by Sean Stewart
I said a quick grace and bit into my cheese cross-ring. “You should try one of these. It’ll give your teeth something to clench.”
Rolly smiled in spite of himself, and looked away, shaking his head. “I think I’d really like working with you Fletcher, if I didn’t hate it so much.”
“You’d love it,” I promised. I laughed too, spraying bits of pastry over the table. “After all, I’m the best.”
“True,” he said. To my astonishment.
Not knowing how to take the compliment, I turned my mind instead to more familiar territory, puzzling over the case. Now that I was on the trail, everything reminded me of Mask’s body: the flash of chrome from the cafeteria counters, or the char marks on my sandwich. Shaper memory is hard to live with: a whole pattern of associations comes with every image. I couldn’t remember Mask’s corpse without the thin smell of burning, the glinting mirrors, the horror.
But I kept calling that memory back, because the image was trying to tell me something.
Rolly shifted his bulk, toying with his teaspoon: bend. Straighten. “I’ve got a little snippet for you.” Bend.
I left Mask’s body on the dressing room floor, tried to concentrate on Rolly’s pale suit, listening to what he had to say.
Straighten. “The Dobin affair? It looks like the Secretary was being blackmailed because of something he did before he was mar—, well, anyway. I had a guy checking through his files; found an entry under Mask’s name. He thought I might be interested, so he sent it up here.”
I nodded. I couldn’t care less about Ex-Undersecretary Dobin’s sins, but I was eager for any crumb on Mask, no matter how small.
Bend. “Turned out to be a report of an investigation launched after they got an anonymous tip on the Net.”
“Oh my God.”
He took out a notepad. “‘Conclusion: having investigated the allegations referred to above, we are forced to conclude that Mr. Mask is no longer a suitable spokesman for this office or the Government it represents.’” He stuffed the pad back into a capacious pocket.
We stared at one another, solemn but excited, like two kids sharing an awful secret about a teacher. “Oh my God,” I said again. “A matinee idol with feet of clay.”
Rolly nodded grimly. “His face on your TV set every day: my younger sister thinks he’s a saint. Literally. Thinks he is the spirit made flesh, the living embodiment of the Redemption movement.”
“No wonder they want the investigation closed. Oh man, it must have seemed like an act of God for him to drop dead so conveniently before any of this came out.” I looked up at Rolly. “Oh no, you don’t suppose…”
Firmly he shook his head. “The President won’t want an exposé, but he wouldn’t have a man killed. No-one in this government would. You may not like what we stand for, Fletcher, but you know a Red would never stoop to that.”
“Rolly, I just made a Red for stoning a woman to death.”
“That’s wrong, but public,” Rolly protested. “To kill a man covertly and make it look like an accident…” He shook his head.
And probably he was right. Slowly I nodded. “Credit.—But I’ll tell you something, Rolly. The government isn’t going to like this. We’re in the running for a major scandal…”
“Unless we don’t launch an investigation.”
Rolly met my eyes for a long moment. God, what a fix for him, torn between his love of the truth and his loyalty to a government he believed in. Still, he was a good Red after all, which meant that the most important thing in his life was his relationship to God, and a clean conscience his greatest treasure. I think he was relieved when I shook my head. “Sorry,” I said. “We’re going all the way.”
That look was all the pressure he ever put on me. The moment passed, he nodded, squared his shoulders and went back at it. Like most Reds, in his heart of hearts I think he was most comfortable when he knew he was going to have to suffer a bit for the courage of his convictions. “The memo isn’t all. Just for the heck of it I used my coffee break to get the account number of the tipster.”
The way cops get supposedly private information never fails to unnerve me. “And the pay-off?”
“Would you believe the face that launched a thousand boats?”
“Celia!” Rolly grinned and nodded, pleased by my reaction. Well well well: so much for Innocence Betrayed. She had squealed on Jonathan Mask. A great man, Delaney had said, and we sit gambling for his clothes. Celia shoving in the spear. And then that comment about maybe she should get a lawyer before she said anything else…“I’d love a copy of the statements as soon as possible, of course. When is the will to be read?”
