The Game: A Crime Thriller Story (Digital Part Two) Read online

  The Game

  A Crime Thriller Story

  Digital Part Two

  by Owen Carlysle

  all rights reserved copyright 2013 by Polaris Mystery In Action

  He saw Darlene with the coffee before he saw the detectives. Again, Flight was struck by her appearance, taking in his breath sharply and having to control the urge to let it out in a low whistle. Standing as she was in her high heels and her business outfit, she displayed her wares with far more efficiency than she had in the office, and he would have had to keep himself from focusing on her curves but for the coffee. She’d taken the request to heart, and she’d delivered a big cup. It was massive and oversized, and he couldn’t get over how tiny her hands looked holding it.

  She passed the coffee over with a smile, and he lifted it to his lips. It wasn’t swill, either. It wasn’t any of the bullshit stuff kids in torn jeans and middle aged professors in turtlenecks pretended was wine, but it was rich and strong and hot. “Thanks, Dar.” He paused, “I’m sorry, Darlene. Can I call you Dar? Is it too familiar?”

  She smiled, and the sight warmed him a bit more than it should have. She was damned near young enough to be his daughter, or at least to be way off limits. “That’s fine, Mr. Flight.”

  “Damien. You can call me Damien.”

  “Are you the antichrist?”

  “What? Oh, the movie. You have no idea what it did to me growing up.” He pointed to his head. “If you shave all this off, you won’t find any numbers.”

  She laughed softly. “Still, I think I’ll call you Flight, if that’s okay.”

  “Flight it is. Look, I appreciate the cof—”

  “Jesus Christ, Flight! Are you gonna flirt with your damn secretary all morning or can I go see the goddam body, now?”

  Flight recognized the voice and spun around. “Bobby Horn! I thought you were working cold cases.”

  The tall detective in the cheap grey suit and poor attempt for a retro fedora kind of a hat lifted his hands and frowned. “Yeah, I was—four years ago when you quit. God, Flight, you know anybody stays in the same assignment for four years?”

  “I did.”

  The detective grew somber. “Yeah, and there was nobody better, man. Nobody.”

  Another detective stood to the side as did a man with a black windbreaker Flight knew was embossed on the back with ME or Medical Examiner or ME Office or something similar. They changed it every time a new chief ascended the post. “The—” He was about to say stiff, but he remembered Darlene’s reaction to the news. “The deceased, Thomas Grotek, is in an office back this way.”

  He thanked Darlene for the coffee again and headed back through the secure door and past the Star Trek doorway pausing when he reached the screen room to make sure Horn and the others were following. Horn stepped through just as he turned around.

  “Fuck, what I wouldn’t give to watch the Buckeye’s play on this thing.”

  “Are you from Ohio, Bobby?”

  “Nah, never been, but I worked in a sports memorabilia shop when I was ten. The guy owns the shop loves all the Ohio teams, you know, the Reds, the Browns, the Indians, even the Bengals. He loves Ohio State, too. So anyway, I end up a fan of all those teams.”

  “You collected baseball cards?”

  “So?”

  “Nothin’. I guess I always figured you for GI Joe or something, that’s all.”

  “Hell, I had those, too.”

  “How’d you work somewhere when you were ten?”

  “Jesus, Flight. I got a stiff to see. Nobody gives a shit in a small town. They pay you under the table just like you were mowing lawns. How long you been running security here?”

  Flight looked at his watch. “Thirty-seven minutes.”

  Horn stared in shock for a moment and then began laughing. It was a long, loud and cleansing laugh, and Flight had heard it before, not just from Horn but from countless cops who used it just as some men used alcohol or drugs to deal with the truth of the darkness they saw and did their best to keep from encroaching on everyone else’s light.

  Flight walked to the office, pushed open the door, and stepped out of the way. “I didn’t touch anything, but I did step in for a minute. The murder weapon is a promotional item the company made to promote some video game. There’s boxes of them in the cabinet.”

  He stepped back and watched the men get to work, wondering if he missed it.

  ***

  Four hours later, Flight stepped into the little diner on 27th and saw Grainger sitting at a booth scribbling on one of those mini computers. He looked as oblivious to the world as Emily did when she played her princess internet games and needed nine or ten calls and finally a stern shout before she lifted her eyes from the screen to hear whatever it was he wanted to tell her. He walked up to the booth, sat down opposite him, and signaled for coffee. Grainger didn’t look up until Flight cleared his throat.

  “Oh.” That was it. Oh.

  “How are you doing?”

