Killed in Fringe Time Page 18

  Coincidences happen all the time; if you think about it the right way, everything that ever happens is coincidental to something. I could take a simultaneous bomb-mailing and poisoning. But this was too much, or rather, too many. I hated it, but that was nothing to the way Lieutenant Martin was going to react when he found out he suddenly had three perps to look for. Maybe. It might have been more merciful not to tell him, but of course I’d have to.

  Since it could not possibly figure in the commission of Bentyne’s murder itself, I decided to tell him tomorrow. Let him enjoy the rest of the day. Maybe I could forget about it until the morning and enjoy the rest of mine, too. Roxanne was coming home tomorrow, and that would save the day no matter what else happened.

  So I crammed it into a box and gave my full attention back to the remarkable specimen I was having dinner with.

  Dessert came, zabaglione over strawberries.

  “Welcome back,” she said.

  “I haven’t gone anywhere. I’ve been talking to you. You were telling me that you’d think of a way to get our Thursday afternoon rating up if it killed you.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Your ear-to-mouth circuit was hooked up, but your brain was long gone. Thinking about me, I hope.”

  “Not exactly.”

  She faked a sigh. “And I had such hopes.” She patted her lips daintily with a napkin.

  “Now, Matt,” she said, “I can tell you why I wanted to have dinner with you.”

  “To get your information before the cops,” I said. “So that if the case is ever solved and your information had anything to do with solving it, you could claim a slice of the credit. The publicity couldn’t hurt a woman on her way to the top.”

  She tilted her head. “Well, there was that, too. But mostly, it was to say good-bye.”

  “Are you going somewhere? Or am I?”

  “Not physically. We are both going out of each other’s lives.”

  “God, you make it sound as if we’re Siamese twins. Not only did I just meet you two days ago, I don’t even like you.”

  She waved that away. “I’ve told you before, I could make you. That’s not the point.”

  “What is the point?”

  “The point is that you’re dangerous for me to be around.”

  If you asked me, the only things she needed to be afraid of were crosses, wooden stakes, and silver bullets, but I let her go on.

  “You bother me,” she said. “I’m attracted to you physically, but anybody who can’t control that is no better than an animal, don’t you agree?”

  “Go on.”

  She smiled. “You don’t have to say it, Matt. I know you do. You make me crazy.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “You’ve got the brains, the outlook, the attitude, and the talent to be truly free. Like me. I’ve never met anyone else like me, have I told that?”

  “Neither have I.”

  “But you could be. I saw you in action. At the studio. At the softball game. You can cut loose, be the center of the universe. I’ve seen it, just for split seconds at a time, but I know it’s there.

  “And then when it’s done, you voluntarily slip back into your chains. You could fly, Matt!”

  “Like you.”

  “Yes, like me! You could soar. But instead you stagger along under the weight of lies like other people matter, or that there are standards outside yourself you need to live up to. It’s sad to see an eagle with his wings clipped, but it’s infuriating when he insists on clipping his own.

  “Every time I see you, I think of what you might be, if you let yourself. Of what we could do together. We could take over the Network in two years, not the ten it’s going to take me on my own. The Network? Fuck the Network! We could rule the whole city.”

  “Tomorrow the world,” I suggested.

  She thought about it, shook her head. “Too unwieldy. Besides, we need opposition, or we’d get bored.”

  Now I shook my head.

  “But you see how you are? If you were like me, I could trust you, fully like me, I mean, because I would arrange things so your best selfish move would be to do what I wanted you to, and you’d treat me the same way, and we’d both prosper. But I’m not going to live forever, Matt, and there’s a lot I want to do. I can’t spend the time and energy training you out of bad habits. So, for my own sake—”

  “Which is why you do anything.”

  “Which is the only intelligent reason ever to do anything, I am going to see to it that our paths never cross again.”

  “Suits me,” I said. “As it will probably please you to know, I foresee your becoming a legend, a legend I’ll undoubtedly be doing my part to spread. As for a more personal good-bye, it’s hard to know what to say. It doesn’t even do any good to feel sorry for you, because you have no way of even imagining the excitement and the glory of just being human. You’d treat sympathy with contempt.”

  Her dark eyes held mine. “Yes, I would.”

  “I won’t even analyze the emotion in me that doesn’t want your contempt. I’ll just keep my mouth shut. Why don’t you pay up—you did invite me, after all—and I’ll put you in a cab?”

  “I live nearby, just walk me home.”

  “Won’t that fill your head with pictures of frustrated eagles?”

  “I can stand it for five minutes. Or I can walk home alone.”

  “No. What you’d call my voluntary weakness makes me want to keep even you from getting mugged.”

  “And that,” she said, “is why no one can stop me.”

  It was less than five minutes. We walked wordlessly to a little apartment house on a deserted back street. You can find those, in Greenwich Village, even at eight o’clock at night.

  She opened the downstairs door. “Good-bye Matt,” she said.

  I told her, “Fare thee well.”

  She smiled and gave me a last, soft lingering kiss that still felt warm on my lips after she’d stepped quickly inside and run upstairs.

  “It’s the Toast of the Town!”

