“It wouldn’t be. Early Chinese pottery is—”
“We’ll show them; we’ll make them believe. I know my audience. Those thirty million people take their clue from my reaction; there’ll be a pan up on my face, showing my response.”
In a low voice Mary Anne said, “I can’t go up there on stage with those TV cameras looking at me; I’m so—overweight. People would laugh.”
“The exposure you’ll get. The sales. Museums and stores will know your name, your stuff, buyers will be coming out of the woodwork.”
Mary Anne said quietly, “Leave me alone, please. I’m very happy. I know I’m a good potter; I know that the stores, the good ones, like what I do. Does everything have to be on a great scale with a cast of thousands? Can’t I lead my little life the way I want to?” She glared at him, her voice almost inaudible. “I don’t see what all your exposure and fame have done for you—back at the coffee shop you said to me, ‘Is my record really on that jukebox?’ You were afraid it wasn’t; you were a lot more insecure than I’ll ever be.”
“Speaking of that,” Jason said, “I’d like to play these two records on your phonograph. Before I go.”
“You’d better let me put them on,” Mary Anne said. “My set is tricky.” She took the two albums, and the twenty dollars; Jason stood where he was, by the broken pieces of vase.
As he waited there he heard familiar music. His biggest-selling album. The grooves of the record were no longer blank.
“You can keep the records,” he said. “I’ll be going.” Now, he thought, I have no further need for them; I’ll probably be able to buy them in any record shop.
“It’s not the sort of music I like…I don’t think I’d really be playing them all that much.”
“I’ll leave them anyhow,” he said.
Mary Anne said, “For your twenty dollars I’m giving you another vase. Just a moment.” She hurried off; he heard the noises of paper and labored activity. Presently the girl reappeared, holding another blue-glaze vase. This one had more to it; the intuition came to him that she considered it one of her best.
“Thank you,” he said.
“I’ll wrap it and box it, so it won’t get broken like the other.” She did so, working with feverish intensity mixed with care. “I found it very thrilling,” she said as she presented him with the tied-up box, “to have had lunch with a famous man. I’m extremely glad I met you and I’ll remember it a long time. And I hope your troubles work out; I mean, I hope what’s worrying you turns out okay.”
Jason Taverner reached into his inside coat pocket, brought forth his little initialed leather card case. From it he extracted one of his embossed multicolored business cards and passed it to Mary Anne. “Call me at the studio any time. If you change your mind and want to appear on the program. I’m sure we can fit you in. By the way—this has my private number.”
“Goodbye,” she said, opening the front door for him.
“Goodbye.” He paused, wanting to say more. But there remained nothing to say. “We failed,” he said, then. “We absolutely failed. Both of us.”
She blinked. “How do you mean?”
“Take care of yourself,” he said, and walked out of the apartment, onto the midafternoon sidewalk. Into the hot sun of full day.
24
Kneeling over Alys Buckman’s body, the police coroner said, “I can only tell you at this point that she died from an overdose of a toxic or semitoxic drug. It’ll be twenty-four hours before we can tell what specifically the drug was.”
Felix Buckman said, “It had to happen. Eventually.” He did not, surprisingly, feel very much. In fact, in a way, on some level, he experienced deep relief to have learned from Tim Chancer, their guard, that Alys had been found dead in their second-floor bathroom.
“I thought that guy Taverner did something to her,” Chancer repeated, over and over again, trying to get Buckman’s attention. “He was acting funny; I knew something was wrong. I took a couple of shots at him but he got away. I guess maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t get him, if he wasn’t responsible. Or maybe he felt guilty because he got her to take the drug; could that be?”
“No one had to make Alys take a drug,” Buckman said bitingly. He walked from the bathroom, out into the hall. Two gray-clad pols stood at attention, waiting to be told what to do. “She didn’t need Taverner or anyone else to administer it to her.” He felt, now, physically sick. God, he thought. What will the effect be on Barney? That was the bad part. For reasons obscure to him, their child adored his mother. Well, Buckman thought, there’s no accounting for other people’s tastes.
