“Sherlocks,” Al Sarrantonio’s story set in the near future (it may be here before you read this), doesn’t actually feature the great detective, but his legacy runs all through it; and an industry that named a nuclear submarine after Jules Verne’s Nautilus would almost certainly honor the World’s Greatest Detective by christening one of Sarrantonio’s devices after the great detective. No doubt the legendary John Henry would also approve of this story of Man vs. Machine.
The hotel room smelled like rosewater. It was twelve foot by twelve foot square, with a few sticks of cheap furniture stuck in the corners, green wall-to-wall carpeting that curled up as it reached the walls, a rumpled bed with an open suitcase on it, and one small, dirty window that gave a good view of the metallic wall on the hotel a few yards away next door. A man lay on the carpeting in the center of the room. He was long and lean, with thinning blond hair and a youthful face with a lot of angles in it. There was a startled expression in his eyes, which were open wide. He lay on his stomach, with his head to one side, and there was a very large kitchen knife with a plastic handle standing straight up out of his back.
Lieutenant Henry Virgil, a small man who looked as much like a weasel as any creature that was not in fact a weasel possibly could, was circling the corpse nervously as his assistant Buckers bent over it. Virgil’s black pebbly eyes stabbed this way and that, out through the doorway, daring anyone who stood out there, myself included, to enter the room.
I looked at the two old-line cops who were with me in the hall, waiting to photograph and bag the body, and they looked at me, and the three of us had the same look of resigned disgust on our faces.
Inside the room, Virgil said, “Well?” to Buckers, who then lifted the slim black tentacles of his sherlock from the body and checked the readout on the flat box strapped to his shoulder that the tentacles led into. “The light’s still green, sir,” he said in a small voice. He was a large, square man, but was scared to death of Virgil. “It’s still collecting.” Virgil nodded briskly, and Buckers bent over the body again. Four other technicians, clean-shaven and efficient as whisk brooms, were minutely combing every inch of the walls, floor, ceiling, and furniture with their own machines.
I stood watching until I became uncomfortable, and then I shifted my weight against the doorjamb and said, in as pleasant a voice as I could, “The guy’s dead, Virgil. Can’t you go back to your computer room and let these poor fellows out here do their dirty work?” Virgil seemed to leap across the room at me. “That’s it, Matheson,” he said. “I agreed to let you up here on the condition that you didn’t open your mouth.”
He took me by the arm and pulled me towards the elevator. I didn’t resist. I gave appealing looks to the cops in the hallway, but there was nothing they could do.
“I’d like to squeeze your arm right off,” Virgil said. I tried to talk reasonably but he cut me off. “I don’t want you bothering my people. Just because someone was stupid enough to hire you to look into this murder doesn’t mean you can follow my crew around like a gawker with a bag of peanuts. I don’t care how many old friends you have on the force. I want you to stay away from me.” His anger subsided a bit as the elevator doors opened. I stepped into the car without saying anything. The doors were closing when Virgil stopped them with his hand. He shook his head in mock sadness and said, “I really feel sorry for you, Matheson. Why don’t you stop playing detective and get yourself a job?”
He let the doors close.
He wasn’t so far from the truth. I hadn’t had a solid investigative job—even a wife-cheating assignment—in six months, and ever since the sherlocks had become commercially available two years before, my caseload had been down about sixty percent. Most of the big agencies were using the machines now, and almost all the younger PIs were using the things, coupled with a databank service. I was starting to feel old.
That morning, though, I’d suddenly found myself involved with a murder case when I’d got up to find a note pinned to the pillow next to my head and an open window where whoever had pinned it had entered and exited. The note had read:
$2000 HAS BEEN CREDITED TO YOUR ACCOUNT. FIND OUT
WHO MURDERED VINDEBEER AT THE SEDGEWICK HOTEL.
There hadn’t been any signature, but after checking with the bank and finding that the money had indeed been deposited, I’d decided there was nothing to do but put on some clothes and go down to the Sedgewick. There I’d found Virgil and his sherlockers, and a dead body, presumably named Vindebeer. And that’s where I stood now.
It was getting dark by the time I reached home. I had a little haven in the middle of all the high-rise metal spires on 212th Street, because about seventy-five years ago, when all the forty-floor monsters were springing up everywhere, a gray-haired old lady named Mrs. Cornelius had refused to sell her two-floor Victorian. They built right up to the border of her eighth-of-an-acre plot, but she ignored them. I’d bought the place from her daughter about ten years ago and blessed Mrs. Cornelius every time I stepped through the gate.
