Variation on a Theme, Book 7
Copyright© 2026 by Grey Wolf
Chapter 18: Naming Names
Thursday, August 21, 1986
We slept a bit late, had breakfast with Mom, then finished up our packing. My pager went off around eleven. It was Kyle, showing as non-urgent.
Once I had him on the phone, he said, “I’ve got news. Does the name Louis Delacroix mean anything to you?”
“It doesn’t.”
“Doesn’t mean anything to me either, but that means very little. Just that he’s not in any sources I can readily look up. Since I can’t say that about you, I’ll compare it to your father. Finding Sam Marshall would take some work. Oh, I’ve got an address for Mr. Delacroix, but that’s about it. If you’re curious, he’s in Bellaire. Not a particularly upscale part of Bellaire, but the guy’s not poor, anyway.”
“But well away from us,” I said. “‘Curiouser and curiouser.’”
“We’ve agreed to hire the PI. My plan is to have him act as a double agent, of sorts. Mostly, that just keeps him out of our hair, but I don’t want Mr. Delacroix to find out we know about him.”
“Yeah. I agree.”
“I want to hire a local PI and start investigating Mr. Delacroix. It won’t be five hundred to start, but it could easily get to that point,” he said.
“Go for it. We’re where we were. This is fairly urgent. We need to know who we’re dealing with, as much as we can.”
“Agreed! I’ll be on it shortly. I know a few PIs. One of them will be up for it.”
“Let us know. And, of course, let Harry know. And anyone else,” I said.
“Will do! Also, Harry’s checking on the graffiti guy. No news yet.”
“Thanks, Kyle.”
“This is a blast! Keeps me out of boring documents for a while, too!” he said, chuckling.
“All to the good!”
We left the house at noon and were in College Station just before two. Al shook hands with me, hugged the girls, thanked us for an entertaining time, and took off. We had him signed up to house-sit for every away A&M football game except for Arkansas and LSU. None of us wanted to drive all the way to Little Rock, and Cammie and Mel didn’t want to go to Baton Rouge, nor did Candice and Sherry. They would go to the other away games, though (Houston, SMU, and t.u.).
Jas, Angie, Paige, and I were going to the LSU game, though. It was a great excuse to hop over to New Orleans and see Curtis, Marsha, Marshall, and Sandra.
We might actually go to New Orleans twice. Tulane was playing TCU at one in the afternoon, while the A&M game was at seven. Sandra was interested in sitting with us — or, rather, inviting us to sit with her and some of her friends. Curtis and Marsha would be there, but we couldn’t get tickets near them, while Sandra apparently had a way to seat us in her area.
We wouldn’t see Marshall on game day, most likely, but we could come back on Sunday and see him. He promised to take enough time away from reviewing game film to have lunch with us. Lunch would include Curtis, Marsha, and Sandra. Marsha had already offered to host.
I trusted Kyle’s research skills. So did the girls. Still, four of us had, or had had, serious research skills, too. Two hours in the library confirmed that Louis Delacroix wasn’t going to be easy to pin down in terms of who he was and why he might be concerned with us. We had his address, but no one wanted to drive past it. The odds were very high that he knew what we looked like and what kinds of cars we drove. He might not be home, but we were hiring a low-profile professional to investigate him. Libraries were one thing. Physical surveillance was entirely different.
I called Amy around four. Up until now, it hadn’t felt like something she needed to know. By this point, she deserved an update. I briefly spoke to her mother, who sounded surprised that someone was calling for her. Amy herself was happy to hear the update. She was careful in what she said, but I was a veteran of that. We had a plan to let her parents in on things, and this wasn’t the time.
The new letters were indeed anti-gay hate mail. Today’s mail brought us two more, both to ‘Sinners’.
Cammie called Maxine while I was talking to Amy and updated her on things. No names, but Maxine got the full picture of what we knew so far. She said she’d never heard of such a thing. And, like Kyle, she found this an amusing diversion from the nuts and bolts of being a real estate agent.
Her mission hadn’t changed. She was to tell them we would decide by Monday. No sense rushing an escalation, but we had the information we wanted. We could decline the offer on Monday and see what, if anything, happened.
Lee paged me just before five. I called him right back and said, “Hey! What’s up?”
“I’ve got an interesting thing,” he said. “Wayne Stark — you won’t know him, probably, but he means a lot to me — anyway, he’s still got some pull with the MSC. He’s putting together a series of business talks. One is ‘The Future of the Computer Industry’. He wants me to debate some consultants from McKinsey. I’m not much of a debater. You are. Now ... I’m not sure I want you on the stage yet, because it’ll make you much too visible in the wrong place. But I can use a ringer.”
I chuckled and said, “Of course, I can do that. I’ll bring the group. Angie might chime in depending on how things go. I could easily see any of the others getting involved, too.”
“I certainly wouldn’t dare cross any of them!” he said. “That would take a much bigger fool than I am!”
“When’s this thing?”
