by Susan Dunlap
Potter turned off into Gattozzi, the rumble of the engine growing deeper as it pulled the car up First Street. There were no streetlights; the dark was broken only by headlights and by the light from windows of old miners’ houses renovated a century after their creation, from the picture windows in the cafes, and from the dimmed saloon windows. And the round white light globe in a protective cage outside the county sheriff’s department, Gattozzi Station.
She walked into the plain, serviceable, government-issue tan room that smelled of tobacco and Pine Sol. A bearlike man was sitting on a swivel chair behind the counter. There was no flag or state seal. The only decoration was a large photograph of a small, dank old slab building. In it cells and mattressless cots were visible through the doorway to the main room, and in that room she could make out the metal eyes to which leg irons were hooked. “The old county jail, behind the old courthouse in Pioche. Not a place you’d want to visit twice.”
“Nor is this. I assume you’re Sheriff Fox?” she said.
“Right, there, lady.”
“And you need a second opinion about the body Dr. Tremaine called me here to view?”
“It’s the truth we need. About the woman you brought here and dumped in the morgue before you sped out of town.”
CHAPTER 17
THERE IS A “RULE of living” in California: “Keep clear of windows in an earthquake.” In New York it’s “Don’t make eye contact on the subway.” Brad Tchernak added to himself, In Las Vegas, “Never drive on the Strip when you’re in a hurry.” Not at midnight, not at dawn, not at four on a Saturday afternoon. He idled in the number-four lane. The sun was already inching toward the calm cover of the mountains. But here on the Strip, life fizzed. Banks of utility lines transformed the power of Hoover Dam into millions of lights in the dozens of casinos crammed into these few blocks. Lights glowed, crackling, snapping on and off in wildly clashing colors, huge, soaring, screaming, trying vainly to shout down their neighbor. To his right sat a glowing green casino large enough to hold the entire Emerald City; to his left, King Arthur’s Palace; and ahead on the left, a miniature New York City, Brooklyn Bridge nudging the Empire State Building. Coming up on the left, a huge pyramid gleamed the black of the Underworld. Ahead of him the Stratosphere tower soared more imposing than McCarran Airport’s. All dazzled, beckoning, promising.
Tchernak loved it. The enchantment stopped at the casino door, and Kiernan hated the predictable disillusionment of it all. The City of Dependable Disappointment, she called it. But for Tchernak, Las Vegas was one great party with ever-new friends, endless diversions, beautiful women, and few inhibitions. It was the party of all parties, and the morning after, you were expected to have no memory of it.
After he found Grady Hummacher and collected his first fee, he’d treat himself to a night in New York, New York.
Eight, or was it ten, lanes of cars idled between the casinos. Good that it’s me and not her, Tchernak thought, grinning at the picture of his employer—his former employer—fuming, muttering, opening the window to stick her head out and cause trouble. By now she’d have cut in and out of every one of the lanes, cell phone to mouth as she bitched to the highway patrol.
He, on the other hand, had used this lull to study the map. Louisa Larson’s clinic looked to be a couple miles north. He shifted into second gear as the casinos thinned, and was in third by the time he passed through the civic center and on north. When the first barred window came into sight, he rechecked the address. Boarded windows led to broken windows, to a neighborhood of mom-and-pop stores struggling between deserted buildings like clover in sidewalk cracks. Horseshoe apartment complexes surrounded bare-dirt courtyards. Louisa Larson’s address was on the next block.
Behind a macadam parking area the Larson Clinic sat crisp and white in the predusk haze. Browning cacti lined the sides of the long narrow building. The whole sad area looked like it had been sucked dry by the thirsty dice palaces to the south.
Tchernak pulled up next to a dark blue BMW and strode to the door, relieved that he’d made it before Louisa Larson packed in her black bag for the day.
Office Hours: Monday, Thursday 9:00-6:00, Saturday 8:00-12:00.
It was hours past noon already, but the car was here and the license said MD. Maybe she spent her Saturday afternoons cleaning up her files or whatever in her clinic. Tchernak knocked, waited, rang the buzzer, waited, rang again, holding his finger to the button. Tires squealed at the stop sign behind him, coughs of music burst from open car windows and were gone. He knocked again, harder.