  —JULIA MEADE

  Toast of the Town, CBS

  20

  I FORGOT ABOUT MY lips when my ears started to tingle.

  It wasn’t that the footsteps behind me were so noisy, they weren’t noisy at all, just barely perceptible. And they weren’t the normal footsteps of someone in sneakers, either. These were muffled, all right, but also furtive, and the rhythm of them was wrong. They matched mine, faster when I walked faster, slower when I slowed down.

  One set of footsteps, and that didn’t make sense, either. At six two, maybe two hundred fifteen pounds (just about my basketball-playing weight), I am not typical New York mugger bait. They like easy pickings. If a lone mugger tries on someone like me, it usually means he’s too strung out on drugs to pronounce surreptitious, let alone act that way.

  I kept walking, listening hard. Did I hear another set of footsteps, some way farther off than these, or was I just imagining it?

  I ran through the unwritten but universally followed New Yorker’s survival manual. Turning on him (or her or them) might provoke an attack; on the other hand it might scare them off, particularly if I acted crazy enough loudly enough.

  I decided to throw a look over my shoulder to check things out, then decide whether or not to scream. A good angry scream is always best in situations like this. My favorite move is to beat my fists together and yell, “Are you ready?” Since the potential mugger doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be ready for, he tends to decide I’m not worth the risk.

  I waited until I was under a street lamp, so I’d have the best chance to size things up before I committed myself to an act of public lunacy.

  I turned. He was the right size and shape to be a mugger, on the tall side of medium and wiry. He was also walking with his hands in his pockets, a good way to hide a switchblade or a gun.

  I was all set to go into my psycho act when he spoke to me.

  “Matt?”

  He came farth
er into the circle of lamplight.

  “Peter, for God’s sake, I thought you were a mugger.”

  He was smiling when he caught up to me.

  “Hi;” he said. “I thought it was you, but I would have been embarrassed to call out if I’d been wrong, you know how that is. So I thought I’d catch up and pass, and then see if it was you.”

  I told him I did the same thing. “Gets a little spooky, though, on these quiet back streets.”

  “What brings you down this way? Visiting Marcie?”

  “Just seeing her safely home. We had dinner together.”

  “Early night,” he said.

  “It wasn’t a date or anything,” I told him. “Marcie wanted to celebrate her new job.”

  “I know. She was speaking from Coif You!”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I remember. Listen, speaking of that, I’ve gotten nothing but compliments on my haircut.”

  “Good to hear.”

  A ramification of the Marcie Declaration that had escaped me previously now sprang to mind.

  “Listen, Peter,” I said. “I’m sorry, but the softball team is going to have to get along without me.”

  “I know that, too.”

  He was still smiling, but the smile seemed to be slowly fading, like an old Polaroid snapshot that hadn’t been dipped in the fixer. I wondered if he was okay.

  I was about to ask him, when he took a sand-filled sock out of his pocket and coshed me in the side of the neck with it. He hit me two more times before I hit the pavement, on the left ear and on the top of the head. When I reached the concrete, he started kicking me.

  I was dazed but not out. I still had enough sense and control of my body to roll up in a ball, but only that much. I certainly couldn’t stand up and fight back; I could barely feel the sidewalk beneath me. All I could see were bright dancing colors just in front of my eyes, a new explosion of which went off with every kick. I tried to ask him why he was doing this, but I was too stunned to form words.

  “Bastard,” he said.

  He stopped kicking me. My muscles untensed a little, involuntarily. Something wet and cold hit me. For a moment, I thought he was throwing water on me to revive me.

  But it wasn’t intended to revive me, and it wasn’t water. My nose told me what it was—gasoline.

  I had to get out there. I tried to struggle to my feet, but I only succeeded in humping myself up a little bit, then rolling over sideways.

  Peter laughed and followed me.

  My eyes were starting to clear. I could see things, but they were smeary. My hand on the dirty pavement. Peter’s face, smiling. The bright colors had gone away, all but one. The one that stayed was the white-red flame of the traffic flare Peter held in his hand.

  “You’re going to die, Matt,” he said. He might have been telling me I was going to bat second. “They tell me it hurts.”

  I almost made it to my feet, but he coshed me again, hitting me across the left shoulder. I went down, and my arm went numb. This time, though, I found a friend. A nice, rough, brick wall. Planting my right hand against it, I finally made it to my feet.

  “Congratulations,” Peter said. “Not that it makes much difference. You’ll burn as brightly standing as you would lying down.”

  He came closer, holding the flare up like some perverted Statue of Liberty.

  The image of him rocked before my eyes. In the shape I was in, even standing with my back against a solid wall was like trying to stand in a rowboat in a hurricane.

  I could see one chance, and I was going to try it. I was going to rush him, hoping to get in under the flare, but even if I didn’t, to rush him and clamp my good arm around him and not let go no matter what. Then we could both taste hell together. He might even realize that burning me meant burning him, and drop the flare altogether.

  If that happened, I swore to God, I would strangle Peter slowly.

  I rocked back against the wall, pushing off with all the strength I could summon. I jumped for him.

