Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

“Hatton didn’t answer the phone. His sister knew that he was taking sleeping pills, so she waited until nine this morning to start calling again. Eventually she called the cops.”

“I don’t get it,” said Lawrence.

Dar crouched by the body, studied the angle of the arm and the turn of the wrist that rigor mortis had sculpted in place, studied the wound high on the dead man’s temple, and then moved around the bed to sniff at the pillow on the empty side. “I do,” said Dar.

Lawrence looked at Dar, at the body, back at Lieutenant Rich, and then at the body again. “Aw, no. You’re shitting me.”

“That’s the ME’s analysis,” said the detective.

Lawrence shook his head. “You mean—he was all doped up with sleeping pills, his sister calls because she has a dream that he’s died, and this guy thinks he’s answering the phone but actually picks up the .38 on the nightstand and blows his brains out? There’s no way anyone could prove that.”

“There was a witness,” said Lieutenant Rich.

Lawrence looked at the empty but mussed side of the bed. “Oh,” he said, getting the picture…or at least part of it.

“Georgio of Beverly Hills,” said Dar.

Lawrence turned slowly to look at his friend. “Are you telling me that you can look at the imprint on the other side of the bed and sniff around—amidst all this stench—and tell me the name of the guy from Beverly Hills that Mr. Hatton was sleeping with?”

The police detective laughed, then covered his mouth and nose again.

Dar shook his head. “The perfume. Georgio of Beverly Hills.” Dar turned to the plainclothes officer. “Let me take a wild guess. Whoever was in bed with Mr. Hatton at the time of the accident didn’t come forward last night—either because she’s married or the situation would be embarrassing in some other way—but she’s given you a statement since then. Whoever she was, you found her this morning…and probably not by checking all of the women in Southern California who wear Georgio.”

Detective Rich nodded. “Two minutes after the patrol car pulled up this morning, she broke down and started sobbing, told us all about it.”

“What are you two talking about?” said Lawrence.

“The psychiatrist,” said Dar.

Lawrence looked back at the body. “Mr. Hatton was boffing his shrink?”

“Not at the time of the accident,” said Lieutenant Rich. “They’d finished their boffing for the night, Mr. Hatton had taken his Flurezapam and Doxepin, and they were both asleep. The psychiatrist…I’ll keep her name out of it for right now, but my guess is that you’ll be hearing it on the eleven-o’clock news a lot in the days to come…she heard the phone ring at midnight, heard Hatton fumble around and say, ‘Hello?’—just as the gun went off.”

“She obviously decided that discretion was the better part of valor on her part,” said Dar.

“Yeah,” said the detective. “She got her ass out of here before the blood quit sprayin’. Unfortunately—for the shrink—the snoopy live-in manager saw her drive off in her Porsche about five minutes after midnight.”

“Does Mrs. Hatton’s sister know about this yet?” asked Lawrence.

“Not yet,” said the detective.

Dar exchanged glances with Lawrence. “That should make the lawsuit even more interesting.”

The detective led the way back out into the hallway. Lawrence and Dar followed readily enough. They stood on the balcony to let the breeze blow some of the smell off their clothes.

“It’s like the old story of how Helen Keller burned her ear,” said Lieutenant Rich.

“How’s that?” said Lawrence, making notes and fast sketches in his notebook.

“By answering the iron,” Lieutenant Rich said, and began laughing almost hysterically.

Lawrence and Dar did not speak for some time after leaving San Jose. Finally Lawrence muttered, “To protect and serve. Ha!”

At the end of the drive back to San Diego, Dar suddenly said, “Larry, remember when Princess Diana was killed a few years ago?”

“Lawrence,” said Lawrence. “Sure I remember.”

“What did we talk about…more or less?”

The burly insurance adjuster sighed. “Let’s see…the first reports were that the Mercedes that Princess Di and her boyfriend were in had been going a hundred and twenty miles per hour. We knew that was incorrect right from the beginning. We used the TV’s freeze-frame to get some stills of the news report, remember? Then we videotaped the later scene reports and studied the stills from them.”

“And we talked about how the impact incursion wasn’t consistent,” said Dar.

“Right. The Mercedes hit that pillar pretty much dead on, so we know that the front-end incursion wasn’t significant enough to show that the car had been going anywhere near a hundred and twenty miles per hour. Also, the TV networks kept reporting that the car had obviously rolled over, but when we looked at the raw video we knew that wasn’t so.”

“You and Trudy identified the missing roof as the emergency workers’ efforts to cut the victims free, right?” said Dar.

“Sure. So did you. And the dents visible in the roof didn’t come from a rollover. They came from the rear passengers’ heads hitting the inside of the roof after the initial impact.”

“And what did we judge the real speed of impact to be, according to the video, the passengers’ injuries, and the other scene reports?”

“I said…let’s see…I said sixty-three miles per hour. Trudy said sixty-seven. I think you had the low number, sixty-two.”

“And when the final report came out, you were right,” mused Dar.

Lawrence went on. “None of the reporters seemed to want to mention it, but we all knew that Princess Diana would have almost certainly survived the crash if she’d been wearing her seat belt and shoulder harness. And they’d all be alive if the accident had happened in the United States…”

“Because?” said Dar.

“Because it’s both federal and state regulations that pillars in an underpass have to be protected by guardrails,” said Lawrence. “You know that; you mentioned it the night of the accident. You even worked out the kinetic-impact-velocity-diminution equations on our computer—showing that if it had been a guardrail rather than a concrete pillar, the Mercedes would have gone ricocheting back and forth through that tunnel, wall to guardrail and back again, dissipating energy as it went. If the occupants other than the bodyguard had been buckled in…”

“But they weren’t,” said Dar quietly.

“Uh-uh. Trudy calls that the taxi-limousine syndrome,” said Lawrence. “People who would never drive or ride in their own automobiles without a seat belt don’t even think about buckling up in a limo or taxi. For some reason, you feel invulnerable when a hired driver is behind the wheel.”

“Trudy even remembered video of Princess Diana buckling up when driving her own car,” said Dar. “What else did we discuss?”

Lawrence scratched his chin. “I’m assuming you’ll get to your point here sometime. Let’s see. We all agreed that the paparazzi didn’t have anything to do with the accident. First, the Mercedes could have easily outrun those little paparazzi motorcycles. Secondly, it could have driven over them without feeling a bump. But we all suspected that a second vehicle was involved…a second automobile, that is. That the driver swerved down into the tunnel and then lost control trying to miss another car.”

“Which turned out to be the case,” said Dar.

“Yeah. And we were sure they’d discover that the driver had been legally drunk.”

Dar nodded. “Why did we assume that?”

“He was French,” said Lawrence. Lawrence did not travel to parts of the world where all the people did not speak English. He also did not like the French just on general principles.