The Gordon Mamon Casebook (13 page)

“Mr Modem, you people seriously need to get a new sponsor.”

“
Mamon
,” said Gordon. “You’re saying cheese doesn’t cut it?”

“I’m saying the last time I had a close look at a piece of cheese was probably twelve years ago, and back then I felt like shooting it full of holes.”

“That sounds a little extreme—”

“Extreme? Maybe. I’ll admit to being lactose intolerant.”

“How long—”

“Now if you don’t mind, I think I’ve neglected this lager for quite long enough.” Idovist turned back to the bar, presenting his back with an air of finality.

Not wishing to push his conversational luck too far, Gordon thanked the ex-con, and moved around to talk to Idovist’s neighbour. Yuri Ligotmi was tall, rake-skinny, sporting long, scraggly hair of a dubious brown. He was wearing a shirt on which the paisley pattern seemed not merely to have attained iridescence, but also an independent life of its own, if not a fully-functioning ecology. “Mr Ligotmi? Do you have the time to answer a few questions?”

“Cheese, you mean?”

“Well, not just cheese. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about yourself. You’re a musician?”

“Musician? Yeah.”

“What kind?”

Ligotmi took a few moments to down a mouthful of beer. “Retro. Old school. Classical music. You know, the Beatles, the Pistols, the Abbas—”

“Have you been up on Skytop for a gig?”

“A gig? Sorry, I wouldn’t know. Our manager takes care of all our memory requirements.”

“No, I mean … look, what was your purpose for visiting Skytop? Did you go off-planet at all?”

“No, man, I’ve given all that shit up. It’ll mess with your head big time. Though I was looking at going to Mars.”

“Mars?”

“Yeah, was looking at setting up a goat farm there. Got to start thinking of my retirement. You know.”

“A goat farm?”

“Yeah, but I decided not to go, in the end.”

“Why not?”

“Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise a kid.”

“Oh. So you stayed on Skytop, then?” asked Gordon, pulling his hand off the bar while the robotic barmaid poured beer into the space where it believed Ligotmi’s empty glass to be.

“Well, I was going to visit my friend Lucy, who’s co-owner of some private asteroid that the two of them are mining for gems.”

“ ‘Was going to’? Did you go?”

“See Lucy and this guy with diamonds? No.”

“So you didn’t venture out of the Skytop Plaza?”

“Well, there was this roleplaying convention, based around a dystopian sci-fi setting, that’s currently on Ceres, I was thinking of dropping in on.”

“You went to Ceres, then?”

“No. Turns out it clashes with my schedule. So I can’t get no sad SF action.”

“Mr Ligotmi. You’ve listed three things you didn’t end up doing. Do you mind telling me what it was that you
did
do?”

“Well, it was all a bit of a fizzer, truth be told. We—that’s me and the band—just stayed on Skytop, and auditioned for a stint as the support act for U238’s upcoming tour of the Belt.”

“U238?” asked Gordon.

“You haven’t heard of them? They get quite a bit of radio activity at the moment. Bit too heavy for my tastes, but they’re massive, and they’ve been getting glowing reviews. Anyway, I don’t think the tour’ll go ahead.”

“Why do you say that?”

“There’s a rumour they’re going to split.” Ligotmi lifted his glass, looked at it, then set it down on the edge of the slowly spreading puddle on the bar. “Oh, and there was one other thing. We’d recorded this advertising jingle awhile back, big bikkies if it got picked up, we were going to check with the company exec to see whether it met with approval. This meeting, all arranged, but the guy never showed.”

“Can I ask what the jingle was about?”

“Cheese.”

“Cheese?”

“Cheese. Pretty much, yeah. D’you know how hard it is? Not the cheese, I mean, but coming up with a decent jingle for the stuff? And something with the right vintage, to suit the demographic.”

“There’s a cheese demographic?” Gordon asked, curious despite himself.

“Oh, yeah,” Ligotmi answered. “I mean, initially, we were going to go with ‘Let It Brie’. But that’s way too soft, right? So then someone suggested ‘Won’t Get Grilled Again’, and that nearly got the nod. We thought long and hard about ‘Stilton On The Dock Of The Bay’. We went into the studio all ready to cut ‘Under the Milky Whey Tonight’, even though Alan, our drummer, reckoned it was way too ‘out there’. But we finally settled on—”

“Thank you, that’s probably more information than I need for the entertainment report,” Gordon interrupted. “I won’t disturb you gentlemen any more for this evening.”

