Gumshoe, page 11
I led them up three levels, then ducked down a flight of stairs, embarrassed for our great nation and its so-called education system. Apparently high school doesn’t teach critical-thinking skills. I could hear more squealing tires, curses echoing off naked concrete. If the video cameras were still rolling, most of this was going to end up on the editing room floor, figuratively speaking.
Out a door at street level. A local van was hugging a curb, engine idling. A Channel 4 crew. I hadn’t fooled them, but then they knew the territory. I led it east on Fifth, then south on Virginia, past Fourth. Ramboette in the blue station wagon got in front of Channel 4, then edged right and hit the brakes, forcing Channel 4 back until Lady Rambo was opposite me. It was a ballsy maneuver. I thought it should be rewarded. Three vehicles were now behind me with more on the way. Under the Reno city arch, embossed with the words “Biggest Little City In The World,” past Harrah’s Club and a bunch of touristy gift shops. Early morning pedestrians stared as we went by. A lazy right turn down a service alley halfway down the block to give everyone a chance to follow, one block west through the alley, then a sudden turn north on Sierra—wrong way up the one-way street.
An abrupt squeal of brakes, then an even louder and therefore more satisfying crunch of metal and glass. I looked back. Lady Rambo had met a Citifare bus head on. Ouch. Expensive way to start the day. I saw steam rising. I saw her hop out and glare up the street at me. I saw her give me the finger in a highly dexterous manner.
I slowed, trotted back to Virginia Street, across to Center, and looked around. I’d lost them. Hard work, but worth every lungful.
I jogged up Lake Street to the university, across the campus, around the track twelve times, then back home on various side streets, feeling better than I had in days.
I did eighty sit-ups, lifted forty-pound dumbbells, and spent a few extra minutes in the shower, lathering up and singing old Beatles tunes, including “Yellow Submarine.”
All traces of my hangover were gone. I thought I might publish the cure in JAMA one day. If I did, I’d be sure to send a copy to the Rambo gal. I was sure I could get her name and address from RPD’s traffic division, especially now that I had friends on the force. Russell Fairchild and I were getting to be pretty good pals.
* * *
I left my gun at home, still under the cushion of the couch. This time I went through the fence, not over. I found a loose plank near the northwest corner of my yard, pried it off, and the one next to it, and squeezed through.
And came face to face with Velma, who had a fistful of chopped honeysuckle in one hand, shears in the other, a glint in her eye. We stood in the shade of a leafy plum, serenaded by sparrows.
“She still over there?” Velma asked.
Ah, my big chance. “Who?”
“That girl.”
“What girl?”
“Don’t you play dumb with me, Mortimer.” She shook the shears at me. She was all gray hair and wrinkles, wore a hearing aid and weighed no more than eighty-two pounds. She had on shorts and a Grateful Dead T-shirt covered in silvery cobwebs and bits of minced honeysuckle.
She peered closer at me. “When on earth did you grow that horrible thing?”
I touched the moustache. “Something I’ve been working on.”
“Horrible. Just horrible. And that hat!”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Doesn’t suit you a-tall.”
“I was thinking about getting rid of it. You wouldn’t happen to know her name, would you?” I pulled the boards back in place. They were behind a good-sized pine tree in my yard. From the street no one would notice they were loose. I hoped.
“Her plane?”
“Her name, name.”
Velma peered at me through one eye. “You don’t have to shout. Whose name? Not your lady friend, I hope?”
“Yeah. Her.”
“You mean to tell me you don’t know?” Her look darkened.
“It, uh, slipped my mind.”
“I would think, Mortimer…” she said in an admonishing tone.
“Yeah?”
“You know.” She frowned at me, then at the fence. “Why you two think you’ve got to go through this fence is beyond me.” Her look became faintly pugnacious, challenging me to explain.
“It’s a long story.”
“I bet it’s a doozy.”
“It is. So, you don’t know her name, huh?”
