Spares Read online

  Howie seemed to want to talk about it. “In the last two weeks, five of Vinaldi’s closest associates have been clipped. I don’t mean losers like the Minimart stooge,” he said, “I’m talking guys who ran most of the thirties and forties. The latest was last night.” I nodded, remembering the report I’d seen on the morning news. “He gets new people in immediately, of course, but it’s rattling him. Also, the new guys are having to learning-curve it, and someone seems to be pushing him pretty hard on all fronts. Deals going sour, DEA agents turning him, the works.”

  “So it’s some other lowlife trying to take over his rackets. Vinaldi can cope with that.” I knew from experience just how capable Vinaldi was of dealing with outside interference, and I didn’t want to discuss it.

  Howie shook his head. “It looks organized. Bottom line is he’s fine until confidence starts to go. Then the rats will start jumping to whatever new ship hoves in view.”

  “Who the fuck could take him on?” I’d tried, with all the so-called resources of the NRPD behind me, and my life would never be the same again.

  “That’s what I’d like to know. When I go to the John I have to give his guys twenty per cent of my turds, so I have a vested interest. Probably Vinaldi’d like to know too.”

  “And Jack Randall makes three,” I said. “So he can buy them all a cigar.”

  Howie smiled painfully. “I’m sorry, Jack.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. I finished my beer in a swallow, stood up, and left the bar.

  At four o’clock I was on 54, rapping impatiently on my third door of the afternoon. There was singing coming from behind the scarred panel in front of me, so I knew someone was in. A collection of corner boys had gathered fifty yards down the corridor, so I didn’t want to be hanging around outside any longer than I had to. I’d already been to 63 and 38, and both had been a waste of time. The lower of the two apartments had already been looted, and nobody within walking distance would admit to having heard of the victim. I’d walked back to the elevator, eye-fucked all the way, and counted myself lucky just to have gotten back out again in one piece. On 63, I’d talked to the second victim’s parents, both still blank-eyed with shock. They didn’t demand to see a badge, or ask if I thought their daughter’s murderer would be caught. They didn’t know anything about their daughter’s friends, or her job, or her life. She just came and went, sometimes early, sometimes late, until one night she hadn’t come back at all.

  Standard responses, no better or worse than usual. I wasn’t expecting anything different on 54, but I kept banging on the door anyway. Eventually it opened, and a stringy black woman in her early twenties stood blinking vaguely at me.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  The woman’s eyes were pinned and a muscle in her cheek pulsed gently. She stopped singing slowly, and internalized my question.

  “Fuck that shit,” she said. “I live here. Who the hell are you?”

  My real question was answered: She was fucked up, but not so much that any answers she gave me wouldn’t be worth listening to. Always assuming I could get her to tell me anything. She didn’t look too tough, but her heart-shaped face was already beginning to hollow out, and junkies don’t trust anyone at all.

  “I need to talk to you about the death of Laverne Latoya,” I said. “Can I come inside?” I glanced up the corridor. The guys on the corner were still there. They weren’t coming any closer, but they were standing and watching carefully. Either they knew the woman I was talking to, or they were on a day-trip up from the 40s, and considering robbing both me and the woman’s apartment. Something told me it was the latter, and that they were only holding off because they thought I was a cop.

  The woman’s shoulders slumped. “I already told about Verne,” she said, but she took a step back and let me inside. “I’m Shelley,” she added, vaguely. “Verne was my sister.”

  The living room looked like shit. The back half was piled high with stuff, and covered with dirty sheets. I knew why; six days ago Laverne had been spread over it in a mess about one inch deep. Shelley was evidently camping in a small area of the remaining floor; witness a pile of clothes, a half-empty bottle of cheap wine, and some hastily hidden works.

  “Did you live here with her?”

  Shelley shook her head. “Only been here two days. I found her ’cos I came to borrow some money off her but I wasn’t living here then. Came here because I lost my apartment ’cos I’m not working at the moment. I’m a dancer,” she added, trying to be helpful, before tailing off sadly, “like Verne.”

