“Here’s hoping!”
That evening I went back to Queue’s. Keith and I were sitting on the porch smoking a joint when Riscky Pharbeque came bouncing up the path-with none other than Susan Poker in tow.
“Yo, bro,” said Riscky. “I brought my friend Sue. She’s the movie agent I was telling you about.” Susan Poker had replaced her hard-shell Realtor garb with black jeans and a Mexican blouse embroidered with cyberspace interface icons. She wore pale lipstick, and had washed the stiffener out of her hair to pull it back into a loose ponytail. She looked arty, in an LA kind of way.
“Hi, there!” she sang. “I’m looking forward to representing you. Riscky won’t tell me what he did to convince you.” She gave Riscky a kittenish slap.
I was on my feet staring down over the railing. “Since when are you a movie agent, Poker?” I demanded.
“What you don’t know about me would fill a book, Rugby,” she fired back. “But don’t you think it’s time we got on a first-name basis?”
They sat on the porch and smoked with us for a bit, and then I took Riscky upstairs alone with me.
“I hope to God you don’t tell that flap-mouth about-” I broke off, remembering that my room was probably bugged. Riscky laid a finger on his long sharp nose and looked kindly confidential. He drew a cloth sack out of his pocket and held it up inquiringly. I pointed to my black satchel. He reached into it with the sack and invisibly bagged his RAM chip and the dormant winged plastic ants. I was glad to see them go. I was dead sick of ants.
Back downstairs, Susan Poker said, “We can’t stay long, Jerzy, but I’ve got these papers for you to sign.”
“What?”
“It’s my standard agency contract. I incorporated on Friday-when Riscky told me he’d get you. The networks already know I’m going to represent you, and ABC and TNT are definitely interested.”
I went ahead and signed the papers. What the hey, “Sue” was only asking for fifteen percent. And it wasn’t like, if she got the deal, I would actually have to do anything more than give them my blessing and take a couple of meetings. “The Jerzy Rugby Story,” yeah, I kind of liked it. Or maybe call it “The Hacker And The Ants”? It would be something on TV worth seeing for once-especially if I won my trials and gave it a happy ending.
“Let me just ask you one thing,” I said, handing back the papers. “Was it a woman called Kay Coolidge who got you onto my case in the first place?”
“Go ask Gretchen,” grinned Susan Poker. “She told me she wants you to come see her tonight.”
I drove down to Gretchen’s. She was home alone in her condo, sitting on the couch watching television.
“Where were you all weekend, Jerzy?” she asked petulantly. “I couldn’t find you.”
“Never mind. Look, is it true that Roger Coolidge’s wife Kay hired you and Susan Poker to watch me?”
Gretchen tossed her bell-shaped hairdo. “Okay, yes, that’s true. But right away I started being really fond of you, Jerzy.” She smiled prettily.
“You weren’t too fond of me to give Riscky Pharbeque my cyberspace access code. You watched me typing it in that time right after our first fuck. I just remembered that on the drive over here.”
“Come on and sit down, Jerzy,” said Gretchen, patting the sofa cushion next to her. “Tell me how your trial’s going. Calm down and give me a kiss.”
The phone rang. Gretchen answered. “Yes. Uh-huh. No, I’m still not sure where he was over the weekend. But I know where he is now. Yes, he’s right here. Oh, he already knows. Talk to him? I guess so.” She giggled and held out the receiver. “Here, Jerzy. It’s Kay Coolidge.”
Reluctantly I took the phone. “Hello?”
It was an older woman’s plummy voice, strained with grief. “Mr. Rugby, this is Kay Coolidge in San Francisco. I’ve just gotten word that my husband Roger is dead. Do you know how it happened?”
“Roger framed me for the GoMotion ant release, and you’ve been helping him spy on me for over a month. Why would I suddenly want to help you?”
