Allen Steele - Jericho Iteration

Farrentino checked his notes. “A quarter to eight, and he nursed it the entire time he was here. I suppose he must have gone somewhere for dinner before then.”

I picked up my beer and took a sip from it. The bottle was slippery in my hand. “Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “That would make sense.”

“Hmm. Maybe so.” The detective coughed, his eyes still on the miniature screen. “Do you know if he was … well, y’know, fooling around with anyone? Had a girlfriend on the side his wife didn’t know about?”

I felt a rush of anger but tried to keep it in check. “I’m not sure that’s any of your business, Officer.”

“Well? Did he?” He shrugged indifferently. “Maybe it’s none of my business, but still it’s something his wife might want to know when I call her-”

“Hell, no!” I snapped. “If he was meeting anyone here, it sure as hell wasn’t a …”

My voice trailed off as the realization hit me. Farrentino had skillfully led me into a trap, forcing me to contradict myself. His eyes slowly rose from the PT. “I didn’t ask if he was meeting anyone here, Mr. Rosen,” he said. “Maybe you do know something about what he was doing here, after all.”

From behind the garden wall, there was the wail of a siren approaching from down the street. I could hear the metallic clank from the balcony as the paramedics unfolded their stretcher. A couple of barmaids stood watching us from the back door, murmuring to each other.

Farrentino was about to say something else when a uniformed cop approached our table, carrying several plastic-bagged objects in his hands. “This is all we found in his pockets,” he said, holding them out for the detective to examine. “Do you want us to have ’em dusted?”

I recognized some of the items: his house keys, his car remote, his wallet, an old-fashioned fountain pen Sandy had given to him as a birthday present, some loose change, the ever-present pack of chewing gum …

And, in a bag of its own, Dingbat.

“Hmm?” Farrentino barely glanced at the collection. “Uhh … naw, I don’t think we need to do that. The only prints we’d find are his own. Just leave ’em with me. I’ll give them to his wife when I see her.”

The cop nodded his head and carefully laid them on the table between us before walking away. It occurred to me that John might have entered a few notes into Dingbat during his meeting with Beryl Hinckley. If there were any important clues as to why he had been killed, perhaps they might be stored on the PT’s floptical diskette.

“Okay, Rosen,” Farrentino said, breaking my train of thought, “let’s level with each other.”

“Sure.” I shrugged, trying not to stare covetously at Dingbat; it was just within hand’s reach. “Anything you want to know, Officer.” As I spoke, I picked up the beer and started to raise it to my mouth …

And then, at the last moment, I let my fingers slip from around the bottle.

It fell out of my grasp, bounced off the table, and fell between my legs, splattering beer across everything before the bottle broke on the concrete under the table. “Aw, shit!” I yelled, jumping up from my seat, staring down at the wet splotch that had spread across the crotch of my jeans. “Goddamn fucking …!”

When I want to screw up a conversation, I can outdo myself. Beer spilled off the table and onto the broken glass scattered across the ground. Farrentino stood up from his chair, alarmed and irritated at the same time. “What a fucking mess!” I whined. “I can’t believe I just … look, lemme go back to my place and get some dry pants on. It’ll just take a-”

“No, no, don’t do that,” Farrentino said, already moving away from the table. “Just stay here, okay? I’ll go get someone to clean all this stuff up …”

Then he turned his back to me and headed for the barroom’s back door; the two barmaids had already gone inside, presumably to get some towels and a broom and dustpan.

For a few precious moments, I was alone in the beer garden. I snatched up the evidence bag containing Dingbat. There was a red adhesive seal across the plastic zipper, but there was no time to worry about that now. I hastily unzipped the bag, breaking the seal, and shook the palmtop out into my hand, all the while keeping one eye on the door.

It took me only a second to eject the mini-disk from Dingbat’s floptical drive and stash it in the pocket of my jacket before I returned the PT to the bag and zipped it shut again. I had barely placed the bag back on the picnic table when Farrentino and one of the barmaids came out the door again.

We spent the next few minutes wiping up the spilled beer with paper towels and letting the barmaid sweep up the broken glass. I made a big deal out of sponging beer from my pants, although I kept one eye on the evidence bag. If you looked closely, you could see the split in the tape seal; someone would notice eventually, but I hoped to be long gone by then.

“Okay,” Farrentino said at last, after the mess was cleaned away and the barmaid was gone. He sat down at the table, clasping his hands together as he stared at me. “Here’s what happened …”

“Go on,” I said, adjusting my posture so that he wouldn’t have to look at both the evidence bag and me at the same time.

“A lady arrived here at the bar shortly after Tiernan showed up,” he went on, his voice lowered. “Black lady, nervous looking. Witnesses say they went up to that balcony together and were up there for a long time, talking. Seems they wanted to be someplace where they couldn’t be overheard. He was getting up as if to leave when he was shot-”

“How was he killed?” I asked. Farrentino hesitated. “That wasn’t a normal gunshot either,” I went on as my memory put together a picture of what I had seen up there. “He should have had his brains splattered all over the place if it had been from a gun, but I didn’t see any blood …”

Farrentino reluctantly nodded his head. “No, there wasn’t any blood. No one heard a gunshot either. Witnesses say that they heard the woman scream, that’s all. A second after that, a van parked across the street took off, but no one got its make or license number. The woman ran off before anyone could stop her.”

“You didn’t answer the question,” I said. “How was John killed?”

“We have some ideas,” he said tersely. “We’re looking into it right now-”

“Wonderful. I’m overwhelmed.”

“Don’t be a smartass,” Farrentino said, giving me a sour look. “Off the record, though, we think that it might have been a laser weapon of some sort. Remember the ‘Dark Jedi’ slayings in Chicago a couple of years ago?”

A chill ran down my back as he said that. Of course I remembered; it had been national news for several months. A serial killer-who, in a letter sent to the Chicago Tribune, had called himself the “Dark Jedi”-had picked off seven people at random over the course of several weeks, using a high-energy laser rifle. When the FBI and Illinois State Police finally tracked him down, the Dark Jedi turned out to be a rather sociopathic high school student from an upscale Chicago suburb. The scariest part of the case, though, was the fact that he had devised his weapon from a science-hobby handbook available in most bookstores, using equipment purchased through mail-order catalogs. In fact, the feds had found him because he had previously showed off a prototype of his laser rifle at a science fair; his “light saber” had won a second-place ribbon.

“So you think it’s a copycat killer?” I asked.

Farrentino shrugged. “That’s a possibility, but we don’t know yet. That’s all I can tell you right now.” He then jabbed a finger at me. “You next. Shoot.”