Gumshoe, page 22
“Divorce still only takes six weeks here in Reno,” she said.
“Know that, thanks.”
More of the wedding march came from below. I found a phone book for 1977, two years before Kayla was born. Good enough. With promises to tell all soon, I escaped back to my house.
I plopped the book down on the dinette, opened it to the attorney section in the yellow pages. Back then there weren’t quite seven pages of lawyers—now there are fifty-five, and personal injury lawyers have monster full-page ads. Another sign of the times. Munching toast with marmalade, still wearing my partly open shirt and nothing else, Kayla perused the names of law firms, tracking downward with a finger. I drank coffee and waited. With so few pages to go through it didn’t take long.
“Okay,” she said, brightening. “Here. Oleson & Critchen. I don’t know about Critchen, but the other one, Oleson, was my dad’s lawyer. Frank Oleson.”
With any luck, he’d been Wendell’s lawyer, too.
Kayla peered over my shoulder as I hunted for Oleson & Critchen in the current phone book. Nothing under “O,” so we started at the front. She spotted it first: Beatty, Oleson, & Myers. How many Olesons could there be? Their office was located on Liberty Street, up near the courthouse.
I took a chance and phoned, surprised when a woman answered on the second ring, giving her name as Helen. I told her I was looking for Frank Oleson.
“Frank? Stephen’s father?” I heard the incredulous note in her voice. “He passed away ten years ago. Hasn’t been active in the firm in over twenty years.” Kayla pressed her ear next to mine to listen in, as Jeri had done the other day. I hadn’t had this much girl scent in a decade. Okay, ever.
At least we’d tracked down Frank Oleson, even if he was dead. Almost like real PIs. “Could I talk to Stephen?” I asked.
For a moment she didn’t say anything. Not many people had phoned that week looking for a man who’d been dead for a decade. “I could make an appointment for you,” she said finally. “He won’t have an opening until, let me see”—papers rustled in the background—“Wednesday at three fifteen, if that’s convenient.”
“He’s not there now?”
“Oh, heavens no. Not on a Saturday. We only keep the office open until noon to catch up on all the paperwork.”
“Fact is, I’m interested in something that took place quite a few years ago.”
“Oh? Exactly what are you—?”
Kayla pressed the disconnect button, ending the call.
I stared at her. “What’d you do that for?”
“Questions like the one you were about to ask—especially over the phone—she was already nervous, Mort. After everything that’s happened this week, you were going to scare her half to death. Let’s go talk to her. It’s a good bet this Stephen Oleson guy is Dad’s lawyer now. Or was. Or might know something useful.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Which I suppose would probably make him mine,” Kayla added thoughtfully.
“Uh-huh,” I said again.
“Which would mean, Mort, that maybe that lady, Helen, will talk to us. In person.”
In person. That was Jeri’s argument, too. And, given who I was, it sounded like a good idea. A phone call from Mortimer Angel at this juncture in Reno’s history might be like a call from the Unabomber, years ago.
“Okay,” I said. I peeled a curtain back an inch to peer outside. Four vans. Hell. They were starting to regroup. Might be a sign that our school systems are improving, and with it the attention span of a nation. One van was Channel 10 out of Seattle. It was a long drive home, so they had a stake in sticking to the story like a corporate executive to an outright lie.
“Get dressed,” I said. “Let’s go out the back.”
“But of course,” Kayla said. “How else?”
Five minutes later she was ready to go. We ducked through the fence. I had Jeri’s wig in one hand like a dead possum, skinned and dyed. As we crept down Velma’s side yard, she poked her head out a window right above us and said, “Oh, no you don’t.”
“Don’t what?” I asked, looking up at her.
“Not without tellin’ me nothin’, “ she answered cryptically.
“Telling you what about what?”
“You know.” She grinned at Kayla. “Da, da, da-da.” Those first four notes of “Here Comes the Bride.”
I dragged Kayla toward the street. She looked back at Velma and called out, “I’ll let you know, Vel.”
“You’d better!”
