to cover a sewer explosion. Someone had poured something he shouldn't have down the drain, and it had reacted with something else. Big deal. It happened all the time. Today nobody had even been killed.
"Did Rod get any good pictures?"
"Said he'd have some for you in about two hours."
"He didn't get Polaroids? Shit, of course not-the pol count is up today, isn't it?" Mel sighed. Days you couldn't get Polaroids were starting to outnumber those when you could; it was something in the air that affected the emulsion. "Well, a couple of hours should be okay…Message for you, by the way. It's on your desk."
"Later."
But the note said she should contact the city morgue, so she put the call in while rolling paper into her typewriter with her other hand, and after five wrong numbers-about par for the course-the phone said,
"Stanway."
"Peg Mankiewicz."
"Oh, yes." Stanway's voice dropped a trifle. "Look, we finally had the definitive lab report on your friend Jones."
"Christ! You mean they've been on at him all this time?" Peg heard her voice ragged. Couldn't they even leave his corpse alone? Weren't they content with hurling insults at his memory? "This self-appointed prophet of a better world who turned out to be just another acid-head."
Quote/unquote.
"Well, it's a slow process looking for these very tiny traces of a drug," Stanway said, missing the point. "Paper chromatography work.
Long-column separation, even, sometimes."
"All right, what did they find?"
"A hallucinogen in his system. Not LSD or psilocybin or any of the regular ones, but something with a similar molecular structure. I don't really understand the report myself-I'm an anatomist, not a biochemist.
But I thought you'd like to know right away."
Like! No, it was the thing in all the world she least wanted to hear.
But there it was: evidence.
"Any special reason why they went to all that trouble?"
Stanway hesitated. He said at length, "Well, the fuzz insisted."
"The busy mothers! They didn't find drugs in his car!" Not strictly his, but rented. Trainites did their best not to contribute to pollution, and the entire community of sixty-some at the Denver wat owned one vehicle between them, a jeep. Apart from bicycles.
Moreover they didn't hold with drugs, not even pot, though they did tolerate beer and wine.
She slid open a drawer in her desk, where she kept the file she'd compiled about Decimus's death, and reread the list of things that had been found in the car-more or less what you would expect. A traveling-bag with a change of clothes, razor, toothbrush and so on, a folder of papers about chemicals in food, another concerned with the family business which had brought him to LA to see his sister Felice, and a sort of picnic basket. That fitted, too; he'd have brought his own food along, the good wholesome kind the wat community grew themselves.
Stanway coughed in the phone. It started as a polite attention-catching noise; a few seconds, and it developed into a real cough, punctuated with gasps of, "Sorry!" When he recovered, he said,
"Was there anything else?"
"No." Absently. "Thanks very much for letting me know."
Having hung up she sat for long minutes staring at nothing. Anger burned in her mind like a sullen flame.
She was convinced-beyond the possibility of argument-Decimus must have been poisoned.
But how? By whom? They'd backtracked on his route, discovered a couple of truck-drivers who'd noticed him asleep in the park outside a diner when they stopped for a snack, then found him awake when they came out again, shaving in the men's room; also a gas station where he'd filled up-and that was that. No one else seemed to have seen or spoken to him on the way.
And his sister, of course, knew nothing useful. She'd refused to be interviewed directly after his death, claiming with good grounds that since she hadn't met her brother in years she hardly knew him, but then the makeup for their December 23rd issue had been half a column short and
"Did Rod get any good pictures?"
"Said he'd have some for you in about two hours."
"He didn't get Polaroids? Shit, of course not-the pol count is up today, isn't it?" Mel sighed. Days you couldn't get Polaroids were starting to outnumber those when you could; it was something in the air that affected the emulsion. "Well, a couple of hours should be okay…Message for you, by the way. It's on your desk."
"Later."
But the note said she should contact the city morgue, so she put the call in while rolling paper into her typewriter with her other hand, and after five wrong numbers-about par for the course-the phone said,
"Stanway."
"Peg Mankiewicz."
"Oh, yes." Stanway's voice dropped a trifle. "Look, we finally had the definitive lab report on your friend Jones."
"Christ! You mean they've been on at him all this time?" Peg heard her voice ragged. Couldn't they even leave his corpse alone? Weren't they content with hurling insults at his memory? "This self-appointed prophet of a better world who turned out to be just another acid-head."
Quote/unquote.
"Well, it's a slow process looking for these very tiny traces of a drug," Stanway said, missing the point. "Paper chromatography work.
Long-column separation, even, sometimes."
"All right, what did they find?"
"A hallucinogen in his system. Not LSD or psilocybin or any of the regular ones, but something with a similar molecular structure. I don't really understand the report myself-I'm an anatomist, not a biochemist.
But I thought you'd like to know right away."
Like! No, it was the thing in all the world she least wanted to hear.
But there it was: evidence.
"Any special reason why they went to all that trouble?"
Stanway hesitated. He said at length, "Well, the fuzz insisted."
"The busy mothers! They didn't find drugs in his car!" Not strictly his, but rented. Trainites did their best not to contribute to pollution, and the entire community of sixty-some at the Denver wat owned one vehicle between them, a jeep. Apart from bicycles.
Moreover they didn't hold with drugs, not even pot, though they did tolerate beer and wine.
She slid open a drawer in her desk, where she kept the file she'd compiled about Decimus's death, and reread the list of things that had been found in the car-more or less what you would expect. A traveling-bag with a change of clothes, razor, toothbrush and so on, a folder of papers about chemicals in food, another concerned with the family business which had brought him to LA to see his sister Felice, and a sort of picnic basket. That fitted, too; he'd have brought his own food along, the good wholesome kind the wat community grew themselves.
Stanway coughed in the phone. It started as a polite attention-catching noise; a few seconds, and it developed into a real cough, punctuated with gasps of, "Sorry!" When he recovered, he said,
"Was there anything else?"
"No." Absently. "Thanks very much for letting me know."
Having hung up she sat for long minutes staring at nothing. Anger burned in her mind like a sullen flame.
She was convinced-beyond the possibility of argument-Decimus must have been poisoned.
But how? By whom? They'd backtracked on his route, discovered a couple of truck-drivers who'd noticed him asleep in the park outside a diner when they stopped for a snack, then found him awake when they came out again, shaving in the men's room; also a gas station where he'd filled up-and that was that. No one else seemed to have seen or spoken to him on the way.
And his sister, of course, knew nothing useful. She'd refused to be interviewed directly after his death, claiming with good grounds that since she hadn't met her brother in years she hardly knew him, but then the makeup for their December 23rd issue had been half a column short and
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