At least, I tried to.
The door bulged away from me, like it was made of rubber.
I almost fell over; putting out a hand, I caught myself against the wall, which had also distorted. Then, slowly, it eased back into position.
I stood there, sweating. I backed away from the door, studied it and the wall. No paint was cracked. I ran my hand over the door, and around the frame. Nothing was warped, there were no splinters.
Jesus. I'd had bad hangovers before, but nothing like that. I rubbed my hands over my face, and unlocked the door.
For just a second it looked very odd in there. At the far end of the room were sliding glass doors that led to a coffin-sized balcony. The doors were shut, but the drapes were blowing as if in a high wind. I couldn't feel the slightest breeze. And everything in the room seemed to be coated with ice.
Maybe ice isn't the right word. Frost, or powdered sugar.
I blinked, and it was all gone. The curtains were barely stirring, and there was nothing wrong with the walls or the unmade bed.
She was gone.
I did everything I could think of. It didn't bring her back.
The balcony door was locked from the inside. I opened it and stepped out, looked around, couldn't see how she could have gotten out from the fourth floor. There was no rope of knotted bedsheets or anything.
I hadn't been gone that long. I suppose she could have come down one elevator while I was going up the other, or she might have used the stairs, but there was something that made me doubt that. Her clothes were still there. All of them, from the brown shoes to the cotton bra.
Her purse was gone, though. Could she have had some clothes in there? The only other evidence she had ever been there was the stained sheets and the heaping ashtrays.
I stayed in the room for almost half an hour, trying to put it together.
A stolen car. A night to remember. A strange story about a place where everybody died.
A dead or stillborn or heroinaddicted infant.
Oh, yes, and two more clues. In the bathroom trash can I found a Vicks inhaler and an empty package of Clorets breath freshener. I sniffed at the inhaler and wished I hadn't.
Whatever was in the thing, l didn't want any part of it.
Chalk it up to experience, I told myself, only it didn't help. You're supposed to learn something from experience, and all I had was questions.
I decided not to tell the police anything about her, at least not until I'd had a chance to talk to her myself. Maybe she needed help. I didn't think she was dangerous.
I had to call a cab to get to the airport. When I arrived, I went straight to the United desk, and around back to where Sarah Hacker had her office.
She looked like she'd had about as much sleep as I had. Maybe there are worse jobs than personnel and public relations for an airline that's just lost a plane, but I don't know what they are.
"Hi, Sarah," I said. "I'd like to find Louise Ball, if it's not too much trouble."
"No trouble," she said. "What does she do, and in what city?"
"She works right here," I said. "Or she did yesterday. She's a ticket agent."
Sarah was shaking her head and reaching for a book. She flipped through it.
"Not unless she was hired after five o'clock yesterday evening. I know all my people, Bill.
She might have been a temporary. Let me look."
She did, and came up with nothing. She put the name through her computer, and confirmed that no one named Louise Ball worked for United.
It was time to call in the FBI. A harmless kook with an obsession about a dead daughter was one thing; an unauthorized person hanging around an investigation pretending to be something she wasn't was another.
I actually got into a phone booth and had dialed the first couple digits of the number Freddie Powers had given me ... then I hung up. Louise had said she'd be back that evening.
I'd wait, and give her a chance to explain herself.
I remembered I did have something to talk to Frddie Powers about, so I went back into the booth. I found him at the temporary morgue.
"What about those watches?" I asked him. "Did you find anything new?"
"One thing," he said. "You remember the digitals that were running backwards? They're all running forwards again."
"Did you bring somebody in on it?"
"Yeah."
"What"d he say?"
"He said it couldn't have happened."
I thought about that.
"How many people actually saw them? I mean, while they were running backwards?"
There was a pause. "You and me, Stanley, and that doctor, Brindle. Maybe a couple people who were helping him take watches off the corpses ... but I don't think so. He's the one who noticed it."
"Did you get any films, videotapes ... anything like that?"
"No. Nothing. All we've got is the testimony of the three of us."
"Three?"
Another pause. "I'm not sure Brindle wants to swear to anything."
"Why don't we wait on this? We've still got the watches that are forty-five minutes off."
"Right."
With the digitals, all we've got is that you and I and Tom saw it."
There was a long pause. I assumed he was thinking over his position, how his career was going and how a story like this would affect his advancement in the Bureau -- which has always liked things neat.
"I saw it," he said, slowly, "but that doesn't mean I think it's important."
"Right. Sit on it for a while, okay? I'll decide if it's important."
"You've got it, Bill."
One anomaly dealt with.
The day went like that: pretty well, except I kept looking over my shoulder expecting Louise to drop into my lap.
She didn't.
We started off with Norman Tyson, from the company who built the air traffic control computers.
He took the position that the firm's equipment was not at fault, as it had been functioning at data-loads beyond what it had been designed to handle. I let Tom work on him, hoping to see a chink in his armor of certainty. They knew they were vulnerable, but that also knew the real story of this crash could be the FAA's failure to replace obsolete hardware.
And the agency would pass that ball along to Congress, who didn't provide the money. By then the guilt was already spread out enough, but you could go further, if you wanted to, and blame the electorate who put the Congress into office.
I knew the Board was in the clear. At least on paper. We had reports and recommendations by the carload. We'd been warning them about the old computers. We'd told them they had to be replaced.
But had we told them hard enough? Who could tell? These were budget-conscious times. Come to think of it, I couldn't remember any time when people weren't howling about cutting government spending, and everybody who ever got cut thought it was the worst case of bad judgement ever seen in Washington. And we never said the new computers would be cheap: we were talking about half a billion dollars.
Look on the brightside, I told myself. I'll bet we buy them now.
Just after lunch I got a call from Doctor Harlan Prentice, who was in charge of the autopsy team. He wanted me to come over, but there are things I'd just as soon skip after a meal, and that was one of them.
"It has to do with the contents of the stomachs," he said. "I guess you know the rate of identification in this crash is going to be low."
"I've been in the morgue, Doctor," I told him. "I've seen the big baggies."
"Yes. Well, with the 747, we've examined seventy-three body fragments containing stomachs. I have before me a menu from that flight, and it lists a choice of chicken crepes, beef a la bercy, and a diet plate in tourist. I haven't seen a menu for first-class: I swallowed queasily, tasting the steak I'd just eaten. I mean, I'm hardened to this sort of thing, but doctors are incredible.