Page 142 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Airtight

reinstate, as much as we can, the good relationship we had in the
dome. It is a sad thing for us to degenerate into hostile strangers in a
crisis. Why don’t we leave the police work to the police?”
“Human nature,” said Blanche, “plus boredom. What the hell else
do we have to talk about now?”
“Well,” began Toro, poised perhaps for another multi-sentence
utterance. But his wisdom was not to be revealed: the door slowly
opened and Waldo shuffled in. His jauntiness was gone. The man
had been a proud test pilot for NASA in his early days, but now it
looked as if he had taken too many trips in a centrifuge.

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Waldo’s eyes focused on our faces, one at a time, as if he had to
make an effort to identify us. Toro was already getting up from the
table. He was the last of the five survivors.
“Yeah, that’s right, Toro. She wants to talk to you. It doesn’t
matter if you want to talk to her.” He sat down as heavily as Toro
had risen lightly. I watched the Project Cultivator, as he was called in
the company’s literature, leave the room nonchalantly. I wondered if
he would be as calm when he returned—if he returned.
Ray was still in a cranky mood, despite Dr. Kapil’s plea for
tolerance and good will. “Well, Great Leader, now you know how it
feels under the spotlight. Which of us did she want you to implicate
in the fiendish plot to bring down civilization as we know it?”
Blanche made a disapproving sound with her tongue and upper
teeth, but Waldo laid his hands palms down on the table and shook
his head. “Which one of you? I don’t think any of you were
mentioned by name in there. Or maybe you were. I’m trying to forget
the whole thing. But I can’t. Each of our failings has become
magnified by this incident, and mine is no exception. It was BugOff
that killed Laurel Reath, and I brought it into the dome.”
That bombshell left everyone stunned for several seconds. Waldo
went on, inexorably, almost in a monotone.
“My fingerprints were on the bottle. She wasted no time
confronting me with that. I went in there hoping to bluff my way
through the interview, but that took the wind out of my sails right
away. My war record, the years of service to my country—all went

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