Then he walked back over to the bar and resumed his conversation with the bartender.
Neely and I drifted back toward the front of the club. It took awhile to get there; there were people everywhere. We were ten feet from the door when we heard the scream.
This was no scream of ecstasy, either.
3
Two coppers were trying to restrain her and doing a pretty bad job of it.
She was a small, fine-boned, blonde woman who was just now starting to go gray. She was all feet and elbows and fists; that’s why they were having such a hard time restraining her.
What she wanted to do, apparently, was get to the man on the sidewalk. The dead man. You see that a lot, the bereaved just wanting to touch the deceased. The problem is the crime scene. You let anybody touch anything, especially the corpse, and you’ve violated the scene pretty seriously. Later on, a shyster could kill you with this in court, especially if you get an android judge. There’s no way to get to those bastards—they don’t care about chicks or dope or money. And there’s no way to blackmail them, either. All the fuckers care about is justice.
I pushed through the crowd. Walked over to the woman. Took out my shooter and put it next to the temple on the right side of her head.
You could hear the people gasp all at once.
It got very quiet, very fast.
Was a copper going to blast this woman right out in public?
I turned the little indicator on the side of my shooter to T and blasted away. The public thinks that all shooters can do is kill people. They don’t know that the T stands for tranquilizer. You zap someone with a little T-juice, and they calm right down.
It worked like a charm. A minute or two later, the coppers were able to let the woman go.
I walked her down the street, out of the nimbus of holo lights, away from the whispering crowd, and she sat on a bus bench and we talked.
About halfway through the interview, Neely joined us. We sat on either side of the woman.
Her name was Eileen Bridges. Her husband’s name was Bob. He’d been a physician’s assistant. He’d been coming to the cybersex bar for the past eight months. She hadn’t liked the idea at first, she said, but she gradually got used to it. At least he wasn’t going out with real women. And this way there was no threat of disease. Or falling in love.
“So you really didn’t mind him coming here?” Neely said.
Eileen Bridges had apparently depleted her reserve of tears. All she had left were sharp little sniffles. “Well, I didn’t, you know, like it.”
“Did you ever argue about it?”
“Sure. Sometimes.”
“Did he ever hit you?” I said.
“You mean because of the steroids and everything?” Eileen Bridges said.
“Right,” I said.
“No. I mean, I know they can make people act kind of crazy but Bobby was able to handle it. He was pretty much of a doctor himself. The doc he worked for was a junkie and Bobby pretty much had to do all the work, anyway.”
Neely asked her more questions. I sat back and looked at all the hover cars trying to sneak into the air space above the cybersex parlor. The traffic was heavy and slow-moving. The sky was crawling with coppers and the beams of the giant searchlights were criss-crossing the sky. It all reminded me of the old holos about Hollywood, the difference being that old Hollywood hadn’t been divided into four sectors that were constantly at war, two of the sectors being pretty much the exclusive property of drug gangs.
Neely said, “How about enemies?”
“Everybody liked Bobby.”
“Everybody?”
“Well, you know.”
“Mrs. Bridges, do me a favor, all right?”
“All right.”
“Knock off the bullshit.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“I’m talking about this nice little act you’re putting on for Officer Mulligan and me.”
“What ‘nice little act’?”
Neely took a deep breath. “According to you, your husband was just a nice normal guy who went to the cybersex parlors as a kind of boyish prank. Right?”
“Right.”
“And also according to you, your husband was a wonderful guy who everybody liked and respected. Right?”
“Right.”
“Well, Mrs. Bridges, I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but I just got a feed on my communicator.” Neely tapped her wrist communicator dramatically. “Your husband has a record. Two recent charges. First one is for beating up a hooker. Second one is for having sex in the middle of a supper club.”
“I didn’t say he was perfect.”
“What I’m getting at, Mrs. Bridges, is a guy who beats up hookers is not the sort of guy everybody would like. Beating up a hooker means he had a bad temper, and having a bad temper means he had enemies. So let’s just knock off the bullshit, all right, and get down to it. Who were your husband’s enemies?”
Eileen Bridges turned and looked at me with real panic in her eyes. She was a nice, gentle little woman and not used to Neely’s sort of harshness.
I just shrugged, indicating that Neely was in charge here.
“Well…I guess Doctor Graves.”
“Doctor Graves?”
“Bobby’s boss.”
“His boss was an enemy?”
“Well, it was because of the party.”
“What party?”
“Oh, last year at holiday time, the medical clinic where Bobby worked put on this big party. I couldn’t go. I had the flu. And Bobby…well, it didn’t really mean anything. He got drunk was all. It really didn’t mean anything.”
“What didn’t mean anything, Mrs. Bridges?”
“When he had sex with Doctor Graves’ wife. On the desk in Doctor Graves’ office, I mean.”
“Did Doctor Graves find out about this?”
“Oh, yes. He walked in when it was still going on.”
