You are here: Webley Page > The Spirit of Exmas Sideways > Part 1Fri 23 Dec 212 A.L., 20:00 O'Clock
"He's dead."
'Twas the night before the night before Exmas, and the first she'd spoken to me for two hours. It wasn't necessary. I'd seen it when the call came: the old guy's face, the entire front half of his skull, blown off with the exit of some soft, heavy, high velocity projectile.
"How long?" I asked as if we'd been speaking to each other that evening. Our breath made empty word-balloons in the air before our faces.
"At least two hours."
As a Certified Healer, Clarissa made a pretty fair medical examiner. Two hours -- the same two hours it had been snowing down here on the plains. The same two hours she'd sat beside me in the Neova HoverSport, arctic silence at three hundred miles per hour, with the wireless playing "White Christmas", over and over again. An old Bing Crosby standard in the States, it was a recent import to the Confederacy. Two hours. As a detective, I'd learned to mistrust coincidence. Right now I just resented it.
We'd been returning from what you might call a less-than-successful mountain holiday -- I'd call it less than successful -- Edward William Bear, though I settle for "Win", and his erstwhile sweetheart, blond, bronze-eyed, and I believe the word is "buxom", Clarissa MacDougall Olson. We'd received the call on the car 'com. After a year of waiting for the goddamned thing to ring at home while Clarissa went on paying the bills, all of a sudden I was wanted at the scene of somebody's violent demise.
But Win, if she'd been speaking to me, Clarissa might have expressed resentment of her own as I hung the dashboard pickup back on its hook, staring, with the autopilot set on GEORGE, at snowflakes sand-blasting the windscreen, we're supposed to be in town in time for Exmas with Mother. We've still got shopping. She didn't have to say it. She didn't bother, just as she didn't say, You're forty-nine years old, Win, can't you go back to playing private eye after the holidays? She was right. About the shopping, anyway. I hadn't even found her a present yet. I had other worries. I wasn't sure she'd still be around to open it on Exmas morning, and I didn't care for giving people gifts I'd paid for with their money.
So, instead of letting the Neova follow its chromium nose to Genet Place, to the warm familiar garage it might have called home (if it had been speaking to me) in the metropolis of Greater Laporte, where a thousand miles of prairie pile up against the Rockies between rivers I'd been calling Cache La Poudre and Big Thompson most of my life, I wrestled the wheel toward the east side, the old Caesar Rodney subdivision, reeking of ancient affluence even by local standards. Maybe the fancy plastic business cards I'd ordered hadn't been a waste, after all. Maybe I wasn't quite as foolish as I looked to myself in the ad I'd recorded on Channel 1572. Maybe the three pounds of Springfield mass under my left armpit weren't gradually deforming my spine for nothing.
By the time, some fifteen minutes later, I backed off on the ducted fans, lowered the soft, fat tires, rolled to the address on the interactive map, and negotiated the sinuosities of the private drive, the wireless had given up on the Groaner and switched to "Silver Bells". I climbed out through the Neova's gull-wing, extracted an El Pungentissimo from my tunic pocket, and lit it, out of reflex, with a hand-sheltered wooden match, although the fringe of my serape hung limp in the frost-bitten silence.
Snow sifted down like the soapflakes in Charles Foster Kane's crystal ball, courtesy of Cheyenne Ridge Power & Light, who control the weather to any extent it can be controlled. The other side of the ridge (we'd passed through the road-cut coming down from Laramie) a blizzard raged over the landscape, reducing visibility to Angstroms, forcing me to trust the road company's sub- surface guidance. Between Owl Canyon and what would have been Wyoming, there must be a hundred onscreen warnings about mule deer crossing the greenway. But, as Clarissa sat as far at the other side of the car as she could, her expression funerial, her arms folded across her picturesque chest, I'd been worried about broadsiding mastadons migrating back for the glaciation.
