The waiting room was empty, except for a guy in a nice suit and a big square haircut who might or might not have been from the Inquisitor's Office. I considered the possibility and withheld judgment. He looked quickly up at me and then back down at his magazine. I shut the door. No one was behind the reception desk, so I sat, down on the sofa across from Mr. Suit.
Testafer and Stanhunt, like any practice which dealt with problems of a confidential nature, charged top-dollar rates for unexceptional treatment and downright indifferent reception. The customers slunk in and out quietly enough, grateful the office was clean and that their problems went away. Stanhunt was the new boy, or was until yesterday. Testafer had already made his bundle and gotten out, except to leave a shingle hanging. His specialty had probably been no different from Stanhunt's: the radical walletectomy. I'd managed to visit the office five or six times without meeting him, but I was going to meet him now if anyone could.
A door opened in the back and the nurse came out. She was a redhead with a pair of alert breasts that always managed to appear slightly akimbo, as if she shopped for her underwear in a discount irregulars place. Recognizing me, she turned down the corners of her mouth. I dredged her name up from the murk of my consciousness, but she spoke before I could use it.
"You can't be here looking for more work—you're not that tasteless and you're not that stupid. Close, but not quite." She was good at her job. I had to give her that.
"I didn't realize I'd made such an impression on you, Princess. I came here looking for a friendly face, actually. I realize I may have to settle for Dr. Testafer."
"If I tell Dr. Testafer what you do for a living, he'll tell me to tell you he's not here. So he's not here."
"You're a sweetheart, I'll admit it. Now find your appointment book"
"We're closed for the next forty-eight hours. I'm sure even you can understand why."
I decided to turn on the heat, or what little I had that could pass for it. "Tell Testafer I want to return some materials I assembled while working for Maynard." It was pure bluff. "I was holding out, but there doesn't seem to be any point in that now."
"You're going to—"
"I'm going to see the doctor at four-thirty, baby. Write it down. Tell him I have a terrible pain right here." I showed her with my hand.
By this time we'd gotten the attention of Mr. Suit. He put down his magazine and stood up, rubbing his jaw with his big beefy hand as if considering the possible juxtaposition of jaw and hand, generally; mine and his, specifically.
"I'm trying to figure you out, mister," he said. "You seem pretty rude." If he was an inquisitor, he wasn't tipping his hand with a question.
"Don't try to figure me out," I said. "It doesn't work—I've tried it myself."
"I recommend you go home and work on it some more. Come back maybe when you've figured out how to apologize. But not before."
I marveled at his swagger. His eyes were unclouded by intelligence. I wanted to see him as an inquisitor, but I still wasn't sure.
"Apologies aren't something you want to get in the habit of practicing in the mirror," I said. "But from the look of you, I guess you wouldn't understand what I mean."
I let him chew on that—it was obviously going to take a while.
"Write it down," I said again to the girl. "I'll be on time—make sure the doctor gets the message, so he can be too." I turned to the door, deciding to quit while I was ahead. The Suit didn't try to stop me.
I got into the elevator and played back the scene in my head while I watched the buttons light up. I'd been my usual sweet self with the girl, but that didn't bother me anymore. I was at permanent war with members of the fair sex because of what they'd cut out of me, dripping blood and still beating. I preferred to keep them hating me, because if they liked me, there wasn't a lot I could do about it. I wasn't a man anymore. That was Delia Limetree's fault, and I would never forgive her for it Not that she ever came back to ask forgiveness.
Delia Limetree and I had undergone one of those theoretically temporary operations where they switch your nerve endings around with someone else, so you can see what it feels like to be a man if you're a woman, a woman if you're a man. It was supposed to be a lot of fun. It was, until she disappeared before we could have the operation reversed.
