The nerd was Paul Rochemont, and his mother, Bernardine, was fighting middle age tooth and claw. From the neck up she was late 40s, the skin of her face smooth as porcelain and her blue eyes wide with the slightly surprised look successive face-lifts can impart. But her cantilevered bosom, skinny legs, and flat butt were all pushing 60.
“My mother made a mistake,” Paul was saying to Warren in an offhand manner, ignoring Giselle. “I don’t need a bodyguard. The security here at the estate is absolutely mega. I designed it myself. State-of-the-art electronic heat sensors, sound sensors, movement sensors, and some holograms that—”
“Nyernguy ahnnha hgatye ntutters.”
Rochemont splattered something around in some other language in his best Bogie impersonation, then turned to Giselle and added rudely in his real voice, “What did he say?”
“What did you say?”
“ ‘The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.’ In Greek.” To her blank stare, he added, “From The Maltese Falcon.”
What a dweeb, she thought. She said sweetly, “Ken told you that your guy on the gate stutters.”
“He’s programmed to make fun of any car which originally sold for under eighty-five thousand.”
“Stutters,” said Giselle.
“Hnditapeered,” added Ken.
“Stutters. Disappeared. I see.” Paul started pacing. “Holograms are just two beams of light overlapping in some substance that diffracts light. These beams interfere with each other, which creates a pattern of light and dark regions.”
Ken struggled with it. “Nhow ndoo gynyou gnreed it nout?”
“How do you read it out?”
Ken nodded. Obviously, Paul listened to how people spoke.
“You shine a third beam of light through it. Where there’s little information stored, this light goes right through. Where there’s a lot stored, an image is projected back as a diffracted light pattern. A guard, a pack of dogs, a dragon...”
“I’m glad you cleared that up,” said Giselle.
“Traditionally, the materials showing this photorefractive effect have been inorganic crystals. They’re okay for optical-processing, holographic, optical-limiting, phase conjugation, and storage applications, but they’re difficult and expensive to grow, and they leak a lot of light. So I’ve developed a photorefractive polymer that can put tiny structures on a single wafer in a portable projector. If Spielberg’d had my polymer when he was doing Jurassic Park...”
“Hnbut...”
“But? Ah! Yes! The guard on the gate, disintegrating. The worst feature of my new polymer is that it maintains the image’s integrity for only a few days. Which is also its best feature. Reversibility. You can store a hologram today, erase it tomorrow, and store a new one. What I’m working on is that and long-term storage capacity in the same polymer wafer...”
Bernardine, on the leather couch with Giselle beside her, was listening to her son with her mouth open as if in wonder at what she had wrought. She shut it with a snap.
“My son is a genius, Miss Marc. Only twenty-eight years old and in just a few days Electrotec will pay him a half a billion dollars in cash and options for what is in his head.”
Giselle gestured. “Photorefractive polymers?”
“No, no, a new computer chip he designed, three times as fast as the P6 and without any difficulties to the right of the decimal like the Pentium. The holograms are just his hobby — for now.” She waved a dismissive hand. “The trouble is that he developed the chip with a man named Frank Nugent.”
“And now Nugent is claiming he developed it?”
She sniffed in disdain. “Everybody knows my Paulie is the creative person in that combine. No, Nugent got a clause into their partnership agreement that if either one dies, the other inherits everything developed during their years together. Paulies agreement with Electrotec will supersede that.”
Giselle felt a surge of excitement. “You think Nugent wants to kill Paul before he can sign?”
Another sniff. “The police cannot prove he was behind the attack on the Mercedes. So let’s just say I want to hire your Daniel Kearny Associates to keep my son safe until the papers are signed. After that, no one will gain from his death.”
“We’re investigators, Mrs. Rochement,” said Giselle. “We don’t do bodyguard work. If you want us to look into the circumstances surrounding the attack on the car—”
“No,” said Bernardine, “physical protection. If you want to do the other, of course, that’s up to you, but...”
“Physical protection,” repeated Giselle almost absently.
Her eyes roamed the antebellum salon as she thought furiously. Vaulted ceilings, antimacassars on the armchairs — and that eerie Disneyland in the garden. There was almost certainly no real danger to the woman’s precious Paul here, even less to her. But the whole setup was so much more intriguing than the repossessions, skip-tracing, fraud and embezzlement investigations they were used to...
So she added, “I’ll ask Mr. Kearny about it immediately, Mrs. Rochemont. Either way you’ll have to tell me about the attack on the car. How many people in your household?”
“Servants, of course. Then Paulie, myself, and Paulies wife, Inga. He married her a year ago over my objections.”
A wife. Who presumably would inherit if anything terminal happened to Paul after the signing. Just as Nugent would inherit if he died before signing. Sounded as if Paulie were whiplashed.
She said cautiously, “If I could have some hint as to the basis of your objections to his marriage...”
That sniff again. “She used to be Frank Nugent’s poopsie!”
Poopsie? Anyway, the classic triangle under one roof; and if she was still Nugent’s poopsie, she had a solid motive for Paul’s death anytime. Kearny would run screaming from this one.
“I, of course, will need personal protection also.”
“If Mr. Kearny approves, I’m sure we can arrange—”
“Oh, I know who I want.”
With remarkable quickness and grace, she was out of the couch and across the room. A bemused Giselle followed. Bernardine already had a proprietary hand on Ken’s arm.
“You know, Mr. Warren, you remind me of the late Mr. Rochemont — so direct, so forceful!”
“Hnuh?”
“I feel Paul will be safe with you here. I feel we all will be safe with you here. A big, strong, physical person such as yourself, Mr. Warren, with your background and training...”
At 1:00 A.M., Georgi Petlaroc and Ray Do emerged from Queer Street. Petrock seemed still euphoric over the council vote despite having been knocked on his butt a few hours earlier.
“Fourteen other Class A hotels have signed the new master agreement,” he boasted. “Stanford Court has settled. The Fairmont has settled. And the Mark’s going to have to settle. The only way they’ll break this strike is over my dead body.”
“I don’t like to hear you talk that way,” said Ray Do. “Not after that Swede assaulted you tonight.”
“Swede” was one of the many p.c. euphemisms for blacks in daily use by street cops and union guys. They laughed and shook hands, then Ray Do went to his car parked on Polk Street.
Petrock’s Nissan Ultima was parked around the corner on midnight-deserted Post Street. In the bus stop next to the fire station across from it was a shiny black luxury sedan, perhaps a limo, motor running. The rear window was down, a shadowy figure sat in the backseat. A second was behind the wheel. The spark of a cigarette being inhaled glowed redly for a brief instant.