Postmortem (36 page)

The young, cultured voice replied, "Speaking."

I told her who I was and heard a faint gasp. "As I understand it, you are Cecile Tyler's sister."

"Yes. Dear Lord. I don't want to talk about it. Please."

"Mrs. O'Connor, I'm terribly sorry about Cecile. I'm the medical examiner working her case, and I'm calling to find out if you know how your sister fractured her left elbow. She has a healed fracture of her left elbow. I'm looking at the X rays now."

Hesitation. I could hear her thinking.

"It was a jogging accident. She was jogging on a sidewalk and tripped, landing on her hands. One of her elbows was fractured from the impact. I remember because she wore a cast for three months during one of the hottest summers on record. She was miserable."

"That summer? Was this in Oregon?"

"No, Cecile never lived in Oregon. This was in Fredericksburg, where we grew up."

"How long ago was the jogging accident?"

Another pause. "Nine, maybe ten years ago."

"Where was she treated?"

"I don't know. A hospital in Fredericksburg. I can't remember the name."

Cecile's impaction fracture wasn't treated at VMC, and the injury had occurred much too long ago to matter. But I no longer cared.

I never met Cecile Tyler in life.

I never talked to her.

I just assumed she would sound "black."

"Mrs. O'Connor, are you black?"

"Of course I'm black."

She sounded upset.

"Did your sister talk like you?"

"Talk like me?" she asked, her voice rising.

"I know it seems an odd question . . ."

"You mean did she talk white like me?" she went on, outraged. "Yes! She did! Isn't that what education's all about? So black people can talk white?"

"Please," I said with feeling. "I certainly didn't intend to offend you. But it's important . . ." I was apologizing to a dial tone.

Lucy knew about the fifth strangling. She knew about all of the slain young women. She also knew I kept a .38 in my bedroom and had asked me about it twice since dinner.

"Lucy," I said as I rinsed plates and loaded them in the dish washer, "I don't want you thinking about guns. I wouldn't own one if I didn't live alone."

I'd been strongly tempted to hide it where she would never think to look. But after the episode with the modem, which I had guiltily reconnected to my home computer days ago, I vowed to be up front with her. The .38 remained high on my closet shelf, inside its shoebox, while Lucy was in town. The gun wasn't loaded. These days, I unloaded it in the morning and reloaded it before bed. As for the Silvertip cartridges-those I hid where she would never think to look.

When I faced her, her eyes were huge. "You know why I have a gun, Lucy. I think you understand how dangerous they are..."

"They kill people."

"Yes," I replied as we went into the living room. "They most certainly can."

"You have it so you can kill somebody."

"I don't like to think about that," I told her seriously.

"Well, it's true," she persisted. "That's why you keep it. Because of bad people. That's why."

I picked up the remote control and switched on the television.

Lucy pushed up the sleeves of her pink sweatshirt and complained, "It's hot in here, Auntie Kay. Why's it always so hot in here?"

"Would you like me to turn up the air-conditioning?"

I abstractedly flipped through the television schedule.

"No. I hate air-conditioning."

I lit a cigarette and she complained about that, too.

"Your office is hot and always stinks like cigarettes. I open the window and still it stinks. Mom says you shouldn't smoke. You're a doctor and you smoke. Mom says you should know better."

Dorothy had called late the night before. She was somewhere in California, I couldn't remember where, with her illustrator husband. It was all I could do to be civil to her. I wanted to remind her, "You have a daughter, flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone. Remember Lucy? Remember her?"

Instead, I was reserved, almost gracious, mostly out of consideration for Lucy, who was sitting at the table, her lips pressed together.

Lucy talked to her mother for maybe ten minutes, and had nothing to say afterward. Ever since, she'd been all over me, critical, snappish and bossy. She'd been the same way during the day, according to Bertha, who this evening had referred to her as a "fusspot."

Bertha told me Lucy had scarcely set foot outside my office. She sat in front of the computer from the moment I left the house until the moment I returned. Bertha gave up calling her into the kitchen for meals. Lucy ate at my desk.

The sitcom on the set seemed all the more absurd because Lucy and I were having our own sitcom in the living room.

"Andy says it's more dangerous to own a gun and not know how to use it than if you don't own one," she loudly announced.

"Andy?" I said absentmindedly.

"The one before Ralph. He used to go to the junkyard and shoot bottles. He could hit them from a long ways away. I bet you couldn't."

She looked accusingly at me.

"You're right. I probably couldn't shoot as well as Andy."

"See!"

I didn't tell her I actually knew quite a lot about firearms. Before I bought my stainless-steel Ruger .38, I went down to the indoor range in the basement of my building and experimented with an assortment of handguns from the firearms lab, all this under the professional supervision of one of the examiners. I practiced from time to time, and I wasn't a bad shot. I didn't think I would hesitate if the need ever arose. I also didn't intend to discuss the matter further with my niece.

Very quietly I asked, "Lucy, why are you picking on me?"

"Because you're a stupid ass!" Her eyes filled with tears. "You're just an old stupid ass and if you tried to, you'd hurt yourself or he'd get it away from you! And then you'd be gone, too! If you tried to, he'd shoot you with it just like it happens on TV!"

"If I tried to?" I puzzled. "If I tried to what, Lucy?"

"If you tried to get somebody first."

She angrily wiped away tears, her narrow chest heaving. I stared blindly at the family circus on TV and didn't know what to say. My impulse was to retreat to my office and shut the door, to lose myself in my work for a while, but hesitantly I moved over and pulled her close. We sat like this for the longest time, saying nothing.

