The Gordon Mamon Casebook (8 page)

* * *

Gordon’s office was a cramped cubicle, alcoved off the main lobby and decorated only with desk, two chairs, and some wall-mounted newspaper cuttings reporting the cases he’d previously solved. (The one with the photo of himself and O’Meara was particularly prized, though he could strangle the subeditor who’d vetted the wording ‘chief suspect Grodon Mammal’ in the caption. But at least the write-up had been better than that piece in the inflight magazine.)

“No, Mr. Bai, I’m not bothered over which channel you were watching, or what the actresses’ names were. Or even what they were doing. I’m merely ascertaining your whereabouts at the time of the, um, incident.”

“You mean the murder?”

“
Incident
. Let’s not jump to conclusions here.”

Perhaps he could have worded that better.

Anyway, he didn’t think Mr. Bai knew anything. About O’Meara’s murder, or much of anything else. It had been the same with the other three guests. He didn’t make any of them to be the criminal mastermind type.

Dismissing Bai, he attempted to re-fold the paperclip he’d been straightening, while he watched the sequence once more on his handheld’s display. The vent grille came off, falling to the obs lounge floor. The spacesuited figure emerged from the duct (recalling his own struggles with the hatchway, Gordon could only bristle with envy at the ease with which the killer had negotiated that bottleneck), pulled itself smoothly to its feet, and walked out of the tile-cam’s field of view. Five seconds later, the depressurisation lights on the wall began to flash. Beyond the camera’s scope, O’Meara, most of the panoramic windowpane’s plastiglass, and the bulk of the obs deck’s air had all suddenly left the building. Then the incapacitating flash of the laser pistol.

The playback was silent, but that solid plastitanium grille had to have made a significant noise when it fell. Clattered. And he defied anyone,
anyone
, to walk noiselessly in one of Skyward’s cheap plastimetal spacesuits. All up, there had to have been a good ten-second warning for O’Meara that something strange was happening behind him. Gordon
knew
One-Ton O’Meara’s hearing was good, even if he hadn’t seen anything reflected in the glass or through his peripheral vision. And the wrestler’s training would surely have been to check out any possible disturbances around him. So why hadn’t O’Meara turned to face his foe? Gordon had gone all through the other tile-cams’ footage, the man had not even tensed as the fatal impulse was applied to his so-broad back. He’d just gone quietly to a horrible death.

It made no sense.

Yes, there were clues; but Gordon preferred his clues to be neatly numbered, and divided into ‘across’ and ‘down’. Puzzles that you could solve through a thesaurus, or a scrabble dictionary, without fear of deadly hazard. Crossword clues never led to anyone dying by violence, except maybe sometimes at the highest, most competitive levels.

A burst of laughter from the lobby disrupted his concentration. He emerged to investigate. The four guests, still excluded from their own rooms, were playing charades. The laughter had been initiated by Ali Bai’s attempt at an Elvis Presley imitation. Gordon shook his head, mired in frustration.

Impersonation
. Something clicked. He went to find Belle.

* * *

“What d’you mean, offline? Is this the same fault that took out our comms link?”

“Don’t think so,” Belle replied. “The security scanner’s topside, at Skytop Embarkation. The comms fault’s local, and Sue thinks she’s just about got that sorted.”

“Huh? So Sue’s chief cook
and
radio operator now?”

“Yep. Her promotion came through last week.”

Gordon grinned, wondering how long it would take Sue to discover that the company ‘promotions’ didn’t actually equate to an increase in income, just in responsibilities. “But—they just let passengers board anyway?”

“They still checked them. Visual, biometrics, random pat-down body searches, sniffers for drugs and weaponry. Just no X-ray or subdermal radar imagery. They haven’t reported any problems.”

No
, thought Gordon.
Just an escaped killer and a mystery
death
. But it was all starting to make sense. “So, this affected our module?”

“Sure. It went offline two hours before we decoupled. You think there’s a connection?”

“Belle, I’m
sure
. This is Haier’s doing.”

“Haier? But how? There’s been no-one of remotely his description passing through Embarkation at all today. The police sound clear on that, it’s one aspect of his disappearance they’re totally puzzled over.”

“I’m not surprised. They wouldn’t have recognised him in his spacesuit.”

