"I don't have any. Who are you, anyway? Your origination isn't registering."
That was because I didn't want it to, of course; I had a scrambler on line, blocking it, and was rerouting the call to make doubly sure it didn't register.
Before I could say anything, though, he said, "Wait a minute, I know you-you're Hsing, the detective, right?" The smile was back, but it wasn't as friendly this time. A mean streak was showing. "That was your software that got busted on me yesterday, right?"
I smiled. He didn't look quite as smooth anymore.
He looked predatory, instead. That I knew how to deal with.
"Hey, I'm glad I stayed up late," he said. "I wouldn't want to have missed your call."
"Oh?" I said.
"That's right, Hsing-Carlie, isn't it?" I didn't answer, and he went on. "Whatever, I've got something I wanted to tell you."
"Oh?" I said again. "What's that?"
"To leave me alone. I'm more than you can handle, lady. Maybe I wasn't before, but I am now."
I didn't believe that, but I didn't argue, because I didn't want him to try to prove anything on me just then. I just smiled again.
We were smiling all over, weren't we? And neither of us meant any of it, not if you consider a smile anything pleasant.
His smile disappeared.
"Listen," he said. "I mean it. I don't want you anywhere near me on Westwall Redevelopment. You just stay out of my affairs, or you're likely to get seriously damaged." He paused, looking at me, and added, "At least, stay out of my business affairs-I won't say I wouldn't mind meeting you in person some time. That won't get you damaged, just bent." He leered, and I blanked the screen. I don't like leers. I don't figure I deserve them; I'm no beauty. I mean, I'm not a hag, either, but I just don't see my face as an incitement to lust at first sight. People don't leer at me much, not anymore. Anyone who leers at me without provocation is either faking it, has perverse tastes, or has no discrimination at all. I figured Orchid for the last, and for a probable case of satyriasis.
After a second's thought, before he said anything more, I exited the call entirely.
That was my third dead end. I'd had three approaches on the case, I'd tried them all, and they'd all died.
Sometimes when you hit a wall, you back up and try another route. Other times, you just have to knock a hole in the wall. Well, it was time to start banging away.
Paulie Orchid was alert and ready for me. He'd warned me off, and he'd be watching; he wouldn't really expect me to lay off. I had a better rep than that-or at least I hoped I did. That meant that going after him really might be dangerous, and I wasn't in any hurry to be damaged.
Besides, I couldn't believe he was anything but hired help.
The West End was dead, and poking the bones wasn't going to do any good. I just couldn't see any way to get anything more there.
That left Sayuri Nakada.
She had real possibilities. Someone with that much money, that many connections in business and family and everywhere else-she would leave traces, stir things up and leave ripples I can read. I could see a dozen ways to get at bits and pieces of her without even trying. If I got enough bits, maybe I could put together enough to recognize what sort of a program was running. This business in the West End might not have been her idea, but she was sure as hell involved somehow, buying up that property. Even if I couldn't get at it directly, I could get an idea as to how her mind worked.
She couldn't possibly keep everything private; she'd be a fool to try. I didn't think she was that foolish. She'd drawn a line that said strangers couldn't contact her personally, but I'd gotten my calls through to intelligent software easily enough. I'd gotten her address from public records-tax records, not directory, it's true, but public records all the same. There were data.
I touched keys, checked my credit balance to make sure I could afford it-I couldn't really, but it wouldn't actually put me over any limits right away-and then I began calling up every data bank I could get at, free or charge, and running full-scale searches for any mention of Nakada.
The stuff just poured in, gigabytes of it. Sayuri Nakada was a big name in the economy and in the general high life on Epimetheus, and that meant that people took an interest in her and recorded a lot about her.
I routed it all to a sort-and-file program that would pull up what I needed on demand, and then I just let it all pile up.
Once I had the searches running, I took a moment to pull some of the basic biodata onto a screen and read it off.
Sayuri Nakada was born on Prometheus, on October 30, 2334, by the standard Terran-ealendar, which made her not quite thirty-two-younger than I was. That surprised me. I had known she was young, of course, and that she wasn't one of the founders of Nakada Enterprises, just one of the horde of heirs, but I still hadn't realized she was that young. I would have guessed that the family would have wanted someone a bit more mature and experienced in charge of things on the nightside.
I called for selection of news stories-or rumors-regarding her arrival in the City, and got a few dozen entries; I picked a few and read on.
After a little of that I backtracked to Prometheus; coverage of events there was spottier, since not everything gets transmitted to Epimetheus, but it was still pretty extensive.
I got interested in what I was reading-I tend to do that. After an hour or so of tiring my eyes I plugged in, to take it all in more quickly.
By 13:00 I thought I had a pretty good idea of what sort of code Sayuri Nakada ran, but I still didn't know what she wanted with the West End. Not in any detail, anyway. I figured it was probably some grand scheme that wouldn't work. That seemed to be in character.
Catch was, I didn't know what kind of a grand scheme.
I ran back through the relevant stuff quickly.
She was born rich, really rich; her parents were second cousins and both major heirs to the original Nakadas, with dibs on something like twelve percent of Nakada Enterprises between them. Sayuri was their only kid, and they spoiled her rotten; human babysitters, unlimited com and credit access, implant education, toy personas-the whole cliché.
Then they dumped her.
Oh, not without reason, and it's not as if she didn't have any warning. She'd been hell since she hit puberty, totally out of control, burning her brain out with guided current and psychoactives of all sorts, reprogramming her personality every few days, growing or building illegal sex partners for herself, screwing up any family business she could get at, bringing assorted street-sleaze into the family compound, and all the rest. Reportedly she'd once fed an illegal intelligence into her bloodstream and spent a week doing nothing but communing with her own interior, then had killed the poor thing. She'd used synesthesia, painwir-ing, neural taps-everything.
Her parents had tried all the usual stuff to level her out, but she'd refused anything more intrusive than counseling -stood on her rights as a natural human, which was pretty ludicrous given some of the stuff she'd done to her brain just for entertainment. She did do sessions with a counselor; she had to put up with that, to keep the juice flowing-but she'd com the counselor with a genen toy between her legs and plug straight into the jackbox when she exited the call.
Finally, when she turned eighteen-Terran years, not Promethean; she was six by local time-her parents told her they'd had enough and threw her out.
Some of this had a pretty familiar ring, you know. My parents did the dump on me, too. That sort of soured me on ancestor worship for quite some time.
Their reasons were completely different, of course. I was never into self-destruction; I like my mind just fine in its natural state, and I saw enough sleaze on the streets without bringing it home. Besides, I never had the juice for the sort of flamboyant decadence that Sayuri Nakada went in for. In fact, that was what got me dumped, a shortage of juice. My parents were tired of supporting me and my sibs, and tired of Epimetheus, with its nonexistent long-term prospects. They wanted to use their money on something besides their three kids. So they did the dump on us all when the oldest, my brother 'Chan-Sebastian Hsing-hit eighteen. I was fifteen, either Terran or Epimethean- there's only twelve days a year difference, and I'd just turned fifteen locally. I hadn't caused anyone any real trouble; I just cost money. My kid sister Alison was twelve Terran, eleven local; she hadn't had a chance to cause trouble, but she cost money, too, and with a sib over eighteen, twelve Terran is old enough. At least, that's what the law says on Epimetheus.