Phoneblum had to be the key. He had his leash on Pansy Greenleaf, Dr. Testafer, the kangaroo, and both of the Stanhunts, including the deceased. It looked like he might have one on Inquisitor Kornfeld as well. He’d flinched when I mentioned Morgenlander—the rogue brass that had Kornfeld and Teleprompter and probably the rest of the Office all jumpy.
I wished I knew more. How the sheep’s murder fit in, or the blueprints for animal barracks on Cranberry Street. What Maynard Stanhunt had been doing in that fleabag motel. And what the high and mighty Stanhunts had to do anyway with the pale little junkie Pansy Greenleaf. I would have liked to believe Orton Angwine’s theory, that Dr. Stanhunt had been having an affair with Pansy, but I couldn’t do it.
No, I couldn’t afford to wait around here for the inquisitors to arrive. I had business elsewhere, even if I didn’t really know what that business was. There was only one problem: what to do with Angwine. If I left him sleeping in the apartment, the only thing missing would be wrapping paper and a bow.
I put my glass in the sink. Angwine was still snoring in the dark. I went over and nudged his leg with my shoe. His eyes flickered open. “I’m going out,” I said. “The door locks by itself. I wouldn’t stay here if I were you.”
I took a hat from the closet, put my jacket back on, and unlocked the drawer with the gun in it I didn’t want to complicate things for the boys when they went through the apartment As I went out the door, Angwine was sitting up on the couch with an astonished look on his face, as if he’d been interrupted in the middle of a nice, believable dream.
I’d crossed the street to my car when the Office van pulled up in front of the building. I ducked behind my car and watched through the windows as they got out and marched up into the foyer, all clustered together like a school of predatory fish. When they were safely inside, I got into my car and started the engine, my hand shaking on the safety brake. I couldn’t afford to wait around and see what happened. It was pretty predictable, anyway. I drove around the block and pulled over until the shaking stopped.
In a way my work would be easier with Angwine out of my hair. I’d been overextending myself to protect him, losing my objectivity. Now I could operate as a free agent, protecting nothing but my own interests. It suited me better If I could untwist the truth from the untruth in the process, then maybe Angwine would get his money’s worth. If not—well, I would have tried, and besides, it wasn’t really his money in the first place. I felt okay.
I felt like an absolute bastard.
CHAPTER 15
IT WAS SIX-THIRTY. I DROVE INTO OAKLAND, PARKED ON A quiet side street, and walked down to the avenue. The makery was the only storefront open on the street, and its neon, lights were reflected in the puddles of rain and on the windows of the closed shops. There was a stiff wind rushing off the bay towards a collision with the hills, and it bit at my ears and nose as I went up the steps to the makery entrance. An electronic bell sounded as I opened the door. I lowered my collar and walked up to the counter.
“I’ll be right with you,” said the maker, squinting into his monitor, his lined face and wire-rimmed glasses bathed in green. He was maybe forty-five, but his hairline had backed away to leave him a high, wrinkled forehead, and the hair at his ears was as white as the powder lying in careful little piles on his lab table. He copied a chemical formula onto a pad at his left without looking away from the screen, then punched up another set of names and recipes and muttered to himself about what he saw. I just stood and watched.
“Name,” he said, turning to me. His eyes, magnified in the lenses, worked over me quickly and indifferently while he waited.
“Conrad Metcalf,” I said, and then surprised him with my blend code. I had it stuck in my head. I don’t know why.
He turned back to the keyboard and punched it in. “Acceptol,” he said.
“Mostly.”
“Don’t see many blends without Forgettol nowadays,” he said.
“Never liked it—”
“One man’s—”
“Right. Listen … if I gave you a couple of names, could you dial up the recipes for their blends on that screen?”
He stopped what he was doing at the keyboard and turned to stare at me blankly. “That was a question you just asked me, mister.”
I put my license on the counter and waited while he looked at it. He held his glasses with one hand and kept the other hand in the air, as if touching the thing would bring him bad luck. When he looked up again, I slipped it back into my coat pocket.
“What about it?”
“You know I can’t do that,” he said in a pinched, reproving voice. He squinted at me painfully. From my jacket I brought out one of Angwine’s hundreds and tore it in half up the middle, and put it where my license had been. The maker looked at it a little more favorably than he had the license. He adjusted his glasses with a little push at the nosepiece, and then looked up at me with his hand still in the middle of his face.
“I’d want one like that for each name,” he said quietly.
I smiled and took out another hundred and ripped it and put the same half out on the counter; The other two halves went in my pocket. “Grover Testafer,” I said.
He turned nervously to his keyboard and punched it in. “It’ll take a minute,” he said. “I have to search the code. He uses another makery.” His fingers moved indecipherably fast on the keys, his brow furrowing into the green light, as if he were some kind of subterranean creature worshiping a phosphorescent god. A recipe appeared on the screen. “Standard,” he announced. “Forgettol, Avoidol, addictol. Nothing special. Lots of Avoidol.”
“Tell me about Avoidol. I don’t use it.”
He liked shoptalk. It relaxed him. “Accelerates repression, basically. And equivocation. I’ll add it to your blend if you want to try it out.”
“No thanks.”
There was a sound at the door that made us both turn and look. I went quickly over and pulled. The guy on the other side had his hand on the knob, and I yanked it out of his hand.
“Excuse me,” he said.
I took out my license and flashed it too fast for him to read. His mouth opened and worked for a second, but nothing came out.
“We’ll be closed for a few minutes,” I said. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”
The guy saw I wasn’t moving. He went away mumbling, and I closed the door and went back to the counter. The two ripped halves of the hundreds had disappeared from view; in their place was a fresh vial of my blend, labeled with the makery sticker and my recipe code. I slipped it into my coat pocket and said: “Okay. Forget Testafer; Try Maynard Stanhunt.”
If he recognized the name from the radio murder report yesterday, it didn’t show. “This is a little more interesting,” he said after the formula flashed up on his monitor. I looked over his shoulder, but the symbols didn’t mean anything tome.
“The blend is almost straight Forgettol,” he said. He looked more closely. “What’s funny is the stuff he’s taking as a modifier.” He rolled the formula off the top of the screen and studied the rest of Stanhunt’s file.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve heard this was on the way,” he said, “but this is the first I’ve seen. He’s using a time-release ingredient. It’s a way of linking up doses so you don’t ever come clean. Very clever, if you can handle it.”
“What if you can’t?”
He snickered. “You’d forget what you do for a living, what street you live on, your name—that sort of thing.”