Gumshoe, page 15
“Great-grandson.” He must have figured that Jeri was the senior partner because he looked at her and said, “I don’t have time for this. The police already asked their questions.” He shrugged and added, “I didn’t have anything useful to tell them, either.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Why do you say that?”
He stared at me, frustrated. “What would I know? Jonnie had an office here. He came in every two or three weeks. He’s been the firm’s senior partner for the past four years, ever since my dad retired. As far as I can tell, that has nothing to do with anything.”
Probably. If it were true. No reason for it not to be, but I was feeling antagonistic toward the guy. I didn’t like him. Too smooth, eyes too close together, who knows? Maybe bad chemistry. That or I sensed he wasn’t a carbon-based life form.
“You want to see his office?” Peter said. Hoping to get rid of us, no doubt.
“How long was Mr. Rudd here?” Jeri asked.
“No more than five minutes.”
“Did you see him leave?”
“Not personally, no. The girls out front would have.”
The girls who did all the work, I thought churlishly. Like a true capitalist, Peter Howard was getting rich off the labors of others. But of course, that’s how it’s done. That’s what makes this country great. Soviet-style communism was the most visible political flop of the previous century.
“About Jonnie’s office,” Peter prompted.
“Sure,” Jeri said, standing. “Let’s go have a look.”
We trooped out past Amyee and down a short hall to an office twice the size of Peter’s, but without a secretary posted out front. Better view, too. A huge west-facing window showed casinos rising against the Sierras. At night it would be quite a sight, impressive. I was surprised Peter hadn’t moved in yet.
“Mr. Sjorgen didn’t have a secretary?” I asked.
“He had no need for one,” Peter said. “At least not here.”
“But you do?” I glanced back down the hall to where Amyee was busy with her manicuring chores.
“Of course. I’m here every day.”
“She looks like a whiz with a computer,” I said. Jeri kicked me in the ankle then spun me around to face the room. My employment interview wasn’t going well. Come tomorrow, after ten o’clock, I was likely to find myself in a county government building somewhere, filling out unemployment forms.
Jonnie’s desk was a big important slab of polished rosewood. It probably weighed four hundred pounds, even more than the behemoth, Officer Day.
“Anything in that?” I asked.
“The police went through it,” Peter said, yellowish teeth gnawing at his lower lip. “They took some stuff, logged everything they took.” He leaned against a wall. “I’ll have the rest of it boxed up for his daughter when I get a chance.”
“You should put Amyee on that,” I said, moving out of range of Jeri’s feet.
Peter remained silent.
Jonnie’s daughter, Rosalyn Sjorgen—Nicole’s dance instructor at Ithaca, New York. Floating out there on the far edge of this uproar. Which was hardly her fault. It sunk in then, standing there in Jonnie’s office, that one way or another, guilty or innocent, Rosalyn Sjorgen wasn’t that far out on the edge. She was Jonnie’s daughter, his closest relative. His only relative, in fact, since Jonnie had no siblings and hadn’t gotten around to marrying my wife. Okay, ex-wife. Rosalyn stood to inherit everything, every last dime. Maybe even this corner office, and the desk. A better motive than mine. I ought to run that past Russell Fairchild.
Family. Family member. Rosalyn was his family. I wondered if that might mean anything, given Fairchild’s pearl of wisdom the other day: The ones who know you best…
I wondered if she’d locked her doors in Ithaca, disconnected her phone, burrowed in to wait out the storm. Or if she was aware that he was dead. Like my daughter Nicole, she might be in Europe, roping her way up a craggy Alp. She might be in India, passing out alms.
Jonnie’s house alone was worth a bundle. I wondered how much equity he had in it, how much his estate was worth, all told—
“Mort?”
I popped out of my reverie. Jeri was seated at Jonnie’s desk, giving me a questioning look. “Huh?” I said sluggishly.
“I said, let’s go through this thing, okay?”
“What, the desk?”
“That’s what I said.”
“The police already did that.”
“Now it’s our turn. C’mon.”