I blessed her now, but when I stepped through, I noticed that the front door was wide open. No one was inside, but I found a folded note attached to my easy chair in the den. This one read:
GO TO THE NORTH DOCKS TOMORROW AT 2:30 PM
AND STAND BY THE EAST TOWER ELEVATOR.
This one was also unsigned. I didn’t really like the game with the notes, but there didn’t seem to be anything to do about it at the moment. So I ate dinner, read a Perry Mason for a couple of hours, then went to bed.
• • •
In the morning I went down to the North Manhattan police station to see Jack Rutgers. I poked my head into the computer terminal as I walked by and saw that Lt. Virgil was pacing around nervously, shouting instructions to Buckers and his other assistants, leaping from panel to panel and adjusting the dials and reading meters. When he saw me he growled, so I hurried past.
Rutgers was a nearly bald man in his middle fifties. He wore an open vest, sweated a lot, and had a round, thoughtful face. He wore round spectacles, which he was always taking off and cleaning with his handkerchief. He was the only old-timer left who had any control at all over Virgil. He had been pretty friendly to me over the years. His office was cluttered with plants; when I walked in, he told me to move a couple aside and find a place to sit.
“I’m glad you’re here, Phil,” he said. He took off his spectacles. “I’d like to bat some ideas back and forth with you.”
“I’m working on the Vindebeer case,” I said.
His eyebrows shot up. “You know his name? Did Virgil tell you?”
“I don’t think Virgil has thought of looking in the guy’s wallet yet. Someone left me a note with the name on it, though.” I told him about my anonymous client. “The only thing I was able to figure out from the short time I was at the hotel yesterday was that this fellow hadn’t been there very long since he hadn’t even bothered to unpack. Is there anything you can add to that?”
“Phil,” he sighed, polishing his glasses, “you know damn well that the sherlock boys only tell me what I pull out of them. They just about run things here now. When I retire they will run things. I was able to find out that this Vindebeer boy was from Norway, though. He’d been in the country only six days, and spent very little time in the hotel. He’d been out looking for a job—he was some sort of technician. A couple of nights he went to a bar called The Norseman on 204th Street. We got all this from the doorman at the hotel who’d talked to him a couple of times. Seems he’d been kind of lonely. There were no fingerprints in the hotel room except for his own. No one suspicious was seen entering or leaving the hotel before or after the murder; nobody heard anything. One of the sherlocks found a brown hair that didn’t belong to the victim. That’s all there is now; Virgil says he’s still running olfactory tests on a kind of rosewater scent the sherlocks detected.” He paused. “You have no idea who broke into your place and left the notes?”
“Nope.” I got up to leave, slowly, because I knew Rutgers didn’t want me to go yet. He was rubbing his spectacles thoughtfully and I sat down again. I knew what was coming since we’d been through it before.
“Plants need watering, Jack,” I said. “Look a bit dried out.”
He stopped polishing, pointed his spectacles at me, and said, in a confidential sort of way, “You know, twenty years ago you and I would have hated each other’s guts—in a respectful kind of way. The police captain and the sharp young detective, eyeball to eyeball.” He shook his head. “I know it was never really like that, Phil, but still, the way it was was better than this. They think they can solve every crime with little sensors, data banks, and electric eyes. Well, I don’t think they work as well as men do.”
“I don’t, either,” I said. “But apparently the things work. And somebody above you thinks they’re worth the investment. I may be old-fashioned, Jack, and I know I’ll never use one of those things. But if someone else wants to use them that’s fine with me. I’ll still rely on my own wits, even if I go down trying.”
“Yeah,” he said, and then he was silent, cleaning his glasses. “Keep in touch, Phil.”
“I will. Thanks for the information.” And this time, when I got up, I left.
• • •
The docks of north New York City are nestled in a basin by Inwood. The Hudson River used to flow there before it was diverted inland into New Jersey, through and behind the cliffs. Don’t ask me why the Hudson River was chopped up like a birthday cake and put back together somewhere else, because I don’t really know. It was some sort of public works project, and the money was there, so it got done. I think there’s an amusement park in Jersey on the banks where the river goes by now.
