“Please, I’m sick. I’m trying to sleep.”
“I’m sorry, M. Lotus, this is official.”
More silence. Lestrade tried the handle. It was unlocked. (Would Mrs. Abigail Greene tolerate locks on her daughters’ doors?) The policewoman went in.
Mandra lay in bed, one arm crooked up over her eyes, the other hanging out over the mattress, sheets and baby blue satinray bedspread bunched up to her waist—the kind of uncomfortable position someone might adopt in a hurry to look bedridden. The girl was quivering like jelly. The room was clean beneath a veneer of token clutter. Mara, Daughter of the Nile lay, face down and pages spread, on the floor near the curtained windowseat. Lestrade guessed the book had been hurled across the room and left where it landed. Mandra said nothing, just held her pose.
And I’m old enough to be this one’s mother, too, thought Lestrade. Not her grandmother. I wouldn’t be quite old enough for that in any culture. Not by a couple of years, anyway.
She closed the door, crossed the room, and picked up the book. It had sustained some damage. One torn page, several badly creased, a partly dislocated front cover. “How are you going to explain this to your mother?” Lestrade inquired.
The girl seemed to shrug. It could have been a convulsive shudder.
“You must hate this book. Bad vibrations?”
Silence.
Sitting on the bed, Lestrade took Mandra’s wrist, gently-but-firmly, and pulled her arm away from her head. “I found that book in his apartment, remember? I didn’t say anything about it yesterday, even brought it back in plain brown wrapper. I hope it won’t be necessary to let anyone else in on our secret.”
No doubt about this shudder. Lestrade felt it through the hand she still held around Mandra’s wrist.
“Come on. You aren’t the first student who ever got into it with a prof. What was it? Grades? Tea and sympathy? Rites of Spring—the wise old mentor initiating the uncertain young acolyte? Or just plain old action? Did he have some animal magnetism we’d never guess by looking at him now?”
“He was an ugly, vile, filthy old man! Yes, it was grades! Nothing but grades!”
“He was only one professor. Your sister made it through Owlsfane Garber without—”
“You’ve been talking to her!” Mandra sat straight up. “The snitch! The—”
“She talked so I wouldn’t suspect anything worse. She talked because I didn’t give her much choice. The way I’m not giving you much choice. Is there anything worse?”
“It’s okay for Ginny. She’s a bigbrain. She made it through middle college in four years flat. Besides, she’s a realizer. I’m a fancier. Like my mother. What else can you expect?”
In that moment Rosemary Lestrade thought she could have pushed Sapperfield in herself and cheerfully tabbed the steelglass over him. How many people in that school besides Pinesweep had suspected? How the hell had they let it go on so long? Wasn’t there such a thing as a little too much respect for privacy sometimes? “M. Lotus,” she finally asked aloud, “is there anything worse?”
The girl hunched over and sobbed.
“We’ll start with your book,” said the policewoman. “How did it come to be in his apartment?”
“I forgot it. I left it there. The…the first time. And then he wouldn’t give it back. He kept promising, next time I came, next time I came. And then he always had it hidden. I thought—I thought maybe he threw it away or burned it or something. I hoped that was it, and then he couldn’t show it to anyone ...”
“Blackmail.” Lestrade touched Mandra’s shoulder sympathetically.
“But I didn’t—I didn’t—”
The policewoman refrained from prompting her.
“He made me do things around school, too. Mess up music in the band room. He told me ... He told me to meet him in the pool area Friday after school. After everybody else was gone. At eighteen fifteen, he said M. Pinesweep would be gone by then, and he was going to show me how to ... I don’t remember what he called it, something about teasing the mermaids.”
Pinesweep would lock up the building as far as students and nonschool personnel were concerned, but Sapperfield as a tenured prof would have his own voicekey in and out. “And afterwards, back to his apartment,” said Lestrade. “What did you tell your mother on evenings like that?”