She was in his chair. Thing probably cost eight hundred bucks. I crouched down next to her and opened a drawer on the right while she opened the one in the middle. Peter watched for a moment, then said, “Hey, if you need anything.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Jeri mumbled without looking up.
Peter shrugged, went out.
The drawer I’d opened contained a bunch of Sjorgen & Howard business forms, letterhead, general office memos, some of which were five years old. Jeri was into paperclips and old pens, a staple remover, rubber bands, scissors, seventeen cents in change.
A photograph on the desk caught my eye. Walnut frame, glass. Jonnie, twenty years ago, squinting into the sun on a beach somewhere. With him was a bony girl twelve or thirteen years old with Jonnie’s black hair, wearing a droopy green bikini, glasses, braces on her teeth. Rosalyn again. Had to be.
I’d never met her, but it was hard to imagine that gawky kid as Nicole’s dance instructor. The picture was probably taken about the time Nicole was born. Time marches on, carrying kids along with it into adulthood, adults into various kinds of oblivion.
“Find something?” Jeri asked.
“Nope.”
“Then keep looking.”
“That mean I’m on the payroll?”
“Keep looking, Mort.”
I made a show of it, but in my heart I knew it was hopeless. The desk had been sterilized. No way was it going to harbor a packet of death threats from a psycho written in a childlike scrawl, with inky fingerprints, DNA-laden drool, and a return address.
In time, even Jeri called it quits. Ignoring Amyee’s squawk of protest, I stuck my head into Peter Howard’s office unannounced and told him we were leaving. Having missed a putt, he wasn’t thrilled to see me, but he was elated to have us out of his building and out of his life. Me, especially. He might’ve put up with Jeri, one on one.
Outside, walking toward the car, Jeri said, “You’re like a rhino in a china shop, Mort.”
“You mean bull, don’t you?”
“No. Rhino suits you. You need to lighten up. Peter Howard might have told us something.”
“Yeah, well, he started it with that get-outta-here-and-don’t-bother-me attitude of his.”
“Oh, say, that’s an enormous help.”
“I didn’t like the look in his eyes, Jeri.” I had to hurry to keep up with her. Women and aerobics will be the death of tens of thousands of men in the U.S. in the coming years. In droves, we will have heart attacks trying to keep up.
“What look?” she demanded.
“Something squinty. Sneaky.”
“So, based on that, you think what? That he killed and beheaded Jonnie? And worse, used a sabre saw on him? That wimp?”
“I didn’t say that. I doubt if the useless prick knows what a sabre saw is. I think we ought to give him another look, that’s all.”
She stopped at the car and faced me, talking across the width of her Porsche. “Motive, Mort.”
“He wanted Jonnie’s office.”
“Try to get a grip.”
“In L.A. they’ll murder you for jogging shoes. An office with a view is better than shoes, especially if you think it would impress little Amyee darlings.”
“I said, try to get a grip. She’d be impressed with gum.” She got in behind the wheel.
I flung my hands in the air. “Motive? How would I know? Maybe Peter Howard’s got illegal land deals coming out his ass, and Jonnie found out and was about to blow the whistle. Or muscle in. We don’t know what’s going on in that place. And we don’t know how the business is set up, either. With Jonnie out of the picture, maybe it’ll just be Howard Title Company now.”
“Terrific, now work our dead district attorney into this surreal little theory of yours.”
I stared at her for several seconds. “It’s not a theory, it’s a possibility.”
“Technically, that would make it a hypothesis, and a weak one at that. Now get in. Or do you want to go back and paw through Jonnie’s desk for another hour or two?”
“Not on your life.” I hopped in, wedged into the seat like a two-hundred-pound woman into size seven panties, then stuck the moustache back on again.
Jeri fired up the engine and took off, looked over at me. “Offhand, I don’t see any compelling reason to uproot Sjorgen & Howard, Mort. We need a helluva lot more than squinty eyes and darling Amyee. Unless what you really want is her phone number.”
“Maybe I do. Gum’s a cheap date.”
She laughed, then snapped my head back shifting the Porsche into third.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JERI DROPPED ME off downtown at the corner of First and Virginia and sped away. I watched her go. I still hadn’t asked her about the judo, not that it mattered. I pretty much had the gist. She turned a corner, gone, and I headed up north on foot, through the heart of Reno’s gaming district.
