WHO MOURNS FOR SILVERSTAIRS?
(First published in Space & Time, #79, Winter 1991)
“Laeti triumphantes!” said Sergeant Holmes Hennessey Harvard. “For once, a second-hand tip chimed true.”
The new regional guidelines of August 2065, three years ago to the month, recommended a mixture of important with picayune but easily solved cases to “maximize workload satisfaction” for every paid police officer. As if that hadn’t been throwing enough glitches at Holmsey Harvard, around the beginning of July they’d assigned him his first rookie, raw out of Illiana Pollytech and obviously suffering some kind of deep self-confidence malfunction beneath her tough exterior.
As a rule, they tried to keep rookies away from real murders for three to four hundred workhours—eight to twelve weeks. But second-hand tips were crank jokesterism often enough that Carter had decided to take the chance and turn this one over to Harvard and Lestrade for checking out. Benedicime Stansey Carter, keep his steaks hot and a head on his beer for the next eighteen months! Blood all over the apartment. A corpus delectible rigor mortising in a slump at the computer desk, and blood all over everything. Not that Holmes Harvard scrolled on blood for its own sake, but 2068 wasn’t like the 2020s or even the 1960s, you didn’t get that many murders nowadays, and murders that actually needed any kind of fancy detective work were rare as lobsters. Add a second-hand tip to a roomful of blood and you got—
“Bad Latin,” said Harvard’s junior partner.
“Specialized in ancient languages up at Illiana, did you?”
“No, sir. Just keying in an observation based on Christmas carols. It’s always been my understanding that ‘laeti triumphantes’ had something to do with rejoicing, and I can’t perceive much cause for rejoicing here, Sergeant Harvard. Sir.”
Annoyed, he looked back at her. Put her in fancy-class high heels and he’d have to look up at her face, but it still wouldn’t have been all that hard and homely if she’d only bother to care a little about it herself. Twenty-three-year-olds hot from police school shouldn’t be all that indifferent to every other point of personal appearance except basic neat-and-cleanness ... Wait a minute. She had tears rolling down those almost-hollow cheeks. Dammit, a slaughterhouse victim was hard enough to handle without a hysterical rookie on his hands, too. “Pull yourself together, Rosie!”
“With respect, M. Harvard, don’t first-name me. Especially don’t nickname me.”
“Better than final-naming you. Dies irae! Any modern professional police officer who’d choose a final name like—”
“I chose it when I was fifteen and registered it when I was sixteen, M. Harvard. It’d still be an obscure old literary reference remembered by fancy-class specialists and very few other people if it hadn’t been for the ‘Three Funny Inspectors’ comic strip taking off a couple of years ago. I’m keeping it, so you can stop throwing other names up at me. Meanwhile, sir, take a look at the computer screen.”
He looked. It was glowing with a dozen pale blue characters in the upper left-hand corner. Telling Lestrade, “If you can’t take the blood, go out to the public comfort,” he strode over to the desk.
“Again with respect, sir,” she was saying, “they put us through worse holographic sims than this, up at Illiana Pollytech.”
But he was hardly listening. The letters on the computer screen read: “wincver ystal cr”
“Gaudeamus!” he exclaimed. “You see what we’ve got here, Rosie?” He jabbed one finger toward the screen, stopping with a flourish his famous two millitimeters short of contact. Then, remembering he’d advised her to find a comfort station, he looked around. “Rosemary?”
There she stood, almost at his shoulder, copying the message into her pocket notecom. “I see what we’ve got, Sergeant Harvard,” she replied carefully, with a last glance from notecom to screen and back again. “I suggest you phone the photos and baggies team to get here as soon as they can, in case the power outs or blips. Meantime ...” She bent for a close scrutiny and, seeing that no part of the corpse lay obstructing the necessary keys, used the end of her notecom stylus to tab for a printout.
He caught it on its way out of the slot, holding it as tenderly as if there could be any reason to check it for fingerprints. “Do you know what we’ve got here?” he repeated.
