He could hear the phone ringing now, and hustled up the narrow driveway that separated his property from the Calhoun’s next door. Nobody called him on the phone, not at home. Telemarketers were a thing of the past; now they just spammed the vidscreen with their ads for wonder drugs and cheap life insurance, the all-inclusive sea cruise packages and the “sneaky secret” to grow four inches in just four weeks. There were only two people alive now who even had his home phone number: Jim was one, Robin Drake was the other; and while he was sure that it would be Jim on the other end of the line if he managed to get to the phone before it stopped ringing, Ezra’s heart skipped a greasy beat in his chest as he thought about it being Robin.
“Hold on, I’m comin,” Ezra muttered. He fished his keys out of his pants pocket, almost lost the bunch, then fumbled out his front door key just as he got to the porch steps. The phone, by some miracle, was still ringing; whoever it was on the other end really wanted to get hold of him. His mind reversed course and now he was sure that it was Robbie; things hadn’t worked out on the coast, she missed him, she wanted to come home. For his part, Ezra was ready and willing to admit to admit that he had been an ass and a fool, and that he was sorry he’d even hesitated over the choice (unfair as it might have been, but that was over and done with now) between his career and her love. He could already hear their conversation in his mind- but even caught up in this, a scenario that he knew deep down could never be anything but pure fantasy, his instincts were still there. He saw the fresh scratches on his key plate, tiny scrapes left there as someone with an amateur’s fingers picked the lock and let himself in the front door. Ezra cocked his head, looking at the scratches. The ringing phone faded away into the background drone that was the rest of the city noise around him. He thought about drawing one of his guns but didn’t, remembering the time he’d almost blown away Walter Kemp, that old newshound from the Harvest Home, when he was sneaking around in the apartment of Beon Hallrig, the murder victim in the case Ezra was working then. Instead of going for a gun he crept to the side of the steps, putting his hand into the bushes next to them and coming out with the friction-taped handle of an old baseball bat.
The phone rang on. He heard it again now, but knew it didn’t matter. The caller was Jim, without a doubt; Jim, wanting to know what he’d come up with on the Jensen case (zilch, until the tox screen came back and he could try to pin down a dealer based on what drug had killed the lady), or if he wanted to get some dinner (no, he wasn’t feeling all that hungry, he just wanted to grab a drink and get some rest, probably falling asleep in his chair with some old movie playing). It wasn’t going to be Robin Drake, waiting for him to pick up. It was never going to be Robin. She and he were quits, now and forever. What mattered right here and now was the someone lying in wait for him in his home. That mattered very much.
Ezra took a step forward on his porch and kicked in his own front door.
The man just inside Ezra’s tiny front hall had expected him to just walk in. Ezra stepped back instead, the door rebounding off the wall and swinging back on the guy. Before he could do anything else, Ezra took the bat and shoved it into the intruder’s gut. The guy went “Wuff!” and staggered back, stumbling over the small table where Ezra dumped his keys and the mail. Ezra moved in, kicking the front door shut behind him and adjusting his grip on the bat. It was late afternoon and the sun was shining outside, but Ezra’s front hall didn’t have any windows and the narrow space was a pool of gloomy shadows. There was enough light for him to see the glint of something metal in the intruder’s hand. Gun or knife, it didn’t matter; Ezra brought the bat back over his shoulder and struck down on the intruder’s wrist, connecting hard. Bones made a brittle snapping sound in the silence, and the intruder cried out.
Ezra stood back, eyes narrowed in the dim. The intruder was a big guy, dressed in dark clothes. The way he moved, his posture- he definitely seemed familiar. Another second, the large man straightening up with his broken wrist cradled against his broad chest, and Ezra had it. “Two choices,” Ezra said. He bounced the end of the old bat against the palm of his hand. “You can get carried out of here on a stretcher, or you can move on into the living room and tell me what the hell you’re doing here. Got that, Bronson?”
