Gumshoe, page 17
I picked it up. “Yes.”
“Your time is up.”
“Just about to leave.” I set the radio down. I hadn’t known it was two-way, like a cell phone, a kind of monitoring device, always on. “Time for me to go, Edna.”
“Oh, and we were having such a lovely visit, too, Albert,” she said, disappointed.
“Yes, I know. I’m very sorry.”
She looked around, perplexed. “Now where on earth do you suppose Sparky’s got to?”
“Sparky?”
“My kitty. He was here only a moment ago.”
The attic window was open. Had been all day. Sparky probably kept his own hours. I’d been there nearly two hours, so a moment in Edna’s life was an indeterminate amount of time.
Her hands fluttered helplessly. “Do tell Charlie I miss him so, won’t you, dear?”
“Yes. I certainly will.”
“Will you come back?” Her eyes seemed to tug at mine, wanting company.
“I’ll try.”
I hugged her as if she were my own grandmother. She stood in the middle of the room where I’d first seen her, watching as I let myself out.
Into a dark passage. Dim light came from the far end, through a north-facing window with a view of an almost-black sky through a canopy of elms.
I felt blind. I missed my gun. I groped to the stairs, found a switch that turned on a grimy fifteen-watt bulb that might’ve once belonged to T. A. Edison himself.
Down the stairs and back along a hallway lit only slightly better than the one above. Then past several doors, off to my right. Ahead, I saw the second-floor landing at the head of the stairs.
A light clicked on. “Mort?”
I turned. Six feet away, Winter was in a doorway wearing a filmy black bra and a black thong, illuminated in soft light by a frosted globe lamp on the ceiling. Her pubic hair must have been shaved off because the thong was a silk patch the size of a credit card. The bra was loose, straps off her shoulders, cups drooping at the sides as she held it to herself with a pale hand. That whorehouse feeling ratcheted upward a notch or three.
“I’m undone,” she said. She turned, revealing the free ends of her bra in back, a nice expanse of bare skin, that improbably tiny waist. The thong hid nothing at all of her bottom, which was nicely rounded and well-muscled.
I stared at her. She turned and faced me again, returning my look, still holding the bra to her chest, one hip thrust out far enough to touch the frame of the door. It was a striking sight, the filmy black undergarments, the raven-haired girl, her smooth, pale skin. I could see that black comforter behind her, the crossed foils on the wall.
“Hitch me up?” she said.
“Depends,” I answered. “Where’s the plow?”
She struck a measured pout. “I mean, my bra, cowboy.”
“Nope.”
I headed for the stairs, started down without looking back. Under the conditions, hooking up Winter’s brassiere wouldn’t have been the smartest move of the day. Under any conditions I could imagine, it wouldn’t have been.
The word “fucker” floated down after me, and a lilting, almost indiscernible laugh. Sweet child.
I’d almost reached the front door when Victoria appeared at the double doors to the parlor. Her face was in shadow, eyes glinting, catching stray light. How these people got around without crashing into things was beyond me, but I guessed they saved a bundle on electricity.
“I told you not to mention Jonathan,” Victoria said tightly.
“You told me not to tell her he was dead. Or how.”
“Get out. Don’t come back.”
“That’s not very friendly.”
“You are an extremely nosy person, Mr. Angel. Very annoying.”
“So I’ve been told. It was a requirement of my former job.”
“Out.”
“No problem.” I opened the door, then looked back, “You might want to try to find Sparky,” I told her. “It looks like he might’ve gone out the window.”
“As near as we’ve been able to determine, Sparky died in 1923, Mr. Angel. When Edna was seven years old. We don’t anticipate that he’ll be coming back.”
“Oh.”
“Good-bye.”
I went outside. Before the door closed behind me, I said, “You might consider giving Winter a good spanking.”
“Might I?”
All I could see was one of Victoria’s eyes, staring at me through a two-inch gap, then the door snicked shut.
