The Best of Fredric Brown

^"Nothing,^" Mearson said. He left.

A guard brought Lorenz Kane to the consultation room and left him there with Mortimer Mearson. Mearson introduced himself and they shook hands. Kane, Mearson thought, looked quite calm, and definitely more puzzled than worried. He was a tall, moderately good-looking man in his late thirties, impeccably groomed despite a night in a cell. One got the idea that he was the type of man who would manage to appear impeccably groomed anywhere, any time, even a week after his bearers had deserted in midsafari nine hundred miles up the Congo, taking all his possessions with them.

"Yes, Mr. Mearson. I shall be more than glad to have you represent me. I've heard of you, read about cases you've handled. I don't know why I didn't think of you myself, instead of asking for a recommendation. Now, do you want to hear my story before you accept me as a client—or do you accept as of now, for better or for worse?^"

^"For better or for worse,^" Mearson said, ^"till—^" And then stopped himself; "till death do us part," is hardly a diplomatic phrase to use to a man who stands, quite possibly, in the shadow of the electric chair.

But Kane smiled and finished the phrase himself. ^"Fine," he said. "Let's sit down then," and they sat down on the two chairs, one on each side of the table in the consultation room. ^"And since that means we^'ll be seeing quite a bit of one another for a while, let^'s start on a first-name basis. But not Lorenz, in my case. It's Larry."

^"And make mine Morty," Mearson said. ^"Now I want your story in detail, but two quick questions first. Are you—?^"

'Wait," Kane interrupted him. "One quick question ahead of your two. Are you absolutely and completely positive that this room is not bugged, that this conversation is completely private?^"

"I am,^" Mearson said. ^"Now my first question: are you guilty?^"

^"The arresting officers claim that before clamming up, you said one thing: `My God, she must have been real!' Is that true, and if so what did you mean by it?^"

"I was stunned at the moment, Morty, and can't remember—but I probably said something to that effect, because it^'s exactly what I was thinking. But as to what I meant by it—that's something I can't answer quickly. The only way I can make you understand, if I can make you understand at all, is to start at the beginning.^"

^"All right. Start. And take your time. We don^'t have to go over everything in one sitting. I can stall the trial at least three months—longer if necessary.^"

^"I can tell it fairly quickly. It started—and don^'t ask me for an antecedent for the pronoun it—five and a half months ago, in early April. About two-thirty A.M. on the morning of Tuesday, April the third, to be as nearly exact about it as I can. I had been at a party in Armand Village, north of town, and was on my way home. I—"

^"Forgive interruptions. Want to be sure I have the whole picture as it unfolds. You were driving? Alone?^"

^"I was driving my Jag. I was alone."

^"Sober? Speeding?^"

^"Sober, yes. I^'d left the party relatively early—it was rather a dull bit—and had been feeling my drinks moderately at that time. But I found myself suddenly quite hungry—I think I'd forgotten to eat dinner—and stopped at a roadhouse. I had one cocktail while I was waiting, but I ate all of a big steak when it came, all the trimmings, and had several cups of coffee. And no drinks afterward. I'd say that when I left there I was more sober than usual, if you know what I mean. And, on top of that, I had half an hour's drive in an open car through the cool night air. On the whole, I'd say that I was soberer than I am now—and I haven't had a drink since shortly before midnight last night. I—"

^"Hold it a moment," Mearson said. He took a silver flask from his hip pocket and extended it across the table. "A relic of Prohibition; I occasionally use it to play St. Bernard to clients too recently incarcerated to have been able to arrange for importation of the necessities of life."

Kane said, "Ahhh. Morty, you may double your fee for service beyond the call of duty_,." He drank deeply.

"Where were we?" he asked. "Oh, yes. I was definitely sober. Speeding? Only technically. I was heading south on Vine Street a few blocks short of Rostov—"

"Near the Forty-fourth Precinct Station."

"Exactly. It figures in. It's a twenty-five-mile zone and I was going about forty, but what the hell, it was half-past two in the morning and there wasn't any other traffic. Only the proverbial little old lady from Pasadena would have been going less than forty."

^"She wouldn't have been out that late. But carry on."

^"So all of a sudden out of the mouth of an alley in the middle of the block comes a girl on a bicycle, pedaling about as fast as a bicycle can go. And right in front of me. I got one clear flash of her as I stepped on the brake as hard as I could. She was a teenager, like sixteen or seventeen. She had red hair that was blowing out from under a brown babushka she had on her head. She wore a light green angora sweater and tan pants of the kind they call pedal pushers. She was on a red bicycle."

"You got all that in one glance?"

"Yes. I can still visualize it clearly. And—this I'll never forget —just before the moment of impact, she turned and was looking straight at me, through frightened eyes behind shell-rimmed glasses.

^"My foot was, by then, trying to push the brake pedal through the floor and the damn Jag was starting to slue and make up its mind whether to go end over end or what. But hell, no matter how fast your reactions are—and mine are pretty good —you can barely start to slow down a car in a few yards if you^'re going forty. I must have still been going over thirty when I hit her—it was a hell of an impact.

^"And then bump-crunch, bump-crunch, as first the front wheels of the Jag went over and then the back wheels. The bumps were her, of course, and the crunches were the bicycle. And the car shuddered to a stop maybe another thirty feet on.

^"Ahead of me, through the windshield, I could see the lights of the precinct station only a block away. I got out of the car and started running for it. I didn^'t look back. I didn^'t want to look back. There was no point to it; she had to be deader than dead, after that impact.

^"I ran into the precinct house and after a few seconds I got coherent enough to get across what I was trying to tell them. Two of the city's finest left with me and we started back the block to the scene of the accident. I started out by running, but they only walked fast and I slowed myself down because I wasn^'t anxious to get there first. Well, we got there and—^"

"Let me guess," the attorney said. "No girl, no bicycle."

Kane nodded slowly. "There was the Jag, slued crooked in the street. Headlights on. Ignition key still on, but the engine had stalled. Behind it, about forty feet of skid marks, starting a dozen feet back of the point where the alley cut out into the street.