The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  But something about it didn’t sit easily with Lestrade’s instincts. Apex’s suite comprised bedroom, dressing room, sitting room, kitchenette, balcony, bath, and comfort station. The bedroom had a door to the bath and one to the comfort station. On the other side, the bath (though not the comfort station) had a door directly to the dressing room. There was a connecting door between the comfort station and bath—would have been unusual if there hadn’t been. The dressing room had a door to the sitting room. Both the sitting room and the bedroom had doors to the corridor. The night nurse had found Apex’s sobuddy White drumming away in the sitting room. To get to the comfort station from there, Apex had had to go through the dressing room and bath. Why not fake a call of nature and go through the bath to the bedroom, then out the bedroom door into the hallway, down to Uncle Westerman’s rooms ...

  So she decided to stage a big climax scene. More often than not they ended up staging one anyway in murder cases where any of the important involvees were fanciers. After two or three centuries of detective drama, fanciers expected it. Felt let down if they didn’t get it. For that matter, so did a lot of reality perceivers, though they were more reluctant to say so.

  Nevertheless:

  “Is all this absolutely necessary?” Apex’s voice repeated on the recorded chip. Lestrade tabbed the pause and shut her eyes, trying to replay the visuals by memory. It was part of the tradition that somebody ask some such question near the start of the Big Confrontation Scene, but there’d been a whine in Hector Apex’s voice, still audible on the recording, and his face had matched the whine, showing more annoyance than the formula demanded. He could have left the line for somebody else. If registered realizers were present, one of them often took it. Lestrade still thought that Apex had been covering up fear. She had him profiled as another one of those fanciers who could probably have registered the other way if they’d chosen to take the standard perception Test.

  Tabbing the play button, she heard her own voice: “Yes, M.’s., it’s essential. If you want to see M. Hartline Westerman’s murderer brought to justice.”

  Withycombe: Justice? A life freed from all mundane considerations and worldly cares, lived to its natural conclusion in the equivalent of a high-luxury monastery? Justice, Sergeant Lestrade, would be smothering the murderer with a pillow, slowly, allowing several partial recoveries of breath before the end.

  Lestrade: I’m not going to argue the point, M. Withycombe. But we have to define justice by the guidelines of the Reformed Constitution, and if you or anybody else metes out the kind of justice you just suggested on an amateur basis, you’re liable—

  Withycombe: An “amateur” basis, Sergeant? And how do you define “amateur”?

  Withycombe, unlike his brother Apex, had seemed to relish the scene.

  Click: We use the legal definition, M. Withycombe.

  Withycombe: Seeing that the death penalty was legally abolished eighty years ago, there cannot be any legitimately “professional” executioners left. In the legal sense, we must all be “amateurs”—

  Spinoza: M. Withycombe, would you please blank it and let them process us on through this scene?

  Spinoza and the other nurses had no reason to play up to Westerman’s heirs. Their employment at Westerman Manor automatically ended with their patient’s demise, and they’d already been assigned elsewhere.

  Withycombe: I sit chastened.

  Dammit, Lestrade still liked the floater. It had never shown. She was too much the experienced polly. “Good,” she heard her voice once again on the chip. “I’m not going to go into what a shrink might make out of some of your statements, M. Withycombe, in light of the fact that so far you’re right on Occam’s razor yourself as the leading suspect.

  According to the guidelines, she shouldn’t have put that into words, but it was so obvious that skirting around it would have been more awkward than saying it. “But not the only possible suspect,” she heard herself go on, and remembered looking around slowly at each of them in turn.

  Apex’s sobuddy the assistant cook White broke first. “It’s only circumstantial that he was murdered at all! It could have been just slipslop laundering—”

  Click: I don’t know about modern kitchens, M. White, but modern forensics labs don’t do slipslop work.

  Not exactly the same tune Dave Click sang within the station walls, and Lestrade had had to give him another rap afterward about interrupting suspect-witnesses in midflow. There was the chance that White had been a willing accessory before the fact.

  Lestrade: We know that M. Westerman was murdered. Accept that fact. The question is, by whom. We know that M. Petite states, at some risk to her job here, she saw M. Withycombe leaving his uncle’s rooms at a crucial moment.

  Withycombe: May I speak?

  A short silence, broken only by somebody’s cough. Lestrade thought she had nodded here.

  Withycombe: You may take M. Petite’s statement as fact. I have never denied it.

  Lestrade: You also stated that you found your uncle alive and snoring peacefully. That could have been a lie. Very likely was.

  Withycombe: That part of my statement a lie? And only that part?

  Lestrade: He was obviously awake when he sent M. Spinoza down to M. Apex’s rooms. Where M. Spinoza saw and spoke with M. White and only M. White. M. Apex himself had just gone to answer a very convenient call of nature. Allegedly. In fact, he could have slipped out by his bedroom door, dashed over to Uncle Westerman’s bedroom as soon as the nurse had left, held the pillow over the old boy’s face for the few minutes necessary, composed the corpse to look natural, and—

  Apex: Damn it, it was a—a call of nature! I never left my suite till after the alarm!

