I stood outside the door listening to the animated stop-and-go burble of Shanna’s voice but couldn’t make out her words over the sound of the shower. Half a minute later, the burble of words stopped.
“Mortimer? You out there?”
“There’s no one out here by that name.”
“Oh, for chrissake, Mort!”
“Yep.”
“I put your phone by the sink. It’s still on. Danya wants to talk to you.”
“Great. How am I supposed to get it?”
“Come in and get it, dope.”
Good enough. I got my phone and another eyeful, thinking girls these days weren’t nearly as bashful as they were when I was in high school, and a football hero at that. I almost made it to the door when Shanna said, “Hey.”
I turned back. “What?”
“Danya and I have been married since April, if that answers a few questions.” She looked through the glass, blinking at me, water dripping from her hair into her face.
“It might. I’ll give it some thought.”
“Do that. Now go.”
“Newlyweds. Wow. Hey. Congrats.”
“Go. Leave. See what Danya wants, then have a smoke or something in the backyard until I get out of here.”
“I gave up smoking in the first grade.” Delaying tactics are one of a multitude of old codgers’ tricks. They usually work, too.
Her lips twitched in what might have been an attempt to keep from smiling. I wouldn’t have been able to see that through pebbled glass, so I was happy that the glass was clear. Body language is a big part of communication. “Good for you. Now get out of here,” she said, but her voice was softer than before.
I went back to the living room, put the phone to my ear. “So, what’s the story, Danya? What’s with the Celebrity News?”
“That guy didn’t see Shanna, did he?”
“Nope. Don’t think so, anyway. Not like I did.”
She hesitated. “What’s that mean?”
“Thought I mentioned that she was in the shower. You know, the one with clear glass?”
“Well . . . okay. That’s good.”
Fascinating. “I doubt that he saw her. But he knew her name. Shanna Hayes.”
Danya didn’t respond to that, didn’t give away any stray bits of information. I was still in the dark. She would’ve made a good CIA agent. When I caught up to her, I thought I might have to waterboard her. I especially wanted to know who her father was—the guy who didn’t like me. That still had me going.
“Anyway,” I said, “if you’re still looking for a gumshoe and think I might do, I probably need to know what’s going on.”
“A what . . . gumshoe, did you say?”
“An investigator.” Kids. I looked out a window and saw a red Chevy Cruze slowing as it went by. What were the odds?
“What do you charge?” Danya asked as I tried to keep track of the car.
“Hah? For what?”
“PI work, of course. What’re we talkin’ about?”
“You still lookin’ for a maverick?” At a sharp angle out the window I could see the Cruze idling at the curb, two houses up the street.
“Maybe more than ever, if that tabloid guy is still around. So, how much?”
Ma Clary went for one seventy-five an hour. I didn’t think Danya could afford Ma. On the other hand, Maude wasn’t here. By now she might be somewhere around Winnemucca, Nevada, headed east.
“Mavericks cost more than your basic run of the mill—”
“Seriously—?”
“How about sixty an hour?” Which is what Ma charged for my time, of which I got twenty-five. “And expenses. But I still don’t know what you need or what’s going on.”
“I’ll get back to you on that.”
“When do you—” She’d already hung up. Shit fire, she was a hard lady to converse with, but my mind was actually on the creep.
Out the front door, medium-fast jog up the sidewalk, and the Cruze took off, headed uphill—west.
I watched it for a moment, didn’t think I could put a bullet through the back window at that distance, then walked back to the house. On the way, I called Danya back. She needed a PI “more than ever,” but I still didn’t know why. The call went to voice mail again, which was just great.
Okay, there’s this tabloid creep nosing around two stunning girls married to each other—interracially, too, which hadn’t meant a thing for the past thirty or forty years—and me with no idea what the first girl wanted. Or the second. Which meant, in the absence of the Cruze, that I could sayonara and head down to the Green Room at the Golden Goose and snack on pretzels and beer nuts over a midmorning Moose Drool. Well-deserved, too, I might add, since I’d already seen a highly naked girl and tossed one guy against a garbage can today, and that was my daily quota for both.
