Conundrum (51 page)

He feels defeat rush at him as he realizes this is not going to play out the way he planned. He strides over to Shirley and slaps her hard across her face. She cries out and falls to the
floor
. “Oh, get up and stop whining! You always make everything into a production. Like you
’
r
e
auditioning for a commercial
or something.”

Nathan puts his arms around Shirley and cradles her, protecting her. Ed fumes even more. Seeing her in his arms is the last straw.

“I’ll kill you, Sitteroff. You take your hands off my wife. You have no right to touch her—she’s mine.”

“And you had no right to touch my wife, either. Did you? But you went ahead and slept with her. How is that all right?”
Nathan’s eyes are daggers.

Ed can’t think of anything to say in response. But Nathan’s argument doesn’t mollify him
. T
o the contrary, it sets loose such rage that Ed can’t help himself. He takes another swing at Nathan, this time connecting squarely in the stomach. Nathan’s groans and doubles over
.
Shirley wraps her arms around him, pulling him back away from Ed.

“Get out!” she screams. “Right now. The police are coming and they’ll arrest you. You want that? You want a criminal record
?
All those times you beat me, I never said a word, never reported you. But I swear to you, Ed
ward
Hutchinson, you lay one more hand on me, or on Nathan, and I’ll find a way to get you thrown in jail. And how will that look at Penwell? Maybe you’ll lose your job.
No one will respect you or look up to you anymore. The happy-go-lucky, swinging party boy Ed Hutchinson will just be another loser out on the street. So scram!”

Ed throws Nathan a sour, condescending look. “What a wimp. Won’t even be a man and fight. No wonder your wife went looking elsewhere for a real man. Someone who could satisfy her—”

“Why, you
.
 
.
 
.
!” Nathan starts to lunge for Ed, but Shirley holds him back long enough to allow Ed to turn and storm down the hall. Ed is aware of eyes on him, but what does he care? He doesn’t know anyone in this part of town, and he sure couldn’t care less what they
think
of him. Maybe they’ll treat his wife differently now—knowing she’s living in sin with another man. He hopes he ruined her day.

Fury lifts and speeds Ed to his car, then surges through him as he
races
back to Burbank. The last thing he wants to do is go home, to his empty, lonely house. He can’t abide the thought of walking through the corridors and rooms, no one there to cook and clean for him but his Mexican maid, who can’t speak a word of English. What he wants is noise, distraction, the companionship of a warm body, someone who doesn’t know him or his name, who will not pass judgment on him or tell him how to act or what to say.

His thoughts keep slipping to the vision of Shirley in Nathan’s arms. Despite his disgust, he allows himself to picture them together in bed, naked, intimate. His rage keeps churning, like lava rising
,
about to erupt.

He gets off at the Burbank ex
i
t and turns in at a bar he frequents.
He’s only a half mile from Penwell.
He knows he can find what he’s looking for here. He’s gone home many a night with a girl from this place, and they weren’t cheap and overly made up like the whores
he hated to stoop for when desperate. He made good money—his clothes attested to his status.
He held a prominent job in the aerospace industry, Why, he helped build spacecraft that would one day go to the moon, and maybe even Mars. That always impressed them.
Throw a few bills around at a bar, buy a girl a few drinks—he knew how to win them over. Sometimes they were so impressed they didn’t even want his money.
They just wanted him.

Ed straightens his tie and puts on his sport jacket. He looks in the rearview mirror, adjusting it so he can see his face. He smoothes his hair
,
then gets out to accomplish his twofold goal—get sloshed and get laid.

But as the night
progresses, Ed find
s that
the more he drinks, the more keen his pain. He’d hoped to drown out his anger at Nathan and Shirley but the alcohol only exacerbates it. With each passing hour, he grows more furious, more desperate. The two women he approached turned him down, and none of the regulars are here. Sexual tension floods his limbs
,
and he needs release. In a haze, he keeps drinking, hoping he’ll pass into oblivion, or something will shake loose.

Something has to give. He can’t keep up this level of tension much longer.

Nathan! He fixes his ire on this man who has stolen his wife, has
makes
him look like a fool. And Shirley. After all he’d done for her, given her. The money he lavished on her, gifts, clothes, a car, a beautiful house. And this is the thanks he gets? He could kill them both—and he should. He should drive back over to that dump and strangle the both of them. But what about Julie?

He thinks about his little girl. He never wanted to have kids, but Shirley had insisted, begged. He figured having a kid would keep her home, out of trouble. Get her away from those leering photographers and male models who ogled her and lusted after her.
That was the only way he could pry his wife from her ambitions. But now that
s
he ha
s
a kid, what good
is
it
?
It sure didn’t stop his wife from jumping into another man’s bed, did it? She just dragged the kid along with her—a witness to her mother’s infidelity. Shirley was just another whore. All women turned out to be whores, didn’t they? Just like his mother, who had left his father for another man when Ed was ten.
They all deserved to be punished.

But what better way to punish Shirley than to take away the man who protected and adored her
?

The idea
grows
as the evening w
ears
on and the alcohol slowly w
ears
off.
At closing, the bartender usher
s
Ed out into the parking lot
,
and the crisp night air sober
s
him somewhat. Now his anger smolder
s
like a hot coal, radiating in his gut, burning, burning. He picture
s
his body full of radioactive plutonium as he look
s
down the dimly lit Magnolia
Boulevard
empty of cars, a lonely street in the November night
.

