The Langley Case: A Nathan Roeder Mystery

Felicia Puts More Things Right Than Just Our Bodies.

Lying in bed after the fact was, to say the least, strange. It’s not like it’s the first time, for either one of us. And even though I’m pretty sure she’s still more experienced than I am, it felt wrong. It felt like I was taking advantage of her. Even though she initiated it, even though she pretty much forced it to happen, I still felt like I was the one taking advantage of her.

That wasn’t the only thing nagging me, though. As I lay there, my mind floating off into that realm that it only gets to after really, really good sex, things started to show themselves to me. I was up with the puzzle pieces, looking around at them. My body was there, a distant little feeling of soft warmth that was comfortably far away.

But there was that thing nagging me. Something that Felicia said, before we got to the down and dirty of it all. She looked at my note, before I left my PDA on the subway. She looked at my note and pronounced Theban as The Ban.

Two words. The Ban. That could mean the banishment; it could mean a whole lot of things. The ban three. That still didn’t mean anything.

There was something else, though. Something about the Danish. And something else Felicia said. What was it?

“Just that he loved ancient literature. Had a flair for the dramatics. Shakespeare, absurdist plays of the twentieth century, that kind of thing.”

Shakespeare. The Danish. Denmark. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Hamlet. Hamlet the Dane.

It’s more than a hunch. There’s backing in Oliver’s journal.

It is there, dear readers, that location and nationality mix in their most literate form

Location and nationality. The Danish nationality is in Denmark. The location of Hamlet is Denmark. Mixing in their most literate form. Hamlet is the most famous Dane in history.

There was a banishment in Hamlet. Hamlet gets banished, by Claudius, after he kills Polonius. When does that happen? He’s banished in act four. But he murders Polonius in act three. And it’s the end of scene three in act four that Claudius tells Hamlet’s friends, Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, to kill him.

What does he say?

By letters congruing to that effect / The present death of Hamlet. Do it, England, / For like the hectic in my blood he rages, / And thou must cure me. Till I know ’tis done, / Howe’er my haps, my joys were ne’er begun.

He doesn’t send Rosencrantz and Gildenstern to do the killing. But he does send them along. He sends them along to make sure the letter gets there. The letter telling the English to kill Hamlet.

Then Hamlet figures it out, and sends the other two to their deaths. That sounds like what Oliver wrote in his journal. Something about the victims knowing, deserving to know. But that’s not it.

There’s more, I just couldn’t put my finger on it at the time. There was still another paragraph that had a clue in it. Another clue that I hadn’t figured out at the time:

Of course, like so many other games, there is significance beyond the initial thought. You must go round about, dear readers, from rules to regulations. Think of the rules as characters, the regulations as authors. Sometimes a character may appear once and again with different authors. So to do many games share rules, but regulations are specific to the sports in question. There is the rub, dear readers.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to keep thinking. No matter how much I wanted to stay in that state, riding the rush of endorphins, it doesn’t last forever. So I was back where I started, down to earth and back to being confused. The puzzle was coming together, but I still couldn’t quite make out the picture.

I pulled a sweater over my skin and cleared my throat. That’s something I do when I don’t know what to say next. There was a weird quality to the air. Not tension, not exactly, but still a thickness, something that hung between us. Expectations, maybe.

“Do you think we’ll hear from Johnny any time soon?” The words, once she said them, floated in the air, like ice cubes slowly melting away. They hung there, in the ether of – what was that? Not tension. Not innuendo. Something.

I looked over at the clock on the wall. “Maybe,” I said. “It’s early still. He’s probably just starting his meeting.”

“Well,” she pulled the sheets of the bed up, covering her nakedness in a way that seemed ineffectual and pointless all at the same time. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen. Wasn’t anything I hadn’t touched.

Still, something about it, something about the intimacy of her being naked. Pulling the sheet up seemed right, somehow.

“Yeah,” I said, wishing for a cigarette, wondering if I should smoke one.

“We could, um, start looking into Oliver’s personal life,” she said. “Maybe figure out where he came across the symbol.”

I scratched my chin. She was trying to change the subject, which made sense. We weren’t talking about anything. There was so much silence it could choke you. I remembered an old phrase about the elephant in the room.

“Can we look at his study?” She asked, still holding the sheets to cover more of her than she did when she was dressed.

I felt like I should turn my back so she could put on some clothes. But then, all I was wearing was a sweater and a towel. Maybe I was the one who was too naked.

“It would be helpful to look at his personal effects,” I said. She was right about that. She really was a smart cookie. She seemed smarter, somehow, after the fact. Hell, I could understand it. My mind was clearer, too. Pity I still couldn’t figure everything out though.

“Unless it’s been disturbed,” she said. “And it probably has. I mean, how long has it been since he died? A few days, a few weeks? A month? Isn’t there usually a certain amount of time that passes before the will can even be read?”

We were filling the room with all the things we weren’t saying. I sat down on the bed next to her, looked deep into her eyes, and took a breath. “Listen, Felicia, about last night—”

She put one of her perfect fingers against my lip. “Shh,” she said. “Let’s not, okay?”

“But, it’s right there in the room,” I protested.

“Leave it.”

