Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon(87)

    He was preening himself as if he’d figured it out himself. “Now watch this,” he said, pointing back at the screen.

    Jack sighed.

    The view widened again. I could see the rail on which the puppeteer was leaning, stacked with little discarded garments - tiny cartoon suit jackets and trousers, crumpled doll-size judges’ robes and minuscule loud ties. Then the face of the puppeteer came into view.

    Jack.

    It was a cartoon version of his face, but larger and more detailed and realistic than the Lawyers from Hell characters, and instantly recognizable. He winked at us, and a curtain began closing over the picture. In a few seconds the game reappeared.

“You programmed Nude Lawyers from Hell?” I said, looking up at the real Jack.

    He shrugged sheepishly. “I just wanted to see if I could,” he said. “And I thought it would make a nice April Fools’ gag.”

“See,” the chief said. “He admits it.”

“Some gag, sending it out all over the world,” I said.

“I didn’t do that,” he protested. “I just put it on a couple of machines here in the office. I have no idea how it got out on the Web.”

“For heaven’s sake, you know these clowns,” I said. “Did you really think it wouldn’t?”

“You could have a point,” Jack said.

“Now you understand his motive,” the chief said, leaning back and lacing his fingers across his stomach.

“Not really,” I said. “What does Jack programming Nude Lawyers from Hell have to do with Ted’s murder?”

    Either Jack was a really good actor or he was looking forward to the answer, too.

“Mr. Corrigan was blackmailing him,” the chief said.

“Ted tried blackmailing me,” Jack admitted. “Back in April, when he found the Easter egg himself. I told him to go to hell, and he didn’t try again.”

“So you say,” the chief said. “But Mr. Corrigan’s blackmail log says differently. It says he approached you Sunday night - the night before the murder. And you struck the next day.”

“You can’t be serious,” Jack said. “For one thing, why would I pay blackmail to conceal something that anyone could stumble on if they pressed the right key combination?”

“And before you strangled him, you stunned him with a blow to the throat,” the chief said, ignoring Jack’s protest. “The kind of blow they teach you in those martial arts classes you’ve taken so many of.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “How can you possibly know from Ted’s body that the person who hit him was a martial artist, instead of someone who just happened to hit the right place?”

“And then there’s the location of Mr. Ransom’s cube,” the chief said. “Not many places along its route that the mail cart isn’t visible to three or four people. But back here, no one but Mr. Ransom here can see the cart when it stops to give him his mail.”

    That was true, anyway, I realized as I thought back to my map.

“What kind of idiot would kill someone outside his own cube?” I asked aloud.

“An idiot who knows he can send the body rolling merrily on its way with the push of a button, and none the wiser,” the chief said.

“And Jack would have to be crazy to kill Ted here, when every few minutes, someone pops in to bother him about something,” I said.

“He can tell all that to his lawyer,” the chief said. “Haven’t you found that damned card yet?”

    He barked the last question to Sammy, who turned beet red and shook his head.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” the chief muttered. He unbuttoned his top left shirt pocket and pulled out a laminated card. He looked over his glasses, reproachfully, at Sammy, and then pushed them up on his nose and looked back at the card.

“You have the right to remain silent,” he intoned, and then he gave the entire Miranda warning. Not that he seemed to need the card and he didn’t rattle it off, either. He paced himself, savoring each word, with the rich, round delivery of a revival tent preacher or an old-fashioned small-town politician. By the time he finished you wanted to stand up and sing “God Bless America.”

“You keep it in your uniform shirt pocket,” he said, tucking the card away in Sammy’s pocket. Sammy blushed again.

“I guess that means you’re going to take me off to jail,” Jack said.

    The chief nodded. Sammy stepped forward, but the chief held up his hand and stopped him.