“So what can I do with a biography?”
“Use your head. I talked to everybody I could find who has known him for the past twenty years. What do I get? A picture of a sour, tight-fisted, greedy man. He didn’t have a friend in the world up to the time he started those broadcasts. He snapped everybody’s head off, bullied his employees, chiseled whenever he could get away with it. He built himself the equivalent of a feudal castle eighteen miles outside San Ramon right in the middle of the pumped-out field he chiseled to get his initial start in the oil business. All of a sudden he turns into a guy so warm and human he makes your heart bleed. Why? How? It has to be an act. If it is an act, then he could have made more money on the stage and in the movies than he ever made out of oil. He’s phoney all the way through.”
Kiddle shook his head sadly. “Not good enough.”
“Here comes the funny business, Kiddle. Remember I told you about his first foreman, Ike Looder? I went back to see Ike. He’s a nice old guy. Lives on a government pension. I wanted to recheck a few points. Ike couldn’t even remember Borden Means. At first I thought somebody had gotten to Ike and fixed him with money. In an hour of talking with Ike I convinced myself that he’s sincere. I decided that it was just the faulty mind of approaching senility. So I tried to recheck with a few other people. They are all sincere too. But they can’t remember a thing. They acted like I was crazy. Something or somebody got to them and did something, somehow, to their memories. Right now I’m in a funny position. The research was going fine — and now the sources are suddenly going sour.”
“You feel okay?” Kiddle asked nervously.
“I feel fine. Just look at the dimensions of the story. Somebody is so anxious to cover up the real Borden Means that they’re willing to tamper with the minds and memories of the people who knew him as he used to be. You ever see this?” He took a thick folder out of his side pocket and threw it on the desk in front of Kiddle.
The picture on the front was of Borden Means. It captured that odd warmth that had so impressed Jeff.
“Nice photo,” Kiddle said.
“It’s an O’Reilly. You can always recognize the touch. Anyway, this purports to be a true biography of Borden Means. It was written up at his hideaway, which has become a sort of headquarters, and it was printed in Dallas. According to this thing, Means never said an unkind word or did an underhanded thing in his life. It’s devilishly clever. It sticks close enough to the truth so that it checks with public records, and yet it changes the whole personality of the man to what he is right now.”
Kiddle scratched a sagging third chin. “I want something hot and you give me this memory stuff. I don’t get it. We can’t use that. It sounds like some of the stuff we print in one of our fiction books. Weird Adventures. Who can prove this mind business?”
“Okay. Here’s something. In nineteen thirty-seven Means got sore at a guy working for him. He beat him up, broke his jaw, threw him off the place. The guy sued. It hit the front pages in the San Ramon papers. The court awarded the guy six thousand bucks damages. I was lucky enough to get hold of a copy of the paper. It’s in a safety deposit box here in New York. I can show it to you. Somebody has gotten into the library files in San Ramon, and into the newspaper files.”
“Aha! It’s missing now?” Kiddle said eagerly.
“More than that, Kiddle. The papers have been changed. According to the changes, the case was thrown out of court and the judges gave the plaintiff hell for trying to work a fake suit on Means. I hired a lawyer and had him check the actual court records. They’d been altered too. I dug up the plaintiff. His name is Harry Lamke. Now he thinks it was thrown out of court. The judge is dead. I think technical experts could examine the newspapers and the court records and find that they’ve been altered. The paper I managed to get hold of is a true copy of the edition that day.”
“Or maybe you got a copy that was run off by some bum who hated Means, eh?”
“Whose side are you on, Kiddle?”
“The side of my readers. You get me notarized statements from qualified experts stating that the library and newspaper copies and the court records have been altered. You give me those and your copy you got in a box. Then I give it the lead position in the first issue I can get it into and I pay you five thousand dollars.”
“You’ve got a deal, Kiddle.”
Jeff waited nervously in his room at the Blue Bonnet in San Ramon. It was a smaller cheaper room than when Crux had been paying for the accommodations. Lately he had felt the strengthening of the suspicion that he was being watched carefully. In the wastebasket was the crumpled wire from Kiddle which said, “Wire date when I can expect documentation.”
There was a knock at the room door. Jeff jumped nervously. He hurried to the door and pulled it open. Dr. Clinton Powyth and his assistant came in. Dr. Powyth, Jeff thought, was eyeing him peculiarly.
“Sit down, gentlemen,” Jeff said, smiling. “I’m glad this is over. I’ve made arrangements to have a public stenographer who is also a notary come up and take your report.”
Powyth didn’t sit down, nor did his assistant. Powyth smiled wanly. “I suppose we have nothing to complain about, Mr. Rayden. Your fee was generous.”
“What do you mean?”
“The newspaper people were very pleasant. They even located an extra copy and turned it over to us. A duplicate of the one in their files. I suppose your object is to find some way to smear Mr. Borden Means. I shan’t quarrel with your objective, even though I find it a bit... distasteful.”
“Would it be too much trouble to get to the point?”
“We used all the standard tests and even some special ones applicable to this situation. The newspaper we examined was printed in nineteen thirty-seven. An age test of the ink and the paper showed that. There is no sign of alteration. We examined closely the suspected passages. The type conforms to the type of other issues of that year. I am sorry to say that this has been a wild goose chase.”
“You’re crazy!” Jeff shouted.
Powyth shook his head, almost sadly. “My dear young man! If you are sincere in believing that statement, I suggest that you are the one who should see a competent psychiatrist.”
The two men trooped out and closed the room door gently.
Jeff sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands, grinding his palms against his eye sockets. After a time he went for a walk. He felt numb. He remembered reading of the experimentations with rats. When the scientists present healthy rats with clearly insoluble problems, the rats develop a very clear and observable anxiety neurosis. Now he was faced with a clear and inexplicable contradiction of fact. He had gone through seven attics in San Ramon before finding the copy he wanted. There was no chance that it had been planted there for him to find. Nor was it within the realm of possibility that as early as 1937 someone had been altering filed data in preparation for Means’ current campaign.
He walked in the city and was shocked to see the way the little pins had taken hold. Men wore them in their lapels. Women wore them on their blouses. Each was small and green with a white border and the white letters spelling out MEANS. Without exception, the persons who wore the buttons also wore a look of concealed exaltation. Their step was springy, their eyes keen. And Jeff knew that this same phenomenon was being repeated in all the major cities of the entire country. One man, with a voice that could be fire, or honey, or thunder, or silk, had worked this magic.