Gumshoe, page 21
“Did you know him well?” Jeri asked.
“Too well,” Clair replied.
“What can you tell me about him?”
“You’re the first to ask.” For a moment something younger was in her voice. It was softer, filled with a kind of hunger. At long last, someone was giving her a little recognition. “No one else has thought to care. How’d you find me, anyhow?”
“Just ordinary detective work, Mrs. Hutson.”
“It was Carl told you, wasn’t it?”
“Well, yes.”
“That son’vabitch. He okay?”
“He sounded okay. We just spoke with him over the phone.”
Clair’s eyes shifted to me, then back to Jeri. A vindictive light came into her eyes. “Jonnie raped Sarah Jean,” she said in a husky smoker’s rasp, enunciating each word with the utmost care. “Least he tried. Got her drunk and tried. He almost made it, too. No one called it rape or attempted rape, though. Not Wendell Sjorgen’s kid. Not our class fucking president.”
“When was that?”
She thought a moment. “Guess it would’ve been the last month or two of school. Senior year.”
“How did you find out?”
“Sarah Jean told me, of course. She wasn’t a liar or anything. If she said it happened, it happened. She managed to fight him off. He didn’t get her so drunk she passed out, which was a damn good thing ’cause Jonnie wouldn’t have had a problem with that. He was a bastard, once you got to know him, but back then he was the Prize. All the girls loved him. He was mine for a while—in my junior year. Zonker. God, all us girls were as dumb as fucking cows. Sarah Jean got him, senior year. Then they elected him mayor, because he’s got all those faces.”
“Faces?”
“Like one of those lizard things, changes color all the time. Sneaky fuck.” She looked straight at me. “If he’d tried it with me, I would’ve ripped his balls off.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
BUT JONNIE HADN’T tried it with Clair back then, and last month he wouldn’t have touched her with tongs and rubber gloves. He wouldn’t have recognized her, wouldn’t have given her a second glance. He had Dallas, the woman I love.
Jeri dropped me off at the Grand Sierra and told me to be at her office at nine on Monday. “And don’t horse around with this Sjorgen thing until then, okay?”
“Horse around?”
“You know what I mean. Too much can go wrong. We’ll pick up where we left off.”
I thanked her profusely for the vote of confidence. She gave me one last warning look, then sped away. I went up to Room 1122. I hadn’t seen Dallas in a while. I wanted to make sure she was okay.
She was reading a magazine, dressed in white slacks and a teal blouse, bare feet. I love the shape of her feet, ankles, all of her. She gave me a stunned look until I remembered the wig. I took it off, tossed it on a chair. I didn’t give her the blow-by-blow about the Clair Albrecht-Schembri-DeMeo-Briscoe-Hutson circus, because it was too big a mouthful, and dredging up the past for Dallas would have been stirring up ancient muck to no purpose. Nor would it have made her life better or protected her from anything. And how much did I trust anything Clair had to say? Not much.
“Getting anywhere yet?” Dallas asked. God, she looked great.
“No,” I said.
“How’s Jeri? She a good investigator?”
“Better than me. A little slow at finding people, though. I’ll be a terrific addition to her agency.”
“Would you like to stay the night, Mort?”
Yes, of course. “I can’t.”
She tilted her head at me. “Kay?”
I shrugged.
“Is that a yes?”
“I don’t know what it is.” Nor was this the time to tell her who K was. That was Kayla’s call, but I wondered how often they’d met. After all, Kayla was the daughter of the guy Dallas had been thinking of marrying, a twist I found more than a little unsettling. It wasn’t that Kayla wasn’t old enough. I was only seven years older. It was the sum total of our tangled relationships that made my relationship with Kayla, such as it was, seem weird. Which wasn’t her fault, or mine.
“If there was any hope for us, Dal…”
“It’s okay, Mort, really.”
