Time Bomb (23 page)

The catalogue went into my jacket pocket.

I said, “Quite an eclectic collection.”

He responded with all the hesitation of a rodeo bull let out of the stall. “My brainchild. I was in the army just after Korea. Cryptography and decoding and computer technology—the infancy of the Computer Age. After discharge I went to Washington, D.C., and worked for the Census Bureau. We were just starting to computerize—the old days of clunky mainframes and IBM cards. I met my wife there. She was a very bright woman. Mathematician. Master’s degree. I’m self-taught, never finished high school, but I ended up being her mentor. All those years working with statistics and demographic patterns, we got a good fix on shifting population masses, trends, how people in different regions and social strata differ in their purchasing patterns. The predictive power of residential variables. When
ZIP
codes came into being it was beautiful—such simplification. And now the new sub-codes make it even easier.”

He sat down in one of the secretary chairs, made a half whirl, and spun back.

“The beauty of it, Doctor—of the informational age—is that things can be done so simply. When I left public service, I adapted my knowledge to the business world. Given my excellent typing skills combined with programming ability, I’m a corporation to myself—don’t even need a secretary. Just a few toll-free lines, several free-lance operators working from home stations, and a few privately contracted printers in various locations around the country. I interface with all of them by modem. No inventory or warehousing costs—because there’s no inventory at all. The consumer gets the catalogue and makes his or her choice. The operators take the order, communicate it immediately to the manufacturer. The manufacturer sends the product directly to the consumer. Upon delivery confirmation, the manufacturer’s hired for retail markup—my fee for facilitating.”

“Electronic middleman.”

“Yes. Exactly. The advanced state of my technology allows me to be extremely flexible. I can add and delete products based on sales performance, alter copy, and produce highly focused mail-outs within a twenty-four-hour period. I’ve even begun experimenting with an automated operator system—pretaped messages combined with voice-activated pauses: The tape waits until the consumer’s finished talking, then talks back in perfectly modulated, grammatical, regionless English. So one day I may not need any employees at all. The ultimate cottage industry.”

“Who’s Graff?”

“A model. I got him through a New York agency. You’ll notice he’s designated as Chief Consulting Officer—a title that’s meaningless from a legal point of view. I’m the President and Chief
Executive
Officer. I went through hundreds of photos before picking him. My marketing research told me exactly what I was looking for: youthful vitality combined with authority—a beard works very well for the latter, as long as it’s short and neat. The mustache implies generosity. The surname
Graff
was chosen because upscale consumers respect anything Teutonic—regard it as efficient, intelligent, and reliable. But only up to a point. A forename like Helmut or Wilhelm wouldn’t have done.
Too
German. Too
foreign.
‘Gregory’ scores high on the likability scale. All-American. Greg. He’s one of the boys, with Teutonic ancestry. A great athlete, smartest boy on the block—but someone you like. My research shows that many people assume he has a graduate degree—usually law or an M.B.A. The button-down shirt communicates stability; the tie, affluence; and the suspenders provide a flair—creativity. He’s a man you believe in, instinctively. Aggressive and goal-oriented but not hostile, dependable but not stodgy. And concerned. Humanistic. Humanism is important to my target consumers—feeling charitable. Twice a year I give them the option of donating one percent of their total purchase to a selection of charities. Gregory’s an excellent fund-raiser. People reach deep into their pockets. I’m thinking of franchising him.”

“Sounds very well thought-out.”

“Oh, it is. And very lucrative.”

Emphasizing the last word to let me know he meant megabucks. A cottage industry tycoon.

That didn’t mesh with the worn carpet, the thirty-year-old furniture, the dirty Honda. But I’d met other rich men who didn’t care to show it. Or were afraid to show it and hid behind a Just Plain Folks facade.

Right now he was hiding something else.

I said, “Let’s talk about Holly.”

He looked surprised. “Holly. Of course. Is there anything else you need to know about me?”

The naked narcissism threw me. I’d thought his self-absorption was a means of delaying painful questions. Now, I wasn’t sure.