“She thinks ... I told her I was going out with my girl friends. So long as I get home before nine-thirty—that’s twenty-one thirty—on weekends ... But I didn’t kill him! Officer Lestrade, I didn’t kill him! I never went near the pool Friday! I said I’d meet him there, but I snuck out of school with everybody else and went down to the shop stop and took the subtrain to his place right away. I knew he was going to stay in school till eighteen fifteen at least, and I was going to get into his apartment and look for my book. If it was still there. Then he couldn’t ... not any more.”
He couldn’t if he was dead, either. “But you didn’t find the book.”
“I couldn’t get in! I thought if you just wiggled a hairpin in the lock, that’s all they have to do in the screenshows. And I got the hairpin, I bought it in Chaney’s Costume Shop, but it didn’t work. It didn’t work!”
Lestrade tried a shock wedge. “So you left me a list of suspects in the police databank to cover your own tracks.”
Mandra looked up. For a moment her eyes seemed blank, and Lestrade thought it was another strikeout. But the girl dropped her gaze again and said, “No. It wasn’t just to cover up my tracks. It really could be one of them. I’m sure it was one of them. Probably mean old M. Pinesweep. Or else Wally Dutois. He’s a real slurd.”
“Suppose we pinned it on an innocent because of your tip?”
“No. It’s got to be one of them. They all hated him, just like me. Even more than I hated him. Everybody knows that.”
“How did you find out about his murder?”
Mandra hesitated. “It was on the school newsheet. I get it on my own homescreen.”
“It wasn’t on the school sheet until this morning, and then only that he was dead. You knew about it by Saturday morning at latest. And you had my name by then. How?”
Mandra slumped.
Lady God! thought the woman, she’s a child. She needs help, not an adult-sized
grilling. But when kids are old enough to be dangerous, you’ve got to get the info out of them somehow. “M. Lotus, gossip is not a criminal offense, and the murderer probably would not be the one to spread the gossip anyway. Now. Who told you?”
“Why?” Mandra mumbled without looking up.
“Because ...” Lestrade shut her eyes for an instant. Not the ancient ‘why’ game, not now, not with an eighth grader in Mandra’s apparent emotional condition! “Because we may need all the secondary witnesses we can find.”
There was another pause, but at last Mandra said, “Sherry Hawthrone. She’s my cousin.”
“Thank you, M.” Lestrade glanced at her watch. 15:21. She looked back at the girl. Whatever Mandra Lotus had or had not done, she had scars from this, too, as surely as Cunningham. Maybe worse. The boy had only happened to find a corpse. The girl had been personally involved with the deceased, and not in a happy way. Would she ever be able to daydream about Prince Charming? “M. Lotus,” the woman said. This time she tried to keep the polly out of her voice, and maybe she succeeded. Mandra looked up with an unguarded expression. “Being a fancier doesn’t necessarily condemn you to having this kind of affair,” Lestrade went on. “We say ‘fancy-class morals,’ but that isn’t really fair. A lot of fantasy perceivers have morals to equal Mother Teresa’s.” Corwin Poe and Angela Garvey flashed through her mind even as she went on, “Besides, you’re still realizer enough to feed data into a computer.”
Mandra wiped her eyes and seemed to nod. She was blowing her nose as Lestrade left, shutting the door behind her. Maybe that last scrap of wisdom wouldn
’t go for much. Maybe the girl would be spending the rest of her life in an asylum. But meanwhile it might give her some flimsy lifeline.
* * * *
Mrs. Greene looked more at ease with Click than he looked with her. When his senior came down, he grabbed the excuse quickly enough to leave his coffee half drunk and say his goodbyes.
Mrs. Greene saw them out and stood in the doorway, watching them slide into the polcar. Click keyed the engine, returned the homekeeper’s parting wave, and asked in tones of relief, “Where to now?”
“Back to Owlsfane Garber.”
He glanced at the car clock. “School lets out at fifteen thirty. We’ll get there just about in time to watch the last of the student body draining away home.”
“That’ll be fine.” She took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. “We’re picking M. Cunningham up at sixteen hundred. He made me a bogus confession today.”
“Bogus?”
“We should be able to do a quick doublecheck and run him on home.”
Click rolled the car away from the curb and accelerated. “You’re sure it’s a bogus confession?”
