Star Song and Other Stories Read online

Could the Book have been wrong? He opened his mouth—

  "Damn you."

  He jumped. It was a woman's voice—the same voice that had originally answered the phone. Listening in on an extension.

  Whittington swore under his breath. "Mave, get the hell off the phone."

  "No!" the woman said, her voice suddenly hard and ugly. "No. Enough is enough—damn it all, can't you even drive to the airport and back without screwing someone? Oh, God... Traci?"

  "Mave, shut the hell up—"

  "Your own niece?" the woman snarled. "God, you make me sick."

  "I said shut up!" Whittington snarled back. "She hit on me, damn it—"

  "She's sixteen years old!" the woman screamed. "What the hell does she know about bastards like you?"

  Radley didn't wait to hear any more. Quickly, quietly, he hung up on the rage boiling out of his phone.

  For a minute he just sat there at his table, his whole body shaking with reaction. Then, almost reluctantly, he reached for the Book, still open to the Rapists listings, and turned to the end. And sure enough, there it was: Rapists, Statutory—See Rapists.

  Slowly, he closed the Book. "It was still a crime," he reminded himself.

  "Even if she really did consent. It was still a crime."

  But not nearly the crime he'd thought it was.

  He took a deep breath, exhaled it slowly. The tight sensation in his chest refused to go away. A marriage obviously on the brink, one that probably would have gone over the edge eventually anyway. But if his call hadn't given it this particular push...

  He swallowed hard, staring at the Book. The solitude of his apartment suddenly had become loneliness. "I wish Alison was here," he murmured. He reached for the phone—

  And stopped. Because when she'd finished sympathizing with him, she would once again tell him to burn the Book.

  "I can't do that," he told himself firmly. "She can play with words all she wants to. The stuff in the Book is true; and if it's true then it's truth.

  Period."

  A flicker of righteousness briefly colored his thoughts. But it faded quickly, and when it was gone, the loneliness was still there.

  He sat there for a long time, staring at nothing in particular. Then, with another sigh, he hitched his chair closer to the kitchen table and pulled the Book and notebook over to him. There were a lot of criminals whose names he hadn't yet copied down. With the whole evening now stretching out before him, he ought to be able to make a sizeable dent in that number before bedtime. He arrived at the shop a few minutes before eight the next morning, his eyelids heavy with too little sleep and too many nightmares. Never before had he realized just how many types of crime there were in the world. Nor had he realized how many people were out there committing them.

  Business was noticeably better than it had been the previous few weeks, but Radley hardly noticed. With the evil of the city roiling in his mind's eye like a huge black thundercloud, the petty details of printing letterhead paper and business cards seemed absurdly unimportant. Time and again he had to drag his thoughts away from the blackness of the thundercloud back to what he was doing—more often than not, finding a bemused-looking customer standing there peering at him.

  Fortunately, most of them accepted his excuse that he hadn't been sleeping well lately. Even more fortunately, Pete knew his way around well enough to take up the slack.

  Partly from guilt, partly because he wanted to give his attention over to the Book when he went home, Radley stayed for an hour after the shop closed, getting some of the next day's work set up. By the time he left, rush hour was over, leaving the streets and sidewalks about as empty as they ever got.

  It was a quiet walk home. Quiet, but hardly peaceful. Perhaps it was merely the relative lack of traffic, the fact that Radley wasn't used to walking down these streets without having to change his direction every five steps to avoid another person. Or perhaps it was merely his own fatigue, magnifying the caution he'd always felt about life here.

  Or perhaps Alison had been right. Perhaps it was the Book that was bothering him. The Book, and the page after page of Muggers he'd leafed through that first night.

  It was an unnerving experience, and by the time he reached his building he was seriously considering whether to start carrying a gun to work with him. But as soon as he left the public sidewalk, the sense of imminent danger began to lift; and by the time he was safely behind his deadbolts he could almost laugh at how strongly a runaway imagination could make him feel.

