Sabre Takes a Case

by Roberto Sanhueza

Table of Contents
Part 1 appears
in this issue.

part 2 of 2

I went around the couch and there lay a woman, her head with an awful dent on the back and lying in a pool of blood. She didn’t look much like the Mrs. Moore I remembered, but then again she wasn’t wearing any sims now.

Tabby had stopped purring, she jumped from my limp arms and went to her mistress softly meowing, she seemed to be asking her to get up.

This was no good. I froze there trying not to touch anything.

I considered my options.

I could call the cops, but I had had enough troubles lately with inspector Brody. I didn’t want to get involved in this.

Perhaps I should just quietly leave. Brody would eventually link Mrs. Moore to my office, but that would be all. Just another customer.

Then I saw Tabby sniffing at something. A baseball bat. A bloody baseball bat.

I didn’t think Mrs. Moore played much baseball. She must have had the bat for self-defense but it had obviously been used against her.

My instincts screamed for me to get the hell out of there, but Mrs. Moore had been my customer, after all, and whoever had killed her had also left me without the rest of my fee.

Besides, there was something odd about that bat. It was too damn visible. it was just lying there like it was meant to be found.

I went closer, intent on not touching anything. I bent over and I clearly saw the finger prints on its handle, the bloody finger prints. I took a deep breath and told myself. “Out Sabre, out of here right now!”

But professional curiosity had taken the best of me already. I scanned the dead woman and the finger prints and called Tiffy via my implants. “Hi Tiffy, I want you to give me an identification on this person and on these finger prints, check on the police mainframe for me.”

Did I mention my not-so-legal gear includes some very nice hacking muscle?

“Sure thing boss! just a sec!”

Tiffy was back in no time. “Ready boss! The woman’s parameters match with Helen W. Moore, your customer of this afternoon and the fingerprints belong to Samuel S. Sabre, that is, you. Good bye and good day boss!”

“What?! Come again Tiffy!”

I almost jumped out of my shoes when I heard a voice behind me.

“Don’t bother Sabre, those are your finger prints there.”

There she stood, gorgeous and cool as ever.

“Claire! What are you doing here!”

“Trying to save your sorry ass, you fool.”

“Save me? from what? I had nothing to do with this!.”

“Sammy, Sammy. You’ve been framed and framed good. To the cops it will look like she tried to throw you out of her flat and you took the bat from her and socked her.”

“But... who’s doing this to me and why?”

She seemed to soften and smiled at me. It was amazing how real she looked.

“You didn’t check on Mrs. Moore as you should have. Do you know what she did for a living? Who she worked for?”

As a matter of fact I didn’t. I had been much too eager to pay my debts to do much checking.

Claire came closer and touched me on my cheek. It felt absolutely real.

“Sam Sabre, you’re in much deeper shit than you imagine. Inspector Brody is on his way here answering an anonymous call and those, trust me, are your finger prints on that bat. You do want to get out of here, pronto!.”

I tried to say something, to find out some more but she was already gone, gone like the ghost she was.

I got to the window and looked out.

Hell! that was a couple of police cars arriving on the street below.

Time for hesitation was through. I was out of there!

I took the bat, that would make it much harder for Inspector Brody to relate Mrs. Moore to me. Brody would eventually link Mrs. Moore to my office but the longer it took him the better.

I also grabbed Tabby, she seemed to be at the bottom of all this and I was decided to get to that bottom.

On my way down the stairs, the ancient elevator started its way up. The cranking and creaking was clearly audible.

On the second floor I stopped to alter my sim. My usual trench coat and brim hat vanished and my face changed to a much older man.

No doubt the cops have the means to see through sims but I think I mentioned my gear is not altogether legal. The two of them standing at the main door didn’t even wink as I went by hiding cat and bat beneath my new look.

The walk to the nearest subway entrance, a block away, seemed to last forever. I didn’t look back but I thought I’d hear them any time calling for me to stop.

They didn’t.

Once I was sitting and the tube was taking cat, bat and me rapidly out of the late Mrs. Moore’s neighborhood I could relax a bit.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this, Sam.” The voice came from behind me, which was odd since the car was empty when I walked in.

Then again perhaps it wasn’t so odd anymore.

“Shit, Claire, stop wracking my nerves like that!”

She was sitting on the bunk behind me, beautiful as ever. “Calm down, Sammy boy. I see you made it out of the scene of the crime in one piece. Perhaps you’re more resourceful than I thought.”

“Okay, my ghost lady, start explaining.”

She just gave me a long inquiring look and smiled. “Call Tiffy first. Ask her to play the recording she keeps of Mrs. Moore’s visit this afternoon.”

I called.

Tiffy played the VR recording and my office seemed to spread around us and the tube car to disappear.

I always feel like a ghost when I watch a VR recording. People go about their business and go through me like I wasn’t there, which actually I’m not. I suppose for Claire the feeling is a much more usual one.