  I looked at her. She was dancing now, in a small and helpless way. She was trying to stand upright, but her legs were doing their best to undermine her. Each time one sagged she compensated with the other, in a tiny weaving side-step. Maybe she had been a dancer once, perhaps even a good one—in her state I’m not sure I could have stood up at all. I briefly considered shaking her down for whatever she was holding, but she didn’t look like someone who carried much spare, instead, I offered her a cigarette.

  Easy question first: “Who did you talk to?”

  “Two guys. Then one guy by himself.”

  “The last guy, was he different from the others?”

  Shelley nodded, smoke curling up out of her mouth. “Yeah. He was okay. He seemed…” She paused for a moment as if about to say something she barely credited. “He seemed like he wanted to know who did it.”

  “He did,” I said. “He was a friend of mine. What about the others?”

  “They was police.” She shrugged. I knew what she meant. They came down here because they had to, they called people to vacuum the body up and take it away and then left, never bothering to leave the impression that anything very much would be done about the fact that someone had dismantled her sister.

  “Were you good friends with Laverne?” I asked. A calculated question. Over the course of the previous two addresses I seemed to have started remembering how things were done.

  Shelley seemed to crumple. She gave up the attempt to stand, and wove toward the one chair which wasn’t covered in crap. The sleeve of her shirt rode up as she sat, revealing a long series of marks. Possibly the reason she lost her job—but if so she had to have been dancing somewhere at least moderately smart. Most places won’t care too much about needle tracks so long as you’ll take everything off and shake yourself in the right directions.

  “Yes,” she said eventually, head down.

  There followed the kind of story I could probably have filled in for myself. Two girls, growing up in the 40s. Only one of them sexually abused, but the other regularly beaten to shit. Laverne the former—sometimes volunteering to prevent Shelley from getting hit. Mother escaped the 40s through death, and her daughters followed as soon as they could by climbing a couple of floors as strippers. Laverne the better dancer, better hustler; Shelley traipsing behind, pulled in her sister’s tiny, doomed wake.

  Then, a month ago, Laverne hooked up with someone. Shelley didn’t know the name, only that the guy had money and that her sister had met him dancing in the 130s. She didn’t see so much of Laverne after that, and started falling deeper into the habits her sister had always somehow kept her out of; doping, and turning tricks to pay for it. As I listened, I could tell that Shelley had known, while she was doing it, that she was starting herself rolling on a slope which got very steep very quickly indeed: and that there’d been nothing she could do about it. Seven days ago a missed shift had left her with no money, and she’d come to Laverne to see about a twenty-dollar loan. She’d found the mess at the far end of the room and nearly run straight back out.

  Instead she stayed for a moment, torn between terror and knowing that no one else in the world would bother to report what she was seeing. Then she spotted Laverne’s purse lying down by the wall. Two hundred dollars inside.

  “That wasn’t mentioned in the scene report,” I said. Shelley started crying, and I waited until she could hear me. “She would have wanted you to
have it,” I added gently.

  Shelley looked up, hoping for absolution. Her eyes were coping with her life much better than the rest of her, were still big and clear and brown. I wished for a moment that I could meet this girl’s father, lean in close and teach him a couple of home truths. “You think so?” Shelley asked.

  “She was your big sister, wasn’t she?” I said. I watched her eyes as they flicked away, and saw that in time she’d feel okay about it. On the one hand I was glad; on the other I knew that part of what I was doing was getting myself into her confidence, the way you do when you want information out of someone. I didn’t feel great about it. I never had. But that was what the job was about.

  In the end there wasn’t much more information to be had. Shelley had called the police, they turned up and went away again. Their questions were perfunctory, and they hadn’t been back. Then yesterday Mal showed up, and that had been different. He tried to find stuff out, got frustrated at Shelley’s answers. Problem was, Shelley really didn’t know much. All you had to do was look at her to see she barely knew anything at all. Like me, like everyone, half the code for her life had been written before she was old enough to know what was going on. All she could do now was watch the lines of instructions play themselves out.

