Armed with the two new batteries and the printout from the Internet, I lift the battery cover off the back once more with my fingernail. My hands are shaking as if I’m defusing a bomb. I pull one battery and quickly slide a fresh one into the slot. I pull the second. I pop the other one in, then realize I’ve gotten it in backward. I almost drop the device on the floor. Sarah grabs it before it can hit the carpet. She holds it while I turn the battery around and slip it in the right way. Then I look at her. “You think we got it?”
“I don’t know. Turn it on.”
I snap the battery cover back in place, flip the device over in my hand, and hit the green button on the bottom. When the screen pops up, the battery indicator hasn’t moved. It’s still where it was before, near empty. Oh, shit. An instant later it flickers. The shaded area suddenly slides across the image of the battery, all the way to the right. It is now fully charged. I let out a sigh.
“Gee, Dad, you really ought to calm down. This stuff really gets you uptight. It’s just a little computer,” she says.
“Yeah. Right.”
“Here, let me see it.”
I hand it over and try to catch my breath.
Sarah starts tapping the screen with the stylus. “You can do graffiti on it too,” she says. “Do you want me to show you?”
“No. No graffiti,” I tell her.
“Dad, it’s not the kind of graffiti you think. Look,” she says. “You can write letters on this section of the screen to call things up. See?” She orders up Nick’s address book and makes the letter “c” in a small window at the bottom of the screen. Suddenly the book jumps to the section with names starting with “C.”
“Got it,” I tell her.
She shows me how to call up the calendar, the To Do List. “This one even has e-mail, but you have to turn the phone on,” she says. “Why don’t we do it? The batteries are fresh.”
“Not right now.”
“Oh, gee,” like I ruin all her fun. “This is really cool. The kids at school would go nuts.”
I’ll bet. Calling people in London and leaving messages for Joe, then calling them back and telling them it’s Joe and asking if there’s any messages.
“Can I take it to school tomorrow?”
“No. And do me a favor. Don’t tell anybody about it.”
“Why not?”
“For the moment it’s our secret.”
She looks at me like “why would I want to do this?” Something this cool and she can’t tell anybody about it. Then she shrugs and says “Sure,” and hands it back to me. She returns to her homework, settles into the chair with her book and the Star Trek reruns, the endless generations.
“Sarah.”
“What?” She looks up at me.
“Thank you. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
She fights it, but finally there’s a beaming smile that slips out. “Anytime,” she says.
I settle back into the sofa and look at the small device. I’m wondering if Nick had software and a cradle and whether he downloaded it onto his desktop at the office or home. If he did, the cops have it. They have seized his computers at both locations; with the firm I’m sure going toe-to-toe with them over client information that may be stored on the hard disks. If he didn’t sync it, the only copy of whatever the device holds is in my hand.
I put my feet up on the coffee table and start to surf using the stylus.
It takes several minutes to scan the address book. There are forty-three names and phone numbers, not nearly as many as I would have thought, knowing Nick and the contacts he had. Most of these are just names, without any addresses or other information.
Some of the area codes are San Diego. I recognize the 415 as San Francisco. The phone book tells me that the only other two area codes for names in the address book are for Manhattan and Washington, D.C.
I recognize a few of the names as lawyers at RDD in San Diego. Nick has made entries under “Title” for some of the people in the other cities. Most of these involve one-word entries: “Litigation,” “Licensing,” “M amp;A,” “Govnt. Affairs.” I don’t recognize any of the names attached to these.
Except for an entry made by the vendor who sold the device to register the warranty, there is nothing on the To Do List.
But the Memo Pad has what appear to be street addresses, three of them, followed by letters, SF, NY, and DC. Three of the four cities listed in the address book. There is also an entry under a separate note, something called Antiquities Bibliotecha, with what look like a series of numbers following it, what could be an overseas or international phone number. I make a note.
By midnight, Sarah is long since in bed, and part of the mystery is solved when I call a few of the numbers and confirm my suspicion, all the numbers ring at Rocker, Dusha offices in the cities listed.
What is puzzling is why the device doesn’t contain more numbers. Nick knew a thousand people in San Diego alone. None of them are in the address book. There is nothing for the courts in any of the four cities, no addresses, phone numbers, and no court appearances in the date section, just meetings with some of the lawyers in the firm’s various offices.
The first of these shows up in early April in San Francisco. There are several meetings, in New York and Washington in the early summer. These continued through the summer. The last meeting was in San Francisco nine days before Nick was killed.
At first I suspect that Nick was only practicing with the device, unwilling to toss his Day Runner in the trash until he had mastered all of its functions. But its true purpose surfaced with the discovery of another name. A single cryptic entry marked on the same day, repeated each month, the twenty-fifth at eleven A. M. Next to the time and the notation-“Money for Laura”-is an icon for an alarm so Nick wouldn’t forget. Next to this is another tiny icon, like a dog-eared piece of paper. I tap it with the stylus and a note opens. Laura’s name, first and last, along with her mother’s. There is an address and phone number.
This is not something Nick would have ever committed to a written calendar or address book in his office, where prying eyes might see it.
Laura would be almost four now, the result of a brief liaison with a young secretary Nick met outside the firm in the months before Dana, when his marriage to Margaret was crumbling. It was a tryst with an unhappy ending. The night Nick told me about the child he was drunk. His eyes filled with tears of regret for what might have been. He had asked the mother to marry him, but she declined, telling him he had no obligations. They kept their secret. She never sought support. Still, Nick visited the child several times a week at night after work. And each month there was an envelope with cash. He told me his daughter knew him only as Uncle Nick. He never told Margaret or Dana.
Why he told me I don’t know. Maybe it was the booze, the blinding clarity of failure offered by drink. Whatever it was, that night I became Nick’s confidant. It was like so much of Nick’s life, a talented gamester full of risk and hell bent for leather on a rocky road paved with luckless choices and a lot of pain.
CHAPTER SIX
In combat it is called “survivor’s guilt”-the fact that people who have witnessed a traumatic event, and lived to talk about it, will often embrace guilt rather than confront the more agonizing reality that matters were beyond their control, that they were helpless.
Since that day, the moments leading up to Nick’s murder have played in my mind like an endless loop of videotape. But the one I focus on, the most unfathomable, was the result of a momentary social impulse.
It is not the fact that I kicked Metz and his case back to Nick. Metz lied to me about money laundering and probably other things as well. I suspect Nick knew what he was shipping over when he sent me the case.
What bothers me is something far more innocuous. It is the fact that I didn’t make more of an effort to call to Nick out on the sidewalk that morning. I have thought about it at night before I sleep and in those endless hours