At the scene, an urban tract in the twenty-acre neighborhood, the body, zapped at contact range in the back of the head with a typical Confederate hand-cannon, had been identified by elderly Alberta Mott, co-owner of the property on which it had been found. The other co-owner, her brother Seaton (pronounced "shotten", and he sure as hell had been), was cooling off on the frozen ground with his face distributed over several dozen square feet in an eighth-inch crimson layer beneath a discreet covering of fresh-fallen snow.
Fri 23 Dec 212 A.L., 22:00 O'Clock
"Okay, let's back up once more."
I lit the evening's third cigar, eye-browing the stiff, getting stiffer every minute under a lacework of ice-crystals sparkling in the Neova's headlights like a display in the window of De Sade's Drygoods. The stuff was still falling, threatening to become an incovenience. We might have gone to the house, ablaze with warmth, a hundred yards away. Clarissa, her arms folded tighter than ever, shifted from one foot to the other beside the car. I was feeling blue about the lips myself. My toes in the ends of my hand- tooled stovepipes might have been Tootsie Rolls for all the feeling they had. Still, I'd found a degree of discomfort -- twenty degrees in this case -- works wonders getting the truth out of witnesses.
Four of same, starting with the sister: white-haired, rail-thin even under a hooded cloak, Alberta Mott had never been anybody's vision of delight no matter how many decades you peeled off; business bigwig Freeman K. Bertram, discovering his taste for kilt-wearing didn't fit the climate, I'd known since Day One in the Confederacy; I also knew Ham Charles of NeverSleep Security -- during the year I'd struggled getting established, I'd ingratiated myself with his profession as a matter of course.
None had seen the actual killing, or I wouldn't have been called. The sister had been in the house all day, getting ready for cocktails. Bertram and Merse Littleshin, the fourth at this Waterloo Bridge party, working late in anticipation of time lost to the holidays, had been on the 'com with one another about the time of the murder, the former from his penthouse atop the mile-tall pyramid that houses Laporte Paratronics, Ltd., the latter from his office on the campus, halfway across town. Bertram and Miss Mott had bundled up and come down after I'd arrived. The closest thing to a real witness was Littleshin, whom I recognized from our recent conversation on the 'com.
Preserving evidence, I'd used the Neova's 'com pad, an electronic clipboard half an inch thick, linked to the vast tangle of communication, entertainment, information storage and retrieval on which Confederate civilization depends. Pulling the walnut-sized pickup from a socket at the pad top, I'd stretched the retractible cable to its limit, scanned it over the area where the body lay. Even at this distance, twenty-five or thirty feet, I'd be able to zoom in later and count nose-hairs.
"Tell me again how you found it."
"Please, Detective!" Littleshin blinked and gulped at the same time, fighting some kind of eruption. You never know what it'll be until it happens. He was big, impressive-looking, six feet, a hundred ninety. Oglala Sioux at a guess, mocassins, gloves, high-collared doeskin jacket, long, thick braids done up in fancy silver bands. Handsome bastard, Stoic as hell most of the time, I'd bet, but it wasn't helping him right now. "He was my dear friend and colleague," Littleshin lifted a broad hand, indicating the object of our conversation, then let it drop to his waist, shoving a thumb into his semi-formal pistol belt. "Seaton Mott, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Laporte University, grew each year in wisdom and lived to see a hundred seven summers. Even in death, one does do not refer to such a man as 'it'!"
"This one does." I shook my head. I'm Ute, myself, both sides of the family, five-eight, two twenty-nine. Not so much overweight, I like to think, as undertall. "You will, too, if you want to feel better sooner. Your friend's gone, Mr. Littleshin, the part you cared about. What he left behind can help us figure out who did this, but only if we skip the sentiment. Killings have a short shelf life, the longer one remains unsolved -- "
"Win," Clarissa didn't finish. She thought I was being hard on him. Maybe I was, but I was right, and she knew that, too.
