Three Days to Never (13 page)

All the on-site emergencies, the unforseen shadow patches or glare spots, the traffic and parking screwups, the crises with the available voltage and amperage, would be dealt with by another location manager. And that guy would get all the on-location pay too.

Several thousand dollars that Bennett had been counting on—gone. Before the end of the month, he thought, we'll be hurtin' for certain.

The telephone rang, and he hurried to the desk to answer it, thinking the Subaru people might have reconsidered.

“Bradley Locations,” he said.

A man's voice said, “I'd like to speak to Bennett or Moira Bradley, please.” It wasn't the Subaru agent.

“This is Bennett Bradley.”

“Mr. Bradley, I represent a company that's always actively
trying to expand its database, and we're now in negotiation with a Francis Marrity for some items that belonged to his grandmother, a Ms. Lisa Marrity. There will probably be a substantial amount of money involved, and our research department has just established that Mr. Marrity is not the sole heir of Ms. Marrity.”

“That's true, my wife is coheir.” Son of a bitch! thought Bennett. “What items? Uh, in particular?”

“I'm not involved in acquisitions, I'm afraid. But it's probably papers, floppy disks, or films; even electrical machinery or precious metals, possibly.”

Bennett had seized a pen and begun scrawling meaningless spirals on a legal pad. “What is your company?”

“The remuneration would be greater if I didn't say. Anonymity is our policy.”

“How did—Mr. Marrity—approach you?—and when?”

“We've been in negotiation with Lisa Marrity for some time. Yesterday we learned that she had died, and the only contact she had provided us with was Francis Marrity. We called him, and he expressed interest in consummating the sale we had arranged with Lisa Marrity.”

“Well you definitely need to talk to my wife too. She's coheir. As I said. As you know.” Bennett was breathing hard. “Now.”

“Are you aware of the nature of the items to be sold?”

“Of course I am,” Bennett said. What on earth could they be? he wondered—what papers, what precious metals? What
electrical machinery
? “My wife and I were in Shasta yesterday afternoon and today, making funeral arrangements—for, uh, Ms. Marrity—and we just got back from the airport half an hour ago. I'm sure Frank meant to get in touch with my wife before concluding any deal,” he said. “With my wife and I. Because no sale could be finalized without our cooperation.”

“Who currently has physical possession of the items in question?”

“Well, they're—divvied up. Some here, some there. I'd need to see a list of which particular—items—are being
discussed. The—” Bennett considered, and then dismissed, the idea of sneaking another drink from the bottle. “The old lady had a lot of valuable things. What's your phone number?”

“We'll get in touch with you, probably tomorrow. Good night.”

Bennett heard a click, and then the dial tone.

He hung up the telephone, had another mouthful of the brandy, and then banged out through the door that led to the kitchen of his house, yelling, “Moira! Your bloody damned brother—!”

H
e doesn't know what I was talking about,” said Rascasse, pushing his chair back from the telephone on the folding desk and standing up, gripping an overhead rail to steady himself as the bus rocked around a sharp housing-tract corner in the evening darkness. To the young man driving the bus he said, “But pull up in front of his house anyway, so Charlotte can take a look.”

“He
was
just up in Shasta,” said Golze hopefully.

Through Rascasse's eyes Charlotte Sinclair looked down at herself and the chubby figure of Golze sitting on the first bus seat aft of the cleared rubber-tiled floor, both of them leaning forward to hear the radio speaker. She lifted her chin and pushed a wing of dark hair back from her face.

From the speaker they could now dimly hear Bennett Bradley shouting at his wife.

“Lousy signal,” said Rascasse.

“I think they're in the hall,” said Golze. “I didn't put a mike in the hall.”

“Yes,” said Charlotte, leaning back in her seat with her eyes closed, “they're in a hall.”

The bus was close enough to the Bradley house now for her to be able to see through the eyes of the people inside—and she saw a tanned blond woman in jeans, standing in a lighted hallway, with suitcases visible beside a door behind her; Charlotte switched to the woman's view, and found herself looking at a man shouting; he had styled reddish hair, and a bristling mustache, and he was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled back on his forearms.

Charlotte felt the bus jolt to a stop, presumably at the curb in front of the Bradley house, but she kept her attention on Moira Bradley's field of vision.

The man was walking backward into a brightly lit kitchen, and the woman's viewpoint followed, and all at once the sound from the speaker in the bus became clearer, and Charlotte had words to go with the man's moving lips.

“—that he doesn't like
you,
it's that he doesn't like
me,
” Bennett Bradley was saying. “He's always been jealous of me.”

“Jealous? He likes teaching,” said the woman Charlotte was monitoring; Charlotte's field of vision bobbed slightly at the syllables.

“Out in the middle of nowhere?” said Bennett. Charlotte saw him wave a hand in the air. “With a dead wife and a bratty kid? And a million cats? He knows he's rotting out there—he'd move west to L.A. or south to Orange County in a second, if he could, but that house of his is probably worth about a hundred dollars. Look at that joke truck he drives! And I drive a Mercedes and I'm on a first-name basis with Richard Dreyfuss!”