“Now you’ve done it,” I said when we reached the street. “She will hound us to the ends of the earth.”
“She’s a dear.”
“You just threw twenty pounds of raw hamburger to a starving grizzly, lady.”
“Surely you exaggerate.”
“Don’t I wish. Now she’ll want the whole cow.”
Kayla led me to her car, a VW bug two decades older than my Tercel, five blocks away. It had been painted at least three times. A ding in the left rear fender revealed the geology: sky blue now, formerly algae green, formerly hot hippie yellow. A fender bender would’ve turned it into a psychedelic acid trip.
“You drove this straight through from Ithaca?” I said, amazed, walking around the thing.
“Uh-huh. Runs great. Hop in.”
She started the engine. I hadn’t heard that sewing-machine sound in years, at least not from the inside. We took off, headed for Liberty Street. It took us four times as long to get there as it would have taken Jeri, but we did it without whiplash.
Kayla got a purse from under her seat, which is why I hadn’t found it or anything else useful the night she’d arrived.
Like many law firms in Reno, Beatty, Oleson, & Myers was in a refurbished two-story mansion. This one was blue with lavender trim, scalloped siding, plate glass windows, wooden stairs leading up to a big front door. I left the wig in the car and Kayla and I climbed the stairs and went inside.
Two women were there, filing papers. Classical music filled the room, coming from a CD player. I hung back while Kayla asked for Helen.
“I’m Helen,” said the thinner and older of the two women. “May I help you?” She turned the music down to a background level.
“Uh, well, my name is Rosalyn Sjorgen. Rosalyn Williams, now.”
Helen stared at her. “Oh, my.”
“Oh, my?” Kayla echoed.
“We’ve been trying to contact you all week. Ever since Jonnie… was…since he…” Her eyes went to me, widening in sudden recognition. “You, you’re…”
“Mortimer Angel, ma’am,” I offered in as non-threatening a manner possible. The other woman, Teresa, chubby and dark haired, was at a filing cabinet with papers in one hand, staring at me in either horror or awe, hard to tell which.
Kayla said, “Why were you trying to find me? Is Stephen Oleson my father’s lawyer now? I mean…was he?”
“Yes, of course,” Helen replied nervously.
She finally asked for some form of identification and Kayla dug her driver’s license out of her purse. I kept quiet, not wanting to cause a panic with any sudden moves. They talked for a while and the tension left Helen’s face. Kayla introduced me as a friend, harmless, which turned out okay since I wasn’t in the first stages of a murderous rampage. Helen and Teresa didn’t look so much like they wished they’d phoned 911 back when Kayla and I first came in the door.
Kayla turned to me. “What was it you wanted to know, Mort?”
I looked at Helen. “Something happened, almost forty years ago.”
“Oh. That was you on the phone. Forty years?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Stephen is only forty-five himself, Mr. Angel.”
“Probably doesn’t matter. Most likely it’d be in your records.”
“What did you want to know?”
“Just…the terms of the arrangement that has permitted Edna Woolley to live in Jonnie’s house all these years.”
“Oh. That. We wouldn’t have information of that kind here in the office. Not after such a long time.”
“Where would it be?” Kayla asked.
“Kaplan Security Services, out in Stead, if it exists at all. They maintain secure vaults for paper storage. Fireproof and all that.”
“Could we get the records?”
“Not right away. They’re closed weekends. I could phone on Monday, let them know I need access. If it’s important,” she added.
Dead end, at least for a while.
“I don’t suppose you would know anything about it? I mean, personally?” Kayla asked. “Before the records were stored.”
“I’m sorry, no. I never saw the documents. Although…”
“Yes?” Kayla prompted.
“Well…Emmaline Dorman, Frank Oleson’s secretary back then. She trained me, years ago. I imagine she would have seen them. She’s retired, though. Has been for, oh, gosh, eighteen years now.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“Oh, yes. Austin.”
“Austin?”
For a moment she didn’t understand Kayla’s confusion, then she said, “Oh, there’s a Texas Austin too, isn’t there? I meant the Austin here in Nevada.”