She didn't even leave a note. I never learned whether she was so sickened by the experience of having a penis that she slipped away into an asylum or convent, or whether she liked it so much that she didn't want to give it up. All I know is that she still had the male set to that day, and I had—well, you know what that left me with. It still looked like the male apparatus, and still functioned that way as far as the other party was concerned, but the sensations from my end of things were the female ones. The doctors offered me the generic male package, but what I wanted were my own personalized nerve endings, the ones Delia was out using or not using who knows where. Someday I was going to catch up with her and take back what was mine, but until then I'd sworn the whole thing off. It was okay. I'd always liked drugs better anyway.
All of which meant I got down to the lobby feeling pretty good about the interaction upstairs, especially how I handled the Suit. Which is when a couple of guys from the Inquisitor's Office stepped up on either side of me and seized my arms.
"You should go back to your apartment, flathead," said the one on the left. "We'll be sending someone up to have a chat with you. Until then you should sit tight."
"Coming here was a mistake, Metcalf," said the other. He aimed his magnet at my pocket, and I heard the telltale digital bleep. "Fifteen points of karma, gumshoe. Now go cool your heels."
I put my hand in my pocket and wrapped my fingers protectively around my card. "Fifteen points is rough, boys. I've got a license."
"You didn't show it to the folks upstairs."
"That your boy? He's got a nice pair of matching brain cells."
The one on the right grabbed me by the collar and tried to slap my face. I squirmed and ended up with a mouthful of wrist. "Don't question us, flathead. You should know better." They shoved me forward, at the revolving door. "Get lost."
I bustled through the revolving door, my hand up over my mouth. An evolved dachshund was in the compartment across from me, waddling his way into the building, and when I pushed on the glass, he was ejected into the lobby faster than his little legs would carry him. He fell in a sprawl across the tiles in front of the two inquisitors, and as I looked back, they were helping him to his feet. A warm little scene. I went around the corner to the parking lot. My mouth hurt, but when I took my hand away, it was wet with drool, not blood.
I had two hours before my appointment with Dr. Testafer, and I didn't know what I was going to ask him. I didn't currently have a client, and I didn't have any other leads. What else? Well, it sounded like the inquisitors would be waiting at my apartment, and maybe at my office as well.
Still, I had managed to shave that burdensome fifteen-point surplus off my card.
CHAPTER 4
STANHUNT HAD ORIGINALLY HIRED ME TO KEEP AN EYE on his wife. Now I had to wonder whether that was just the cover story, whether my peeping had been to set an alibi for someone somewhere, whether I'd been playing a patsy even before he requested strong-arm services and I said no. Nonetheless, I had spent a week trailing her around, and that probably made me the current authority on the subject. I decided to stop in. She and Stanhunt had been freshly separated, and the electricity between them had still been going strong—back when Stanhunt was still capable of generating electricity. Now there was a blackout. I wondered if the lady behaved any differently in the dark I wondered if maybe she was the one who cut the wires.
She'd met me once, as a guy who sidled up to her in a bar with liquor on his breath and a quick lay on his mind. Stanhunt suspected his ex was fooling around, so I thought I'd check. To make the pass more realistic, both the drunk and the lust were authentic. I was a method actor. Celeste Stanhunt was a nice-looking woman who became some
thing more when you were being paid to peek through her windows. To put it simply, there hadn't been any need to undress her in my mind.
The problem I wrestled with now was whether to pick up where I left off playing peeper, or to cast myself against type and knock on the door. I decided on the latter course. If she recognized me, I could come clean about working for her husband—it was bound to come out anyway, during the investigation.
I drove up into the hills, past quiet tree-lined streets with space between the houses. The streets were a bit too quiet for my taste; I would have liked it better to see kids playing in front, running, shouting, even asking each other innocent questions and giving innocent answers back. That's the way it was before the babyheads, before the scientists decided it took too long to grow a kid and started working on ways to speed up the process. Dr. Twostrand's evolution therapy was the solution they hit on; the same process they'd used to make all the animals stand upright and talk. They turned it on the kids, and the babyheads were the happy result. Another triumph for modern science, and nice quiet streets in the bargain.
