The Gordon Mamon Casebook (7 page)

He hated crime work; the type of detection he preferred involved the rearrangement and elucidation of words, to fit within carefully-ordered racks of small square spaces. Nonetheless, he felt secretly pleased at the investigation’s outcome, from a number of perspectives. Not only had he apprehended a murderous, amoral embezzler—the Blessed Echidnans would likely require quite some time to track down the hiding places that Flange had arranged for his ill-gotten gains—but he’d also ensured a temporary inrush of hotel guests, three thousand or so in total, in sharp contrast to the customary slow business which the hotel would now normally be experiencing. Some of the Echidnans would likely stay on for a month or more, while they sought to arrange slower-than-light travel to Shangvanatopia. Already there were rumours of a developing bidding war between TransGalactic Freight, Andromeda Spaceways, and Chastity Cosmic, all courting the Echidnans’ lucrative STL flight business. It would be interesting, Gordon thought, to see who offered the best, or the slowest, deal …

He felt no unease at Flange’s fate. Gordon didn’t like murderers, any more than he liked people who thought orange and purple went together, and Flange deserved everything the Church, and the police, could throw at him. No, the one he almost felt sorry for was Cassie, stripped of her command and archived while the authorities tried to decide what to do with her. True, she’d obstructed him, had actively misled him, and had sought to derail a criminal investigation; but at the end she’d stopped Flange, when nobody else had found a way.

Plus, she’d got Gordon’s name right; and
that
counted for something, in his book.

The Fall Guy

(first published in
Masques
, ed. Gillian Polack & Scott Hopkins, CSFG, 2010)

Gordon Mamon strained to make sense of the tile-cam footage of the murder. But several aspects refused to tally, even after five viewings. The assailant purposefully approached his (or her) victim. O’Meara, engrossed in the vista, showed no acknowledgement of the intruder behind him. Then the mystery perp pushed the victim—no minor feat, all considered—with enough force to send him through the full-length plastiglass viewing window, to his death. The tile’s playback ended in a wash of pixellated whiteout as the killer turned his laser pistol on the camera.

Gordon downloaded the footage to his handheld and switched the tile off. Telemetry from the observation deck’s other four tile-cams had been identical except for viewing angle, and for the time elapsing before laser-induced overload.

Gordon moved his scrutiny to the massive hole in the plastiglass wall. He hoped the transparent emergency shielding was genuinely airtight. He had no wish to follow O’Meara.

There was, he mused, your regular, common or garden defenestration; and there was the over-the-top, all-stops-out, no-expense-spared variety. What you might call ‘defenestration with extreme prejudice’. Gordon Mamon (overworked lift operator, first-aid officer, janitor, dishwasher, room service attendant and part-time hotel detective of the Skyward Suites 270) strongly suspected he was investigating an example of the latter classification of window-mediated murder.

He was starting to feel like the doorman of some sick Mile-High Club for vicious killers. But even putting aside his misgivings at having come into close proximity with death by violence for the third time in three months, Gordon had to wonder about the assailant’s mentality. To push someone out a window to their death was distasteful enough. But when the window was effectively several million storeys up, on the top floor of a descending space elevator/hotel module, it was something else again.

There were two particularly upsetting aspects to the murder. First, Gordon knew the victim personally. Second, due to the complexities of near-geostationary orbital mechanics, he had no notion whatsoever of the direction in which he should be seeking the corpse. One hour and counting, and the feasible volume of space was growing disconcertingly large.

As any detective can confirm, solving a murder usually pivots around discovery of a corpse. It looks bad to claim a homicide without the provision of the victim’s body, or at least some corporeal remains. A severed head, say, a mangled torso, or,
in extremis
, a majority shareholding in some vital internal organ. In the present case, there should by rights have been more than the usual quantum of corporeality—the last time Gordon had seen One Ton O’Meara alive, he’d thought the famed Mexican-Irish sumo wrestler looked like five Elvises jammed into the one human frame—but of identifiable remains there were none. Explosive depressurisation had expelled O’Meara’s body. Also absent were the window’s plastiglass fragments, most of the observation deck’s original air supply and (with two notable exceptions) all items of material evidence.

