Killing Plato

the effort-when the doorbell buzzed.

My state of mind at that moment beinat wn g what it was, the sound of it scared the unholy crap out of me.

TWENTY FOUR

So absorbed was I in my outbreak of paranoia, I had forgotten for a moment that Jello was coming around. Opening the door I saw he had dressed for the occasion. He was wearing a lemon-yellow Hawaiian shirt with a chorus line of topless hula dancers strung out across the considerable width of his chest. The shirt hung out over a pair of baggy khakis and the cuffs of the khakis flopped onto a shiny pair of silver Air Jordans with black laces. For Jello, this was dressing.

I led him into the study and he paused next to the straight chair in front of my desk, examining it as if he wasn’t quite sure what it was. I had to admit it looked a little dainty next to him. A lot of people doubted Jello was a Thai since he was so big. Rather than possessing the wiry, whippet-like physique usually associated with Thais, Jello was build more like a sumo wrestler. A big sumo wrestler.

“You got something I won’t break?” he asked, pointing at the chair.

I sat back down behind my desk and waved him into the chair without saying anything. He settled gingerly onto it. Remarkably, it held.

“You get some bad sushi for dinner or something, Professor?” Jello studied my face as he laid the red accordion file he was carrying in his ample lap. “You don’t look too good.”

I tapped my fingers on the desk and avoided Jello’s eyes. How much should I tell him?

The last conversation I had with Jello had ended with ominous warnings from him not to have anything to do with Plato Karsarkis. If I told him I had just been hanging out with Karsarkis while somebody was breaking into my apartment and checking out my laptop, he would have looked at me pretty strangely. I could hardly blame him. Shoot, I was looking at me pretty strangely.

“Well…” I paused, but Jello didn’t say anything to help me out, so I made a snap decision to stick strictly to the mystery of the moment and leave Plato Karsarkis out of it. “It looks like somebody’s been messing with my laptop, but there’s nobody here who could have.”

“Anita?”

“No, she’s out and it happened just a couple of hours ago.”

Jello leaned forward and tossed the file he’d brought me onto the desk, then he folded his arms and looked at me.

“Go on,” he said.

I told him what I knew about what had happened, which wasn’t much, so it didn’t take long.

“Is there anything on the laptop anybody might want?” he asked when I was done.

“Not really. My class preparation stuff, a little personal financial data. Like that.”

“No client files?”

“No…well, nothing important. Certainly nothing anybody would want to break into my apartment for.”

“You think this was a break-in?”

“I don’t know what I think. Maybe the damned software is all fucked up. You asked me why I looked a little strange and I told you. Now lay off. Don’t grill me about it.”

I looked at Jello for ten or fifteen seconds and he looked back, but he never said a word. Then abruptly he stood up and began to wander around the sn='jtudy, apparently aimlessly, examining the framed memorabilia hung on the walls.

“Any signs of forced entry?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Anything missing?”

“I don’t think so. Somebody just tried to get into my laptop, that’s all.”

“So you’ve checked everything?”

“No,” I admitted. “ I’ve looked around in here. Not in the other rooms.”

Jello nodded very slowly as if I had somehow just confirmed all his deepest suspicions.

“You piss anybody off recently, Professor?”

“Not that I know of.”

“How about the stuff you’re working on now. You involved in any flaky shit I ought to know about?”

I apparently took a beat too long to respond because Jello shot me a dead-eyed look over his shoulder and then went back to examining the hangings on my walls with considerably more care than I thought they merited.

“Look, could we just drop this?” I asked as Jello scrutinized the elaborately engraved certificate attesting to my good standing with the United States Supreme Court. “It’s probably nothing. You’re making me wish I hadn’t told you.”

Jello worked his way around the wall to the low filing cabinet. All of a sudden he hopped on top of it with such astonishing agility for a big man that I just sat and stared, too dumbstruck to do much else.

Jello reached up and ran the fingertips of his left hand lightly back and forth over the wide molding that joined the wall and the ceiling. Then a small penknife materialized in his right hand and, after feeling around a bit more with his left, he pressed the point into the soft wood and twisted it into the molding with a corkscrewing motion.

“Jello, what in Christ’s name-”

He waved me into silence without turning around. Digging something out of the molding with the blade, he closed the knife and cradled whatever it was in his palm, examining it, but his body blocked my view and I couldn’t tell what it was. Jello’s body was so big he could have been holding a small automobile and I wouldn’t have been able to tell what it was.

“Look, man, what the hell are you doing?” I asked. “What’s that?”

Jello turned around and hopped off the filing cabinet, then walked over and gently placed what looked like a nail on my desk blotter. I stared at it for a moment and then looked up.

“Okay, it’s a nail,” I said. “So what?”

“Not a nail.”

Jello picked up the thing that still looked to me like a nail and held it right in front of my face, rotating it between his thumb and forefinger. Then he cupped it in his hand and closed his fingers around it, burying the head in his palm.

“It’s a wireless transmitter,” he said. “Short range, maybe three hundred yards, but pretty reliable over that distance. The main drawback to this model is its internal power only lasts for about seventy-two hours. After that you have to replace it.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me.”

“I shit you not, Professor. I shit you not one little bit.”

I stared at Jello’s closed fist and tried to envision the device he had cupped inside it.

“Oh, come on,” I shook my head at him again. “Surely it’s not really…”

“Very sophisticated stuff, too. Almost looks like one of ours, although it isn’t.”

“You mean somebody’s listening to us right now?” I asked.

“Not as long as I’ve got the business end blocked like this.” Jello wiggled his fist at me. “But somebody has been listening to everything that’s been said in this room.”

“For how long? Three days?”

I began frantically trying to remember what might have been said in this room during the last three days.

Jello shook his head. “Not necessarily.”

He carefully reseated himself on the fragile looking chair in front of my desk, keeping the listening device closed up inside his big hand.

“I said this thing was good for about three days,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it’s been here three days.