  Still, he waited until he'd finished dinner and had a beer in his hand before hauling out the Book, the newspaper, and his notebook and beginning the evening's perusal.

  There had been two more murders—again, apparently by repeaters, since there were no new names under the appropriate listing in the Book. Ditto with rapists and armed robbers. The Muggers listing had increased by eleven names, but after wasting half an hour comparing lists it finally dawned on him that isolating the new names wouldn't do anything to let him link a particular person to a particular crime. The Burglars listing, increased by three, presented the same problem.

  "Growing like a weed," he muttered to himself, flipping back and forth through the Book. "Just like a weed. How in blazes are we ever going to stop it?"

  It was nearly nine o'clock when he finally went back to the Embezzlers listing... and found what he was looking for.

  A single new name.

  And what was more, a name Radley couldn't find mentioned anywhere in the newspaper. Which made sense; a crime like embezzlement could go unnoticed for weeks or even months.

  Radley had tried informing on a murderer, and had wound up making matters worse.

  He'd tried wangling information out of a rapist, with similar results.

  Perhaps he could become a conscience.

  The phone was picked up on the third ring. "Hello?" a cool, MBA-type voice answered.

  "Harry Farandell, please," Radley said.

  "Speaking," the other man acknowledged. "Who's this?"

  "Someone who wants to help you get off the path you're on before it's too late,"

  Radley told him. "You see, I know that you embezzled some money today."

  There was a long silence. "I don't know what you're talking about," Farandell said at last.

  Almost the same words, Radley remembered, that James Whittington had used in denying his rape. "I'm not a policeman, Mr. Farandell," Radley told him. "I'm not with your company, either. I could call both of them, of course, but I'd really rather not."

  "Oh, I'm sure," Farandell responded bitterly. "And how much, may I ask, is all this altruism going to cost me?"

  "Nothing at all," Radley assured him. "I don't want any of the money you stole.

  I want you to put it back."

  "What?"

  "You heard me. Chances are no one knows yet what you've done. You replace the money now and no one ever will."

  Another long silence. "I can't," Farandell said at last.

  "Why not? You already spent it or something?"

  "You don't understand," Farandell sighed.

  "Look, do you still have the money, or don't you?" Radley asked.

  "Yes. Yes, I've still got it. But—look, we can work something out. I'll make a

  a"

  "No deals, Mr. Farandell," Radley said firmly. "I'm trying to stop crime, not add to it. Return the money, or else I go to the police. You've got forty-eight hours to decide which it'll be."

  He hung up. For a moment he wondered if he should have given Farandell such a lenient deadline. If the guy skipped town... but no. It wasn't like he was facing a murder charge or something equally serious. And anyway, it could easily take a day or two for him to slip the money back without anyone noticing.

  And when he had done so, it would be as if the crime had never happened.

  "You see?" Radley told himself as he turned to a fresh page in the notebook.

  "There is a way to use this. Tool of the devil, my foot."
r />   The warm feeling lasted the rest of the evening, even through the writer's cramp he got from tallying yet more names in his notebook. It lasted, in fact, until the next morning.

  When the TV news announced that financier Harry Farandell had committed suicide. Business was even better that day than it had been the day before. But again Radley hardly noticed. He worked mechanically, letting Pete take most of the load, coming out of his own dark thoughts only to listen to the periodic updates on the Farandell suicide that the radio newscasts sprinkled through the day.

  By late afternoon it was apparent that Farandell's financial empire, far from being in serious trouble, had merely had a short-term cash-flow problem. In such cases, the commentators said, the standard practice was to take funds from a healthy institution to prop up the ailing one. Such transfers, though decidedly illegal, were seldom caught by the regulators, and the commentators couldn't understand why Farandell hadn't simply done that instead.

  Twice during the long day Radley almost picked up the phone to call Alison.

  But both times he put the handset down undialed. He knew, after all, what she would say.

