The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Wonderful,” said the policewoman. “Tapestry?”

  “An ongoing record of our college’s history.” Dame Elfreda pulled and shook the cloth until there came into view the embroidered picture of a slender woman with yellow braids almost to the hem of her long gown, standing framed in a stone doorway. “There am I, entering these cloisters for the first time. I was younger and slighter then.” Her cheeks dimpled. “But so was the school. It has grown larger and finer—I, larger and grayer. All the great events told to me that took place before my time here, I put on the left side. All the great events since my arrival, on the right. The outmost edge is for the day of my departure. Look at my hair.” She bounced her knee beneath the image of her younger self. “It is my own, cut when it was golden as flax, to work into my tapestry.”

  “Clever. Ingenious craftwork.” Lestrade pointed at the stretch of cloth within the embroidery hoops. About a third of it was filled with wavelike blue and green swirls, apparently background for what looked like the start of a head in brown and gray. “This wouldn’t be ...”

  “The saga of poor Baron Sapperfield.” Swanneck heaved a sigh. “A major event, though a tragic one. I spoke against digging that pool for serpents and sea snakes, but who listens to a fancier in matters of moment?”

  “Poor Sapperfield,” Eric Fermi said with a sneer.

  “Aye, poor Baron Sapperfield,” the fancier repeated firmly. “A brave man, though an enemy and a grasping, rapacious Norman. I may not grieve for him, but I will speak no ill of him now. All the honor to him that his death deserves.”

  Lestrade commented, “You talk as if you’d seen it, Dame Elfreda.”

  “I have some snittering of the second sight.” Swanneck smiled and tapped her forehead. “Imagination, Dame Rosemarie.”

  “And you work remarkably fast. When did you hear how he died? This morning?”

  “Yesterday afternoon,” Swanneck replied complacently. “Dame Carolyn came round herself to bear me the tidings. But I work very quickly, do I not? And without a pattern. It comes of native talent long practiced.” Her tone was too modestly practical to be called boasting.

  Lestrade looked at the younger profs. Fermi stood smoking another cigarette, Adagio sat taking coffee in little sips, both of them watching the policewoman intently. “How about you two? When did you learn the details?”

  “We have that time-hallowed institution, a grapevine,” said Adagio. “We tend it very carefully. We hardly need our official bulletin.”

  Paolo Pinesweep to Esther Rivers to Carolyn—Tintorelli?—to Elfreda Swanneck and so on. “A private grapevine for staff only?” Lestrade demanded. “Or do students help cultivate it as well?”

  Fermi said, “The late lamented Baron Sapperfield used to leak selected tidbits to certain favored seniors and postgrads. Including a few items of his own invention. The grapevine may even be a little more reliable with him out of it.”

  “Speak no ill of the dead, Thane Eric,” Dame Elfreda reminded him.

  Adagio stood, emptied the last of her coffee into the sink, gave Lestrade what looked like an eye signal, and started out. Giving good-day to the other profs, Lestrade left the lounge and caught up with her in a doorway a few meters down the hall, now deserted except for a yawning monitor in his console at the far end.

  “Dame Elfreda is too gentle for this world,” Adagio began in a low voice. “She was born to a family fortune—not grand, but comfortable. She started teaching because she wanted to be useful. Sapperfield got to her. One of his hobbies was researching the stock market with other people’s money. He got to most of us sometime or other during our first month or two, before we caught on to him, but most of us lost only a few tridols, no more than we could afford. She lost everything. She lives in the eleventh century and she was born to money. She didn’t understand stocks any more than she understood computers. Now she has to go on teaching, she has no choice.”

  “Thank you, M. We respect your confidence.”

  “I’d rather you heard it from me than from someone else, or dug it out of the databanks. Dame Elfreda wouldn’t hurt a mosquito.” The music prof paused. “And I spent Friday evening with three co-professors. M.’s Goldtone, Euclid, and Tintorelli.”

