Wilson Tucker sold his first science fiction short story in 1941 to a pulp magazine called Super Science Stories, and since then has written perhaps two dozen more. He’s concentrated on novel-writing, in both the science fiction and mystery fields; his sf novels THE LONG LOUD SILENCE and THE YEAR OF THE QUIET SUN are among the best in the field. But his work in the shorter lengths has been excellent too, with the result that new Tucker stories are always eagerly awaited. Herewith, Tucker’s first short story in a number of years, written specially for UNIVERSE 1: a quiet, matter-of-fact account of crime solving in the future, with a police camera that can photograph up to fourteen hours into the past. Provided there’s anything to be seen, of course.
Wilson Tucker
Sergeant Tabbot climbed the stairs to the woman’s third floor apartment. The heavy camera case banged against his leg as he climbed and threatened collision with his bad knee. He shifted the case to his left hand and muttered under his breath: the woman could have been gracious enough to die on the first floor.
A patrolman loafed on the landing, casually guarding the stairway and the third floor corridor.
Tabbot showed surprise. “No keeper? Are they still working in there? Which apartment is it?”
The patrolman said: “Somebody forgot the keeper, sergeant—somebody went after it. There’s a crowd in there, the coroner ain’t done yet. Number 33.” He glanced down at the bulky case. “She’s pretty naked.”
“Shall I make you a nice print?”
“No, sir, not this one! I mean, she’s naked but she ain’t pretty anymore.”
Tabbot said: “Murder victims usually lose their good looks.” He walked down the corridor to number 33 and found the door ajar. A rumbling voice was audible. Tabbot swung the door open and stepped into the woman’s apartment. A small place: probably only two rooms.
The first thing he saw was a finger man working over a glass-topped coffee table with an aerosol can and a portable blacklight; the sour expression on the man’s face revealed a notable lack of fingerprints. A precinct Lieutenant stood just beyond the end of the coffee table, watching the roving blacklight with an air of unruffled patience; his glance flickered at Tabbot, at the camera case, and dropped again to the table. A plainclothesman waited behind the door, doing nothing. Two men with a wicker basket sat on either arm of an overstuffed chair, peering over the back of the chair at something on the floor. One of them swung his head to stare at the newcomer and then turned his attention back to the floor. Well beyond the chair a bald-headed man wearing too much fat under his clothing was brushing dust from the knees of his trousers. He had just climbed to his feet and the exertion caused a dry, wheezy breathing through an open mouth.
Tabbot knew the Lieutenant and the coroner.
The coroner looked at the heavy black case Tabbot put down just inside the door and asked: “Pictures?”
“Yes, sir. Time exposures.”
“I’d like to have prints, then. Haven’t seen a shooting in eight or nine years. Damned rare anymore.” He pointed a fat index finger at the thing on the floor. “She was shot to death. Can you imagine that? Shot to death in this day and age! I’d like to have prints. Want to see a man with the gall to carry a gun.”
“Yes, sir.” Tabbot swung his attention to the precinct Lieutenant. “Can you give me an idea?”
“It’s still hazy, sergeant,” the officer answered. “The victim knew her assailant; I think she let him in the door and then walked away from him. He stood where you’re standing. Maybe an argument, but no fighting-nothing broken, nothing disturbed, no fingerprints. That knob behind you was wiped clean. She was standing behind that chair when she was shot, and she fell there. Can you catch it all?”
“Yes, sir, I think so. I’ll set up in that other room-in the doorway. A kitchen?”
“Kitchen and shower. This one is a combination living room and bedroom.”
“I’ll start in the doorway and then move in close. Nothing in the kitchen?”
“Only dirty dishes. No floorstains, but I would appreciate prints just the same. The floors are clean everywhere except behind that chair.”
Sergeant Tabbot looked at the window across the room and looked back to the Lieutenant.
“No fire escape,” the officer said. “But cover it anyway, cover everything. Your routine.”
Tabbot nodded easily, then took a strong grip on his stomach muscles. He moved across the room to the overstuffed chair and peered carefully over the back of it. The two wicker basket men turned their heads in unison to watch him, sharing some macabre joke between them. It would be at his expense. His stomach plunged despite the rigid effort to control it.
