Gumshoe, page 27
I woke up a few minutes past three when Jeri turned on the light by the bed and looked down at me, swaying slightly on her feet. Her hair was damp and tangly and she had a towel wrapped around her. Rain was still thundering down. I had the idiot idea that she’d been out walking in it.
“I threw ub,” she said, speaking with effort, doing a pretty good job of enunciating, all things considered.
“Did you?”
“I didn’ make id to the bathroom. The bed’s a mess.” She blinked owlishly at me.
“Why am I not surprised?”
“I toog a shower. I’m clean. Can I sleeb here, Mord, wisch you?”
“That could get complicated, Jeri.”
“You mean ’cause of Kelza?”
“Kayla.”
“I need sleeb. I’m so dizzy. I won’…try anythig, I promiz.”
“Are you all through throwing up?”
“Yes.”
I patted the bed next to me. She turned off the light and came around to the other side. I heard the towel drop, then she slid in beside me. I couldn’t tell how she was dressed, but she’d just come from a shower and all I’d seen was that towel, so odds were she was naked, which is the kind of deductive power that separates world-class PIs from your run-of-the-mill PIs.
“How’d you get in?” I asked.
“I use the phone by the elevadors and call down an’ tol’ ’em I logged myself oud by assident.”
“Wearing only a towel?”
“Well, I didn’ tell ’em thad. A kid broad a mazzer key. Nod a big deal. I bet weirder things habben ’round here alla time. I mean, this is my room.”
“A kid, huh?”
“Sorta. He was like aroun’ twenny.”
No doubt Jeri had made his day, or night. For a while I listened to the downpour outside. It was a soothing sound, watery, something you don’t hear much in Reno.
“Mord?”
“Yeah?”
“Juss lizzen to id. All thad rain.”
“It’s great. Christ, I miss rain. I guess people who live here probably get sick of it, but after years of Nevada…”
“I know.” For a moment we lay there, listening to it. “Mord?”
“Yeah?”
“Could I like…hold you? Juz for a while.”
“Sure.”
She shifted in the dark, pressed herself against my side, and put an arm across my chest. I smelled rum and wine on her breath, and toothpaste, and soap. She suddenly felt more real to me, more human. Not that iron piston I thought I knew, but a young, vulnerable woman trying to get by in a rough world. Twenty-eight years old. To me she was young, but she would see herself approaching thirty. She would be staring at the hard press of time, wondering where the last five years had gone, starting to have an idea how fast the next five would go.
I thought about Kayla. Would she care about this? Hard to say. Would she understand? Hell, did I? I decided I didn’t, not entirely, but that was nothing new. I have a history of not understanding things, then having them slam into me at high speeds.
She was warm. She was wonderful. She was hard and soft and pliant and naked and everything one might hope for in a woman. This gumshoe business was definitely underrated.
I was confused as hell. I felt every breath she took. I switched off the words and listened to the rain, secure in this temporary womb, the wild din and wet of it out there beyond the windows, howling off the ocean, glad that it wasn’t a full-scale hurricane.
Jeri shifted her arm, placing her hand on my chest. Her elbow ended up touching my erection.
“Oop, sorry,” she said, moving her arm an inch.
“It’s okay. Go to sleep.”
“Not so awvly sorry, Mord.”
* * *
She drifted off.
I knew what it was, of course. Pheromones, a la Mike Hammer. Spores, burst out of an unknown pod, fatally attractive to the fair sex. I had acquired it or them that Monday when I’d woken up as a private investigator, a whole new man. It had started about then, all these women.
Before Monday—year upon year before, after Dallas divorced me—I’d lived a traditional IRS life of longing and near-celibacy. God’s curse, no doubt, as if sexual fulfillment was not meant for those who confiscated the piggy banks of eight year olds and spread misery throughout the land with the steamroller weight of the federal government behind them. But of course, the rationalization is that it’s a lousy job and somebody has to do it. Which wouldn’t be true if we had a rational tax code.
Since Monday I’d had three gorgeous women in my bed and one scantily clad beauty beckoning to me from a doorway, even if she was a scary little brat.