The Cruze, however, was still hovering, so beer was out. Too early for beer, anyway, since it wasn’t yet noon. Then again, I didn’t know if I was being teased or hired. So far, teasing was in the lead—Danya on the phone, Shanna in the shower. If I was being hired, I still didn’t know what for, which left things pretty much up in the air, so I still didn’t have to call Ma and get her okay. But according to last summer’s media circus, I was a world-class gumshoe, and a wet slippery-looking naked girl was loose in the house, and those two facts were somehow related, so I went up the driveway, past the sound of the shower still going full blast behind a window that had been lifted six inches to vent steam, and went back inside.
More hurried snooping, trying to get a handle on things. With the sound of water as a cover, I ducked into the smaller of the two bedrooms and looked around. A computer was on top of an oak desk against a wall beneath a window. An inkjet printer was on top of a bookshelf beside it. I opened the top drawer of the desk. Stamps, stationary, a ruler, paper clips. Office stuff. Next drawer down held bank statements, phone and power bills. I found a rent receipt for nine hundred forty dollars. Bills were in the name of Danya Fuller. Fuller. I didn’t know anyone by that name. The bank statement was from First Interstate on South Virginia. I knew the place, a block or so south of Vassar Street. It wasn’t a joint account. She had a thousand and sixty-four dollars in checking. The bottom drawer of the desk held two reams of printer paper and a stapler.
I hurried into the kitchen and opened drawers, found flatware, Ziploc bags, aluminum foil, half a dozen dish towels rolled up into neat tubes, Tupperware. One drawer held the usual detritus that can’t be thrown out because it might be useful sometime in the next thirty years—stale rubber bands, nails and screws, picture hangers, pencil stubs, dried-out pens, a modest collection of matchbooks, a bent screwdriver that might have been used as a pry bar, a small rusted claw hammer purchased around the time of the Korean War.
Matchbooks were classic hot-ticket items for clues, so I took particular notice of those—half a dozen big-name Vegas casinos, a few no-name places I’d never heard of on Highway 93, one from the Pahranagai Inn in Caliente, Nevada, site of a hot springs and where a juvenile girls’ correctional facility was located.
“Find anything interesting?”
I looked up. She was wrapped in a fuzzy cream-colored towel. Pretty short one, too—one disadvantage of being tall, not that I saw it that way, but I try to see things from the viewpoint of others.
I held up a pen. “You oughta toss this one. It’s dried out.”
“Danya said you’re a private investigator.”
“Uh-huh. World-renowned.”
“You might investigate the backyard while I get dressed. See if anything looks out of place out there.”
“Okey-dokey.”
Back outside. A glance down the side of the house toward the street. No Cruze. I went scratching around the yard without a clue as to what might be a clue since I didn’t have the slightest idea what Danya or Shanna wanted. The yard didn’t look any more promising than it had half an hour ago—dead patchy grass as dry and tough as broom straw, powdery dirt, a few boards
stacked in weeds against the back fence, old doghouse, faint funky smell in the vicinity of the garage, which might be a garbage can ready to be hauled out to the curb.
I looked over the west fence into the neighbor’s backyard, same to the east and north, didn’t see anyone mowing, weeding a garden, hammocking, sunbathing nude—nothing interesting. The day was relentlessly quiet, eighty degrees. Sunshine and blue sky, a few puffy white clouds—
Shanna came out in jeans and a green short-sleeve shirt that did little to hide the curves, hair still damp, brown sandals, hot-pink polish still on her toenails. As she came closer, I refined my estimate of her height to six-one in order to keep my eyes where they wouldn’t get me in trouble—though after that business in the shower, I couldn’t tell how much it mattered. She was a hell of a sight. And married to Danya. That had taken me by surprise.
“In case you’re wondering,” she said, “she’s Danya Fuller-Hayes and I’m Shanna Hayes-Fuller. Now.”
“Bet the IRS hates you two.”
“We haven’t had to file married yet. Next April we might file ‘married filing separately.’”
“Expect an audit.” I glanced down the driveway, checking to make sure Vince wasn’t still around, then turned back to Shanna. “You two’re really married, huh?” Not that I didn’t believe her, but I hoped the question would provoke a bit more elaboration.
