Czanek’s gaunt face drooped.
“I heard it,” Jervis Phillips said. “My receiver picked it up; I recognized Besser’s voice.”
“That’s impossible,” Czanek declared. “It’s out of range.”
“If it’s out of range, how come
“I…hmm. Good question.” Czanek felt inept, his pride excreted upon. “I would never have agreed to plant your bug if I thought there was a chance of this happening. And that’s just it—there isn’t. These things only transmit eight hundred feet or so.”
“Besser’s office is over a mile from my dorm,” Jervis replied. He absurdly pulled the filter off a cigarette.
Czanek stared perplexedly into his beer. He was a bad man—even he would not argue that—but he had ethics. The sins of others were Czanek’s treasure. He was a destroyer of reputations. He’d ruined marriages, families, careers. He’d promoted divorce, abortion, estrangement. Like an alchemist, he turned love into hate, but he was not ashamed. If he didn’t do it, someone else would. Czanek’s pride was his justification—to do an unspeakable task with grace. The kid had paid him to do a job, and Czanek had fucked it up. It was this simple fact he could not accept.
“Okay,” he told Jervis. “I’ll give you your money back.”
Jervis started his second beer. “I’m not asking for my money back, I just want to know what’s going on. I heard some strange shit last night. There were four people in that office. One guy was Besser, but there was another guy who’s a friend of mine. What the hell is a student doing in Besser’s office at two A.M.?”
“I don’t know,” Czanek admitted.
“And the dean’s wife? I made out her voice too.”
Czanek gulped hard. The kid had too many pieces. “You said there were four people. Who was the fourth?”
Jervis seemed to catch a chill. “That’s the strangest part. The fourth person’s voice sounded like running water or something. I can’t describe it. It was just…weird.”
Czanek’s embarrassment crested. “All right, between you and me, last month I bugged Besser’s office for another client. The client thinks Besser may be fooling around with his wife.”
“You mean Dean Saltenstall,” Jervis prodded. “Everybody knows that his wife cheats on him. Even the
“Because he has a tremendous life insurance policy,” Czanek admitted. “If you were an old homosexual millionaire married to a thirty five year old bombshell, wouldn’t you want to know what your wife was up to, regardless of any mutual sexual agreements made within the marriage?”
“So that’s it,” Jervis said, smoking slowly.
“Here’s what I’ll do,” the detective offered. “I’ll go into Besser’s office tonight and replace that bug with one on a different frequency. Then it won’t butt in on your transmissions anymore, and the problem’ll be solved.”
Jervis lit still another cigarette.
“I’d appreciate that very much, Mr. Czanek.”
Czanek watched Jervis leave. The kid was cracked—Czanek could see that—just like most of Czanek’s clients. Paranoia, jealousy, and inferiority complexes were more nuggets in Czanek’s treasure. But that wasn’t what bothered him. It was what the kid had said.
The kid, it seemed, knew more about Czanek’s case than Czanek did.
««—»»
County police headquarters loomed like a neoteric brick fortress. TV cameras probed the enclosed entry. Two uniformed cops ID’d Lydia at the door and searched her suitcase. She took out a tiny pistol in a wallet holster and gave it to them to lock up. Then they frisked Wade, a bit too thoroughly for his liking.
They passed doors with queer plastic signs: Toolmarks, SEM, Electroporesis, and finally Spectrometry.
A sergeant showed them in and left.
The room was long and narrow. Bulky machines hummed in ranks, regurgitating rolls of paper. One machine sported a face of dials and jumping meters, with a hatch for a belly. Lydia told Wade this was a BV Model 154 peptide analyzer. It identified trace foreign substances in the digestive system by measuring peptidal deviations. It cost $100,000.
A stoop shouldered bald man was reading a book at the desk. Wade caught the sensational title:
“That’s me,” Lydia said. “Thanks for making a space for me.”
“What have you got?”
“Oxidized residuum, two eight inch counterabrasions.”
“Depth?”
“About .23 mils.”
Glark whistled. “Anything that thick should be easy. Let’s get to it.” He seemed not to notice Lydia’s cutoffs and top. Was he a county eunuch? Rust, evidently, was his turn on. Lydia withdrew from her case, of all things, a King Edward cigar box. Glark pulled up a stool behind the biggest microscope Wade had ever seen. It had the word “Zeiss” on its condenser. Glark removed a cutting of old grayed wood from the box. He placed the “cope” under the triple objectives and focused down through dual eyepieces. His mouth twisted up. “This is funny,” he said.
“I know,” Lydia commented. “That impactation was the first strike; I’m assuming the striking object hadn’t been used for a long time.”
“You assume right,” Glark said. “And I can tell you, if it’s stainless steel, it’s something way down in the low scales.”
“How could it be stainless steel?” Wade asked. “Stainless steel doesn’t rust.”
“Anything made of metal rusts,” Glark grumbled to him. “Lead rusts, titanium rusts, aluminum, lithium, mercury, anything. If it’s metal, its surface molecules rust. You just can’t see it without some form of magnification.”
“I knew that,” Wade said. “I was just testing you.”
Glark frowned. Lydia leaned over. Wade found her cleavage much more interesting than whatever they were inspecting. “The color’s what threw me,” she said. “It’s too…”
“Asperous,” Glark finished for her. He changed to a higher objective. “It’s old, whatever it is, and I don’t mean the residuum, I mean the source metal. Usually you can see the alloy constituents, but I don’t see any here. This stuff is crude, adulterated.”
“Do you think it’s indexed?”
“Unlikely,” Glark said. “But let’s run it anyway.”
Wade smirked. This was Dullsville. He followed them to a bank of low machines. Glark closed a circular lid and turned on a CRT. Actually four machines made up this apparatus. Lydia explained that the process was called A/N spectrophotometry spectrography. Wade didn’t know what the “N” stood for, but he thought he could make a pretty good guess when he noticed a label on the hatched machine: “Warning, this device contains radioactive isotopes.”
Lydia went on to explain. A trace substance was burned at a phenomenal temperature. The light from the combustion was then focused through a prism structure and photographed. The photograph was processed as a line of colors ranging from white to dark purple. This was called the source spectrum. The colors represented the trace substance’s constituents, which were then identified by comparison against indexed control samples. The total cost of the four machines was over a million dollars.
Wade noticed bright white light leaking from the hatch lid’s seam. Numbers and letters, the numerical equivalents of the combusted molecular factors, began to pop up on the CRT. Within seconds the machines clunked off. A slit in a fat Canon film processor ejected a slip of paper, the source spectrum.
