The Hidden Throne (Hazzard Pay Book 2)

by Charlie Cottrell

  “A moment before you enter, actually,” said the man beside the desk, coming over to shake my hand. As his palm gripped mine, a feeling of greasiness overwhelmed me. Here was an individual nearly swimming in the slimiest ooze mankind can produce. I’m not a class warrior, but there are certain individuals with money who always rub me the wrong way. They see poverty as a moral defect, a wrongness that has everything to do with the poor individual and nothing to do with the conditions that the individual finds themselves in. Here was such a man, a guy who looked at my shabby clothes and scruffy demeanor and saw a moral failing on my part.

  Not that he was necessarily wrong about me, mind you. I’ve definitely got some moral failings, but I came by them honestly, and they had nothing to do with my also being flat broke.

  “Mr. Calthus is, as I’m sure you can imagine, a rather busy man,” the new oily man said as we broke contact. “He is humoring you—for reasons I do not understand, but it’s not my place to question—so I want to make it very clear that your time here is preciously limited. You will not make any effort to upset Mr. Calthus, nor will you gain access to any information that is sensitive to his business or personal life. He has agreed to provide a pre-written statement as to his whereabouts last night and corroborating evidence to support his assertions, and you shall be allowed ten minutes to ask other questions about Mr. Wallace. Is this understood?”

  “Sure, sure,” I said, mentally gritting my teeth and thinking about all the ways I would enjoy making a jackass like this pay for his asinine behavior, given half a chance.

  “Then please, this way,” he said, ushering me into the inner office. When you’re on the receiving end of life’s crap most of the time, you look for the little, petty revenges you can take. I settled for scuffing my feet across the marble floor, marring its pristine surface and creating a loud squeak that echoed throughout the room. I watched him flinch and smiled inwardly.

  I stepped into the inner room of the office and found it just as extravagant as the anteroom. Instead of marble, the floor in here was done in deep-pile carpet, soft and fine and bright, stark white. Keeping it from turning a dingy gray must’ve been the life’s work of a whole team of carpet cleaners. The walls were paneled in the same exotic wood as the receptionist’s desk in the previous room, but hidden lights made the wood almost glow. There were no windows here, save for one at the very back of the office, behind Calthus’s desk. It took up the entire wall, floor to ceiling, and overlooked the street, facing toward Eakin Plaza. You could see the fountain from here, and tiny individuals rushing by, all around, as the middle of the day slid into early afternoon. Calthus had one hell of a view, I had to admit, and his office was certainly the only one of its kind I was ever likely to stand in.

  The desk itself was a monument to excess. It was fully fifteen feet across and five feet deep, with curled, clawed feet at each corner. It was made of the same wood as the walls, but inlaid with gold filigree and what I thought might be ivory. It was empty save for a few functional pieces of what might as well have been art. One was some sort of old-fashioned desk lamp. I couldn’t tell if it was a true antique or just done up to look like one, but it seemed to be hooked up to a sophisticated lighting panel that allowed the user to vary the brightness by applying different levels of pressure when touching the “on” switch. There was a fountain pen set in ebony and platinum, the pens resting in a small stand. These pens had never written a bad check, I was sure. A small control panel was built into the desk on the left-hand side, and a simple in-out tray arrangement of brushed metal sat on the right-hand corner along the front edge of the slab of wood. It had very few papers in it. Behind the desk, a high-backed office chair of the sort a king might sit in if he were to suddenly find himself the CEO of a Fortune 500 company was turned away from me. I could see Calthus’s reflection in the window beyond, his fingers steepled like a supervillain about to turn around and give a five-minute monologue on his dastardly plan. His eyes looked hooded in the reflection, dark pits set in a thin, probably-once-handsome face.