Good enough. I can take a hint. She still liked me, maybe even a lot, but that was all. I flushed the moustache down the toilet, put on the wig, rode the elevator to ground level, caught the airport shuttle to Reno-Tahoe International where I caught another shuttle over to the Golden Goose. All in all, a poor man’s taxi service, but…why not?
From the Goose I walked home through sulfur-yellow pools of high-pressure sodium lights. A vermilion sunset glowed through the leaves of trees. Two vans were still out front. Only two. Without new grist they were starting to back-burner the story. Even so, I went through Velma’s yard and through the fence.
Kayla wasn’t in. She’d left a note:
Out walking, back in a while, K.
Out walking. I didn’t know if that was such a good idea. If I found her head anywhere I would go live in Bolivia and call myself Pepe. Or something. Maybe Helmut.
I pulled drapes across the windows and turned on lights. It was my house. If a media type came to the door, I was prepared to escort him or her back to the sidewalk in a highly aerobic manner. Perhaps I gave off warning vibrations, because no one knocked or rang the bell.
I took a long shower. Still no Kayla.
I read for a while, then went to bed. Still no Kayla.
She came in while Leno was ignoring me for the second straight night—fine with me. I was stretched out, covered by only a sheet in the night’s heat, drowsy, about ready to pack it in.
“Hi,” she said, gazing at me from the doorway.
“Hi yourself.” I hit the remote, killing the TV.
“You naked?” she asked.
“If you can’t tell, then I’m not.”
“I mean, if I yanked that sheet off you.”
“What’s it to ya, kiddo?”
“Okay, don’t tell me. I’ll find out for myself soon enough.”
“Where’ve you been?”
“All over. Down to Meadowood, over to Sparks. Back again. No one’s looking for me, at least not here. I guess I put in about twenty miles.”
“Twenty! You walked twenty miles?”
“Uh-huh, thereabouts. I’m not used to being cooped up. I have to move. You weren’t around. Once the sun got low, I left.”
“Twenty!”
“It’s no big deal, Mort. It felt good.” She gave me an expectant look. “I need a shower, though.”
“Right there at the end of the hall where we left it.”
“How ’bout you?”
“Took one already, thanks.”
“Spoilsport. Look what I bought.” She held up a paper bag.
“What’cha got there?”
“A five-watt bulb and a yard of red silk.”
“Oh, jeez.”
“Here.” She dropped the bag on the bed. “See if you can figure what to do with this.”
She left. After a minute the water came on. I unscrewed the bulb in the lamp that we hadn’t destroyed the night before and put her bulb in, draped the silk over the shade. I could imagine her in there, soapy and wet. I could go in. I was invited. It would be fun. I turned on the lamp and the room glowed crimson. I lay back. The shower ended. I heard the sound of a toothbrush churning away.
She came into the room wearing a towel, hair damp and tousled. She yawned, then smiled. “Hey, you figured it out. Just look at this place.”
“Yeah, look at it.”
She unwound the towel and draped it over the back of a chair. For an instant I had a vision of Dallas in the shower—and Winter, slinky in her unhooked bra and lace thong panties.
“Every time I turn around,” I said, “someone’s either naked or darn near.”
Kayla tilted her head at me. “Is that a fact?”
“Recently, yes.”
“Is it becoming a problem?”
“Not so far. I think it’s a PI thing.”
She smiled. “A private dick thing?”
I peered at her through one eye. “Private investigator, yeah. I’ve been thinking it might have something to do with that.”
She stared at the bed. “Which side’s mine? Same as last night?”
“Take your pick.”
She crawled in, lifted my right arm and put it over her shoulders, snuggled up next to me. For a while we lay like that, comfortable, neither one of us moving, then her face turned toward mine. Her eyes had what I misinterpreted as a sultry look. She said, “I’ve…uh, got a tiny request. If you can stand it.”
“Lucky you, this is request night. And during happy hour, drinks are half price.”
“You’re going to absolutely strangle me.”
“I doubt it. With the IRS it’s blunt trauma or nothing.”
She touched the tip of my nose with her finger. “Could we…do whatever we’re going to do later, like in the morning? I’m pretty tired. It’d be a lot better then.”
