Chapter Seven: The Database
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I was sitting back in my assigned divan when Sally led Vince through the magic door at the top of the staircase and down into Clarence’s batcave.
“What the --,” the distant memory of parental displeasure may have been why Vince cut that sentence short as he took a look around this very remarkable room. Or maybe he just didn’t know the word for steampunk yet.
I gave my friend a little wave but let him follow my eyes to the monitor showing a very angry Cynthia Ito giving a piece of her mind to the JJ’s. I had known him long enough to detect the hint of a smile which was long gone before Sally had a clue.
“Ms. Druthers,” I saw Vince take out an old fashioned reporter’s notebook and a pen. “Why don’t you fill Captain Smith in on what you’ve been telling me.”
Vince’s head nodded at Sally after every couple of sentences as she outlined the story as she knew it. At the end of each nod, Vince’s eyes would return to the notepad. When she was done, it looked to me like he was on page ten of the little spiral pad.
“Ms. Druthers, given all you’ve told me here today, who exactly do you think had a motive to kill your brother?” Vince gave Sally his most earnest look.
“What the fuck?” Sally turned to me with annoyance. “Is your friend here deaf, dumb, and blind?”
“Let’s go at it another way,” I raised a hand to calm Vince. “Who would stand the most to lose from what your brother had been studying? And perhaps more importantly, who else knew what he was up to?”
“I thought you were the only person who knew all of the details,” tears started to roll down Sally Druthers’ cheeks.
“Ms Druthers,” Vince tried again. “Why don’t you let me bring the police department’s electronic forensics department down here to study your, uh, system. We need to find out who Clarence was really communicating with in these e-mails.”
Over Christmas break in our sophomore year, Vince had elected to stay on campus rather than make the long trek to wherever his parents were stationed that year, likely in some secure undisclosed location. I had gone home and spent the holiday with my parents and friends from High School but returned to Sonoma State the day before New Year’s Eve, theoretically to get some studying done but in reality just to spend time with Vince. I had brought a few bottle rockets left over from my job at a Fourth of July fireworks stand the previous summer to help ring in the New Year.
I thought back to the slow burn of the fuse leading suddenly to a sustained whistling launch then to a spectacular explosion that illuminated the vineyards for what seemed like miles around when I watched Sally Druthers register Vince’s suggestion.
She sat motionless for about the same amount of time the fuse took to burn. Then, like the bottle rocket launching towards the heavens over Sonoma County, Sally Druthers shot straight up off the sofa. Her arms flowered over her head as the powder in the firework detonated.
“There is no fucking way I am bringing a bunch of goddamned city bureaucrats into this home so that they can sabotage my brother’s life work,” Sally’s face pulsated the same red tones as at the heart of the bottle rocket’s burst. Blue light reflected off her hair as she shook her head with vigor. I realized the light was coming off Cynthia Ito’s Navy dress that seemed to fill the screen showing the scene outside the home. “If you think there’s any way that’s going to happen, Mr. Po-Lees Captain, you are fucking buts.”
I almost corrected her to say, you mean “fucking nuts” but realized that would probably not be the correct move at this exact moment in our relationship.
Just like the bottle rocket went from incendiary sparkle to just memory in a matter of seconds, the outburst seemed to have sucked all of the energy out of Sally Druthers.
Vince had sat out the entire rockets’ red glare without moving from his seated position on the divan next to me. Now he reached for his wallet, I assumed to pull out a business card. Instead he glanced hard and deep into my eyes, the way he had while trying to make me understand some complex note in physics all of those years ago, then led my gaze down to the wallet. He flipped past the business cards, past his driver’s license, past the photo of Amy from their wedding day two days after graduation, over the picture of his graduation day from the police academy, and landing on a snapshot of Blake.
My only child stared back at me from the prow of a deep sea fishing trawler. Vince loved to rent fishing boats and take my son out to the Farallons to spot whales and haul in the night’s catch. This photo was from four years ago, a trip to celebrate Blake’s very early entrance to Stanford at the age of 16.
“What the hell are you two doing over there on my brother’s divan with him dead and his killers still on the loose?” Sally had recovered some energy and anger but still at nowhere near her earlier level of intensity.
While I smiled at the memory, Vince shook his wallet insistently at me. Then I got it and met his gaze. Vince reached back for a business card and slid it across the small wooden table to Sally.
“If you change your mind, here’s how to reach me,” Vince stood, glanced back at me, then made for the staircase. He knew he had to get out of there for our, okay, his plan to work.
“You stay here,” Sally pointed a finger at me. “And this time I mean it, don’t touch nothing.”
This time I did stay seated while I watched on the monitors as Sally escorted Vince first back into the living room then outside onto the porch. The outside camera showed Vince huddling with the JJ’s while Jenkins sprayed the house and the neighborhood with his Channel Five video camera. I couldn’t see Cynthia and suspected she was canvassing the neighbors. That’s what I would have done in her place.
