MEMP’IS

BOOK THREE – “HEARTBREAK HOTEL”

(Incident Report... draft... of Sergeant Chester Aspid regarding events that commenced Thursday, January 4, 2035 - moments past midnight)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN – “STOP, LOOK and LISTEN”

Norlin, he stays behind... the way I read off his second IR that night, doin' more kebbin' overtime... oozing up to Demmy. And Eric Ice taggin' along, probably waiting for the moment that Coroner's back is turned, so's he can slice somethin' off somebody... or something... dead. All the kebbin' Frenchy native sorts like to put on how they're bigass giglio scientists who took courses at Man Ray, been to Magnolia College an' the Playhouse School; better than us refugees, so of course he's gonna throw on the whole five-dollar, fifty-franc show. Leads Norlin by the nose, practically, to the first microscope to show him this gunk on the slide.

"These skin samples came off our mysterious burglar," said the Coroner.

"Nothing mysterious the way I hear it. Igor Topple was LC incarnate... a genuine, old hardcore needle freak... swipe the gold teeth off a corpse to feed his monkey, then steal more gold teeth outta the monkey for brandy, cigars and ten minutes of love from a no-good donna." Norlin left the parts about the smell outta his IR... I would've, too... but he was just about on target regarding Igs. There's some, in Patrols, call 'em frequent flyers, I call 'em fex! Everythin' slidin' into fex...

"Then this is not... was not," Demmy corrects himself, "...Igor Topple. I presume you boys graduated from or, at least, attended middle school and saw pictures of human cells in a textbook..."

"Well sure, I..." Eric says.

"Look at these!" And Norlin bends an eye to the microscope...

"There are variations among human skin cells, nerve cells, organ cells, but all have one thing in common... sphericity," the Coroner explained. "They are round or, at the least, elliptical. These are rectangular, perfect artificial re-planed lines... as if stamped, identically, from a mold that turns out miniatures of some of Dane Varrick's hideous pre-fab boxes. I have performed experiments, unpleasant experiments; they're a silicon-calcium compound, not carbon. A sort of ceramics, cunningly fashioned in the image of a man, and animated... a veritable Incunabula of unlife. Now rotate the lenses of this microscope... so!... this is carnival glass, highly illegal by the way, I had to have it imported from Amsterdam, well, smuggled... to tell the truth..." and, as Norlin told me later but, of course, left out of the IR, Demmy bared the longest, sharpest, yellow fangs ever seen outside of those within certain cages at the zoological gardens of the Jatesaneum. "We Coroners of the world have our brotherhood, and our techniques. Now... do you see that hooked, hairy stuff between the individual cells?

"Like prick hairs..." Norlin squinted.

"That stuff. It's what Henry Hat, that strange fellow from the Solar Commission, calls Protein X... when alive, it vipe-er-rates. On this slide is an infused culture; Mr. Hat provided it to me from, he says, that robbery at the Third Fifth Bank. Perp spat on the floor and someone thought to save that spit in agar until the detectives needed it. Do you understand the implications?"

"That somebody was a collector?" Ice ventures.

"That the New Criminal who has been fashioning these monstrosities of science," the Corporal disagrees, "is a sort of genius, albeit a warped genius..."

"At the very least. And, much more, I fear," suggested the Coroner, "much, much more! If the New Criminal, no less than the artist-of-the-future, distills his genius from the universal downwards to the individual, such regression must continue to condense, ultimately, towards one, central point. We're seeing a new lining sewn into Old Chaos and, I suspect, our foe has a specific, if yet-incomprehensible objective, and a calendar of action, Norlin - and all of these wicked auspices are bouncing downhill... like a snowy boulder, towards the orphanage... inexorably pointed towards Jatesday!"

Demmy has a hand-operated dimmer that he aims at the morgue lights, kills them, and gray, ghastly smoke arises from the corpses on their slabs and gurneys... hardly any from Heenes and the miscellaneous, more from the clones, billowing fumes from the two scarab-mottled others.

"The glow of genius!" he marvels.

The Coroner turns the lights up, again, and Norlin has an inspiration - another one of them, conveniently left out of the IR... this I pry out of him later, after the fex has hit the fan...

"Did you save the clothes of the victims?"

"Their clothes?" Demmy scoffed. Of course... we save everything. Over there!"

He points to a pile of boxes with markings like Mazzola 4, Mazzola 7, Unidentified 52, Heenes, Topple. Prying the latter out from the middle of the stack, Norlin opens it and, in the pocket of a pair of plain brown trousers, finds the bloody, crusty panties used as bait to trap the unlucky burglar and his killer. He checks to see that Eric's otherwise occupied, lingering around what's on the slabs, then shakes these at the Coroner.