The scene went on pretty much as I remembered it to the point where Mrs. Moore mentioned the cat. In the recording she was asking me to look for her niece. Niece? what niece? The rest went on as it had. Mrs. Moore paid and I left the office.

“That’s enough, are you starting to get the picture?”

My office vanished around us and the tube appeared again, Claire and I sitting alone in the car and the bright flash of the stations going by. My head was spinning.

“Okay, Claire, point taken. You know a whole lot more about this than I do. Please explain.”

“It goes all back to the cat, Sam. You see, Mrs. Moore didn’t actually buy Tabby from Stargene. She happened to work there as a cleaning woman, and she picked the kitten from the trash cans where it had been dumped as dead. She took the kitten home hidden, and as Tabby grew, Moore realized she hadn’t adopted your everyday run of the mill cat.

“In fact, Tabby is an experiment Stargene is doing on enhanced animals. She’s far brighter than the average cat.”

I looked at Tabby. She had remained very cool through all this and she seemed to be hearing our conversation, although I knew that she couldn’t see or hear Claire. Cats don’t usually have VR implants.

“Soon Moore saw Tabby as a very valuable possession indeed. I suppose she might have considered selling the cat to some of Stargene’s rival companies. When Tabby disappeared, she feared the worst and panicked.

“She couldn’t very well go the police, and in fact she never did. She started looking for a private investigator, not a very well known one but rather a low profile one.”

Low profile! my ass! This Claire dame knows how to be insulting.

She went on. “In fact I helped a bit. I hacked her line and put your name at the top in her search.”

“So I owe it to you to be involved in this mess!”

“In a way, but I never thought it would come to murder.”

“But why me?”

Her expression hardened. “Because an old acquaintance of mine (and of yours as well) is involved in this. Remember Rick?”

“You mean Rick from the Café Américain?”

“Very same one. You dealt with him before; you can handle him.”

“What if I don’t want to handle him or anybody else? What if I just go straight to Inspector Brody with the cat, bloody bat and the whole story? He might not buy it, but he’s bound to do some checking just the same.”

“You don’t want to do that, Sammy dear. There’s an angle you haven’t considered”

I didn’t like her smile.

“What do you mean?”

“Check your bank account, dear. And Sam... don’t call us, we’ll call you. So long!”

“Claire! hold it, damn it! don’t go!”

She was gone, just like that. I was alone in the tube again.

I called Tiffy once more. The good thing about AI’s is that they don’t sleep. They’re available at any time.

“Tiffy, please send my bank account over. Any calls for me?”

“Okay boss. Here goes, and yes, there are calls for you. Many.”

The numbers displayed in front of me.

“But this is wrong, Tiffy. The down payment Mrs. Moore made is missing.”

“And that is one of the calls about. Your bank cancelled the deposit. It seems Mrs. Moore’s credits bounced.”

Things were clicking neatly in place. There you had the reason why I could have killed the old hag. She was throwing me out of her apartment when I came demanding my payment and I took the bat from her and gave it back on her head. That’s the way Brody would eventually figure it out anyway.

Hell. That’s the way anybody would figure it out.

I was nailed, nailed good.

“You got some other calls from a certain Mr. Manson, boss. He seemed very upset.”

If things had clicked into place a while ago, now they screamed.

Manson! My gear dealer. If the credits Mrs. Moore had paid me with had bounced, then Manson would be indeed very upset.

And looking for me.

So I was back were I started this morning, financially wise. Plus one murder charge and a cat and minus a client.

Tabby meowed softly and brought me back to the world. I looked around to see where I was. It seemed like I had been riding the tube all night but it couldn’t be that late.

“All right, girl, I know you’re hungry and so am I. Let’s find a place to eat something before the night is over while I consider my options.”

There we were, Tabby and I, sitting in a late snack place that was still open. The cat seemed completely unconcerned with the whole mess and licked her milk and purred contentedly.

By the time the dark sky was beginning to turn a dirty gray I had my mind pretty much made up.

My late client Mrs. Moore had tried to cheat Stargene taking what they thought it was theirs. The big corporate bucks had retaliated, with a vengeance. Trouble was, they had chosen me as a scapegoat, in the process putting my gear dealer against me as a by-product.

So now I had to stay clear from the police and my dealers. And from Stargene as well, most likely.

The only leverage I had was Tabby. Stargene wanted her, wanted her bad enough to kill for. Why? All I had to do was to find out why was the cat so important to Stargene, find the real murder and turn him/her to Brody and try meanwhile to stay alive. Peace of cake, really.

What was Claire’s part in all this? Something else to find out.

Didn’t have much time though. It was only a matter of hours before Brody traced Mrs. Moore to my office. Not much time, but it was a least a head start.

“Come on Tabby, let’s go to my office before it’s morning. I’ve got a baseball bat to analyze.”

The cat just purred when I picked her up but her green eyes seemed to mischievously laugh at me as we left and faced the gray dawn.

A new day was beginning in the city.

Continuation pending...