Her eyes dropped away. “It was something like Kelso, or Callie, or…or, you know, Mortimer, I believe she said one thing, then another. So I asked, and I swear she came up with another—Kelly.”
It sounded as if Velma’s hearing aid needed new batteries. Either that, or K was intentionally muddying the waters.
“What’re you two doing?” she asked. “You duckin’ her husband or something?” The gleam returned. Her voice lowered, becoming conspiratorial. “You kin tell me.”
“You’re too sharp for us, Velma.”
“I knew it, I knew it!” she said joyfully. Then she cut that off and pursed her lips. “That’s an awful risky business, boy.”
“Don’t I know it.”
Her bony shoulders lifted in a shrug. “Well, you kin use my yard, I reckon. Anyone asks, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout nothin’.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“Fact is, a feller came nosing around yesterday, long about dusk, asking about you.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“I already tole you.” She waved an arm, slinging around bits of honeysuckle. “Nothin’.”
“Thanks. It’d probably be best if you kept it that way.” I edged past her shears, then bent down and kissed her cheek. “I’ve gotta get going.”
Velma nodded toward my place. “She in there?”
“Not right now.”
“She’s a beauty. I can see how she turned your head, Mortimer.” Her look became wistful. “There was a day when…well, if I see her, I’ll show her the boards you got loose here. Pretty girl like that shouldn’t be hiking herself over fences.”
“You do that.” I went around the side of her house to the street, then walked downtown in my disguise, keeping an eye out for roving vans.
* * *
Give up or go on? Floating for the moment on one of life’s cusps, I found myself faced with a choice. Nothing said I had to pursue Jonnie’s death. I could bail out any time I wanted. And, I thought…I would. My stride slowed. By God, I would do exactly that. For one glorious second a dozen paths opened up ahead. Fifty. Light shone down. I felt illuminated. I could do whatever I damn well pleased. I was free. I came to a stop right there on the sidewalk. Free.
“Do it for Dallas, Great Gumshoe”—the idiotic words of the bartender, Patrick O’Roarke, rattled around in the perfect vacuum of my skull.
Hell.
Love is a trap.
And, I admitted, if I quit now that would be the end of it. The spark would go out. I would go back to being an IRS agent. The tax code would bubble up past my eyes and blot out the sun. I would get a paunch, turn gray, end up on a porch fussing with my medications, yelling at kids as they whizzed by on skateboards, calling them whippersnappers or something equally demented.
In an instant the light winked out and all those paths ahead disappeared. Except one.
So much for cusps. I kept on walking.
The Yellow Pages had listed fifteen detective agencies, including Carson & Rudd, the status of which was in grave doubt now that both Carson and Rudd were dead. I’d gone through the remaining fourteen and picked one within walking distance that sounded like more than a one-horse operation: Rix & Associates, Inc.
Rix was on Arlington in a low, stone-and-glass building next to the Arlington Tower. I removed the porkpie and the moustache as I pushed through a glass door and went in.
A young woman was talking on a cordless headset while making coffee. She was hassling with whomever about a delinquent account and the terms of a revised payment schedule. She was slender, pretty, nicely dressed, curvy, and I figured those attributes were minimum requirements for working as either a PI or a PI’s secretary.
The place looked profitable. The outer office had more pizazz than Gregory’s—not that it mattered, now. Potted plants, magazines on a table, framed prints on the walls, pleasant mint-green wall-to-wall carpeting, even an old-fashioned water cooler, complete with a stack of four-ounce paper cups in a holder that gave the place a nice retro look.
The girl looked at me. Her eyes widened, and she doubletaked, or doubletook, whatever, then terminated the call with a quick, “Gotta go. Call ya back. Bye.”
She stared at me. “You…you’re…”
“Yep.”
“…that guy…I mean…”
“Your ad in the Yellow Pages said discreet. Your sign, too, right there on the door. This place is discreet, isn’t it? Confidential?”