In the middle of nowhere on U.S. 50. Literally in the middle, if Nevada is nowhere, which is arguable—right in the geographic center of the state that’s been slated to take the nation’s nuclear waste, because one look at a map and it’s obvious that Nevada is the perfect place for gambling, whorehouses, and DNA-altering radioactivity.
“She had a brother there,” Helen said. “But I heard he died a few years ago. Her husband too, poor thing. I’ve got Emmaline’s address here somewhere if that’d help.”
Kayla got it, then looked at me. “Want to go?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
TO AUSTIN? IN the heat of summer? Hell, no.
I gave Kayla a shrug.
“Okay, great,” she said.
My fault. I should have known. Never send a woman a mixed message. It will be interpreted accordingly, one of the ways they seize control. On the other hand, a trip to Austin would get us out of Reno where we might get a little breathing room. The media would never track down this Austin connection, such as it was. If it gave us a day of peace, it would be worth it.
Back in the VW, Kayla said, “Do we need anything at your place before we go?”
“Got m’ wig right here, ma’am,” I said in John Wayne’s voice, picking it up and twirling it on one finger.
She rolled her eyes. “Is that a no?”
“Yep. It’s a no.”
More eye rolling. “What about money? In case we end up having to spend the night.”
“Now there’s a thought-provoking thought.”
“Uh-huh. So…what if, Mort?”
“I’ve got one of those things you’ve avoided all your life, sugar. A hated MasterCard.”
“Oh, goodie. Maxed out?”
“Not a dime on it. And it’s got a limit of two thousand dollars, too.” Which not only shows how little I’d used it, but also showed how little the folks at MasterCard trusted me.
“Whoopee, we’re rich.”
* * *
We. She had an interesting way with words.
It wasn’t until one thirty that we got on Interstate 80, headed east. I’d insisted on an oil change for the VW, something Kayla hadn’t had done since she’d left New York. The night before, with Kayla beside me in bed, July had slipped quietly into August. This time of year Highway 50 would be an empty, sun-scorched stretch of heat mirages and misery. Boy Scout that I am, I wanted to minimize the risk of having a breakdown. That antique air-cooled engine was risk enough. Then I got hungry and we had sandwiches at Carrows, I in my wig, she in a smile as she stared at it. And I called Dallas on my cell phone, told her what I was up to. I. Me. I was going to Austin.
“Is K going with you?” she asked, right off.
You can’t slip anything by them. They are so much smarter than we are. Making us look like we’re in charge is only a game to them, something to alleviate boredom. They probably laugh their heads off when they’re alone.
“Uh-huh.”
“Have fun, Mort.”
“This’s detective work, Dal.” And it was against Jeri’s express orders, too, but…what the hell, all I did was work for her, after a fashion. Something that could change as easily as the weather.
“Of course it is. Call me when you get back?”
“Yeah.” I shut the phone, ending the call.
We didn’t get to Fallon until nearly three. Then the real Highway 50 began, two lanes of shimmering blacktop, scoped out by floating buzzards, like riding toward the end of the world. The pavement would be up around a hundred eighty degrees. You could roast a steer on it.
The Volkswagen didn’t have air-conditioning. With the windows open, hot air buffeted through. Kayla had the top two buttons of her shirt undone. She told me to take the wheel, and I held it while she untucked her shirt, unbuttoned the lower two buttons, then knotted the loose ends under her breasts.
“Watch the road,” she said.
“What for? The sonofabitch is naked—I mean empty.”
She grinned. “Watch the road, you fool.”
She took over the wheel, and I played it cool, not looking at her belly for at least two minutes, which took all my self-control. You see stomachs like that only in your dreams, and then only if you’re damn good at it.
East of the junction of Route 839, two jets from the naval air station at Fallon swooped down and dropped bombs on invisible targets, white bursts of light, smoke plumes, snarls of thunder. What else would you do with a desert on a semi-permanent basis except bomb it? Whorehouses are just something to do on your way through.
