The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Including the sovereign states of New York and Upper California! Yes, yes, and half a dozen state legislatures are even talking about offering the charlatans paid jobs. Deo gratias, good old Indiana isn’t one of them.”

  “No, sir,” Lestrade agreed dryly. “Our home state has a long history of wisdom in its Legislature. But M. Pargeter’s date calendar still shows that she was expecting an Andy last night.”

  “There are hundreds of Andies in this town. Not all of them masculines. What with Andrews, Andrinas, Andreas, Andersons…final names, family names, a few of those stray nicknames unrelated to the actual registered names, and all the budding young hoopball hopefuls already calling themselves ‘Andy’ after Dah Smythe. But that’s probably where Crowley got her inspiration, all right. Noticing the name ‘Andy’ on her victim’s date calendar. It was still downright brazen to choose Dah Smythe, of all the Andies in this town, for her mug shot ...” Harvard grinned, no doubt at his bad pun ... “but I guess she reasoned that she could always claim afterwards that ‘molecular entanglements’ or something had mixed up in the airwaves and broadcast the wrong ‘Andy’ to her. What the Styx are ‘molecular entanglements,’ anyway?”

  “I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea, sir,” Lestrade lied. Actually, it wasn’t that big a lie. All she really knew about molecular enmeshments was that they had to do with the interactions of etheric doubles, that they were supposed to create various patterns as easy to read as Tarot cards—if you had the gift, as Windcrystal would say—and that it was a fairly recent theory, at least under that name, though its students naturally traced it back to ancient Mesopotamia.

  Edith Carmichael Willowmartin used to tell her daughter Rosemary: “I once saw an aura—your father’s, the first time we met. That was why I married him, the dear old Polish Catholic Agnostic.” Fred Lozinski Gardener had never seen anything like an aura, except on scientific screenshows with specially treated film to show heatwaves radiating from bodies. Which was all the personal visual contact his daughter had ever had with them.

  The man she had seen in Windcrystal’s “Scrying Mug” could have been Andy Dimaggio Smythe. But the resemblance could also result from power of suggestion. You couldn’t be too careful with eyewitness accounts. Even your own. Even—maybe especially—when you were a trained polly. Besides, Windcrystal hadn’t mentioned what he was wearing or not wearing. In fact, the whole thing could have been—

  The car radio buzzed. “Sergeant Harvard? This is—”

  “Non, carissima. Let me guess. Marislavina, Queen of Lab Reports! What have you got for me, dulcissima?”

  “Oh, nothing much, you old Latin fancier, you. Just a match on those hair and bodily fluids baggies from ... let’s see ... Site Codename Parquet. Big Pater, you’d never guess whose!”

  Marislavina Gyropolis was another of Harvard’s running flirtations. Lestrade made herself yawn.

  “Let’s see,” her senior was saying. “To get a match this quickly, we must have had samples already entered in our own files. Ergo, some know felon. I thought as much.”

  Oh? And your thoughts about Windcrystal, then?

  “Don’t bet your last denarius on it, Big Pater. His fingerprints must have been all over the place. You gathered us a complete matching set. All we had to do was run it through Public Names and Prints and then patch into National Hospital Records for a check on the hair and bodily fluids. Andrew Dimaggio Smythe!”

  “Factus est? Dah Smythe himself?”

  “Dah Smythe himself,” the Queen of Lab Reports agreed happily. “Why can’t I ever get dates like that? Some floaters have all the luck!”

  Harvard chuckled. “Amen. Must have been better than any last meal.”

  “Well, if you’re going to exit, might as well exit with a whang like that, huh?” Marislavina agreed.

  “Cheer up, carissima. You have me to take you out whenever you say the word.”

  “Heard and registered, Big Pater. Over and out.”

  Lestrade sat rigid, hearing their signoff patter through a daze of heavy static. The lab wasn’t supposed to know anything about this case yet except that an identification was wanted on the bagged samples. That was the stated purpose of the code name system. But Marislavina Gyropolis had to be aware that investigating pollies didn’t send in hair, blood, and semen samples to get identifications on hot dates. She shouldn’t have needed Harvard’s unprofessional wisecrack about a last meal to guess murder or at least rape. And she still assumed that, because the samples and fingerprints came from the pride of the Ahbeenahbee Basketweavers, they must have resulted from a wildly pleasurable experience that had happened well before and was unconnected with the actual crime, whatever it was and whoever—else—had committed it.

