Bela Joad took a cigarette from the dispenser on the desk; it lighted automatically as he picked it up. It was a green cigarette and he exhaled green smoke through his nostrils before he asked, almost disinterestedly, «Any ideas, Dyer?»
«I’ve had two, but I think I’ve eliminated both of them. One is that the machines are being tampered with. The other is that the technicians are being tampered with. But I’ve had both men and machines checked from every possible angle and can’t find a thing. On big cases I’ve taken special precautions. For example, the detector we used at the Girard trial; it was brand-new and I had it checked right in this office.» He chuckled. «I put Captain Burke under it and asked him if he was being faithful to his wife. He said he was and it nearly broke the needle. I had it taken to the courtroom under special guard.»
«And the technician who used it?»
«I used it myself. Took a course in it, evenings, for four months.»
Bela Joad nodded. «So it isn’t the machine and it isn’t the operator. That’s eliminated, and I can start from there.»
«How long will it take you, Joad?»
The little man in the red suit shrugged. «I haven’t any idea.»
«Is there any help I can give you? Anything you want to start on?»
«Just one thing, Dyer. I want a list of the criminals who have beaten the detector and a dossier on each. Just the ones you’re morally sure actually committed the crimes you questioned them about. If there’s any reasonable doubt, leave them off the list. How long will it take to get it ready?»
«It’s ready now; I had it made up on the chance that you’d come here. And it’s a long report, so I had it microed down for you.» He handed Bela Joad a small envelope.
Joad said, «Thank you. I won’t contact you till I have something or until I want your cooperation. I think first I’m going to stage a murder, and then have you question the murderer.»
Dyer Rand’s eyes went wide. «Whom are you going to have murdered?»
Bela Joad smiled. «Me,» he said.
He took the envelope Rand had given him back to his hotel and spent several hours studying the microfilms through his pocket micrographer, memorizing their contents thoroughly. Then he burned both films and envelope.
After that Bela Joad paid his hotel bill and disappeared, but a little man who resembled Bela Joad only slightly rented a cheap room under the name of Martin Blue. The room was on Lake Shore Drive, which was then the heart of Chicago’s underworld.
The underworld of Chicago had changed less, in fifty years, than one would think. Human vices do not change, or at least they change but slowly. True, certain crimes had diminished greatly but on the other hand, gambling had increased. Greater social security than any country hitherto known was, perhaps, a factor. One no longer needed to save for old age as, in days gone by, a few people did.
Gambling was a lush field for the crooks and they cultivated the field well. Improved technology had increased the number of ways of gambling and it had increased the efficiency of ways of making gambling crooked. Crooked gambling was big business and underworld wars and killings occurred over territorial rights, just as they had occurred over such rights in the far back days of Prohibition when alcohol was king. There was still alcohol, but it was of lesser importance now. People were learning to drink more moderately. And drugs were passe, although there was still some traffic in them.
Robberies and burglaries still occurred, although not quite as frequently as they had fifty years before.
Murder was slightly more frequent. Sociologists and criminologists differed as to the reason for the increase of crime in this category.
The weapons of the underworld had, of course, improved, but they did not include atomics. All atomic and subatomic weapons were strictly controlled by the military and were never used by either the police or by criminals. They were too dangerous; the death penalty was mandatory for anyone found in possession of an atomic weapon. But the pistols and guns of the underworld of 1999 were quite efficient. They were much smaller and more compact, and they were silent. Both guns and cartridges were made of superhard magnesium and were very light. The commonest weapon was the .19 calibre pistol — as deadly as the .45 of an earlier era because the tiny projectiles were explosive — and even a small pocket-pistol held from fifty to a hundred rounds.
But back to Martin Blue, whose entrance into the underworld coincided with the disappearance of Bela Joad from the latter’s hotel.
Martin Blue, as it turned out, was not a very nice man. He had no visible means of support other than gambling and he seemed to lose, in small amounts, almost more often than he won. He almost got in trouble on a bad check he gave to cover his losses in one game, but he managed to avoid being liquidated by making the check good. His only reading seemed to be the Racing Microform, and he drank too much, mostly in a tavern (with clandestine gambling at the back) which formerly had been operated by Gyp Girard. He got beaten up there once because he defended Gyp against a crack made by the current proprietor to the effect that Gyp had lost his guts and turned honest.
For a while fortune turned against Martin Blue and he went so broke that he had to take a job as a waiter in the outside room of a Michigan Boulevard joint called Sloppy Joe’s, possibly because Joe Zatelli, who ran it, was the nattiest dresser in Chicago — and in the fin de siècle era when leopard-skin suits (synthetic but finer and more expensive than real leopard skin) were a dime a dozen and plain pastel-silk underwear was dated.
Then a funny thing happened to Martin Blue. Joe Zatelli killed him. Caught him, after hours, rifling the till, and just as Martin Blue turned around, Zatelli shot him. Three times for good measure. And then Zatelli, who never trusted accomplices, got the body into his car and deposited it in an alley back of a teletheater.
The body of Martin Blue got up and went to see Chief Dyer Rand and told Rand what he wanted done.
«You took a hell of a chance,» Rand said.
«Not too much of a chance,» Blue said. «I’d put blanks in his gun and I was pretty sure he’d use that. He won’t ever find out, incidentally, that the rest of the bullets in it are blanks unless he tries to kill somebody else with it; they don’t look like blanks. And I had a pretty special vest on under my suit. Rigid backing and padded on top to feel like flesh, but of course he couldn’t feel a heartbeat through it. And it was gimmicked to make a noise like explosive cartridges hitting — when the duds punctured the compartments.»
«But if he’d switched guns or bullets?»
«Oh, the vest was bulletproofed for anything short of atomics. The danger was in his thinking of a fancy way of disposing of the body. If he had, I could have taken care of myself, of course, but it would have spoiled the plan and cost me three months’ build-up. But I’d studied his style and I was pretty sure what he’d do. Now here’s what I want you to do, Dyer —»
The newspapers and videocasts the next morning carried the story of the finding of a body of an unidentified man in a certain alley. By afternoon they reported that it had been identified as the body of Martin Blue, a small-time crook, who had lived on Lake Shore Drive, in the heart of the Tenderloin. And by evening a rumor had gone out through the underworld to the effect that the police suspected Joe Zatelli, for whom Blue had worked, and might pick him up for questioning.
And plainclothesmen watched Zatelli’s place, front and back, to see where he’d go if he went out. Watching the front was a small man about the build of Bela Joad or Martin Blue. Unfortunately, Zatelli happened to leave by the back and he succeeded in shaking off the detectives on his trail.