Four and Twenty Blackbirds Page 2

  On those other four occasions of the past several weeks, someone had written "case closed" after a murdered woman's name because her killer had slain himself. And in a few more days or weeks, another woman had died in circumstances that were all too similar to the previous, supposedly-closed case. Either there was a sudden rash of murder-suicides going on in this city, or there was something very wrong with the deductions of the city constables.

  "You're asking too many questions, Tal," Jeris said, as the wagon passed by. "The Captain doesn't like it. You're taking up too much time with this obsession of yours."

  "Too much time?" He felt as if he should be angry, but he was too tired for anger. He weighed his next words down with heavy contempt. "Since when are you concerned with my private interests? Most of this has been on my own time, Jeris. The last time I looked, what I did with my own time, whether it was bead-work, plowing, or criminal investigation, was no one's business but my own."

  Jeris grunted scornfully. "Charming hobby you have, Tal, and frankly, I don't give a rat's ass what you do on your time off. The only problem is that you've cooked up some half-crazed idea that there's a force out there, walking the night and murdering women. Even that would be all right if you kept it to yourself, but you can't do that, can you? You have to tell every gypsy bitch and street whore you meet why she should be more careful at night, as if a few stupid cows more or less in this town would make any difference to anyone."

  Now anger did stir in him, dull and sullen, smoldering under a heavy weight of sheer exhaustion. It had been a long night before this happened, and the end wasn't in sight. Jeris's arrogance made him want to give the man a lesson in humility—and in how it felt to be the one under the hammer. "So far, there've been five murder victims that look enough alike to make anyone with a brain think twice about them. These murders are too damned similar to be coincidental, and these murders don't fit the patterns of anything I've ever seen before, not in twenty years as a constable. Just for one moment, why don't you play along with me and pretend I'm right? Don't the women who have to be out in the street to make a living deserve to be warned of danger?"

  A sudden gust of wind blew rain into their faces. "They're street-trash, Tal," Jeris replied crudely, never once slowing down to look at him, just pulling the brim of his hat down over his face. "Anybody out on the street at night instead of decently home where she belongs is out looking for trouble. Try getting it through your head that scum doesn't deserve anything. They aren't worth considering, but decent, tax-paying citizens are beginning to get wind of your stupid idea, and they're getting nervous. The higher-ups don't like it when citizens get the idea that there's something dangerous on the street that the constables can't stop."

  Tal's anger burned in the pit of his stomach, warming him more efficiently than his sodden cloak, but he knew better than to make a retort. Jeris was a boot-licker, but as such, he had the ear of the Captain, with an eye to making himself—Jeris-the-upstart—look better. Jeris had only been a constable for four years to Tal's twenty, but he was already Tal's equal in rank and probably his superior in advancement prospects because of his lack of personal modesty and his artistically applied hostility. Ordinarily, Tal wouldn't have cared about that; he'd never wanted anything more than to be a good constable, maybe even the best if that was how things turned out, keeping the streets safe, solving the cases that were less than straightforward. But Jeris-the-toady, interested only in what the job could gain him, grated on Tal's nerves and enraged his sense of decency. This was not the least because Jeris represented not only everything Tal found despicable in the city constables, but also precisely the kind of constable who would advance through ambition and eventually become Tal's superior in rank. Captain Rayburn was exactly like Jeris—and when Rayburn gave up the job, no doubt Jeris would be promoted into it.

  So Jeris was only reflecting the sentiments of Those In Charge; "street-trash" didn't matter. Forget that those who Jeris and Rayburn styled "street-trash" were also tax-paying citizens; Rayburn would dismiss that simple truth with an unverifiable allegation that everyone knew that the "street-trash" cheated to avoid paying their taxes and so did not warrant service.

  As if the "good citizens of Haldene" that Rayburn favored never did anything of the sort! How did he think some of them got their fortunes?

  That didn't matter; really, nothing was going to make any difference to the Rayburns and Jerises of this world. The real fact was that the underdogs of the city had no power in the politics and policies of the city, and never would, and for that reason, Rayburn and his ilk discarded and discounted them, always had, and always would.

  Tal slowed his steps deliberately, allowing Jeris to splash on ahead. Let Jeris, the ambitious, be the one to file the initial report. Let him get the "credit" for the case. Tal would file a second report, and he would see if Jeris could find a way to explain the missing murder-weapon, or the myriad of discrepancies and illogics in the story.

  Then again, it probably wouldn't matter if he couldn't. This was just another inconvenient blot on the record, an "unfortunate incident" that no one would bother to pursue any further. Neither the victim nor the murderer were of any importance to anyone who mattered, and thus it would be simpler and easier for the authorities to ignore everything connected with them.

  That realization—or rather, the final acceptance of something he had known in his heart of hearts—sickened him. If he had not been so weary, he would have been tempted to turn in his baton, badge, and braids as soon as he reached the station and find some other job in the morning, perhaps as a private guard for one of the wealthy merchants.