I said, “I’m sure I’ll have lots of questions about all your family members, Mr. Burden. But right now I’d like to see Holly’s room.”

“Her room. Makes sense. Absolutely.”

We left the office. He opened a door across the hall. More notepaper walls. Two windows, covered by Venetian blinds. A thin mattress lay on the floor, parallel to a low wooden bedframe. The mattress had been slit open in several places, the ticking peeled back, the foam scooped out in handfuls. A crumpled ball of white bed sheet lay rolled in one corner. Nearby was a pillow that had also been slit and sat in a pool of foam chunks. The only other furniture was a pressed-wood three-drawer dresser below an oval mirror. The mirror glass was finger-smudged. The dresser drawers were pulled open. Some clothing—cotton undergarments and cheap blouses—remained inside. Other garments had been removed and piled on the floor. Atop the dresser sat a plastic clock radio. Its beaverboard back had been removed and it had been gutted, parts spread across the wood.

“Compliments of the police,” said Burden.

I looked past the disarray, saw the sparseness that had pre-existed any police intrusion. “What did they take with them?”

“Not a thing. They were after diaries, any sort of written record, but she never kept any. I kept telling them that but they just went in and pillaged.”

“Did they say you were allowed to clean it?”

He fingered his eyeglasses. “I don’t know. I suppose they did.” He bent and picked a piece of foam from the floor. Rolled it between his fingers and drew himself up a bit.

“Holly used to do most of the cleaning. Twice a year I’d bring a professional crew in, but she did it the rest of the time. She liked it, was very good at it. I guess I’m still expecting her to . . . walk right in with a dustrag and start tidying.”

His voice broke and he walked quickly to the door. “Please excuse me. Take as long as you like.”

I let him go and turned my attention back to the room, trying to conjure the place as it had been when Holly had been alive.

Not much to work with. Those white walls—no nails or brackets, not a single hole or darkened square. Young girls typically used their walls as plaster notebooks. Holly had never hung a picture, never tacked a pennant, never softened her life with rock-poster rebellion or calendar imagery.

What had she dreamed about?

I kept searching for some sign of personal imprint but found none. The room was cell-like, assertively barren.

Did her father realize this wasn’t right?

I recalled the back room, barren except for his toys.

His own place of refuge, cold as a glacier.

Emptiness as a family style?

Daughter as charwoman, handmaiden to the cottage tycoon?

The room began to close in. Had she felt it too? Living here, sleeping here, feeling her life drift by?

Ike—anyone who cared, who’d taken the time to care—might have been seen as a liberator. Prince Charming.

What had his death done to her?

Despite what she’d become—what she’d
done
—I felt for her.

I heard Milo’s voice in the back of my head.
Getting mushy on me, pal?

But I wanted to believe that if Milo were to come to this place, he’d feel something too.

The door to the closet was partially ajar. I opened it and looked in. The poison/perfume of camphor. More clothing—not much of it, mostly casual knits, T-shirts, sweaters, a couple of jackets. The pockets had been slit, the linings shredded. Faded colors.

More heaps of clothing on the floor.

Bargain-bin quality. Daughter of a tycoon.

Above the clothes pole were two shelves. The lower one bore two games. Candy Land. Chutes and Ladders.

Preschool amusements. Had she stopped playing at the age of six? Apart from that, nothing. No books, no fan magazines, no stuffed animals or mugs printed with fatuous phrases. No clear-plastic things that snowed when you turned them upside down.

I closed the closet door and turned back to the ravaged room, tried to picture the way it had looked before the police had come. The damage made it seem more human.

Cot and a dresser. Blank walls. A radio.

The word
cell
kept flashing.

But I’d seen jail cells that looked more inviting.

This was worse. Punitive.

Solitary confinement.

I had to get out of there.

18

Burden was back in his office, sitting at one of the computer workstations. I wheeled one of the secretary chairs into the center of the room and sat down. He touch-typed rapidly for a few moments before looking up, dry-eyed.

“So. What’s the next step, Doctor?”

“Holly didn’t seem to have many interests.”

