All But a Pleasure: An Alternate-History Role-Playing Romance Murder Mystery. Phyllis Ann Karr
the hollow beneath his right collarbone.”
Lestrade stooped for a closer inspection. “Good eyes, Dave!… Looks like a tattoo of some kind… Whirligig? All blue, I think… Maybe one of those stamped tattoos popular with semi-secret groups like fraternal lodges and rolegame clubs.”
“Some kind of initiation that went too far? Bloody…bloody motherprickers!”
“Getting a little warmer with that one.” Lestrade straightened up and wiped her hands on her trousers. Not that she had touched any of the evidence, but that she felt dirty just being this close to it. “Better leave all this alone until the M.E. gets here.” For what he’s worth, she repeated to herself.
Rolegamers in futuristic and science-fiction scenarios, and maybe forensic specialists in some of the “alternate worlds” a few bona-fide scientists thought existed, might have wonderful machinery for pinpointing things like genetic evidence, exact nanosecond of death, and so on. Here and now in the real world, a small town of 35,000 budgeted minimal funds for its police department. She and Clayton were its only two detective grades. As for their medical examiner, Doc Grumeister might have an office in the station where he was on duty “ten to four,”—a dying idiom now the whole country had been on the twenty-four hour clock about twenty-four years; but Doc Grumeister was a joke, just marking time until retirement, and probably not that competent even in the forensics of the year Rosemary Lestrade was born.
Baptized Rosemary Lozinski—with herbs and flower petals in a Wiccan ceremony—she had grown into a tall, roughhewn-looking woman who entered law enforcement less to catch bad guys than to make sure no good guys got caught by mistake. Back in second grade, she had been punished herself for something she hadn’t done, and the experience left its mark. If catching the real bad guys came along with clearing the innocent suspects—and sometimes you had to catch the bad guys in order to clear the good ones—that was just an added bonus. Especially if and when the cases involved crimes likely to be repeated. Which, up to now in this town, had mainly included petty robbery and passing bad checks. Two cases of vandalism and one of arson—more than bad enough. She hoped that what she stood looking down at today wasn’t the first in a string of serial killings like the ones that, once solved, had made up her mind to leave Chicago, Illinois for Forest Green, Indiana.
Doc Grumeister tottered in at last, fumbled the corpse around for a few minutes, and ruled death by violence. No surprise. Whether the genital mess, burn marks, splinted finger- and toenails, lines of criss-cross cutmarks, and stamped tattoo had come before or after death, he couldn’t say and showed no real interest in trying to find out, not after the unknown number of hours the body had spent in the Vigo River. He simply ruled—also no surprise—that death had likelier resulted from torture than from drowning.
* * * *
Deep in the Deep, Deep Woods, halfway to the hot dog bush on the edge of the Lemonade Lake, the Raggedy Ann gamers in the library started hearing loud screams from the direction of the living room. One, then another…a short pause, then three more…another pause, and then one last one that sounded less like a scream than a blood-curdling shriek.
At the first scream Angela started up, recognizing Corwin’s voice. Then—“It’s just that stupid Spanish Inquisition game,” she told the four people in easy chairs around her, as she sat herself back down on the loveseat and returned to her title role in the game.
Two or three minutes after the shriek, Corwin strolled into the library, brushing invisible dust off his black lounge suit. “That was invigorating,” he remarked. “A genuinely cathartic experience.”
“Lawsy me!” Pearl Mitsu spoke more or less the way she conceived her character—Beloved Belindy—ought to speak, whether Johnny Gruelle had written it that way or not. “Was that you’m we done just heard a-screamin’ an’ a-caterwaulin’ fit to bust our buttons?”
“As unmusical as that?” He sat down on the loveseat beside Angela and stretched his arms along its back. “Yea, verily, ’twas I. They found me out and administered certain exquisite devices held in especial reserve for those who fall from their own exalted ranks. Then, for the climax, they naturally burned me alive at the stake. Thus expediting me, by their own lights, straight from a terrestrial into an infernal holocaust. I, of course, enjoy a variant eschatological interpretation, my secret heresy having been that rather arrogant species of universalism termed apokatastasis. Do I make myself clear?”
“Oh, yes,” Angela replied. “To about ten percent of the members of Mind-sa.”
“You sounded like they were really doing something to you,” said Gerry Wu, who was playing Policeman Percy.
“I rejoice—if that is an appropriate idiom—in a singularly vivid imagination. I also strongly suspect,” Corwin mused on, “that every last inquisitor in that game is secretly either heretic, morisco, or judaizer. It was simply my fortune to be found out first. I wonder why?”
Angela glanced at his nearer arm. If he dropped it just a few inches, he could have it around her shoulders. She decided to leave it where it was, for now. “Because you wanted to be found out,” she told him. “You were teasing them all along to find you out. Trying to get all the non-inquisitor players off like that. And never accused even one of your fellow inquisitors, I’ll bet.”
“I was biding my time while gathering, sifting, and collating evidence. Alas, I bided it a bit too long. Does the role of Raggedy Andy remain open?”
“We’ve been saving it just for you,” Hank replied. “At our dear Raggedy Ann’s special request.”
“Ah! This may perhaps be the place for me to interject that I have never been entirely clear as to the exact relationship between the beloved Raggedies. Are they sweethearts or spouses or —”
“Sister and brother,” Angela said firmly.
“Rulemaster?” Corwin looked around to see who the Rulemaster might be. His glance settled on Hank, probably because Hank had been the one who told him they were saving Raggedy Andy for him.
“Your sister’s right, Andy,” Hank confirmed. “She’s a bright girl, but even if she wasn’t, it doesn’t take genius level to know one’s own brother.”
“Brother,” Corwin repeated, sounding a little disappointed. “Siblings.” He folded his arms. “Very well, Rulemaster, if you will graciously brief me on the identities and whereabouts of our congenial cameraderie in this pastoral scenario?”
“First, Thesaurus Kid,” Hank ruled, “cut the sesquipedalian gymnastics. They don’t fit Raggedy Andy.”
Corwin blinked, and nodded. “Hard, but I’ll try.”
As the evening wore on, Angela had to confess to herself that he was fitting into her scenario quite a bit better than she had fit into his. He didn’t even slip into complicated vocabulary more than half a dozen times.
Of course, Spanish Inquisition hadn’t exactly been “his” scenario. It had been the one Julie Whitcomb and Sam Imani and their crowd were inviting people into at the start of the afternoon. True, Corwin had fairly jumped at the chance.
* * * *
As more and more players got killed or otherwise retired from their original games, the players regrouped into four wind-down scenarios in all: besides Raggedy Ann in the library, there were Dragon Mountain in the conservatory, Wonder-Glass in the dining room; and Roly-Polies and Fence Rails—based on the French children’s classic Patapoufs et Filifers—in the billiards room.
At length only four players remained in Sam Imani’s living room: Imani himself, Julie Whitcomb, lean Paul Osaka, and Curly Friedman, who was so hefty she could pull off a convincing male interpretation if and when she chose, and whose rich, coffee-colored skin was dark enough to have let her pass for an ethnic pureblood if only her hair had been woolly instead of long and straight. “Curly” was one of those ironic nicknames meaning the opposite.
All four of them bore a tattoo like a whirligig of tiny lightning