"I'd rather not stay on this open line too long," Smith said.
"All right, one thing more," Remo said. "A name. Dexter Morley. I think he's a professor or something."
"What about him?"
"He's the one we didn't kill."
"How did he die?"
"If he's the one I think, in a puddle."
"A puddle of what?"
"A puddle of himself. That's all that was left of him except for some papers we can't make out, scientific stuff. That is, if he's even the corpse. We don't know."
"I'll be back in a few hours," Smith said as he replaced the receiver.
Barry sat back down in the corner, wrapped the sliver of blanket around him like a silk scarf and stuck the end of it in his mouth and stared glassily, pouting ahead.
"Now, Barry, stop that," Smith said. He frowned to cover his embarrassment at seeing a grown man and the smartest man he'd ever met acting like an infant.
"You're the only friend Blankey and I ever had," the fat man whimpered, still staring straight ahead. "And now you're going away."
"Blankey has no feelings," Smith said. "It's an inanimate object. Blankey . . ." He stopped, annoyed with himself for referring to a blanket as if it were a person. "You've just got to learn to get along without me sometimes. After all, you got along before you met me, didn't you?"
"Wasn't the same," Barry sniffed.
Unable to deal with irrationality, Smith left the room to pack his things.
It was inexplicable, Smith thought as he placed his extra three-piece gray suit, identical to the one he was wearing, in a plastic garment bag that he had gotten free from a clothing store fifteen years earlier. He was the farthest thing from a father image that he could think of, and yet the computer genius had grabbed onto him as if he were Smith's little boy.
It was ridiculous. Even Smith's own natural daughter had never been dandled on his knee or told a bedtime story. His wife, Irma, always took care of those things, and like a sensible woman, Irma had understood that her husband was not the type of man one clung to for emotional comfort. Harold Smith did not believe in emotion.
He had spent his entire life looking for truth, and truth was not emotional. It was neither good nor bad, happy nor distressing. It was just true. If Smith was a cold man, it was because facts were cold. It didn't mean that he wasn't human. He just wasn't a slobbering fool. At least Irma had had the intelligence always to realize that.
Now why couldn't Barry Schweid understand that? If Smith wanted to play father in some misguided moment of maudlinism, he hardly would have picked an emotional cripple whose only solace in life was a ratty old blanket. It embarrassed Smith even to think of him. Fat, homely Barry Schweid with the gumption of a hamster.
What complicated it all was that the sniveling wreck possessed the brain of an Einstein, and genius had to be forgiven some shortcomings.
But not this. No, Smith decided. He would not take Barry Schweid back to the United States. He would not be manipulated by childish tears into living out the rest of his life with an overweight albatross wrapped around his neck, clutching onto a spittle-covered blanket. No.
He zipped up the plastic garment bag to the spot halfway where the zipper no longer worked, then taped the rest of it together with pieces of masking tape. He carried the bag out into the living room.
"I think we've come up with something," Barry said without turning around. He was kneeling on the floor near the coffee table and Smith's attache case. His blanket was on his shoulder.
"What do you mean?" Smith said.
"That name you wrote down. Dexter Morley. He's a prominent entomologist from the University of Toronto. In earlier years, he was an associate of Dr. Ravits, the one who was killed. He helped Ravits to isolate pheromones, the substances that attract animals to each other. Then two years ago, he disappeared."
"Interesting," Smith said blandly. It was interesting. Ravits had been killed by terrorists, and now Remo may have found the body of Dr. Dexter Morley, a former Ravits associate, also dead. And he had been killed in the home of Waldron Perriweather III, who was a well-known spokesman for animal groups. Was it possible that Perriweather was behind all the violence?
"I looked it up in the computer," Barry said. "Actually, I knew that part already. Most scientists know about Morley's disappearance a couple of years ago. But I found out something even more interesting."
"What's that?"
"Will you take me with you?" Barry said. He turned tearful eyes toward Smith.
"No, Barry," Smith said. "I will not."
"I just wanted to go with you."
"Quite impossible. Now will you give me that information or not? It will save me a few minutes' work."
"All right," Barry whined. "I learned about Dr. Morley when I was in school because I studied entomology. Some believed that Morley had made a scientific breakthrough on the pheromones and left because he did not want to share credit with Dr. Ravits. Others thought that he had just had a breakdown and ran away."
"Well?" Smith said impatiently.
"Because the name came in in connection with Perriweather, I started to look at banks where Perriweather lives. And there's a Dexter Morley listed at the Beverly First Savings with a bank balance of two hundred and one thousand dollars."
Smith arched an eyebrow, and pleased by the man's reaction, Barry rushed along with his story.
"I'm sure it's him. I've cross indexed him a lot."
"So Morley might have been hired away from Ravits at a big salary increase?" Smith said.
"I couldn't find anything about an employer, though," Barry said. "All the deposits were made in cash."
"I presume because the employer didn't want anyone to know about it," Smith said.
"Morley must have lived with his employer too because there's no listing of him as homeowner, tenant or telephone user within a hundred-mile radius of Beverly."
"Interesting," Smith said.
"I could really be helpful," Barry wheedled. His brow creased.
"I don't know, Barry," Smith said.
"Just tell me what you need, Harold. I want to earn my way. You'll be glad you took me along. Really you will. I can install the device on your other computers to prevent break-in. I'm better at that than you are. And I can help with this Dexter Morley. I studied entomology for three years."
"Three years isn't very much study in a field like that, is it?" Smith asked.
Barry looked hurt. "In three years, I read every major work on the subject written in English. My reading in French and Japanese was extensive too. I had to read German and Chinese in translation."
"I see," Smith said.
"They were good translations though," Barry offered. "Give me a chance, Harold."