She was a sandy blonde and had been about thirty years old; her face had been reasonably attractive but was not likely to have won a beauty contest; it was scrubbed clean, and free of makeup. There was no jewelry on her fingers, wrists, or about her neck; she was literally naked. Her chest had been blown away. Tabbot blinked his shocked surprise and looked down her stomach toward her legs simply to move his gaze away from the hideous sight. He thought for a moment he’d lose his breakfast. His eyes closed while he fought for iron control, and when they opened again he was looking at old abdominal scars from a long ago pregnancy.
Sergeant Tabbot backed off rapidly from the chair and bumped into the coroner. He blurted: “She was shot in the back!”
“Well, of course.” The wheezing fat man stepped around him with annoyance. “There’s a little hole in the spine. Little going in and big—bigod it was big-coming out. Destroyed the rib cage coming out. That’s natural. Heavy caliber pistol, I think.” He stared down at the naked feet protruding from behind the chair. “First shooting I’ve seen in eight or nine years. Can you imagine that? Somebody carrying a gun.” He paused for a wheezing breath and then pointed the same fat finger at the basket men. “Pick it up and run, boys. We’ll do an autopsy.”
Tabbot walked out to the kitchen.
* * * *
The kitchen table showed him a dirty plate, coffee cup, fork and spoon, and toast crumbs. A sugar bowl without a lid and a small jar of powdered coffee creamer completed the setting. He looked under the table for the missing knife and butter.
“It’s not there,” the Lieutenant said. “She liked her toast dry.”
Tabbot turned. “How long ago was breakfast? How long has she been dead?”
“We’ll have to wait on the coroner’s opinion for that but I would guess three, maybe four hours ago. The coffee pot was cold, the body was cold, the egg stains were dry—oh, say three hours plus.”
“That gives me a good margin,” Tabbot said. “If it happened last night, yesterday, I’d just pick up my camera and go home.” He glanced through the doorway at a movement caught in the corner of the eye and found the wicker basket men carrying their load through the front door into the corridor. His glance quickly swung back to the kitchen table. “Eggs and dry toast, sugar in white coffee. That doesn’t give you much.”
The Lieutenant shook his head. “I’m not worried about her; I don’t give a damn what she ate. Let the coroner worry about her breakfast; he’ll tell us how long ago she ate it and we’ll take it from there. Your prints are more important. I want to see pictures of the assailant.”
Tabbot said: “Let’s hope for daylight, and let’s hope it was this morning. Are you sure that isn’t yesterday’s breakfast? There’s no point in setting up the camera if it happened yesterday morning, or last night. My exposure limit is between ten and fourteen hours—and you know how poor fourteen-hour prints are.”
“This morning,” the officer assured him. “She went in to work yesterday morning but when she failed to check in this morning, when she didn’t answer the phone, somebody from the shop came around to ask why.”
“Did the somebody have a key?”
“No, and that eliminated the first suspect. The janitor let him in. Will you make a print of the door to corroborate their story? A few minutes after nine o’clock; they can’t remember the exact time now.”
“Will do. What kind of a shop? What did she do?”
“Toy shop. She made Christmas dolls.”
Sergeant Tabbot considered that. After a moment he said: “The first thing that comes to mind is toy guns.”
The Lieutenant gave him a tight, humorless grin. “We had the same thing in mind and sent men over there to comb the shop. Black market things, you know, toys or the real article. But no luck. They haven’t made anything resembling a gun since the Dean Act was passed. That shop was clean.”
“You’ve got a tough job, Lieutenant.”
“I’m waiting on your prints, Sergeant.”
Tabbot thought that a fair hint. He went back to the outer room and found everyone gone but the silent plainclothesman. The detective sat down on the sofa behind the coffee table and watched him unpack the case. A tripod was set up about five feet from the door. The camera itself was a heavy, unwieldy instrument and was lifted onto the tripod with a certain amount of hard grunting and a muttered curse because of a nipped finger. When it was solidly battened to the tripod, Tabbot picked a film magazine out of the supply case and fixed it to the rear of the camera. A lens and the timing instrument was the last to be fitted into place. He looked to make sure the lens was clean.
