He ceased talking. And stood. Helplessly. Waiting.
“There’s something about me in the article,” Heather said, between clenched teeth. “Look on the back page.”
Obediently, he turned to the back page, the continuation of the article.
as a hypothesis pol officials offered the theory that the relationship between Heather Hart, herself also a popular TV and recording personality, and Miss Buckman triggered Taverner’s vengeful spree in which
Jason said, “What kind of relationship did you have with Alys? Knowing her—”
“You said you didn’t know her. You said you just met her today.”
“She was weird. Frankly I think she was a lesbian. Did you and she have a sexual relationship?” He heard his voice rise; he could not control it. “That’s what the article hints at. Isn’t that right?”
The force of her blow stung his face; he retreated involuntarily, holding his hands up defensively. He had never been slapped like that before, he realized. It hurt like hell. His ears rang.
“Okay,” Heather breathed. “Hit me back.”
He drew his arm back, made a fist, then let his arm fall, his fingers relaxing. “I can’t,” he said. “I wish I could. You’re lucky.”
“I guess I am. If you killed her you could certainly kill me. What do you have to lose? They’ll gas you anyhow.”
Jason said, “You don’t believe me. That I didn’t do it.”
“That doesn’t matter. They think you did it. Even if you get off it means the end of your goddamn career, and mine, for that matter. We’re finished; do you understand? Do you realize what you’ve done?” She was screaming at him, now; frightened, he moved toward her, then, as the volume of her voice increased, away again. In confusion.
“If I could talk to General Buckman,” he said, “I might be able to—”
“Her brother? You’re going to appeal to him?” Heather strode at him, her fingers writhing clawlike. “He’s head of the commission investigating the murder. As soon as the coroner reported that it was homicide, General Buckman announced he personally was taking charge of the incident—can’t you manage to read the whole article? I read it ten times on the way back here; I picked it up in Bel Aire after I got my new fall, the one they ordered for me from Belgium. It finally arrived. And now look. What does it matter?”
Reaching, he tried to put his arms around her. Stiffly, she pulled away.
“I’m not going to turn myself in,” he said.
“Do whatever you want.” Her voice had sunk to a blunted whisper. “I don’t care. Just go away. I don’t want to have anything more to do with you. I wish you were both dead, you and her. That skinny bitch—all she ever meant to me was trouble. Finally I had to throw her bodily out; she clung to me like a leech.”
“Was she good in bed?” he said, and drew back as Heather’s hand rose swiftly, fingers groping for his eyes.
For an interval neither of them spoke. They stood close together. Jason could hear her breathing and his own. Rapid, noisy fluctuations of air. In and out, in and out. He shut his eyes.
“You do what you want,” Heather said presently. “I’m going to turn myself in at the academy.”
“They want you, too?” he said.
“Can’t you read the whole article? Can’t you just do that? They want my testimony. As to how you felt about my relationship with Alys. It was public knowledge that you and I were sleeping together then, for Christ’s sake.”
“I didn’t know about your relationship.”
“I’ll tell them that. When”—she hesitated, then went on—“when did you find out?”
“From this newspaper,” he said. “Just now.”
“You didn’t know about it yesterday when she was killed?”
At that he gave up; hopeless, he said to himself. Like living in a world made of rubber. Everything bounced. Changed shape as soon as it was touched or even looked at.
“Today, then,” Heather said. “If that’s what you believe. You would know, if anyone would.”
“Goodbye,” he said. Sitting down, he fished his shoes out from beneath the couch, put them on, tied the laces, stood up. Then, reaching, he lifted the cardboard box from the coffee table. “For you,” he said, and tossed it to her. Heather clutched at it; the box struck her on the chest and then fell to the floor.
“What is it?” she asked.
“By now,” he said, “I’ve forgotten.”
Kneeling, Heather picked up the box, opened it, brought forth newspapers and the blue-glazed vase. It had not broken. “Oh,” she said softly. Standing up she inspected it; she held it close to the light. “It’s incredibly beautiful,” she said. “Thank you.”
