The Hidden Throne

by Charlie Cottrell

  I took a long look at the body. It wasn’t a pretty sight, the gaping wound where the guy’s heart should’ve been. It was an oddly clean hole, like someone had taken a core sample from his chest. That ruled out most standard projectile weapons, which would’ve torn and ravaged the tissue around the wound something fierce on the way through. A new, powerful laser, maybe? Those tended to be pinpoint-accurate weapons, designed not for a massive wound like this, but for precise, surgical shots. They were also expensive as all hell, and making one that had this wide a beam would’ve been next to impossible. A new way to weaponize Compound 16, maybe? But surely that would have left more goo than corpse.

  “Something new, then,” I muttered, taking another pull on the cigarette. Higgins nodded grimly, having reached the same conclusion. “So,” I continued, looking from the body to Officer Higgins, “what does O’Mally want me to do?”

  “As much as we’d like to, we don’t really have the resources or manpower to pursue this case ourselves,” Higgins said. “The deceased, one Terrance Wallace, was a bank employee for Arcadia Savings and Loan.” Higgins opened a vid window in the air between us and brought up Wallace’s basic information. “He had access to a couple of mid-level secured systems in the bank, but nothing you’d kill for,” Higgins went on, pulling up another window with Wallace’s bank personnel file. “He didn’t have a prior record for anything worse than a speeding ticket. So far, Data Division hasn’t been able to dig up any possible connections to the Organization or Kirkpatrick’s Confederation, so we have no idea why he’d have been killed or how.”

  “It’s not much to go on,” I said, standing up.

  Higgins nodded grimly. “I know, but it’s about the best you’ll get. I’ll have Data Division forward the information to your personal assistant.”

  “Thanks,” I said, shaking hands with Higgins. “Any idea where I should start?”

  “He had a wife,” Higgins replied, pinching shut the vid windows floating around him. “I suggest talking to her. Address is in his records.”

  “Thanks,” I muttered. “Anything else?”

  “Not unless you want to fill out the paperwork,” Officer Higgins replied.

  “Paperwork? Perish the thought,” I replied, pulling my hat low over my eyes against the coming dawn.

  II.

  The Wallace Widow lived in the area where Old Town transitioned into Downtown. She lived in an apartment in the Westinghouse Building, an up-and-coming tower of refurbished condos. The area had once been just as rundown as much of Old Town still was today, but in recent years, a number of social climbers like the Wallaces had attempted to reclaim the area, gentrifying it and getting old buildings remodeled and refurbished for upscale living. I suspected—and a quick search of public records confirmed—that the demolition and renovation had been conducted by Pithman Construction.

  The Wallaces lived on the 10th floor of the building, about halfway up, in a small two-bedroom apartment that was tastefully decorated in a minimalist, almost Spartan manner. What little furniture there was in the place was quite nice. Their couch, for example, was stark white and barely padded, but well-upholstered; much nicer than the sagging, shapeless shambles that was my own couch, which was known to swallow small animals whole.

  Mrs. Wallace was approaching middle age, but doing so gracefully. She was slender, with manicured fingernails and a well-tended coif of wavy dark hair done up in what I could only assume was a popular style. Her clothes were tasteful and simple, a sleeveless dress in form-fitting black fabric of some shimmery sort and a simple shrug cardigan in lavender cashmere. Her face was relatively free of wrinkles or worry lines, though she was developing small crows’ feet around her eyes, and slight grooves between the corners of her mouth and nose from a lifetime of laughter. She was an attractive if rather plain woman, her most impressive physical asset being her deep, brown eyes. They were large and dark, and you could easily fall into them if you weren’t careful. A person could easily fall in love with a woman with eyes like that.

  She was sitting opposite me in a straight-backed chair with no arms, her hands folded in her lap, those eyes looking rather dim and the corners of her mouth downturned. There was the hint of tear-streaked mascara, a suggestion of tears wept recently, though she looked like she’d cried herself dry.