Sally was just opening the door to return to her brother’s room as I saw Vince finish his confab with the JJ’s and walk to his command car and drive off. Hector looked pissed off at the turn of events, but I suspect he’s pretty much always that way. Tommy put a hand on his shoulder in a calming manner but that’s all I had time to take in before Sally was back in my face.
“I know you said that Captain fellow is your friend but if that’s the best this city can produce, I think we’re in deep fucking shit,” a small poof of dust arose from her chair as she settled down across from me.
“Sally, you’ve got to understand, Captain Smith has to play by the rules, and sometimes those rules don’t make a hell of a lot of sense to outsiders.”
“I guess so,” Sally reached for a brass box about six inches square, pried open the lid, and removed a clean, pressed handkerchief. She went back to dabbing her eyes. “I’m just so confused. Where do we go from here?”
“Why don’t you tell me about your brother’s research. What had he been working on lately?”
“It’s all in the database,” Sally’s white billowy dress knocked an old copy of Wired magazine off the table in front of her and onto the carpet as she stood. “It’s all in the database.”
“That database almost certainly has the answer to finding the person responsible for Clarence’s murder,” I stayed seated hoping to get her to calm down and focus. Instead Sally started pacing between a floor-standing torch light and a wooden desk piled with what appeared to be technical manuals. “Someone who knows what he’s doing has got to take a look at it.”
“I do not trust some civil servant,” I cut her off with a raised hand.
“That’s not what I’m suggesting,” I pulled out my wallet as I stood and met her in mid-pace directly in front of a painting of a 19th Century pastoral scene featuring haystacks and peasants with pitchforks. God only knew what miniature cameras were hidden in its rococo frame. “Take a look at this.”
I showed Sally one of my favorite pictures of Blake. He had been up most of the night trying to solve some problem I couldn’t begin to understand on the computer \. He sat in his room, hair disheveled, soda bottles dangling from a full trashcan, and a look of triumph on his face.
“This is my son Blake,” Sally took the photo and for the first time since I arrived at her house I saw the glimmer of a smile. It made me realize what a beauty she must once have been. “This is from his first year at Stanford. He’ll be graduating here in a couple of months with a double-major degree in computer science and literature. Not only would he love this room, he’s the only person I know who could figure all of this out. And he’s the most trustworthy person I know.”
“I just don’t know what to do,” Sally held onto the picture of Blake with such intensity I feared she would crinkle it. I gently took it from her and put it back in my wallet.
“Ms Druthers, uh Sally,” I held her by the shoulders and stared deep into her eyes. “You asked for my help. This is what I can offer. Blake knows more about databases and complex systems than 99.9% of the people in this world. And he has the knowledge of 19th Century literature that I think might be needed to get past whatever defenses your brother might have in place. Please let me call him and get him over here. Nothing he finds will go to the police or anywhere else without your approval. Okay?”
“Okay, how soon can he start?”
“I will call him as soon as I can get someplace with a cell phone signal,” Sally nodded towards the stairs and made a move in that direction. “There’s something else we need to talk about first.
“What’s that?” Her defenses started to rise again.
“Sally, you know I want to help, and you’re right I do feel some responsibility here for your brother,” she dabbed her eyes with the hanky. “But I also have a job to do. While I clearly made a mistake in not taking your brother more seriously when he was alive, Clarence Druthers is now one of the biggest stories in the Bay Area and I have to cover it.”
I pulled out my voice recorder and led Sally back to the divan.
“I can’t tell you what to do but I can tell you it would help me a lot if you would do an exclusive interview with me for today’s radio. I just want to let people know about your brother and your love for him. I think it’s best if we don’t go into his investigation of the mayor or the database he had compiled. Let’s wait until we have something more substantial on that.”
She nodded her agreement.
“Also, my help does not depend on this being an exclusive, but the less you say to other reporters,” I pointed at Cynthia Ito and Fred Jenkins on the monitor showing her lawn, “the better I think it will be for all of us, yes including me.”
“If you say so,” Sally held my left knee as we sat.
She held it together pretty well through the interview then escorted me back into that front room which now didn’t seem nearly as creepy as when I had entered just about an hour earlier. I took down her phone numbers and e-mail addresses and told her she would be hearing from Blake before the day way out. We hugged and then I headed for the front door thinking about my next challenge, getting past Cynthia.
The Channel Five reporter surprised me by her absence as I stepped onto the front porch. Tommy James was swinging on the bench but just offered me a little wave. I dialed Blake to avoid conversation with the JJ’s but I did wonder where Hector and Cynthia had gone off to. The two of them both missing at the same time couldn’t be good news. Fred Jenkins walked up, camera on his shoulder, and seemed to give me a little apologetic shrug of the shoulders before videotaping my walk back to my car. Now that was weird but I didn’t think enough of it as I got in the Focus and drove away.
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