All But a Pleasure

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  But all Julie really cared about right now was Dave.

  * * * *

  M. Garvey came in looking curious, glanced around the interrogation room, started getting herself a cup of coffee, and noticed the letter laid out on the counter. Lestrade watched her staring down at it, carafe in one hand and unfilled cup in the other. The policewoman stepped up behind her and took away the coffee and cup before the material witness forgot and dropped them.

  “Interesting, M. Garvey?” Lestrade inquired, filling the cup with coffee.

  For answer, the younger woman gathered up the four pieces of letter, folded them carefully, and tucked them into her breast pocket. She accepted her coffee, walked to the easy chair, and sat down like a china doll trying not to break.

  “So now you know,” said Lestrade. “The young idiot broke that promise to you because he thought in his muddle-headed way it was the best thing he could do to help keep you safe.”

  “Don’t talk about him like that.”

  “Just a few minutes ago I called him a lot worse than that to his face. He survived.”

  “He admits right here in this letter that there were other reasons, too,” said M. Garvey. “Psychomystical reasons.”

  “Everything’s psychomystical. You know and I know that all those other reasons wouldn’t have been worth a broken ice-cream stick without the concern for your safety. Now. What are you going to do about it?”

  “…I always planned to forgive him.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “I just thought he deserved to squirm a little first.”

  “He did. Richly. And he has. Between you and me, M. Garvey, woman to woman, the two of us have made him squirm enough for this evening.” Lestrade quickly wrote a pass and held it out. “He’s in cell number two. Show them this at the desk and someone will take you back there.”

  “Oh, thank you, Sergeant, thank you! You’re a wonderful woman!” M. Garvey snatched the pass and dashed out the door, leaving her coffee steaming on the snack table.

  “I’m a wonderful woman, am I?” Lestrade muttered dubiously, picking the coffee up and starting to drink it herself. “And you, M. Garvey, just missed acting like a total pumpkinhead. I hope, anyway, you were telling the truth about planning to forgive him all along. Well, I’m heading back to my office now, see if anybody else’s statements have reached my desk yet.”

  * * * *

  Angela had never actually been in a cell block before. It didn’t look so very different from the screenshows, only a little more pleasant, somehow. The overhead light was turned down to a quarter-moon glow, and the pinpoint lamps at foot level outlined the corridor like a straight-line constellation of tiny stars. Small lamps must be on in two of the cells at the far end, because light shone out between the bars and pooled in the corridor.

  “Seems to have settled down for the night,” the Cinnamon polly—Officer Little Bird—observed softly at Angela’s side. “I understand there was quite a little celebration in here just a few minutes ago.”

  Not liking to disturb the hush, in case people were sleeping in their cells, Angela whispered, “Celebration?”

  “All I can say for sure,” Officer Little Bird replied, “is, Detective Clayton went in a while ago, it sounded like cheering, Detective Clayton came out again looking happy and worried both at once.”

  That would be Julie.

  And they had Julie in one of the cells.

  The cells had reflective-glow numbers on the dividing walls, even numbers on Angela’s right, odd numbers on her left. Officer Little Bird unlocked the first cell door on the right—cell number two—and stepped aside to let Angela in.

  It was really much nicer than she would have expected, the little she could see of it in the dimly reflected light. Of course, her attention was on the cot, the form lying quietly beneath the blanket.

  “He could be asleep,” the polly observed in a low voice. “Would you rather…?”

  “No, I’ll stay. That’s a chair, isn’t it?”

  Officer Little Bird hesitated, almost as though she was trying to decide whether to leave Angela the key. Finally she said, “Just tab this chimer when you want to come out,” showed Angela a night-lighted button on the wall a few centimeters from the cell door, went out and relocked it behind her. It made only the smallest clunking sound.

  She tiptoed to the cot, leaned over, whispered, “Cory? Are you asleep?”

  “Angela? Is it you? Or a dream?”

  “Not a dream, Cory. Or else we’re both dreaming it at the same time.”

