Everything but the Squeal

15

Perfect Pitch

“Don't you listen?” she snapped, long-distance from Kansas City. She sounded like Aurora's imitation of an adult talking to a child. “I said that you weren't to do anything.” I'd awakened late, but even in Kansas it was only noon, so it was safe for me to call: the Pork King couldn't be home.

“You paid the ransom,” I said. “What does that mean?”

“It means that I mailed the money. Please, Mr. Grist, just send me a bill and forget about it.”

“Mailed it?” I asked. I was pretty sure that she was speaking English, but to me it didn't make any more cognitive sense than running water. “Mailed it where?”

“To an address he gave me. In Los Angeles. Now, please, leave us alone.”

“Hold it, hold it,” I said. “Park and idle for a minute. He gave you an address?”

“Yes.”

“In Los Angeles.”

“I believe I just said so.”

“Mrs. Sorrell,” I said. I was developing a headache. “Kidnappers don't give out their addresses.”

“This one did,” she said in the tone of a threatened child. “Ask Aurora.”

“I don't want to ask Aurora. Aurora's a kid and Aimee's her sister. What do you mean, he gave you an address? Was it a he?” I asked, backtracking.

“You heard him on the tape. And when I say he gave me an address, I mean a number and a street and a zip code, all the things that usually make up an address.”

“What is it?”

“I'm not going to tell you that,” she said. “Just send me a bill.”

“How long are you supposed to wait?”

“Four days. Aimee will be home in four days.”

“She won't,” I said, without thinking.

“Oh, yes she will. And listen, you, don't do anything. This is my daughter's life you're fooling around with.” She hung up. When I called back there was no answer. I noodled around with the phone for a few minutes, dialing numbers at random and hanging up when they started to ring. I didn't like any of it, and I needed to do something meaningless while my subconscious sorted it out and came up with something for me to do.

So I didn't have a client anymore. So bill the client. I made out a bill for a few days' work, addressed it, remembered to add the receipts from the Sleep-Eze, and slogged down the unpaved muddy driveway to the mailbox. I raised the red flag to get the attention of my brain-damaged mailman. Then I stuck the letter halfway out and closed the mailbox on it to get a little more of his attention. After twenty years of sizzling his neurons with anything he could buy cheap, his attention needed a lot of getting.

So, there. I'd done something.

The house, as usual, was a mess. I sort of cleaned it, wondering how Eleanor was, all those watery miles away in China. Then I went outside and sort of weeded my root garden. The radishes looked good; you can't discourage a radish. The onions were up, and the potatoes were probably rotting after the cold snap and the rain. I dug one out, and it looked fine. Little, but fine. It wasn't something you could put back, so I went inside and washed and sliced it. Then I fried it in butter for a few minutes and wrapped it into the center of a nice breakfast omelet. Then I threw the omelet away. I hate breakfast.

So now what was I supposed to do? I made some more coffee that I didn't want and sat around, counting my toes through my shoes. When I got to ten for the second time, I remembered that I was scheduled to see Mrs. Brussels at ten, or tennish, or something. I called to cancel.

“We've been trying and trying to reach you at the motel,” Birdie said waspishly. “They said you weren't there.”

“And we're not,” I said. “We're at the Free Clinic. Jewel has the flu.”

“Oh, my God,” Birdie gasped, “and she was in here only yesterday.”

“She's okay,” I said.

“Who cares about her?” Birdie said. “She was probably absolutely redolent with germs. That's why the flu spreads, you know, because you're most contagious before the symptoms appear. I hope it's not one that dogs can get.”

“In fact,” I said spitefully, “it is. It's called the Bowser flu. It's decimated the canine population of Hong Kong.”

“Oh, heavens. Poor Woofers. I'll have to wear a surgical mask when I get home. That will upset her. She loves to see me smile.”

“Whatever you do, don't smile. This virus coats the surface of the teeth. A smile could be lethal. You'll know she's got it if her tail starts to droop.”

“My baby,” he said. “I'll tell Mrs. B. that you won't be in.” He hung up.

The moment I hung up, Jessica called. I told her nothing was doing. She sounded disappointed, but she mastered it. Youth is resilient. I'm not sure what's supposed to be so great about being resilient.

There was a time in my life when I enjoyed having nothing to do. There was also a time in my life when I smoked two packs a day and my idea of exercise was reading a digital watch. It was the only thing I did that took two hands. In those days, I'd weighed more than two hundred pounds. Eleanor had changed all that. She'd gotten my beer consumption under control, helped me to cut out the cigarettes, and gotten me running. My first quarter of a mile had been sheer agony, wheezing and limping behind her while she encouraged me in a bright and completely stress-less voice. “Positive reinforcement,” she called it. It was only the view of the back of her gym shorts that kept me going. Six months later I weighed one-eighty and was doing six or seven miles at a time. I had actual muscles. I bought new clothes. Women smiled at me on the street.

Unfortunately, with health came energy. I could no longer sit still. So here I was with a day, or four, on my hands. An hour in, and both my feet were tapping.

Jessica called again. “Maybe we could make something happen,” she said brightly.

“No way. We're on hold for four days.”

“There must be something I can do. I'm going crazy sitting here. Simeon, if we don't do something, this is going to be the longest Easter vacation of my life.”

“Can you vacuum?”

“What's that, a joke?”

“We can clean house,” I said. “They didn't say anything about cleaning house.”

“Heck,” she said before she hung up. “I'd rather do my math.”

I sort of washed the dishes. Then, probably in order to avoid sort of drying them, I realized that there was actually quite a lot I could do, without Aimee's kidnapper knowing anything about it.

I cleared a space on the living-room floor and went through Mr. Kale's files, a sheet of paper at a time, without much hope. My pessimism was rewarded. There were many good reasons why he should never be elected president of the Girls' Club of America, but there wasn't anything that linked him to Aimee. I made a note to turn the files over to Hammond and then dumped them into a box.

Okay, concentrate on Mrs. Brussels. I got the little tape recorder I'd taken with me when I broke into her office and played back the tones of the phone numbers I'd lifted off Birdie's auto-redial telephone. I listened to all of them about ten times but they went by too fast to do anything about, so I scrounged around in a closet until I came up with an old semiprofessional reel-to-reel that an aspiring rock singer had left there after she and I stopped seeing each other and she decided that being a secretary was steadier. I recorded the tones at three and three- quarters inches per second and played them back at seven and a half. They still went by too fast, but at least now there was some tape space between them.

Using a pair of rusty scissors and the roll of Scotch tape I'd bought to silence Mrs. Brussels' alarm, I cut into each of the spaces between the tones and inserted a few inches of blank recording tape. Manual dexterity is not my strong point, but eventually I had a nice long pause after each tone. I had also invented a few profane expressions