“May I have the tape, please?”
He handed it to her. She went over to the couch. She had cleared the long coffee table and set up electronic equipment on it. Two reel-to-reel recorders. A small amplifier. A piece of laboratory equipment which looked like an unfinished television receiver. Two small speakers on the floor.
As she threaded the tape onto one of the decks, he said, “It’s just a lot of standard husband and wife talk. Russo said to just turn on that machine and make sure she talked.”
Miss McGann made no reply. She started the tape, adjusted the amplifier controls, then leaned back on the couch, arms folded, eyes half-closed. And the breakfast table voices of Wyatt and Mary Lou Ross, husband and wife, came into the room with a special clarity, a startling presence. The small routines of domesticity. The man had fixed the dishwasher but it still wasn’t working right Denny’s new tooth looked as if it was coming in sideways. Maria wants three days off to go visit her sick sister down in Brownsville. She wants to borrow the bus fare.
And then a part that made him edgy and uncomfortable.
“Darling, you look so tired. And you seem so kind of remote. I suppose it’s all this trouble with the government. They’re sort of persecuting you, aren’t they?”
“That’s a good word, honey.”
“Is it... real bad trouble?”
“Pretty bad.”
“They’re saying such ugly things about you in the newspapers. It hurts me when they say things like that. I know you’re not like that.”
“Thanks.”
“Wyatt, darling?”
“What is it?”
“It’s all a lot of misunderstandings, isn’t it? I mean you haven’t ever done anything... sneaky and underhanded, have you? I shouldn’t even ask you that. I know you better than that.”
“I’m absolutely clean, honey. Believe me.”
“I do. Then this is just something... we have to go through, and they’ll find out they’re wrong about you. I think I would just die if you ever did anything crooked. I love you and I know you couldn’t. I shouldn’t spoil your breakfast by even talking about it. I’m sorry.”
“You have a right to ask, honey. You have a right to be reassured.”
“Well, I wish it was over, dam it.”
Wyatt’s face felt hot. The conversation turned to trivialities — to invitations they couldn’t accept, to when the dog should have his shots, to what to send her mother for her birthday this year.
The tape ended. Miss McGann said, “That sounds like a nifty little wife, Mr. Ross.”
“She is a nifty little wife indeed.”
“North Carolina?”
“Until she was about fifteen, and then her family moved to Atlanta.”
“Nifty little wife isn’t going to take this very well, is she?”
“I’m paying Russo a very large piece of money to get me out from under. The deal does not include my listening to your personal appraisals, Miss McGann.”
“Correction, dearie. I’m not on your conglomerate payroll. I am a specialist, and I am damned good, and I get paid very very well. You got too confident and you got too cute and you got caught. You can lose your ass, fellow. Russo knows it, you know it, and I know it. I think your Mary Lou is better than you deserve, and I think you will be doing her a favor by dropping her off the back of your sleigh, fellow. I say what I want when I want to, and take crap from no man alive. Now tell me you’re not used to being talked to like this. And I will tell you to relax and enjoy it. Now let me get to work.”
She ran the tape back and found a place she wanted. A simple sentence. “Maria gets so all gloomy and dramatic when there’s any kind of family trouble, especially financial problems.”
“Why that one?” Wyatt asked.
“Why not?” she said.
“Look, Miss McGann. Truce. I’m in trouble. I’m humble. I need your help. My name is Wyatt.”
She studied him, head tilted, then smiled for the first time. “Sure. Call me Ruth. That sentence has the sounds in it that are going to give me the most trouble. She turns financial, for example, into a four syllable word. Fye-nance-you-wull.”
She recorded the sentence from tape to tape ten times, leaving blank tape between each repeat. She then replayed the new tape, watching the ever-changing graph pattern on the screen of the unfamiliar piece of equipment.
With a microphone, she then repeated the sentence, recording it onto the new tape in the blank spots she had left, working the piano key controls of the recorder deftly while she watched the sound pattern, the voice profile, on the screen.
Wyatt Ross felt disappointment. The imitation seemed way off, unconvincing. Ruth McGann opened a small jar and took out a wad of pink, puttylike material, broke off two pieces, thumbed them into her cheeks outside her back molars.
“Changes the amount of space inside the mouth,” she explained. “Changes the resonance. I can alter the pitch.”
She practiced for a little while, then put the duplicate tape on the first machine and a fresh tape on the second. She spoke at the same time, saying the same words, and both voice patterns appeared on the screen, becoming ever more similar.
Then she turned the equipment off and said, “Wyatt, darling, what in the world are you doing in this hotel room with this female person?”
The uncanny accuracy of it made him jump. It was Mary Lou’s voice coming out of the stranger’s mouth. She laughed at his startled look, and it was Mary Lou’s laugh.
“Now I got it, I better stay with it right along, because if I go back to being me, I’ll like lose the taste of it, dear.”
“It’s a very weird sensation.”
“Honey, we better go over the little scripts. Here’s your copies. Soon as we get to sounding natural, then we can put them on the tape.”
Russo had worked out the dialogue. Ruth McCann became very irritated with Wyatt when he could not get away from the sound of somebody reading something. Once he had the sense of it, she made him put it aside and ad lib it. Finally, by changing her own lines, she was able to help him sound natural.
They taped the first exchange and then listened to it on playback.
“You got time for more coffee, darling?” she asked.
“I guess so. Sure.”
“Wyatt?”
“What is it?”
“I think there was a Kallen girl in school with me In Atlanta. Could that be the same family?”
“Where did you get that name from, Mary Lou?”
“Well, I couldn’t help seeing it. All those papers about the Kallen Equipment Company all over your desk in the study. I don’t let Maria go in there, but somebody has to do a little bit of dusting and cleaning. I saw the name and I wondered about that girl.”
“I don’t know. The company is in Michigan.”
“That’s who you went up there to see last week?”
Listening to the tape, he could appreciate Russo’s cleverness. It back-dated the conversation by almost six months.
“Yes, but it’s strictly confidential, honey.”
“Oh! Are you going to buy that little old company? My goodness, if you keep on buying things, doesn’t it get hard to keep track of everything?”
“Not with the team I’ve got working for me.”
“But why do you want that little company?”
“Because it’s there, honey.”
“Oh, come on!”
“Well, for instance they’ve got about sixteen million dollars worth of raw land, at fair resale value, and it’s carried on their books at what it cost them way back. Eight hundred thousand dollars.”
“Wow! Do they know that?”
“They sure do, honey. That’s why we might have to give them one share of Wyro for every share of Kallen outstanding, which is a difference of better than twice what their shares are worth oh the big board.”