Tabbot focused on the front door, and reached into a pocket for his slide rule. He checked the time now and then calculated backward to obtain four exposures at nine o’clock, nine-five, nine-ten, and nine-fifteen, which should pretty well bracket the arrival of the janitor and the toy shop employee. He cocked and tripped the timer, and then checked to make sure the nylon film was feeding properly after each exposure. The data for each exposure was jotted down in a notebook, making the later identification of the prints more certain.
The plainclothesman broke his stony silence. “I’ve never seen one of those things work before.”
Tabbot said easily: “I’m taking pictures from nine o’clock to nine-fifteen this morning; if I’m in luck I’ll catch the janitor opening the door. If I’m not in luck I’ll catch only a blurred movement—or nothing at all— and then I’ll have to go back and make an exposure for each minute after nine until I find him. A blurred image of the moving door will pinpoint him.”
“Good pictures?” He seemed skeptical.
“At nine o’clock? Yes. There was sufficient light coming in that window at nine and not too much time has elapsed. Satisfactory conditions. Things get sticky when I try for night exposures with no more than one or two lamps lit; that simply isn’t enough light. I wish everything would happen outdoors at noon on a bright day— and not more than a hour ago!”
The detective grunted and inspected the ticking camera. “I took some of your pictures into court once. Bank robbery case, last year. The pictures were bad and the judge threw them out and the case collapsed.”
“I remember them,” Tabbot told him. “And I apologize for the poor job. Those prints were made right at the time limit: fourteen hours, perhaps a little more. The camera and the film are almost useless beyond ten or twelve hours—that is simply too much elapsed time. I use the very best film available but it can’t find or make a decent image more than twelve hours in the past. Your bank prints were nothing more than grainy shadows; that’s all I can get from twelve to fourteen hours.”
“Nothing over fourteen hours?”
“Absolutely nothing. I’ve tried, but nothing.” The camera stopped ticking and shut itself off. Tabbot turned it on the tripod and aimed at the sofa. The detective jumped up.
The sergeant protested. “Don’t get up—you won’t be in the way. The lens won’t see you now.”
“I’ve got work to do,” the detective muttered. He flipped a dour farewell gesture at the Lieutenant and left the apartment, slamming the door behind him.
“He’s still sore about those bank pictures,” the officer said.
Tabbot nodded agreement and made a single adjustment on the timing mechanism. He tripped the shutter for one exposure and then grinned at the Lieutenant.
“I’ll send him a picture of myself, sitting there three minutes ago. Maybe that will cheer him up.”
“Or make him mad enough to fire you.”
The sergeant began another set of calculations on the slide rule and settled himself down to the routine coverage of the room from six to nine o’clock in the morning. He angled the heavy camera at the coffee table, the kitchen doorway, the overstuffed chair, the window behind the chair, a smaller chair and a bookcase in the room, the floor, a vase of artificial flowers resting on a tiny shelf above a radiator, a floor lamp, a ceiling light, and eventually worked around the room in a circle before coming back to the front door. Tabbot rechecked his calculations and then lavished a careful attention on the door and the space beside it where he had stood when he first entered.
The camera poked and pried and peered into the recent past, into the naked blonde’s last morning alive, recording on nylon film those images now three or four hours gone. During the circle coverage—between the bookcase and the vase of artificial flowers—a signal light indicated an empty film magazine, and the camera paused in its work until a new magazine was fixed in place. Tabbot made a small adjustment on the timer to compensate for lost time. He numbered the old and the new film magazines, and continued his detailed notes for each angle and series of exposures. The camera ignored the present and probed into the past.
The Lieutenant asked: “How much longer?”
“Another hour for the preliminaries; I can do the kitchen in another hour. And, say, two to three hours for the retakes after something is pinned down.”
“I’ve got work piling up.” The officer scratched the back of his neck and then bent down to peer into the lens. “I guess you can find me at the precinct house. Make extra copies of the key prints.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Lieutenant turned away from his inspection of the lens and gave the room a final, sweeping glance. He did not slam the door behind him as the detective had done.
The full routine of photographing went on.