“We’re closed!”
“Doctor Larson?” he shouted.
“Closed!”
“Louisa, I’m a buddy of Grady Hummacher. Brad Tchernak. Give me a minute, huh?” The door was solid, the speaker shielded.
“Grady’s not here.”
“Right. And that’s the problem. You know how Grady is.”
A bus ground to a stop, brakes squeaking, engine belching, passengers calling back and forth as some disembarked.
“Louisa? Louisa, I can’t hear you. There’s too much going on in the street.”
No answer.
“I flew in from San Diego to find Grady. I know Grady and I’ll tell you, I’m worried about the guy.”
Still no answer, and the traffic noises were too loud to allow him to guess what was happening inside the building. Why didn’t she just open the door and get it over with? Tchernak’s shoulder tightened and he caught himself an instant before pounding again. Brad Tchernak was not used to women ignoring him. If he could just get face-to-face, he’d be on the fast track. But what good was charm, or whatever it was he had with women, when the woman was behind a closed door? “Louisa, this’ll only take a minute. Look, if you’d told me where to find Grady, you’d already be done with me.”
Now he could make out something, feet moving but not away, voice muffled as if it were revving up its vocal cords.
“I’m staying right here on your doorstep. I’m a big guy; I’m going to be a real impediment to your business. Your patients’ll have a hard time clambering over me.”
“Really?”
She ought to have been grinning by now, but that voice didn’t ring with smile tones. Still, it was as good as he was likely to get.
“Picture a casino on your stoop. Maybe Hercules with slot machines all up one arm.”
“Okay.” The woman’s voice was tentative. “What do you want?”
This was one woman who’d never make a tourist-bureau ad. No endless party for her. She was the voice of the day after. “Grady,” he said. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
A bus harrumphed to a stop.
“Louisa, can we talk about this inside? I’m broadcasting to the whole neighborhood. Open the door. Five minutes. I’m too rushed to stay longer.”
“No!” Louisa’s voice. Panic.
“Okay. Then leave the door on the chain and just open it enough so we can talk.” And don’t think how easy it’d be for me to snap that little chain.
“There’s nothing I can tell you.” But the door opened an inch.
“Grady landed at McCarran yesterday, Friday. Have you seen him?”
“No.”
“Talked to him?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“I’m not an idiot!”
It was the first sign of life that nervous squeak of a voice had shown. This was a woman used to barking orders. The Lady Napoleon tone. This voice was out of place in a woman hiding behind a closed door.
Tchernak narrowed his eyes, vainly trying to pierce the building’s darkness. All he could see was a black strip, bisected by a silver linked chain. From Louisa’s voice, Tchernak figured her to be about five eight. Two tones of voice, two personae. Kiernan would have chosen to deal with the snapper. Tchernak took the softer route. “Grady’s in a lot of trouble.”
“Look, I haven’t heard from him. I don’t know where he is. Got it?”
/> “He’s somewhere. He landed here and vanished.”
“It’s a big empty state.”
“Does he have another house? A hideaway? Friends he’d go off with, hide out with?”
The door shifted but didn’t close.
“Look, Louisa, I’m a detective. Once I get ahold of Grady, he’ll be out of your hair. Guys like me will stop looking for him. We won’t be pounding on your door and bugging you. Point me in the right direction and you can eat your dinner in peace.”
On the sidewalk a clutch of teenaged boys shouted at each other in Spanish. A car raced by, thumping bass smacking the air against her ears. Still, Louisa neither answered nor shut the door.
