The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  The medium-sized man looked old enough, that day, to be the woman’s husband. All I would have remembered about him, if that had been the only time I ever saw him, was that once I glimpsed a funny little smile playing around his face, and thought that if he was trying to enact grief, he was doing an especially bad job of it.

  I don’t believe I ever thought of connecting them with the flowers or funeral arrangements. I must have assumed all those details had been handled by distant relatives, via phone and computer communication lines. I really knew very little about Rob’s life before February, 2036.

  When I got home from the funeral, I found my employer rereading Rob’s official death report on the mailroom screen.

  “Carmine’s,” she repeated. “You know, Tommi, I’ve never liked that diagnosis. What about the purple rash—”

  “Oh, I wish I’d never seen that ugly purple rash!” I cried. “I wish it had never been there to see!”

  For once, neither of us had a recorder going; or if Cagey did, she erased it afterward and never told me. So I’m not at all sure what I said next. Something, I expect, like, “I don’t care anyway, what difference does it make?” I know I rushed out of the room, because I found myself in my own bedroom in time to drop face down on the bed and have my sob out.

  Some employers wouldn’t take any excuse for that sort of outburst, then or now. They’d shake their heads, say, “Twenty-twentyish,” and deduct time and a half from the offender’s wages, if not worse. As well as I can tabulate, it happens oftener in videoshows and plays than real life, but everybody agrees that acting as I did that afternoon to my employer’s face is in the same unguided behavior pattern that made the 2020s such a lurid decade. When I eventually got back into control of myself, I felt thankful to have the employer I did.

  Cagey Warrington Thursday, who never minded if people spelled her first name the way it was pronounced, “K.G.,” was one of those individuals we’ve taken to calling “fanciers.” She wasn’t really a police detective any more than the Boston Pops is a volcano rock group, for all its occasional selection of Vesixius or Lavular Larvae hits. But Cagey Thursday lived in her own cops-and-robbers world and interpreted her Reformed Constitutional rights-to-be-eccentric as including the right to call herself “Sergeant” and wear a dollarstore badge.

  She was obviously enough a playactor to get away with it most of the time, and rich enough to bail herself out the rare times her act got her in trouble with the real police. She was also rich enough to hire and occasionally bail out a “police partner.” For almost two years, ever since March of 2034, I had been that paid partner.

  It was good employment, and I was still grateful to have stumbled into it a few months after graduation. Of course, with an A.M., even an A.M. in Cinematic Literature, I was probably overqualified. But Cagey paid me four hundred tridols a month—one hundred in real cash, the rest by check-credit to my bank account—more than real pollies were making at that time, and they had to pay their own living expenses out of it, while I got crashspace and meals in the various Warrington properties, all as a fringe of the job.

  It could be embarrassing. As a police detective, Cagey often seemed more of a Clouseau than a Dalgleish. But in spite of her clumsinesses, eccentricities, and absentmindednesses, she had brains and a heart.

  Far from deploring the Terrible Twenties, Cagey liked to say that she wished she had been able to enjoy them as a grownup; she was only three years older than I. She probably would have enjoyed playing her detective games in that decade. She probably also would have been killed off very early that way. One of her keenest ambitions in the ’30s was to unearth a cache of “contraband” Zinkola; it wasn’t really illegal, but she could pretend it was.

  * * * *

  When I finally dried my eyes that Wednesday afternoon, blew my nose, and returned to the Warrington House mailroom, Cagey was gone. She had left a blinking message on the screen: “Gone to newsroom.” On the desktop beside it, a half-drunk mug of almost cold coffee was making its ring on a printout of Rob’s official death report.

  As usual, Cagey had forgotten to switch the unit from Send/Receive to Compose/Edit mode. Her message was going out to any mailscreens that might happen to be on and switched to General Scan. Since nobody watching them would know who had gone to what newsroom, or anything else about the message except that it had been logged 3/12/36 between 16:35:14 and 16:35:20, that hardly mattered. I keyed Cancel/Blank, switched the machine off, returned the mug to the beverageserve’s automatic wash and dispense unit, and went on to my employer’s newsroom.

