Page 75 - Tales Apocalyptic and Dystopian

Cannon’s Last Case

decisively turned right and began following a well-trod path up and
down the rows.
“I usually do five complete turns through the garden. That’s about
a mile and a half. About twelve years ago a recycling company carried
off a lot of what had been planted here, and it took quite a while for
it to grow back.”
Mary glanced at him in alarm. But he was smiling.
“Now tell me, Miss Chase: why did you come to me with your
problem?”
She took a deep breath. “I wanted a private investigator, not the
police. I searched a lot of directories and archives. I couldn’t find
anyone doing that sort of work. The profession has disappeared.”
“And do you know why?”
“It’s obvious,” she quickly replied. “Nobody has secrets any more.
My research indicated that the communications and digital
information revolutions in technology ended the old ideas of privacy.
What we take for granted now would have been shocking and
unthinkable to our grandparents in the twentieth century. Some
people then wanted to hide things—good or bad, according to their
interpretation—and other people wanted to discover them. They had
no access to records secured by government or business, so they had
to go outside the law to get them; no chips or web cams to locate
anyone night or day; no Me Museum to display the complete history
of every single person on the planet you’d ever care to know about—
not much there about you, I might add.”
“Very good,” said the old man, feeling like Methuselah. “Indeed, I
was one of the last P.I.s; I started young and have lived a long time.
But why me?”
They came to the end of a row, made two sharp left turns and
headed down another.
“I am very good at digging out data,” she said proudly. “That’s
how I got my job as a fact-binder. I matched cases with named
private investigators making it into the press in the past seventy-five
years against city directories and got lucky on one of them. You gave
up all your pseudonyms several decades ago. Maybe you guessed how
pointless it was.”
“Right again,” growled Cannon. “But I don’t like the feeling of
having been investigated. Poetic justice, I guess. Which case was it?

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