Celeste Stanhunt was staying in a big house at the end of Cranberry Street, where the monorail tracks intersected almost at a right angle the hill behind the trees. The house was perched on rocks like a bird of prey with a toehold over a fresh carcass. It was going to be a lot easier to walk up to the front door than it had been to find a way around the back to a good view of the bay window.
When I rang the doorbell, the other woman opened the door. I still didn't know her name, though I'd seen a lot of her when I cased the house in my stint as Celeste Stanhunt's shadow. She was thin and pale, with a cloistered air, as if she never left the big house. I'd certainly never seen her leave. She was playing mother, both to a babyhead who was in and out, mostly out, and to a young, newly evolved kitten who was home all the time except when she was out selling cat-scout cookies door to door. The woman doted on them both, but the kitten appreciated it a lot more than the babyhead did.
Celeste Stanhunt had fled to the Cranberry Street house when she left Maynard. My impression was that this was a temporary measure, until she found somewhere else to live or went back to her husband, and that she and the pale woman were just friends. I probably should have been more curious, the first time. I'd catch up now.
She didn't say anything, just stood there, the usual way. It would have been impolite to ask me who I was.
"I was looking for Mrs. Stanhunt," I said.
The woman knit her brow. There weren't many walk-up visitors on Cranberry Street.
"My name is Conrad Metcalf," I said gently. "I realize this is a difficult time, but that's what I've come about."
She took a tentative step backwards into the house. My sympathy made things difficult. I was still unsavory-looking, but she was going to have to meet me halfway.
"Come in," she said. "I'll tell her your name." I followed her through the foyer.
The house was elegant, high-ceilinged, spotlessly clean—but I knew that already. My hostess pointed to the couch, and I went and sat on it while she vanished upstairs. This wasn't a house where you yelled upstairs from the bottom step. It was a house where you walked all the way up and said there was a guest in a low, even tone, and she was going to make sure I knew it.
I sat there and tried to puzzle out what I would ask Mrs. Stanhunt, and what I would do with what I learned, if I learned something. I was playing this case existential, maybe a bit too existential. I needed a lead. I needed a client. Hell, I even needed a sandwich. There was probably little chance of Celeste Stanhunt coming downstairs and offering me a sandwich.
I didn't hear the pitter-patter of little cat feet coming up behind me, but all of a sudden the kitten was there at my side, in a red-and-white dress, carrying an armload of notebooks like a schoolgirl. She smiled through her whiskers and looked at the floor.
"Hello, little girl," I said.
"I'm learning to read," the kitten announced. She put the books down on the coffee table, sat on the carpet, and pulled off her little shoes.
"Learning to read," I repeated. "I didn't realize they still taught that."
"At growth camp. I go every day. I go to the library with my mother."
"Celeste is your mother," I suggested, keeping it a statement. I could get in trouble busting into houses and questioning defenseless little cats.
"No, silly. Pansy is my mother."
An alley cat is your mother, I thought, but I didn't say it. "Pansy and Celeste live together," I tried.
"Celeste is visiting."
"Celeste never visited before." This was too easy.
"No, silly. Celeste visits a lot."
I thought about the possible relationships: sisters, lovers, employer and employee. In my line of work you start to sort people out that way, and there weren't really all that many categories.
"Don't call me silly," I said. "You and Pansy live alone."
"No, silly." It was a fun game. "Barry lives with us sometimes."
"Don't call me silly. Barry is a rabbit."
"No, silly. Barry is a boy."
"Barry is a babyhead, Mr. Metcalf," said Celeste Stanhunt from the middle of the stairway. "Sasha, you should go upstairs and leave me alone with Mr. Metcalf. Pansy is waiting for you."
"Okay," said the kitten, but she wanted to stay and play. "Mr. Metcalf is silly, Celeste."
"I know he is," said Celeste cleanly. "Now go upstairs."
"Good-bye, Sasha," I said.
The kitten scrambled up the stairs, on all fours at first and then, self-consciously, back on two feet. I heard a muffled voice and the shutting of a door upstairs.