As Gordon walked away, he heard Idovist say to the rocker, “So where were we? Yeah. Just four little words. ‘Lift with your knees’.”

* * *

Someone with responsibility for 270’s last refurbishment had evidently decided that, for the upper floors at least, ‘well-appointed’ was synonymous with ‘busy’. Which was all well and good (particularly if you appreciated a nice plastic potted palm—or ten—at every corridor corner; a live-action computer-generated wraparound mural of jungle scenery, ocean views, or Grand Canyon abseiling at every landing; and an omnipresent muzak system dispensing traffic noise, kazoo interpretations of light orchestral favourites, and the notable karaoke efforts of former guests without fear or favour), but which could make things a trifle difficult when one was trying to perform maintenance. Gordon
knew
there was an emergency chute cover recessed into the wall somewhere along the second-floor corridor, but could he find it among a constantly changing diorama of calving glaciers, aurorae, and erupting volcanoes? And trying to locate it by feel was a less-than-satisfactory strategy, given the architect’s apparent desire to experiment with texture on this section of the corridor’s surfaces, and to disguise any and every mandated safety feature as a work of art or a piece of unattended luggage. The whole thing was an exercise in frustration, almost as vexing as the question of the cheese magnate’s murder, the stealth cloak, the suggested connection between Havmurthy and the Saturn Propulsions wonderdrive, and the still-mysterious motive behind Gordon’s abduction. Running his fingers along a promising rockfacelike seam on the corridor’s left wall, while striving valiantly to ignore the intercommed sound of a cascading waterfall—at this point in the corridor, he was about as far as it was possible to get from any of the lift-module’s restrooms—Gordon tried to tease apart the several pieces to the Havmurthy conundrum.

Why choose to kill on Skytop, in a fairly busy public setting? Havmurthy had presumably been just passing through, had in all probability made his enemies elsewhere … possibly Skytop had the advantage, for the killer, of
not
being anyone’s home territory, and thus stood to disguise the motive for the hit.

Just passing through … disguise …
there was something there, an idea, a thought, a connection, below the surface; but it wouldn’t coalesce properly.

And somehow, in his tactile explorations towards locating the concealed emergency chute cover, Gordon had acquired a paper cut on his index finger.

His handheld chirped. Incoming call.

“Gordon?”

“Yes?” he replied.

“Sue. You were wanting that locator.”

“Yes. D’you have it ready?”

“Raring to go. I would have had it sorted sooner, but I couldn’t find an appropriate casing for the electronics. In the end I had to go with—”

“I’m sure whatever you’ve chosen will be fine, Sue.”

“I hope you still think that when you see it. You were saying this … thing was beeping every ten minutes or so?”

“About that, I’d say. Yes.”

“Probably take up to an hour to triangulate, then. I’ve programmed it to move around the cargo bay, build up a volume profile for our mystery beep.”

“Splendid. Thanks, Sue. You still in the galley?”

“Workshop. Diners tend to get uneasy if they hear a rivet gun firing off in the kitchen.”

“Heh. OK, I’ll pick it up on my way through.”

“Fine by me. And Gordon?”

“Yes?”

“Just … take care, won’t you?”

“Caution is my middle name,” said Gordon. Which wasn’t strictly true, but on the other hand he’d never forgiven his parents for ‘Fortescue’.

* * *

Gordon was arching his back, still trying to work out the kink he’d acquired from manhandling Sue’s makeshift (and decidedly fridgelike) gizmo down three flights to the cargo deck. He should have mentioned ‘portable’ as one of the desired attributes for the thing … even with a countergrav patch stuck on the side, it had been brutally unwieldy, as attested by the bouquet of plastic palm fragments he’d picked up from the foyer’s fake arbor. And from the corner outside the laundry. And from the power-plant entranceway … really, the case could be made that a measure of deforestation of 270’s plastic-palm infestation was long overdue. Finding the third-floor recycling chute (he’d given up locating anything on the second floor until he’d succeeded in decoding the apparently encrypted blueprints), he dumped the plastic greenery and checked further along the corridor.

Suite 302. He knocked at the plastimahogany door. “Ms Miharties?”

“Yo?” came the reply.

“Gordon Mamon,” he explained, to the still-closed door.

“Yo?”