  Chapter 17

  Pushed out of the computer lab by an incoming max-occupancy of students, Dave Click waited for his senior in the school cafeteria, sipping coffee provided by a friendly, attractive middle-aged cook who appreciated pollies and only asked him not to smoke the place up for the kids. Following the message he had left with the com-lab prof, Lestrade found him here several minutes later than he’d expected, waved away the offer of coffee for herself, and gave him a rundown in her own words.

  “Sounds easier,” he commented, “to weed out the ones who didn’t hate him. So far, that includes ...” Dave Click pretended to tab a runthrough on his notecom, “M. Rivers, the girls’ swimming coach.”

  “Or so she claims,” said his senior. “By her own account, she was a key relay satellite on GBC—the Grapevine Broadcasting Corporation. Gleefully spreading the good news. Ding, dong, the witch is dead.”

  “You must be more depressed than usual. I can tell when you start quoting Shakespeare.”

  “Shakespeare?” Lestrade repeated. “Oh, you’re thinking of ‘Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell.’ Also appropriate. ... The old problem of the troublemaker, the zizanny, what to do about the person nobody likes and nobody can change.”

  Click was sure he had heard that song in a Shakespeare play. Sometime when he was a kid. Must have been a screenshow aimed at fanciers, because all the performers had dressed alike in gray skinfits, and he remembered sprawling bored and half asleep, but all at once they’d stopped talking and started singing, “The wicked old witch ding-dong is dead.” Well, a few years ago The Lightyears had staged their own crawlswing version of Hamlet. “Maybe it was one of those conspiracies,” he suggested. “The whole staff plotted it together.”

  Lestrade shook her head. “Too many chances for a leak. A small conspiracy, maybe, not a staff-wide chain. But I think it was one and one. Could even have been spontaneous impulse.”

  “Fed by long smolders?”

  “Alone together at last, the perfect opportunity. Maybe Sapperfield even delivers some final stimulus that cracks the scale. Or it could have been planned. If we can find out what Sapperfield was doing at the aquanatorium ...”

  “Which probably no one can tell us now, except the killer.”

  Lestrade sighed. “At least it looks motivated. Against one specific victim. For a choice of reasons, quite possibly cumulative.”

  “Might not break our hearts to stamp ‘Unsolved’ on this one,” said Click. “With no other victims likely.”

  “Unless something leaks. A tight little staff, all plugged into their own Gossip Line.”

  “Poe sort of asked for it, back in that Standard affair. Overall, very few amateurs commit a second homicide to cover their traces.” Click didn’t often get the chance to remind his senior of statistics.

  “Very few that we know about,” she came back. “Until Sapperfield’s presumably amateur killer comes to us confessing, there’s still that outside chance of more deaths. If it were confined to adults, I might say all right, we can clock it with the minimum eighty hours. But with so many potential juvenile involvees—”

  “Give it the maximum six months’ worth?”

  “If nothing else happens for two or three terms, we should be safe to leave it. Of course, there’s always the chance of blackmail, even years later. It could even be a new homicidal hobbyist who just happened to get the school’s least loved prof.”

  “You should smoke something stronger than anise extract, Les,” he said before she got started on the additional victims (eventually proven or not) who died because cases went unsolved.

  “And if it was a kid who did it,” she went
on. “To get away with one homicide in midschool and carry that through life undetected, even without ever trying it again ...”

  “You brought that up,” said Click.

  “That’s right, I did. And I wasn’t talking about Cunningham. Owlsfane Garber Middle College is full of kids. That’s its reason for existing.”

  “Okay, how do we divide the student body?” He grinned. “Boys to you and girls to me?”

  She started to give him her “Lord, you’re juvenile when you’re joking” look, good as groaning for a pun, but relaxed it into a twitch that was not quite a smile. “All right, Dave, you can interview Badger and Big D all by yourself, so that I don’t fall in love with them, too. After you see that boys’ swimming coach.” She glanced at the cafeteria clock. “It’s about time for that now. I’ll take Tintorelli and Hawthorne and meet you ...”

