spoke without hesitation, the modern businesswoman.
The backseat of her car, I’d noticed, was crammed with boxes and folders and pieces of some kind of plastic shelving, maybe something that had to do with dispensing medications. Just a guess. It looked as if she’d been making the rounds, calling on her clients, and had interrupted a busy day to meet us at her old house.
“What kind of friends do you have, Doc? A person who can do something like this to a stranger’s computer… my God! He changed all this through the telephone modem?”
It was hard to tell if she was impressed or spooked. Bernie had recolored each and every screen icon in rainbow shades. They appeared to drift randomly, not unlike pinballs, on a fluorescent wallpaper backdrop of pink flamingos in flight.
The exception was a folder labeled PILAR.
It sat in the center of the screen, many times larger than any other icon, and it flashed as methodically as a smalltown caution light. One of his little jokes.
“What’s pilar mean?”
“It’s Spanish. It means, well… like a support or a column. Something that will hold up a building.”
“But here he means like support for my computer program, right?”
“For the computer… sure. That kind of support. What else could he mean?”
“Is he some kind of drug freak or something? These colors, all the activity, just looking at the screen is giving me a headache.”
“A drug user, you bet,” Tomlinson said, nodding. He was looking over Amanda’s shoulder, riveted. “This kind of genius, there almost has to be synthetics involved. Yes… yes, I’m sure of it. It’s a professional guess, but still a guess… yeah, I believe this whole scene demonstrates certain signature effects that I associate with what may have been the bitchingest acid ever produced. The Hitchcock Estate, Dutchess County, New York, nineteen sixty- seven. Dr. Leary had a hand in that one, God bless him.” He turned to me. “If this buddy of yours has a tab or two to spare, I’ll pay top dollar. I know you don’t approve, but I just got a nostalgia rush you wouldn’t believe. All I want is enough so I can go back and revisit some old friends. Maybe talk to the dead, visit my own karma in the afterlife. Nothing fancy. You don’t mind, why don’t we take a second and jot his number down-”
Amanda said, “Hey, be quiet a minute.”
Tomlinson said, “Huh?”
“Look at this. There’s something wrong here.”
I watched Tomlinson’s face as he looked at the screen. Maybe from his reaction I’d be able to read what was going on.
She said, “I just tried to sign on to my mom’s account, but I get this damn thing.”
There was a message corralled by a blue border: “Invalid Password. Please try again.”
“I thought you said that her password still worked. That you’d tried it.”
“It worked fine last night when I came over to turn on the computer.”
“Maybe her bill hasn’t been paid and they’ve terminated her service.”
“Nope, it’s a credit card thing and the money’s taken out of her account just like everything else. She’s got plenty of money left for stuff like this.”
“Try signing on again.”
She did.
The response was the same: Invalid password.
“Someone’s changed it,” she said. “That’s the only explanation. Someone had to. Which means it had to be my mom.” Her voice gathered a little energy. “So that’s good, right? It means that she’s near a computer and she’s still… that she’s still okay.”
Tomlinson was patting her shoulder, comforting her but also asking her to move. “Tell you what, let me dig into the folder that Doc’s hipster friend sent. Maybe it’s got the juice to find the password, recover the old files, the whole works.” He glanced at me. “Your buddy said everything would be self-explanatory, right?”
I had my arms crossed; stood there trying to picture someone with a computer on a sailboat in Colombia. But yeah, why not? There were phone lines and notebook computers everywhere. I said, “I told him you’d done some of your own programming, that you knew all the basics. He said no problem then.”
To kill time while Tomlinson worked, Amanda walked me through the house. The furniture was draped with white sheets. Her old bedroom was pink with flowers, neat as a museum. There were trophies on the shelves: tennis and softball. An athlete. One big window looked out onto the screened pool and the canal beyond.
“See all those Australian pines across the Intracoastal? That’s Birch State Park. At night, when I was, like, a sophomore or something, I used to sneak out and paddle our canoe across. I’d have the beach all to myself. Not too far from here, you look across and you can’t see anything but condos. Bahia Mar, where Frank and his little soulmate moved. Places like that, there’s no skyline, just buildings. The people there, you got these old men the color of bagels, plus all the yachties and the beach bunnies.”
Playing tour guide while Tomlinson worked.
I noticed that the closet door was wide and the boxes therein were open, scattered, as if someone had recently ransacked them. She replied to my quizzical expression: “I was looking for more photographs. While I was waiting for you guys to get here.”
“Why? You already sent the ones of your mom and Merlot. That’s all I wanted.”
“I know, but I started wondering after you asked me. The pictures of me when I was a little girl? I thought I’d piled them all in the same box. Now I can’t find the box. My mom must have put them somewhere, someplace she thought was safe.”
“You can’t find them.”
“No, but it’s okay. Mom probably hid them. She knows how sensitive I am about how… about, you know. How my eyes looked.”
Like she was kidding, Amanda said, “Mom was probably worried I might burn the whole bunch.”
It took Tomlinson slightly less than three hours to nail the password and recover the lost correspondence between Gail and her E-mail friends. Three intense nonstop hours, during which he shouted orders and updates to us from the study:
“Beer! Bring me beer! My fluids have been sapped. I need to rehydrate!”
“This fucking computer can kiss my ass on the county fucking square! Killing’s too good for it! Burning this noxious bitch would be a kindness. Where’d your mom GET this piece of junk?”
“Amanda, dear? Ahum-m-m. Oh-h-h-h-h Aman-N-N-N-da? Would you mind very much if I, uh, have a smoke in your mom’s study? Now… before you even answer, I know what you’re thinking but you’re wrong: It’s not tobacco, so you’ll hardly even notice the smell.”
She said yeah, sure, he could smoke a joint.
That surprised me.
Dressed in her power clothes, she was still coming across as a much different person than she’d been at Dinkin’s Bay Marina. We were the guests here and she was comfortable with being in charge. Wasn’t self- conscious, not at all reluctant to show little bits and pieces of herself.
Every now and then, she’d flip open her cell phone like it was some kind of Star Trek communicator. I’d listened to her say, “Larry… Larry, I realize the woman’s a pain in the ass and I realize what she’s asking is unfair. But it’s her hospital and it’s a major account and I want you to do whatever it takes to make her happy…” I listened to her say, “Kath? Amanda. Look, girlfriend, about dinner tonight… I’m up to my ass in work and I don’t think I’m going to be able to get away.” She gave me a sly glance before she added, “Yeah, I’ve got company, but they’re a couple of gorgeous hunks, so it’s okay.”
Once her cell phone rang and I listened to her say, “Steve, I’m going to make this short and sweet. I don’t want you calling anymore. I don’t want you leaving any more messages. I’m sorry, but I don’t feel that way about you and there’s nothing you can do about it. No… no more of your idiotic lines from Casablanca. We never crossed the Broward County line, so don’t even fucking talk to me about Paris.”
After that, she stomped off toward the study and came out a few minutes later, exhaling smoke.
Behind her, I heard Tomlinson say, “Pretty good shit, huh?”
I said, “Dope fiends, I’m surrounded by dope fiends. Jesus.” And I watched her smile at me.
She had removed her blazer. Through the white blouse I could see that she wore a gauzy-half bra. It showed her washboard body like a relief map. I pretended that I didn’t notice. It was an old buddy’s daughter, for Christ
