he was a stranger.

Where computers were concerned, Charlie was a hanging judge; sentence first, questions later, if ever. For two weeks Charlie had been doing battle with the telephone company over an error in their billing. “Let me talk to a person!” he had yelled into the telephone finally. Then he had banged down the phone and turned a stricken face to her.

“What happened?”

“It was a computer pretending to be a person,” he said in a near whisper. “By God, it was passing itself off as human!”

Milton Sweetwater did not hesitate a second about taking off his jacket. He handed it to Constance with gratitude, followed her to the terrace, and shook hands with Charlie in the ritualistic manner of men, eyeing each other carefully. He accepted a beer and sat down. Very handsome, she thought. Movie star looks, like Gregory Peck. And he was obviously studying both her and Charlie as much as she was studying him. Charlie, she also thought, was not being helpful.

“Hot day for driving,” Charlie said; Milton Sweetwater agreed, and now there was silence.

Abruptly Milton Sweetwater laughed and leaned back in his chair, obviously relaxing. Until that moment Constance had not realized that he had been tense.

“I got your names from Ralph Wedekind,” he said and drank his beer thirstily. His glass was covered with condensation, so heavy that it dripped like a shower when he moved it. “Actually I have three names. I already talked to someone else and didn’t like him. You’re the second. If you turn us down, there’s another man in New York that I’ll talk to. I was ready to reject you for making me drive out to your place, instead of your coming in to the city, but after a couple days in New York, I’d be the first to admit you’d be crazy to live there. And the last thing we need at Smart House is a crazy detective.”

“Why a New York detective?” Charlie asked lazily.

“We don’t care where our person is from, as long as he’s good, with good references. Wedekind gave you his highest recommendation. So I’m here.”

“Did the computer kill those two men?” Charlie asked, but without any real interest.

“Of course not. But the shareholders are in a bind. We’ve had three meetings so far and no one knows exactly where to go next, what to do next. The company’s in a tailspin financially and the management is in a tailspin psychologically. Beth Elringer is crying murder, and her brother-in-law is screaming for action. It’s a real mess.”

Charlie sighed and poured himself more beer. “I read the news stories you sent. What else is there to know? Were the stories accurate?”

“To a point,” Milton Sweetwater said after a pause that was hardly noticeable, as if in that brief moment he had come to a decision. “Can we all accept that our conference today is confidential whether or not you take on our problem?”

Charlie waved his hand. “That’s the way we play it.”

Milton Sweetwater leaned forward. “There’s a major part of that weekend that we decided not to talk about with the press or the police. I don’t think it has a bearing, but at our last meeting, we decided to tell a detective all of it and go on from there.”

Charlie nodded, then regarded the cats under the lilac bush again. The leaves of the bush were drooping dispiritedly; the cats looked dead; he felt wrung out.

“You should know something about Gary Elringer and the company or that weekend won’t make a bit of sense,” Milton began. “Gary was a prodigy. I guess the news stories went into that. He built his own computer before he was ten, went to Stanford at fifteen, Ph.D. by twenty, with half a dozen innovations or outright inventions or discoveries under his belt already. He had a couple dozen patents before he could legally take a drink. He also had a difficult personality. Spoiled rotten as a kid, spoiled as an adult. He was chubby and had the social graces of a polecat, snarling, taking what he wanted, and generally making people miserable. In college he met Beth MacNair, shy and very bright, and undeveloped physically. Somehow they hit it off and got married. That was ten years ago. Bruce Elringer, Gary’s brother, meanwhile had come up with a program to write music on a computer, some kind of breakthrough, and they decided to start the Bellringer Company. They had a new computer—hardware—and a lot of software to go with it. Gary had already made a lot of money—not enough, but a lot. They rounded up a few others, including me, and we launched the Bellringer Company, Incorporated. It was a spectacular success from the start. That was eight years ago.”

He finished his beer and lifted the bottle to read the label.