Greg hadn’t been wrong, the cad. He’d been trying to throw me off track, wanting to keep it all to himself. But I figured it out, Greg, you twerp. Now I know. Except you didn’t have to die. There was plenty of it to go around, enough for both of us.
So darn much of it.
* * *
I woke up at eight thirty. Jeri was still out cold. I slid quietly out of bed and hopped into the shower to wake up, running the water hot, then cold, like the night before. When I came out in a towel, she was standing at the window, looking out at the storm, wearing nothing but panties.
“How’s your head?” I asked.
She didn’t turn around. “Hurts. I’ll be okay.”
“What time’s our flight back?”
“Not till four fifteen.” Her speech had improved markedly in the past few hours.
“How’s that storm looking?”
She turned her head. “Wet. Windy.”
“Think we can make it? I’m worried about Kayla. She’s not answering the phone.”
Jeri faced the storm again. “We’ll make it. If they haven’t closed the airport.”
* * *
We ate at a place called Aleece’s. Jeri toyed with her oatmeal and toast. I had grits with butter, salt and red-eye gravy, scrambled eggs, ham, sausage, two plates of toast and strawberry jam, coffee.
“Gawd,” Jeri said, staring at her oatmeal. Her skin had a pale greenish cast.
“We oughta stay another night,” I said. “Go out drinkin’ again. Paint the town red from one end to the other.”
“Ha, ha. You’re so not funny.”
I leaned closer to her. “Even when you look like hell, Jeri, you look good.” And I meant it, but I wasn’t sure why I said it. Maybe I was trying to make her feel better.
She almost smiled. “Go fly a kite, buster.”
Buster paid the tab and we went outside into a downpour that turned the whole world gray and misty. Visibility was a quarter mile. Jeri drove. She wanted to do something. I didn’t object since she was steady on her feet. I wanted to get a look at the country, what little of it could be seen from inside the unruly fringe of a tropical storm.
We went west on Highway 501, past 17 and the Intracoastal Waterway, past tobacco fields, half a dozen misty golf courses, the Myrtle Beach Speedway, shaggy waterlogged cypress, tupelo and palmetto, creeks full of brown water. Rain slanted down, unending buckets of it that turned the highway into a quarter-inch-deep sheet of gray water and oily bubbles. Jeri had to keep the speed down to avoid hydroplaning.
We turned onto Business Route 501. Houses outside Conway came into view. Watery neon signs glowed in the dimness beneath a turbulent sky. Conway was a town of about twelve thousand people, a bucolic place of modest but generally well-kept Victorian, Georgian and Federal houses, Colonial, some recent nameless junk. It looked like the kind of place a person named Jewel Holmquist would live. Spanish moss swayed in the limbs of live oaks, dripping water. Water raced down gutters and flooded street corners in dirty swirling pools, clogged with leaves.
We stopped at a small market on a corner. The place had two gas pumps and an empty bench out front, RC Cola signs, the ghost of a fading Nehi ad painted on a brick wall. A traffic light danced on a wire strung across the intersection.
We dashed inside. A morbidly obese woman in a blue housedress was behind a counter smoking a cigarette, watching a tabloid show on a small television, something about pregnant teenage hookers who’d returned home with AIDS. Educational and uplifting. Who could ask for more at ten in the morning? Jeri asked for directions while I tried to look interested in a selection of flavored potato chips, extra crunchy Cheetos, and spicy pork rinds.
Back in the Mustang, we dripped water on the seats and grinned at each other.
“Wow,” she said, wiping water from her face.
“Watch out. That shirt’s going see-through. The bra, too,” I added unnecessarily, but included it for the sake of completeness and accuracy.
“If it bothers you, don’t look.”
“Doesn’t bother me.”
“What’d you mention it for?”
“Just so you’d know.”
“Yeah, well, I know. Not much I can do about it, is there? If it bothers you, don’t look.” She gave me a look.
I shrugged. “Doesn’t bother me in the least.”
