Gumshoe, page 5
The ex-wife, being hassled and harried by the media even more than I, now that our beloved mayor, Jonnie, had flown the coop. I had a choice of responses, a few of which might blow the lid off my cover, things like: “How’d you find me here?” So I said, “What’s up, kiddo?” Kiddo to throw off the ears in the room, but I call her that from time to time to keep her loose.
“Who’s the girl?”
“What girl?” I asked.
Iris’s head hitched up half an inch. Both Phil and Betty’s fingers slowed on their keyboards.
“The girl at your house.”
“Uh, K.”
“Kay?”
“Yeah, K.”
“Not especially bright, is she?”
“Why do you say that?”
“It was a bit like talking to a fence post.”
“At least you got through.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s kind of tired.”
“Oh? Did you wear her out? If I remember correctly, you have a way of—”
“Is there a point to any of this, Dal?” Ears twitched at the name. No one looked up, however.
“I have a flat.”
“Yeah? You looking to rent it out or sell it?”
That stopped her. “A flat tire,” she expounded.
“Flat all the way around or only on the bottom?”
“For God’s sake, Mort…”
“Exactly what do you want me to do, Dal?”
“I…What are you doing at…at that place? Skulstad Meats? I spoke with Gregory.”
“Then you know,” I said. Iris flicked her eyes up at me, then down.
“Oh. Sorry. Private investigation stuff, right?” A hint of irony in her voice. “You can’t talk right now, can you?”
“Now you’re cookin’, kid.”
“Well, I was hoping…maybe if you could get off for an hour, like for lunch?”
“That depends. Are you buying?”
“To change my tire, Mort.” She was starting to sound weary. Jonnie’s absence was probably getting to her. That and the media, going through her bank account, underwear drawer, crawling through her life like a bunch of roaches in the name of truth and the public’s Right To Know, which, as sheer luck would have it, coincides with ratings, market share, advertising revenue, and end-of-year bonuses.
“What happened to your Triple-A?” I asked.
“I, uh, sort of let it lapse.”
“Good move. Where are you now?”
“Macy’s. Meadowood.”
Macy’s. Of course. Where else? What kind of a gumshoe was I? “Where at?”
“The east side. North of the Sears extension.”
“I’ll get there soon as I can. Say, fifteen, twenty minutes?”
“Great. Thanks, Mort.”
I hung up. Three pairs of eyes looked up, then down. The chair squawked as I got to my feet, announcing my departure.
“Family emergency,” I said to Betty. “Try to keep me on the payroll, okay?”
She didn’t smile as I left, but I thought Phil looked hopeful that maybe I’d blown it and wouldn’t be back.
* * *
The Toyota was hot enough to broil salmon when I opened the door. I let it cool a little before getting in. It’s too small for me, but on IRS wages, and with a double mortgage, and stashing the maximum allowable into a Roth IRA, it was all I could reasonably afford. Well, okay, I can be cheap. Perhaps it was one of those final straws, the reason Dallas finally split—me buying that car, used, already scarred by battle. Once she got the name Angel and figured out where I was headed, how far I was likely to go, and Nicole was in her freshman year of high school, there wasn’t much to hold her. I couldn’t blame her. Turns out there wasn’t much to hold me either, once I’d hit forty and saw that long empty stretch of road ahead. It had just taken me longer to figure it out, or at least to do something about it.
Dallas was standing beside her Mercedes when I pulled up. No TV crews were hanging around filming the event, which made me think Jonnie’s disappearance was winding down even more than I’d thought. Later she told me she’d raced through an almost-red light somewhere on South Virginia Street to give two news vans the slip.
She looked good. Dallas always looks good. At the breakfast table, asleep, mucking in the garden, sweating on a StairMaster, Dallas looked terrific. She would look good mud wrestling Tommy Lasorda. Hell, she would make Lasorda look good, not a mean trick.
She had on a green skirt, a sleeveless pearl-colored blouse, gold necklace, gold bangles. Even in all that clothing you could sense the Playmate body underneath. I could, at least.
“Nice outfit,” I said, squeezing out of the Toyota like a circus clown. “I can see why you didn’t want to change the tire yourself.”
