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Authors: Fredric Brown

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The Collection (8 page)

BOOK: The Collection
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"
Nothing,
"
Mearson said. He
left.

 

 

***

 

A guard brought Lorenz Kane to the consultation room and
left him there with Mortimer Mearson. Mearson introduced himself and they shook
hands. Kane, Mearson thought, looked quite calm, and definitely more puzzled
than worried. He was a tall, moderately good-looking man in his late thirties,
impeccably groomed despite a night in a cell. One got the idea that he was the
type of man who would manage to appear impeccably groomed anywhere, any time,
even a week after his bearers had deserted in midsafari nine hundred miles up
the Congo, taking all his possessions with them.

"Yes, Mr. Mearson. I shall be more than glad to have
you represent me. I've heard of you, read about cases you've handled. I don't know
why I didn't think of you myself, instead of asking for a recommendation. Now,
do you want to hear my story before you accept me as a client—or do you accept
as of now, for better or for worse?
"

"
For better or for worse,
"
Mearson said,
"
till—
"
And then stopped himself;
"till death do us part," is hardly a diplomatic phrase to use to a
man who stands, quite possibly, in the shadow of the electric chair.

But Kane smiled and finished the phrase himself.
"
Fine,"
he said. "Let's sit down then," and they sat down on the two chairs,
one on each side of the table in the consultation room.
"
And
since that means we
'
ll be seeing quite a bit of one another for a
while, let
'
s start on a first-name basis. But not Lorenz, in my
case. It's Larry."

"
And make mine Morty," Mearson said.
"
Now
I want your story in detail, but two quick questions first. Are you—?
"

'Wait," Kane interrupted him.
"One
quick
question ahead of your two. Are you absolutely and completely positive that
this room is not bugged, that this conversation is completely private?
"

"I am,
"
Mearson said.
"
Now
my first question: are you guilty?
"

"
The arresting officers claim that before
clamming up, you said one thing: `My God, she must have been real!' Is that
true, and if so what did you mean by it?
"

"I was stunned at the moment, Morty, and can't
remember—but I probably said something to that effect, because it
'
s
exactly what I was thinking. But as to what I meant by it—that's something I
can't answer quickly. The only way I can make you understand, if I can make
you understand at all, is to start at the beginning.
"

"
All right. Start. And take your time. We
don
'
t have to go over everything in one sitting. I can stall the
trial at least three months—longer if necessary.
"

"
I can tell it fairly quickly. It started—and
don
'
t ask me for an antecedent for the pronoun it—five and a half
months ago, in early April. About two-thirty A.M. on the morning of Tuesday,
April the third, to be as nearly exact about it as I can. I had been at a party
in Armand Village, north of town, and was on my way home. I—"

"
Forgive interruptions. Want to be sure I
have the whole picture as it unfolds. You were driving? Alone?
"

"
I was driving my Jag. I was alone."

"
Sober? Speeding?
"

"
Sober, yes. I
'
d left the party
relatively early—it was rather a dull bit—and had been feeling my drinks
moderately at that time. But I found myself suddenly quite hungry—I think I'd
forgotten to eat dinner—and stopped at a roadhouse. I had one cocktail while I
was waiting, but I ate all of a big steak when it came, all the trimmings, and
had several cups of coffee. And no drinks afterward. I'd say that when I left
there I was more sober than usual, if you know what I mean. And, on top of
that, I had half an hour's drive in an open car through the cool night air. On
the whole, I'd say that I was soberer than I am now—and I haven't had a drink
since shortly before midnight last night. I—"

"
Hold it a moment," Mearson said. He
took a silver flask from his hip pocket and extended it across the table.
"A relic of Prohibition; I occasionally use it to play St. Bernard to
clients too recently incarcerated to have been able to arrange for importation
of the necessities of life."

Kane said, "Ahhh. Morty, you may double your fee for
service beyond the call of duty
,
." He drank deeply.

"Where were we?" he asked. "Oh, yes. I was
definitely sober. Speeding? Only technically. I was heading south on Vine
Street a few blocks short of Rostov—"

"Near the Forty-fourth Precinct Station."

"Exactly. It figures in. It's a twenty-five-mile zone
and I was going about forty, but what the hell, it was half-past two in the
morning and there wasn't any other traffic. Only the proverbial little old lady
from Pasadena would have been going
less
than forty."

"
She wouldn't have been out that late. But
carry on."

"
So all of a sudden out of the mouth of an
alley in the middle of the block comes a girl on a bicycle, pedaling about as
fast as a bicycle can go. And right in front of me. I got one clear flash of
her as I stepped on the brake as hard as I could. She was a teenager, like
sixteen or seventeen. She had red hair that was blowing out from under a brown
babushka she had on her head. She wore a light green angora sweater and tan
pants of the kind they call pedal pushers. She was on a red bicycle."

"You got all that in one glance?"

"Yes. I can still visualize it clearly. And—this I'll
never forget —just before the moment of impact, she turned and was looking
straight at me, through frightened eyes behind shell-rimmed glasses.

"
My foot was, by then, trying to push the
brake pedal through the floor and the damn Jag was starting to slue and make up
its mind whether to go end over end or what. But hell, no matter how fast your
reactions are—and mine are pretty good —you can barely start to slow
down
a
car in a few yards if you
'
re going forty. I must have still been
going over thirty when I hit her—it was
a hell
of an impact.

"
And then bump-crunch, bump-crunch, as first
the front wheels of the Jag went over and then the back wheels. The bumps were
her,
of course, and the crunches were the bicycle. And the car shuddered to a
stop maybe another thirty feet on.

