Колин Маккалоу – On, Off (страница 9)

“I’m surprised that in this Hilton of a place everything is not piped in or laid on.”

She rose to her feet to tower. “Have you anything more to ask me, sir?”

“No. Thanks for your time.”

How do I get on the right side of her? he wondered as he walked up the hall to Tamara Vilich’s office. She’s a fount of information that I need badly.

The Prof’s secretary’s office had a door that directly communicated with his own office, Carmine noted as he entered.

“Do you realize,” Tamara Vilich said with a touch of acid in her voice, “that leaving us until last has created considerable inconvenience? I am late for an appointment.”

“The penalties of power,” Carmine said, not sitting. “You know, I’ve heard more stilted language and technical jargon today than I usually hear in months? I’m inconvenienced too, Miss Vilich. No breakfast, no lunch, and so far no dinner.”

“Then get on with it! I have to go!”

Desperation in her voice? Interesting. “Do you ever see the dead animal bags, ma’am?”

“No, I don’t.” She looked fretfully at her watch. “Damn!”

“Ever?”

“No, never!”

“Then you can keep your appointment, Miss Vilich. Thanks.”

“I’m too late!” she cried in despair. “Too late!”

But she was gone, running, before Carmine could knock on the communicating door.

The Prof was looking more worried than he had that morning, maybe, thought Carmine, because nothing’s happened since then to soothe his anxieties or satisfy his curiosity.

“I will have to inform the Board of Governors,” Smith said before Carmine had a chance to speak.

“Board of Governors?”

“This is a privately endowed institution, Lieutenant, that is supervised from on high by a board. You might say that we all have to sing for our suppers. The generosity of the Board of Governors is in direct proportion to the amount of genuinely original and significant work the Hug produces. Our reputation is second to none, the Hug has indeed made a difference. Now this—this—this singularity happens! A random event that has the power to affect the quality of our work drastically.”

“A random event, Professor? I don’t call murder random. But let’s leave that aside for a moment. Who’s on this board?”

“William Parson himself died in 1952. He left two nephews, Roger Junior and Henry Parson, in control of his empire. Roger Junior is Governor-in-Chief of the Board. Henry is his deputy. Their sons Roger III and Henry Junior are also Board members. The fifth Parson member is Richard Spaight, director of the Parson Bank and the son of William Parson’s sister. President Mawson MacIntosh of Chubb is a Governor, as is the Dean of Medicine, Dr. Wilbur Dowling. I, as Chair Professor, am the last,” said Smith.

“That gives the Parson contingent a strong majority. They must crack the whip hard.”

Smith looked astonished. “No, indeed! Anything but! As long as we produce the kind of brilliant work we have done for fifteen years, we have a virtual carte blanche. William Parson’s will was very specific. ‘Pay peanuts and you get monkeys’ was one of his favorite maxims. Therefore we do not pay peanuts at the Hug, and our researchers are infinitely brighter than the macaques downstairs. Hence my concern over this singularity, Lieutenant. Half of me insists it is a dream.”

“Professor, the body is real and the situation is real. But I want to digress for a moment.” Carmine’s face assumed a look that most who saw it found disarming. “What’s going on between Miss Dupre and Miss Vilich?”

Smith’s long face puckered. “Is it that obvious?”

“To me, yes.” No need to mention Hilda Silverman.

“For the first nine years of the Hug’s existence, Tamara was both my secretary and the business manager. Then she married. I assure you that I know absolutely nothing about the husband, except that after a few months he left her. During the time they were together, her work suffered terribly. With the result that the Board of Governors decided that we needed a qualified person to head our business affairs.”

“Was Miss Vilich’s husband a Hug-ite?”

“The term is ‘Hugger’, Lieutenant,” Smith said as if he were chewing wool. “Frank Watson’s barb went deep. If there are Chubbers, he said, then there ought to be Huggers as well. And no, the husband was not a Hugger or a Chubber.” He drew a deep breath. “To be perfectly candid, he led the poor girl into an embezzlement. We worked it out and took no further action.”

“I’m surprised the Board didn’t insist you fire her.”

