The Gordon Mamon Casebook (3 page)

Taybill shrugged. “If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll just shoot.” He stepped fully into the room and allowed the outer door to close, sealing off Gordon’s only feasible escape route.

Taybill did not look at ease with the weapon he deployed. His face was pale and tense, his hands were unsteady, and his aim was poor. Not that that would matter. The gun’s ammunition pretty much obviated the need for a keen eye: if a round hit you, you were more or less assured of death.

Gordon’s mind pulsed with the unfamiliar problem of a life-and-death puzzle. He was keenly aware that every action, every word choice, on his part was critical. A skilled negotiator (such as Hostij) might well be able to talk Taybill down, but Gordon wasn’t Hostij. He was under no delusion that he had anything like the required verbal skills to defuse Taybill. And, since the needle gun was semi-autonomous (and perfectly capable of firing itself if it felt the situation warranted it), any attempt by Gordon to dissuade Taybill would probably be disastrous. His one remaining option was to keep the dialogue going, to merely delay the inevitable. Time was all he had to play for now.

“Tell me why you did it,” he asked again.

“Why should I bother?” Taybill asked. He was nervous enough, he might just fire the gun accidentally.

“Humour me,” Gordon said, desperately. “Look, I already know why you did it. I just want to check if I’m right.”

“Don’t believe you,” the gun sneered. “You couldn’t figure—”

“No, I’ll prove it,” Gordon interrupted, frantically playing for time. “It was the transport charges, wasn’t it? That, and the gambling debts—”

“I’ve had it!” Taybill snapped. “Every month, I make another payment off my gambling debts, and they go hike up the interest rates! I’ve been going backwards for the past year! You don’t know what it’s like … I work twenty-five hours a day, seems like, and it’s
never enough
. And Formey, one-fifteen kilos of excess baggage, dead weight, at fifty credits a
gram
, just for shipping him back to Proxima Centauri. It was the answer to all my problems! I mean, most passengers, there’d never be enough in the estate to cover that kind of expense, they’d just ask for burial-at-space, but Formey’s families, they’re loaded, they could cover that without even blinking. I’ve got the transmission all set to go, official Chastity letterhead and everything, just as soon as I finish with you here.” His fingers twitched on the gun’s trigger housing.

Gordon swallowed. “And the projector? That was so it appeared Formey took the flight as a
live
passenger, from Chastity’s perspective, am I right? You could then just pocket the baggage payment from Formey’s family, and nobody at Chastity would be any the wiser. You know, I wasn’t at all suspicious of you until I remembered that you’d named yourself as an alibi.”

“What d’you mean?” Taybill asked. The needle gun was starting to hum in a way that couldn’t be good. Powering up.

“You are the booking clerk, right? So, that email confirming you were at your desktop when the murder was committed. You sent
yourself
that email, confirming your whereabouts, and you changed the timestamp on it. No problems, no inconsistencies, because
the whole thing never left your computer
.”

“See if you’re so smart dead,” the gun jeered, and Taybill’s finger closed on the trigger—

The room thumped as though hit by a small earthquake. Taybill was knocked prone by the flattened door. A larger-than-life figure stepped through the broken doorframe and cast his eyes around the room, eventually coming to rest on Taybill’s broken form beneath the heavily-dented door.

Gordon hadn’t known sumo wrestlers could move so fast.

O’Meara helped Gordon pull the door off Taybill. The latter was plainly dead, though whether from the impact or from the needle gun couldn’t be determined. Might never be known.

“I hope I wasn’t out of line there,” O’Meara said, earnestly staring into Gordon’s eyes. “I was just walking to my room, and I overheard—your corridor walls must be pretty thin, I could hear every word.”

Thank God for mass minimisation
, Gordon thought. In the right places, at least. “No,” Gordon replied. “No, you did good. It was him or me. And frankly, I’m glad it was him.”

“So what was all that about?”

“Look, I’m sorry, I don’t think I can tell you anything more than you overheard. And I have to ask you not to tell anyone else about this for now. I’ve got to make a report on this, and then we’ll both need to talk to the police once we get to the Plaza. Paperwork—you know …”

Gordon eyed O’Meara up and down, left to right. Taybill had been hoping for Formey’s weight in gold, but
O’Meara
 … O’Meara was worth two Formeys, at least. Two Formeys, plus change. “Listen, word of advice. Just … be careful next time you book a flight on Chastity Cosmic.”