When the river was drained at Inwood, natural walls were left against the river banks, and the empty basin that was formed was coated with quickly constructed transport offices and launching docks and turned into a cargo port. The place looked nice in the beginning: thirty years later the better facilities in Philadelphia and Virginia had most of the shuttle cargo business and the Inwood docking area was pretty much a ghost port. Now a lot of it was abandoned, and the other parts were used by fly-by-night transporters. The surrounding neighborhood wasn’t too nice, either.
I took the creaky east-end elevator down to basin level, staring up at the launch gantry and empty, dilapidated control towers. When the car finally wheezed to a halt at the bottom I threw the rusting metal caging back and stepped out.
A long block of shabby structures—abandoned travel offices, mostly—lay in front of me. The block stretched straight as an arrow to the west end of the docks, and I could make out the creaky framework of the other elevator from where I stood.
I checked my watch and noted that it was now two thirty. Fifteen minutes went by. No one used the elevator or came down the shabby lane to meet me. After a half hour my feet got tired; twenty minutes later I decided to give up. As I turned around to get back on the elevator I heard a shuffling noise behind me and then everything turned black.
Even though I don’t use a sherlock, I do make certain concessions to modern technology. There was a piece of equipment which I wore that probably saved my head from being split open. It’s a thin membrane of ultra-high-impact plastic, which fits skin-tight at the base of my skull and up around my ears. I can’t feel it when it’s there, and unless you look close it can’t be seen. A friend of mine had sent it to me; one just like it had saved his head a couple of times from the poundings of annoyed husbands.
The impact of the blow knocked me down. I was staggering to my feet when suddenly everything went dark gray and I dropped out cold. Someone had used gas on me—and I wasn’t wearing a nose filter.
I awoke in a small room. There was a tiny light bulb on the ceiling directly over my head that threw off sour light that hurt my eyes. There weren’t any windows. When I tried to get up I discovered that my arms were tied to the bottom of the bed I was lying on.
Someone came and stood over me, cutting off the sour light. It was a young girl, with long, straggly brown hair and a small chin and a grim, set mouth. Not very pretty. She held her hair back with one hand and leaned over me.
“You’re not groggy?” Her voice was throaty, hard-edged.
“A little,” I said. “Would you mind telling me what’s going on?”
She straightened up, and I saw what looked like a smirk on her face. “I think we’d better have this out now.”
I just looked at her.
“I’ll make this concise,” she went on. “If you don’t leave my father alone, I’ll do anything I have to to stop you. You have no business with us.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I really don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’ll—”
“I’ve warned you,” she said, and then she uncovered something in her hand, moving it close to my face, and the next thing I knew I was waking up in front of the east-end elevator.
I made my way back home. There weren’t any notes waiting for me there. An hour later I had just settled into a warm bath when Jack Rutgers called to tell me that another young technician from Norway had been murdered.
• • •
This victim had lived in one of the nicer parts of town, a swanky apartment building in the lower 90s. The front of the place was sealed tight and operated by a voice print–activated computer that wouldn’t let me in. There were no police outside, but I finally was able to get in when an elderly, wide-eyed couple, who had obviously just heard about the murder, left the building. Once inside I merely followed the line of uniformed policemen who had been dropped like peas along the route to the victim’s apartment.
When I walked into the living room I found Buckers and Virgil bent over a woman on the couch. She’d been stabbed in the chest. Buckers was tracing the outline of her body with the tentacles attached to his sherlock; a few more men were crawling here and there, little black boxes in hand.
I got the woman’s name, Ingri Hoffman, from one of the cops standing outside. After waiting around for a while I discovered that that was about all they knew. I stayed out of Virgil’s way. I thought I smelled a hint of rosewater, but I couldn’t be sure.
I stood watching the sherlocks work for a few minutes. I can’t help it, I just don’t like the little black boxes. They have retracting tentacles, electronic eyes, olfactory filters, and audio sensors; they collect data, sniff out criminal odors, study fingerprints, footprints, breathprints, collect bits of clothing and skin and strands of hair, beep, whiz, talk to each other, correlate information with a central data bank. And though the courts were still tied up in knots over whether the evidence presented via sherlock was admissible, it seemed that after eight long years they were slowly coming around to favor the little machines.
The last image I had in my eyes as I turned to leave was of Ingri Hoffman on the couch; and Buckers, bright and eager as a puppy, sliding the slender cold tentacles of his sherlock over her dead body.
