“As well as drawing a Hilton-Maracott paycheck?” Corwin sought clarification.
“Dot on the ‘i,’” Click confirmed. “They’ll pump it direct into whatever bank account you designate. Besides the reward Withycombe or his guardian angel Magadance will presumably shower on his lifesaver. So long as you have some kind of license or hardcopy waiver, just for the record—amateur snoop’s permit will do fine—all that us pollies can input is cooperation.”
“Which you can also refuse,” said Angela. “And then how would this project get along?”
“Without us. You’ve never seen the Hummingbird Hill security arrangements. When the new man comes in through the airlocks, the other guests won’t have a clue whether he got brought to the wall in a polcar or a Hilton-Maracott deluxe limousine.”
“Handcuffed?” said Corwin. “Yes, of course ...”
“And unofficially,” Angela persisted, “just what does Senior Sergeant Lestrade have to say about all this?”
“That’s the dazzle of it,” said Senior Sergeant Lestrade’s partner. “She’s out of town. Left the station ten minutes after you did, M. Poe. Should be halfway to Nostalgia City by now, officially on a long stressaway weekend.”
Chapter
Like some obscure fictional detective or other, Rosemary Lestrade kept an overnight case packed and ready. In fact, she kept two, one at home and one at the station. Both were attache’ cases containing one change of tunic and underclothes, one opaque nightrobe, toothbrush and the few other bathroom-cabinet accessories Lestrade found basic (including a pillbox of her prescription spirit peppers), one gaudy tunic and a pair of squashable patterned slippers totally unlike the owner’s usual sensible footwear, and a line for drying the garments, all of which were sink washable. Also a small chipcase of favorite screenshows and a paperback-size codex reader with twenty bookchips, in case the hotel screen wherever she stayed had gone buggy.
On getting back from the courthouse today, all she’d had to do was pick up her station attache’ case and have Click drive her to the needletrain terminal, where her police badge got her a free ride-anywhere token. Some pollies thought this kind of privilege was unfair, or at least bad PR. Lestrade considered it part of the paycheck. She didn’t, however, insist on a first-class private cubicle, not for the zip to Nostalgia City. She found a seat in one of the six-packs, as they called the second-class compartments. Three of the other seats were occupied. Nobody intruded on anybody else’s private thoughts. Lestrade might almost have welcomed the rude distraction if they had.
Starting this jaunt should have keyed her high enough to forget her chronic depression, but her spirit peppers were throbbing at her from deep in her attache’. If she’d had any in her beltcase, as she often did, she’d have swallowed one. Still, she’d taken one about midmorning, and the prescribing medico had cautioned her against taking more than three a day. Chris Grunewald said it was safe to take twice that many, but Chris was a forensic specialist. Lestrade preferred to follow Doc Welkin’s advice and save the things for hours of hard desperation. Or for bedtime.
It was M. Poe who’d wilted her spirits after lunch. Had to be. Between swinging a weekend recess in Moan’s trial this morning on grounds of possible new evidence and keying up to chase that evidence, she’d been doing just fine until they came in and found Poe ready and waiting to take that undercover-agent shim seriously. Blast the young idiot! If anybody ought to have learned a lesson about amateur snooping ...
Of course, the source of this tip she was chasing could also have something to do with her state of mind, now that she was in transit, with time to think. Tagging after the months-old memory of an unnamed friend of Magnum the Hard-Boiled Private Dick Hammersmith’s. If Hammersmith wasn’t a fancy-class sam spade, he did his best to come across like one, and yesterday evening when he gave her this line, he’d been trying to plea-bargain his way into Hummingbird Hill. Given that she could check it out in less time than it’d take to set things up for him to go in as Moan, he’d have been pretty stupid to try bargaining with a complete airbubble; but she wasn’t sure she should count on any stunt being too stupid for your typical intelligent floater. (Witness Corwin Poe. Witness some of the stunts Dave Click still pulled now and then. Witness more than half the crimes she investigated. For that matter, witness a couple of things Rosemary Lozinski Lestrade had done in her own life. Like becoming a polly.) She hoped there was only one “Pepper Pot” in Nostalgia City. There were enough of them elsewhere. You’d think it was another chain, if the shops themselves weren’t so individual. Some weren’t even spice shops. She knew of two Pepper Pot restaurants, and Cleveland had a Pepper Pot that sold, of all things, nonelectronic table games.