“Local company,” Charlie said. He went inside and returned with two more bottles. Constance was having iced tea. She drank beer with Mexican food. He began to think of Mexican food—pork with green sauce, chicken breasts with chilies in a creamy sauce…

“Well,” Milton went on after pouring more beer, drinking again. “The company was Gary’s from the start. He kept controlling interest. And no one objected. We all knew that without him there wouldn’t be a company. Even after he started handing out shares to buy loyalty, he kept control, no doubt about it.” He went on at length explaining the articles of incorporation, the shares that had been distributed, how the company functioned. “And until three years ago it didn’t make a lot of difference who had control,” he said presently. “In the first years there weren’t any profits to go to shareholders; we were all on salary. Then there were profits to parcel out, but when Gary started Smart House, the profits vanished.”

Charlie didn’t actually yawn. He wasn’t that much of a boor, he told himself, but neither could he work up any interest in the corporate structure that the lawyer was going on about. Mexican or Italian, he deliberated. Hot, spicy food was said to be more cooling than nonspicy food in the long run. And a pitcher of margaritas. He was leaning more in that direction. Maybe Milton Sweetwater would finish in another few minutes and go away, and he and Constance could discuss the matter of food until it was time to go eat the food.

“You have to understand some of the background or you’ll never understand why we all went along with Gary’s game of murder,” Milton said then, not at all unaware of the effect his words would have.

Charlie blinked at him. “Tell me about it.”

By the time Milton had finished describing the game, Charlie was regarding him with disbelief, and Constance was looking at him with horror.

“You’re a lawyer and you went along with that?” she asked.

He shrugged. “You had to know Gary. It would have been worse if we hadn’t gone along with it. I decided that it was relatively harmless, and it did exactly what he predicted: It made each of us find out for ourselves what a marvel Smart House really is.”

“Such a marvel that it wanted to play, too,” Charlie muttered. “Go on. I take it this is what your game players failed to tell the cops.”

“Exactly. We just didn’t see the point. Think how it would have looked all over the newspapers, the tabloids. And the game had nothing to do with what happened. It might have been any game, or no game at all. What difference could it make to their investigation?”

“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “You tell me. What difference did it make?”

The lawyer looked uncomfortable now. “For one thing everyone became paranoid. It seems incredible now, but we were all paranoid almost instantly when the game started. The other thing is that because of the game we knew that the house, the computer, I should say, appeared responsible for both deaths. You see, it kept track of everyone’s movements all that weekend, and when that portion of the program was displayed, it clearly showed that Rich had been alone in the elevator, and that Gary had gone into the Jacuzzi alone. The police determined that there were glitches in the program, as we all agreed; after all, this was its test run, the weekend, I mean. And no one came forth with any information to contradict that, so although the case wasn’t officially closed, it’s at a standstill, a dead end. An unfortunate accident—two of them. And Bellringer makes killer computers,” he added bitterly.

Charlie was shaking his head. “The police had more than a lousy program with glitches. What else?”

“Yes,” Milton admitted. “There was more. You see, the way the game was set up, and everyone so paranoid, no one was staying for any length of time with just one other person. For the most part we were all staying in groups of four or more, and keeping a sharp eye out for each other. If you were with one other person, a third person might join you looking for his victim, you see. One victim, one witness, one killer. I think we all had our suspicions about who had been killed already and who hadn’t, but even an apparently nonchalant attitude could have been an act.” He spread his hands in a curiously helpless gesture. “Anyway, we knew Rich was alone, not with just one other person, and we knew he wasn’t in a group of four.”

Very patiently Charlie asked, “Exactly how did you know that?”

Milton looked more uncomfortable than ever. Sheepishly he said, “I was stalking Laura Westerman. She was in a group watching a movie. There was a bar set up in the room, and she was drinking. I thought it was just a matter of time before she wanted to refill her glass, so I waited near the bar. Sure enough, she came back. Rich was near there, too, and I spoke to him, to get his attention, so he would be my witness. When Laura got within range, I shot her with a pea shooter.” He did not look at Charlie or Constance, but frowned into the distance. “It was listed as a poison dart, an instant kill.”

Charlie watched his glass sweat and Constance swirled her ice in her tall glass. Finally Milton glanced at her, then at Charlie, and continued.