"Clem's gonna want these back if Topple ain't human and his case against Pearson gets compromised."

"He ain't... and it is! Take 'em. Give my regards to ol' One-Eye," Desmoulines waves as Norlin hauls ass out. Like we say on the street, NHI... "No hebes involved!"... only, this time, Norlin means it literal.

Norlin, by the way, tells me he has another destiny in mind for the kingsblood panties - a peace offering to Eric or, more likely, something to bargain against a future service rendered. He stuffs them in the pocket of that old jacket, but forgets about them and, then, Philip Said turns everything upside down. Me... I go back to my desk in the detectives' pen and there's a kebbin' gift waitin': this little postcard painting from Henry Hat and a suggestion... check out the records of Mazzolo's cloning. I see where that might make sense, and Clem does, also, so I'm off to the Courts of Flux, bringing Eric to get such various warrants as might shake something loose off of the Count's family tree. Norlin, the poor keb!... he's barely into the door of C-Squad when the autocom buzzes, it's this Peg Reilly, one of C-Squad's frequent flyers (as Homer Sack makes clear to me, just before his kebbed-up farewell party).

"As I was saying last summer, Corporal," Peg cackles for all of kebbin' C-Squad to hear, "this man in back of the building on Eleventh who stood in his window and exposed himself to me resembled a man Victor Iowa pushed into a hydro one day, with glasses on. He had brown eyes, I believe, a wig and a false beard, but I remember the face... the face was a-feminite. Very brown eyes, thin and jumpy, very much like a fellow that drinks too much coffee, but that one has weak blue eyes and this one had strong brown eyes. Victor almost pushed a guy into a car on his head one day I eyed, as it was the same type of a-feminite face and the things he did were preverted and between wife's various a-feminite boys used to show up down in his lozenge and, of course, the drugs... and dogs, always the dogs... "

"This is most important," Norlin shines her on, "are you going to put it in writing?" It's a fex of job, so I'm glad I don't have to do it and... traitor as he is... Norlin does it by the book. They had this one other guy in there, before, and there was no end of Compliance Doctrine fex - lots of it still churning in the Courts of Flux and Flow. Hateful, hateful fex...

"We are now on the third Mrs. Iowa," Reilly rambles on. If there ever was a Mister Reilly, he's probably dead, and glad of it. "Victor picks a masculine type of woman, but they are always of higher intelligence than he is, this is his third once since 2030. The other one disappeared in '32, when Miss Hanzik's puppy had howled in the middle of the night."

"I'll want to read all about it in your report," Homes remembers Norlin reiteratin'.

"I was only in court because the Perrys had a case... they had complained I said they were drug pushers. They're not pushers, they are drug distributors, and they operate in a multimillion dollar drug ring that for years had been police and court-protected, all the way back to the k'ball and before, in Memphis, so I hear. Now there are dogs, and there is coffee and, Triple-J knows, what else under the sun..."

"I'll be waiting," Norlin promises.

"It will be on your com tomorrow morning," Peg promises back. And, of course, into Drawer 21 by noon.

"Good girl!" Norlin signs off. When he's rid of her, at last, Percy Said's holding - a few more seconds and things would've turned out much different. Oh - musta forgot to mention that C-Squad’s onliest prisoner Frank Desperate's gone, now, save for some crud on the floor and dangling shreds of duct tape on the fridge... nobody's clear on who sprung him, why, or how (there's dooks from the Law Firm who are always comin' and goin' downstairs, lookin' for criminals to coddle)... Norlin has left the speaker on, by which Homer Sack is accorded the privilege of this advance information.

"Norlin? This is Percy Said. I have charged tomorrow's paper... I mean, today's Jatesville Journal with the box of tomorrow's news..."

"Well, that's very interesting," the Corporal allows.

"It sounds like the speakercom's on. Is that imbecile near, the one who keeps interrupting to ask about sports and the FexMarket?"

"Eric? He's out, sorry..." Norlin says, of course not sorry at all.

"Then I have news for you, important news. The murders at the Tulane Hotel, which I reported to you yesterday and which have obviously come to pass? They've been solved."

Philip Said pauses for effect, theatrical little creep. Nice that he'd get his, and soon! "Go on..." Norlin finally sighs.

"The murderer will be - is - the Comte Mazzolo... I don't understand, myself, how he can be a killer and victim, but he's under arrest, as of tomorrow morning, and has confessed... oh, this explains it..."

"Explains what? How?"

