The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  She leaned forward, her eyes glittering, and stretched out her bandaged palm. “Officer Tomlinson, hand it over. That’s an order. At worst, handing it over will mean postponing your test one day. While if you don’t hand it over, it could mean your job.”

  Jobs were not yet that easy to find in the ’30s; but it wasn’t so much that thought as the shock of Cagey actually threatening mine for insubordination. It was the first time she had ever threatened to fire me for any reason at all. Struck a little numb, I got the envelope out and handed it over.

  “Thank you,” she replied, and that was that.

  She called Verne while I freshened up, then had Gucchi drive us both to Verne’s home. He lived a three-minute walk from Spuds’s Doghouse, the oldest and one of the most picturesque junkmeal joints in Marltown. Gucchi, who despised junkfood, settled down to wait in Verne’s living room with a glass of milk and his host’s video library; but Cagey always used a trip to Verne as an excuse for a Spuds hot dog and mug of three percent beer, so she and I had our late dinner there.

  Because of her natural accident proneness, my employer rarely varied her coffee with any beverage more alcoholic than a single mug of three percent. I, on the other hand, drank full strength that evening. Doc Mac hadn’t said anything about avoiding it; and I feared I might have to take him a made-up alibi tomorrow about why I had failed to swallow his prescription tonight.

  We had finished two hot dogs and a dish of fries apiece and were considering the dessert board when Verne came in and joined us.

  “Already?” Cagey asked, flicking on her recorder, which she seldom did at Spuds’s because of the high background noise factor.

  “Nothing to it.” Verne sat down in our booth and took a drink from the mug he had drawn himself at the coin-op vendor on the way in. “Ninety percent sugar and tangerine flavoring, ten percent a harmless dye used to give certain body fluids a temporary coloration. Used for practical jokes or certain kinds of highly technical medical tests. Here.” He plunked an old clear-plastic envelope containing one tiny greenish white pill the size of a nonpareil or seed bead down on the table. “I just happen to have a few left over from my old college career as the school’s best-loved trickster. Tested in dozens of mint juleps every Derby Day between Thirty and Thirty-four. Same dye and same amount as in your sample, without the sugar coating. I’m even saving you a trip to your nearest friendly novelty shop.”

  Well, M. Coffield had told me, “The rest is impressive theatrics.”

  Cagey picked it up for a closer look. She used her bandaged hand, and the plastic envelope slipped off her palm into the mug of coffee she had gotten to chase down her beer. Fishing it out with her spoon, she passed it on to me so that I could rescue the tiny pill before anything else had a chance to happen to it.

  * * * *

  I have always tried to avoid saying, “I told you so,” especially to an employer, so I would have swallowed the pill and gone to bed without saying anything more about it; but Cagey beckoned me into her office the minute we got home, motioned for me to sit down, got us each a mug of decaf, and switched on the room recorder.

  “I know,” she began, clearing her throat, “that you might be thinking I overreacted earlier this evening, Officer Tomlinson. From where you sit, you may have cause for your opinion, and I want to tender my apologies for maybe risking your test tomorrow. Me, I’m confident you’re perfectly clean of Carmine’s, but I’m not the body at risk there.”

  “Well, Sergeant,” I said, “since it all came out okay—”

  She waved me to silence, coughed nervously, and went on: “No, please don’t stop me. Let me keep going on a full head of steam, whatever that expression means.” A shaky grin. “It’s hard enough breaking this data to you as it is.

  “This morning, after it came to me to suggest you try running a check on Coffield as C-A-U-L-field, I tried the same thing. Only I was really interested in looking for some link between Coffield and Rob Grove, and I’d already exhausted every way I could think of with name variants on Rob—even tried ‘Hood, Robin’ and variants on that—so when I got to those same Chicago Tribune items you printed out for me, I went on from there. When I saw how the later edition put an ad for the Epicures’ Palace restaurant right where the earlier edition had that story about Caulfield’s possible involvement in a botulism outbreak at the Sicilian Vespers ...” She coughed again. “Well, I followed that up as far as I could take it in the time remaining. The Epicures’ Palace was the Sicilian Vespers, renamed and under new management. I found a bigger ad, featuring a caricature of the new owner, this S. Scarpio Scarpini ... Tommi, I don’t quite know how to ... Here, maybe this is the best way ...”

