“Thanks,” Buckman said. He had smoked up his own week’s ration.
“I want to discuss one matter with you,” Herb said. “I wish it could wait but it can’t.”
“Not even until we get to the office?”
Herb said, “There may be other policy-level personnel there when we get back. Or just plain other people—my staff, for instance.”
“Nothing I have to say is—”
“Listen,” Herb said. “About Alys. About your marriage to her. Your sister.”
“My incest,” Buckman said harshly.
“Some of the marshals may know about it. Alys told too many people. You know how she was about it.”
“Proud of it,” Buckman said, lighting a cigarette with difficulty. He still could not get over the fact that he had found himself crying. I really must have loved her, he said to himself. And all I seemed to feel was fear and dislike. And the sexual drive. How many times, he thought, we discussed it before we did it. All the years. “I never told anybody but you,” he said to Herb.
“But Alys.”
“Okay. Well, then possibly some of the marshals know, and if he cares, the Director.”
“The marshals who are opposed to you,” Herb said, “and who know about the”—he hesitated—“the incest—will say that she committed suicide. Out of shame. You can expect that. And they will leak it to the media.”
“You think so?” Buckman said. Yes, he thought, it would make quite a story. Police general’s marriage to his sister, blessed with a secret child hidden away in Florida. The general and his sister posing as husband and wife in Florida, while they’re with the boy. And the boy: product of what must be a deranged genetic heritage.
“What I want you to see,” Herb said, “and I’m afraid you’re going to have to take a look at it now, which isn’t an ideal time with Alys just recently dead and—”
“It’s our coroner,” Buckman said. “We own him, there at the academy.” He did not understand what Herb was getting at. “He’ll say it was an overdose of a semitoxic drug, as he already told us.”
“But taken deliberately,” Herb said. “A suicidal dose.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Herb said, “Compel him—order him—to find an inquest verdict of murder.”
He saw, then. Later, when he had overcome some of his grief, he would have thought of it himself. But Herb Maime was right: it had to be faced now. Even before they got back to the academy building and their staffs.
“So we can say,” Herb said, “that—”
“That elements within the police hierarchy hostile to my campus and labor-camp policies took revenge by murdering my sister,” Buckman said tightly. It froze his blood to find himself thinking of such matters already. But—“Something like that,” Herb said. “No one named specifically. No marshals, I mean. Just suggest that they hired someone to do it. Or ordered some junior officer eager to rise in the ranks to do it. Don’t you agree I’m right? And we must act rapidly; it’s got to be declared immediately. As soon as we get back to the academy you should send a memo to all the marshals and the Director, stating that.”
I must turn a terrible personal tragedy into an advantage, Buckman realized. Capitalize on the accidental death of my own sister. If it was accidental.
“Maybe it’s true,” he said. Possibly Marshal Holbein, for example, who hated him enormously, had arranged it.
“No,” Herb said. “It’s not true. But start an inquiry. And you must find someone to pin it on; there must be a trial.”
“Yes,” he agreed dully. With all the trimmings. Ending in an execution, with many dark hints in media releases that “higher authorities” were involved, but who, because of their positions, could not be touched. And the Director, hopefully, would officially express his sympathy concerning the tragedy, and his hope that the guilty party would be found and punished.
“I’m sorry that I have to bring this up so soon,” Herb said. “But they got you down from marshal to general; if the incest story is publicly believed they might be able to force you to retire. Of course, even if we take the initiative, they may air the incest story. Let’s hope you’re reasonably well covered.”
“I did everything possible,” Buckman said.
“Whom should we pin it on?” Herb asked.
“Marshal Holbein and Marshal Ackers.” His hatred for them was as great as theirs for him: they had, five years ago, slaughtered over ten thousand students at the Stanford Campus, a final bloody—and needless—atrocity of that atrocity of atrocities, the Second Civil War.
Herb said, “I don’t mean who planned it. That’s obvious; as you say, Holbein and Ackers and the others. I mean who actually injected her with the drug.”
“The small fry,” Buckman said. “Some political prisoner in one of the forced-labor camps.” It didn’t really matter. Any one of a million camp inmates, or any student from a dying kibbutz, would do.
“I would say pin it on somebody higher up,” Herb said.
“Why?” Buckman did not follow his thinking. “It’s always done that way; the apparatus always picks an unknown, unimportant—”
“Make it one of her friends. Somebody who could have been her equal. In fact, make it somebody well known. In fact, make it somebody in the acting field here in this area; she was a celebrity-fucker.”
“Why somebody important?”
“To tie Holbein and Ackers in with those gunjy, degenerate phone-orgy bastards she hung out with.” Herb sounded genuinely angry, now; Buckman, startled, glanced at him. “The ones who really killed her. Her cult friends. Pick someone as high as you can. And then you’ll really have something to pin on the marshals. Think of the scandal that’ll make. Holbein part of the phone grid.”
Buckman put out his cigarette and lit another. Meanwhile thinking. What I have to do, he realized, is out-scandal them. My story has to be more lurid than theirs.
It would take some story.
25
In his suite of offices at the Los Angeles Police Academy building, Felix Buckman sorted among the memos, letters, and documents on his desk, mechanically selecting the ones that needed Herb Maime’s attention and discarding those that could wait. He worked rapidly, with no real interest. As he inspected the various papers, Herb, in his own office, began typing out the first informal statement which Buckman would make public concerning the death of his sister.
Both men finished after a brief interval and met in Buckman’s main office, where he kept his crucial activities. At his oversize oak desk.
Seated behind the desk he read over Herb’s first draft. “Do we have to do this?” he said, when he had finished reading it.
“Yes,” Herb said. “If you weren’t so dazed by grief you’d be the first to recognize it. Your being able to see matters of this sort clearly has kept you at policy level; if you hadn’t had that faculty they’d have reduced you to training-school major five years ago.”
“Then release it,” Buckman said. “Wait.” He motioned for Herb to come back. “You quote the coroner. Won’t the media know that the coroner’s investigation couldn’t be completed this soon?”
“I’m backdating the time of death. I’m stipulating that it took place yesterday. For that reason.”
“Is that necessary?”
Herb said simply, “Our statement has to come first. Before theirs. And they won’t wait for the coroner’s inquest to be completed.”
“All right,” Buckman said. “Release it.”
Peggy Beason entered his office, carrying several classified police memoranda and a yellow file. “Mr. Buckman,” she said, “at a time like this I don’t want to bother you, but these—”
“I’ll look at them,” Buckman said. But that’s all, he said to himself. Then I’m going home.
Peggy said, “I knew you were looking for this particular file. So was Inspector McNulty. It just arrived, about ten minutes ago, from Data Central.” She placed the file before him on the blotter of his desk. “The Jason Taverner file.”