The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Not on a very nice side of her character,” I guessed.

  “Well,” Cagey replied innocently, “it isn’t exactly the nice side of anyone that commits murder, is it?”

  “No, I suppose not. Young Aaron Randolph seems to adore Dr. Suttler, though,” I remarked.

  “Aaron Randolph?”

  “The teenage boy who was waiting to see her when they brought you in. He stood up and said he was happy to give you his time-slot.”

  Cagey closed her eyes and frowned a little. “Yes ... I think I remember being aware of something like that.”

  “He’s quite a fish fancier,” I added. “You’ll be hearing him on my cube.”

  “Good. So he adores Suttler? Well, he’s a male, isn’t he? At a susceptible age, too, as if they weren’t pretty susceptible at any age. That’d be enough to explain him perceiving her from a completely different angle. I wonder if there’s any way we could recruit young M. Randolph,” she went on thoughtfully. “What’s Suttler treating him for, did you find out?”

  “A broken wrist. He fell out of a tree.”

  “Hmmm. Then she probably wouldn’t be prescribing anything for him except painkillers.”

  “And from something he said, I don’t think he’s been taking any of them. Not for quite a while, at least. Why? You don’t suspect them of poisoning people with prescription medicine, do you?”

  “Not just any people.” Cagey shook her head. “But it might be a dandy way to get rid of some specific victim.”

  “The pharmacist would recognize lethal poison in a prescription.”

  “Well, how do we know the Sunvale pharmacist isn’t our killer? I know I didn’t take any of the caplets he gave me. I stuck with Anazin Super from my own medicine cabinet.”

  “Saving the prescription caplets for analysis, of course?”

  “Of course. Gucchi’s taking them over to Verne first thing this morning. Both the blue painkillers and the green thingies. When I described the dizzy spell that had supposedly caused my fall in the glass shop, Suttler diagnosed ‘nervititis jaundiculosis’ and told me to take the green thingies three times a day and lay off coffee. Lay off coffee!” Grinning, Cagey lifted her cup and took a good swallow. “I also told Gucchi to ask Verne if there’s any such disease as nervititis jaundiculosis. Just to see who’s fooling whom.”

  I said, “You mean, did you fool her with your faked symptoms, or has she put you down for a hypochondriac?”

  “Hypochondriac? No, more likely for someone who feels a psychic need to make up excuses for being clumsy, I’d guess. Anyway, the real meat is what I learned afterward. ...”

  She stopped talking, the way people do when they suddenly realize they’re about to break a confidence.

  “Sarge?” I said after a few seconds.

  “I’m not sure ... Tommi, I think maybe I should take you off this case.”

  And put who on it in my place? I wondered again. “That’s all right, Sergeant,” I told her. “I can handle it. I only knew him three weeks, after all. I’m not that personally involved.” Although I knew that if I hadn’t been personally involved, she’d never have tuned this in as a murder case.

  “You’re sure, Officer?”

  I swallowed and said, “I’m sure.”

  “Well, all right. Remember, he seems like a real gossip, so a lot of what he had to say could be just his own fantasy ...”

  “Who, Sergeant?”

  “Oh, that’s right, I didn’t say, did I? Jeb Peters Peters. One of the three Sunvale clinical assistants—’technicians,’ they like to be called. He chauffeured me ‘home’ to the Belvedere.”

  The Belvedere was an upper midrange residential hotel on the western edge of

  town. Cagey’s usual undercover identificiation, which called her April Washington Cagney, gave the Belvedere as her address; the people there knew her. In fact, if Marltown had been any smaller, or Cagey more enthusiastic about the status she could have enjoyed as Samuel Warrington Warrington’s daughter, she wouldn’t have been able to get away with an incognito at all; but the city was just about large enough, and Cagey fond enough of keeping a low social profile, that not everybody knew her by sight. The undercover identification I had carried to Sunvale gave my old address on Carter Avenue, where my friend and ex-housemate Carmelita Wu still lived, but didn’t bother to give me an alias name. The Sunvale people could easily find out who we really were, and how connected, if they were interested in running the check; but at the same time they would find out that Cagey was just a harmless fancy-class hobbyist and roleplayer, so I wasn’t worried.