  “Back here?”

  “When it’s full of kids?” She stood. “The plant engineer’s control room, about eleven hundred. We should be able to catch M. Pinesweep coming on the job.”

  Click carried his mug back to the kitchen, where the friendly cook smiled at him across a raft of croquette molds she was filling with pinkish-white meatdough. “Rabbit?” he guessed.

  “Chicken.”

  “Nothing but the best in a school like this, hey?”

  “I like rabbit better, myself,” she remarked. “Just set your mug by the sink over there, and thanks. Be back for lunch?”

  “Probably not, alas. Not even for real chicken.” He lowered his voice to mock- confidential. “By lunchtime I’ll have to get the senior sarge away for a while. Afraid it’ll be rabbitburgers for us at Little Mack’s again today.”

  “Lucky her. Well, take a cupcake, anyway. Fresh-mixed from boxes, none of that ready-squeeze junk for us.”

  He took two cupcakes. The first one he ate daintily, in three bites, so as to compliment the cook in his last good-by. He took the second in a single mouthful, so as not to leave crumbs on his way to the boys’ dressing room.

  Chapter 18

  The gymnasium protruded from the main school plant. On a less expensively re-architected and landscaped building, it would have looked like an afterthought addition. As it was, it looked like the kind of arrangement you saw on small, exclusive single-building high schools and bud colleges. The idea, Dave Click remembered from his own alma high (an old plant dating from the 2020s, on which the new 2050s gym had been an eyesore) was to give its sound-soaking an additional assist by isolating it as much as possible while still keeping it accessible under the same roof. Also, you could open up these bump-gyms for games after school hours, but leave the rest of the building locked. Not that midschool gyms came in for much after-hours use, especially in cushiony neighborhoods, but the principle had seeped down from higher education—to such an extent that the only way to reach the gym from inside the main building without going through a dressing room was via one of two little curved passages, roofed and windowed with steelglass.

  The aquanatorium, on the other hand, was in the heart of the building’s north half, its high dome making the school look from a distance like a Byzantine church. Even filled with a swimming class, pool areas were theoretically quieter than gyms, so normal sound-soaking was supposed to be good enough. Besides, the level beneath the swimming floor was partitioned into viewing galleries for science classes and a lounge with marine views from below, very tranquilizing to some types. Then, too, some of the ’natorium specimens were pretty valuable, and it made sense to surround them with layers of building.

  Dave Click had taken plenty of time to memorize the school-plan printout while waiting for his senior in the cafeteria. The two dressing rooms, girls’ entered from the east, boys’ from the west, formed a dual corridor between gym and pool, each dressing room with a north door opening into the gym and a south door opening into the swimming area. Also each dressing room had a door opening onto the school corridor. As his senior maintained, it was not your classic locked-room situation. At best, a locked building, with chances for the homicide to slip out a back door after Cunningham set off the alarm by opening a front one. Or even, with perfect timing, to have tripped the victim into the ’natorium during the final moments of exodus for the weekend, when the school was almost but not quite empty, so that someone could slip out without looking conspicuous but with the minimum risk of anybody else happening along into the pool area.

  But Click’s vote still tended toward the obvious suspect.

  When the mikebox at the boys’ dressing-room door failed to answer him within ten seconds, he beckoned the elderly hall monitor from her booth and smiled her into snapping the clearance for him. Faced with a footbath in the entrance, he broadjumped, landed dry with twenty centimeters to spare, and strode on in whistling, “Don’t You Marry a Doctor, Baker, Polly or Marine.”

  For some reason, physical exercise areas always had only their outer walls and doors soundproofed, never their inner surfaces. In a building like this, where expense was obviously a minor consideration, the phex complex must have been sealed into its own audio welter on purpose to get that traditional old locker-room atmosphere. Gym noises carried through from the north and splashes with squeals from the south, but for the moment the only sounds originating in the boys’ dressing room came from Click’s slapsole shoes and the shower in one of the stalls.