We went out past Frenchman, gliding through the scent of hot alkali. The temperature was a hundred and two. Over dry mountain passes, past twenty thousand square miles of dun-colored grass and silvery-blue sage, between hot bare mountains ten thousand feet high. The air cooled as we gained altitude, but the sun’s ultraviolet became harsher, seeming to burn on my skin. We passed the Reese River and finally pulled within sight of Austin, snugged into Pony Canyon in the Toiyabe Mountains, just this side of Austin Summit.
Kayla slowed the VW as we passed buildings at the west end of town. A sign, Stokes Castle, whipped by, pointing to a winding dirt road that led up a gentle slope and around a low nub of hill.
“Ever been here before?” I asked her.
“No. You?”
“There’s a first time for everything. Until Sunday, I’d never found a stray blonde in my bed before. Not one.”
“Then all hell broke loose. Poor you.”
Austin lay on the old Pony Express run, which came down through the canyon before silver was discovered in 1862. That year, a retired rider found a greenish ore, which proved to be silver sulfide, and the “Rush to the Reese” was on. At one time Austin was the second biggest city in Nevada—Virginia City being first—back when Vegas was a ghost town, having once been nothing but a camping spot on the Mormon Trail, then a fort, a mission, and finally, in 1858, an abandoned mission in the soul-grinding dust and heat of the minor Mojave Desert. So much for Vegas, which had exploded into what was arguably the most artificial city in the history of the world. Nevada’s real history lies farther north, in places like Austin.
Kayla drove through town at twenty-five miles an hour, which took the better part of sixty seconds. Past the Lander County courthouse where a guy had once been hanged from a second-story balcony, up to the Gridley store, built of weathered stone, and the house next door, formerly the town brothel. The tailings of old mining operations littered the surrounding hills. The desert changes slowly. The arid land is relatively unaffected by water. The tailing piles would still be visible a thousand years from now. Austin’s history lurked all around in the form of its red brick buildings, churches, abandoned mines, and, Kayla and I discovered, the size of its motel rooms, which could be described as either quaint or Leavenworthian, circa 1890.
Without exchanging a word, we decided to stay the night. Our room at the Lincoln Motel was marginally bigger than your average walk-in closet, about eight by ten, much of it taken by a queen-sized bed. One of us had to sit on the bed if the other wanted to walk around it. The bed sagged in the middle, which was likely to prove interesting later on.
Kayla bounced on the bed. “It squeaks, how fun,” she said, then we went outside and looked around.
“Shall we eat now, or find Emmaline Dorman?” she asked. She’d untied her shirt so as not to draw attention or cause a riot. I had my wig on in case satellite dishes we’d seen in town were operational. If they could get the Sjorgen-Milliken Spectacle in Rangoon, odds were they could get it here too, a hundred seventy miles from ground zero.
I was hungry, but said, “Mrs. Dorman.”
“Work before pleasure?”
“With the IRS, the two are indistinguishable.”
“Mmm, nasty.”
Emmaline Dorman lived in a house on the northern slope of a hill overlooking the town, three blocks off Main Street, otherwise known as Highway 50. Kayla and I walked over through the kind of small-town quiet you have to hunt for these days, a quiet that reminded me of a time when gas stations had soda machines with heavy lids and bottles in rows that you slid out through a gate-latch mechanism—a time before my time, when small-town grocery stores had wooden floors and paddle fans circulating stale air. I had the impression that Austin was standing still in a world that was moving fast somewhere out beyond the horizon…except for those satellite dishes, and bottled water with a per-gallon cost five times that of gasoline, sold at the convenience store at the Chevron station at the west end of town.
Emmaline’s yard was hot and dry. The earth was dusty yellow-gray rock. Wiry blue-green sage and cheat grass filled the yard. The roof of the house was frayed composition shingles, lifted by the heat and wind into a reddish shag.
I knocked. Moments later a woman answered, tall but stooped, wearing a loose-fitting housedress over a thin frame. Bony arms, no chest, a gaunt face dominated by watery blue-gray eyes still alive with intelligence. Cool moist air blew out past Kayla and me. I heard the airy rumble of a swamp cooler somewhere inside the house.