  “Yes,” Cagey repeated, “Peters turned out to be a regular five-star gossip.” I wondered if Jeb Peters was the nice-looking fellow who had told Miss Woodburn that M. Coffield was ready to see her; it later turned out that he was. “A real mega-mine of data,” Cagey went on. “Of course, that’s one area where I’ll always have a bit of an edge on you, Officer Tomlinson. Not through any fault of yours, but a lot of males are still much readier to feedback gossip to a woman they don’t feel any need to impress. And they’re always going to want to impress the beautiful women, where it’d never even occur to them to think about having to impress me. Unless they were fortunehunters, which is how

  I can spot fortunehunters.” She wasn’t jealous; I truly think Cagey felt that beautiful women should be jealous of her in this respect. She had made these same remarks before, but she usually sounded cocky about it. Today she sounded like somebody trying to fill a cube up with white noise. She went on, “For most of the male breed, women like me make the best sounding boards for them to ramble on at, especially when we seem to be helpless but sympathetic strangers.”

  “You’re stalling, Sergeant,” I said. “Come on, I can take it. Let me in on it, whatever it is.”

  She coughed, swallowed more coffee, and said, “All right, Officer Tomlinson. Remember it’s office gossip, and that means there might not be anything in it but empty calories. But according to Jeb Peters, Rob Grove had been having an affair with Raisa Suttler.”

  * * * *

  I’ve sometimes wondered if the main reason Cagey suspected murder in the first place was outrage that it had happened to a boyfriend of her partner’s. It would have been like her to have sincerely wished she could keep the story of his romance with Dr. Suttler secret from me.

  She would have had to find some excuse for not trading recordings with me, or for editing hers first without my knowledge, because there it was, in detail that made it rather difficult to hope it had been nothing more than the talebearer’s hyperactive imagination.

  Not that I had ever expected a man like Rob Grove to reach his middle thirties without ever having had a woman in his life before me. I’d had my share of steady boyfriends in the past, and Rob had had a ten-year headstart on me. But this business between him and Raisa Suttler…from what Jeb P. Peters said and what he hinted, it sounded like something out of a 1970s movie.

  “Cold? Unfriendly? Our Doktora Suttler?” the pleasant tenor voice came out of the player at me. I’m going to cut and edit his remarks a little; for all his boyish appearance, Peters must have begun his formative years earlier in the 2020s than I did. “Oh, no,” it went on, “you just caught her in a bad week. Just ... only three days ago? Seems like longer. Yas’m, just Monday morning she had one slamdunk of a blowup with her co’ ... y’know? Regular tall, dark, ’n’ handsome, real pulse-palpitator, the kind that people of the female persuasion really go for.” His voice sounded smugly aware that he, too, in his blonder and more cherubic style, was the kind that people of the female persuasion really went for; I have listened to it more than once since that first time, and that “yas’m” could be just a general speech mannerism that would have crept in no matter who Jeb Peters was gossiping with; I never could tell how far he remembered that his passenger was a member of that persuasion. As Cagey used to poin
t out, such forgetfulness on an informant’s part was one of her best tools for data-gathering.

  “A good ten years younger than ta doktora, too,” Peters went on. “Yas’m, easy to see why he appealed to her. What kind of hold she had on him ... Well, it musta been something solid. Not that she’s any old slouch of a czarina, of course. I wouldn’t mind that much being sighted at a restaurant or some show with her, long as we left it respectful at her door afterwards, if you know what I mean. But he had a few years on me. ’Course, he didn’t spend his worktime with her. All the same, I think she had something on him, some kinda hold more than the old pheromenes, if y’know what I mean.