I strode down the walk to the street. At the sidewalk I looked back at the house, half expecting to see Winter standing naked at a window, peering out, wanting whatever she wanted. Other than faint yellow light emanating from Edna’s window, the house was dark.
I headed home on foot again, wondering when I could safely retrieve the Toyota and start driving again.
Jonathan, Victoria had called him. No one called Jonnie that. It didn’t sound right, like saying Jonathan Wayne or Robert Hope. You just don’t do that.
* * *
I loosened the fence boards and slipped through, stood in my backyard gazing at the house.
All dark, all quiet.
News vans were still camped on the street in front. Persistent as mosquitoes, the sons of bitches, but there were only three of them, so maybe things were starting to cool off.
I unlocked the back door and went in, left the lights off while I toured the house to assure myself that I was alone, then took a quick shower and got dressed again in clean clothes. I made a sandwich in the dark and ate it in the backyard sitting in a lawn chair with a view of casino lights through trees to my left. I washed the sandwich down with two beers while looking up at the stars. I was dog tired, but knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep for a while. I thought K might show up, but she didn’t. Finally I opened a window in the bedroom for air and went to bed, caught the eleven o’clock news and, later, Leno on The Tonight Show.
Channel 4 ran a recap of the Sjorgen-Milliken-Rudd-Angel circus, but they had nothing new to add. I watched one last clip of Mortimer Angel’s infamous morning jog and the blonde’s encounter with the Citifare bus, which I enjoyed very much. No mention of Dallas or me by Leno, so I went to sleep thinking maybe our moment in the limelight was over. With luck, this whole thing might blow itself out, except for the lingering dregs of an unfinished investigation. Once they caught the perpetrator things would flare up again, but by then Dallas and I would be out on the furthest reaches of it, barely a footnote. We were done.
Innocent babes dream the deepest, and I was innocent enough, or dumb enough, to sink into the Valkyrian mists of a very deep dream indeed.
And, I was tired right down to the bone.
* * *
Which explains why I didn’t wake up when K crawled into my bed, sometime during the night.
Fact is, I didn’t wake up at all, didn’t feel a thing. But when I got up at three in the morning to pee, I damn near jumped out of my skin when I encountered a warm body. I yelped, scrambled out of bed taking the sheets and the blanket with me, and ended up on the floor against the closet, crushing a lampshade.
For a moment I wondered where my gun was. I wasn’t operating at anything like full capacity. Panic is like that.
“Mort?” K’s voice came at me in the dark. It brought me back to reality just as I’d remembered where my gun was. Lucky her.
“K?”
She groped around and turned on the other bedside light, the one I hadn’t destroyed. She sat on the newly stripped bed, naked except for panties. Christ, she looked good. A little peeved, too, though it wasn’t easy to tell while looking at her tits. She crossed her arms across her chest and stared at me with the lamp back-lighting her hair.
“Why’d you do that?” she said.
“Do what?”
“Tear the sheets and everything off me. I mean, if you wanted to look or anything you could’ve just asked.”
It was a comment I would have to digest at my leisure, especially the “or anything.”
“It wasn’t intentional,” I said, wired to the gills on adrenaline, heart hammering away. “I didn’t know you were here. I never heard you come in. I was headed for the bathroom, and there you were. I mean, I thought I was alone.”
“You flip out pretty easily.” K hugged a pillow and sat with her legs crossed. A strip of blue French-cut cotton was visible at her hips. The rest was behind the pillow.
“Hell, woman, you should’ve nudged me or something when you came in.” I stood up with the blanket in front of myself and took a deep breath, willing my heart to slow.
“I made plenty of noise. And I bounced around a little too, on purpose, but you never moved, so I figured, okay, you need your sleep. I could relate to that.”
“You didn’t bounce enough.”
“I would’ve hit you with a chair if I’d known you’d act like this. You were out, Mort.”
“There, see.”
“See what?”
“Hell, I don’t know.” I rubbed the back of my neck, trying to think, making it look like something I don’t do all that often.