She held up a finger with a ring on it I hadn’t noticed earlier. Gold, tiny diamond. Not much in the way of elaboration. She looked back at the house. “Um, in there . . . that wasn’t . . .”
“No need to explain.” Or apologize, I didn’t say.
“It’s just, you should know—I’m trying really hard not to hate men, all men, since it’s like really bad karma.”
“Right.”
Not hate all men? I got a little whiff of something there. Not sure what it meant though.
Shanna looked around the yard. “So, what’d you find?”
“Look at this place. What’s to find?”
She shrugged. I was about to suggest that she phone Danya and get this employment thing settled one way or another. Maybe I didn’t want any part of it, terrific-looking girls or not. So far, for all I knew, they’d lost a dog—empty doghouse against the fence—and Ma doesn’t take missing-mutt cases, and I wouldn’t know where to begin anyway.
Shanna reached into a pocket and pulled out a torn piece of paper. “Here, read this.”
It was a note, rough masculine-looking print, barely legible.
Get $1000000 redy in smal bills by tusday and I will get him down and take him away no problum. I will fon monday and tok to you.
The amount was hard to decipher without commas. I had to count zeros. Today was Sunday. I looked at Shanna. “Where’d you get this? And when?”
“It was left in our mailbox four days ago. And, no, we don’t know who put it there or why. Get who down from where? And a million dollars? Seriously? It had to be kids. We couldn’t figure it out.”
It might be why Danya had wanted a PI, though. A maverick PI. Maybe she knew what it was about and hadn’t told her . . . wife? Okay, I’m a philistine. Her partner. Spouse. Significant Other.
“A million bucks,” I said, wrinkling my nose as an odor wafted across the yard, like a cat had died somewhere nearby.
“That’s what it says. Really, it’s ridiculous. We thought it must be kids, some sort of a stupid neighborhood prank.”
Maybe. But then why would Danya want a private eye?
“Mind if I keep this?” I asked. “I’ll keep it safe.”
“Go ahead. Anyway, we couldn’t come up with a thousand, much less a million—not that there’s any reason to.”
Couldn’t come up with a grand? At sixty dollars an hour, I was an expense these girls couldn’t afford.
I put the note in a pocket. Before I could ask anything more, something clicked in my head. I’d tossed Ignacio against a trash can at the side of the house. A not-unexpected bit of garbage smell there, which is what garbage cans are known for, so what was this miasma drifting across the yard, coming, it seemed like, from the garage? Moldering grass? What grass? The lawn was two inches of brown dry ruff. Run a mower over it and you’d raise a cloud of dust and blow a few ants into the air.
The single-bay garage had one of those ancient one-piece panel doors, held down by a padlock. No other way in.
“Got a key for the lock?” I asked, rapping on the scaly lift-up door, though I might have been able to bust it off its hinges with a modest kick. Near the door, the smell was stronger.
“Danya and I are just renting this place. We’re not using the garage. Anything in there belongs to the lady we’re renting from. Mrs. Johnson. Thelma.”
“Uh-huh. That’s not what I asked, kiddo.”
“Well, some keys are in the kitchen. Hanging on a hook by the back door. Maybe one of them will open it.”
I went back inside, found keys on a ring, came back and found the one for the padlock. As I opened it, screws pulled out of the wood and the hasp fell out. The frame was gouged where a crowbar had popped it out. The marks looked recent. Someone had carefully torn the lock out then shoved it back in place to hide what they’d done. Not good. I grabbed a handle and hauled the door up on twanging springs.
The funky smell got worse. Ten times worse. Twenty.
“Omigod,” Shanna said, taking a step back.
The interior of the garage was dark. I went in first. Shanna came in on my heels. My eyes were still adjusting to the dimness when she let out a thin shriek and stood staring up at rapper Jo-X, shirtless, eyes the color of curdled skim milk, blind. He was hanging against the back wall with a rope around the rafters and under his armpits, black tongue lolling, one nasty-looking bullet hole in his forehead, another in his chest.