  “Momma Poppy—that’s our head technician, M. Poppaea Standing Heron, the big ol’ lady with a face like Queen Victoria and skin like Baker’s chocolate, we call her Momma Poppy, she’s been with our docs ever since they opened up the clinic. Anyway, Momma Poppy says this Grove character, that’s his name, Rob H. Grove, first showed up at the clinic a coupla years ago. Before my time, I’ve only been there eight months. I tune in the picture that he usta float around a little, state to state, but every few months here

  he’d turn up at Sunvale Clinic. Healthy as a cosmonaut, so it just about had to be either that one of ’em had some kinda hold on the other, unless he was a hypo, and he just never much acted like a hypo—hypochondriac, y’know what I mean, even if ta doktora did give him a prescription every time for ol’ Coffield to fill. Just keeping up appearances, I guess. Like to know who they thought they were fooling.

  “Heather—that’s Heather Kareem, our afternoon desksitter, pretty little thing—Heather thinks maybe there was a little casharooney blackmail going on, but Heather’s still pretty innocent, y’know? The rest of us never had much trouble seeing what score it was. They had some verrry long consultations in there every other month or so. Door closed and all. Then this last Monday the vacuum hit the airlock, if y’know what I mean. Fight? Just like when Fairfax and Gavchenko had it out in Twenty-eight for the world heavyweight title, but worse. Yelling at each other till you could hear it right through the sound-soak. And lemme tell you, M., there ain’t any way to mistake that kinda thing for a business argument, not over blackmail or anything else except just exactly what it was. What it was, seems he’d fallen for some new body. He came out of there so mad he forgot his prescription. Came back in for it an hour and a half later, and then he had to pick up a prescrip slip from Doc Mac, seems he’d got so mad he forgot to take it from ta doktora. At that, he wouldn’t have had to. She’d already thrown the slip she would’ve given him at old Arlie, so it was ready and waiting.

  “Well, ta doktora happened to step out in the hall just about when Grove was stalking out again, and the look they gave each other ... Well, if looks were warheads, y’know? Not a word. Just the look. Anybody’d stepped between ’em right then woulda probably got sliced in half.

  “And then within twenty-four hours, he’s dead. Meaning she never got any chance to even try and make up, if she’d ever wanted to. Must be pretty hard on the czarina. Anyhow, if she seemed a little rough on you today, that’s why. Usually she’s got a better bedside manner, if y’know what I mean.”

  Cagey’s voice: “Oh, she wasn’t rough. Not on my hand. Just…cold. Did you say ‘dead’? Dead how?”

  “You gotta be kidding, M.! Robyn Hotchkiss Grove—oh, that’s right, they didn’t give it any more than an obit, and who reads strangers’ obits? An edited obit, at that. Well ... let’s just call it carried away by a sudden illness, y’know.” So even this gossiper Peters was shy of starting a Carmine’s panic in Marltown.

  “Then maybe he wasn’t just hypochondriac?” said Cagey.

  “Hey, whoever said he was hypo?” Peters rattled on like an old politician. “’S true, you can’t always tell just by watching ’em, but he never walked or talked like a hypo. All those prescriptions, probably just a blind.” (Then why, I thought, had he bothered to go back for that last one?) “Oh, I see what you mean,” Peters continued. “No, nothing like that, no old disease, nothing we’d ever failed to catch. Something quick and sudden, that anybody could ... Well, I guess I might as well let you in on it, M., but keep it to yourself, or at least don’t let on where you heard it. His official death report has it down as Carmine’s.”

  “Carmine’s? But you don’t sound quite sure of that, yourself? ...”

  “Look, M., it could be worth my job if you ever let on about this, but ... If you’ve got something every other doctor tells you is probably terminal, come to Sunvale sooner than right now. We’ve got a percentage of wonder cures you wouldn’t believe. Better’n an old-time faith healer. But if you’ve got hypochondria or any kind of injury, get yourself someplace else pronto.”

  “Injury,” Cagey repeated. I could picture her grinning and lifting her bandaged hand.

  “Oh, hey…did I say injury? No, ’m, you’re okay. I just meant, what I think is, ta doktora likes to take hypos for all they’re worth. Because she doesn’t have any use for ’em, y’know. Thinks they just waste her valuable time. That’s why I know Grove wasn’t hypo. Well, here’s your roof, isn’t—”

  The cube’s memory had filled up at just that point. Very much tempted to erase the whole thing, or even throw it against the wall, I forced myself to drop it into the automatic transcriber instead, just in case Cagey hadn’t.

