A Kind of Murder Page 2

  "Then it clears him."

  Hennessey laughed. "Suppose he did go to the bathroom. Do you think anyone would remember it? Nobody in the world has had an alibi for anything since the JumpShift booths took over. You can be at a party in New York and kill a man in the California Sierras in the time it would take to go out for cigarettes. You can't use displacement booths for an alibi."

  "You could be jumping to conclusions," Fisher pointed out.

  "So he's not a cop. So he reads detective stories. So someone murdered his wife in his own living room. Naturally he wants to know if he's got an alibi."

  Hennessey shook his head.

  "She didn't bleed a lot," said Fisher. "Maybe enough, maybe not. Maybe she was moved."

  "I noticed that too."

  "Someone who knew she had a key to Walters' house killed her and dumped her there. He would have hit her with the cigarette box in the spot where he'd already hit her with something else."

  Hennessey shook his head again. "It's not just Walters. It's a kind of murder. We get more and more of these lately. People kill each other because they can't move away from each other. With the long distance booths everyone in the country lives next door to everyone else. You live a block away from your ex-wife, your mother-in-law, the girl you're trying to drop, the guy who lost money in your business deal and blames you. Any secretary lives next door to her boss, and if he needs something done in a hurry she's right there. God help the doctor if his patients get his home number. I'm not just pulling these out of the air. I can name you an assault rap for every one of these situations."

  "Most people get used to it," said Fisher. "My mother used to flick in to visit me at work, remember?"

  Hennessey grinned. He did. Fortunately, she'd given it up. "It was worse for Walters," he said.

  "It didn't really sound that bad. Lovejoy said it was a friendly divorce. So he was always running into her. So what?"

  "She took away his clubs."

  Fisher snorted. But Fisher was young. He had grown up with the short-distance booths.

  For twenty years passenger teleportation had been restricted to short hops. People had had time to get used to the booths. And in those twenty years the continuity clubs had come into existence.

  The continuity club was a guard against future shock. Its location was ... ubiquitous: hundreds of buildings in hundreds of cities, each building just like all the others, inside and out. Wherever a member moved in this traveling society, the club would be there. Today even some of the customers would be the same: everyone used the long distance booths to some extent.

  A man had to have some kind of stability in his life. His church, his marriage, his home, his club. Any man might need more or less stability than the next. Walters had belonged to four clubs ... and they were no use to him if he kept meeting Alicia there. And his marriage had broken up, and he wasn't a churchgoer, and a key to his house had been found in Alicia's purse. She should at least have left him his clubs.

  Fisher spoke, interrupting his train of thought. "You've been talking about impulse murders, haven't you? Six years of not being able to stand his ex-wife and not being able to get away from her. So finally he hits her with a cigarette box."

  "Most of them are impulse murders, yes."

  "Well, this wasn't any impulse murder. Look at what he had to do to bring it about. He'd have had to ask her to wait at home for him. Then make some excuse to get away from Larimer, shift home, kill her fast and get back to the Sirius Club before Larimer wonders where he's gone. Then he's got to hope Larimer will forget the whole thing. That's not just cold-blooded, it's also stupid."

  "Yah. So far it's worked, though."

  "Worked, hell. The only evidence you've got against Walters is that he had good reason to kill her. Listen, if she got on his nerves that much, she may have irritated some other people too." Hennessey nodded. "That's the problem, all right." But he didn't mean it the way Fisher did.

  Walters had moved to a hotel until such time as the police were through with his house. Hennessey called him before going off duty.

  "You can move home," he told him.

  "That's good," said Walters. "Find out anything?"

  "Only that your wife was murdered with that selfsame cigarette box. We found no sign of anyone in the house except her, and you." He paused, but Walters only nodded thoughtfully. He asked, "Did the box look familiar to you?"

  "Oh, yes, of course. It's mine. Alicia and I bought it on our honeymoon, in Switzerland. We divided things during the divorce, and that went to me."

  "All right. Now, just how violent was that argument you had?"

  He flushed. "As usual. I did a lot of shouting, and she just sat there letting it go past her ears. It never did any good."

  "Did you strike her?"

  The flush deepened, and he nodded. "I've never done that before."

  "Did you by any chance hit her with a malachite box?"

  "Do I need a lawyer?"

  "You're not under arrest, Mr. Walters. But if you feel you need a lawyer, by all means get one." Hennessey hung up.

  He had asked to be put on the day shift today, in order to follow up this case. It was quitting time now, but he was reluctant to leave.

  Officer-1 Fisher had been eavesdropping. He said, "So?"

  "He never mentioned the word alibi," said Hennessey. "Smart. He's not supposed to know when she was killed."

  "You're still sure he did it."

  "Yah. But getting a conviction is something else again. We'll find more people with more motives. And all we've got is the laboratory." He ticked items off on his fingers. "No fingerprints on the box. No blood on Walters or any of his clothes, unless he had paper clothes and ditched 'em. No way of proving Walters let her in or give her the key ... though I wonder if he really had that much trouble keeping her out of the house.

  "We'd be asking a jury to believe that Walters left the table and Larimer forgot about it. Larimer says no. Walters is pretty sure to get the benefit of the doubt. She didn't bleed much; a good defense lawyer is bound to suggest that she was moved from somewhere else."

  "Its possible."

  "She wasn't dead until she was hit. Nothing in the stomach but food. No drugs or poisons in the bloodstream. She'd have had to be killed by someone who—" He ticked them off. "Knew she hid Walters' key. Knew Walters' displacement booth number. And knew Walters wouldn't be home.

  "Maybe. How about Larimer or Lovejoy?"