  He scooched himself up in the cot and asked, “Still…friends?”

  The wistful hope in his voice tore her heart. She groped, got tight hold of his shoulders, bent farther over and kissed him. Hard.

  After a heartbeat, he responded, kissed back, got his arms up around her and started squeezing, very gently.

  I won’t break, Cory, she thought, I won’t break! And tried to tell him so by squeezing him harder. And harder. So happy that every time she tightened her grip, so did he.

  She thought about teasing his lips apart and sticking her tongue between his teeth, the way she’d heard other people liked to do. But the moment was too perfect as it was. Why risk disturbing it? She felt his bird swelling up and growing very, very solid. Her nest was feeling warmer and softer by the moment, ready to welcome…

  Just in time for self-restraint, he pulled back out of the kiss and said, “May I…interpret that as an affirmative?”

  “Oh, Cory, you silly!”

  “…Copacetic! But I need a few moments to…recover somewhat.”

  They settled side by side on the cot, resting their backs against the wall, his arm hugging her shoulders while she curled her legs up under her and snuggled into his chest. She needed a few moments to recover, too. She wasn’t quite sure this was the best way to recover, but he registered no complaint.

  “I thought…I feared…I had lost you forever.”

  “Oh, not that easily, Cory, not that easily!” A breath or two later, she added, “We belong together, don’t we? Yin and yang, man and woman…”

  “Day and night, light and darkness, sunshine and shadow…”

  “We…complete each other. Together, we make a whole.”

  “The universal unity in microcosm. The eternal recombination of the elements.”

  “Oh, Cory…”

  “Still, it might be better, for you, not to… We might soon be ‘free’ and ‘imprisoned.’”

  “Oh, no, Cory, no. I can’t believe that could ever happen. When they know why you did it—and the police already know…”

  “But neither the courts nor public opinion.”

  “They’ll find some way to keep you out of court. I’m sure they will! If Sergeant Lestrade and Detective Clayton…Cory… That double date… Was Dave Julie’s date, all along?”

  “So I had understood at the outset.”

  “Then why didn’t you correct me when I…”

  “Your certitude caused me to question my own former view of the situation.”

  “Oh, you silly! You mean you just didn’t want me to feel embarrassed!”

  “Well…perhaps…a modicum of that, also,” he admitted.

  Anyway, if worse came to worst, they still let people on the outside get married to people in prison. She decided not to say that aloud, now he seemed to be relaxing a little. “Cory, will you be able to fall asleep tonight?”

  “Between the joy, the apprehension, the exhaustion, and…this other, it could prove difficult. Angela, this has been a…a very strange day…no, a very strange set of days for me.”

  “For all of us, Cory. Let me see if I can’t get you some kind of sleeping pills.”

  * * * *

  Three of their statements—Imani’s, Osaka’s, and Whitcomb’s—were ready and waitin
g on Lestrade’s desk. Vergucchi and Little Bird took statements directly on their typewriters. Brown and Wentworth used shorthand, but Brown transcribed it into typescript a lot faster than Wentworth.

  The three she had before her were in substantial agreement, just enough differences for plausibility. When you got suspicious—if you had any intelligence—was when different people’s statements matched too closely, detail for detail. That suggested premeditated conspiracy. Small differences in relatively unimportant details suggested everybody concerned was telling the truth as they saw it filtered through their individual psychomystiques.

  Imagine Davison worrying about whether “psychomystique” was too fancy a word. Wasn’t that he was really trying to show off, just that he loved words and lost track of which ones his listeners might not know as well as he did. I must really have put the fear of something—the dictionary?—into him for a while there. Lestrade almost chuckled, sobered again at once. Lady God! If she had ever wanted to clear any innocent floater…make that plural. Blast if she didn’t like the idiot lot of them.

  She turned her attention back to the statements, shuffled Whitcomb’s to the top, tapped it with her pipestem. Okay. This one next. She tabbed her chime.

  When Officer Brown answered it, all she told him was, “M. Whitcomb. Interrogation.” When Lestrade couched an order that way, the “Right now!” was understood.

