Irontown Blues

Thirteen

“You be a good dog while I’m away,” I said to Sherlock. I scratched behind his ears, and he let his tongue hang out as he enjoyed it. I briefly wished I could be as carefree and content with life as a dog. Sherlock was a special dog, a supersmart dog, but in the end he was a dog, after all. How worried could he be about a trip to the outskirts of Irontown?

“You stay here and hold down the fort, old friend.” He looked up adoringly at me. I know he understood that I had told him to stay and to guard the place, as if it needed guarding.

I arranged with downstairs to bring him food if I was away longer than I intended. I didn’t really like leaving Sherlock behind, but I felt this trip might be dangerous, it might be confrontational, and I didn’t know for sure how he might react if he saw me threatened. I couldn’t have him biting people. Maybe I was doing him an injustice, but I wanted to err on the side of caution.

Besides, between what Mom had told me and what I had learned from the girl who called herself Pumpkin, I at last had something to go on. It was a long way from what you might call solid, but it was something.

But a bit before that…

When I returned to the restaurant, I asked the owner if I could talk to Pumpkin for a while. He was reluctant but became a lot more cooperative when I slipped him a sawbuck.

“You get ten minutes,” he said.

Sherlock followed me into the kitchen.

I could tell at once that Pumpkin was not the spiciest pepper in the hot and sour soup. She was the owner’s daughter and had worked there as long as she could remember. She did all sorts of work in the kitchen that could have easily been done by robots, and she was proud of this. I would never have told her it was because she was cheaper, in the end, than a machine. She was happy in her work. If she liked to spend her days cutting up celery and washing woks, that was fine with me.

I learned most of this in the first few minutes of my questioning, and none of it was the result of questions. She was one of those persons who chatters incessantly, and once she got started, it was hard to steer her in the direction you wanted her to go. She liked to talk about herself, and I got an earful of her pretty boring life story.

Like any cop, I can listen to someone I’m interrogating for a long time, knowing that people often say a lot more than they intend to. With Pumpkin, that would not be a problem. There was nothing in her life she felt like she needed to hide. She had no deep, dark secrets.

Sherlock was curled up under a prep table chasing dream rabbits by the time I nudged her in the direction of Mary Smith. I showed her my composite picture, and she brightened at once.

“Oh, yes, Delphine! Our new cook! She is my friend for months and months.”

“Just months?”

“Oh, yes! Baba hired her months ago. She is a very good cook. Her moo shu bronto is much better than the old cook made. Also her twice-cooked lizard with garlic sauce. And her—”

“Do you know where she lives?”

“And it’s a funny thing. She came through the air grate just like you did. I was scared! She told me not to tell anyone about…”

Her hand flew to her mouth. I had the feeling she had never been able to keep a secret in her whole life.

“Oh, I did it again. Pumpkin, why can’t you keep your mouth shut?” She actually smacked herself on the cheek and looked very sad.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “I have something to give her. She won’t mind that you let it slip.”

Pumpkin brightened at once. I doubted she could remain worried about anything for very long unless it was right there in front of her.

“Do you know where she lives?” I asked again. “Do you know her whole name?”

She made a gesture twirling her finger around the side of her head, which I took to mean something like, “Information flies in one ear and out the other.” But she took me to a terminal and looked up her employment application.

Delphine RR Blue Suede Shoes. Oh, terrific. A Presleyite and a Westerosian, with para-leprosy.

There was an address. It was not actually in Irontown — there are no real addresses in Irontown, you have to know somebody who can tell you how to get there — but it was within walking distance.

“What do you think, Sherlock?” I asked him. “You think we’ll find her there?”

The dog sprang to his feet and looked up at me with his tongue hanging out. Sherlock knows many, many words, but there are a handful that he likes more than others. Find is one of them. He was all set to get on her trail. If only I had a piece of her clothing to give him.

But I decided I’d better leave Sherlock behind. I knew where I was going.

