Fantasy Gone Wrong

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  Back to square one. As the forensic team carried off the corpse to their lab in another wild rush of wind and clap of thunder, I took a deep breath and tried again with our one suspect. “Come on, Red, admit it. You knew him.”

  “I told you!” the kid shouted at me. “I never saw him before!”

  “Yeah, right. Okay, guys, let’s get her back to the stationhouse.”

  We’d been going at it for an hour by now. I didn’t know about Little Red, but I was getting pretty fed up with being stuck in this squad room, with nothing in it but the table, the chairs, and the framed portrait of King Cole. At least the kid had stopped swearing at us by now.

  “Yeah, right, and you were taking a stroll in the woods just to look at the pretty flowers,” I drawled.

  “I went for a walk. That’s all.”

  Marie shook her head. “We saw what was in was the basket. Two sausages, two loaves of bread, a bottle of wine . . . seems like a lot of food for someone just going for a walk. A picnic, maybe. With whom?”

  “No one!”

  I leaned forward. “Come on, Red. You’re already in this up to your pretty red riding hood. Who was it? You were meeting Wolf, weren’t you?”

  “I told you! I was just taking a walk!”

  “With a full basket of goodies.”

  She turned away from me, pouting. “I was taking it to my grandma.”

  “Your grandma who’s serving five to ten for peddling joy juice? Kind of a long way around to get to Babylon Prison.”

  No answer to that but a scowl.

  Marie’s turn, woman to woman. “It was flattering, wasn’t it?” she murmured, leaning forward. “A grown man, and after you. Yes, and I bet he said all the right things to you. I bet he made you feel really special.”

  “Special!” Little Red exploded. “He tried to eat me, that’s what!”

  The emphasis on eat made it pretty clear that whatever Mr. Wolf had been into, it hadn’t been cannibalism.

  “So you hit him,” I said. “Self-defense.”

  “I didn’t hit him!”

  “Self-defense, Red. Know what that means?”

  “I’m not stupid. Of course I do. But I didn’t hit him.”

  “Then who did?”

  “I don’t know.” But little by little she was looking less like a punk and more like a really scared kid. “H-he was already dead when I got there.”

  Marie and I exchanged a quick glance. When she’d gotten there? For another meeting? Looked like Little Red hadn’t been exactly worried about being eaten if she’d returned for a second course.

  Too bad there’s no such thing as a truth-telling spell. Ken, the tallest of the three forensic mages, had once told me a horrific tale over a couple of beers of an attempt at a truth-telling spell that had literally melted the suspect’s brain.

  Instead we had to do it the old-fashioned way, wearing the kid down until I felt that my brain was about to melt. But we finally had the complete and sadly predictable story of a naive girl who wanted desperately to be tough. She had run with a gang as a sort of mascot and then, after we’d pretty much eliminated the gang, had had this fling with an older man as a way of, well, belonging.

  “I can’t see her being the killer,” I said to Marie afterward.

  “Neither can I. But she’s the only suspect we have.”

  We could legally hold her for a day. Then, since she was a minor, we had to turn her over to Juvenile or, since we had nothing but the most circumstantial of evidence against her, just let her go. Not much time.

  “Okay, let’s try this,” I said. “What was Wolf really doing for a living?”

  Marie nodded. “Good question. Why bring the Crooked Man into this if Wolf was merely a real estate agent?”

  I thought about it for a few moments. “Now, here’s my take on it: What if our Mr. Wolf, and for the moment forget his taste for underage girls and his real estate cover, was really . . . mmm . . . an inspector?”

  “A secret one, you mean?” she asked. “Makes sense.”

  Yes, it did. If the late Mr. Wolf had actually been a secret buildings inspector hunting corruption and shoddy work, he would have made a few enemies. Maybe even a few deadly enemies.

  Well, we spent quite some time talking to the Crooked Man, trying not to think about the clock ticking away on our time to legally hold Little Red. Didn’t need the traditional mouse running up it to tell us to get going on this.

