The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  But she had taken the chance with Gentian Truemeasure. Maybe—thinking back—because she hadn’t taken it with Adrian Withycombe, and wished later that she had, after the jury found him guilty and it was too late.

  Truemeasure had been sitting at the screen in her supervised cell, with her back to the door. Since the screen was so angled that, in theory, the supervisor could see the screenwatcher’s profile, it meant that Truemeasure was reading at a bad angle. But there was a text on the screen, and the page changed just before Cartwright, who was on duty that shift, let Lestrade in. The policewoman had one glimpse of a color illustration of some kind of flower, with a column of print at one side, and then the prisoner blanked the screen. At the sound of the opening door, Lestrade guessed.

  She shut the door.

  Truemeasure stood up and said, “I know my rights, Sergeant Lestrade. I can demand that you get a second polly and take me to the regular interrogation room with its window open to the public. If you won’t—”

  “This is informal, M. Truemeasure. I thought you might prefer privacy.”

  “For my benefit, or yours?”

  At that point, Lestrade had considered ducking out at once and demanding a heatprint photo of the floor to prove she and the prisoner had stayed at opposite ends of the cell. But even that couldn’t shield her from any verbal abuse charge Truemeasure might make. “You’re a mother, M. Truemeasure,” she said. “I’m a godmother.”

  “A fairy godmother, I suppose?”

  “A flesh godmother. To a boy I helped clear of suspicion of murder.” To blazes with the Meanpolly role.

  “Do you people jail children, too?” Truemeasure sat again and turned her head to face the wall.

  Without something big to get this discussion on track, the policewoman would probably waste her stress-time, charge of brutality or not. “M., there are reasons I’d like to cloud the window and activate the soundscrambler. They don’t involve any kind of abuse, but I can’t tell you what they do involve unless I get our privacy first.”

  Without turning around again, Truemeasure slowly nodded.

  Lestrade used her jailkey to fog the spywindow in the door and activate the soundscrambler. “All right,” she said. “We’re private.”

  “Are we really?”

  “As private as if I were your lawyer. It wouldn’t help me to have a witness, M. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t bring any charge against you. You could against me. So why should I lie about it?”

  Truemeasure buried her head in her hands and her shoulders started heaving. After a few seconds, the choking sobs began to come as well.

  Even though time was passing and the longer they were private the worse the potential charge, Lestrade let her have her cry out. If she hadn’t been Officer Badpolly on this case from their first visit to Sauce for the Goose, she might have stepped over and offered her a chest to cry on. The mere fact that the suspect let go in her presence, after holding it in for three days in front of unknown watchers outside the door, was something. By regulation, the watchers on duty had to be of the prisoner’s own gender and free from any known homotends, but not all prisoners believed or even read all the notice cards in their cells, and it was true that opposite-gender officers came through corridors from time to time. Their peeking didn’t happen nearly as often or as long as in the popular screenshows, but constipation was still one of the commonest health problems among inexperienced arrestees.

  After three minutes and some-odd seconds, Truemeasure wiped her eyes and blew her nose, probably on the Softsniff Kitten handkerchief, and said, “What reasons, Sergeant?”

  “We can’t let this go any farther, M., or I could be accused of feeding a potential witness data leading to memory distortion.”

  “If they ask me pointblank, I can’t very well perjure my soul.”

  “Then talk it over with your lawyer. Who’ll be in the courtroom whenever you are, with the right and the duty to protest any time that you, even as a witness in somebody else’s trial, might be subjected to questioning that could prejudice your own case. As M. Greene can verify, if he hasn’t already told you, the privcom rule of 1999 gives lawyers almost the same rights and duties as priest-confessors and psychologists in this area. All he has to do is stand up and say ‘Privileged lawyer-client communication,’ and the judge is required by law to sustain the objection.”

  “That in itself could make me look guilty by implication.” The herbseller turned around at last in her chair and glanced up at the policewoman. “So I think you’d better not say it, Sergeant. Whatever it is.”