  As I walked across the acre of carpet between me and the desk, Calthus swiveled silently around to face me. He rested his hands light on the armrests of the chair and sat back, the chair tilting. “Detective Hazzard, I presume?” he said. I stopped a few feet shy of the front of the desk. I noticed there were no chairs for anyone else to sit in. If someone came into this office, Calthus wanted them off-balance and uncomfortable. It was clever, if rather annoying. Calthus was in his late-50s, with thinning dark hair and a pale face lined with age and frowns. You got the impression that this was not a man who smiled often.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” I said, still looking around the room. “Mind if I smoke?” I asked. If I was going to have to be ill at ease throughout this little meeting, I wanted to go ahead and throw a curve at him, too.

  “Quite a bit, actually,” Calthus replied smoothly. His voice was a lazy drawl, drawing out vowel sounds in odd and unusual ways, gliding over syllables until everything sounded like a single, continuous sound. “Now, Detective, I’m sure your time is quite valuable,” he said in a tone that conveyed the exact opposite opinion, “so why don’t we get down to business so that we might both carry on with our lives.”

  “Your assistant was killed last night,” I said, flipping the vid window up in front of my left eye and hitting Record.

  “Yes, quite terrible, really,” Calthus said, his voice betraying no actual emotion. “Terrance was a valuable member of the Arcadia Savings and Loan family, and will be sorely missed.” He came across like a press release, all cold and slightly disinterested, the words a form letter with the blanks filled in. His mind was already on a half-dozen other topics he found considerably more interesting.

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, bristling slightly. He was too smooth, too casual about all of this. I knew men like Calthus didn’t worry about much beyond making their massive piles of money even more massive, but murder was a pretty serious thing and it was his damn assistant, for God’s sake. He could at least pretend to be bothered about it. “Any dirty laundry hanging about in his closet?”

  “Terrance was a model employee, Detective, and I will not have his good name sullied by the likes of you,” Calthus said, a rod of steel forced through the ice of his tone. It came off as rehearsed, though, and not entirely genuine. I filed away this little tidbit to chew on later.

  “I’m sure, I’m sure,” I demurred. “So what was he doing down in Old Town last night, and what the hell put that giant hole in his chest?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” Calthus said, tapping a button on his control panel and bringing up a handful of vid windows across the desk. “Now, I’m sure any additional information you might need can be handled by my receptionist. Please, don’t let me keep you.” He spoke with a finality that told me this interview was, in no uncertain terms, over. I flipped the recorder off.

  “Thanks for your time, Mr. Calthus,” I said, half turning away from the desk.

  Calthus didn’t even look up. “Mmm,” he muttered, already engrossed in his work.

  └●┐└●┐└●┐

  Stepping back into the anteroom, I saw the receptionist still at her post and two newcomers standing on either side of the elevator door. They were each well over six feet tall and, while they wore suits, were clearly not men of refinement and class. Rather, these were obviously enforcers, individuals hired for their brawn rather than their brains. I saw the bulge of guns under their left arms, and knew my time in this building was now measurable in minutes, at best. I stopped by the receptionist and leaned against her desk, acting as casual as possible.

  “So, anything you can give me on Mr. Wallace, miss?” I asked in my best suave voice.

  The receptionist was having nothing of it. “Mr. Calthus has sent Messrs. Worthiton and Alfonse to escort you back downstairs and off the premises,” she said shortly.

  I straightened up, fake hurt radiating from my very being. “I’m not entirely sure
why Mr. Calthus is beings so unhelpful,” I said, “but who am I to argue with the city’s favorite son?” I turned toward the two enforcers, my hands in the air in mock surrender. “Okay, gentlemen, I guess it’s time for me to take my leave. If you’d lead the way?”

  IV.

  I stepped out into the first-floor lobby of the Arcadia Savings and Loan, my two escorts close at hand on either side. “Tell me, boys,” I said as we walked toward the glass doors at the entrance, “how exactly do you pour solid muscle into such expensive suits? Do you need a funnel?” Neither man said anything as the doors slid open in front of us. Mister…Worthiton, I think it was, gave me a slight shove as I crossed the threshold, causing me to almost lose my footing.

  “Stay out,” he said, his voice a growl that would do the meanest wild carnivore proud. “If we catch you nosing around here again, you will be dealt with.” They turned and walked back into the building, the door swishing closed behind them. I straightened the hang of my coat and turned on my heel, heading back to my car.