  The newscreen was frozen on Rob’s public obituary. A printout of that lay beneath another half-empty coffee mug. Again I punched off the screen and took care of the mug. A note scrawled in manual highlighter on the margin of the printout said, “FILES.”

  In spite of all that had happened the last few days, I couldn’t help smiling. Whenever I caught up with my employer, her first comment would be to the effect that we had to get everything—mailscreen, newscreen, back files, and all—consolidated into one single, convenient, up-to-date data processing room. We never would. Secretly, she liked walking around from room to room, wing to wing. It gave her plenty of exercise, and it fit in with her perception of Warrington House as a more or less oldfashioned police station.

  I went on to the basement room we called our back files. It was much too large. Cagey’s parents, now dividing most of their year between Jamaica and Reykjavik, had planned it as a private triple-lane bowling alley. Cagey had partitioned off one of the lanes, floored it over, lighted it with four ghastly antique bare-bulb ceiling lamps, and lined it with bookshelves and metal filing cabinets salvaged from junkshops. Not that she couldn’t have afforded everything new and deluxe. She preferred the atmosphere of real junk. Seeing that almost everything she considered truly important was on computer disks and microchips, a single filing cabinet would have been enough. The rest of the filing cabinets were filled up with duplicate printouts, the shelves with dusty secondhand books—twenty or thirty of them actual dictionaries, atlases, and other outdated but occasionally useful reference volumes, the rest mainly old textbooks and turn-of-the-century bestsellers. Every now and then, when she found another dictionary, Who’s Who of people most of whom must be dead by now, or stray encyclopedia volume, she would box up an old novel to make room for it; and once or twice a month she would say something about re-sorting her file folders.

  This afternoon I found two of the ceiling lights still on, one drawer of the computerforms cabinet partly pulled out, and the screen flashing another message. The screen was the only visible thing in this room that couldn’t have come out of a 1950s movie, and even it was limited-function, strictly for reading, printouts, and messages. This time the message was: “Mailroom. Bring your copies.”

  I glanced around and didn’t see any new printouts. Either she had forgotten to make them, or absentmindedly stuffed them in a file drawer, or left them on top of one of the dangerously balanced piles. Or she might mean the printout sheets she had left in the other rooms. Not that it mattered. I often neglected to bring “my copies.” It made her feel superior in competence, and she always had copies of her own. I pushed the file drawer shut, switched off the screen and lights, and went back up to the mailroom.

  This time Cagey was there, letting yet another mug of coffee cool while she checked the Marltown city directory.

  “Sergeant,” I remarked, trying for a light touch, “you may just be accounting for half the electricity used up in Marltown from day to day.”

  “Mm-hmm,” she agreed without looking up. “One of these days we’re going to have to get all our working data together in one modern processing room.”

  I caught back a giggle—pure, overstrained nature breaking out at the first scrap of anything that resembled humor. It must have sounded like a sob, because Cagey glanced around at once, her round face full of concern. She looke
d a bit like a cross between Elsa Lanchester and Angela Lansbury at about age thirty, and she echoed the overall roundness by wearing little eyeglasses, two lenses each one as round as a monocle, with no kind of frame except nosebridge and wire earpieces. She didn’t need them—they were plain window plastiglass—but she liked them as a costume accessory. She perceived them as making her look wise beyond her years. In fact, they made her look rather like a cartoon owl, which may have been close enough.

  “Feeling all right now, Tommi?” she asked gently.

  “In control again, Sarge,” I replied.

  “Because there won’t be any problem about a temporary reassignment,” she went on, “if you’d rather not work with me on this case. Being, in a sense, personally involved ...”

  “This case, Sergeant Thursday?”

  She nodded soberly. “Officer Tomlinson, I believe that what we have on our hands here is first-degree homicide.”