“So we’re all good here, huh?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Great.” She backed out and took off. We went down a main street with a few traffic lights, turned left, then left again, cruising slowly through a neighborhood of older homes, mostly two-story houses with gables and clapboard, deep porches, old oaks bearded with moss in the front yards.
Jeri slowed the car, pointed. “There it is. Six eighty-eight.”
It was half the size of Sjorgen House in Reno, but similar: white clapboard, a turret, gingerbread trim, two red brick chimneys, one at either end of the house. The windows were dark. Its gutters were overflowing with rainwater, and a For Sale sign was in the front yard, shuddering in the wind.
“C’mon,” Jeri said, opening her door.
We ran to the porch. I rang the bell, water leaking down my back from my hair.
The house looked empty, felt empty.
I rang the bell again. Jeri cupped her hands and peered in through a window. She looked at me and shook her head.
I turned, looked back at the street. “Now what?”
She rang the bell eight or ten times, then knocked, hard, tried the handle. It was locked. Finally she gave up. “Now we go talk to the neighbors.”
We dashed across the street to a Georgian house with a hipped roof and columns, red brick, splashing through what seemed like one continuous puddle.
A spindly woman opened the door, hair done up in a bun, eyes dark. “Yes?”
“Do you know the people who used to live over there?” Jeri asked, pointing across the street.
The woman’s face went stony. She shut the door without a word. Jeri looked at me, shrugged.
“Not what you’d call a good sign, huh?” I said.
“Not very, but it’s a sign, Mort. Let it register. C’mon.”
We ran down to the next house, arriving under a porch overhang as soaked as if we’d stepped out of a shower. Jeri’s shirt was all but transparent.
“You better hope a guy answers,” I told her.
“You ring, okay?”
I did. A man in his seventies opened the door and looked out at us. “Hep you?” He looked past me to Jeri. He had a twenty-pound cat in his arms that might have been dead, except that it was purring like a moped with a bad muffler, peering at me with one yellow eye.
Jeri edged around me. “We were wondering if you know the folks in that house.” She pointed.
“What’d you want to know?”
“Well, where they are, for one thing.”
He looked at her for a moment, then at me. “Better come on in, huh? Wet out there.”
We trailed him into a parlor that had been decorated by a woman, which I recognize as a sexist remark and not necessarily true, but the room was full of flowered sofas and chairs, lace curtains and doilies, a red velvet loveseat, ceramic and jade figurines, a few dolls in satin dresses. But whoever had decorated the room was long gone, or so I thought by the film of dust covering everything, and the brown plants in pots by the windows, as dry and dead as cornstalks in December. Jeri and I stood in the room, looking around.
“Holmquist,” the man said. “Either a you kin?”
“No,” Jeri replied.
“Know ’em pretty good, do ya?”
“Not really.”
“Then why’re you lookin’ for ’em?”
“I’m a private investigator,” Jeri said.
He looked her up and down, then grunted, evidently satisfied with the explanation. He stuck out his hand, which both Jeri and I shook. “Name’s Kennedy. Kennedy Lynch.” He held up the cat and grinned. “This here’s Johnson, vice president. Go on, sit wherever it suits ya. Water’ll dry all right.”
He didn’t offer Jeri a towel, so either he liked the look or it didn’t occur to him.
Jeri and I sat on a couch. Kennedy and Johnson took an armchair facing us. Kennedy had on khaki slacks and a brown sweater covered in cat hair. The hair on his head looked as if he’d slept in it for several weeks since it had last seen a comb. A stale smell of bacon hovered in the air, and a powerful reek of Old Spice.
“Ask yer questions,” Kennedy said when he was settled.
“Are the Holmquists gone?” Jeri asked.
“Reckon so. Place’s been sittin’ empty for over two months now. Realtors come and go. Housing market’s not so good around here right now. Might be too hot, muggy. Be better in September.”
“Do you know where they went?”
“Didn’t consult me, ma’am. Though if I had to guess, I’d say Reno. Way out in Nevada.”
“Please, call me Jeri.”
Kennedy smiled. “Jerry. That there’s a man’s name.” He stroked Johnson’s fur, eliciting a purr as loud as a muffled paper shredder.