  Hey, guess what? After wasting much of everyone’s time, the Crooked Man finally grudgingly admitted that surprise, surprise, we’d been right and Wolf had, indeed, worked for him. He kept most of the details of that work from us on general principles, being what he was. But after leaving his office, Marie and I put a few facts together, and cross-checked Wolf’s real estate client list with police records. Two matches there. And we still did have that magic-preserved partial footprint that might yet net us a match with the murderer.

  “All right,” I said to Marie, “let’s go talk to a few people.”

  First stop, Dumpty Construction Company. But we were too late on that one: Cops hadn’t notified us yet because they weren’t ruling it a murder. Again, yet. Mr. Humphrey Dumpty had apparently taken a header off one of his company’s walls, which had been high enough to leave the body pretty well scrambled. I saw Marie glance up and up and shudder.

  “Looks like he landed feet first,” she said.

  “Yeah.” Not a chance of comparing our partial footprint with what was left of Mr. Dumpty’s feet.

  Accidents happen—but with the murder of Mr. Wolf so recent we had to wonder if this really had been an accident. In other words: Did he fall, or was he pushed?

  A sudden rush of air, a sudden clap of thunder: “Hey, guys,” I said. “Busy day.”

  Tom grunted. “Yeah, right. Let’s hear it for slow, boring days.”

  The three forensic magicians started their work once again. Ken and Tom examined the body, muttering charms together, while Ilana and Marie—Marie being the lightest of us two—levitated up to the top of the wall to look for clues. They were back soon enough, looking frustrated.

  “Nothing,” Marie said.

  “Nothing,” Ilana agreed. “Other than pigeons.”

  But just then I heard Ken exclaim, “Whoa. That’s new.”

  It didn’t look like anything new to me, just the same mangled corpse it had been a moment ago, but Ilana and Tom, crouching over the body with Ken, agreed. “Better get this back to the lab.” Ilana glanced up at us. “You coming?”

  Hell. I made the usual excuses about walking being good for the constitution, riding being the good old-fashioned way to travel, and got nowhere. Even I had to admit we needed to examine the body back in the lab.

  The next thing I knew, we were in the lab, solid stone under our feet, and I was throwing up in a bucket that Ilana had hastily and thoughtfully conjured for me. I don’t know how the forensic guys do it, but they were already calmly at work without a sign of discomfort. Marie, who has one of those proverbial cast-iron constitutions, was watching their work with a great deal of professional interest.

  After a moment, I joined her. Mangled corpses are part of the job and don’t bother me—hell, no matter how mangled, they’re just empty houses with the tenants gone—but damned if I’ll ever get used to teleportation.

  “You see?” Ilana said to Ken. “Definitely a K-1.”

  “I’d say K-2, but a really a cheap one.”

  She shook her head. “K-1, definitely. See the state of the liver?”

  “What’s left of it. The damage could have come from the fall.”

  “Uh, guys?” I asked. “What’s a K-1?”

  “Protective spell,” Tom said shortly, doing something to the corpse that made it suddenly glow a really disgusting hue of gray-green. “The sort of thing anyone can buy in some corner magic store and use without needing any special powers. Only . . . this one isn’t quite . . . damn.” The glow snapped out of existence. He tried to get it g
oing again, then shook his head: no luck. “You get what you pay for. He was using some bargain-basement version of your basic K-1, and not only didn’t it protect him, it managed to scramble itself and his general aura into one big mess.”

  “So you can’t tell if he was murdered?”

  “Hell, he’s so scrambled I couldn’t tell you anything.” Ken glanced up at me, wiping a streak of blood—at least I assumed it was only blood—from his face. “Right now all we can be sure about is that it was definitely the fall that killed him.”

  And we still didn’t know if he’d been pushed.

  Okay, now we had two cases instead of one.

  What followed was how our jobs usually go: Interviewing people who didn’t want to be interviewed, had no choice about it, and were not going to make it any easier for us. Marie and I headed back to the construction site and started going down the list of workers.

