The Langley Case: A Nathan Roeder Mystery

The Girl with the gun, the symbol on the book

I took a quick shower, just getting the dirt off rather than sitting in water. While I was in there, I thought about what to wear to this date.

My normal dress code was a three piece suit without the jacket, or just a rumbled shirt and tie, along with a fedora and a long trench coat. Somehow, that didn’t seem to fit. I wanted something nice, something that showed I was a trustworthy guy. My normal attire of the two-fisted hard-drinking bad ass wouldn’t help me here. I had to go with my strengths, from a dating perspective. Which were few and far between.

I decided in the end not to slick back my hair, but just brush it a little, so that it had that fresh-out-of-the-shower look. I wore a pressed button down shirt, no tie, and a suit jacket. Jeans. Casual.

I didn’t bring my gun. It was a stupid thing to do, but I figured we were just going to dinner. How bad could it possibly get?

I arrived at the little baby, that’s what Le Petit Enfant means, a few minutes before the reservation. I figured she’d be late. Girls are always late. It’s what they do. They want us to know our place, and keep us waiting. Works even if they ask us out. Not fair, but that’s how the game is played.

Oddly enough, she didn’t keep me waiting that long. She showed up right on time. Had I not been early, she wouldn’t have kept me waiting at all. At the time, I chalked it up to how much she liked me. It was a stupid, amateur move on my part. One that I would pay for pretty heavily by the end of the night.

One look at her, though, and I was willing to pay the price. I had thought she was cute in her little business suit. I didn’t realize how far things really went until I saw her dressed for the date. She had legs that you couldn’t stare directly at, not without a chance of going blind. They were incased in the greatest sacrifice any cow has ever made to the cause of leather. Her skirt, which started a bit above the knees and just a little bit higher than the boots ended, was red and as sheer as the law allows. She had a top, but if you looked too quickly, you might miss it. All in all, there was a lot of skin showing. A whole lot.

She carried a purse, in which I assumed was her PDA and maybe a bit of makeup. It didn’t occur to me to wonder if it was big enough for a gun.

Which, incidentally, it was.

We sat down to dinner, and she ordered in French. So did I, but I did it by reading it off the menu. She knew what she was saying. Her accent was better, too.

“So how long have you been involved in this case, Mr. Roeder?” She asked after the waiter—she called him garçon —had left.

I smiled. “Call me Nathan,” I said. I was trying to deflect the topic to something else. It’s always dangerous to talk shop on a date. Especially a first one.

She was having none of it. “Okay. How long have you been involved in this case, Nathan?”

I leaned back. “Not very long,” I said. “I found out about it today.”

“You never read the paper?” She asked. “The murder was front page news.”

That phrase struck me as odd. Newspapers weren’t printed on pages. Except among the eccentrics. “I’d heard about it,” I said. “But I wasn’t involved.”

“Murder in the Tiers,” she leaned back and shook her head. “Amazing.”

Something about the way she said it perked my ears up. “Why is that so amazing?”

“Well, it had to be someone from the Sprawl, didn’t it?” She said, her hand slipping beneath the table. I had no idea what for at the time.

I smiled the smile of a man who knows the woman he’s talking to doesn’t know what she’s talking about. “Why would you say that?” I asked.

“Who else could it be? No one on the Tiers would kill anyone.”

I shook my head. “Still, you can’t get from the Sprawl to the Tiers. It can’t be done. The only way to the Tiers is from Town.”

“You live in Town, don’t you?”

I nodded. “So do you.”

She ignored me. “Living in Town, you have access to the Sprawl and the Tiers, don’t you?”

“In a sense.”

“Moreso, given your line of work.”

I’ll admit it. I’m not the smartest man in the world. But even I knew that there was something very wrong here. This was not first date conversation. It was more like putting heat to someone, hoping they’ll crack open like an egg and divulge all their messy little secrets. Not this egg, sister. I’m hard boiled.

“There something you want to say to me Karen?”

I felt something hard press against my leg. I knew this wasn’t that kind of date, so it didn’t take me long to figure out it was a gun. “What got you involved in this investigation?” She asked.

I leaned back in my chair. When there’s a gun involved in any situation, and you’re not the one holding it, you need a plan of attack. I figured the best one to start with was relying on the fact that she wouldn’t shoot me in public. “I was hired earlier today to look into a number of murders.”

Her eyes widened a bit. “How many?”

I leaned forward, putting my elbows on the table. I laced my fingers together and leaned out over them, close enough to whisper. Close enough to spit. “You planning to shoot me, Karen?”

She looked hard. Or she tried to. “Not here,” she said.

“Then put the gun away,” I said. “It’s impolite.”

I leaned back and fixed her with a half-mile glare. That’s somewhere between boring into the soul and pretending you don’t even see them. I spent weeks in front of a mirror trying to get it down. I didn’t feel the gun on my leg anymore, but that didn’t mean anything. What mattered is that she wasn’t going to shoot me.

“You going to try to pin this murder on me, or is there a bigger issue at stake?” I asked.

“What?”

“The way you were asking before, it sounded like you wanted to pin the whole thing on me. But I’m nobody’s fall guy.” I’m feeling the spirits of Bogart and Spade flowing through me now. “You try to make that stick, you’ll find me harder than Teflon. Ain’t gonna be a hard rap to beat, sister. I’ve been through worse.”

“Nathan, I’m not trying to pin anything on you.”

I’m taken about by that. But I figure the best way is to pretend she’s lying. Or at least backtracking. “Then what’s the deal? I stumble into something? Did I hit the jackpot, step on someone’s toes? What’s the word?”