  I stood up. Shelley was still perched on the edge of the chair, staring into nothing. It didn’t look like she’d be singing again this afternoon.

  “There much of the two hundred left?” tasked.

  Shelley gave a small, tight smile without looking up and kept staring at the half-bottle of wine. I took my wallet out and found a hundred-dollar bill.

  “Remember what Verne would have told you to do with this,” I said. “What were good things, and what were bad.” I put the money on a shelf in the hallway and left.

  92 was another washout; the apartment empty, a “For Rent” sign outside. The neighbor on the right was a bad-tempered old tosser; he said the victim had been working for the Devil in some administrative capacity, possibly opening His mail for Him. On the other hand, he also claimed to be 180 years old, so it’s possible he was as mad as a snake. A battered and yellowing news sheet headline taped to his door said “Suffer the little children”; I couldn’t work out whether this was a plea for sympathy or a heartfelt request. The neighbor on the other side asked to see identification before answering any questions; but one look in his clear, bland eyes told me he had nothing to tell me that he wouldn’t already have spilled to Mal. Asking to see a badge was just another way of saying that he would tell anyone in authority everything he knew, at length and probably more than once.

  It was pushing six by the time I made it up to 104 and I was getting thirsty. I told myself that once I’d cased the last address I could go downstairs somewhere and have a drink. Maybe Howie’s, or maybe somewhere I could be alone and think. I crossed the 100 divide via an unorthodox route that cost me a hundred dollars. Normally, you have to apply for a pass, and I wasn’t in the mood for that; not least because I didn’t want the NRPD knowing that I was here.

  I was fighting to remain calm, because I. knew that the one thing that scares the shit out of witnesses is the sight of someone who looks like he’s ready to hit them. Being scared just makes them shut up or tell lies—neither any use to me. But in between every intentional thought I had was a reminder that Jenny and David and the others were lost somewhere in New Richmond, and that every minute which ticked by helped count them into some unmarked grave. A call from a phone post to Howie told me what he’d already predicted—none of his contacts had heard anything at all. Also that Suej was wondering where I was, and when I was coming back.

  The higher you get in New Richmond the fewer people live on each floor: the ultimate being the 200-plus levels, now the province of just one family. 104 is the lowest of the park floors—forty per cent of the area laid out in nearGrass and sculpted trees. You can’t throw a brick without hitting someone rendering something in watercolors. It’s sometimes fun just to throw the brick anyway. Round the edge of the floor are a string of midrange bistros and clothes stores, all selling the same things at prices that make you want to bark with laughter; the buildings in the center are full of Identi-Kit studio apartments for aspiring young professionals.

  Louella Richardson’s apartment was in a small block near the xPress elevator. She’d been found only that morning, and she lived the right side of the line, so I hung outside for a while. It was possible that some cops might still be around, working the scene hard enough to make it look like they tried. When I saw nobody worth noticing after fifteen minutes, I went inside and tramped up the glowing white stairs until I found Louella’s door. No tape across it, as there hadn’t been at any of the others. I waited dutifully for a few minutes after knocking, but nobody answered. A couple of yards away was the door to the next apartment. The name tag under the buzzer told me a Nicholas Golson lived there. I leaned on the bell for a while, and was about to leave when the door opened.

  “Jeez, man—there’s no one dead in here, if that’s who you’re trying to wake.”

  I turned to see a kid in his early twenties with a foppish wave of brown hair and clothes carefully chosen to look about twice as expensive as they actually were. Behind him stood a woman in front of the bedroom mirror, fixing her lipstick. The sheets on the bed had seen recent action. Young Nicholas was obviously a bit of a lad.

  “Not bad,” I said, “but you want to work on making it sound less rehearsed.”