  But he was tired; his head ached, his joints complained, his stomach was knotted into a burning ball, and the only thing he could really muster any enthusiasm for was the fact that his shift would be over in an hour or two and for half a day he would no longer have to tolerate Jeris and his ilk. In fact, by the time he reached the station, made out his report, and did the follow-up with the searchers at the river, it would probably be time to stop for the day.

  He plodded on, head down for many reasons, through the cold wind and intermittent rain, and because he had deliberately lagged behind Jeris, when he arrived at the station he discovered that the other constable had already commandeered the single clerk on duty at this time of night. That meant Tal would have to write out his own report, instead of dictating it to the clerk.

  One more miserable item in the long list of the evening's miseries.

  The station, a cramped, narrow building, three stories high with a basement lockup for violent cases, was unusually busy for a cold and rainy night. The waiting room was full, and the sergeant at the desk looked as haggard as Tal felt.

  For a moment, he simply leaned against the wall and let the warmth and babble wash over him. With oil lamps along the walls and a small crowd pressed together on the benches, there was enough heat being generated to make up for the fact that one of the two stoves supposed to heat the place was cold. This was the Captain's idea, a means to economize during the hours that Rayburn was not on duty, and never mind that there were other people who were forced to shiver through the coldest hours of the night due to his economies. This was the only part of the building that the general public ever saw, but it was enough to make them nervous. No one ever came to the station who was not forced to.

  The first story consisted of one main room and several smaller offices and the ward-room behind them all. The main room had a half dozen benches arranged in front of a desk; at the desk sat the Duty-Sergeant, and on the benches were ranged a variety of folk who either had complaints that needed a constable's attention, or were here to see about getting someone out of the general lockup on the second floor where drunks and minor troublemakers landed. They were the source of the nervous babble, and unfortunately, also of a variety of odors, none of them pleasant. Sweat, dirt, garlic, wet wool, beer, and wet rawhide; bad breath and flatulence; and a hint of very cheap perfume from the one or two whore
s waiting to register complaints—the people who came here at night were not among the city's elite by any stretch of the imagination, and they brought the "atmosphere" of their lives with them. Judging by the crowd out front, the offices were probably all full, either of constables interviewing witnesses or constables interviewing people with complaints. More accurately, given the attitude of the night watch, the truth was closer to enduring than interviewing.

  The second floor was divided into the general lockup—a temporary holding area for drunks, vagrants, general "undesirables," and as many participants in a fight as could be rounded up—and a second ward-room. Third floor held the records. It would be quieter up there, but much colder. There was a clerk in the records-room by day who refused to work if the stove wasn't fired up, but there was no one to keep it stoked at night, and no one cared if the prisoners in the lockup were comfortable.

  The harried Sergeant barely acknowledged Tal's presence as the latter entered and saluted. Since he was dealing with three different arguing parties all at the same time, Tal didn't blame him. Instead, he went in search of pen and paper to make his report, and a relatively quiet corner to write it in.

  When he finally found both in the ward-room his headache was much worse and his jaw ached—and he realized to his chagrin he'd had it clenched tight ever since Jeris started in on him. It was enough to give him a deep throbbing at the root of his teeth, which faded slowly as intermittent shocks of pain until only a background discomfort remained.

  By that time, the Sergeant had managed to throw out all three of the contending parties, which had cleared the waiting room considerably. While he'd been searching for writing materials, Jeris had finished his report. The Sergeant gave him a look at it, and as Tal had suspected, no mention was made of a missing murder-weapon or even that the weapon had been something other than the usual belt-knife.

  He went up to the third floor in search of quiet. With his fingers stiffening in the cold, Tal rectified those omissions, wishing a similar headache and bout of indigestion on Jeris, who, according to the Sergeant, had chosen to go off shift early once his report had been written.

  When he came back down, with his stack of closely written papers in hand, the Sergeant waved him over to the desk.

  "The riverside search-team come in, Tal," he said with a gleam in his red-rimmed eyes. "They found the body of a man they figger was the murderer. What's more, they know who 'twas."

  He handed the new report, a short one, to Tal, who read it quickly, his eyebrows rising as he did. The body certainly fit the description that the boy had given, and he had been identified almost as soon as he had been pulled from the water by a most extraordinary chain of coincidences.

  Both the discovery of the body and the identification were exceedingly fortunate for Tal, if not for the prospects of turning in his shift early, for he had not expected the body to turn up until it floated by itself. But as luck would have it, a barge had gotten torn from its moorings this afternoon before he arrived for his shift; it had run up against a bridge-pier downstream, then sunk. Now the usual scavengers were out in force on the water with all manner of implements designed to pull cargo out of the water. One of the scavengers had netted the body and brought it up. As it happened, several of the river-rats had recognized who it was immediately, though they had no idea that the man had murdered a girl before drowning himself.

  So now Tal had his identification, and the search-crew had happily retired from the scene, their job completed.

  The Desk-Sergeant had the particulars. The murderer had been the owner of a shabby shop in Jeris's district, who made a living buying and selling secondhand goods. The scavengers had sold their pickings to him more than once, and knew him not only by sight, but by habits—and the one who had pulled him out was actually in the station waiting to be interviewed.