And . . . funky, putrescent, having achieved in death the apt and essential condition of every gangsta rapper in the country.
And here I was, back in the thick of it.
Ma was gonna fire me. Out of a job, I was gonna end up in a crappy little trailer park in Dubuque.
Shit.
CHAPTER FOUR
“NO, NO, NO,” Shanna cried from a few feet behind me. “That . . . that just isn’t possible.”
Impossible or not, there he was: Jonnie Xenon, Jo-X, in the . . . okay, I was going to say in the flesh, but that would’ve been gross, given his degree of decomposition in that warm garage, and, of course, the feasting flies. So, there he was . . . in person. Sort of.
According to all the hip, teen magazines—which I didn’t read and thought ought to be burned, First Amendment or no, in a last-ditch effort to save what’s left of our society—Jonnie Xenon’s real name was Aaron Louden Butler. In print he was Jonnie-X, but pronunciation made it Jonnie-Z, which had then become Jo-X in print—still pronounced Jo-Z—because it worked, unlike B-Ob. He had “54” tattooed on both sides of his neck in Gothic print and on a shaved patch on the back of his head—54 being the atomic number for xenon. To his deep-thinking fans, this suggested a cool scientific bent that lent him some cachet. He had spiderwebs tattooed from the corners of his eyes to his ears. A spider in each web was actually a tiny swastika. At last count he had twenty-eight facial piercings in his eyebrows, nose, and lips. And, of course, his tongue, which was pierced by twin spikes . . . which now caught the light and glinted obscenely in the garage.
He had grungy blond hair four inches below his shoulders, wild blue eyes, thin as a whip, and could stick his spiked tongue out a measured—and reported—three and a half inches, which may have accounted for some of his popularity. Onstage, he would tear his shirt off and drive hordes of “Generation Y” girls mad with his thrice-pierced belly button, sunken chest, washboard abs, narrow hips, and unique blend of hip-hop style and toxic lyrics that gave the rest of the gangsta rapper population pause. He was a “bad boy” who gave off palpable criminal vibes, adored by some two million fans, ninety-seven percent of whom were female. By age eighteen, he was a milliona
ire. Now, at twenty-four, he was worth a reputed thirty-two million dollars—an overt and self-proclaimed user of “recreational” drugs, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, a living, breathing example of why reasonable limits should be put on free speech. You can’t shout “fire” in a movie theater, so why are you allowed to “bang yo ho like a drum roll, yo, an’ if the ho whole you gotta get down go down go, go, go, y’know?”
Un-freakin’-believable. I didn’t know why lightning hadn’t struck the diseased son of a bitch years ago.
But now it had, in the form of fast-moving hunks of lead. Two fast-moving hunks, either of which looked fatal. Now Jo-X was dead, and I figured two million fathers would be suspects in his murder. Murder, because I didn’t think Jonnie-X’s talents extended to shooting himself in the chest and the forehead then stringing himself up in rafters.
Trouble was, here I was, in the garage with him, speaking of suspects.
And Shanna.
Or so I thought, but when I turned away from Jo-X she had reached the sidewalk and was disappearing around the front of the house at a dead run, headed east, downhill.
I took off after her, tried to keep up for two blocks, then gave it up because she was pulling away. All I had on were Nikes, not sandals that were actually rocket shoes. I try to run five or six miles several times a week, fast, but I was out of my league here. Maybe that was what Ignacio had meant.
Ignacio.
Sonofabitch.
I trotted back, turned the corner at the front of the house, and Vince was in the garage, snapping pictures of Jo-X. He must’ve had a spare SD card, or a spare camera in his car.
I didn’t call out, but he heard me coming, got off a shot of me bearing down on him, then darted across the backyard. A little hop, and in a surprisingly athletic move, he put one foot on the doghouse and went over the fence like a wharf rat. But—no way was he going to escape. I was fifteen feet behind him. I put one foot on top of the doghouse, and broke through the rotten plywood, barking my left shin and slamming into the fence hard enough to crack a plank. Fuckin’ doghouse roof took a hundred forty flyweight pounds but imploded at two hundred eight.
Gumshoe on the Loose Page 4