  The kid stared at me for a moment, then grinned. The woman walked into the hallway and Golson moved aside to let her pass. “See you later, Jackie.” He winked.

  With a roll of her eyes she corrected him. “It’s Sandy.” Fuming quietly, she swayed and tottered off toward the stairs.

  “Whatever,” he said, with a vague flap of his hand, and then turned his attention back to me. “What do you want, tall dude?”

  The inside of Golson’s apartment was tidier than I expected, presumably because Mom paid for a maid to come in. Maybe also because someone who evidently dedicated so much of his life to encouraging members of the opposite sex to take their clothes off had probably figured out the fact that they liked to be able to find them again afterward. The furniture was white and the carpet red—it looked like the inside of someone’s mouth. Three of the living room’s walls were studded with artificial view panels, each showing a stretch of beach. The sound of waves piped round the room, the ebb and flow exactly matching the movement through the windows. The view looked kind of like one I knew as a child. Except that it had been idealized, which meant it said nothing at all.

  On the remaining wall was hung a piece of strange-looking sporting equipment, like a large fiberglass dowsing tool. To loosen him up I asked Golson what it was.

  “Wall-diving rod,” he said, enthusiastically. “Bought it yesterday.”

  I connected vaguely with a newspost report. “I gather it’s all the rage.”

  “Yeah, it’s cool this week. You just grab your rod and leap out the window. Freedom, man—you know what I’m saying?”

  “Probably not. How well did you know Louella?”

  Golson kicked the end of his bed, activating some inbuilt droid. Thin telescopic hands reached out of either side of the headboard, grabbed the sheets and started making the bed.

  Golson winked. “Never know who I might run into later.” I smiled politely, but let him know that I was waiting for an answer. He sighed. “Not that well. Okay, a little bit. We hung occasionally, you know? I already told the cops this.”

  “Yeah. But you haven’t told me.”

  “Louella was a babe—obviously I’m going to sniff around. But she held it pretty tight, you know—God knows I tried, and I usually get there. So after a while I figure okay, so I’m not going to fuck her. We ended up kind of friends instead.”

  “Any idea who might want to kill her?”

  “God no, man. I mean, have you seen what she looked like?” He reached across to a bookcase and pulled d
own a file box. Placing it on the table he started rifling through a collection of maybe a hundred LED-wafer photographs of women. After a moment he tutted, and pulled out a photo of the girl who’d just left. He showed me the back of the picture: The name “Sandy” was clearly written there. “Got to get better at remembering that shit,” he said, obviously pained at his incompetence.

  “Louella,” I reminded him.

  “Oh, yeah. Here.” I took the picture he handed to me. It showed Louella Richardson looking rich and beautiful and intelligent. There was an extraordinary gloss to her bearing, as if her ancestors hadn’t so much crawled out of the primeval swamp as taken a cab. Golson shrugged. “Who’d be selfish enough to scrub something like that off the planet? I mean, if you can’t score yourself, you at least got to have the grace to leave it around for the other guys to have a try—am I right?”

  Somewhere during the last sentence or so I’d remembered that I wasn’t a cop anymore, and that I didn’t have to be polite to everyone above the 100 line. Nevertheless, I smiled thinly, and didn’t hit him or anything.

  “So tell me something,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like what Louella was doing in the last week, who she might have seen.”

  “Hell, Louella saw everyone, man—you know how it is.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said firmly, wishing that Mal, with his infinite patience, had been here first and written a report for me to read. “What did she do for a living?”

  “She was a Shopping Explainer,” he said, and I nodded. Rich people who sometimes couldn’t come up with an excuse for buying something they wanted often hired people to come up with an excuse for them. Often the Explainers worked on staff, helping them with every little purchase; sometimes they were freelance, and only called in for unusual extravagances. Louella was the latter, and had a number of clients in the 160s and above. So, yes, in the world view of an airhead like Golson, she saw everyone. Everyone who counted.