“Probably Windcrystal Gorlock Crowley, sir. It’ll take further checking when we can get to our own terminals, but I don’t know of any other people named Windcrystal, and I’d guess that the spelling discrepancies resulted from—”
“Yes, yes, pestis, but sound like you understood it!” He ought to be used to her annoying him by now, but some kinds of annoyances only got worse. “Like it had sunk into that little rookie cranium of yours! We’re going to rate whole files in the public newsbanks and databases with this case. Not one real victim in five hundred blesses us with a real, tangible, classical-style dying clue!”
Rosemary Lestrade looked at him, opened her thin lips, closed them again, swallowed, deliberately clipped the stylus back into its slot on her notecom, and finally said, “Tell me, Sergeant Holmes Harvard, if you found an ‘I am a Catholic, please call a priest’ card on a murder victim, would you run out and arrest the nearest Catholic priest for the crime?”
* * * *
She regretted over and over having broken down and said it. Every time he explained all over again, from his exalted seat behind the driver’s wheel, why it was tote non disputander an entirely different thing. “Call a priest” cards didn’t specify any particular padre or madre. “Call a priest” cards said, “In case of accident,” not “in case of murder.” Priests were real clerics and Windcrystal Crowley was one of these so-called magists. And in any case, if you were dying of a hard bash to the head and a kitchen knife administered deeply if amateurishly to the ribs, whose name would you tab, your murderer’s or your psychomystical advisor’s?
“Neither one,” Lestrade snapped back at last. “I’d try for the nearest medic, and I’d use the medical emergency phonewave, not the public computer network. But—”
“Exultate for you, Rosie.”
She cleared her throat and pushed on. “But different people, different preferences. M. Pargeter might have believed she had a soul. She might conceivably have felt worried about it. Especially if she sensed she was dying. There are records of attitudes like that. Until we know more about what happened in that apartment last night—”
“Debbi P. Pargeter was a murder victim, Rosie. Murder victims name their murderers when and if they can. Quid est demonstrandum. No deep psychomystical spiritual questions about it.”
“If you say so, sir. But may I point out that if it hadn’t been for those ... letters on the screen—” She had almost said damned letters—”we’d have been trying right now to find out who ‘Andy’ is, and if Andy’s hair, blood, and intimate fluids match what we collected from M. Pargeter’s—”
“I hate to shock your virginal sensitivities, Rosie, but there are other explanations for a few yanked hairs and blood traces beneath fingernails than fighting off an attacker. Especially when the date’s name is on a passion pink calendar marker engraved with hearts and flowers.”
Lestrade’s pollytech trainee group had assisted two investigations in houses of eden; she had read all the assigned novels for that course in Literature of the Last Salacious Age, ca. 1960-2035; and she had had a pretty good idea what she was turning down those times she had turned down invitations to the kind of fancy orgies college kids could still throw, if they kept the activity well shaded. It wasn’t so much what people did in privacy that embarrassed her, it was breaking in on their privacy. But she had given up trying to explain the difference to Holmes Hennessey Harvard. Today she said only, “A match of hair, blood, fingerprints, and semen traces with the person whom the victim was expecting to see according to her own refrigerator calendar could mean nothing more than a wild date, but a ‘dying c
lue’ always means a ‘dying clue’?”
“Q.e.d.,” he repeated. “Unless and until you can suggest something else that a row of letters keyed out with the victim’s dying strength could constitute.”
She had already suggested something else it could constitute, but what was the use?
“Let’s see,” he was rambling on. “‘win…c ... what was it?…cvr ... We’ll have Jandi or Tessy try tabbing ‘Windcrystal’ under simulated circumstances, get an additional exhibit for the trial, but I really think you hit the nail head on, Rosie. Even if you did have a little trouble seeing what nail you hit, stulta erata.”
She guessed he was murdering Latin again but, like most other modern people, she didn’t know it well enough to correct him. Probably that was how he could get away with it where he couldn’t have gotten away with misusing Spanish or French. Arrogant blowhard. Sometimes she understood how some floaters could get themselves murdered.