“Frank wouldn't try to gyp us out of any money,” said Moira. “I'm sure he—”

“There were no messages on the machine from him, just from that damned Subaru agent. You think your brother wouldn't try to keep this for himself? ‘Substantial amount of money,' this guy said—”

Charlotte's view rocked as Moira's voice from the speaker
said, “For—what was it? Machinery? That doesn't make any—”

“Or papers, or gold. She knew Charlie Chaplin! Your grandmother—” Bennett backed into some decorative glass candleholders on the counter by the sink, and clattering sounded from the speaker. “What
is
all this trash?” He shoved the jars that hadn't fallen into the sink back against the wall, breaking at least one more.

Bennett shifted out of Charlotte's line of sight as Moira looked into the sink instead of at her husband; but his voice on the speaker said, “Your grandmother might have letters, manuscripts, even lost Chaplin films.”

“Well, they're trash now,” said Moira's voice as Charlotte saw Bennett swing into view again. “The candles, I mean. So now you believe she knew Chaplin.”

“Well obviously she had
something.
Maybe her violin
is
a Stradivarius.”

“Frank will tell us. He'll tell me, anyway. Unless this was a crank phone call. ‘Anonymity policy'! It's certainly made trouble.”

“Call him. Ask him. Or I will.”

Charlotte's field of vision swung away from Bennett to a calendar above a telephone on the wall, and then back. “We'll see him Thursday.”

Bennett shook his head. “This money guy wants to meet me tomorrow. And Frank won't want to talk at his grandmother's funeral, with Daffy underfoot. Call him.”

“O
kay
.”

Charlotte watched the telephone bob closer, and then she saw one of Moira's hands lift the receiver while the other spun the dial. Charlotte read the number out loud as she watched Moira dial it—while from the speaker she heard the clicking of the dial being turned, and the hiss of it spinning back—and she felt Golze shift beside her on the bus seat. “That's Marrity's number, all right,” Golze said.

Charlotte could smell tobacco smoke; evidently Golze had lit a cigarette.

Charlotte watched the telephone receiver swing closer
and then disappear beyond her right-side peripheral vision; of course she couldn't hear anything from the phone. Then after about twenty seconds it appeared again, receding, and Moira's hand hung it back in the cradle with a loud clatter from the speaker. The microphone must be very near the phone, Charlotte thought.

”‘ You've reached the Marritys,'” quoted Moira's voice, “‘and we're not able to come to the phone right now.'”

“You should have left a message,” grumbled Bennett. “‘ We're onto your filthy tricks.'”

Bennett's frowning face swung back into Charlotte's sight, and Moira laughed. “Or, ‘You're not fooling anyone.'”

Bennett laughed too, though he was still frowning. “Do it in a disguised voice,” he said. Then, growling in a Bronx accent, “‘I know what you been doin', an' you better stop it.'”

“He'd lock the gate,” said Moira, “and never answer the phone again.”

“Right, and then we'd find out this
was
a joke call, and your crazy grandmother didn't own anything but old Creedence records. But—he'd never dare go to another X-rated movie.”

“Frank doesn't go to X-rated movies. You go to X-rated movies.”

“I have to, sometimes, it's business. Anyway, that's why he's jealous of me.”

“Drive on,” said Rascasse to the young man in the driver's seat. “No use having the bus get noticed for this.”

Moira was saying something back, but Golze said, “He mentioned lost Charlie Chaplin films.”

The bus surged forward with no more noise than a car would have made; the Vespers had replaced its diesel engine with a Chevrolet 454 V-8, and put disk brakes on instead of noisy air brakes.

“He was just choosing random examples,” said Rascasse. “It was an obvious thing to say, after I mentioned films in my call to him. He doesn't know anything about it. Neither does she, probably.”

Bennett Bradley's voice was coming out of the speaker
now, talking about the Subaru deal that Rascasse had managed to get taken away from him, but already the bus was too far away from the house for Charlotte to see any more. She shifted her attention to Rascasse, who was still standing and looking down at her and Golze. Charlotte took the opportunity to check her lipstick, but it was still fine.

“The artifact moved east, yesterday,” Rascasse went on, “and Francis Marrity and his daughter are in a, a
crisis.
It's got to be Marrity who took it. We should have been at that hospital, not wasting our time here.”

But I've soured the appoach to Francis Marrity, Charlotte thought, bracing herself for reminders of it; but then the soft gong sounded from the cabinet behind the driver's seat, and in sudden fright Charlotte's vision bounced several times between the driver and Golze and Rascasse, so that in rapid succession she was seeing the empty curbside cars and pools of streetlight ahead of them and two views of her own face—lips pinched and brown eyes wide—one in profile and one head-on.

“See—what it wants,” said Rascasse to Golze.

Charlotte thought she could already hear the filigreed-silver jaw hinges snapping inside the cabinet.