  I made a good start, too, but after the second step, my legs crumbled beneath me, and I wound up lunging weakly for Peter’s knees. One step back and he was out of my reach again.

  I was on the sidewalk at his feet, breathless, listening to him laugh. The gas was very cold, and was making me shiver. It would, I knew, be warming me up in a few moments.

  Peter brought the flame closer. I put my arm up to shield my face, just as though I expected it to help. At least it blocked the sight of his grin.

  I wanted to pray; I couldn’t think of anything to say except please don’t let this goddam maniac do this to me.

  Then a voice said, “Peter.”

  Marcie’s voice.

  “I glanced out my window and saw you duck out of a doorway and follow Matt. What are you doing?”

  “He’s been messing around with you, sis. He doesn’t love you, I can tell. The other one, didn’t either, Bentyne. They just weren’t good enough for my Marcie.”

  Marcie got closer to her brother. Her lovely face was impossible to read in the harsh red light of the flare.

  “Peter?” she said softly. “Listen to me.”

  Peter shook his head. “He’s got to die, sis. For your sake. I can’t stand the thought of him pawing you, putting his filthy mouth on you. I stood it with Bentyne, because ...” He paused as if he couldn’t remember because of what. “Because you said you were using him.”

  “I was.”

  “I don’t care!”

  He sounded like a four-year-old on the verge of a tantrum.

  “It’s not right. You shouldn’t have to let them abuse you like that just so you can get ahead at their stupid Network!

  “And anyway, Matt couldn’t do anything for your career. He’s just another filthy, lecherous pig, and he’s got to die.”

  “Of course he does,” she said.

  Her brother looked suspicious. “But I’ve got to be the one to do it,” she said.

  “You?”

  “I’m the one he’s victimized, after all.”

  “You shouldn’t have to do this. You shouldn’t even have to see it. It’s going to be gruesome.”

  “He deserves it,” she insisted. “Give me the flare,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Give it to me before it burns out.”

  “It’s not right.”

  “It’s perfectly right. I have the right to burn him, because of what he is, and what he makes me feel inside.”

  Oh, Jesus, I thought.

  “I’ll burn him, Peter, I’ll burn him right out of my life, him and all the rest of them. Then I’ll settle down with the one and only man in the world who is good enough for me.”

  Peter scowled. “And who’s that?”

  “You, darling, you. You’re my brother and my father and my only friend. You deserve to be my lover, too.”

  The flare backed away from me an inch, giving me room to take a shallow breath.

  Peter was in tears.

  “But we can’t!” he wailed.

  Marcie was right next to him now. “Shh, darling, shh. We’ll talk about that part of it when we’re done with this. Now give me the flare.”

  His voice could barely be heard over the hissing of the flame. “I love you, Marcie.” He gave her the flare.

  Immediately, she threw it out into the middle of the street, where it landed in a pothole, popped, hissed, sizzled, and went out.

  Meanwhile, she was wading into him, slapping his face with loud resounding wallops.

  “You stupid son of a bitch!” (pow!) “Don’t you know what something like this could do to my plans?” (pow!) and so on.

  Peter stood there and took it. I don’t know how long it would have lasted if I hadn’t gotten to my feet and delivered a pow myself that laid him out.

  As I bent to relieve him of the final flare, Marcie said, “Well. At least this will get him out of my hair.”

  “... And out in left field ...”

&
nbsp; —VIN SCULLY

  Major League Baseball, NBC

  21

  IT SEEMED STRANGE TO be in a hospital without Lieutenant Cornelius U. Martin Jr., and Detective First Grade Horace A. Rivetz at my side, but I could excuse their absence. After I had phoned them from the emergency room of Bellevue Hospital, they had gone with all possible dispatch to first, the Sixth Precinct, in the Village, where the cops had custody of Peter Nast, hairdresser and arsonist, and second, to the premises of Coif You! and the apartment of Mr. Nast.

  It seemed a little strange to be the patient, too. It is my belief that a hospital gown is the single greatest incentive to good health ever invented. Who are these things designed for, anorexic midgets?

  I was, however, in too much pain to work up too big a grump about it. I’d been washed and anointed (scraped my knees, crawling around), but had been given no painkillers until the extent of my concussion could be assessed.

  I’d told them to assess away, so they hooked me up to numerous machines, poked my head into something that looked like a miniature front-loading washer, shone lights in my eyes, and asked me trick questions.

  I could have slept through most of it, except I’d been warned not to fall asleep.

  So I thought about the case instead.

  I wondered, first of all, if Peter had been a poisoner, a bomber, or in some arcane way we’d never know if he didn’t explain, both.

  I marveled how he’d never crossed my mind as a suspect. Blindness. New York decadence-induced blindness. So, she was sleeping with somebody, and her brother knew it, so what. Post-sexual revolution blindness. Who could believe that a brother would get so worked up over his sister’s honor? I mean, even if he coveted it for himself?

  I myself had teased the lieutenant about the would-be King of Fringe Time being killed by someone on the fringes of the case.

  I’d delivered the warning, all right, then I’d gone right back into the rut of assuming that the Forty-Five-Million-Dollar Man had to be the victim of a Forty-Five-Million-Dollar Plot.