The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “My total knowledge of the Pepper Pot, dear lady—make that Lady Polly—is what I told you about it the other night.”

  “All right, then I’ll update you. It has no record whatever in the police databanks. Neither it nor its owner and proprietor, one James Hovreson Brown, has ever even been under a hard glance for suspected bad-substance peddling.”

  “Every scuzzball ever nailed had to start being suspected at one particular point in time. Maybe you’ll be the one with our pal Brown.”

  “But you’ll kindly let me tackle him alone?”

  “Be my guest.” Hammersmith pulled out a softpack of cigarettes and gave the bottom a practice tap to shoot several tips a few centimeters into sight at the sloppily opened end. “As it happens, I came down on other business. Yesterday an old chum down here on holiday sighted a Derry Venture gamechip in the window of one of these Nostalgia City flotsam and jetsam shops, place called Grandma’s Memories. Establishment was closed for the day. My buddy went back after breakfast, found the chip sold, merchant wouldn’t or couldn’t say to whom. So he called me in on the case.”

  “To locate a Derry Venture gamechip?”

  “Hey! Sentimental value. ‘Derry Venture and the Asteroid Pirates’—same game my pal grew up on. Beats proof of paternity cases to make a few tribucks on, don’t it? Anyway, I looked up the local screengame packers club, got a membership list from them, and sweet-talked my way into the Accredited Accommodations databank to see how many out-of-town members might be here just now on holiday. Figured the local members were likelier to stay put awhile, if I needed to hit them, too, but I didn’t. Only one out-of-town member was here this week, checked into the Hojo. turned out she’s interested in chips of the period, not in Derry Venture as such. Very happy to sell it back to my sentimental buddy, once she knew the picture and I put the pair of them in touch.”

  “Almost a dating service.” Hammersmith’s chum was probably in his fifties or sixties. Lestrade could just remember the tail end of the Derry Venture craze, spiraling down to a blank in the early years of her own childhood. For a moment she envied the private eye. Regular pollies couldn’t spend their paid stress-hours tracking down mathoms for whimsyists. Might be something she should consider taking up in her offduty hours, keep her mind away from the serious cases. “Does this sweet story have anything to do with our mutual interests?”

  “Nope. Nothing except that it left me the chance to hook up with you this evening.” He lit his cigarette.

  She thought of pulling out her pipe, but it didn’t seem appropriate with Hammersmith. Her pipes were clean props to help influence the way fanciers perceived her. Their bowls had never experienced anything but drops of anise or spearmint extract to flavor the air she sucked through them. Hammersmith claimed to be a realizer, and his stick was sending up actual smoke. “Well?” she said.

  “The question that came to my mind,” he said, more as if bulling ahead in his own time than replying, “was whether anybody on the outside might want Withycombe dead.”

  “And you came up with the name Hector Heikkinen Apex.”

  He looked at her. “Sergeant, for a polly, you ain’t bad.”

  “It didn’t take any extensive search through the databanks. H. H. Apex was the old man’s other principal heir and the only other family member in the mansion. If he’d been the one that maid saw coming out of Uncle Westerman’s bedroom, or due for the older brother’s share of the inheritance, he’d have been the one who ended up on trial.”

  “Yeah. How come you never hauled Apex in at all, Lady Polly? Instead of or in addition to brother Withycombe?”

  “I wanted to. Like hades. Unfortunately, Withycombe confessed.”

  “Yeah?” The P.I. cocked an eyebrow. “That ain’t in the trial transcript, according to which he leaded not guilty all the way.”

  “He confessed only that once. In the drawing room of Westerman Manor, during what fanciers and other nostalgics like to consider the Big Confrontation Scene.” Dave Click had caught it with his pocket recorder, but she decided not to mention that chip, which at the present moment resided deep in her own beltcase. “Inadmissible in court.”

  “Mmmm. Pity he didn’t repeat it under what they call court-admissible circumstances. Or go all the way with a guilty plea. Might have enjoyed his early cloistered retirement free from threat of premature death.”

