Glen Cook - A matter of time

They stared at one another.

"A practical joke?"

"Annie, people don't kill people for a joke. But I'll check it out. See if anybody's got it in for her, or if there's any bodies missing…"

"You never did say. You think it's murder?"

"I don't know, hon. When we get bodies in alleys, we have to dig. He could've escaped from a funeral parlor."

"You said he died there."

"Yeah. So let's do the dishes and watch the movie, or something. Before it drives me crazy."

Next morning, before beginning the rounds of the coin shops, Cash cornered Railsback. "Hank, you ever heard of a Lieutenant Carstairs?"

"On the force?"

"Yeah."

"Can't say that I have."

"He'd go back a ways."

"I can ask the old man. Is it important?"

Old Man Railsback had retired in 1960, but still hung around the station more than home. He lived with his son, which Cash felt was explanation enough.

"Not really. Just curiosity."

The old man seemed to know everything that had happened since Laclede's landing. Apparently, he had been there. Or so his reminiscences made one think.

Cash shifted subjects. "Annie thinks our John Doe might have been lowered from a helicopter."

"No way," Railsback said. "I thought of that myself, Norm. I called Lambert Field. They said not even a nut would fly a chopper in that."

"I didn't think so. But Annie-"

"Annie should write mysteries, not solve ours. Now, if you've got the time, find John and do the coin shops. Maybe we can wrap this up before the next one comes floating belly up. Here's your list."

It was no go. They got shrugs, blank stares, and a few definite negatives. They wasted half a day. But that was the nature of the job. You always played out every chance.

"What I think," said John, around his Big Mac at lunch, "is we should put his picture on the wire. Guy's probably got a wife and seven kids in Little Rock, or someplace."

"Maybe. But you've got the feeling too, don't you? This one's going in the files unsolved."

"Yeah. It's weird. Like in Nam, you could tell Charlie had an ambush set without seeing a thing…" He turned it off because of what he saw in Cash's face.

Funny how it keeps on hurting, Cash thought.

He had had an uncle who had gotten it in Italy, 88 mm in the chest while standing half out of his tank turret. That had never bothered him the way Michael's loss did. He supposed it was this not knowing for sure, this perpetual half-suspicion that the boy was alive somewhere in the Asian jungles. And it was worse for Nancy and the kids. Their lives were drifting away while they marked time.

"Maybe FBI will find something."

"They're running out of places to look. What do we do then? Call the CIA? Interpol? Or put his picture in the papers?"

Cash got a new angle on John there. This case was bothering his partner as much as it was him. He thought he understood why. It did not seem right that a man should die, murdered or not, without so much as a memorial in a police record. A man should have a monument, like maybe: "Here Lies the Unknown Victim, A Casualty in the Cops-and-Robbers War."

They were remembering Michael, that was why. Michael would have no memorial either. His war had cast him into a limbo where there were no monuments, no eulogies, no benefits for his survivors… Only their memories would ever show that he had existed. And here they had the mirror image, a corpse that was the only proof that a man had ever lived.

One wake without a ship, and one ship without a wake.

"Maybe Tucholski got something," Cash said.

"Want to bet?"

"Not a doughnut hole."

John was right. The women on the reinterview list had ironclad alibis. One had a mother, and the other a boyfriend very much alive and kicking about being hassled. And of the cars illegally parked on the Wednesday side of the street only one could not be accounted for. That was a junker without plates the neighbors said had been there for months.

Dead ends. It was all dead ends. They still had nothing from FBI. Missing Persons across the country had come back with nothing. Lieutenant Railsback got growly when he heard his brainchild had been stillborn, grumbled about putting the case on a back burner till something concrete turned up.

It had begun bugging them all. Nobody wanted to do it slow and by the numbers.

"I talked to the old man at lunch," Railsback told Cash later, as he and John were about to go home. "He said there was a Colonel Carstairs on the Board of Commissioners in the late thirties. Came up out of Homicide. That's the only Carstairs he remembered."

"Probably the same man. Thanks, Hank."

"What was that?" John asked on the way down to the parking lot.

"Just checking something the old woman said the other day. About a Lieutenant Carstairs. You and Carrie coming by?" Annie had insisted that morning so he had extended an invitation.

"Yeah. We'll bring Nancy and the kids, too. Carrie called Nancy and Nancy said Annie had already called…"

"I get the picture."

It was nice having people around sometimes, Cash reflected, though the children made him nervous. And Carrie and Nancy, who were cousins, made these evenings together a sort of wake. Michael's body might be gone, but his ghost remained very much among them.

Following dinner the children established squatter's rights to the TV while the women caucused in the kitchen, so Cash and Harald retreated to the rathskeller.

"Something bothering you?" John asked, letting Cash pour him a scotch and water.

"The case. The damned John Doe." He repeated Annie's story about Miss Groloch and her mysteriously missing lover.

"Coincidence," said John. "Or a grisly joke."

"That's what Annie thought. Wanted me to check for body snatchings."

"No go. Front page."

"That's what I told her. And how to get it there still warm, during a snowstorm, without leaving a trace?"

Against one wall stood a crude set of shelves, boards on cinder blocks, that Cash had erected for his wife's old mysteries. Somehow, when Michael had gotten married, a lot of his science fiction had migrated into them rather than out of the house. Nancy's people were stodgy. He had preferred to hide his reading tastes the way his father's generation had hidden their Playboys from their wives in the fifties. John pulled out a couple and tossed them onto the bar.

"Tried to read The Time Machine once," Cash said. "Didn't grab me. Never noticed this other one before." It was The Corridors of Time by Isaac Asimov. Its dog-eared look suggested that it had been one of Michael's favorites.

It was Cash's fault that his son had gotten started reading that stuff. He had brought home a book called The Naked Sun, same author, given him by someone at the station who had thought Annie would like it. "But I get your drift."

John looked expectant in the way a pup does when his master catches him peeing off the paper.

Cash shrugged. "There's a more reasonable explanation."

"Tell you what," John replied. "Let's check the files. See what the reports have to say."

"John, I wouldn't know where to look. I mean, sure, they keep the files open forever. Supposedly. But where? We'd really have to dig. First just to find out where they keep records of where they keep records from fifty years ago. And on our own time…" The case bothered him, yes, but twenty-three years of homicide investigations had put calluses on his curiosity. He had not worked on his own time for ten years, since the bizarre rape-murders around Mullanphy School.

John seemed disappointed. "All right. I'll do the digging. If I locate the file, I'll have it sent over."

"Railsback would crucify us just for thinking about it. No imagination, old Hank."