“No heat and motion detectors inside the building?”
“Not necessary with the outside perimeter sensors.”
The Baron’s attention had been caught by a panel set slightly to one side which had on it only a big red knob and a small black button.
“Most uff de equipment iss self-evident, but vut iss dis?”
“Pull that red knob, and steel shutters drop down over all the doors and windows except for the front door and a stairway from the third-floor barracks. The off-duty guards live and sleep up there.” R.K. pushed the inconspicuous black button. A piece of wall slid up to reveal a steep narrow stairway going through the ceiling. “From there they have access to the helicopter landing pad on the roof.”
“Let’s take a look,” said Kearny.
They found a military-style barracks with six single cots down each side of the room, green-metal floor lockers between them, the usual pinups and photos on the walls above them.
One end of the room was a lounge area with a pool table, a couple of armchairs, and a home entertainment center with a stereo system and a flat-screen TV for viewing videos and DVDs. There was even a shelf of paperback books. Nobody was there. R.K. waved a hand around.
“Off-duty personnel are at the mess hall at this hour.”
At the other end was a spacious enclosed cubicle with a regular closet and its own shower and sink and toilet.
“My quarters,” said R.K. stiffly.
No pinups here. No books, either, although Dan half-expected to see a copy of the Universal Code of Military Justice on the night table. But there was none.
Beside the cubicle was a rough staircase of two-by-fours with one-by-eight stair treads to a heavy door in the roof.
“To the helipad,” said R.K. “It cannot be unlocked from in here, only from the roof or from the Security Control Center.” He took his cell phone off his belt. “Baron, if you wanna—”
“Dot iss not necessary,” said the Baron. “Ve vill go down unt you can introduce Herr Kearny to Freddie vhile I question your man on de control panel.”
Freddie. A nickname for a sculpture? A painting? Some humongous gemstone? Dan was about to find out why he was here.
“You’re the boss,” R.K. said sourly. He paused at the head of the stairs beside a black button similar to the one on the control panel. “They can use this to get down and defend the Control Center if the door is somehow blown open.”
Both men nodded. It was a good system. They went down. As R.K. led Dan to a door across the Security Control Center, the Baron said to the duty officer, “You vill please to show me de Surveillance Room from vhich Freddie iss monitored.”
It was a box of a room, sterile and modern, with only one door and no windows and nobody in it. Above the door was a scanning camera. An empty cage of black iron bars took up most of it, with a wooden partition across the back forming a small room they couldn’t see into. A mirror of one-way glass in a side wall let anyone in the Observation Room monitor this room without being seen himself unless he wanted to fade out the mirror effect so the window would be two-way.
R.K. said to Kearny, “Meet Freddie,” and began making an unearthly racket by running his swagger stick rapidly back and forth across the bars of the cage. He probably had done the same with his nightstick across cage bars in Walla Walla.
Dan didn’t know what response this might have brought from the prisoners, but here the result was instant and dramatic. A full-grown male orangutan bounded out from behind the partition to hurl himself against the bars, trying unsuccessfully to get at R.K. with a hairy, muscle-banded arm. Orangutan. Freddie. Now the Baron’s monologue about apes made sense.
R.K. was acting very much like Freddie, leaping around, poking at the orangutan with his swagger stick.
“Yeah, c’mon, c’mon, you lousy ape, try an’ get me!”
Freddie tried, he really did, but R.K. stayed just inches from his grasp. He went to a ring of keys hanging from a peg on the wall. He jangled them, grinning.
“C’mon, don’t you want the keys? C’mon, try an’ get ’em!”
Kearny, fed up, grabbed him by the collar and threw him back against the wall. R.K. fumbled at his holster, but Knottnerus-Meyer’s icy tones came over some hidden loudspeaker.
“Dot iss quite enough uff dis disgraceful display.”
R.K. froze with his pistol halfway out, then guiltily thrust it back. Freddie was leaping up and down and crowing for joy. He began manipulating his hands at Dan in what almost looked like sign language.
“Is he trying to say something to me?”
“Are you nuts? He’s a friggin’ ape, for Chrissake.”
Knottnerus-Meyer’s disembodied voice came again, his guttural German accent heightened by the speakers.
“You vill immediately come out uff dere, both uff you. You haff disturbed Freddie quite enough.”
“I’m not gonna forget this, shithead,” whispered R.K.
“Don’t,” said Dan Kearny.
Knottnerus-Meyer was waiting. “Herr Kearny, come in here.”
He drew Dan into the Observation Room. The one-way window showed the partitioned area. Beside a cot in one corner were a few large rubber toys. Beyond that was a chair and a computer desk with a terminal, keyboard, screen, and printer. The keyboard was equipped with a bewildering array of outsize lights and buttons and symbols rather than letters.
Freddie was tearing around the enclosed area, still highly agitated. He picked up a big red rubber ball, squashed it several times between his long-fingered hands, then threw it against the wall. He threw himself down on his bunk on his back. Milled the air with his arms and legs. Gradually, he quieted. Finally, he got off the bunk and went over to his work station and seated himself at the console. He began punching in data with great confidence. Each time he hit a button, a tone sounded. Symbols appeared on his screen.
“Before Freddie,” said Knottnerus-Meyer, “dere vere language experiments mit chimpanzees unt Koko, dot female gorilla vut chooses certain keys on a computer’s auditory keyboard.”
“Something like what Freddie’s doing in there?”
“Nein. It iss clear Freddie hass gone beyond dot. I haff been told dot his trainer in Hong Kong hass taught him whole sentences. Dot iss vhy Herr Marr bought dot ape; he iss unique.” He paused. “But now a man in Rome plans to steal him.”
“Why?” said Kearny bluntly.
Knottnerus-Meyer gave a heavy Germanic shrug. “Vut does it matter? Maybe a dispute in ownership. Dot man in Hong Kong alerted Herr Marr to de thief. Dot iss vhy ve are here.”
When she saw his black face, Etty Mae Walston started to give Bart Heslip a noseful of door; then she saw his detective license. It developed Etty Mae had been a fan of some mid-50s NBC TV series called Meet McGraw that featured a lantern-jawed actor named Frank Lovejoy as a sort of P.I.
Standing in her open doorway, Etty Mae even sang, in a cracked contralto, about it being a quarter to three without anyone in the place except you and me...
Then, for a solid hour, Bart sat in an antimacassar-covered easy chair that Etty Mae said had been her husband’s favorite, while she poured iced tea into him and regaled him with everything that had happened in her life and on television for the past twenty years.
Bart finally got her on to the murder next door, and she was equally voluble. This time he egged her on.
“So you saw this woman go up on Poteet’s porch and lost sight of her, and then she came out and you—”
“The first night I never did see her come out.”
“Wait a minute. You’re telling me you saw her twice?”
Etty Mae nodded. “The night before the murder she stopped right under the streetlight and went up on his porch, just like the next night when she killed him. More iced tea, Mr. Heslip?”