“Know that, thanks.”
More of the wedding march came from below. I found a phone book for 1977, two years before Kayla was born. Good enough. With promises to tell all soon, I escaped back to my house.
I plopped the book down on the dinette, opened it to the attorney section in the yellow pages. Back then there weren’t quite seven pages of lawyers—now there are fifty-five, and personal injury lawyers have monster full-page ads. Another sign of the times. Munching toast with marmalade, still wearing my partly open shirt and nothing else, Kayla perused the names of law firms, tracking downward with a finger. I drank coffee and waited. With so few pages to go through it didn’t take long.
“Okay,” she said, brightening. “Here. Oleson & Critchen. I don’t know about Critchen, but the other one, Oleson, was my dad’s lawyer. Frank Oleson.”
With any luck, he’d been Wendell’s lawyer, too.
Kayla peered over my shoulder as I hunted for Oleson & Critchen in the current phone book. Nothing under “O,” so we started at the front. She spotted it first: Beatty, Oleson, & Myers. How many Olesons could there be? Their office was located on Liberty Street, up near the courthouse.
I took a chance and phoned, surprised when a woman answered on the second ring, giving her name as Helen. I told her I was looking for Frank Oleson.
“Frank? Stephen’s father?” I heard the incredulous note in her voice. “He passed away ten years ago. Hasn’t been active in the firm in over twenty years.” Kayla pressed her ear next to mine to listen in, as Jeri had done the other day. I hadn’t had this much girl scent in a decade. Okay, ever.
At least we’d tracked down Frank Oleson, even if he was dead. Almost like real PIs. “Could I talk to Stephen?” I asked.
For a moment she didn’t say anything. Not many people had phoned that week looking for a man who’d been dead for a decade. “I could make an appointment for you,” she said finally. “He won’t have an opening until, let me see”—papers rustled in the background—“Wednesday at three fifteen, if that’s convenient.”
“He’s not there now?”
“Oh, heavens no. Not on a Saturday. We only keep the office open until noon to catch up on all the paperwork.”
“Fact is, I’m interested in something that took place quite a few years ago.”
“Oh? Exactly what are you—?”
Kayla pressed the disconnect button, ending the call.
I stared at her. “What’d you do that for?”
“Questions like the one you were about to ask—especially over the phone—she was already nervous, Mort. After everything that’s happened this week, you were going to scare her half to death. Let’s go talk to her. It’s a good bet this Stephen Oleson guy is Dad’s lawyer now. Or was. Or might know something useful.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Which I suppose would probably make him mine,” Kayla added thoughtfully.
“Uh-huh,” I said again.
“Which would mean, Mort, that maybe that lady, Helen, will talk to us. In person.”
In person. That was Jeri’s argument, too. And, given who I was, it sounded like a good idea. A phone call from Mortimer Angel at this juncture in Reno’s history might be like a call from the Unabomber, years ago.
“Okay,” I said. I peeled a curtain back an inch to peer outside. Four vans. Hell. They were starting to regroup. Might be a sign that our school systems are improving, and with it the attention span of a nation. One van was Channel 10 out of Seattle. It was a long drive home, so they had a stake in sticking to the story like a corporate executive to an outright lie.
“Get dressed,” I said. “Let’s go out the back.”
“But of course,” Kayla said. “How else?”
Five minutes later she was ready to go. We ducked through the fence. I had Jeri’s wig in one hand like a dead possum, skinned and dyed. As we crept down Velma’s side yard, she poked her head out a window right above us and said, “Oh, no you don’t.”
“Don’t what?” I asked, looking up at her.
“Not without tellin’ me nothin’, “ she answered cryptically.
“Telling you what about what?”
“You know.” She grinned at Kayla. “Da, da, da-da.” Those first four notes of “Here Comes the Bride.”
I dragged Kayla toward the street. She looked back at Velma and called out, “I’ll let you know, Vel.”
“You’d better!”
“Now you’ve done it,” I said when we reached the street. “She will hound us to the ends of the earth.”
