“Do you think it was really terrorists? I guess that’s a dumb question, since every murderer’s a terrorist, more or less. Every murder scares us, anyway.”
“No,” Blue answered. “No, I don’t think this murderer is a terrorist, much less one of a secret band of terrorists—though I might be wrong. And, no, not every murderer is a terrorist. Most are not. A terrorist has as his chief aim the excitation of fear, usually for political or quasi-political reasons. If a bank robber shoots one teller to intimidate the rest, you could call him a terrorist, I suppose. But it’s only in one case out of a hundred that a bank robber does that; the other ninety-nine who shoot tellers do it because they themselves are frightened, with or without reason. They are terrorized, and not terrorists, even though their fears are the result of their own acts. Most murderers don’t even want to excite our fears—they would be far happier if they could get their victims out of the way without our noticing, which is why they often go to considerable lengths to conceal them, or to make us believe they died by accident or disease.”
“Whoever killed Larry Lief certainly didn’t do that.”
There was only one chair in my bedroom besides the vanity stool, a chintzy thing I never found very comfortable. Blue was in it now, his hands on the handle of his stick.
“On the contrary,” he said slowly, “in some sense that may have been exactly what Larry’s killer did. Terrorism is a sort of disease in our society, and we’re supposed to believe poor Larry died of it.”
“Is it the one who made those phone calls?”
Blue shook his head. “Larry may have been killed because of something that took place in Vietnam, or he may have been killed just because he happened to be in the wrong spot at the right time. But both those things can’t be true together. No, I don’t believe that the hand that directed that shell at him was the one that dialed those calls. I never have.”
“Shell?” I must have looked as wiped out as I felt.
“I should have told you sooner. The shrapnel they dug out of the casualties made it plain enough when they got a bit of it together—that’s what Sandoz was talking about when he said that he had evidence that showed there was no bomb in Pandora’s Box. Now his men have found the baseplate. Larry was killed—and you were injured—by the explosion of an artillery shell.”
How Blue Got That Way
“You’re crazy!” I said. “You are stark, staring nuts!”
“No, not at all.” Blue was smiling his littlest smile, one that’s mostly in his eyes. “You’ll find the story in tomorrow’s
“Somebody shot at them—shot at us—with a cannon? That’s crazy!” As you may have noticed, I pride myself on originality. The truth was that I was still trying to take it in. Every time I got it past my ears, my head tossed it out.
“So it seems.”
“Then that would tie right in with Vietnam! Look, suppose Larry was in the artillery there, see? And he added a bunch of numbers wrong, so they aimed too low and killed somebody’s best friend. Now the other friend gets him back.”
Blue shook his head. “I don’t think so. I believe that I mentioned that they found the baseplate. Do you know what that is?”
“What they put the gun on to fire it, I suppose.”
“You’re thinking of the baseplate of a mortar, a different thing with the same name. The baseplate of an artillery shell is a thick metal section that separates the explosive inside the shell from the gunpowder that will propel it. When the shell explodes, most of its casing shatters into the ragged and deadly scraps we call shrapnel —or when they come from an antiaircraft gun, flak. The base plate is too strong to fragment like that, however; it has to be, in order to prevent the firing of the gun from setting off the charge in the shell. If the baseplate can be found, an ordnance expert can usually determine exactly what type of shell it came from. This one was made for an artillery piece that to the best of my knowledge wasn’t used in Vietnam at all: a World War Two German eighty- eight.”
“That still doesn’t prove it had nothing to do with Vietnam,” I argued. “If there were some guys who wanted to kill Larry, they couldn’ve stolen the gun from a museum or something. Anyway, they sure couldn’t have brought their own gun back with them, and maybe they were willing to take anything they could get. Hell, they’d have to be.”
“If it’s any comfort to you, Lieutenant Sandoz appears to agree with you. He has a crew of men looking at possible sites for such a gun—it would have to have been within a mile or two of the school—and another team looking for the gun itself, in abandoned quarries and so forth.”
“And you’re not doing that.”
“Why should I?” Blue asked. “They have an army: deputies, state troopers, God knows what. If there’s a deserted spot that can be reached by road within range of that high school, they’ll find it. If the gun’s within a hundred miles of here and hasn’t already been melted down for scrap, they’ll find that.”
“Only you don’t think they will.”
Blue shrugged. “At this point I don’t know what to think. Please notice that I never said I believed anything so fantastic occurred; I merely said that the police seem to. Yet they have evidence. Conceivably, that shell might have been thrown from some kind of catapult or dropped from a plane, but those ideas are as bad as the gun. Worse.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, and then I told him about the old lady’s house where we’d gone in for lemonade. “Naturally she’d notice if somebody shot a cannon in her front yard,” I finished, “but she must leave home sometimes, and come to think of it, she said she might come to the Fair this year. If she did, she’d have been gone, and I’m certain she was living there alone.”
Blue waved a hand and stood up. I think that may have been the first time I ever saw him pace, which is something he only does when he’s really upset. He goes up and down dragging his bad leg behind him and hitting