"
Ahead of me, through the windshield, I
could see the lights of the precinct station only a block away. I got out of
the car and started running for it. I didn
'
t look back. I didn
'
t
want
to look back. There was no point to it; she had to be deader than
dead, after that impact.

"
I ran into the precinct house and after a
few seconds I got coherent enough to get across what I was trying to tell them.
Two of the city's finest left with me and we started back the block to the
scene of the accident. I started out by running, but they only walked fast and
I slowed myself down because I wasn
'
t anxious to get there first.
Well, we got there and—
"

"Let me guess," the attorney said. "No girl,
no bicycle."

Kane nodded slowly. "There was the Jag, slued crooked
in the street. Headlights on. Ignition key still on, but the engine had
stalled. Behind it, about forty feet of skid marks, starting a dozen feet back
of the point where the alley cut out into the street.

"
And that was all. No girl. No bicycle. Not
a drop of blood or a scrap of metal. Not a scratch or a dent in the front of
the car. They thought I was crazy and I don
'
t blame them. They didn
'
t
even trust me to get the car off the street; one of them did that and parked it
at the curb—and kept the key instead of handing it to me—and they took me back
to the station house and questioned me.

"I was there the rest of the night. I suppose I could
have called a friend and had the friend get me an attorney to get me out on
bail, but I was just too shaken to think of it. Maybe even too shaken to
want
out, to have any idea where I'd want to go or what I'd want to do if I got
out. I just wanted to be alone to think and, after the questioning, a chance to
do that was just what I got. They didn't toss me into the drunk tank. Guess I
was well enough dressed, had enough impressive identification on me, to
convince them that, sane or nuts, I was a solid and solvent citizen, to be
handled with kid gloves and not rubber hose. Anyway, they had a single cell
open and put me in it and I was content to do my thinking there. I didn
'
t
even try to sleep.

"
The next morning they had a police head
shrinker come in to talk to me. By that time I
'
d simmered down to
the point where I realized that, whatever the score was, the police weren
'
t
going to be any help to me and the sooner I got out of their hands the better.
So I conned the head shrinker a bit by starting to play my story down instead
of telling it straight. I left out sound effects, like the crunching of the
bicycle being run over and I left out kinetic sensations, feeling the impact
and the bumps, gave it to him as what could have been purely a sudden and
momentary
visual
hallucination. He bought it after a while, and they let
me go.
"

Kane stopped talking long enough to take a pull at the
silver flask and then asked, "With me so far? And, whether you believe me
or not, any questions to date?"

"Just one," the attorney said. "Are you, can
you be, positive that your experience with the police at the Forty-fourth is
objective and verifiable? In other words, if this comes to a trial and we
should decide on an insanity defense, can I call as witnesses the policemen who
talked to you, and the police psychiatrist?"

Kane grinned a little crookedly.
"
To me my
experience with the police is just as objective as my running over the girl on
the bicycle. But at least you can verify the former. See if it's on the blotter
and if they remember it. Dig?
"

"
I'm hip. Carry on.
"

"
So the police were satisfied that I'd had
an hallucination. I damn well wasn't. I did several things. I had a garage run
the Jag up on a rack and I went over the underside of it, as well as the front.
No sign. Okay, it hadn
'
t happened, as far as the
car
was
concerned.

"
Second, I wanted to know if a girl of that
description, living or dead, had been out on a bicycle that night. I spent
several thousand dollars with a private detective agency, having them canvass that
neighborhood—and a fair area around it—with a fine-tooth comb to find if a girl
answering that description currently or ever had existed, with or without a
red bicycle. They came up with a few possible red-headed teenagers, but I
managed to get a gander at each of them, no dice.

"And,
after asking around, I picked a head
shrinker of my own and started going to him. Allegedly the best in the city,
certainly the most expensive. Went to him for two months. It was a washout. I
never found out what he thought had happened; he wouldn't talk. You know how
psychoanalysts work, they make you do the talking, analyze yourself, and
finally tell them what's wrong with you, then you yak about it awhile and tell
them you're cured, and they then agree with you and tell you to go with God.
All right if your subconscious knows what the score is and eventually lets it
leak out. But my subconscious didn
'
t know which end was up, so I was
wasting my time, and I quit.

"
But meanwhile I'd leveled with a few
friends of mine to get their ideas and one of them—a professor of philosophy at
the university—started talking about ontology and that started me reading up on
ontology and gave me a clue. In fact, I thought it was more than a clue, I
thought it was the
answer.
Until last night. Since last night I know I
was at least partly wrong."

"Ontology—" said Mearson. "Word
'
s
vaguely familiar, but will you pin it down for me?"

"I quote you the
Webster Unabridged,
unexpurgated
version: `Ontology is the science of being or reality; the branch of knowledge
that investigates the nature, essential properties, and relations of being, as
such."

Kane glanced at his wrist watch. "But this is taking
longer to tell than I thought. I'm getting tired talking and no doubt you're
even more tired of listening. Shall we finish this tomorrow?"

"
An excellent idea, Larry.
"
Mearson stood up.

Kane tilted the silver flask for the last drop and handed it
back.
"
You'll play St. Bernard again?
"

 

 

***

 

"
I went to the Forty-fourth," Mearson
said.
"
The incident you described to me is on the blotter all
right. And I talked to one of the two coppers who went back with you to the
scene of the—uh—back to the car. Your
reporting
of the accident was
real, no question of that."

"I'll start where I left off," Kane said.
"Ontology, the study of the nature of reality. In reading up on it I came
across solipsism, which originated with the Greeks. It is the belief that the
entire universe is the product of one's imagination—in my case,
my
imagination.
That I myself am the only concrete reality and that all things and all other
people exist only in my mind."

BOOK: The Collection
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