  She had been sitting perched on the edge of her desk. Bending over the printouts, and—remarkably—for once doing everything without an accident, even balancing her coffee mug safely through it all, she shuffled up her printout of the larger ad and handed it to me.

  I looked at it and cried, “No!” S. Scarpio Scarpini was shown in Roman toga, reclining on the cushioned rooftop of his Epicures’ Palace; and for all that the drawing was a cartoon caricature of a rather plumper man, Scarpini’s resemblance to Rob Grove was unmistakable.

  “You see it, too?” Cagey asked softly and unhappily.

  “Yes ... Yes, I can’t get around it ... But this isn’t proof, Cagey—Sergeant Thursday! After all, everyone has doubles ... Oh! What…else did you find?”

  “Not too much. I just had time left to call M. Scarpini’s fingerprints up from Names and Prints. A match, I’m afraid. The complete difference in names would have hidden it for weeks from a general search-and-compare print program.”

  “But ... what does it mean?” I asked, recovering myself. After all, what did it mean? I had always known Rob hadn’t just sprung into existence as a handsome man in his thirties in Marltown, Kentucky. If he had once worn an Italian-sounding name and owned an Evanston restaurant where there had been an outbreak of suspected botulism when somebody else owned it, what was criminal about that? Why had I reacted so sharply? “What does it really prove?” I added.

  Cagey shrugged. “It doesn’t prove a doggone thing. It might not even mean a doggone thing. Just that it appears Coffield and Rob Grove could both have been in Evanston, Illinois, about the same time during the Twenties, could have known each other there, and could have been involved in something together. That adds up to the chance that it wasn’t simple coincidence that made Rob choose Sunvale Clinic when he came to Marltown.”

  “You mean he might have been blackmailing M. Coffield? No, Sergeant! I won’t believe that Rob was a blackmailer! And what about Raisa Suttler? Don’t tell me she was in on it with them, too?”

  “He could have met her for the first time when he came to find, or join up again, or whatever with Coffield,” Cagey replied mildly. “I’m hoping to dig up more data tomorrow. Meantime, we’d better not even speculate. I wouldn’t have brought it up tonight, except—Blast it! Tommi, I wanted you to know I wasn’t just arbitrarily pulling rank on you about that pill. After all, if the two of them were in cahoots, Coffield would have known who you were before you ever went to Sunvale. Or if Rob was blackmailing him, and then later you showed up ... I just didn’t feel we could take any chances.”

  I think I started to say that next she’d be accusing Rob of having wanted to murder me; but I stopped myself, remembering the point I told her next: “Thank you, Sergeant. I think I’m glad you did what you did. Today I recognized M. Coffield and Dr. Suttler as the man and woman who were at Rob’s funeral.”

  Cagey nodded. “Interesting. Yes. Thank you, Officer, we’d better keep sight of that fact. Did they recognize you?”

  “I don’t think so. Dr. Suttler looked as if she thought she might know my face from somewhere. M. Coffield ... I don’t think so, at all.”

  “Well, if either or both of them did, they might’ve been too shrewd to let on.
Which in itself could be suspicious, especially the way gossip goes around that clinic. And there’s another thing that maybe you should know, Officer. A program I set Officer O’Hara here to work on while I was running my check on Rob with Officer O’Rourke.” Officers O’Hara and O’Rourke were her office and fileroom computers, respectively. “To check that statement of Jeb Peters about the abnormal rates of miraculous cures and mystifying deaths among Sunvale patients. Set it to check the last five years, to be sure that if there was anything, it wasn’t just some temporary atypical quirk.” She nodded. “Jeb’s story checks out.”

  “It does? Then why hasn’t anybody noticed?”

  “Jeb Peters did. He exaggerated a little. It isn’t as noticeable as all that. Besides, the statistical percentages are just about the same for Sunvale and other clinics when it comes to moderately or seriously-but-not-terminally ill people. It’s just among the supposedly terminal or near-terminal patients that the recovery figures top the average, and only among the supposedly healthy ones—the ones who come in for ordinary regular checkups, presumed hypochondria, or everyday accidents—that the death figures go higher than average. It might not mean anything. But I couldn’t help adding it in when you came home with that prescription.”