  “I have to figure out this algorithm. There’s a bug in the primary engine that keeps players from—oh, you mean with Bubba.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. When I saw him there with a game dagger in his back, I thought it was a joke, you know. It was like a scene from the game, except he was wearing a suit and not like, Victorian clothes. I thought it was a joke because Bubba was the kind of a guy who did things like that, and I didn’t…”

  Flight let the silence hang for a while. The waitress arrived with coffee, and Grainger went back to scribbling. Finally, Flight put his hand over the screen and moved the tablet away from him. “I need you to focus on this, and only this right now. We need—”

  “I can’t.”

  Flight paused. “Look, son. I know it’s hard, but you need—”

  “I don’t mean emotionally. I mean I can’t focus on just one thing. I’ve never been able to. Right now I have you and Darlene and Skull Kingdom III and VR4 and the Annual Report all running in my head. I can push some to the background, but I can’t focus on only one thing.”

  “Okay.” Flight took another sip of his coffee. “I have a hard time focusing on more than one thing, so can you make it look like you’re only focusing on me right now?” The younger man nodded and Flight nodded back. “Thanks. What we’re going to do is try to figure out if Bubba—Thomas had any enemies. We’re going to try to figure out if you have enemies. We’re going to see if your company has enemies. I need to know what—”

  Grainger smiled. “You don’t focus on just one thing either.”

  Flight chuckled. “I suppose I don’t at that. Let’s start with Bubba. Did you know anybody who would want to do harm to him?”

  “No.”

  “Was he married?”

  “No. Darlene thinks he’s gay.” His face fell suddenly. “Um…used to, I mean she probably still thinks it, but I guess he used to be gay, if he was.”

  “Why does she think that?”

  “It was because he didn’t hit on her when she was naked.”

  Flight spilled his coffee over his chin and onto his shirt, and as his chest burned, he set the cup down on the table spilling more on his hand. He coughed a bit as his tongue grew numb from the burn and reached for a napkin. “You want to expand on that a little for me, Arthur?”

  “Yeah. We hired her almost two years ago as a body model for one of our games. She was naked in a room with Bubba for almost five weeks straight and he never came on to her.” He said it as though having Darlene naked for five minutes straight wasn’t already an incomprehensible idea.

  “I still don’t get it, Son.”

  “Well you’ve seen h
er. She was naked. He didn’t try anything, so she thought—”

  “No. I get that part. I’m ready to believe he was gay or impotent, and I lean toward impotent because as horribly bigoted as it is to say it, Darlene naked would likely be too much for any man gay or not.” He put the napkin down and reached for his coffee. Damn. His tongue was shot for the day. He drank some anyway. “What I don’t understand is why she was naked in a room with him.”

  “Oh. Well, you know we do body modeling, right?”

  Flight shrugged. “For video games?”

  Grainger nodded. “Yes. We want the characters to walk, jump, crouch, punch, stab and everything else accurately. So we hook them up to all sorts of sensors and record all the movements. Computer modeling takes the 3D images and makes them into the heroes and the villains.”

  Flight took a breath. “Okay. I think I’ve seen something like that on TV, but either you or me—one of us is missing the point here.” He spoke slowly and punctuated the words. “Why was Darlene naked?”

  “Oh. Oh, I see.” He reached for his tablet and pressed a few buttons. He handed it over, and on the screen was a picture of Darlene naked, or more accurately an animated video-game version of Darlene. In an old text font that reminded Flight of LCD calculators, the word TITLE ran across the top. A subtitle read Digital Entertainment for Men. Flight shot a questioning glance at Grainger.

  “That’s an early mock-up of the art. We’re not sure if we’re calling it Digigirl or Virtue—you know, for virtual—but the programming is done and we let the key stakeholders play it last week.”

  “So it’s an adults only game? Like that…what was that, um, back when I was a kid? What the hell…Larry something?”

  “Leisure Suit Larry, yeah. That was an early adult video game, but this is more like an experience than a game.”

  “Yeah, spare me the marketing, Son.”

  “No, I mean it. We’re gonna price it at $229 for the game and $189 for the apron, and we’ve already pre-sold eleven thousand in Japan.”

  “The apron? What the hell is the apron?”

  Abruptly, Grainger stood. “Come on. Let me show you at the office.”

  ***

  Grainger was closed-mouthed about the game, but Flight was reasonably certain the police would be gone by now. Naturally, Detective Horn wanted to speak with the young CEO, but he’d taken Flight’s word that he’d deliver him to the station for questioning in the morning and let it go. He really didn’t want to waste time on this, even if the this involved seeing an animated version of a naked Darlene in action.

  “So how did a naked model end up being a receptionist?”

  Grainger looked over from the passenger seat. “She’s not a receptionist. She’s the executive assistant.”