  Chapter 2

  Of course. Why else all the printouts? My brain must have been in more of a holding pattern than I’d thought.

  We had been to over a dozen oldfashioned “murder weekends,” but Cagey knew these were purest make-believe. Twice she had even played victim, once according to the pre-arranged scenario and once on her own inspiration, just to keep things lively with an extra and totally inexplicable murder. Unfortunately, she had never solved any of those murder games; but even if she had, I don’t think it would have satisfied her yearning.

  News of real crimes, recognized as such, were worthless to her. She had had to give up trying to join forces with the regular police years before; that had been when she decided on hiring her own partner. But she was always on the watch for some real crime that nobody else recognized as one, always scanning newscasts and obits for anything at once suspicious and ignored by the regular police. Two or three times a month we hopped aboard a plane or needletrain and chased some news item to its original state. We’d even been overseas that way. Now and then Cagey succeeded in getting somebody else to agree that yes, there might have been a crime; but at that point, the local police always insisted on taking over. So far, Cagey’s big successes had been finding lost pets and children.

  My conscious brain should have clicked the first instant she’d brought up Rob’s purple rash. I suppose I hadn’t quite expected…but then, why shouldn’t she make a case out of Rob’s death? Cagey Warrington Thursday could have made a case out of her own mother’s death, if only as a way of coping with it.

  All right, I’d see if I couldn’t make it a way of coping, too. After all, what had he really been to me? A potential husband? A man I could have come to know intimately, but hadn’t known at all a month ago. I had known Cagey a lot longer. How could I let her chase this fancy with who knew what strange sidekick?

  Because if I opted out of the case, she would surely hire a new partner for it. I wasn’t worried about being replaced permanently; but on a “murder” investigation, my employer needed someone familiar, reliable, and of proven responsibility at her side. Following up on Rob’s death should keep her happily occupied for at least as many weeks as I had known him; and steadying her through her self-produced mazes might possibly help me psychodoctor my own way through my personal loss.

  So I told her, “Sergeant Thursday, I want to work with you on this one. As you say, I’m personally involved. That means I’ve got a personal interest in settling the score.”

  “Good woman!” She keyed the mailroom unit to print out the directory page that was showing on the screen. Turning back to me, she went on, “Now, do you have your copies of ... No, I see you don’t. Okay, we can both use mine.”

  Beside the keyboard lay a manila folder two centimeters thick with papers. Cagey grabbed it up by the fold—too quickly and carelessly—and the loose papers flipped out, some landing in a splayed sheaf on the floor, others fluttering down like huge snowflakes, a few skidding to a stop on the edge of the desktop.

  “Never mind,” said Cagey. “Sorting documents is the best way to study ’em.”

  I got down and gathered the sheets that had fallen to the floor, including the ones that slipped the rest of the way off the desk when Cagey started to pick them up. Even though I was used to her methods, I couldn’t understand how she had already found so much to print out regarding the death of Robyn H. Grove. Not until I saw that most of the sheets were public news records of known cases of Carmine’s disease.

  There had been, as I recalled, some two or three hundred confirmed cases since Carmine’s first made news in ’31. I wondered if she had a printout for every one.

  She collected her copies of the directory page, added them to the folder and its few file sheets that hadn’t reached the floor, said, “My office,” and left the room. I made sure I had all the rest of the printouts, shook them into a manageable imitation of neatness, switched off the screen, and followed.

  Cagey’s “office” had originally been a guest bedroom in the south wing. Now it had a real, 1960s police station desk—Cagey’s pride and joy—in the middle; an even older antique rolltop desk for the computer in one corner; another old metal filing cabinet opposite; and an overstuffed sofa along one wall, beneath frames holding old photos of obscure people in oldfashioned police uniform and de-acidified clippings from actual twentieth-century pressprinted, woodpulp newspapers.

