Pobjoy chuckled. “What makes you think I know?”
Garrod was tempted to mention Jane Wason—after all, he was in a position to recompense her for the loss of a job in multiples of a lifetime’s salary—but he decided to carry it through alone. “I think you know because you tried bloody hard to make it appear that I, who couldn’t possibly help, was able to provide the answer. You identified the killer—but the method you used is packed with too much political dynamite for it to be made public.”
“This is just so stupid, man. Can you even suggest such a method?” Pobjoy spoke in a scathing, relaxed manner, but there were barely perceptible inflexions in his second sentence which spurred Garrod on. A chilly intuition stirred far back in his consciousness. He turned away and busied himself with another cigarette, both to hide his face from Pobjoy and to give himself time to think.
“Yeah,” he said, mind still racing. “I can suggest a method.” “Such as?”
“A highly illegal use of Retardite.” “That’s just a vague generality, Mr. Garrod—not a
method.”
“All right, I’ll be a little less vague.” Garrod sat down facing Pobjoy and stared into his eyes, filled with a new certainty. “Slow glass has already been used in satellites, but
the ordinary man-in-the-street—even your average member of the Privacy League—doesn’t mind that, because the recorded information is beamed down by television and nobody believes we’ll ever have a TV system which could show up details as small as individual human beings. At orbital heights the loss of picture quality makes that impossible.”
“Go on,” Pobjoy said cautiously.
“But the resolution of slow glass is so good that in the right circumstances and atmospheric conditions and with the right optical equipment, turbulence compensators, et cetera, you could follow the movements of people and cars—provided you bring the glass down out of orbit for direct interrogation in a lab. And to do that all you need is a transfer system, small robot spacecraft, torpedoes really, which the mother satellite could fire down to prearranged pick-up areas.”
“Nice idea—but have you thought of the expense?”
“Astronomical, but justifiable in certain circumstances—such as major political assassinations.”
Pobjoy lowered his face into his hands, sat quietly for a moment, then spoke through his fingers. “Does that idea horrify you?”
“It constitutes the most massive invasion of privacy anybody’s ever heard of.”
“When we were driving up to Bingham yesterday you said something about the huge drop in crime figures compensating for the citizens’ loss of some rights.”
“I know—but this new idea carries it to the point where a man couldn’t be sure of being alone even on a mountain top or in the middle of Death Valley.”
“Do you think the Government of the United States would spend millions of dollars just to watch a family having a picnic?”
Garrod shook his head. “You’re admitting I’m right?”
“No!” Pobjoy jumped to his feet and walked to the window. He stared out into the verticalities of the city then added in a quieter voice, “If…If such a thing were true—how could I admit it?”
“But if it were true, it would put you in the curious position
of knowing Wescott’s killer yet having to prove your case or appear to prove it by some other means.”
“We’ve already gone over that ground, Mr. Garrod, but that’s roughly the situation we would be in. What I need to know is—are’ you still determined to spread your theory
around?”
“As you point out—it’s only a theory.”
“But one which could do a lot of…” Pobjoy chose his word with obvious care, “…mischief.”
Garrod stood up and followed the other man to the window. “I could be persuaded not to. As the inventor of slow glass I feel sort of responsible—also I hate walking away from an unsolved problem.”
“You mean you’ll stay on as a member of the advisory
panel?”
“Not on your life,” Garrod said cheerfully. “I want to work on the real investigation. If you know your man we ought to be able to find some way to pin this thing on him.”
Ten minutes later Garrod was in Jane Wason’s room, in her bed. After yet another merging of bodies had ratified his new contact with life, he—although bound to secrecy—let her know that all her suspicions about Pobjoy’s handling of the investigation had been correct.
“I thought so,” she said. “John never said anything to me about it, but I know he’s been trying to figure out their secret
method.”
“You mean he doesn’t know?” Garrod was unable to resist boasting. “He mustn’t have used the right approach to Fobjoy.”
“I’ve been working with John long enough to know he uses the right approach to everything.” She raised herself on one arm and looked down at Garrod. “If he wasn’t able to
find out…”
Garrod laughed as he saw the speculative look in Jane’s eyes and the beginning of a frown disturbing the fine line of her eyebrows. “Forget it,” he said easily as he pulled the already-familiar torso across his own.
Chapter Thirteen
It was obvious right from the start that Captain Peter Remmert disapproved of Garrod’s intrusion. (He was a moody, changeable man; sometimes laconic and at others voluble in an incongruously bookish manner. Once during coffee he said to Garrod, “The rich amateur who solves murders as a hobby is no longer a credible figure, even in cheap fiction, thanks to the levelling out of the distribution of wealth. His heyday was the first half of the century when the anomaly of his position wasn’t appreciated by a poor to whom the rich were incomprehensible beings who might very well turn detective just to pass the time.”) But Remmert co-operated fully on what must have been, from his point of view, a tiresome and frustrating case. At the outset, all he knew was that he and a small selected team had been sworn to secrecy, given a name and address in Augusta, and told to do all they could to link the suspect with the assassination of Senator Wescott.
The suspect’s name was Ben Sala. He was aged forty-one, of Italian extraction, and he ran a small wholesale business specializing mainly in detergents and disinfectants. He lived, with his wife, in a smallish house in a middle-class district on the city’s west side. They had no children and the upper part of the house was sublet to a fifty-year-old bachelor, Matthew H. McCullough, who drove for the local transit system.
As a matter of routine, Remmert did some checking into Sala’s Italian ancestry and family, looking for a connection with the Mafia, but drew a blank. As he had been instructed not to make a direct approach to Sala about the assassination, the investigation seemed about to end almost before it had
begun—until another death occurred.
On the morning after Senator Wescott’s death among the exploding metallic vapours of his car, Sala’s lodger—McCullough—died of a heart attack while climbing up into his bus.
The coincidence did not come to the attention of Remmert’s team for several hours, and when it did they regarded it as little more than a ready-made excuse to pay a direct visit to Sala’s home—at first. At that stage the results of certain interrogations of Traffic Department slow glass monitors became available. And they gave Remmert an unpleasant and unwanted surprise. He had been instructed to prove that Sal a had carried out the assassination, and the monitors collaborated to the extent that they showed Sala’s battered delivery truck leaving his home, heading north towards Bingham some hours before the killing, and returning by the same route some hours after it. There was a drawback, however.