“So you want a pass to the events,” she said after I’d done that. “Permission to look round, question people, examine files and evidence—”
“Just so,” I said. “If I’m going to do this job at all, I’m going to need it. And my friends among the police are non-existent.”
“I’ll make a call or two,” she said. “You’ll want it now, of course. You usually do.”
“In this case,” I said, “I damn well need it now. Things get cold fast, and if I’m going to go looking—”
“Right,” she said. “I was about to shower and collapse. I should love to shower and collapse. I’ll make the calls first, and someone will get back to you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks very much. Have a lovely shower.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Then I started punching buttons on the room screens. Cornelia Rasczak (I knew a little of this from Euglane, and got more, as I punched and read, from news files, directories and a few professional yearbooks) had been 42 years old, a tiny brown-haired woman with a fierce expression and, people said, a very mild manner. She’d been a neuropsychologist—which is not much like a neurosurgeon; the emphasis is on the psychologist half, and her field would be a little closer to Euglane’s than to Guin Jenn’s—attached to a Rehab unit in (Ravenal’s flair for names again) Third Injuries Complex, one of the larger hospitals in the city.
She’d been born on Pupil III, blazed her way through schooling there, and managed to get a place at the Scholarte for her graduate work, which meant that she’d been in the top one per cent of her field, for her age and weight. She went on amassing degrees for a while, taking a year off after the Ph. D. to get into practice with a small Rehab facility in City Three, and finally found herself a spot with Third Injuries Complex, in City Two, as an associate. Her family was back on Pupil III, and it had never been one of those close-knit families; on Ravenal she found friends and co-workers, and when she’d been with Third Injuries Complex about four months she met Harris France.
It had been a romantic story, in a way, and it turned up in several features on the couple: a Homicide Detective-Captain had become a patient of Cornelia Rasczak’s. He’d had one of the wasting diseases of the nervous system that used to be quickly fatal, a hundred years back, and are now very slowly fatal— which is an improvement, as it gives the patient ten or twelve years in which to find something else to die of—and he needed a lot of physical retraining after the first set of major attacks, and some understanding of what he could expect his nerves and muscles to do, which was where Cornelia had come in.
He hadn’t been a good patient—a good patient, as somebody has noticed, is not the patient who causes no trouble, but the patient who gets well. He’d caused no trouble, he’d followed orders and advice, he’d even improved very slightly—but he felt more and more tired of the fight, and he was ready to pack it in. He was thinking of suicide, and came to France for help.
France temporized with him—and called his doctor. Between them, he and Cornelia managed to restore enough of the man’s spirit so he went on working, and gradually began to improve mentally and emotionally as well as physically. He lived fairly happily, and with a good deal of normal function, for eight years, and fell out of a boat during a storm, and drowned.
Long before that, Harris France and Cornelia Rasczak had become an Item, and they had remained an Item. France had had, as I’ve said, a few liaisons here and there, though nothing serious since his early twenties; for Cornelia there had been work, and little else; he was her first and, as things turned out, her only love.
I looked around for any evidence at all of an affair, and found nothing. Euglane had assured me there hadn’t been one, but he had to be going on what Harris France knew, and if there had been one, Cornelia wouldn’t have been supplying him with bulletins.
But there was nothing. I amassed a pile of small facts, and found nothing in them to chew on. So I reached for the phone to start calling people, and it blipped at me.
A secretarial voice told me I could pick up an official document giving me official permission to look anywhere and question anybody, and only (she emphasized it just a hair) as regarded the murder of Cornelia Rasczak, at police HQ for City Two. I thanked the voice, hung up and made that my first stop. Just about an hour later, document in hand, I was standing at the door of Harris France’s two-story house, arguing with an officer.
I’d showed him the document, all neatly printed out on fax paper, and he’d read it. Two or three times, and slowly. “Nobody gets in here,” he said, in a lagging, almost smooth baritone. “It’s closed to the public.”
“I’m not the public,” I said wearily. “This paper comes from Michael Morse. Directly. You do know who Michael Morse is?”
“He has to follow the rules, just like everybody else,” the officer said. He’d been lounging in front of the brightly painted door when I arrived, looking bored.
“Damn it,” I said, “this paper is the rules. It says I can—” and a good alto voice from a second-story window said:
“Paolo, what the Hell’s going on down there?”
“Gink wants to get in, Mirella,” the officer called back.
“Nobody gets in,” Mirella said.
Paolo said: “He’s got papers. From the M. G. Says he can look around.”
Mirella sighed. A very theatrical sigh, worthy of the voice. “So let him look around,” she said.
“But—”
“The M. G. says, so you do,” Mirella said. “Let him by.”
Paolo raised his hands to heaven, or to Mirella one flight up, and then, reluctantly, opened the door. I took a last look around—the house sat in the middle of a greenflower expanse, surrounded at several hundred feet by a circling double row of walking-trees: that inner row would move along with the sun every day, providing maximum shade for the front of the big lawn; these were the tame variety, and I felt a certain fondness for them. Their cousins, on Rigel IV, had had a nasty habit of stampeding, and I’d managed, after some struggle, to break the habit. They’re not trees, of course, but—when not actually stampeding—they’re good company, if you like the leafy silent type.