“I was just wanting a word with you, Ms Miharties—”

“Arr,” she replied, opening the door. Middle-aged, skinny, a touch weatherbeaten, but not in a bad way. Dark ringlets, black T-shirt and jeans, her face partly obscured by a black iPatch. Something about her smelt faintly of rum. She ran her eye up and down, appraising Gordon; for his part, he couldn’t get past the prosthetic ‘hand’ with which she’d opened the door.

“I hope I’m not interrupting, Ms—”

“Arr.”

“Ms—”

“Arr.”

“Ms—”

“Please, call me ‘R’,” she said.

“Short for …?”

“Not short for anything. It’s just me name.”

“Ah.”

“Precisely.”

“May I have a few words? It’s one of my duties as Entertainments Officer to check on the wellbeing of each guest at least once during our descent.”

“Yah, orright then. may as well. Time t’kill, and all that. Come in, Mr Madman.”

“
Mamon
,” said Gordon, crossing the threshold. He consulted his handheld briefly. “You—er—you’re a deejay?”

“That I be. Pirate radio,” she said, proudly.

“Quite,” said Gordon. “And—not meaning to pry, in any sense, but you’re booked in with Mr Ligotmi?”

“Why do you ask?” Suddenly, all trace of the accent was gone, replaced by a voice as hard and unyielding as the hook which terminated her right arm.

“Just seeking to ensure I have the right box ticked, for the statistics. If you want to see our piracy—er,
privacy
policy—”

“No, I don’t suppose that’ll be necessary. I’m just … a little touchy, I guess. The others in Yuri’s band, I think they see me as a bad influence. O’Rigby hasn’t put you up to anything, I suppose?”

“O’Rigby?”

“Yuri’s drummer. Alan’s a mean little sod. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“No, I can assure you I’ve never heard of this O’Rigby.”

“Right then.” She took off the iPatch, and detached the prosthetic hook. Underneath, her right hand appeared to be entirely normal. “Yes, Yuri and I are an item. Long-distance, like, of course. Been looking forward to this holiday together for months, no lie. And yeah, the descent’s been enjoyable enough so far.”

“I—well, again, I don’t mean to pry, but I noticed you weren’t at dinner.”

She sat on the bed’s end, nudging aside a black canvas-skinned suitcase. “Yeah, tum’s been a bit skew-whiff. I think the rarebit I had at the Plaza nightspot yesterday must’ve been a bit dodgy—not sure what they put in it. Didn’t want to risk dinner, this evening, in public, so I had something sent up. It went OK, though the dessert just now was a touch too rivetty for my liking.”

“I have no idea why that might be,” said Gordon. “But out of curiosity, what’s your reason for visiting Skytop?”

“No other way to get to Earth,” she replied. “I’m not exactly a local, Mr Merman.”

“
Mamon
. But, excuse me—I’d just assumed you were from Earth? Like Mr Ligotmi, I mean.”

“From Earth, yes. Not so often on Earth, these days.”

“Why’s that?”

“Pirate radio don’t work like that. The whole point is that we operate outside geostationary, so we’re not subject to terrestrial broadcasting restrictions.”

“I didn’t think Earth had many broadcasting restrictions left.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the fly in the whole business model, isn’t it? It’s mainly a gimmick thing, now, more than anything. Difficult to keep the wolf from the airlock, too. Devil of a job trying to drum up advertising revenue. I don’t mind telling you, we were looking at having to shut up shop, until Yuri and his band landed that advertising promo for Havmurthy. I do hope he’s been able to secure payment—he’s been very quiet since we came on board. Don’t know why I’m telling you all this—”

“Not at all, Miss—ah—”

“No, you need to roll it more. Like this. ‘R’.”

“Indeed. Thank you for your time, ‘R’.”

* * *

Gordon made his way back to his office / complaints counter / janitorial headquarters, deep in thought. Or at least, in something that would do until thought came along. He was struck by the conviction that, like a badly solved sudoku, things didn’t add up right. A mysterious and distant cheddar / anticheddar explosion; Havmurthy’s death; his own abduction; the presence of a stealth cloak somewhere in the cargo bay. The cloak suggested that the murderer might well be present on board … but on the other hand,
why
would a killer bring on board such an obvious piece of incriminating evidence? Perhaps, instead, Havmurthy’s hitman was still on Skytop, or had travelled Earthside on a different Skywards lift-module, or had escaped beyond geostationary altogether, and had planted the cloak on 270 as a ruse. In which case, the garment would most likely be bereft of fingerprints, DNA, or other useful forensic evidence. Assuming the murderer was competent.