  └●┐└●┐└●┐

  “Did you find anything, Eddie?” Miss Typewell asked as I stepped into my office. She was at her usual place behind the battered receptionist desk in the anteroom, an alternate-universe doppelganger of the receptionist at Calthus’s place. You could feel the humanity and emotional warmth radiating off of Miss Typewell; she genuinely cared about people and really liked helping them. A number of vid windows were collapsed into a stack and floating to the left of her head, waiting to be recalled. Ellen, I mused, basically held the whole enterprise together, in that grand tradition of personal assistants who make it possible for their bosses to have absolutely no business sense of their own. She was the platonic ideal of an office manager: clever, independent, organized, and capable of figuring out what I needed even before I did. Why she worked for me at the salary I was barely able to afford was a mystery beyond my reckoning.

  “Nothing worth noting, really,” I replied, doffing my hat and coat and tossing them over a chair in the corner. “Calthus is definitely hiding something, but I already knew that,” I continued, dropping into another chair with a heavy sigh. “I think we’re gonna have to do some digging on this one, and I’m gonna have to call in a few favors to get some idea what we might be looking at with this new weapon, whatever it is.”

  Miss Typwell nodded, swiping a few vid windows off the stack and starting up her data-mining program. “You got a message from the 4th Precinct while you were out,” she went on, “they’re ready for the autopsy of Mr. Wallace.”

  I stood up, grabbing my hat and coat again. “All right, I’m on my way over there now. Call if you find anything.”

  └●┐└●┐└●┐

  Marcus Franklin, 4th Precinct Coroner, welcomed me with his usual enthusiasm. “Eddie, good to see you,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand with his befouled, latex-gloved hand. I looked at the hand with barely-concealed concern, and Franklin seemed to remember himself. “Oh, sorry ‘bout that,” he said, stripping the glove off and pumping my hand vigorously. Marcus Franklin was a good man, an individual who hadn’t let bitterness and cynicism break him down like it had so many in the city. Franklin was in his mid-40s, balding, with a fringe of curly brown hair around the rising dome of his head. The coroner had sharp, clear eyes, a hawkish nose, and a quick grin. He was one of the few people in Arcadia that I trusted implicitly; alongside Higgins and Captain O’Mally, Franklin was a reliable, honest, dependable man who would always play it straight with me.

  He also really enjoyed his work. He liked puzzles, figuring things out, and helping bring justice to the victims of Arcadia’s less savory denizens.

  “This is an absolutely fascinating case. I’ve never seen a wound like it,” he continued.

  “Yeah, it’s a puzzler,” I replied, grabbing a pair of gloves as Franklin donned a new pair himself.

  “It’s not a traditional projectile, I can tell you that much,” he said, pointing to the wound. “No tearing at the site of the wound, no powder burns. Maybe laser-based, but it’d have to be something set at a low power: there’s no cauterization, very little in the way of burning around the edge.”

  “Weird,” I said, peering at the hole in Wallace’s chest. “Whatever went through this guy’s chest went through fast, anyway. And really clean. Bone looks like it was cut cleanly, too.”

  “I know,” Franklin replied. “Most projectile-based weapons, as I’m sure you know, tend to fragment and deform when they meet resistance, such as a human body.” He tapped a couple of buttons on a vid window and brought up a three-dimensional display of the corpse. “Generally speaking, when a bullet hits a rib or some such hard obstacle, it ricochets, chips bone and leaves a hell of a mess. Even if it only hits soft tissue, there’s lots of tearing and ripping and an exit wound out the back that’s often bigger than the entry wound. This wasn’t like that. Exit and entry are exactly the same size and shape.” He drew a line across the diagram and through Wallace’s holographic chest. “Trajectory of the wound looks almost like a flat line, so he was killed by someone about six feet tall, standing just a few yards away. Can’t tell if the shooter was in front or behind him, though. Whatever killed Mr. Wallace did so by perforating his heart and ribcage at a very high speed. CSU found no bullets, no casings, nothing to indicate what might have been used in the murder.” Franklin snapped the vid window closed and turned to me. “Eddie, there’s absolutely nothing here to tell us what killed Terry Wallace. I am at a loss.”

