I said, “She was a good woman, Bernie. And thanks a lot for your help.”
“There isn’t something else you want to tell me, Doc?”
I said, “No… I don’t think so.”
Bernie Yager, the tough electronics guru, said, “The number, I need her mother’s phone number. And her E-mail address. I need to be able to access the machine if I’m going to upload software. What, I’ve got to take your hand and lead you through this?”
10
The Calloway family home was in the Lauderdale suburb of Coral Ridge south of Oakland Park and north of Plantation. Probably one of the original gated communities on the Intracoastal Waterway, built back in the fifties when dolphin-finned Cadillacs and pink stucco defined the sunrise coast.
There were banyan vines and shadows on streets that never took the full heat of summer because of moss and filtered light. The brick gatehouse was unattended, but the neighborhood still had the solid look of corporate money, good benefits and upwardly mobile executives. Not old-time wealth, but high-salaried position players with plenty left over for pension plans and toys.
Tomlinson was talcing it all in. “The people who first lived in these houses, I bet they voted for Eisenhower and bitched about Elvis back when they were built. Caddys, yeah. Can’t you picture great big land yachts sitting in the driveways?”
We were in my Chevy pickup, windows down, driving through the shade of ficus trees. We’d crossed the saw-grass flats of Alligator Alley to I-595, then north on U.S. 1 past Freddy’s Anchor Inn, tattoo parlors and Comfort Suites, then through the Kinney Tunnel into a gray corridor of furniture stores, Burger Kings, Porsche and Ferrari dealerships, Chinese restaurants.
Now we were looking at houses that were set back behind thick brick fences, the yards hedged with sea grape. Dominant colors were conch pink and Bermuda white. Not many Cadillacs in the driveways, though. Mostly sport utility vehicles in earth colors, but a few BMWs and Lexuses hitched up close to large ranch houses with red tile roofs showing through the trees.
“Can you smell it?” Tomlinson said. “The Atlantic Coast, man. It… smells different. Big ocean, big seas, lots of wind out there beyond the condos, even if you can’t feel it.”
I was cruising at maybe ten miles per hour and the truck cab was filtering odors.
I said, “Yeah, nice air. Not as dense.” Meaning not as heavy as the air on Sanibel Island.
No matter where I’ve been in my life, I can get within ten miles of an ocean and feel it. Can sense the implied weight of the sea even if the horizon is blocked, fogged in, you name it. Thatch-roofed huts or trees or mountains or high rises, it didn’t matter what stood between us. The convexity of sky is always different. Brighter? No, but there is a distinctive sheen to it, as if rarefied by lightning or chemical reaction: saltwater, oxygen, wind, isolation. I always, always know if the sea is near.
The Calloway house was several blocks from U.S. 1, just off Bayview at the corner of 8th Street and Middle River Drive, not far from Bayview Elementary and the Coral Ridge Yacht Club. Very solid-looking brick one-story painted key lime yellow with vines that trailed up the walls and framed the bay windows. Pie-shaped quarter-acre corner lot, old tropical vegetation, the weathervaned masts of sailboats showing above the roofs of neighboring homes.
A yachting community. Each house with its own dock out back.
I noticed a frayed rope hanging from an oak tree in the side lawn. Presumably it had once held a swing. I noticed the plywood remnants of a tree house in said oak and thought about Amanda with her tomboy attitude. Sometimes you can look at a house and read what’s gone on there. This had once been a child’s place; a family place. A little girl had once lived here with her mother and stepfather. Not now, though. The property had the sterile look of weekly yard maintenance and vacant bedrooms.
You take one look at such a place and you guess that someone’s dream came unraveled here.
The front door of the house was cracked open, though, as if to let stale air escape.
Amanda’s little car was in the drive.
“Jesus Christ, what happened to my mom’s computer?” Amanda, wearing gold wire-rimmed glasses, sat at a desk in a study just off the master bedroom, her face illuminated by the monitor screen.
No T-shirt for her now. She was wearing pantyhose, a pale gray pleated cotton skirt, white blouse with pearl buttons and a navy blue blazer. The way she dressed, it not only changed the way she looked, it changed the way she handled herself. An athletic-looking redhead with some lanky size, maybe handsome but not pretty. Interesting face, with her mom’s great cheekbones but her dad’s tough-guy nose. Not a person to take lightly. She moved and spoke without hesitation, the modern businesswoman.
The backseat of her car, I’d noticed, was crammed with boxes and folders and pieces of some kind of plastic shelving, maybe something that had to do with dispensing medications. Just a guess. It looked as if she’d been making the rounds, calling on her clients, and had interrupted a busy day to meet us at her old house.
“What kind of friends do you have, Doc? A person who can do something like this to a stranger’s computer… my God! He changed all this through the telephone modem?”
It was hard to tell if she was impressed or spooked. Bernie had recolored each and every screen icon in rainbow shades. They appeared to drift randomly, not unlike pinballs, on a fluorescent wallpaper backdrop of pink flamingos in flight.
The exception was a folder labeled PILAR.
It sat in the center of the screen, many times larger than any other icon, and it flashed as methodically as a smalltown caution light. One of his little jokes.
“What’s pilar mean?”
“It’s Spanish. It means, well… like a support or a column. Something that will hold up a building.”
“But here he means like support for my computer program, right?”
“For the computer… sure. That kind of support. What else could he mean?”
“Is he some kind of drug freak or something? These colors, all the activity, just looking at the screen is giving me a headache.”
“A drug user, you bet,” Tomlinson said, nodding. He was looking over Amanda’s shoulder, riveted. “This kind of genius, there almost has to be synthetics involved. Yes… yes, I’m sure of it. It’s a professional guess, but still a guess… yeah, I believe this whole scene demonstrates certain signature effects that I associate with what may have been the bitchingest acid ever produced. The Hitchcock Estate, Dutchess County, New York, nineteen sixty-seven. Dr. Leary had a hand in that one, God bless him.” He turned to me. “If this buddy of yours has a tab or two to spare, I’ll pay top dollar. I know you don’t approve, but I just got a nostalgia rush you wouldn’t believe. All I want is enough so I can go back and revisit some old friends. Maybe talk to the dead, visit my own karma in the afterlife. Nothing fancy. You don’t mind, why don’t we take a second and jot his number down-”
Amanda said, “Hey, be quiet a minute.”
Tomlinson said, “Huh?”
“Look at this. There’s something wrong here.”
I watched Tomlinson’s face as he looked at the screen. Maybe from his reaction I’d be able to read what was going on.
She said, “I just tried to sign on to my mom’s account, but I get this damn thing.”
There was a message corralled by a blue border: “Invalid Password. Please try again.”
“I thought you said that her password still worked. That you’d tried it.”
“It worked fine last night when I came over to turn on the computer.”
“Maybe her bill hasn’t been paid and they’ve terminated her service.”
“Nope, it’s a credit card thing and the money’s taken out of her account just like everything else. She’s got plenty of money left for stuff like this.”