“It wasn’t even a clear-cut confession, more like a tentative insinuation. He did break a heavy school rule, and he was understandably scared of going to the princeps’ sanctum after school. He did not tab the steelglass on Sapperfield, so he thought he’d rather go with us.”
“Mmm.” Click took the corner at well under maximum speed. “Yeah, maybe. If a kid did it, my money’s gone over to Big Dutois. I wouldn’t trust that type with twinkies in the twilight. How did it go with Miss Lotus up there?”
She had almost finished summing it up when they turned onto the President Mei Gan Overway and found it choked with a real, old-fashioned, twice-a-year traffic jam.
“What the hell is going on?” Lestrade got out of the car, stood on the fender step, and shaded her eyes against the westering sun.
“Accident?” said Click.
“Doesn’t look like one.” Twenty cars or so ahead, a bunch of brightly costumed pedestrians were waving streamers and ... yes…flying fancy kites. One at a time, cars trickled through a cordon of waving hands at about a klick an hour. Now and then, in defiance of the guideline about sounding only for danger alerts, some driver tapped out the Morse cheer on a car horn—technically illegal, but sufficiently widespread that few traffic controllers bothered to write citations for it. Good way to get laws laughed at—make up a bunch that aren’t going to be obeyed anyway.
Lestrade drew her penphone and tabbed the general number for the nearest troller in scanning distance. There was at least one controller up there—she saw the round stop and go sign dipping up above people’s heads—but it took her thirteen chimes to get a response.
“Troller Artesian, Mei Gan Overway above Grant and Hummingbird.”
“Artesian? This is Lestrade, Corporal Crimes Division. Twenty cars down the road from you. What the hell is going on up there?”
“Peking Peace Day celebration.”
“Peking Peace Day? That’s not until next week!”
“They’re celebrating it all week.” Artesian didn’t sound too unhappy about it.
“On a major public overway?”
“Unscheduled, Les,” Click put in, leaning out the window. “Not in the databank yet, anyway. Must be some spontaneous combustion with fanciers in charge.”
“Come on through, Sergeant,” Troller Artesian invited. “They’re tossing rice cakes and plum wine squeezes around for anyone who can catch ’em.”
“Artesian, find out who the hell cleared or neglected to clear this wingding with City Hall, or you may find yourself on report,” Lestrade said into the penphone just before she tabbed it off. “All right, Dave,” she went on, sliding back inside the car, “you’ll have to get us there by the fastest back roads.”
“Siren?” he asked with a grin.
Something tempted her to say yes. She recognized it as the aftereffect of having scheduled their afternoon so tightly. Good textbook police procedure to cram as much as possible into the budgeted investigation hours, but it didn’t leave much room for spontaneous-combustion wingdings. How to clock up stress-hours fast. “No siren,” she replied. “Keep to the limit and obey all stops.”
He shrugged and started backing the car. “Not afraid Cunny’ll give us the slip?”
“He won’t give us the slip.” She didn’t try to cover her annoyance. “Stop trying to make the Big Chase Scene out of this. It’s nothing but a piece of routine, for the Lady God’s sake.”
Chapter 32
Dame Elfreda’s screenshow was from an old movie cassed at Reconstructed Tintagel on the Oregon coast. It had a lot of fighting and battle scenes, and Cunningham wished he could watch it better. It lasted right to the bell, almost on the nanosecond.
“Cony,” Badger mumbled as they stood up, “want me to wait for you? I can hang around the astroball field.”
Cunningham almost said yes, but Senior Sergeant Lestrade was going to be there, and if he told why, Badger might think he was nuts or something, because of her sidekick. So he said, trying to sound like Yuri Yokamo going around to hold off the Shivonites while Jamie Hazard defused the bomb, “No thanks, Badge, I’ll just phone you later. Tell you what that flagellator looks like to a realizer. Uh, how about putting my cushion away for me this time? So I can get going.”
They slapped palms. Badger picked up both their cushions and went to join the crowd at the storage slots along the back of the room. Cunningham hurried on out. Straight curve to the office on the other side of the building. Go like a secret courier, don’t think about the end of the mission.
