“Very shortly. Just as soon as I talk to Mrs. Carmody.”
“Hah! Maybe she’s the reason I couldn’t come with you.”
“You’re obsessed with sex. You ought to see somebody about it.”
“Maybe I would, if you ever got home. But while you’re visiting your father’s sexpot, keep reminding yourself of the Oedipal overtones.”
“Hell, just thinking of the comparisons would do it.”
“That’ll be the day.”
After he’d hung up, he debated whether to put through a call to Murdock. No, that could wait till he’d talked to Paulette Carmody; he’d call after he was back in San Francisco. He showered and put on a fresh shirt and a tie and the suit he’d worn coming up. As he was putting the dusty and sweat-stained shirt in the bag, he remembered the fragment of brown plastic or cardboard he’d found out in the flat -by the dead burro. He removed it from the pocket.
What could fd mean? Mfd for manufactured? No, there’d have to be something after it. Mfd by, or Mfd in— He frowned. Solder. Radio officer. Check out the simalizer and put a new frammistat in his KLH. Jeri Bonner had worked for an electronics supply company, probably where she’d met Tallant. He grabbed up the telephone directory and flipped through the thin section of yellow pages. RADIO AND TV, REPAIRS. There were three, one of them on West Third Street. Well, they couldn’t lock you up for asking stupid questions. He dropped it in the pocket of his jacket and finished packing.
He carried the bag out to the car and stopped at the office to pay for the toll calls and the extra day. The sour-faced man was behind the desk.
“Have to pay for an extra day,” he said. “Checkout time’s two P.M. Same’s it has been for years.”
“Right.” Romstead put down the Amex card.
“You’d think someday people’d learn—”
Romstead picked up the card and put down two twenty-dollar bills. It’d be quicker, and he wouldn’t have to listen to the old fart.
“Posted right there on the wall, plain as anything.”
Romstead picked up the change, his face suffused with wonder. “Well, I be dawg; so that’s what that writin’ said? I thought it meant I could take the towels for keepsakes.”
He went up Aspen and made the turn into Third. The TV repair shop was near the end of the block with a parking space a few doors away. It was after five now, and he hoped it wasn’t closed. It wasn’t, quite. At the counter in front a girl was putting on lipstick and appraising her hair in a small mirror. In back of her was an open doorway into the shop.
“Are any of your service men still here?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said. “Raymond’s back there. We’re about to close, though.”
“This’ll only take a minute.” He went around the end of the counter. There were two service benches in the back room with long fluorescent lights above them, littered with tools and parts and the denuded carcasses of TV sets and radios. Raymond was a pleasant long-haired youth wearing a University of Nevada T-shirt. He glanced up inquiringly from the writhing green snakes he was watching on the screen of some kind of test equipment.
“I just wanted to ask you what may be a very dumb question.” Romstead set the fragment of plastic on the bench. “Is this part of anything electronic?”
Raymond glanced at it, turned it slightly to look at the markings. “Sure,” he said. He reached into a bin and brought out a cylindrical object that reminded Romstead vaguely of a shotgun shell except that it had a short piece of wire attached to each end. He set it on the bench. It was imprinted with the manufacturer’s name, but what instantly caught Romstead’s eye was the legend, “100 Mfd,” in the center of it. There was a minus sign at one end and a plus at the other.
“Electrolytic capacitor,” Raymond said. “‘Mfd’ is the abbreviation for microfarad. They’re used in a number of different circuits for high capacity at a low-voltage rating. Have to be installed with the right polarity, though; that’s the reason for the plus and minus on the case.”
Romstead understood little or nothing of this except that his stab in the dark had paid off. He smiled at Raymond and put five dollars on the bench. “Thanks a million,” he said. “I won the bet.”
He drove on out West Third Street in the sunset, wondering if he hadn’t merely made the whole thing worse; certainly you could go crazy trying to figure out what all these different parts had to do with each other or with his father’s inexplicable trip to the bank. Lost in thought, he almost went past Paulette Carmody’s drive and had to slam on his brakes to make the turn. He parked in front of the walk on the circular blacktop drive and went up to ring the bell, thinking now that it was too late, that he should have called first. She’d probably heard about Bonner by now and might not feel like talking to anybody. She came to the door herself, and he suspected she’d been crying, though she’d done a good job of covering the effects with makeup. He started to apologize, but she interrupted.
“No,” she said. “I’m glad you came; I wanted to talk to you.” She led the way down the short vestibule into the living room. “Come on into the kitchen,” she said, “while I fix the drinks. It’s Carmelita’s day off.”
The kitchen was in front, on the opposite side of the living room, with a separate dining room in back of it. There was a door at the far end of it, probably to the garage. She opened the refrigerator for ice cubes. “Martini, vodka and tonic, scotch?”
“Vodka and tonic would be fine,” he said.
She began assembling the drinks, the old ebullience and blatant sexiness subdued now, though the simple sheath she wore was still overpowered by the figure that nothing would ever quite restrain. Her legs were bare, as usual.
“I’m sorry about Bonner,” he said.
“He made a lot of enemies,” she replied, “but I liked him. He was hard-nosed, bullheaded, and horny, and always in a brawl or trouble of some kind, but in most ways he was a simplehearted and generous kind of guy and a good friend. And lousy husband, naturally.”
“Then he’d been married?”
“Oh, yes, for about six years. But his wife finally gave up. Poker, and cheating on her all the time. Men. I’ll swear to Christ.”
They carried their drinks into the living room. Dusk was thickening in the patio beyond the wall of glass, and the pool was a shimmering blue with its underwater lights. She had heard very little of how it had happened, so he told her, playing down the gory aspects of it as much as possible.
“Then Brubaker thinks Jeri was killed, too?” she asked. “And Lew had an idea who did it?”
“Or at least they were afraid he did.”
“You realize you could have been shot, too?”
“I guess he wasn’t worried about me,” Romstead replied. That was no answer, he knew, but he didn’t have any better. “But about that radio officer on the Fairisle, was his name Tallant?”
“No,” she said. “Kessler. Harry Kessler.”
That wasn’t conclusive, Romstead thought; he could have changed it, unless he was on parole. “You knew him about four years ago?”
“That’s right. Actually, it was five years ago, of course, when your father picked us up out there, but I hardly noticed him then. Jeri did, though. She thought he was cute.”
“He’d have been in his late twenties? Medium height, slender, dark complexion, brown eyes, black hair?”
“Oh, no. The age and the build would be about right, but he was as blond as you are. Blue eyes.”
Romstead glumly shook his head. So much for that brainstorm. But then how did Tallant get into the picture?
“Anyway,” Paulette went on, “it seems to me he’d still be in prison. I don’t know how long a sentence he got, but it’s only been a little over three years.”