“She’s a dear.”
“You just threw twenty pounds of raw hamburger to a starving grizzly, lady.”
“Surely you exaggerate.”
“Don’t I wish. Now she’ll want the whole cow.”
Kayla led me to her car, a VW bug two decades older than my Tercel, five blocks away. It had been painted at least three times. A ding in the left rear fender revealed the geology: sky blue now, formerly algae green, formerly hot hippie yellow. A fender bender would’ve turned it into a psychedelic acid trip.
“You drove this straight through from Ithaca?” I said, amazed, walking around the thing.
“Uh-huh. Runs great. Hop in.”
She started the engine. I hadn’t heard that sewing-machine sound in years, at least not from the inside. We took off, headed for Liberty Street. It took us four times as long to get there as it would have taken Jeri, but we did it without whiplash.
Kayla got a purse from under her seat, which is why I hadn’t found it or anything else useful the night she’d arrived.
Like many law firms in Reno, Beatty, Oleson, & Myers was in a refurbished two-story mansion. This one was blue with lavender trim, scalloped siding, plate glass windows, wooden stairs leading up to a big front door. I left the wig in the car and Kayla and I climbed the stairs and went inside.
Two women were there, filing papers. Classical music filled the room, coming from a CD player. I hung back while Kayla asked for Helen.
“I’m Helen,” said the thinner and older of the two women. “May I help you?” She turned the music down to a background level.
“Uh, well, my name is Rosalyn Sjorgen. Rosalyn Williams, now.”
Helen stared at her. “Oh, my.”
“Oh, my?” Kayla echoed.
“We’ve been trying to contact you all week. Ever since Jonnie… was…since he…” Her eyes went to me, widening in sudden recognition. “You, you’re…”
“Mortimer Angel, ma’am,” I offered in as non-threatening a manner possible. The other woman, Teresa, chubby and dark haired, was at a filing cabinet with papers in one hand, staring at me in either horror or awe, hard to tell which.
Kayla said, “Why were you trying to find me? Is Stephen Oleson my father’s lawyer now? I mean…was he?”
“Yes, of course,” Helen replied nervously.
She finally asked for some form of identification and Kayla dug her driver’s license out of her purse. I kept quiet, not wanting to cause a panic with any sudden moves. They talked for a while and the tension left Helen’s face. Kayla introduced me as a friend, harmless, which turned out okay since I wasn’t in the first stages of a murderous rampage. Helen and Teresa didn’t look so much like they wished they’d phoned 911 back when Kayla and I first came in the door.
Kayla turned to me. “What was it you wanted to know, Mort?”
I looked at Helen. “Something happened, almost forty years ago.”
“Oh. That was you on the phone. Forty years?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Stephen is only forty-five himself, Mr. Angel.”
“Probably doesn’t matter. Most likely it’d be in your records.”
“What did you want to know?”
“Just…the terms of the arrangement that has permitted Edna Woolley to live in Jonnie’s house all these years.”
“Oh. That. We wouldn’t have information of that kind here in the office. Not after such a long time.”
“Where would it be?” Kayla asked.
“Kaplan Security Services, out in Stead, if it exists at all. They maintain secure vaults for paper storage. Fireproof and all that.”
“Could we get the records?”
“Not right away. They’re closed weekends. I could phone on Monday, let them know I need access. If it’s important,” she added.
Dead end, at least for a while.
“I don’t suppose you would know anything about it? I mean, personally?” Kayla asked. “Before the records were stored.”
“I’m sorry, no. I never saw the documents. Although…”
“Yes?” Kayla prompted.
“Well…Emmaline Dorman, Frank Oleson’s secretary back then. She trained me, years ago. I imagine she would have seen them. She’s retired, though. Has been for, oh, gosh, eighteen years now.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“Oh, yes. Austin.”
“Austin?”
For a moment she didn’t understand Kayla’s confusion, then she said, “Oh, there’s a Texas Austin too, isn’t there? I meant the Austin here in Nevada.”