He smiled. “Ah, the room. You’re thinking I isolated her. For some ulterior motive.”

Exactly what I’d been thinking, but I said, “No. Just trying to get a picture of the way she lived.”

“The way she lived. Well, it wasn’t like
that,
believe me. Though I can understand your thinking it was. I’ve done my reading on child psychology. So I know all the theories of child abuse. Isolating the designated victim in order to maximize control. But that had nothing to do with us. Not even remotely. That’s not to say we’re . . . we
were
social butterflies. As a family or individually. Our pleasures have always been solitary. Reading, good music. Holly loved music. I always encouraged discussions of current events, various cultural debates. Howard, my firstborn, took to that. Holly didn’t. But I always tried to provide the same sorts of things other children seemed to like. Toys, games, books. Holly never showed any interest in any of it. She hated to read. Most of the time the toys stayed in the box.”

“What did she do for fun?”

“Fun.” He drew out the word as if it were foreign. “Fun. For
fun,
she talked to herself, created fantasies. And she
was
inventive, I’ll grant her that. Could take a piece of string or a rock or a spoon from the kitchen and use it as a prop. She had a terrific imagination—genetic, no doubt. I’m highly imaginative. However, I’ve learned to channel it. Productively.”

“She didn’t?”

“She simply fantasized, went no further with it.”

“What were her fantasies about?”

“I have no idea. She was a demon for privacy, liked to close her door tight even when she was very young. Just sit on the floor or on her bed, talk and mumble. If I prodded her to get fresh air, she’d go out into the backyard and settle down on the grass, and start in doing exactly the same thing.”

I said, “When she was younger, did she rock back and forth or try to hurt herself?”

He smiled like a well-prepared student. “No, Doctor. She wasn’t autistic—not remotely. If you talked to her she’d respond—if she felt like it. There was no echolalic speech, nothing psychotic. She was just very self-sufficient. From an amusement standpoint. She made her own
fun.”

I watched the constantly blinking phones and self-shifting computer images. His fun.

“And she never kept any sort of diary?”

“No. She hated paper—threw everything out. Hated clutter, was a bug on neatness. Probably another example of genetics. I plead guilty to that kind of precision.”

He smiled, not looking guilty at all.

I said, “I saw only two games in her closet. What happened to all the toys and the books?”

“When she was thirteen she did a massive housecleaning, took everything out of her room except for her radio and her clothing, and piled it up in the hall—very neatly. When I asked her what she was doing, she insisted I get rid of it. So, of course, I did. Gave it to Goodwill. There was no arguing with Holly when she made her mind up.”

“She didn’t want anything to replace what she’d gotten rid of?”

“Not a thing. She was quite happy with nothing.”

“Nothing but Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land.”

“Yes. Those.” A split-second flinch. I snared it as if it were a moth.

“How old was she when she got those two games?”

“Five. They were bought for her fifth birthday by her mother.”

He flinched again, forced a smile. “You see, we’ve got an insight already. What do you make of it? An attempt on her part to cling to the past?”

His tone was clinical, detached—the classic intellectualizer. Trying to turn the interview into a chat between colleagues.

I said, “I’m not much for interpretation. Let’s talk about her relationship with her mother.”

“A Freudian approach?”

Trying to keep any edge out of my voice, I said, “A thorough one, Mr. Burden.”

He didn’t say anything. Turning slightly, he tapped his fingers on the keyboard. I waited, watched the letters and numbers on the monitor do their freeway crawl.

“So,” he finally said, “I guess this is what people in your field would call active listening? A strategic silence. Holding back to get the patient to open up?” He smiled. “I read about that too.”

I spoke with deliberate patience. “Mr. Burden, if this is uncomfortable for you, we don’t have to continue.”

“I want to continue!” He sat up sharply, without grace, and his glasses slid down his nose. By the time he’d righted them he was smiling again. “You’ll have to excuse my . . . I suppose you’d term it
resistance.
This whole thing has been . . . very difficult.”

“Of course it has. That’s why there’s no reason to cover everything at once. I can come back another time.”