The Gordon Mamon Casebook (11 page)

* * *

Belle Hopp was at 270’s Reception desk, processing this descent’s passenger intake. She was in discussion with a middle-aged, dark-haired woman when Gordon strode up.

“Gordon—” Belle began.

“Belle, we’ve got a problem.”

“Gordon—”

“It’s the handheld.”

“Gordon—”

“I’ve contacted Lost Property. They say the handheld didn’t come through them.”

“Gordon—”

“So whoever dropped it off here, it wasn’t—”

“GORDON!”

“What, Belle?”

“Dress!”

Gordon glanced down. “Oh.”

* * *

Why would a criminal have opted to return the handheld?
It didn’t make sense. If Gordon’s involvement at the crime scene had only been a matter of wrong place, wrong time—he hadn’t personally witnessed the attack on Havmurthy, but he’d been in the vicinity—then there was nothing for the killer to gain, and everything to lose, by returning the handheld.
Assuming it was returned unaltered.

The handheld wouldn’t have been either valuable, or very useful, to whoever had killed Havmurthy. It was far from a state-of-the-art device, and while Gordon had a lot of material stored on it, the information contained was hardly of a calibre to provoke theft. (Even the elevator blueprints relevant to Gordon’s sometime role as 270’s Safety Officer could hardly be considered ‘sensitive’—they’d been freely available on the worlds-wide-web for years now. Aside from the blueprints, there were a few freeware detection apps, forensic plugins, and criminal-code modules, compressed electronic cheek by virtual jowl alongside a myriad saved crossword puzzles, sudokus, riddles, mazes, trivia questionnaires and solitaire card games.)

So, nothing of significant value. Nor did it seem that anything had been erased from the device.

Which suggested, Gordon suspected, that something had been added to it. But what, where, and why?

* * *

“But you
can’t
just go around treating them as suspects,” Belle protested.

“Why not? They were all on Skytop when Havmurthy got killed,” said Gordon, flicking his eyes towards the top of the obs-deck panoramic window, through which the sunlit edge of the Skytop Plaza was still visible, several kilometres above. Module 270 had commenced its descent just five minutes earlier, inching down the thick carbon-and-metal cable that connected Skytop, like some colossal spider suspended at the end of a gravity-inverted silk strand, with Earth’s surface. Back up on Skytop, Module 271 would be already preparing to start its own descent, one of so many pearls that cascaded in an endless progression down the superhigh-tensile elevator cable. The view in either direction was an impressive sight, and one which always left Gordon feeling slightly uneasy: he wasn’t great with heights.

“Yes, so they were on Skytop,” replied Belle. “So were thousands of other people. Gordon, you’ve said it yourself. The hotel police don’t have anything on anybody. ‘Couldn’t find a limburger in a lingerie shop’ was what you said earlier.”

“No, what I said was that they’re so busy trying to enforce this comms lockdown—the Saturn hyperdrive thing that Judy Sargent mentioned—that they don’t have the resources to deploy to get to the bottom of the Havmurthy murder. And that’s true, I tried comming them about my handheld getting returned, all I got was a recorded message, ‘All our officers are busy at the moment, but your life-threatening emergency will be attended bla bla bla’. The email I sent them bounced. And when I called again, it wouldn’t even go through. So no, I don’t think the hotel police are going to be able to help much, they’re too preoccupied. So it’s up to the people on the ground … uh, the people on the … well, what I mean, people like me—like us—to get to the bottom of this. If we can.”

“But there’s no reason to suspect our guests. They’re not suspects. They’re
customers
.”

“I’m not treating them as suspects. I’m just looking to have, well, a little chat with each of them. Odds are none of them are involved, I know that. But I’d feel untrue to myself if I didn’t try to do what I could in the situation. This isn’t about trying to catch Havmurthy’s killer. It’s about—look, someone left me trussed up, naked, unco, in the ladies’, and that makes it personal, far as I’m concerned.”

“I still don’t like it. You can’t go all private dick on them—sorry, poor choice of words—just because they’re stuck with you for the next thirty-five thousand kilometres.”

“I’m
not
going all—like I said, just a chat. Just seeing how each of them is enjoying the descent. Perfectly innocent, completely above board. There’s no reason why an entertainments officer wouldn’t do that.”

“But Gord, we don’t
have
an entertainments officer.”