  “Because Apex is afraid that Withycombe might still decide to spill enough to justify reopening the investigation?” Even though she entertained that daydream herself, Lestrade shook her head. “It’d have to be one heck of a databomb before anybody would check out anything the brother convicted of the crime might have to say against the brother who never even got arrested for same. More likely Apex—assuming he’s behind the alleged death threats, which is a long assumption—just got tired of footing his brother’s security hotel bill out of the Loshani Westerman, now the Heikkinen Apex, tribillions. You aren’t really smoking that cancer nail, are you?”

  After the puff to help ignite it, he had just been holding it between two fingers, letting it send up its smoke like an incense stick, once in a while tapping it into the tin ashtray glued to the tabletop. He had put it back to his mouth exactly once, and then, when he exhaled, no smoke came out. Now he grinned and mashed it down in the bottom of the ashtray. “Maybe you are a realizer at that, Lady Polly. Okay. Whether he wants to make sure Withycombe doesn’t get tired of keeping his yap shut, or whether he just wants to have those tribillions all to himself, brother Apex has about the only known motive anybody still on the outside could have to want anybody on the inside dead, not just permanently out of circulation.”

  “And if the money was enough motive to kill Uncle Westerman in the first place…as the jury decided it was. When faced with evidence that the Heikkinen family fortune was pretty well expended and the brothers already living largely on the Westerman largesse ...”

  “Of course, Apex could just refuse to foot Withycombe’s bill. Which he’s just footing out of the goodness of his heart anyway, the guilty verdict having blanked Withycombe’s inheritance share right down to the last red tri-cent.”

  Lestrade shook her head. “As long as Adrian Heikkinen Withycombe is alive, Hector Heikkinen Apex has to go on paying to keep him in luxury. Otherwise, if gossip ever got out that Withycombe had been forced into some low-budget or lottery-funded lockup, M. Hector Apex would find himself shunned and blacklisted in most of the social circles to which he is accustomed. Even fanciers who aren’t generous-hearted by nature like to keep up the appearance. And the gossip would get out. They aren’t very snoopy as a class, but there’re always a few scandal packers.” Of course, she thought, it could explain why Withycombe wasn’t putting in a transfer request. Because if Apex was trying to murder him at long distance, Apex could go on trying no matter what security hotel his brother checked into; and meanwhile, why do anything to spook Apex, make him afraid that Withycombe was feeling restive or in a mood to spew out some kind of damning data?

  Contrary to what she’d told Hammersmith, Lestrade would have jumped at any new evidence at all that she might be able to use to talk Stan Carter or one of the district judges into reopening the case.

  “Good points,” said the P.I. “Thanks for strengthening my own case against Apex. But I don’t think he sent in a general contract. Too much chance of another ‘guest’ or even a staff member blowing the whistle on him.”

  “Like Talasia Magadance?”

  “Magadance only mentioned evidence. Murder attempts that have already taken place. If she knew about a contract, she’d have mentioned that, too. No, our boy must have made a specific deal with one, maybe two specific inmates. Three at most. But even that would be darn risky. I’m guessing just one.”

  “Making the contact by means of smuggled envelope letters.”

  “Like the ones we got, you and I, but in both directions. Yeah. Any
mail fed into the Hummingbird closed and watchdogged computer from either end would have been so monitored and censored that not even code could slip by unquestioned.

  “Unless it was clever enough code to look like a genuine innocent message, instead of the usual minimum-sense coded garble.”

  “In which case the intended recipient would have missed the code, too.”

  “It takes communication before two parties can even set up a code.”

  “Right. So at least the opening gambit had to be smuggled in by envelope letter.”

  Suddenly noticing how for half a minute they had dropped the tough-boiled hedging game, Lestrade fell silent. So did Hammersmith. He swallowed half his beer. She drank maybe a quarter of her Scotch coffee and waited for him to break the silence.

  “Of course,” he said at last, “so far as Withycombe is concerned, it doesn’t much matter why. The big question mark is still who.”

  “No argument there. But if you’re still angling to go inside—”

  “Hey, Dragon Lady! If any of that paper correspondence still exists at all, it’ll be inside. Apex will have been shredding and incinerating everything as he goes.”

  “So we’re back to ‘Dragon Lady,’ are we?”

