She had met M. Thurby Fitzhugh twice on official business and three or four times on a casual social basis. Having a fine memory for names and faces, she recognized him at once. She had never met the two with him, but she saw without difficulty that they were realizers: a young manservant with dark skin, roguish expression, and costume of forest green embroidered in gold—the type who, if a store clerk, would sell gaudy patterns to unsuspecting fanciers—and a policewoman in light brown trousers and tan tunic, much like common fancy-class attire except for the blue and silver badge of office over the hollow between her left shoulder and breast. The policewoman wore the final name Lestrade, the manservant Portent. Curious names they had chosen, for realizers.
M. Lestrade offered details and Squire Fitzhugh sympathy while M. Portent drove the limo. The policewoman seemed clinically detached. It might be the same careful guard that Margaret had put on her own emotions, and yet for once The Standard felt more drawn to a fancier than to those of her own kind. Was that a presage of the hours to come? Most of M. Fitzhugh’s houseguests were fanciers.
As they rode through the steelglass gates of M. Fitzhugh’s estate, M. Portent phoned the house, and by the time the squire brought Margaret into his living room they were all gathered there waiting for her. Her numerical sense registered eleven new individuals. She tried to refrain from gauging them until introduced to each, but she had the instant impression of three realizers among them ... or was it four? There should be three: M. Weaver, a second servant, and M. Lestrade’s junior sergeant. But degrees of perception varied more wildly among fanciers than among realizers. Although the realizing classes were larger, for every realizer whose basic perception included a noticeably large taint of fantasy there were an estimated three to five fanciers who perceived solid reality at least part of the time, and of course almost all of them perceived enough reality most of the time to agree on a groundwork for everyday living, and a few even fancied themselves realizers.
A tall black woman came forward to be introduced first, as if it were her unquestionable privilege. The Countess Irene DiMedici, walking as if her floor-length ivory skirt were heavy brocade. She wore a large ring on every finger, and the gems were genuine.
The other people held back, letting Squire Fitzhugh introduce them in order. He took them counterclockwise about the room, though skipping a few the first time around.
M. Stanley Livingstone was a contemporary of the squire’s, almost of Margaret’s, and his fantasy was easy to guess from his name. Fancy-class tan was nearly the right color for the khaki he must see himself wearing when he looked in a mirror. Captain Dobbert Drake was a younger man of the type who fancied themselves old hands and told more personal anecdotes, in all sincerity, than they could have had years to live through except in manufactured recollection. His walk swayed a little. His fancy must work the hardest of anyone’s here—perceiving Fitzhugh Manor as a tall sailing ship, he expressed the hope that Dame Margaret’s boat ride over had been smooth.
Angela Garvey Garvey gushed out her own full name when her turn arrived, stepping forward to take both The Standard’s hands between her young palms. The perennial child, probably in her mid twenties, all golden innocence. M. Corwin Poe waited close behind, watching M. Angela until manners required him to turn his dark eyes toward the new arrival. Sister and brother? Or lovers who proved the attraction of opposites? If M. Angela were a sundial’s gnomon, M. Poe would be its shadow.
At last, M. Pamela Weaver, the other reality-perceiving guest, the one Squire Fitzhugh had hoped to match with Aelfric. She seemed sullen, but Margaret guessed it might be the taciturnity of grief. She thought she would not have disapproved of the match.
M. Willa Quantum, red-haired, gray-eyed, thirtyish and wearing the calm poise of the very reserved. So reserved that Margaret wondered briefly if this could be the extra realizer she had sensed in the room. Hovering as close to her as possible was M. Nantice Serendip, with the black hair and graceful eyes of an Oriental heritage, the nervousness of someone not entirely accustomed to feeling frightened and shy.
The final fancier, a tall young man, perhaps in his thirties, stepped forward. He had been waiting between and behind M. Poe and M. Weaver, apparently half-sitting on a sidetable as if to disguise his height and escape notice for a moment in order to present himself out of sequence. M. Tertius White.