  There were three chairs: Cagey’s swivelchair on rollers behind the desk, and two heavy old straightbacks on the visitors’ side. When we had only one set of printouts at hand, however, we sat on the sofa with the sheaf between us. By the time I got there, Cagey was already sitting on her usual end of the sofa, feet up on one of the straight chairs and two new mugs of coffee, steaming hot from the dispenser, one on the flat of each sofa arm.

  I pulled up the other straight chair and used its seat as a ledge for sorting and rearranging the printouts, while Cagey talked, from time to time snatching sheets by singles and pinchfuls to find the data she wanted to illustrate some point. My coffee was the way I liked it: milk, no sugar.

  “There have been,” Cagey said, “to date, two hundred and eighty-seven documented cases of Carmine’s disease, up until Tuesday morning. And not one—not one—of those two hundred and eighty-seven have any purple rash listed among the clear and immediate symptoms.”

  “How did you get all their personal access codes, Sergeant?”

  “Carmine’s is a classified public health hazard,” she reminded me. That meant all relevant documentation had to be filed where any qualified researcher could access it; Cagey had gotten the medical researchers’ access code from Verne Tarkinson, a friend with a degree in chemistry, a job in the Warrington Environmental Research Foundation, and a moonlighting role as Cagey’s favorite forensic pathologist. While Verne never postmortemed any human bodies, he could and did run any simple chemical analyses or other such work she fancied needed doing.

  “Well, not by initial computer check, you must mean,” I persisted, sipping my coffee. Surely she couldn’t have read through all 287 reports yet.

  “Not by initial computer check,” she agreed. “Which is why I scrolled for the printouts, of course. You take half, I’ll take half, and between us we should have them thoroughly human-eyeballed by tomorrow morning. I’d meant to take out numbers ... let’s see…forty-five, ninety-two, and two hundred thirty-something. One had a purple rash, but it was a proven allergic reaction to some unpronounceable preservative, he’d been suffering from it sporadically for years, and the last attack was already fading by the time he collapsed from Carmine’s. The other two had rashes, but they were orange, almost yellow.”

  “Maybe Rob’s rash was another allergic reaction to something,” I suggested. “Unrelated to his death. Just…coincidental.”

  “Maybe,” she said without enthusiasm. “But I doubt it. You’d never seen anything like it on him before, had you?”

  “No. But I only knew him th
ree weeks, and ... never saw more of his skin than his face, neck, and hands.” Hard to believe; but I’d never even seen him in short or rolled-up sleeves, as I might have if our three weeks had been in summer rather than winter.

  “And he never mentioned anything about allergies?”

  “No. But people don’t always know they have them. And they can develop very suddenly.”

  “Did you ever notice him scratching or—”

  “Please, Sergeant!” I said. “Rob Grove was a perfect gentleman.”

  She had remarked once or twice, while talking him over with me after a date, that she could never find lifetime happiness with a perfect gentleman. She didn’t repeat it now. Instead, she asked, “But you first noticed the rash appear only minutes before the other symptoms?”

  It was painful, but I closed my eyes and remembered. “Right after the appetizers. He had shrimp cocktail.”

  “Which you’d seen him eat before without ill effect.”

  “There might have been something different in the sauce. And by the time dessert came, he was ...”

  Cagey put her hand on my shoulder. For a few minutes neither of us spoke. At last she said, “All this can wait till morning.”

  “No, Sarge, I think I’d just as soon get to it right away.”

  She cleared her throat. “Actually, Tommi, there isn’t that much more to talk about just at this point. What we basically have to go on so far is a remarkably fast diagnosis of Carmine’s disease in spite of a symptom unreported in any earlier known cases. Interestingly, while the official death report under Rob’s name—which we couldn’t have seen without his personal access number—says ‘Carmine’s’ unambiguously, the researchers’ access report that just calls him number two hundred eighty-eight and codes his autopsist as ‘Jamie’ adds a big question mark to the diagnosis, and the public obit calls it a probable case of choking to death.”