“We do now.”

* * *

Skyward Suites 270 had a dozen rooms and suites, but it was rare for them to all be occupied: space-elevator traffic was surprisingly seasonal, and also influenced by the schedules of the major interplanetary and interstellar cruise flights which departed from the Skytop Plaza. For this descent, 270 had just four guests. Gordon wasn’t at all sure how he was going to engineer a spontaneous, private, and ostensibly innocent encounter with each of them, but they’d be aboard for the next three days, so presumably the opportunity would arise.

He got his chance to meet-and-greet soon enough. In the foyer, Belle was showing a floor-plan map to one of the guests, a gaunt-looking man of indeterminate age, long hair, wire-rimmed spectacles and immoderately flamboyant clothing (headbands? sandals? and hadn’t paisley been declared extinct a decade and a half ago?), but it was the woman standing behind Mr Fashion Crime who quite arrested Gordon’s eye.

To be fair, Gordon suspected, she would have attracted the attention of almost anyone in possession of a pulse. There was something remarkably compelling about her appearance. Brunette hair which, although affecting disarray, managed to look not a strand out of place, framing as it did a face not so much chiselled as perfectly defined: exquisitely blue eyes, aquiline nose, full but not overly generous lips. And as for her outfit … Gordon fancied himself a snappy dresser, but in matters of sartoriality, this woman was an
artist
, and one with an exceptional palette to work with. She wore the kind of dress which is dangerous to stare too closely at, and an understated constellation of jewellery which perfectly complemented her shoes. In Skyward 270, she looked nothing so much as fabulously, gloriously, spectacularly out-of-place.

Somewhat appropriately, she also looked lost.

Gordon seized the moment, flashing his name badge as he approached her. “Welcome aboard Skyward 270. Gordon Mamon, at your service. Is there anything we—I—can help you with?”

“270? Now why does that sound familiar?” she asked. Gordon was abruptly made aware that, in addition to her stunning appearance, this woman was also possessed of a voice at once thoroughly unmelodic and several decibels the wrong side of shrill. Her pause was just long enough to ensure that every face within the lift-module’s foyer—Belle’s, Sue’s, and two of the other guests’—turned to hear whatever it was she would say next … which, as these things went, did not disappoint. “Oh, 270! So this is where all those people died! And you’re the famous Gordon Mastodon!”

“
Mamon
,” said Gordon, feeling the colour rise in his cheeks. “And if I may correct you, there were only ever two people who died on my watch, one of whom murdered the other.”
So much for staying incognito
, Gordon told himself. But he couldn’t let the guest’s remarks go unchecked.

“Only two? Are you sure?” asked the woman, in a sort of amplified, crestfallen, price-check-on-aisle-three tone of voice.

“I counted very carefully, Madam,” he assured her, trying very hard to keep his gaze focussed on her face, and to ignore the almost magnetic downward pull of her collar. “But I was asking whether there was anything with which I could offer assistance. And, excuse my impertinence, but might I know to whom I’m speaking?”

By way of answer, she produced a floral-scented business card from her purse, and passed it to him.

He glanced down at the card in his hand, which in an unnecessarily cursive fashion (the capital ‘W’s, in particular, he felt could have been rendered in an altogether less suggestively pendulous style) proclaimed her to be ‘Grace UnderWire: Purveyor of Support Services for Women’. “You were wanting to see Belle about some matter, Ms—er—Underwire?”

“I was just hoping someone could point me to the hotel lift.”

“The hotel doesn’t have a lift,” Gordon answered. “The hotel
is
a lift. However, if you wish to get to your room, or to visit the restaurant or obs deck, there are rampways and escaladders clearly marked. Or stairs, if you’d prefer.”

“Stairs? In
these
shoes? I don’t think so. But could you show me the ramp? I haven’t been up to my room yet. It’s 106.”

“Of course. This way.” Gordon led her along the corridor to the rampway, conscious of Belle’s stare drilling into the small of his back.

Hoping to strike a tone of innocent conversation, he enquired, “Might I ask whether you’ve enjoyed your time at the Plaza, Ms Underwire?”

“It’s been useful enough,” she answered, her voice a thousand cats clawing vainly for purchase on the world’s biggest blackboard.

“Useful. So business, then, rather than pleasure?”

