Then, a few minutes later: “Looks like a foster-reb pad. Mystical books. Diagrams. Ouija board, that kind of thing. Man’s and woman’s clothes in the closets.”
“Names?” was Clarke’s only counter.
“Danty Aloysius Ward, male. Magda Hansen, n6e Porter . . . . Say, Mr. Clarkel”
“Yes?”
“What the hell are we looking for? I been in hundreds of places like this one”-a vibrating, hammering sound, the overheard passage of a hovercar-“though maybe not all quite so noisy! Bad place to plant bugs, this!”
Maybe that’s why they’re there. “Did you check the phone?”
“Sure we did. It’s unlisted, but the number corresponds.”
“Ah-hah. Then tell me what size shoes they take, will you?”
“I guess it’s Charlie who’s checking out the clothes. I’ll get him; just a moment!”
Waiting. Clarke looked again at the tape he had-well, put it politely, don’t say extracted, say-obtained from the police computers.
SOURCE: LODGED BY CLOUGH WILLIAM N., PATROLMAN #7653. LOCATION: GASTATION 132 SUPERWAY ZONE H-8. TIMED AT:
“Mr. Clarke?”
“Yes.”
“I have those shoe-sizes for you. Brand-names too, where I can read them. Most of them are pretty worn.”
“Shoot, then.” Poising pen over paper.
When he had the details before him, Clarke felt his mind congealing like fresh concrete. into new hardness, new heaviness. He was barely aware of his own voice saying, “It fits. Keep at it. Turn the apartment inside out. This one is big.”
After which he stared at the news-cutting framed on the wall and did nothing for nearly five minutes.
“Where’s Sophie?” Mrs. Gleewood demanded in the middle of a sentence uttered by the TV that she and her son-in-law were watching.
“What?” Bemused, as usual, into a semi-stupor by the polychrome images on the screen, Turpin started up in his chair. “Oh! Sophiel Well . . . well, I guess she went to lie down, didn’t she?”
“You mean she’s drunk again,” Mrs. Gleewood snapped. “I noticed at dinner–don’t think you can hide that sort of thing from me! I never thought when she married you she’d be driven to alcoholism, I swear I didn’tl”
She folded her bony hands and jutted her sharp chin forward. She dieted, of course, to “keep her figure,” apparently in the hope that young men would continue to find her attractive in spite of her narrow, cruel eyes with
those dirty-looking dark bags under them, the chicken-skin scrawniness of her throat-which should have sported about three comfortable double chins, but instead sagged in loose pore-dotted folds-and the rasping. whining note that never left her voice. If there were any single conceivable reason to bad-mouth anyone fool enough to wander within earshot of this woman, Turpin had sometimes thought, it was beyond her powers of self-control to deny herself the pleasure of mentioning it.
Why couldn’t the stupid old bag eat a normal diet, get comfortably fat, and die young and happy-instead of hanging on until doomsday, griping about everyone and everything? Maybe she’d have kept one of her three husbands if she hadl
But all he said aloud was, “Come now, mother-in-law, you can’t say that Sophie is an alcoholicl She does drink more than most people, I imagine, but she’s always been highly strung.”
Mrs. Gleewood sniffed. “And where’s your guest?” she snapped. “That Mr. Donald Holtzer, or whatever his name is?”
“I believe he-uh-he went out with Lora,” Turpin said, and tensed, his hackles bristling.
“I see,” Mrs. Gleewood said. “1 seel Another scalp, hm.
“What do you mean?” Bridling-knowing he was expected to, because if he didn’t that would ruin her evening. But it was getting harder and harder to fill his designated role.
“Scalps,” Mrs. Gleewood said with satisfied deliberateness. “Pubic scalps. Not yet nineteen, I would remind you, and already she has enough of those to qualify her for a full Indian brave’s head-dress. And, while I’m considering the subject of the children you inflicted on my daughter, may I ask what you’re going to do about Peter’s haemorrhoids?”
Christl How 1’d love to take that scrawy neck and wring id And 1 could, 1 could, 1 keep myself in good shape, and if 1 just-
He caught himself, barely in time.
Oh, that reeky turd Sheklov! If he weren’t here, if 1 hadn’t been compelled to cushion him, 1 could have rid myself for good of this loathsome, disgusting, incompetent