  Lestrade: It would have taken careful timing. But if M. Apex had left M. White to play the drums alone, stood watch with his bedroom door open a crack, slipped out as soon as he saw the nurse’s head safely in his sitting-room doorway talking with M. White, and then maybe hidden in M. Westerman’s sitting room to avoid passing M. Spinoza on the way back, until the corridor was clear for his return—

  Apex: Why not accuse Spinoza? He had the best chance of all, didn’t—

  Spinoza made some exclamation that was garbled on the chip, probably hadn’t been clear even at the moment.

  Lestrade: Where is M. Spinoza’s motive? A quarter of the Westerman tribillions, on the other hand—

  Withycombe: Sill isn’t quite as strong a motive as three-quarters of the same.

  Another short pause, as everybody had looked around at Withycombe. Lestrade’s memory picture was still sharp and clear. A tall, dark young beanpole of a fancy-class gentleman lounging back in his cushioned armchair, with his legs crossed at the knee and his fingers, three of them sporting rings with gemstones big enough for a game of marbles, steepled at ease beneath his slightly lopsided smile. He himself had quipped to Lestrade, at some time or other during their acquaintance, that his smile had to turn on its side because his mouth was too wide proportionately for his overly thin face. Otherwise, he liked to think that he might have married his choice of the world’s beautiful rich women.

  “Why overburden Occam’s razor, Sergeant?” he had gone on at that point in the Confrontation Scene. “I told you the truth about finding my late uncle breathing peacefully in his sleep. The lie came when I bore witness to leaving him in that same condition. I had rather hoped a pillow murder would pass unnoticed, but since it hasn’t, there seems little profit in letting you continue to waste your professional time badgering M.’s White and Spinoza, not to mention making my poor brother go on referring to a subject which, unlike murder, is usually left unmentioned in polite conversation.”

  So that was it. Withycombe’s unique and only confession. He had never repeated it nor ever expanded on it, not even immediately afterward. Never said “I did it” in simple, pointblank words. He had sat for as many hours as they
kept him in the station interrogation room, commenting on the deep carpet, soft lights, and soporific background music, waving at any passerby who stopped to look through the window, smiling dreamily when the sessions lasted long enough for him to get sleepy, and never letting another clear statement slip out by way of confession.

  But neither had he ever denied the little he had said. And that was enough, even by what the police detectives testified they had heard, remembered, and taken down in their manual notes (without benefit of the recording), to get his brother off the hook and himself into Hummingbird Hill. So quick and easy as to raise jocular suspicions about what he’d instructed his lawyers in unrecorded privacy. The juries hadn’t needed any kind of fresh confession direct from the lips of Adrian Heikkinen Withycombe. The first jury had deliberated ninety-seven minutes, the second one less than half an hour. Twenty-four good and true believers in Occam’s razor.

  Well, maybe he had done it.

  Or maybe both brothers had been in it together, with the agreement that if the pinch came only one would take the blame. Letting the other get full legal control of the entire inheritance, and trusting him to pay the prison bills. Might make more sense than that a completely innocent Withycombe had jumped in spontaneously to save a brother he might only suspect of being guilty.

  In either case, it’d be pretty rotten of Apex to hire another inmate to kill Withycombe now. If Apex was simply tired of footing the security hotel bill, nothing more.

  But what if they hit Apex successfully with attempted murder? If they couldn’t at the same time clear Withycombe, get him released and back in control of the Westerman fortune, it all went to some private foundation for struggling artists, writers, and performers. That would leave both brothers at the mercy of state economy prisons for life. Withycombe might prefer the luxury, even with the risk of premature death.

  Meaning that Apex shouldn’t have any reason to worry about his brother blurting out anything that might damn him unless at the same time it could clear Withycombe himself. Which at this point would take a lot of twistings and weavings through the legal processes, whatever the evidence might be, and it’d have to be doggone good. Better, probably, than any convict could offer months after the court decisions.

  But there was always that old “the guilty run away without being chased” principle. Lestrade remembered Hector Apex as just the type whoever coined that phrase might have had in mind.

  Of course, Withycombe might be the one with the guilty conscience. He might be setting up some kind of elaborate suicide attempts, staging them to look like murder because he wanted full funeral treatment from one of the religions that still damned suicide. Member of one of the Episcopalian branches, wasn’t he? She’d have to check ...

  Except that officially the case was closed, and she was risking her job effectiveness by headaching about it.

  She’d had a vision, off and on since her university days, of most of the world’s problems never getting solved, just buried beneath newer problems, until society rested on the top crust of layers and layers of impacted sedimentary problems going down, maybe, to the Paleolithic. Social historians ought to be able to take core samples the way geologists did to chart the planet’s development. Von Hoferism, mid to late 21st century. Histerical euphorianism, the 2020s. Smugosity and imperialism, the Victorian era. Old layers of witch hunting, hairline the early R.S.A. decades, thin in colonial New England, thicker in Europe. Crusading fever, this marks the Middle Ages. And so on. And so on. Were all the old layers going safely cold, or was there a volcano of forgotten social problems building in the core of history, getting ready to erupt one of these years? Maybe that’s be the old World Ending in Fire prophecy, that a century ago people believed would be the nuclear holocaust; a century before that, a coming collision with some comet or megameteor; some centuries before that, the simple burning wrath of the currently most popular Thunder God ...