High Guard Mitchell Bronson leaned against the wall, his right hand drawn up like an old claw and sweat running down the sides of his fat face. Ezra moved up closer and the big man shrank back, holding himself against the wall while Ezra found the standing lamp at the end of the front hall and pulled the chain. Bronson blinked in the yellow light. His eyes went from Beckitt to the frayed old floor runner they stood on. The glinting metal object he’d had in his hand wasn’t a gun or a knife but an odd sort of blackjack sap, with a small trigger in the end- a stunner. A guy could do a lot of damage with one of those things. Stunners were legal for Striders to carry once upon a time, before it came to light that a subject could seize and die if you lit one up in the middle of his sternum. Ezra wondered where Bronson would have stuck him, if he’d had the chance.
“Not gonna ask again,” Ezra said. “Get movin or get carried outta here. Your call.”
“Broke my damn wrist,” Bronson said. His face was cheesy white in the lamplight. He reeked of dirty sweat and the stink of wasted adrenaline.
“Sure,” Ezra said. “And what were gonna do to me with this joy buzzer, chum?” Ezra stooped down quick, fast as a fox, and scooped up the stunner. Quick as he was, Bronson tried to make a play for him anyway. The bigger man reached down with his good hand, meaning to either grab Ezra by the throat or administer some sort of half-assed chop. Ezra brought the end of his bat up and drove it between Bronson’s legs. The big Guard uttered a weak, high groan and slithered down the wall, sitting in a heap on the floor with both hands pressed to his jewels.
“Guess we’ll just sit and talk here,” Ezra said. He slid down the wall and sat on the floor with his legs crossed in front of him. He propped the bat up with the handle against his shoulder and fished out his cigarettes, lighting one up. “So, what’s up, Bronson?” he said. “How’s things?”
“Told you to leave my case alone,” Bronson managed to say. “Wouldn’t listen. Fuckin hotshot. Gonna do what you want.”
“Yep,” Ezra said. There was an ashtray on the small table and he grabbed it and set it on his thigh so he didn’t get ashes everywhere. The house was still pretty new to him- Jim had helped him navigate the labyrinthine maze that was the Guards Housing and Financial Aid Act and co-signed on the loan for this place. The small house was a major step up from the slums Ezra had lived in ever since he got to the big city, and he was proud of it. “See, here’s the thing. We’re not Guilders, Bronson. Gorton says take a look at this case, that’s what I do. You think you can rough me up a little and make me go away, but that’s not how this works.”
Bronson either laughed or groaned, trying to find a way to sit comfortably. Between his broken wrist and his swollen balls, it was tough going. “Yeah, you got Gorton in your corner,” he said. “But let me tell you something, Beckitt. Gorton ain’t everything. He’s one of the big suits- he don’t know the streets. He’s the only friend you got. Me, I’ve been on the force for a long time…and I’ve got friends, Beckitt. That’s something you never bothered with, makin friends. Lot of other Guards don’t like you. You thumb your nose at everybody. Gonna catch up with ya, someday.”
“Looks like it caught you today,” Ezra said. “And if you’ve got friends, you better bring them along next time. But I’ll tell ya right now, Bronson- you come back to my place to call on me again, I ain’t gonna be so friendly. Bother me again, it’s not gonna matter how many friends you got. I’m not gonna come in with a bat. I’ll just shoot you bastards right through the door. You got that?”
Bronson shook his head.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” Ezra said. He crushed the last quarter inch of his Chesterfield out in the ashtray sliding off of his leg and got another one going. “This case, the Peters thi
ng- there’s nothing there. Kid’s just dead. I’m already on something else. So what’s the deal? Why you got your panties in such a twist?”
“Principle of the thing,” Bronson said. He was feeling lively enough now to try and get up from the floor but not having much success. “Told you to leave it alone. And I don’t like your pal the Commissioner stickin his oar in, either.”
Ezra grunted. “Oar?” he said. “Shit, Bronson- it’s his boat.”
Bronson managed to gain his feet this time, using his legs to push himself up against the wall. “Yeah,” he said. “For now. Be seeing you around, Beckitt,” the big, slump-shouldered Guard said, staggering past Ezra to the front door.