Tabbot moved the camera backward into the kitchen doorway to gain a broader coverage of the outer room; he angled at the sofa, the overstuffed chair, and again the door. He wanted the vital few moments when the door was opened and the murderer stepped through it to fire the prohibited pistol. Changing to a wide-angle lens, he caught the entire room in a series of ten minute takes over a period of three hours. The scene was thoroughly documented.
He changed magazines to prepare for the kitchen.
A wild notion stopped his hand, stopped him in the act of swiveling the camera. He walked over to the heavy chair, walked around behind it, sidestepped the spilled blood, and found himself in direct line between door and window. Tabbot looked out of the window-imagining a gun at his back—and pivoted slowly to stare at the door: early sunlight coming in the window should have limned the man’s face. The camera placed here should photograph the assailant’s face and record the gun blast as well.
Tabbot hauled tripod and camera across the room and set up in position behind the chair, aiming at the door. The lens was changed again. Another calculation was made. If he was really lucky on this series the murderer would fire at the camera.
* * * *
Kitchen coverage was a near repetition of the first room. It required a little less time.
Tabbot photographed the table and two chairs, the dirty dishes, the toast crumbs, the tiny stove, the aged refrigerator, the tacked-on dish cupboards above the sink and drain board, the sink itself, a cramped water closet masquerading as a broom closet behind a narrow door, and the stained folding door of the shower stall. The stall had leaked.
He opened the refrigerator door and found a half bottle of red wine alongside the foodstuffs: two takes an hour apart. He peered into the cramped confines of the water closet: a few desultory exposures, and a hope that the blonde wasn’t sitting in there. The shower stall was lined with an artificial white tile now marred by rust stains below a leaky showerhead: two exposures by way of an experiment, because the stall also contained a miniature wash basin, a mirror, and a moisture-proof light fixture. He noted with an absent approval that the fixture lacked a receptacle for plugging in razors.
Tabbot changed to the wide-angle lens for the wrap-up. There was no window in the kitchen, and he made a mental note of the absence of an escape door—a sad violation of the fire laws.
That exhausted the preliminary takes.
Tabbot fished his I.D. card out of his pocket, gathered up the exposed film magazines and walked out of the apartment. There was no keeper blocking passage through the doorway, and he stared with surprise at the patrolman still lounging in the corridor.
The patrolman read his expression.
“It’s coming, Sergeant, it’s coming. By this time I guess that Lieutenant has chewed somebody out good, so you can bet it’s coming in a hurry.”
Tabbot put the I.D. card in his pocket.
The patrolman asked: “Was she shot up, like they said? Back to front, right out the belly?”
Tabbot nodded uneasily. “Back to front, but out through the rib cage—not the belly. Somebody used a very heavy gun on her. Do you want a print? You could paste it up in your locker.”
“Oh, hell no!” The man glanced down the corridor and came back to the sergeant. “I heard the coroner say it was a professional job; only the pro’s are crazy enough to tote guns anymore. The risk and everything.”
“I suppose so; I haven’t heard of an amateur carrying one for years. That mandatory jail sentence for possession scares the hell out of them.” Tabbot shifted the magazines to his other hand to keep them away from his bad knee going down the stairs.
The street was bright with sunlight—the kind of brilliant scene which Sergeant Tabbot wanted everything to happen in for better results. Given a bright sun he could reproduce images a little better than grainy shadows, right up to that fourteen-hour stopping point.
His truck was the only police vehicle parked at the curb.
Tabbot climbed into the back and closed the door behind him. He switched on the developing and drying machine in total darkness, and began feeding the film from the first magazine down into the tanks. When the tail of that film slipped out of the magazine and vanished, the leader of the second film was fed into the slot. The third followed when its time came. The sergeant sat down on a stool, waiting in the darkness until the developer and dryer had completed their cycles and delivered the nylon negatives into his hands. After a while he reached out to switch on the printer, and then did nothing more than sit and wait.
The woman’s exploded breast hung before his eyes; it was more vivid in the darkness of the truck than in bright daylight. This time his stomach failed to churn, and he supposed he was getting used to the memory. Or the sight-memory was safely in his past. A few of the coming prints could resurrect that nightmare image.