Rolly grunted. “Tomorrow. Mask wasn’t a poor man: if we’re looking for motives…” The spoon tapped against the inside of his teacup, curled, straightened up. Crumpled metal, pointing to the fall, twisted with fear. The blasphemous cross.
A strange shape, the cross. Perpendicular lines. The conflict of irreconcilable ideas. Christ as man and Christ as God. The cross the form of paradox. But—where had I seen that crucified body before? Jesus—of course!!
“Christ!” I breathed, sitting bolt upright.
As I bumped the table a wave of Rolly’s tea leapt from his cup and into his lap. He swore and grabbed a handful of napkins. “Can’t you stay under control for ten consecutive minutes? What the hell is wrong with you, lady?”
“Shut up. Listen. Remember how Mask looked when we saw the body?”
“We’ve been through this before—”
“No, not his expression,” I said, revelation cresting over me. Another part, another piece: I could feel the hit of the pattern dancing in my blood as I leaned across the table. Rolly paused, seeing I was on to something. “Not his expression, his whole body.”
The actor sits in his dressing room. The door opens and the assassin enters. The actor pales beneath the scarlet mask as he understands the meaning of the object in the killer’s hand. Frantically he tries to get out of the costume. Long before he can get free, death reaches his heart, freezing a vision of Hell on his face.
Rolly’s eyes were pudgy slits. “Yeah?”
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it.” I fell back into my usual slouch, grinning like a maniac. “If you hadn’t known about the costume, what would you have said when you saw the body?”
For a fat man in a cream-coloured suit, Rolly wasn’t slow on the uptake. His eyes widened. “Taser cross!” he whispered.
“Yeah. Taser cross.”
He took the phone from the hip pocket of his jacket and punched in a four-digit extension. “Dory? Captain French. I need some information, double time. Send a couple of men around to the Mask site and search it for a taser—could be hidden. Find out which suspects carry ’em. Impound everything.”
“That’s what did it,” I said. “Of course he didn’t stick his finger in a light-socket. Someone shot him with a taser and it overloaded the capacitor.” I finished my cross-ring, feeling the hunting curl in me. O, it was good to feel my strength again. I was on the trail now, and inevitably the tiny fragments of data, each meaningless in itself, would form into a whole.
“Getting somewhere,” Rolly muttered. “I really wish you were wrong about this, Fletcher, but I’m beginning to think you’re right. If we find the puncture marks, we’ll know for sure that Mask was murdered. We still won’t know who did it, of course.”
I waved expansively. “Have faith, Captain! Just as God created man in his image, our great acts bear our imprint. When I have completely recreated the murder, I’ll have found the murderer.” Rolly favoured me with his best dubious frown. “The trick is to walk in the killer’s footprints. Then you’ll know why he makes each twist and turn.” Rolly rolled his eyes and I laughed. “Really, it’s elementary, my dear Captain.”
In a fit of good humor I bought him dessert.
By eight we had the preliminary searches and I left Central with the list in my hip pocket. Delaney, Allen, Vachon, “Wagner,” Len, and Sar
ah Riesling, another member of the stage crew, had all carried civilian tasers at some point. As had Mask, for that matter. These weapons had been collected and sent to Forensics.
I glowered at the city through the window of my car. What did it say about modern life that half of the possible suspects owned a taser? Mine lay in my jacket like an unwanted toy. The perfect weapon for the age: effective, personal, efficient, and clean. We like our air unpolluted and our assaults bloodless, thank you. God’s weapon—lightning at your fingertips.
I cursed my stupidity in not realizing earlier that Mask had been shot. If we had treated his death like a murder from the start, we would be most of the way home already. By now the killer would have ditched the murder weapon. If he was clever and cautious, he’d have gotten another, second hand, so he would have one to turn over if required.
A quick call to the forensics lab had confirmed my guess that even a civilian taser charge would have been easily sufficient to overload the capacitor. They were going to go over the suit again looking for puncture marks where the taser’s prongs had struck. Such marks might have been obliterated in the massive shock, but I was betting the murderer had shot Mask from in front. The worst damage was on the back and side of the costume around the battery and main cables: with luck the prong marks would still be there.
