“Yeah. He probably will, but at least he’ll get to choose his method of execution. But he isn’t dead yet. I don’t know what that guy went through. Nobody does but him. Hell, he may not even know for sure. Each guy has to deal with it in their own way. His way is drinking. My way is being tough and bitter. Pete’s way is tending bar.”
“I thought Pete was a logistics guy.”
“Supply and Logistics. Army Occupational Specialty 52P. Don’t think for a second he didn’t take a holiday hayride through hell. You know when he mentioned taking wounded and dead back from the front?” Blanc nodded. “They called them ‘fun runs,’ soldier-speak meaning they were anything but.
“On one of those days he hauled my sorry ass out of there... after pulling my half-dead carcass from a collapsed bunker while under fire. I took one through the knee that should have cost me my leg, if not my life, but Pete patched me up and got me to the med center. I came to in the truck on the way there. You don’t want to know what it was like. A rolling box of blood, guts, pain, and death. The wounded were screaming and dying and the sound echoed inside the truck like I don’t know what. Still does in my head when I think about it. Most of us made it. Pete did that nearly every damned day. The docs saved my leg, gave me a new knee, and six weeks later I was back on the line. Pete feels guilty about that.”
“How could he have known?”
“He couldn’t. He saved my ass, but it’s soldier’s lament. If I had lost my leg I would have gone home, so he feels responsible. The fucked up thing about it is they offered me an ‘easy’ job like Pete was working when I left the hospital, but I turned it down. You remember me telling that vet about fools who turned down those kinds of jobs? That was me. I knew a couple dozen guys that did the same stupid thing. We were young and dedicated and never once thought about what we were doing.”
“Does Pete know about you turning down the job?”
“Of course he does. It makes him feel even worse. He feels responsible.”
“Why?” Blanc asked incredulously.
“Soldier’s lament.”
“I guess I’ll never understand what you guys went through.”
“I hope you’ll never need to. It won’t make you a better person, trust me.”
“Rick, you know these conversations with you are not just enlightening, they’re like a breath of polluted air.”
A couple of days later Detective Robert Blanc started his first shift in High Town District. He told me he would stop by when High Town had him baffled.
About mid morning the same day I picked up a client. I’d like to say that if I had known what it would lead to I might have turned the job down, but who am I kidding.
I couldn’t remember the last time I saw a private skycar in the Red Light during the day, but there it was setting down at the curb in front of Building 313. From my window, I saw the driver exit the vehicle. Turns out he was no mere driver, but a chauffeur. He opened the rear door and let a lady out onto the sidewalk. The chauffeur looked uncomfortable standing next to the car. This wasn’t the usual neighborhood for his sort.
She was rich, that much was obvious. She wore a white blouse under a skirted black business suit. It wasn’t so much her attire—I guessed she had dressed down for her visit—it was her demeanor. She walked like someone born to power, or someone who took to it naturally. Not two minutes later she was in my office.
I’d just turned on the coffee maker, an old fashioned percolator, when I heard the tapping of fingernails on the plass panel on my front door. It was fortunate that I was dressed, half the time I was still in my underwear that time of the morning, if I was awake at all. I shoved my pistol into the waistband of my pants at my lower back as I went to unlock and open the door. I let the lady inside and gave her a seat in front of my desk.
She told me her name was Savan, Beverly Savan. From the Spire, of course. She was a little peeved that there was no place to land a skycar on the roof, but she went straight to business matters.
“Mr. Johnson, I would like you to look into the activities of my husband, Charles.”
“All right, Mrs. Savan. I have a few questions if that is okay with you.”
She inclined her head then shifted in her seat and crossed her black silk clad legs. She glanced at the cabinet by the window where the percolator was doing its job. The rhythmic whooshing sounds of the machine distracted her.
“First, why me?”
“The activities I wish to be investigated occurred in High Town. I would think a local investigator would be more effective than one from elsewhere.”
“By that, ma’am, do you mean to say you think some of your husband’s activities were here in the Red Light?”
“Yes. Not entirely, but all within High Town.”
“And what is the nature of the matter?”
“Marital.”
“Do you suspect some infidelity?”
She nodded. “Suffice it to say I am suspicious. Charles went to oversee some work at the space elevator yesterday. He’s an executive. When he did not come home last night I called his administrative assistant and learned that he had a meeting somewhere in the Red Light last evening. He never mentioned this to me. He did not return home and I would like to know his whereabouts. I suspect he was with a prostitute,” she said.
She didn’t pause, weep, or show anger when she said that. She was all business. A lot of PIs would have pushed for more salacious details, but unless it was somehow pertinent, it’s not something a professional does. The issue she wanted me to look into was certainly not an unusual task in and of itself. A lot of men and women from all walks of life come to the Red Light for such things, but execs from the Spire? Then again, the spouses of Spire executives didn’t generally hire me, so what did I know.
“I would like to know what he did between the time he left the space elevator and this morning. Do you think you can do this?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. I can do that and do it discreetly.”
“That would be desirable.”
