He couldn’t go to sleep, but he didn’t get up again. He lay in bed hugging his woolly mammoth. He hadn’t slept with a stuffed toy since he was seven years old, but he figured it was all right to sleep with Herman tonight because of how Sergeant Lestrade herself had petted the mammoth while she sat here.
Senior Sergeant Lestrade was the kind of polly who should be on a showscreen series or in a set of books. Only she should change her final name to Marlowe or Dietrich or Queen or something. Maybe Lestrade was her mother’s family name, or her favorite grandparent’s, and she had taken it for her final name anyway even if it was such a bad name for a detective. The way he was using Cunningham for his final name because it was his dad’s family name, and for his first name too because it was also his grandmother’s name.
He hoped M. Lestrade would be the one who arrested him, if things came to that.
He couldn’t tell Mom he wanted a spanking this time because if they were going to arrest him for killing M. Sapperfield, he wanted to keep on walking around free outside till the last minute. He hoped she didn’t see it for herself, but you didn’t have to be a sherlock or a poirot to figure out how bad things looked. Just a bad kid and a teacher nobody liked, alone in a locked-up school building. If the pollies couldn’t find anybody else ... But Senior Sergeant Lestrade would be fair.
He hoped he wouldn’t get Sherry or Big D in trouble, slipping things out about them like a bugbrain. Badger was going to catch it too, of course, but one of the rules when he and Badge covered for each other was that they could confess it, so that part wasn’t snitching. But he didn’t think he fooled Sergeant Lestrade when he blurted that about Wally Dutois and Sherry Hawthorne, how they hated Old Sticksap especially because of him using their family names. Good thing Cunningham mentioned both of them. If he’d thought fast enough, he could have talked about a bunch more kids, like getting the short match lost in a whole bundle of long matches. That would’ve been better than choking up and trying to lie.
At last he heard Mom and Woodstock come upstairs. He thought both their footsteps headed for Woodstock’s room on the other side of the stairtop. The line of light beneath his door winked out. By lying very quiet, he thought he could hear their voices murmuring, but he couldn’t understand any words. He pressed his right ear into the pillow, like an Indian listening to the ground for horses’ hooves, but all he heard was pillow noises and his own heartbeat.
His eyelids were finally starting to get sandy, but every time he started to doze off he was standing beside the pool again looking down at M. Sapperfield’s body beneath the steelglass. Sometimes it was just M. Sapperfield’s face, hanging there in the dark in front of his eyes. Sometimes it looked even worse than it had when he really saw it.
If I were a fancier, he thought, what would I have seen? Maybe I’d have thought he was just a lazy old walrus, pushed him out of my way in the water and swum right on past him and never even guessed he was dead. Or maybe I’d have thought he was a shark, and then I’d never have gone in the water at all. We don’t have any walruses or sharks in our natorium, but fanciers don’t think about things like that. Maybe I’d have just camped out overnight the way I had it set up, left in the morning and they wouldn’t have found him until Monday, and I’d be in the clear.
But I’m a reality perceiver. And I’m going to make them arrest me as a reality perceiver. I don’t want to get stuck in a fancy-class asylum with a bunch of crazy, murdering fanciers the rest of my life.
He cried a lot that night, but he wouldn’t get up except once for a short trip to the comfort station, and finally, long after tears stopped coming with his sobs, he turned his pillow over to the dry side, blew his nose again, and got a little sleep.
Chapter 5
David Chekhov Click was as happy to be Lestrade’s junior partner as someone else’s senior. But when it came to clinical detachment, he calculated he had been born possessing several decades’ worth more of it than she’d ever learn. Not that he was callous about people—as he saw it, he had the natural talent for withholding his sympathies until he knew where they belonged. Meanwhile, it was the thrill of the chase all the way, for him. Maybe not for her, but at least the Old Woman never let her sympathies get in the way of pinning the right culprit, however much it might tear her up inside. You could tell, when you’d worked with her for a few years.
