by Jeff Edwards
I turned the doll around. The backside looked real and natural, but the computer flagged it with a wireframe as well. Another best guess. I put the doll back on the bureau.
I turned my head again. My field of view passed over the mirror on the vanity. I could see the reflection of the panoramic sim camera and its tripod standing in the center of the room like one of the three-legged alien machines from H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.
Past the reflection of the camera, on the other side of the room, I could see the reflection of a four-poster canopy bed. The pastel blue canopy and the wall above the headboard were flecked with dark spots.
I decided to get it over with. I turned my head quickly, and took in the other half of the bedroom. The blood that peppered the canopy and wall was just the beginning. The bed sheets and pillows were doused with great gouts of blood, turning glossy black as it dried. Christine lay sprawled on her back in the middle of the black slick.
The size of the data readout doubled as the computer began to throw in potentially relevant information on the body: skin temperature (based on surface thermographics), height, width, and estimated weight, coordinates and attitude as measured from three fixed points on the walls and ceiling.
She was dressed in a tight green sweater jersey and white French-cut plastic pants that were probably supposed to make her look grown up. The blood had beaded up on the slick plastic of the pants, still oddly red and liquid in contrast to the dark pool drying on the fabric of her sheets and sweater.
The hole in her chest was larger than my fist, the edges ragged, reddish-black and wet looking. The killer had cut directly through her sweater.
Enough blood had sprayed her face and matted her mousy brown hair to make it difficult to make out her features, but the look in her still-open eyes burned itself into my brain.
I spent twenty more minutes in Christine’s virtual bedroom. Then I checked out the crime-scenes of three more of the killings at random.
The MO was identical, variations on a theme.
I pulled off the data-shades at a little after two in the morning and shut down the computer. I was tired of looking at files and recordings. I wanted to ask some questions of my own.
My brain must have been on autopilot. Halfway out the door, I caught myself strapping on the shoulder rig for my 12mm Blackhart. Surprising how old habits could still sneak up on me.
They weren’t my habits. They were the habits of a David Stalin who no longer existed. I put the automatic and shoulder holster back in the desk drawer.
I was not that man anymore, and hadn’t been for a long time.
CHAPTER 5
The decor of the Velvet Clam Hotel was no more tasteful than its name implied. The central theme was retro-Art Deco sleaze, the vision of a designer who had obviously made no attempt to reign in his or her baser impulses. The front counter was a thick oval pane of smoked acryliflex stretched across the naked back of a kneeling woman, rendered in the style of the chrome angels that used to decorate the hoods of cars in the nineteen thirties. The woman was painted a tarnished gold, the paint scaled and flaking, brassy chips of it flecking the gray fake-marble tile. The door frames, the columns flanking the main entrance, and the wall sconce candelabras all had the same cheesy look about them.
At 3:12 a.m., there was no one in the front office. From the customer’s side of the counter, I could see through a half-open door into the back. There, in a worn-out easy chair, a man sat reading a book. It was a real book, not a data viewer, but an actual hardcover with pages. From my vantage point, it looked like Kipling.
Presumably, the man in the chair was the night manager, William Holtzclaw. If so, he defied any preconceptions I might have had about what sleazy hotel managers should look like. He was in his mid-fifties, tastefully dressed and had the sort of indefinable good looks that people call distinguished. Any self-respecting talent agent in the world would have cast him in the role of a college professor.
I pressed the service button and a bell rang in his little office. He looked up, set down his book and joined me at the desk.
His voice and gestures were as refined as his appearance. “Will it just be a room, or will you require a lady? We can provide an excellent selection of companions.”
I shook my head. “No. No ladies. I...”
He interrupted smoothly. “We can also provide gentlemen companions.”
“No. No thank you. I just want to ask you a few questions.” I reached into my breast pocket.
Holtzclaw tensed, possibly expecting me to pull out a badge, or worse. He relaxed when he saw the sheaf of Euro-marks in my hand.