He blinked and gulped again. "Quite correct. As I said, following long custom, I'd gathered, with other members of the Board of Trustees," this time he lifted the hand at Bertram and the guest of honor's sister, "for a holiday drink with my ... my old friend the evening before Exmas Eve." I thought he was going to lose it on "old friend", but he went on. "Arriving somewhat earlier than the others, I was told that Seaton was strolling alone, enjoying the gentle snowfall. Such walks are -- were -- a habit with him. I'd often accompanied him. Sometimes we'd walk here, sometimes in a wooded park adjacent to my office, discussing this and that as old friends will. I'd thought to do so again. I searched his favorite spots, and found ... "
"Steady, now."
" ... it, and called you on my pocket telecom."
In the snow, his mocassins had left the second of two sets of footprints, a quarter hour old when we'd arrived. The others were friend Seaton's, harder to make out given their hundred minutes' seniority, but unmistakable. Both led to an evergreen-surrounded clearing, seventy or eighty yards from the driveway, where the body had been lying, according to Clarissa, an hour and forty-five minutes when discovered. Littleshin had managed to stay put beside the leftovers, as instructed by telecom, without throwing up or otherwise spoiling any evidence, until I got there to make permanent records.
I'd let the pickup linger over those prints, tracing both sets back to the house. At the rate snow was falling, anyone stomping around here the last two hours should have left traces. Mott had. Littleshin had. So should the creep responsible for the small, circular hole at the back of Mott's head, ringed with a dusting of used pistol propellant ("powder burns" as the media love calling them, militantly mistaken as they are about everything else) which told me the wound had been inflicted from a distance of mere inches.
But by whom, Santa's eight tiny flying reindeer?
"Okay, Mr. Littleshin," we'd been over it all a dozen times by now, "one more question. Why did you pick me to call?" Maybe my one big moment, eighteen months ago, still had some advertising value.
He reddened, a neat trick, given the cold and his ethnic background. "I, er, asked Directory Assistance for the investigator most experienced with crimes of extreme violence."
"Right." The Confederacy is nothing if not a land of contrasts. I'd had this teddibly British wimpier-than-thou routine constantly from individuals who considered themselves more civilized than United Statesians, ever since I'd come here. I turned. "Ham, how's the family?"
Mine weren't the only headlights illuminating the scene. Despite his ethnic background -- simian as any orangutan can be -- Ham Charles seemed to enjoy the cold. A head shorter than me, draped in urban cammies, the red- bearded security specialist was as wide as he was tall. I noticed, in a professional way, that he was wearing his old service pistol, a .476 Esquimaux issued to certain volunteer regiments during the War Against the Czar in 1957 (referred to locally as 181 A.L.). He'd been busy with his own evidence collecting. Now he waddled across the snow (the kind that squeaks underfoot) humming "We Wish You a Merry Exmas". He was on overtime. I'd never cared much for the embroidery on his uniform. Too many bad assocoations. Overhead, a small dirigible with the same NeverSleep Eye-in-the-Pyramid logo emblazoned on its fuselage, had maneuvered floodlamps into position, adding to the confusion of light and shadow below.
"Little woman's fatter every day," Charles grinned, "Kid'll grow up to be a gunsmith, we let him live. Win, this never woulda happened, they'd let us set up perimeters like I wanted. Customer's always right." He snorted the sarcasm. "Any idea who's paying you?"
He had a point: he patrolled on contract, I'd been called and come running. I wasn't sanguine about perimeter alarms, however. Confederate crime is rare (one reason for Littleshin's snotty attitude about the States) and it wouldn't have been worth it. What really griped Charles was the job of keeping the newsies out. Their lights and their demented gabble were perceptible at the property line, even from where we stood. I expected gunfire any minute -- or maybe it was wishful thinking.
Being a doorknob rattler by profession, Ham's natural assumption was that the killer was some evil-minded outsider he'd failed to keep outside. I was working on a different assumption: who said the killer wasn't one of the insiders I was dealing with? Except in my late homeland, where, until Bernie Goetz became a hero, slaughtering strangers was a national sport (Bernie would have been an ordinary citizen here, with only his odd preference for underpowered weapons to distinguish him), a murderer needs reasons for selecting his victim, reasons someone he already knows is likeliest to offer.
