The Gordon Mamon Casebook (9 page)

“Hah.”

“If he’s come to harm through this, I’ll , I’ll—”

“You’ll nothing. Face it, Membrane, you’re finished.”

“
Mamon
. And you’re missing two important points.”

“Yeah? Shoot.”

Gordon winced. He
really
didn’t care for that word at the moment. “One. That gun you’re holding?”

“The Magnum π? What of it?”

“You’ll only get the one shot.”

“That’s plenty. Not going to leave much of your face. And?”

“Two’s the clincher,” Gordon replied. “The bit you’d hidden so well. I found it. Haier,
I know about the ladder
.”

“Yeah? Smart. But I don’t see where it gets you.”

“Clever. A stick-figure robot to occupy the spacesuit. Program it to push ‘O’Meara’ out the window, then to crawl into the vent-shaft and hide. And getting it to dismantle itself, disguise itself as the top few rungs of the shaftway ladder,
that
was pure genius. You
were
busy in that engineering shop, weren’t you?”

“Might even be tempted to go into engineering full time, once I get dirtside. Except it doesn’t pay as well as my regular line of employ—”

“
But
. You should’ve taken out the top five original rungs beforehand. ’Cause I noticed, eventually, that the top section of ladder wasn’t on the blueprints. Wasn’t supposed to be there. And steel bars? You gotta
know
Skyward doesn’t use anything that heavy. That clinched it for me—otherwise I might just have thought it was a slip-up on the blueprints. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I needed steel for the impact of the big push. But hell, I’m impressed,” said Haier, though he disguised it well. “Still …” He gestured with the gun.

“Oh, and one other thing,” said Gordon. “The stick-figure robot? You should’ve got it to burn out its programming core, once its mission was complete. ’Cause I had Sue, our tech wizard, give it a quick spot of reprogramming. That one shot? It’s not going to save you.” And Gordon nudged the controls to jet the spacesuit towards the sumo-frame. Not too fast, just a half-metre a second.

Haier went for the head shot anyway. The shattered visor exploded outwards in a constellation of shards, revealing the blunt head of the stick-figure robot within the helmet’s remains.
Should’ve bled the suit’s air first
, Gordon thought from the relative safety of the pod’s cockpit. The spacesuit in his forward view started tumbling from the bullet’s impact and the ejecting gases. He fumbled the controls, trying to right the suit. It was going to take too long, and with the helmet’s viewcam damaged by the shot, he’d lost his direct close-up of Haier. Crux time. Gordon swallowed, and edged the pod forward.

Haier was spinning too, both pitch and yaw, thanks to the gun’s recoil. But it would be close. Gordon wasn’t sure he could bridge the distance before Haier completed a revolution.

Second time around, Haier would know where to aim: not at the suit, but at the pod.

But the suit got there first, through pure inanimate chance. It was feet-foremost as it pushed gently into Haier’s sumo-broad leisure-suited back. Not forceful, but unexpected enough. Haier reflexively dropped the gun.

The Magnum drifted with balletic grace from his outstretched fingers. Haier swore like a consummate professional. Gordon accelerated the pod towards the gulf between gun and gun-arm, sideswiping both.

The longer he could keep Haier tumbling, the better.

* * *

“Comfortable?” Belle asked.

“Bit space-sick.” Gordon swallowed, looking around the interior of the medic-evac ship. Out the porthole he could see the sleek black lines of the police cruiser within which Haier was now safely incarcerated. “You took your time turning up. Did it really take Sue that long to fix the comms link?”

“She
still
hasn’t fixed it. So she heliographed topside instead.”

“
Heliograph?
” Gordon asked.

“Sure. You’re not the only one has ideas, you know, Gordon. She thought of it right after you Don Quixote’d off in the pod. I’m a little surprised you didn’t think of it yourself.”

“Huh.”

She smiled.

“Belle, did you say we’re heading back to 270?”

“Yes, why?”

“I’m not ready for active duty. Call it shock, trauma, whatever. Can they dock this thing with one of the ascending modules?” He checked his handheld. “Like, maybe, 188? That’s at the same altitude, won’t be much out of their way.”

