Man on a leash - By Charles Williams Page 0,45
ought to see somebody about it.”
“Maybe I would, if you ever got home. But while you’re visiting your father’s sexpot, keep reminding yourself of the Oedipal overtones.”
“Hell, just thinking of the comparisons would do it.”
“That’ll be the day.”
After he’d hung up, he debated whether to put through a call to Murdock. No, that could wait till he’d talked to Paulette Carmody; he’d call after he was back in San Francisco. He showered and put on a fresh shirt and a tie and the suit he’d worn coming up. As he was putting the dusty and sweat-stained shirt in the bag, he remembered the fragment of brown plastic or cardboard he’d found out in the flat -by the dead burro. He removed it from the pocket.
What could fd mean? Mfd for manufactured? No, there’d have to be something after it. Mfd by, or Mfd in— He frowned. Solder. Radio officer. Check out the simalizer and put a new frammistat in his KLH. Jeri Bonner had worked for an electronics supply company, probably where she’d met Tallant. He grabbed up the telephone directory and flipped through the thin section of yellow pages. RADIO AND TV, REPAIRS. There were three, one of them on West Third Street. Well, they couldn’t lock you up for asking stupid questions. He dropped it in the pocket of his jacket and finished packing.
He carried the bag out to the car and stopped at the office to pay for the toll calls and the extra day. The sour-faced man was behind the desk.
“Have to pay for an extra day,” he said. “Checkout time’s two P.M. Same’s it has been for years.”
“Right.” Romstead put down the Amex card.
“You’d think someday people’d learn—”
Romstead picked up the card and put down two twenty-dollar bills. It’d be quicker, and he wouldn’t have to listen to the old fart.
“Posted right there on the wall, plain as anything.”
Romstead picked up the change, his face suffused with wonder. “Well, I be dawg; so that’s what that writin’ said? I thought it meant I could take the towels for keepsakes.”
He went up Aspen and made the turn into Third. The TV repair shop was near the end of the block with a parking space a few doors away. It was after five now, and he hoped it wasn’t closed. It wasn’t, quite. At the counter in front a girl was putting on lipstick and appraising her hair in a small mirror. In back of her was an open doorway into the shop.
“Are any of your service men still here?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said. “Raymond’s back there. We’re about to close, though.”
“This’ll only take a minute.” He went around the end of the counter. There were two service benches in the back room with long fluorescent lights above them, littered with tools and parts and the denuded carcasses of TV sets and radios. Raymond was a pleasant long-haired youth wearing a University of Nevada T-shirt. He glanced up inquiringly from the writhing green snakes he was watching on the screen of some kind of test equipment.
“I just wanted to ask you what may be a very dumb question.” Romstead set the fragment of plastic on the bench. “Is this part of anything electronic?”
Raymond glanced at it, turned it slightly to look at the markings. “Sure,” he said. He reached into a bin and brought out a cylindrical object that reminded Romstead vaguely of a shotgun shell except that it had a short piece of wire attached to each end. He set it on the bench. It was imprinted with the manufacturer’s name, but what instantly caught Romstead’s eye was the legend, “100 Mfd,” in the center of it. There was a minus sign at one end and a plus at the other.
“Electrolytic capacitor,” Raymond said. “‘Mfd’ is the abbreviation for microfarad. They’re used in a number of different circuits for high capacity at a low-voltage rating. Have to be installed with the right polarity, though; that’s the reason for the plus and minus on the case.”
Romstead understood little or nothing of this except that his stab in the dark had paid off. He smiled at Raymond and put five dollars on the bench. “Thanks a million,” he said. “I won the bet.”
He drove on out West Third Street in the sunset, wondering if he hadn’t merely made the whole thing worse; certainly you could go crazy trying to figure out what all these different parts had to do with each other or with his father’s inexplicable