Oddments (15 page)

My stomach knotted again. I wanted suddenly to get out of that room, out of that building and into the sunlight. I started to turn aside.

Stiles moved.

He came to his feet with startling abruptness, spun out of profile, and took four long steps toward the glass. From his side it was only a mirror returning his own image to him, and yet it was as if he had sensed that someone was there, watching him. A glimmer of intelligence seemed to come into his eyes.

And his mouth opened and framed a word.

If he spoke that word aloud, I couldn't hear it; the room was probably soundproofed. But I saw clearly the movement of his lips, and I understood—was sure I understood—what the word was. It brought chills to my back, made me take an involuntary step backward.

Grim-faced, Doctor Fuller brushed past me and pulled the drapery shut. When I caught his eye, he met my gaze with an expression that revealed nothing. I looked at the others then, but none of them had understood what Stiles had said; I would have seen it in their faces if they had.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Fuller said in the corridor outside, "I must ask you to confine your reports of what you've witnessed here today to factual impressions. Irresponsible speculation of any kind, particularly that based on uncertain visual interpretation, will not be tolerated." He was looking straight at me as he said it.

Once we had been returned to our point of departure in downtown Washington, I left the others, and went to the nearest bar and drank two double bourbons. I was shaken, badly shaken. Fuller had made it clear that there would be severe repercussions if I printed what I thought I'd heard Stiles say; but his warning was unnecessary. I had no intention of printing it.

The public had a right to know, yes; they were desperate to
know.
Scare hell out of us, we can take it.
But could they? I
wasn't so sure. The implications in that single word were
enough to sow the seeds of panic.

I was about to order a third drink when Joe Anders came
into the place. He was another newsman, a UPI correspon
dent whom I knew on a first name basis. He sat down next to
me and called for a draft beer.

"Little early in the day for you, isn't it?" he asked.

"Not today it isn't."

"That bad, huh?"

"What?"

"Seeing Stiles and Webber."

"Yes," I said. "Very bad."

"Want to talk about it?"

"No."

"Suit yourself," he said, and shrugged. "Latest poop on the Venus situation is bigger news, anyway."

I sat up straight. "What latest poop?"

"You mean you haven't heard?"

"I haven't checked in with my office. What is it?"

"Well, it's not official yet, but NASA's expected to make the announcement within a week. Plans are under way for Exploration Six, to confirm or deny the Venus life question. Six-man crew this time, including a biologist and a linguist. Just in case."

"Oh my God," I said.

Anders said something else, but I didn't hear it. Six more men, I was thinking. Six more just like Stiles and Webber? And how many after that? How many others before they accepted the truth?

If it
was
the truth.

NASA didn't think it was; they knew what I knew, of course, but the possibility was beyond their collective scientific minds. Maybe they were right. I prayed to God they were.

But the image of Stiles' face was sharp and terrible in my mind, and so was that word I believed I had seen him speak. The one word that told nothing and yet may have told everything about what had happened to him and Webber, about what awaited all men who landed on Venus.

The word "Medusa."

Y
ou wouldn't think a man could change completely in four months—but when Kaprelian saw Fred DeBeque come walking into the Drop Back Inn, he had living proof that it could happen. He was so startled, in fact, that he just stood there behind the plank and stared with his mouth hanging open.

It had been a rainy off-Monday exactly like this one the last time he'd seen DeBeque, and that night the guy had been about as low as you could get and carrying a load big enough for two. Now he was dressed in a nice tailored suit, looking sober and normal as though he'd never been through any heavy personal tragedy. Kaprelian felt this funny sense of flashback come over him, like the entire last seven months hadn't even existed.

He didn't much care for feelings like that, and he shook it off. Then he smiled kind of sadly as DeBeque walked over and took his old stool, the one he'd sat on every night for the three months after he had come home from work late one afternoon and found his wife bludgeoned to death.

Actually, Kaprelian was glad to see the change in him. He hadn't known DeBeque or DeBeque's wife very well before the murder; they were just people who lived in the neighborhood and dropped in once in a while for a drink. He'd liked them both though, and he'd gotten to know Fred pretty well afterward, while he was doing that boozing. That was why the change surprised him as much as it did. He'd been sure DeBeque would turn into a Skid Row bum or a corpse, the way he put down the sauce; a man couldn't drink like that
more than maybe a year without ending up one or the other. The thing was, DeBeque and his wife really loved each other. He'd been crazy for her, worshipped the ground she
walked on—Kaprelian had never loved anybody that way, so he couldn't really understand it. Anyhow, when she'd been
murdered DeBeque had gone all to pieces. Without her, he'd told Kaprelian a few times, he didn't want to go on living himself; but he didn't have the courage to kill himself either. Except with the bottle.

There was another reason why he couldn't kill himself, DeBeque said, and that was because he wanted to see the
murderer punished and the police hadn't yet caught him.

They'd sniffed around DeBeque himself at first, but he had an alibi and, anyway, all his and her friends told them how
much the two of them were in love. So then, even though no
body had seen any suspicious types in the neighborhood the day it happened, the cops had worked around with the theory
that it was either a junkie who'd forced his way into the DeBeque apartment or a sneak thief that she'd surprised. The place had been ransacked and there was some jewelry and mad money missing. Her skull had been crushed with a lamp, and the cops figured she had tried to put up a fight.