She beamed at me.
“What I can’t understand is why you don’t have a line out here,” I added, looking around. The lot was about half full this close to the building. Farther out it was empty, rippling with heat waves. The asphalt felt slightly squishy under my shoes.
“A line?”
“Of drooling hopefuls, fighting over who gets to change the tire and impress the gorgeous lady.”
“Oh, Mort.”
Oh, Mort, what? She thought I wasn’t serious? I crouched by the tire. She didn’t have to tell me which one, sleuth that I am. Left rear. It was one flat sonofabitch. I even spotted the gash where the knife blade had gone in.
I stood up quickly and looked around. I didn’t see anyone staring in our direction, but someone knew where Dallas was. Either that or it was one of those random things. Some people don’t like Mercedes, or Mercedes owners. Maybe she should’ve been driving a Smart Car, or a Zapino. Something that would fit in her purse.
“Got a spare?” I asked.
She shrugged, handed me a set of keys, singling out the one for the trunk.
She stood a few feet away as I popped the lid and looked in, my eyes goggling and double taking at the sight of Jonnie Sjorgen’s head staring milky eyed up at me, blackish tongue protruding. Just his head. Nothing else.
Dallas screamed. I caught her a quarter second before she fell.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE NEXT FEW hours went by in something of a blur. At least we got a free lunch out of it. Well, I did. Dallas barely touched her salad.
Two patrol cars were at the scene two minutes after I called it in. Twenty minutes later I counted ten RPD cruisers, four sheriff’s cars, one paramedic van, a fire truck, three carloads of unsmiling RPD plainclothes detectives, a coroner’s wagon, and a particularly ugly gray-green sedan full of blue-suited, stiff-legged, serious-looking FBI agents who must’ve broken every speed law on the books hauling ass over from their Booth Street offices. Everyone with a scanner, a siren and a so-called need-to-know had hot footed it over, and a few more besides. I was the only former representative of the IRS, which would no doubt make my previous colleagues green with envy. I didn’t see any border agents, but the day was young. The number of flashing blue-and-red lights was enough to cause skin cancer. The huge turnout of law enforcement personnel was too late to help Mayor Jonnie when he’d really needed it, but it was impressive all the same.
Like locusts, the media descended—an almost biblical plague. Television crews from each of the four local network affiliates were crawling over each other like Twister contestants, practically rioting in an attempt to out-scoop everyone else. Given the situation, that was a physical impossibility, as any eight-year-old could’ve told them, but apparently they didn’t know that. The word had gotten out and they were trying to get a shot of Sjorgen’s head for the six o’clock news, just in time for dinner. But with the banners of crime scene tape and the burly officers backing it up, neither they nor the print newshounds were having any luck.
Reno Police Chief Paul Menteer was nosing around, staying out of the way while trying to appear in charge, looking solemn, no doubt sizing up the political angle. The decapitation was already general knowledge, no way to put that genie back in the bottle, keep the story from going international. The British love a good bit of gossip, as did much of the rest of Europe and parts of Asia. The French in particular would eat this mess up.
Reporters shouted questions at Dallas and me across the barrier of yellow police tape, which encompassed her Mercedes, four squad cars, and my Toyota. Their questions were beyond idiotic—coarse, vapid, vulgar, predictable. Tabloid TV questions, geared to appeal to the dimmest of wits who might tune in. And they got paid to do it. Is this a great country or what? Forget education or class. All you need is an eighty-dollar haircut, two hundred if you’re a woman, and a mouth unfettered by sensitivity or intelligence.
Chief Menteer was keeping us well away from them, but video cameras intruded, lenses set on full zoom, glinting in the sunlight. Dallas was photogenic as hell, I was her ex, and Jonnie’s head, his head for Christ’s sake, had been found by the aforementioned ex in the trunk of her car. The word “Scandal,” with a capital “S,” hovered over us like a neon cloud. An erupting volcano in that parking lot couldn’t have drawn as big a crowd or incited as frenzied a feeding.
