"Oh-oh," he said. "I know what's coming."
"There's this business on West Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan called Stuttgart Precious Metals, a subsidiary of an outfit registered in Luxembourg. Stuttgart leases their premises. I'll give you the address, and I need to know who owns the property and anything else you can find out about Stuttgart: the terms of the lease, how long they've occupied the place, and so forth."
"What's this got to do with the Starrett insurance claim?"
"Nothing," Dora said breezily. "I'm just having fun."
After he calmed down, she gave him the address of Stuttgart, and he promised to get back to her as soon as he had something.
"Miss me?" he asked her.
"I sure do," she said warmly. "What's your name again?"
She hung up on his profanity and then, a few minutes later, phoned Mario, and they talked for almost a half-hour. Dora got caught up on local gossip and told Mario how much she missed him and their little house.
"It's the home cooking you miss," he said.
"That, too," she agreed.
"When are you coming back?"
"Soon," she promised. "Have you been behaving yourself?"
"As usual," he said, which wasn't exactly what she wanted to hear.
But the talk with her husband cheered her, and she went to bed resolved to forget all about people with sloppy morals; nothing could equal the joy of a happy, faithful marriage.
But sleep did not come easily; her equanimity didn't last, and she found herself questioning again. So she got out of bed to kneel and pray. It was something she hadn't done for a long while, and she thought it was about time.
Chapter 37
Felicia Starrett was not a stupid woman, but introspection dogged her like a low-grade infection. She was aware- continually aware-that her life lacked some essential ingredient that might make it meaningful, or at least endurable. Her mother never ceased to remind her that a loving mate and a happy marriage would solve all her problems. That advice, Felicia thought wryly, was akin to telling a penniless, starving bum that he really should eat good, nourishing meals.
But it was true, she admitted, that her relations with men had soured her life. She was still in her teens, with the arrogance of youth, when she began to offer money or valuable gifts to men. This pattern continued after she was graduated from Barnard and, in an effort to find the cause of this curious behavior, she read many books of popularized psychology. But none offered clues as to the reason she continually met (or sought?) men who accepted her largesse casually as if it were their due.
At various periods of self-analysis she had ascribed different motives for her compulsive generosity. First she thought it was a power ploy: She wanted to dominate men. In fact, she wanted to own them, reduce them to the role of paid servitors. Finally she concluded that she gave money because she was unable to give love. She was fearful of commitment, recognized the deficiency, and lavished gifts as a substitute.
But recognizing the cause did nothing to ameliorate her unhappiness. And so she surrendered to addictions: caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, a variety of drugs, and eventually cocaine, in an endless search for the magic potion that would provide the joy life had denied her.
She thought her search had finally succeeded when Turner Pierce provided ice, the smokable methampheta-mine. Here was a bliss that turned her into a beautiful creature floating through a world of wonders. The high was like nothing she had ever experienced before.
But there was a heavy price to pay. The crash was horrendous: nausea, incontinence, dreadful hallucinations, fears without name, and frequently violence she could not control. But Turner-the darling!-was always there to minister to her and, when the worst had passed, to provide more of those lovely crystals in a glass pipe, and then she soared again.
She was vaguely aware of vomiting, weight loss, respiratory pain, thundering heartbeat, and heightened body temperature. But she became so intent on achieving that splendid euphoria that she would have paid any price, even life itself, if she might slip away while owning the world.
But death held no lure, for there, always, was Turner who had promised to marry her, an act of love that made her happiness more intense. So joyful was she that she was even able to acknowledge the beauty and beneficence of Helene-a woman she had formerly mistrusted-who came once to help Turner bathe her and wash her hair. And also clean up the apartment, which Felicia, during a vicious crash, had almost destroyed, slashing furniture with a carving knife, breaking mirrors, and smashing all those cute china figurines belonging to the landlord.
So she alternated between ecstasy and despair, hardly conscious of time's passage but, in her few semilucid moments, realizing with something like awe that she would soon be a married woman and finally, at last, her life would be meaningful.
Chapter 38
Dora drove around the block twice, and then around two blocks twice. Finally, three blocks away, she found a parking space she hoped she might be able to occupy, but it took ten minutes of sweaty maneuvering to wedge the Escort against the curb. She locked up and walked back to Gregor Pinchik's building in SoHo. She didn't even want to think about the eventual problem of wiggling the Ford out of that cramped space.
The computer maven had the top floor of an ancient commercial building that had recently been renovated. There were new white tiles on the lobby floor, and on the walls were Art Deco lighting fixtures with nymphs cavorting on frosted glass. The original freight elevator-big enough to accommodate a Steinway-had been spruced up with crackled mirrors and framed prints of Man Ray photographs.
Pinchik's loft was illuminated by two giant skylights that revealed a sky as dull as a sidewalk. But there was track lighting to fill the corners, and Brahms played softly from an Aiwa stereo component system that had more knobs, switches, gauges, and controls than a space shuttle.
"How about this, lady?" Gregor cried, waving an arm at his equipment.
He gave Dora what he called the "fifty-cent tour," warning her not to trip on the wires and cables snaking across the floor. He displayed, and occasionally demonstrated, a bewildering hodgepodge of computers, monitors, printers, modems, tapes and disks, telephones, fax and answering machines, digital pagers, hand-held electronic calculators, and much, much more.
"I'm a gadget freak," the bearded man admitted cheerfully. "If it's electronic, I gotta have it. A lot of this stuff is junk, but even junk can be fun. Now you sit down over here, and I'll get you caught up on the adventures of our pigeon."
Dora sat in a comfortable swivel chair, and Pinchik perched on a little steel stool that rolled about on casters. He settled in front of a monitor and punched a few buttons with his stubby fingers.
"I put the whole file on one tape," he said. "You know what I collected in Dallas and Denver. Now we'll get to the new things."
Typed lines began to reel off across the screen, and Pinchik leaned closer to read.
"All right," he said, "here's the scoop I got from my hacker pals in KC. Our hero showed up in Kansas City after leaving Denver. Now he's Turner Pierce. Same initials, but who the hell knows if it's his real name."
"Still got the mustache?" Dora asked.
"Still got it. And he's still on the con. The reason the KC hackers knew so much about him was that he set up what was apparently a legitimate business. Office, secretary, letterheads, advertisements-the whole schmear. He called himself a computer consultant and designer of complete systems for any size business, large or small. He was one of the first in that field in KC, and he made out like gangbust-ers. First of all, he knew his stuff, and he never tried to sell a client more hardware than he needed. Of course Pierce was probably getting a kickback on the equipment he did recommend, but that was small potatoes. He lined up some hefty clients: a bank and its branches, a local college, an insurance company, a chain of retail shoe stores, and a lot of factories, distributors, supermarkets, an entire shopping mall, and so forth."