“Look, Mr. Rugby, Roger told me on Saturday that you were coming to visit him. You’re such an unworldly dreamer that it would be perfectly easy to frame you again, if that’s what you want to call it, you fool. But if you’ll just tell me the truth, I might let you go. Even if you did kill him.”
I took a deep breath. Would this ever be over? “I’m certainly not going to say I was there-” I began.
“Go on.”
“But I might speculate that Roger was killed by some new four-armed robots and some little robots that look like plastic ants. That’s what he was experimenting with, I understand. From having worked with Roger in the past, I can tell you that he could be quite reckless about new forms of artificial life.”
“I see,” said Kay Coolidge quietly. “But the coroner said something about a fire.”
“This would still be pure speculation on my part, but it may be that someone was trying to kill the four-armed robots along with the plastic ants that were crawling on… on Roger’s body.”
“Oh how horrible.” She started sobbing.
“Will you and your people leave me alone now?” I grated.
There was a hiccuping pause while Kay Coolidge composed herself. “Yes, we’ll leave you alone,” she said finally.
“So good-bye. And I’m sorry about Roger. You don’t need to say anything else to Gretchen, do you?”
“No need.” Her voice was shakily calm. “Tell Miss Bell that her final check will come this week. Goodbye.”
I-hung up the phone.
“What was that all about?” asked Gretchen.
“You’re out of that job,” I told her.
“I’m glad, Jerzy. Susan and I have felt terrible about tattling on you.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute,” I said. But I spent the night with her anyway. What with having to turn myself in to the sheriff the next day, who knew when I’d get another chance to sleep with a woman. And, face it, I was still in love with Gretchen, even if she did have the morals of a Realtor.
The story about Roger Coolidge being killed by his robots broke in the media the next morning. I went downtown at noon and spent the next six days in jail and the courtroom.
On Wednesday morning, Stu presented Vinh’s testimony. There were records of Roger calling Vinh, and of Roger calling the number of Vinh’s transponder. Vinh said he hadn’t known why Roger had wanted him to drive the transponder over to his family’s house; he said he’d thought it was just a divorce case or a matter of industrial espionage. Wednesday afternoon, after Vinh’s testimony, Stu showed a kick-ass cyberspace demo that made the story really hang together.
For his summation on Thursday, Stu got permission from the judge to bring in the fact that Roger had recently been killed by robots, and that all the GoMotion ants seemed to have disappeared from cyberspace with Roger’s death. By the time Stu was through, nobody doubted anymore that Roger had been the sole and supreme master of the GoMotion ants.
The jury came in with a not guilty verdict on Friday, and on Monday, June 8, the federal prosecutor dropped all charges against me. I walked out of jail a free man with a dynamite story. I spent the rest of that day hanging out with my kids. I saw Carol too, of course, and she told me that she was planning to marry Hiroshi in the fall. I was so happy about getting out of jail that I congratulated her.
Tuesday, Susan Poker got me a contract with Fox for “seven figures,” as she happily put it. Riscky was with her when she told me. He was really excited about his Sue’s deal. Studly was to be equipped with fresh chips and given a starring role. It almost felt like Riscky had made this whole adventure happen to me just so Susan Poker would have a miniseries to sell. But that was a paranoid thought, and I was sick of being paranoid.
While they were talking to me, Riscky started hinting around that he might want to try and find a hacker to help him develop some miniature flying robots with “certain new technology I’ve got ahold of,” meaning the winged plastic ants. “ Not me,” I told him. “ No more ants for me.”
On Wednesday, Stu filed a seven-figure lawsuit against GoMotion for having framed me. Given Kay Coolidge’s promise not to pull any more dirty tricks on me, it seemed like we had a good chance of winning. Stu lined up two other lawyers to help him, all of them working on a contingency basis.
On Thursday, Otto Gyorgyi phoned to offer me my job back at West West, and I had the joy of telling him to get fucked, royally. I still had most of the eighty thousand I’d gotten from Roger, and before long the miniseries
