“You are a literary broker, this is correct?” Dellor asked as they rode along.
“Yes. Jenithar is still a wide-open market for my world’s literature.”
“Had you been long dealing with Highest Levexitor?”
“Just for the past four months,” Rabinowitz replied. “I’d hoped it would be the start of a long business relationship, but now it looks like I’ll have to make other contacts.”
“You have stated that when he was killed you were visiting Levexitor.”
“I was veering only. There were awkward silences in our conversation. I suspect someone else was physically present at the same time, but that person wasn’t linked into the veer-space so I don’t know who it was.”
“About what subject were you speaking when the death occurred?”
Rabinowitz hesitated. “Business,” she said. “I had come to talk about the underwater theatrical rights to the works we were negotiating—”
“There is no need to elaborate,” Dellor interrupted. “I do not need to know the intimate details of the Highest’s business affairs. Did you know Dahb Chalnas well?”
“Levexitor’s assistant? Not really. He was usually there in the background when the Highest and I met, but he seldom even spoke.”
“He was, though, not there this time.”
“Not in the veer-space, no. Levexitor told me it was his day off.”
The cab had reached a different part of the city, far less crowded. The buildings here were smaller and detached from one another, and eventually their vehicle pulled to a stop in front of a two-story house with a low wall around it and a postage-stamp garden in the front yard. Rabinowitz looked at it in wonderment, Levexitor was one of the most important people in Jenithar, and his house was less than two-thirds the size of her own. “Everything’s relative,” she muttered as she got out of the cab with her police escorts.
The constables led her into the house, and she stared with shock as she crossed the threshold. Levexitor’s home made simple squalor look respectable. Piles of detritus covered the floor, making it hard to find a clean path to walk, and she had to step carefully over little rivulets of yellow-green fluid. Greasy globules of some unidentified viscous material oozed down the walls. Rabinowitz was sure the stench would have knocked her unconscious if her artificial body could have transmitted anything more in the way of smell than an alarm about smoke or corrosive chemicals.
“Who’s his decorator?” she asked aloud. “Central Sewage and Reclamation?” This house was such a contrast, both to the cleanliness of the public streets and to the starkness of Levexitor’s veer-space, it was hard to believe they belonged on the same planet. But she knew lots of people on Earth, too, who kept their veer-space looking very different from their real homes and offices.
“He must have had a very incompetent staff,” she continued.
“Highest Levexitor lived here alone,” Dellor said. “He had no staff except his clerk, Dahb Chalnas.”
“All alone? No staff? A man as tall and important as Highest Levexitor?”
“One of the advantages of being so tall,” the constable said, “is that you’re allowed to live alone.”
Rabinowitz nodded thoughtfully, or at least tried to; the action made her heavy metallic body bob unsteadily. “I guess so. Well, show me what you wanted me to see so I can get this body back to the agency. They’ll want to give it a good acid bath before it’s used again.”
Dellor led her through several rooms, each more disgusting than the last, until finally he stopped and said, “This is where Highest Levexitor was murdered.”
As far as Rabinowitz could see, the only resemblance this room bore to Levexitor’s veer-space was the tall work table with the computerized desktop, an analog to the one he’d been standing at when he died. “This isn’t really anything like what I saw.”
“I didn’t expect so. Just tell us what you did see.”
“Highest Levexitor was standing at this table, talking to me. There were occasional pauses; he might have been pulling momentarily out of veer-space to talk to someone physically present. In the middle of our conversation he suddenly looked up, gave a small cry, and slumped against the table. I looked around, but couldn’t see anyone else in the veer-space. Then the Highest’s body jerked upright—I assume his murderer pulled his physical body up to get at the veering set—and I saw the controls being worked by invisible hands. Then the connection was broken and I was back in my own home.”
Dellor was silent for a moment, then said, “This confirms our theory. Accept our gratitude for your cooperation. We will take you back to the rental agency now.”
“Wait a minute. This is it? You go to the expense of bringing me here, make me go through all the rigmarole of renting this body, and take me to this festering sewer just so I can spend two minutes looking at a table and telling you the same story I did over the phone?”
“That is correct.”
“Tell me, what is this theory of yours?”
“Really, that is not of your concern.”
“Well, I’m making it my concern.” She stood beside him and drew her body up to its full height, staring down at him with what she hoped was icy imperiousness. “And if you ever hope to be any taller, you’ll make it my concern, too.”
Dellor paused. “It is really too simple to bother you with. There is only one person who could have committed the crime.”
“Humor me.”
“It could only have been his assistant, Dahb Chalnas. We have already detained him, and it will be but a short while before he confesses.”
“Right. The butler did it. How did you come to this startling revelation?”
“It is not difficult. Chalnas is the only person who had access to the house.”
“Couldn’t the Highest have let someone else in?”
“Like most people of his height, he valued his privacy too much. He wouldn’t have let someone else in physically when he could simply have veered them.”
“Unless there was something he didn’t want to discuss over the channels,” Rabinowitz mused.
Dellor paused. “Do you have evidence of such delicate matters?”
“No. No evidence. But why are you so convinced it’s Chalnas? He always seemed so quiet, so meek.”
“Ms. Rabinowitz, you are a stranger to Jenithar. You do not know our ways. People as lowly as Chalnas often harbor poisonous envies of their superiors. I have seen it happen far too often, a person killing someone taller than he for no apparent reason but frustration and rage. Perhaps it is a sad commentary on our civilization, but it is a fact we must live with.”
“What did he hit him with?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“If Chalnas was that much smaller than Levexitor, his bare hands probably weren’t strong enough to kill him. What did he use as a murder weapon?”
The constable was not the least bit phased. “He could easily have used some heavy object in the room and then taken it away to dispose of. As you see, it is impossible to tell whether anything is missing. Please believe me, Chalnas is undoubtedly the culprit.”
“Well, if you’re that sure… this is your business and your planet, and I have no right telling you how to run it. Next time, though, just talk with me on the phone and don’t bring me teeping all over the galaxy just to look at slag heaps.”
Rabinowitz tried hard to concentrate when she returned home. There was a rehearsal in just a couple of days. She had scenes to block out for Mac and Lady M. as they chewed on each other while plotting Duncan’s fate. But other visions intruded. When she wasn’t seeing the quagmire of Levexitor’s home, she was thinking about quiet, servile Chalnas in prison for his boss’s murder. The chiming of the phone was actually a blessed interruption—especially when she checked the caller ID before accepting the call.