Ms. Blue Suede Shoes’s neighborhood was overdue for some urban renewal. It was reachable only on a train that clattered a bit as it wobbled down the rails, one of a series of small malls strung out along the rail tunnel like… well, pearls is not a good analogy, unless it was the ones that were cast before swine.

These were the abodes of people with absolutely no marketable skills that could lead to a job, or no inclination to get a job. Society guaranteed them air, housing, water, and food.

But the air didn’t have to be odor-free.

The housing needn’t be more than a cubicle with a spigot for metallic-tasting water (shower and toilet down the hall, and cross your fingers that either of them worked), and a microwave.

The food was edible. That was the best that could be said for it.

As in any place where things were in short supply, there was a thriving black market in anything people might desire. The economy was largely barter, off the books.

Any cop was familiar with places like this. A high percentage of our work always took us to slums like this.

I smelled moldy socks and sweaty armpits. I wondered how often they washed or changed the air filters around here? Weekly? Yearly? Decadely? I know that’s not a word, but it somehow seemed right for this neighborhood.

I found Delphine’s level, then her corridor. It was narrow, as they tended to be around here. There were a couple of grubby, naked small children, maybe four or five, playing with a scruffy lion cub. There was a disassembled playbot beside them. It had not been taken apart carefully. I wondered if they planned to take the cub apart when they were through.

I stepped around them. The lion cub’s hair stood on end, and she hissed at me as I passed. The children actually looked more feral than the little lion.

Ms. Shoes’s apartment was at the far end of the corridor, what people referred to as the “bedrock” end, though there was not much chance it was actually up against the Lunar bedrock. If you went through the fire-escape door at the end, you would almost certainly find yourself in a stairwell, with another door on the other side of the landing that led to the end of another corridor.

The door leading to the cubicle of Delphine RR Blue Suede Shoes was plain, and slightly battered, as if someone had tried to get in without a print. I’m sure he left in frustration.

Beside the door was a large canvas bag, an old-fashioned duffel with a drawstring pulled tight.

I pressed the plate and faintly heard, “Well it’s one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready now go cat go!”

“Well, it could have been worse,” I muttered. “It could have been ‘Hound Dog.’” Anyone alive in Luna is familiar with at least half a dozen Elvis songs because the Church of Celebrity Saints makes sure you encounter at least one every day.

In one of my old detective books and movies, the shamus would take a step back and kick the door open with his black-leather wingtip. If he tried that on a Lunar door, he could break his ankle. Even an abode as humble as this one would have a pressure door that sealed tighter than a constipated frog’s ass, as Mom used to say during breeding season.

If the door looked really sturdy, a fictional detective would get out his trusty picklock. Even if this door had a pickable mechanical lock — which it did not — I wouldn’t know how to pick it.

But one legacy from my time as a cop was knowing how to bypass a touchplate even if you don’t have the right fingerprint. It’s known as a Universal Passcode Unit. Cops call them jimmies and can check them out when serving a warrant. They are supposed to be returned to the property master after they’ve been used, but they are one of those items that somehow keep going missing. Most cops can figure out a way to take one home and never return it. I had done so, and I still had it.

I held the UPU against the touchplate and let it do its thing.

It was taking long enough that I began to get nervous. No matter that they are called universal, jimmies are not capable of picking the highest-security locks. There are systems that will alert the local precinct if someone attempts an unauthorized entry. Very few private residences have them, and it didn’t seem likely that there would be one here in the suburbs of Irontown, but I couldn’t be sure. Sometimes people engaged in illegal activity have their own systems, and they don’t report to the police. They send out a silent signal to some very large and very nasty folks who specialize in knocking heads together. Or removing them. Painfully.

I was about to beat it down the hallway when there was a click and the door opened inward a few inches. I pushed it open slowly.

I pushed the door open all the way. The light came on automatically, a very dim overhead panel.

