The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Not when you play, surely.”

  Harvard cut in again. “The next time you think about volunteering to make the coffee, Rosie, do everybody a favor and think again.”

  “Thank you, sir, I will,” she replied, wishing she had programmed the thing to give him either one or three squirts. Or four. Of course, he was only trying to get her off the tender subject of Smythe’s ring. No doubt he thought she was violating his substitute son’s Reformed Constitutional privacy rights. “I really would appreciate a chance to see it up close, M. Smythe,” she repeated. “I’ll handle it like the Pluto Diamond. Trust me.”

  “Jove, Rosie! I ought to make you drink your own brew.”

  “I’d be afraid of accidentally dropping M. Smythe’s ring in the cup, sir.” She did not withdraw her hand from above Smythe’s cup until the basketball player yanked his ring off and dropped it in her palm.

  She strolled to the window, where the light was better.

  “How was she killed, son?” Harvard was asking. It might have sounded as if he’d remembered he was a polly, except that there was too much overload of sympathy oozing from his voice. Of course he meant that old classmate of Dah Smythe’s.

  “C-Car. Hit and run. Only a…a few weeks after graduation.” Smythe doubled over, face in hands again. “First Lucy ... now Debbi ... What’s wrong with me? Why am I death to them?”

  Hurts all over, Lestrade thought in her father’s Polish, and then felt a little appalled at her sardonic reaction. She held the ring closer to the steelglass pane and examined it in silence. The stone was ruby chips and gold dust—the school colors, no doubt—embedded in clear superluce, with a micro-edition of some school emblem, possibly a bulldog, in the middle. The letters WCHS surrounded the stone, one at each corner. The setting as a whole was school-jewelry pretentious, as if imitation rococo ivied columns shrunk down small enough to fit around a finger ensured lifelong nostalgic loyalty to the old Alma Mater. WC must be either an aged institution or one pretending to be aged and tradition-laden, still to be using the old term “high school” instead of “junior college” or “intermediate college.” The graduation year, 2063, was tucked in on the pillars, half hidden, as if aware that some people eventually grew into the tradition-laden fashion of concealing their age.

  After what he apparently judged a decent interval of rubbing Smythe’s shoulder, Harvard said, “You can’t blame yourself for Lucy, son, any more than you can blame yourself for Debbi. If some worthless maniac of a driver—”

  “You don’t ... understand. We—We were out walking to…gether. I—I tried to push her clear. If I’d only ...”

  They all sat or stood without saying anything for a few minutes, while Smythe struggled to keep control, Harvard continued rubbing his shoulder, and Lestrade went on pondering the late Lucy’s WCHS 2063 class ring.

  At last Harvard said, “Did they corner the worthless coward?”

  Smythe nodded.

  Lestrade observed, “It isn’t always easy with hit and run. But if you were there, you’d have seen the car.”

  “Y-Yes. I d-did. And the license plate ... ZIPFLAK. I even had a…good glimpse of the driver.”

  “So you helped erase one more dangerous operator from the roads,” Harvard comforted him. “Look at it that way. In the long run, we’ll never be able to say exactly where or whose, but you probably saved at least one life.”

  And this profound thinker, mused Lestrade, makes fun of fortunetellers! She gave things another minute or two before remarking, “There seems to be a little brown buildup in your ring here, M. Smythe.”

  “What? But there—there can’t be!”

  “What the Hades is driving you, Rosie?” said Harvard. “Can’t you see the man is broken up enough as it is?”

  “I m-mean, there shouldn’t be,” Smythe went on. “I toothbrushed it just last night.”

  Lestrade shrugged. “You might have to soak it in some cleaning solution. Even take a beading needle to it. I know a jeweler who—”

  “No! ... That is, I—I never let it out of my possession. N-Never. It’s a…a sen-sentimental thing, you understand. L-Like any good-luck charm. Even when I play…then I ... I wear it pinned to my sweatband.”

  “Yes ... Yes, I’ve seen it.” Harvard nodded. “So that’s what ... Well, Rosie, if you ever watched the games, you’d know about Dah Smythe’s lucky badge.”

