“Did you consider stopping by in person?”
“I was about to. Just now. You got here first.”
“Did you call the police?”
“No. I’ve got a wife to worry about as well as myself.”
“I see.”
“Did you call them?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not certain. Well, I guess it’s that I’d like a better idea as to what’s going on before I blow the whistle on him.”
Hal nodded, a dark-eyed study in bruise and Band-aid.
“And you think I know something you don’t?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I don’t,” he said, taking a sip, wincing and stirring more sugar into his iced tea. “When I answered the door earlier, there he was. I let him in and he started asking me about that damned stone. I told him everything I could remember, but he still wasn’t satisfied. That was when he began pushing me around.”
“Then what happened?”
“I remembered some more things.”
“Uh-huh. Like you remembered I have it-which I don’t-so he’d come rough me up and leave you alone.”
“No! That’s not it at all!” he said. “I told him the truth. I left it there when I moved out. As to what became of it afterwards, I have no idea.”
“Where’d you leave it?”
“Last I remember seeing it, it was on the desk.”
“Why didn’t you take it with you?”
“I don’t know. I was tired of looking at it, I guess.”
He got up and paced his living room, paused and looked out the window. Mary was off attending a class, a thing she had also been doing that afternoon when Paul had stopped by, had his conference with Hal and started the ball rolling down the alley that led to me.
“Hal,” I said, “are you telling me the whole truth and nothing but?”
“Everything important.”
“Come on.”
He turned his back to the window, looked at me, looked away.
“Well,” he said, “he claimed the thing we had was his.”
I ignored the “we.”
“It was,” I said, “once. But I was there when he gave it to you. Title passed.”
But Hal shook his head. “Not that simple,” he said.
“Oh?”
He returned to sit with his iced tea. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop, took a quick sip, looked at me again.
“No,” he said. “You see, the one we had was really his. Remember that night we got it? We played cards in his lab till pretty late. The six stones were on a shelf above the counter. We noticed them early and asked him about them several times. He would just smile and say something mysterious or change the subject. Then, as, the night wore on and after he’d had more to drink, he began talking about them, told us what they were.”
“I remember,” I said. “He told us he had been to see the star-stone, which had just that week been received from the aliens and put on display in New York. He had taken hundreds of photographs through all sorts of filters, filled a notebook with observations, collected all the data he could. Then he had set out to construct a model of the thing. Said he was going to find a way to produce them cheaply, to sell them as novelty items. The half dozen on his shelf represented his best efforts at that point. He thought they were pretty good.”
“Right. Then I noticed that there were several rejects in the waste bin beside the counter. I picked out the best-looking one and held it up to the light. It was a pretty thing, just like the others. Paul smiled when he saw that I had it, and he said, ‘You like it?’ I told him that I did. ‘Keep it,’ he said.”
“So you did. That’s the way I remember it, too.”
“Yes, but there was more to it than that,” he said. “I took it back to the table with me and set it down next to my money-so that each time I reached over for some change, I automatically glanced at it. After a time I became aware of a tiny flaw, a little imperfection at the base of one of the limbs. It was quite insignificant, but it irritated me more and more each time that I looked at it. So, when you two left the room later, to bring in more cold beer and sodas, I took it over and switched it with one of those on the shelf.”