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pickup and a ponytail,” I said.
    â€œBut all we got is vaporware here so far.” Gary likes talking computerese. He’s fifty-five and just found Mac-heaven. “Let’s see.” He thumbed over the first few sheets on his FI pad—FI for field interrogation—as he was talking to me. “I also questioned two people who came in soon after commission—a housewife wheeling a stroller, who freaked, and an Iranian potato chip salesman. Both of them pretty shook. Did not see a soul. They just walk in, there’s blood all over the place. They go hollering next door.”
    â€œThey touch anything?”
    â€œWould you touch anything, you see blood all over? The door was open, they see blood the first thing.”
    â€œThat doesn’t make any sense.”
    â€œWhy not?” Then he was settling into his belt, ready to defend himself, taking a modified form of the stance, astraddle something invisible.
    I said, “I’m coming into a store with something on my mind, okay? Something I want to buy. Twinkies, whatever. I’m not looking up toward the back of the store. I’m looking at things , checking which aisle my Twinkies are in.”
    â€œWell, that’s the deal. They’re a few feet in, they smell something,” he said, coming loose again. “Cordite, only they don’t know it. The Iranian looks up. The woman, she’s looking over the top of the stroller easing in the door.” He planed his hand out, eye level, to show me. “She looks up. Straight on. The stains don’t register at first. She’s pushing the kid down the aisle. All of a sudden the tire skuds on a shell casing. She fingers it out, looks up, starts screaming.”
    I asked him how much time he was going to give this case. He shrugged. These days, plain old robberies just don’t get much attention, burglaries less than that. Crimes of property have to wait: bike thefts, forget it; car thefts, mmm, maybe you’ll get a second phone call from an investigator, but not likely. Crimes of person—assaults, rape, murder—get manpower despite the fact that the numbers are increasing in alarming proportion. On murder the case never closes till it’s solved; because murder, to civilized minds, is still unacceptable.
    Joe walked up, and Svoboda said, “Unless you guys do your magic, we don’t have much.”
    â€œWe’ll do what we can, Sergeant,” Joe said, and looked at me a millisecond. Probably still mad.
    I said, “Can’t you do an NCIC pattern check for stop-and-robs?”
    â€œI don’t think it’s refined down that far,” Svoboda said.
    â€œYou doing the sergeant’s work now, Smokey?” Joe broke down a Styrofoam cup, one piece flipping onto the leg of his pants, and when he leaned over to pluck it off, his eyes leveled out over the store. Checking, where he’d checked before. And then he grinned a little, and that’s all that counts.
    Bud Peterson came up behind us. Joe said hello. Bud’s always nice and polite, respectful. He’s thin, with a stoop to his shoulders that makes his chin jut out when he walks. His green tie this morning sported a miniature golfer in back-swing. Most lab folks don’t wear ties; they wear knit shirts and look like they’ve been out shopping with their wives in the mall. Joe wears suits, because Joe’s been management. Bud aspires, and I wish I could say he’ll never make it.
    After Joe and Gary went off, Bud said to me, “I’ll tell you what you could do. You could go back to the coroner’s and pick up the autopsy report.”
    It was almost a shock, hearing the word autopsy . Maybe I thought the procedure wouldn’t be over so soon, yet I know how proud the coroner’s office is of how they shove them through. They do their work on a contract basis; piecework, you could say. The more bodies, the more pay. I didn’t want to