  “Sorry, sir, I’d rather watch the games on the exclusively full-court channels. It gives me more sense of being there than close-up coverage does. But if this is your lucky badge, M. Smythe, I guess your sweat may eventually do the job. Though I think I’d be careful about wearing it anywhere during play. This stuff looks like dried blood.”

  “Rosie!” said Harvard.

  “Oh,” said Smythe. “Y-Yes. From when I cut my—my finger. Dicing…carrots or ... something. For a r-ragout, I think.”

  “We’re fortunate that it didn’t affect your play,” said Harvard.

  “It wasn’t much of a cut, H-Holmsey.” A shaky grin. “Just…bled a lot, that’s all. Not very deep. Only needed plastiband for a…day or two.”

  Lestrade pretty well gave up at that point. She spent the next twelve minutes rolling the ring around the divider top and trying to hide her impatience, while the two men made conversation that wouldn’t be worth the routine transcription and review. The transcribing was done by computer, but reading the transcriptions and listening to the chips before deciding whether to file or clear them ate up human workhours.

  When they were finally at the door, she tried one more probe. “M. Smythe. What would you say if I told you that one of M. Pargeter’s neighbors looked out an unlit window last night and saw someone running away in a bloodstained yellow athletic workout jacket?”

  “Officer Lestrade!” Harvard began. “What ...” But he let his voice trail off, maybe because Smythe had gone white, shut his eyes, and stood clutching the doorframe.

  “That—That…can’t be,” he whispered.

  “Do you have a yellow workout jacket? Hard to tell at night, of course, but a Basketweavers’ workout jacket would be in the team colors, wouldn’t it?” She was surprised that Harvard let her get the whole question out. As soon as she finished, however, he started explaining it to her as if to a preschooler,

  “Each player usually has at least two workout jackets, Officer Lestrade. For our own home team, that would be one yellow jacket with green trim and one green jacket with yellow trim.”

  “I’m talking about a light-colored one,” Lestrade said in the same kind of voice. “Presumably with dark trim. I guess that would be the yellow one with green trim. And with some new splotches of dark red trim that weren’t planned by the sportswear designers.”

  “Are you all right, son?” Harvard touched Smythe’s arm. “Look here, you shouldn’t mind my junior partner. She’s just a rookie. Like a brown belt in martial arts, you understand? Punchdrunk with a premature notion of authority. And…how does Deacon Beacon say it? ‘Not enough old calendars yet in her personal backfile of life to really sense another soul’s tribulations.’”

  Lestrade took a deep breath. She and the budding superstar had the same number of old calendars in their personal backfiles. She repeated, “Then you have at least one yellow workout jacket, M. Smythe?”

  “It’s ... It’s…at the laundry. I was wearing it when ... when I was cutting those…carrots.”

  “Which laun—” she began, but Harvard cut her off with a brusque “Tacite, Lestrade, TACITE!” before offering Dah Smythe as many apologies and respects as he could fit into the few minutes before he hustled his junior partner downstairs and out the building. She supposed she ought to be grateful that he hadn’t forced her to apologize, too.

  * * * *

  “So that’s what it takes to get you to final-name me,” she remarked at the car door. “Make you mad enough.”
>
  “Angry, Lestrade. ‘Mad’ refers to a malady of the psychomystique. I am not ‘mad.’ I am angry. I am in a blistering rage.”

  “Then you’d better let me drive, sir.”

  “What the hell did you mean, trampling on his sensitivities and privacy rights that way? If you didn’t actually fracture the nonharassment guiderules, you came damn close! Close enough to merit a good, stiff reprimand from the commissioner’s office—”

  “Good! Send them the interview chips. And meanwhile, Sergeant Harvard, sir, I can file my own complaints about you. E.g.—what the hot Hades did you mean, telling him about M. Pargeter when I wasn’t on hand to doublewitness his reaction?”

  He stamped around to the driver’s side, yanked open the door, threw himself behind the wheel, and shut the door with a slam that shook the polcar. Tabbing down the windows, he told her: “There are still times and places for the man-to-man touch. I assumed that was why you left us alone. I credited you with a little human feeling. It is not a mistake I will make again. Hell! If it’d been a woman, I’d have left you alone with her!”