  * * * *

  “Sleeping pills? Sure.” The officer at the desk reached into a drawer and produced a small white envelope. “Ol’ Doc Grumeister swears by these. We keep ’em on hand for any time we really need to settle anyone down in the cells. Doesn’t happen too often.”

  Angela accepted the envelope. It was sealed and carefully labeled. She thought she could feel two roundish lumps inside.

  Good. He wouldn’t even have to wait for her to go out and find a drugstore open late. She looked around for Officer Little Bird, who was waiting to take her back to cell number two.

  CHAPTER 25

  Still Tuesday October 3

  So this was Dave’s romantic interest. Yes, now she had time for a closer look, Lestrade could definitely see the appeal. If I were a man, I might be fighting Dave for her. That long black hair, red lips, high forehead, skin just a hint of Butterscotch, cheeks just a hint of hollow, long legs in a long gray skirt just flared enough for easy walking, guileless green eyes.

  Never trust appearances. Especially guileless. That guileless look can be faked. Or authentic.

  The two little giggleboxes were back outside the picture window, this time with a couple of stout lads to keep them company. Lestrade wondered how long before the girls got jealous of the way their young sweethearts ogled the interrogatee, and dragged them away. Or maybe they were all siblings and it didn’t matter.

  “M. Whitcomb,” she began, riffling the pages of statement in her hands. “Correct me if I’ve got any of this wrong. You wanted to retire—‘go emeritus,’ M. Imani calls it—from the Purgatorio, at least partly for romantic reasons of your own. You thought you had M. Davison lined up for your replacement. M. Garvey objected. Strongly enough to change Davison’s mind. But you held off telling the rest of your group the bad news.

  “There was M. Garvey standing in your way. There had already been one killing. A second one would be easy to copycat. Next thing we know, there’s M. Garvey’s ringer floating dead in that little lake right behind the place where you—and M. Osaka—have your apartments. And M. Davison is back in, being geared up to take your place.”

  Always interesting to watch how different psychomystiques reacted when they saw where she was headed with stuff like this. M. Whitcomb breathed faster and faster, more and more heavily. Her face started to flush. But she sat perfectly still and composed, letting the pollydeck say her fill.

  Lestrade finished grimly, “It’s possible for a group as a whole to be innocent, but one or two members guilty. How about it, M. Whitcomb? Did either you or M. Osaka have easy access to that tattoo stamp?”

  M. Whitcomb took a deliberate swallow of her coffee, set the cup back down very carefully in its bone china saucer, cleared her throat, and said, “Sergeant Lestrade. I didn’t do it. I’m not going to shout and cry and protest that I could never under any circumstances kill anyone. Under certain pressures, I’ve often thought that anyone with any strength of character at all—even doctors and trained nurses—probably could do anything. But I’m grateful to say I’ve never felt under any such pressures.”

  “Not even to make sure of Dave Clayton? From whom you kept all this secret.”

  “Not even for him. It looked as if Corwin—M. Poe—wasn’t going to work out, after all. That was too bad, but recruitment has always been a tricky business for Dante’s Delight. It was simply back to the old lookout posts. And—Sergeant Lestrade—Angela is a person you want to coddle and protect, not—not murder! Not for any reason at all. I sincerely wished every happiness for her and Corwin. So would the rest of us—so will the rest of us, if we come through this thing. Sergeant, the Purgatorio offers our pain to help other people, not hurt them.”

  “Hmf.” Secretly, Lestrade liked Whitcomb. She liked her self-possession, she liked her answers, and she felt satisfied that these damfool pain gymnasts were at least sincere in their lunatic philosophy. And, so far, everything fit in with the hunch she’d had all along. But brilliant leaps of sleuthing insight were for Holmeses and Poirots. Lestrades couldn’t afford to rule out any possibility, no matter how plodding. So what she said, without any softening of her voice, was:

  “So could the late Gaia Soderstrum could have been a person most people wanted to coddle and protect.”