In the middle of nowhere on U.S. 50. Literally in the middle, if Nevada is nowhere, which is arguable—right in the geographic center of the state that’s been slated to take the nation’s nuclear waste, because one look at a map and it’s obvious that Nevada is the perfect place for gambling, whorehouses, and DNA-altering radioactivity.
“She had a brother there,” Helen said. “But I heard he died a few years ago. Her husband too, poor thing. I’ve got Emmaline’s address here somewhere if that’d help.”
Kayla got it, then looked at me. “Want to go?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
TO AUSTIN? IN the heat of summer? Hell, no.
I gave Kayla a shrug.
“Okay, great,” she said.
My fault. I should have known. Never send a woman a mixed message. It will be interpreted accordingly, one of the ways they seize control. On the other hand, a trip to Austin would get us out of Reno where we might get a little breathing room. The media would never track down this Austin connection, such as it was. If it gave us a day of peace, it would be worth it.
Back in the VW, Kayla said, “Do we need anything at your place before we go?”
“Got m’ wig right here, ma’am,” I said in John Wayne’s voice, picking it up and twirling it on one finger.
She rolled her eyes. “Is that a no?”
“Yep. It’s a no.”
More eye rolling. “What about money? In case we end up having to spend the night.”
“Now there’s a thought-provoking thought.”
“Uh-huh. So…what if, Mort?”
“I’ve got one of those things you’ve avoided all your life, sugar. A hated MasterCard.”
“Oh, goodie. Maxed out?”
“Not a dime on it. And it’s got a limit of two thousand dollars, too.” Which not only shows how little I’d used it, but also showed how little the folks at MasterCard trusted me.
“Whoopee, we’re rich.”
* * *
We. She had an interesting way with words.
It wasn’t until one thirty that we got on Interstate 80, headed east. I’d insisted on an oil change for the VW, something Kayla hadn’t had done since she’d left New York. The night before, with Kayla beside me in bed, July had slipped quietly into August. This time of year Highway 50 would be an empty, sun-scorched stretch of heat mirages and misery. Boy Scout that I am, I wanted to minimize the risk of having a breakdown. That antique air-cooled engine was risk enough. Then I got hungry and we had sandwiches at Carrows, I in my wig, she in a smile as she stared at it. And I called Dallas on my cell phone, told her what I was up to. I. Me. I was going to Austin.
“Is K going with you?” she asked, right off.
You can’t slip anything by them. They are so much smarter than we are. Making us look like we’re in charge is only a game to them, something to alleviate boredom. They probably laugh their heads off when they’re alone.
“Uh-huh.”
“Have fun, Mort.”
“This’s detective work, Dal.” And it was against Jeri’s express orders, too, but…what the hell, all I did was work for her, after a fashion. Something that could change as easily as the weather.
“Of course it is. Call me when you get back?”
“Yeah.” I shut the phone, ending the call.
We didn’t get to Fallon until nearly three. Then the real Highway 50 began, two lanes of shimmering blacktop, scoped out by floating buzzards, like riding toward the end of the world. The pavement would be up around a hundred eighty degrees. You could roast a steer on it.
The Volkswagen didn’t have air-conditioning. With the windows open, hot air buffeted through. Kayla had the top two buttons of her shirt undone. She told me to take the wheel, and I held it while she untucked her shirt, unbuttoned the lower two buttons, then knotted the loose ends under her breasts.
“Watch the road,” she said.
“What for? The sonofabitch is naked—I mean empty.”
She grinned. “Watch the road, you fool.”
She took over the wheel, and I played it cool, not looking at her belly for at least two minutes, which took all my self-control. You see stomachs like that only in your dreams, and then only if you’re damn good at it.
East of the junction of Route 839, two jets from the naval air station at Fallon swooped down and dropped bombs on invisible targets, white bursts of light, smoke plumes, snarls of thunder. What else would you do with a desert on a semi-permanent basis except bomb it? Whorehouses are just something to do on your way through.