“And he didn’t fire Bobby?”
“He said that would be too easy.”
“Doctor Graves said it would be too easy?”
“Right.”
“So what did Doctor Graves do?”
“He just started making Bobby’s life hell for him. Kept writing up disciplinary reports and things like that all the time. You know, all that stuff gets fed into the big computers and it stays on your permanent record. What he was doing, Doctor Graves I mean, was slowly destroying Bobby’s career.”
“Why didn’t Bobby quit?”
“Couldn’t afford to.”
“All right. How about any other enemies?”
“Sandy Lane.”
“Sandy?”
“This nurse he worked with.”
“What happened with Sandy?”
“Oh, you know, they had a little thing.”
“Sex?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How long did it last?”
“According to Bobby, just a few nights. According to her, it was more like four months.”
“How’d you find out about it?”
“Sandy.”
“Sandy told you?”
“Uh-huh. And to my face. I was at the supermarket one day, getting out of my car, and there she was. She just came right up to me and said, ‘Your husband and I are in love and we plan to get married.’”
“And what did you say?”
“What could I say? I felt kind of embarrassed for both of us, so I just ran inside the supermarket.”
“And you confronted Bobby later?”
“Oh, no.”
“You didn’t confront Bobby?”
“It had happened before. Women coming up to me like that. Bobby had a lot of these little affairs. They didn’t mean anything.” Eileen Bridges shook her
head. “They really didn’t. They were just sex. They weren’t real love. The kind Bobby had for me, I mean.”
While she was talking, I saw the teenage girl start walking toward us. She wore a tan jumpsuit that flattered her dark hair and long, lovely face. The closer she got, the more I saw the resemblance. She was Eileen Bridges’ daughter. Had to be.
“Oh, honey,” Eileen said when she saw her. To Neely, “It’s my daughter, Melissa.”
She got up off the bench and ran to her.
“How’d you find out about this, honey?” Eileen said.
“I was over at Cindy’s watching the holo. It was on the news. So I took a skybus down here.”
She looked stricken, she seemed so sad. Eileen took her hand and brought her over and introduced us.
Eileen Bridges wouldn’t let go of her. Kept giving her motherly little hugs and combing her long, shiny hair with her fingers. And wiping the tears from Melissa’s face.
Melissa raised her gaze every half-minute or so and looked at the man sprawled on the sidewalk, the sheet over him.
“I wonder if he’ll get cold, lying there like that,” Melissa said. She sounded dreamy. Shock victims usually do. “Maybe they should put a heavier blanket on him.”
Eileen Bridges looked at Neely and said, “I’d like to take her home.”
Neely nodded her assent.
We sat there on the bench and watched them walk away and disappear into the thinning crowd.
Then we went back to work.
The next hour was spent cleaning up odds and ends and checking with all the other coppers on the scene.
Afterwards, we sat in the hover car for another half-hour while Neely typed out the prelim on the car’s computer. I spent the time looking up the names and addresses of the two people — boss Graves and girlfriend Sandy Lane — Mrs. Bridges had given us. I then checked them out for criminal records. None. Economic profiles indicated that Graves was well off, with no heavy debt. Sandy Lane wasn’t so lucky. A working girl, she’d had to refinance her debt load twice and was on the brink of refinancing it a third time.
When Neely finished with the prelim, she punched off the computer and dusted her hands off and said, “Done and done.” Neely spends a lot of her time watching old Laurel and Hardy holos.
Then we shot up into the air and headed back to the station. Time for beddy-bye.
Neely’s funny after a murder. You never know which way she’s going to go. Murder can make her really horned up or it can make her frigid as hell.
Tonight was the former. She slid her hand across my thigh and said, “You feel like putting into Bradhill down there?”
Bradhill is a park.
I smiled. “Only if you’re willing to pay me. My services come pretty high.”
“Then fuck you. Forget it.”
Murder can also do that to Neely. Make her quick to anger.
“Hey, I was kidding. Jesus, you couldn’t tell I was kidding?”
“Maybe I’m not in the mood to kid.”
“You’re in the mood to fool around but you’re not in the mood to kid?” I said.
“I didn’t know the two necessarily went together.”
I sighed. “I’m sorry, all right?”
Her hands were folded over her sweet breasts and she was staring out the window with tears in her eyes. You think the Sphinx is a mystery, you should try Neely some time.
“Let’s just forget it for tonight, all right?” she said, her voice soft now.
“Great,” I said. Then: “Look, I could really use it tonight. And I think you could, too.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Neely? You hear what I said? I said I could really use it tonight. And I think you could, too.”
I could barely catch her nod. It was a dinky tiny little thing but it was there and I saw it and I put the hover car down near the lake that takes up the northernmost part of the park.
After I killed the rocket, we sat there for a long while not saying anything. Just listening to the night sounds.
I took her hand and held it.