  Anyway, the guidelines said that M. Adrian Heikkinen Withycombe should remain one of Senior Sergeant Rosemary Lozinski Lestrade’s personal buried layers. Until his case could be officially reopened. When and if. For the time being, it was in Hilton-Maracott’s topsoil. let them be the ones to worry about Withycombe’s life.

  Chapter

  “Is it not customary,” Corwin inquired, “for the condemned to enjoy a last outside meal in the restaurant of personal choice?”

  “It used to be,” said M. Liberty. “Until eight years ago, when Ruby Papandreou Gantry managed to touch off a minor state of riot in the Denver Downtown Golden Arches, getting herself and two other people killed and fourteen wounded, rather than ride on to the Rocky Mountain Snugaway Security Hotel.”

  “‘Snugaway,’” said Corwin.

  “A Hojo establishment,” M. Click explained. “Hojo swims in those cutesque names. Not like Hilton-Maracott. Of course, your lordship could always order up a last lunch here in your room.”

  “To what purpose? If I cannot take one last look at life among the unfettered masses, I feel confident that Hilton-Maracott cuisine is as tasty in the Hummingbird Hill dining facilities as here.” Corwin pointed to his suitcase, which he had left open on the stand. “You will naturally want to search my luggage.”

  “Yep,” said the policeman, “but at our leisure. We’ll be sending it on after your lordship when we’re through finetoothing it. Meanwhile, you can take in yourself, the clothes on your corpus, and any sentimental mementos of a harmless nature you may want to carry in your pockets. No folding money. Every inmate’s personal finances are banked by computer—the security hotel’s internal computer with periodic guarded connections to outside banks via the guardhouse lines to Hilmar central.”

  Corwin nodded. The hotel corporation was starting him with a thousand tridols for expenses, to be increased another two hundred every day he spent inside, in addition to his undercover investigator’s fee. So he would have sufficient to purchase wardrobe and personal needs from the hotel’s inside shops.

  “I also have to do a complete search of your lordship’s clothes and corpus,” Click went on without apology.

  M. Liberty looked annoyed. “I don’t feel like going through all that fuss at the door again, and then wasting my time standing around. You two can use the bathroom, or the bedroom and pull the curtains. I’ll put in a few minutes’ work here at the sitting-room computer.”

  “I think,” said Corwin, “that we can safely leave a few details to my fertile imagination. It’s hardly a subject on which my fellow guests will be likely to compare notes. And even if they do, I can always treat it with extreme reticence myself.”

  “The clothes and corpus search is strictly guideruled,” said Click. “Ever since ’Sixty-three, when Farley Evans Kipper concealed an explosive up a private place. Went off the first pothole they hit on the way to Hilmar’s Minnesota Blue Waters. Wasn’t pretty. Not for Kipper, not for his guards and driver, not for the other cars that piled into the wreck. They never did figure out how he’d gotten the glop smuggled to him in the first place.”

  “Having every hope and expectation of my eventual re-emergence,” Corwin protested, a little stiffly because he feared his face was reddening, “I am not about to attempt suicide, most particularly not by any such desperately immodest, not to say uncomfortable, means. Even if I knew the first thing about explosives.”

  “Forget the body search, Dave,” said M. Liberty.

  “Fine by me. Not my favorite part of the job anyway. Better at least make your lordship empty your pockets for me, though. Here on the desk will be fine. Turn each pocket lining out when it’s emptied.”

  Two hip pockets in his trousers, two near the front hem of his tunic, two on the insides of what would be his lapels if he were in fantasy perceptional mode; just now he was a realizer, perceiving his garments as they had come from the tailor, the tunic being a two-way zipper affair with softvel catches at three-centimeter intervals, permitti
ng it to serve as either pullover or jacket, depending on perceptional preferences.

  “But is there any peril,” he suddenly thought to ask, “of anyone inside noticing the discrepancy between my credit bankline and the real Lord Moan’s personal assets?”

  “No,” replied M. Liberty. “Hilton-Maracott has actually entered the real Moan’s personal bank account. It’s up to you to keep track of your own accounts. In your head, I’d suggest. Hilmar will have the record of what you spend, and if it exceeds your allowance and the payment due you, you’ll have to make up the difference. Remember that Lord Moan can’t inherit his late wife’s fortune if he’s found guilty of murdering her, so he’ll have to practice a little economy if he wants to spend the rest of his life in a hightone security hotel.”

  “Handkerchief and lip balm, okay,” said Click, sniffing the latter. “I see you even got a new hanky, monogrammed with an ‘M.’ Comb, matches, pocket watch, penknife, pencil case, money foldover, coin purse, no.”

  “The pencil case has sentimental value,” said Corwin.

  “Oh, all this will be sent in after your lordship,” Click explained. “Except the money in the foldover. Just can’t let you have it on your person on the way in. Cute things have been tried with combs and pencils, even with heavy coin purses. Card case ...”