The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “How long have you been waiting there?”

  “Quite a while. You have a very boring apartment building. I like the bougainvillea, though.”

  Kinlaw waved Sturges ahead of him down the hall. “I bet you’re an expert on bougainvillea.”

  “Yes. Some of the studio executives I’ve had to work with boast IQs that rival that of the bougainvillea. The common bougainvillea, that is.”

  Kinlaw holstered the gun, unlocked his apartment door, and gestured for Sturges to enter. “Do you have any opinion of the IQ of police detectives?”

  “I know little about them.”

  Sturges stood stiffly in the middle of Kinlaw’s living room. He looked at the print on the wall. He walked over to Kinlaw’s record player and leafed through the albums.

  Kinlaw got the bottle of scotch from the kitchen. Sturges put on Ellington’s “Perfume Suite.”

  “How about a drink?” Kinlaw asked.

  “I’d love one. But I can’t.”

  Kinlaw blew the dust out of a tumbler and poured three fingers. “Right. Your wife says you’re turning over a new leaf.”

  “I’m working on the whole forest.”

  Kinlaw sat down. Sturges kept standing, shifting from foot to foot. “I’ve been looking for you all afternoon,” Kinlaw said.

  “I’ve been driving around.”

  “Your wife is worried about you. After what she told me about your marriage, I can’t figure why.”

  “Have you ever been married, Detective Kinlaw?”

  “Divorced.”

  “Children?”

  “No children.”

  “I have a son. I’ve neglected him. But I intend to do better. He’s nine. It’s not too late, is it? I never saw my own father much past the age of eight. But whenever I needed him he was always there, and I loved him deeply. Don’t you think Mon can feel that way about me?”

  “I don’t know. Seems to me he can’t feel that way about a stranger.”

  Sturges looked at the bottle of scotch. “I could use a drink.”

  “I saw one of your movies this afternoon. Nathan Lautermilk set it up. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.”

  “Yes. Everybody seems to like that one. Why I didn’t win the Oscar for original screenplay is beyond me.”

  “Lautermilk said he was worried about you. Rumors are going around that you’re dead. Did you ask him to call me?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “To find out whether I thought you had anything to do with this dead man.”

  “Oh, I’m sure Nathan told you all about how he loves me. But where was he when I was fighting Buddy DeSylva every day? Miracle made more money than any other Paramount picture that year, after Buddy questioned my every decision making it.” He was pacing the room now, his voice rising.

  “I thought it was pretty funny.”

  “Funny? Tell me you didn’t laugh until it hurt. No one’s got such a performance out of Betty Hutton before or since. But I guess I can’t expect a cop to see that.”

  “At Paramount they’re not so impressed with your work since you left.”

  Sturges stopped pacing. He cradled a blossom from one of Kinlaw’s spathes in his palm. “Neither am I, frankly. I’ve made a lot of bad decisions. I should have sold The Players two years ago. I hope to God I don’t croak before I can get on my feet again.”

  Kinlaw remembered the line from the Life profile. He quoted it back at Sturges: “‘As for himself, he contemplates death constantly and finds it a soothing subject.’”

  Sturges looked at him. He laughed. “What an ass I can be! Only a man who doesn’t know what he’s talking about could say such a stupid thing.”

  Could an impostor pick up a cue like that? The Ellington record reached the end of the first side. Kinlaw got up and flipped it over, to “Strange Feeling.” A baritone sang the eerie lyric. “I forgot to tell you in the restaurant,” Kinlaw said. “That dead man had a nice scar on his belly. Do you have a scar?”

  “Yes. I do.” When Kinlaw didn’t say anything Sturges added, “You want me to show it to you?”

  “Yes.”

  Sturges pulled out his shirt, tugged down his belt, and showed Kinlaw his belly. A long scar ran across it from right to center. Kinlaw didn’t say anything, and Sturges tucked the shirt in.

  “You know we got some fingerprints off that dead man. And a set of yours too.”

