were the garage windows flooded with white radiance and a man was seen within. He was stubby and black-haired—unmistakably Ben Sala.
While Sala was moving about the garage doing odd cleaning and tidying jobs, Remmert touched a button which triggered a recording of the suspect’s statement:
“Well, roundabout seven that evenin’ Matt came downstairs. He wasn’t lookin’ too good—sorta grey, you know—and he was rubbin’ his left arm like there was a pain in it. Matt told me the transit company had asked him to do a few hours’ overtime that night. Most of the time he went everywhere by bus ’cause he was allowed to ride everywhere free, but this time he asked me for the lend of the truck. He said it was ’cause he was tired and didn’t feel up to walkin’ up to the bus stop on the main road.
“I told him okay he could have the truck, so he went off in it about eleven. After he’d gone I did some work in the garage for about an hour, then I went to bed. I heard Matt bringin’ the truck back some time in the middle of the night, but I didn’t look to see what time it was. Next mornin’ he went out to work like he always does, and that was the last time I saw him alive.”
Remmert switched off the recording. “What do you think of that?”
“What do you think of it?”
“It was just a statement— I’ve taken thousands of them.”
Garrod kept his eyes on the screen, where Sala’s image could still be seen occasionally as he moved around the garage. “Sala doesn’t talk like a professional communicator, and yet…”
“And yet?”
“He packed a tremendous amount of information into a short statement—all of it relevant, well-ordered, logical. Out of those thousands of statements you’ve taken, Peter, how many were there in which not one word was wasted?”
“The weight of damning evidence is piling up against Sala,” Remmert said tartly. “He looks like he could be an assassin, and he talks sensibly. You know we interview lots of people
in here who don’t use academic English, yet can make you see a thing better than a university don can. Have you never noticed that in interrogation scenes in crime movies the tough slum kids always get the best lines? The screenwriter’s talent must be liberated by the knowledge that for a while—in this character—he can kick the subjunctive out the window.”
Garrod thought for a moment. “I’ve got an idea.”
Remmert was not listening. “One night last year I had a kid in here for questioning on a manslaughter charge, and I asked him why he had done it. Do you know what he said? He said, ’All that the public ever reads in the papers about young people is that they keep going around doing welfare work and voluntary service—I wanted to let them see that some of us are real bastards.’ Now, that’s better than anything I’ve heard in the movies.”
“Listen,” Garrod said. “I’m seeing this holofilm for the first time, isn’t that right?”
“Right.”
“Would it improve my credibility if I made a prediction about something we’re going to see later in the film?”
“It might. Depends.”
“All right.” Garrod pointed at the screen. “Note that the tarpaulin on the garage roof has been folded back so that we can see inside through the door windows. My prediction is that after we’ve seen McCullough driving the truck back into the garage, the edge of that tarp will somehow fall down again and cover the windows.”
“What if it does? We’ve seen McCullough driving away and leaving Sala behind…” Remmert stopped speaking as the truck appeared on the screen, moved down the drive. The coded frequency in its headlight beam caused the garage door to swing up and the vehicle disappeared into the now-darkened interior. As the door was swinging down behind it, a loose strand from the tarpaulin seemed to snag part of the locking mechanism and the covering twitched downwards over the windows.
“That was pretty good,” Remmert conceded.
“I thought so, too.”
“But you can’t make predictions like that without a theory to base them on. What have you got up your sleeve?”
“I’m going to tell you, but first I need one extra piece of information,” Garrod said. “Just to confirm it in my own mind.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Can you find out how much Sala actually got paid for the truck he sold?”
“Huh?.Come through to my office—I haven’t got a computer terminal here.” Remmert gave Garrod a frankly puzzled look as they walked to his office, but he refrained from asking any more questions. At his desk he tapped briefly on the keys of the terminal which was linked to the big police computer at the other side of the city. The machine chimed a second later and Remmert tore off a strip of photoprinter tape.
He glanced at it and became even more puzzled. “It says here he got fifteen hundred dollars for it from a dealer out along the line.”
“I don’t know about you,” Garrod said, the old triumphal pounding now filling his chest, “but if that truck had been mine I’d have had no difficulty in turning down that kind of an offer.”
“It’s hellish low, I must admit—which means Sala was drifting a bit in that part of his statement anyway. I can’t understand why a sharp businessman like him would practically give away a good truck and buy a beat-up utility model.”
“If you ask me, it was like this.” Garrod began to explain his theory.
When the word came to Ben Sala that it was time to move against Senator Wescott, he was dismayed. He had been hoping that the call would never come, somehow, but now that it had he had no choice but to act—the alternative would have been death, perhaps by a bomb planted in his next consignment of detergent. In any case, the plan had been so carefully worked out that there was practically no risk of detection.
The first step was to get hold of a G.M. Burro, an ultra-cheap delivery truck which had been tried out then discontinued by the manufacturers four years earlier. Its big feature, as far as Sala was concerned, was that all its transparencies were of flat glass and the windshield could be pivoted to admit air. Sala, however, was not concerned with letting air in—but with seeing out.
He sold his own truck and bought a Burro. The latter was quite difficult to obtain and he had to accept a model in poor condition, but it was adequate for his needs. He took the Burro home, began using it for his daily transportation, and set other phases of the plan into action. The first night on which there was a high wind he went into the garage by the kitchen entrance and, working in complete darkness, loosened several roof tiles from the under side. A couple of days later he covered the roof with what appeared to be a randomly chosen piece of tarpaulin from his warehouse, but which had actually been carefully designed for its task. With the interior of his garage now hidden from the gaze of the Scenedow across the street, he was able to go ahead with assembly of the laser cannon which had been mailed to him piece by piece in small packages.
He also began work on one of the most delicate parts of the operation.
Thanks to the simplistic design of the Burro it was easy to remove the windshield and replace them with panels of Retardite. But getting Matt McCullough to sit in the driving seat for the best part of an hour was more difficult, even though he had been selected as a tenant because of his dullness. Sala solved the problem by telling McCullough the Burro had developed a fault in the steering linkage and that he was going to repair it himself. McCullough, who would only have been broodingat one of his windows anyway, agreed to sit in the truck and turn the wheel each time Sala called out to him. He even wore his old hat in case it would be draughty in the garage.