  “Well,” I said. “Well ... Thank you again, Sergeant Thursday.”

  * * * *

  At 05:36 next morning, my bedside phone chimed me awake. When I answered, Miss Woodburn’s voice burst forth at me:

  “Oh, Mistress Tomlinson, you were so sincerely concerned yesterday, I made sure that you would want to know at once ... Oh, my dear!” A stifled sob. “He’s dead. Aaron ... Master Randolph…half an hour ago.”

  Whatever I might have been dreaming, I have no idea; but among my first thoughts was an irrational relief that Cagey hadn’t let me swallow M. Coffield’s tablet. Until I remembered that it had been harmless, anyway.

  Chapter 8

  Cagey looked very grave that morning before breakfast when I told her about Aaron Randolph. “Another stat,” she murmured, shaking her head.

  “Cagey! He wasn’t a statistic! He was a living teenage boy who loved fish and gave up his own appointment the other day with Dr. Suttler—whom he adored—so that she could dig glass splinters out of your hand!”

  My employer looked at me and blinked. “Statistics are always people, Tommi. None of us can help being a statistic in some classification or other. It’s part of our job as police to try and use stats so as to help other people stay in the good-stat classifications.”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” I agreed, sighing. Then: “Oh, my gremlins! I forgot to make my appointment with Dr. Macumber for today!”

  I phoned the clinic at once, getting the golden voice of Angelo Stavropolos.

  “Oh, yes, M. Tomlinson!” he said. “Doc Mac was very disappointed. In fact, he left a screen message to call you this morning and check on it. I was just about to chime your number.”

  “It must have been the emergency yesterday. All that confusion chased it out of my head.”

  “Well, M., no harm done. He says to make a slot for you at ... let’s see here ... seventeen fifteen this afternoon. That be all right?”

  “Fine,” I said, writing it down. “Fine, thank you. I’ll be there.” Neither of us said anything about the cause of yesterday’s emergency, or its outcome. I hoped that was professional reticence on the receptionist’s part, and not callousness.

  When I rejoined Cagey in the breakfast nook, she was muttering to herself, “Two in one week. Even for Sunvale, that has to be unusual. But where’s the connection? Groves-Scarpini ... Aaron R. Randolph ... Coffield ... Suttler ... Well!” she greeted me as I sat down. “Scarpini and young Randolph both had romantic feelings about Raisa Suttler.”

  “Not really like that on the boy’s part, surely,” I murmured. “More like hero-worship. And Rob had just broken it off.”

  On Cagey’s instructions, I filled in the day trying to run down any possible relevant common factors among Rob, Aaron Randolph, and as many other names drawn from Sunvale’s unusual statistics as I had time for. I didn’t have time for many, especially as my concentration was difficult to keep focused; and I may not have delved as deeply as I ought to have. Besides, all I could get at were names and such public files as newstories and obits. I found nothing more relevant than we had already talked about at breakfast. Whether or not the male statistics had all felt romantic or worshipful about Dr. Suttler wouldn’t show up in any public databank; besides, a fair proportion of the stats were women, and all were listed only as the clinic’s patients, not as Dr. Suttler’s, Dr. Macumber’s, or M. Coffield’s in particular.

  I knew Cagey was spending most of her time looking for further links between Rob and M. Coffield; but she shared none of her results with me until after our third trips to Sunvale Clinic, hers in the morning and mine in the afternoon. I’m not even sure she was aware of when I left, so deeply had she buried herself in her work after lunch. At the clinic, Doc Mac dealt with me as reassuringly as ever, took more test samples, and gave me another caplet from his office cabinet.

  Cagey began our after-dinner police conference, not with what she had learned about Rob’s past, but with: “You told me Macumber keyed that long dream of yours into his notes.”

  “He did. He seemed very interested in it.”

  She handed me a printout of Dr. Macumber’s personal-access report on me. It included all the other symptoms I had told him, but not one word about my dream. “He must have decided it wasn’t important, after all,” I said. “Or he might be too delicate to enter anybody’s dreams in the clinic’s main database of personal-access records. After all, other people besides the individuals with personal rights in them do sometimes get into those files, and some analysts can still pull lurid interpretations out of any kind of dream at all.”