And yet he, himself—he loved her. She had a powerful quality, he reflected. I’ll miss it. She filled up a good deal of space.
And a good part of his life. For better or worse.
White-face, Herb Maime climbed the stairs two steps at a time, peering up at Buckman. “I got here as quickly as I could,” Herb said, holding out his hand to Buckman. They shook. “What was it?” Herb said. He lowered his voice. “An overdose of something?”
“Apparently,” Buckman said.
“I got a call earlier today from Taverner,” Herb said. “He wanted to talk to you; he said it had something to do with Alys.”
Buckman said, “He wanted to tell me about Alys’s death. He was here at the time.”
“Why? How did he know her?”
“I don’t know,” Buckman said. But at the moment it did not seem to matter to him much. He saw no reason to blame Taverner…given Alys’s temperament and habits, she had probably instigated his coming here. Perhaps when Taverner left the academy building she had nailed him, carted him off in her souped-up quibble. To the house. After all, Taverner was a six. And Alys liked sixes. Male and female both.
Especially female.
“They may have been having an orgy,” Buckman said.
“Just the two of them? Or do you mean other people were here?”
“Nobody else was here. Chancer would have known. They may have had a phone orgy; that’s what I meant. She’s come so damn close so many times to burning out her brain with those goddamn phone orgies—I wish we could track down the new sponsors, the ones that took over when we shot Bill and Carol and Fred and Jill. Those degenerates.” His hand shaking, he lit a cigarette, smoking rapidly. “That reminds me of something Alys said one time, unintentionally funny. She was talking about having an orgy and she wondered if she should send out formal invitations. ‘I’d better,’ she said, ‘or everyone won’t come at the same time.’” He laughed.
“You’ve told me that before,” Herb said.
“She’s really dead. Cold, stiff dead.” Buckman stubbed out his cigarette in a nearby ashtray. “My wife,” he said to Herb Maime. “She was my wife.”
Herb, with a shake of his head, indicated the two gray-wrapped pols standing at attention.
“So what?” Buckman said. “Haven’t they read the libretto of Die Walküre?” Tremblingly, he lit another cigarette. “Sigmund and Siglinde. ‘Schwester und Braut.’ Sister and bride. And the hell with Hunding.” He dropped the cigarette to the carpet; standing there, he watched it smolder, starting the wool on fire. And then, with his boot heel, he ground it out.
“You should sit down,” Herb said. “Or lie down. You look terrible.”
“It’s a terrible thing,” Buckman said. “It genuinely is. I disliked a lot about her, but, Christ—how vital she was. She always tried anything new. That’s what killed her, probably some new drug she and her fellow witch friends brewed up in their miserable basement labs. Something with film developer in it or Drano or a lot worse.”
“I think we should talk to Taverner,” Herb said.
“Okay. Pull him in. He’s got that microtrans on him, doesn’t he?”
“Evidently not. All the insects we placed on him as he was leaving the academy building ceased to function. Except, perhaps, for the seed warhead. But we have no reason to activate it.”
Buckman said, “Taverner i
s a smart bastard. Or else he got help. From someone or ones he’s working with. Don’t bother to try to detonate the seed warhead; it’s undoubtedly been cut out of his pelt by some obliging colleague.” Or by Alys, he conjectured. My helpful sister. Assisting the police at every turn. Nice.
“You’d better leave the house for a while,” Herb said. “While the coroner’s staff does its procedural action.”
“Drive me back to the academy,” Buckman said. “I don’t think I can drive; I’m shaking too bad.” He felt something on his face; putting up his hand, he found that his chin was wet. “What’s this on me?” he said, amazed.
“You’re crying,” Herb said.
