The Second Reginald Bretnor Megapack

by Reginald Bretnor

  Once, Errol Vasquez Munrooney had been a very handsome man. More recently, showmanship and charisma had combined with what was left to charm not only a succession of impressionable women but much of the general electorate as well. Now the flamboyant personality was gone; the vulgar magic had run out.

  “Well,” said Timuroff, considering the remains, “he may have rated a few imps, perhaps even one or two noncommissioned demons—but a stone Commendatore? Never! Still, don’t underrate the dead. His Honor can make more trouble for you now than when he was alive and kicking.”

  “You know,” Pete remarked thoughtfully, “he looks sort of like an overblown Richard Burton run to mod. Look at that outfit—right out of Esquire’s fashion section, shaggy curls and all. He must really have been sucking for the teenage vote.”

  Abruptly, before Timuroff could suggest that the mayor had probably had more carnal reasons for trying to bridge the generation gap, Jake Harrell bulled his way out of a busy knot of criminalists. “Pete!” he boomed. “Boy, am I glad you’re here! We’re almost through. After Tim tells us all about the dagger, I’ll fill you in. Then—thank God!—the detective bureau can go hit the sack. You want to look around awhile before we wrap things up?”

  “No need. Your boys know their job.”

  “Okay, they’ll bring you everything they have tomorrow.”

  He gestured at the body. “How about him? Any fond farewells?”

  Pete shook his head. “Just tell me, did he die there at her feet, or what?”

  “He was half on, half off. Looked like he’d grabbed her, then she’d stabbed him, then he’d reared up and fallen back again. See how her nightie’s torn around her breasts? When he was found, his head and shoulders were hanging over on the floor, her right hand was above his wound, and the dagger was still sticking in him.”

  “Did you turn her on again? Maybe she’d want to make a statement.”

  “Funny man! Sure we turned her on, but not until we’d questioned Grimwood to find out how she works, and then we videotaped the whole procedure to make sure we’d fouled nothing up. All she did was start her recitation over again right from the start.”

  “Well, that’s it, I guess,” Pete said. “At least for now.”

  “Fine. The Chronicle just phoned, and they’re on their way. The Trib and everybody’ll be right on their tail. I want all this cleaned up before they get here.” He turned aside. “All right, Doc, you can have him now. Jimmy, bring the dagger over here for Mr. Timuroff. Bring both of ’em.”

  “Both of them?” asked Timuroff.

  “Yeah. She’s programmed for a fake one, a stage dagger. When you turn her on she starts reciting this long piece about some Roman rape case way back in B.C. Then, if anybody makes a pass at her, whammo! She screams and lets him have it in the back. All nice, clean fun—only this time the dagger was for real, and the fake one was stashed in that vase up there. Thanks, Jimmy—” He took the daggers, wrapped in Pliofilm and neatly ticketed, and held them out to Timuroff. “You want me to undo them, Tim?”

  “It won’t be necessary,” Timuroff said slowly, stroking his moustache. “I had a feeling the weapon would be something special when you asked for me.” He handed back the rubber dummy dagger. “And it is special. I can tell you when it last was sold, and where, and for how much, and to whom.” He turned the weapon over. The blade was about ten inches long, slightly curved, double edged. “It is a khanjar, Indo-Persian, and there are lots of them around—but not like this. It’s said to have belonged to Nadir Shah, and it was sold at Sotheby’s in London roughly six or seven weeks ago for seventeen thousand, seven hundred pounds.”

  “You mean,” exclaimed Harrell, “that some nut paid that kind of money for a sticker just so he—so he could—?”

  “Kill our Heroic Leader?” Timuroff smiled. “I doubt it very much. But the man who bought it was an agent named Strickland, acting for our friend Socrates Voukos.”

  Grimly, police glances were exchanged.

