Spares (15 page)

92 was another washout; the apartment empty, a “For Rent” sign outside. The neighbor on the right was a bad-tempered old tosser; he said the victim had been working for the Devil in some administrative capacity, possibly opening His mail for Him. On the other hand, he also claimed to be 180 years old, so it’s possible he was as mad as a snake. A battered and yellowing news sheet headline taped to his door said
“Suffer the little children”;
I couldn’t work out whether this was a plea
for sympathy or a heartfelt request. The neighbor on the other side asked to see identification before answering any questions; but one look in his clear, bland eyes told me he had nothing to tell me that he wouldn’t already have spilled to Mal. Asking to see a badge was just another way of saying that he would tell anyone in authority everything he knew, at length and probably more than once.

It was pushing six by the time I made it up to 104 and I was getting thirsty. I told myself that once I’d cased the last address I could go downstairs somewhere and have a drink. Maybe Howie’s, or maybe somewhere I could be alone and think. I crossed the 100 divide via an unorthodox route that cost me a hundred dollars. Normally, you have to apply for a pass, and I wasn’t in the mood for that; not least because I didn’t want the NRPD knowing that I was here.

I was fighting to remain calm, because I. knew that the one thing that scares the shit out of witnesses is the sight of someone who looks like he’s ready to hit them. Being scared just makes them shut up or tell lies—neither any use to me. But in between every intentional thought I had was a reminder that Jenny and David and the others were lost somewhere in New Richmond, and that every minute which ticked by helped count them into some unmarked grave. A call from a phone post to Howie told me what he’d already predicted—none of his contacts had heard anything at all. Also that Suej was wondering where I was, and when I was coming back.

The higher you get in New Richmond the fewer people live on each floor: the ultimate being the 200-plus levels, now the province of just one family. 104 is the lowest of the park floors—forty per cent of the area laid out in nearGrass and sculpted trees. You can’t throw a brick without hitting someone rendering something in watercolors. It’s sometimes fun just to throw the brick anyway. Round the edge of the floor are a string of midrange bistros and clothes stores, all selling the same things at prices that make you want to bark with laughter;
the buildings in the center are full of Identi-Kit studio apartments for aspiring young professionals.

Louella Richardson’s apartment was in a small block near the xPress elevator. She’d been found only that morning, and she lived the right side of the line, so I hung outside for a while. It was possible that some cops might still be around, working the scene hard enough to make it look like they tried. When I saw nobody worth noticing after fifteen minutes, I went inside and tramped up the glowing white stairs until I found Louella’s door. No tape across it, as there hadn’t been at any of the others. I waited dutifully for a few minutes after knocking, but nobody answered. A couple of yards away was the door to the next apartment. The name tag under the buzzer told me a Nicholas Golson lived there. I leaned on the bell for a while, and was about to leave when the door opened.

“Jeez, man—there’s no one dead in here, if that’s who you’re trying to wake.”

I turned to see a kid in his early twenties with a foppish wave of brown hair and clothes carefully chosen to look about twice as expensive as they actually were. Behind him stood a woman in front of the bedroom mirror, fixing her lipstick. The sheets on the bed had seen recent action. Young Nicholas was obviously a bit of a lad.

“Not bad,” I said, “but you want to work on making it sound less rehearsed.”

The kid stared at me for a moment, then grinned. The woman walked into the hallway and Golson moved aside to let her pass. “See you later, Jackie.” He winked.

With a roll of her eyes she corrected him. “It’s
Sandy.”
Fuming quietly, she swayed and tottered off toward the stairs.

“Whatever,” he said, with a vague flap of his hand, and then turned his attention back to me. “What do you want, tall dude?”

The inside of Golson’s apartment was tidier than I expected, presumably because Mom paid for a maid to come in. Maybe also because someone who evidently
dedicated so much of his life to encouraging members of the opposite sex to take their clothes off had probably figured out the fact that they liked to be able to find them again afterward. The furniture was white and the carpet red—it looked like the inside of someone’s mouth. Three of the living room’s walls were studded with artificial view panels, each showing a stretch of beach. The sound of waves piped round the room, the ebb and flow exactly matching the movement through the windows. The view looked kind of like one I knew as a child. Except that it had been idealized, which meant it said nothing at all.

On the remaining wall was hung a piece of strange-looking sporting equipment, like a large fiberglass dowsing tool. To loosen him up I asked Golson what it was.

“Wall-diving rod,” he said, enthusiastically. “Bought it yesterday.”

I connected vaguely with a newspost report. “I gather it’s all the rage.”

“Yeah, it’s cool this week. You just grab your rod and leap out the window. Freedom, man—you know what I’m saying?”

“Probably not. How well did you know Louella?”

Golson kicked the end of his bed, activating some inbuilt droid. Thin telescopic hands reached out of either side of the headboard, grabbed the sheets and started making the bed.

Golson winked. “Never know who I might run into later.” I smiled politely, but let him know that I was waiting for an answer. He sighed. “Not that well. Okay, a little bit. We hung occasionally, you know? I already told the cops this.”

“Yeah. But you haven’t told me.”

“Louella was a babe—obviously I’m going to sniff around. But she held it pretty tight, you know—God knows I tried, and I usually get there. So after a while I figure okay, so I’m not going to fuck her. We ended up kind of friends instead.”

“Any idea who might want to kill her?”

“God no, man. I mean, have you seen what she looked like?” He reached across to a bookcase and pulled down a file box. Placing it on the table he started rifling through a collection of maybe a hundred LED-wafer photographs of women. After a moment he tutted, and pulled out a photo of the girl who’d just left. He showed me the back of the picture: The name “Sandy” was clearly written there. “Got to get better at remembering that shit,” he said, obviously pained at his incompetence.