“Sure.” Not sultry, Great Gumshoe, sleepy. She walked twenty miles, for chrissake.
“You don’t mind?”
“No.”
She got up on one elbow and gazed into my eyes. “Mean it?”
“Know what happens if you can’t shake the money out of your piggy bank, so you bust it open to get at the loot?”
“I think I see where this is going.”
“You get your dollar eighty-five, and a busted piggy bank. One you can never use again.”
“How ineffably wise you are, sir.”
“You are lovely, Kayla.”
“Wise, perceptive, and, well, extremely…something.”
“I mean it. You are incredible.”
“Maybe sneaky,” she said. “I’ll have to keep that in mind.” She sank back down and rested her head on my shoulder. Her hands toyed with the hair on my chest for half a minute, then went slack. A minute later she was sound asleep.
I was tired, too. I tried to sleep, but things began to putter around in my head.
Events, numbers. One number in particular. Forty. Forty years ago, according to Clair, Jonnie attempted to force sex with Sarah Jean Humbolt. Call it rape. He might have tried to get her drunk in order to accomplish it. A year after that, thirty-nine years ago—enough of a coincidence to at least give a gumshoe pause—Wendell Sjorgen had in effect turned over his house to Edna Woolley and moved out.
But why? Why would he do that?
Did he have a thing going with Edna back then? Hard to say. She would have been nearing sixty. He would have been forty-five, fifty tops. It wasn’t likely. Then Edna had gotten the house, and Jane, Wendell’s wife, had divorced him soon thereafter.
The answers, whatever they might be, felt as much a dead end as the merry-go-round I’d been on with Jeri all day. What did it matter?
Kayla stirred, murmured something and put a cool hand on my groin, then promptly fell asleep again, leaving my body to undergo a pleasant but not particularly useful transformation.
I didn’t love Kayla, but I liked her. A lot. She was bright and sunny and warm, playful. Maybe I could love her. Probably could, and easily. I could get over Dallas, or maybe love them both. And maybe this was just one of those wonderful but temporary things. Kayla would go back to New York, Ithaca, and that would be that. There was something of the whirlwind in her being there, one of those things you have to catch up to. A woman in your bed isn’t something you understand overnight, or even in a month. Sometimes, after a lifetime, you find you still don’t know the why of it. It’s another kind of white magic.
I turned off the lamp and closed my eyes.
I was half asleep when another thought came tiptoeing through. Fairchild’s words, which had also replayed in Jonnie’s office at Sjorgen & Howard Title Company: The most likely person to commit murder is a family member of the victim.
The people who know you best.
Kayla was Jonnie’s closest living relative. But, hell, no goddamn way…it couldn’t be her, not this lovely creature beside me. I put it out of my mind.
* * *
I woke up at 7:25. Kayla was still out cold. I lay there for half an hour, thinking alternately of the number forty and Kayla’s body, then got up quietly and dressed out in the living room when Kayla’s body started to win. I was in the kitchen watching a Mr. Coffee slowly drip caffeine into a pot clouded to opacity with various minerals when she came in, barefoot, wearing only a shirt. One of my shirts, in fact, with the top three buttons undone, making it something of a negligee. It reached to mid-thigh. Two of her could have fit inside with room to spare.
“You escaped,” she said.
“I was awake, you weren’t.”
“About last night, I’m sorry.”
I offered her my arms. She came into them and gave me a hug during which I detected a number of feminine curves. “I don’t have expectations, Kayla. You are a gift I don’t understand.”
“Didn’t we have this conversation earlier? There’s nothing to understand, Mort.”
“How about, ‘Why me?’ ”
She leaned back and looked at me. “Why not you? You’re an attractive man.”
“Trust me, I’m not getting anywhere with that.”
“Okay, truth is, it’s because you’re a private eye and terribly mysterious, bordering on sinister and dangerous, very Bondlike, sexy as all get-out. You make my knees feel weak. My heart flutters when I’m in the same room as you. I get all dizzy just thinking about—”
“You forgot your Prozac again, right?”
