The Langley Case: A Nathan Roeder Mystery

The Dame was a lot of things; none of them good.

Max is right. It is all my fault. If it weren’t for me, he wouldn’t be here right now. But, to be fair, if it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t be here, and Max would be fine.

I’m not talking about Felicia. She’s important, but she’s not where it all starts. It doesn’t even start on the Sprawl.

It starts in my office, in Town. My name is Nathan Roeder, and I’m a detective.

I live in Town. That should tell you a bit about me. I don’t have the money to live in the Tiers, but I don’t have the genes to force me to live in the Sprawl, either. That’s a good enough introduction, I think.

My office is dark, the way I like it. Light from outside shines through blinds I had installed, giving a nice frame to everything that walks around. I’ve got three filing cabinets and two bottles of whiskey. Four of them are empty; if she hadn’t walked in when she did, all five of them would’ve been by the end of the night.

She walked in to my life like a nasty habit coming to rest. I didn’t need a kid hawking papers to tell me she was bad news.

I wouldn’t have given her the time of day if it weren’t for the money. She didn’t wave it around, but she didn’t have to. People like her ooze money.

I saw it all over her. She had long legs, the kind you write sonnets about. And she wore a suit that told me everything I needed to know. Long skirt, long legs, long hair. This was a woman who could buy and sell people. This was someone who lived on the Tiers.

She was Wired, too. Long as her hair was, that tell-tale bald spot couldn’t be missed. She was wired, and from the looks of it, very. It was in her body language. From the way she sashayed to the way her eyes didn’t take in the environment all that well. I didn’t think she was myopic or blind or anything: she was no natborn. That much was for damned sure. But she looked like she spent a little too much time connected. Maybe she was connected right then and there.

That was a level of Wired I’ve never been able to afford. So she’s at least got more of a flow than I do.

Suede.

I stood up on legs that were not as shaky as they could have been, but far shakier than I like them to be when I meet a new client. “Come in,” I said. “Have a seat.”

She took the chair across from my desk and crossed her legs, sending messages and fantasies to every inch of my mind.

I sat back down, partially so she wouldn’t know how drunk I already was. Mostly so she couldn’t see the tent pitching itself in my pants. There was no use denying that she was attractive, no more than trying to deny that it was working on me.

Trying to cover the kind of awkward silences that I tend to have when I first meet a woman of such impeccable genetics, I took out some tobacco and started to roll myself a smoke.

I don’t like buying the store brand. There’s something more appealing about rolling my own. I know I’m a bit obsessive. But the image works. It gets me clients. At least, it got me this one.

In retrospect, I should have hammed it up a little more. Scared her off. Would’ve saved me a whole lot of grief.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

She opened her mouth, revealing a set of teeth that must have been perfect since birth. They don’t make people like her in the lottery. If I had any doubt where she lived, if she was faking it, all those doubts faded when she spoke. Her accent was all Tiers, so proper and so precise.

“My name is Theresa Langley,” she said. The name meant nothing to me. I don’t read the papers, at least not deeply enough to follow who owns what up there in the Tiers. “My father’s name was Oliver Langley.”

Still nothing. “What can I do for you, Miss Langley?” I hoped it was miss. Something about being married just fucks up the fantasy.

“I’m told that you can be very discreet in your investigations, Mr. Roeder.” That was my first inkling that there was going to be trouble. It was from the way she was sitting, the way she didn’t smile. But also from the way she didn’t look nervous.

“Go on.” I’m not going to confirm or deny anything. She thinks I’m discreet, that’s fine by me. Any reputation is better than no reputation.

“I heard about what you did on the Clydesdale case,” she said.

Clydesdale. Now there’s a story to tell. Maybe later.

“Liked what you heard.” I know it’s a fragment. It’s part of the motif.

“I need a similar level of discretion.”

Now that’s a bad thing. Too many people ended up way too dead with the Clydesdale case. If that’s what she was looking for, I knew it had to be bad.

To make a long story short, there were an awful lot of signals coming from this dame, all of them telling me that I should have stayed in bed that morning. Or that I at least should have finished off that other bottle.

“What is it you want me to do?” I asked.

“My father,” she said, “was a very wealthy man. He passed away recently.” That, I thought, was unusual. But not unheard of. “In his will, he placed a stipulation that no one would receive any inheritance until we handed a document to the authorities.”

That wasn’t unusual. Stiffs put provisos in their wills all the time. Sometimes, it’s the only way to get shit done.

“What kind of document?” I asked.

When she reached into her purse, I had no idea what she’d pull out. A disc, maybe. But she could have had that in her pocket. Hell, she might have had the file wired, and just sent it to me. A part of me wondered if she was going to shoot me. Since Clydesdale, that’s always been a concern. I never should have taken that job.

I shouldn’t have taken this one either. But sometimes, you have to take that kind of job, or you won’t have anything to do at all but drink yourself out into the Sprawl. Something I’d been on my way to before that piece of bad news swayed herself into my place.

She didn’t take out a gun, for which I was at least a little bit grateful. But what she did take out was almost as scary.

I’m not an old man, but I’m no young buck, either. Thanks to the magic of Telomereystm, I’m older than most people in the Sprawl ever get to be. But still, in all my sixty-seven years, I’ve never seen a paper book before.