“Better not,” Ezra said. “And I better not hear anything about your broken wrist, other than you had some sort of dumb accident at home and broke it there. Someone comes asking me about it, I get hauled in front of a panel of inquiry? Then I’ll come to you, Bronson. Ya get?”
Mitchell Bronson said nothing. He lurched down the porch steps and shambled off into the late afternoon, walking painfully away to whatever pocket park or conshop lot he’d left his vehicle in before, unbelievably, lying for Ezra in Ezra’s own house.
“Shit,” Ezra said. He stood up in the front hall without using his hands or the wall, holding onto the ashtray. He only stood there staring for a second, unhooked from thought or feeling. He remembered the phone; it had long since stopped ringing and he must have forgotten to turn on the answering machine when he left this morning or it never would have rang and rang like that in the first place. Well, it had only been Jim. He would call back. Ezra kicked his front door shut again (Bronson hadn’t bothered to shut it, the savage) and then locked it, engaging the deadbolt he usually never bothered with and then berating himself as a coward for using it now.
He walked into the small kitchen, looking at the frying pan and mixing bowl in the sink from breakfast. He decided they could keep until tomorrow, or whenever. He made a note to call a locksmith and invest in a better setup for his doors and windows and stuck it on his fridge with a magnet; the magnet was shaped like a glass jar, full of ice with moisture beading along the sides. That done, he turned on the oven for a TV dinner from his freezer, made himself a tall drink, and went to sit in the gathering gloom of his living room. He didn’t turn on a lamp but flipped on the vidscreen, tuning in to the retro channel that usually had a movie on he wanted to watch. Staring at it, Ezra took a long sip of his first drink of the night, set the glass aside, and lit a Chesterfield.
The phone didn’t ring again that night.
Nine
“Say that again?” Ezra said. “I must not have heard you right, Forest.”
Ezra sat on a swivel chair down in Purgatory, relishing the blessed cool of the stainless steel room beneath the Justice Building. As per usual on a night when he was upset about something (an issue he didn’t think about- introspection wasn’t really his thing), last night he’d had one or two drinks too many before finally passing out in his recliner. He’d woken up with a mouth full of matted old fur, his heart beating sluggish and fast at the same time from too many cigarettes, too much booze, and not enough food. It was going to be a hell of a day- the thermometer nailed to his garage (You and Me, Keepin Cool with a Pipsee!) had reported a temperature of seventy-eight degrees already at nine in the morning. To be perfectly frank and truthful, Ezra felt like seven pounds of greasy shit in a five pound sack.
“I said negative,” Forest said. From the look on his young face, one would think he was enjoying the obvious discomfort of his elder- but that couldn’t be. “All of the toxscreen reports came back negative. Missus Beverly Jensen didn’t have so much as an over the counter heartburn medicine in her system when she died.”
“That’s what I thought you said,” Ezra said. He reached into his jacket pocket and came out with a single serve tin foil pouch containing a tab of dissolvable antacid. He didn’t feel like climbing from his chair to get a glass of water so he just ripped the pouch and popped the round white tablet into his mouth, chewing it up with a grimace on his face. “And it’s absolute bullshit, pal o’ mine. The woman OD’ed in her car down in Londell’s. I’ve got a witness who saw a guy, might as well have been wearing a sign on his back that said ‘Friendly Neighborhood Pusher,’ come up to the car to do the deal.”
Doctor Leonard shrugged. “Well,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you, Ezra. There’s nothing in her system. A lot of these older rich types, they still go in for the old-fashioned stuff they grew up with: cocaine, heroin- the non-synth stuff. That’s what I checked for first. When I came up empty I moved on to the modern day. Still zilch.”
Ezra looked down at the body of Beverly Jensen. Here in Purgatory, with all of her makeup scrubbed away and the unforgiving light bars eliminating every shadow and laying her bare, her body dead and lax, all traces of the attractive middle-aged housewife were gone. “How old do you think she was?” he said.
“How old do you think she was?” Doctor Leonard shot back. He was smiling.
Ezra shrugged. “Her ID-”
“Her ID was a professional fake,” Doctor Leonard said. “I mean, the guy was an artist. According to her ID, she was forty-three. And she looked it, from the pictures I saw in her palmscreen. But this woman hasn’t seen her forties in thirty years, Ezra.”