  Timuroff shook his head. “Somehow, I can’t believe Socrates is involved. He’d have too much respect for it. He actually threw a party for it when it arrived; I was invited, but I was down south. See how delicately the hilt is carved from spinach jade, inlaid and overlaid with gold and precious stones. Look at that splendid fretwork! And even though the blade is bloodied, you can still see that its damask and carving and inlay are unmatched. Master craftsmen created it.” He handed the dagger back regretfully. “I hope you’ll wipe that blood off before too long—just in case Socrates decides to sell it to some honest local dealer when this is over. You didn’t find the scabbard, by the way?”

  “No,” Harrell answered. “Ought there to be one?”

  “There was. It matched the rest, gold and more jewels, with velvet carefully chosen to complement the jade, though that of course had faded quite a bit over the years.”

  Harrell signaled, and the man who had been taping Timuroff’s remarks hustled his gear away and disappeared. Suddenly the room was empty; everything—cameras, extension cords, hand vacuum cleaners, chemicals—had been removed. Moments before, everyone had been packing frantically; now the only sign of activity was the slow march to the. door of the ambulance crew carrying the discreetly packaged mayor.

  “What about Exhibit A?” Pete pointed at Lucrece.

  “Leave her here,” said Harrell. “You can’t subpoena her, and trying to pry her out could wreck the evidence. I’ve ordered a lockup on the room until the picture clears. You just explain it to the chief in case he starts to throw his weight around, ha-ha!” He slapped Pete reassuringly on the back. “And now I’ll brief you on what we’ve learned so far, which won’t take more than about two minutes. Tim, do you want to sit in on this?”

  “I’d rather prowl around a little, Jake. This is a fine old place; I’d like to look it over. Pete, is that okay with you?”

  “Sure. Just don’t let Kielty give you a bad time. And leave word with someone if you go anywhere you’d be hard to find.”

  Timuroff shut the door silently behind him, and strolled toward the staircase. Here the walls were paneled in a glowing hardwood much darker than those downstairs. The high ceiling was of modeled plaster, the sort of work once done for the great houses of Horace Walpole’s England. The only pictures, incongruously, were half a dozen modern Japanese prints, all of them wonderfully dramatic cats by Tomoo Inagaki. Timuroff regarded them approvingly, recognizing that they had been chosen by someone who didn’t give a damn for the opinions of interior decorators, and his estimate of Dr. Grimwood went up accordingly. At the head of the stairs, in an alcove, he spied what appeared to be a first-rate suit of Renaissance half armor, possibly from Nuremburg, but he remembered that the press was on its way and hastened on. Downstairs, he walked politely around a livid Amos Ledenthal, who, just released from questioning, was furiously shaking his grizzled mane and enormous fists, and telling the imperturbable plainclothesman at the door how he was going to bring about the downfall of Judson Hemmet, Mario Baltesar, and the chief of police, in that order. Ledenthal didn’t even notice him, but his partner in the heavy-construction business, Reese Guthrie, was waiting for him in the background, so Timuroff said hello to him instead. “Amos seems upset,” he said. “I can’t say I really blame him.”

  A much younger man—young enough to have been a captain in Vietnam—Guthrie had impressed him favorably on the few occasions when they’d met. He was a southerner, from one of the Carolinas, strong and courteous and soft-spoken—and under all of it, taut and battle-hardened. Now he returned the greeting, and glanced over his shoulder at the altercation. “I just got here,” he answered. “They tell me Munrooney’s been killed. Too bad it had to happen here at Grimwood’s. Otherwise, I don’t think the country’s suffered a great loss. I hope they don’t think Amos had anything to do with it.”

  Timuroff sa
id he didn’t think so, then told him about Lucrece, the locked door, the strong suggestion that the mayor’s intentions had not been of the noblest, and the khanjar.

  Guthrie laughed aloud. “Well, that dagger puts Amos in the clear. He would’ve used a big katana or—what’s the other one?—a tachi.”