So DeBeque kept coming to the Drop Back Inn every night and getting drunk and waiting for the cops to find his
wife's killer. After three months went by, they still hadn't
found the guy. The way it looked to Kaprelian then—and so far that was the way it had turned out—they never would.

The last night he'd seen DeBeque, Fred had admitted that same thing for the first time and then he had walked out into the rain and vanished. Until just now.

Kaprelian said, "Fred, it's good to see you. I been wondering what happened to you, you disappeared so sudden four months ago."

"I guess you never expected I'd show up again, did you, Harry?"

"You want the truth, I sure didn't. But you really look great. Where you been all this time?"

"Putting the pieces back together again," DeBeque said. "Finding new meaning in
life."

Kaprelian nodded. "You know, I thought you were headed for Skid Row or an early grave, you don't mind my saying so."

"No, I don't mind. You're absolutely right, Harry."

"Well—can I get you a drink?"

"Ginger ale," DeBeque said. "I'm off alcohol now."

Kaprelian was even more surprised. There are some guys, some drinkers, you don't ever figure
can
quit, and that was how DeBeque had struck him at the tag end of those three bad months. He said, "Me being a bar owner, I shouldn't say this, but I'm glad to hear that too. If there's one thing I learned after twenty years in this business, you can't drown your troubles or your sorrows in the juice. I seen hundreds try and not one succeed."

"You tried to tell me that a dozen times, as I recall," DeBeque said. "Fortunately, I realized you were right in time to do something about it."

Kaprelian scooped ice into a glass and filled it with ginger ale from the automatic hand dispenser. When he set the glass on the bar, one of the two workers down at the other end—the only other customers in the place—called to him for another beer. He drew it and took it down and then came back to lean on the bar in front of DeBeque.

"So where'd you go after you left four months ago?" he asked. "I mean, did you stay here in the city or what? I know you moved out of the neighborhood."

"No. I didn't stay here." DeBeque sipped his ginger ale.

"It's funny the way insights come to a man, Harry—and funny how long it takes sometimes. I spent three months not caring about anything, drinking myself to death, drowning in self-pity; then one morning I just woke up knowing I couldn't go on that way any longer. I wasn't sure why, but I knew I had to straighten myself out. I went upstate and dried out in a rented cabin in the mountains. The rest of the insight came there: I knew why I'd stopped drinking, what it was I had to do."

"What was that, Fred?"

"Find the man who murdered Karen."

Kaprelian had been listening with rapt attention. What DeBeque had turned into wasn't a bum or a corpse but the kind of comeback hero you see in television crime dramas and don't believe for a minute. When you heard it like this, though, in real life and straight from the gut, you knew it had to be the truth—and it made you feel good.

Still, it wasn't the most sensible decision DeBeque could have reached, not in real life, and Kaprelian said, "I don't know, Fred, if the cops couldn't find the guy—"

DeBeque nodded. "I went through all the objections myself," he said, "but I knew I still had to try. So I came back here to the city and I started looking. I spent a lot of time in the Tenderloin bars, and I got to know a few street people, got in with them, was more or less accepted by them. After a while I started asking questions and getting answers."

"You
mean," Kaprelian said, astonished, "you actually got a line on the guy who did it?"

Smiling, DeBeque said, "No. All the answers I got were negative. No, Harry, I learned absolutely nothing—except
that the police were wrong about the man who killed Karen. He wasn't a junkie or a sneak thief or a street criminal of any kind."

"Then who was he?"

"Someone who knew her, someone she trusted. Someone she would let in the apartment."

"Makes sense, I guess," Kaprelian said. "You have any idea who this someone could be?"

"Not at first. But after I did some discreet investigating, after I visited the neighborhood again a few times, it all came together like the answer to a mathematical equation. There was only one person it could be."

"Who?" Kaprelian asked.

"The mailman."

"The
mailman
?"

"Of course. Think about it, Harry. Who else would have easy access to our apartment? Who else could even be seen entering the apartment by neighbors without them thinking anything of it, or even remembering it later? The mailman."

"Well, what did you do?"

"I found out his name and I went to see him one night last week. I confronted him with knowledge of his guilt. He denied it, naturally; he kept right on denying it to the end."

"The end?"

"When I killed him," DeBeque said.

Kaprelian's neck went cold. "Killed him? Fred, you can't be serious! You didn't actually
kill
him—"

"Don't sound so shocked," DeBeque said. "What else could I do? I had no evidence, I couldn't take him to the police. But neither could I allow him to get away with what he'd done to Karen. You understand that, don't you? I had no choice. I took out the gun I'd picked up in a pawnshop, and I shot him with it—right through the heart."

"Jeez," Kaprelian said. "Jeez."

DeBeque stopped smiling then and frowned down into his ginger ale; he was silent, kind of moody all of a sudden.

Kaprelian became aware of how quiet it was and flipped on the TV. While he was doing that the two workers got up from their stools at the other end of the bar, waved at him, and went on out.

DeBeque said suddenly, "Only then I realized he couldn't have been the one."

Kaprelian turned from the TV. "What?"

"It couldn't have been the mailman," DeBeque said. "He was left-handed, and the police established that the killer was probably right-handed. Something about the angle of the blow that killed Karen. So I started thinking who else it could have been, and then I knew: the grocery delivery boy. Except we used two groceries, two delivery boys, and it turned out both of them were right-handed. I talked to the first and I was sure he was the one. I shot him. Then I knew I'd been wrong, it was the other one. I shot him too."