A Kind of Murder

Officer-1 Fisher had been eavesdropping. He said, "So?"

"He never mentioned the word alibi," said He

"You're still sure he did it."

"Yah. But getting a conviction is something else again. We'll find more people with more motives. And all we've got is the laboratory." He ticked items off on his fingers. "No fingerprints on the box. No blood on Walters or any of his clothes, unless he had paper clothes and ditched 'em. No way of proving Walters let her in or give her the key ... though I wonder if he really had that much trouble keeping her out of the house.

"We'd be asking a jury to believe that Walters left the table and Larimer forgot about it. Larimer says no. Walters is pretty sure to get the benefit of the doubt. She didn't bleed much; a good defense lawyer is bound to suggest that she was moved from somewhere else."

"Its possible."

"She wasn't dead until she was hit. Nothing in the stomach but food. No drugs or poisons in the bloodstream. She'd have had to be killed by someone who—" He ticked them off. "Knew she hid Walters' key. Knew Walters' displacement booth number. And knew Walters wouldn't be home.

"Maybe. How about Larimer or Lovejoy?"

He

"Then again, a lot of people at the Sirius Club knew Walter. Some of them must have been involved with Alicia. Anyone who saw Walters halfway through a domino game would know he'd be stuck there for awhile."

"True. Too true." He

He

The Walters case had haunted him all through di

Easy? If Walters had killed Alicia during a game of dominos at the Sirius Club, then there wouldn't be any case until Larimer remembered. Aside from that, Walters would have been an idiot to try such a thing. Idiot, or desperate.

But if someone else had killed her, it opened up a bag of snakes. Restrict it to members of the Sirius Club who were there that night, and how many were left? They'd both done business there. How many of Jeffrey Walters' acquaintances had shared Alicia's bed? Which one would have killed her, for reason or no reason? The trouble with sharing too many beds was that—one's chance of ru

If Walters had done it, things became simplier. But she hadn't bled much.

And Walters couldn't have had reason to move the body to his home. Where could he have killed her that would be worse than that?

Walters owned the murder weapon ... no, forget that. She could have been hit with anything, and if she were in Walters' house fifteen seconds later she might still be breathing when the malachite box finished the job.

He

"Her displacement booth must be ten years old—" That was it. The sight of the booth must have sparked that memory. And it was fu

JumpShift booths were all alike. They had to be. They all had to hold the same volume, because the air in the receiver had to be flicked back—to the transmitter. When JumpShift improved a booth, it was the equipment they jmproved, so that the older booths could still be used.

Ten years old. Wasn't that—yes. The altitude shift.

Pumping energy into a cargo, so that it could be flicked a mile or a hundred miles uphill, had been an early improvement. But a transmitter that could absorb the lost potential energy of a downhill shift, had not become common until ten years ago.

He

"Yes ... No. Get me Alicia Walters' number."

Sobel got it for him. "What's up?"

"Tell you in a minute," said He

It was black night. His ears registered the drop in pressure. His eyes adjusted rapidly, and he saw that there were lights in Alicia Walters' house. He stepped out of the booth. Whistling, he walked a slow circle around it.

It was a JumpShift booth. What more was there to say? A glass cylinder with a rounded top, big enough for a tall man to stand upright and a meager amount of baggage to stand with blur—or for a man holding a dead woman in his arms, clenching his teeth while he tried to free one finger for dialing. The machinery that made the magic was buried beneath the booth. The dial, a simple push-button phone dial. Even the long distance booths looked just like this one, though the auxiliary machinery was far more complex.

"But he was sweating—" Had Lovejoy meant it literally?

He

The lights of the Homicide room flashed in his eyes. He

Walters sat slumped, staring straight ahead of him. "She didn't understand and she didn't care. She was taking it like we'd been all through this before but we had to do it again but let's get it over with." He spoke in a monotone, but the nervous stutter was gone. "Finally I hit her. I guess I was trying to get her attention. She just took it and looked at me and waited for me to go on."

He

"Where do you think? I hit her with it."

"Then it was hers, not yours."

"It was ours. When we broke up, she took it. Look, I don't want you to think I wanted to kill her. I wanted to scar her."

"To scare her?"

"No! To scar her!" His voice rose. "To leave a mark she'd remember every time she looked in a mirror, so she'd know I meant it, so she'd leave me alone! I wouldn't have cared if she sued. Whatever it cost, it would have been worth it. But I hit her too hard, way too hard. I felt the crunch."

"Why didn't you report it?"

"But I did! At least, I tried. I picked her up in my arms and wrestled her out to the booth and dialed for the Los Angeles Emergency Hospital. I don't know if there's any place closer, and I wasn't thinking too dear. Listen, maybe I can prove this. Maybe an intern saw me in the booth. I flicked into the Hospital, and suddenly I was broiling. Then I remembered that Alicia had an old booth, the kind that can't absorb a difference in potential energy."

"We guessed that much."

"So I dialed quick and flicked right out again. I had to go back to Alicia's for the malachite box and to wipe off the sofa, and my own booth is a new one, so I got the temperature shift again. God, it was hot. I changed suits before I went back to the Club. I was still sweating."

"You thought that raising her temperature would foul up our estimate of when she died."

"That's right." Walters' smile was wan. "Listen, I did try to get her to a hospital. You'll remember that, won't you?"

"Yah. But you changed your mind."