  “Again, I’m very sorry,” I said, taking a sip from the cup of tea she’d insisted on making for me. I’m not generally much of a tea drinker—what, with its complete lack of alcoholic content—but I hadn’t been able to say “no” to a new widow, especially since I’d somehow been saddled with the responsibility of telling this woman about her dead husband.

  “Don’t the police usually handle this?” she asked, her voice slightly hoarse and cracking.

  “Usually,” I replied, placing the fragile teacup in its saucer on the glass coffee table between us and settling back into the couch. It really had no give, so settling back consisted of nearly slamming my body into the frame of the couch unpleasantly. “I’m a consultant with the Arcadia Police Department, and they asked me to step in and handle this rather…delicate case.” My explanation rang a little hollow in my own ears. I knew the reason I was here, delivering the bad news, was that none of the officers wanted to try to explain quite how Mr. Wallace had died. They probably thought it’d be funny to send me off to do it instead.

  “How did my husband die, Detective Hazzard?” she asked finally. Her voice was monotone, but the words were clipped and precise, as though she’d learned English as a second language and wanted to make sure she said every syllable as accurately as possible.

  “Well,” I said, trying to gather my wits and finding that they’d all decided to take a holiday and not inform me ahead of time, “that’s the tricky bit, see. We’re…not entirely sure.”

  “Why not?” she asked, confused.

  “The…nature of the wound he sustained…it…well, it doesn’t look like anything we’ve ever seen before,” I said, deciding to go ahead and be as upfront as possible with the woman. It wasn’t her fault neither the police nor the hapless sap of a private detective they’d suckered into handling this case had a clue what was going on. “He was…shot, from best we can tell, but we don’t know what sort of weapon it might’ve been or who might’ve done it.” I tapped a small button on the personal computer in my pocket and brought up a vid window. “Record audio and video,” I said, and a small red light flicked on in the corner of the window. “Tell me,” I continued, looking at Mrs. Wallace through the semi-transparent window so it would record her, “did your husband have any enemies?”

  The question sounded cliché, but its TV cop drama familiarity almost seemed comforting to Mrs. Wallace. “Enemies? No. I mean, none that I was aware of. He’d had an argument with the neighbor a few months back about how loud their son played his music, and we’d argued with the building superintendent over getting the garbage disposal fixed, but not…but nothing that could lead to something like this.”

  “What about at work?” I asked, taking another sip of the tea.

  “None that I was aware of. You’d have to ask his boss, Mr. Raymond Calthus,” she said, the look in her weary eyes reflecting the laundry list of possible horrors that plague you when your spouse has been brutally murdered.

  “Calthus?” I repeated, almost to myself. I knew the name, but so did anybody who lived in the city: he owned half the property in town, was the head of a financial empire that had its fingers in everything you could think of, and had more money than God. He was a major power player in city politics as well, and was rumored to own the mayor and at least a couple of council members. Along with the Pithmans, Raymond Calthus had helped fund the new City Hall building several years back. To say he was one of the most powerful individuals in Arcadia was to undersell things by quite a bit.

  “Yes. Terry was Mr. Calthus’s personal assistant. I think Raymond was grooming him to take over one of the banks in a few years.” Mrs. Wallace started crying at that, pro
bably overwhelmed by thoughts of the future that would never be.

  I stood up, saying, “End recording.” The light blinked off in the vid window as I pinched it shut. “Mrs. Wallace, I am very sorry for your loss. I’m sure you have phone calls you need to make, and the police do need you to come down to Precinct 4 later to identify the body.” I reached into my coat and pulled out a battered, stained copy of my business card, one of only a few I had left from the original set I had printed up about twelve years earlier, when I’d started down this whiskey-soaked path. “Here’s my card. Call me if you think of anything that might help.” I hesitated for a second. “Or if you need anything from me.” Not that I had much I could offer her, honestly, but it felt like the right thing to say. Her sad smile indicated I was right.

  Mrs. Wallace escorted me to the door of the apartment. “Thank you so much, Detective,” she said, palming the door button. The door slid open quietly; I stepped out into the hallway and turned back to look her in the eyes. Tears were welling up in them, again.

  “Like I said, anything you need,” I said, not even daring to blink.

