Роберт Стивенсон: Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 3, March 1990

“And you are going to be dead soon if you keep bothering me,” I said.

He peered at me for a minute. “I know how to make coffee,” he said finally.

I had my doubts, but I was a desperate man.

“I tell you what. You make coffee and I’ll take a shower.”

“Okay.”

When I got out of the shower, a steaming cup of coffee was sitting on the bathroom sink. He hadn’t lied. It was better than the stuff I make. I drank it while I dressed and went out to the kitchen to get another cup.

The kid was sitting on the living room floor with pieces of my television set scattered around him.

“What in God’s name are you doing to my TV?” I shouted.

“Fixing it. It’s a compulsion of mine. I couldn’t get Channel 2, and the cartoons are about to come on.”

I sighed and got another cup of coffee. This was the kind of kid even a mother would probably leave in the desert, or at least send out to play on the freeway. He was making me loco. Then I thought, well, if he can make coffee, maybe he can fix TV’s.

“I’m finished,” he called out. “See?”

I looked. The picture was terrific. “How about the others?”

He flipped through with the remote button. They were all clearer.

“Want me to rig you into cable?” he said.

“Isn’t that slightly illegal?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Sort of. I just wanted to see if you thought I could do it.”

“Okay. I believe you. Now, who are you, and what makes you think I have your toy?”

“My name is Don Gervase. Have you ever heard of me?”

“No. Should I have?” I remembered his voice from the answering machine.

“I created the Gervase Greeks.”

“What are they?”

“Toys — computerized simulations of war games.”

I raised my eyebrows — very carefully. “I’m impressed.”

“Yeah?”

“You must be pretty smart.”

He blushed. “I’m supposed to be some kind of boy genius. Too bad I can’t convince my mother. She won’t even let me drive.” His shoulders slumped.

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Oh. You still have baby fat. You need to exercise.”

“Yeah, I know. But the asthma slows me down.”

“Maybe if you make enough money with your toys, you can buy your own car.”

“I made twelve million last year. She won’t let me touch it until I’m twenty-one.”

“Your mother sounds like a tough broad.”

“Yeah.”

“So, what is this missing toy of yours that you think I have?”

“Last year I designed this game, see? It’s called the Trojan Horse. It was the top seller at Christmas, so the manufacturer wanted me to design another one that was even harder. You know, like, more complicated. I finished the prototype last week, but before I could send it off to the manufacturer, it was stolen from my safe by this guy named John Schroeder.”

“How do you know he stole it?”

“A guy I met at a science fiction convention last year told me about him. He hangs around guys like me, then goes off with their stuff. See, I had this problem with the Trojan Horse. Right after Christmas, another company ripped off the design and made knockoffs a lot cheaper, so I lost money I could have made. I didn’t worry when Schroeder started hanging around and calling me up and stuff because I had put this self-destruct device on the prototype, and I had a camera rigged up in my safe. I have really good photos of him taking it.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“I’m already in trouble with my mom. I didn’t want her to know it got stolen. She’d think I’m irresponsible, and then she’d never let me do anything.”

“Oh. What made you think that I had it?”

“I talked to Cynthia Hendricks. She told me your apartment had been broken into. It made sense that if Schroeder’s office was ransacked and he was killed there, it was by somebody who was looking for the chip. But if your place was broken into right after the piece in the paper about how his body was found, then whoever did it hadn’t found the chip and thought you had it.”

“That’s pretty good reasoning. How did you get to know Cynthia Hendricks?”

He looked uncomfortable. “She was always nice to me. I liked talking to her. When I found the office phone disconnected, I decided to call her at home. You know — see if she was all right.”

I sensed there was more to it than that, but I didn’t want to embarrass the kid.

“Anyway,” he said, “I have to deliver the chip to my manufacturer by Tuesday, even if Schroeder already opened it and destroyed the coding. That part I can do over again.”

“What was the coding part of it?”

“It was this light-sensitive... oh, forget it. You wouldn’t understand.”

“I get it. The minute you expose the insides to light, they don’t work any more.”

“Yeah.”

“Who was it who stole the Trojan Horse thing?”

“Anderson Toys. They’re in L.A.”

“Did they steal it from your house?”

“No. They just bought one and opened it up. Once it’s on the market, everybody rips you off.”

I was starting to get a sick feeling in my stomach. I stood up and took my wallet out of my back pocket. “Hey, kid, I need some time to think.” I handed him a twenty. “Could you run down the street to McDonald’s and get a bunch of Big Breakfasts or something?”

He looked suspicious. “I guess so.”

“How did you get in here?”

“My mom’s old VISA card. You need a better lock on that door.”

“Yeah.”

I lay down on the couch after he left and tried to piece everything together. Schroeder steals this toy design from the kid — Don. Maybe a buyer like Anderson sends him after it. What next? Schroeder gets greedy, decides to sell it to someone else, too, and tries to copy it. But suddenly he doesn’t have anything to sell, so he what? Maybe he cleans out his accounts and decides to leave town? That sounded good to me.

But what next? I thought about it for a while, and managed to put myself to sleep in the process. The next thing I knew, the kid was standing over me with a big white bag in his hand, shaking me awake.

“You snore,” he said.

“Only when I’m about to beat someone to death with my bare hands.”

“You have a weird sense of humor.”

While we ate, I explained what I had come up with.

“So, what you’re saying is that if I hadn’t booby-trapped Helen of Troy — that’s the name of the toy — Schroeder wouldn’t be dead.”

“Probably not, but you shouldn’t feel guilty about it. You didn’t ask him to steal your toy. Helen of Troy? Does this thing have a lot of sex in it?”

The fat kid blushed. “Not exactly.”

“So what does this toy look like?”

“It doesn’t look like a toy. It’s just the electronic components. The manufacturer is going to package it.” He reached into his pocket and took out a Polaroid snapshot. “That’s what it looks like.”

I slumped in my chair. “Ay, Dios.”

“What?”

“I’ve had your toy all along — I just didn’t realize it.”

“Where is it?”

“At the dry cleaner’s, probably.” It was all rushing back to me now — the little electronic part I had found in Schroeder’s car ashtray and forgotten to return at the lot in the excitement of discovering Schroeder’s body in the trunk; the dirt on my jacket from my trip to the linoleum floor of Schroeder’s outer office; the hasty trip to the cleaners on my way to work Thursday.

I fumbled for the car keys while Don Gervase looked on, worried. “Dry cleaning solution will destroy everything,” he said. “How long have your clothes been there?”

“Two days,” I said. “Don’t worry. Mr. Lee always cleans out my pockets.”