“Socializing,” I said. “Who did she hang out with?”
“Her friends, of course,” Golson said, clearly baffled. I checked my mental question gun, and found I only had about two patience bullets left. After that, it was going to be live ammunition.
“Okay. You, who the fuck else?” I asked.
“Well, Mandy and Val and Zaz and Ness and Del and Jo and Kate.”
My last patience bullet. “Remember any guys’ names?”
“Well, no—I mean, who cares, right?” Suddenly sensing that I was reaching critical mass, Golson apparently decided to throw me something real. “Look. The last couple of weeks she’d been going to this new club. That’s all I know. I only went there once—it was kind of ganchy.”
I decided against asking what “ganchy” meant. I found I didn’t care. “What was it called?”
“Club Bastard, and I can’t remember where it was because I was totally loaded.”
Golson saw me to the door, prattling about wall-diving. I tried not to hold the fact that he was a waste of DNA against him, and gave him Howie’s number—in case anything unusual happened, or in the unlikely event he remembered something more significant than Sandy’s bra size.
As he shut the door behind me I noticed he wore thick silver rings on each finger of his left hand, and wondered how long Shelley Latoya could live on what they’d cost. Then I walked straight to the elevator and Beaded down to a world I understood.
About nine o’clock, something tickled at the back of my rusty brain. At first it was slow and indistinct, and I dismissed it as oncoming drunkenness. All the other evidence certainly pointed that way. But it was insistent, and I started to listen, still running my eyes over Mal’s reports but in reality waiting for some inner voice to speak. I hoped it would be loud enough for me to hear. All I could sense with any certainty was that it was something very, very straightforward I had missed.
I was slumped by then in The Ideal Mausoleum, and had been for several hours. The IM was perfect for my needs. It was dark, played old music very loudly, and had a row of Matrix terminals for hire in the back. When I arrived I asked the barman to give me all the Jack Daniels they had and took it with me into the gloom. Two of the terminals were broken, and some kid was checking out alt seal-culling on the other, but I encouraged him to leave.
I took Mal’s disk out of my pocket and jacked it in. While it negotiated with the host frame I took a long sip of Jack’s and peered around me into the gloom. I’d remembered the place as a dive, and a dive it surely was. I wouldn’t have trusted anyone I could see here to be able to spell their name right at the first attempt, and a bored cop could have busted over half of them for dealing and everyone else for possession. Luckily, nobody was interested in that kind of law enforcement anymore, which made it a perfect place to hang out; the patrons were all far too wasted to be into anything which would attract unwelcome attention.
“Jesus—this place is filthy.”
“How can you tell?” Tasked, turning my attention to my screen, which now showed Mal’s desktop environment. The Ideal Mausoleum is so dark I’d never been able to tell what color the floor was.
“This terminal’s swarming with viruses,” Mal’s versonality said. “Nice place you’ve brought me to.”
“You can handle it. Any news?”
“Still no match on the dead guy, they still don’t know Mal’s dead, and the murder reports are still locked. I’d advise against trying anything fancy on this terminal, because half these viruses are probably reflecting the datastream to hackers. Ow—piss off.”
I watched as the computer stomped on a little bitey virus that was trying to chew its way into his RAM.
“All I want is the stuff on Mal’s hard disk,” I said, when the dogfight appeared to be over. “Can you keep the Mongol hordes out for an hour or so?”
The computer’s voice changed momentarily to a high-pitched warble. “You’re a big hairy knobface,” it sang.
Mal’s versonality came back a second later, sounding more than a little pissed. “Another poxing virus. It’s dead now, little fucker. Yeah, I can—but don’t take too long.”
As the computer settled down to swatting the products of juvenile minds, I watched Mal’s files scroll onto the screen.
Mal’s reports documented, in page after page of detail, one of the essential truths of homicide investigation.
Real murders don’t get solved.
Let me explain. There are two types of murder. There are those where you catch someone red-handed, on video, with fifteen on-site witnesses and a murder weapon in the killer’s hand. These will go down.
