Merrimac Murder Mystery #1
Waterfalls And Glass
Track 1, Sector 1: The Plunge
Monica hated everything about departmental galas. The departmental catering. The departmental bar. But worse than departmental hors d’oeuvres and the departmental punch was the loss of a perfectly good evening of hacking departmental machines.
"Chuck?" she inquired of the toupee in front of her at the buffet. It was one thing that every man in the department seemed to own the same sportcoat. It was quite another that they seemed to be adopting the same toupee and had thus become nearly indistinguishable to her.
The toupee answered to Chuck and wheeled around bringing its owner along with it, though perhaps it was the other way around. Monica considered them both, suddenly unsure which she was addressing.
"Chuck. Did you load the maintenance deck in the machine this afternoon?" "Mmrph." responded Chuck the Lower. "Lamp check fine? Solid across the board? High tension supply? Pump pressure? Did you bleed the reservoir?"
Chuck the Upper seemed more confident here as the toupee nodded its assent while the Lower continued to chew something in an elaborate way that Monica hoped was not about to produce a cherry stem tied in a knot. That Chuck had recently bled the reservoir was apparent upon closer inspection. The spray from the new cooling fluid in the machine had dried quickly on Chuck’s tie but left a series of little clean spots where coffee had earlier been.
"Monica, don’t worry. It’s all set. Dean Allen just has to get those guys to put their hands on the plungers and press. The show should start right up. We couldn’t get the input/output buffer working up on the stage, so we’re using a teletype again like last year. Once they press the plungers, the rest is automatic."
Monica looked over towards the raised platform. It had been erected on a piece of open floor in what had until recently been the armory. A curtain of glass and steel descended about 25 feet from the ceiling of the space and partitioned it with an undulating, almost sinusoidal wave. Standing on the far side of the curtain was what Monica imagined could be a nursery for baby versions of the futuristic new TWA jet terminal at Idlewild, still with their wings folded and covered with matted gray down. On her side was a mostly-empty white floor peppered with the types of bespoke lounge furniture that, even more than concrete and glass and steel, was the sign these days that a Serious Architect had been involved. The furniture here was all a uniform gray that Monica thought looked as if made from the pelts of some baby terminals less fortunate than those now squatting across from her.
Monica knew that the gray chairs could easily overwhelm the few guests now milling around if they advanced slowly and struck just when the dozen techs and caterers on the floor were distracted with their last-minute preparations. In a half an hour, Monica thought, the tables would be turned and guests would handily outnumber chairs. She wasn’t entirely sure who she would root for in such a matchup. Monica snared a passing work/study student.
"You. Do you see all these little tables by the chairs?" "Ma’am?" "Turn them all so that they are centered in the floor tiles and facing front. You have ten minutes to bring them into correspondence. Off you go."
And he was released like a trout caught just for sport. Monica let herself go a little bit as well and snorted grenadine soda out of her nose as she suppressed a giggle. She was turning the tables. The kid wasn’t going to succeed but it hardly mattered. Already, he had turned three of the blobby modern tables so that they were mooning the stage. How were these students going to succeed in computers if they addressed circuit cards at the knees instead of making eye contact with them.
Up on the stage, six identical plastic plungers stood upright in six gray boxes. The clear plungers would have been hard to see if they did not internally refract the spotlights now trained on the area. They were probably strong enough to stand on but they looked fragile. Monica guessed that they were difficult to breed in captivity. She decided that they must be jellyfish orchids. There probably already was such a thing. There seemed to be an orchid named for every beautiful thing already but this was certainly it. Was there yet an orchid named for a circuit? A rare specimen from the wilds of Borneo that bore an uncanny and coincidental resemblance to a full adder? Probably.
Monica thought that the rarest would be the exclusive xorchid. They could only get together if one partner was interested. Both was the same as none. That was the problem with people, she thought, before she caught herself adrift and came back to the problematic people at hand.
The six problematic people now at the top of the her hit parade belonged to the orchids.
Number six was . . . well what was his name anyway? He was that toothy guy in the front office who always hung around Barbara. The guy who signed their time cards with a messy hand. Scrawl Scratch. That was his name. Mr. Scratch to her, though, surely. Mr. Scratch was often available to cover events where Monica would normally be expected to say a few words about the program. Sometimes even at short notice and often when even Monica had expected that she would have a few words to say. There was not one single time that she could recall when he had turned up to spare her from having a word with one of the machines. She respected that about him.
Number five was Oliver Marchant Revett Jr., president of Merrimac Tabulator Incorporated. Everybody called him 'Omer like a French Homer. Monica thought that he was a little like a French Homer. For a start, his vision was poor. He had spent decades working close to the operating coils that had formed the heart of his family's tabulating machines. Nobody then understood that the relay boys could sustain permanent vision damage from an accumulation of a million imperceptible flashes as the solenoids clacked their barnyard song. ’Omer could spill out quite an epic as well. Trouble, but Monica liked him. Maybe it was the cataracts but he was the only person here that she could really practice eye contact with. It was hard sometimes, too, with that giant furry mustache that walked across his face. ’Omer was also the only person in the room whose shoes Monica couldn't recognize on sight.
Number four was State Senator Benjamin Packard (no relation to the car company that plowed under just a few years ago). He was like what a toothy grin became when it had completely matured and taken over the hosts's head. Anyway, all this was happening and he hadn't done anything serious to keep it from happening and that seemed all right. He had already asked Monica twice that evening if he could count on her vote. "He's looking for a different congress", she thought, and snorted more grenadine soda out of her nose. "I should switch to 7-Up or people will think I’m going to die." As she thought that, she saw Walter Hatch, number three, and thought that dying by having your nose burned out with soda would be better than an evening with him.
Walter Hatch was from the Bureau of the Census and he was bad news to two decimal places. He looked like he might count the people milling around, count the chairs, count the hors d’oeuvres toothpicks in the trash and decide it was all wrong somehow. Monica had no idea if she should cut off somebody's leg or break a toothpick in half to set the numbers right. Maybe just turn a chair upside down to be safe. Just to get the parity bit right. Hatch had given her a number of those looks that afternoon as they talked about the costs of the project. There seemed to be no particular number that was the right number but Hatch looked pained every time he saw a punched card in the trash. Monica wondered if she would ever see him pull a half-sucked butterscotch candy from the wastepail. Why was she thinking about that? Oh, Oh no, he’s sucking on a candy right now, that's why. Monica tried to pull herself together a little bit and not think about the candy be- cause she knew that this project was a big deal for Census.
Number two was Dean Allen. This was certainly his physical space and his department and nominally his show but this was not really ’his line of country’ as he would often say. Monica spotted him milling around with a brandy coupe and looking as if he were trying to come in for a landing but couldn’t quite figure out how to settle into the modern chair. He looked unusually pleased with himself and it didn't suit him.
Number one was certainly Dr. Oliver Marchant Revett Denbridge Jr. A cousin of 'Omer's. A complicated cousin through a complicated relationship. Monica decided the less thought about OMRD2 was the better thought.