  “Like any sensible man.” Timuroff smiled. “Though it’d be a shame to risk a blade in perfect polish on someone like our Tarquin.” Seeing that Ledenthal wasn’t even beginning to run down, he decided to resume his tour. He said good-night to Guthrie, asked him to say hello to Amos for him, and wandered down the hall until it merged, through two stately doors standing open, into the living room. There he stopped to chat with Pascoe, another of Harrell’s men, and to survey the guests.

  The room extended more than forty feet across the rear of the house. Its paneling was of Circassian walnut, framing the windows and the mirrored mantels, one at either end, and setting in relief the precious First Empire paper on the walls. Fires in both fireplaces blazed cheerfully; and on the right, another door through which a caterer’s waitress was carrying a tray of empty glasses betrayed the existence of a bar and butler’s pantry.

  Most of the guests looked apprehensive. Like livestock in a blizzard, they had huddled into more or less homogeneous knots. Before one fireplace, rebelliously sitting on the floor, were six or seven male and female hippies, probably chosen for relative cleanliness from the fringes of the English Department at U.C. They were paying court to an epicene but hairy person in a once-white swami suit, whom Timuroff recognized as a poet who had achieved public notoriety by publishing amatory verse involving a large section of the animal kingdom.

  To counterbalance these, before the other fireplace were gathered those with pretensions to prestige, position, money, and high fashion: pretty people, vain people, inheritors of new money and onetime possessors of old fortunes—people who kept the gossip columnists alive.

  Between them and the hippies, scattered by twos and threes, were the most valid people in the room. Socrates Voukos, squat and bristle-bearded, was talking seriously and softly with Wade Kalloch, a speculator and subdivider whose smooth, plump face and rimless glasses concealed the social conscience of a wolverine. Miranda Morphy Gardner, gaunt and diamonded and sheathed in silver, a power in the shadow world of ruthless moneylending, sat with one hand on the thigh of her effete male secretary, watching a well-known architect swiftly sketch imaginary designs on a burnished tabletop. Rear Admiral Houston Melmoth, retired, towered above them silently, grim-faced, turning his highball glass slowly in his hand.

  Timuroff knew them all. They were all customers of his. But now he realized that he had never really looked at them before. From the beginning, the murder of the mayor, like the man himself, had had something so far-out about it that he had thought about it only as good theater: a farce, a travesty of the believable. Suddenly this had changed. Indefinably, on the edge of consciousness, a breath of cold and deadly purpose had reached out and touched him. It came and it was gone, leaving the world transmuted.

  Timuroff had experienced it before in more than one of his several strange careers, and he had learned that it was not to be ignored. He surveyed the room again. There were a dozen others there whom he recognized, but they were unimportant, uninteresting. He looked again at Voukos and Kalloch and the looming admiral. He looked again at Miranda Gardner. He smiled at Pascoe. “Quite a party, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Weird, real weird.” Pascoe shook his head. “Can’t see why the chief keeps ’em here. Hell, we can haul ’em back for questioning anytime.” He broke off, cocked an ear to listen. “Doorbell,” he said. “That’ll be the media. Boy, is this place going to be a nuthouse for a while!”

  “It’s certainly going to be confused,” Timuroff agreed. “I think I’ll wander down and get a drink.”

  “I wish I could,” sighed Pascoe.

  CHAPTER III

  The Fearful Guest

  Long ago, Alastair Alexandrovitch Timuroff had learned how to move unobtrusively, so that strangers did not notice him and acquaintances immediately forgot that he was there. Now, on his way toward the bar, he was recognized only by a moulting actress, who blew him a moist, crimson kiss, and by young Coulter, who nodded vaguely and instantly turned back to the young lady he had his lustful eye on.