“Let’s just do it, all right,” she said. “And get it over with.” She looked over at me. “You don’t need to hold my hand or tell me I’m pretty or special or any of that stuff tonight, okay, Mulligan? You know it’s bullshit and I know it’s bullshit so why even bother?”
Ah, the language of love.
I suggested we get out of the car, use the blanket I keep on hand for official gonadic emergencies. But she didn’t even want to do that tonight.
She slipped out of her uniform with surprising ease, given the confines of the hover car, and then told me to move over to her seat, and then she unzipped me and when I was good and hard, she slid herself down me, like she was sliding down a pole.
Neely has a juicy thirty-eight-year-old body and it’s always like getting a gift from the gods. She gives herself up to sex in a way I can only envy. Even when I’m going at it hot and heavy, I can still hear mosquitos buzzing and feel breezes on my bare bottom and I get ideas about cases I’m working on.
Not Neely. She’s a pounder and a screamer and a sweater. I’m like that only at the very end.
I always think of coming as almost like dying and being reborn again because, when you think about it, those two-and-a-half seconds of orgasm are a kind of blissful death, and then you’re rejuvenated, and for at least a small amount of time you feel optimistic and happy and at peace. A whole bunch of happy-face little cells bouncing around and applauding their little asses off.
I’ve never had a bad orgasm and tonight wasn’t any exception.
After she’d pummeled me while she was coming, she slumped against me, sort of tucking her face into my shoulder, and said, “I’m depressed.”
“How come?”
She gave a little shrug.
“You ever feel guilty about boppin’ me all the time?” I said.
She lifted her face and looked at me. “No. My old man’s a sweet guy and I love him to death but he’s a dud in the sack.”
The docs had had her try to make love to her husband a few times, thinking that maybe sex would jar him from his self-imposed prison. No suck luck.
She said, “Well, yeah. Maybe a little. Guilty, I mean. I wouldn’t want my daughter to think I’m a slut or anything.”
“I just wish you’d be happy once. You know, after we do it.”
“It’s your ego.”
“What’s my ego?” I said.
“You think that because I’m not happy, you haven’t satisfied me. But you have. I always come and I always feel good.”
“About coming you feel good?”
“Yeah,” she said. “In fact, about coming I feel real good.”
“But not about anything else?”
“Not about anything that concerns you.”
“Oh.”
“See.”
“See what?”
“That’s what I mean. The way you said ‘Oh.’”
“The way I said ‘Oh?’”
“Yeah. Like you’re all hurt inside and stuff.”
“Well, maybe I am all hurt inside.”
“It’s just your ego, Mulligan. Take my word for it. You want me to fall in love with you. But I’m not going for it. No offense.”
“Yeah. No offense.”
“See.”
“See what?”
“You said ‘No offense’ just the way you said ‘Oh.’”
“All hurt inside?”
“Right.”
“Because you won’t fall in love with me?”
“Right.”
I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut the rest of the night.
4
It took twenty-four hours to catch up with Doctor Graves, and thirty-two to find Sandy Lane
.
Doctor William Graves III, as he was referred to in the tri-D letters on his doorway, practiced medicine in an eyrie one-hundred-and-three floors above the ground. I assume he didn’t have many patients who suffered from vertigo.
As we stepped off the elevator, Neely whistled. “Wow. He must do all right for himself.”
And she wasn’t kidding.
Graves had the entire floor and he obviously spent a lot of cash designing and decorating it. Everything was bright and relentlessly cheery. Cute little tunes with syncopated rhythms played low in the background while a very appealing scent of something fresh and outdoorsy was spritzed on the air.
The red-haired receptionist looked sexy in her white nurse’s outfit. But not too sexy. Young but not too young. Intelligent but not too intelligent.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to give the doctor a few minutes,” she said. “He just got in.”
I checked the chrono on the wall. “At eleven thirty-seven in the morning he just got in?”
“He was in San Diego last night. His rocket landed just about half-an-hour ago. He came straight here.”
Well, Graves seemed to be covered with an alibi. Didn’t surprise me. And I emphasize “seemed.” A lot of alibis disintegrate on closer inspection.
“No problem. We’ll wait,” I said.
“He was a very nice guy,” the receptionist said.
“Bobby?”
She nodded.
I wondered just how nice she thought he was. Ole Bobby got around a bit. I wondered if maybe he’d ever met up with the red-haired receptionist in a dark conference room.
****
“It’s terrible,” Doctor Graves said when we were escorted into his private office. “Just terrible.”
He said this even before he offered a handshake.
“He was the best physician’s assistant I ever had.”
After we were seated, I spent a long moment staring out the window that covered half a wall. This high up, you felt very close to the rockets that were constantly blasting off from the port ten miles to the east. Their flames were vivid against the bright blue sky.
Neely wasn’t up for any testimonial dinners that Graves was going to visit upon his old friend Bobby Bridges. She got right to it.
“I believe he had an affair with your wife, Doctor Graves. Isn’t that true?”
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