“Drive me back to the academy and I’ll wind up what I have to do there before I can turn it over to you,” Buckman said. “And then I want to come back here.” Maybe Taverner did give her something, he said to himself. But Taverner is nothing. She did it. And yet…
“Come on,” Herb said, taking him by the arm and leading him to the staircase.
Buckman, as he descended, said, “Would you ever in Christ’s world have thought you’d see me cry?”
“No,” Herb said. “But it’s understandable. You and she were very close.”
“You could say that,” Buckman said, with sudden savage anger. “God damn her,” he said. “I told her she’d eventually do it. Some of her friends brewed it up for her and made her the guinea pig.”
“Don’t try to do much at the office,” Herb said as they passed through the living room and outside, where their two quibbles sat parked. “Just wind it up enough for me to take over.”
“That’s what I said,” Buckman said. “Nobody listens to me, God damn it.”
Herb thumped him on the back and said nothing; the two men walked across the lawn in silence.
On the ride back to the academy building, Herb, at the wheel of the quibble, said, “There’re cigarettes in my coat.” It was the first thing either of them had said since boarding the quibble.
“Thanks,” Buckman said. He had smoked up his own week’s ration.
“I want to discuss one matter with you,” Herb said. “I wish it could wait but it can’t.”
“Not even until we get to the office?”
Herb said, “There may be other policy-level personnel there when we get back. Or just plain other people—my staff, for instance.”
“Nothing I have to say is—”
“Listen,” Herb said. “About Alys. About your marriage to her. Your sister.”
“My incest,” Buckman said harshly.
“Some of the marshals may know about it. Alys told too many people. You know how she was about it.”
“Proud of it,” Buckman said, lighting a cigarette with difficulty. He still could not get over the fact that he had found himself crying. I really must have loved her, he said to himself. And all I seemed to feel was fear and dislike. And the sexual drive. How many times, he thought, we discussed it before we did it. All the years. “I never told anybody but you,” he said to Herb.
“But Alys.”
“Okay. Well, then possibly some of the marshals know, and if he cares, the Director.”
“The marshals who are opposed to you,” Herb said, “and who know about the”—he hesitated—“the incest—will say that she committed suicide. Out of shame. You can expect that. And they will leak it to the media.”
“You think so?” Buckman said. Yes, he thought, it would make quite a story. Police general’s marriage to his sister, blessed with a secret child hidden away in Florida. The general and his sister posing as husband and wife in Florida, while they’re with the boy. And the boy: product of what must be a deranged genetic heritage.
“What I want you to see,” Herb said, “and I’m afraid you’re going to have to take a look at it now, which isn’t an ideal time with Alys just recently dead and—”
“It’s our coroner,” Buckman said. “We own him, there at the academy.” He did not understand what Herb was getting at. “He’ll say it was an overdose of a semitoxic drug, as he already told us.”
“But taken deliberately,” Herb said. “A suicidal dose.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Herb said, “Compel him—order him—to find an inquest verdict of murder.”
He saw, then. Later, when he had overcome some of his grief, he would have thought of it himself. But Herb Maime was right: it had to be faced now. Even before they got back to the academy building and their staffs.
“So we can say,” Herb said, “that—”
“That elements within the police hierarchy hostile to my campus and labor-camp policies took revenge by murdering my sister,” Buckman said tightly. It froze his blood to find himself thinking of such matters already. But—
“Something like that,” Herb said. “No one named specifically. No marshals, I mean. Just suggest that they hired someone to do it. Or ordered some junior officer eager to rise in the ranks to do it. Don’t you agree I’m right? And we must act rapidly; it’s got to be declared immediately. As soon as we get back to the academy you should send a memo to all the marshals and the Director, stating that.”
I must turn a terrible personal tragedy into an advantage, Buckman realized. Capitalize on the accidental death of my own sister. If it was accidental.
“Maybe it’s true,” he said. Possibly Marshal Holbein, for example, who hated him enormously, had arranged it.
“No,” Herb said. “It’s not true. But start an inquiry. And you must find someone to pin it on; there must be a trial.”
