She laughed, and the blood came.
"No matter, my dear. You did beautifully there at the end, with your learning memories of all our rehearsals. I was proud of you."
He wiped the tape as he stole out.
RICHARD BIRELEY
Not a Petal Falls
Richard Bireley is the only practicing electrical engineer I know who has written radio commercials, run a late night disc show—and toured vaudeville as a magician, The Great Bikini. This sounds more like the proper exotic background for a writer—and so it is and he proves here.
pleasure warmth comfort
irritation anger pain pain that radiates
my leaves my roots pain a jumble of thoughts confusion
and pain and pain
a fading thoughts separate separate separate
gone one is gone sorrow grief FEAR
rapid motion the other retreats where is my friend
the game has ended too soon
why why my friend who feeds me
who soaks the dry earth that i may drink where is he
i am alone i thirst alone i thirst
not usual wrong wrong
warm thoughts gone gone gone gone gone
faded in pain pain gone
the other he he who came for the sharing of patterned cards
gone gone gone gone he who
also cooled my roots with brief rain
gone gone in haste gone in fear why why why am i alone
The sergeant took a long, careful look around the small room. Better than a lot of the S.C. hangouts I've been called to, he thought. Neat. And some of those old books look valuable. He picked up one and flipped it open. First printing, 1953. Seventy years old. Bound, too. The old boy had money. The room showed it. Wonder how he kept Senior Citizen status without signing over everything he owned. Probably put it in trust for some relative and took the interest. That was the usual dodge.
Yep. Nice room. Sim-oak furniture. A small tri-D by the bed. And a reader, too, with a couple of cubes lying on top. A touch of green came from the window, where a drooping plant on the sill faced its leaves to pick the last bit of warmth from a haze-shrouded sun. He sighed and turned away.
"Ralph. Get a vid of the room, will you. I want to move the corpus out of here."
"Sure, sergeant. Got the whole thing already. Finished the compu-check, too. You might like to take a look at the printout." He handed the sergeant a wide sheet of paper.
The sergeant ran his eyes down the column of figures. The red-inked summary at the bottom caught and held his eye.
Available data show high negative correlation factor. Probability of murder: 99.99%
He gazed at the impersonally accusing red letters for a moment, then sighed and crumpled the paper into a tight ball. Another officer hurried up behind him.
"This is the list you wanted," the man said. "Everybody who lives here in the home. The checks mark the ones who the old boy saw the most of. I underlined one. Charley Michner. He had a running bridge game going with the deceased. Should have known him better than anyone else around here."
"Thanks, Irv. Might as well start with him. Is he in?"
"Got him outside."
The sergeant lost interest as soon as the old man entered. Just another poor, tired bastard, he thought. Baggy pants. Faded shirt with frayed collar, and the shuffling gait of one who has nothing to hurry for. His head was down, and his fingers picked nervously at a dangling button on his shapeless black sweater. His answers came slowly, as if from far away.
"Huh? Sure I was here. It was Tuesday night, wasn't it? We play cards every Tuesday. On Wednesdays I go to a show. ... No. Not too late.... Sure. He was fine when I left. Happy. He beat me pretty bad. Poor Sam."
He stared at the floor for a moment, blinking, then raised his head, his mouth working.
"Killed? You said killed. Not Sam. He musta had one of his dizzy spells and fell. You said killed?"
The sergeant nodded, waiting.
The old man pulled his sweater tighter around him. He shook his head.
"That's got to be wrong. Nobody'd kill Sam. He fell. Didn't he fall? Nobody'd kill Sam." Charley Michner shook his head obstinately. "He musta had one of his dizzy spells and fell. He did fall, didn't he?"
"Someone killed him, Mr. Michner." The sergeant pomted to the table. "That small, green box there makes it very clear. We focused it on the area where we found your friend. The unit scanned his body, just as it was lying there. It scoped the thickness of his skull at the point of impact, checked the position of the body and location of all nearby objects. According to the computed results, the fracture was too deep, and the body position was all wrong. He had to be shoved, hard, to end up the way he did."
It seemed very quiet in the room. The old man rubbed at his eyes, and his chin quivered. His face was gray.
"It's wrong," he mumbled. "It's wrong. We played cards."
His shoulders drooped as he leaned foreward and put his head in his hands.
The sergeant nodded to one of the men.
"Better get him back to his room," he said.
Charley Michner shuffled to the door, then stopped and turned.
"Please tell me if you find out who did it. Poor Sam. Will you tell me?"
The sergeant nodded.
thoughts swirl and twist many mixed
fade and swell loud soft fast slow hurry get job done go i rest as light fades rest
a small shining drifts high to bathe me in pale light
my leaves are silver and gold is hiver wish to lift them to moonlight but no no moisture no moisture can't can't can't i die i die
oh now coming i feel thoughts brush near it i he someone comes fear fear again HIDE back to earth back to seed hide hide in drying earth
bright flash then dark thought twists and builds
fear fear and sorrow sound of shuffling
sound of small hardness hitting earth floor i sense a stopping fear stopping and the warm feeling surrounds me
my leaves my roots drenched drenched with life drenched with water
sound small noises faint from afar fear is back now very strong the shuffle noise
a strange dragging noise and again a quick light dark returns
fear goes smaller and smaller
i rest drinking
The room was filled with the quiet bustle of a routine job, efficiently done. The sergeant, hands in pockets, glanced around the room.
"Okay, people. Let's get this stuff checked out. Next of kin is already waiting to claim it as soon as we run it through the empathy plotter. I'd guess we won't find much, though. Just traces of his card-playing friend, Charley, and maybe the nephew, if he was here recently."
"That the guy who's in such a hurry to get his hands on the loot?" one of the techs asked.
"Yeh. That's him. Showed up first thing this morning. Raised seven kinds of hell because he couldn't come right over and pick it up. I bet he didn't leave much of a trace around here. He's the type that visits every Easter unless he has something better to do. Got it all ready?" The last to a technician standing beside a small console. The tech nodded.