Please, Lady God, she thought, let there be something solid in Hammersmith’s data. For Gentian Truemeasure’s sake.
Gentian Marjamaki Truemeasure. The type strangers hardly looked at twice—maybe three times maximum, depending on the clothes—unless and until they got in trouble. Female. Mixed Dark Vanilla, with a hint of epicanthic fold in the eyelids and kinkiness in the hair. One point six meters tall, seventy-seven kilograms heavy. Hair black and, despite the marginal kinkiness, midway to waist when let down. Hairline regular. Face round. Eyes brown and close-set. High cheekbones. Large brown mole at inner tip of left eyebrow. Nose small. Mouth large. Ears flat with medium lobes, pierced. Age 37. Registered reality perceiver, but preferred everyday wardrobe reminiscent of 1960s flower children. Scars on the balls of right forefinger and left thumb made her prints immediately distinctive. Teeth white and regular, but since almost everybody’s were in this age of painless dentistry, they didn’t bother to tab teeth into the preliminary hunting description as a general guideline.
Not that they’d needed to hunt Truemeasure down with their memocoms keyed to her description. They had simply walked into her shop the morning after Winstanley’s death, which had not yet been cleared for the newscreens, and there she was, whistling around her shelves and glass canisters, getting ready for the business day. She called her shop “Sauce for the Goose,” and her posted hours were 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., but she already had the doors unlocked at 08:43. And what she’d first said when they came in wasn’t, “Not open for business yet,” but instead, “Ah, early birds! What can I do for you today?” She’d had her hair braided back and tucked under a headscarf, as per foodstuff dealers’ guiderules. The headscarf matched her floppy orange and green tie-dyed tunic. Her eyes weren’t really all that close-set, except in proportion to the broadness of her temples. She had little butterfly studs in her pierced ears. Their wingspans were about a centimeter and their eyes were some kind of jewels or rhinestones, visible mainly by the occasional tiny glint.
Click maintained that her face had crumpled too quickly and theatrically the moment she learned about the death of Kara Akabogu Winstanley, “Countess Moan.” By Truemeasure’s own account, Winstanley had been into Sauce for the Goose no oftener than once or twice, on her husband’s arm. And Truemeasure hardly moved in the same social circles as the Moans. But people did behave theatrically. Most people some of the time, some people most of the time, to paraphrase somebody’s famous quotation.
Dave Click still insisted that he’d really had Poe pegged for a while as a leading suspect in Aelfric Standard’s murder, because who else but a guilty conscience would have perceived simple fingerprinting apparatus as some kind of thumbscrews? Or if he’d been shamming, what innocent floater would have been in the mood for theatrics at a time like that? If Click was serious, and you couldn’t always be sure, then his theories seemed to be blocking his assimilation of experience. He was even underestimating his own flair for theatrics. He’d played that fingerprinting scene with Poe for every groan it was—or really wasn’t—worth.
Not that Click had let Truemeasure see his suspicions. Dave Click liked playing M. Goodpolly. Maybe police work should have gotten past the classic Goodcop and Badcop routine along wi
th the “cop” slangtag. Maybe police work would have gotten past a lot of things if it hadn’t been for the fancy-class influence.
There in Sauce for the Goose, Click had already been digging out his spare handkerchief to offer Truemeasure, but she beat him to it and started mopping her eyes with her own twenty square centimeters of sheer cotton stamped with the Softsniff Kitten in blue and purple.
“Lady Moan must have been quite a presence,” the junior sergeant had remarked, as if oozing sympathy.
“She was alive,” Truemeasure replied, “and now she isn’t anymore.”
Still playing Goodpolly, Click had left it to the senior sergeant to present their search warrant and confiscate samples, including everything Truemeasure kept beneath the counter and her open-shelf canister of “Pumpkinseed Flour, Superfine.”