  Sturges poured himself a scotch, drank it off. He coughed. “I guess police detectives have pretty high IQs after all,” he said quietly.

  “Not so high that I can figure out what’s going on. Why don’t you tell me?”

  “I’m Preston Sturges.”

  “So, apparently, was that fellow who washed up on the beach at San Pedro.”

  “I don’t see how that can be possible.”

  “Neither do I. You want to tell me?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Who’s the German you’ve been hanging around with?”

  “I don’t know any Germans.”

  Kinlaw sighed. “Okay. So why not just tell me what you’re doing here.”

  Sturges started pacing again. “I want to ask you to let it go. There are some things—some things in life just won’t bear too much looking into.”

  “To a cop, that’s not news. But it’s not a good enough answer.”

  “It’s the only answer I can give you.”

  “Then we’ll just have to take it up with the district attorney.”

  “You have no way to connect me up with this dead man.”

  “Not yet. But you’ve been acting strangely. And you admit yourself you were on your boat at San Pedro this weekend.”

  “Detective Kinlaw, I’m asking you. Please let this go. I swear to you I had nothing to do with the death of that man.”

  “You don’t sound entirely convinced yourself.”

  “He killed himself. Believe me, I’m not indifferent to his pain. He was at the end of his rope. He had what he thought were good reasons, but they were just cowardice and despair.”

  “You know a lot about him.”

  “I know all there is to know. I also know that I didn’t kill him.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not good enough.”

  Sturges stopped pacing and faced him. The record had reached the end and the needle was ticking repetitively over the center groove. When Kinlaw got out of his chair to change it, Sturges hit him on the head with the bottle of scotch.

  * * *

  Kinlaw came around bleeding from a cut behind his ear. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. He pressed a wet dish towel against it until the bleeding stopped, found his hat, and headed downstairs. The air hung hot as the vestibule of Hell with the windows closed. Out in the street he climbed into his Hudson and set off up Western Avenue.

  The mess with Sturges was a demonstration of what happened when you let yourself think you knew a man’s character. Kinlaw had let himself like Sturges, forgetting that mild-mannered wives tested the carving knife out on their husbands and stone-cold killers wept when their cats got worms.

  An orange moon in its first quarter hung in the west as Kinlaw followed Sunset toward the Strip. When he reached The Players he parked in the upper lot. Down the end of one row was a red Austin; the hood was still warm. Head still throbbing, he went into the bar. Dominique was pouring brandy into a couple of glasses; he looked up and saw Kinlaw.

  “What’s your poison?”

  “I’m looking for Sturges.”

  “Haven’t seen him.”

  “Don’t give me that. His car’s in the lot.”

  Dominique set the brandies on a small tray and a waitress took them away. “If he came in, I didn’t spot him. If I had, I would have had a thing or two to tell him. Rumor has it he’s selling this place.”

  “Where’s his office?”

  The bartender pointed to a door, and Kinlaw checked it out. The room was empty; a stack of bills sat on the desk blotter. The one on the top
was the third notice from a poultry dealer, for $442.16. PLEASE REMIT IMMEDIATELY was stamped in red across the top. Kinlaw poked around for a few minutes, then went back to the bar. “Have you seen anything of that German since we talked yesterday?”

  “No.”

  Kinlaw remembered something. He went down to where the foreigner and the blonde had been sitting. A stack of cardboard coasters sat next to a glass of swizzle sticks. Kinlaw riffled through the coasters: On the edge of one was written, Suite 62.

  He went out to the lot and crossed Marmont to the Château Marmont. The elegant concrete monstrosity was dramatically floodlit. Up at the top floors, the building was broken into steep roofs with elaborate chimneys and dormers surrounding a pointed central tower. Around it wide terraces with traceried balustrades and striped awnings marked the luxury suites. Kinlaw entered the hotel through a Gothic arcade with ribbed vaulting, brick paving, and a fountain at the end.