"The culprit was not Mazzolo, Mazzolo's dead. You were right. Fake news, the Journal was spreading, with intent not to provoke the public into panic…"

"We know that."

Norlin's informant deflates - kebbin' prima donna! "Oh. Well, have you figured out how the killer could have dispatched eight creatures with an 8-shot Heston, if he'd had to shoot one of the victims twice?"

"Because two of the eight were human beings, five were clones and one was... well, he was something else. Does your Journal answer that question," Norlin loses patience. Way I see it, he had everything ridin' on Said. Job, future, reputation... what remained of it. Dook fails to come through and Norlin might be down in C-Squad forever.

"Uh, no..." says the rat, "...in fact, the Jatesland Coroner's quoted to that very effect, in the same, very words... something else. There is, in fact, insinuation that matters at the Trouble Factory are being covered up, and that scapegoats are being nurtured for the public."

"About the murderer..." Norlin jerks him back to reality...

"A clone, of course, one of Mazzolo's disgruntled medicals. The usual allegations of cruelty, the reality of jealousy and, of course, the apprehension that spare-partners have to feel, really no business of the law. He, curiously, blames a 'spectre' for inducing him to act. It's rather like the problems with my paper; a ghost appearing before the crime, which would make him a premature ghost, I suppose, a ghost before its time, if alive-dead clones can have ghosts. The dead man... clone... other... anyway, he was tempted by this being, tempted with visions of wealth and autonomy. He could take Mazzolo's place and nobody would be wiser... this creature even volunteered to give up his life, such as it was, or face a forever prison term in the furtherance of a higher cause which you may find your ordinary clone incapable of understanding..."

"I should think the prospect of avoiding vivisection to prolong the life of some old, piss-collecting Euroyal sufficient motivation. But this interests me... go on!"

And the particulars of the murders unfolded, as if plucked from the killer's mind the way I used to take pink bubblegum or Silly Putty... kebbin' Silly Putty! all kids had it... an' lift faces off a comic book or one of them old-fashioned newspapers, on paper, you know? Bend it and twist it ‘round like the k’ball winds did to people after they hit three hundred miles per. I guess that the box of out-of-time headlines on that Journal was somewhat larger than usual, because there were a lot of details, which more or less jived with facts as that we would find out, later. Too bad that there wasn't nothin' about Percy Said himself in that box, might've hepped him to the fact that doin' your civic duty don't always pay off like you'd think.

The killer clone had been approached by this spectre at this cafe, the Wide Angel; the spectre having aged himself, somehow, some way that Philip Said was accidentally-on-purpose vague about...

"Making a liar of the manager, whom we questioned..." Norlin had mentioned.

"He is brazen, no? Told the police and Journal that the spectre was Mazzola himself... aged somehow, or perhaps disguised in the interests of facilitating a fexual transaction..." and neither the Corporal, nor Homer Sack could tell me with a straight face whether they thought their rat was tellin' the truth, or just vampin'... making things up as he went along. "It's improper for men and clones to meet in public,” the murderer said, “but the rich are different from ourselves..."

I'd heard that before, so had Norlin. "How true!" he said and, after awhile, Philip Said went on.

"The killer clone... Clone Six, he's been identified… accompanied the Comte and six other of his brothers to the Tulane, did away with his victims most efficiently. The interesting thing's that he did this despite it being a known characteristic of most clones that they lack initiative and would scarcely have put up resistance... and, now, the Journal's tale takes an unconventional turn..."

"I 'm still listening..." Norlin had said.

"When the gunsmoke cleared and Heenes and the seven Mazzolo bodies... killed by eight shots from the Heston..." Philip Said pointed out, "lay on the floor of the locked Phylactery Room, the spectre I have made mention of simply manifested... as if from smoke, through a keyhole... and, as arranged, simply lay down and expired of his own natural, or unnatural causes. Many clones, of course, have been fabricated to do just this... die on cue, so they'll be ready, right away, if the host should require an emergency transplant. Clone Six pretended to do the same, and the Tulane staff, drawn by the shots, entered the room and, just as promptly, became convulsed in their varying states of panic and nausea without counting nine presumed corpses on the rug. Their attention failed. Clone Six arose amidst chaos, buttoned his coat over a shirt daubed with blood to fool the witnesses, and walked out of the room. He returned to the Comte's villa, where he was interviewed by the police... described in an uncomplimentary fashion, I fear... and immediately began attempting to raise funds for his getaway by selling Mazzola's assets short."

"That is sufficient," Norlin had determined, "...pardon me, but I must report this to my superiors at once..."

"I am satisfied," Philip Said replied, "proud to have been of service."