So what did I have? I knew Mask had been murdered, and I was pretty sure of when and how it had been done. The next question was why?
I was not looking forward to a night alone in my apartment. I had been up too long; I was tired of the case. Actually, I was just plain tired. Like cheap wine the hunting edge had turned thin and sour. I considered my prospects without enthusiasm. Queen E was lousy conversation. Tuesday was Finance Night on NT. I wasn’t in the mood to read.
You just want to feel sorry for yourself, right? Uh, yeah. That’s right.
Shit.
I wanted to feel, but I couldn’t. Fatigue, burnout—whatever. The world beyond the rain-spattered windshield was filming over, leaving me. As if a layer of shellac had been brushed across my senses.
I wondered if getting old was like this. With age the corneal lens dries, hardens, yellows. Without noticing it, your light-reception goes down by as much as sixty percent. Touch fades too; I remembered an old woman in the cafeteria, fumbling with her spoon because she couldn’t find its edges any more. Losing the edges on things.
When the greyness comes down you’re too tired to get out, too numb. You’ve got to fight it by prevention. Don’t let it catch you.
Skirting the edge of the barrio. About five blocks over was Jim’s Presbyterian Church. Would have been pleasant, but they weren’t Tuesday night worshippers. Suddenly I envied the minister, Mary Ward. How pleasant it would be to work with people who cared for life, not those bent on destroying it. We both had our calling, but Mary Ward worked for the God of Love, and I for the God of Wrath.
Maybe it didn’t have to be that way. I could change. I should. Yes. And soon…
There, beneath the Coke glow-board, the Redemption Ministry Church. Short one deacon, because of me. And you know, I didn’t care. Couldn’t care about Rutger White, or Jonathan Mask, or Angela Johnson either. I tried to see her body again, her golden hair clotted with blood, tried to catch the taste of her terror, her pain, tried to imagine what it must have been like for Mask in those last seconds when he knew he was about to die. Thought about my father, sitting in his study, thinking he was alone, head bent over papers, blind eyes filling with tears, whispering my mother’s name.
Anything. Anything to feel.
A whisper of my father’s grief stirred in me, like a thin sigh of wind. I seized it, held it, craved its cool touch within me, where I felt still and empty as a desert.
This was the first time the numbing had caught me during a hunt. Before, the chase had always been enough to keep my senses open, alive. But the grey was catching up to me, catching up. After each time you have to go a little closer to the edge…you have to cut a little deeper to remember what it is to feel.
What would have happened, there on that tower in Jerusalem, had Christ taken the Devil’s bet and flung himself over the parapet? Would he have floated, the Son of God? Or hurtled, the Son of Man, through the empty air, Icarus with doubt-melted wings, and dashed his mortal foot against a stone?
On a sudden impulse I darted across two lanes and slid down an alleyway while someone swore behind me and braked, slamming his horn. “Sorry, brother,” I said, not sorry a damn.
In five minutes I was parked behind a car with no back tires, next to a vandalized powerbox.
I was dripping wet by the time I reached Jericho Court and knocked at #8. A distorted eye filled the spyhole, then retreated as the door opened. “Hi,” Jim said uncertainly.
“Hi.” Tension fluttered in my stomach. “So.”
Standing on his threshold, Jim kept staring at me as if hoping I was a side-effect. “Is…—is there a problem?” His fingers flexed nervously around the doorknob.
“No, no problem.” A drip of water ran gracefully down my forehead and plunged off the end of my nose.
Galvanized, Jim reached for my arm. “Please, come in! Good God, I didn’t mean to keep you standing there in the rain. It was just unexpected, see—”
“Yeah. Thanks.” I came in and dripped on his rug while he reached behind me and shut the door on the blattering rain.
“Come in, come in. It’s not much, but at least it’s dry.”
I had forgotten how warm his place was: hot and snug, like the burrow of some small animal. A rabbit, or a mole maybe. “Thanks. I felt like company, and I was in the neighbourhood, so…” As I turned into the living room I saw why Jim was nervous.