Along Science Row he saw Wally Dutois coming out of Lab 4, and swerved to avoid him—not because he was scared of Big D, just because he couldn’t afford to tangle with him right now and get slowed up.
Someone said, “Easily, youngster, easily.” Cunningham looked up and saw he was about to bump into Old Piney at the terrarium door. He stopped and bobbed his head. Nobody messed around with the maintenance engineer, any more than they’d mess around with the First Science Officer of the Enterprise. “Gol, M. Pinesweep, I’m sorry!”
Old Piney stood there grinning down like he was waiting for something else, so the boy added,
“And I’m sorry about your aquanatorium, too.”
“Hey?” M. Pinesweep frowned.
“Friday night, I mean. I’m sorry about ... what happened Friday night.”
“Ah, so you’re that kid, hey?” The maintenance engineer took a half step back and waved his hand. “Well, hurry on now and keep your radar a little sharper.”
Cunningham looked around. Wally Dutois was gone, so he took another grip on his Historical Backgrounds book, dodged respectfully past M. Pinesweep, and hurried on. Old Piney had sounded like he didn’t know before who the kid was in the pool area Friday. Cunningham had sort of thought all the grownups knew all about it, even before he blabbed it himself to the other kids in Homeroom Six this morning, but maybe they didn’t. Yeah, Senior Sergeant Lestrade must have played it close, all right.
Princeps Cage must have played it close, too. So maybe it wouldn’t be so bad this afternoon.
Sheryl Hawthorne was going into the Seacave Groves vending area for a last cola. She saw him and said, “Good luck.”
“Hi. Uh, I can’t hang around today.”
“I know. Good luck,” she said again, and waved.
Art Wawo was leaning by the door to the boys’ comfort station. “Hey, good soldge!” he said, thumping the symbol. “Last chance.”
Cunningham just said, “Hey, yourself,” and walked on.
“Don’ worry, little realizer, you’ll probably survive,” Wawo yelled after him. Puffy senior.
At least he didn’t pass Microphone Donaha anywhere on the way. But right at the office door he looked around and
saw little frosh Yancy Datsun staring at him till his eyes probably wouldn’t open any wider. Cunningham squared his shoulders and marched on in. He didn’t turn around, but he could imagine how awed Yancy was looking now, and it made him feel pretty brave for a few moments.
“Well, good afternoon,” said the office aide.
He looked up at her. “Good afternoon, M. Robotnik.”
She checked her deskscreen. “Cunningham?”
“Yes, M.”
“You can go right on back. He’s waiting for you.” She sounded just like M. Peppydent at the dentist’s office.
“Uh, yes, M.”
And, just like M. Peppydent, she flashed him a big, friendly smile. “Don’t worry. He’ll be gentle this time.” M. Robotnik looked like a screenstar, and Cunningham wanted to ask if Princeps Cage had told her exactly what he was going to do and how long it would take, but it’d be stupid to keep the princeps waiting. Cunningham said thank you and began the Last Mile.
His footsteps didn’t echo like in the old, old movies. They sort of whispered in the carpet instead. Somehow that made it even spookier than if this corridor had plain sound-soak tile like all the hallways out in the rest of the school. And another thing, in the old movies there was always the prison warden and a bunch of guards and the chaplain—a whole squad of people marching down the corridor, not just one. One, all alone on the honor system, nothing to plug retreat except a single guard sitting at the front desk. The oldest movies always had a lot of white background noise, too. They couldn’t filter it out any more because it had gotten in before they had good sound-soak techniques. But you knew those scenes were supposed to be quiet, all except for the footsteps and maybe some music, the way it was quiet going down the princeps’ corridor, without even the footsteps…till Cunningham stepped on the bulge in the carpet and the sanctum door swung open with a little noise like old soundtrack static.
Princeps Cage stood up behind his big desk, bright in the dark sanctum. “Ah, yes, Cunningham Roberts Cunningham. Don’t dawdle, boy.” His voice was no-nonsense, but he seemed to be smiling a little, so maybe he wasn’t too angry any more.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 44