  He made friends with the middle-aged Filipino barman, received a double brandy and soda instead of the single he had asked for, then shifted into Spanish for a chat. The barman was disturbed. The people here, he said emphatically, were very strange, more so than any group he’d ever served. It was no wonder the poor mayor had been slain! He gestured, dismissing the hippies and the real and aspiring idle rich contemptuously. He dropped his voice. “But there are others here, senor, who frighten me—and I, Florencio Pambid, who was a sergeant in the constabulary at nineteen and fought the Japanese as a guerrilla, I do not frighten easily.”

  Timuroff, familiar with their combat record, was impressed. “I would value your opinion highly,” he replied.

  “Senor, I know you were not here before, that you came with the police. Listen!” He pointed at Miranda Gardner. “That woman looked into my eyes, and she is dead inside. But worse—” Almost surreptitiously, he crossed himself.

  “There was a man here who is gone. A big man, very cold, with a loose skin and pale eyes. But it was what he was, not how he looked. When the Japanese held my country, such men came. They came from here, from there, but they were all the same. They lived only to kill, to give others pain. You understand?”

  “I understand,” said Timuroff. “I have met such men. My friend the police inspector, who will be in charge, will speak with you.”

  “I will tell him everything I know—that the man went away before they found the mayor had been killed, that he stayed by himself and, I think, spoke to no one.”

  “Mil gracias. I will write the inspector’s name on my card. If you think of more that you can tell, speak to him only or telephone me. The police know where to reach you?… Good.”

  There was a hubbub at the door; the gabble of the guests died suddenly; a strobe or two went off. Timuroff, realizing that the newsmen had arrived, paused only long enough to have his glass refilled. Then, as waitresses came up with trays of orders, probably for the press, he faded back into the butler’s pantry, and out of it into a service hall. Rather to his surprise, the policeman there was the one who had opened the front door to them on their arrival. He was staring disconsolately into a cup of coffee.

  “Hello, Kerry,” Timuroff greeted him.

  “Glad to see you, Mr. T. The chief booted me back here when the newsmen came. Where’s Pete?”

  “Still upstairs, I think. Your captain was briefing him when I came down.”

  “I sure don’t envy him. All those characters. And would you look at this joint—twenty different ways in and out.” Timuroff saw that in addition to the service stairs there was a service lift, another little hall with a mysterious door at its end, a door announcing the probability of a john, a door to the main hallway, a great many closets and cupboards, and finally, at the dead end, a taller and more ornate door obviously opening into the library.

  “Anybody in the library now?” Timuroff asked.

  “Uh-uh. It’s empty. Nobody’s been there since the media came. Why?”

  “Maybe I’ll hole up there and kill my drink while I wait for Pete. Think anybody’d mind?”

  “Can’t see why.” Kerry, who had hoped for company and conversation, sounded disappointed. “You want me to tell him where you are if he shows up?”

  “Tell him to come in and wake me.” Timuroff turned the handle of the door. “It’s been a long, hard day.”

  Some of the lights had been left on, and being fond of libraries, he was pleased to see that this was more than one in name only. Between the windows, and
on either side of the high fireplace, bookshelves rose from floor to ceiling. Morocco, calf, and vellum spoke of centuries spanned; specially made slipcovers and shelves high enough for folios and tall quartos hinted at fine printing and probable rarity.

  Everything was mahogany: the paneling, the great desk in the center of the room, where presumably Chiefy had been putting people to the question, the dictionary stand that flanked it, the wheeled library ladder, the heavy chairs, the huge Victorian couch before the fire. Two lovely Ting Yao bowls, almost a pair and obviously Sung, were on the mantel, next to a French clock extravagantly gilded and enameled, with at one end a dying gladiator and at the other his mourning wife and minor children, all in bronze. Timuroff was enraptured; he stood and stared, and presently the clock went bong! sepulchrally, as though announcing the sad end of the Franco-Prussian War.

  He drank a toast to it, then let his gaze continue round the room. Beside the door to the main hall stood yet another suit of armor, dark and nobly Gothic, almost unornamented, made for an unusually tall man, its steel hands crossed over the hilt of an enormous broadsword. Idly, he raised the visor.