  He rapped on the pebblex shower door. The water stopped, the door opened, and a smooth-muscled cropcut in his twenties, redhaired and glistening naked, looked out.

  “M. Neptune Jones, I presume?” Click patted his pocket to tab on the tapebox.

  The cropcut glanced him over and raised both hands for a second. “It’s the pollies at last! You got me, I surrender, but how about letting me duck one last class before you run me in?”

  “And drown a few more?” Click bantered.

  “Better that than leave twenty-five midschool frosh and sophs unsupervised beside an aquanatorium with no place else to go for a whole session. Good way to produce neurotic ’natorium specimens.” Jones looked at Click’s feet. “Grucks! You a polly and came in here with your unsanitized shoes on?”

  “Police privilege.”

  “Better not tell that to M. Pinesweep.” Without toweling or blowing dry, Jones stepped into a pair of orange swimming trunks. “Come on, crawl into my office. In a few minutes this place’ll be swarming with the gym crowd in a hustle to get out before my pool crowd gets in.”

  Click followed the coach into his office. Ignoring the plastimesh chair behind the vinyl desk, Jones sprawled on a slat bench against the one opaque wall. Click took the airchair and put his feet up on the desk.

  “Hey, be a zoom and barefoot it for now,” said Jones. “Remember the gymsters and tadpoles. Ever try to rub regulations into a mob of schoolboys when they see authority types like pollies breaking same?”

  Click laughed and bared his feet. “What’ll it strain you, Jones? I’ll be running you in after this class anyway.”

  “No strain. Just good, friendly cooperation all around.”

  “All right, time to get serious. You must have a leakproof alibi or you wouldn’t be joking about it.”

  Jones spread one hand, palm open. He had the other arm curled under his head. “No alibi. When did it happen, Friday night? But no—what d’you call ’em?—no motive, either. I’m not going to mire down at Owlsfane Garber all my life. This job is just a springboard. Sure, I was aware everybody else hated the late unmourned, but he was nothing to me. I hardly ever saw him. He kept away from the pool during swimming hours, afraid to let the smallfry know he couldn’t swim. Hard to maintain your hobgoblin character once they’ve seen you in a life jacket.”

  “But he came in here sometime Friday afternoon or evening. Any idea why?”

  A momentary frown swam over Jones’s face. “Sure. No mystery. He liked to annoy the mermaids. But only when nobody else wa
s around. As I said, he never bothered me personally.”

  “Mermaids?”

  “Mermaids.” Jones sat up and put his ear to the wall. “Listen. You can hear them coming in from the pool area.”

  “That’s the wall between this and the girls’ dressing room, huh?” Click listened. The wall between the two dressing rooms was better sound-soaked than the other inner partitions, but he could hear squeals and shower-swells.

  “When our boys come charging in on this side,” said Jones, “you might as well give up trying to hear the little darlings over there. I like it when the girls come in first.”

  “They’re your mermaids? Sapperfield didn’t mind letting girls see him in a life jacket?”

  “What?” For a moment Jones looked blank. “Midschool girls? Lord, they can be worse than the boys! In the skin he might not have minded stepping out in front of them. Not in a life jacket. Besides, M. Rivers locks her classes in, guiderules or no guiderules. M. Rivers makes her own guiderules, and keeps ’em. Tight.”

  The gym doors whooshed and boys burst in, gym coach whistling on their heels. Noticing youngsters gawking and pointing at him through the glass, Click returned his bared feet to the desk, hooked his arms behind his head, looked back at Jones and repeated, “Okay, so who are the mermaids?”

  Jones swung his legs to the floor and propped his elbows on his knees. “I’m a borderline fancier. I qualify as a legal reality perceiver, but just barely. Dig deep in my records and you can find my scores for yourself. It affects me only in water, and only to the extent that I see mermaids out there.”