Through the predictable law enforcement whirl, preliminary forensic busywork, and the sheer noise, excitement, and strangeness of it, I focused on Dallas—keeping an eye on a pair of RPD detectives Menteer was in the process of assigning to work her over. And me, of course. Dallas was still weeping softly, mascara running.
“Don’t say anything,” I told her as the two detectives drew near.
“Who the hell’re you?” the male of the team asked me, a guy in his forties who bore an uncanny resemblance to Buddy Hackett back in the day.
“My husband,” Dallas answered, an automatic response that made my day. “I…I mean…my—”
“Mortimer Angel, the ex,” said the other detective, Shannon Neely, a woman in an attractive blue-gray skirted suit, evidently more up on current events than her partner. My face had been on television too, briefly, one small sideshow in the media circus.
Hackett, whose day-to-day name was Russell Fairchild, said, “Oh, yeah, him,” catching up like a greyhound. “We’ll get to you in a minute, big guy.”
“You won’t get to either one of us out here,” I informed him in my best IRS-like voice.
“Say what?”
I nodded at the burgeoning horde of paparazzi, backed up by a growing throng of onlookers. “Not here, not with them out there. It’s too hot and I was promised lunch.”
In fact I wasn’t, not that they would care. I was only promised the fun of changing a flat in the sun as the temperature approached a hundred, but I could tell that would have to wait for calmer times. I have a sense about these things.
Russell glanced at his partner and shrugged. I had him pegged as a man who liked the word lunch. He was paunch-bellied and round-shouldered. His polyester tie was pulled loose at the collar.
Shannon returned his shrug. “It is awfully hot, Russ.”
Out of hearing, Dallas’s and mine, they got the okay from Chief Menteer. One look at the TV crews convinced him. After he’d asked a few “how and why” questions for show, which I answered, the four of us took off in a marked unit, Russ driving, Shannon up front with him, Dallas and I in back where the door handles don’t work. Two RPD cruisers ran interference for us, cutting off half a dozen news vans as we got the hell out of there. I put an arm around Dallas’s shoulders. She didn’t look well, and I hoped for her sake that whatever ordeal lay in store wouldn’t drag out.
Russ headed for a yellow light, went through on red with the siren wailing. The two cruisers stayed with us. Menteer wasn’t about to hand over two prime murder suspects to Russ and Shannon without rolling backup as escort.
“So, how about Rapscallion?” I said to Russ. “I hear they’ve got a pretty good luncheon menu.”
“Seafood. You got it.” He grinned at Shannon, happy to be the guy in charge of the scamp who might have killed and beheaded his beloved mayor. Rapscallion, on Wells Avenue, is arguably the best mostly fish place in Reno. But Russ, the idiot, made a wrong turn and we ended up downtown at RPD headquarters on Second Street instead, south of the river in one of the least attractive buildings in all of Reno, butted up against the municipal courthouse.
Dallas and I were taken to separate rooms. Mine had chairs bolted conveniently to the floor and a plain wooden table, stained and gouged by countless suspects, who, from the looks of it, had been allowed to keep their knives. Dallas went off with Shannon, and I was left with Russ and a taciturn blue-uniformed officer by the name of Clifford Day. Day was noticeably bigger than me. Six-six, three hundred-plus pounds. The word on me must’ve gone out. God only knows why—the most violent thing I’ve done in the past few years is occasionally laugh out loud watching episodes of Breaking Bad, but I guess these guys weren’t taking chances.
No rubber hose, but they Miranda’ed the hell out of me. I waived my right to shut up and/or have my attorney give them a hard time for $400 an hour, not an expense I cared to take on, which is the Catch-22 in that arrangement, and they set up a recorder and began asking questions.
Before switching on the recorder, Russ gave the door a glance and said, “So, that’s your ex, huh?”
“Yep.”
He shook his head. “Man, I wouldn’ta let that one off the hook.” Out of his bed, he meant. Dallas would’ve been thrilled to the point of speechlessness by his interest.
“She threw me back,” I said.
“Weren’t big enough, huh?” He punched Day on the shoulder, happy that he’d made a joke. Day grinned. Two good ol’ boys, one nearly twice the size of the other in spite of Russ’s paunch.