“Reno?” Jeri said. “Why Reno?”
“That’s where they’re from. They come an’ they go.”
“Do you know Jacoba?”
“Knew her, yep.”
“Knew?”
“She died about twenty years ago. You don’t know much, Miss Private Eye.”
“I’m trying to find out,” she said.
“Jacoba was simple. Beautiful, but about as simple as they come,” Kennedy said.
“How did she die?”
“Story is, which my Olivia got over the back fence and you kin take that for what it’s worth, is that she fell, slipped and hit her head in the tub.”
“What about Jewel?”
“She died too, couple a years back. Near a hundred years old, she was. After that, it was just those two women.”
“Victoria and Winter.”
“Yep.” He looked fondly down at Johnson. “I’ve been in this house goin’ on forty-six years. Jewel Holmquist was here long before that. Wouldn’t take up with no man, that lady, not that I ever tried.”
We waited. Jeri took my hand. It was warm, small, as firm as a chunk of cured ham.
Kennedy went on: “Long time ago, upwards of forty years, Jacoba showed up. Came all the way from Reno. Jewel’s sister sent her. I don’t recollect her name, though, the sister’s. Pretty as a picture, Jacoba was, but just a kid. Pregnant, which’s why she come out. Just startin’ to show.”
“Did she have the baby?” Jeri asked.
“Yep. Jewel named ’er. Called ’er Victoria, but I s’pose you’d know that, huh?” He gave us a squinty look.
“How were they?” I asked.
“What d’you mean?”
“As a family. How did they act?”
He shrugged, running a hand over Johnson’s fur. Cat was lucky to have any left. “Quiet. Kept to themselves. Jewel took ’em off to church Sundays, Jacoba and Victoria. Other than that, I didn’t see ’em around much.”
He frowned. “Except…”
“Except…?” Jeri prompted.
“Well, I seen ’em a few times, now and then, over the years—Jacoba and Victoria. Down at the store, around. Nothing regular. Victoria was a kid, but when she was seven or eight years old she was like a mother to Jacoba, tellin’ her what to do, doin’ things for her. I saw her tie Jacoba’s shoes once, right out in front of the house. It didn’t take no special insight to see that Victoria loved her mama, simple as Jacoba was.”
“Do you remember what year Jacoba died?”
He thought about it, then started counting on his fingers, lips moving silently. Outside, the storm raged. The water sounded like birdshot against the window. It ran in sheets down the glass, causing the street to ripple wildly.
“Be about twenty years, I’d say. That was the year my grandson Ricky was born. If Olivia was alive, she’d know to the day, God rest ’er.”
Twenty years. That sounded familiar. What had happened twenty years ago? Something. I could feel it clumping around in my brain, trying to get out. Things do that more now than when I was thirty, facts trapped in there like convicts serving a life sentence.
“How did Jewel and Victoria take her death?” Jeri asked.
“Jewel was okay. She took most everything like an old Marine. Nothing bothered her. I called her Rushmore, after the mountain, all those stone faces. Olivia’d shush me when I did, but Jewel had that look. Victoria took Jacoba’s passing pretty doggone hard, though, way I heard it. Fourteen, fifteen years old. Olivia said she was a handful. Got that over the back fence too. Probably true, though, since Victoria went back to Reno not long after Jacoba died.”
Jeri looked at me in surprise.
Kennedy stroked the cat. “I heard tell Jewel couldn’t take any more. You know how kids can be.”
“But then—Victoria must’ve come back,” Jeri said. “You said she and Winter left only recently.”
“Oh, yeah. Victoria came back, all right. She was only gone for a couple or three months.”
“How was she?” Jeri asked. “Better?”
“All depends on your point of view. She was as pregnant as two cats, that’s how she was.” He smiled at the expression that bit of news put on Jeri’s face.
“With Winter,” I said.
He nodded. “Yep. Victoria swelled up, then by and by along came Winter. Weird doggone name, huh? Cute kid, though. Grew up beautiful, like her mama, but thin. Not enough meat on her, I always thought.”
A moment of silence spun out, filled with the sound of wind and rain.
