'And if you found some fake human footprints, that proves there's no such thing as human beings?'
'I know, but there's so much junk written about Bigfoot, so much charlatanism and plain bad science... I just don't want to get involved in it.'
'Look,” Abe said gently, “a man who's written books about it, a professor at a big university, I'm willing to give him a little of my time. Maybe I'll learn something.'
Gideon smiled and turned to Bertha. “How old is this man now?'
'Seventy-five years young last July.'
'Don't patronize, goddamn it,” Abe said testily.
'Seventy-five and still giving me lessons in open-mindedness.'
'That goes for you, too,” Abe snapped. “You're coming or you're not coming?'
'Okay, let's go,” said Gideon, still smiling. “But I'm warning you, I'm going to take some convincing.'
Abe brightened immediately. “Fair enough. Come, give a listen, keep an open mind. Unless you got some other answers?'
'Answers?'
'To how this Eckert guy got a spear stuck through his T-7. If not a nine-foot gorilla, what was it? Bertha, where's my black shoes with the buckles that don't need shoelaces?'
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Chapter 6
* * * *
Roy Linger and Port Townsend were made for each other; a pair of handsome, elegant anachronisms only faintly gone to seed. The town, especially the part on the hill, would not have been out of place a hundred years before. The houses were all Victorian, most of them modest, but many with French mansard roofs, gabled cupolas, and widows’ walks that looked far out over Admiralty Inlet and Port Townsend Bay.
Linger himself was pure F. Rider Haggard, an extraordinarily good-looking, silver-haired man in bush jacket and cream-colored ascot.
'Professor Goldstein?” he said in a polished Bostonian accent. He pronounced it the German way:
He led them through a long entryway, the walls of which were covered with mounted heads of tigers, leopards, deer, ibex, and animals Gideon couldn't name. Below each head was a small gold plaque. Gideon managed to read one, under an open-mouthed tiger's head, as they walked by:
The living room, down two carpeted steps, was completely modern, with a huge, rectangular fieldstone fireplace in the middle, rising twenty feet to the canted ceiling. The carpet was a pale rose, most of the furniture white.
Linger paused, smiling, at the entrance. “I'd like you to meet my good friend Professor Earl Chace.'
In a deeply upholstered white couch sat a large, beefy, smiling man in a three-piece peach-colored suit that might have been chosen to go with the rose and white and gray of the room.
'A pink suit?” Abe murmured in Gideon's ear. “Already I don't like him.'
Chace strode forward to greet them, hand extended. “Professor Goldstein?” (He said
He had very white teeth, a great many of them, and abundant black hair that was slicked back, except for full sideburns down to the corners of his jaw and a single, curling lock that tumbled boyishly over his forehead. A big, strong grip with a palm so clean and dry that it rustled when he shook hands, a redolence of musky cologne, and a palpably oleaginous aura made him seem half country singer, half country preacher, and not at all Berkeley professor. When he shook hands he revealed a large expanse of smooth, lilac-colored French cuff with a diamond- spangled cuff link that matched a heavy gold ring on his pinkie.
Already I don't like him either, Gideon thought, as they seated themselves in the white sofa grouping.
'We were having some Courvoisier,” Linger said. “Eighteen sixty-five. Remarkable stuff. Would you care to join us?'
He went to a fieldstone bar built into a corner of the room and poured four generous measures from an old bottle. While the others were turned in his direction, Gideon saw Chace quickly pick up one of the two snifters on the coffee table and toss off most of it, choking slightly before it all got down. Linger brought them their cognacs and then noticed with a small frown the two glasses on the coffee table. He took them to the bar and poured their contents down the drain.
It might well have been meant to impress—the cognac had to be wildly expensive—but his action seemed to come naturally to him. So, for that matter, had Chace's.
In near-unison, they all raised their glasses, swirled the dark, golden liquid, sniffed it appreciatively, drank, and said, “Aah.'
Linger elegantly crossed one trouser leg of powder blue over the other, being careful first to hitch up the material. He cupped the belly of the glass between his first and second fingers and continued to swirl the contents.
'Gentlemen, I want to thank you for coming. As...yes, Earl?'