Tonight, as they settled back in the polcar, she said, “Dave, I want a drink.”
“Back to Dave? No more ‘M. Click’?”
“Setting a good example for the kid.” She glanced at her watch. “On a new case since approximately twenty-fifteen, possible homicide in a school plant, unusual circumstances, examining scene of death, interviewing juvenile witness. That should give us enough stress-hours, put us on our own time. So you can be just plain Dave. Who’s on Control?”
He checked the carscreen. “Fanchelli.”
“Good.”
While Click geared the motor, his senior reached Control and clocked them out by carphone. You could always count on Fanchelli to agree with your own estimate of stress-hours. Lestrade tabbed the carphone to Emergencies Only, and Click asked,
“Joe’s or Laurie’s?”
“Joe’s.”
The Laurel Leaf and Old Joe’s Barroom catered especially to pollies and other official realizers, but Laurie’s was where you went to celebrate, even if all you had to celebrate was a strong hunch. Joe’s was where you went to hash problems out: a seventy-year-old tavern made to look more like a hundred and seventy, dark and drab, with a mural of the purported original early twentieth-century St. James Infirmary, stylized but naturalistic enough to quench boisterishness. All the tables managed to be semi-enclosed in booths and cubbyholes. The present Old Joe kept her family’s tradition of providing a place where pollies could in effect continue work on their own time, over the kind of braingrease that was otherwise the prerogative of marlowes and samspades.
“All right, M. Click,” Lestrade emmed him again when they were settled, he with his usual Coorsbock and she with a Scotch coffee (light on the Scotch). “Read out.”
He read out. They had one dead teacher and one student who had allegedly discovered the corpse, making him either primary witness or primary suspect. They had secondary witnesses: Junior Captain Frye and his fireflies. They did not yet have any special candidates for last-except-murderer to see the victim alive. Death could be assumed to have finalized between the time school let out and 19:53:07 hours when the fire alarm went off. No matter what Les had led M. Cunningham to believe, not even an expert like Chris Grunewald working with a full lab could pinpoint it too much closer than that, under the watery circumstances.
The circumstances made suicide unlikely. Judging from young Cunningham’s initial statement, the deceased had been unpopular with his students. The witness had perjured himself at least once, in the matter of his fellow students Dutois and Hawthorne.
“Of course he was lying,” Lestrade put in, her first comment since telling Click to read out. “One of them obviously had something to do with why he was in that building after lockup. But you can’t call it perjury, not in any legal sense. We never spelled it out that he was making an official statement.”
“Maybe we should have. Think he’d have come straight about it if we had?”
“Dave, it doesn’t matter that much at this stage. Chances are it was some schoolkids’ dare. If and when it starts to look important, we can begin by running Dutois and Hawthorne down for quiet little chats. Meanwhile, we might as well go with the theory that he was inside by coincidence and otherwise they wouldn’t have found Sapperfield until Monday morning.”
“What about nobody else in the school plant with them?” He started a long swallow of Coorsbock in the polite pause before she spoke.
“We don’t have a locked-room classic yet. It could’ve been done in the last few minutes, after most of the school people w
ere gone and most of the area deserted except the halls, but before the doors were locked. Or the killer could still have been hiding in the building and grabbed the chance to get out by another door when Cunningham opened the front. Owlsfane Garber is still set up on the old Magruder Public Safety System, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” And on Magruder Public, opening any door released the locks on all the other exits.
“What kind of arrangements for staff to get in after hours? As in ‘Omigosh, I forgot my gradecom’?”
He tabbed up the record, emptied into his notecom direct from the polcar terminal. “Sanjack voiceprint, on a tenure basis. Staff members of five years’ standing get the main door tuned to their vocal open sesame. Newer teachers had better remember their gradecoms.”
“Tomorrow get us a printout of everyone who has the open sesame.”
Watching her chew at the stem of her empty pipe, Click began filling his own. “Les,” he said, his gaze on his tobacco, “you’d better face the idea that we may end up arresting that kid.”