Tchernak grappled for a wedge question. “A week is a long rime to be missing. This is desperate, Louisa. Desperate enough for his boss to call me here from California. Grady could be lying off the road somewhere bleeding to death.” He strained for any sound of acquiescence. “If you know Grady as well as I do, you can imagine him taking a shortcut that leads him fifty miles from the main road and getting stranded there. Without food or water.” Still no response. He was sweating. Why didn’t the woman trust him? What proof—“Grady and me, we were in college together. Maybe he mentioned me? Did he ever mention the raid on Tasman Hall across campus when ten of us pushed a VW bug up the stairs to the fourth floor? Not easy around the corners. Took all ten guys. And then—this is the Gradyism of it—we get to the top and there’s only a little person-sized door. Not even a landing for the car. No place for us to leave it. So, we have to lower the thing down again, all four flights. That’s real work when you’ve gone all out pushing the damned thing up. And of course when we got down to street level, the campus cops were waiting.”
Behind the door Louisa sounded like she was choking.
“Any lead, Louisa.”
“Street News!” a man called from the parking lot. “Hey, man, you got your issue of Street News? Just off the presses.” He ambled toward him.
Tchernak waved him off. “Louisa, any lead!”
“Grady had two deaf teenaged boys he brought back from Yaviza.”
“Were they here?” Tchernak asked.
“They were until Grady broke in and took them. He got them an apartment three blocks north, half a block to the right. Number One.”
CHAPTER 18
“THAT TRUE?” CECIL MCGUIRE kept the point of the knife against Louisa Larson’s throat. Damned woman was bigger than he was. But he’d taken her by surprise. They called him the Weasel, and he was good at finding holes and passages, but when it came to springing like a cat, dead quiet with fangs ready to slash, hell, there was no one better.
This lady doc, she thought she was street-smart. Lot to learn for this one. She didn’t open the door right up wide like a hooker looking for trade. She figured she was smart just cracking it an inch.
Smart? Yeah. Open’s open. She put up a helluva fight, but the stupid broad broke half the pictures and beakers and glass gizmos herself. And then she told him where the tape was, like he was going to do like he said and not tie her up. Stupid broad. Then the dick’s banging at the door. His pulse is banging at his skin. All the doc needs to do is scream. But she don’t. She plays it smart. If she’d been that smart to begin with …But she was too scared then. “I said: Was it true, what you told him?”
She didn’t answer.
He pricked her skin. Scare her some more.
She didn’t even gasp. He ached to do another, dig the knife in deeper, but good sense stopped him. He hadn’t made it all these years in Vegas, when big guys were going down all around him, by being stupid. “Don’t fool with me, lady. You don’t give me the truth, I won’t be giving you just a scar. Get it?” He levered her around so that she was looking into the upended chairs, smashed pictures, broken glass. “What you told the dick, that true?”
“Yes!” He could feel her body lurch forward as she let out the word. He yanked her back by the wrists. His free hand was ready to slap over her mouth, but she didn’t scream.
“These kids, they know where he is?”
“I don’t know.”
He hesitated. “Maybe I better take you with me. Let you get them to tell me.”
She turned her head toward him. And then the damned bitch laughed. “By the time you do that, they’ll be gone. That private eye’ll have them halfway to L.A. by then.”
He gave her a good cut for that, a slash right beside the eye where she’d remember it. She gasped at that one.
Then he ran for his car.
CHAPTER 19
THE GATTOZZI SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT was not much bigger—or better—than the picture of the century-old Pioche lockup on the sheriff’s office wall. The whole affair was one storefront wide, with a counter blocking entry to two cells, bathroom, and the twelve-foot-square office in which Kiernan sat. The cells in the old Pioche jail were tiny windowless rooms with metal bed slabs and low openings barely large enough for a meal tray. The other half of the dank slab building was the “exercise room,” whose main features were the drain in the floor and the big metal eye for shackling prisoners. Lest the rustlers and card cheats conjure thoughts of unhooking themselves and escaping the garrote that hung in their future, the cellblock was surrounded by another building as if the two were Russian nesting dolls.
The sepia-toned photograph hung on the side wall of Sheriff Fox’s office where the present-day interrogee could study it in horror and the sheriff could ponder better days gone by. “Gives you pause, doesn’t it?” he said. “What it tells you is, in the state of Nevada we don’t lose prisoners. In Nevada we’ve had a century of practice keeping them.”