  “Yes,” Cagey said. “Speaking of other people getting into those files ...” She handed me a second printout, this one being a copy of Aaron R. Randolph’s death report. “Miss Woodburn phoned again,” she explained. “When I assured her I was your friend and roommate, she gave us his personal access number.”

  Aaron’s death report, like Rob’s, was signed by Dr. Macumber. “That’s odd,” I remarked. “Aaron was more Dr. Suttler’s patient.”

  “So was Rob, ‘for the record.’ But there are at least two good explanations. Some clinics give most death-report work to one member doctor as a matter of policy. Or Suttler could have been a little too emotionally involved in both cases to tackle them as professionally as she should have. What interests me is that there’s no mention of the earliest symptoms, the ones Grandpa Randolph told you—sleeping till the middle of the day and then dragging around like an old hound with broken legs up until the actual collapse.”

  “Lots of people sleep until noon, and it isn’t all that uncommon to feel dragged out sometimes. Even when you’re a teenager.”

  “No, it isn’t,” she agreed. “But the way Grandpa Randolph said it implies it was unusual for Aaron. With your dream and Rob’s rash ... I just don’t know.”

  “Rob,” I said. “What else did you find out about him and M. Coffield today, Sergeant?”

  She eyed me sadly. “I was kind of hoping you wouldn’t ask. Are you sure you really want to know, Tommi?”

  I took a deep breath and said, “Yes, Sergeant. After all, the worst shock is already over with.”

  “You might not say that after you hear it all. Anyway, he’s dead now.”

  “Rob is, yes. But M. Coffield is still alive. And if you want to keep me on my guard against him, I think you’d better tell me all your reasons.”

  She sighed. “All I can really back up with hard data is that Rob Grove, then S.—for Sherman—Scarpio Scarpini, had tried to buy the Sicilian Vespers restaurant from its original owner, a certain Altruzzia Carter Da Vinci, several months before the alleged botulism outbr
eak; that a week before that outbreak, he was seen going into Jan Caulfield Jansen’s Nostrum Shop by the back door; that the old Sicilian Vespers was closed down because of the outbreak, which was when Scarpini bought it, remodeled it, and reopened it as the Epicures’ Palace—all by the time the Evanston Police decided they wanted to see Jansen. That by April of Twenty-eight the restaurant was closed down again and Scarpini on trial for having caused the supposed botulism by bribing Da Vinci’s cook to spike the daily special with a virulent drug allegedly obtained from Caulfield’s Nostrum Shop; that Scarpini was found guilty and drew a five-year prison sentence. There were a dozen editorials and a hundred letters to editors complaining how outrageously light that sentence was, but apparently the guilty verdict wasn’t quite as rapid and resounding as it might have been, or maybe the judge really had been bribed the way a number of the letters suggested. And that they never could find Jan Caulfield Jansen, either in time to testify at Scarpini’s trial or later.”

  “My Lord!” I breathed.

  “Most of that is in Scarpini’s trial transcript. The neatest way I’ve found so far to fit it together is ... I’m sorry, Tommi…blackmail. Maybe Scarpini already had something on Caulfield to blackmail him into providing the drug to cause the false botulism. Anyway, he obviously had something on him in Marltown.”

  “Couldn’t Caulfield have been blackmailing Rob?” I asked, though I hated it about as much one way as the other.

  “Scarpini had already paid his ‘debt to society,’ even if the price they charged him had been on the light side. There was a lot of that going around in the Twenties…too much,” she admitted regretfully. “But Caulfield-Coffield could still be ruined. Besides losing his pharmacist’s license, he could conceivably go to prison if they could work those near-deaths into some kind of attempted homicide charge, and sentences tend to be a lot longer nowadays. I guess that even a few years were enough to slim Scarpini down, but when they released him they were still being tolerant enough about Twenties crimes to let him change his name and bury his past. Getting it uncovered might hurt Rob Grove, but not nearly as much as it’d hurt Arlington Coffield, who managed to change identities without being laundered through the prison system. Which would’ve cost him his pharmacy career anyway. The legal authorities seem to have just let Caulfield’s case slide through along with a million other little fish of the Twenties, but the medical authorities would still boot him out of his profession quick enough, so if Scarpini tracked Caulfield here to Marltown in order to blackmail him, that could give Coffield one humongous motive for erasing Rob Grove.”