  I scratched my brow with a gloved finger. “So this has to be something experimental, right?” I mused. “Does it have to be a gun of some sort?”

  “Most likely,” said Franklin. “But not like any I’ve ever seen. I checked a tissue sample from the wound under a microscope, and the wound looks…perfectly clean.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, there’s not a single tear or ragged edge. Whatever did this severed bone, tissue, everything, cleanly, which should be—”

  “Impossible?” I finished.

  “Yes,” Franklin confirmed, nodding. “I’ll forward you the information I’ve got, but it’s gonna be a bundle of confusion for you just as much as it was me.”

  “Thanks, Marcus,” I said, stripping my gloves off and tossing them in the bin as I walked out of the morgue.

  A weapon that left a wound like that wasn’t something I wanted anyone in the city getting their hands on. A weapon that dangerous would only be trouble.

  And somehow, I suspected—without a whole lot of hard evidence to support the notion just yet—that Raymond Calthus was all tied up in the whole thing.

  V.

  Private detectives, especially those of the hard-boiled variety, spend years developing a network of useful allies and resources to aid in our work. They’re usually a motley assortment of lowlifes, thugs, informants, street urchins, and people who are virtually invisible in the life of the big city. Not all of them are trustworthy—hell, most of them would sell their grandmothers if they thought there was any profit in it—but they were usually reliable if you had enough cash. Or booze. Some of them weren’t that picky.

  I spent an hour or so visiting a handful of spots around Old Town. Each one was a dead drop for one of my contacts in various and sundry positions of questionable legality across a variety of fields. With luck, one of them would have some information on the mystery weapon, Wallace’s murder, or Calthus. Afterward, I headed back to the office to ask Miss Typewell to do some research for me and to make a couple of phone calls. One was to Walter Ellicott, the former soldier.

  “What can I do for you, Eddie?” he said after we’d exchanged pleasantries.

  “I’m trying to track down a possible new weapon,” I said, flicking a couple of vid windows into the transfer pile and sending them over to him. Ellicott looked at the wound in Wallace’s chest, frowning. “Any ideas?” I asked.

  “It’s pretty unique,” he said, his frown deepening as he zoomed in on the woun
d. “No actual tearing?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. The Data Division in the 4th Precinct did a fairly comprehensive exam, but couldn’t find any tearing or anything. It’s like it’s been perfectly cut.”

  “That’s damn weird,” Ellicott said. “I’ve got a couple of friends in army R&D; I’ll give them a call and see if they can tell me anything.”

  “Thanks,” I said, snapping the vid window shut.

  └●┐└●┐└●┐

  The hard-boiled detecting business is a waiting game. There are long periods of boredom and games of solitaire occasionally punctuated with gunfire and burly men trying to punch your teeth through the back of your head. You’d think moments like those would make you appreciate the boredom, and you’d mostly be right. But boredom is still boredom, and you can only stare off into space or create imaginary civilizations in the water stain in the corner of the ceiling for so long.

  I settled in for some boredom and Solitaire that afternoon, waiting for Miss Typewell to finish her research and for my contacts to get back in touch with me. In between lost card games, I scanned the files the police had sent me, but I didn’t really see anything in the official records that would explain what was going on. I didn’t expect to, really. This was not the sort of case that could be described as “open and shut.” Granted, cases that came my way from Arcadia PD rarely were; if the cases were simple, they wouldn’t ask for my help. In this particular case, there were just too many variables, too many unknown quantities. Nothing was connected or made sense yet. Then again, this early in a case this complex, I didn’t expect it to. My completely unsupported theory was that Calthus was bankrolling a new weapon, Wallace had stumbled upon it, and Wallace had been removed from the picture with extreme prejudice. That they used the new weapon to do so was either: (1) a sadistic form of poetic justice or (2) a convenient field test for an unproven technology.