They don’t happen very often.
Then there are all the others. Out of those, one in ten may lumber toward resolution; with a lucky print-hit, a long-shot DNA match, or a last-minute witness falling out of the woodwork. This one in ten may also go down. Sometimes.
The others will not.
The whodunits will stay out there, inviolate and perfect; part of the tapestry of life’s events and only wrong because we say so. People always say that the perfect crime is next to impossible, but that’s a crock of shit. The perfect—in the sense of insoluble—crime happens hundreds of times a day. Mal’s files were like an abstract of his mind; his personality stamped into words. Patient, thorough, comprehensive. His files also documented three such perfect crimes. No witnesses. No prints. No murder weapon. No forensic evidence of any kind. Mal could have worked those cases until the end of time and the murderer would have remained out there, capering and laughing just out of reach behind the curtain of shadow which would always surround him. There was nothing physical to tie the three murders together except the manner in which they were carried out: the frenzied desecration of a female body, and the stealing of their eyes. The eyes might—or might not—be relevant, and could possibly help narrow the field down to a few hundred subjects. Maybe it was a Bright Eyes who had committed the crimes. Mal had obviously thought so, which would have been one of the reasons he’d been following them up. On the other hand this didn’t tally with the NRPD’s apparent attempts to stall the already perfunctory investigations. The police department had no special love of Bright Eyes, and certainly wouldn’t have gone out of their way to prevent one from being caught for red ball crimes. Added to which, eye desecration was a standard MO for the kind of psychotic meltdowns who managed to remain undetected for years. Frankly, it could have been anyone.
I spent two hours, aided by regular slugs of whiskey and distracted by the computer’s swearing as it fended off further viral attacks, trying to find something between the lines of Mal’s reports. There was nothing, no theory that I could get to even beta stage. None of the dead women appeared to share a single friend, ex-boyfriend, job, drug habit or even star-sign. They lived on five different floors, from 38 up to 104. The nearest I came to an insight was the possibility that the victims had been chosen for their complete lack of relation to each other, which pointed to a distressingly organized murderer.
It was nearly ten o’clock before two half sentences finally wandered into each other in my brain like ships colliding in the night. By then the shipping lanes were somewhat fogged by alcohol, and it’s fortunate the sentences found each other at all.
“Yo,” I said, to the screen. “Can you spare a minute?”
The versonality was amusing itself by generating an animated history of its victories against the viruses. Though attractively rendered, it was perhaps rather epic in tone. “Yes,” it said sheepishly. “What do you need?”
“Club Bastard,” I said. “Tell me about it.” An onscreen agent sprinted off to check some database or other, and I took another quick slug of Jack’s. I suddenly knew this was what I had been listening for, was so confident I was already reaching for my cigarettes when the information I’d been looking for came back.
It still came like a bolt from the blue. I stared at the screen, reading the name at the bottom; then I yanked the disk and ran.
54 was dark and intense, most of the ceiling lights broken and every corner a gaggle of dealers. I jumped out of the elevator and ran down the second corridor, hoping the fuck that Shelley was still in. All I needed was a confirmation. I caught a little grief from the homeboys up from the 40s, and flicked my jacket open to reveal what was hanging close to my chest. No big threat in this neighborhood, because most of them were probably even more heavily armed than I was; but no one wants to die unless they absolutely have to, not even now.
I nearly tripped turning into the final corridor, some animal getting under my feet. I turned, trying to see what it was, but it disappeared round a corner. It looked a little pale and strange to me, but presumably that was an effect of the half-light Probably it was just some stray cat, though it seemed to scuttle rather than run. There was no singing behind Shelley’s door now, and no answer when I banged on it. I called her name and pressed my ear close to the wood, but couldn’t hear anything inside. I gave her a minute, then I pulled my gun and kicked it in.
