“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I, but I propose to.” I tried to signal a waitress, but it was like trying to flag down a helicopter from inside a foxhole. “I’ll find out who killed Stanhunt, and why. If you’re guilty, I suggest you take your money back and spend it on drugs or women, real fast, because I’m in no position to cover for you.”
“I’m not guilty.”
I dropped the newspaper on the table, but the effect was lost in the darkness. “What’ve they got on you?” I asked.
There was a pause. I looked into Angwine’s face, but I couldn’t read anything. “I threatened him,” he said finally. “They’ve got a letter I wrote. But they’re misinterpreting—”
“Morgenlander said it was blackmail. Did you have something on Stanhunt?”
“It was more personal than that. My sister worked for him, and it was ruining her life. I let him know how I felt about it.”
“Tell me more.”
“She’s raising a child for him, a babyhead. It’s a little monster—”
“All babyheads are monsters,” I said, and then I made a guess and knew I was right. “Is your sister named Pansy Greenleaf?”
I’d gotten Angwine’s attention, and maybe a little more of his respect. He leaned forward so his features were in the light. “That’s right,” he said. “You must have spoken with her already.”
“No, but I should have, and I will tomorrow if I can. Go on with your story.”
He slipped back into the shadows. “I’m less sure than I was at first,” he said. “I think he got my sister pregnant and he’s paying her to keep it quiet.”
“From the look of that house, it’s a pretty nice deal for her,” I said.
“You don’t understand. Before I left for L.A. my sister had some kind of life of her own. Now she’s—cowering. She’s afraid to tell me what’s the matter. Stanhunt was treating her like some kind of puppet.”
“So you wanted to cut the strings,” I suggested, “or collect some money not to.”
“Go on insulting me, Metcalf. Thanks a million.”
“You’re welcome a thousand. Come on, Angwine. Your story doesn’t look clean, even in the dim light of what little I’ve learned.” Sometimes my source of metaphors is remarkably close at hand. “Morgenlander’s got you pegged as a blackmailer, and Dr. Testafer showed the inquisitors your name in the appointment book, more than once. You and Stanhunt went for more than a stroll around the block together:”
He folded his hands across the table like a schoolboy. “I went to visit him about what I said, originally. I got pretty worked up, called him names, trying to get a reaction.” His hands twitched in a way that told me the recollection wasn’t fiction. “But he didn’t defend himself. He was obviously hiding something, and he practically forced the money on me.”
“Okay, slow down. So the two of you worked out some kind of compromise—you traded off your anger for cash in hand.”
“He tried to scare me—he said I was in ‘deeper water’ than I knew, and he asked me to go away. He could see that I was down and out, so he offered me money, which I took. It obviously didn’t mean anything to him, but it made a big difference to me.”
“He made you part of the family. One of the puppets.”
“Go to hell.”
I smiled. “Where’d you come from, Angwine? Where did you study up on how to play the fall guy? You’re the punch line to everybody’s worst jokes.”
Questions are rude, and this was a question embedded in a morass of insults. I was surprised when he picked the question out and answered it straight, but I guess he was a desperate man.
“I came up here from L.A.,” he said soberly. “I spent six years in the Army, trying to work out a degree in military sociology, but I kept getting bounced by the military inquisitors. They were getting their toilets cleaned cheap, was how I started to see it. So I got out, with a bit of karma and a bit less cash. That’s when I came up here to see my sister.”
“Where are you staying?”
“I was with a friend in Palo Alto at first, then with my sister for a few nights, before Celeste Stanhunt moved in. Now, nowhere.” He opened his hand as if to demonstrate. “Morgenlander made it clear I wasn’t to go anywhere near the house on Cranberry Street. I’ve spent a couple of nights at the Y, but they’ve got a minimum karma requirement I can’t pass anymore.”
I was warming up to him, but that was just the generic effect someone more pathetic than I am has on me. I was as predictable—and sloppy—as Pavlov’s drooling mutts.
A waitress finally looked at her map somewhere and figured out we were on it. She bent low over the table and asked if we wanted anything. I ordered a shot of tequila and told her to bring a mirror to the table. Angwine just shook his head in the darkness, and the waitress went away.
I had a realization. “You’re paying me with Stanhunt’s money, aren’t you?”
He thought about it for a while, but decided on the truth. “Yeah. I suppose you’re going to give it back and tell me to forget it again.”
“No,” I said. “I just think it’s funny. We’ve both been sucking at the same nipple, only now it’s dry.” I patted my pocket. “This the last?”
“Just about.”
The waitress came back. She set down my drink, a small beveled pocket mirror, and a plastic snorting straw imprinted with the Vistamont logo and phone number. I paid her with a twenty, and while my wallet was out I unfolded a foil packet of my blend and laid it on the table. Halfway through chopping it up with my pocketknife, I looked up to see Angwine watching me intently.
“You don’t snort, do you?”
“No.”
“The military?”
“No. I just never did.”
I experienced another twinge of pity for the guy, but it was tempered with scorn. “You make a pretty humorous blackmailer, Angwine. Stanhunt was a Forgettol user, in a pretty big way. For you to go in there and threaten him without knowing what he knew or didn’t know at the time—that’s awfully stupid. The version you were talking to might not have even remembered who your sister was.”
I bent over and sniffed through the plastic tube, then leaned back and let the excess drain down the back of my throat. When I’d had enough, I wiped the mirror on my sleeve and pocketed the complimentary straw. Angwine must have spent the entire time working out a speech in his head, because when it came out, it sounded rehearsed.
“It’s just a sophisticated version of good cop/bad cop,” he said.
“What?”
“You’re not really working for me at all. You’re just a shill for the inquisitors. You keep tabs on me and ask me questions. You play on my fears of them, but there’s no real difference.” He snickered. “It’s just a game. They take my karma and you take my money and then the game is over. You like to act disenchanted and cynical, like you’re something more than a cog in the machine, but it’s just a pose.” There was a hysterical rise in his voice, the sound of a man convincing himself. “You live and work under their protective wing, or else they’d cut you off.”
“You’ve got it wrong, Angwine. It’s more complicated than that.”
“Sure it is,” he said. “Tell me how.” He had the look of a rabbit frightened into fierceness by dire circumstance.
“First of all, I wouldn’t have taken up your case if I didn’t believe you when you first walked in. The inquisitors specialize in nifty solutions at the expense of the truth; that’s one of the reasons I went private. You’re right to observe a certain symbiosis in our relationship, but they’re perfectly capable of enacting good cop/bad cop without my help and they know it. I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out why I’m tolerated by the Office and it’s not simple, and I don’t think I particularly want to try to explain it to you now.