  “Six,” he told the elevator operator, a wizened man who stared straight ahead as if somewhere inside he were counting off the minutes until the end of his life.

  Kinlaw listened at the door to suite 62. Two men’s voices, muffled to the point that he could not make out any words. The door was locked.

  Back in the tower opposite the elevator a tall window looked out over the hotel courtyard. Kinlaw leaned out: The ledge was at least a foot and a half wide. Ten feet to his right were the balustrade and awning of the sixth-floor terrace. He eased himself through the narrow window and carefully down the ledge; though there was a breeze up at this height, he felt his brow slick with sweat. His nose an inch from the masonry, he could hear the traffic on the boulevard below.

  He reached the terrace, threw his leg over the rail. The French doors were open and through them he could hear the voices more clearly. One of them was Sturges and the other was the man who’d answered the phone that first afternoon at the Ivar house.

  “You’ve got to help me out of this.”

  “‘Got to’? Not in my vocabulary, Preston.”

  “This police detective is measuring me for a noose.”

  “Only one way out, then. I can fire up my magic suitcase and take us back.”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t go postal. There’s nothing he can do to prove that you aren’t you.”

  “We should never have dumped that body in the water.”

  “What do I know about disposing of bodies? I’m a talent scout, not an executive producer.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You won’t be here to deal with the consequences.”

  “If you insist, I’m willing to try an unburned moment-universe. Next time we can bury the body in your basement. But really, I don’t want to go through all this rumpus again. My advice is to tough it out.”

  “And once you leave and I’m in the soup, it will never matter to you.”

  “Preston, you are lucky I brought you back in the first place. It cost every dollar you made to get the studio to let us command the device. There are no guarantees. Use the creative imagination you’re always talking about.”

  Sturges seemed to sober. “All right. But Kinlaw is looking for you too. Maybe you ought to leave as soon as you can.”

  The other man laughed. “And cut short my holiday? That doesn’t seem fair.”

  Sturges sat down. “I’m going to miss you. If it weren’t for you I’d be the dead man right now.”

  “I don’t mean to upset you, but in some real sense you are.”

  “Very funny. I should write a script based on all this.”

  “The Miracle of Ivar Avenue? Too fantastic, even for you.”

  “And I don’t even know how the story comes out. Back here I’m still up to my ears in debt, and nobody in Hollywood would trust me to direct a wedding rehearsal.”

  “You are resourceful. You’ll figure it out. You’ve seen the future.”

  “Which is why I’m back in the past.”

  “Meanwhile, I have a date tonight. A young woman, they tell me, who bears a striking resemblance to Veronica Lake. Since you couldn’t get me to meet the real thing.”

  “Believe me,” Sturges said, “the real thing is nothing but trouble.”

  “You know how much I enjoy a little trouble.”

  “Sure. Trouble is fun when you’ve got the perfect escape hatch. Which I don’t have.”

  While they continued talking, Kinlaw sidled past the wrought-iron terrace furniture to the next set of French doors, off the suite’s bedroom. He slipped inside. The bedclothes were rumpled and the place smelled of whiskey. A bottle of Paul Jones and a couple of glasses stood on the bedside table along with a glass ashtray filled with butts; one of the glasses was smeared with lipstick. Some of the butts were hand-rolled reefer. On the dresser Kinlaw found a handful of change, a couple of twenties, a hotel key, a list of names:

  Jeanne d’Arc

  Carole Lombard

  X

  Claire Bloom

  Germaine Greer

  X

  Anne Boleyn

  X

  Vanessa Redgrave

  Eva Braun

  X

  Alice Roosevelt

  X

  Louise Brooks

  X

  Christina Rossetti

  Charlotte Buff

  X

  Anne Rutledge

  Marie Duplesis

  George Sand

  X

  Veronica Lake

  Brooks had been a hot number when Kinlaw was a kid, everybody knew Hitler’s pal Eva, and Alice Roosevelt was old Teddy’s aging socialite daughter. But who was Vanessa Redgrave? And how had someone named George gotten himself into this harem?

