Fritz Leiber - Horrible Imaginings

The Lieutenant quit pacing and paused, but Groener just stared at him—incredulously, almost stupifiedly, but still steady as a rock. Zocky shot an apprehensive look at his superior.

“The important thing you overlooked,” the Lieutenant went on relentlessly, “was that I’d find out your wife was an acrophobe, and that her dread of heights was so great, sober or drunk, that she’d tie her arm to her chair when she was merely sitting near a big window or up on a theater balcony. To suggest that such a person would commit suicide by jumping is utterly implausible. To imply that she’d preface it by sitting or leaning on the window ledge having a last drink and smoke is absolutely unbelievable.”

The Lieutenant paused and narrowed his eyes before adding, “Moreover, Mr. Groener, quietly as you walked back to the bedroom, did you really suppose you accomplished that so silently that Mrs. Labelle’s sharp ears wouldn’t catch the sound of your footsteps?”

Groener roused himself with an obvious effort. “I… I… This is all quite absurd, Lieutenant. Mrs. Labelle…” He made the usual gesture with his left hand. “You can’t really believe that.”

He looked at his left hand. So did the detectives. It was shaking and as he continued to stare it began to shake more violently. The tendons stood out whitely as he stiffened it, but the shaking didn’t stop.

Groener’s tight-pressed lips lengthened in a grin but the corners of his mouth wouldn’t turn up. “This is embarrassing,” he said. “Must be embarrassing to you too. First time I’ve had the shakes in five years.”

But the shaking only became convulsive.

“All right,” he said, closing his eyes, “I did it.”

The shaking stopped.

After awhile he went on gently, “Just about as you’ve described it. I was insane to think I could ever get away with it. I suppose your doctor noticed that her neck had been broken before she fell. He probably deduced it from the tear in her scalp where I’d jerked her head back by the hair.”

“No,” the Lieutenant said, “but he will now. Zocky, would you get Cohan? Tell the ladies Mr. Groener’s coming with us to make a statement at the station. Tell them he doesn’t want to speak to either of them now. I imagine that’s the way you want it, Groener?” The other nodded.

After Zocky went off, Groener said, “Would you tell me one thing?”

“I’ll try to.”

“How did you know her hair looked like a silver fleece?”

The Lieutenant flushed. “Oh that—please excuse it. I was just blasting away at you. The words came.”

Zocky returned with the third detective. They opened the front door and started down the stairs. The Lieutenant told Cohan to go first with Groener.

Zocky said to the Lieutenant in a gruff whisper, “Hey, I gave you a right steer on that walking loud on purpose business, didn’t I?”

“Yes, Zocky, you did.”

“I don’t like this case, though,” the blond detective went on. “This Groener’s not a bad guy. Think of listening to those chimes night after night!”

“If they were all bad guys, our job would be easy.”

“Yeah. Say, I just realized we don’t know any of their first names—not Groener’s or either of the dames.”

“Cohan will have them,” the Lieutenant said. “But that’s a very important point about detective work you’ve just made, Zocky. Never know their first names.”

The top half of the blade of grass growing in a railed plot beside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan said “Beetles! You’d think they were the Kings of the World, the way they carry on!”

The bottom half of the blade of grass replied, “Maybe they are. The distinguished writer of supernatural horror stories H. P. Lovecraft said in The Shadow Out of Time there would be a ‘hardy Coleopterous species immediately following mankind,’ to quote his exact words. Other experts say all insects, or spiders, or rats will inherit the Earth, but old H.P.L. said hardy coleopts.”

“Pedant!” the top half mocked. “ ‘Coleopterous species’!” Why not just say ‘beetles’ or just ‘bugs’? Means the same thing.”

“You favor long words as much as I do,” the bottom half replied imperturbably, “but you also like to start arguments and employ a salty, clipped manner of speech which is really not your own—more like that of a deathwatch beetle.”

“I call a spade a spade,” the top half retorted. “And speaking of what spades delve into (a curt keening signifying the loamy integument of Mother Earth), I hope we’re not mashed into it by gunboats the next second or so. Or by beetle-crushers, to coin a felicitous expression.”

Bottom explained condescendingly, “The president and general secretary of the Coleopt Convention have a trusty corps of early-warning beetles stationed about to detect the approach of gunboats. A coleopterous Dewline.”

Top snorted, “Trusty! I bet they’re all goofing off and having lunch at Schrafft’s.”

“I have a feeling it’s going to be a great con,” bottom said.

“I have a feeling it’s going to be a lousy, fouled-up con,” top said. “Everybody will get conned. The Lousicon—how’s that for a name?”

“Lousy. Lice have their own cons. They belong to the orders Psocoptera, Anoplura, and Mallophaga, not the godlike, shining order Coleoptera.”

“Scholiast! Paranoid!”

The top and bottom halves of the blade of grass broke off their polemics, panting.

The beetles of all Terra, but especially the United States, were indeed having their every-two-years world convention, their Biannual Bug Thing, in the large, railed-off grass plot in Central Park, close by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, improbable as that may seem and just as the grassblade with the split personality had said.

Now, you may think it quite impossible for a vast bunch of beetles, ranging in size from nearly microscopic ones to unicorn beetles two and one-half inches long, to hold a grand convention in a dense urban area without men becoming aware of it. If so, you have seriously underestimated the strength and sagacity of the coleopterous tribe and overestimated the sensitivity and eye for detail of Homo Sapiens—Sap for short.

These beetles had taken security measures to awe the CIA and NKVD, had those fumbling human organizations been aware of them. There was indeed a Beetle Dewline to warn against the approach of gunboats—which are, of course, the elephantine, leather-armored feet of those beetle-ignoring, city-befuddled giants, men. In case such veritable battleships loomed nigh, all accredited beetles had their directives to dive down to the grassroots and harbor there until the all-clear sounded on their ESP sets.

And should such a beetle-crusher chance to alight on a beetle or beetles, well, in case you didn’t know it, beetles are dymaxion-built ovoids such as even Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright never dreamed of, crush-resistant to a fabulous degree and able to endure such saturation shoe-bombings without getting the least crack in their resplendent carapaces.

So cast aside doubts and fears. The beetles were having their world convention exactly as and where I’ve told you. There were bright-green ground beetles, metallic wood-boring beetles, yellow soldier beetles, gorgeous ladybird beetles, and handsome and pleasing fungus beetles just as brilliantly red, charcoal—gray blister yellow hieroglyphs imprinted on their shining green backs, immigrant and affluent Japanese beetles, snout beetles, huge darksome stag and horn beetles, dogbane beetles like fire opals, and even that hyper-hieroglyphed rune-bearing yellow-on-blue beetle wonder of the family Chrysomelidae and subfamily Chrysomelinae Calligrapha serpentine. All of them milling about in happy camaraderie, passing drinks and bons mots, as beetles will. Scuttling, hopping, footing the light fantastic, and even in sheer exuberance lifting their armored carapaces to take short flights of joy on their retractable membranous silken wings like glowing lace on the lingerie of Viennese baronesses.