“That he died early Tuesday morning. ... Yes, Doctor, I’m the party who accompanied him to the hospital.”
“I see. And have you actually discovered anything that seems like a symptom in yourself, M. Tomlinson? Or ...”
“No, Doctor, it’s just that I’d been dating him ...”
“Right, right, M., we don’t need to go into any of that over the phoneline. Let’s just have a look, here ... Yes, I can work you in today. This afternoon at sixteen thirty, if that’ll be all right?”
I think I swallowed before replying. “Yes, Dr. Macumber, that will be fine.”
After one or two more polite pleasantries, I signed off. Cagey gave the phone a tap to be sure it was dead, and then let out a whooping cheer and sprang up to get herself more coffee. “Have you switched the recorder back on for our little conference, Officer Tomlinson?”
I had, and said, “Yes.”
“Good. Well,” she went on, moderating her outburst, “you might have gotten in this morning if you’d said you had Carmine’s symptoms yourself—”
“I couldn’t have produced them when I got there. Not unless I tried to fake them, and if they saw through my fake, we’d have been out.”
“You could’ve said you’d had them and they went away. But who cares? You’re in, that’s the important part, and it gives me most of the day to plan my own strategy. Jamie Macumber sounded doggone anxious to check you, too, Tommi. More anxious than he tried to let on, I’d bet. After all, he’s the one who signed the postmortem ... Which means I’m pretty sure to draw the other one. Dr. Raisa R. Suttler…the senior partner—going by the fact that her name gets top billing in their ad.” Cagey stopped, took another look at the printout directory page, and added, tapping it, “Y’know, Officer Tomlinson, we shouldn’t forget this third partner, either. Coffield. Coffield, the pharmacist. Yep, we’ll have to keep our eyes peeled for chances to gather data on M. Arlington Johnson Coffield, Phar.D.”
Chapter 4
We spent the morning at our home computers looking up everything we could about the partners in Sunvale Clinic.
We could search only Cagey’s own files and the public records in various open-access data repositories. Cagey never acquired more than intermediate computer skills, and my own essential honesty kept me from any wish to learn the tricks of piracy. Besides, even before the ’20s, banks, governments, and other concerns had been learning how to keep their especially sensitive and important data in software and store it out of the machine except when actually needed for use. The Lawless Decade made them do more and more of this sort of thing in order to fight computer crime, and also popularized strictly internal powerpac hardware that couldn’t be patched into by any other computer equipment on electric line or even airwave.
Not much of this caution had yet worn off by 2036. It was probably even harder to rob a bank with computers in the 2030s than it is today. I’d guess it was even harder to get at sensitive private information than it would have been to rob a bank, and that’s considering only the privacy safeguards on the databanks, without adding the factor that up until the Metterkranz System for filing fingerprints, it was still relatively easy to become a missing person under one name and start a completely new life under another name somewhere else. Nowadays it’s difficult to believe how many people did this during the 2020s and early 2030s, especially right after the Great Christmas Quake destroyed thousands of records and documents that hadn’t yet been filed anywhere else.
But what with libraries, newspaper datamorgues, and Cagey’s own collection of reference disks and microchips, we had plenty to keep us busy just gathering the public, nonsensitive data.
Dr. James Fitzpatrick Macumber had been born Jan. 10, 1996, in Brooklyn, New York. He had earned his M.D. from Columbia, graduating with high honors in 2022; interned at Belleview Hospital; and gone from there to become one of the first members of the medical staff at the brand-new Oshiba Memorial Hospital in Boston, where he had stayed until 2027, when he joined Dr. Suttler in coming to Kentucky and establishing Sunvale Family Health Clinic in Marltown.
His avocation was botany. The way other people spend their nights as amateur astronomers or their summers as volunteers on archeological digs, Dr. Macumber spent his vacations in the last preserved rainforests of South America, Africa, and Asia, collecting new species of plants. He had discovered a number of these new species himself and, after due process, named them or had them named for him. Professor Phylla Walters Walters of Indiana University had gone on public record with the statement that if Dr. James Fitzpatrick Macumber were a professional botanist he would probably win a Nobel for his work in the field.
