Everything but the Squeal

that I could use later to please and impress my friends. Hauling the contraption over to the phone, I went to work.

The procedure was simple: One, crank the recorder back down to three and three-quarters, then play a tone and stop the recorder. Two, hit a number on the touch-pad of the phone. Three, when it didn't sound right, rewind, play the tone again, and hit the next number. When I found the matching tone on the telephone at last, I wrote down the number on a pad and went on to the next tone on the tape. After three or four hours of mind-numbing boredom, I'd developed perfect pitch for all the tones from one to zero, I had a blister on my index finger, and sixteen phone numbers were scribbled on my pad. Three of them were outside the 213 area code. Hot damn, I thought, I really am a detective.

By then I was on my eighth cup of coffee and more wired than a marionette. I switched to beer to calm down and dialed the first of the numbers.

“Doggies Do,” said a fey voice on the other end of the line.

I coughed a little beer onto the mouthpiece of the phone. “I beg your pardon?”

“Doggies Do,” the voice said, sounding a tad peevish. I'd have been peevish too, if I'd had to say it twice.

I took a wild conjectural leap. “I'm calling about a dog,” I said.

“I certainly hope so. If you're not, I'm wasting my time. What is it you want?”

“Well, I was hoping you'd tell me about your services.”

“Wash, dry, curl, manicure, dip,” he said automatically. “Perms require advance notice.”

“Perms.”

“Permanents, you know? Permanent waves, silly. If your dog needs a permanets, you've got to call forty-eight hours in advance. Got it?”

“Thanks,” I said. “She's a Mexican hairless, but I'll keep it in mind.” I hung up. The next number on the pad was a veterinarian's office. The one after that was a dog hotel, the Bark ’n Wag. Woofers had more appointments than a producer's wife. What I had burgled, apparently, was a Yorkshire terrier's Rolodex.

The fourth number rang forever. The fifth was a disconnect. The sixth was Birdie's colonic therapist. I was not on a hot streak. I worked on the beer for a while and then went back to the phone.

The seventh, just maybe, was something. It rang twice and then a gruff male voice said, “Cap’n’s.”

For lack of anything better, I asked, “Is the captain there?”

There was a long pause, and then the man said, “You've got the wrong number,” and hung up. When I called back, the phone was off the hook. On the whole, I thought, a very odd exchange.

One more disconnect. Then no answer. Then, on number ten, one of the ones with an out-of-state area code, I got a different man, but the same greeting.

“Cap’n’s,” he said.

“Which captain?”

I listened to the cosmic whistle of long distance. “Who is this, anyway?” the man asked.

This time I was ready. “I'm calling for the National Naval Census. We've gotten up to captains.”

“How did you get this number?”

“I told you, I'm calling-”

He disconnected. I tried another out-of-state number. “Cap’n’s,” a new man said. This time I hung up. A small revenge, but mine own.

My, my, my, I thought. I may even have said it out loud. Captains, or, rather, Cap'ns, all over the landscape. Where were all the people who answered the phones when I punched up these numbers? Hammond could have given me addresses, but I figured that calling the cops was out of bounds until Mrs. Sorrell said it was okay. However remote I thought Aimee's chances of getting home standing up might be, I didn't want to do anything to jeopardize them.

What I could do, though, was check the area codes with the operator. One of the Captains was in Arizona, one was in Idaho, and the third was in L.A. It was beginning to sound like the First Interstate Bank.

“Your phone has been busy forever,” Jessica complained when I picked it up on the third ring. “Are you working?” She sounded aggrieved and suspicious.

“Looking for a job,” I said.

“You have a job.”

“Jessica,” I said, “this has been a memorable partnership, but for the moment it's over.”

“Treat me like a baby,” she said bitterly. “I thought we were getting to be friends.”

“As soon as there's anything you can help me with, I'll let you know.”

“In other words, don't call me, I'll call you.”

“Something like that.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I'll be at Blister's.”

“Great idea,” I said. “You can bench-press his nose.”

“You are totally gross,” she said, hanging up.

I tried the remaining numbers and got nothing. There was something else I wanted to do, but it would have to wait until Hollywood's nocturnal population crawled out from under their paving stones. In the meantime, there were the computer disks.

The disks, unfortunately, seemed to be garbage. Every time I tried to find my way into them, I got a bunch of mathematical symbols that looked like a physicist's guess at the perfect universal symmetry that might or might not have existed a millisecond or so before the Big Bang. They booted up okay, but after one or two keystrokes I found myself looking at all that garbled math.

A computer whiz is something I've never claimed to be. I bought the Korean-made micro that takes up most of my desk in a misguidedly upbeat moment after a client had overpaid me almost to the point of sarcasm. That was a couple of years ago, when everybody who claimed to be an expert on the future was talking about the electronic world: people working at home and shooting messages and data back and forth like a bunch of wash hung on a line that traveled at the speed of light. Well, that hadn't happened. Despite the experts, people still wrote in longhand and talked on the phone. The U.S. postal service was still in business. And me, I'd learned to work a simple word-processing program to the point where I could type in my case notes and print them out, and I'd mastered Flight Simulator. I could now land an imaginary airplane at an imaginary airport. Neither of these accomplishments had prepared me for the mathematically coded chaos of Birdie's disks.

Nevertheless, I went through all ten of them, including the one I'd labeled DOS. DOS is short for disk operating system, and it's what you feed the computer first. Until it's digested DOS, you might as well stick your fingers in the drive and ask for a readout on your prints. In short, without DOS, the computer is just something you have to dust. It can't do anything.

Birdie's DOS diskette was the first clue that something was intentionally wrong. You're supposed to put DOS in and then turn the goddamned machine on. After some beeping and some blinking, the screen gives you an enigmatic symbol that looks like this: A›. Then you can load whatever program you want and tell the computer what to do. If you're lucky and if you know what you're doing, it'll behave.

I'd used my own DOS diskette to look at the disks numbered one through nine, and I'd gotten the mathematical salad. In a flash of inspiration, I shut the computer off and slipped in Birdie's DOS diskette. Maybe it was a different DOS, I reasoned. Maybe it could make sense of numbers one through nine.

But when I turned the computer on and hit Enter twice, as I'd learned to do, the reassuring A› was nowhere in sight. Instead, I got a message that said: disk error or nonsystem

DISK. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ANY KEY.

I'd seen that before, and recently: on the screen of Birdie's computer, when I'd forgotten to put a DOS diskette in before firing up the computer. When I'd worked on Birdie's computer I'd used the DOS I'd bought. And that meant that Birdie's DOS diskette wasn't really DOS. Like the other nine disks, it was written in some kind of computer code.

There was nothing to do but try my own DOS diskette again. As before, I got a few words of English before the screen dissolved into the kind of mathematics that gives high-school kids zits. But this time, I noticed the message at the bottom of the screen. It said: disk full.

Well, that was peculiar, because I'd already done a directory on that disk, and the computer had told me that