“About my fee, I get—”
She cut me off with a wave of her hand as she drew an envelope from a jacket pocket and slid it across my desk with one manicured finger. “That is three days in advance. It is what I understand to be the going rate for private investigations,” she said.
I picked up the envelope and looked inside.
“Three thousand credits in scrip, Mr. Johnson. Scrip is agreeable? Discretion as you said.”
Three thousand. Maybe the Spire private dicks pull in a grand a day, but that’s four times what I charge at the most. She didn’t need to know that though. “There is also the matter of expenses, ma’am.”
“Of course. My driver will conduct any further face-to-face business that may be necessary. Here is a list of pertinent information about my husband and contact numbers you may use.”
“I wish all clients were as efficient as you,” I said as I took the items from her.
“And that all business matters could be dealt with as quickly,” she said with a slight smile. “Good day, Mr. Johnson.”
She stood and I walked her to the door. A couple of minutes later the skycar was off the ground and gone.
~~~:{o}:~~~
Chapter 2
on the QT News Service - Local, High Town
Big-Time Client for Local Gumshoe?
Building 313 in the Red Light had a recent visitor from places on high it seems. A chauffeured luxury skycar with Spire ID numbers delivered a well-dressed lady who visited a business establishment located within. Rumors say she met with a private investigator, and interestingly enough two investigators work in the 313, R.R. Johnson, and Pat Bland. Johnson is known as an old school tough guy while Bland is a pastry soft psychic. Was the fine lady seeking a lost bird, or perhaps hubby made a recent visit to High Town’s own Red Light and she’s checking up on him?
on the QT - We’ve got the lowdown in High Town.
---o---
The best place
to start is usually at the beginning. A good rule of thumb to follow is this: a PI does homework before footwork. That’s exactly what I did in this case.
Clients will rarely tell you everything. Usually it was because there might be something embarrassing or incriminating they didn’t want discovered. That was understandable, no one likes to air all of their dirty laundry. PIs are not priests or attorneys. The expectation of keeping mum is a lot lower for Private Dick X than it is for Father Y or Shyster Z. It wasn’t ethical or legal for a shamus to use information they uncovered against their clients, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
A PI was obligated by law to refer any criminal acts they may discover during the course of an investigation to law enforcement, even if it was a client that committed the crime. PIs were mandated reporters, as the powers that be called it. I generally wouldn’t bother unless they did something pretty heinous. Let’s say I had a client who I found was a serial killer, then yeah, the cops probably would get a call. If they sold bootleg porn holos or their vehicle registration was expired, what did I care. I wasn’t going to do the cops any favors.
Beverly Savan’s info told me her husband worked for BluCorp, but didn’t say what he did for them exactly. It wasn’t that difficult to dig up. The webnet could save a PI some shoe-leather.
Charles Everett Savan was on the board of directors for BluCorp, a Gulf City based corporation that operated all over the globe, a megacorp. They were a diversified company that did business in a bewilderingly wide array of fields.
Mr. Savan came from rich stock, a family that hit it big in some techno boom back in the 20th Century. He was the youngest member on the BluCorp board. Pretty nice work if you could get it.
As Beverly Savan said, BluCorp was indeed doing some work at the space elevator, but I wondered why a board member would need to look into work being done at a jobsite personally. Unless it had some influence on what he did in the Red Light it wasn’t important. It was a starting point though.
A cab ride got me to the Space Elevator Security Zone, an area that surrounded the space elevator. During the day portions of it were open to the public. The place was nearly always busy with tourist traffic.
The construction project was easy to spot. It was a four-story structure, an office building was my guess. The information Mrs. Savan provided said her husband met with a site manager, but she didn’t know the name of the individual. A sign in front of the construction site showed me what I needed to know. It read Site Manager, James York. A visit to the office trailer on the site didn’t help much. York wasn’t there. He had called in sick early that morning.
I asked the guy manning the phones in the office if he was there when Savan visited the previous day. It turned out he was. He didn’t know much, but sometimes a little is a lot. He said York and Savan went out to an area where a crew was putting in some reinforcing mesh before they did a plascrete pour.
Lunch hour wasn’t far off, so I decided stick around the work site and see if any of members of the crew knew anything.
When the plascrete crew came through the gate in the chain link fence, they swung a right and headed for the gut truck parked nearby with me following right behind. While they stood in line I listened to them gab among themselves. It wasn’t much of a conversation, usual working stiff talk. But it told me these guys would talk to me if I approached them the right way.
“Hey, you guys working that plascrete pour?” I asked.
“Yeah, what’s it to you?” said the oldest man in the group.
“The work? Nothing. There was a guy went there yesterday. I’m looking for him.”
“York, or the suit?”
“The suit. Guy stiffed me on a job.”
“Yeah? You’d think a guy that wears a suit like that to a worksite would pay his bills.”
“That’s what I thinking. Maybe that’s how he got to be so rich,” I said with a smile.
The guys thought that was funny.
“I ain’t sure what he was out here for. Him and York didn’t talk about the job,” the older guy said throwing a thumb at the building under construction. “I don’t know where he is now, but I know where he was headed when he left,”
“You tell me where he went and I’ll buy you guys lunch.”