“But Gord, the spacesuit’s one of ours. And it hasn’t been off-station. Ever.” Belle stared at him, as if to find the answers in his face. “And if it’s Haier,
where is he?
”

“That,” replied Gordon with the theatrical affectation he knew so annoyed others around him, “is a matter of some gravity.” And he went off for another look at the obs deck vent shaft.

* * *

The murder, including O’Meara’s counterintuitive lack of response to perceived danger, now made complete sense. But the problem of the space-suit’s vanished occupant remained. Gordon stared through the hatchway, baffled by the empty duct’s featurelessness. He’d checked all the patch-cams’ playbacks. Nothing.

Where had it gone?

Slowly, it occurred to him that all might not be as it seemed. A false panel somewhere in the ducts might mask another exit. He’d checked the shaft’s dimensions by laser rangefinding, but a carefully-placed solid panel, where a grille should exist, might well have escaped his attention. He asked his handheld to load a VR tour of the shaft system, as per the lift module specs, and mentally prepared himself to squeeze through that bloody opening one more time, to play spot-the-difference.

He didn’t need to resort to contortions. The difference was staring him in the face.

Cunning. Ingenious, even.

Just as in any crossword, there was one vital clue from which everything else would cascade.

This was it. He extracted a large evidence bag from his pocket, and started pulling rungs off the shaft wall.

* * *

“Belle?”

“Yes? Where are you?”

“Cargo deck. Listen, I’ve gotta go out.”

“Out?”

“Yeah. Pod. Sue’s been helping me on something, but she’s staying behind. And I really need you to help her get the comms link working. We’ll need the cops down from topside.”

“Police? Gord, d’you have a problem down there?”

“Not a problem. A solution. But Belle, I gotta go.”

“But what about Haier? Remember? The guy who pushed O’Meara out the window?”

“That’s who I’m after,” Gordon replied. “The ladder did it.”

“
Gord
—”

“Sorry, Belle, no time to fill you in. Look, I’ve downloaded some trajectory calcs to the mainframe. Just get through to topside. Please?”

“Trajectory?”

“Sorry. Gotta go.” Gordon closed the call, and turned to thank Sue for her help. Then, grabbing up the spacesuit and the evidence bag, he jogged across the cargo bay’s radiation-proof plastilead flooring to the escape pod.

He hoped the pod could move faster than it looked. It
looked
like nothing other than a Henry Moore snail sculpture.

* * *

The escape pod’s responses, to every attitude-jet impulse, felt exaggerated, hypersensitive. In reality, it was simply that the pod was tiny, and rather flimsy; and Gordon was no pilot. Still, as long as the space-nav directions from his handheld were reliable, he’d get to where he needed to be.

Walls lined with plastihemp matting, two benches with rough plastigel padding, a simple control panel mounted below a small screen. The pod’s cockpit was spartan, befitting a craft not intended for frequent or extended occupation, nor by those concerned overmuch with immediate comfort. Still, it could be worse. Gordon wondered how Haier was finding
his
current quarters.

Not for the first time, he wondered at the wisdom of this lone-wolf approach. Gordon nurtured his lack of physical bravery, it was part of who he was. But he couldn’t have brought Belle, or Sue, into danger with him: quite aside from his concern for their safety, there were the lift-module’s minimal-staffing regulations of which to be mindful. And he couldn’t leave Haier to escape, and kill again another day.

The search volume, several hours after O’Meara’s fall through the window, was uncomfortably large: too many uncertainties in the trajectory. Large, too, was the brooding crescent Earth below Gordon’s feet; then above his head; then below his feet again. Larger still was Gordon’s frustration at his inability to stop the pod’s infernal tumbling. Largest of all, or so it felt, was the lump in Gordon’s throat at the thought of the approaching danger.

The O’Meara-shaped figure seemed, in the end, almost small when Gordon finally sighted the lifeless form drifting open-mouthed through space. He wrestled again with the attitude controls, and finally struck on a lucky combination of thrusts that quenched the pod’s chaotic rotation. Then he dialled the docking camera’s magnification up to the max, and inspected the stridently leisure-suited, sumo-shaped husk while the pod nudged closer.