The room was all but empty.

Lying on the floor, up against the far wall — all of eight feet away from me — was a slab of foam of the type you would find if you removed the ticking from a mattress. Lying on top of it was a pillow and a neatly folded blanket. There was a single folding chair.

That was it for furniture. In one corner was a sink. A mirror was on the wall behind it. There was a built-in table against another wall, with connections for power and cyber access.

Ah, well. I got the duffel bag from the hall and dumped its contents on the table. I sat down on the chair and started going through it.

It didn’t take long. There were a dozen plastic food trays from various restaurants that delivered. I learned that she had a weakness for Chinese, which would make sense, given the last job she had worked. For variety she occasionally had a box from the neighborhood taco shop. Every once in a while, donuts for dessert.

Before going through it all, I looked all around the place again. I tried to imagine living there. I tried to imagine what a sad existence it must be. Or must have been, since all the signs were that she had moved out. Sitting in the chair, eating chow mein with a plastic fork. Thinking about getting out and dancing with dubious partners at a sleazy nightclub, coming home with a case of resistant leprosy…

It was surely possible that she had had more personal items, more furniture, maybe a touch of decoration… but somehow it didn’t feel like that. To me, it felt like a hideout. It felt like she had gone to ground here. I might have been reading too much into my single meeting with her, but she just didn’t seem like someone who had grown up in a pit like this.

And there was also the matter of her job. She hadn’t had it long, but I knew she must have made a salary that could have easily paid for a much nicer place in a much nicer neighborhood.

So what was she doing here?

I sighed and turned back to the discarded stuff.

There was a green tunic with the name “Delphine RR” printed under the words “No-MSG Garden,” and a high chef’s hat. I wondered briefly why chefs would wear such a ridiculous lid, but I guess a guy sporting a twentieth-century fedora shouldn’t toss stones.

There was a white apron with brown stains on it that I assumed were the remains of food.

The only vaguely personal item was a wilted bunch of yellow daisies and a cracked ceramic vase with a geometric pattern in red and black.

What was not there? For one thing, there was no matchbook with “The Frolic Room” printed on it, like Philip Marlowe might have found in Los Angeles. There was no handkerchief with the initials of the murderer embroidered on it, smelling of chloroform, as Miss Marple might have found in the drawing-room wastebasket.

In short, I didn’t see anything that a detective-story writer would have invented to guide my next steps in the pursuit of my missing client.

Which meant I would now have to look up either the address Hopper had given me a few days ago in the Nighthawk or somehow try to make a connection with the ancient Mr. Scrooge.

Which meant a trip deep into Irontown.

I shuddered and turned to go, then realized I was missing something. In the stories, when they speak of thoroughly searching a place, the mystery writers said the hero or the cops tossed it. There was almost nothing to toss in the sad little cubicle.

Just the mattress. If it had been an old-fashioned spring construction like in the movies, I would have cut it open. People apparently liked to hide stuff in there. Since pretty much all mattresses these days were slabs of foam like this one — or thinner, since with Lunar gravity it was possible to be fairly comfortable on a bed of nails — there was nothing to be done there. But the other place people liked to hide stuff was under the mattress. Misers kept their money there, or so it was said.

So I lifted it.

There was a pair of gloves. I felt sure they were the ones she had worn in my office. There was her crazy hat with the peacock feathers, crushed almost flat. And there was a piece of paper. I picked it up. I read it. It was in a lovely cursive hand:

I heard something behind me and turned in time to see the pressure door close. The next sound I heard was the distinctive chunk of the wards sliding home. Every Lunarian knows that sound from his first pressure drill as a toddler.

“Hey!” I shouted. I pounded on the door.

That’s when I heard the hiss of gas coming from the air duct high in the wall. The gas had a greenish tint to it.

I held my breath, but you can only do that for so long. I felt consciousness slipping away.

The last thing I thought I heard was the sound of barking.