Last, Squire Fitzhugh introduced his other servant, M. Jones, a round-faced woman with hair more salt than pepper, bearing an attitude of competent authority and a cup of tea as per the choice Margaret had let M. Portent phone ahead.
Then the remaining man presented himself as Sergeant Click, Sergeant Lestrade’s partner, and The Standard had all eleven names to register in her mind’s databank along with the physical aspects.
But the presage was coming true. With a few exceptions, Margaret felt more drawn to the fanciers. They might not fully appreciate the fact of murder, but in their romanticism they seemed the more eager to exude awkward sympathy. Most of them. Her fellow realizers, who did appreciate the fact, treated it with hard practicality. Most of them. M. Weaver’s shell had hardened to the cracking point. She looked at Margaret, and The Standard knew they would spend what remained of the afternoon comforting each other.
Chapter 15
For years there had been talk of putting all wheeled motor traffic on rails and regulating speed automatically, but David Chekhov Click doubted it would ever be done. Despite speed laws and lane regulators, guiding your own vehicle still gave an illusive sense of atavistic self-determination—Click felt it himself—and the human spirit clung pretty tenaciously to its remaining freedoms. The fancy class stood most to profit by automated roads. Some of the richest fanciers already had them on their private estates. The few fanciers who could get legal licenses to drive in public had to prove they perceived their cars as some kind of motor vehicles and their speedometers as registering compatibly with the standard. But for every fancier who might have enjoyed climbing into a mass-transit automated scalawagon and riding public rails, two or three preferred their illusions of chariots, horsedrawn buggies, or aircoaches, with chauffeurs or taxyists to drive them. Besides, railing all public roadways would be a staggering project. So pollies had to go on enforcing traffic laws, mopping up after accidents and trying to weed out the fanciers who bribed their way to phonied licenses.
They caught one that Saturday afternoon on their way back to the station. Click was telling Lestrade about M. Poe’s scheme when a flameprint orange sportscat sideswiped them on the rider’s side, going a good forty klicks over the limit.
“Damn!” Lestrade swore. “Another one—either drunk or a fancier. If not both.”
Click always enjoyed the excuse to pump his own fuel line, though he tried not to show it too much. Still in the country, they soon caught up. The offender turned out to be a drunken fancier who lived somewhere between last century’s stockcar demo derbies and early vidgames. Lestrade gave him a quick shot of the sleepy and bundled him into the back seat of the polcar while Click drove the orange sportscat well off the roadway and marked it with a police sticker. He sighed. It was a baby little car, sleek and slick as an Indy racer must have been. Maybe he could pull collection duty on it and wheel it back to the pound himself tomorrow.
“Mario Fancy-Class Andretti must’ve got a realizer to paint it for him,” Lestrade remarked as they settled in the polcar’s front seat again. Most fanciers’ cars were as neutral as their clothes, unless the realizer chauffeur had directed the paint job.
“Born out of his time, poor fellow,” said Click.
“Don’t waste your sympathy. In his way, this one’s worse than our murderer back at Fitzhugh’s squirery. That one presumably aimed for one specific victim. Fancy Mario doesn’t care who he may erase. And he’ll probably buy a light sentence, house arrest for five years—and then break parole and be on the roadways again his first chance—while young Standard’s killer
gets a mandatory life. If I had my way, it’d be the asylum for drunk drivers, too. Including realizers.”
“If Standard’s killer did know what he was doing to who,” Click pointed out. In the back seat, Fancy Mario snored cherubically.
“Any other victim, and we’d start with the idea of a fancier gone homicidal.” The senior sergeant shook her head. “M. Standard being who he was, we pretty well have to start with the idea he was no random victim, that the killer knew enough to single him out.”
“Still could have been coincidence.”
“Could have been.”
“You like Poe’s notion better?” Click offered her. “Some kind of fancy-class snobbery run amok?”
“No. A fancier that far gone would have made some slip this morning when we were grilling them.”
