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.”