• • •
The Norseman Inn was what I would call a gimmick bar. It was small, dark, and congenial, and everything in it was made of different-sized pieces of wood. The beer mugs and wine goblets were wooden, the tables were square slabs of wood, the bar itself was half a tree, sliced lengthwise and resting on huge wooden blocks. There were horned helmets and carved spears on the wall behind the bar, and though there was piped-in music, it was set low enough so that people could talk. Things were very carefully engineered: you could see and hear only the people in your immediate vicinity. There were a lot of young working girls.
I pulled a heavy wooden stool up close to the bar and motioned for the bartender to stay after he’d poured a beer for me. I asked him if he knew Helmut Vindebeer.
He thought for a moment, then shook his head and frowned. He was built like a Viking, of course, and the frown he made through his beard when I repeated the name told me he didn’t know Vindebeer by name. I described the technician to him and his memory seemed to warm a little.
“I remember him,” he said, the Viking persona dissolving into a Brooklyn accent. “He was in here three, maybe four nights in a row. That was about it. He looked like he belonged in the place, very Norwegian-looking, very naïve-looking too. I guess he came in because of the name, thought he’d meet a lot of Scandinavians, who knows. But I remember that the first time he came in it didn’t take him long to meet a few people—there were one, maybe two people I remember him latching onto. As a matter of fact, they were Scandinavians. Wait here a minute.”
He went to the other end of the bar, looking out over the crowd. He served a couple of customers down there, then came back.
“I think I found the two he was talking to: a guy and a girl. They’re sitting at a table along the wall in the back. She’s got a blue-and-white striped dress on, pretty good-looking. The guy has short black hair. Okay?” He smiled his Viking smile through the beard.
I thanked him and took my beer to the back room, threading my way through a lot of wooden tables and chairs.
The guy and the girl both had nice smiles, and they were sitting together on one side of a booth. They responded to Vindebeer’s name when I asked if they knew him. The guy asked me to sit down on the other side of the table and I did so. His name was William Anderson—when he talked he sounded Scandinavian. So did the girl.
It turned out that they had met both Vindebeer and each other the first night Vindebeer had come into the bar. Vindebeer had been very shy, but friendly, and his accent had drawn them to him. Then Anderson told me that there had been another girl who had attached herself to their little group that night also.
“She was very animated, very bright,” he said. He then went on to describe the girl I had seen dead an hour before.
They’d known about Vindebeer’s death, but when I told them that the girl was dead too, they got a little upset.
“I don’t understand,” the girl, Helga, said after a few moments. She looked a bit older than she dressed, and she now held Anderson’s hand tightly. “They both looked so happy. We were all so happy that first night. All of us had been alone, and then we all met at once.”
I asked her if they’d gotten together with Vindebeer or the girl again.
“Yes,” she said. “We met a couple of nights later, and once again the night after that. Helmut was very happy that last night because Ingri was going to get him a job.”
“She was trying to get him a job,” William corrected. “She worked for a research scientist, a well-known man, as his assistant, and was trying to get Helmut a job with his project. They were both technicians.”
Neither could remember the scientist’s name. I took a sip of my beer, which was now flat. “Did anything strange happen that night you were together? Did you meet anyone else?”
They both shook their heads.
“Did they say anything about the job Helmut was trying to get?”
“Not much,” Anderson answered. “Just that this scientist needed another assistant. They mostly talked about how strange this scientist and his daughter were.”
“Strange?”
The girl spoke up. “Ingri told us some very funny stories about the things these two people had done, how they were always complaining about being bothered, that people wouldn’t leave them alone.”
She looked down at her drink, and I looked down at mine. There was silence for a few minutes.
“Do you think someone would try to hurt William or me?” the girl said.
“I’m not sure, but I don’t think so,” I said. “Can I get you two another drink?”
“No, thank you,” Anderson said. “I think we’ll be leaving soon. Actually, we came here tonight to see if Ingri might come.”
“I see,” I said. “Well, is there anything else you can remember? Anything at all?”
There was another silence, this one longer. Then Helga said, and she was almost crying, “Only . . . that they looked very happy together. I thought they looked very happy.”
On the way out I met Buckers coming in, who gave me a nasty look and passed on. Virgil was close behind him. I stepped in front of him so he couldn’t avoid me.
“What’s new, Lieutenant?” I said.
He scowled and made a motion to walk around me, then stopped. “I told you to stay out of this, Matheson.”
“You know I’ve been hired to look into it.”