  “Thank you, Detective,” she replied again, palming the door closed.

  III.

  My car stuttered to a stop outside Arcadia Savings and Loan on Tesla Avenue, Downtown, about a block or so down from Eakin Plaza. My beat-up, rusted-out hulk looked out of place among the stylish luxury cars lining the street. The sidewalks here were free of graffiti or the homeless that seemed to make up the majority of pedestrians in Old Town. The folks walking along here wore smart business suits in neutral tones, carried leather briefcases most likely stuffed with important documents, and wore shoes that cost more than everything I was wearing put together. Everyone seemed purposeful and focused, their eyes on the proverbial prize.

  Arcadia Savings and Loan was a monolithic building in glass and black marble, all shiny surfaces and sharp corners. The bottom two floors were the bank and bank offices, the basement held the vault, and floors three through twenty-two were high-end office space for rent. The top three floors were given over to Raymond Calthus’s personal office and penthouse apartment. My assistant, Miss Typewell, had conducted some research before I made my way to the bank and had turned up some basic information on Calthus. The Savings and Loan had been Calthus’s cornerstone, the business he’d built his empire upon. His personal assets were set at somewhere between three and four billion dollars, depending on the stock market that day. They included the bank, of course, as well as several pieces of key real estate across the city. He owned several apartment buildings, dozens of shopping centers and strip malls, a share of the hospital, and the land that City Hall was built on. Recently, he’d gotten into industrial research and development, sinking large sums of money into installations around Arcadia that specialized in practical applications of new materials and elements. Arcadia Savings and Loan remained the lynchpin of his empire, though, and as a privately-owned company it didn’t issue records on its financial status, but the bank seemed to be in pretty good shape. His real estate empire was managed mostly by subsidiary companies, each of which had their own CEO who was nominally in control, but the reality was that all were ultimately answerable to Calthus.

  He was also a well-known philanthropist in Arcadia, donating millions to charities and civic causes. He’d single-handedly funded the new library system, built a half-dozen homeless shelters, and sponsored a number of scholarships for underprivileged children attending some of the better sort of universities across the country.

  It was an impressive résumé, made all the more impressive by the fact that he’d built it all up from virtually nothing. He’d risen through the ranks at Arcadia Savings and Loan, from a simple teller to the assistant to the previous manager, Jerome Robins, then he used his position as leverage to create the real estate business and stage a hostile takeover of the bank’s board of directors. I operated under the assumption that anyone who had as much money as Calthus was probably more crooked than a scoliosis patient’s spine, because no one makes that much money without at least a little bit of cheating. He was clearly a bit of a snake, but he was a well-heeled snake with a talent for making bags of money.

  The doors of Arcadia Savings and Loan slid open as I approached, debunking my theory that they would be able to detect just how little cash I had in my own bank account and somehow prevent me from entering the building. A well-groomed man with slicked-back hair and a hint of razor burn on his neck stepped to me smoothly as I entered, his voice thick with oily condescension as he said, “Good morning, sir, how many I help you today?”

  I flashed the guy my private detective’s license while I casually looked around the expansive, open lobby. The middle part of the room was open, with a high ceiling that reached to the second floor. Around the balcony that circled the high ceiling, offices lined the walls, with glass walls facing out over the lobby, giving the employees who worked there an eagle-eye view of the whole operation. A staircase off to the left and another off to the right swept up and granted access to the second floor, with elevators in the back right and back left corners, as well. The offices on the second floor wrapped all the way around the lobby, with foyer areas on the second floor landings where each elevator would deposit anyone riding them to that floor. The elevators were housed in transparent shafts of glass and steel, allowing anyone riding in the elevator to see and be seen.

  “I’m here to speak to Mr. Calthus on a police matter,” I said nonchalantly, pocketing my license. “It’s about his recently-deceased personal assistant, Mr. Wallace.”