  Although Jeris had officially declared himself off-duty, the Sergeant noted (with a sly smile) that he was still proclaiming his genius in the second-floor ward-room to the clerk and anyone else who would listen. "The boy come to witness wants out of here," the Sergeant said. "He's not likely to wait much longer." He did not offer to send someone after Jeris.

  The Sergeant was as old a veteran as Tal, and with just about as little patience for boot-lickers. They both knew that since the shopkeeper was from Jeris's district, it would look very bad if someone else took the report because Jeris had gone off-duty early and had not bothered to check back at the desk.

  "Any sign of Jeris checking back in, then?" Tal asked.

  The Sergeant shook his head. "Not that it's your job—"

  "No," Tal replied, deciding to get subtle revenge by grabbing the interview for his own report—which was, without a doubt, what the Sergeant had in mind. "But a good constable concentrates on the case, not the petty details of whose district the witnesses and victims come from."

  "That's the truth," the Sergeant agreed. "Your witness is in the fourth crib along, right-hand side."

  Tal collected more paper, left his initial report with the Sergeant, and found the man waiting patiently in one of the tiny cubicles in the maze of offices and interview-rooms in the back half of the first floor.

  There were oil lamps here as well, and it was decently warm at least. Maybe too warm; as Tal sat down behind the tiny excuse for a desk at the back end of the room, he caught himself yawning and suppressed it.

  He had brought with him a steaming cup of the evil brew that was always kept seething in a pot on another pocket-sized stove in the first cubicle. Allegedly, it was tea, though Tal had never encountered its like under that name anywhere else. It was as black as forbidden lust, bitter as an old whore, and required vast amounts of cream and whatever sweetener one could lay hands on to make it marginally palatable, but it did have the virtue of keeping the drinker awake under any and all possible circumstances.

  The witness had evidently been offered a cup of this potent concoction, for it stood, cooling and barely touched, on the floor beside his chair. Tal didn't blame him for leaving it there; it was nothing to inflict on the unprepared and unprotected, and offering it to a citizen came very close to betraying the Constables' Oath to guard innocent people from harm. He just hoped it wouldn't eat its way through the bottom of the cup and start in on the floor, since he'd be held responsible.

  "I understand you and some of your friends located the body of a man who drowned?" he said as he slowly dropped down in the chair, after setting his cup on the table within reach of his right hand. "Can you tell me how that came about?"

  The young man, lean and sallow, with a rather pathetic excuse for a beard and mustache coming in, nodded vigorously. "We been salvagin', an' I hooked 'im. Knowed 'im right off. Milas Losis, 'im as got the secondhand story on Lily, just off Long, in the Ware Quarter."

  Tal nodded; so the murderer had not even come from the same quarter as the victim, although Wharf and Ware were next to each other and in this district. Still, Lily Street was a considerable distance away from Edgewater, where the girl had made her usual stand. And more significantly, Edgewater held nothing to interest a dealer in second-hand goods, being the main street of the fish-market. With luck, this boy would know a bit about Milas Losis.

  "Did Milas Losis have any reason to want to do away with himself?" he asked.

  The boy shook his head. "Hard t' tell about some of these old geezers, but not as I think. Shop was doin' all right, old man had no family to worry about, an' never had no reason t' want one. Useta make fun of us that came in and talked about our girls—told us he'd be laughin', and free in a brace of years, an' we'd be slavin' to take care of a naggin' wife and three bawlin' brats, an' wishin we was him." The young man shrugged. "On'y thing he ever cared for was chess. He'd play anybody. Tha's it."

  And I doubt that the girl was one of his chess partners. "Did he ever show any interest in music?" Tal persisted. "In musicians? In female musicians? In women at all?"

  To each of these questions, the boy shook his head, looking
quite surprised. "Nay—" he said finally. "Like I said, on'y thing he ever seemed to care for was his chess games, an' his chess-friends. He could care less 'bout music, 'e was half deaf. An' about wimmin—I dunno, but I never saw 'im with one, and there wasn't much in 'is shop a woman'd care for."

  After more such fruitless questioning, Tal let the youngster go. The boy was quite impatient to be off doing something more profitable than sitting in the constable-station, and only pressure from the team searching for the body had induced him to come here at all. There were a few more hours of "fishing" he could get in before traffic on the river got so heavy that he would legally have to stop to allow day-commerce right-of-way and pull his little flat-bottomed salvage-boat in to the bank until night. He had money to make, and no reason to think that Milas had been the victim of anything other than an accident or at worst, a robbery gone wrong.

  Tal sat at the tiny desk, staring at his notes for a moment, then decided to go prowling in the records-room again. This was a good time to go poking through the records, for during the day, the clerk defended them as savagely as a guard-dog, allowing access to them with the greatest of reluctance.

  He took his notes with him, since the records-room was as good a place as any to write his addition to the report. Besides, now that he officially had the identity of the murderer, he wanted to check the file on current tax-cheats, debtors, heretics, and other suspected miscreants to see if Milas was among them. There was always the barest chance that the girl was a blackmailer who'd found something out about him that could ruin him. Not likely, but best to eliminate the possibility immediately, and leave Jeris no opportunity for speculation.