“Why, yes, of course.” An offended note crept into her voice in spite of being face to face with the most successful locator of missing persons in all of North America. Of course, some people might think that didn’t count since I was most likely the one who’d caused them to go missing in the first place.
“Then I was never here,” I told her. “And I’m not even who I am, so you don’t have to keep staring at me like that, right?”
My words broke her paralysis. She pressed a button on her desk, twice. A moment later, a door opened and a man in a hundred-dollar haircut came out, power tie loosened, shirtsleeves.
Mike Grissom. One look at me and he waved me inside without a word and shut the door. In his office, which overlooked Arlington and a gaggle of workmen, one of whom was jack hammering a hole in the street, I explained what I wanted.
He grinned at me from across a cluttered desk. “You’re shittin’ me. One PI hiring another.”
“Nope. Happens all the time,” I said with some authority. But maybe not in the same city, I didn’t bother to say. “And I expect full confidentiality.” I nodded toward the outer office. “From her, too.”
He shrugged that off. “Beyond these walls, we don’t discuss our clients’ business, ever.” He leaned back and put his hands up behind his head. “Damn if I don’t wish I could help you, too, but I gotta fly to L.A. this afternoon and we’re backed up three weeks around here, minimum. A month if you’re looking to bag a cheating spouse.”
“How many investigators work out of this office?”
“Five, including me. All of us booked solid. ’Tis the season for infidelity and runaways, not to mention the ongoing problem of delinquent dads, and moms, and what the courts hand us, which I’ve got to tell you has priority. That’s bread and butter, and they want what they want pretty much the day before they ask for it. District Court alone keeps two or more of us running full time, and we serve a lot of defense lawyers around town.”
I sank back in the chair. “So…got any suggestions?”
He shrugged. “DiFrazzia might have time for it.” He gave me a first name: “Jerry.”
DiFrazzia. The name rang a bell from my recent perusal of the phone book, but I’d rejected it as a one-man operation. It hadn’t said “& Associates.”
Mike grinned. “It’s close. Office is a few blocks west of here, on Washington, between First and Second.”
* * *
The place was a house, or had been. Good-sized one, too. Two stories, peeling pale-yellow paint with cream trim, a section of gutter held up with wire. Next door was a nest of lawyers in what had once been a modest riverfront mansion. The street was shaded by elms and maples. Sidewalks were buckled, grass growing in the cracks. No traffic going by on the street at the moment. Quiet neighborhood.
I went in blind, but what else is new? The sign on the door read DiFrazzia Investigations, so how was I to know?
The gal at the desk was shorter than any I’d spoken with recently, five-three. But she was a looker, in a solid, Mediterranean, outdoorsy way. And, like Dale, she could type a mile a minute, so that was also a requirement of the job.
A dozen prisms dangled in a window on fishing line, catching sunlight and shooting rainbows throughout the room—a large, open, humid place. It was a jungle, twenty potted plants, including a rubber tree and two enormous palmetto things eight feet tall. The pegged wooden floor creaked as I crossed the room.
“Help you?” the woman asked, looking up from her terminal. She had on a comfortably baggy brick-red cotton shirt and black sultan pants. I guessed her age at about twenty-eight, give or take.
“I’d like to talk to Mr. DiFrazzia.”
“You’re assuming something.”
“Huh?”
She smiled. “I’m DiFrazzia.” She paused a moment, then said, “Okay, now you’re staring. Is it the outfit? Not businesslike enough for you?”
“You’re DiFrazzia?”
“Yep. Geraldine, but everyone calls me Jeri, including my dad.”
I didn’t know what to say. Jeri, not Jerry. A vision of Jonnie’s head came back, his fogged stare, a maniac out there somewhere, gliding through the darkest of Reno’s shadows.
“You were expecting a man,” Jeri said, pushing herself away from her computer. She had short dark hair with feather bangs, full of deep-red highlights, cut in a carefully tousled way. Her eyes were direct, unwavering, right on mine.