She moved out of my arms, grinning. “You’re hopeless.”
“Want some coffee?”
She shook her head. “Milk, fruit, toast. I’ll get it.”
I stared openly at her barely concealed chest. “The sights in this kitchen have improved a lot since yesterday.”
She looked down at herself and grinned. “Should I button up another one or two of these guys?”
“No. I think you’ve got it just right.”
“Uh-huh. Thought so.”
“How well did you know your grandfather?” I asked, giving the coffeepot a longing look, willing it to hurry the hell up.
“My grandfather?” She paused with a hand on the refrigerator door. “Which one?”
“Jonnie’s dad. Wendell.”
She shrugged, got out the milk. “He was gruff and overbearing, didn’t have any idea how to be around kids. He’d shake my hand like I was a business acquaintance, just about crush my fingers. I was thirteen when he was murdered. That was a huge mess.”
“Do you remember much of it?”
“Not a lot. Just that Dad was shook up and all kinds of legal stuff was going on afterward, him taking over his father’s businesses and everything. And the funeral. Black dresses and flowers, depressing organ music, everyone somber and quiet. I guess murder is like that.”
“Any idea who Wendell’s lawyer was at the time?”
“Not a clue.”
“Chances are, whoever it was would’ve become Jonnie’s lawyer after Wendell’s death.”
Kayla pursed her lips. “I guess so. I wasn’t paying any attention to that kind of thing back then. I was past Barbie dolls, somewhere around thinking boys might be more interesting than I’d thought in the past.” She put bread in the toaster, pushed the lever down. “All these questions. Does this mean we’re sleuthing now?”
“We?” I asked.
“Well, you might like me better if I’m mysterious and sinister too.”
“I like you fine the way you are, especially dressed like that, I might add. And who the hell says you’re not mysterious or sinister?”
She smiled brightly. “Think so?”
“I found you in my bed. No name. No ID. No expiration date. Even now I’m taking your word for everything you’ve said. What do you think?”
“Well, darn. I’ve been found out. My real name is Mata Hari.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised, except her real name was Gertrud Zelle and she was executed by the French during World War I, so you’d not only be older than I give you credit for, you’d be embalmed. Not my type. So—about your father’s lawyer?”
“Is it important?”
“I’m wondering how Edna Woolley ended up in that house back in 1976, or thereabouts. An arrangement of some kind was made. Wendell and his family moved out, Edna moved in. She’s been there ever since. I imagine lawyers were involved.”
“All of which happened years before I was born, Mort.”
“Your father never said anything about it?”
“No, never.”
“Think you’d recognize a lawyer’s name from a list if I got you one?”
“It’s possible. Especially if the lawyer was one of his friends, like a golfing buddy or something. I imagine I met most of them at one time or another, or heard their names.”
“Let’s find out.” I told her to stay put, then went out the back, through the fence, and rapped on Velma’s back door.
I’d given some thought to the problem last night. Last time I’d been up in Velma’s attic, helping her look for a set of china she hadn’t seen in years, I’d gone through a zillion boxes. Two of them held old phone books Velma’s husband Orrin had stashed up there, God knows why. I remembered seeing over a dozen of them. It had meant nothing to me at the time, but now I saw them as a window into the past. Something of yesterday must’ve sunk in.
Velma was awake, of course, eager for information about Kayla and me and the husband we were dodging. Was he big? Did he have a temper? Did he know anything about guns? I fended her off as best I could as I climbed a ladder into her attic and spoke to her through the opening, raising clouds of dust as I pawed through boxes.
“You gonna do the right thing by her, Mortimer?” Velma called up to me.
I sneezed explosively, which raised even more dust. “What’s the right thing?”
“You know.” She let fly a few bars of “Here Comes the Bride.”
“You never know, Velma.” I couldn’t have answered yes or no. If I had, I would’ve been in big trouble, one way or the other.