Not Debbi Pargeter Pargeter. She didn’t understand Debbi’s death yet, and until she did, there was the natural tendency to sympathize with the victim and hate the murderer’s guts.
Nineteen years old, M. Pargeter. Svelte, stylish dresser to judge by her wardrobe, probably pretty once upon a time before last night’s brutality. And, if her collection of microchip texts, hardcopy printouts, and old realprint volumes was anything to go by, desperately worried about which religion, if any, had it right, and how to program an individual life to best meet that great postmortem standard Test for eternity. If she was dying as a result of some violent argument with Andy ... or whomever ... Debbi Pargeter might have felt too much share in the guilt to think about fingering the other party. Her most pressing perceived need could have been for her spiritual counselor. And what anybody else might think about the value of said counselor was irrelevant.
No, not quite irrelevant. Often enough, the less popular some Teacher or Prophet or Guru was with the general public, the more devoted that sage’s own personal disciples became.
Harvard broke into her thoughts. “How did you happen to have Windcrystal G. Crowley’s cognomeni right there in the front of your ready-reference brainbank, Rosie?”
She sighed. “Just one of those bytes a floater picks up here and there, M. Harvard. Like the manners tidbit as to how first-naming people without their permission is considered rude these days.”
“O tempora, O mores! Watch it, Rosie, I’m not that old. Plenty of time yet to make captain before I even hit my prime.”
“I hope you make it, sir.” And leave me so far behind I’ll never have to worry about working with you again, she added mentally. She hoped even more that he never found out the real reason she knew Windcrystal Gorlock Crowley’s name as well as she did.
More than a decade and a half ago, her mother had belonged, briefly, to Windcrystal’s coven.
* * * *
To Lestrade’s relief, if Windcrystal recognized her, she kept quiet about it. Well, not counting glimpses in crowds, they’d seen each other three or four times at most, and Lestrade had been a ponytailed kid of eight or nine. Still a little pudgy, and with her name still registered Rosemary Lozinski Willowmartin. She guessed the years had changed her a lot more than they’d changed the magist.
Short, fiftyish, and just rolypoly enough to look down-home, Windcrystal milked the friendly neighborhood good-witch role for all it was worth, dressing just like anybody else who didn’t have much of anywhere to go and couldn’t quite manage to keep up with the latest fashions. The only thing about her appearance that might get her evicted from a Southern Baptist tent revival was her trademark amulet, a craftily tarnished silver ankh eight centimeters long, with supposedly Babylonian symbols engraved wherever they’d fit and the yellowish crystal she associated with her first name inset in the loop. Come to think of it, even the ankh probably didn’t draw that many stares. It blended right in like a chameleon when she wore it over the right color tunic, and look at all the floaters who thought an ankh was just a fancy kind of Christian cross. Look at all the people who never noticed things like that at all. Maybe even most people at a Southern Baptist tent revival.
Windcrystal was wearing the right color tunic today, faded blue and yellow that had once been very bright, in a pattern that, if stared at long enough, might turn into imitation Escherian birds and fishes. Nice touch. The tunic was almost ankle length, but she wore trousers beneath it anyway, a few inches of starched and creased white cuff displayed between skirt hem and moccasins. An even nicer touch.
“I’ve been expecting you, Sergeants,” she said, standing there in her doorway nodding to them.
The only trick involved in knowing they were pollies was spotting the badges on their tunics. But if “I’ve been expecting you” was a pseudomystical trick to cover surprise, Lestrade thought it had been one of Windcrystal’s mistakes. Even delivered in that calm contralto, it stiffened Harvard’s shoulders at once.
All he said, however, was, “My junior here is not a sergeant yet, M. Crowley.”
“Oh?” The magist squinted elaborately over his shoulder at Lestrade’s name badge, as if puzzled at some discrepancy. “No, I see. Not yet. You will be very soon, M. Lestrade. Come in, both of you.” She stepped aside for them.