The hallway was dark but a flicker of orange light came from the room down the end. I ran in to find a candle burning in the middle of silence, and a slim brown body lying curled round it. A needle still hung out of the artery in her thigh, and the candle had an inch to go. When I rolled her onto her back I saw that her eyes were tilted completely up under the lids, and a trickle of drying vomit ran out of her mouth and slid off her face.
Shelley Latoya was about as dead as you can get, outlasted by a cheap candle that was dripping milky wax onto the carpet. Head thumping, my vision blurred orange by Jack’s and the guttering flame, I searched the area around her until I found the foil packet. It was empty, but one taste told me what I already suspected. Rapt, hardly stepped on at all. A tiny spark of darkness flared on my tongue and then disappeared, leaving me next to a cooling corpse and without the confirmation I needed.
I held the foil next to the candle and found the name of a club embossed in the back: “Weasel Enemas.” Maybe if I’d just thought about the information I’d gathered I could have worked it out more quickly. Perhaps if I’d been thinking less about having a drink I might have paid better attention to Golson. Maybe not. My whole day had been predicated on just seeing the murder sites, and then relying upon Mal’s reports. How was I to know that two half sentences would have been enough, and that burying myself in real information would just blind me?
Laverne Latoya had been seeing a man she met in a club in the 130s. Okay, there were probably a hundred clubs in that area, but Club Bastard, where Louella Richardson had been spending her time in the weeks before she died, was on 135. It catered to aspiring young things from the low hundreds and high-lifers slumming it down from the 140s. It also—the database had said-featured dancers, with strippers after midnight.
Not many people deal Rapt. It isn’t very popular. It’s kind of a heavy experience. Weasel Enemas was owned by a different guy than Club Bastard was, but that was exactly the point: If you were dealing drugs out of your club you didn’t pack them in something with your own logo on it. You stole stuff from a competing joint, and sold them in that for the cops to find.
I’d come to see if Club Bastard rang any bells with Shelley. What lay in front of me wouldn’t stand up in court as the answer, but was answer enough for me. There had never been any question that this was going anywhere near a court anyway. Two women had died through their contact with just one club. The computer had supplied me with the name of the man who owned it, and I felt my head glow like a bulb as I knew what I was going to do.
First I pulled a sheet from the pile at the back and laid it over the body, then I snuffed out the candle and stood for a moment in darkness. I was drunk, and angry, but not stupid enough to be able to ignore a simple fact. I couldn’t blame Shelley’s death on anyone else. I couldn’t blame it on anything except a hundred-dollar bill left by someone who thought he was doing her a favor.
But I didn’t know how to punish myself for that, and so someone else was going to have to do.
What was it like, being a cop? In New Richmond, of all places? A complete waste of time.
I don’t say that for effect, as a heroic declaration of the pride of doing a difficult job in impossible circumstances, or out of a desire to articulate some painfully wrought insight on the state of society. It’s simply a fact. It was completely and utterly pointless. It was like being in a war where you couldn’t trust your own guys, where the enemy were even better equipped, and where you got to go home at night. Being a cop isn’t law enforcement anymore, it’s like being in a kind of Junk War: convenient, prepackaged, and just round the corner from wherever you are.
From a homicide point of view it worked like this. On floors 1-50, in official terms, you have human garbage. Black, white, Chicano, Asian—it doesn’t matter. No one cares what happens to these people, except the Narcs and DEA, because this is where most of the drug industry happens. Unfortunately, well over half the cops in these departments are dirty, so they’ll be more concerned with hiding what’s going on than with solving crimes. Complicating matters is the fact that not all the cops on the take are on the same side. It’s generally reckoned that about a third of the homicides on 1-50 are committed by men with badges. The last time one of these was solved was never.