  After the beep that told them the Queen of Lab Reports had tabbed off, Harvard cracked, “Mea culpa if we offended your virginal sensitivities, Rosie.”

  You did, you ... witch hunter, Lestrade thought. More than you can probably imagine, but not because of what you act like you think shocked me. Aloud, she said very carefully, “Sergeant Harvard, do we have grounds for an interview with M. Smythe now?” If he said no, she’d go over his head. She’d take it all the way to the regional commissioner, if she had to.

  “Quoi?” said Harvard. “Oh. Well, I suppose we’ll have to, now. Just for the record. Pestis! But bear in mind, Rosie, all this has to be treated with Confessional confidence. No leaking anything to anybody.”

  “Especially not to sports reporters. Because budding basketball superstars are entitled to their consenting-adult privacy, just like everybody else. I understand, sir.”

  * * * *

  “Ser-Sergeants?” Andy Dimaggio Smythe greeted them, making the same mistake Windcrystal had, but correcting himself right away. “I mean, Sergeant Harvard. M. ... Officer Lestrade. What…can I do for you today?” His voice started deep, jumped toward a squeak, then swooped back down into the lower registers.

  Lestrade thought, you couldn’t have done that better if you’d planned it, fella. Only a little novice rookie like me could possibly interpret it as having anything at all to do with a nervous conscious. Your big, wise paterfamilias here understands it’s just a little boy’s voice growing up.

  “M. Smythe,” she began aloud, “this conversation is—”

  “Tacite, Rosie,” Harvard muttered back at her. Then, to Smythe, in broad, cheery tones: “M. Smythe, the advantage of our workline is that we have the privilege of being able to invite ourselves in anywhere. May we?”

  Dah Smythe stepped aside. They entered.

  His apartment looked exactly the way people might expect a wholesome young athlete’s apartment to look. Big living room, dominated by trophy cases and quagahide furniture in the team colors. Big kitchen with uncluttered work counters and the basic minimum of meal preparation equipment. The waist-high room divider between kitchen and living room held the kitchen sink, tidy beneath its retractable cover; cabinet space on the kitchen side; and, on the living-room side, a decoratively framed entertainment screen, presently playing a holographic aquarium of tropical fish, flanked by shelves displaying the resident’s personal library, which seemed to be mainly biographies of famous sports figures. What should have been his bedroom door was open as if on purpose to show off a home workout gym. Presumably he slept in the living room on a hideaway bed, or maybe a rollout gym mat. Nothing out of place anywhere, unless you counted a few newscom printouts on the coffee table as clutter. The squeaky clean dwelling place of a good, healthy, clean-cut, all-American budding sports superstar.

  Only the tropical fish surprised Lestrade. With basketball playoffs, the Dublin Olympics, baseball heading toward Series playoffs, soccer, lacrosse, the Osterwoman-Overhand tennis match, whizzball, astrodisk, and all the other hundreds of menu-indexed sports airwaved live from all over the world…did even athletes burn out on sportscasts sometimes?

  “Cof-C
offee?” Smythe was asking them. “Tea? Cocoa? Novaltine? Seltzer or ... or tonic? I’m…afraid I can’t offer you anything alcoholic, because I don’t have any of the stuff around. But I could give you some pseudobrew.”

  “Gratias,” said Harvard. “Thanks, son. Coffee will be fine.”

  Smythe might assume that the sergeant spoke for both of them. “Nothing for me, thanks,” Lestrade added quickly.

  Smythe gave her a timorous glance and darted into the kitchen.

  Harvard looked at his junior partner with something like disgust and said, “Better make that coffee for all three of us, M. Smythe. Rosie sometimes changes her mind. She may hate herself in the morning if she misses the chance for a full share of the hospitality of Andy Dah Smythe.” Bending at the knees, Harvard started scanning his host’s book titles. “This is an excellent library you have here, M. Smythe. Bird, Hooper, Gehrig, Lombardi, Didrikson, Mann ... Not strictly hoopball, I see. Very eclectic. Hey! Hummingbird Wilson!”