Very impressed at the thought that I was going to meet this man in a few hours, I closed the folder of printouts I’d amassed on him and went to see what Cagey had learned about the doctor she hoped to see this afternoon.
We exchanged folders. “Hmmm,” said Cagey, scanning the profile sheet I’d made up and laid on top. “What are people like this doing here in sleepy little Marltown?”
It took me longer to scan her findings on the senior partner. Cagey Thursday had given up trying to learn how to put together a profile sheet as she went; her method was to highlight items in the printouts and say she’d get around to the formal profile sheet eventually. Once in a great while, she did. More often, she never even got around to sorting the printouts. Today I found some turned upside down, others reverse side up, many sliding around with edges and corners sticking out, and a few page twos separated from their page ones—all as usual in a folder thrown together by my Sergeant Thursday.
Bit by bit, however, I learned that Dr. Raisa Rachmaninova Suttler had been born in Leningrad in 1990; gotten her medical training and served her internship in Moscow; returned to Leningrad for five years at its Gorbachev Hospital; and then spent another five years in practice at a nearby kolkhoz before announcing that even in this century she found Soviet life unbearably restrictive, and emigrating to the Reformed States of America in 2026 as a freechoice exchange for Davis G. Hardiwink, the novelist, poet, and literary translator, who claimed to be starving to death under Reformed Capitalism.
Once in the States, Dr. Rachmaninova had formally registered the final name of Suttler, after the courageous old doctor in Alton Dailey’s famous novels, and announced her plan to settle down to “helping the family of humanity in good, warm, and friendly oldfashioned private clinic in oldfashioned smalltown heartland of America.” The next item Cagey seemed to have located about her, chronologically speaking, was a news announcement in the Marltown Satellite for July 16, 2027, of the opening of a new family health care clinic, Sunvale, under the “joint auspices” of Raisa Rachmaninoff [sic] Suttler and James Fitzpatrick Macumber, both M.D.’s, on Madden Drive.
Cagey said, “Think this afternoon you might be able to dig up how and when Macumber and Suttler got together, Officer Tomlinson? Did she recruit him, or did he make first contact with her? I’m guessing the latter, because of the little splash she made coming into this country ... let’s see, she came over in Twenty twenty-six, I was eighteen that year, surprised I don’t remember hearing anything about it at the time, especially when she settled right here in Marltown the following year ... or was that the year I took a summer course in Paris? But big as Jamie Mac’s rep seems to be in medical and scientific circles, it’s possible she approached him first. You know, the Old Commissioner would have asked what the H, E, double L either of them is doing as a ‘mere’ G.P. The Old Commissioner never could adjust to the fact that being a G.P. is as prestigious in this century as being a specialist was in his generation.”
By “the Old Comissioner,” she meant her late grandfather. Her father was “the Captain”; her mother, “the New Commissioner.”
I said, “Somehow, I’d never exactly thought of Marltown as ‘oldfashioned smalltown heartland America.’”
“Neither had I. Maybe she got the
translation from Alton Dailey. Or from Hardiwink when their planes passed. You know, I think they banned one of Hardiwink’s books from the school library back when I was in the elementaries. Or was that one of Alma Hardihood’s? If you have time, we need a rundown on the pharmacist, too. When and how he joined the partnership, what he was doing up until then ... ‘Where were you in the Twenty twenties,’ all that kind of thing. Better not work on after ... oh, make it fourteen hundred hours, give yourself time to rest before getting on over to the clinic.”
“What about you, Sarge?” I asked.
“I’d like to get over to Shoppers’ Paradise right after lunch, give myself plenty of time to case the place and plan my approach. Also see if this new brew shop they just opened up in there, this ‘Beans of St. Mary’s,’ has anything worth telling Nancy to stock up on. I expect we could be running low again. Stop in and see if McBooks has anything by Hardiwink. And maybe help educate a few salespeople. You’d be amazed, Tommi, how many salespeople still try to take advantage of us ‘fanciers.’ As if we couldn’t tell quality stuff from junk!”