She pressed her lips together. Her hair was mussed, eyes big but puffed with sleep, which made me wonder how long she’d been lying there alongside Mr. Oblivious.
I backed toward the door still holding the blanket. Sleeping in the buff had become risky of late. “Don’t go anywhere,” I said.
“Where on earth would I go?”
“Excellent question. God only knows, but it happens a lot with you. And kill the light before it attracts national attention.”
The light winked out. I came back a few minutes later and stood beside the bed, looking down at her in the watery gloom filtering in the windows. Outside, I caught a distant glimpse of high-rise neon.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Would you please sit?” she asked. “You look positively huge standing over me like that.” She scooted over a few inches.
I sat, warily, still holding the bedclothes. She kept the pillow in place. Between Jeri, Dallas, Winter, and Victoria, not to mention Libby, Dale, Rachael, Amyee, and the hooker, Holiday, at the Golden Goose, the past few days had been full of unexpected interactions with the fair sex—although fair sex, as in delicate, was beginning to sound like a misnomer of the first order.
“Who are you?” I asked again.
She pursed her lips at me, then yawned. “It might be better if we discussed it in the morning. I’m awfully tired, Mort. You too.”
“Oh, no,” I thundered. “No one sleeps. No one closes their eyes or so much as blinks excessively until I find out who you are.”
“Izzatso?” Her tone got huffy.
I folded my arms across my chest, blanket wadded in my lap, feeling more than a little huffy myself. “You got that right, Miss K.”
She sighed. “If you insist. My name is Kayla.”
Which didn’t mean a thing to me, but I liked it. It suited her. “Kayla,” I echoed, then followed up smartly with, “Kayla who? Mind telling me that?”
“Williams.”
I gave her a blank look. I didn’t know any Kayla Williams.
“Actually,” she said, “if you want to get picky, my name is Rosalyn Kayla Williams.”
I felt a chill travel up my spine on tiny feet, right to the base of my skull.
“Before Williams it was…uh, Sjorgen.”
Aw, shit. She was Jonnie’s kid.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“JONNIE’S KID,” I said.
A humorous light filled her eyes. “If I look like a kid to you, then yes.”
“Okay, his daughter.”
“You don’t look awfully thrilled about that, Mort.”
“Should I be?”
“I guess not. Probably not. One more person connected to Jonnie. I imagine you’ve had plenty of that lately.” She glanced around. “You wouldn’t happen to have like a nightlight or anything, would you? I can’t see your face very well.”
“It’s not that good a face.”
“And people think only women fish for compliments.”
“Just stating a fact, K—Kayla.”
“Well, if you believe it, I guess it must be true. One of those nightlight thingies? Maybe a flashlight? This is hardly the way to get acquainted.”
I dug a flashlight out of a nightstand and stuck it partway under a sheet, turned it on. The room took on a dim yellowish glow, hopefully not bright enough to attract the likes of Brian Williams, Katie Couric, or Wolf Blitzer—or a ragtag gang from Inside Edition.
“Better,” she said.
I stared at her. “Your hair was dark in a photo I saw recently.”
“Must’ve been an old one, about the time I was in middle school. Mom let me dye it black for my birthday. But haven’t you heard? Blondes have more fun.”
“Do they?”
“In fact, that’s a myth. I oughta know.” She twirled a lock of hair. “This is my natural color.”
“I know.”
Her eyes held mine. “Do you?”
“Got that when I was checking for bullet holes.”
She thought about that for a moment, then laughed. It was a nice, musical sound, without a trace of annoyance or dismay in it.
“What’re you doing here?” I asked.
“I needed a place to stay.”
That wasn’t an answer. “Why here, Kayla? Why me?”
“Why you what?”
“Was it because of Nicole?”
“Uh-huh. Indirectly, at least. She’s been away in Europe for a month, as you probably know. She doesn’t know I’m here.”
“Neither does the rest of the world. You’re a missing person, an enigma. Part of this puzzle everyone’s trying to figure out.”
