The Langley Case: A Nathan Roeder Mystery

Felicia has a conversation. I get a word or two in edgewise.

“Are we really going to Town?” She asked me.

“Yes,” I said. It was one of the last words I got to say.

“That is amazing! I’ve always wanted to live there. Ever since I was a child, I knew I wasn’t meant to live out here. But what am I going to do?” She paused. I should have said something. “I don’t have any skills. Not yet. Not anything I could do in Town, anyway. I mean, I guess I could keep being a prostitute until I was ready for other things, but the whole plan was to get out of the Sprawl and stop hooking. You understand that, don’t you Nathan?”

“Yeah, sure.” I didn’t think I was part of the conversation. She just needed me to assure her of something. To be honest, I didn’t want her to be a hooker any more than she wanted to be one. But she had a point. With no skills, how was she going to make any money?

“Where am I going to live? Could I live with you Nathan? Just for a little while, of course. And I guess I could sleep on the couch. Unless, you know, you wanted me to share the bed with you. You do have a bed, don’t you? What am I saying? Of course you do. You live in Town. Still, I have no idea what I’m going to do with myself. Even if I do stay with you, I wouldn’t want it to be forever.” She paused again, gave me a look with those violet eyes that nearly turned my knees to jelly. “Unless, of course, you wanted me to.”

I tried to stammer out something. She laughed a little.

“But eventually, I’d need a place of my own. Somewhere that I paid for with money I got working an honest job. I’m going to be a Townie, sooner or later. Do you think maybe someday I might get to see the Tiers?” She stopped, totally excited by the dream of it all. “I’ve never even seen them. I don’t want to move in, just go up there and look around. You know, for an hour or so. Is that at all possible? Oh, that would be a dream come true! To see the Tiers—”

I’d had about enough. “Felicia!”

Her eyes stopped looking a million miles away and turned towards me again. “What?”

“Can you type?”

“What?”

“Can you type, answer the phone, take messages?”

“Yeah, sure. What idiot can’t?”

“Then you can be my secretary,” I said. I didn’t need a secretary. There were computer programs that could do that. But Sam Spade had a secretary, and she did a hell of a lot more for him than just be a secretary. “You may have to run a few other errands, though.”

Her eyes lit up, she threw two perfect arms around my neck, and planted lips that were softer than I’d even imagined against mine. I felt her tongue slip in, and pulled her away from me before her hands slipped too low down my body. I wasn’t opposed to things happening, but we had to get out of the Sprawl first.

“There,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “Now you’ve got a job. Can we get out of here?”

She couldn’t stop smiling, even when I pushed her away. “We can go anywhere you want to, Nathan Roeder.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. But I needed an assistant. Maybe she could help me with the Langley case. Somehow.

I took her to an elevator, used my credentials to get us up into Town. “Sooner or later,” I said, “We’re going to have to get you some ID.”

“What do I have to do to get it?”

“Pass a DNA test,” I said. “They don’t let natborns live in Town.”

“I know that. I’m not a Natborn. But am I going to have any problems?”

I shook my head. “I have no idea. We’ll worry about it when the time comes. Right now, let’s go get a hotel room.”

“Don’t you have an apartment?”

I stopped for a second. Didn’t know how to tell her what I was worried about. “Yeah,” I said. “But let’s go to a hotel anyway.”

Too many stories, too many movies. I’ve seen apartments explode far too many times in circumstances way too similar to the one I was in. I liked my place, and if there was a bomb there, I wanted to make sure that it didn’t go off any time soon. At least not before I got some serious insurance.

Felicia was too taken in by the idea of being in Town to really argue. As soon as we got off the elevator, she shut up; something I had started wondering if she could do. On the way up, she spent time talking about how much she’s always wanted to live in Town, and how she used to spend nights imagining what it would be like up there. How she used to stand on her roof and look up at all the lights that shone down from Town and the Tiers. I wasn’t sure how much of the Tiers can really be seen from down in the Sprawl, but I wasn’t looking to correct her. At the time, I was just hoping the elevator ride would end.

One step outside, her first step into Town, and she was silent. Flabbergasted, or whatever you want to call it. I didn’t see the big deal; but then, I grew up in Town. I’m a Townie, born, bred, and altered.

So I huddled against the rain, while she let it wash over her. “It feels different,” she said. I hadn’t noticed. Rain always feels the same to me. “Warmer, almost.”

“Whatever.”

She took a deep breath. “It smells so good up here.”

That was one I didn’t agree with. It smelled good in the Tiers. It smelled bad in the Sprawl. The smell of Town was too varied to call it good or bad.

I had to drag her along towards a walkway. If I didn’t have a hold of her, I was sure she would be off, trying to buy pretty much anything she could. We weren’t in tourist town, so not much crap was on sale, but I wasn’t sure she had the funds to back up those saucer plate eyes she had. Hell, for all I knew, she was totally broke.

I rolled my eyes when she was fascinated by the walkway. It was just a moving stretch of rubber and cloth. It wasn’t like it was a new invention. They’d been used for hundreds of years, so far as I know. But she treated it like it was something magical, something new she’d never thought to think about before. I moved her along to a faster strip, and she nearly stumbled at the speed change.