I dropped a twenty on the scratched acryliflex surface of the counter and slid it toward him. “Michael Winter. You were working the night he committed suicide?”
Holtzclaw nodded and made the twenty disappear.
I replaced it with another €m20. “You checked him in yourself?”
Another nod and another disappearing act.
I slid a third €m20 bill across the counter. This one I hung on to. “Tell me about it.”
He rested his fingers on the other end of the bill. “Not much to tell, really. Mr. Winter checked in at a bit after eleven that evening. Perhaps an hour later, I heard the gunshot and called the police.”
“Was he alone when he checked in?”
“Yes. I offered to provide a suitable companion, but he declined. I assumed that he had made his own arrangements.”
“Did he have any luggage?”
“Hmmm... I believe that he was carrying a small case. Smaller than a briefcase.”
“Could it have been a video camera case?”
Holtzclaw considered it for a few seconds. “It might very well have been.”
I looked around and spotted an ashtray at the far end of the counter. I relinquished my hold on the twenty and reached for the ashtray. As I lit up, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the bill disappear. “Could someone else have been in the room with Winter?”
Holtzclaw produced a pipe and began the elaborate ritual involved with packing and lighting it. “Someone could have been. I cannot say with certainty.” He looked thoughtful.
“Are your door locks electronic?”
“Of course.”
“Are they monitored by your office computer?” I indicated a desktop machine visible through the door to the back office.
Holtzclaw hesitated. I dropped another twenty on the counter.
“They are electronic,” he said. He motioned for me to slip around the end of the counter and I followed him into the back office.
The book wasn’t the only antique in the office. The computer was a gravely misused relic. The holo display was badly skewed; the characters on the left were two or three times larger than those on the right, giving the impression that the text trailed off into infinity. I leaned my head to the side in hopes that it would make the display easier to read.
Holtzclaw looked at me expectantly.
I straightened my neck. “Call up April fourteenth and fifteenth.”
He stroked a few keys and the projection changed to two columns of data: time/date stamps on the left, and five digit alphanumeric codes on the right. There were only three types of code entries: 00216, 00000, and PPPPP.
I pointed to the column of code entries. “What do those mean?”
Holtzclaw poked the stem of his pipe at a line that ended in 00216. “This indicates that the door was unlocked using a key chip. Entries ending in five zeros mean the door was opened without a key chip, from the inside.”
The entry for 12:14 ended in zeros. Someone had opened the door to Room 216 from the inside, four minutes after Michael was dead.
“What about the two records marked PPPPP?”
“That’s the system’s way of showing that the door was opened using a pass chip. That first record would have been Housekeeping opening the door just before noon to clean the room. The second entry was from when I let the police in, after Mr. Winter shot hims
elf.
Twenty marks bought me a chip with a copy of the door lock files. For another twenty, Holtzclaw agreed to let me into room 216.
“Consider yourself fortunate,” he said, as he led me down the hall. “Two sixteen has been extremely busy of late. We were afraid that Mr. Winter’s death would adversely affect business, but quite the reverse has been true. Apparently, a great many people find death sexually stimulating. Instinct, perhaps. The reaffirmation of life in the face of one’s own mortality.”
From behind a closed door, I heard the crack of a whip and a scream. Agony? Ecstasy? Either way, it didn’t sound much like the reaffirmation of life to me.
“Right.”
On the stairs, we passed a tall brunette in a skintight red latex skirt and heels that made Sonja’s stiletto pumps look like flats. The top of her outfit seemed to consist entirely of a coating of oil and a sprinkling of glitter across her nipples. She pursed her lips at us and raised one elaborately arched eyebrow. Her lipstick and nail polish were the exact same glossy shade of red as her skirt. Holtzclaw winked at her and shook his head once as we climbed past her.