“And I’d like to keep it that way. Dad disappeared and suddenly I was ducking reporters all over Ithaca. They were beyond persistent. It would be worse if anyone knew I was here in Reno. A lot worse.”
“But in spite of that you came back.”
“I had to.”
“Understandable. He’s your father.”
She hugged the pillow tighter. “It wasn’t that. I mean, he is, and maybe that’s part of the reason I’m here, but that’s not why I had to leave Ithaca.”
“Yeah? Why did you?”
She shivered. “How about I explain it in the morning? It’d take too long now.”
“You cold? Want me to shut the window?”
She smiled. “No. It’s still pretty warm out. Muggy. I’d forgotten the desert can get like this. Which, by the way, is one reason I’m dressed the way I am.”
“One reason? What’s another?”
“I haven’t worn clothing to bed since I was ten.” She shrugged. “PJs are uncomfortable. When you turn, they twist around you like those Chinese handcuff thingies.”
Dallas might’ve said the same thing. “How old are you, Kayla?”
“Thirty-four.” She tilted her head and smiled. “Relieved?”
“More than you’ll ever know.”
“Maybe not. Nicole told me you were a, well…something of a stick-in-the-mud.”
“She said that? My own kid?” That damn stockbroker heritage had surfaced again like a whale covered in old squid-sucker scars.
Kayla pursed her lips, suppressing a smile. “She didn’t mean it in a bad way, Mort.”
“Of course not. A stick-in-the-mud in a good way, what else?”
“Nicole loves you, Mort. A lot. She talks about you often. From everything she told me, I thought it would be safe to come here, you know, that first night. Then…” She shrugged. “You started finding all those heads and all hell broke loose.”
All those heads. Hell of a phrase. My own head was beginning to throb. I sensed nuances in Kayla’s words. I could tell I wasn’t picking up on even half of them. “Jonnie was your father, Kayla,” I said, trying to sound as nonjudgmental as possible.
She stared at her toes, wiggled them, then looked up at me again. “Dad and I weren’t close. We hadn’t been in a long time, since before I left for college. Once I left, I hardly ever came back, except for an occasional holiday. Weird, huh?”
“Maybe not. It all depends on the family.”
“My father…I don’t know, at times I had the feeling he wasn’t a very nice man.”
“Care to elaborate on that?”
“Not really. I just didn’t like being around him all that much. He wasn’t like a…a father. He made me uncomfortable. And… well, we didn’t get along all that great, that’s all.”
She was fumbling. I felt she wasn’t telling me the whole truth. And I was tired, suddenly feeling the need for more sleep now that the adrenaline had worn off. And I had to see Jeri at ten, find out if I was still a trainee-PI, but questions kept popping into my head. Guess it was all the gumshoe training I’d had that week. Hard to turn a thing like that off once it gets to be second nature.
“How’d you get in?” I asked. “Or do you scrub windows and pick locks?”
She smiled. “They do look better, don’t they?”
“The neon’s never been brighter, the sky’s never been so deep a blue.”
The look Kayla gave me was not unlike the ones Dallas gives me on occasion. She said, “Nicole told me she lived with her mom after the divorce. Your divorce, I mean. She hid a key to your house under a brick in your backyard. You’d sometimes go out of town on an audit or something, places like Elko or Hawthorne, and she’d come here with some friends and have a party.”
I stared at her.
“No big deal now, right?” she said. “This was when she was sixteen or seventeen. Anyway, I got into Reno at dusk on Sunday. You weren’t home so I hunted around out back and eventually found the brick and the key, so I let myself in. I wouldn’t have done it…well, okay, maybe I would have, but at the time I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t have any money, just a ridiculous Citgo card. My only credit card. Good for gas, junk food, staying on the road. I guess I’ll have to break down and get a real credit card sometime, even though I hate the idea of credit, owing people.”
I was still way behind, miles behind, not catching up very fast, either. “Parties,” I said. “In my house.”
“Not big ones, Mort. She didn’t have the junior class over. No more than six or eight kids, from what I gathered.”
