Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [37]
My last patience bullet. “Remember any guys’ names?”
“Well, no—I mean, who cares, right?” Suddenly sensing that I was reaching critical mass, Golson apparently decided to throw me something real. “Look. The last couple of weeks she’d been going to this new club. That’s all I know. I only went there once—it was kind of ganchy.”
I decided against asking what “ganchy” meant. I found I didn’t care. “What was it called?”
“Club Bastard, and I can’t remember where it was because I was totally loaded.”
Golson saw me to the door, prattling about wall-diving. I tried not to hold the fact that he was a waste of DNA against him, and gave him Howie’s number—in case anything unusual happened, or in the unlikely event he remembered something more significant than Sandy’s bra size.
As he shut the door behind me I noticed he wore thick silver rings on each finger of his left hand, and wondered how long Shelley Latoya could live on what they’d cost. Then I walked straight to the elevator and Beaded down to a world I understood.
About nine o’clock, something tickled at the back of my rusty brain. At first it was slow and indistinct, and I dismissed it as oncoming drunkenness. All the other evidence certainly pointed that way. But it was insistent, and I started to listen, still running my eyes over Mal’s reports but in reality waiting for some inner voice to speak. I hoped it would be loud enough for me to hear. All I could sense with any certainty was that it was something very, very straightforward I had missed.
I was slumped by then in The Ideal Mausoleum, and had been for several hours. The IM was perfect for my needs. It was dark, played old music very loudly, and had a row of Matrix terminals for hire in the back. When I arrived I asked the barman to give me all the Jack Daniels they had and took it with me into the gloom. Two of the terminals were broken, and some kid was checking out alt seal-culling on the other, but I encouraged him to leave.
I took Mal’s disk out of my pocket and jacked it in. While it negotiated with the host frame I took a long sip of Jack’s and peered around me into the gloom. I’d remembered the place as a dive, and a dive it surely was. I wouldn’t have trusted anyone I could see here to be able to spell their name right at the first attempt, and a bored cop could have busted over half of them for dealing and everyone else for possession. Luckily, nobody was interested in that kind of law enforcement anymore, which made it a perfect place to hang out; the patrons were all far too wasted to be into anything which would attract unwelcome attention.
“Jesus—this place is filthy.”
“How can you tell?” Tasked, turning my attention to my screen, which now showed Mal’s desktop environment. The Ideal Mausoleum is so dark I’d never been able to tell what color the floor was.
“This terminal’s swarming with viruses,” Mal’s versonality said. “Nice place you’ve brought me to.”
“You can handle it. Any news?”
“Still no match on the dead guy, they still don’t know Mal’s dead, and the murder reports are still locked. I’d advise against trying anything fancy on this terminal, because half these viruses are probably reflecting the datastream to hackers. Ow—piss off.”
I watched as the computer stomped on a little bitey virus that was trying to chew its way into his RAM.
“All I want is the stuff on Mal’s hard disk,” I said, when the dogfight appeared to be over. “Can you keep the Mongol hordes out for an hour or so?”
The computer’s voice changed momentarily to a high-pitched warble. “You’re a big hairy knobface,” it sang.
Mal’s versonality came back a second later, sounding more than a little pissed. “Another poxing virus. It’s dead now, little fucker. Yeah, I can—but don’t take too long.”
As the computer settled down to swatting the products of juvenile minds, I watched Mal’s files scroll onto the screen.
Mal’s reports documented, in page after page of detail, one of the essential truths of homicide investigation.
Real murders don’t get solved.
Let me explain. There are two types of murder.