"Put it away for a while. You know the shape the company is in. It's making money and we put out good products. But the only new items we've brought out in five years are ones we've acquired by license. I can't get anything new past Mac. But you can bypass Mac and take this to the big boss. So don't... unless you want to hand it over to the company just for your salary check."
I took his advice. I continued to design but I burned any drawings I thought were good-I didn't need them once I had them in my head. I didn't feel guilty about it; they hadn't hired me as an engineer, they were paying me to be a show-window dummy for Galloway. When my advertising value was sucked dry, they would give me a month's pay and a vote of thanks and let me go.
But by then I'd be a real engineer again and able to open my own office. If Chuck wanted to take a flyer I'd take him with me.
Instead of handing my story to the newspapers, Jack Galloway played it slow for the national magazines; he wanted Life to do a spread, tying it in with the one they had done a third of a century earlier on the first production model of Hired Girl. Life did not rise to the bait but he did manage to plant it several other places that spring, tying it in with display advertising.
I thought of growing a beard. Then I realized that no one recognized me and would not have cared if they had.
I got a certain amount of crank mail, including one letter from a man who promised me that I would burn eternally in hell for defying God's plan for my life. I chucked it, while thinking that if God had really opposed what had happened to me, He should never have made cold sleep possible. Otherwise I wasn't bothered.
But I did get a phone call, on Thursday, 3 May, 2001. "Mrs. Schultz is on the line, sir. Will you take the call?"
Schultz? Damnation, I had promised Doughty the last time I had called him that I would take care of that. But I had put it off because I did not want to; I was almost sure it was one of those screwballs who pursued Sleepers and asked them personal questions.
But she had called several times, Doughty had told me, since I had checked out in December. In accordance with the policy of the sanctuary they had refused to give her my address, agreeing merely to pass along messages.
Well, I owed it to Doughty to shut her up. "Put her on."
"Is this Danny Davis?" My office phone had no screen; she could not see me.
"Speaking. Your name is Schultz?"
"Oh, Danny darling, it's so good to hear your voice!"
I didn't answer right away. She went on, "Don't you know me?"
I knew her, all right. It was Belle Gentry.
CHAPTER 7
I made a date with her.
My first impulse had been to tell her to go to hell and switch off. I had long since realized that revenge was childish; revenge would not bring Pete back and fitting revenge would simply land me in jail. I had hardly thought about Belle and Miles since I had quit looking for them.
But Belle almost certainly knew where Ricky was. So I made a date.
She wanted me to take her to dinner, but I would not do that I'm not fussy about fine points of etiquette. But eating is something you do only with friends; I would see her but I had no intention of eating or drinking with her. I got her address and told her I would be there that evening at eight.
It was a cheap rental, a walk-up fiat in a part of town (lower La Brea) not yet converted to New Plan. Before I buzzed her door I knew that she had not hung onto what she had bilked me out of, or she would not have been living there.
And when I saw her I realized that revenge was much too late; she and the years had managed it for me.
Belle was not less than fifty-three by the age she had claimed, and probably closer to sixty in fact. Between geriatrics and endocrinology a woman who cared to take the trouble could stay looking thirty for at least thirty extra years, and lots of them did. There were grabbie stars who boasted of being grandmothers while still playing ingenue leads.
Belle had not taken the trouble.
She was fat and shrill and kittenish. It was evident that she still considered her body her principal asset, for she was dressed in a Sticktite negligee which, while showing much too much of her, also showed that she was female, mammalian, overfed, and under exercised.
She was not aware of it. That once-keen brain was fuzzy; all that was left was her conceit and her overpowering confidence in herself. She threw herself on me with squeals of joy and came close to kissing me before I could unwind her.
I pushed her wrists back. "Take it easy, Belle."
"But, darling! I'm so happy-so excited-and so thrilled to see you!"
"I'll bet." I had gone there resolved to keep my temper just find out what I wanted to know and get out. But I was finding it difficult. "Remember how you saw me last? Drugged to my eyebrows so that you could stuff me into cold sleep."
She looked puzzled and hurt. "But, sweetheart, we only did it for your own good! You were so ill."
I think she believed it. "Okay, okay. Where's Miles? You're Mrs. Schultz now?"
Her eyes grew wide. "Didn't you know?"
"Know what?"
"Poor Miles... poor, dear Miles. He lived less than two years, Danny boy, after you left us." Her expression changed suddenly. "The frallup cheated me!"
"That's too bad." I wondered how he had died. Did he fall or was he pushed? Arsenic soup? I decided to stick to the main issue before she jumped the track completely. "What became of Ricky?'
"Ricky'?"
"Miles's little girl. Frederica."
"Oh, that horrible little brat! How should I know? She went to live with her grandmother."
"Where? And what was her grandmother's name?"
"Where? Tucson-or Yuma-or some place dull like that. It might have been lndio. Darling, I don't want to talk about that impossible child-I want to talk about us."
"In a moment. What was her grandmother's name?"
"Danny boy, you're being very tiresome. Why in the world should I remember something like that?"
"What was it'?"
"Oh, Hanolon ... or Haney... Heinz. Or it might have been Hinckley. Don't be dull, dear. Let's have a drink. Let's drink a toast to our happy reunion."
I shook my head. "I don't use the stuff." This was almost true. Having discovered that it was an unreliable friend in a crisis, I usually limited myself to a beer with Chuck Freudenberg.
"How very dull, dearest. You won't mind if I have one." She was already pouring it-straight gin, the lonely girl's friend. But before she downed it she picked up a plastic pill bottle and rolled two capsules into her palm. "Have one?"
I recognized the striped casing-euphorion. It was supposed to be non-toxic and non-habit-forming, but opinions differed. There was agitation to class it with morphine and the barbiturates.
"Thanks. I'm happy now."
"How nice." She took both of them, chased them with gin. I decided if I was to learn anything at all I had better talk fast; soon she would be nothing but giggles.
I took her arm and sat her down on her couch, then sat down across from her. "Belle, tell me about yourself. Bring me up to date. How did you and Miles make out with the Mannix people?"
"Uh? But we didn't." She suddenly flared up. "That was your fault!"
"Huh? My fault? I wasn't even there."
"Of course it was your fault. That monstrous thing you built out of an old wheel chair... that was what they wanted. And then it was gone."
"Gone? Where was it?"
She peered at me with piggy, suspicious eyes. "You ought to know. You took it."
"Me? Belle, are you crazy? I couldn't take anything. I was frozen stiff, in cold sleep. Where was it? And when did it disappear?" It fitted in with my own notions that somebody must have swiped Flexible Frank, if Belle and Miles had not made use of him. But out of all the billions on the globe, I was the one who certainly had not. I had not seen Frank since that disastrous night when they had outvoted me. "Tell me about it, Belle. Where was it? And what made you think I took it?"