Fox nodded toward the photograph, vibrating his lower chin in the process. There was nothing of the fast, lithe fox in his bearlike build, his wide nose, brush of a mustache, his round red cheeks. It was as if the fox were in costume and visible only in the tight hazel eyes that peered out beneath his fluffy red-blond eyebrows. At a distance, Kiernan thought, Sheriff Fox’s big, soft body, his round face, could have lulled the unwary onto his lap to present their Christmas wishes. “We don’t,” he repeated, “lose our prisoners.”
“Congratulations.”
He might have mumbled something in response, but Kiernan couldn’t hear it. The voice that shouted in her head was Tchernak’s, repeating his oft-repeated maxim to her: “No taunting, no speeding, no defenestration!” Well, she’d already blown the first one. If she didn’t watch it, she’d have to count on the last two—in reverse order.
Fox leaned forward, his red-blond brows scrunched angrily. “Look, lady, you don’t dump a dead body, not in my district.”
“You want to talk law, let’s talk about kidnapping. I’m willing to discuss Jeff Tremaine’s dead woman with you, but if you continue to threaten me, you’ll be talking to my lawyer.”
“You better think carefully before you make your one and only phone call.”
She took a deep breath and then another. No way was she going to let Fox find out, but she wanted to know his take on the dead woman as much as he did hers. She breathed more slowly, until her skin no longer vibrated in anger. “The policeman is your friend,” Tchernak had teased her the last time he’d launched into his lecture on dealing maturely with authority figures. She hated authority, and the authority she hated most was this kind of asshole made omnipotent by his isolation.
She had ended up in jail three times before. This jail in Gattozzi was not one she wished to make number four. She took a deep breath and said, “Dr. Tremaine called me to confirm his findings on the cause of death of the deceased. I am a pathologist. We worked together in Africa and we had both seen Lassa fever deaths. This woman’s condition appeared to be similar. But there’s no way to tell until your pathologist does a complete postmortem and gets the results of toxicology reports. Doctor Tremaine would have told you all that if you had bothered to ask him instead of dragging me back here.”
“I interviewed him, all right. Know what he told me? H
e told me you dumped this body and ran.”
For an instant the room seemed to swirl. She gave her head a sharp shake. “Why would he say that?” She put up a hand to forestall his retort. “I mean, what reason would I have? I’m a licensed—” This was not the place to mention being a PI; she didn’t need Tchernak to remind her of that—” physician in San Diego. I flew in this morning, rented a car, and drove up here. The only place I stopped—the only place to stop—was the Doll’s House Cafe. Are you suggesting I came all the way from California to transport a dead body from there to here?”
Fox jerked back as if she’d punched him. Then he hunched forward, as if protecting that bruise. “I don’t know you flew in. The airline will tell me someone with your name came in.”
She held up one finger. “Someone who had to show a photo ID.”
Fox laughed. “Someone who’s got their picture on the ID that says Kiernan O’Shaughnessy.”
She lifted a second finger. “So pull up my motor vehicle file from California.”
Slowly, deliberately, Fox glanced around the room. “Dam, I guess the big fancy computer the taxpayers out here bought us just up and disappeared.”
Her fingers crushed into a fist. “What kind of lawman are you? You’re so determined to believe I’m a fraud, you won’t check the evidence. You’re wedded to the idea of me crossing a state line to relocate a corpse I have no connection with. Do you have psychedelics in the water out here?”
“Lady, I don’t put up with—”
“What’re you going to do? Arrest me? Take me back to Vegas and kidnap me again?”
“Lady!”—His face was all red now. He was yelling—” I am damned well going to make you tell me the truth about this.”
“Fine.” She leaned back on her chair, propped her feet against his desk, and said, “You’ve decided what the truth is. Tell me about it.”
His arm came down hard, stopping an inch from her shins. She forced herself to maintain the rhythm of her breath, to give no indication that his muscular control was more frightening than the hit would have been. “Am I under arrest? Or is police brutality a gift to every citizen?” Her voice was too loud for her languid pose, but she needed the volume to cover the quiver that was threatening to expose her. Fox was twice her size, but she wasn’t about to lose.