“Almost exactly a month from now. Saturday, September 20th, at two in the afternoon.”
“Can’t imagine why we wouldn’t be there! Unless ... that can’t be on top of the Aggie game, can it?” I said.
“I asked the same thing! The game’s at seven-thirty. No conflict at all. Wayne’s hoping we’ll get people in town for the game to attend.”
“Sounds good to me!”
“Also, don’t mention it to Michael. If we win, I’ll tell him. If we lose, mum’s the word,” he said, chuckling.
“Works for me.”
“Also, one other thing. This is longer-term. I wish it wasn’t, but it is.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Tell me what you think of the name ‘P.C.’s Limited’?”
“Honestly? I’ve never liked it. If it were up to me, I’d have stuck with ‘Dell Computer Corporation’, and just d.b.a.’d to simply ‘Dell’ most of the time.”
Why not? It had worked really well in the two out of three universes where ‘Dell’ was a thing, after all. Right now, the official name was ‘Dell Computer Corporation’. ‘P.C.’s Limited’ was a ‘doing business as’ name. Changing it would require changing packaging, letterhead, badges, and a lot of other things, and it would require plenty of advertising to make people aware, but making it legal was easy.
He chuckled and said, “Good. That’s where I am. Michael’s balky right now, but I think we can move the needle. Not right now, and not before the party. I don’t even want to bring it up again yet. But align it with some big operational change, and I think we’ve got something.”
“Works for me. I’m on your side on this one, Lee. I know Michael likes ‘P.C.’s Limited’, but it just ... it lacks something. Of course, so does ‘IBM’, especially if you use the full name. ‘Compaq’ is a good name. Just ‘Dell’ is short, sweet, and lends itself to advertising. And it has no more — and no less — meaning to most people than ‘Apple’ or ‘HP’.”
“Glad to hear it. Let’s see if we can make this happen soon.”
“I hope so!” I said.
“Thanks, Steve! See you in a few days!”
“We’re all looking forward to it!”
I updated the others later. Angie, in particular, found it hilarious that I was now part of the team pushing for the iconic ‘Dell’ name in this universe. I pretty much agreed. Low profile? We sucked so badly at that!
The rest of the day, and evening, was pretty quiet. No calls from anyone, no updates, no suspicious cars. Nothing. We could do with that!
We talked about it and decided that we weren’t going to freak out about short outings. Church, shopping, movies, classes, or whatever were fine. Thus far, the house activity was limited to surveillance and a purchase offer. Would they escalate to violence? We all hoped not. If they did, we were well insured, and the most important things were in fireproof storage. It would absolutely suck if the house burned down or was otherwise damaged, but we would be fine.
And, if someone did burn it down, we wouldn’t rest until they were in prison for arson. Even Paige was emphatic about that.
“I can get away with arson!” she said. “No one else!”
Friday, August 22, 1986
The call we’d been waiting for came at two in the afternoon. Jas, Mel, and Paige were off at the grocery store. The rest of us had stayed home just in case a call came in.
Once we’d said hello, Kyle said, “Are you sitting down? Because ... you should probably be sitting down.”
“Sitting down,” I said, and did.
“So ... we now know who Louis Delacroix is. Basically, he’s a dumb version of Harry Penders.”
“Fixer type? Muscle?”
“All of that. I might even say ‘enforcer.’ He comes out of the oilfield business. The guy who knocks sense into the roughnecks. He’s not dumb, but ... he’s also no Harry.”
Something was nagging at me, but I couldn’t quite place it. It jumped into my head just as Kyle said, “Remember an outfit named Pemberland Petroleum?”
I growled a bit. What a blast from the past! Literally, in a way. That was the company Nathan McBride, the jerk who’d slammed into my car (barely missing killing Jas), then ranted at me in the deposition instead of just settling, worked for.
“I remember. Don’t tell me?”
Kyle chuckled dryly. “Louis has moved up in the ranks. He’s now, officially, Vice President of Operations. An enforcer with a title, pretty much. Not the brains, but the muscle.”
“And...?”
“There was a shakeup at Pemberland a year and a half ago, and your old friend Nathan McBride took the whole thing over. They’ve been on a bit of a roll, too. Profitable, and old Nathan’s got some new toys to drive. The thing he doesn’t know, but we do, is that you’re almost certainly worth more than he is. I suspect that might matter down the road. I’m trying to confirm that, but I’ve got clues in what sort of house he has and where, the type of cars he’s buying ... all of that. My PI is on it right now.”
“Fuck,” I said, then covered the microphone and said, softly, “Nathan McBride.”
Angie looked shocked. It took Cammie a second to remember who that was, and then she looked shocked, too.
“I did some additional research. Turns out that a certain Nathan McBride was a fairly big donor to Louis Welch’s campaign. And, in general, seems to hate ‘the gays.’”
“Am I allowed to mention something from McBride’s deposition, now that it’s material?”
“I’m your counsel. If I need to know it, I need to know it.”
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