“Not to worry,” O’Meara responded, with a toothy, open smile. “I always travel Andromeda Spaceways.”*

* DISCLAIMER: The preceding narrative, though entirely factual, has had the names of all parties changed for legal reasons. The journalist responsible for this report has not received any payment from, nor has been in communication with, the marketing and promotional division of Andromeda Spaceways. Andromeda Spaceways has always denied, and continues to repudiate, the suggested existence of a ‘dirty tricks’ division which, it is claimed, has been set up to counter the competitive inroads being made into Andromeda Spaceways’ business by Chastity Cosmic. Further, even if such a division were to exist—which it does not—the aforementioned piece of reporting has not, nor would ever have been, financed through the operations of such a purely hypothetical division. Finally, any perceived slur against the character of employees of Chastity Cosmic, who are, for the most part, moderately law-abiding if underpaid and overworked individuals, is unintended and should not be taken to represent the views of Andromeda Spaceways.

Single Handed

(first published in
Kaleidotrope
issue 6)

Gordon Mamon was halfway across the lobby, mental processes almost totally consumed in anticipation of a meal at Fairdig’s, when his handheld bleeped. He ignored the electronic plea for attention—there were some things more important than hotel business (and dammit, Martin A. Fairdig, famed chef of the Skytop Plaza’s only eight-star restaurant, was a culinary genius)—but paused when the unit bleeped again. Then again. It was astounding, how much plaintive urgency could be conveyed by a simple sonic tone … it bleeped once more. Cursing—Gordon
was
off duty, and the caller almost certainly knew it—he pressed ‘answer’.

“Gordon,” he intoned, with as much weary resignation as those two syllables could hold (which was, in truth, quite a lot). The crossword-puzzle screensaver faded out, replaced by the caller’s face. Not, felt Gordon, a visual enhancement.
This had better be urgent. And not too complicated.
He hoped the handheld’s microphone didn’t pick up his rumbling belly.

“Hey-yah, Gords. Catch you at a bad time?” Con Sierje, the hotel’s duty manager, radiated the offensive glee of someone who’d found the perfect sucker on whom to unload his in-tray’s current assortment of steaming crapwork. Gordon didn’t even bother to answer, beyond making a strained effort not to glower. Sierje continued cheerily, “Bit of a situation, looks like you’re the o—the best person to take care of it.”

“Con, I’m off duty.”

“Yeah, sure, sorry and all that. There’s been a murder.”

“
Murder
? Con, topside I’m just customer service. Complaints, info desk requests, miscellaneous errands and, if you smile sweetly enough, lost luggage. I don’t
do
detection.”

“Yeah, you do if we say so. Ever read the nano-print in your contract? Plus, you did that Formey case a coupla months back,” Sierje argued.

“Yeah, but
that
time, there really was no-one else within ten-thousand klicks. Can’t one of the hotel police crews tackle this?”

“It’s their annual social, booked out the bar at Heisenberg’s or someplace. Doubt you’d find any of them with the sobriety of a tequila worm by now.”

“Yes, but Con … what about the regular security staff? House detectives?
Anyone
? There’s
gotta
be someone else.”

“Nope. That new Venusian flu that’s going round, ground leave, and the rest of them in the slammer. Don’t ask. You’re
it
right now, Gords.”

“If, hypothetically, I agreed … would I get any kind of, uh, physical authority? Weaponry?”

“I can lend you a pair of plastic cuffs and a tube of fluoro-dye to identify the perp.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of a taser or a sonic whip.”

“Sorry, Gord, security regs …”

Whose
security, Gordon wondered? He took another tack. “Uhh—what about backup?”

“Gord, if you don’t know by
now
how to save stuff on your handheld …”

Gordon’s sigh was sufficiently deep and heartfelt that an elderly passerby looked nervously around for an airleak. “There really is no-one else? Okay, then I suppose it’s me. Show me dealing.”

“You moonlighting as a croupier now, then?” Sierje asked.

Wise guy. “Look, just where is this murder? What do I need to do?”