"Pardon me, Detective." Littleshin again. "I couldn't help overhear. I believe I may speak for the University Trustees, horrified as we all are at what's been done to our Chairman."
From the Neova's direction, out of one corner of my ear, I heard a 'com shrill. Clarissa reached to get it. I dismissed it from my mind.
Littleshin went on. "I'm not certain how one does this, but we wish to hire you to expose Seaton's murderer. I suggest, no, demand -- " For emphasis he drew his own gun, a stylish .39 caliber SEK III, matte black with bright metallic highlights glinting along the sighting rib in the lamplight. " -- that you begin with Dora Jayne Thorens, the one person who could have done this, or would have wanted to."
"Nonsense!"
I'd opened my mouth, was interrupted before I got a word out, and shut it to avoid frozen tonsils. Miss Mott trudged from where she huddled beside Bertram. "Merse Littleshin, you haven't any right to speak for the Trustees."
He shrugged, "I concede that any decision will have to be confirmed -- "
"Mrs. Grundy's having a crisis," Clarissa came close, lowering her voice, "I have to go see whether there's anything to it." In the last stages of rejuvenation, she was always having a crisis. Or somebody was. Now that I thought about it, I was surprised Clarissa hadn't been called away earlier. Miss Mott was waiting, not listening to whatever Littleshin had to add.
I turned to Clarissa, a familiar sour expression settling itself on my face. "Okay," I told her under my breath, "But what happened to 'We've got shopping to do in time for Exmas with Mother'?"
Clarissa gave me a look; I remembered she hadn't said that. "I have to go. I'll send for a hovercab." Her tone was impatient, her thoughts already somewhere else. "If you wish, I'll perform the autopsy myself."
"Young man," Miss Mott hadn't heard our exchange. For a moment I wished she'd shut up and let me finish one thing at a time. Charles gave me a look of professional sympathy -- or maybe one married sapient to another.
I let out a disgusted breath. "I'd appreciate that," I told Clarissa, referring to the meatcutting, "Take the Neova, though, and let me call a cab."
"I have to pick up the van and my equipment," she explained, exasperation in her voice, "Anyway, you're the one who uses the car as an office."
I'd been trying to say something nice -- look what it gets you. "Okay, call a cab, then. Ham, here, will tell his men to let it pass." The orangutan nodded. "See you when I'm through here."
She shook her head. "Not tonight, Win. I really ought to do my rounds, now that we're back in town. And Mrs. Grundy needs me."
I didn't ask What if I need you? Instead, I directed my attention to Miss Mott. "I'm sorry, you were saying?"
"I said I lived with my brother many years, he a bachelor, I remaining unmarried to take care of him. It's true Mr. Littleshin was Seaton's friend. I've never had much liking for the man and never attempted to conceal it. For the University to hire you would require unanimous consent of the Trustees. One of them, Jennifer Smythe, is on vacation and cannot be reached."
"The President of the Confederacy?" I'd known she was visiting a low- gee Lunar health resort, we'd gotten a postcast from her last week. What I hadn't realized was that she was a University Trustee.
"Being a Trustee myself," Miss Mott continued, "I'd vote against hiring you, although for no reason you may imagine. Seaton and I are the last of our line, young man, brought up to take care of our own. If you're willing, however, I'll engage you privately to discover who murdered my brother."
It suited me. I still had to find a gift for Clarissa (her mother, too, although to tell the truth, I'd always preferred Ebenezer Scrooge before he was intimidated into a state of altruistic perfection). Now I knew how I was going to pay for it. During twenty-seven years as a Stateside cop, I'd never worried about things like advertising, bookkeeping, billing. I'd had the City & County of Denver taking care of that. I collected a check every month, whether the paying customers liked what I was doing or not. Life is hard in a free country, don't let anybody tell you otherwise.
I turned to look, but Clarissa was gone.
"Okay," I told them, "let's go over it one more time."
Next: Sat 24 Dec 212 A.L., 02:15 O'Clock
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