I took a breath. She was right. There’d be time for that later. “Okay,” I said. “So let’s see what we can do. If we can’t look at his stuff—”

“And there’s no guarantee that we can’t,” she said. “It just might be contaminated. That’s something we have to worry about.”

“Okay, so it might be contaminated. But it might have a clue.”

“So would other things. If you’re right, and he made that diary to expose things, then he must have left other clues, or even evidence. He had to have it.”

Our minds chugged along the same rail. “But it wouldn’t look like evidence. You’d need to have the clues in the diary to connect things. It would have to be pieces of a puzzle.”

“And without all the pieces, nothing makes any sense.”

“But with the diary, with the cipher inside, you could use the clues to figure out who is the man up top, the man in charge.”

“And then expose him.” She was getting excited again. I couldn’t see her breasts, but I was willing to bet they were ‘heaving’. At least, I expected they would be. It seemed appropriate.

I stood up and started to pace the room again. Pacing helps me think. But as I started walking, I felt the towel start to slip. Knowing I wasn’t wearing anything underneath it, I grabbed it before it fell. Something feels fundamentally wrong about wearing a sweater when you don’t have pants on.

And there was something, some nagging feeling, that told me not to be naked in front of Felicia. Not yet. It was like last night didn’t count. Like there was something that needed saying, but wasn’t ready to be said. Not yet.

I found my pants in a crumpled heap on the floor and pulled them on, hopefully without flashing too much of my ass at Felicia in the process. I cleared my throat to try to head off the blush on its way up my face. She cleared hers to cover a giggle.

“So we need to head up to the Tiers,” I said. “Looks like you’re going to get your wish after all.”

Her eyes lit up. I expected her to ask if I was serious, in some mind bogglingly cute fashion. But she played it cool. “Suede,” she said. “I’ll get dressed.”

“Yeah,” I looked away, though every fiber of my being, at least the lower half, wanted to watch her run into the bathroom.

Once I heard the water running, I dialed up Theresa on the hotel phone.

I hit the same damned secretary I’d hit last time. “Can I help you, sir?” The emphasis on sir sent me images of various unpleasantries, insults she was no doubt slinging silently at me.

“Put me on with Theresa Langley,” I said, putting all the force I could muster into my voice.

“I’m afraid she’s not—”

I cut the bitch off. “I didn’t ask you for excuses,” I said. “And I didn’t ask you to deflect me. Hell, I didn’t even ask you to put me on with Theresa. I told you to. Now do it.”

“Sir, she’s not—”

You can’t let them even get started. “Unless she’s dead, you put her on. I don’t care if she’s asleep, I don’t care if she’s in a meeting, and I don’t care if she’s fucking someone. You put her on, right now.”

Her shoulders collapsed a bit. “One moment please.”

It was just one minor victory, but it felt like the world to me. I’m not saying things were going so badly at the time – it had been a pretty good night – but it was nice to finally beat someone, even it was just a secretary.

When Theresa came on the line, about a minute later, her hair was wet, she wasn’t wearing makeup, and I realized it was a pretty good bet that she’d been in the shower. “What is it, Nathan? I was told it’s some kind of life or death thing.”

She called me Nathan. “If I don’t convince your secretary of that, I’d never get to talk to you.”

Theresa smiled. “Jenna can be a bit, what’s the word?”

“Annoying?” I offered.

“Tenacious.”

“Whatever.”

“Nathan, as much of a thrill as it is to talk to you right now, I was kind of in the middle of something. So if you could be so kind as to get to the point?”

“I’ve almost got it,” I said.

“Got what?”

“Your father was not a killer. But he knew of someone who was.”

“What?”

“It’s not safe to talk here.”

“Where should I meet you?”

“I need to come to you. In the Tiers.”

She twisted her head a bit, squinted her eyes. Suspicion. “Why the Tiers?”

“I need to see his study. His rooms. Anywhere he spent a good deal of time.”

“Why?” More suspicion in that one word than there were people living in the Sprawl.

“To get the final piece I need to clear your father’s name and to achieve what he wanted to achieve.”

“Which is what?”

I shook my head. “I’ll tell you in person. I need to go up to the Tiers.”

She sighed. “Fine, I’ll send you a day pass.”

“I need two.”

“Two?”

“I’ve got a partner,” I said. “And she’s a quick one. She notices things.”

“She?”

I sighed. It’s not like Theresa and I ever said anything, or like I believed there had ever been a chance with her. She was too high above me, too lovely for someone like me. Still, I hadn’t told her about Felicia, not just yet. “Yes,” I said. “She.”

Theresa smiled. “Well, that explains some of the expenses. I was thinking you had some very strange habits to help your thinking, Mr. Roeder.” Back to Mr. Roeder. So there had been something there, and I missed it. I was supposed to be one of the most perceptive people in the world. Born a Reader; still can’t tell what a woman’s thinking. Why the hell didn’t I pay attention to that stuff as a kid?

“So can you get me the passes?”

She nodded. “Where should I send them?”

“To this hotel,” I said. “Oh, and Theresa, don’t call my PDA anymore.”

Suspicion again, mixed with confusion. “Why not?”

“I’ll explain in person,” I said.

She shook her head. “Fine. When can I expect you?”

“We’ll head up as soon as the passes get here.”

“Okay, Mr. Roeder. Just one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Do not come to the Tiers armed,” she said. “They’ll check if you have a day pass.”