Jason said, “I didn’t kill that woman.”
Wandering away from him, Heather placed the vase on a high shelf of knickknacks. She said nothing.
“What can I do,” he said, “but go?” He waited but still she said nothing. “Can’t you speak?” he demanded.
“Call them,” Heather said. “And tell them you’re here.”
He picked up the phone, dialed the operator. “I want to put through a call to the Los Angeles Police Academy,” he told the operator. “To General Felix Buckman. Tell him it’s Jason Taverner calling.” The operator was silent. “Hello?” he said.
“You can dial that direct, sir.”
“I want you to do it,” Jason said.
“But, sir—”
“Please,” he said.
27
Phil Westerburg, the Los Angeles Police Agency chief deputy coroner, said to General Felix Buckman, his superior, “I can explain the drug best this way. You haven’t heard of it because it isn’t in use yet; she must have ripped it off from the academy’s special-activities lab.” He sketched on a piece of paper. “Time-binding is a function of the brain. It’s a structuralization of perception and orientation.”
“Why did it kill her?” Buckman asked. It was late and his head hurt. He wished the day would end; he wished everyone and everything would go away. “An overdose?” he demanded.
“We have no way of determining as yet what would constitute an overdose with KR-3. It’s currently being tested on detainee volunteers at the San Bernardino forced-labor camp, but so far”—Westerburg continued to sketch—“anyhow, as I was explaining. Time-binding is a function of the brain and goes on as long as the brain is receiving input. Now, we know that the brain can’t function if it can’t bind space as well…but as to why, we don’t know yet. Probably it has to do with the instinct to stabilize reality in such a fashion that sequences can be ordered in terms of before-and-after—that would be time—and, more importantly, space-occupying, as with a three-dimensional object as compared to, say, a drawing of that object.”
He showed Buckman his sketch. It meant nothing to Buckman; he stared at it blankly and wondered where, this late at night, he could get some Darvon for his headache. Had Alys had any? She had squirreled so many pills.
Westerburg continued, “Now, one aspect of space is that any given unit of space excludes all other given units; if a thing is there it can’t be here. Just as in time if an event comes before, it can’t also come after.”
Buckman said, “Couldn’t this wait until tomorrow? You originally said it would take twenty-four hours to develop a report on the exact toxin involved. Twenty-four hours is satisfactory to me.”
“But you requested that we speed up the analysis,” Westerburg said. “You wanted the autopsy to begin immediately. At two-ten this afternoon, when I was first officially called in.”
“Did I?” Buckman said. Yes, he thought, I did. Before the marshals can get their story together. “Just don’t draw pictures,” he said. “My eyes hurt. Just tell me.”
“The exclusiveness of space, we’ve learned, is only a function of the brain as it handles perception. It regulates data in terms of mutually restrictive space units. Millions of them. Trillions, theoretically, in fact. But in itself, space is not exclusive. In fac
t, in itself, space does not exist at all.”
“Meaning?”
Westerburg, refraining from sketching, said, “A drug such as KR-3 breaks down the brain’s ability to exclude one unit of space out of another. So here versus there is lost as the brain tries to handle perception. It can’t tell if an object has gone away or if it’s still there. When this occurs the brain can no longer exclude alternative spatial vectors. It opens up the entire range of spatial variation. The brain can no longer tell which objects exist and which are only latent, unspatial possibilities. So as a result, competing spatial corridors are opened, into which the garbled percept system enters, and a whole new universe appears to the brain to be in the process of creation.”
“I see,” Buckman said. But actually he did not either see or care. I only want to go home, he thought. And forget this.
“That’s very important,” Westerburg said earnestly. “KR-3 is a major breakthrough. Anyone affected by it is forced to perceive irreal universes, whether they want to or not. As I said, trillions of possibilities are theoretically all of a sudden real; chance enters and the person’s percept system chooses one possibility out of all those presented to it. It has to choose, because if it didn’t, competing universes would overlap, and the concept of space itself would vanish. Do you follow me?”