“You’re tellin me she was in her seventies?” Ezra said. “Holy moly. I wonder if her husband knew. He really is in his forties, as far as I can tell.”
“And I really doubt that he cared,” Doctor Leonard said. “Young girls aren’t the only ones who try to hook a partner for their money. Missus Jensen was rich. That house on Hawethorne Heights? One of seven residences, all over the world. Her first husband, Joseph Holdyne, was the CEO of Delta City Motors- the last of the old gas engine companies bought out by Makross during the Ithur revolution.”
Ezra whistled. “Christ. She must have been worth a fortune.”
“Doesn’t really matter now. Not to be cliché, but you don’t get to take it with you.”
“The hell’s goin on here, anyway,” Ezra muttered under his breath. He looked back up at Doctor Leonard. “A witness says a second man came up to Missus Jensen’s car after the dealer left. He described the man as very white. This second guy, he could have been Mister Jensen- who wasn’t at home when I dropped by to chat with him.”
“Did Mister Jensen spend a summer as an intern at a mortuary?” Doctor Leonard said.
“Why would you ask that?”
The young doctor shrugged. “Because this is the cleanest dead body I’ve ever seen, Ezra,” he said. “She looks ready for visiting hours. Well, maybe she could use a little rouge, some face powder…but damn, man, just look at her.”
Ezra did just that. He looked for a long time. The dead woman looked at peace. Whatever problems she’d been having, whatever drugs she’d been using to get away from those problems for a little while, all of that was gone. There was a secret little half smile on her colorless lips. Her closed eyes were more reminiscent of a person putting her contented face up to the summer sky than those of a corpse. “Is it possible,” Ezra started, then stopped because he wasn’t really sure how to say what he wanted to say. “Is there something that can eliminate any trace of drugs from a person’s body? Some chemical or something?”
“If there is I’ve never heard of it,” Doctor Leonard said. “And something like that- if it existed- would show up itself. There’s nothing there. She’s clean. What are you after, anyway? You think the husband found her and cleaned up after her? Even if he could do it, why? To avoid scandal? Maybe something in her will that would exclude him if she died under certain unsavory circumstances? What?”
“I don’t know,” Ezra said. “I’ll have to talk to the man and see. In the meantime, do you want to tell me what did kill the lady?”
“I’d love to,” Doctor Leonard said. “But I can’t.”
“What?”
“For a woman her age, Missu
s Jensen was in remarkable shape,” Leonard said. “In fact, she was in remarkable shape for a woman half her age. I can tell you that she was still sexually active, as recently as the day of her death. I can tell you that the night before last she had a lovely medallion of venison with fingerling potatoes for dinner, and she skipped breakfast the next morning. Her ticker was in perfect shape. Ditto her liver, kidneys, and lungs, though she did smoke. I can tell you that she was right-handed, and I can tell you that she loved to play retro video games- she has the ridge of callous on the pads and sides of her thumbs that comes from continued use of the old plastic game controllers. I can tell you almost anything about this woman, down to what her real hair color was before it went grey and she started coloring it this lovely shade of red. But I can’t tell you what killed her, because I don’t know.”
“Just like Kevin Peters,” Ezra said.
Doctor Leonard blinked. “Now, hold on a second,” he said. “There’s no real correlation there. These two people are about as different as any two people can be, Ezra.”
“They both seem perfectly healthy, other than the fact that they’re dead,” Ezra said. “In both cases, the cause of death is unknown.”
“All right,” Doctor Leonard said. There wasn’t any humor in his face now. “Why don’t you just go ahead and say what you’re trying to say, High Guard Beckitt- that the cause of death is unknown in these cases because I haven’t been able to determine it.”
Ezra waved this away. “Not what I was saying. What if there’s something new going on here? A disease- a virus or something like that?”
“That doesn’t make sense to me, either,” Doctor Leonard said. “There would be some indication, some cellular damage- something. These two bodies, Mister Peters and Missus Jensen…there’s nothing there.”
Tableau Page 7