The golf hat didn’t suit me, so I shoved it in a pocket and bought a cheap black cowboy hat at a tourist ripoff joint on the corner of Second and Virginia. Reno’s transient and tourist population is eclectic enough that you can get away with that wild west, drugstore cowboy look without drawing stares, even if this wild west is one of used car salesmen, crack dealers, fast food, and massage parlors.
It was nearing three o’clock when I got to the Golden Goose. O’Roarke was just coming on shift, tying on an apron. He stared wordlessly at the hat. I took it off, knowing by his smirk that buying it had been one more mistake in a long line. I set it on the stool next to mine, ordered a plain Coke.
“How ‘bout a sarsaparilla, pardner?” he drawled. “Cuts trail dust like nothin’ you ever saw.”
“Aaaaand, there goes your tip, smart ass.” I stuck my moustache on a jar of beer nuts again. Made it look like Groucho, or Hitler.
“You haven’t tipped me in two years, Angel.” He slid a Coke in front of me.
“Not true. February I told you tomato paste gets out skunk odor.”
He went to the other end of the bar and waited on three elderly ladies who were waving drink coupons at him. He didn’t return for ten minutes. So much for giving him cool tips.
I sat there in the gloom, thinking about this deal with Jeri, letting the week’s events wash over me.
K.
Three people dead.
And me, right in the thick of it, with no more idea of what was going on than your average teenager knows about Kurds in Iraq or border tensions between Mexico and Guatemala.
How close was the danger? More to the point, how close was it to Dallas? Or to K, or Jeri? Or even Dale, though she was probably safe now, on her way to New Hampshire.
Questions without answers. The danger might already be past. It could have been a transitory horror that had swept Greg up in one final blaze of glory and was over now.
I closed my eyes and…saw rage. At a gut level, penises hacked off and stuffed into holes cut into skulls equates to rage, hatred of an astronomical order.
Or not. Colombians in the drug trade might do that on a whim, a warning to the competition, or as a way to amuse themselves on a slow night, but I didn’t see Colombians anywhere near this. Or drugs. Nothing like that.
Fact is, I didn’t see much of anything in it. Nothing added up. Milliken might have been the initial target and Jonnie and Greg had somehow ended up on the tracks when the train went by. The enemies of Reno’s D.A. would number in the hundreds. An imaginative psychopath might’ve been sprung from the state prison down in Carson and come north to settle a score. Things like that happen. If so, it was strictly a police matter. I wouldn’t have a hope in hell of finding a lunatic with prison tattoos and a smoldering grudge who might already be off in the Great Smokies of Tennessee working as a dishwasher in a rowdy little no-name roadhouse.
And, was I fooling myself?
Was I a gumshoe, or just an early middle-aged ex-IRS agent on a barstool fooling himself, headed down one more dark road to an unknown destination?
Some questions don’t have easy answers.
* * *
Four Cokes and four hours later, I left, regretting the choice of drinks. Coke doesn’t have the ongoing appeal of beer. It doesn’t cloud the mind, so you can’t even fool yourself into thinking you’re getting somewhere. The only diversion of note was the national news on TV at five thirty, in which one bulky and almost certainly dangerous Mortimer Angel—unquestionably a household name by this time—out for his morning jog, had led news vans into a parking garage, jogged downstairs to an exit, and, minutes later, was more or less responsible for the collision of an L.A. news wagon and a Citifare bus—to which O’Roarke, still smirking, said, “And to think I knew you when.” The jerk.
By seven fifteen I was on the sidewalk, facing east. The day was cooling but still hot, still in the nineties, bright sunlight slanting in from the west. A stink of exhaust overlay Virginia Street. The tourists had a worn, glazed look. Even normally alert panhandlers were lethargic.
Across the street, Sjorgen House was a grayish-brown hulk rising into the shadows of overhanging elms. Light glinted off a rickety TV antenna on the roof, near a canted, copper-green cupola topped by a weathervane.
Sjorgen House.