  But at last we could say with certainty that none of the construction workers had seen anything out of the ordinary. They were all pretty well shaken up—seeing your boss go down like that, splat, couldn’t have been easy on any of them—but they all swore they’d seen no one up there on the wall with him. No one’d held a grudge against him, at least so they claimed.

  Actually, looking at the Dumpty Construction records, there didn’t seem to be much of a reason for grudge-holding. The company was completely above board—since it had done some work for the Crown, it pretty much had to be—and paid its workers good wages. Sure, they’d seen Mr. Wolf around. He’d been there several times but that wasn’t surprising as he was involved in the sale of the property.

  While we’re on the subject, none of the workers matched that partial print, either.

  There was a Mrs. Dumpty, and when we went to see her, a couple of days later, it wasn’t surprising to find her even more badly shaken up than the workers had been. A painting on one wall of her tastefully decorated living room showed us a pretty, slender, young woman, but the figure we faced had swathed herself in a mourning veil, old style, dripping black jet beads and showing little of the woman underneath, and sobbed her way through the interview. Yes, she’d loved her husband, yes, she’d always been after him to lose some weight, get some exercise, and now, now none of it mattered. Did she know a Mr. Ivar Wolf? Not really, though she thought that her husband had mentioned him a time or two. Since we already knew that Dumpty Construction Company’s records were legit, it didn’t seem likely that Wolf had had any grounds to threaten or, for that matter, blackmail Dumpty.

  We’d given the grieving widow enough trouble. It also was looking like, without any evidence to the contrary, this might really have been death by accident.

  Okay, put a hold on the Dumpty case for the moment. On to the second of our two names on the Wolf suspect list: The three Pigg brothers, Arnold, Harold, and Larry. Three plump, pink, well-scrubbed young men, triplets without a doubt. All three unmarried, all three well-to-do. Do-it-yourself types, according to our records, and a quick glance at those records showed that their involvement, or run-in, rather, with Ivar Wolf had been over the houses they’d built for themselves. On the same plot of ground, not surprisingly.

  “Mr. Wolf?” Arnold said. “Oh yes, he was here.”

  “He was the agent who got us this land,” Larry added.

  “Then he came back,” Harold continued, “after we’d built our houses. Said he wanted to see how we were doing.”

  “Meeting didn’t go well?” I prodded.

  “Well!” Harold exclaimed. “He said my house was not up to the building code. Not up to the code! Can you imagine?”

  “What was wrong?”

  “He said there was too much straw in the mix. Too much straw! Can you imagine?”

  “And . . .?” Sometimes it seems as though the other half our job, other than interviewing hostile witnesses, is prodding reluctant speakers.

  “And he knocked it down!” Harold said indignantly. “Had one of those blasted wind spells: One, two, three, and down! Look at that mess. I still haven’t gotten everything to rights.”

  This time to proper building code standards, I assumed. “Looks like you had some troubles, too,” I said to Larry, whose house looked more like a pile of lumber than a home.

  “Huh.”

  “Used the wind spell on you, too, I take it. Guess Mr. Wolf was pretty strict about the legal way to build something.”

  “Huh.”

  “But he didn’t wreck your house,” Marie said to Arnold.

  “I used brick. He liked that. Said even the wind spell couldn’t hurt it. But it’s a crime what he did to my brothers!”

  “Well, he won’t be bothering you anymore,” I told them all.

  They blinked as one. “What do you mean?”

  “He’s dead,” I finished shortly.

  The three Piggs reacted in exactly the same way: Surprise, but not much in the way of sorrow. Wouldn’t have expected sorrow from them, of course. But was that genuine surprise? Those plump bodies looked soft, but they’d had the strength to build—and rebuild—their houses.

  Marie and I exchanged glances. “I have an odd question for you,” I told them. “I need to see your feet.”

  To my surprise, all three brothers drew themselves up in indignation. “I say, something wrong?” I asked.