We went out past Frenchman, gliding through the scent of hot alkali. The temperature was a hundred and two. Over dry mountain passes, past twenty thousand square miles of dun-colored grass and silvery-blue sage, between hot bare mountains ten thousand feet high. The air cooled as we gained altitude, but the sun’s ultraviolet became harsher, seeming to burn on my skin. We passed the Reese River and finally pulled within sight of Austin, snugged into Pony Canyon in the Toiyabe Mountains, just this side of Austin Summit.
Kayla slowed the VW as we passed buildings at the west end of town. A sign, Stokes Castle, whipped by, pointing to a winding dirt road that led up a gentle slope and around a low nub of hill.
“Ever been here before?” I asked her.
“No. You?”
“There’s a first time for everything. Until Sunday, I’d never found a stray blonde in my bed before. Not one.”
“Then all hell broke loose. Poor you.”
Austin lay on the old Pony Express run, which came down through the canyon before silver was discovered in 1862. That year, a retired rider found a greenish ore, which proved to be silver sulfide, and the “Rush to the Reese” was on. At one time Austin was the second biggest city in Nevada—Virginia City being first—back when Vegas was a ghost town, having once been nothing but a camping spot on the Mormon Trail, then a fort, a mission, and finally, in 1858, an abandoned mission in the soul-grinding dust and heat of the minor Mojave Desert. So much for Vegas, which had exploded into what was arguably the most artificial city in the history of the world. Nevada’s real history lies farther north, in places like Austin.
Kayla drove through town at twenty-five miles an hour, which took the better part of sixty seconds. Past the Lander County courthouse where a guy had once been hanged from a second-story balcony, up to the Gridley store, built of weathered stone, and the house next door, formerly the town brothel. The tailings of old mining operations littered the surrounding hills. The desert changes slowly. The arid land is relatively unaffected by water. The tailing piles would still be visible a thousand years from now. Austin’s history lurked all around in the form of its red brick buildings, churches, abandoned mines, and, Kayla and I discovered, the size of its motel rooms, which could be described as either quaint or Leavenworthian, circa 1890.
Without exchanging a word, we decided to stay the night. Our room at the Lincoln Motel was marginally bigger than your average walk-in closet, about eight by ten, much of it taken by a queen-sized bed. One of us had to sit on the bed if the other wanted to walk around it. The bed sagged in the middle, which was likely to prove interesting later on.
Kayla bounced on the bed. “It squeaks, how fun,” she said, then we went outside and looked around.
“Shall we eat now, or find Emmaline Dorman?” she asked. She’d untied her shirt so as not to draw attention or cause a riot. I had my wig on in case satellite dishes we’d seen in town were operational. If they could get the Sjorgen-Milliken Spectacle in Rangoon, odds were they could get it here too, a hundred seventy miles from ground zero.
I was hungry, but said, “Mrs. Dorman.”
“Work before pleasure?”
“With the IRS, the two are indistinguishable.”
“Mmm, nasty.”
Emmaline Dorman lived in a house on the northern slope of a hill overlooking the town, three blocks off Main Street, otherwise known as Highway 50. Kayla and I walked over through the kind of small-town quiet you have to hunt for these days, a quiet that reminded me of a time when gas stations had soda machines with heavy lids and bottles in rows that you slid out through a gate-latch mechanism—a time before my time, when small-town grocery stores had wooden floors and paddle fans circulating stale air. I had the impression that Austin was standing still in a world that was moving fast somewhere out beyond the horizon…except for those satellite dishes, and bottled water with a per-gallon cost five times that of gasoline, sold at the convenience store at the Chevron station at the west end of town.
Emmaline’s yard was hot and dry. The earth was dusty yellow-gray rock. Wiry blue-green sage and cheat grass filled the yard. The roof of the house was frayed composition shingles, lifted by the heat and wind into a reddish shag.
I knocked. Moments later a woman answered, tall but stooped, wearing a loose-fitting housedress over a thin frame. Bony arms, no chest, a gaunt face dominated by watery blue-gray eyes still alive with intelligence. Cool moist air blew out past Kayla and me. I heard the airy rumble of a swamp cooler somewhere inside the house.