“Louella,” I reminded him.

“Oh, yeah. Here.” I took the picture he handed to me. It showed Louella Richardson looking rich and beautiful and intelligent. There was an extraordinary gloss to her bearing, as if her ancestors hadn’t so much crawled out of the primeval swamp as taken a cab. Golson shrugged. “Who’d be selfish enough to scrub something like that off the planet? I mean, if you can’t score yourself, you at least got to have the grace to leave it around for the other guys to have a try—am I right?”

Somewhere during the last sentence or so I’d remembered that I wasn’t a cop anymore, and that I didn’t have to be polite to everyone above the 100 line. Nevertheless, I smiled thinly, and didn’t hit him or anything.

“So tell me something,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like what Louella was doing in the last week, who she might have seen.”

“Hell, Louella saw everyone, man—you know how it is.”

“No, I don’t,” I said firmly, wishing that Mal, with his infinite patience, had been here first and written a report for me to read. “What did she do for a living?”

“She was a Shopping Explainer,” he said, and I nodded. Rich people who sometimes couldn’t come up with an excuse for buying something they wanted often hired people to come up with an excuse for them. Often the Explainers worked on staff, helping them with every little
purchase; sometimes they were freelance, and only called in for unusual extravagances. Louella was the latter, and had a number of clients in the 160s and above. So, yes, in the world view of an airhead like Golson, she saw everyone. Everyone who counted.

“Socializing,” I said. “Who did she hang out with?”

“Her friends, of course,” Golson said, clearly baffled. I checked my mental question gun, and found I only had about two patience bullets left. After that, it was going to be live ammunition.

“Okay. You, who the fuck else?” I asked.

“Well, Mandy and Val and Zaz and Ness and Del and Jo and Kate.”

My last patience bullet. “Remember any guys’ names?”

“Well, no—I mean, who cares, right?” Suddenly sensing that I was reaching critical mass, Golson apparently decided to throw me something real. “Look. The last couple of weeks she’d been going to this new club. That’s all I know. I only went there once—it was kind of ganchy.”

I decided against asking what “ganchy” meant. I found I didn’t care. “What was it called?”

“Club Bastard, and I can’t remember where it was because I was totally loaded.”

Golson saw me to the door, prattling about wall-diving. I tried not to hold the fact that he was a waste of DNA against him, and gave him Howie’s number—in case anything unusual happened, or in the unlikely event he remembered something more significant than Sandy’s bra size.

As he shut the door behind me I noticed he wore thick silver rings on each finger of his left hand, and wondered how long Shelley Latoya could live on what they’d cost. Then I walked straight to the elevator and Beaded down to a world I understood.

About nine o’clock, something tickled at the back of my rusty brain. At first it was slow and indistinct, and I dismissed
it as oncoming drunkenness. All the other evidence certainly pointed that way. But it was insistent, and I started to listen, still running my eyes over Mal’s reports but in reality waiting for some inner voice to speak. I hoped it would be loud enough for me to hear. All I could sense with any certainty was that it was something very, very straightforward I had missed.

I was slumped by then in The Ideal Mausoleum, and had been for several hours. The IM was perfect for my needs. It was dark, played old music very loudly, and had a row of Matrix terminals for hire in the back. When I arrived I asked the barman to give me all the Jack Daniels they had and took it with me into the gloom. Two of the terminals were broken, and some kid was checking out alt seal-culling on the other, but I encouraged him to leave.

I took Mal’s disk out of my pocket and jacked it in. While it negotiated with the host frame I took a long sip of Jack’s and peered around me into the gloom. I’d remembered the place as a dive, and a dive it surely was. I wouldn’t have trusted anyone I could see here to be able to spell their name right at the first attempt, and a bored cop could have busted over half of them for dealing and everyone else for possession. Luckily, nobody was interested in that kind of law enforcement anymore, which made it a perfect place to hang out; the patrons were all far too wasted to be into anything which would attract unwelcome attention.

“Jesus—this place is filthy.”

“How can you tell?” Tasked, turning my attention to my screen, which now showed Mal’s desktop environment. The Ideal Mausoleum is so dark I’d never been able to tell what color the floor was.

“This terminal’s swarming with viruses,” Mal’s versonality said. “Nice place you’ve brought me to.”

“You can handle it. Any news?”

“Still no match on the dead guy, they still don’t know Mal’s dead, and the murder reports are still locked. I’d advise against trying anything fancy on this
terminal, because half these viruses are probably reflecting the datastream to hackers. Ow—piss off.”

I watched as the computer stomped on a little bitey virus that was trying to chew its way into his RAM.

“All I want is the stuff on Mal’s hard disk,” I said, when the dogfight appeared to be over. “Can you keep the Mongol hordes out for an hour or so?”

The computer’s voice changed momentarily to a high-pitched warble.
“You’re a big hairy knobface,”
it sang.

Mal’s versonality came back a second later, sounding more than a little pissed. “Another poxing virus. It’s dead now, little fucker. Yeah, I can—but don’t take too long.”

As the computer settled down to swatting the products of juvenile minds, I watched Mal’s files scroll onto the screen.

Mal’s reports documented, in page after page of detail, one of the essential truths of homicide investigation.

Real murders don’t get solved.

Let me explain. There are two types of murder. There are those where you catch someone red-handed, on video, with fifteen on-site witnesses and a murder weapon in the killer’s hand. These will go down.

They don’t happen very often.

Then there are all the others. Out of those, one in ten may lumber toward resolution; with a lucky print-hit, a long-shot DNA match, or a last-minute witness falling out of the woodwork. This one in ten may also go down. Sometimes.

The others will not.