Flatlander - Larry Niven [115]
She sat down to think. Presently she nodded. “Anyone that good could have stolen a puffer, too. No wonder you didn’t find the weapon.”
“Okay.” Though that wasn’t exactly what I was after.
“Hold it. With a puffer she could have reached the Belt Trading Post. She could have taken a ship out. Gil, we’d have found her anyway, but at least she would have had a chance! Why would she come back?”
“Yeah, you’re right. It was just a thought. Thanks,” I called the phone off, and her puzzled frown vanished. Then I started laughing.
Some alibi! And perfectly genuine, too. Naomi could have been committing an entirely different crime at the Belt Trading Post!
I was going to have to walk softly. I would have to find Chris’s failed killer without showing the lunie police where Naomi had been.
I was stripping for a bath when Laura called me back that evening. I said, “Chiron, voice only. Hi, Laura. I’m glad you called. Has anything unusual happened lately at the Belt Trading Post?”
“Nothing I’ve heard about. And there weren’t any puffers missing that night.”
“What? How sure are you?”
“Mesenchev was on duty. He says there were no puffers checked out and no slots. No computer program could keep him from noticing one empty slot. And is that finally the end of the Naomi Mitchison case?”
“Yes. And if it isn’t, I’ll at least quit bugging you. I’ve done too much of that.”
She studied me thoughtfully … no, she must have been studying a blank screen. She’d better, because I was just climbing into the tub. She said, “Did I louse up a voice-only command a few days ago?”
“Eee-yess. I wasn’t about to be the one to tell you.”
“Well, you’re a gentleman,” she said, and called off, leaving me bemused. What did lunies consider a gentle-man?
No puffers missing. Futz. While water and air bubbles churned around me, I called up the map again and traced the trade road west. Roads branched off to the water and oxygen works, to the abandoned metal mines, to a linear accelerator project that had gone bankrupt.
I was back to assuming that Naomi had been on foot. Could she have met someone somewhere within reach? The air works required sunlight. At night they might be deserted. Or what about the old strip mine?
The screen blinked, and Laura Drury glared out of it. “Now, what are you doing with that map again?”
Watery amoebas left the tub with the force of my flinch. “Hey, are you sure that’s your business? And how do you break into a computer display without permission, anyway?”
“I knew how to do that when I was ten. Gil, will you give up on her? Maybe she wasn’t out there when Penzler got shot. Maybe she researched it somehow. Gil, if she wasn’t shooting at Penzler, she must have been committing an organ bank crime somewhere else!”
“You saw that, huh? I went to the wrong person. Well, if you must know, I can’t leave puzzles alone.”
Long silence. Then, “Want help?”
“Not from a cop. If you found a crime, you’d have to report it.”
She nodded reluctantly.
“Hey, why did you call me a gentleman?”
“Well, you didn’t… if a lunie saw a, a person naked on his phone screen—” She stopped.
“He’d crawl out of the screen at you, drooling and leering?”
“He’d think it was an invitation.” She was blushing darkly.
“Oh. Hahaha! No. If a lady wants to give me an invitation, I expect her to say so. Flatlanders don’t hint.” I stood up. “Especially on the moon. I was told never to make advances to a lunie.” I started scraping the half inch of water off me with the edges of my hands. Then I saw her eyes bugging. “Have you got vision?”
She was stricken. Caught!
“Serves you right.” I reached for a towel. I used it on my hair, concealing my grin, concealing nothing else. Why shouldn’t a lunie be curious? And she’d given me the same privilege inadvertently.
“Gil?”
“Yeah.”
“It was an invitation.”
I looked at her over the towel. Her lids were lowered, and her blush was darker yet.
“Okay, come on up.”
“Okay.”
It took her forty minutes. She might have been changing her mind over and over again. She arrived still in uniform, carrying a briefcase.
I’d