Another said that Florence Wood was employed as a safety deposit vault clerk in the Third National Bank. This didn't bother me. What the standard human gets out of staring at a solid phalanx of safety deposit boxes is a headache, not perceptive-gained information.
There was a medical report that Wood had undergone a mild coronary occlusion some months ago which had hastened his retirement. I wondered whether his retirement had been hastened by a real coronary occlusion or whether he'd used his extra-sensory power to fake the symptoms and control the doctor's instruments.
Among the papers was a complete dissertation on the stab-wound in Gordon Andrews' chest. There was no trace of any foreign body; the wound did not go all the way through the chest cavity. It was not clean cut, as if made by a sharpened weapon, but more like the semi-rounded end of an umbrella or a blunt, heavy spike. In the opinion of the medical examiner, the wound had been made with a rapid thrust, but it looked as if there had been no withdrawal. An inspection of the wound for traces of excess water (icicles) or carbon dioxide (dry ice) had failed to disclose any plausible weapon or projectile that could have evaporated or sublimed out of existence.
I longed to suggest that a test be made for air. If a kinematic can create pyrotic effects by agitation of the molecules in something to be ignited, a good kinematic could make Maxwell's Demon go to work for him. Like compressing a volume of air into a .38 slug and projecting it at revolver velocity.
And in the end I was not leafing the reports or reading them. I was really staring at the wall. Specifically, I was staring at the calendar without paying much attention to it, and as I came out of my reverie I realized that I'd been absorbed in a little red smudge on one of the dates.
Association is a funny process. The combination of calendar and red blob stared at hazily had finally brought my mind around to thinking of February the fourteenth, which honors a patron saint who has absolutely nothing to do with Jimmy Valentine, who was reputed to have been a very fast man with the combination of a safe, especially the type of safe that Gordon Andrews kept his money in because he did not trust banks, which may have been a good idea considering that Florence Wood worked in a bank vault, and her father....
I jumped out of my office chair just as it tilted over backward. If I hadn't jumped, I'd have split my skull on the radiator under the window behind me.
A heavy brass-edged ruler came up from the desk and swung in a whistling saber swipe at my face. I ducked in time to let the cut pass over my head; it clipped a few upstanding hairs. When it reached the end of its stroke, I wrested it out of Wood's control just to prove that an alert local force could exert more power than a distant kinematic force. Naturally I could. Leverage, of course.
Next came a metal-to-metal clicking sound; it was the police positive in the upper left-hand corner of my desk. I thought strongly, "Psi-man, you lift that gun and fire it at me through the desk drawer, and the angle and everything will be enough evidence to change Weston's opinion from angry rejection of all Psionics to a cold, calculated, vengeful agreement with everything I've suggested."