The label was an elaborate multilayer bluff. Real pumpkinseed flour had been a fad back in the fifties, when it gained enough devotees that it could still show respectable sales now. In the late seventies, “pumpkinseed superfine grind” had become a favorite cutting substance for the then-newest illegal hallucinogen, “razzlelick.”
For fantasy perceivers, all such substances had been decriminalized in the blanket guideline ruling of [date]. The burden of illegality lay entirely with such peddlers and suppliers as could be demonstrated to be reality perceivers, whether so registered or not. Truemeasure was a registered realizer, but well within her legal rights not only to display “Pumpkinseed Flour, Superfine,” but to make capital out of the name’s double meaning and sell it to fanciers who supposed, or pretended to suppose, that they were actually buying razzlelick. More theatrics.
That was, Truemeasure was within her rights to sell it as razzlelick just as long as it really was plain, unadulterated pumpkinseed flour. The flour in Truemeasure’s open-shelf canister had been okay. That in her “under the counter” canister had been approximately one part razzlelick to five parts ground pumpkinseed.
“But it wasn’t!” she had kept repeating when they brought her in and confronted her with the evidence. “I never sold anybody any real mindgunk!”
“You had it under the counter,” said Lestrade.
“Only because my fancy-class customers expected it there! It was only part of the game! The pumpkinseed in both my canisters comes from exactly the same manufacturer’s sealpak.”
“It might help if we could see that sealpak,” Click said as if making an eager suggestion.
“It’s gone into the city recycle bin. I just get sealpaks large enough to refill my canisters—a five-kilogram pak if I keep two canisters, like for pumpkinseed flour—two and a half kilos for a single canister shop stock. When one canister of pumpkinseed runs out, I juggle in more from the other until they both need refilling. All I’ve got in the back room are unopened paks.”
“The question isn’t where the flour came from,” Lestrade had pointed out. “It’s where the razzlelick came from.”
“I don’t know! Oh, Goddess, how should I know? I never put it in!”
Simply calling on the Lady didn’t prove anyone’s innocence. In fact, in a culture still dominated by credists of Yahweh, Buddha, Allah, and company, a lot of jurors—from Von Hoferites to coldcoals no more churchgoing than Lestrade herself—would take Goddess worship as further evidence of guilt, especially on an illegal substances charge.
But Lestrade guessed she’d have inclined to believe Truemeasure even if the shopwoman had called on Saint-Germaine. What would have stopped Moan from coming in, buying his pumpkinseed superfine, then dumping a tube of real razzlelick into the canister while Truemeasure’s back was turned. He’d been in before, once or twice with his wife, maybe a lot more times than that alone. And M. Truemeasure seemed like the trusting kind of shopkeeper who might easily turn her back in order to package the purchase and bag it up while the canister still sat on the counter.
Of course, that would clinch the case against Moan. He’d have had to buy enough razzlelick somewhere else both to odee his wife and spike Truemeasure’s canister in preparation for his defense, which was that he’d trustingly assumed himself to be purchasing pure, nonharmful pumpkinseed flour.
It was an interesting trick of the fancy-class psychomystique. Not of all fanciers. They were individuals, too. But of enough of them that Moan might very well be able to get away with his story. On some deep level they could call up if and when they wanted or needed to, most fanciers who bought “illegal substances” from the right dealers were aware that they were actually paying fancy prices for harmless placebos. Chances were that they even chose their dealers in this trust. Then they blanked it from their conscious daily operating data, and the placebos had the same effects on them that the real stuff would have had. The same psychological effects, not the same physiological ones. All part of the game, consummate method acting, roleplaying carried all the way. No, not quite all the way. An odee of fancied razzlelick could have given Lady Moan a thundering nightmare, a simulated “bad trip.” It should not have killed her. Not unless she’d had some serious instabilities that her docs never caught. And she’d had regular annual checkups from a high-priced family G.P., besides a psychotuning every five years from the continent’s finest, Dr. Ford McTavish McTavish, who scorned to reregister his final name as “Freud” or “Jung” because he aimed to make McTavish another restricted final name in the field.
