Chapter 9: Cruiser Crash
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A small man with glasses and a tired face and a black bag came down the steps onto the deck. He picked out a fairly clean spot on the deck and put the bag down. Then he rubbed the back of his neck and stared at the wrecked cruiser, as if he didn't know where he was or what he had come for. Ohls said: "There's your customer, Doc. Dived into the rock last night. Around nine to ten. That's all we know." The small man looked in at the dead man morosely. He fingered the head, peered at the bruise on the temple, moved the head around with both hands, felt the man's ribs. He lifted a lax dead hand and stared at the fingernails. He let it fall and watched it fall. He stepped back and opened his bag and took out a terminal pad displaying a DOA form and began to write on it. "Broken neck's the apparent cause of death," he said, writing. "Which means he wasn't breathing vacuum for very long. Which means he's due to start getting stiff pretty quick now he's in the air. Better get him out of the ship before he does. You won't like doing it after." Ohls nodded. "How long dead, Doc?" "I wouldn't know." Ohls looked at him sharply and took the little cigar out of his mouth and looked at that sharply. "Pleased to know you, Doc. A coroner's man that can't guess within five minutes has me beat." The little man grinned sourly and put his pad in his bag. "If he ate dinner last night, I'll tell you - if I know what time he ate it. But not within five minutes." "How would he get that bruise - falling?" The little man looked at the bruise again. "I don't think so. That blow came from something covered. It had already bled subcutaneously while he was alive." "Blackjack, huh?" "Very likely." The little ME's man nodded, picked his bag off the deck and went back up the steps where he had come from. A robot ambulance trolley was backing into position near the cruiser. Ohls looked at me and said: "Let's go. Hardly worth the ride, was it?" We went back through the recovery barge to the port where we had docked and got into Ohls's ship. He wrestled it from the couplings and blasted back in the direction of Saturn, from here a mere bright light with no vestige of rings showing. Ohls cocked his chin at me and said: "Know him?" "Sure. The Sternwood chauffeur. I saw him working on that very cruiser out there yesterday." "I don't want to crowd you, Marlowe. Just tell me, did the job have anything to do with him?" "No. I don't even know his name." "Owen Taylor. How do I know? Funny about that. About a year or so back we had him in the cooler on an underage sex rap. It seems he run Sternwood's hotcha daughter, the young one, off to Venus. The sister ran after them and brings them back and had Owen heaved in the icebox. Then next day she comes down to the Habitat Attorney and gets him to beg the kid off with the prosecutor. She says the kid meant to marry her sister and wanted to, only the sister can't see it. All she wanted to do was to kick a few high ones off the bar and have herself a party. So we let the kid go and darned if they don't have him come back to work. And a little later we get the routine report on his prints back from Earth and he's got a prior back in Indiana, attempted hold-up six years ago. He got off with a six months in the county jail, which is where he got the cybernetic legs. We hand that to the Sternwoods and they keep him on just the same. What do you think of that?" "They seem to be a screwy family," I said, "Do they know about last night?" "No. I gotta go up against them now." "Leave the old man out of it, if you can." "Why?" "He has enough troubles and he's sick." "You mean Regan?" I scowled. "I don't know anything about Regan, I told you. I'm not looking for Regan. Regan hasn't bothered anybody that I know of." Ohls said: "Oh," and stared thoughtfully at the screens. For the rest of the ride back to our habitat he hardly spoke. He dropped me off downtown. I ate noodles with chopsticks at a counter for lunch and glanced at the afternoon news screens and couldn't find anything about Geiger in it. After lunch I walked spinwards on the boulevard to have another look at Geiger's Counter.
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Part 2