  The man shifted mental gears smoothly, saying, “Yes, we heard about poor Mr. Wallace. A true tragedy.” He wrung his hands but managed to do so in a way that conveyed neither concern nor actual human sympathy. “But I’m afraid Mr. Calthus is unavailable for comment today. He is, as I’m sure you can imagine, quite a busy man, especially with his personal assistant no longer among us. He will be more than happy to send an official statement over to the police later today, but he does not have time for banal questions about his whereabouts or whether or not Mr. Wallace had any enemies.”

  “Hey, how’d you know what my banal questions were gonna be?” I asked sarcastically, frustrated with the stonewalling. “Guess I’ll have to come up with some new banal questions on the way up to his office.” I started for the elevator.

  The oily floor manager oozed after me, slipping between me and the elevator. I came to a stop, crossed my arms across my chest, and gave the guy a look I’d borrowed from a teacher friend of mine. It didn’t have any appreciable effect on the bastard in front of me, unfortunately. “Sir, perhaps you misunderstood me. You are not allowed to the upper floors under any circumstances. You will not be seeing Mr. Calthus today.”

  I glanced at the floor, half expecting to see a slime trail behind this guy. “Oh, no, I understood you,” I said, gently but firmly pushing him to the side. “I just don’t care and I’m not listening.”

  “Sir, I will call the police and have you forcibly removed from the premises,” the man said, stepping into my path once again. I stopped, my lips set in a firm line.

  “Alright, look, slappy, I’ve tried to be nice, but you’re starting to annoy me,” I said, tensing. “Now, you’re gonna get out of my way, I’m going to speak to your boss, and everyone will be…well, not happy, exactly, but certainly unhappy in an acceptable way.”

  “Sir, I—” the oily man began again, but he was interrupted by a faint beep and a vid window that popped up over his left eye. “Yes, Mr. Calthus?” the man said, concern and a little bit of fear creeping into his expression. “Yes, Mr. Calthus,” I heard him say in response to an unheard direction from his boss. “No, Mr. Calthus, I didn’t think that…no, sir, I’m sor…yes, sir, I am sending him up.” The vid window collapsed silently, and the man turned back to me, the color having drained from his face. “Mr. Calthus says you are to proceed immediately to his private office, where you will have ten minutes of his very precious tim
e.”

  “Thanks, slappy,” I said, patting him on the shoulder as I walked by. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  └●┐└●┐└●┐

  I stepped out of the elevator and into another world; specifically, one of luxury and questionable taste. I’d worked for rich clients before, but I’d never been exposed to something like Calthus’s office. Shafts of light shot across the room from tall, narrow windows done in an almost gothic style. There were some hidden recessed lights that helped minimize shadow in the cavernous room, but the room seemed to absorb light, whether natural or artificial. It was all the black marble, I decided. Despite the stone’s high polish, light seemed to just disappear into it. The floors were made of the stuff, the same marble that covered the facade of the building. The furniture was really something to behold, though. A small herd of leather sofas occupied the echoing anteroom I was standing in, clustered around claw-footed coffee tables that had probably never had a worn magazine or cup of coffee placed upon them. This was not a room where one actually waited to be seen; no, if you made it this far, you would be seen immediately, and at Calthus’s pleasure.

  I continued my examination of the room. Several species of very small, very soft animals had gone extinct to create the area rugs that lay between the couches. The walls were lined with the sort of paintings you can usually only see behind velvet ropes in the nicer museums. Only these were even nicer. A hell of a lot nicer. Even I could name a few of the pieces hanging in that room, and I’m a cultural Philistine. But I couldn’t even begin to calculate the cost of them. It was astronomical, I knew that much.

  At the far end of the anteroom was a low, curved desk of some exotic wood I couldn’t even hope to identify. Behind it sat a petite woman in a simple gray pantsuit, her golden hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. She had several vid windows pulled up around her, illuminating her face in a strange orangey-yellow glow that washed out her already-pale skin and made her look colicky. Standing next to her was a gentleman in a neatly-pressed suit with a similar oily look to the guy I’d encountered downstairs. The receptionist looked up at me through her forest of vid windows as I approached. “Mr. Calthus is expecting you,” she said, her eyes darting back to the vid windows arrayed around her, as though she feared missing even a byte of the data streaming across them. “Please proceed.”