I wondered who she talked to at home. I couldn't imagine her having any conversations of substance with my sister. Dorothy and her children's books had been lauded by various critics as "extraordinarily insightful" and "deep" and "full of feeling."

What a dismal irony. Dorothy gave the best she had to juvenile characters who didn't exist. She nurtured them. She spent long hours contemplating their every detail, from the way their hair was combed to the clothes they wore, to their trials and rites of passage. All the while Lucy was starved for attention.

I thought of the times Lucy and I spent together when I lived in Miami, of the holidays with her, my mother and Dorothy. I thought of Lucy's last visit here. I couldn't recall her ever mentioning the names of friends. I don't think she had any. She would talk about her teachers, her mother's ragtag assortment of "boyfriends," Mrs. Spooner across the street, Jake the yardman and the endless parade of maids. Lucy was a tiny, bespectacled know-it-all whom older children resented and children her age didn't understand. She was out of sync. I think I was exactly like her when I was her age.

A peaceful warmth had settled over both of us. I said into her hair, "Someone asked me a question the other day."

"About what?"

"About trust. Someone asked me who I trusted more than anybody else in the world. And you know what?"

She leaned her head back, looking up at me.

"I think that person is you."

"Do you really?" she asked, incredulously. "More than anybody?"

I nodded and quietly went on, "That being the case, I'm going to ask you to help me with something."

She sat up and stared at me, her eyes alert and utterly thrilled. "Oh, sure! Just ask me! I'll help you, Auntie Kay!"

"I need to figure out how someone managed to break into the computer downtown."

"I didn't do it," she instantly blurted out, a stricken look on her face. "I already told you I didn't."

"I believe you. But someone did it, Lucy. Maybe you can help me figure it out?"

I didn't think she could but had felt an impulse to give her a chance.

Energized and excited again, she said confidently, "Anybody could do it because it's easy."

"Easy?"

I had to smile.

"Because of System/Manager."

I stared at her in open astonishment. "How do you know about System/Manager?"

"It's in the book. He's God."

At times like these I was reminded, if not unnerved. Lucy's IQ. The first time she was given an IQ test she scored so high the counselor insisted on testing her again because there had to be "some mistake."

There was. The second time Lucy scored ten points higher.

"That's how you get into, SQL to begin with," she was rattling on. "See, you can't create any grants unless you got one to start with. That's why you've got System/Manager. God. You get into SQL with Him, and then you can create anything you want."

Anything you want, it dawned on me. Such as all of the user names and passwords assigned to my offices. This was a terrible revelation, so simplistic it had never occurred to me. I supposed it never occurred to Margaret either.

"All someone's got to do is get in," Lucy matter-of-factly went on. "And if he knows about God, he can create any grant he wants, make it the DBA, and then he can get into your data base."

In my office, the data base administrator, or DBA, was "DEEP/THROAT."

Margaret did have a sense of humor now and then.

"So you get into SQL by connecting System/Manager, then you type in: GRANT CONNECT, RESOURCE, DBA TO AUNTIE IDENTIFIED BY KAY."

"Maybe that's what happened," I thought out loud. "And with the DBA, someone not only could view but actually alter the data."

"Sure! He could do anything because God's told him he can. The DBA is Jesus."

Her theological allusions were so outrageous I laughed in spite of myself.

"That's how I got into SQL to begin with," she confessed. "Since you didn't tell me any passwords or anything. I wanted to get into SQL so I could try out some of the commands in the book. I just gave your DBA user name a password I made up so I could get in."

"Wait a minute," I slowed her down. "Wait a minute! What do you mean you assigned a password you made up to my DBA user name? How did you know what my user name is? I didn't tell you."

She explained, "It's in your grants file. I found it in the Home directory where you have all the INP's for the tables you created. You have a file called 'Grants. SQL' where you created all the public synonyms for your tables."

Actually, I hadn't created those tables. Margaret did last year and I loaded my home computer with the boxes of backup diskettes she gave me. Was it possible there was a similar "Grants" file in the OCME computer? I took hold of Lucy's hand and we got up from the couch. Eagerly, she followed me into my office. I sat her down in front of the computer and pulled up the ottoman.

We got into the communications software package and typed in the number for Margaret's office downtown. We watched the countdown at the bottom of the screen as the computer dialed. Almost immediately it announced we were connected, and several commands later the screen was dark and flashing with a green C prompt. My computer suddenly was a looking glass. On the other side were the secrets of my office ten miles from here.

It made me slightly uneasy to know that even as we worked the call was being traced. I'd have to remember to tell Wesley so he didn't waste his time figuring out that the perpetrator, in this instance, was me.

"Do a find file," I said, "for anything that might be called 'Grants.'

Lucy did. The C prompt came back with the message "No files found."

We tried again. We tried looking for a file called "Synonyms" and still had no luck. Then she got the idea of trying to find any file with the extension "SQL" because ordinarily that was the extension for any file containing SQL commands, commands such as the ones used to create public synonyms on the office data tables. Scores of file names rolled up the screen. One caught our attention. It was called "Public. SQL."

Lucy opened the file and we watched it roll past. My excitement was equaled by my dismay. It contained the commands Margaret wrote and executed long ago when she created public synonyms for all of the tables she created in the office data base commands like CREATE PUBLIC SYNONYM CASE FOR DEEP. CASE.

I was not a computer programmer. I'd heard of public synonyms but was not entirely sure what they were.