  The three of them nearly drowned each other out with their angry protests: “Don’t you know—are you making fun of—”

  “All I know,” I drawled, “is that we’re investigating a murder.”

  All three gasped. Arnold began, “You can’t possibly think that we—”

  “I don’t think. I’m a detective. Show us your feet, and we’ll go away.”

  The three brothers gave each other reluctant glances. Then Arnold shrugged. “Let’s get this over with.”

  He took off his shoes. So did Harold and Larry. “Oh,” said Marie.

  All three brothers had the same deformity: Feet that looked almost like, well, pig feet. Considering the brothers’ last name, not surprising that they’d be sensitive about the whole issue. And no way that they’d fit our partial print.

  Okay, not absolute proof, but proof enough for the moment. “Sorry to have bothered you,” I said, and Marie and I left.

  “Now, what?” she asked.

  “Now I’m thinking that we’re missing something. Something . . . something about Ivar Wolf . . . Little Red . . . yes! Come on, Marie, we’re going to pay the Crooked Man another visit.”

  “You’re asking me to defame an agent’s name!”

  We’d been at this far too long. “We are trying to solve his murder!”

  Marie held up a hand. “Now we understand you don’t want to dishonor the dead.” Her voice was smooth and soothing, almost a purr. “And we don’t want to do that, either. But we do want Ivar Wolf to rest in peace. Don’t you?”

  He stared at her, for the first time since I’ve known him actually at a loss for words. Marie can be pretty damned convincing when she turns on the Gallic charm. “But . . . you’re asking . . .”

  “All I want to know is if Mr. Wolf had affairs with other girls, with other young women.” Her smile almost sent a shiver running up my spine, and I’m used to her. “You can tell us that. We’re not going to tell anyone else.”

  The Crooked Man didn’t stand a chance against her.

  As we left his office, Marie, all business once again, said, “We know he had a taste for underage girls or married young women. Where does that get us?”

  “Remember a certain painting?”

  “In Mr. Dumpty’s house! But that doesn’t make sense, our partial print’s that of a man, and Mrs. Dumpty is a slender young woman!”

  “Is she? With all that veiling, who could tell what was underneath?”

  We made a brief stop at the forensic magician’s lab. Ken was there, in the process peeling off protective gloves that were covered with something brown and slimy—I didn’t care to know just what it was—and I asked him, “That K-1 sp
ell Dumpty used . . . the protection spell that wasn’t. Could it have been used as a disguise as well?”

  He frowned. “Not normally, no.”

  “But you guys said it had been scrambled, not easy to read.”

  Ken nodded thoughtfully. “Go on.”

  “Could it have been deliberately scrambled, maybe before Dumpty took the fall?”

  “But . . . oh. To hide who it really was? Geez. Hey, Tom, Ilana, get over here. We’ve got a body to disinter!”

  “You do that,” I said. “We have other bodies to catch.”

  Marie and I caught up with Mrs. Dumpty leaving her house, still swathed in that black mourning veil. “One moment,” I called.

  “The detectives! I thought you’d already asked all your questions.”

  “Not quite.”

  “I’ve lost my husband! Can’t you understand that? Can’t you just leave me alone?”

  “I’m afraid not, ma’am,” I said. “You heard about Cinderella? How that slipper proved who she really was?”

  “I . . . don’t . . .”

  “We have a footprint here. Now, granted, it’s only a partial print. But if you’ll just step on it, I think we’ll see something interesting about—”

  I didn’t get any further. Mrs. Dumpty turned and ran. But I keep myself pretty fit, and I tackled her. The mourning veil billowed free—

  “Well, well, what do you know?” I said. “Look who’s here. None other Mr. Dumpty himself. Pretty spry for a dead man, don’t you think?”

  The picture of pretty young Mrs. Dumpty had given me a clue, although it had taken long enough to percolate through my brain, that, and the fact that the purported widow had been so completely hidden by that damned veil.