  Hennessey spread his hands in surrender. "It's worth asking Larimer's alibi is as good as Walters', for all that's worth. And we've still got to interview Jennifer ... Lewis."

  "Then again, a lot of people at the Sirius Club knew Walter. Some of them must have been involved with Alicia. Anyone who saw Walters halfway through a domino game would know he'd be stuck there for awhile."

  "True. Too true." Hennessey stood up. "Guess I'll be getting dinner."

  Hennessey came out of the restaurant feeling pleasantly stuffed and torpid. He turned left toward the nearest booth, a block away.

  The Walters case had haunted him all through dinner. Fisher had made a good deal of sense ... but what bugged him was something Fisher hadn't said. Fisher hadn't said that Hennessey might be looking for easy answers.

  Easy? If Walters had killed Alicia during a game of dominos at the Sirius Club, then there wouldn't be any case until Larimer remembered. Aside from that, Walters would have been an idiot to try such a thing. Idiot, or desperate.

  But if someone else had killed her, it opened up a bag of snakes. Restrict it to members of the Sirius Club who were there that night, and how many were left? They'd both done business there. How many of Jeffrey Walters' acquaintances had shared Alicia's bed? Which one would have killed her, for reason or no reason? The trouble with sharing too many beds was that—one's chance of running into a really bad situation was improved almost to certainty.

  If Walters had done it, things became simplier. But she hadn't bled much.

  And W
alters couldn't have had reason to move the body to his home. Where could he have killed her that would be worse than that?

  Walters owned the murder weapon ... no, forget that. She could have been hit with anything, and if she were in Walters' house fifteen seconds later she might still be breathing when the malachite box finished the job.

  Hennessey slowed to a stop in front of the booth. Something Fisher had said, something that had struck him funny. What was it?

  "Her displacement booth must be ten years old—" That was it. The sight of the booth must have sparked that memory. And it was funny. How had he known?

  JumpShift booths were all alike. They had to be. They all had to hold the same volume, because the air in the receiver had to be flicked back—to the transmitter. When JumpShift improved a booth, it was the equipment they jmproved, so that the older booths could still be used.

  Ten years old. Wasn't that—yes. The altitude shift.

  Pumping energy into a cargo, so that it could be flicked a mile or a hundred miles uphill, had been an early improvement. But a transmitter that could absorb the lost potential energy of a downhill shift, had not become common until ten years ago.

  Hennessey stepped in and dialed the police station. Sergeant Sobel was behind the desk. "Oh, Fisher left an hour ago," he said. "Want his number?"

  "Yes ... No. Get me Alicia Walters' number."

  Sobel got it for him. "What's up?"

  "Tell you in a minute," said Hennessey, and he flicked out.

  It was black night. His ears registered the drop in pressure. His eyes adjusted rapidly, and he saw that there were lights in Alicia Walters' house. He stepped out of the booth. Whistling, he walked a slow circle around it.

  It was a JumpShift booth. What more was there to say? A glass cylinder with a rounded top, big enough for a tall man to stand upright and a meager amount of baggage to stand with blur—or for a man holding a dead woman in his arms, clenching his teeth while he tried to free one finger for dialing. The machinery that made the magic was buried beneath the booth. The dial, a simple push-button phone dial. Even the long distance booths looked just like this one, though the auxiliary machinery was far more complex.

  "But he was sweating—" Had Lovejoy meant it literally?

  Hennessey was smiling ferociously as he stepped back into the booth.

  The lights of the Homicide room flashed in his eyes. Hennessey came out tearing at his collar. Sweat started from every pore. Living in the mountains like that, Alicia should certainly have had her booth replaced. The room felt like a furnace, but it was his own body temperature that had jumped seven degrees in a moment. Seven degrees of randomized energy, to compensate for the drop in potential energy between here and Lake Arrowhead.

  Walters sat slumped, staring straight ahead of him. "She didn't understand and she didn't care. She was taking it like we'd been all through this before but we had to do it again but let's get it over with." He spoke in a monotone, but the nervous stutter was gone. "Finally I hit her. I guess I was trying to get her attention. She just took it and looked at me and waited for me to go on."

  Hennessey said, "Where did the malachite box come in?"

  "Where do you think? I hit her with it."

  "Then it was hers, not yours."

  "It was ours. When we broke up, she took it. Look, I don't want you to think I wanted to kill her. I wanted to scar her."

  "To scare her?"

  "No! To scar her!" His voice rose. "To leave a mark she'd remember every time she looked in a mirror, so she'd know I meant it, so she'd leave me alone! I wouldn't have cared if she sued. Whatever it cost, it would have been worth it. But I hit her too hard, way too hard. I felt the crunch."

  "Why didn't you report it?"

  "But I did! At least, I tried. I picked her up in my arms and wrestled her out to the booth and dialed for the Los Angeles Emergency Hospital. I don't know if there's any place closer, and I wasn't thinking too dear. Listen, maybe I can prove this. Maybe an intern saw me in the booth. I flicked into the Hospital, and suddenly I was broiling. Then I remembered that Alicia had an old booth, the kind that can't absorb a difference in potential energy."

  "We guessed that much."

  "So I dialed quick and flicked right out again. I had to go back to Alicia's for the malachite box and to wipe off the sofa, and my own booth is a new one, so I got the temperature shift again. God, it was hot. I changed suits before I went back to the Club. I was still sweating."

  "You thought that raising her temperature would foul up our estimate of when she died."

  "That's right." Walters' smile was wan. "Listen, I did try to get her to a hospital. You'll remember that, won't you?"

  "Yah. But you changed your mind."

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  Document ID: niven-kind-of-murder-2006_08_18

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  Анатолий Бурдин (Legio)

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