“We have a sheep,” he said. “Built her a room on the back of the house. But she likes to sleep curled up.”
“Who has a sheep?”
“My family. I’m just saying I think animals, evolved ones even, probably don’t sleep all lined up in bunk beds.”
I’d managed to get Bayzwaite interested, but it only made me wonder if the whole architectural angle wasn’t a waste of time. Maybe whoever drew up the diagrams, assuming the diagrams meant anything at all, stole the paper with the logo from Copperminer and Bayzwaite’s office supply. Maybe I should have been questioning the secretary.
“Okay,” I said. “Good point. But then what are the beds for? Sixteen beds, remember. That’s a lot of people in the same room.”
“Sounds like kids,” he said.
“Kids.”
“Right.”
“What kids? There are no kids. There’s babyheads. About how tall is a babyhead?”
“Tall enough for those beds of yours,” said Bayzwaite.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Excuse me.”
“I said Jesus Christ, Cole. I’m just feeling a little bit stupid. There’s babyheads in this case, at least one, so I should have made the connection earlier. You’ve been a great help.”
Bayzwaite was all smiles. He’d helped a private inquisitor on a case, and it made him feel good inside. He’d have a story to tell his pals. It was worth my not being a new client. I shook his hand again and got out of my seat. And that was that.
Almost. Maybe I just don’t like happy endings, but something made me feel not right as I was reaching for the doon I turned around, and Bayzwaite’s smile plastered itself back into position, but not before an appreciable interval. In that interval I spotted what the smile replaced, and it wasn’t pretty.
I put up a smile to match Bayzwaite’s but I let go of the door handle.
“Just occurred to me,” I said. “Would you mind trying one more name on that client list of yours?”
“Shoot,” he said, and made a gun out of his thumb and forefinger and pulled the imaginary trigger.
“Danny Phoneblum.”
The name was magic. It stiffened up conversation wherever it was used. Bayzwaite’s face had fallen when he saw my license; now it froze into a mask of tension, but not without retaining the all-important smile. He put his hand on the keyboard and tapped in the name.
“Nope.”
I moved around to where I could see the monitor. “You spelled it wrong,” I said. “Pee-aitch, not eff.”
I watched his hands this time, and he knew it, and spelled it right. The name blinked into existence, along with the address of the place in the hills. I’d almost walked out of the office without making the connection, but the name was just sitting there waiting for me to find it.
“What a coincidence,” I said. “He must have been the one who ordered those blueprints. I guess he didn’t go ahead with the project and you forgot all about it. But the name stayed in your files. I guess—what, do you keep a mailing list? Invite people to brunches and stuff?”
“We just keep the names,” he said stiffly.
“Lucky for me. So, let’s see—you must have the designs filed away somewhere too, right?”
At that moment I became aware of a subtle shift. We’d been bodiless, even as the banter got hostile. Now we suddenly came into our bodies and sized one another up. I wasn’t any taller, but I probably had a few pounds on him. Not that we were about to pounce on each other, but the physical element was suddenly tangible.
“I’m not sure,” he said carefully.
“Let’s have a look.” I stepped up to his desk and put my hands on the keyboard, and I had to nudge him aside to do it. “Index.” I spoke aloud as I tapped out the commands. “Client, file. Phoneblum.” The set of diagrams blinked into existence.
I stepped back. “So. You thought a design like that was meant for babyheads. That look like what I described?”
“Yes.”
“You draw this up?”
“We draw up thousands of proposals—”
“Right, right. You remember Phoneblum?”
“No.” Too fast, too firm.
“What if I told you those blueprints were found curled up in the fist of a dead man?”
Bayzwaite swallowed hard. “I guess I’d say that I wanted to contact the Office before I said anything further. I’m not so good at this game of questions and answers.”
“Well they weren’t, so relax.” I laughed. “Nobody’s good at questions and answers anymore, so don’t worry about that either.” I realized I wasn’t learning anything. I’d already seen the designs, and I’d more than confirmed the connection. Twisting Bayzwaite’s arm wasn’t going to get me any more. If I was hard up for arms to twist, I could come back later. He wasn’t going anywhere.
I took my business card out of my pocket. “Call this before you call the Office. I’m working on keeping a guy out of the freezer, and I’ll take any help I can get. If you or your ‘ partner remember anything…” I put the card on his desk and picked up my license. Bayzwaite took the card and put it in the drawer of his desk. His face was blank.
I went outside, nodded at the receptionist, and passed through the cavern of poured glass to the exit doors. Coming this way, I almost liked the effect of the early afternoon sun on the distorted walls of the office, all blurry and chiaroscuro, like some kind of underwater dream. I went into the corridor and pressed the button for the elevator.
The attendant handed over my car, and I drove out into the sun and parked on a side street behind the Overmall. I pulled out the mirror in my glove compartment and snorted up a couple of lines of the new batch of make, the first I’d used today. It had the effect of flashing my memory back over the events of the past two days: the kangaroo in the rain, Morgenlander in my office, and, most of all, Angwine in the bar of the Vistamont. The drug should have provided the sense of remove I craved; instead it served to focus and intensify my disquiet.
This case was like some kind of invasive malignancy. It filled whatever space it was given, and worse, blended itself into the healthy tissue so you didn’t know where to make the cut. It had blended itself into my life. I’d already lost most of my karma to it, and my client was already frozen and shipped. I thought about Celeste Stanhunt and Catherine Teleprompter and decided it was also fair to say I’d lost my sense of objectivity.
With that cheery thought I put away the mirror, closed up the glove compartment, and started the car. It was time to find the babyheads. One in particular.
CHAPTER 20
TELEGRAPH AVENUE IN OAKLAND WAS A DUMP, AND IF there was an exception to that rule, the babybar on 23rd Street wasn’t it. The bar took up the bottom floor of an abandoned transient hotel, and the facade of the building was brownstone eroding into dust, like some kind of urban archaeological dig. The windows above the storefront were boarded up or sealed with sheets of tin, and the long narrow window of the bar itself was crammed full of dusty cardboard Santas and wreaths of archaic tinsel. The babyheads were reputed to sleep upstairs in the hotel when they didn’t feel like going home to their parents—and judging from what I’d seen at Cranberry Street, they didn’t go home to their parents very often. I was hoping to find Barry Greenleaf at the bar, and I was hoping he wouldn’t be too soused to talk. If Barry was like the other babyheads I’d met in my work, he was drinking himself to death trying to counteract the unpleasant side effects of the evolution therapy he’d undergone, and in a babybar the drinking started early.
There weren’t any signs of life beyond the glimmer of lights in the window and the creaky strains of music seeping out to where I stood in the street, but compared to the surrounding neighborhood it seemed almost inviting. I stepped into the shadow of the entrance and tried the door. It was locked. I rattled the handle, and the door opened a crack and a bahyhead looked up at me from behind it, his distended bald head gleaming with reflections from the barroom behind him. He was dressed in a toddler’s red jumper with a little embroidered yellow fish on the chest, and he had a cig-. arette tucked behind his ear. “Let’s see some ID,” he said gruffly, in a high-pitched voice.