The murderer’s vacuum-suit was crumpled, empty, on the obs deck floor. A laser pistol lay alongside. A nearby ventilation duct’s access panel hung open, askew. Gordon had already ordered the guests’ suite doors to be maximum-security locked, with the guests corralled into the ground floor beyond the reach of this set of ducts. But even believing that the assailant was nominally confined, Gordon felt monumentally uneasy. He’d been a Skyward’s employee too long to have faith in the elevator-hotel’s structural robustness. The cars were vacuum-resistant, but internal divisions were flimsy (notoriously so, in the case of the honeymoon suite). Thin plastiminium wall, floor, and ceiling panels conferred the illusion of privacy; they wouldn’t obstruct a determined murderer.

And the crime didn’t
feel
right. Not that murder ever felt right, unless you were fighting in self-defence, or had just come face-to-face with the soulless reprobate who’d for the past year been deluging your handheld with seventy misspelled messages a day offering their 150%-guaranteed-effective masculinity-enhancing surgical prowess. Lately with illustrations, and once with a let’s-leave-absolutely-nothing-to-the-imagination auto-playing vid clip. In 3D. Gordon shuddered, returning to the present with a grimace.
Why
the window-push?

The attributes—the murder, the cameras’ obliteration, the killer’s subsequent tidy disappearance—spoke of premeditation. But why destroy the detectors
after
the murder, rather than before? Why choose such a physically demanding and dangerous method of killing, when the laser pistol could have discharged death as effortlessly as it had dispatched the tile-cam CCDs? How had the perp smuggled the laser through the hotel’s security cordon?

And why O’Meara? The man wouldn’t hurt a fly, wouldn’t intentionally hurt anyone who wasn’t at least one hundred and fifty kilos and clad only in a sweaty white bedsheet origami’d into an oversized nappy. (And the vac-suit was much too small to have encased an aggrieved sumo victim. So. Not revenge, then.)

His handheld beeped. Belle.

“Gordon here. Any news?”

“Just that we’re all gathered in the lobby, as you instructed.” The voice of Belle Hopp (Skyward 270’s receptionist, concierge, counsellor and childcare attendant) betrayed the strain she was under, striving for composure in the face of nebulous danger. “Uh—Gord—you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Sure as I ever am,” he replied. “I need to check out the ventilation shafts, looks like the escape route. Think we’ve got him—or her—cornered.”

“That’s a good idea?”

“No,” he admitted. “But we’ve got to keep the guests safe.” With a seventh-wave surge, it struck him that he’d lost O’Meara, had let the big man down. For the second time now, a murderer had tarnished Skyward 270,
his
module, and this time had claimed the life of someone Gordon had to say was more than just a guest.

It was not as though One-Ton O’Meara had exactly become one of his friends, though Gordon could not now think of who else might fit this category. He’d had drinks with O’Meara at one of the Skytop Plaza’s sushi-and-Guinness bars more than a month back, just a few days after the sumo wrestler had saved his life. They talked about wrestling. Gordon confessed he was turned off by the live-action cartoon violence of professional wrestling, had heard it described as the only sport to have suffered during the recent scriptwriter’s strike. One-Ton had told him sumo wasn’t
like
that, there was art to it, grace, a genuine spontaneity. He’d gifted Gordon tickets to his next bout. Gordon had intended to go, he really had, but hadn’t realised the match clashed with his schedule: Skyward 270 would be on descent then. He’d failed to see O’Meara in action. Now, he never would.

“Gordon?” Belle dragged him back to the moment.

“Here. Look, send Sue up. And ask her to grab something useful from the galley, just by way of protection.”

* * *

He felt conflicted about imposing on Sue Sheff, Skyward 270’s chief cook, for backup. She was a new recruit, whereas Belle and he had logged up dozens of 270’s ascent/descent cycles as a team. But Belle’s excellent people skills were best employed in ensuring the hotel guests didn’t succumb to panic. And with a total staff of three, himself included, there wasn’t another option. So Sue now guarded the obs deck, armed with a turkey baster—it wouldn’t have been Gordon’s first choice of weapon—while he contorted his way through an access hatch that really, you’d have to say, could have been made larger than child-labour-sized. How had the murderer managed this?