* * * *
Thanks to the indexes, it took me only about half an hour to learn that Dr. Suttler had simply advertised for a partner in the classified ads of the AMA Journal. Having made two printouts of her ad, one for each of their folders—Suttler’s and Macumber’s—I labeled a third manila folder “JOHNSON, ARLINGTON COFFIELD,” added my draft sheet for the profile, and started searching for the data to fill it in.
The pharmacist had come into the Sunvale partnership in March, 2033.
His date and place of birth were given as April 1, 2001, Los Angeles, California.
He had earned his doctorate in pharmacology from Columbia between September 2030 and January 2033. Our Warrington House computers couldn’t access any university files directly, and a lot of the pertinent data would never have been recorded anyway; but I guessed that at Columbia he must have heard a lot about the school’s highly distinguished alum, Dr. James Fitzpatrick Macumber. It might even have been the Columbia placement service that helped him to Marltown.
All of M. Coffield’s earlier schooling was listed as having been in Los Angeles, which we now sadly called “Lost Angeles,” with his bachelor’s and master’s degrees earned at UCLA. Since even some of UCLA’s records had been lost, he might have had to take a proficiency exam to demonstrate his claim to those degrees, following the special laws and guidelines the country had had to pass for all the Lower Californians who had escaped the disaster and needed to replace vital documents.
Unless Arlington Johnson Coffield was one of the countless people who had taken advantage of the Christmas Quake to pretend their personal documents had been lost while they forged new, law-abiding identities for themselves.
All the Lower California birth records should, of course, have been fed into the National Name and Print Directory on a constant update, and thus escaped destruction. But not only were fingerprint checks slow and often lackadaisical in the ’30s, in those pre-Metterkranz days they could be thrown off completely by any previously unrecorded scar in even one print.
All ten of Arlington Johnson Coffield’s fingerpads were polka-dotted with tiny pecklike scars—the result, said the explanatory note to their registration with Johnson Coffield’s name, of an accident involving the attempt to grab a piece of rotating-bristle machinery when the subject was eighteen.
If in fact he had done it more recently on purpose to disguise his prints, and never had them, in their scarred condition, registered under any other name he might have worn earlier, then there was a superb chance that no computer program available in 2036 would ever be able to match them up with any set of unscarred prints.
Somewhere there might be a record of where he had lived between Christmas 2029—or November of that year, if he was telling the truth about his early life—and September 2030, when he showed up at Columbia. But all I could find for sure was that on December 28, 2029, he had reregistered his name and prints with the Oneida, New York branch of Names and Prints.
The only data I had on his life before December 28, 2029, was what he himself must have fed the databanks.
We weren’t stupid in those days. We could see very well that more people had escaped that catastrophe than could have escaped according to any scientific statistical analysis. But except for a few jokes about more Lower Californians having happened to be away from home the fatal night than had been living in L.A. to begin with, we generally chose to ignore it.
Rob Grove had never hinted to me about having lost any personal records in the Big Quake; but he hadn’t ever given me anything about his past except a few shadowy hints about a 2020s wildstyle, and I had been ready to fall in love with him. Why should I jump to the assumption that M. Arlington Johnson Coffield was trying to hide any truly vicious secret?
There were, of course, those fingerprints. By law, anyone who had had such an accident, even if it scarred only one fingerpad, was required to give all his or her past names along with the new, scarred print or set of prints. And the National Directory had no Johnson, Arlington Coffield with unscarred fingerprints. Still, that kind of accident happens so seldom that not many people are aware of the law, and even fewer would bother to rush in and reregister every time they scratched a fingertip. I only knew about it because Cagey loved browsing through lawcodes and fingerprint lore. Maybe whatever clerk had reregistered Arlington Johnson Coffield in 2029 hadn’t remembered that law; civil servants can be as absentminded as anybody else. Or had overlooked it on a busy day, or tacitly skipped it in the rush of people taking advantage of the disaster to change their identities. Although December 28 would have been a little early, wouldn’t it? for that rush to have started among anybody except the people who really did have immoral crimes to hide.