The greenflower came right up to the door, or within inches; at the door itself there was some packed dirt. It looked scuffed or trampled, probably, I thought, by the endless parade of police who’d certainly been visiting since the afternoon before.
Paolo was waiting with exaggerated patience at the open door. I gave him a nod and a smile and went on through.
I shut the door behind me, leaving Paolo to enjoy the sunshine—it was a lovely day in late Spring for City Two—and set about things. I gave the room I was in one look—it was a large living-room, furnished in a plain, almost bare style—and turned right back to the door.
There must be ways to gimmick glassex windows, but I have never heard of one: glassex is unbreakable, and sealed into place by heat and an electric field, and though I was going to look over the locks and sealing with great care I wanted to concentrate on the damn door first. It had been locked when France saw it after the murder—which was easy: many doors lock automatically when closing unless you tell them not to, and most locks can be gimmicked, anyhow, without enormous effort—and it had been chained from the inside, which was not easy at all.
The room was painted almost as brightly as a circus, for all its simplicity. Harris France and Cornelia Rasczak had apparently liked bright colors, because the walls were a staring sky-blue almost the color of Euglane’s eyes, the door itself— thin wood, showy just because it was real wood, but thin enough to be kicked in without your having to be a notable athlete about it—a fine, slightly dark yellow, and the chain—which was of fairly heavy metal—bright red.
It was the simplest kind of chain lock, a set of small heavy links hanging from a metal plate bolted to the wall, about four feet from the floor. A knob at the end dropped into a slot in a smaller metal plate bolted to the door. I took out a handkerchief—the odds were e
normous that the thing had already been fingerprinted, possibly two or three times, but if so the job had been done very neatly, there was no powder residue, and in any case why take chances?—picked up the chain, and dropped it into the slot. It looped down gracefully a bit, the red standing out against the dark-yellow door. It looked solid, heavy enough not to break under pressure from outside. The bolts holding the metal plates looked solid, too, and showed no sign of tampering
And the chain hadn’t been broken. I lifted the knob out of its slot and went over the whole chain visually. I dug out a small magnifier from a side pocket of my jumper, and went over the damn thing link by link. Then I went over it again.
Freshly painted, but not all that freshly—slight signs of wear. No signs of breakage, solder or strain.
I made a note to check the police files for records of heat residue on the chain, on the inside of the door, on the metal plates, and on the wall near the chain. If somebody had touched those within an hour—perhaps within two hours—of examination, there’d be heat residue the police measurements would have turned up.
Not that the touch would tell me anything: if the door had been used, the chain would have to have been touched by somebody; the knob was in its slot when France saw it, right after waking up.
Unless, of course, there’d been a visitor present who could walk right through the locked and chained-up door without leaving traces. An alien, in fact—one of Harris France’s invisible alien examiners.
Or Folla, for that matter—who might have got in and out through the damn fourth dimension.
God knows that sounded improbable—but then, Folla himself had sounded improbable, and here I was on Ravenal.
I sighed, and vowed to concentrate on heat residue. It made things so much simpler. Then it occurred to me that the subject was really, truly, totally meaningless: Harris France had had to get out of the damn house to go see Euglane, and he’d have had to handle the chain then.
Damn.
The door itself got an examination as thorough as I’d given the chain. It had occurred to me that the whole wood door could have been taken off its hinges, or removed in some way, and replaced after the murder. That notion left me with the same problem the chain posed: the hinges were on the inside of the door. But it seemed easier somehow to gimmick large iron hinges (painted the same yellow as the door) than to gimmick a smaller and much more visible chain of the same material.
Removing the door would have been noisy, and visible. But that was not an objection: Harris France, asleep, wouldn’t have heard the noise (and if Cornelia had heard it, she might not have lived long enough to do anything about it), and nobody would have seen the removal—the walking-trees would have interfered, and any (remotely possible) spectator would have been standing in an open road hundreds of yards away.
But getting the hinges back, on the inside of the door, would have been a neat trick. They were painted, and the paint showed no cracks or flakes.
Damn.
All right, pass the door. Provisionally. Maybe one of the window locks would offer a clue. Maybe there was another entrance to the place; a back door, a kitchen door, a cellar door— did the place have a cellar?
Had Harris France checked the upstairs windows?
Was there a chimney?
There is seldom any shortage of questions. I sighed again, and turned away from the door, and started out to look through the house.
I was almost instantly interrupted.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A voice I recognized—a good alto—said: “All right: what the Hell have you been doing?”
“My job,” I said, and nodded at a police officer who had to be Mirella, standing near the foot of the flight leading to the upstairs.
“All right, so Paolo says you’ve got a paper,” she said. She came down to ground level. “Let’s see it, buster.”
I walked across the big room, took the fax paper out of a pocket and handed it over. Mirella read it—once, and speedily—and handed it back.
“You got to be something very special,” she said. “This thing is an open pass to poke your nose in everywhere—which I have never seen before. You don’t mind my asking, buster, who the Hell are you?”