The coroner believed some hood had murdered the woman who made Christmas dolls—some professional thug who paid as little heed to the gun law as he did to a hundred and one other laws. Perhaps—and perhaps not. Discharged servicemen were still smuggling weapons into the country, when coming in from overseas posts; he’d heard of that happening often enough, and he’d seen a few of the foolhardy characters in jails. For some reason he didn’t understand, ex-Marines who’d served in China were the most flagrant offenders: they outnumbered smugglers from the other services three or four to one and the harsh penalties spelled out in the Dean Act didn’t deter them worth a damn. Congress in its wisdom had proclaimed that only peace officers, and military personnel on active duty, had the privilege of carrying firearms; all other weapons must under the law be surrendered and destroyed.
Tabbot didn’t own a gun; he had no use for one. That patrolman on the third floor carried a weapon, and the Lieutenant, and the plainclothesman—but he didn’t think the coroner would have one. Nor the basket men. The Dean Act made stiff prison sentences mandatory for possession among the citizenry, but the Marines kept on carrying them and now and then some civilian died under gunfire. Like the woman who made Christmas dolls.
A soft buzzer signaled the end of the developer’s job. Tabbot removed the three reels of nylon negative from the drying rack and fed them through the printer. The waiting time was appreciably shorter. Three long strips of printed pictures rolled out of the printer into his hands. Tabbot didn’t waste time cutting the prints into individual frames. Draping two of the strips over a shoulder, he carried the third to the door of the truck and flung it open. Bright sunlight made him squint, causing his eyes to water.
Aloud: “Oh, what the hell! What went wrong?”
The prints were dark, much darker than they had any right to be. He knew without rechecking the figures in his notebook that the exposures had been made after sunrise, but still the prints were dark. Tabbot stared up the front of the building, trying to pick out the proper window, then brought his puzzled gaze back to the strip prints. The bedroom-living room was dark.
Peering closer, squinting against the bright light of the sun: four timed exposures of the front door, with the dim figures of the janitor and another man standing open-mouth on the third exposure. Ten minutes after nine. The fifth frame: a bright clear picture of the plain-clothesman sitting on the sofa, talking up to Tabbot. The sixth frame and onward: dark images of the sofa opened out into a bed—coffee table missing—the kitchen doorway barely discernible, the overstuffed chair (and there was the coffee table beside it), the window— He stared with dismay at the window. The goddam drapes were drawn, shutting out the early light!
Tabbot hurriedly checked the second strip hanging on his shoulder: equally dark. The floor lamp and the ceiling light were both unlit. The drapes had been closed all night and the room was in cloudy darkness. He could just identify the radiator, the vase of flowers, the bookcase, the smaller chair, and numerous exposures of the closed door. The floor frames were nearly black. Now the camera changed position, moving to the kitchen doorway and shooting back into the bedroom with a wide-angle lens. Dark frustration.
The bed was folded away into an ordinary sofa, the coffee table had moved back to its rightful position, the remaining pieces of furniture were undisturbed, the drapes covered the only window, the lights were not lit. He squinted at the final frames and caught his breath. A figure—a dim and indistinct somebody of a figure-stood at the far corner of the coffee table looking at the closed door.
Tabbot grabbed up the third strip of prints.
Four frames gave him nothing but a closed door. The fifth frame exploded in a bright halo of flash: the gun was fired into the waiting lens.
Sergeant Tabbot jumped out of the truck, slammed shut the door behind him and climbed the stairs to the third floor. His bad knee begged for an easier pace. The young patrolman was gone from his post upstairs.
A keeper blocked the door to the apartment.
Tabbot approached it cautiously while he fished in his pockets for the I.D. card. At a distance of only two feet he detected the uneasy squirmings of pain in his groin; if he attempted to squeeze past the machine into the apartment the damned thing would do its utmost to tear his guts apart. The testicles were most vulnerable. A keeper always reminded him of a second generation fire hydrant—but if he was grilled at one of the precinct houses he would never be able to describe a second generation fire hydrant to anyone’s satisfaction. His interrogator would insist it was only a phallic symbol.
The keeper was fashioned of stainless steel and colorless plastic: it stood waist high with a slot and a glowing bullseye in its pointed head, and it generated a controlled fulguration emission—a high-frequency radiation capable of destroying animal tissue. The machines were remarkably useful for keeping prisoners in and inquisitive citizenry out.