“Look,” I said, “You’re going to have to drop this bumpkin act. You keep being so amazed at all the little things around Town, folk’re going to notice. They’ll see that you don’t belong here, and they’ll ask for ID. When you don’t have it, guess what happens?”

“Back to the Sprawl?” She asked.

“If you’re lucky. They don’t get many Sprawl trespassers around here. They might decide to make an example out of you.”

“What kind of example?”

“The kind where you don’t want to find out what kind. Suede?”

She nodded, looking cute even when afraid. I looked her up and down. “We need to get you some new clothes.”

“Why?”

“Because you look like a hooker,” I said. “And while that’s in fashion for some, it’s probably not the motif you want to go for.”

“I don’t know what motif I want to go for.”

“Then stick with mine, sister.”

“Suede.”

At least she was picking up the lingo.

The hotel in Town made the one in the Sprawl look like a dump. The difference was no more lost on me than it was on Felicia.

I left her to explore the room, most notably the television, while I looked at the difference in the bathroom. The hotel in the Sprawl had been a pretty simple number. There had been a claw foot bathtub, but only one shower nozzle. A clean shower curtain, but still a curtain. One towel.

The hotel we checked into, which wasn’t the nicest in Town, had a proper bathroom. There was an ionized field to prevent water from getting out of the shower area. Four different nozzles let the water spray out in a general mist, pushing steam and water wherever you might want it; this was something that could get you clean. And it was big enough for two, something I might take advantage of once we had both cleaned off. Nowhere better than a shower to get dirty. Once you’re clean, that is.

When the shower was done, I dried off with air: hot, flowing air gently massaging my body as it removed the beads of water from it, leaving me relaxed and comfortable.

When I came out of the shower, wearing a towel roughly twice the size of the one that had barely managed to cover me out in the Sprawl, Felicia was spread out on the bed, trying to touch two opposite edges, failing. Hotels don’t have much, but they know what they need. A good bed, a good shower, and a good television.

“This is amazing,” she said. “It’s like I can sink into it.”

If it was one of the beds I thought it was, she could. If it broke, that is. And those things often did. That was the big problem. The heavier you were, the deeper you’d sink, so that the bed could be as firm as you needed it to be to take support and stress away from your muscles. Great sleep, if you didn’t weigh too much. I doubted Felicia would ever have to worry about that.

“Take a shower,” I said. I didn’t mean it to sound rude. I wasn’t suggesting she was a dirty Sprawl dweller or anything like that. But I was a little concerned she’d take it that way, so I added, “You’ll love it.”

She jumped out of the bed as fast as one can jump out of that kind of bed. “Okay!” she said. “You want to join me?”

“Maybe later.”

She winked at me, then practically skipped into the bathroom. She was giddy.

I picked the remote off the bed where she’d left it and turned the television on. The window scene it was portraying disappeared, and I was able to surf for whatever I wanted to watch, or whatever window scene I wanted to see.

I skipped over the meadowlands, the ocean, the moon, the fireplace, and all the other images. I wanted something real to watch. I thought about turning on the news, but figured it would be nothing but the business report. Real news doesn’t get shown at hotels. At least, not the cheap ones. You have to prescribe.

I kept flipping, past the images of the gyrating women, past the porn. I flipped past the real estate channel, past the science and technology channel, past the history channel, all the way to the set of movie channels. After a little bit of choice, I laid back to watch Bogart do his thing, looking for a bird that a dead man was going to deliver at the end of act two. I love that movie.

While I waited for Felicia to finish her shower, I let my mind drift back to the case. So much had happened in the last day or so, I’d almost forgotten.

Whatever was going on with Oliver Langley, there was someone who wanted me to never figure it out. There was a connection with one person, or a group of people, that went all the way to the top of the Tiers. It had something to do with a symbol that didn’t exist anywhere on the net.

That was probably what had drawn them to me. When I searched for that symbol, they’d backtracked me and figured me out. If I’d just left that thing alone, I’d be fine. My apartment would be fine, and I’d be well on my way to figuring all this out.

Then again, that whole deal with The Albino would’ve gone a whole lot worse, so maybe I had something to thank them for after all.

The question in my mind was why they were willing to kill me over something I hadn’t even figured out yet. I knew there were a lot of murders attached to that symbol. I also knew there were a lot of powerful people attached to it. That I knew because of my ‘date’ with Karen. I knew that Oliver Langley was attached to them somehow, and that he was trying to expose some kind of secret.

That must be it. There was something so important to Oliver Langley that he was not only willing to kill for it, he was willing to give up his own immortality to expose it.

What kind of secret could be that big?

And who was I to figure it all out?

I knew I had to. If I didn’t, they’d keep trying to kill me. It was them or me, at that point. The best I could hope to do was to find some way to convince them that my death would be more dangerous to them than my life. Part of that had to include proving that the diary wasn’t true.

Which I was pretty sure, even that early on, that it was.

I had to talk to Theresa again. And I had to get a better look at the diary itself. Not to mention all that information I’d gotten from The Albino. I had pretty much everything I needed from the Sprawl.

The next step was to figure out what I needed from Town. If I had to keep going after that, I would. I’d do whatever I had to do to keep myself safe and to earn that money that Theresa had promised. All that and then some, if things kept going the way they were.