“Why don’t you ask her?” I said. Dallas would’ve ripped him a brand-spanking new asshole before the entire sentence was out of his mouth.
Then they went to work. They were almost cordial before they learned I was Reno’s newest private investigator, or might be in the future. Before that moment, Fairchild even managed to find me a tuna sandwich. “Seafood,” he said, tossing it on the table in front of me. It landed with an appropriately dead plop, one day past its expiration date, having stewed in a vending machine for the last three days. And, I learned later, Shannon got salads for both her and Dallas from somewhere, although Dallas just picked at hers.
When Russ asked what I’d done before I joined the firm of Carson & Rudd, both he and Officer Day got a little more serious, a bit less smug. IRS agents live in a world of forced smiles and artificial goodwill. I suspected the two of them of having been creative with their 1040s a few months back. When it comes to taxes, almost everyone’s an artist, including cops. Especially cops, I’d learned early on in my career. They never report bribes as tip income.
My questioning didn’t take as long as I’d thought it would. Five minutes of scintillating background stuff, then we went through Dallas’s phone call, my trip to Meadowood and the subsequent discovery of the body—or head, corpse—twice in maybe another ten. The story was simplicity itself. The second time around was a carbon of the first, not so much as a change of syllables, same during the third go-around, so after consulting with someone in another part of the building, getting my story one last useless time and instructing me not to leave town in the next few days without notifying RPD, Fairchild and Day cut me loose. Total time, one hour twenty minutes.
Later, armed with forensics data and pathology reports they might haul me in again and dig into things farther back in time, like motive and opportunity, alibi—if they could pinpoint time of death, which I didn’t think likely. Jonnie’s last known body temperature was up around a hundred forty degrees. Without a body or the actual murder scene, which the trunk of Dallas’s car was not, I didn’t think they’d come up with a time of death, much less a murder weapon or any of that stuff that so impresses juries. And it wasn’t lost on them that the district attorney, David Milliken, was still missing or at large—unaccounted for was the current, politically correct term—not that his absence necessarily had anything to do with Jonnie’s even if it had looked that way right from the start. Nor was it clear how Dallas or I were connected to Milliken, even to detectives eager to solve a case and look like heroes before a bug-eyed public now holding its collective breath. Indictments were a long way off and they knew it, evidenced by all the long faces I saw, everywhere I turned.
I hung around, waiting for Dallas in a room that hadn’t been cleaned anytime that week. It had vending machines, worn-out chairs and tables, a bulletin board for the cops to buy things from each other, and wire-reinforced windows that looked out on a dingy hallway with green linoleum tiles on the floor.
Shannon and a burly cop, Mary, took a lot longer with Dallas. All the way from when she’d last opened the trunk of her car: yesterday afternoon. And was Jonnie’s head in there at that time: no, she was certain she would’ve noticed. Where, if anywhere, she’d gone the night before: nowhere. When she’d gotten up that morning: 6:20 a.m. Where she kept the car at night: in her garage. And was the garage locked: yes. Had she heard anything unusual the night before: no. When she’d had breakfast, showered, dressed, and left the house. Every stop she’d made before ending up at Meadowood Mall: none. Did anyone else have keys to her car: Jonnie, but chances are he hadn’t used them to put himself in the trunk. And why, exactly, had she phoned her ex-hubby for help and not Triple-A or any other person or organization? Later, according to Dallas, there’d been a lot of that ex-husband kind of thing. Evidently they liked the idea of a big guy with a possible motive—jealousy—right there on the scene when Jonnie had finally turned up.
After I’d cooled my heels for an hour she came out, looking pale and drained. The damage to her mascara had been repaired, however. Women understand the importance of such things. I asked Russ for a ride back to my car. Dallas’s, too.
He shook his head. “Been impounded. Might get it back in two, three days. Maybe four.”
“What? Both of ’em?”
“Nope. Just hers.”
He led Dallas and me out a back door. The temperature was 102 degrees. My Tercel was baking in the heat in a parking lot with its windows up. “All yours,” he said, handing me my keys. “We’ve been through it already. Nice rig, by the way.”