“It’s off-station.
Dart of Harkness
, moored over in the Beta Quadrant.” So, not even in the hotel proper, but on a bloody
ship
. Gordon could sense the phantom of his notional Fairdig’s dinner receding ever further into the depths of improbability.

“Okay, what’s the link-tube number?”

“There isn’t a link-tube. Told you, it’s off-station.
Really
off-station. You’ll need a shuttle. Go to shuttle bay 2B, should be one there.”

“2B. Great. Anything else I need to know? Who’s the stiff?”

“Ship’s full of them. But the
dead
one’s the captain. Have fun.”

* * *

How could there be this much turbulence in orbital space? Was the pilot flight-simming a combat mission? Or lost?

Gordon’s other thoughts, during the shuttle ride aboard the
Hamlet’s Pencil
, oscillated between a grudging gratitude that he’d been interrupted before, rather than after, his intended dinner, and a sense of puzzlement that the
Dart of Harkness
wasn’t tethered to the hotel superstructure, as was normally the case. It wasn’t as if this was high season, or anything …

“Hold on,” the pilot announced cryptically, as the shuttle started to spin. What the hell was the guy playing at? Gordon swallowed, closed his eyes—no, that was worse—and at length fathomed the purpose behind the shuttle’s gyrations. They were nudging closer to the
Dart of Harkness
, a ramshackle-seeming cluster of fuel tanks, all encircling a central hab module, the whole assembly spinning around its collective axis.

Spin-gravity? Who spun ships anymore? Hadn’t these people
heard
of artificial grav?

The shuttle nosed tentatively towards the starship’s axial docking port, and ultimately mated with a well-calibrated
clang
. Gordon thanked the pilot, willed his stomach and inner ears to sort it out amongst themselves in as dignified a fashion as possible, and pulled himself hand over hand towards the airlock.

* * *

The corridors, studded with rubbery handgrips and lined with Velcro, all in last year’s shade of off-cream, bent around and away from the ship’s inner airlock like unfurling tentacles. Along one particular corridor, a sequence of pinkly glowing floor panels (or was that the ceiling?), progressing at a slow walking pace, suggested what Gordon presumed was the appropriate direction. He followed.

After a few minutes of awkward, bruised, Brownian progress,
down
began to assert itself with more conviction. The glow-signal flowed past doorways and stairwells. The ship, Gordon reminded himself, was
big
.

“Good evening. How should I address you?” The disembodied voice, ageless and androgynous, emanated from directly behind him. No matter which way he turned.

“Gordon. Gordon Mamon. And you are?” He continued walking, not wishing to exhaust the glow-path’s patience.

The voice appeared to have kept pace. “Cassandra. Ship’s oversight, guidance, and control systems. Please call me Cassie, if the pretense of familiarity simplifies your task here. But I was enquiring as to your rank, for protocol purposes. Detective? Inspector? Senior investigator?”

He gave up playing locate-the-voice. Gravity was still hesitant enough that the gyrations weren’t helping his stomach. “Skylift operator, third class.”

“Ex
cuse
me?
You’re
here to investigate the murder? We were expecting someone a little more …”

Qualified? Competent? Tall?

“… specialised.”

“I
have
investigated homicides before this,” replied Gordon, with as much dignity as he could manage.

“Often?” The synthesised voice’s derision was evident.

“I have a one hundred percent success rate,” he said, neglecting to add that the only other possible value would have seen him dead.

“Then we had better hope your success continues here.”

Gravity was, Gordon thought, approaching Earth-normal. How much longer did this corridor go on for? “Cassie? What can you tell me about this murder?”

“I can give you the victim’s name, and guide you to the location. Nothing beyond that, I’m afraid.”

“So you’ve no information on who committed it, or how?”

“Oh,
that
I know,” explained Cassie. “But the crew’s wellbeing is my paramount concern. It would violate Asimov’s First Law for me to divulge that information.”

Gordon stopped dead—metaphorically, I mean; that is, literally stopped, but not literally dead, so maybe in that sense a mixed metaphor; or maybe not, perhaps just a badly-chosen phrasing—and turned around, again vainly trying to face Cassie’s voice. “What d’you mean? You
know
, but you’re not telling? There’s been a
murder
, hasn’t there? Doesn’t murder violate First Law?”