“By who—the Man in the Moon?” He gave a short laugh. “You don’t even know who your client is.”
“Would you like to bet I get to the bottom of this before your sherlocks do?” I knew I was putting my foot in my mouth, but couldn’t help it.
“You’re on,” he said. “Fifty bucks?”
“Fifty bucks it is, Lieutenant. See you around.”
He walked back towards the bar, shaking his head.
I took a long walk home, and when I got there, there was another note from my anonymous employer waiting for me. This one was taped to the refrigerator door and read:
GO BACK TO THE NORTH DOCKS AT 9:00 TOMORROW MORNING.
I rolled it into a ball and threw it away. It was just about midnight. I grabbed a flashlight, made sure my neck guard was in place, put in my nose filters, and left for the North Docks.
• • •
To say the least, the docks were dark. I took the west-end elevator down, thinking it might be in better running order than the other one and make less noise, but if anything it groaned even louder. When I got to the bottom I could barely make out where I was, but flicking the beam of my flash this way and that soon told me what I already knew—that I was at the opposite end of the street bordered with travel offices that ran to the east end. I began to slowly make my way up one side of the street, pausing at each closed building with my flash off, trying to detect the least sound or possibly a flicker of light coming from inside.
When I’d gone about halfway up the block I thought I heard something close behind me, a footstep or a shifting in the dark. I stopped but nothing followed it; but as I turned to go on, someone rushed out at me from the darkened doorway I’d just passed and grabbed at me from behind.
I felt a little jab in the side and was down and out in about four seconds.
When I woke up there was one hell of a sore spot on my left side where a needle had been pushed in crookedly. I was trussed up again in the room with the sour yellow light.
“Your doing this twice to me is quite embarrassing,” I said. The girl was standing off to one side, her back to me. It looked like she was going through my billfold.
“Keep quiet.” She turned around, and I saw that she held a sherlock in her hand. She replaced my billfold in my breast pocket and then moved the sherlock slowly over my body.
“Where did you get that thing?” I asked.
She ignored my question. “You’re a detective?” I nodded. “You’re not who I thought you were,” she said evenly. “Who sent you to look for my father and me?”
“I don’t know, to tell you the truth.” I told her about the notes to see what kind of reaction I’d get.
She finished with the sherlock and put it on a table behind her.
I said, “Is your father here now?”
“If he was anywhere near here you’d be dead.”
She stood still for a moment, just staring at me, and then she left the room. When she came back she leaned over me.
I smelled rosewater, and my heart almost stopped.
She grabbed at something on a table against the wall. I was sure it was a knife, long-bladed and plastic-handled; but after the split second it took my eyes to tell my brain what it was seeing, I realised that it was a hypodermic. She plunged it savagely into my arm, and I quickly went under. When I swam up I found myself once again at the base of the elevator.
• • •
The next morning I called on Jack Rutgers to see if anyone had come up with anything on Ingri Hoffman.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “Virgil did come up with something. There was a partial print on the knife’s handle this time, and also another strand of long brown hair, which was found on the rug near the body. The olfactory tests also showed a correlation on a type of perfume detected at the scene of the first murder. It’s a kind of rosewater, from Scandinavia.”
“Has anyone been able to find out who she was working for?”
“No. And we may have some trouble finding out because it now looks as though the girl was in the country illegally; Vindebeer wasn’t but that doesn’t help because he hadn’t really started working for this fellow yet.”
I told him about my two visits to the North Docks, and he listened in silence, polishing his glasses with his handkerchief. “You went there last night alone?”
I smiled sheepishly. “Sure it was stupid. But even though this girl’s father is the scientist who hired Vindebeer and Ingri Hoffman, everything still doesn’t fit. The girl may be the killer, but then again maybe she’s not. And I still don’t know who hired me, or why.”
He sighed. “Well, looks like I can send some men out to the docks to flush the two of them out; at least we know the general area they’re hiding from where you got ambushed last night. Why don’t you sit tight for a little while, and I’ll give you a call later.”
“Sure,” I said. “Sounds fair enough. And Jack.”
His face had a probing look.
“Give those plants some water. They’re starting to wilt.”
He hesitated. “Right,” he said.
I spent the rest of the day going through the last few days’ junk mail and thinking. No matter how I twisted things around, everything always pointed back to whoever was leaving me those notes. There was a connection somewhere that I didn’t have. And if the girl was the cat she seemed to be and eluded Rutgers’s men, and if the note-man didn’t reveal himself, the whole thing could stay very confused indeed.