“Poe was pretty far gone himself.” Click chuckled. After the first smudged printsheet, he had played along so far as to draw out the usually thirty-second process. Both to watch Poe’s reactions and to keep from spoiling another sheet. Then he sobered. “Guilty conscience?”
“I doubt it. I’d as soon zero in on Fitzhugh.”
“Deduction?”
“Gut instinct,” said Lestrade. “On Poe. Deduction on Fitzhugh. He was the one who invited them all. He could have invited Standard to kill him instead of matchmaking him. Opportunity. The squire was in the right position to make his own of that. If he’d really intended to matchmake the young Standard, why not find a governing-class woman for him? And we have Fitzhugh’s habit of retiring early, leaving his houseguests to themselves. That fits right in.”
“Slipped everyone else a sleepy, Standard a whipper to make sure he’d be up alone?”
“Not drugs. It’d be as easy to slip his victim a deathdose, let suspicion fall on DiMedici, neat and nice. No, Fitzhugh could have meant to smother Standard in his bed, changed his plans when he found him still awake downstairs.”
“Not quite so easy to slip him a deathdose,” Click corrected. “With soporifics and wakers, no great harm done to anyone else if the cups get mixed up. Lethal poison, and he’d risk getting the wrong victim. Anyway, you don’t have our country squire marked as prime.”
“No. He’d have filled his guest list with an overload of morbid fanciers, a full complement of red herrings for us, not just three or four. And my gut instinct says he’s not the type to muck his comfortable world up with murder. All I’m saying is that logic points to him as the only one who could have arranged opportunity and some potential weapon or choice of weapons very far in advance.”
“And motives are slippery little fishes when you’re dealing with the fancy class, eh what?” said Click. Seriously, that might be why gut instinct had come to be recognized as a legitimate investigative tool—the poor realizer’s instant pocket guide to psychoanalysis, very useful when tempered with due respect for logic and evidence. Lestrade was good with it. Click was a throwback to old-fashioned skepticism. M. Julie Police-Standard liked to pair up the two attitudes. “So who does your instinct point out as the three or four herrings?”
“DiMedici, for one,” Lestrade replied. “Poe for the morbidity, though he seems like more masochist than sadist. M. Quantum might keep mum about her world because it’s too ugly to talk about. And there’s something my gut doesn’t like about M. White.”
“And Livingstone could have seen the realizer as a hostile native who got over the stockade last night.”
“Livingstone’s a teddy. His jungle is full of stuffed toy animals.”
“Not to him, I’d guess,” said Click. “He wakes up from a bad dream, comes down to the verandah for a smoke, finds a realizer—he seems to see all us realizers as natives: M. Weaver said something this afternoon about how people look just like meat when they’re cut up for autopsy, and damned if Livingstone didn’t go green on the jowls, probably takes us for a bunch of cannibals—”
“Damn documentaries,” said Lestrade.
“So he finds a realizer on the verandah at midnight and sees him as a painted native chief leading the raiding party in.”
“Standard was hit from behind. If Livingstone did it, I’ll buy you a year’s supply of old Scotch.”
“Well, it’s a better motive than Poe’s snobbery inspiration.”
Lestrade sucked at her empty pipe. She didn’t smoke, but she had used the thing as a stage prop among fanciers for so long that it was a habit with her now even when alone with fellow realizers. To escape a similar empty habit, Click indulged in tobacco, though not when alone with his senior.
“Yes, M. Poe,” Lestrade said after a moment. “Naturally, you refused that scheme of his. You didn’t give him any hint we might sanction it?”
Click choked a passing impulse to crunch down hard on the fuel feed. “I told him we’d haul him in on a charge of obstructing justice if he tried it.”
“All right, all right, you probably told me, and I should have known anyway. Fancy Mario back there drove it out of my mind.”
“I told him we had some fingerprinting machinery at the station that made our field kit look like kindergarten stuff.”