“We may. It’s the kind of m.o. a ten-year-old could have managed on a grownup. But it would have been easy for him to lie about the aerator bubbles.”
“Hey!” Click looked up at her. “He may be a smart kid, but let’s not make him a moriarty.”
“He saw why I asked about those bubbles.” Lestrade stared into her coffee mug as if looking for an aerator there. “And he took his time thinking. Long enough to figure out that if he reported having seen enough bubbles, he could have led us to believe he didn’t find the body till fifteen minutes or more after the glass went over. It would’ve taken a moriarty to go the next step and figure if he lied about seeing bubbles we’d figure he was lying. So if he’d done it, he’d probably have lied, the way he lied about Dutois and Hawthorne. But I think he was telling the truth about those bubbles.”
“And another thing you should remember. We’re dealing with a kid here, not an adult.”
“Damn it, Dave, there’s no special childhood psychomystique. Just a continuum. Kids are adults stuck in smaller bodies and relatively unprogrammed brains.”
“And every kid’s a legal fancier until age thirteen.”
“Yes, and don’t write off every fantasy perceiver as a fumehead. You should know better by now.” Lestrade tabbed for Old Joe to come freshen her drink. At Joe’s, you could trust them to freshen your drink with plain mixer until you specified otherwise.
Click watched Joe refill his senior’s mug with steaming coffee, shook his head when Joe glanced over and pointed a question at his beer, sat and mused for a moment. So it still hit women, even after three generations (was it?) of global population control, even old girls like Senior Sergeant Lestrade. Mama fever, baby hunger, the hereditary disease, whatever you called it. Maybe it hit all the harder whenever it finally hit old girls like Lestrade, who could have applied for parenthood and got her clearance as recently as five years ago.
“Y’know, Les,” he remarked when Joe was gone, “it’s lucky for us I’m just the right age to work with you. Ten years older and you’d have made me mating material, ten years younger and you’d try to make me a surrogate son.”
“Read your rulebook again. You wouldn’t have been too young if I’d set my goal that way. Not for a surrogate.” She eyed him through his tobacco clouds. “I wish you’d smoke denatured leaf like Woodstock Baez, not that old-fashioned stuff. So you think we should transfer out of this case before I end up mother hen to a wild duckling?”
“No. But I hope to Hal the kid didn’t do it.”
Chapter 6
The autopsy told them nothing they could not have determined without it. If the killer had left any foreign-matter signature on the corpse, finding it now would have required draining the aquanatorium and analyzing both water and marine specimens. Lestrade put in a request that the maintenance engineer collect everything that turned up in the drains and filters, and let it go at that.
The school princeps, Nelhybel Case, was at a professional meeting in the Rockies. When Lestrade phoned him with the news of Sapperfield’s death, he worried about finding time to feed it into the school bulletin newscom, decided after several uhs and ers that it could wait till Monday morning, worried about finding a substitute prof, decided that could wait till Sunday, insisted on knowing the identity of the delinquent student—”for, er, school disciplinary purposes, you see”—and only remembered to express polite grief after those three flusters of practical concern.
Sapperfield’s landlady seemed less shocked by his death than annoyed at having to make the funeral arrangements in default of close family or friends. The undertaker she contacted was one of those who complained because, after Chris Grunewald had spent the night doing an immediate autopsy and rebuilding the corpse from preliminary wax casts, police expected the undertaker to come and collect the deceased.
All indications so far suggested that if Douglas Hatto Sapperfield’s consciousness was still hovering around, it must be smacking up every last piece of trouble its mortal remains were causing.