She was a short, roundish and muscular woman in her early thirties, with a great mass of tightly curled black hair, and a dark face that was trying hard not to look cheerful, dark shining eyes, pug nose and all. I had the feeling she had to work at not looking cheerful every day she was on duty, and I liked her at once.
“Says so on the paper,” I told her. “Gerald Knave.”
She nodded, unappeased. “And who the Hell is Gerald Knave?”
“I’ve been hired to look into things,” I said. “The note from the M. G. makes it official for you.”
“Hired,” she said, and sighed again, almost as theatrically as she’d sighed at her partner. “Oh, God, don’t tell me you’re private. I thought I knew most of the people work private around here.”
“Just a friend,” I said.
“A friend of the Master General’s,” she said. “Riding a hobby, friend?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “And I do have work to do.”
“You spend half an hour standing at the front door,” she said. “Doing what, I don’t know, but I heard no steps away from the area. Now what?”
“Now the rest of the place,” I said. “You people have had since yesterday afternoon to print and measure, get heat spots and bag anything you found around. Give me a while to do my own version.”
“Got no choice, buster,” she said. “I don’t got to like it, only got to do it. But would you mind telling me what the Hell you’re looking for?”
I shrugged. Why not? “The woman’s dead. Somebody made her dead. Was it Harris France? Maybe something in the house will tell me.”
“Right,” she said. “And you think maybe it wasn’t. I get the door now. There are two others—kitchen door and a little side thing on the right, opens into a kind of garden. Locked, both of them, but no chain.” She saw me look interested, and grinned. She had a fine grin. “Bolted, both of them. Nice heavy iron bolts, inside, and tight.”
“Well,” I said, “he had to get in somehow.”
“He was already in,” she said. She’d moved across to a chair, and sat down on it. I took another chair, across a little table littered with magazine spools. “Harris France. Why look for somebody else?”
“Because maybe he didn’t do it,” I said. “He was sleeping.”
She nodded, tiredly. “Sure,” she said. “He says he was sleeping. What do you want him to say, he was sitting there and watched the whole thing? Look: there was no struggle. Nothing knocked over. All very peaceful, one dead person.”
“So whoever came in was somebody she could trust, more or less,” I said. “He—or she—didn’t come in waving a beamer and foaming at the mouth.”
“He was already in,” Mirella said. “I told you.”
“You found the beamer?” I said.
“We found his,” she told me.
“Clean, no recent shots, fully charged.”
“So he cleaned it, he fiddled the shot counter, he recharged. This is difficult?”
“According to his doctor,” I said, “it’s impossible.”
“Right, I heard that,” she said. “He shot her, went over to this doctor, called it in from there.”
“Or he found her dead, went over to the doctor—”
“You buy his story,” she said, “you are going to be the one person in City Two who does. I mean, come on, now. Nice locked house, one beamer, one body, one guy walking around.”
I nodded. “Who says the house was locked up?”
“He does,” Mirella said.
I gestured at her. “And why would he say that? If he killed her—why not say the door was wide open? Why not put on gloves and open two or three windows, too, just to keep things confusing? No prints, and the heat residue could be anybody’s— an unknown killer, opened a
window and fled. Or walked out the wide-open door, take your pick.”
“Do I know why a killer does things?” she said.
“He’s not a civilian,” I said. “He had to know how it would look. He’s been in Homicide a long time.”
“This job can make you crazy,” she said. “He snapped. End of story.”
“There are always a lot of stories,” I said. “One of them is the right one. Maybe I can find out which one.”
She grinned again. “Good luck,” she said. “You go right ahead and poke around, buster. We did that already. Paolo and me are just here on post now. On your way out, you stop for a fast search; for all I know that paper said you can take stuff away, even, but at least we want to know what.” She looked at me. Hard. “You won’t upset this one,” she said. “No chance. That doesn’t happen. But you want to look—feel free, buster. Feel free.”
So I felt free, and I poked around. Mirella let me work—she ambled over to wherever I was, now and then, just for the company—on post in an empty house can be the dullest of duties—and we exchanged a few words when whatever I was doing at the moment left me any conversational room. I learned a little bit about Mirella, and the Hell of a lot about the house.
The bedroom where Harris France had taken his nap was actually a sort of small den, on the ground floor, a room in the front, to the left of the living room as you came in. The front door led straight into the living room, but a wall only about eight inches to your left had a door in it leading to the sunny little den. which had a small single bed in it. On the ground floor there was also a kitchen, which was extensive, and a bathroom, and a small library. The kitchen had a door—with a nice solid bolt, the kind you slide into its socket and then turn—and there was a door at the far end of the library, also well bolted.
Upstairs, two larger bedrooms—one used as a guest room— a sort of office for Cornelia, and another for France himself, as well as another bathroom.
And I could give you details of the place—I could spend hours doing it, because I took the house about as far apart as I could—and they would be useless. The two bolted doors were impossibilities—maybe somebody cut that front-door chain and restored it undetectably, though I didn’t believe it—but cutting large, solid bolts was something else again. The damn windows were glassex, sealed into place, and the window locks were absolutely solid. There was no chimney.
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