Page 134 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Airtight

to offset it. The door to the hall opened and a uniformed policeman
stuck his head in.
“Ray F. Hope?”
Ray stood up, a sickly grin on his face. “Off to the Spanish
Inquisition, gang. Don’t wait up for me.”
“Right you are, buddy.” Waldo and Ray seemed to have developed
a joking, gallows-humor relationship over the months. “Can I have
your Porsche if you don’t come back?”
“It’s yours,” quipped Ray. “The keys are in the cyanide bottle
sitting on top of the nitroglycerine and blasting caps balancing on a
tiny pyramid of plutonium on a raft in the alligator-filled moat Ben
dug out around the offices while we were on vacation in that
overgrown soap bubble.”
“Ah, get out of here.” Waldo actually smiled.
“I’m going.” Ray went.
His exit was followed immediately by a strangled groan from
Blanche. “How can you people joke about this? Poor Laurel is dead
out there and we are being treated like criminals in here.”
“It’s all right, Blanche,” said Larry quickly, to head off any sharper
rejoinder from Waldo. “We’re all under a lot of stress. You may cry,
others may laugh. It’s toward the same end, you know. We’ll still have
to deal with our grief, but plenty of time for that later. I suppose
there will be a funeral.” He looked at me.
“Yes, yes, of course. I’ll arrange everything. Cyborganics will give
her the best funeral money can buy.” God, I hated it when people
put me on the spot like that. Give me a good old prepared statement
any day of the week.
Blanche didn’t show any signs of hearing me. She was lost in some
reverie of her own for the moment. I was resigning myself to another
long period of Quaker-style self-examination when she suddenly
blurted, “No! I’ve got to tell you. It’s going to come out sooner or
later now that the police know!”
“What on earth are you talking about?” Waldo was irritated.
“Oh, just shut up and listen for once, would you, Waldo? When
Cyborganics hired me to join the project team, they did so because I
was a free-lance journalist with knowledge of scientific topics and
some experience as a chef in a small restaurant. And, of course,
because I had the right psychological profile and passed the physical

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