Sapperfield had lived alone with an ant farm cased in cheap, brittle plastic. “Daring somebody to break it and spread the dirty little crawlies all through my building,” his landlady remarked as she carried it out at arm’s length. He had lived quietly and (aside from the ant farm) cleanly, but that was all his fellow tenants had to say in his favor. He left a cheap realtor-drawn Will, openable on his demise by any official. In it, he willed his entire estate to the General Millimo Corporation. Chances were that General Millimo would not regard Sapperfield’s estate as much of a windfall, since it consisted of cheap furniture, expensive booze, tailored clothes, overdue library books, receipts for extravagant donations to groups like the Junior Neo-Nazis, the Aardvark for National Animal Movement, and the Al Everymind Fan Club. And the ant farm—which his landlady was no doubt immersing in a tub of water. Sapperfield’s booze might go into some General Millimo office-party stock, and the clothing might not be wasted if an executive saw it who had the same size and fashion tastes, but the rest was going to cost more in worker-hours than it was worth.
“Executrix doesn’t work for General Millimo, does she?” Lestrade remarked.
Click tabbed up a few records on Sapperfield’s terminal and shook his head. “Nostalgic Transport Corporation.”
“Too bad. Sapperfield’s Will would have given the Millimo people a good motive for keeping him alive.”
“More public library property,” Click observed, checking a few more bound volumes. “Also overdue. This is the first professorial type I ever saw without several shelves of publishers’ books as personal property. Old Stickysap just roughed it with printout sheets and borrowed tomes. Wonder if he’s the one who dog-eared them all?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me.” Lestrade compared double dog-ears in different public library volumes. “Well, gather them up. We’ll run them back and get that much out of the way.”
“I’m not paying the fines.” Click flashed a grin. “We’ll slide ’em in the drop and clear out.”
“Fine,” Lestrade replied absently, looking at the first volume she had found that lacked public library coding: a nice edition of McGraw’s classic Mara, Daughter of the Nile, for generations a favorite with adolescent girls. She had read it herself, back then. This copy had a bookplate with the name Mandra Lotus, pasted below an inscription dated last Christmas and reading “To Mandra, With Love, Mother.” Lestrade tucked Mara under her arm to keep it separate from the public library’s books.
* * * *
That was the work of Saturday morning. After a late lunch, Lestrade settled down in her cubicle to start Saturday afternoon looking for the late M. Sapperfield’s distant relatives and other connections. Finding and notifying anyone concerned with a person’s death was the business of the Name and Print Registry, but you couldn’t trust Names and Prints to bounce their findings on to
the police computers. Pollies were safer doing their own checking. Dave Click was better than Lestrade at computer work. He went at it with the same zest he showed for driving, maybe more since there was no reason to hold down his computer speed. But every polly had to pass an annual computer literacy test, so Lestrade got her practice in at the station.
She tabbed her name and Metterkranz fingerprint code, then entered Sapperfield’s name and school. Before she could enter Sapperfield’s Metterkranz, the screen jumped into premature control and line-flashed:
* * * *
FIND OUT WHY THEY HATED M. SAPPERFIELD:
WALLACE DUTOIS
M. ELFREDA SWANNECK
M. TINTORELLI
M. PINESWEET
END OF MESSAGE
* * * *
Lestrade gazed at it a few seconds and muttered, “Damn!” before tabbing for a printout. Anonymous informers were nothing new. Usually they turned out to be cranks or grudge carriers, but they were cheaper than sale-stoolies, and their tips materialized often enough that official police policy gave them tacit encouragement. Safeguards on police computer lines hedged only readout, not input. Anyone except a total computer illiterate could crack the nominal secrecy in five minutes maximum and input any garbage they liked, and computer literates included most schoolkids between the ages of nine and thirteen, virtually all realizers, and more fanciers than your average realizer-on-the-street might expect.
She took the printout to Click’s cubicle. “Anything from Stool Pigeons Anonymous, Dave?”
“I’m working on the Tibbald Narcine records.”
“Put ’em on temporary transterm and try a new search.” She handed him the printout. “Your name and Sapperfield’s.”
He tried it. His ident and Sapperfield’s name produced no voluntary message, just the small quivering in light patterns that androcentric thinking likened to a computer’s query inflection. “All right, Dave, take it back to the Tibbald Narcine case.”
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 32