Of course Lestrade would be a sergeant soon. In today’s psychomystically minded police service, “promotion” to sergeant was all but automatic after the first twelve months. Part of the theory had been that it lent young officers more authority, but the public didn’t need to imbibe too many screenshows before catching on.
Following Harvard in, Lestrade could picture the expression on his face: his suspicion vindicated, his triumph only a little soured by the prospect of getting the confession too easily.
Windcrystal’s apartment was like herself, almost middleclass reality, just one or two arcane little touches here and there if you knew how to spot them. It looked as if Harvard did, but then, he was preprogrammed to zero in on them.
Sunlight flowed into the living room through two alcove windows. One alcove hosted Windcrystal’s altar. A very tasteful affair, several objet-d’art quality statuettes and an incense burner that looked like a tiny little Oriental pagoda. Not even an athame’ in sight. It could have been any collector’s knickknack table. In the other alcove, an antique-shop copper and faceted glass tea-anywhere set waited on a spot table. The kettle was steaming on the miniburner as if to confirm Windcrystal’s remark about expecting them.
Harvard eyed the tea-anywhere set and said, “So you’ve been expecting us, have you?”
“Yes. About that poor—”
“Before you say anything further, M. Crowley,” Lestrade cut in, seeing that Harvard still hadn’t done it, “we’d better warn you that—”
“Warn me? Why?” The magist blinked. “Surely you don’t ... Oh, no, Sergeants, I had no personal responsibility for it. Beyond what every individual owes every other individual in the Grand Interface of the Universe, of course.”
“Blank it, M. Crowley,” said Harvard. “Tabula rasa. You obviously know why we’re here, and don’t try to tell us it’s already scrolled into the newscoms.”
“I witnessed it.” Windcrystal went to her tea alcove and began pouring water from the kettle into an old blue porcelain teapot, drawing the process out with pretentiously old-fashioned everydayness. “If your minds can accept this, I was an eyewitness.”
“Veritatis?” said Harvard. “Then why didn’t you report it?”
“I have tried reporting such things at once. Never before now a murder, but other cries of distress. Lost children, accidents in isolated areas, the occasional robbery ... Emergency teams believe me approximately as often as not. The police, almost never. Had there been any chance of helping the poor child, of course I would have tried. But as she was beyond help, it seemed as well to wait for you to come to me. Your minds, I could hope, would then be better attuned to perceive the truth.�
�� She bounced a mesh teaball up and down in the steaming pot.
“You could have tried the emergency teams,” said Lestrade, remembering but carefully not saying that it must have taken awhile for Debbi Pargeter to finish bleeding to death, even after losing consciousness.
The magist shook her silver head. “I read auras. Whether or not your minds are ready to receive it, I have had the eye to see them since my earliest childhood. Debbi’s life force was gone from her poor, abused body within seconds. There was no hope that any emergency team could have reached her in time.”
“Auras,” said Harvard. “All right, M. Crowley, if you can read ‘auras,’ what do you read in mine?”
She looked at him and shook her head. “Sergeant Harvard, I’m afraid that, at this particular stage in your spiritual development, you really would rather not know.”
“Neither would I,” Lestrade said quickly. “What we want to know right now, M. Crowley, is where and how you eyewitnessed the incident.”
Windcrystal gazed from one of them to the other, gracefully filled two shellware cups with tea, picked them up by the saucers, and brought them to her visitors, serving them simultaneously.
The mama holy cow could reek an almost hypnotic quality. Must have been what had attracted Edith Carmichael Willowmartin to her coven for a couple of sabbats. Unhappily for Windcrystal, any effect her chemical magnetism had on Holmes Hennessey Harvard would be negative. He eyed the tea as if he perceived it to be Lucrezia Borgia’s poison.
On her own guard, Lestrade sniffed it. Harmless blend of lavender, lemon grass, and, she thought, a pinch of camomile. Nothing hallucinogenic or hypnotic, but if she risked so much as a sip, Harvard would probably accuse her later of having taken evidence while under the influence. Too bad. It smelled like the best hours of her childhood.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 48