  At the foot of the bed lay an open suitcase full of clothes; Kinlaw rifled through it but found nothing that looked magic. Beside the dresser was a companion piece, a much smaller case in matching brown leather. He lifted it. It was much heavier than he’d anticipated. When he shook it there was no hint of anything moving inside. It felt more like a portable radio than a piece of luggage.

  He carried it out to the terrace and, while Sturges and the stranger talked, knelt and snapped open the latches. The bottom half held a dull gray metal panel with switches, what looked something like a typewriter keyboard, and a small flat glass screen. In the corner of the screen glowed green figures: 23:27:46 PDT 3 May 1949. The numbers pulsed and advanced as he watched.… 47 … 48 … 49 … Some of the typewriter keys had letters, others numbers, and the top row was Greek letters. Folded into the top of the case was a long finger-thick cable, matte gray, made out of some braided material that wasn’t metal and wasn’t fabric.

  “You have never seen anything like it, right?”

  It was the stranger. He stood in the door from the living room.

  Kinlaw snapped the case shut, picked it up, and backed a step away. He reached into his jacket and pulled out his pistol.

  The man swayed a little. “You’re the detective,” he said.

  “I am. Where’s Sturges?”

  “He left. You don’t need the gun.”

  “I’ll figure that out myself. Who are you?”

  “Detlev Gruber.” He held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

  Kinlaw backed another step.

  “What’s the matter? Don’t tell me this is not the appropriate social gesture for the mid-twentieth. I know better.”

  On impulse, Kinlaw held the case out over the edge of the terrace, six stories above the courtyard.

  “So!” Gruber said. “What is it you say? The plot thickens?”

  “Suppose you tell me what’s going on here? And you better make it quick; this thing is heavier than it looks.”

  “All right. Just put down the case. Then I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

  Kinlaw rested his back against the balustrade, letting the machine hang from his hand over the edge. He kept his gun trained on Gruber. “What is this thing?”

  “You want the truth, or a story you’ll believ
e?”

  “Pick one and see if I can tell the difference.”

  “It’s a transmogrifier. A device that can change anyone into anyone else. I can change General MacArthur into President Truman, Shirley Temple into Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Who’s Marilyn Monroe?”

  “You will eventually find out.”

  “So you changed somebody into Preston Sturges?”

  Gruber smiled. “Don’t be so gullible. That’s impossible. That case isn’t a transmogrifier, it’s a time machine.”

  “And I bet it will ring when it hits the pavement.”

  “Not a clock. A machine that lets you travel from the future into the past, and back again.”

  “This is the truth, or the story?”

  “I’m from about a hundred years from now. Twenty forty-three, to be precise.”

  “And who was the dead man in San Pedro? Buck Rogers?”

  “It was Preston Sturges.”

  “And the man who was just here pretending to be him?”

  “He was not pretending. He’s Preston Sturges, too.”

  “You know, I’m losing my grip on this thing.”

  “I am chagrined. Once again, the truth fails to convince.”

  “I think the transmogrifier made more sense.”

  “Nevertheless. I’m a talent scout. I work for the future equivalent of a film studio, a big company that makes entertainment. In the future, Hollywood is still the heart of the industry.”

  “That’s a nice touch.”

  “We have time machines in which we go back into the past. The studios hire people like me to recruit those from the past we think might appeal to our audience. I come back and persuade historicals to come to the future.

  “Preston was one of my more successful finds. Sometimes the actor or director or writer can’t make the transition, but Preston seems to have an intuitive grasp of the future. Cynicism combined with repression. In two years he was the hit of the interactive fiber-optic lines. But apparently it didn’t agree with him. The future was too easy, he said, he didn’t stand out enough, he wanted to go back to a time where he was an exception, not the rule. So he took all the money he made and paid the studio to send him back for another chance at his old life.”