Tabbot inserted his I.D. into the slot and waited for the glow to fade out of the bullseye.
A telephone rested on the floor at the far end of the sofa, half hidden behind a stack of dusty books: the woman had read Western novels. He dialed the precinct house and waited while an operator located the officer.
Impatiently: “Tabbot here. Who opened the drapes?”
“What the hell are you— What drapes?”
“The drapes covering the window, the only window in the room. Who opened them this morning? When?”
There was a speculative silence. “Sergeant, are those prints worthless?”
“Yes, sir—nearly so. I’ve got one beautiful shot of that detective sitting on the sofa after the drapes were opened.” He hesitated for a moment while he consulted the notebook. “The shot was fired at six forty-five this morning; the janitor opened the door at ten minutes after nine. And I really have a nice print of the plain-clothesman.”
“Is that all?’
“All that will help you. I have one dim and dirty print of a somebody looking at the door, but I can’t tell you if that somebody is man or woman, red or green.”
The Lieutenant said: “Oh, shit!”
“Yes, sir.”
“The coroner opened those drapes—he wanted more light to look at his corpse.”
Wistfully: “I wish he’d opened them last night before she was a corpse.”
“Are you sure they’re worthless?”
“Well, sir, if you took them into court and drew that same judge, he’d throw you out.”
“Damn it! What are you going to do now?”
“I’ll go back to six forty-five and work around that gunshot. I should be able to follow the somebody to the door at the same time—I suppose it was the woman going over to let the murderer in. But don’t get your hopes up, Lieutenant. This is a lost cause.”
Another silence, and then: “All right, do what you can. A hell of a note, Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir.” He rang off.
Tabbot hauled the bulky camera into position at one end of the coffee table and angled at the door; he thought the set-up would encompass the woman walking to the door, opening it, turning to walk away, and the assailant coming in. All in murky darkness. He fitted a fresh magazine to the camera, inspected the lens for non-existent dirt, and began the timing calculations. The camera began ticking off the exposures bracketing the point of gunfire.
Tabbot went over to the window to finish his inspection of the third strip of prints: the kitchen. The greater bulk of them were as dark as the bedroom.
The strip of prints suddenly brightened just after that point at which he’d changed to a wide-angle lens, just after he’d -begun the final wrap-up. A ceiling light had been turned on in the kitchen.
Tabbot stared at a naked woman seated at the table.
She held both hands folded over her stomach, as though pressing in a role of flesh. Behind her the narrow door of the water closet stood ajar. The table was bare. Tabbot frowned at the woman, at the pose, and then rummaged through his notes for the retroactive exposure time: five minutes past six. The woman who made Christmas dolls was sitting at a bare table at five minutes past six in the morning, looking off to her left, and holding her hands over her stomach. Tabbot wondered if she were hungry—wondered if she waited on some imaginary maid to prepare and serve breakfast. Eggs, coffee, dry toast.
He searched for a frame of the stove: There was a low gas flame beneath the coffee pot. No eggs frying. Well . . . they were probably three-minute eggs, and these frames had been exposed five or ten minutes apart.
He looked again at the woman and apologized for the poor joke: she would be dead in forty minutes.
The only other item of interest on the third strip was a thin ribbon of light under the shower curtain. Tabbot skipped backward along the strip seeking the two exposures angled into the shower stall, but found them dark and the stall empty. The wrong hour.
Behind him the camera shut itself off and called for attention.
Tabbot carried the instrument across the room to an advantageous position beside an arm of the chair and again angled toward the door. The timer was reset for a duplicate coverage of the scenes just completed, but he expected no more than a shadowy figure entering, firing, leaving—a murky figure in a darkened room. A new series was started with that one flash frame as the centerpiece.
His attention went back to the woman at the table. She sat with her hands clasped over her stomach, looking off to her left. Looking at what?
On impulse, Tabbot walked into the kitchen and sat down in her chair. Same position, same angle. Tabbot pressed his hands to his stomach and looked off to his left. Identical line of sight. He was looking at the shower stall.
One print had given him a ribbon of light under the stained curtain—no, stained folding door. The barrier had leaked water.
He said aloud: “Well, I’ll be damned!”