O’Meara looked odd. Where the wrestler’s shod feet should have been—
had
been, according to the hotel’s tilecam footage—there were clusters of small rocket nozzles. Elsewhere, on the vacuum-exposed face of the ‘corpse’, there was no sign of the expected tracery of burst capillaries and bloodily bugshot eyes. Instead, the eyes had a persistently glassy quality, as though they might be camera lenses. Or viewing windows.

Whatever Haier’s faults, he obviously wasn’t a claustrophobe.

The pod edged closer. Time for Gordon’s spacewalk.

O’Meara performed a leisurely quarter-roll, expertly twisting and then stopping to face the pod. The wrestler’s arm reached into its jacket pocket.

Gordon’s approach had apparently not gone unnoticed. He was expected by the occupant of the O’Meara-suit.

The reluctant detective flicked a switch, opening the outer hatch of the pod’s cramped airlock. The suited figure squeezed out clumsily. Earth was a huge curve of brilliant blue and white, hanging off to the side of the pod, deceptively distant.

But no time to sightsee. This was time to meet and greet.

“Haier,” he called out through the suit’s short-range radio, hoping O’Meara’s occupant was tuned to the correct frequency.

* * *

The gun, Gordon judged, was a Magnum 3.14159, one of the deadliest bits of weaponry either side of the exosphere. ‘O’Meara’ held it in his right hand, his face unreadable as any mannequin. The gun pointed straight at Gordon’s mirrored visor as the pair faced off, perhaps ten paces apart.

Gordon fumbled his suit’s verniers, straining with the double necessity of arresting a slow tumble and of keeping his suit interposed between ‘O’Meara’ and the pod. (The gun didn’t help. Signals of cold dread trickled down Gordon’s spine. He wished he’d thought to bring the laser pistol with him.)

A voice crackled through the radio speaker, cold, devoid of charm: “Any messages for your next of kin?”

“Haier?” Gordon responded.

“Who do I got the pleasure of addressing?” Haier asked.
Snide.

Gordon introduced himself.

“They might at least have sent me a
professional
.” For the first time, a degree of emotion crept into Haier’s tone. Disgust.

Gordon swallowed. That gun looked
big
. “Give up, Haier, the game’s over.”

“I don’t read that, Marmot.”

“
Mamon
.”

“Whatever. Where’s your backup?”

“Just me.”

“Oh, how sad.”

“You were clever,” Gordon said, wondering how long before Haier pulled the trigger. “But you slipped up.”

“You’re pretty damned cocky, considering you’re not packing. What you got, aside from those plastimache cuffs you’re dangling? A bullet-proof vest, under that suit? Vacuum patches? Way I see it, a visor shot’ll take care of you good, whatever. You clearly haven’t thought this through.”

“I figured
you
out, didn’t I?”

“You got lucky. But that’s about run out, Mambo.”

“
Mamon
. Luck had nothing to do with it. Give me credit for my intelligence.”

“I don’t
deal
in denominations
that
small,” Haier scoffed. “But I bet you thought you were pretty smart, tracking me, figuring Wrestler-Boy here for just a suit.”

“Yeah. It had us fooled, for a bit. You were obviously busy, those two weeks in the engineering shop. Nice bit of plastiflesh moulding, over a frame of—what? Stainless steel? With what, some additional heatproofing? And oxygen tanks, propellant, navigational computers—no wonder you needed a sumo-sized frame for the play. But the ‘murder’ was too obviously a set-up. You were too careful about placing the pointers, giving us what you wanted us to see. Like I said, you stuffed up.”

“I don’t see that,” said Haier. His finger—O’Meara’s finger—shifted lazily on the gun’s trigger. “You ever seen what one of these can do? Two minutes from now—less if you bore me—you’ll be dead. And I’ll be trimming Sumo-baby here for final re-entry. An hour after that I’ll be splashing down somewhere around Indonesia or the Philippines. Still need to figure where, but somewhere they’ll never find me. Not with the disguises I’m shipping. But say your bit. For all the good it’ll do you.”

“What did you with O’Meara? The real O’Meara?”

“Sumo-guy? Tranked him and trussed him up in a trashpile topside somewhere. Don’t remember where. The dose was supposed to be enough to fell a horse. He took three.”

“
Where is he
?”

“What d’you care, Marlin?”

“
Mamon
. He’s my friend.”