“I’m sure the medics can take you back to Skytop if you ask them,” Belle said. “That’s where they’re based.”

“That would be good.”

“Good how?”

“I need to track someone down. Someone I thought, a few hours ago, had been killed. Not exactly sure where to find him, but he’d be harder to conceal than most people. And then … and then, if there’s
any
justice in the universe, I’m going to stay long enough to watch me a wrestling match.”

The Hunt for Red Leicester

Gordon had to admit that, as naked as he felt without his handheld, he felt even more naked without his jacket, his cardigan, his shirt, his cufflinks, his tie, his trousers, his shoes, his socks, his cosmic-radiation-resistant singlet, his Skyward ID badge, and his boxers.

A pedant would, of course, have noted that Gordon couldn’t genuinely be considered ‘naked’ owing to the rough lengths of rope which bound him tight, hand and foot, and which prevented him from clambering up off this unremittingly cold tile floor. (And how was it, by the way, that an expanse of tiles always managed to get twenty degrees colder than its surroundings? Wasn’t that in contravention of one or other physical law?) To which Gordon would have responded with an exasperated plea for said pedant to stop pedanting [
Yes, I
know
that’s not the correct term. Just let it go.
] and for pity’s sake do something
useful
like undo these bloody knots …

Sadly, there were no pedants, hypothetical or otherwise, in evidence. Just Gordon, and the deserted public restroom in which his unknown assailants had dumped him.

He took another look around the restroom and noticed something unsettling. The long row of lavatory stalls along one side, the corresponding rank of washbasins, nanosoap dispensers, and infra-red hand-drying units along the opposite wall.
No urinals
.

Whichever way it played out, this was not going to end well.

* * *

Some idea of the restroom’s location would help; but Gordon had no markers, no reference points, in this scenario. The odds were, though, that he was still somewhere within the Skytop Plaza, the sprawling hotel complex atop the space elevator for which Gordon Mamon was a lift attendant (and complaints officer, first aid officer, janitor, room service attendant, security officer and, on occasion, house detective: a man with many hats, regrettably none of which he could lay his hands on at this minute).

The restroom
felt
, in some indefinable sense, like it was Skytop. The cheap opulence, the ill-judged colour scheme, the swirl-motifed plastimarble wall panels, the plastigilt door handles and faucets, the inimitable ammonia-and-lavender bouquet, the bad mood lighting. There must be scores of restrooms like this, scattered across the Plaza’s hectares-broad expanse, its dozen levels.

His eyes were drawn to the main door at the other end of the room. For now, it remained shut. But he’d need to get a shuffle on, if he wished to move to one of the stalls before anyone came in. Time to impersonate a caterpillar.

He managed, over the course of the next fifteen minutes, to wriggle a distance of approximately four metres, and to severely chafe his ankles and wrists in the process, before the restroom door opened.

* * *

“Am I glad to see you,” Gordon said, while Belle busied herself, businesslike, with the task of struggling to untie the knots. “I mean, of all the people who might’ve found me in here, naked on the floor …”

“Yes, well,” she replied, with the cautious demeanour of one trying desperately to type while not looking at the keyboard. (Belle Hopp was Gordon’s longtime co-worker on Skytop, and on 270, one of the hundreds of Skywards liftmodules that ferried guests to and from the Plaza. They’d been through a lot together, but this was something new.)

“You might’ve been here awhile.”

“How so?”

“This restroom’s marked as ‘Closed for Cleaning’.” She unravelled another component of the knot around Gordon’s wrists.

“Then why—”

“It’s been closed for the last three months. Been past it dozens of times. I figured it must be clean enough by now, and even if it wasn’t I was ready to give the cleaning staff a flea in their ear about the length of time it was taking. And I couldn’t be bothered walking another half-kilometre to get to the next one, after all the legwork I’ve done this morning already.”

“Morning? Legwork?”

“Yep. You do realise we’re scheduled to commence descent in about four-and-a-half hours?”

“Is it that late? I thought—”

“Gordon, you were supposed to be at 270 three hours ago, for the pre-descent fumigation detail. We waited half an hour for you to show, and then when you were still AWOL, and not answering our calls—”

“Sorry. I’ve been a bit tied up.
Ouch
.”