Seated a short way off, at his own desk, Herb Maime said, “He means that the brain seizes on the spatial universe nearest at hand.”
“Yes,” Westerburg said. “You’ve read the classified lab report on KR-3, have you, Mr. Maime?”
“I read it a little over an hour ago,” Herb Maime said. “Most of it was too technical for me to grasp. But I did notice that its effects are transitory. The brain finally reestablishes contact with the actual space-time objects that it formerly perceived.”
“Right,” Westerburg said, nodding. “But during the interval in which the drug is active the subject exists, or thinks he exists—”
“There’s no difference,” Herb said, “between the two. That’s the way the drug works; it abolishes that distinction.”
“Technically,” Westerburg said. “But to the subject an actualized environment envelopes him, one which is alien to the former one that he always experienced, and he operates as if he had entered a new world. A world with changed aspects…the amount of change being determined by how great the so-to-speak distance is between the space-time world he formerly perceived and the new one he’s forced to function in.”
“I’m going home,” Buckman said. “I can’t stand any more of this.” He rose to his feet. “Thanks, Westerburg,” he said, automatically extending his hand to the chief deputy coroner. They shook. “Put together an abstract for me,” he said to Herb Maime, “and I’ll look it over in the morning.” He started off, his gray topcoat over his arm. As he always carried it.
“Do you now see what happened to Taverner?” Herb said.
Halting, Buckman said, “No.”
“He passed over to a universe in which he didn’t exist. And we passed over with him because we’re objects of his percept-system. And then when the drug wore off he passed back again. What actually locked him back here was nothing he took or didn’t take but her death. So then of course his file came to us from Data Central.”
“Good night,” Buckman said. He left the office, passed through the great, silent room of spotless metal desks, all alike, all cleared at the end of the day, including McNulty’s, and then at last found himself in the ascent tube, rising to the roof.
The night air, cold and clear, made his head ache terribly; he shut his eyes and gritted his teeth. And then he thought, I could get an analgesic from Phil Westerburg. There’s probably fifty kinds in the academy’s pharmacy, and Westerburg has the keys.
Taking the descent tube he rearrived on the fourteenth floor, returned to his suite of offices, where Westerburg and Herb Maime still sat conferring.
To Buckman, Herb said, “I want to explain one thing I said. About us being objects of his percept system.”
“We’re not,” Buckman said.
Herb said, “We are and we aren’t. Taverner wasn’t the one who took the KR-3. It was Alys. Taverner, like the rest of us, became a datum in your sister’s percept system and got dragged across when she passed into an alternate construct of coordinates. She was very involved with Taverner as a wish-fulfillment performer, evidently, and had run a fantasy number in her head for some time about knowing him as an actual person. But although she did manage to accomplish this by taking the drug, he and we at the same time remained in our own universe. We occupied two space corridors at the same time, one real, one irreal. One is an actuality; one is a latent possibility among many, spatialized temporarily by the KR-3. But just temporarily. For about two days.”
“That’s long enough,” Westerburg said, “to do enormous physical harm to the brain involved. Your sister’s brain, Mr. Buckman, was probably not so much destroyed by toxicity but by a high and sustained overload. We may find that the ultimate cause of death was irreversible injury to cortical tissue, a speed-up of normal neurological decay…her brain so to speak died of old age over an interval of two days.”
“Can I get some Darvon from you?” Buckman said to Westerburg.
“The pharmacy is locked up,” Westerburg said.
“But you have the key.”
Westerburg said, “I’m not supposed to use it when the pharmacist isn’t on duty.”
“Make an exception,” Herb said sharply. “This time.”
Westerburg moved off, sorting among his keys.
“If the pharmacist was there,” Buckman said, after a time, “he wouldn’t need the key.”
“This whole planet,” Herb said, “is run by bureaucrats.” He eyed Buckman. “You’re too sick to take anymore. After he gets you the Darvon, go home.”
“I’m not sick,” Buckman said. “I just don’t feel well.”
