Door Into Summer

"Danny boy, you're being very tiresome. Why in the world should I remember something like that?"

"What was it'?"

"Oh, Hanolon ... or Haney... Heinz. Or it might have been Hinckley. Don't be dull, dear. Let's have a drink. Let's drink a toast to our happy reunion."

I shook my head. "I don't use the stuff." This was almost true. Having discovered that it was an unreliable friend in a crisis, I usually limited myself to a beer with Chuck Freudenberg.

"How very dull, dearest. You won't mind if I have one." She was already pouring it-straight gin, the lonely girl's friend. But before she downed it she picked up a plastic pill bottle and rolled two capsules into her palm. "Have one?"

I recognized the striped casing-euphorion. It was supposed to be non-toxic and non-habit-forming, but opinions differed. There was agitation to class it with morphine and the barbiturates.

"Thanks. I'm happy now."

"How nice." She took both of them, chased them with gin. I decided if I was to learn anything at all I had better talk fast; soon she would be nothing but giggles.

I took her arm and sat her down on her couch, then sat down across from her. "Belle, tell me about yourself. Bring me up to date. How did you and Miles make out with the Mannix people?"

"Uh? But we didn't." She suddenly flared up. "That was your fault!"

"Huh? My fault? I wasn't even there."

"Of course it was your fault. That monstrous thing you built out of an old wheel chair... that was what they wanted. And then it was gone."

"Gone? Where was it?"

She peered at me with piggy, suspicious eyes. "You ought to know. You took it."

"Me? Belle, are you crazy? I couldn't take anything. I was frozen stiff, in cold sleep. Where was it? And when did it disappear?" It fitted in with my own notions that somebody must have swiped Flexible Frank, if Belle and Miles had not made use of him. But out of all the billions on the globe, I was the one who certainly had not. I had not seen Frank since that disastrous night when they had outvoted me. "Tell me about it, Belle. Where was it? And what made you think I took it?"

"It bad to be you. Nobody else knew it was important. That pile of junk! I told Miles not to put it in the garage."

"But it somebody did swipe it, I doubt if they could make it work. You still had all the notes and instructions and drawings."

"No, we didn't either. Miles, the fool, had stuffed them all inside it the night we had to move it to protect it."

I did not fuss about the word "protect." Instead I was about to say that he couldn't possibly have stuffed several pounds of paper into Flexible Frank, he was already stuffed like a goose when I remembered that I had built a temporary shelf across the bottom of his wheel-chair base to hold tools while I worked on him. A man in a hurry might very well have emptied my working files into that space.

No matter. The crime, or crimes, had been committed thirty years ago. I wanted to find out how Hired Girl, Inc., had slipped away from them. "After the Mannix deal fell through what did you do with the company?"

"We ran it, of course. Then when Jake quit us Miles said we had to shut down. Miles was a weakling... and I never liked that Jake Schmidt. Sneaky. Always asking why you had quit. as if we could have stopped you! I wanted us to hire a good foreman and keep going. The company would have been worth more. But Miles insisted."

"What happened then?"

"Why, then we licensed to Geary Manufaturing, of course. You know that; you're working there now."

I did know that; the full corporate name of Hired Girl was now "Hired Girl Appliances and Geary Manufacturing, Inc." although the signs read simply "Hired Girl." I seemed to have found out all I needed to know that this flabby old wreck could tell me.

But I was curious on another point. "You two sold your stock after you licensed to Geary?"

"Huh? Whatever put that silly notion in your head?" Her expression broke and she began to blubber, pawing feebly fox a handkerchief, then giving up and letting the tears go. "He cheated me! He cheated me! The dirty shiker cheated me...he kinked me out of it." She snuffled and added meditatively, "You all cheated me... and you were the worst of the lot, Danny boy. After I had been so good to you." She started to bawl again.

I decided that euphorion wasn't worth whatever it cost-or maybe she enjoyed crying. "How did he cheat you, Belle?"

"What? Why, you know. He left it all to that dirty brat of his after all that he had promised me... after I nursed him when he hurt so. And she wasn't even his own daughter. That proves it."

It was the first good news I had had all evening. Apparently Ricky had received one good break, even if they had grabbed my stock away from her earlier. So I got back to the main point "Belle, what `was Ricky's grandmother's name? And where did they live?"

"Where did who live?"

"Rickey's grandmother."

"Who's Ricky?"

"Miles's daughter. Try to think, Belle. It's important."