Besides, quickly as razzle was assimilated, the autopsy had revealed a linger trace of it. That even a trace was still isolatable indicated a very strong overdose. But not even the most persuaded fancier could manufacture actual chemical configurations without the right basic ingredients. Lady Moan had been poisoned with razzlelick. Had it come from Sauce for the Goose?
Lestrade had gone direct to the lab. “Who analyzed the samples from Sauce for the Goose?”
Lester Lister checked his screen and told her, “Stiglitz.”
She went to Stiglitz’s cubicle, found him out on break, and left a message on his screen. When they finally connected, an hour later, she demanded, “Was the razzlelick in a layer on top, or mixed all through the pumpkinseed flour?”
Stiglitz had scratched his bald crown—he kept it shaved rather than wear a lab cap—and said, “Pretty well mixed, as I recollect. But nobody ever said to stabilize layers before analysis. Anyway, it could have got shaken up in transit. There wasn’t much left in the canister.
“From now on, always stabilize layers, whether anyone reminds you to or not.” Lestrade had also gotten Chief O’Hara to tab out a station memo that all such confiscated samples should be layer-stabilized before transport whenever even halfway possible; when stabilization was absolutely impossible at the moment, they should at least be handled gently and packed upright. Not that the memo would be remembered longer than two weeks except by the best pollies. Or that it could help Truemeasure now. Since Lestrade herself had forgotten to tell Click to handle the samples like thinshell eggs, she mentally kicked herself out of the “best polly” class.
Truemeasure wouldn’t help herself, either. She refused to divulge the names of her other regular customers. Called it privileged information. Actually, she might not even know a lot of them by name. Her salescomp showed a record only of items sold and prices, not of buyers’ names. That’d look suspicious to the average jury, too, never mind that there weren’t that many businesses, outside of legit drugstores and dealers in large or high-priced goods, who actually recorded buyers’ names. It was extra work and took up extra storage bytes. Depending as she did on many small sales, Truemeasure wouldn’t have had any reason to record buyers’ names, no matter how innocent her stock might be.
Lestrade sent private envelope letters to everyone she could think of who even might have patronized Truemeasure’s shop and wouldn’t mind stepping forward. Answers varied from “Afraid I never tried the establishment, but hope to someday,” to “Think I may have bought a lavender cachet there once.�
�� For two weeks before closing Sauce for the Goose, they had a polly in as clerk, slipping a message card in with each purchase. The same notice went into the newscoms under personals. Under Police Notices would have scared too many people off for sure, not that that many more people read Police Notices than read Personals all the way through. And finally a slightly reworded version appeared in the General Advertising Home Computer Mailservice. A notice to the effect that if you were a fancier and had ever bought a “controlled” or “illegal” substance from Sauce for the Goose, your testimony could be invaluable and you yourself were fully protected in all ways from any legal repercussions by the /Act of 2017/.
All this effort had netted two volunteers, neither of them exactly the best witness material for the defense. A floater so far gone that his personal world changed hourly, and one who had patronized Sauce for the Goose once, right after her regular supplier disappeared last year. Her regular supplier had been an underjacket dealer in the real stuff, who had “disappeared” into Albuquerque Heights Luxury State Pen, having been caught in that vicinity on a business trip. After the one visit to Sauce for the Goose, that volunteer had probably found another supplier of real stuff, so Click passed her name on to Inindrucon. She ran no risk aside from losing another supplier, and if she ever ran out of ace changs to sell her the real stuff, she could get just as high and probably even escape withdrawal symptoms on innocent substitutes from dealers with consciences. Lestrade had trouble understanding why anybody ever sold real stuff to fanciers anyway. The point was that both these two testified they got just as high on razzlelick from Truemeasure’s shop as from anywhere else.
Where were the Corwin Poes when they could be useful? If Poe, with his present split perception, had bought razzlelick or any other controlled substance from Truemeasure, taken it when he happened to be in reality mode, and could testify that it had had no effect ... But he’d never been in Sauce for the Goose, and never indulged in such substances anyway if there were the slightest chance they might be real.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 157