Norlin disconnected the autocom and immediately called Captain Modesty, reaching his secretary, Agnes.

"Agnes, I've heard from my informant again... that one as sees tomorrow's news today?" he'd explained. "Yes, that one. Listen... the killer's Count Mazzolo, rather, a clone of his. Clone Six, if it matters... he'll be masquerading as his employer, but the real Mazzolo's lying dead, rotting away in our morgue. I'll have a full report up shortly, but someone ought to get out at once and collar that doop. He's raising cash for a getaway..."

"Oh my... I'll tell the Captain at once."

So Agnes tells Modesty, the Captain calls Clem, Clem hauls me and a couple of Junior Detectives up to Northwest Twelfth and we pinch Clone Six literally packing his bags... even the shirt he'd worn to the Tulane, with fake bloodstains. Clones are thrifty, might say. Sang like the King in Vegas on the sole condition we book him under the name of Mazzolo, and why not... any other way confuses the citizens, and a dead man's reputation don't amount to a pile of fex next to smooth n' easy prosecutions in the Courts of Flow. Captain Modesty's impressed... so impressed that he immediately starts hatchin' plans to stake out that tenement on Southwest Ninth where Norlin's informant hangs, bust that paperboy in the act, crack him open like you used to crack open real chickens’ eggs before they made 'em illegal. Speakin' of which, instead of his being grateful at the recognition of his contribution, Norlin goes all red-faced in the Captain's office... this, of course, gettin' back to me, through channels...

"Sir, this informant's like the goose with golden eggs," our own Czar of Crazy Squad appealed, "and that newsboy's the one which brings 'em round, faithfully, every morning..."

"Not to countenance an unhealthy, fatty diet or the abuse of poultry, but... Norlin..." the Captain had answered him, "I want that goose cooked. I've had a revelation of centrality and pre-emption, thanks to you and Henry Hat. In fact, I so want that goose cooked, I'm going to put you in charge of the operation."

Well, I guess that was how the real trouble started, cause Norlin... well, I had no personal beef with the zook, but he wasn't in the right frame of mind to command such a complicated operation as a consequence of his ex-wife... way I heard it, Reason had this date with some artist sort, and, when her babysitter cancelled, she calls Norlin in to look after their kid the very night before he's supposed to command this operation and things go all to hell. This on top of him sort-of being right... not that I question the Captain's judgement, but the thing with informants is that they're a lot like C-Squad, mushrooms. You keep 'em in a cellar, feed 'em a little water and a lot of fex, cut off their bloom in the dark of night and they grow back. Can't help it - don't know any other way.

It's culture as causes this - our culture of complacency. After the k'ball, while Triple-J was still among us mortals, culture was made useful; what was not useful... well, it just became against the law. Since his ascension, however, we've seen a loosening of morals... a re-loosening, as it might be called... you got your fex on the Hamorite Strip and dissonant fashions at the Qual-Mart, you got "funny papers" back in the kebbin' Journal an' Paul Parchette. Drive a good cop to drink, if it weren't still against the law. Others get cynical, serve time or start doin' fex outside the lines of what Compliance says can and can't be done. Then you got the hardcore Jatesists who really believe that advanced beings, and a few hebes as proved worth the trouble... Triple-J, of course, Jesus, Mohammed, Henry Ford and George Washington, maybe... are livin' it up up there on top o’the sun, waitin' for the rest of us to join them. Could be. I could cash my pension in, head up to the sun via Tupelo like Homer Sack intends to do. But, on the other hand, there's Mex-America, hot enough for arthritis. Not hot as the sun, but a guy wit' a condition, old an' tired; he might be allowed a shot of tequila now and again, maybe an aspirin to take the edge off.

What happened to Norlin an' the Veronica... well, that wasn't right. I got sent up there. I was one of those as had to sweep up the mess...

I ain't saying one thing or the other. Just an old cop, talkin' to himself, ramblin' if you will. Triple-J said that the New Man he would bring into bein' would represent truth that ain't corrupted by the physical or linear. Maybe those Mohammedans as run most of EastAmerica now are right to prohibit any representative expression other than geometry... or carpets... beauty might have to be abrogated before it entangles, through emotion. Maybe there's no hope left in the struggle of the One against the New World... maybe there ain't even no place left for this old cop in this New World, but I still put one foot in front of the other, every morning, and, if the streets of Jatesland I still walk curve 'round and, eventually, double back on top of themselves... well... that's like the rent you pay or stationmaster's portion. In time, or bloody plastic, Graceland awaits us all. God only sniffin’ posies - lagging behind the culture's raw, voracious design.

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