Warren Murphy: Bottom Line

"Yeah," Ruby said. "I know. It ain't Connecticut."

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"Right."

She found Zack Meadows in the sixth locker. There was no mistaking the bloated face. Looking down at him, covered only by a sheet, his hair matted around his head as if he had died stepping out of the shower, Ruby thought to herself that even in death, Zack Meadows looked stupid. She bit her lip. You shouldn't talk bad of the dead, her mother had always told her. God would punish you for that. She inspected the corpse carefully. The fingertips on both hands were destroyed. They looked as if they had been cut off.

"That's unusual, isn't it?" she said.

"What?" asked the cop.

Ruby pointed to Meadows' fingers. The cop shrugged.

"Who knows?" he said.

The tag on Meadows's toe said he had been taken out of Central Park's lake, with another body, two weeks before.

"Where's the other body?" she said.

"Let's see." The patrolman looked at the tag. "It ought to say on the tag but it don't. I don't know what the hell help is coming to when they can't do a simple thing like put the right information on a toe tag. The kind of people we get around here."

"Where might the other body be?" Ruby asked patiently.

"Around here somewhere," he said angrily. "You done with this one?"

"Yeah."

The cop slammed the rolling tray back into the freezer locker. It hit the back wall with a loud metal-

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lie clank. God help Zack Meadows, Ruby thought, at the hands of this cretin.

The cop began to pull out slabs quickly, just checking the toe information. On the fourth try, he found it.

"Here it is," he said. "Central Park lake. Same day. That's it. Want to see him?"

"Yes," Ruby said.

He pulled out the tray and pulled down the sheet from the face. It was a small man with thinning hair and a mousey meek face. Ruby checked his hands. His fintertips too had been cut off.

"Probably two guys got a load on and got into a swimming contest and both of them drownded," the cop said.

"In December?" Ruby said.

"Could be. Remember, this . . ."

"I know. It ain't Connecticut," Ruby said. "What do you make of their fingertips being mutilated?"

"I don't make nothing of it," the policeman said.

No wonder the city was like Fort Apache, Ruby thought. She gave the small corpse an encouraging slap on the bottom of its bare foot, then smiled at the cop.

"Thanks. You've been a big help," she said.

"All right," he said. "Maybe you can do something for me some day."

"Hope so," Ruby said. Like put a tag on your toe, she thought.

Out front, Ruby caught another cab and gave it the name of Remo's hotel. Inside the hotel, the desk clerk looked at her as if she were a hooker on her way to visit a John with a middle-of-the-night urge.

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She rode a squeaking elevator up to the twenty-third floor and stood outside Remo's door. She found a pen and paper in her purse and wrote a note.

Chiun heard the noise instantly. Something had been pushed under their door. He rose quietly from the grass mat on which he slept. Remo was asleep in the inside bedroom. Chiun saw the piece of paper on the floor. He opened the note and looked at it. The greeting read: "Dear Dodo." Chiun decided the note was not for him. He crumpled it onto the floor and went back to his mat to return to sleep. He hoped the squeaking of the elevator did not keep him awake all night.

Back in the lobby, the clerk again looked at Ruby with distaste. Once he could have gotten away with; twice was too much.

Ruby walked up to the desk and even though the clerk was standing directly in front of her, she slammed her hand down on the night service bell, sending a loud ring throughout the lobby.

"What was that for?" the clerk asked in his best surly manner.

"Just making sure you alive," Ruby said.

"And now that you're sure . . ."

"Who says I'm sure?" Ruby asked. "All I see is somebody staring down his long nose and making sounds."

The clerk took a breath. "What is it, Miss, that you want? We don't want people hanging around the lobby, if you get my drift."

Ruby dug her wallet from her purse and opened it to a New York City police identity card.

"That elevator over there ain't been inspected in the last six months like it's supposed to be," she said.

The clerk looked startled. He stammered. "Just an oversight, I'm sure."

"People get killed by oversights," Ruby said. "If I look at all the rest of them elevators, you think they'll have oversights too?"

"I ... er ... I don't know."

"Well, I'm going to take it easy on you. I won't be back till noon. Make sure those elevators are checked by then 'cause if they ain't, I'm going to close them all down and you can have your guests walk upstairs. You get my drift?"

"Yes, ma'am."

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137

CHAPXER TWELVE

Dr. Elena Gladstone had not been able to get back to sleep in her apartment above the Lifeline Laboratory.

She had felt relieved when Dr. Jesse Beers called her to let her know that he had "taken care" of Randall Lippincott before the man had a chance to talk.

"Better late than never," she had told him.

But what kept her awake was a telephone call she did not receive and as the clock moved on toward 4 A.M., she began to doubt if she was ever again going to hear from the two men she had sent after the Oriental and the American. They should have been back by now, but they had not returned and they had not called and inside she had the sinking feeling that perhaps the two government agents—what were their names, Remo and Cbiun?—just perhaps there was more to them than met the eye. They had managed to keep Randall Lippincott alive, when by all medical practice he should have been dead. How had they done it? It had caused no real danger. Jesse Beers had taken care of it, but still those two were a threat. For a brief moment, a chill passed through her body and she thought that perhaps she might be willing to get out of the whole business.

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She rejected that thought right away. She wasn't talking aboui wealth; she was thinking about riches. Not just millions, but hundreds of millions. She was thinking of yachts and villas and chauffeurs and the beautiful Ufe.

Nothing must get in the way of that dream.

Ruby saw the silent alarm wires in the back door of the laboratory, so she did not attempt to slip the door. She rooted around inside her pocketbook and found a long wire with two thin adhesive clips on the ends. She carefully pressed the clips into the top of the door, until she was able to bridge the two wires of the alarm.

Then she picked the lock with a small tool from a set she carried with her.

"CIA was good for something," she mumbled to herself.

She stood inside the closed door of the laboratory for long minutes, waiting, ready to flee if another alarm had sounded and alerted someone. Her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. She saw the cages lining the wall, cages of rats and mice and monkeys. She examined them clinically. While most people might be afraid of rats and mice, in the neighborhood where Ruby had grown up, they were constant companions, and you didn't stay emotionally fearful of them for long. When Ruby was ten years old, a rat had climbed into her bed and bitten her. She had grabbed it behind the head, and beaten it to death with the spiked heel of her mother's shoe.

The animals quieted as Ruby stood in the room. She listened. Had Zack Meadows been here too? Had he come to find out what was going on, only to

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wind up dead in the Central Park lake? If that was what had happened, Ruby realized she had better be very careful.

There was no point in trying to sleep anymore so Elena Gladstone dressed casually in blue jeans and a plaid shirt and decided to go down to the laboratory to look in on her latest experiments. She had succeeded in conditioning a rat to be afraid of metal, to the point that the rat went berserk if placed in a metal cage. Even after hundreds of experiments, she never lost her sense of wonder that a learned response such as fear, trained into an animal, would produce a substance in the animal's brain that could be isolated, purified, and intensified so that it could be injected into the bloodstream of another animal and produce exactly the same fear.