  Perversely, I was less upset with Rob for having that affair than I was with Jeb P. Peters for the crude and callous way he had repeated it to a woman who was a virtual stranger to him and, as far as he could have known (I hoped), a complete stranger to both Rob and me. I realized with a sick feeling that everybody who worked at Sunvale Clinic must know by now that I was the somebody else for whom Rob had broken with Dr. Suttler; I could almost picture the staff clustered around her door Monday morning, pressing their ears to the soundproofing, sponging up every word they could. And then when I told Angelo Stavropolos what I’d told him in making my appointment ...

  But we had given them nothing to connect Cagey with Rob or me. It was true that they could dig up that data, if the thought crossed their minds to run a check; but they couldn’t have done it already by the time Jeb Peters drove Cagey under her disguised name to the Belvedere Hotel last night.

  Peters was nothing but a foulmouthed, foulminded ... Well, if it hadn’t been for Dr. Macumber himself, and for my very real fear of Carmine’s disease, I truly believe that not even loyalty to Cagey’s games could have taken me back to the Sunvale Family Health Clinic after listening to that recording.

  Leaving it in the transcriber, I went to find Cagey, who was sitting in her office listening to my recorded afternoon at Sunvale. “Actually more Dr. Suttler’s patient,” Dr. Macumber’s voice was saying as I came in, “even if in theory you’re all of you our common property ...” It took me a second to remember that he had been talking about Aaron Randolph.

  “I think,” said I, automatically pushing the button to alert the room recorder for our “police” conference, “that that dear little man had better get out of Sunvale and start up a clinic of his own.”

  “Mmmm ... yes.” Cagey sat up and switched the player off. “Yes, I think we don’t have to worry about Doc Mac. Transcribed this yet, Officer Tomlinson?” When I told her I hadn’t, she took my cube out of the player and handed it to me. As I crossed the room to her transcribing unit, she went on, “But what do you think about Suttler?”

  “Why, I ... I ...” The Jeb Peters monolog must have driven the earlier partial conversation on Cagey’s cube, the part in Dr. Suttler’s office, more or less out of my mind. “I’m afraid she just sounded like ... like a doctor to me, Sergeant. Slight Russian accent, very light. I ... I only wish we had a recording of what went on between her and Rob Monday morning!” I exclaimed, shocking myself.

  “So do it,” said Cagey, her voice suggesting that we might be better off without it, for my sake. “But since we don’t ... You s
ee what I mean about Jeb Peters? A mine of data the lad may be, but I’m not sure it’s the purest data.”

  “He contradicts himself every fourth word.”

  “Of course he does!” she agreed at once. In eagerness to spare my feelings, I suspected, seeing some of his words on the top sheet of a stack of printouts on her desk. So she had made her transcription already, either late last night or early this morning. “What about Arlington J. Coffield?” she went on. “Did you get a look at him yesterday?”

  “No. I only know that Miss Woodburn had nothing but praise for him.”

  “Then Doc Mac didn’t give you a prescription after the cube filled up?”

  “No. Only that caplet for the test this afternoon.”

  “Too bad. I’d been hoping for more samples from Coffield’s friendly family pharmacy. But I kind of thought that if you had seen him, you’d have mentioned the fact over breakfast. Coffield’s a good-looking man, Tommi. Good voice, too. Good manners; kindly bearing; all in all, he comes across as a very pleasant specimen. So I’m warning you now, Officer, play it carefully until we know a little more about what’s going on in that clinic.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Sarge. This lady is going to be very careful with her heart for a good, long time. Starting right now.”

  Cagey lifted her mug, meanwhile looking me so intently in the face that she missed her own mouth and spilled coffee down her chin and tunic. She must have refilled her mug just before I came in, because this time the beverage was scalding hot, causing her to drop the mug with a little screech and clutch her chin. It even felt hot where it splashed me.

  We were so used to this kind of thing that mopping up took little time, even with only three hands. She salved her chin—fortunately, the scalds were minor, fading almost at once—and drew two more mugs of coffee; while I wiped chair, desk, and papers.