  He made sure to leave on time that evening, to get home during rush hour when there were lots of people on the streets. All the way up the stairs he swore he would leave the Book where it was for the rest of the night, and for the first hour he held firmly to that resolution. But with dinner eaten, the dishes washed, and the newspaper read, the evening seemed to stretch out endlessly before him.

  Besides, there had been another murder in the city. Taking a quick look at his list wouldn't hurt.

  There were no new names on the listing, which meant either that the murderer was again a repeater or else that he'd already left town. The paper had also reported a mysterious fire over on the east side that the police suspected was arson; but the Arsonists listing was also no longer than it had been the night before. "You ought to close it now," he told himself. But even as he agreed that he ought to, he found himself leafing through the pages. All the various crimes; all the ways people had found throughout the ages of inflicting pain and suffering on each other. He'd spent he didn't know how many hours looking through the Book and writing down names, and yet he could see that he'd hardly scratched the surface. The city was dying, being eaten away from beneath by its own inhabitants.

  He'd reached the T's now, and the eight pages under the Thieves heading.

  Compared to some of the others in the Book it was a fairly minor crime, and he'd never gotten around to making a list of the names there. "And even if I did," he reminded himself, "it wouldn't do any good. I bet we get twenty new thieves every day around here." He started to turn the page, eyes glancing idly across the listings—

  And stopped. There, at the top of the second column, was a very familiar name.

  A

  familiar name, with a familiar address and phone number accompanying it.

  Pete Barnabee.

  Radley stared at it, heart thudding in his chest. No. No, it couldn't be. Not Pete. Not the man—

  Whom he'd hired only a couple of months ago. Without really knowing all that much about him...

  "No wonder we've been losing money," he murmured to himself. Abruptly, he got to his feet. "Wait a minute," he cautioned himself even as he grabbed for his coat.

  "Don't jump to any conclusions here, all right? Maybe he stole something from someone else, a long time ago."

  "Fine," he answered tartly, unlocking the deadbolts with quick flicks of his wrist. "Maybe he did. There's still only one way to find out for sure."

  There were more people on the streets now than there had been on his walk through the dinnertime calm the night before: people coming home from early-evening entertainment or just heading out for later-night versions.

  Radley hardly noticed them as he strode back to the print shop, running the inventory lists through his mind as best he could while he walked. There were any number of small items—pens and paper and such—that he wouldn't particularly miss even if Pete had been pilfering them ever since starting work there.

  Unfortunately, there were also some very expensive tools and machines that he could ill afford to lose.

  And he'd already discovered that Thieves, Petty and Thieves, Grand were both included under the Thieves heading.

  He reached the shop and let himself in the back door. The first part of the check was easy, and it took only a few minutes to confirm that the major machines were still there and still intact. The next part would be far more tedious. Digging the latest inventory list out of the files, he got to work.

  It was after midnight when he finally put up the list with a sigh—a sigh that hissed both relief and annoyance into his ears. "See?" he told himself as he trudged back to the door. "Whatever Pete did, he did it somewhere else.

  Unless," he amended, "he's just been stealing pencils and label stickers." But checking all of those would take hours... and for now, at least, he was far too tired to bother. "But I will check them out eventually," he decided. "I mean, I don't really care about stuff like that, but if he'll steal pencils, who's to say he won't back a truck up here someday and take all the copiers?"

  It was a question that sent a shiver up his back. If that happened, he would be out of business. Period.

  He headed toward home, the awful thought of it churning through his mind...

  and, preoccupied with the defense of his property, he never even heard the mugger coming.

  He just barely felt the crushing blow on the back of his head. He came to gradually, through a haze of throbbing pain, to find himself staring up at a soft pastel ceiling. The forcibly clean smell he'd always associated with hospitals curled his nostrils.... "Hello?" he called tentatively.

  There was a moment of silence. Then, suddenly, there was a young woman leaning over him. "Ah—you're back with us," she said, peering into each of his eyes in turn. "I'm Doctor Sanderson. How do you feel?"