“I couldn’t have done that, Lieutenant! She came to me from the Kirk Secretarial College here in Holloman, and has never had another job.” A huge sigh. “However, it was inevitable that when Miss Dupre arrived, Tamara took against her. A pity. Miss Dupre is excellent at her job—much better than Tamara was, in all honesty! Degrees in medical administration and accountancy.”

“A tough lady. Maybe they’d have gotten on better together if Miss Dupre was more of a glamour girl, huh?”

That bait was ignored; the Prof chose to say, “Miss Dupre is very well liked in all other quarters.”

Carmine glanced at his watch. “Time I let you go home, sir. Thanks for being so co-operative.”

“You don’t really think that the body has anything to do with the Hug and my people?” the Prof asked as he walked with Carmine down the hall.

“I think that the body has everything to do with the Hug and your people. And, Professor, postpone your board meeting until next Monday, please. You’re at liberty to explain the situation to Mr. Roger Parson Junior and President MacIntosh as of now, but the information chain cuts off right there. No exceptions, from wives to colleagues.”

Being next door to the Holloman County Services building meant that Malvolio’s found it profitable to stay open 24 hours a day. Perhaps because so many of its patrons wore navy-blue, the décor was after the manner of a powder-blue Wedgwood plate, with white molded plaster maidens, garlands and curliques to break up the blueness. Corey and Abe had long gone home when Carmine parked the Ford outside it and went in to order meatloaf with gravy and mashed potatoes, a side salad with Green Goddess dressing, and two wedges of apple pie à la mode.

Stomach full at last, he walked home to take a long shower, then fell naked into bed and didn’t remember his head hitting the pillow.

Hilda Silverman, home to find that Ruth had already made the dinner: a casserole of pork chops she hadn’t bothered to de-fat, Smash powdered mashed potatoes, a salad of iceberg lettuce limp and transparent from Italian dressing applied far too early, and a Sara Lee frozen chocolate cake for dessert. At least I have no trouble keeping my figure, Hilda thought; the miracle is how Keith manages to keep his, because he loves his mom’s cooking. That is about the only evidence of his poor white trash origins left in his character. No, Hilda, be fair! He loves his mom just as much as he loves her cooking.

Not that he was present. His plate was sitting, covered in foil, atop a pot of water that Ruth kept on the simmer until her son came in, even if that meant two or three in the morning.

Hilda disliked her mother-in-law because she was so defiantly poor white trash to this day, but they were joined at the hip—a hip named Keith—and jealousy did not enter the picture. Keith was all, that simple. If Keith preferred people not to know of his background, that was fine by his mom, who would have died for him as cheerfully as Hilda would have.

Ruth made a great deal of difference to Keith’s and Hilda’s comfort in that her presence enabled Hilda to continue in her very well paid job. Even better, Ruth actually liked living in an awful house in an awful neighborhood; it reminded her (and a shrinking Keith) of her old house in Dayton, Ohio. Another place where people filled their backyards with dead washing machines and rusted car bodies. As damp, as depressing, as cold as Griswold Lane in Holloman, Connecticut.

Keith and Hilda lived in the worst house on Griswold Lane because its rent was a pittance, enabling them to save most of their combined salaries (hers was twice his). Now that Keith was out of his residency and marking time as a post-doctoral fellow, he was planning to buy into a lucrative neurosurgical practice, preferably located in New York City. Not for Keith Kyneton the lowpaid drag of academic medicine! Mother and wife struggled heroically to help him achieve his ambition. Ruth was a natural cheapskate who deemed J.C. Penney’s outrageously expensive and bought the day before yesterday’s produce at the supermarket; Hilda scrimped over something as trivial as a haircut, wouldn’t buy a nice pair of barettes, and suffered her Coke-bottle-bottom glasses. Whereas Keith’s clothing and car had to be the best, and his work made the huge expense of contact lenses mandatory. What Keith wanted, Keith must have.

At which moment, just as Ruth and Hilda were sitting down, in breezed Keith, and with him the sun, the moon, the stars and all the angels in heaven. Hilda leaped to throw her arms around him, nuzzle her head under his chin—oh, he was so tall, so—so fantastic!