  “Lady Polly, then. My point being that digging through Apex’s digs would be looking for a Gutenberg Bible in the heart of blazing Sol.”

  “And you think his inside contact might be saving his or her end of the correspondence?”

  “Exactly. Yeah, I do. To use if Apex decides to renege on the arranged payment, which our bird would see as more of a clear and present threat than having a fellow con find the documents in question. After all, once you’re already convicted and in for the maximum, how much difference can another conviction or two make in your mandatory life?”

  “Be that as it may, neither you nor anybody else is going undercover inside Hummingbird Hill.”

  “Yeah?” That cocked brow again. “Though you had that Poe yegg all lined up for the job.”

  “I said anybody else, Hammersmith,” she told him, congratulating herself on covering up her forgetful moment. “Anyway, it should be possible to start where Apex must have started. Look into any old, outside relationships he might have had with some party or parties now in Hummingbird Hill. Failing any good leads there, search everything on public record and figure out who might be the best inmate for him to have contacted with the offer.”

  “Lot of work. There could be a quicker route. Only three staffers who check in and out. Only three floaters who could have played mail carrier. Seven at most, if we count the weekend chaplains.”

  “Try roughing any of those people up, Hammersmith, and—”

  “Hey, who said anything about any rough stuff?” He spread both hands. “Chances are whoever carried the letters acted in all innocence, just like whoever brought out Magadance’s messages to us.”

  “I don’t know about yours, but mine came in an envelope that was too cheap to match the stationery. Meaning that the carrier could and probably did read it before posting.”

  “You don’t think Apex and his contact would have risked sending their messages in unsealed envelopes?”

  “Sealed ones can be unsealed and then either resealed or replaced.”

  “Which would make the carrier a real accomplice before the fact, for seeing what was in the wind and failing to report it to the ‘proper authorities.’ Be that as it may, Lady Polly, all we’ve really got to do at this stage is zero in on that carrier. If he or she is innocent of knowledge, she or he shouldn’t make any bones about telling us who Apex’s letters went to. If full of guilty knowledge, it may take a little more work—”

  “Which you will leave to us regular pollies!”

  “Oh, sure, sure. Your methods are so much more humane. Nowadays.” He winked.

  She didn’t bother to stifle her sigh.

  Chapter

  Rosemary Lestrade didn’t watch The Amfalula Tree or Roxy O’Banion that night, after all. Instead, she dug out the chip of Adrian Withycombe’s confession and replayed it. Over and over.

  It was sound only. Technology hadn’t quite progressed to picking up visuals with a recording device that was in somebody’s pocket. It had progressed to catching every voice within ten square meters while cloaking out the heartbeat and breathing sounds of the person in whose pocket it was. And with “in the winter drawing room” (chosen rather than the “summer drawing room,” “spring drawing room,” or “autumn drawing room”) of Westerman Manor there had been the dead man’s two night nurses, the maid who had seen Withycombe coming out of his uncle’s bedroom, the assistant cook who had been sharing Apex’s rooms on the fatal night, the two “struggling creators” who roomed and boarded in the house as part of the rich old floater’s living charity program, and the brothers Adrian Heikkinen Withycombe and Hector Heikkinen Apex. The last two being Westerman’s nephews and principal heirs. Also the investigating pollies.

  Not that Lestrade could have remembered all these people after ... nineteen months, Magadance’s letter had said. Nineteen months of other cases, including her own stressout.. She had voiced in a cast of characters note when she decided to keep the chip. Illegally. She had a small illegal collection, souvenirs of cases she hadn’t worked out to her own satisfaction. Dave Click made them strictly out of investigative habit. They were for police convenience only, completely inadmissible in any court from the outset, and the department guiderules said that all such chips had to be blanked before the case ever went to court. In order to keep them, Lestrade bought blank replacement chips for Click to “smuggle” back to Supplies. Not that it was such a closed secret. Stan Carter dropped occasional odd hints about the noxious psycho-effects of simmering over perceived failures.