  "My head hurts," Radley told her. "Otherwise... okay, I guess. What happened?"

  "Best guess is that you were mugged," she told him. "Apparently by someone who doesn't like long conversations with his victims. You were lucky, as these things go: no concussion, no bone or nerve damage, only minor bleeding. You didn't even crack your chin when you fell."

  Reflexively, Radley reached up to rub his chin. Bristly, but otherwise undamaged. "Can I go home?"

  Sanderson nodded. "Sure. You'll have to call someone to get you, though—your friend didn't wait."

  "Friend?" Radley frowned. The crinkling of forehead skin gave an extra throb to his headache.

  "Fellow who brought you in. Black man—medium build, slightly balding. Carried you about five blocks to get you here—sweating pretty hard by that time, I'll tell you." She frowned in turn. "He told the E/R people you needed help—we just assumed he was a friend or neighbor or something."

  Radley started to shake his head, thought better of it. "Doesn't sound like anyone I know," he said. "I certainly wasn't with anyone when it happened."

  Sanderson shrugged slightly. "Good Samaritan, then. A vanishing breed, but you still get them sometimes. Anyway. Your shoes are under the gurney there; come on down to the nurses' station when you're ready and we'll run you through the paperwork."

  He thought about calling Alison to come get him, but decided he didn't really want to wake her up at this time of night. Especially not when he'd have to explain why he'd been out so late.

  With his wallet gone, he had no money for a cab, but a tired-eyed policeman who had brought in a pair of prostitutes gave him a lift home. What the blow on the head had started, the long trek up the steps to his apartment finished, and he barely made it to his bed before collapsing. His headache was mostly gone when he awoke. Along with most of the day.

  "Yeah, I figured you were sick or something when you didn't show up this morning," Pete said when he called the print shop. "Didn't expect it was something like this, though. You okay?"

  "Yeah, I'm fine
," Radley assured him, a wave of renewed shame warming his face.

  How could he ever have thought someone with Pete's loyalty would betray him?

  "Let me shower and change and I'll come on down."

  "You don't need to do that," Pete said. "Not hardly worth coming in now, anyway.

  If I may say so, it don't sound to me like you oughta be running 'round yet, and I can handle things here okay." There was a faintly audible sniff/snort, and Radley could visualize the other man smiling. "And I really don't wanna have to carry you all the way home if you fall apart on me."

  "There's that," Radley conceded. "I guess you're right. Well... I'll see you in the morning, then."

  "Only if you feel like it. Really—I can handle things until you're well.

  Oops—gotta go. A customer just came in."

  "Okay. Bye."

  He hung up and gingerly felt the lump on the back of his head. Yes, Pete might have had to carry him home, at that. That little outing had sure gone sour.

  As had his attempt to catch a murderer. And his attempt to solve a rape. And his attempt to stop an embezzlement.

  In fact, everything the Book had given him had gone bad. One way or another, it had all gone bad.

  "But it's truth," he gritted. "I mean, it is. How can truth be bad?"

  He had no answer. With a sigh, he stood up from the kitchen chair. The sudden movement made his head throb, and he sat down again quickly. Yes, Pete might indeed have wound up carrying him.

  Like someone else had already had to do.

  Radley flushed with shame. In his mind's eye, he saw a medium-build black man, probably staggering under Radley's weight by the time he reached the hospital.

  Quietly helping to clean up the mess Radley had made of himself.

  "I wish they'd gotten his name," he muttered to himself. "I'll never get a chance to thank him."

  He looked down at the Book... and a sudden thought struck him. If the Book contained the names of all the criminals in town, why not the names of all the Good Samaritans, too?

  He opened to the Yellow Pages, feeling a renewed sense of excitement. Perhaps this, he realized suddenly, was what the Book was really for. Not a tool for tracking down and punishing the guilty, but a means of finding and rewarding the good. The G's... there they were. Ge, Gl, Go...