The printed strips were stretched across the table to free his hands and then he examined his notebook item by item. Each of the prints had peered into the past at five minutes after six in the morning. Someone took a shower while the woman sat by the table.
Back to the last few frames of the second strip taken from the second magazine: a figure—a dim and indistinct somebody of a figure—stood at the far corner of the coffee table looking at the closed door. Time: six-forty. Five minutes before the shot was fired.
Did the woman simply stand there and wait a full five minutes for a knock on the door? Or did she open it only a moment after the exposure was made, let the man in, argue with him, and die five minutes later behind the chair? Five minutes was time enough for an argument, a heated exchange, a threat, a shot.
Tabbot braced his hands on the table edge.
What happened to the man in the shower? Was he still there—soaking himself for forty minutes—while the woman was gunned down? Or had he come out, dried himself, gulped down breakfast and quit the apartment minutes before the assailant arrived?
Tabbot supplied answers: no, no, no, and maybe.
He jumped up from the chair so quickly it fell over. The telephone was behind the stack of Western novels.
The man answering his call may have been one of the wicker basket men.
“County morgue.”
“Sergeant Tabbot here, Photo Section. I’ve got preliminary prints on that woman in the apartment. She was seated at the breakfast table between six o’clock and six-fifteen. How does that square with the autopsy?”
The voice said cheerfully: “Right on the button, Sergeant. The toast was still there, know what I mean?”
Weakly: “I know what you mean. I’ll send over the prints.”
“Hey, wait—wait, there’s more. She was just a little bit pregnant. Two months, maybe.”
Tabbot swallowed. An unwanted image tried to form in his imagination: the autopsy table, a stroke or two of the blade, an inventory of the contents of the stomach— He thrust the image away and set down the telephone.
Aloud, in dismay: “I thought the man in the shower ate breakfast! But he didn’t—he didn’t.” The inoperative phone gave him no answer.
The camera stopped peering into the past
* * * *
Tabbot hauled the instrument into the kitchen and set up a new position behind the woman’s chair to take the table, stove, and shower stall. The angle would be right over her head. A series of exposures two minutes apart was programmed into the timer with the first frame calculated at six o’clock. The probe began. Tabbot reached around the camera and gathered up the printed strips from the table. The light was better at the window and he quit the kitchen for yet another inspection of the dismal preliminaries.
The front door, the janitor and a second man in the doorway, the bright beauty of a frame with the detective sitting on the sofa, the darkened frames of the sofa pulled out to make a bed— Tabbot paused and peered. Were there one or two figures sprawled in the bed? Next: the kitchen doorway, the overstuffed chair, the misplaced coffee table, the window with the closed drapes— All of that. On and on. Dark. But were there one or two people in the bed?
And now consider this frame: a dim and indistinct somebody looking at the closed door. Was that somebody actually walking to the door, caught in mid-stride? Was that somebody the man from the shower?
Tabbot dropped the strips and sprinted for the kitchen.
The camera hadn’t finished its programmed series but Tabbot yanked it from position and dragged it over the kitchen floor. The tripod left marks. The table was pushed aside. He stopped the timer and jerked aside the folding door to thrust the lens into the shower stall. Angle at the tiny wash basin and the mirror hanging above it; hope for sufficient reflected light from the white tiles. Strap on a fresh magazine. Work feverishly with the side rule. Check and check again the notes to be certain of times. Set the timer and start the camera. Stand back and wait.
The Lieutenant had been wrong.
The woman who made Christmas dolls did not walk to the door and admit a man at about six-forty in the morning; she didn’t go to the door at all. She died behind the chair, as she was walking toward the window to pull the drapes. Her assailant had stayed the night, had slept with her in the unfolded bed until sometime shortly before six o’clock. They got up and one of them used the toilet, one of them put away the bed. He stepped into the shower while she sat down at the table. In that interval she held her belly, and later had breakfast. An argument started—or perhaps was carried over from the night before—and when the man emerged into a now darkened kitchen he dressed and made to leave without eating.
The argument continued into the living room; the woman went to the window to admit the morning sun while the professional gunman hesitated between the coffee table and the door. He half turned, fired, and made his escape.
“There’s a little hole in the spine...“
Tabbot thought the Lieutenant was very wrong. In less than an hour he would have the prints to prove him wrong.
