“Wait a minute,” Jade said, putting down the tall cool glass she had been holding for so long that its contents had melted down to ice water.
Johansen, who had hardly touched his own drink, eyed her quizzically.
“Was that old man Sam’s contact in the Commerce Department, after all? Had he tipped Sam off about the small business set-aside?”
I thought the same thing—Johansen answered—but the guy slipped out of the meeting room like a ghost disappearing into thin air. And when I asked Sam about it, back in Florida, he just got quiet and evasive. There was something going on, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Not until a lot later.
Anyway, about six weeks afterward we got the official notification that we had won one of the two contracts for what the government called “The Orbital Debris Removal Test and Evaluation Program, Phase I.” The other contract went to Rockledge.
“We’re in!” Sam yelped. “We did it!”
We partied all that weekend. Sam invited everybody from the swimwear shop downstairs, for starters, and pretty soon it seemed like the whole shopping mall was jammed into our little office. Sometime during the weekend our two geniuses from Texas A&M showed up and joined the fun.
The hangover was monumental, but the party was worth it. Then the work began.
I saw trouble right away. The kids from Texas were really brilliant about superconductors and magnetic bumpers, but they were emotionally about on the level of junior high school.
The girl—uh, woman—her name was Melinda Cardenas. It was obvious that she had the hots for Sam. She followed him with those big brown eyes of hers wherever Sam went. She was kind of cute although pretty badly overweight. Could have been a real beauty, I guess, if she could stay away from sweets and junk food. But that’s just about all she ate. And every time I looked at her, she was eating.
Her boyfriend—Larry Karsh—ate as much junk food as she did, but never put on an ounce. Some people have metabolisms like that. He never exercised. He just sat all day long at the desktop computer he had brought with him, designing our magnetic bumper and munching on sweet rolls and greaseburgers from the fast-food joint a few doors down the mall from our office. He could lose weight just by breathing, while Melinda gained a pound and a half every time she inhaled.
It took me a while to figure out that Larry was plying Melinda with food so she’d stay too fat for anybody else to be interested in her. They were rooming together, but “like brother and sister,” according to Melinda. One look at Larry’s pasty unhappy face, sprinkled with acne, told me that the brother-and-sister thing was making him miserable.
“You gotta get her away from me,” Sam told me, a little desperation in his voice, one evening down in the bar where we had originally formed VCI.
“Melinda?”
“Who else?”
“I thought you liked her,” I said.
“She’s just a kid.” Sam would not meet my eyes. He concentrated instead on making wet rings on the tabletop with his beer bottle.
“Pretty well-developed kid.”
“You gotta get her off me, Mutt.” He was almost pleading. “If you don’t, Larry’s going to pack up and leave.”
I finally got the picture. Sam had used his charm to get Melinda to join VCI because he had known that Larry would come wherever she went. But now Larry was getting resentful. If he broke up our design team VCI would be in deep yogurt.
“Just how much charm did you use on her?” I asked.
Sam raised his hands over his head. “I never touched her, so help me. Hell, I never even took her out to dinner without Larry coming with us.”
“Did he have acne back in Texas?”
“Yeah. I think they’re both virgins.” Sam said it as if it were a crime.
I can see now, with twenty-twenty hindsight, that what I should have done was buddy up to Larry, give him a few pointers about personal grooming and manners. The kid was brilliant, sure, but his idea of evening wear was an unwashed T-shirt and a pair of cutoffs. And he was so damned shy that he hid behind his computer just about all the time. He never went anywhere and he never did anything except massage his computer. And eat junk food. He had that dead-fish complexion of a guy in solitary confinement. He was about as much fun as staring at a blank wall.
To tell the truth, I just couldn’t see myself buddying up to the kid. So, instead, I made the mistake of trying to get Melinda interested in me, rather than Sam. I invited her out to dinner. That’s all it took. I didn’t even hold her hand, but the next morning there was a love poem on my desk, signed with a flowery M. And Larry didn’t show up in the office.
“Where is he?” Sam snapped the minute he entered the office—around ten-thirty. He headed straight for his desk, which I called “Mount Blanc” because of the mountain of paperwork heaped on top of it. Sam paid practically no attention to any incoming paper. The mountain just grew bigger. How he ever found anything in that pile I never knew, but whenever I couldn’t find some form or some piece of important correspondence, Sam would rummage through the mountain and pull out the right piece of paper in half a minute.
Neither Melinda nor I answered Sam’s question. I didn’t know where the kid was. Melinda was watching me shyly from behind her computer. Then I realized that Larry’s desk was bare. He had taken his computer.
“Where the hell is he?” Sam screeched.
It took me about ten seconds to figure out what had happened. Ten seconds, plus reading Melinda’s poem. It was pretty awful. Can you imagine a poem that rhymes dinner, winner, and thinner?
“Where the hell is Larry?” Sam asked her directly.
She shrugged from behind her computer screen. “He’s very immature,” she said, batting her eyelashes at me. Good lord, I realized that she was wearing makeup. Lots of it.
“Of all the gin-joints in all the towns in all the world,” Sam growled, scurrying from behind his desk and heading for the door. “Come on, Mutt! I’ve got to meet Bonnie Jo at the airport and you’ve got to find that kid before he runs back to Texas!”
“Bonnie Jo?” I called after him. I flicked my phone console to automatic answer and then dashed out after him. Melinda sat where she had been since eight that morning; her only exercise was reaching for a bag of nacho chips.
Bonnie Jo Murtchison was the daughter of our financial backer, the banker who wanted his daughter married.
“She’s coming in on the eleven o’clock plane,” Sam said over his shoulder as we rattled down the stairs and ran out to his leased Jaguar convertible. I never saw it with the top up, yet somehow it was always under shelter when Florida decided to have a cloudburst. Sam was uncanny that way.
“You’ll never make it to the airport by eleven,” I said, vaulting over the Jag’s door.
Sam gave me a sour look as he slid behind the wheel. “And when’s the last time any goddamned commercial airliner arrived on schedule?”
He had a point there.
The apartment that Larry and Melinda shared was on the way to the airport. Sam’s intention was to drop me off, assuming Larry was still there, and hustle on to the airport.
We spotted him on the driveway of the old frame three-storey house, packing all his belongings into their battered old Volvo station wagon. As far as I could see, Larry’s belongings consisted of one duffel bag of clothes and seventeen cartons of computer hardware and documentation books.
He was just getting into the car when we pulled up and blocked the driveway, just like the Highway Patrol.
“Where’re you going?” Sam yelped as he bounded out of the Jag. I followed behind, my boots crunching on the driveway’s gravel.
The three of us looked like a set of Russian dolls, the kind that fit one inside of the other. Sam stood about shoulder-high to Larry, who stood little more than shoulder-high to me.