Two other men, both in their early thirties, were sitting in the middle of the floor. Each held a forgotten hand of cards. Both were staring at me. “Aren’t you going to introduce us to the lady?” the one on the left said to Jim with undisguised admiration. The smell of templar lolled in the air; a small cone of incense next to the bookshelf threw off languid coils of pungent scent. I felt a twinge of guilt—years of working for the Law. I looked back at Jim and his smiling friends and repressed the morality pang.
Long limbs fluid and a little loose with the templar, Jim hurried back from the doorway and stood halfway between me and his friends, swallowing. “Uh, sure. Um, Diane: this is Rod, and Bob. Guys, this is Diane.” We all smiled at one another, Jim’s grin a bit on the sickly side. “Uh, Diane. Mm. The guys and I were just playing a few hands of Hearts…” He looked at me awkwardly, flustered.
Bob, a round-faced victim of early balding, stepped in suavely to cover his friend. “Would you care to join in?”
“I don’t know the rules.”
Rod smiled at me like a life insurance salesman meeting Methuselah. “Care to play for money?”
Bob waved away all minor complications, momentarily exposing his cards (I saw Rod peeking). “The rules are simple, the game is relaxed, the stakes,”—and here he grunted contemptuously—“are non-existent.”
“Well then. Don’t mind if I do.” In their different ways all three of them were so very harmless. Between their lazy good will, and the warmth of the apartment, and the smoke coiling through the air in long tranquil ropes, it was hard not to feel relaxed.
I sat cross-legged on the carpet. At Rod’s suggestion they threw in their cards and dealt a practice hand for four players. Bob went through the rules with careful precision. “The basic idea is to win as few tricks with hearts in them as possible, and avoid the Black Bitch, the Queen of Spades…” Rod waited until he thought I wasn’t looking and then winked at Jim and leered. Jim sprang up and went into the kitchen. “Can I get you anything to eat or drink,—Diane?” He approached my name like it might explode.
“Nothing to drink,” I said. “It’s too damn wet outside.”
“We got some celery,” said Jim dubiously. “And dressing,” he added.
“Sounds fine.”
Rod dealt.
“Bring on the celery! Hell, go the whole way: break out the carrots!” Bob added majestically, sorting his cards. He winked at me. “We’ll make a junk food run if Diane starts to win.”
Rod fumbled through the pockets on his flannel shirt and produced a cough-drop tin. “So, Diane,—what line of work are you in?” he asked, leaning towards me and flipping open the lid to reveal eight hand-rolled cigarettes untainted by tobacco. There was a gulp from the kitchen.
Preparing for the game ahead I put on my best poker face. “I’m a hunter,” I said.
“What, big game and that?” Rod grinned incredulously, stretching out his limp mustache.
“You might say so. I work with the police department.”
Bob inhaled thoughtfully through his nostrils. His early baldness left his forehead a wide white plain, ideal for setting off rising eyebrows. There was another moment of silence, followed by a tiny metallic click as the lid of the cough-drop tin snicked shut. “Is that so?” Rod gasped. A horrified smile trembled on his lips.
I nodded and smiled companionably back. “Yep,” I said, happier than I had been in weeks. “Who leads?”
“I think you do,” said Jim with a sudden laugh as he came back into the living room, balancing a plate of celery sticks and dip. Rod had dealt our hands close together; Jim hunkered down beside me and picked up his cards. “Well, gentlemen? Prepare to be demolished: the shark is back.”
“Young lady.” Jim gazed owlishly at me; our sentences were drifting dangerously, and he had to make sure his words went somewhere close to my face. “Do you feel your deportment befits your department?”
“What? Lying down?” Rod collapsed into a heap of giggles.
Meanwhile, Bob had given up the struggle to maintain focus, and swept the air with his fingers, addressing the ceiling. “Is it not enough that I pay good tax dollars to this young lady to apprehend drug fiends? Is it reasonable that she should then inhale the booty?”
I smiled at him across the length of my body. I had stretched out with my head cushioned on Jim’s lap. I puffed a stray lock of brown hair out of my eyes. “Confiscated,” I said. It took a long time after I made the word in my brain for it to seep from my mouth.