To save a few minutes’ time he carried the exposed magazine down to the truck and fed the film into the developing tank. It was a nuisance to bother with the keeper each time he went in and out, and he violated regulations by leaving it inert. A police cruiser went by as he climbed down from the truck but he got nothing more than a vacant nod from the man riding alongside the driver. Tabbot’s knee began to hurt as he climbed the steps to the third floor for what seemed the hundredth time that day.
The camera had completed the scene and stopped.
Tabbot made ready to leave.
He carried his equipment outside into the corridor and shot three exposures of the apartment door. The process of packing everything back into the bulky case took longer than the unpacking. The tripod stubbornly refused to telescope properly and fit into the case. And the citizens’ privacy law stubbornly refused to let him shoot the corridor: no crime there.
A final look at the unoccupied apartment: he could see through into the kitchen and his imagination could see the woman seated at the table, holding her stomach. When he craned his neck to peer around the door he could see the window limned in bright sunshine. Tabbot decided to leave the drapes open. If someone else were killed here today or tomorrow he wanted the drapes open.
He closed the apartment door and thrust his I.D. card into the keeper’s slot to activate it. There was no rewarding stir of machinery, no theatrical buzzing of high-frequency pulsing but his guts began growling when the red bullseye glowed. He went down the stairs carefully because his knee warned against a fast pace. The camera case banged his other leg.
Tabbot removed the reel of film from the developing tanks and started it through the printer. The second magazine was fed into the developer. He closed the back door of the truck, went around to the driver’s door and fished for the ignition key in his trouser pocket. It wasn’t there. He’d left the key hanging in the ignition, another violation of the law. Tabbot got up in the cab and started the motor, briefly thankful the men in the police cruiser hadn’t spotted the key—they would have given him a citation and counted him as guilty as any other citizen.
The lab truck moved out into traffic.
The printing of the two reels of nylon film was completed in the parking lot alongside the precinct house. He parked in a visitor’s slot. Not knowing who might be watching from a window, Tabbot removed the key from the ignition and pocketed it before going around to the back to finish the morning’s work.
The strip results from the first magazine were professionally insulting: dark and dismal prints he didn’t really want to show anyone. There were two fine frames of gun flash, and two others of the dim and indistinct somebody making for the door. About the only satisfaction Tabbot could find in these last two was the dark coloring: a man dressed in dark clothing, moving through a darkened room. The naked woman would have been revealed as a pale whitish figure.
Tabbot scanned the prints on the second strip with a keen and professional eye. The white tile lining the shower stall had reflected light in a most satisfying manner: he thought it one of the best jobs of backlighting he’d ever photographed. He watched the woman’s overnight visitor shower, shave, brush his teeth and comb his hair. At one point—perhaps in the middle of that heated argument—he had nicked himself on the neck just above his Adam’s apple. It had done nothing to improve the fellow’s mood.
One exposure made outside the apartment door—the very last frame—was both rewarding and disappointing: the indistinct somebody was shown leaving the scene but he was bent over, head down, looking at his own feet. Tabbot supposed the man was too shy to be photographed coming out of a woman’s room. He would be indignant when he learned that a camera had watched him in the little mirror above the wash basin. Indignant, and rather furious at this newest invasion of privacy.
Tabbot carried the prints into the precinct house. Another sergeant was on duty behind the desk, a man who recognized him by his uniform if not by face or name.
“Who do you want?”
Tabbot said: “The Lieutenant. What’s-his-name?”
The desk man jerked a thumb behind him. “In the squad room.”
Tabbot walked around the desk and found his way to the squad room at the end of the building. It was a large room with desks, and four or five men working or loafing behind the desks. Most of them seemed to be loafing. All of them looked up at the photographer.
“Over here, Sergeant. Did you finish the job?”
“Yes, sir.”
Tabbot turned and made his way to the Lieutenant’s desk. He spread out the first strip of dark prints.
“Well, you don’t seem too happy about it.”
“No, sir.”
The second strip was placed beside the first.
“They’re all dark except those down at the bottom. It was brighter in the shower stall. That’s you in the shower, Lieutenant. The backlighting gave me the only decent prints in the lot.”