Not a real one, anyway. I’ve seen plenty of novels on screens, or when I was connected, but never one in old fashioned paper and ink. You just didn’t see those much anymore. It wasn’t that they were antiques; it was just cheaper to use ones and zeroes than it was to use a printing press. The people with regular books were the kinds of people who never looked at the Sprawl as an alternative lifestyle; they just looked at it as a sore on society that they had to bear for the good of the unwashed masses.

I’m not sure whether it was more or less shocking when she opened the book and showed me the handwriting. Paper and ink aren’t expensive. Printing presses are. But the binding of it was like a regular book, the kind you see in the vids.

“This is my father’s diary,” she said. She rubbed a hand over it with a mixture of reverence and revulsion.

Another clue that I should have walked away. Maybe I would have if my legs were steady. Maybe I can blame this whole thing on an empty bottle of whiskey.

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

“It suggests some terrible things,” she says. “But I cannot access my inheritance until the authorities have seen it.”

I wonder who the authorities are. Maybe one of the legal firms. Maybe the Better Business Bureau.

I took a stab at it, a shot in the dark. Never a good idea. Ask Hamlet. “And you want me to find out if it’s true or not?”

She shook her head. “No, Mr. Roeder. I don’t want you to find out if it’s true. I want you to find out that it is false. I want you to prove to me that it is not true, so that I can hand things over without any fear of embarrassment.”

I didn’t tell her that people don’t usually lie in their diaries. I didn’t tell her she was probably going to be disappointed by the whole thing. I had smelled money since she walked in, and as much as I hated compromising what few principles I had left, the rent needed paying.

“I can do that,” I said.

“I will pay you two thousand now, plus fifteen more when everything clears out.”

Seventeen. That ain’t bad. “Plus expenses,” I said.

She nodded. “Plus expenses.”

We shook on it. I felt like Faust, but didn’t know why.

I know why now.

“Why don’t you tell me what you already know?” This is a trick I learned a long time ago. You can save a whole lot of time if you get the client to tell you what they’ve already done. Most people try to solve a problem on their own before paying someone else to do it. Sometimes, they were just missing that one little piece.

This was not one of those times.

“I know a bit,” she said. “And I’m not pleased by what I know.”

“Well, what does the diary say?”

“According to the diary,” she took a deep breath and straightened a crease in her shirt. I didn’t need to be trained as a reader to tell what that meant. “My father murdered more than sixty people in the last ninety years.”

I let out a low whistle. “How old was your father?”

“He died two weeks shy of four hundred seventy.”

Ah, telomereys. Those poor bastards in the Sprawl won’t live to see a hundred. To be fair, I won’t see four seventy, but it’s nice to know that I’ll outlive someone, at least.

Assuming, of course, that I don’t get shot before then. Which seems to get more and more likely every time I get one of these cases.

“And was he doing anything out of the ordinary before the big thirty-eight-oh?”

She shrugged. “Not that I remember.” That told me a lot. First, she wasn’t that close with dear old dad. Second, she was old enough to know that she didn’t remember anything strange. Her next statement confirmed that. “Actually, he didn’t do anything out of the ordinary ever. He was a pretty boring man. Never went on vacation, barely left the office.”

“How was he as a father?”

She shrugged again. “I barely remember my childhood, Mr. Roeder. What relevance does this have?”

I held up a hand in defeat. I had stumbled from detective work to flirtation without realizing anything other than how bad a flirt I was. “Fine,” I said. “Tell me what you’ve already done.”

“There were seventy-four murders, according to the diary,” she said.

That’s a lot more than sixty.

“I’ve checked all of them with the city computers,” she said. “Of the seventeen that occurred in Town and in the Tiers, all of them match up time wise. Whenever he claimed to do it, there was a body.”

“But no one knows who killed them?”

She smiled. “Usually, there was a conviction. Often times someone from the Sprawl. You’ve probably read about them.”

It was true, I had. Every so often, you’d hear about some Sprawl drifter that somehow managed to make it in to Town and kill someone. Usually, they were caught and taken care of. Sometimes, they were just blamed.

“That’ll cover seventeen,” I said. I already didn’t believe her. But it was a starting point. “What about the rest?”

“That’s where you come in,” she says. “I can’t get access to the records out in the Sprawl.” Of course she couldn’t. No one could. You can’t get records from the Sprawl because Sprawl records aren’t Connected. That explained why dear old dad did so many out there.

“Sounds like a lot of work,” I said.

“Seventeen,” she said. “Plus expenses.”

“Have you told me all there is to tell?”

“Of course,” she lied to my face. She wasn’t the first girl to do that. Wouldn’t be the last. She stood up with a liquid grace that the lottery doesn’t give: you really have to buy it. She gestured to the book. “You can hold on to that, if you need to,” she said. “But I will need it back.”

I nodded. I would’ve shown her out, but I wasn’t sure I could walk straight.

She twirled at the doorway, letting her skirt show off just a little bit more leg. “I’ll be in touch,” she said, her voice nice and throaty.

Once she was gone, I thought about all the ways this thing was going to bite me in the ass. The list was longer than I would have been comfortable with.

The first step, I figured, was to read the diary. It had to have something, some clue, something I could use. I wasn’t sure if it was authentic or not, but she was paying me enough not to care. Of course, if it turned out that papa was a rolling stone with one very nasty little habit, I could probably add another zero to the end of my bill. That many zeroes all crowded together can make for a very happy birthday.