Somebody Else's Music(130)

“What’s a psychofan?”

“Somebody who dresses up like Queen Amalia and tries to talk to Bennis in Zedalian.”

“What?”

“It’s a long story. Let’s go back in the living room.”

Kyle still looked bewildered, but he did as he was told. Gregor went out to the suite’s living room and pulled out one of the chairs around its oval dining table. Then he reached into his pocket to get his folded-up version of Russ Donahue’s fax. He spread it out against the table. The first page was one of those fax administrative pages and he pushed it away. The second page was full of Russ’s lawyer’s scrawl.

Gregor, it said. I have no idea what you wanted this for, but here it is. There’s not much of it. I checked a couple of sources and they all say the same thing. We weren’t really collecting comprehensive crime records in this state back in 1969. What I was able to get were the big things that the municipal police forces thought were worthwhile to talk to Harrisburg about, but that doesn’t give you much. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help. Get in touch if you need anything else. Donna and Tommy say hi. Tibor says there’s some Bible fanatic on rec.arts.mystery who claims that the King James Bible is a perfectly accurate translation of the Masoretic text, but he doesn’t even know there are two Masoretic texts. I have no idea what that means, but he said you would. Take care. Russ.

Gregor had no idea what the Masoretic text was, never mind that there were two of them. He put Russ’s note away, thinking he would get back to it, and Tibor and rec.arts.mystery and the Masoretic text, when he had a little time. There were only two more pages left, and there wasn’t much on them but bureaucratic verbiage about “felony crime reporting patterns” and “inadequacies in local law enforcement paradigms.” He got out his notebook, flipped it to a fresh page, and got out his pen.

“So what’s that,” Kyle asked, “a list of all the crimes committed in Hollman in the last six days? What?”

“It’s the only list available of the crimes committed in this county in July and August of 1969. It’s nowhere near comprehensive, unfortunately.”

Kyle came and stood behind Gregor’s shoulder. “There doesn’t look like there’s much there but a lot of talk. Were there really practically no crimes here back then? I mean, even just in the last month, I could probably do you better than that in Hollman alone.”

“In felony arrests?”

“Oh,” Kyle said. “Well, no. We don’t really get a lot of felony arrests.”

Gregor looked through the first page and wrote a list that said:



July 5 Kennanburg arrest attempted murder weapon shotgun

July 7 Kennanburg arrest murder weapon blunt instrument

July 8 Kennanburg arrest attempted murder weapon pistol

July 16 Kennanburg murder weapon razor

July 17 Kennanburg arrest narcotics possession with intent to sell

July 18 Kennanburg attempted murder weapon shotgun

July 19 Kennanburg murder weapon razor

July 22 Kennanburg attempted murder weapon shotgun





He pushed that page out of the way and went through the next one. There was far less on this page. Russ was right to say they hadn’t done much about collecting crime reports in 1969. Gregor wrote down:



August 2 Kennanburg arrest attempted murder shotgun

August 3 Kennanburg narcotics possession with intent to sell

August 12 Kennanburg arrest murder weapon pistol





Then he sat back and looked over what he had.

“Why do some of them say ‘arrest’ and others don’t?” Kyle said.

“Because whenever the Kennanburg municipal police got in touch with the state police, some of the suspects were under arrest and some weren’t. Which means sometimes they were asking for help with supporting evidence and sometimes they were asking for help finding the perpetrator.”

“Why is it only Kennanburg?”

“Kennanburg is a denser population area. Denser population areas have more crime. They’re also more likely to know who to talk to if they want help from the state. And, like I said, this is not a complete list. It’s not anything like it. All kinds of mayhem could have been going on, and all kinds of mayhem could have been reported to the state police, without it actually showing up in this report. Even now, when we try to be careful about this sort of thing, we miss a lot.”

Kyle came around to Gregor’s side and leaned far over the table. “Look at that,” he said. “Murder, weapon razor. Twice.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, what about it? Did they arrest the guy who did it? Did they find the murder weapon? What? Because Michael Houseman could have been killed with a razor. We always thought it was a knife, but I never heard anything except that whatever it was had to be really sharp. And they never found the weapon.”