  “Yes. Yes, Sergeant. One of my own heroes.”

  “Mine, too. Called Hummingbird because of the way he could make that hoopball hum. Yes, I was fortunate enough to see him play in person. Twice.”

  “No slosh, M.? I wouldn’t have thought you were ... I mean, you don’t look ...”

  “Yes, I was still no more than a miniature floater. I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight, but those memories will stay with me for the rest of my life.”

  Lestrade broke in. “If you don’t mind, M. Smythe, even pollies have to look for a comfort station sometimes.”

  “Oh! Oh, yes, of course, M. Uh ... Straight down the hall or ... or you could go through the workout room if you ... like.”

  She went straight down the hall. She hated to take any hospitality at all from Smythe, and she could have waited. But the hero worship was getting so heavy that she had to get away from it for a minute or two. She also noticed that Harvard was dropping his Latin pretenses and talking more like a 21st century, reality-perceiving type. Which might have been okay, if he hadn’t also dropped all pretenses of being a policeman. Some kind of act to put Smythe at ease and offguard, or just plain adulation of a basketball pro less than half Harvard’s own age? Maybe Harvard regarded Dah Smythe as the son he wished he’d had, and all that.

  The cinerary toilet was brown marbleplas over alloy. Like the rest of the apartment building, almost fancy-class rich at first glance, and you didn’t start noticing until you looked again that it was really budget stuff. Not penny-squeezing budget, but definitely middleclass. Lestrade was taking her chance to have a good, careful look at everything she could check without a search warrant.

  No bloodstains or anything else suspicious in the comfort station. In the adjoining bath-room, two small brown specks on the white shag carpeting right at the corner where bathtub met wall. Smythe could say he sliced himself while cutting his toenails, or that he zitted a pimple too hard, or something. It might even be the truth. And what would it take to convince anybody to soak up enough for trial-worthy tests from the home of Andy Dah Smythe?

  She could never help wondering about the privacy of a bath with three doors, one to comfort station, one to hallway, and one to bedroom—here, to home workout room. Today, however, she appreciated the natural excuse to cut back through the workout room.

  She couldn’t spot anything suspicious here, either. But thanks to the open door she couldn’t look it over as thoroughly as she had the two smaller rooms. Since it had originally been planned as a bedroom, it had the clothes closet, and one mirror-door was half open, showing part of Smythe’s wardrobe. Unfortunately, without a warrant she couldn’t examine it at fingertip range. From across the room she couldn’t see any workout jacket in the Basketweavers colors of corn gold and green, but with the garments hanging close together and half the closet shut off from view, what she couldn’t see meant very little.

  Besides, judging by what she heard and didn’t hear from the living room, she guessed she’d better get back there. She didn’t hear voices. She heard something that sounded like soft weeping. Too bad the angles gave workout room and living room only partial views of each other.

  Tabbing her wrist-unit back on (they could still study these recordings, even if they couldn’t use them in court without having duly given every recordee the warning in advance), she returned to the living room. They were sitting on the couch, Smythe muffling his sobs on the older man’s shoulder.

  Harvard shot her a disgusted look. She sensed that the disgust was aimed entirely at her. “I broke it to him, Rosie,” he told her in a gently watch-your-step voice, meanwhile rubbing Smythe’s upper arm. Instant surrogate father-son bonding.

  “About M. Pargeter, sir?” Lestrade replied. And hated herself at once. It hadn’t been exactly a professional response. She should have said, “About what?” But what kind of model of professionalism was Holmes Hennessey Harvard?

  Smythe lifted himself away from Pater Harvard to sit slumped forward, elbows on knees and face in hands. “She was ... She was ... so ... so full of life ...” he choked. “So ... so ... Damn it, she was too young to die!”

  The hell of it was, all that grief might be genuine. Murderers had been known to mourn violently for their victims. Sometimes even sincerely. And the best people fell back on time-proved speech formulas at moments of sincerely deep stress. (Introduction of Overviews of Basic Criminal Psychomystical Patterns 101.)

  “Pull yourself together, son,” Harvard was crooning, leaning forward to rub his surrogate child’s back between the shoulder blades.