  “The way you left me alone for a woman-to-woman talk with M. Crowley?”

  He punched the right dashboard tab and the passenger’s door swung open. “Get in!” he ordered her.

  She shook her head. “No, sir. Not unless you let me drive. Angry driving is as bad as drunken—”

  “AND TACITE QUOTING YOUR DAMN TEXTBOOKS AT ME!” He gunned the engine and the car jerked away from the curb. It was halfway out of sight before the passenger’s door finally shut. You couldn’t slam a car door from its dashboard control no matter how hard you punched.

  She had never seen him this angry—this mad—before. Of course, she had never seen him in action on any homicide case before. Let alone one touching alternate-religion mystics and sports idols. Shaking, she turned and walked for the nearest metrotrain station. She had no intention of staying where she was. He might change his mind and come back for her.

  The metro station was a three-minute walk, and she was still shaking when she got there. Caffeine aggravated nerves and nothing, she kept repeating to herself, was worth risking the nicotine habit. Besides, she understood the first time for tobacco was more ordeal than relaxant anyway. But she bought a pipe and sucked plain air through it between bites of real chicken soup in a place that deserved its name, Mama Meyerstein’s.

  The worst part of her got caught up in a daydream of Harvard stopping for a few quick ones to calm his own nerves and getting back to the police station with alcohol on his breath. That would probably neutralize whatever he reported about her.

  * * * *

  Stan Quincy Carter wasn’t told much about what, exactly, was going on around Harvard this time. As yet, Lieutenant Carter was only assistant deputy commissioner, a less impressive position than it might sound to anyone looking in from the outside at the Ahbeenahbee County branch of the Midwest Regional Police in this generation of the Reformed States of North America. In practice, it meant that Stan Carter drew an enhanced salary, which was very welcome, and spent most of his workhours as a glorified desk detective, which was also welcome to a family man with a wife by old-fashioned religious marriage ceremony and a toddling daughter by joint procreation permit.

  But when a Holmes Harvard came in minus his junior partner, stomped through the outer office, and slammed without a word into the commissioner’s sanctum, it didn’t take a nero wolfe to figure out that something was going on. Harvard might wear everybody thin with his Latin, but he rarely lost his dignity, and he liked keeping his junior partners on a tight leash.

  That was why both Tiompkins from the front lobby desk and M. Searchkey the commissioner’s volunteer secretary brought Harvard’s raging solo entrance to the assistant deputy commissioner’s attention. Not via wristphone, either. By slipping away for a walk down the hall and a face to face, unrecorded communication. That was why Stan instructed Tiompkins to notify him the nanosecond Lestrade tabbed back in. And that was why, as soon as she did, he left his computer cubicle, headed her off, tabbed them both out, and took her across the park to Kaplan’s.

  Somewhere he had heard or read about a time when things could be written in reports that now could only be spoken face to face, because in those times certain files were kept confidential from their subjects. When he gave it serious thought, he saw why it had been an insidious practice, going against everything the States had always stood for, ever since the Declaration of Independence and the Original Constitution. In fact, he didn’t quite believe that kind of confidential filing system had ever really existed outside of propagandists’ and proto-fanciers’ imaginations.

  But it had sounded good at first. When all files, even hardcopy ones, were open to whomever they most concerned, things either didn’t get in, or got in as ambiguous shorthand. Rosemary Lozinski Lestrade’s file had come to them from Polytech with the notation “WTO”—”Watch This One”—the same tag used both for people with special promise and ones with special problems.

  In light of her grade transcript and his own observation, Stan Carter guessed that Lestrade’s was a special-promise case. He’d argued against pairing her with Harvard, but Deputy Commissioner “Mover and Shaker” Reilly decreed that it’d give them her measure as soon as possible, and might be good for Harvard, too.

  Kaplan’s Snax and Meals specialized in good caffeine, exotically flavored phosphates, and high, sound-soak booths. Stan told Lestrade what little he knew while they were waiting for their orders. She told him her side of things over his coffee and her anise phos.

  “You’re right,” he said when she had finished. “If M. Smythe wasn’t a local basketball idol, he’d definitely be our number one suspect.”