  Lestrade had planned to ask whether Moan could have emptied a pac of razzlelick into the pumpkinseed flour when Truemeasure’s back was turned. Faced with the herbseller’s scruples, she decided to let it drop. Probably the best answer she could have pulled out to that specific question would have been a qualified, “Well, it’s possible.” Truemeasure’s refusal to so much as hear it lent gut confirmation to Lestrade’s gut belief in the woman’s innocence.

  “It’s your soul, M. Truemeasure,” she told her, going gruff again, when her deep reaction was a touch of admiring awe. Then she had left the cell and gone straight to Carter’s office.

  Stan Quincy Carter was local top commissioner and Lestrade still a sergeant, but unless he was in some genuine conference or out of his office, he always let her come in right away.

  She told him this time, barely waiting for the office door to close on them, “I want Gentian Marjamaki Truemeasure transferred to maximum privacy, maximum comfort, and I want it done before coffee break this afternoon.” Neither she nor Stan had much use for polite bushbeating on worktime. “My authority.”

  “Been risking one on one again, Rosie?” he said, tabbing his screen a search order. Stan Carter was the only male west of the Appalachians who could call her Rosie without her minding it. Not because there had ever been anything languorous between them. Because there hadn’t. And each of them respected that. “A quiet one,” he went on, reading Truemeasure’s incipient police file on the screen. “Youngdaughter says you always have to watch out for the quiet ones.”

  “Dr. Youngdaughter is a bachelor with the ink still wet on her psychoshrink degree. Gentian Truemeasure put as much of her assets as she could into trust for her six-year-old son. That’s the action of a mother who still hopes to see her kid again.”

  Stan didn’t remark that Lestrade was a bachelor-woman without any psychodoc degree at all. He just nodded, told her to help herself from his bottomless urn, and put through the change of accommodations directive while she was drinking his special blend Kona-Bolivian.

  He might’ve gone along partly to help keep Truemeasure from bringing a charge. Even if she suicided in her maximum privacy cell, it’d look less damning on Lestrade’s record than an accusation of irregularity. No matter why he did it, the main thing was that it got Truemeasure into slightly better housing. The maximum privacy cells didn’t compare badly with low-budget motel rooms, and had shutters the prisoners themselves could close over every window.

  It was the best Lestrade had been able to do for her so far. She didn’t think that it was the reason Truemeasure refrained from filing an irregularity charge, either. She’d left the herbseller’s original cell in the firm conviction that this woman never intended to bend the truth about anything.

  Gentian Truemeasure struck her as the type who would have tried to hold out against the Spanish Inquisition. Maybe even made it. Somebody once told her that a few floaters had. Oh, yes, that was Corwin Poe. According to him, you’d have been better off being tortured by the Inquisition than by the secular European criminal courts of that era, and the Inquisition might finally turn you loose. Unfortunately for Truemeasure, she wouldn’t be able to get loose of the modern, enlightened, R.S.A. legal process on honor and fortitude alone. Not with the public prosecutor feeding a jury picked evidence from Moan’s trial, howeve
r it came out for Elegius, Lord Moan. Not unless Truemeasure’s own lawyer had something pretty solid to balance it.

  If Lestrade had been out for glory and a rocketboost career, like most of her partners before Dave Click, she wouldn’t have been hurting this much about Gentian Truemeasure. She might have been moonlighting for more evidence against Moan, because it looked a lot better on your record to have arrested a “guilty” party than a “not guilty” one. Her first junior partner, Paul Tracy, would actually have wanted to cover up any evidence pointing to Truemeasure’s innocence.

  Not that Truemeasure’s case was going to cause that much stir either way. Just the little trial of a little person whose condemnation or acquittal was going to follow that of “the Earl of Worminglass” as an anticlimax. Like the last race on Kentucky Derby Day, watched by almost nobody, with the crowds more interested in leaving the track after the big Run for the Roses. Even back in the “Golden Age of Newspapers,” when his lordship’s case would have splashed over the front pages beneath huge headlines day after day, Truemeasure’s would have gotten a couple of paragraphs buried somewhere in the back. M. Gentian Truemeasure, small shopkeeper, just an afterthought set up to disappear into a state penitentiary for the rest of her life, or most of it, with nobody paying much attention except herself, her friends, her six-year-old son, maybe her lawyer.