Celeste looked good. I had to admire her composure. It was obvious she had recognized me and didn't know what to do about it. Her lovely bottom lip was trembling—but just a little. It was the only flaw, and it was a minor one.
"You've gotten my attention, Mr. Metcalf. I suppose it's time you introduce yourself." She paused gravely. "You work for Danny."
Danny. I jotted the name down mentally on that tattered notepad I call a memory. The pen skipped. "No, I'm afraid not. Or would that be good news?"
"I've answered enough questions today to last a lifetime. Let's see some identification, or I'm calling in the heat."
"The heat?" I smiled. "That's ugly talk"
"You're using a lot of ugly punctuation." She stuck out a hand. "Let's see it, tough boy."
I pulled out my photostat. "Last time I worked, it was for your husband, Mrs. Stanhunt. That was two weeks ago."
She looked it over and tossed it in my lap.
"You're really a private eye." She composed herself. "You don't work—"
"It's all straight," I said. "I don't work for Danny. I'm not actually working for anybody right now. I guess you could say I'm a hobbyist."
"You have to excuse my rudeness," she said. She wanted to take it all back. "The last twenty-four hours have been a nightmare." Her intonation was different. It went with the house and the car and the doctor now. The veneer had peeled up momentarily, but she was gluing it back down as fast as she could.
I went along. "You don't have to ask for my indulgence. I've been more than a little rude myself. You'd be within your rights to have me thrown out of here."
"I've already been treated pretty roughly by the inquisitors," she said, and her lip started to tremble again. Then she made a show of a show of strength. "But if there's anything I can help you with ... A friend of Maynard's..."
"I'd rather not misrepresent myself, Mrs. Stanhunt. Your husband didn't count me among his friends. Our relationship was purely supply and demand."
"I see. And you supplied—"
"I followed you around for about a week. No hard feelings. It was a job."
She raised an eyebrow. "So that little scene in the bar—that was just part of the job."
"I work pretty much around the clock when I get work, if that's what you mean. I pick up my dividends where I can." Even I wasn't sure what
that meant.
She opened a cigarette box on the coffee table and took out a cigarette, then began fussing with a pack of matches.
But she was nervous and handled the cigarette like a cigar, except for biting off the end.
"I'm still unclear, Mr. Metcalf, as to whether you're working now."
"I guess I am. Sorry for wasting your time." I crossed my legs. "When you say the inquisitors treated you rough, do you mean they treated you as a suspect?"
She smiled. "That's indirect, even for you. No, they were fairly civil. If it crossed their minds, they never said anything."
"They didn't ask where you were last night, during the killing?"
"I told them I was here, Mr. Metcalf. If you ask, I'll tell you the same thing."
"Then I don't think I'll bother. Let's try another angle: Do you know a man named Orton Angwine?"
She answered fast, but the rhythm was off. "Not until this morning. I understand he had some kind of grudge against Maynard."
"The inquisitors seem to think so. You sure he doesn't ring any bells? Most enemies start out as friends—but I'm sure you know that. He was never in the house?"
"No."
"Most people would say, 'Not that I can recall.'"
She got the joke and took it pretty well. "Not that I can recall," she repeated, mimicking my intonation.
"Not bad. But I'm in the business of unmasking liars, not helping them polish their act. What's the story with Angwine?"
"It can't be good business for you to go around calling people liars, Mn Metcalf. That license you carry says you're allowed to ask me questions, but it doesn't say I have to answer them."
"I rely on circumstance for that Let's put our cards on the table, Celeste. You can't afford to brush me off. You don't know who I might talk to next, and what I might find out. You want to know whose side I'm on—well, so do I. We're both involuntary participants in a murder investigation, only I think you're in a little deeper than you say. As for me, I'm a free agent. Just because I get paid doesn't mean I get paid off. Now you want very much for me to leave with the impression that you cooperated. Which makes two of us. Only problem is, I'm wearing a bullshit-proof vest. I can't help it. I was born with the thing. Lies bounce off me and land on the carpet like ticks picked off a dog."
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