In as far as his waist, Gordon turned awkwardly to check out the vent shaft. The motion, and an unsettlement in his stomach, confirmed his suspicion. The vent system wasn’t subject to the comforting artificial gravity of the hotel’s public spaces, instead manifesting only the fey descent-inverted microgravity of the lift module’s powered fall through subgeostationary space.

In contrast to the hatchway, the ventilation duct was capacious, a good two metres wide. A solid plasticrete bulkhead capped the shaft above the hatchway. Below Gordon, the duct ran downwards for what seemed the full thirty-metre height of the lift module, branching horizontally at intervals.

Gordon wasn’t good with heights. Ironic; but, enclosed within the hotel module, however-many-thousand kilometres above Earth, he could usually ignore vertigo’s overtures. Here, faced with a thirty-metre drop and stuck halfway through the hatch—with stomach and inner ears telling him he had nothing to fear while his legs and eyes conspired to insist the drop was lethal—he could feel his innards turning to jelly. And the ladderway’s plastichrome rungs on the duct’s opposite wall were still beyond his reach. He wriggled through to mid-calf level (with which his hips were happier; now it was his
mind
all a-quiver), and managed to grab the nearest rung. He finished pulling himself through into the shaft, slapped a miniature patch-cam to the bulkhead above, and began descending.

At the five-metre mark, he inspected the horizontal ducts radiating off in three directions. Each duct was straight and bulkhead-terminated. He affixed more patch-cams to the main shaft’s side, aligned so the cameras could survey each offshoot while he searched for any irregularity.

Fifteen minutes later, he’d drawn a blank at this level. None of the patch-cams had displayed any movement save that of the Mamon hindquarters (the horizontal ducts were too narrow to turn within). There were no obstacles visible, the rangefinding checked out correctly, and (according to his trusty handheld) none of the top-tier suites’ vents had been opened in several months, since their last maintenance check.

* * *

Later, back in the obs lounge’s unequivocal gravity, he relieved Sue from guard duty and called Belle.

“You there?”

“
Yes
, Gordon. Where
are
you? Been trying to reach you for the past hour.”

“I’m fine, just had my handheld in forensics mode, hadn’t noticed the call light. Listen, can you send Skytop HQ these fingerprint images, to pass on to the police? That’s all I’ve found from checking the vent system. Looks like our perp went in, but didn’t come out—and he’s not there now.”

“OK, got them. Wait a second. Ah, here we go. Looks like they’re all Skyward maintenance staff.”

“Huh? You’ve got their fingerprints logged locally? I thought you’d at
least
have to go off-station—”

“Just thumbprints. Biometric locks on the broom cupboard. But Gord, the Skytop police—I’ve been trying to reach you. They’ve been going frantic, trying to contact us.”

“Us? You mean me?”

“No, us. There’s some problem with our broadcast cable: it’s receiving but not transmitting. I’ve heard everything they’ve sent us, but there’s no way of letting Skytop know we’ve heard.”

“When did this start?”

“Before the murder. They don’t even
know
about that yet.”

“So why’ve they been calling?”

“An all-modules alert, dangerous fugitive. Gunther Haier, noted hit-man. Number three on the league table. Anyway—”

“They have a
league table
for assassins?”

“Yeah, helps to humanise the job. Or so claims their official-spokesperson-in-hiding. Anyway, police believe Haier has very recently been lying low on Skytop, working in one of the engineering shops, but now he’s nowhere to be found. They’re concerned he’s taken a lift down to the surface.”

“You got a mugshot?”

“Sending it now, Gord.”

“OK. Yeah. Nasty. No, doesn’t look like any guests, what I saw of them anyway.”

“No. And there’s a dozen
other
modules he might’ve taken, if he left Skytop within the last few hours like they reckon. Assuming he didn’t ship out of the system entirely on a spaceliner. But it’s still a bit of a coincidence, you’d have to say.”

“Yeah. I was just thinking the same. A murder, a missing killer. You’d have to think they’re connected. Did O’Meara see something he wasn’t supposed to?”

“You tell me.
You’re
the detective.”

It wasn’t an assignation he’d ever felt comfortable with.