Colt had surrendered without a struggle, and that night at the Third District station the four eyeball witnesses had picked him out of a lineup. Their description of the getaway car matched that of the car the police had seen speeding from the service station. The loot from the holdup, and several gas-station holdups committed earlier that night, wasn't on Colt, but it was probably in the car. A paraffin test on Colt's hands turned up nitrate traces, indicating that he'd recently fired a weapon.
"Colt's innocence just jumps out of the file at you, doesn't it, Nudge?" Hammersmith said. He was grinning a fat grin around the fat cigar.
"Paraffin tests aren't foolproof," Nudger said. But he knew they were virtually always right; Colt had fired a gun.
"They aren't even admissible in court," Hammersmith said. "The evidence against Colt was so strong, that didn't make any difference."
"What about the murder weapon?"
"Colt was unarmed when we picked him up."
"Seems odd."
"Not really," Hammersmith said. "He was planning to pay for the cigarettes. And maybe the gun was still too hot to touch, so he left it in the car. Maybe it's still hot; it got a lot of use for one night."
Closing the file folder and laying it on a corner of Hammersmith's desk, Nudger stood up. He was relieved to find that the air was more breathable in the upper half of the room. "Thanks, Jack. I'll keep you tapped in if I learn anything interesting."
Hammersmith waved the cigar gracefully, almost as if conducting a silent orchestra. "Don't bother keeping me informed on this one, Nudge. It's over. I don't see how even a fiancee can doubt Colt's guilt."
Nudger shrugged, trying not to breathe too deeply in the smoke-hazed office. "Maybe it's an emotional thing. She thinks that because thought waves are tiny electrical impulses, Colt might experience time warp and all sorts of grotesque thoughts when all that voltage shoots through him. She thinks he might die a long and horrible death. She has bad dreams."
"I'll bet she does," Hammersmith said. "I'll bet Colt has bad dreams, too. Only he deserves his."
"Is there any doubt the switch is going to be thrown?" Nudger asked.
Hammersmith bit down on his cigar and shook his head. "No doubt at all. This one is Governor Scalla's personal project. Once Colt became a convicted felon and ceased to be a voter, all hope was lost."
Though he believed in the necessity of capital punishment, Hammersmith was no fan of Governor Scott Scalla. Hammersmith was a good man and a good cop; he didn't like the methods Scalla had used to put people away when the governor was attorney general.
Early in Scalla's career, he'd seen to it that all the juveniles he'd tried received maximum sentences when convicted; he'd often done this by plea-bargaining and letting their confederates serve lighter terms in exchange for their cooperation and a sure conviction. As long as those terms kept the juveniles in prison until they were twenty-one, it was all fine with Scalla. That way he could brag about juvenile crime statistics decreasing under his special attention, not mentioning that these juveniles were often back out on the streets adding to adult crime statistics. Crime paid for Scalla; it had helped to get him elected governor despite the often-accurate charges by his opponent that he had used his office of state attorney mainly to further his political career, and that he had been bought and was controlled by several special-interest groups.
Scalla blithely denied all of these charges, all the while decrying the evils of crime and espousing the biblical credo of eye-for-an-eye. He belonged to a stiff-backed religion, something called Friends of God, occasionally played piano and sang gospel music, smiled boyishly and often, and had a wife who wore no lipstick. How could you not believe a guy like that?
"Maybe the fiancee is right," Hammersmith said.
"About what?"
"About all that voltage distorting thought and time. Who's to say?"
"Not Curtis Colt," Nudger said. "Not after they throw the switch."
"It's a nice theory, though," Hammersmith said. "I'll remember it. It might be a comforting thing to tell the murder victim's family."
"Sometimes," Nudger said, "you think just like a cop who's seen too much."
"Any of it's too much, Nudge," Hammersmith said with surprising sadness. He let more greenish smoke drift from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth; he looked like a stone Buddha seated behind the desk, one in which incense burned.
Nudger coughed and said good-bye. His eyes stung and watered for twenty minutes after he got outside.
V
After leaving Hammersmith, Nudger located and phoned Gantner's drinking buddy, Roy Sanders, at a tire-retreading plant out in Westport where Sanders worked. Sanders was working overtime, as Gantner had been yesterday. Busy, busy. Industry was thriving. Sanders agreed to talk with Nudger during his lunch break, which was in about fifteen minutes.
Nudger got to Westport, a business and warehouse complex in West County, in twenty minutes, and found Sanders sitting with four other men in the employee's lounge of Roll-On Recap City.
The lounge was a long, narrow room, painted workplace green and lined with colorful vending machines that seemed to sell everything from sandwiches to birth-control devices. There were a lot of potted plants suspended from the ceiling in front of the window at the far end, spilling lush viny greenness almost to the floor. On the windowsill sat opened boxes of plant food and a mist-sprayer.
Sanders, a tall, Lincolnesque man with dark smudges on his bare arms, carefully placed his cheese sandwich on a white paper napkin and shook hands with Nudger. Everyone at the table was dressed in a workshirt and dark-stained jeans and was wearing a similarly soiled blue work apron. Picking up his coffee and sandwich, Sanders led Nudger to a table near the end of the long room, where they could talk privately.
"You want a cup of coffee?" he asked Nudger, before they sat down at the gray Formica table.
Nudger said no thanks, and they sat. Neither man said anything while a tall, redheaded woman in a business suit stalked into the lounge, deposited coins in a soup machine near the table, then cursed mightily because the machine hadn't freed the little captive soup can from its glass cell but had kept the proffered ransom. The woman kicked the machine softly but precisely with the pointed toe of a high- heeled shoe, as if aiming for its groin, before moving down the lounge to another bank of machines that might prove more amiable.
Nudger went through the routine he'd pursued with Gantner. The answers were the same. Sanders and Gantner had been in the rear of the store, heard shots, saw the old man on the floor, the old woman staggering around with a bullet wound in her head. Saw her fall, saw Curtis Colt run from the store, gun in hand, and get into a dark green car that screeched away. Sanders had only caught a glimpse of the car as it sped past the display window, and said he didn't hear the shot Colt had allegedly fired from the speeding car.
"Did you get a good look at Colt's face?" Nudger asked, knowing Sanders had testified in court that he had.
Sanders took a big bite of his cheese sandwich, chewing with his mouth open. His melancholy eyes were thoughtful. "Pretty good." For a moment Nudger thought he was commenting on the sandwich, then realized Sanders was talking about the look he'd gotten at Colt. "All this takes a lot of time to tell, but it happened fast, only a couple of seconds. I got as good a look at him as I could have in that short a time."