  “Ah…” That explained it, not that Flight begrudged the kid. They’d sent the company car and the company driver back to the office, and he’d learned that Grainger didn’t drive, hadn’t ever learned. His whole life had been managed by parents and then professors, and now that he could buy and sell all of them, he was left with a brilliant intellect and the emotions of a fourteen year old boy. Hell, it was a good arrangement. She got a billionaire and all she had to do was give him what every fourteen year old boy wants.

  “It’s not like that, Mr. Flight.”

  “It’s okay Art. You’ve made a great many people rich, and you have the right to enjoy your wealth a little bit, son.”

  “No, I mean it. It’s not like that.” As he turned the wheel to navigate a right turn, Flight glanced at the younger man and noticed he was gripping the hand hold above the door so hard his knuckles had turned white.

  “You don’t sit in the front seat a whole lot, do you Arthur?”

  The boy let out a sigh. “No. Look, I get this way when my ninety year old grandmother drives. It’s not you.”

  Flight laughed. “One of your grandmother’s is sixty-two and she lives in Selah, Washington. The other is sixty-four, and she lives in Florida. Neither of them is ninety and neither of them is driving you around.”

  Grainger looked shocked for a moment and then started laughing. Flight joined in and then guffawed when Grainger said, “It’s the thought that counts.”

  They laughed for a block or so before he said, “Seriously, Darlene has a bachelor’s degree in business administration. She danced at a burlesque place to pay her way through college—I found that out later—and Bubba couldn’t stop raving about her professionalism. I thought he was confusing professionalism for boobs, but I had HR gather information from her anyway.” He seemed more at ease when discussing the business. “We were trying to come up with something that could get teen girls into video games, you know, something like Tomb Raider with a strong female character. I figured on maybe have her be the body model for that one, too. When HR sends her package up, it turns out she’s perfect for an operations role, and I needed somebody to organize all of us, you know, and to help keep the guys from battling over control of the boy genius.”

  They were quiet for a while. Finally, Flight asked, “So there’s nothing going on between the two of you?”

  “I’m not the kind of guy who has things going on with women.”

  “Sure you are. You’re a genius and you’re rich.”

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t the kind of a guy women want, I said I’m not the kind of guy who has women.”

  “Oh. Were you and Bubba…well, you know?”

  His eyes grew wide. “I didn’t mean I was gay! Jesus. I just mean I haven’t spent a damned minute on living life since I was…well, hell, since forever. You have any idea what it’s like to have a birthday party as a five year old and find the chemical reaction between the wick, the flame, and the fire on your birthday candle holds more interest for you than any of your friends? It’s always like that.” The boy shook his head and Flight resisted the urge to pat his shoulder. “I remember a frat party. I was eighteen, and I was already a graduate student, almost done. I’d been in the fraternity forever, you know, kind of like a mascot in the beginning, but all of my friends kept talking about getting me laid because I was legal, you know.”

  He paused. Flight made the turn into the business park and turned into the complex toward the building. “So, what happened?”

  “They brought in some girls from one of the sororities, and they picked which one got to screw the virgin boy genius by spinning a bottle. It wasn’t like I had never been with a girl I mean I’d done some stuff. I was tall by the time I was sixteen, and I was a bit of a celebrity. Plus, I tutored girls all the time. I never had sex, but I made out with a bunch of girls, and one had even used her hand on me. So anyway, this redhead cheerleader that looked like someone out of a teen sex comedy wins the prize, and we get up to a room and she starts getting undressed.”

  Flight parked the car, turned the engine off, and looked at Grainer. The CEO stared out the passenger window. “I tell her I want to touch her breasts, see, but I’m not turned on. I can tell right away that she has breast implants, and I want to know it they’re silicone or saline. She walks up to me, and I lay her on the bed and start trying to figure it out. I examine the surgery scars and try to determine whether the surgeon did a good job, whether he did a good job with symmetrical placement. I actually reach into my goddam pocket for a pen and start writing notes and doing calculations on my skin. Finally, the girl asks me if I want to make love to her, I tell her just a minute while I’m doing math on the fucking palm of my hand. So, she stands up, kisses me on the cheek, and leaves. That kind of shit happens every time.”

  Flight let out a low whistle. “So are you still a virgin?”

  Grainger shook his head.

  “How did you get past all that shit?”

  Flight watched as a smile spread across his face, the first of the conversation. It wasn’t mirthful, but almost sarcastic and definitely bittersweet. “I didn’t. The girls just stick around now. I guess it’s hard be impatient after you eat a meal that costs as much as y
ou pay in rent and go to a hotel rooms that costs more.”

  Flight nodded and opened his door. “Come on, let’s go look at Darlene naked.”

 

 

  Owen Carlysle, The Game: A Crime Thriller Story (Digital Part Two)

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