  And Rosemary Lozinski Lestrade, the senior arresting officer.

  Lady God! she thought. My thoughts are starting to sound like Hammersmith with his hard-boiled mush.

  She drank more sake and stared out at Nostalgia City after dark. It was full of neon and mock neon, this block of it anyway. Looked very old-movieish in the light rain that was shining the blacktop street and concrete sidewalk. And there, sure enough, was Magnum Hammersmith, complete in costume trenchcoat, standing across the street in a doorway, lighting a cigarette.

  Her impulse was to hit the tab that closed the windowscreen. She stifled it. It’d be a dead giveaway that she had seen him. Wondering if it was idle to hope that maybe he hadn’t seen her yet, she sat back as far as possible and turned her head to look at the raised platform in the middle of the restaurant, where a holographic screen cube was showing a Japanese ‘No’ play.

  Every year or so popular studies appeared demonstrating that espersensitivity was substantially higher in the Fancy Class than in the reality-perceiving majority. After two decades of serving more or less as the local police specialist in cases involving fanciers, Lestrade wasn’t as ready to shrug off those studies as she was the equally predictable semi-annual proofs that dolphins were spies for space alien colonies under the sea or that Ace Chang’s brain was still alive and powering a supercomputer beneath the South Pole or the New York subway system or wherever, poised to take over the world along with the moon and the Asteroid Colonies, too. But if the fancytend esper had started rubbing off on her ... No, it had to be just a plain old hunch. Or coincidence. Or, most likely, Hammersmith was dogging her.

  “M.-san?” said the waiter, stepping forward. Blond, but with a trace of epifold above his eyes. She understood he was asking for her order, and she’d forgotten to read the menu.

  She told him, “Mixed tempura with rice.” There was always the good chance she’d have ended up with that dinner even if she had read the menu.

  “Ah! Most wise choice, very wise,” he said, grinning and nodding, as he would have no matter what she called for. She wondered briefly why he didn’t dye his hair black or wear a wig, for the sake of the realizers who made up a respectable percentage of Nostalgia City’s visitors. Then he had taken back the menu and bowed himself away.

  She shot a quick glance through the window. Hammersmith was gone. That could mean that he’d drifted away. Or that he’d crossed the street and reached the Contented Sumoist’s vestibule. Wishing she had taken Harihoto’s invitation, big family and all, she put a piece of sushi in her mouth.

  Sure enough, before she had finished chewing it, the private cop was being ushered in, wearing kimono and sandals. He exchanged a few words and nods with the hostess, a small woman of almost pure Butterscotch stock. Lestrade hoped that lady’s rapt upward gaze at the tall round-eyes with the rugged jawline was simple customer relations. Then, picking up his own menu, he headed for the policewoman’s booth, his sandals flopping.

  Swallowing, she decided not to raise a fuss. She could have called the hostess over and complained that she hadn’t invited Hammersmith and preferred to eat alone. The restaurant would be legally obligated to respect her statement and find him another table. But he was still here in Nostalgia City, and she might as well know why as soon as she could.

  “Ah-so!” he fanfared his arrival, slipping off the sandals to fold himself into the booth. “Honorable Dragon Lady! Why on earth you choose joint where they make you leave shoes at door and give you straw mat instead of chair?”

  “It isn’t too late for you to find a place more to your liking, Hammersmith. There’s a joint calling itself the Original Greasy Spoon about a hundred and twenty meters down the street.”

  After considerable shuffling, he settled down with his long legs crossed round-the-campfire style. It put him at an awkward reach from the table, but she couldn’t picture Magnum Hammersmith trying to relax on his calves and haunches Japanese style, and since the last thing she wanted was to play footsie with him, she didn’t remind him of the legwell under the table.

  “That stuff sooshee?” he asked, eying the plate. “Never had you pegged for a raw fish eater!”

  “The way you eat Abilene steak, M. Hammersmith, ‘broiled’ is only a courtesy title for it.”