  “And if it hadn’t been for those letters on the screen,” Lestrade said bitterly, “and for my guessing what M. Pargeter had been trying to key, M. Crowley wouldn’t even be in the running.”

  Stan shook his head. “And for this alibi of Crowley’s about eyewitnessing it in a teacup. Why would an intelligent floater come up with a story like that? She must have guessed it’d look more suspicious than if she hadn’t said anything.”

  “Windcrystal Crowley is only about two-thirds phony,” Lestrade replied, playing with her straw. “The other third is probably sincere.” She shot him a wary glance. “That’s the way I’d guess it, anyhow, sir.”

  “You mean she really believes in crystal balls and tea leaves herself, Rosie?” Seeing her stiffen, he remembered that “Rosie” was what Harvard liked to call her. “And you can call me Stansey,” he added with a grin.

  She relaxed a little. “Thanks. Will you accept ‘Stan’? Yes, some people believe in tea leaves and crystal balls and things like that. Not just fanciers, either. A kind of self-delusion, if you like.”

  “What about the physical angle? Could we rule out Crowley on grounds of build and age?” Harvard obviously didn’t think so, but Harvard had been known to overlook some fairly obvious details in his time.

  “I doubt it, Stan,” Lestrade replied. “She must be in her fifties, but she uses silver wash on her hair to make herself look older than she is. There’s nothing feeble about her. She’s shorter than Smythe, but the angle of the wounds won’t necessarily prove anything without reliable data on exactly how M. Pargeter was standing, kneeling, or whatever in relation to her assailant. We’d have to rely mainly on the statistics of this kind of attack still being more a masculine than a feminine m.o., and stats don’t always work in individual cases. That ‘dying clue’ would probably clinch a conviction. Especially considering her religion.”

  “But you think the jury would be dead wrong.”

  Instead of yes or no, Lestrade replied: “One way I can fit this together, sir—Stan. The killer leaves M. Pargeter for dead. But she isn’t quite dead yet. She tries to phone her psychomystical adviser, but Crowley has her phonechime turned low for the night. The chime
nudges Crowley awake, but she doesn’t recognize it as a natural signal. She interprets it as some kind of parapsychic signal, gets her ‘Scrying Mug,’ sits above it dozing off, and has some kind of nightmare, which her waking brain later interprets as a magistical vision of the actual murder. Making it partly coincidental that she appears to know exactly what was behind our visit to her today. Meanwhile, having failed to get an answer by phone, M. Pargeter manages to pull herself to her comp and start trying for contact via the homescreen patchwork, but can’t quite finish the message before she collapses.”

  He nodded. “That isn’t bad. Except ... Mind if I play prosecuting attorney?”

  “Be my guest. Stan. Please.”

  “Thanks, Rose. All right, why her magist? Why doesn’t M. Pargeter tab for police and medical help?”

  “Because people aren’t always at their clearest-minded when they’re concussed and bleeding to death. It might have been a fight rather than an unprovoked assault. M. Pargeter might have been blaming herself for what happened.”

  He nodded again. “Yes, that could work from M. Pargeter’s end. But what about Crowley? Why does her subconscious just happen to tune in on Debbi Pargeter? You said she volunteered the name before either of you said it?”

  “Before either of us said it aloud, to the best of my own recollection. My chipcorder will have the conversation for as long as I was in the room.”

  “Good. We’ll be reviewing it in due process. Meanwhile, a phone chime sounds the same no matter who’s trying to get through, and I think we can assume that Crowley has more than one client.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Lestrade agreed dryly. “She has a quarter-screen ad in the public directory. But M. Pargeter could have been the uppermost client in her mind. Especially if she knew about Pargeter’s big date that evening. If Debbi Pargeter sensed she was caught in a high-pressure duality, she could have been talking about it a lot with her psychomystical counselor. Besides, Harvard had me out of the room for a while, running that test with the mug and the Egalitarian Convention. He could have dropped clues then about M. Pargeter’s identity and the circumstances of her death. People like Crowley can pick up clues us normal, practical floaters don’t even know we’re letting drop.”