Lestrade removed the pipe from her mouth and tapped its bowl with her thumbnail.
“You know that noise piffs me,” said Click.
“A few of your habits do the same to me.” But she pocketed the pipe. “He’ll try it anyway, of course. Assuming Angela goes along with it.”
“I should’ve threatened to arrest her, too. That would’ve damped him down.”
“Or he’d have found someone else. It’s remarkable we haven’t had any more offers from amateur marples and tom peepers than we do this time.”
“M. Weaver,” said Click. “And her a realizer, too.”
“I was remembering Weaver. I don’t mind having an inside realizer eager to keep an eye on the rest of them.”
“As long as she keeps the other eye on herself. She was no slouch with the booze this afternoon.”
Lestrade sat silent for a few minutes, while Click drove and Fancy Mario snored. “The Standard is in that house,” she said at last, “with a probably homicidal maniac. That should give us all the excuse we need to post ourselves inside on a clockround basis.”
“M. Margaret abhors bodyguards,” said Click. “It’s one of her most famous trademarks.”
“She’s not the only person in potential danger. Only the most important one.” Lestrade switched on the carphone. “I’m calling the forms in right now.”
Click sighed. He’d had personal plans for the evening.
Chapter 16
Squire Fitzhugh had given The Standard his best available suite. He had talked of seeing whether Countess DiMedici would mind giving up her choice accommodations, had offered to turn over his own. Fanciers, he pointed out, made their own surroundings. Surely it never crossed his generous mind that the observation implied a certain patronage to realizers for being more at the mercy of the actual decor around them. Margaret had only smiled and said she was sure any room in his house would be gracious in fact as well as fancy, and it was less bother to settle in a vacant room than to unsettle someone else’s small, necessary claptrap of living. Neither of them had mentioned that Aelfric’s apartment, the best suite of all, was vacant now.
The Squire would have instructed M. Jones to unpack The Standard’s case, but Margaret had always preferred to do such things for herself. She had based her life on being as anonymous as possible. Bodyguards were a carryover from the turbulent last century, and she often mused that one reason assassinations had been so much more frequent then might have been that bodyguards signposted assassins the way to notable people. To be anonymous, one should look and behave like any other moderately well-off realizer.
Besides, she had thrown things slipshod into her case, another reason for unpacking it herself. Except that she was not unpacking it. She could pull things out as she
needed them. Probably no one but M. Weaver and the servants would notice wrinkles, and they’d understand. She could even tell the fanciers her family name and watch them transform her into a feather-bonneted chieftainess. She might not change for dinner, as the fanciers were retiring to do. She sat with M. Weaver, alone in her small parlor overlooking the garden. A fine real-porcelain coffee urn stood on the maplewood writing-desk, and thin Belleek cups of the beverage cooled in their hands as they tried to smother the emptiness with practical considerations.
“You didn’t tab it down?” said Margaret.
“I have a good memory. Not for names and people, but for things.”
“Even the police take notes.”
“You can check my memory against their list, if they let you see it.”
“Well.” Margaret groped for the small notecom she always wore at her belt. Usually she could snap it into her hand with one smooth twist. Today she fumbled the first try and needed a second.
A purely personal unit, it was not tied into any databank; but its own memory was more than ample for a normal working day’s worth of notes. She had sometimes gone two, even two and a half days before transferring its stored information to her briefcase com. She had long ago perfected the knack of tabbing its simplified keyboard with one hand. “Now,” she said. And M. Weaver described how each of them had perceived the cordless brass lamp. When she could not remember a name, she described the person and Margaret knew who she meant.
She ended her report, “Both the servants saw it as it is, of course.”
“Did you ask them?” said Margaret.
“I asked M. Portent when he brought me my drink. I haven’t had a chance to ask M. Jones yet, but she’s another realizer.”
“I should take a look at the thing myself.”
“They’ve taken it away,” said M. Weaver. “I’m sure eventually they’ll want your official perception of it.”
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 20