“You’re lucky I found you so quickly, all things considered,” said Belle. “You know, it was always going to be some staff member or other, caught short, who found you here. A guest wouldn’t have had the temerity to ignore the ‘Closed’ sign.”

“I guess not. But, I mean, if you need—”

“It can wait. Any idea who did this to you?”

“Other than that they evidently weren’t Boy Scouts, no.”

“Hold still. It really doesn’t help when you move your arms.”

“Cramp.”

“Even so. There. You want to try untying your feet yourself, while I go get an outfit for you?”

“My hands feel half-numb,” replied Gordon, rubbing at his wrists, before moving to belatedly shield his nether regions. His hands
were
cold. He caught Belle smirking, noticed how the gesture accentuated her laughter lines; and felt his cheeks, those on his face, blush involuntarily. “You’ll probably be quicker on the untying. Belle, why does this always happen to me? I’m just a humble Lift Operator, Third Class.”

“No, you’re a markedly egotistical Lift Operator, Third Class,” replied Belle, not unkindly. “And what do you mean, ‘always happen to me’? I’ve never known you to be tied up in a women’s toilet before this—unless there’s something you haven’t been telling me.”

“
Belle
—”

“Kidding.”

“And what do
you
mean,” Gordon asked, “when you offer to ‘go get an outfit’ for me?”

“Just something appropriate to the location. Can’t have you scandalising the Plaza.”

“Not entirely sure I like the sound of that.”

“I can stop untying you, if you’d rather.”

“No,” said Gordon hurriedly. “Outfit sounds good.”

“Splendid. Any preference between blonde and brunette, for the wig?”

“I’ll leave that to your discretion,” Gordon said. “If I must.”

Belle rose to her feet. “There you go. Do you need a hand up?”

“Uh—no.” Gordon stood, and became conscious of just how much mirror there was on that wall. “Might be an idea if I wait in one of the cubicles, while you get this … outfit.”

“Probably best. Oh—”

“What?”

“Looks like that one at the end is occupied.”

* * *

The stall’s occupant was male, motionless, corpulent, pale of skin, grey of hair, and dressed in an expensive-looking business suit. The kind of suit, Gordon strongly suspected, from which it would be the very devil to remove those bloodstains.

“Who is it?” Belle asked, anxiously looking around the door of the cubicle.

“Not sure,” Gordon answered. “But I suppose the correct tense would be ‘was’.”

“He’s dead?”

“Certainly looks that way.”
If I had my handheld, I could get
a time-of-death from core body temp
. It seemed recent, though: no evident decomposition, no odour of putrefaction. If anything, the corpse—or possibly its suit—smelt
floral
. Roses, or something similar.
Odd smell for a middle-aged dead guy in a suit
 …

The ideal would be for him to turn the body face-up without handling it in any way—fingerprints—but Gordon neither believed in, nor displayed any particular talent for, telekinesis. And, nonexistent telekinetic abilities or no, the victim looked heavy.

The blood on the tiled floor was concentrated around the body’s upper torso, suggesting a chest wound, but with the corpse face-down there was no means of determining whether it was from a bullet, an energy weapon, or a knife wound.
Knife would be easiest to smuggle up here
, Gordon told himself.
Energy weapon would cauterise as it blasted, so probably no. And if
I had my handheld, I could scan for gunshot residue
 …

Something about the body’s left arm caught Gordon’s attention. The wristwatch.

He’d seen enough. He backed out of the stall, trying to ignore the naked man in the mirror.

“Gordon?” asked Belle.

“It’s the man from the promenade,” Gordon explained.

“Promenade?”

“C level. I was just outside the Na—well, on my way to Fairdig’s, and this guy stopped me to ask the time. I recognise the wristwatch. Because I thought it was odd, someone goes to the trouble of wearing a watch, why’d they need to ask the time?”

“And you don’t know who he was?”

“No, he’d just bumped into me. And … it must’ve been just after that, they knocked me out. And, it would seem, killed him.”

Belle moved forward slightly into the stall, fascination apparently trumping discomfort. She crouched down, peered in for a closer look. “Oh my God,” she said, raising a hand to her cheek and stepping back. “It’s old Havmurthy.”