As I was putting a late dinner on, Rutgers called. He had nothing to tell me on the girl and her father, but it seemed that Virgil wanted to talk to me, and that there might be the possibility of trading some information. I figured what the heck and headed downtown.
Halfway there I remembered I’d left the two front burners of the stove on and rather than burn my house down I turned back.
The front door had been opened, and as I reached the front porch the scent of rosewater hit my nostrils.
I edged the door all the way open and reached around to the umbrella stand where I kept a very heavy stick. It was pretty dark inside. I raised the stick in front of me and slipped inside.
I took two steps, then heard two sounds at once. There was a girl’s scream from one side of the living room, and at the same time a lamp fell over as someone rushed at me from the other side. I could barely see but I could tell that it was a man and that he had an upraised hand with something in it. He ran into me and the hand swung down at my chest but I knocked it out of the way. He scrambled to his feet and pulled at the front door and ran out. Whatever he’d been holding fell to the porch behind him.
I lay breathing heavily for a moment. Suddenly someone turned on the hall light overhead. I was momentarily blinded, but I pushed my way to my feet and threw my arms out defensively, blinking fiercely. After a few seconds I was able to see that the girl with the light brown eyes stood before me.
I told her to stay away from me while I shut the front door and then walked over to my writing desk and took out a gun from the bottom drawer. There was a folded note taped to the desk and I pulled it off. I waved the gun at the girl, sat down in a chair, and told her to sit down in one opposite me.
She did as she was told—she was shaking like a leaf and looked dazed—and then I asked her what she was doing in my house.
“I . . . came here to bring you to my father,” she managed to get out.
“Wasn’t that your father who just tried to kill me?”
She shook her head no.
I ignored her for a minute and pulled open the note, which read:
YOU MUST RETURN TO NORTH DOCKS AND LOCATE SCIENTIST
AND DAUGHTER. 10:30 TONIGHT. CASE DEPENDS ON IT.
2000 MORE DOLLARS IN YOUR ACCOUNT.
“Hell,” I said and showed the note to the girl. “Do you know who wrote this?”
She was really shook up for some reason but when she saw the look on my face and the way I held the gun she managed to open her mouth. “No.”
“What’s your name?”
“I . . . thought you knew. My name is Angela Beberger. My father is Edward Beberger.”
“Edward Beberger?” I said, startled. Edward Beberger was the inventor of the sherlocks.
The girl began to talk, in a kind of stupor. “I came here because my father wants to see you. He thinks you can be trusted.”
“What about the man who was here?”
“He was here when I came. He’s the man who’s been after my father and me all this time. He made me tell him where my father is . . .”
It all came into focus. I went to the front door and opened it, and there on the front porch was a pump sprayer, the kind you use to water plants. It was filled with rosewater. I showed it to Angela Beberger.
“He was spraying that all over when I came in. I only had three bottles. Two of them were stolen. They belonged to my mother when she was alive. She brought them from Norway—”
“Is your father alone now?”
“Yes.”
I made a phone call to Virgil and then turned back to the girl. “Take me to him,” I said.
• • •
When we got to the North Docks the floodlights were on and Virgil was waiting with his men.
“He’s up on one of the rocket gantries,” he said to me. “I wish I could kick you out of here and handle this myself, but he’s got Edward Beberger with him, and he says he’ll kill him if we don’t let you go up.”
I looked up into the bright lights and could just make out two figures perched on a gantry arm that swung out high above us. I told Angela Beberger to stay with Virgil and took a step towards the gantry. I stopped and turned back to Virgil.
“How close were you to finding out what was going on?”
It was an effort for him to tell me. “We thought for sure it was the girl, here. I owe you some money, Matheson.”
I turned back to the gantry. I took the service steps up the side one by one, in silence.
“Hello, Jack,” I said and I reached the top. He was on a small platform suspended between two girders about twenty feet away from me.
Below the platform was a drop of about a hundred meters. It was windy up there, and the floodlights gave everything a stark, black-and-white appearance.
Beberger was propped up against a steel canister with a plastic-handled knife in his chest. He looked dead.
Rutgers sat down on the platform with his feet dangling over the edge and began to polish his spectacles. “I had hoped it would take a lot longer for us to reach this point,” he said calmly. “Things didn’t go the way I planned, Phil.”