  “So could the late Harry Jackson.” Whitcomb answered like the registered nurse she was when not purgatory-ing or romancing.

  “All right, M. Whitcomb. Let’s say, provisionally, that I’m willing to take your story at face value. I’d like to see the tattoo in question on a body that’s still alive.”

  Whitcomb glanced at the teenagers outside. Then she stood up, turned her back to the window, walked over to Lestrade, and took off her white neck-scarf. Her tunic had two mother-of-pearl buttons below a V neckline.

  Lestrade also noticed she was wearing a single small black pearl around her throat. Probably for sentiment, since the scarf had covered it from view. Hadn’t Dave mentioned giving her something like that?

  Whitcomb undid the buttons and eased the tunic aside to bare the area of her upper chest between breast and armpit. Sure enough, stamped there beneath the collarbone, pretty much where it was on both murder victims: a tattoo that looked identical to theirs. Lestrade figured it would probably still be identical, or all but, if placed side by side. Identical as two cookies from the same cutter. There could be tiny, accidental variations, but who was going to look for them? Not as if they were fingerprints, after all. And even identifying fingerprints was a job for the experts in the field, not exactly as cut and dried as most civilians seemed to think.

  “I see yours seems to be part of a larger tattoo, M. Whitworth.”

  “That was done about two months ago, Sergeant. I had the artist incorporate the symbol of Dante’s Delight into the larger image.”

  “Your artist did a good job of it. A good enough job that Detective Clayton never noticed it even when you and he found M. Soderstrum’s body.”

  Whitcomb flushed again and quietly rebuttoned her tunic.

  “Pretty much in the same place as M. Soderstrum’s. As you would have noticed yesterday morning. Same place as the one on M. Jackson, too.”

  “But not the same place all of us have ours, Sergeant. Sam’s is below his navel, Paul’s on his inner right thigh, Curly’s on the heel of her left foot. They’ll be willing to show you for themselves. Our group is private, not secret.” Readjusting her scarf, Whitcomb turned back toward the window and gave the teenagers a wave as she told Lestrade, “But I hope you can give Sa
m and Paul a little more privacy when they show you theirs. Because of where they have them.”

  “Fine. I can check them in Processing—the fingerprints and photos room.” Lestrade waved to the teenagers with the hand that held her pipe. At Whitcomb, they had grinned and waved back. At the polly’s wave, they turned and melted away. “Who keeps this tattoo stamp?” Lestrade asked Whitcomb.

  “Sam. M. Imani.”

  “At his house?”

  “In his box at the bank, I think.” M. Whitcomb smiled. “It doesn’t get that much use. Our maximum membership would be six—if we ever got there—but it’s hard enough just keeping it up to four.”

  “Any idea who made that stamp for him?”

  “I know he tried Dupont and O’Toole first, but it turned out they never do stamps. M. O’Toole gave him some recommendations, but if I ever knew which one of them Sam—M. Imani—went to, I’ve forgotten. Or maybe M. Imani even found someone else entirely. It isn’t exactly a fact I ever needed for my working memory, Sergeant. You’ll have to ask M. Imani himself.”

  “I will. Meanwhile, M. Whitcomb, I don’t imagine it’ll strain your working memory too much to let me know where you got the rest of that big tattoo about two months ago.”

  Whitcomb started to answer. At that nanosecond, Officer Little Bird thrust open the door and said,

  “Sergeant Lestrade, ma’am! Detective Clayton and Officer Brown are rushing M. Davison to the Emergency Room.”

  “WHAT NOW?”

  “M. Garvey gave him a couple of sleeping pills—the Slumbersound Dr. Grumeister swears by, and we’ve never had any trouble with them before. But he seems to be having some kind of reaction.”

  “Slumbersound?” Whitcomb looked a lot more shaken than when Lestrade had suggested casting her as the murderer. “Oh, no! Sergeant, it’s reacting with the traces of Visiondust still in his system!”

  Lestrade took only an instant to make up her mind. “Nurse Whitcomb. You’re coming along to the hospital with us.”