“Right,” said Golze.

He stood up from beside Charlotte and swayed forward toward the cabinet, and Rascasse stared after him, so Charlotte fixed her attention on the driver, a humorless physics student from UC Berkeley, and watched the cars ahead of the bus through his eyes. They had left the housing tract and were on East Orange Grove Boulevard, passing a Pizza Hut and a Shell station.

She heard the cabinet lock snap, and then she really could hear the Baphomet's jaws clicking; and though she was staring at the dashboard and the taillights beyond the windshield, she could smell the head now, the spicy shellac reek.

She heard several voices whispering—and she had never heard the thing form words before. Reluctantly she let herself share Rascasse's perspective.

The cabinet doors were swung open and the shiny head inside was gleaming in the yellow overhead light; its black jaw, with the chin capped in silver like the toe of a cowboy boot, was wagging up and down rapidly, but it was not synchronized with the whispering.

Golze had switched on the Ouija-board monitor over the cabinet: The cursor on the screen was motionless, but there were several breathy voices huffing out between the Baphomet head's crooked ivory teeth.

“Call
me
flies in summer,” hissed one.

“Eighty cents,” whispered another. “Can I bum one of your smokes, at least?”

Charlotte swallowed. “What—who the hell are they?” she managed to ask in a level voice.

“Ghosts,” said Rascasse in disgust. “The Harmonic Convergence has brought them out like…flies in summer, and the head attracts them when it's not properly occupied. I think it's worse when we're moving—the head is a psychic charge moving through the Harmonic Convergence field. If we weren't smoking cigarettes right now, we'd draw hundreds of them—probably condensed enough for us to
see
them.”

Charlotte shuddered and reached into her purse for the pack of Dunhills.

The feathery-frail ghost voices were coming faster now, overlapping one another:

“Why will you do it?”

“One, nineteen, twenty-four, twenty-seven, thirty-eight, nineteen.”

“Will you show me your tits if I can guess how much money you've got in your pocket?”

“Two whole days.”

“Why don't you try a real man?”

“Hello, pretty lady! I can tell you what lottery numbers are gonna win!”

Charlotte cleared her throat. “Should I say hello back? It seems rude to snub a ghost.” She was still holding her unlit
cigarette—neither Golze nor Rascasse had looked at her, and she didn't want to light it just by touch with her shaking fingers.

Golze answered, “You already snubbed him. They run backward in time. But you could say, ‘Hello, ghost!' and then his remark would be a reply to that, not an unprompted salutation.”

“Hello, ghost!” she said.

Golze glanced at her, and Charlotte saw her nervous smile through his eyes. Quickly she used his perspective to snap her lighter below the tip of her cigarette. “Is he going to tell us the winning lottery numbers?” she said, exhaling smoke.

“He did already,” said Golze. “And he guessed you've got eighty cents in your pocket. No use showing him your tits now, it would be before he asked. I don't think they can actually see anyway.”

“Nineteen…twenty-four,” said Charlotte quickly. “You should have written down the numbers!”

“They're lying,” Golze said. “They don't know which lottery numbers are going to win.”

“If they're moving backward in time,” said Charlotte, “how come they talk forward? They don't sound like records played backward.”

“Very good!” said Golze. “They're mostly on the freeway, just dabbling their toes in here for a few seconds at a time. While they're down here with us, they're carried along with the stream in the same direction we are. So each sentence is beginning-first, end-last, but the next remark for us is the
previous
remark to them.”

“Lock it up,” Rascasse said to Golze. “But leave the monitor on.”

“Two days,” whispered one last ghost, “I sat beside my body, staring at the holes in my chest.”

Charlotte kept her attention on Golze, and watched his pudgy hands close the cabinet. The copper handles were miniature reproductions of the Vespers emblem: the Grail
cup—two plain, smooth cones joined at the tips, one cone opening upward, the other downward, like a double-jigger measure in a Bauhaus bar.

Charlotte used Golze's brief glance to focus hungrily on the little copper chalices. Then he had straightened up and was looking at her.

“How does the Harmonic Converence bring out ghosts?” she asked, and Golze helpfully looked toward Rascasse.

“It's like Gargamelle,” said Rascasse.

“What, Gargantua's mother?—in Rabelais?”

“No—or maybe they named it after that, what you said—Gigantor's mother—no, it's the name of a big bubble chamber at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland. Ten tons of liquid is kept very near its boiling temperature, but under high pressure; then they suddenly release the pressure, and any invisible particles shooting through the liquid form lines of bubbles. They become actual, manifest, rather than unseen potential.”

Rascasse waved out at the night. “All these mystics on the mountaintops, emptying their minds all at once, have suddenly dropped the pressure in the common psychic water-table, and things are becoming actual that should only be low-probability potentials.”

Charlotte dug coins out of the pocket of her jeans and held them out on her palm. Golze looked, and so she was able to see that it was three quarters and a nickel.

“I do have eighty cents,” she said.