“And they say there ain’t no free lunch,” the guy said. “Lacey’s, in the Red Light. Heard him say he had to meet some guys there.”
“He say who these guys were?”
“Nah, that’s all.”
“Well, that gets me closer to the man. Thanks.”
I paid for the lunch, which proved the old guy wrong. There is no free lunch, because somebody somewhere always has to pay. Lacey’s wouldn’t be open for a few hours, so I decided to see if York wanted to talk.
Another visit to the office trailer told me he was renting an apartment a few stories below in one of the Riser districts.
His apartment was a nice one. It overlooked the skyway, which meant it had windows. I knew this because the door had a small window through which I could see inside. I saw no sign of him. The place didn’t look like anyone was in there, unless he was still in bed. I rang the bell a few times and got no response, so I tried knocking with the same results.
A woman cracked a door one apartment down and across the hall. She glared at me. “He’s not home. He left last night on a trip,” she said watching me with one squinting eye peeking around the edge of the door.
York left last night on a trip and called in sick this morning, I thought. Odd, but if it didn’t involve Savan it wasn’t any of my affair. “What time did he leave?”
“A little before midnight.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“No. Who are you?” she asked, still squinting her eye at me.
“I am a representative of the Church of Universal Darkness,” I lied. “I was going to give him a pamphlet.”
“Solicitation is illegal. I’ll call the cops.”
“Would you like a pamphlet, ma’am?” I smiled.
“I’ll call the cops,” she said as she shut the door.
I’m sure they’ll get right on that, I thought as I headed for the elevators.
I caught a nap when I got back to my office, then I made my way to Lacey’s, a classy little strip club that slotted in about half way between sleazy and high end on the club scale. Lacey Danns was an ex-stripper who saved her credits and steered clear of trouble while she was shaking her ass and bought a club of her own when she’d had enough. Enough of the dancing, and enough credits to buy a decent place and work to make it better.
She was a good gal, stuck to her plan, never screwed anybody over, and managed to stay nice through it all. She knew the business, ran a clean joint, knew the kind of crap her girls could pull that might get a club owner in a jam, and didn’t put up with it.
I got there maybe half an hour after it opened. I hadn’t been in the place for awhile and there’d been changes. There were already a few customers, and there was a platinum blonde onstage. I asked the bartender if Lacey was around. I’d never seen him before. His plastic nameplate read Tim.
“Yeah, she’s in her office.”
“Tell her Johnson is here.”
“Are you Johnson?” he asked. I think he thought he was being funny.
I glared at him. “Yeah. She knows me.”
He picked up a landline phone handset and called her. “She’ll be out in a few minutes,” he said after he hung up. “Can I get you anything?”
“Ice water,” I said. The guy glared at me. Maybe he thought I was being funny with him. I turned to watch the blonde on the stage. She was talented.
“She looks... nostalgic,” a paunchy middle-aged guy a few stools down the bar said to no one in particular.
“What?” I said glancing his way.
“She looks nostalgic,” he repeated, sounding sure of himself.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“She makes me think of actresses in a l
ot of those old pre-color movies with femme fatales,” he said never taking his eyes off the blonde.
I shrugged and turned back to the bar and picked up the glass the bartender had just set down. No coaster. I pulled one off the stack on the bar. If he didn’t straighten up Tim wouldn’t last long. I looked back at the stage and imagined the blonde, clothed and in black-and-white. Nostalgic. Maybe the guy was right.
I drank half the water and looked at the guy watching the blonde. He was mesmerized.
A man watching a naked girl dancing on a stage and his money are soon parted, I always said. I reminded myself I was in the wrong racket.
A few minutes later Lacey came out from the back. “Rick Johnson. I thought Tim meant another Johnson was here. If I’d known it was you I wouldn’t have bothered,” she said as her eyes flashed.
I think she’d always had a slight crush on me, which didn’t say much for her judgment.
I smiled. “Yeah, I figured. That’s why I didn’t tell your glass wrangler there my first name.” Tim didn’t like my comment, but Lacey thought it was funny.
“C’mon, we’ll talk in my office,” she said.
I followed her down the hall. It wasn’t that long ago Lacey gave up dancing. She used to be a platinum blonde like Miss Nostalgia out on the stage, but she’d let her hair go back to its natural chestnut brown color. She was prettier now and still had the dancer’s body. I was a little sorry when we got to her office because I was enjoying the view.
She sat down in her giant black office chair behind a cluttered desk. I sat across from her. “What’cha need, Rick?”
“A Spire business exec came here yesterday. He was supposed to meet some guys.”
“You working another kidnapping case? I heard you didn’t like doing that.”
Kidnapping. Either Lacey was confused, Mrs. Savan was playing me for a sap, or I just stumbled into something complicated.
“I don’t like working kidnappings involving kids. Savan is a big boy,” I said. She didn’t need to know I wasn’t working a kidnapping, or that I didn’t know anything about it. If she did, she might squeeze me for more scrip than she would otherwise. I said she was a nice girl, but she was also a businesswoman. Business is business, they say.
The Lowdown in High Town: An R.R. Johnson Novel Page 4