Читать книгу Alienist - Laurence M. Janifer - Страница 14

CHAPTER EIGHT

It took a little while, but some facts emerged. Let me give you a few of them in summary, just for openers:

Harris France: age 53, career police officer, current rank Detective-Colonel, head of Homicide Four (which was the—reasonably extensive—Lavoisier section of Ravenal Scholarte, plus twenty square blocks of expensive houses, and a small park) for City Two. Twenty-two years with the police, steadily climbing the ladder. Bright, a little slow physically, medium height and a tad overweight. Living with Cornelia Rasczak for the past nine years; before that he’d been a bachelor, with a few short-term liaisons here and there but nothing serious. He’d had some kind of unhappy love-affair in his early twenties, and the details, Euglane told me, were private—“if at all possible,” he added.

“I won’t pry if I don’t have to,” I said. As it happens, I never did have to. “This Cornelia—”

“Rasczak,” he said. “Yes. She’s the one whose body he just found.”

I nodded. By then we had coffee in front of us. Euglane had pulled his arms in, and kept extending them and pulling them back. It was a little disconcerting, but at least both arms changed at the same time. I wondered if he could extend only one, and put the question aside for a more peaceful moment.

“He wouldn’t have heard the beamer,” I said. “Even awake, with a shut door between them, he might not have heard it. But he would have heard somebody come in. When he went to sleep, nobody else was in the house?”

“Just Cornelia,” he said. “Knave, I’m not used to violence. It’s not—a part of our natures, really. Gielli are not hunters, not eaters of animal life.”

“It isn’t easy,” I said. “But surely some of your patients—”

“Troubles in ideation,” he said. “Emotional difficulties. There is violence in the mix, of course there is. For humans, violence is a given, like rigidity or love. But it’s—a factor. Not an object in itself. It’s an idea, a drive.”

“Not a thing lying right out there in actual, physical, bloody existence,” I said.

“Exactly,” he said. His arms shrank and lengthened, rapidly. “I tried to persuade Harris to stay. I told him I would get help, we would discuss this fully, we would conclude—something. I was—not very effective.” His arms twined. His eyes shut and opened. “Knave, I was ill. Physically ill.” He made that sound again, the moan. “Violence,” he said.

I nodded. “I’m a little easier with it,” I said. “You don’t have to carry this by yourself. You can hand it off. And just by the way—why haven’t you handed it off?”

“But I called you.”

“I don’t mean me,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m doing here, in fact. The police will know—probably know already—”

“He called them from this house,” Euglane said. “He explained that the shock had been very great, and he had had to come here and talk for a bit before being able to make the call. He had wanted to try to find out what had happened, he said. But we could not find that out, Knave.”

“The police will,” I said. “He was an important man there. They’ll be extra-careful. They’ll figure it out. You don’t need me.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “The police—this will be a subject for the news readers. Of course it will. And the police will be anxious to make clear that Harris committed this horror. They will do everything possible to convict him.”

I opened my mouth, thought for half a second, and then nodded. “They’re afraid of being accused of covering up for one of their own,” I said. “If everything looks clear and simple—”

“They’ll fight to keep it simple,” he said. “Yes. It’s because he’s an important police figure that we can’t leave it to them to investigate thoroughly enough. They’ll see what they want to see—as humans do a good deal—and that will be the end of it.”

“So you want me to investigate.”

“I want you to find out what really did happen, Knave,” he said. “Someone has to.”

I did not rush eagerly into agreement. I knew a few police officials in City Two, and they were no fonder of me than most police officials are, anywhere. I am not a detective by trade, and taking apart a murder was not my favorite occupation.

“There’s no doubt it was murder?” I said at one point.

“No doubt at all,” Euglane said. “The only beamer found in the house belonged to Harris, and had not been fired in several weeks. He had had it on a practice range then. It was fully charged. The beamer that—that blotted out Cornelia’s life was not to be found in the living room, according to Harris. His own beamer was in the bedroom, in his holster, hanging over a chair.”

“He’s sure he didn’t use that one, clean it, recharge it, erase the counter, and put it back before he—woke up?”

Euglane shook his head. His arms quivered a little, retracted, then extended again. “He’s sure of nothing,” he said. “But I’m sure. Harris might conceivably perform some single, directed act without full consciousness. A series of complex acts—cleaning, recharging, revising the shot counter, returning the beamer—would be impossible. Absolutely.”

I nodded. “All right, then,” I said. “No suicide, no accident, or where’s the weapon? Either Harris got rid of it—could he have done that?”

“If he got rid of it in some simple, direct way, yes,” Euglane said. “Knave, you see why I need you. You’re thinking. Analyzing events.”

“I’m saying the obvious things,” I told him. “There must be detectives on Ravenal, professional people who could—”

“With no ties to the police?” he said. “With no need to see the police view, no matter what the facts? I doubt it.”

“It really isn’t my sort of—”

“There would be payment, of course,” he said. I gestured at him.

“Payment isn’t the thing,” I said. “But I might not help as much as a professional could.”

“Please try,” he said. “Harris will need you. And I—I am undone by this. I will need you, Knave.”

Gjenda saying she needed me would have been a lot more pleasant. But what the Hell could I do? Plead a previous engagement?

And maybe the Master would help out. I might be better than a detective. Better than the local police, no question.

The Master would be, I told myself, a lot better than that; he always was.

I sighed. “Tell me about it,” I said. “All about it. Everything.”