“But don’t stick around here. I’ll finish up. You start to leave and then you come back.”
“I’m like an animal,” Buckman said. “Like a laboratory rat.”
The phone on his big oak desk buzzed.
“Is there any chance it’s one of the marshals?” Buckman said. “I can’t talk to them tonight; it’ll have to wait.”
Herb picked up the phone. Listened. Then, cupping his hand over the receiver, he said, “It’s Taverner. Jason Taverner.”
“I’ll talk to him.” Buckman took the phone from Herb Maime, said into it, “Hello, Taverner. It’s late.”
In his ear, Taverner said tinnily, “I want to give myself up. I’m at the apartment of Heather Hart. We’re waiting here together.”
To Herb Maime, Buckman said, “He wants to give himself up.”
“Tell him to come down here,” Herb said.
“Come down here,” Buckman said into the phone. “Why do you want to give up?” he said. “We’ll kill you in the end, you miserable murdering motherfucker; you know that. Why don’t you run?”
“Where?” Taverner squeaked.
“To one of the campuses. Go to Columbia. They’re stabilized; they have food and water for a while.”
Taverner said, “I don’t want to be hunted anymore.”
“To live is to be hunted,” Buckman rasped. “Okay, Taverner,” he said. “Come down here and we’ll book you. Bring the Hart woman with you so we can record her testimony.” You goddamn fool, he thought. Giving yourself up. “Cut your testicles off while you’re at it. You stupid bastard.” His voice shook.
“I want to clear myself,” Taverner’s voice echoed thinly in Buckman’s ear.
“When you show up here,” Buckman said, “I’ll kill you with my own gun. Resisting arrest, you degenerate. Or whatever we want to call it. We’ll call it what we feel like. Anything.” He hung up the phone. “He’s coming down here to be killed,” he said to Herb Maime.
“You picked him. You can unpick him if you want. Clear him. Send him back to his phonograph records and his silly TV s
how.”
“No.” Buckman shook his head.
Westerburg appeared with two pink capsules and a paper cup of water. “Darvon compound,” he said, presenting them to Buckman.
“Thank you.” Buckman swallowed the pills, drank the water, crushed the paper cup and dropped it into his shredder. Quietly, the teeth of the shredder spun, then ceased. Silence.
“Go home,” Herb said to him. “Or, better yet, go to a motel, a good downtown motel for the night. Sleep late tomorrow; I’ll handle the marshals when they call.”
“I have to meet Taverner.”
“No you don’t. I’ll book him. Or a desk sergeant can book him. Like any other criminal.”
“Herb,” Buckman said, “I intend to kill the guy, as I said on the phone.” Going to his desk he unlocked the bottom drawer, got out a cedar box, set it on the desk. He opened the box and from it brought forth a single-shot Derringer twenty-two pistol. He loaded it with a hollow-nosed shell, half cocked it, held it with its muzzle pointed at the ceiling. For safety’s sake. Habit.
“Let’s see that,” Herb said.
Buckman handed it to him. “Made by Colt,” he said. “Colt acquired the dies and patents. I forget when.”
“This is a nice gun,” Herb said, weighing it, balancing it in his hand. “A fine handgun.” He gave it back. “But a twenty-two slug is too small. You’d have to get him exactly between the eyes. He’d have to be standing directly in front of you.” He placed his hand on Buckman’s shoulder. “Use a thirty-eight special or a forty-five,” he said. “Okay? Will you do that?”
“You know who owns this gun?” Buckman said. “Alys. She kept it here because she said if she kept it at home she might use it on me sometime during an argument, or late at night when she gets—got—depressed. But it’s not a woman’s gun. Derringer made women’s guns, but this isn’t one of them.”
“Did you get it for her?”
“No,” Buckman said. “She found it in a pawnshop down in the Watts area. Twenty-five bucks she paid for it. Not a bad price, considering its condition.” He glanced up, into Herb’s face. “We really have to kill him. The marshals will crucify me if we don’t hang it on him. And I’ve got to stay at policy level.”
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said Page 20