  On the night of Uncle Westerman’s death, nephew Hector Apex was noise-polluting the family wing of the mansion by getting drunk with a sobuddy and playing the drums and electronic piano in his rooms. It had been happening, by everybody’s report, twice a week on the average for the last several months. As usual, the bedridden old man listened to it more or less as to a concert till “about oh two hundred hours, then he decided it was time for him to sleep and sent his night-duty nurse, M. Lawrence Spinoza, down to Hector’s suite with the message to get quiet.

  When Spinoza reached Apex’s suite, he found the sobuddy, the assistant cook M. Charles White, pounding the drums alone and Apex himself nowhere to be seen. White explained that M. Apex was, in the quaint old euphemism revived by a popular screenshow series of the 2070s, “Seeing a man about a dog.” With no grounds for suspicion, Spinoza gave White the sick man’s message and returned to Westerman’s rooms, to find the old man dead.

  Meanwhile, the maid, M. Violet Petite, had seen M. Withycombe coming out of Uncle Westerman’s bedroom door, “about two a.m., maybe two fifteen.” Petite shouldn’t have been anywhere in the family wing at that time of night (no more should the assistant cook, for that matter), but the maid tiptoed up once or twice a month because she found the view of the garden from the terrace at the end of the corridor the loveliest view you could get from anywhere in the mansion, especially by moonlight. Since she wasn’t supposed to be there, she had hidden in a doorway until Withycombe was back inside his own apartment, by which time Spinoza had reappeared in the hallway. Petite didn’t mind being sighted by Spinoza, and they exchanged a wave before he opened the old man’s door.

  Westerman had just crossed the great divide, as it didn’t take the trained nurse long to ascertain. Spinoza caught up with Petite again at the head of the stairs, giving her the news before anybody else.

  It wasn’t unexpected. Westerman had been on the brink for more than a year. There had even been two or three false alarms. Nevertheless, considering her glimpse of M. Withycombe, Petite decided to phone the police right away.

  McBain and Takamoto, who had been on night duty to answer the
call, were good enough pollies to check things thoroughly, whether they thought it was a waste of time or not. They’d seen no reason to cart the body back, but they had brought, among other things, the pillow, first tracing on the pillowslip the outline of the dead man’s head where they had found it resting. Everybody in the mansion had testified that Westerman’s body hadn’t been moved until the police moved it, except for Spinoza’s touching and pulse-searching to ascertain death.

  The corpse’s eyes had been shut. The night nurse thought he’d found them like that, but wasn’t entirely sure. Once in a while, when people slipped away very peacefully in their sleep, you found them with eyes shut. But Spinoza said that he himself might have closed the lids automatically. That was a comparatively minor question beside the saliva and mucous on the pillowslip. Not on the side where Uncle Westerman’s head had lain, seemingly at ease, when they found him. That side was perfectly clean. His nurses used to change his pillowslips morning, evening, and whenever else it might be necessary in either their own or their patient’s opinion. The saliva and mucous had been on the other side, the side where the original investigating pollies hadn’t drawn the outline of the head, the side that had been turned toward the bed. That was enough.

  An old boy who had never taken out a procreational permit nor got listed on that of any woman who had one, Westerman wasn’t among those famous rich eccentrics who made a favorite hobby out of getting revised wills drawn up every month. He’d made his will right after falling sick, let everyone read it right after the formal witnessing, sent it to his principal strongbox at First American, and never had a lawyer in since. After the usual generous pittances to servants and sentimental souvenirs to old friends, three quarters of everything went to Withycombe and the rest to Apex.

  Lestrade thought it wasn’t just the old “speak no ill of the dead” taboo when everyone said that he’d been a decent, pleasant old geezer, even when bedridden. All the servants seemed to have been genuinely satisfied with their employment. They’d had more to lose than to gain by their employer’s death, and there was no indication that any of them besides Petite had been in that wing at the crucial time anyway. The two struggling creators definitely had much more to lose than gain. They had never been mentioned by name in Westerman’s will. All the old man had done was express the hope that his heirs would continue his living charity program, and both the artist and the author were aware of it. An unknown housebreaker who had left no other trace than Westerman’s death was such a long chance as to be faintly ridiculous. That left “Uncle Westerman’s boys,” and the one who stood to inherit most and had actually been seen coming out of the old man’s room looked likeliest. Click was all for clamping the cuffs on Withycombe right away.