When we were in the hall, and out of earshot, he nodded back over his shoulder in the direction of the stairs. “That young lady’s name is Kenya,” he said in his pleasant voice. “Surgical hermaphrodite, both sets of sexual organs. Nobody’s really quite sure which set she was born with, and which came from the clinics. Personally, I don’t believe I care to know.”
He stopped in front of a door and slid a key chip through the lock sensor.
Room 216 looked pretty much like it had in the holo. Large irregular areas of the red carpet were stained a darker shade of red. Someone with a flair for theatrics had created those stains. There wasn’t that much blood in the human body. Besides, Winter had fallen on the bed, so the mattresses and sheets would have absorbed most of the blood. The management of the Velvet Clam was obviously playing up the scene-of-the-crime angle.
The air had a strange scent, a bizarre combination of raw sexual musk and cinnamon air freshener.
I walked around the room for a few minutes, trying to reconstruct events in my head. The camera would have been about here, facing the bed. Winter had sat there, on the bed.
From this angle, I could barely see my own reflection in the mirror on the left wall. I couldn’t see myself in the mirrored ceiling at all. I took a small step backwards and disappeared from the wall mirror. The camera had been here. Someone had positioned that camera carefully, to insure that it didn’t appear in any reflections. Anyone behind the camera would have been similarly screened from reflection.
“Someone was with you, Michael,” I said quietly. “Someone stood here and watched you pull the trigger. Someone leaned over your body, took a pack of cigarettes out of your pocket and calmly let themselves out the door.”
“It’s a pity that the video chip didn’t run longer.” Mr. Holtzclaw stood in the hall just outside the room. His voice startled me. I’d almost forgotten him.
“I’m sorry?”
“I was just thinking what a shame it is that the camera wasn’t loaded with a longer chip. If some unknown person disturbed the body before the police arrived, as you seem to believe, a longer running chip would have recorded them. Caught them in the act, so to speak. As it is, the camera shut itself off well before the police arrived.”
“Good point. That probably wasn’t an accident.”
Holtzclaw nodded. “My thoughts exactly.” He looked around the room. “Are you about finished in here?”
“In a minute. I want to get a look at the bathroom and the closet.”
The closet was empty, except for six of those steel coat hangers that stay locked to the rod, and a few dust bunnies.
The bathroom was no more helpful.
After one last look around, I thanked Mr. Holtzclaw for his help. I didn’t have any business cards, so I wrote my name and phone number on the inside of a Velvet Clam matchbook, and asked him to call me if he thought of anything I might find interesting.
He closed the matchbook and slipped it into a trouser pocket. “Are you a detective, Mr. Stalin?”
I thought about it for a second. “It’s starting to look that way.”
CHAPTER 6
Outside, I stopped under the hotel’s sign to light a cigarette. The sign was predictable: an animated hologram of a cartoon clam slowly opening and closing. Its fleshy pink lips were overtly vaginal. The words Velvet Clam in bright red cursive lettering endlessly orbited the sign at a forty-five degree angle.
My gaze wandered until I found myself staring through the dome at the night sky. It was one of those rare nights where the air was clear enough to see the stars. A three-quarter moon hung low over the western arc of the dome. The transparent polycarbon panels of the dome facing repeated the moon’s image hundreds of times, a brilliant collage of ghostly silver orbs. Each image was slightly different, the distortions growing more pronounced in the reflections farther removed from the single perfect moon at the center.
This eerily beautiful collage reminded me that there was an entire world outside the domes. I hadn’t been out there since the night Maggie died. I wondered how many other people were caught in the same rut, going through their daily routines without ever considering the world outside. How quickly the rats become accustomed to the cage.
I yawned and started walking toward the Melrose Avenue Lev station.
By the time the sun was dragging its hundred reflections up the eastern panels of the dome, I was in bed.
House woke me up less than two hours later with his someone’s-at-the-door routine.
“Who is it?”
“Two persons, identities unknown.”