Suddenly, he ha
s
the
perfect
solution to his problem. It
is
magnificent. Mean, vindictive, and yet somehow poignant in its scope. The irony
strikes
him in a funny way and
makes
him laugh.
Why should he burn inside? Why not Nathan?
He should be the one who suffers.

Without a second thought, almost mindlessly and void of emotion, Ed drives
over to the Penwell facility.
He parks in the back. Security is minimal
, for this is just a warehouse, where prototypes for the engineering projects are stored. Ed is very familiar with this place. He knows exactly where he is going and what he plans to do. His palms get sweaty with the thought of pulling off this crime. He’s no criminal, but he knows he won’t be able to come up with any good excuse if he is stopped and questioned. He can always claim he is drunk and doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s sure had enough scotch tonight to validate that story. So he proceeds in confidence.

He walks to the single metal door on the side of one building. He punches a security code into the pad and opens the door. Might as well look and act as if he’s drunk and not snooping around. If any guards are around, they’ll find him soon enough. He switches on lights and marches down the hall, but no one comes over
;
there’s no one in the building. Just my luck, Ed thinks, whistling a little, his anger now morphing into glee. Every nerve in his body tingles as he opens the door to a room at the end of the corridor.

And then, at one more door, he punches in another code, then pauses. The green light gives him the go-ahead. This is his moment of decision. He can turn around and just go home, forget this.

But he’s come too far. And he knows now there is no other way. Justice needs to be served, and he can’t think of a better way to serve it.

With precision and efficiency, with a clear and determined mind, he opens drawers and gathers tools, then sets to work. He disassembles the aluminum outer shell of the SNAP 3 standing over in the corner. They had brought this one over for the photo, for the brochure. And they had posed right there, he and Nathan, and the other members of the team. Ed looks across the room, recalling the photographer’s bright flashes and Ed smiling, standing next to Nathan,
both
of them smiling, and knowing they hated each other’s guts.
Ed knew the module would be taken back to Distribution. But no one would know. They’d find out later, when it would be chalked up to a mystery—or someone’s mistake.

Ed muses over possible scenarios as he deftly works the screws and removes the assembly.
He thinks how he will tell Ruth Sitteroff something that will remove any suspicion. Like how that research project Nathan went on in San Diego was really a top-secret experiment. Something Nate volunteered for, and ended up exposing him to radiation. That would work. If she tried to investigate, she’d hit a wall and assume it was covered
up. Any official denial of the “experiment” would look suspicious. Ed snickers at the thought of Ruth making phone calls and getting no answers.

He takes the iridium casing off and
lifts out
the high-strength graphite blocks that hold the fuel cell.
This he doesn’t take apart
,
because he knows the risk. Instead, he finds a box and places it inside, then carefully close
s
up the RTG. Satisfied it looks untampered with, he pockets
three
tool
s
, then puts the rest away, closes drawers, turns off lights, and leaves the room, making sure it locks behind him. In the next room, in the closet, he pulls out a contamination suit
his size
. It’s lightweight but bulky. This he places in the box, then heads out.

No one is at the office building—not at three a.m. No security is needed here, when the only things of value are the intellects of
Penwell employee
geniuses.
Hard to s
teal those, Ed thinks, then laughs at the image of some alien spaceship coming to earth and sucking intelligence from scientists’ minds. Just like those sci-fi movies they show in the cinema.

As Ed enters Nathan’s small office, he pauses. He thinks how his
coworkers
would laugh at him if they found out Nathan was living with Shirley. It
is
bound to get out sometime. Sure, while
those two
were in San
Diego
, that was a different
story
. But here! He thought once they got ba
ck
, he’d be able to knock some sense into his wife. Didn’t she feel guilty for breaking up Nathan’s marriage? How could they both blame him for their affair?
This ha
s
to stop. It
does
!

Shirley was right. He could lose his job, los
e
everything he worked hard for, lose his reputation. He
is
not going to let that happen. He
will
not let some insignificant
, arrogant
mathematician ruin his life.

Whatever hesitation Ed feels now vanishes. His anger, renewed and flaring like someone
blowing
on hot coals, squelches his last vestige of conscience.
He closes the office door and dons the suit. He makes sure all the seals are tight and pulls a mask over his face. He knows there’s very little chance any of the radiation can hurt him with such short exposure time, but he’s taking no chances. He’s almost giddy, picturing Nathan sitting at his desk, completely unaware of the danger he is in, unaware that his life, which has poisoned Ed’s, is soon to be
poisoned too. He plots how he will bury Nathan with work, work he must do alone and not with others. Work that will require long hours behind his desk.

Ed works quickly. Uses a tool to
separate
the two halves of the graphite blocks, revealing the core.
Ed studies this innocuous-looking cylinder. It weighs heavily in his gloved hand. Funny, he thinks. It gives no indication of its danger. It looks
simple
and unimportant. Ed reaches into the box and pulls out a strip of insulation strapping. He gets the snippers out of the box, and the hammer
and nails
, then crawls under the large desk. It’s deep enough that
Nathan
could scoot his chair all the way under and still not hit the fuel cell. Ed places it up against the edge of the desk at the far back, underneath where it will never be detected. He holds it in place with one hand while he hammers the strips across the cell, latching it onto the wood.