The Search for the Dice Man. Luke Rhinehart

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      ‘Sure,’ said Cooper. ‘I mean how many guys accused of something tell us the dice told them to do it? Drove Putt bananas. One day this guy Rhinehart would confess to half the things we were after him for, and the next he’d say the dice had told him to lie in confessing, but that now the truth was that he was innocent. ’Course the dice told him to say that too. Poor Putt.’

      ‘Where might I find him?’

      ‘Putt thought Rhinehart was a murderer, embezzler, rapist, forger, traffic violator and general all-round menace.’ Cooper went on, ignoring the question. ‘But until that lime he helped those Commie radicals raid the TV station he could never prove anything. Had to go after him for breaking FCC regulations. Putt was on the case for seven months officially and two years after that on his own – after Rhinehart jumped bail.’

      ‘Did he find any leads?’

      ‘Not so you’d notice,’ said Cooper. ‘He got pretty closed-mouth about it after a while, though. A little nuts, you know? He told me once just before he left the force that he prayed every night that God would give the man what he deserved. “What’s that?” I asked. “Castration and dismemberment,” says Putt.’ Detective Cooper laughed.

      ‘Do you have any idea how I might locate this Mr Putt?’ I pressed again, irritably.

      ‘Sure,’ said Cooper. ‘Try the FBI. Putt got his law degree and joined the bureau. He likes to wear suits.’

      I couldn’t decide whether to pursue the Putt lead into the FBI or not. It seemed a little silly to go and ask them where Luke was when just two weeks before they had come to me with the same question. Instead I decided to see what I could find out from the World Star.

      Kurt Lyman was a ton of fun. He received me in his office at the World Star with a hearty handshake and a big grin. He was a small wiry man whose conviviality seemed inconsistent with his slight build. His office was a mess and throughout our talk a chunky secretary kept scurrying in and out, scavenging for papers or notes either on the desk or in a file cabinet, but ignoring Lyman and me as if we were custodial help.

      ‘So you’re the guy’s son, huh?’ asked Lyman after he had motioned me to a chair still slightly buried in papers and had himself sprawled back in the tip back chair behind his desk. ‘He must be raking in millions, right?’

      ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I answered irritably. ‘I haven’t seen him in years and need to locate him.’

      ‘Hey, if I had a daddy who was worshipped by thousands of assholes with money I’d want to find him too.’

      I did a wondrous job of not showing active displeasure.

      ‘You indicated in your article that no one seemed to know for sure where this Luke Rhinehart was,’ I went on. ‘Do you have any ideas about where I might look for my father or how I might find him? I assume you have a lot of material that you didn’t include in your article.’

      ‘Hey, I never even went to the place,’ Lyman countered easily. ‘The whole article is based on this girl who came to us. Even the photo of the church comes from some Polaroid she took when she was there.’

      ‘Did she say she’d ever met this Luke Rhinehart?’

      ‘Met your father?’ echoed Lyman, grinning. ‘No, she says she met some people who claimed they had seen him in the commune – one girl even claimed the Big Dice Daddy fucked her in the orgy room – but our source herself never saw him.’

      ‘Why didn’t your paper send someone to the commune to dig up some more juicy stuff?’

      ‘Funny you should ask,’ said Lyman, poking at his nose with the eraser end of a pencil. ‘Griggs wanted to go for it but seems the girl couldn’t tell east from west or Paris from Pittsburgh. She says a girlfriend drove her there through a lot of back-country roads someplace down in Virginia or North Carolina or Kentucky. We spent about half an hour over some road maps with her and we might as well have been throwing darts. We couldn’t narrow it down any better than a big circle of more than a hundred and fifty miles’ diameter. Turns out she was asleep or stoned most of the way.’

      ‘She doesn’t sound like too reliable a source.’

      ‘Reliable source!’ snorted Lyman with a grin. ‘Christ, compared to some of our sources she was integrity incarnate. She was simple, sincere and spacey. Everything in that article of mine is the God’s truth by the standards of the World Star.’

      ‘So the commune exists and people say that my father is there,’ I suggested, looking at Lyman sceptically.

      ‘Yep.’

      ‘Is there a chance I can talk to the girl?’

      ‘Sure, there’s a chance,’ said Lyman, tipping forward in his chair and vaguely shuffling among some of the papers on his desk. ‘But not much of a one. She gave us a phone number in Pennsylvania where she said she was going, but when I phoned there a week ago to ask her something, they said she’d never showed up and they wanted nothing to do with her.’

      ‘Can I have that phone number?’ I asked.

      Lyman was still groping absently at his papers.

      ‘The number?’ he said and finally looked up at me. ‘Of course not,’ he added. ‘We have to protect our sources.’

13

      More than two months before Larry had been visited by the FBI Jeff had known he could take it no more. He saw clearly that there was some Malignant Force permeating the financial markets that was perversely working to thwart his every move. Whenever he or Larry would be making a profit on a trade Jeff would be furiously wondering how this Malignant Force was using this temporary profit to trick them into a much greater loss. Jeff had concluded then that every profitable trade was in fact a demonic trick to lure Jeff on, to give him a false sense of hope, to make him believe that he still might possibly make money as a futures trader.

      He couldn’t tell Larry about his new discovery. Larry was an agnostic. Larry had no sense of the Divine which moved through and controlled all things, especially the Malignant Divine. But Jeff knew. Jeff was a believer. The Gods did not take kindly to mere humans presuming to be able to predict the future. And what was futures trading if not the arrogant act of a man thinking he could predict the direction of the price of something? The Greeks called it hubris. The Hebrews called it pride. The results were the same: the arrogant presumer ended up a cripple, a crackpot or a clutz.

      Jeff had finally decided to do something to end his madness. No longer would he challenge the Gods’ domain over the future. He would never again presume to know something that only the Gods could know. He would become religious. He would honour the Gods. He would acknowledge that only factual knowledge should or could be used to take an investment position. He solemnly vowed that he would never voluntarily trade again except on the basis of privileged insider information. That, he knew, the Gods could accept.

      Cheating was not presumptuous. Indeed, the Gods expected it of man. Cheating was a man’s way of acknowledging that he knew no way of beating the laws of chance. Cheating was, in fact, the rational man’s answer to the great Mystery of Life. Some men of course simply surrendered to the laws СКАЧАТЬ