“I think I can manage that. Which one do you want to start with?”
“Three. It’ll be the most recent.”
“Three it is.” He smacked the keyboard, sure-fingered as Arthur Rubinstein, and we were looking at this:
“Um,” I said.
“He was being a very bad boy.” Jack was back to ripping knots from his beard. “Just not like Max at all.”
“Are they all like that?”
Ten keystrokes later we had an answer. They were. Max had apparently been corresponding with a geometrical figure.
“I’ll fool around with these,” Jack said. “It shouldn’t take too long.”
“Can you give me a copy? On disk?”
He slid a diskette into a slot. “Trade you,” he said, “for the info on Max’s wake.”
My computer at home ate the disk.
It accepted it eagerly, like a drunk popping an aspirin, sent it whirling, and then burped. I pulled the diskette out, turned off the computer, slapped it on the side a couple of times, and reinserted the diskette. Same result. Pushing the envelope of my technological expertise, I pulled out the diskette again, slapped it a couple of times, and fed it to the computer again. Three was the charm; the machine accepted the diskette without gastric distress and sat there, waiting for me to do something with it.
Do what? I keyed in type a: letter. thr and hit the ENTER key. Greek, literally Greek, spooled by, followed by a self-satisfied little beep. I brought up WordPerfect and asked it to retrieve the document. After some grumbling about the letter being in the wrong format, the program put its shoulder to the wheel and delivered the same geometric scramble I’d seen at Jack’s. Progress.
I knew how to use the phone, so I called Schultz at home. Without bothering to sound patient, he told me that he’d done all he could on a Sunday; he’d used his personal federal crime-busting connections to get the military working on the dog tags, but I knew how the military was. Some of them might like to take Sundays off. They might regard defending the country as a higher priority. We failed to identify the enemy against whom they might be defending it.
“Not that that will hamper them,” Schultz said.
“We have met the enemy,” I suggested, “and he is missing.”
“A call to the police might speed them up.”
“From me? I thought you were the one with clout.”
“Get married,” he advised soothingly. “Settle down.”
“Norbert,” I said, “have you been talking to my mother?”
He turned shrink on me. “Should I?”
Eleanor wasn’t home yet, so she and Christy and Alan were presumably still at the West Hollywood Sheriff’s station. My mother would be out in the courtyard of her apartment house, having cocktails with her cronies, a group of women she calls the cacklers. My father regards the telephone as a small and noisy piece of furniture and generally refuses to answer it. When my mother comes in, he usually says, “Phone rang,” as if that were helpful information.
That left the computer.
From the layout of the document, it was a letter. That confirmed what its name, letter. thr, might have led even a nonprofessional to suspect. The four short lines at the top suggested that Max might be the kind of old-fashioned correspondent who put an internal address even in private correspondence, and wouldn’t that be nice?
Detective fiction just crawls with skilled cryptographers who can take one look at a slate of characters in Mayan knot writing or Linear B, snort once or twice in a superior fashion, and read it aloud. I suppose such people exist in real life, too, but they don’t seem to get out much. Still, a code is a code. Max’s letters had to be based on the alphabet, and the alphabet has its own rules of internal consistency. The one everyone always seizes on is the fact that E is the letter that gets the most use. Unless, of course, the writer of the code is intentionally avoiding words with an E in them, or is allergic to the letter E, or belongs to a religion that regards the letter E as the devil’s work, or has a keyboard with a broken E key, or is writing in a language in which E is the least common letter, or can’t spell and doesn’t know about the silent E, or…
The phone broke in on this productive train of thought, although “broke in” might be putting it a trifle strongly. So might “thought.” I practically flew across the room to answer it.
“Your Sergeant Spurrier is a piece of work,” Eleanor said without preface. “Never again will I wonder where the concentration camp guards came from, or the Albanian secret police, or the men who poured the hemlock into Socrates’ mouth.”
“He drank it himself,” I said.
“Well, if the Athenian cops were anything like Spurrier, it was the wisest course of action. He browbeat poor Christy until it was a wonder Christy had any brow left. Every question got asked thirty-two times, one for each tooth, like it was some sort of chewing rule. And he kept smiling at me and calling me ‘little lady,’ as though we were on the same side in some loathsome conspiracy.”
“How’d Christy take it?”
“He’ll survive. He tires so easily, though. If it hadn’t been for Alan, I don’t think he would have made it. Alan, as Wayde might say, is way cool. He treated Spurrier like something that had just crawled onto land and needed a good kick back into the drink.”
“Where’s Christy going to stay?”
“With Alan and his friend tonight. Tomorrow, he said he might check into a hotel. I told him what you said about staying away from the house.”
“He can go back tomorrow,” I said. “Tomorrow’s Monday, the day Nite Line will hit the streets-
“What vivid language.”
“-and our killer will know Christy doesn’t have his damn tags.”
“Our killer,” she said dryly. “Spurrier made Christy look at pictures of Max.”
“He’s a gob of phlegm,” I said. “Write about it.”
“I can’t. They’re giving it to someone on the police beat. Thank you very much, now butt out. How does someone turn into Spurrier?”
“Bitterness,” I said. “He’s only got one sport coat.”
“I’m serious.”
“How do I know? Some cops get like that. Some people become cops because they’re already like that. As Harry Golden once said about an anti-Semite, maybe his teeth hurt.”
“Well, I’m going to shower him off.”
“I tried that once,” I said. “It took a lot of water. What are you doing after your shower?”
“I don’t know. Get dirty, I guess.”
“Want to have dinner?”
She paused. I pictured her curling the phone cord around her index ringer, something she doesn’t know she does. She’s always wondering why the cord gets knots in it. “I’d considered it.”
“With me.”
“A girl lives clean for months,” she said, “deferring worldly pleasures in the pure faith that saintly conduct will be rewarded, and the world does not disappoint.”
“Is that a yes?”
“What language do you think in?” she asked. “Of course it’s a yes.”
“We can work on my English,” I said.
“You have more pressing problems. Eight o’clock?”
“Eight’s great, mate,” I said.
“I’ve got to learn to hang up earlier,” she said, hanging up.
The phone rang again immediately. “Listen to this,” Jack said. Then he read me Max’s letters. They were even better than I’d hoped.
“How did you do it?”
“Have you got Microsoft Word?”
“No. WordPerfect.”
“Well,” he said with leaden patience, “import the document.”
“I’ve got it on my screen.” I carried the phone to the computer and sat down.
“Okay, go into fonts. Wait, wait, highlight the document first. Do you know how to do that?”
“Yes, Jack,” I said through my teeth, “I know how to do that.”
“Got it?”
“Hold it. Okay.”
“Go into fonts. Choose roman, choose anything. Nah, choose roman. That’s all Max did, the old codger. He wrote his letter, printed it, mailed it, and then saved a file copy in a nonalphabetic font called Monotype Sorts. Talk about transparent codes.”