Floors 50-100, you had to start taking notice. Some of these people have proper jobs. So if one of them gets killed, you have to at least look like you’re trying to find out who did it. But chances are you won’t, because no one saw anything, no one knows anything, no one’s going to help the cops if they can avoid it, and anyone involved is probably holed up on one of the floors where the cops simply won’t go. Every now and then, the mayor’ll get a hair up his ass over the hundreds of unsolved homicides in this sector, and there’ll be a show of strength—which basically involves framing enough losers to bring the percentage solved up to an acceptable level. Say ten per cent. So if you’re lucky enough to get murdered during one of these periods, you’ve got a one in ten chance of being—technically, if not actually—avenged. Otherwise, forget it—most people don’t even bother calling the cops for minor misdemeanors like murder anymore.
Floors 100-184 are different. If someone gets killed there, you’re supposed to solve it. But you don’t, most of the time. Sure, you’ve got the subnet and computer-enhanced suspect tracking, print matching, photo analysis. But most of those crimes will have been committed by people out of 1-50, in which case you’ll never find them. They’ll probably have been killed in some other action before you even get close to knowing who they were. A few of the other murders will be the standard deals of jealousy, hatred and revenge, some of which will go down. The rest will have been committed by people who live above 150, in which case you can’t touch them. As soon as a case starts pointing above this magic second line, toward some wayward son or psychotic patriarch, the case is marked “Beyond Economic Repair.”
185 is the mob floor, frequent social visitors to which include every senior policeman, local politician, and businessman. The mob generally only kill their own kind—unless they feel like killing someone else, in which case there’s a set kickback fee to ensure it never goes any further. Any homicide investigation originating out of 185 is dead before it reaches the station.
Nobody gets killed above 185, except by their own hand or by God. Neither has so far proved indictable.
You join the force, for whatever reason, and within days you’ll be locked into place. You choose which club to join: the one creaming money off the drug trade, or prostitution, protection, or the mob—the NRPD is basically an overhead which crime has to pay, Smart cops get recruited in the first weeks. The others will either leave by the end of the month or get killed in the line of duty. Nobody gets a big funeral for that anymore; it’s understood that it means the cop didn’t get with the program. You go stand at crime scenes, you fill in reports, you take money—half of which you’ll have to kick back to someone else—and you run around with a gun in your
hand. At night you swap cop tales over beer, shake prostitutes down for freebies, and then go home to your wife. Sometimes you might get killed. That’s pretty much it.
Some cops were different. Mal was different. Mal would take the call on any homicide, anywhere, and then try to make that sucker go down. I did, too, I guess, which is why I ended up a Lieutenant at the wise, old, experienced age of thirty-two. Within each department there is a hidden and motley collection of cops who are still there to solve crimes, like some tiny vestigial organ hidden in a thriving body of corruption. Mal solved enough prostitute killings that they had to promote him. However much the brass hated real work being done on kickback time, they couldn’t ignore the statistics. I concentrated on the soluble homicides in 50-184, and dunked enough to make lower brass myself.
And that was my mistake. Up till then I’d been on the take in a small way, enough to demonstrate I was one of the team. I’d shaken down a lot of drug dealers for my own purposes, which brought up my average. But when I made Lieutenant, things changed. I was expected to take my place in the second hierarchy, the criminal one. I didn’t, mainly for self-serving reasons of my own, partly because I was naïve enough to think it was wrong.
Worse than that, I tried to put away someone who was then one of its up-and-coming stars. A man by the name of Johnny Vinaldi.
I took the xPress elevator up to 100, then had to get out, like everyone else, and shuffle through Clearance Control. As usual, the commuters were outnumbered by security guards, men in gray uniforms who tried to combine subservience with a clear threat toward anyone who shouldn’t be there. Most of them couldn’t pull off the mixture, and tended to skimp on the subservience. In front of me in the queue were a typical selection of midlifers trying to get higher for the night. Most got turned away—single-day passes out of date, or straightforward fakes. One guy was either a habitual offender or a known criminal who hadn’t paid enough kickback, and was hustled unceremoniously into a side room, his cooperation ensured by a blow across the face from a metal riot stick. The remaining few, like me, were allowed through, and then given a complimentary peppermint.
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