“Goodness me, yes.”

“What kind of business?”

“Why, Mr Manhood, quite the third degree you’re giving me.”

“
Mamon
,” said Gordon, a little stiffly.
I really must update the antivirus on my namebadge.
“My apologies, I wasn’t attempting to be intrusive.”

“No offense,” Underwire answered. “I’ve been trying to get people to take a look at my goodies.” They had arrived at the door of her room. She gazed at it, as if expecting it to open automatically for her, before belatedly placing her thumb against the reader built into the doorframe. The door swung inwards. Her luggage waited beside the bed. “Would you like to see them? My goodies, that is?” she asked, in a voice Gordon felt sure must be audible all the way down in Reception.

This woman could hire herself out as a foghorn
, Gordon reflected. “I really must be getting back,” he said, attempting ‘wry smile’ but achieving, he was sure, something more sadly akin to ‘leer’.

“It’ll only take a minute,” she replied, her own smile effortless, perfect. And with that, she opened the clasp on her suitcase and pulled out a brassiere, holding it up for his perusal. The smile intensified a notch or two, and was augmented by a dangerously imploring fluttering of Ms Underwire’s lashes.

“It’s—ah—very nice,” said Gordon, feeling a touch of furnace-heat start to lick seductively at his face’s sweat glands, and marvelling at the rapidity with which his hopes for learning something vaguely relevant to Havmurthy’s murder, and his own abduction, seemed to have degenerated into farce. “But I really—”

“It’s a smartbra,” she said, in the tones of an overworked tractor,
sans
muffler, expressing its pride at a field well ploughed.

“A what?” Gordon asked, curiosity overcoming his own better judgment.

“Smartbra,” she repeated. “It constantly monitors the wearer’s environment—gravity, temperature, air pressure—and adjusts the tension and support settings accordingly.” She held the undergarment out towards him. “This one’s an outer-planet model, set for Jupiter’s gravity, with extra elasticity and heavy-duty hydraulic support. I sold them thousands. Go on, have a feel.”

“I think,” said Gordon, “that I really must be getting back. Thank you for your time, Ms Underwear.”

And he fled.

* * *

The checked-baggage compartment was, naturally enough, located in Skyward 270’s underbasement level, where it would perform, in case of an emergency re-entry, the important dual function of impact cushioning and makeshift additional heat shield. The latter presupposed, of course, that none of the luggage was in fact flammable, a criterion which—while accepted as convenient fact by the Skyward safety engineers who liked to view the vast array of possible calamities which might befall a lift-module with the rosiest-tinted glasses they could lay their metaphoric hands on—would nonetheless hold no water whatsoever in the real universe. Still, Gordon mused, if you went around worrying about all the shortcuts taken by those in charge of travellers’ safety, you’d never—

A shrill siren sliced through the air, causing Gordon to twitch and tip over a carefully-arranged, tarpaulined shape which comprised, it transpired, a stack of percussive instruments in which cymbals were a repeating, perhaps dominant, motif. His attempts to quell the tumbling instruments were scarcely more effectual than his suggestion that they ‘shush’; but, having rearranged the tarp over the scattered sprawl of maracas, tambourines, triangles, castanets, bongoes etc., he noticed that the siren still sounded with, if possible, a steadily-increasing urgency. Belatedly identifying the source of the outburst (and cursing his own misguided choice of a ringtone), he pulled his handheld out of his pocket and activated its comm feature. He was rewarded, if direct video link to a policeman can ever be considered a reward, with a view of the fresh and disconcertingly young face of Warren Tofficer.

“Gordon?”

“Yes.”

“Just thought you should know. There’s been a development.”

“What kind of development?” Gordon asked, inadventently kicking a stray steel-drum.

“Sorry, you busy?”

“No—er, please go on. You’ve identified Havmurthy’s killer?”

“Huh? No, afraid not. Just something else that I thought should be passed on to you. In connection with the Saturn Propulsions situation. There are reports coming in of an explosion at their main testing facility on Dione—no confirmed casualties as yet, but it looks as though it’s destroyed the prototype engine, and there are suggestions that it may have also wiped out the engine’s blueprints. Sat Prop’s keeping quite quiet about the whole thing, as you’d imagine, but it looks pretty major. And it’s upped the ante on whatever form of industrial espionage is behind the whole thing.”