Or Woolley House, depending. A dark, haunted-looking thing of old gables and cornices, dormer windows, square columns supporting an empty porch that ran the full width of the front. The place should have been painted New England white. It would’ve transformed it.
Whose was it now? What was its legal status, and what would happen to it and to Edna Woolley now that Jonnie was gone? Would the Huns of Progress bribe someone on the historical society and a few council members, raze the mansion and the rest of the block, and put up another gleaming six-hundred-million-dollar casino or a new parking garage?
A dormer window was open on the third floor, a yellow curtain hanging limp over the sill. The yard was deserted, the grass dry and gone to patches of bare earth and weeds. Thick shrubs grew along both sides of the house, and a climbing rose had reached the second floor, putting out bright explosions of yellow.
I jaywalked over, cowboy hat tilted at a jaunty angle. The front yard was unprotected by a fence. Cigarette butts and gum wrappers were ground into the dirt near the sidewalk like the aftermath of a double-A baseball game.
I remembered seeing Edna Woolley on television a few years ago, during her ninety-sixth birthday. By now she would be nearing a hundred.
How had she come to live in Sjorgen House? I had a rough idea of when, but didn’t know any of the particulars. Either I hadn’t paid enough attention to the news of late, or the subject hadn’t been brought up. Wendell and Jane Sjorgen—Jonnie’s parents—had vacated the place, and Edna moved in. I did know that Jane Sjorgen divorced Wendell a few months after that, which carried the scent of scandal, but there wasn’t a hint that a scandal or anything like it had occurred.
Now, I was or wasn’t a private detective. If I wasn’t, I could turn in my badge, symbolically speaking, go home, shower, circle job openings in the paper, catch another of Leno’s Mortimer Angel jokes, crawl into bed and dream sweet dreams. If, on the other hand, I still had dreams of another kind, I could go nose around Jonnie’s holdings, shake the trees, see if anything interesting fell out. And I was standing in front of one of his holdings right now.
So, Great Gumshoe, what’s it gonna be?
I strolled up a concrete walk toward the house, hands in my pockets, not yet committed to anything. Who knows? I might’ve been an encyclopedia salesman in a cowboy hat. Come to think of it, that might be in my future, or going door to door with Electroluxes.
For forty years Edna had lived here. Last I’d heard, she had a live-in housekeeper or nurse taking care of her, something like that.
I climbed four warped treads to the front porch and came face to face with a recently written note on a three-by-five card that read: No solicitors, no interviews, no reporters. Do NOT Ring the Bell! This means you! It was thumbtacked to the wood above the doorbell.
Evidently the Sjorgen-Milliken saga had also reached this place and the occupants were fed up with it. I knew how they felt.
Roadblocks, decisions. I turned and looked back at the street, fifty feet away. What would a real gumshoe do at a time like this?
Ring the bell, of course, see who answers, try to strike up a conversation, apologize if necessary, wing it, backpedal if anyone pulled a gun, pretend to be a Mormon, hand out tracts.
Or maybe come back at two in the morning, climb in through a window and skulk around. A real gumshoe might do that.
I compromised. I knocked.
Waited half a minute, knocked again. Waited a full minute, then rang the damn bell. Nothing. I listened to the dead quiet of the house, stared at the blank, empty gaze of its windows.
So much for Plan A. Plan B, skulking in the wee hours of the morning, didn’t have much appeal. If a Plan C were in the works, I’d have to invent it.
I stepped off the porch, went around the side of the house and looked down toward the back. High above, the attic window still stood open, curtain across the sill as if a gust of wind had blown it there. A sound of jazz floated on the air, as faint as a memory.
Toward the back, a separate garage sat in the backyard, also in a state of disrepair, low and shadowy beneath the leafy elms. Along the outer wall of the main house, a phone line dangled from loose, rusty staples and disappeared through a badly puttied hole. I looked up. The siding was stained where water had leaked from a damaged gutter. Big discoveries, these.
Between the shrubbery, whatever foundation the house had was partly hidden by latticework, two-inch-wide cedar strips crisscrossing in diagonals, forming diamonds beyond which lay blackness, exuding a cool moist odor of dark earth and worms.