She laughs like she’s on a date and I said something funny. Someone must have walked by. She leaned in and whispered in good harsh, no-bullshit tones. “You have no idea what you’re fucking with,” she said. “This is not something you want to expose. People don’t get curious about the murders in the Tiers. They stay away, where it’s safe, and let the others forget all about it. You don’t want to make any trouble, Nathan.”

“Trouble from you?”

She shakes her head. “No, you dumb fuck. I’m here to protect you. I’m trying to let you know what’s what before it’s too late. You’re just lucky you ran into me, instead of talking to one of the ones who are involved. There’s worse in this world than death, and they can do all of it.”

“Who’s they?”

She laughed. “What, you think I’m going to suddenly be on your side? It doesn’t work that way.”

The waiter arrived with the food. The conversation stopped until he was gone again.

“You stop now, for your own good, and maybe the world’ll stay a nice happy place,” she said. “If you don’t, then the Sprawl’s going to look like a picnic for you.”

“So they, whoever they are, are pretty powerful?”

“How the fuck did you get involved with this?” She shook her head. “For that matter, how the fuck did you get your detective’s license?”

I couldn’t help but feel a little insulted at that. But I recovered quickly. “If I’m so stupid, what are you worried about?”

She shook her head again. “Even an idiot can stumble on a few facts and make things very difficult for certain people.”

“Well, I haven’t found anything yet.”

“You’ve been chasing down the same person,” she said. “I checked your Net access. Why are you looking at him?”

“I was hired to.”

“Why?”

“That’s between my client and I.”

Her eyes got wide. “You have the book?”

I decided at that point that the best bet would be to leave, as fast as I could. She still had the gun, and if she wasn’t going to shoot me in public, I was pretty sure she would find an excuse to be alone soon enough.

I stood up, without a word, and left the restaurant. On my way out, I told the waiter to bring us a bottle of his finest wine. He asked where I was going. I told him I was going outside to smoke.

I smoked four cigarettes on my way home. There was just a whole lot of thinking to do. It was exactly what I’d asked for. As soon as I made any progress, someone with a gun tried to knock me off the trail. That just confirmed that I was going the right way. I should have been happy.

But there was so much more detail there, so much more I hadn’t even thought of. There was information that she had given me, without realizing she’d given it. All I had to do was sort through it. Figure out what I’ve learned.

Well, I knew I’d learned that there was more at stake than just Oliver Langley. I also knew that other people knew about his diary, and had a vested interest in preventing anyone else from knowing about it. I knew they, whoever they were, were dangerous, and that my life was probably going to be in danger as long as I had that book in my possession.

Which reminded me; I needed to either have it with me all the time or get rid of it once and for all. It wouldn’t do for Theresa to lose her entire inheritance because my apartment had been robbed.

Karen had let a few other things slip. What had she said?

“This is not something you want to expose. People don’t get curious about the murders in the Tiers. They stay away, where it’s safe, and let the others forget all about it. You don’t want to make any trouble, Nathan.”

People don’t get curious about the murders. I could certainly understand that if they happened once every thirty years. Even in the huge life spans of some of the folk living up there, that’s still pretty rare. How can you get curious about something that happens once every third decade?

More to the point, she suggested that there were people who did get curious, people who had, in the past, been curious and had something bad happen to them. She wasn’t speaking of trouble as if she was guessing what would happen. She meant she had seen it. It had been there.

Had she been working the same job for sixty years? I had my doubts. But that would be the only way she’d have seen that many kills. Unless there were more than just the ones suggested in the diary.

Murders. In the plural. That was significant. There had to be more than just the one I was investigating, just the ones Oliver Langley claimed credit for.

Once I was back in my apartment, I grabbed a satchel bag big enough for the diary, slipped the diary in, and prepared to head back out. If someone was coming for me, they’d figure out where I lived sooner or later. I’d rather not be there when that happened.

I threw a few changes of clothes into a suitcase, along with my guns and other toys of the detective trade. I had no idea when I would be back there, so I didn’t take chances.

My first stop after abandoning my apartment, and that bottle of whiskey still calling my name, was a bookstore. That, I figured, was a safe place to sit down with a book and examine it for clues. A safe place to get a cup of coffee. And, if I found an outdoors café, a safe place to smoke. A lot.

Nice thing about a city the size of TriCity. You can find damned near anything you want, if you’re willing to go far enough to find it.

I was on my seventh smoke since dinner when I found what I was looking for. That’s the trouble with looking for something. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s harder to find. Harder to know when you’re done.

But I figured it out just when I’d about given up. I slammed the book shut. There were no patterns to the text, no dates, nothing that looked like a cipher key. I hadn’t really applied many ciphers, but it still looked like normal text—written in free hand by a normal man, though granted one with a few socially unacceptable mental disorders.

It was there, on the cover. A symbol. It looked like a crossed pair of scythes with a floating eye between them.

I went through the store, looking up every book on symbols I could find. Most of them I could download temporarily and flip through them for free. None of them had anything about this symbol. Not that I could find.

The closest I found was the Free Masons. A group that supposedly ran the world a few hundred years ago, always operating from the shadows, a hidden secret government. That led me to the Illuminati. But neither of those groups were real, and neither had the kind of symbol I’d found on the diary.

Just to be safe, I made sure there wasn’t some kind of Langley family crest. Then I cross referenced the symbol with book publishers and diary manufacturers. I did everything I could to make sure that the symbol wasn’t something meaningless.

When I finally cross checked it around the Net as a whole, I got a hit like a freight train.

Seven murders, all committed in the Tiers, all over the last fifteen years. On each of the victims, somewhere on the body, that symbol had been carved or burned. Always post mortem.