Free city blues 01 - dome city blues by jeff edwards

made Sonja’s stiletto pumps look like flats.  The top of her outfit seemed to consist entirely of a coating of oil and a sprinkling of glitter across her nipples.  She pursed her lips at us and raised one elaborately arched eyebrow.  Her lipstick and nail polish were the exact same glossy shade of red as her skirt.  Holtzclaw winked at her and shook his head once as we climbed past her.
    When we were in the hall, and out of earshot, he nodded back over his shoulder in the direction of the stairs.  “That young lady’s name is Kenya,” he said in his pleasant voice.  “Surgical hermaphrodite, both sets of sexual organs.  Nobody’s really quite sure which set she was born with, and which came from the clinics.  Personally, I don’t believe I care to know.”
    He stopped in front of a door and slid a key chip through the lock sensor.
    Room 216 looked pretty much like it had in the holo.  Large irregular areas of the red carpet were stained a darker shade of red.  Someone with a flair for theatrics had created those stains.  There wasn’t that much blood in the human body.  Besides, Winter had fallen on the bed, so the mattresses and sheets would have absorbed most of the blood.  The management of the Velvet Clam was obviously playing up the scene-of-the-crime angle.
    The air had a strange scent, a bizarre combination of raw sexual musk and cinnamon air freshener.
    I walked around the room for a few minutes, trying to reconstruct events in my head.  The camera would have been about here, facing the bed.  Winter had sat there, on the bed.
    From this angle, I could barely see my own reflection in the mirror on the left wall.  I couldn’t see myself in the mirrored ceiling at all.  I took a small step backwards and disappeared from the wall mirror.  The camera had been here.  Someone had positioned that camera carefully, to insure that it didn’t appear in any reflections.  Anyone behind the camera would have been similarly screened from reflection.
    “Someone was with you, Michael,” I said quietly.  “Someone stood here and watched you pull the trigger.  Someone leaned over your body, took a pack of cigarettes out of your pocket and calmly let themselves out the door.”
    “It’s a pity that the video chip didn’t run longer.”  Mr. Holtzclaw stood in the hall just outside the room.  His voice startled me.  I’d almost forgotten him.
    “I’m sorry?”
    “I was just thinking what a shame it is that the camera wasn’t loaded with a longer chip.  If some unknown person disturbed the body before the police arrived, as you seem to believe, a longer running chip would have recorded them.  Caught them in the act, so to speak.  As it is, the camera shut itself off well before the police arrived.”
    “Good point.  That probably wasn’t an accident.”
    Holtzclaw nodded.  “My thoughts exactly.”  He looked around the room.  “Are you about finished in here?”
    “In a minute.  I want to get a look at the bathroom and the closet.”
    The closet was empty, except for six of those steel coat hangers that stay locked to the rod, and a few dust bunnies.
    The bathroom was no more helpful.
    After one last look around, I thanked Mr. Holtzclaw for his help.  I didn’t have any business cards, so I wrote my name and phone number on the inside of a Velvet Clam matchbook, and asked him to call me if he thought of anything I might find interesting.
    He closed the matchbook and slipped it into a trouser pocket.  “Are you a detective, Mr. Stalin?”
    I thought about it for a second.  “It’s starting to look that way.”
     

CHAPTER 6

    Outside, I stopped under the hotel’s sign to light a cigarette.  The sign was predictable: an animated hologram of a cartoon clam slowly opening and closing.  Its fleshy pink lips were overtly vaginal.  The words Velvet Clam in bright red cursive lettering endlessly orbited the sign at a forty-five degree angle.
    My gaze wandered until I found