On the other hand, M. Coffield certainly couldn’t have had time to scarify his fingerpads and have them healed well enough for making new registration prints, let alone fooling the clerk into thinking the scars were ten years old, between December 25 and December 28.
And if he really had a guilty past, wasn’t it more likely to involve moneyprinting than murder? If he had moneyprinted on a large enough scale—say, operating an underground bank for a whole county—he might have been liable to criminal prosecution, but who would he really have hurt, back then under the conditions of the 2020s?
True, in 2033 the Federal Government had announced amnesty for all “counterfeiters” who had operated before the July 2030 reinstitution of real currency and coinage. But by the 2033 amnesty Coffield had his Columbia doctorate and his Sunvale partnership in his new identity, and may well have found it easier to remain Arlington Johnson Coffield, survivor of the Great Christmas Quake.
I think the idea crossed my mind to begin a search on Rob; but by now it was after 14:00, and I was eager to seize the excuse that I was already running overtime. Let Cagey do the check on Rob, if she wanted it. My wound was still too tender.
* * * *
I walked into Sunvale Clinic at 16:15, a quarter-hour early for my appointment. A little to my disappointment, the receptionist on duty was a blond woman with an olive complexion. Her name badge said: “Heather K. Kareem,” and she seemed as pleasant as possible; but I found I’d been looking forward to seeing the face that went with that wonderful baritone voice of Angelo Stavropolos.
The waiting room was done up in orange and yellow wallshag and green floorcarpeting. It had straight chairs, cushion chairs, and two deep beanbag chairs; a large aquarium of tropical fish along one wall; a videoscreen showing a crackling fire on another wall; and a second screen running sixty-second health care animations on a third. Five people were there already, so I guessed the clinic was running late. Two of the people were watching the animations, two the fish, and one the fire.
The aquarium should be the best natural conversation starter. Switching on the recorder in my wristwatch as per my employer�
��s standing instructions, I joined the two who sat here: a lanky teenage boy sprawled in a beanbag, and a tall woman perfectly erect in a straightback chair.
“Oh, look!” I exclaimed after a moment. “Is that a Pearl Danio?”
“Nooo,” said the lanky teenager. “No Pearl Danios in there. There’s Elvis the Blue Danio, Norbert the Paradise Fish ...” and so on through eleven names. He obviously spent a lot of time here, and was more than happy to talk—about the fish.
After several minutes of hearing all about Elvis and Norbert and their companions, I took advantage of a pause to remark, “This is my first time here.”
“I thought I had not seen you before,” said the tall woman. Wearing a floorlength sheath dress with long sleeves and a mantle-like top piece trimmed in artificial fur, she almost had to be a fancier. “But, however,” she went on, “kindly permit me to introduce myself. I am Miss Woodburn, and I am here to see Mr. Coffield, the apothecary.”
“That’s a hill of shredded paper!” said the tropical fish expert. “My grandpa says they shouldn’t ever have let druggists play doctor, and they wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for all those old TV ads where they showed ’em telling people what medicines to buy. He says they did enough damage just filling prescriptions, without giving ’em regular consulting rooms on top of it. He says it’s the same as midwives—”
“That is enough, young man!” Miss Woodburn said sharply. “The midwife and the apothecary have brought many a sufferer back to health and strength where the doctor would have sent them to the grave or, at best, kept them lingering for years on dry toast and laudanum. As for Mr. Coffield, he is a very modest, perfect gentleman who has never once questioned my word nor caused me to blush. I have nothing but praise for his treatment of me.”
The boy replied, “That’s just because he plays along with you, y’know. He knows enough to see you aren’t really sick at all, but you bet he’s ready to play along for your money.”
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 4