“If you hadn’t dropped that rosewater at my house tonight it might have taken me quite a while to figure things out.”
“But the girl had decided to trust you. That was another thing I hadn’t counted on. I thought I had the two of them too scared to trust God himself. That’s why I had to get Beberger tonight.”
“How long had you been harassing them?”
“A couple of months,” he continued in a matter-of-fact tone. “It was easy. I started with anonymous phone calls; after a while I showed up at their place and said the police had received a threat against them. I picked up the rosewater, a few strands of hair, a kitchen knife with fingerprints on it—enough to throw the sherlocks off for a while. After I killed Vindebeer they didn’t know what to think; it was obvious I was involved and since I was a cop, who could they turn to? I kept up the phone calls. Then they disappeared. I knew they were hiding down here at the docks somewhere, but I couldn’t find them. That girl was smart. That’s when I started leaving you notes.”
“To get me to flush out Beberger for you?”
“That was part of it. The girl knew my face, but I thought that if she got a chance to get ahold of someone else who was possibly involved, I could track the two of them down. She was so careful, though; even though I found out where they were hiding, she moved her father right after getting rid of you. That’s why I wanted you to go back, to give me another shot. But there was more to it than that, Phil.” His voice rose a bit, and took on a bit of an hysterical edge. “You see, the whole idea was for you to come in cold and figure things out before the sherlocks did. The whole idea was for you to beat that damned machine.”
“Like Paul Bunyan?”
“Yes.”
“That’s why you killed Vindebeer and Ingri Hoffman?”
“No!” He looked straight at me. “I killed the two of them because Beberger was expanding his research.”
I gave a puzzled look.
“Come on, Phil! Don’t you read the papers? He wasn’t content with developing the god-damned black box Virgil is fondling down there. He was assembling a new research team to perfect the sherlocks; and eventually he was going to develop a centralized data bank that would replace almost all of the detective force in the city. Ninety-five percent. Most of the remaining personnel would be data computer experts, with only rudimentary police training. In one fell swoop, no more detectives. A way of life wiped out in a generation.” I was silent while he rubbed at his glasses. Then I said, “What now, Jack?”
He put his spectacles down on the platform and looked at me with tired eyes. “I don’t know, Phil. I suppose we could end this like an Alfred Hitchcock film with the two of us grappling on this little platform. Or I could sit here and start to weep like the crazy person I must be and let you lead me down to a squad car and a straitjacket.” He paused. “I’ve been confused for a long time, Phil, and this whole thing ended too soon. But I guess you’ll be the hero after.” He sighed heavily, pointing at Beberger. “I didn’t kill him. He’s only unconscious; there’s not a knife blade in the handle. Anyway,” he smiled weakly, “there are other people carrying on the same type of research he’s doing, so I guess it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Give me a hand down, will you?”
He took a step toward me with his hand out. I don’t think it was the wind or that he slipped or that he didn’t have his glasses on, but after one step he stumbled and fell from the platform, soundlessly hitting the concrete below hard. I looked down at his crumpled body, then at his spectacles lying on the platform. I picked up the spectacles and put them in my pocket.
Beberger was alive, as Rutgers had said, and when he came to I helped him down the steps of the gantry into the waiting arms of his daughter. I then waited solemnly as Virgil counted out five crisp ten-dollar bills into my hand. He wasn’t happy about it.
“You know,” he said, watching as Jack Rutgers’s body was bagged and carried off, “I still can’t believe a cop like that could do something like this. I knew he was a relic, but I didn’t know he was a stupid relic.”
I almost hit him then, but he quickly went on, seeing the look in my eyes. “Don’t get me wrong, Matheson. I respected that guy. I knew he was like the old dog who can’t learn new tricks, and I had every intention of forcing him out when I could, but, after all, we were all after the same thing, right? We just have different ways of doing it now, right?”
“Sure, Virgil. Whatever you say.”
He seemed to want more, some kind of reassurance that what he was doing was worthwhile, but I left him to his little black boxes then; already a couple of his lab technicians were crawling up the gantry like sterile spiders to let their machines sniff what there was to be sniffed.
When I got up to street level and stepped out of the elevator I almost hailed a taxi, feeling the fifty dollars in my pocket already trying to leap out, but at the last moment I kept my hailing arm down and began to walk.
With the fifty dollars I renewed my investigator’s license.