  He chuckled. “That round to you, my lovely. Got any beer?” he went on to the blond waiter, who had glided forward.

  “Beer? Many kinds beer, M.-san.” The lad started scrolling off a list of brands, Japanese first, then Australian and New Zealand, German, and finally American. Hammersmith listened patiently until he said, “Miller,” then nodded.

  “Yeah,” Hammersmith confirmed. “Miller. Green label if you got it, otherwise plain pilsner.”

  The kid bobbed himself away, returning shortly with a frosted stein and an oldfashioned aluminum can, condensation beading on its surface. “Hell’s bells,” the P.I. remarked. “No bottled stuff?”

  “If M.-san likes, we got Old Tokyo on tap.”

  Making a face, Hammersmith shook his head. “At least it’s in a can, not one of those blasted plastibulbs.” He popped the tab, filled his stein, added a pac of salt, and watched it foam up.

  “You like order now?” said the waiter.

  Hammersmith flipped to the back page of the menu, located the “Regional American Tastes” section, and ordered two burgers with a side of mixed fries that turned out, when they came, to look suspiciously like a smaller dish of the stuff Lestrade was served as a main course of tempura.

  But he ate with a minimum of grumbling. As if by mutual consent, they stuck to sports, the weather, the lights of Nostalgia City, and long silences throughout the meal. At its end he stood up, dropped a half-tridol piece on the table, and said, “Well, Dragon Lady, thanks for the company.”

  Much as she’d have liked to let him drift out of her weekend, assuming that was what he really intended to do, she couldn’t. For the sake of her work. Maybe of Gentian Truemeasure’s future. “Hold it, big boy. We’ve still got our serious talking ahead of us.”

  “Thought you’d never ask. Okay, lovely, but not in a Japanese joint.”

  Not in my hotel room, either, she thought. And definitely not in yours. “This town’s full of braingrease tanks. You choose. I reserve veto power.”

  They ended in a place called “The 1890’s,” complete with the apostrophe in the name, holographic molded metal ceiling, and real sawdust on the woodsim floor. The lighting was photographic darkroom intensity. Even had red shades on the mock gaslights. The booths were high, straightback, uncushioned, but
made of sound-soak disguised as plain darkwood. Hammersmith first-named the barmaid who brought his double boilermaker and Lestrade’s Scotch coffee.

  He downed his first shot of bourbon at a gulp, took a deep swig from his frosted stein of beer, wiped his mouth, and grinned at her.

  “All right,” she said. “This round to you. Now maybe we can knuckle down to business.” She hoped that was the phrase. “Twenty to one your being here in Nostalgia City isn’t any coincidence.”

  “Followed you down, lovely lady. Hoping to catch you in a holiday mood.”

  “In a holiday mood, I’d have let you walk out of the Sumoist alone.”

  He spread one hand. “Okay. You robbed me of a chance to bodyguard Withycombe for a nice, fat retainer, so I thought I might be able to earn a little something toward the continued cohabitation of body and soul by giving you a hand here on the outside.”

  M. Truemeasure wasn’t rich. Lestrade wasn’t about to offer Hammersmith anything out of her own automatically bankdeposited paycheck, and as for applying to Special Funds, she was moonlighting without authorization. But as long as he was here offering, she’d talk first, for Truemeasure’s sake, and explain the financial facts of life to him later. “‘Continued cohabitation of body and soul’ isn’t too bad,” she said, refusing to act overeager for his data. “Got it copyrighted?”

  “Free as blisters, Lady Polly.”

  “Thanks for the improvement, such as it is, on ‘Dragon Lady,’ et cetera. Well?”

  “Well?”

  “If you dogged me down here to give me a hand with the Moan case, give!”

  “I never said the Moan case, my lovely. Not even the Truemeasure case, which, between the two of us, we both know is the real reason you’re so anxious to nail Moan with his actual supplier. I’m still interested, as you may recollect, in a few of the Withycombe tridols.”

  “Then it would be fruitless to ask you how likely that family funeral notice on the Pepper Pot door is to be authentic.”