I asked House to throw a projection of my visitors on the bedroom wall. No real help. One woman, one man. She was in her early thirties and looked like a professional body builder. He looked like an aging used car salesman. I didn’t recognize either of them, but their body postures and off-the-rack suits said “cop.”
“House, scan them for weapons.”
“Both persons are armed with semi-automatic hand guns, stun wands, and handcuffs, all of which appear to be standard police issue. The gentleman is carrying a briefcase-sized object that is emitting low levels of electromagnetic energy, consistent with active electronics. If you like, I can run a signature-analysis of the electromagnetic emissions, and attempt to identify the contents of the briefcase.”
“No thank you.”
I was pretty sure that I already knew what was in the briefcase: a Magic Mirror. That was the street slang for it, anyway. The technical jargon was a string of polysyllables about a kilometer long: Multifaceted-Electro-something-something-something.
“Uh... give me two-way audio.”
I waited for the chime. “Can I help you?”
The woman turned her head and stared into the camera. “David Stalin?”
“Who are you?”
She leaned toward the camera. Forced perspective made her image seem to grow larger and closer. It’s a good trick if you do it right. It feels threatening, even when you know it’s a projection. She did it right.
“Don’t fuck with me,” she snapped. “Are you David Stalin? Give me visual. I want to see your face.”
Her partner pulled out a badge. “Los Angeles Police Department. We’re here to...”
The woman glared at him. “We’re gonna kick this fucking door down.”
I took a hit off the cigarette. “I wouldn’t. My house is equipped with an extensive anti-intrusion system. Starting from stun level and escalating to lethal-mode in ten seconds. All registered, and all perfectly legal.”
She flipped out a badge, flashed it at the camera for a millisecond and put it away. “We need to...”
“Name and badge number?”
She glared at the camera. “Detective P. L. Dancer, Alpha Two Seven Six One.”
Her partner leaned in. “Detective R. Delaney, Alpha Two Nine Two Four. We’d like to ask
you a few questions.”
“Do you have a warrant?”
For a second, I thought Dancer would explode. Then she visibly swallowed and spoke in a tense voice. “No, we do not have a warrant. I can have one transmitted to me in about five minutes. Is that what you want?”
“I don’t think that will be necessary.”
I told House to open the front door and start a pot of coffee.
I met them at the door and led them into the living room. “Sorry there’s no coffee ready; I’m just getting up. I’ve got a pot on now.”
Detective Dancer scowled. “We’re not here for tea and biscuits. We’re here pursuant to a murder investigation.”
I motioned them toward chairs. Delaney sat down. Dancer did not.
I sat in my favorite wingback. “I thought the investigation was closed.”
Dancer arched her eyebrows. “Closed? What in the hell are you talking about?”
“The Aztec investigation. It’s formally closed, isn’t it?”
Dancer’s brow furrowed. “Aztec? What does Aztec have to do with this?”
Delaney pulled an audio recorder out of his pocket and loaded a fresh chip. “Are you David Stalin?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m David Stalin.”
“For the record, Mr. Stalin: do you object to our recording this interview?”
“What if I say yes?”
Dancer tried to stare a hole through me. “Then we get that warrant, and things start to get ugly.”
I shrugged. “No, I don’t object.”
Delaney punched the record tab and put the little unit on the coffee table. Then he set his briefcase on the table and opened it. The lower half of the case was packed full of electronics modules and the anodized louvers of heat sinks. The inside of the lid was a flat-screen crystal display with an integral keypad. It was a Magic Mirror all right.
Dancer smiled a hard little smile that had no joy or amusement in it. “You know your rights, Mr. Stalin?”
“Why? Am I accused of something?”
Delaney pulled a worn plastic card out of a small pouch inside the case and began to read. “This is a Multifaceted Integrated Electroencephalographic Response Analyzer and Recorder. It measures physiological changes that take place in response to certain visual stimuli. It incorporates...”