Джон Макдональд - S*E*V*E*N

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.”

“Now you’ve lost me, sweetheart. More coffee?”

“I better run. If you get a chance, find out about the suit the cleaner lost.”

Ruth McGann switched it off. “You’re a little wooden, but it’s good enough. Let’s get these others done.”

There was one where she pried into the profitability of Wyro until he told her that their next quarterly earnings statement was going to be about half what had been estimated, and another where he told her he had decided to break off negotiations to acquire Henderson Homes.

After she had listened intently to the playback, Ruth turned off the equipment and sighed, plucked the two wads of pink plastic substance from her mouth, and got up and went into the bathroom. When she came back she said in her normal voice, “That should do it.”

“But what happens next? How can Russo explain the reason the tapes were made in the first place?”

“There’s a lot of options. He won’t come into it at all. Somebody will show up with the tapes. In the interest of fair play and all that. Mr. Russo makes everything logical. Don’t worry about it. It will all fit together. I could make a guess, but it won’t mean much.”

“Go ahead.”

“Some woman hired an investigator to get the goods on your Mary Lou and her husband. So the investigator bugged the house, and because it isn’t exactly legal, he sends the tapes in with an anonymous letter of explanation, sends them to your attorneys.”

“That won’t be enough.”

“Not without some trimmings. Maybe a fake phone tap, Mary Lou talking to an unidentified boyfriend.” She switched to Mary Lou’s voice. “Sweetheart, I’m doing the best I can, I really am. I mean I’ve never paid much attention to all this business stuff in the past. I’ve been asking him everything you told me to ask him, lover, and I’ve been telling you everything he says, but when can we stop all this? When will you have enough money so we can go away, my dearest? I think of you every living minute of the day and night, honest. I love you so.”

He found that he was standing. And roaring. “No, dammit! I won’t stand for that!”

“Dearie, you were very shifty the way you worked those accounts. Nobody can tie you directly to them, Mr. Russo says. But he says you were stupid with the timing, because you made your moves in the market on the basis of information known to you alone. He says you were greedy-stupid, getting in at the bottom and out at the top. And you pulled the cash out in a way that it can’t be traced back to you.”

“I had to do something! Too many things started to go wrong all at the same time.”

“We all have our little rationalizations, sugar. You made your moves and you siphoned off the cash, and if you hadn’t you couldn’t afford Russo to get you into the clear. But you didn’t declare it, and you haven’t planned on paying taxes on it. And unless you can throw them some alternative, you get your pick of Leavenworth or Atlanta or some other garden spot.”

“But I was doing it for...”

Wise and crooked smile, too old for her mouth and face. “For the wife and kiddies? Come on! Any way you deal the hand, you’ve lost your Mary Lou. Best to set it up to look as if somebody was using her. Otherwise she could get clipped for tax evasion. After they play the tapes and question her, and after you testify that those are conversations you had with your wife, you think she’ll forgive and forget?”

“No.”