  “It ... It must have hap-happened right…after I left ... last night.” Smythe took one hand away from his face and fumbled for his handkerchief.

  “Don’t blame yourself,” the policeman assured him. “There was nothing you could have done. Don’t blame yourself.”

  “But I do! Ser-Sergeant, if only—if only I hadn’t ... left her ... when I did! If only I’d ... stuck around ... just a little while longer, then may-maybe ...”

  “There was no way you could have known, son,” said Harvard. “There was no way anyone could have known.”

  Lestrade couldn’t help throwing one quick glance at the ceiling.

  Smythe got his handkerchief unfolded and blew his nose. “What ... What time d-did it happen?”

  Lestrade demanded, “What time did you leave her, M. Smythe?”

  “Rosie, tacite!” Harvard yapped at her. “Let’s show some respect for the situation!” With an instant change of tone, he explained gently to Smythe, “It isn’t always easy to set the exact minute of death, son, not even with modern forensics. But at the best estimate we have as of now…between oh three hundred thirty and oh three hundred forty-five hours this morning.”

  “Oh, God! Oh, dear God! If I’d only stuck around a-another half an hour, I m-might have been there to…to ...”

  “Another half hour, M. Smythe?” said Lestrade. “Then you left her apartment at about oh three hundred hours?” (Leading the witness, she tsked herself. Leading the witness, and “Object!” sings the defense attorney. Who has nothing on Holmes Hennessey Harvard in the art of grilling unliked people, and I see I’m getting higher on Harvard’s list of unliked people by the nanosecond. Okay, it’s mutual.)

  “H-Half an hour, an hour,” Smythe amended. “I ... left a-about ... oh two thirty ... I think. But who-whoever did it m-must have been l-lurking around already, s-somewhere outside. Is ... n’t that right, Sergeant?”

  “Very likely,” Harvard agreed. “Probably watching for you to leave. If you’d stayed there all night, the buzzard would have waited for some other night. Stop blaming yourself, boy.”

  “Th-Thank you, H-Holmsey.” The ballplayer wiped his eyes and fumbled his handkerchief back into his trousers pocket. “L-Look, how about I g-get you people that coffee?”

  “I’ll get it,” Lestrade said tightly.

 
There wasn’t that much to get. If Smythe liked to gourmandize, he obviously did it in restaurants. A quick check of the cupboards and fridge revealed no realcoffee equipment and no packaged coffee in any of its semiprepared forms. Just the readysip dispenser on the cupcleaner door. Readysip tasted like bathwater to her. She was glad she had said, “None for me.”

  Knowing that Harvard always wanted two squirts of coffee concentrate, she was seriously tempted to tab him one or three, but managed to refrain. Smythe’s was easy, just return the program to “usual recipe.”

  The cups that came up out of the cleaning and storage unit to catch the coffee were square, double-handled, and glossed corn yellow and green. The team colors again. The change of team would mean a whole change of home furnishings for this boy. At a cost his new salary would make it easy to afford.

  All this time Harvard had been tenderly feeding his sports hero the wisdom of a deputy father about life, death, and interlocked universes. Smythe had graduated from using his handkerchief to jerking the ring around and around on his right little finger and looking miserable. Yes, Lestrade felt sorry for him, too. But pity wasn’t an emotion she could pay any attention to right now.

  If Smythe had any trays, he kept them well tucked away. Lestrade hand-carried the men their cups. Harvard took his by the second handle. Smythe sat and watched, still twisting his ring, as she set his cup down on the table at his knees.

  “Nice ring, M. Smythe,” she remarked. “Class ring?”

  “Wh-What? Oh. Yes. A class ring.”

  “Mind if I see it?” She held out her hand.

  “Rosie,” said Harvard, “you can’t even make a decent cup of coffee.”

  “No, sir. Not even with readysip. I’d really appreciate a closer look at your ring, M. Smythe. It reminds me a little of my own.”

  “Oh ... You mean the size? It ... wasn’t mine, you see. It was a…a friend’s. Somebody else in the same class with me. We…exchanged rings, you see. Sh-She was killed. Sh-She’s ... still wearing mine. I’m still wearing hers. Always. All the time. Even when I s-sleep.”