Sullivan unbolted the door and pulled it open. Gray-haired old Shadroe pushed his way inside even as Sullivan was saying, “Sorry, I’m having some friends over right now—”
“I’m a friend,” Shadroe said grimly. He was wearing no shirt, and his vast suntanned belly overhung his stovepipe-legged shorts. His squinty eyes took in Elizalde and Kootie, and then fixed on Sullivan. “Your name’s Peter Sullivan” he said, slowly, as if he meant to help Sullivan learn the syllables by heart. “It was on the… rental agreement.”
“Yes.”
“It’s a common enough name—” Shadroe paused to inhale. “Wouldn’t you have thought so yourself?”
“Yes…?” said Sullivan, mystified.
“Well, not today. I’m your godbrother.”
Sullivan wondered how far away the nearest liquor store might be. “I suppose so, Mr. Shadroe, but you and I are going to have to discuss God and brotherhood later, okay? Right now I’m—”
Shadroe pointed one grimy finger at the also-shirtless Kootie. “It’s him, isn’t it? My pigs were—starting to smoke. I had to pull the batteries out of ‘em—and I sent my honey pie to my boat—to take the batteries out of the pigs aboard there. Burn the boat down, otherwise.” He turned an angrily earnest gaze on Sullivan. “I want you all,” he said. “To come to my office, and see. What your boy has done to my television set.”
Sullivan was shaking his head, exhaustion and impatience propelling him toward something like panic. Shadroe reeked of cinnamon again, and his upper lip was dusted with brown powder, as if he’d been snorting Nestle’s Quik, and Sullivan wondered if the crazy old man would even hear anything he might say.
“The boy hasn’t been out of this room,” Sullivan said loudly and with exaggerated patience. “Whatever’s wrong with your TV—”
“Is it ‘godbrother’?” Shadroe interrupted. “What I mean is, your father” Sullivan coughed in disgust and tried to think of the words to convince Shadroe that Sullivan was not his son, but the old man raised his hand for silence. “Was my godfather” he went on, completing his sentence. “My real name is Nicholas Bradshaw. Loretta deLarava is after my. Ass.”
Sullivan realized that he had been almost writhing with insulted impatience, and that he was now absolutely still. “Oh,” he said into the silence of the room. “Really?” He studied the old man’s battered, pouchy face, and with a chill realized that this could very well be Nicholas Bradshaw. “Jesus. Uh…how’ve you been?”
“Not so good,” said Bradshaw heavily. “I died in 1975.”
The statement rocked Sullivan, who had not even been completely convinced that the man was dead, and in any case had only been supposing that he’d been dead for a year or two at the most.
“Amanita phalloides mushrooms,” Bradshaw said, “in a salad I ate. You have bad abdominal seizures twelve…hours after you eat it. Phalloidin, one of the several poisons. In the mushrooms. And then you feel fine for a week or two. DeLarava called me during the week. Couldn’t help gloating. It was too late by then—for me to do anything. Alpha-amanitine already at work. So I got all my money in cash, and hid it. And then I got very drunk, on my boat. Very drunk. Tore up six telephones, ate the magnets—to keep my ghost in. And I climbed into the refrigerator.” His stressful breathing was filling the hot living room with the smell of cinnamon and old garbage. “A week later, I climbed out—dead, but still up and walking.”
Elizalde walked to the kitchen counter, put down the egg, and picked up Sullivan’s beer. After she had tipped it to her lips and drained it, she dropped the can to clang on the floor, and held out her right hand. “I’m Angelica Anthem Elizalde,” she said. “The police are after my ass.”
Shadroe shook her hand, grinning squintingly at Sullivan. “I’m gonna steal your señoriter, Peter,” he said, his solemnity apparently forgotten. “What are you people doing here? Hiding here? I won’t have that. You’ll lead deLarava and the police to me and my honey pie.” He was still smiling, still shaking Elizalde’s hand. “Your van is an eyesore, even under the parachute. I can’t understand people who have no pride at all.”
Sullivan blinked at the man’s random-fire style, but gathered that he was on the verge of being evicted. He tried to remember Nicky Bradshaw, who had been a sort of remote older cousin when Pete and Elizabeth had been growing up. Their father had always seemed to like Nicky, and of course had got him the Spooky part in “Ghost of a Chance.”
“Listen to me, Nicky, we’re going to try to build an apparatus; set up a séance, to talk to dead people, to ghosts,” he said quickly. “To get specific ones, clearly, not the whole jabbering crowd. I want to talk to my father, to warn him that deLarava is devoting all her resources to finding him and eating him, tomorrow, on Halloween.”
And then an idea burst into Sullivan’s head, and suddenly he thought the séance scheme might work after all. “You should be the one to talk to him, Nicky, to warn him—he always liked you!” Sullivan’s heart was still pounding. I might need to buy another part or two, he thought excitedly. This changes everything.
“You should talk to him yourself, Peter,” said Elizalde, who was standing beside him.
“No no,” Sullivan said eagerly, “the main thing here isn’t what I’d prefer, it’s what will work! This is a huge stroke of luck! He’ll listen to Nicky more seriously than he’d listen to me, Nicky’s twelve years older than I am. Aren’t you, Nicky? He always took you seriously.”
Bradshaw just stared at him, looking in fact a hundred years old these days. “I’d like to talk to him,” he said. “But you should be the one—to warn him. You’re his son.” “And he’s your father,” Elizalde said.
Sullivan didn’t look at her. “That’s not the point here,” he snapped impatiently,. “what matters—”
“And,” Elizalde went on, almost gently, “Nicky presumably isn’t linked to your father by a consuming guilt, the way you clearly are.”
“You’re the antenna,” agreed Kootie. “The variable capacitor that’s fused at the right frequency adjustment.”
Sullivan clenched his fists, and he could feel his face getting red. “But the machinery won’t work if it’s—”
For a moment no one spoke, and the only sound was a faint fizzing from one of the cans of Coke that he’d dropped when Bradshaw had knocked on the door. Sullivan’s forehead was misted with sweat. You re not Speedy Alka-Seltzer, he thought, you won’t dissolve.
“You weren’t going to do it,” said Elizalde, smiling. “You were going to go through the motions, set it all up so plausibly that nobody, certainly not yourself, could accuse you of not having done your best. But there was going to be some factor that you were going to forget, something no one could blame you for not having thought of.”
Sullivan’s chest was hollow with dismayed wonderment. “A condensing lens,” he said softly.
“A condensing lens?” said Kootie. “Like in a movie projector, between the carbon arc and the aperture?”
Sullivan ignored him.
Without a condensing lens set up between the Langmuir gauge and the brush discharge in the carborundum bulb, the signal couldn’t possibly be picked up by the quartz filament inside the gauge.
But wouldn’t he have thought of that, as soon as he saw the weakness and dispersion of the flickering blue brush sparks in the bulb? Even if Elizalde hadn’t said what she had just said?