“Yes,” he agreed dully. With all the trimmings. Ending in an execution, with many dark hints in media releases that “higher authorities” were involved, but who, because of their positions, could not be touched. And the Director, hopefully, would officially express his sympathy concerning the tragedy, and his hope that the guilty party would be found and punished.
“I’m sorry that I have to bring this up so soon,” Herb said. “But they got you down from marshal to general; if the incest story is publicly believed they might be able to force you to retire. Of course, even if we take the initiative, they may air the incest story. Let’s hope you’re reasonably well covered.”
“I did everything possible,” Buckman said.
“Whom should we pin it on?” Herb asked.
“Marshal Holbein and Marshal Ackers.” His hatred for them was as great as theirs for him: they had, five years ago, slaughtered over ten thousand students at the Stanford Campus, a final bloody—and needless—atrocity of that atrocity of atrocities, the Second Civil War.
Herb said, “I don’t mean who planned it. That’s obvious; as you say, Holbein and Ackers and the others. I mean who actually injected her with the drug.”
“The small fry,” Buckman said. “Some political prisoner in one of the forced-labor camps.” It didn’t really matter. Any one of a million camp inmates, or any student from a dying kibbutz, would do.
“I would say pin it on somebody higher up,” Herb said.
“Why?” Buckman did not follow his thinking. “It’s always done that way; the apparatus always picks an unknown, unimportant—”
“Make it one of her friends. Somebody who could have been her equal. In fact, make it somebody well known. In fact, make it somebody in the acting field here in this area; she was a celebrity-fucker.”
“Why somebody important?”
“To tie Holbein and Ackers in with those gunjy, degenerate phone-orgy bastards she hung out with.” Herb sounded genuinely angry, now; Buckman, startled, glanced at him. “The ones who really killed her. Her cult friends. Pick someone as high as you can. And then you’ll really have something to pin on the marshals. Think of the scandal that’ll make. Holbein part of the phone grid.”
Buckman put out his cigarette and lit another. Meanwhile thinking. What I have to do, he realized, is out-scandal them. My story has to be more lurid than theirs.
It would take some story.
25
> In his suite of offices at the Los Angeles Police Academy building, Felix Buckman sorted among the memos, letters, and documents on his desk, mechanically selecting the ones that needed Herb Maime’s attention and discarding those that could wait. He worked rapidly, with no real interest. As he inspected the various papers, Herb, in his own office, began typing out the first informal statement which Buckman would make public concerning the death of his sister.
Both men finished after a brief interval and met in Buckman’s main office, where he kept his crucial activities. At his oversize oak desk.
Seated behind the desk he read over Herb’s first draft. “Do we have to do this?” he said, when he had finished reading it.
“Yes,” Herb said. “If you weren’t so dazed by grief you’d be the first to recognize it. Your being able to see matters of this sort clearly has kept you at policy level; if you hadn’t had that faculty they’d have reduced you to training-school major five years ago.”
“Then release it,” Buckman said. “Wait.” He motioned for Herb to come back. “You quote the coroner. Won’t the media know that the coroner’s investigation couldn’t be completed this soon?”
“I’m backdating the time of death. I’m stipulating that it took place yesterday. For that reason.”
“Is that necessary?”
Herb said simply, “Our statement has to come first. Before theirs. And they won’t wait for the coroner’s inquest to be completed.”
“All right,” Buckman said. “Release it.”
Peggy Beason entered his office, carrying several classified police memoranda and a yellow file. “Mr. Buckman,” she said, “at a time like this I don’t want to bother you, but these—”
“I’ll look at them,” Buckman said. But that’s all, he said to himself. Then I’m going home.
Peggy said, “I knew you were looking for this particular file. So was Inspector McNulty. It just arrived, about ten minutes ago, from Data Central.” She placed the file before him on the blotter of his desk. “The Jason Taverner file.”