“Sort of.” Okay, yes. I wanted a man the size and disposition of Officer Day, say three hundred twenty pounds, naturally suspicious of all humanity and sporting an Uzi he could field-strip in the dark, with a neck you couldn’t chainsaw through in a weekend. What I didn’t want was a fluffball who located missing dogs. Again, this shows how little I knew. Given all that, it’s amazing I’ve gotten this far in life without succumbing to some tremendous, avoidable accident, but, give me credit, something like that could still happen.
“Investigator-wise, I’m it, Mr. Angel. At least in this office.”
Christ, she practically knew my name. “Mort. At least you’re up on current events.”
“Everywhere one turns, there’s Mortimer and Dallas Angel. The two of you have been impossible to miss.”
“Not by choice. And the name’s Mort.”
“What you’re looking for, let me take a wild guess here—it’s got something to do with the Sjorgen and Milliken murders.”
“Jeez, you’re good.”
“Better than you know.”
I edged half a step toward the door. “Uh, no offense, but this is a pretty rough deal.” The floor squawked under my foot as I transferred weight.
Jeri leaned forward. “I can handle rough. Sit down. Let’s talk.”
“It’s more than rough. You heard about Gregory Rudd?”
“Your nephew, sure.”
“Then you know. This thing reaches out and grabs people, Ms. DiFrazzia.”
She made a face. “Jeri, please. And, yeah, I know. All the world knows. They found Mr. Rudd’s car this morning. Why don’t you sit down?”
I stared at her. “They found Greg’s car?”
“It was on the news,” she said, giving me a look.
While I’d been out busting vans and busses. Jeri was more on top of things than I was. The look she gave me wasn’t precisely one of scorn, but I knew she was wondering what planet I was from.
“Where’d they find it?” I asked.
“Parking lot at the Peppermill.”
Two miles south of his office. I had no idea what he might’ve been doing down there.
“Sit,” Jeri said.
“Really, I don’t think this is a good idea. I probably oughta can the whole idea. Might be best if you forgot I ever came in.”
“Sit down, Mr. Angel.”
I paused. “Mort.”
She pointed. “In the chair, Mort.”
There was only one parked in front of her desk. So, to be polite, I sat. I wasn’t about to hire her, but I couldn’t just walk out. She looked like she’d weigh in at about one-fifteen, soaking wet. I could see her walking into whatever Greg had come across. Goddamn if I wanted to find her head lying around anywhere.
“Exactly what’re you looking for?” she asked.
“Is the money clock running?”
“Not until I take the case. Which I haven’t yet.” She made an impatient “come-on” gesture with a hand tipped with short, bright red nails, about what I’d expect of a finder of lost mutts.
So, what the hell, I laid it out. Hired by my ex, Dallas, Gregory Rudd had gone out to check out Sjorgen’s properties and businesses and had been decapitated. The top portion of said decapitation had been returned to the desk in his office. A grim tale, but not lengthy or overly complicated.
Jeri held my gaze. “And you want to follow up, try to find who did it.”
I nodded. “That, and who killed Jonnie and Dave.”
“Find one, you’ll find them all.”
“Probably.”
“You don’t trust the police to do their job?”
“I do, yes. Absolutely. Dallas doesn’t, though, and it’s her money, her call.”
“So here you are.”
“You wanted the story, there it is.”
“So, not being a, uh, qualified investigator yourself, you want to hire one.” In the depths of her eyes I detected a hidden spark of amusement. Not hidden enough.
“No. What I want is to get out of here.” I got to my feet.
“Sit.”
I sat. Voice like that, she would’ve made a terrific drill instructor or IRS field agent.
“You need an investigator,” she repeated.
I nodded reluctantly.
“And you’d prefer that investigator to be a man?” Her eyes bored into mine.
“It’s not that,” I said, forced into an outright lie. “It’s just…you know, whatever Greg ran into—”
“You’re still assuming things, Mort.”
“What?”
“That I can’t handle it. Or myself.” The look she gave me was neutral, except for a flickery little light way down deep, something you had to look for.
