Flatlander - Larry Niven [129]
Boone looked cautiously triumphant. “There’s some inconsistency in the records. Mrs. Mitchison was given a room on the second floor because the computer registered all ground floor rooms as occupied. I got a printout of the occupants as of that date. The computer does not list room oh-forty-seven as empty or occupied.”
“Have you tried to look in oh-forty-seven?”
“Not yet. I’ll need a court order.”
“No, you won’t. Have Naomi ask for that room. If anyone flinches, it may tell us something.”
He smirked an un-Lincolnesque smirk. “I like it.”
“Okay, Now tell somebody about this, will you? Get the judge in charge of reviewing Naomi’s conviction and tell him about that disappearing room. Or tell anyone at all.”
“Surely you’re being overdramatic?”
“You know too much to be safe. We’re dealing with someone who can control the lock on your apartment. Look, do it just to make me happy.”
“All right, Mr. Hamilton.” Smiling, he called off.
I went back to the window.
A mirror would reflect a laser beam for only an instant. No mirror is perfectly reflective, of course. In the first instant of a laser burst the face of a mirror would already be vaporizing, going concave, defocusing the beam … and it had defocused in midburn!
But where had the mirror gone?
The case was loaded with traditional elements. Locked room, inverted, with the failed murderer locked out on the moon. Cryptic dying message. Now I was looking for mirror tricks. What next? Disappearing daggers of memory plastic, broken clocks giving spurious alibis—
The moonscape blazed at me through the window. I rubbed my fingers together, remembering …
Alan was on top of the tilted rock, finding nothing. I’d scraped at the shadowed back of the rock with my gloves. White stuff had come off. I’d watched it disappear from my fingertips.
Frost, of course. Water ice. But on the surface of the moon? It had startled me then. Now, suddenly, it made sense.
And now, suddenly, I had half the puzzle solved.
12. THE TRADITIONAL ELEMENTS
“Phone call, Mr. Hamilton. Phone call, Mr.—”
“Oh, futz.”
“—milton. Phone call—”
“Chiron, answer phone.” I disengaged the strap across my chest and sat up.
“Hello, Gil.” The screen was blank, but the voice was Naomi’s. She sounded tired. There was none of the jubilation you’d expect of someone raised from death.
“Hello. You going to give me vision?”
“No.”
Something like postoperative depression, maybe. “Where are you calling from?”
“Here. Hovestraydt City. They say I’m still under arrest.”
Had she arrived early? But my clock said noon. I’d been a long time falling asleep.
“Have you talked to Boone yet? We still have an attempted murder to deal with. We’d like to pin both murders on someone.”
“Go ahead.”
“Are you under drugs?”
“No, but nothing seems to matter much. Who got me out of the freezer?”
“Mostly Alan Watson,” I said for sweet charity’s sake.
“Um.”
“Naomi, we know where you were when someone shot Chris Penzler in his bath. Boone and I discussed it over the chili at lunch yesterday.”
“Over the … oh.” She thought it out. Clearly I knew and didn’t trust the phone system. “All right. Now what?”
“You’re still a suspect. We’d like to produce an actual killer. But he wasn’t outside after his first try at Penzler. We have to explain why, or else we have to show where you were at that time. Boone says that’s not as bad as it sounds. You should talk to him.”
“All right.”
“We’d like to see you in your apartment.”
“Gil, I’d rather not see anyone.” Bitterly, “I was just getting used to the idea of being dead.”
“So you’re not dead. Now what?”
“I don’t know.”
I couldn’t tell her why we had to see the apartment. Not by phone. In her present state, would she take orders? “Call Boone,” I said. “Tell him I’ll meet him in your apartment. It’s oh-forty-seven, isn’t it? Tell him to get the police to let us in. Then order us breakfast. Plenty of coffee.”
There were several seconds of dead air. Then, for the first time, I heard emotion in her voice. “All right, Gil,” she purred, and was gone.
Bitter satisfaction, that was what it sounded