Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [36]
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.”
“Yeah, it’s cool this week. You just grab your rod and leap out the window. Freedom, man—you know what I’m saying?”
“Probably not. How well did you know Louella?”
Golson kicked the end of his bed, activating some inbuilt droid. Thin telescopic hands reached out of either side of the headboard, grabbed the sheets and started making the bed.
Golson winked. “Never know who I might run into later.” I smiled politely, but let him know that I was waiting for an answer. He sighed. “Not that well. Okay, a little bit. We hung occasionally, you know? I already told the cops this.”
“Yeah. But you haven’t told me.”
“Louella was a babe—obviously I’m going to sniff around. But she held it pretty tight, you know—God knows I tried, and I usually get there. So after a while I figure okay, so I’m not going to fuck her. We ended up kind of friends instead.”
“Any idea who might want to kill her?”
“God no, man. I mean, have you seen what she looked like?” He reached across to a bookcase and pulled down a file box. Placing it on the table he started rifling through a collection of maybe a hundred LED-wafer photographs of women. After a moment he tutted, and pulled out a photo of the girl who’d just left. He showed me the back of the picture: The name “Sandy” was clearly written there. “Got to get better at remembering that shit,” he said, obviously pained at his incompetence.
“Louella,” I reminded him.
“Oh, yeah. Here.” I took the picture he handed to me. It showed Louella Richardson looking rich and beautiful and intelligent. There was an extraordinary gloss to her bearing, as if her ancestors hadn’t so much crawled out of the primeval swamp as taken a cab. Golson shrugged. “Who’d be selfish enough to scrub something like that off the planet? I mean, if you can’t score yourself, you at least got to have the grace to leave it around for the other guys to have a try—am I right?”
Somewhere during the last sentence or so I’d remembered that I wasn’t a cop anymore, and that I didn’t have to be polite to everyone above the 100 line. Nevertheless, I smiled thinly, and didn’t hit him or anything.
“So tell me something,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Like what Louella was doing in the last week, who she might have seen.”
“Hell, Louella saw everyone, man—you know how it is.”
“No, I don’t,” I said firmly, wishing that Mal, with his infinite patience, had been here first and written a report for me to read. “What did she do for a living?”
“She was a Shopping Explainer,” he said, and I nodded. Rich people who sometimes couldn’t come up with an excuse for buying something they wanted often hired people to come up with an excuse for them. Often the Explainers worked on staff, helping them with every little purchase; sometimes they were freelance, and only called in for unusual extravagances. Louella was the latter, and had a number of clients in the 160s and above. So, yes, in the world view of an airhead like Golson, she saw everyone. Everyone who counted.
“Socializing,” I said. “Who did she hang out with?”
“Her friends, of course,” Golson said, clearly baffled. I checked my mental question gun, and found I only had about two patience bullets left. After that, it was going to be live ammunition.
“Okay. You, who the fuck else?” I asked.
“Well, Mandy and Val and Zaz and Ness and Del