Larry Niven – A Kind of Murder
"You are constantly coming to my home!" he shouted. "You never think of calling first. Whatever I'm doing, suddenly you're there. And where the hell do you keep getting keys to my door?"
Alicia didn't answer. Her face, which in recent years had taken on a faint resemblance to a bulldog's, was set in infinite patience as she relaxed at the other end of the couch. She had been through this before, and she waited for Jeff to get it over with.
He saw this, and the dinner he had not quite finished settled like lead in his belly. "There's not a club I belong to that you aren't a member too. Whoever I'm with, you finagle me into introducing you. If it's a man, you try to make him, and if he isn't having any you get nasty. If it's a woman, there you are like the ghost at the feast. The discarded woman. It's a drag," he said. He wanted a more powerful word, but he couldn't think of one that wouldn't sound overdramatic, silly.
She said, "We've been divorced six years. What do you care who I sleep with?"
"I don't like looking like your pimp!"
She laughed.
The acid was rising in his throat. "Listen," he said, "why don't you give up one of the clubs? We, we belong to four. Give one up. Any of them. Give me a place of refuge," he prayed.
"They're my clubs too," she said with composure. "You change clubs."
He'd joined the Lucifer Club four years ago, for just that reason. She'd joined too. And now the words clogged in his throat, so that he gaped like a fish.
There were no words left. He hit her.
He'd never done that before. It was a full-arm swing, but awkward because they were trying to face each other on the couch. She rode with the slap, then sat facing him, waiting.
It was as if he could read her mind. We've been through this before, and it never changes anything. But it's your tantrum. He remembered later that she'd said that to him once, those same words, and she'd looked just like that: patient, implacable.
The call reached Homicide at 8:36 P.M., July 20, 2019. The caller was a round-faced man with straight black hair and a stutter. "My ex-wife," he told the desk man. "She's dead. I just got home and f-found her like this. S-someone seems to have hit her with a c-c-cigarette box."
Hennessey (Officer-2) had just come on for the night shift. He took over. "You just got home? You called immediately?"
"That's right. C-c-could you come right away?"
"We'll be there in ten seconds. Have you touched anything?"
"No. Not her, and not the box."
"Have you called a hospital?"
His voice rose. "No. She's dead."
Hennessey took down his name—Walters—and booth number and hung up. "Line, Fisher, come with me. Torrie, will you call the City Hospital and have them send a 'copter? If Walters hadn't touched her he could hardly be sure she was dead."
They went through the displacement booth one at a time, dialing and vanishing. For Hennessey it was as if the Homicide room vanished as he dialed the last digit, and he was looking into a porch light.
Jeffrey Walters was waiting in the house. He was medium sized, a bit overweight, his light brown hair going thin on top. His paper business suit was wrinkled. He wore an anxious, fearful look—which figured, either way, Hennessey thought.
And he'd been right. Alicia Walters was dead. From her attitude she had been sitting sideways on the couch when something crashed into her head, and she had sprawled forward. A green cigarette box was sitting on the glass coffee table. It was bloody along one edge, and the blood had marked the glass.
The small, bloody, beautifully marked green malachite box could have done it. It would have been held in the right hand, swung full-armed. One of the detectives used chalk to mark its position on the table, then nudged it into a plastic bag and tied the neck.
Walters had sagged into a reading chair as if worn out. Hennessey approached him. "You said she was your ex-wife?"
"That's right. She didn't give up using her married name."
"What was she doing here, then?"
"I don't know. We had a fight earlier this evening. I finally threw her out and went back to the Sirius Club. I was half afraid she'd just follow me back, but she didn't. I guess she let herself back in and waited for me here."
"She had a key?"
Walters' laugh was feeble. "She always had a key. I've had the lock changed twice. It didn't work. I'd come home and find her here. 'I just wanted to talk,' she'd say." He stopped abruptly.
"That doesn't explain why she'd let someone else in."
"No. She must have, though, mustn't she? I don't know why she did that."
The ambulance helicopter landed in the street outside. Two men entered with a stretcher. They shifted Alicia Walters' dead body to the stretcher, leaving a chalk outline Fisher had drawn earlier.
Walters watched through the picture window as they walked the Stretcher into the portable JumpShift unit in the side of the 'copter. They closed the hatch, tapped buttons in a learned rhythm on a phone dial set in the hatch. When they opened the hatch to check, it was empty. They closed it again and boarded the 'copter.
Walters said, "You'll do an autopsy immediately, won't you?"
"Of course. Why do you ask?"
"Well ... it's possible I might have an alibi for the time of the murder."
Hennessey laughed before he could stop himself. Walters looked puzzled and affronted.
Hennessey didn't explain. But later, as he was leaving the station house for home and bed, he snorted. "Alibi," he said. "Idiot."
The displacement booths had come suddenly. One year, a science fiction writer's daydream. The next, A.D. 1992, an experimental reality. Teleportation. Instantaneous travel. Another year and they were being used for cargo transport. Two more, and the passenger displacement booths were springing up everywhere in the world.
By luck and the laws of physics, the world had had time to adjust. Teleportation obeyed the Laws of Conservation of Energy and Conservation of Momentum. Teleporting uphill took an energy input to match the gain in potential energy. A cargo would lose potential energy going downhill. And it was over a decade before JumpShift Inc. learned how to compensate for that effect. Teleportation over great distances was even more heavily restricted by the Earth's rotation.
Let a passenger flick too far west, and the difference between his momentum and the Earth's would smack him down against the floor of the booth. Too far east, and he would be flung against the ceiling. Too far north or south, and the Earth would be rotating faster or s1ower; he would flick in moving sideways, unless he had crossed the equator.
But cargo and passengers could be displaced between points of equal longitude and opposite latitude. Smuggling had become impossible to stop. There was a point in the South Pacific to correspond to any point in the United States, most of Canada, and parts of Mexico.
Smuggling via the displacement booths was a new crime. The Permanent Floating Riot Gangs were another. The booths would allow a crowd to gather with amazing rapidity.
Practically any news broadcast could start a flash crowd. And with the crowds the pickpockets and looters came flicking in.
When the booths were new, many householders had taken to putting their booths in living rooms or entrance halls. That had stopped fast, after an astounding rash of burglaries. These days only police stations and hospitals kept their booths indoors.
For twenty years the booths had not been feasible over distances greater than ten miles. If the short-distance booths had changed the nature of crime, what of the long distance booths? They had been in existence only four years. Most were at what had been airports, being run by what had been airline companies. Dial three numbers and you could be anywhere on Earth.
Flash crowds were bigger and more frequent.