Kearsarge: But why?
Horowitz: Just you listen. We start with the murders and finish with the why. You’ll see.
Iris: Well then, the ship will do the removal. The cyanide —both cyanides—do the actual killing, and it hits so fast that the ship keeps blasting, out and out until the fuel is gone, and forever after that. We three are on it; Flannel crashes in a small craft and if anybody wonders about it, they don’t wonder much. Is there any insignia on that boat, by the way, Kearsarge?
Kearsarge: Always.
Iris: Go look, will you? Thanks. Now, what about the traces we leave behind us? Well, we took off illegally so notified no one and filed no clearances. You, George, were already in hiding from Heri Gonza’s persecutions; Kearsarge here is so frequently away on indeterminate trips of varying lengths that he would soon be forgotten; Flannel here— no offense, Flannel—I don’t think anyone would notice that you’re gone for good. As for me, Heri Gonza himself had me plant a story about going off secretly for some solitary research for a year or so. What’s the matter, Kearsarge?
Kearsarge: I wouldn’ta believed it. No insignia. Filed off and sanded smooth and painted. Numbers off the thrust block. Trade-name off the dash, even. I... I wouldn’ta believed it.
Horowitz: Now you’d better listen to the lady.
Iris: No insignia. So even poor Flannel’s little smashup is thoroughly covered. Speaking of Flannel, I say again that it was stretching credibility to put him aboard that way— unless you assume that he was put aboard like the rest of us, to be done away with. I certainly came under false pretenses: Heri Gonza not only told me he needed an astro-gator for the trip, which he didn’t, but had me bone up on the subject.
Now we can take a quick look at motive. George Horowitz here is the most obvious. He has for a long time been a thorn in the flesh of that comedian. Not only has he concluded that Heri Gonza doesn’t really want to find a cure for iapetitis—he says so very loudly and as often as he can. In addition, George is always on the very verge of whipping the disease, something that frightens Heri Gonza so much that he’s actually hoarding patients so George can’t get to them. Also, he doesn’t like George.
Why kill Flannel? Is he tired of you, Flannel? Did you boggle something he asked you to do?
Flannel: He don’t have to kill me, Miss Iris. He could fire me any time. I’d feel real bad, but I wouldn’t bother him none. He knows that.
Iris: Then you must know too much. You must know something about him so dangerous he won’t feel safe until you’re dead.
Flannel: So help me, lady, there ain’t a single thing like that I know about him. Not one. Not that I know of.
Horowitz: There’s the key, Iris. He doesn’t know he knows it.
Kearsarge: Then that’s me too, because if there’s a single thing I know that he’d have to kill me for then I don’t know what it is.
Iris: You said “key.” Lock and key. A combination of things. Like if you put what Flannel knows with what Kearsarge knows, they will be dangerous to Heri Gonza.
Flannel and Kearsarge gape at each other blankly and simultaneously shrug.
Horowitz: I can give you one example of a piece of knowledge we all have that would be dangerous to him. We now know that the disease virus does not originate on Iapetus. Which means that poor Swope was not responsible for bringing it to earth, and, further, the conclusion that the little Tresak girl—the first case—caught it from the wreckage of the space ship, was unwarranted.
Flannel: I brung that picture of that little girl standing in the wreck, I brung it to Heri Gonza. He liked it.
Iris: What made you do that?
Flannel: I done it all the time. He told me to.
Horowitz: Bring him pictures of little girls?
Flannel: Girls, boys . . . but pretty ones. I got to know just the ones he would like. He liked to use ‘em on his show.
Iris and Horowitz lock glances for one horrified second, and then pounce all but bodily on Flannel.
Iris: Did you ever show him a picture of any child who later contracted the disease?
Flanneclass="underline" (startled) Wh ... I dunno.
Iris: (shouting) Think! Think!
Horowitz: (also shouting) You did! You did! The Tresak girl—that photograph of her was taken before she had the disease!
Flannel: Well, yeah, her. And that little blond one he had on the telethon that din’t speak no English from Est’-onia, but you’re not lettin’ me think.
Horowitz: (subsiding) And you didn’t know what it was you had on him that he considered dangerous.
Flannel: What?
Kearsarge: I remember that little blond girl. I flew her from Esthonia.
Iris: Before or after she had the disease?
Kearsarge: (shrugging) The kind of thing I never noticed. She . . . she looked all right to me. Real pretty little kid.
Iris: How long before the telethon was that?
Kearsarge: Week or so. Wait, I can tell you to the day. (He rises from the chess table and goes to a locker, from which he brings a notebook. He leafs.) Here it is. Nine days.
Iris: (faintly) He said, on the telethon, three days . . . first symptoms.
Horowitz: (excitedly) May I see that? (Takes book, riffles it, throws it on the table, runs to lab, comes back with cardboard file, fans through it, comes up with folder.) Iris, take Kearsarge’s book. Right. Now did he fly to Belem on the ninth of May?
Iris: The sixth.
Horowitz: Rome, around March twelfth.
Iris: March twelfth, March—here it is. The eleventh.
Horowitz: One more. Indianapolis, middle of June.
Iris: Exactly. The fifteenth. What is that you have there?
He throws it down in front of her.
Horowitz: Case files. Arranged chronologically by known or estimated date of first symptom, in an effort to find some pattern of incidence. No wonder there was never any pattern. God in Heaven, if he wanted a clinic in Australia, cases would occur in Australia.
Flanneclass="underline" (bewildered) I don’t know what you all are talkin’ about.
Kearsarge: (grimly) I think I do.
Iris: Now do you think you’re worth murdering—you who can actually place him on the map, at the time some child was stricken, every single time?
Kearsarge: (huskily) I’m worth murdering. I. . . didn’t know.
Flanneclass="underline" (poring over the case file) Here’s that one I seen in Bellefontaine that time, she had on a red dress. And this little guy here, he got his picture in a magazine I found on the street in Little Rock and I had to go clear to St. Louis to find him.
Kearsarge hops up on a chair and kicks Flannel in the head.