“I bet. Anyway, I thought I’d let you know Alice phoned a while ago. She misses me, so I’m going to visit her for a few days. I’ll drive down tomorrow morning.”
Alice, Holiday’s aunt, lived in San Francisco. She was fifty-five. She let Holiday bathe with two male cousins until the day Holiday turned eleven. I was so jealous. I never had a cool aunt like that, and I had female cousins the right age, too.
“Good to know. How long you gonna be gone?”
“Four or five days, maybe a week. I’m driving down, and she said something about us going to San Luis Obispo to visit her sister, Irene, so it might be longer.”
“Safe trip, huh?”
“Yep. Thanks. I’ll let you know when I get back.”
The call ended. Everyone was out of town or about to leave. I sat there with Ignacio’s snide words drifting around in my head, mostly that crack that I was out of Shanna’s league. I hated him until it was full dark and Venus got hung up in the trees over the Sierras. No moon.
Then Venus slid below the mountains.
The night was warm. For a while I contemplated this Danya-Celine thing. Jo-X had been stinking up Danya’s—or Shanna’s—garage, but what did that mean? According to the covers of half a dozen tabloids, Celine was a “mystery woman”—an expression that sold tens of thousands of additional copies to a relatively low-IQ or easily amused market—so if Danya and Celine were one and the same, in spite of the apparent difference in their heights, then it was likely Danya had an agenda. A hidden agenda, to be precise. Might that agenda include turning out Jo-X’s lights for some unknown reason? If so, why the hell would she string him up in her garage?
Made no sense. I couldn’t fit Shanna into any of that. And if those two were in fact married, Shanna would know about the Danya-Celine connection—especially if Danya had disappeared for two or three weeks while Celine was making headlines. That would put Shanna in cahoots with Danya, “cahoots” being a word I like to use around Ma. Russell Fairchild must be fizzing like Alka-Seltzer in a glass of Pepsi about now. If—when—the media made that final connection, all hell was going to break loose and Fairchild was going to know how I felt last year, which might make him a better person, more empathetic.
The Wicked Ale was long gone, including its buzz. I wasn’t sleepy and I had things to do later that night, so I got up and hiked over to the Green Room, half a mile away.
As soon as I came through the door, O’Roarke grabbed a bottle of Pete’s Wicked Ale and had the top off, the bottle sitting in front of my favorite stool, opposite the TV.
“Nice goin’, spitfire. You’re four for four now, right?”
“Something like that. I’m beginning to lose count.” I pushed the Pete’s back at him. “Gimme a Coke.”
“Just Coke?”
“Okay, put a twist of lime in it.”
O’Roarke frowned at me. “Guy gets famous, suddenly he gets picky. It’s a bitch in this place, trying to keep up.”
“Yeah, I get that bitch thing a lot.”
He set a Coke in front of me, lime on the rim. “Bottoms up. Eleven-o’clock news in ten minutes. You wouldn’t want to miss that. You’ve gone national, baby. Sure you don’t want something stronger, like a V and V?”
“V and V?”
“Vodka and Valium.”
“You serve that here, do you?”
“We aim to please.”
A hooker by the name of Rosa came in and sat next to me. She’d known Holiday last year, knew Holiday and I had a thing going and that Holiday had never really been a hooker. Rosa was a cute little gal, twenty-three, petite, wearing the sort of cleavage-rich dress that attracts business. I didn’t complain. Rosa had been in and out of the Green Room a dozen times in the past year, working on a mortgage and car payments.
“I caught your act on the six-o’clock,” she said, then turned to O’Roarke. “Caipirinha with cachaca, Patrick.”
“Patrick,” I said to O’Roarke. “You two are on a first-name basis. That’s good. I still call you O’Roarke.”
“Unlike you, she’s a great customer. That is to say, she pays for her drinks—or someone does. On the other hand, you’ve still got a bunch of those goddamn free-drink coupons. I gave you too many of ’em last year. How about you don’t chase her off before she pays for her drink?”
“I’ve never chased Rosa away. That was Holiday, and it was last year, long time ago.”
To make his day as complete as mine, I thumbed a free-drink coupon out of my shirt pocket and slid it across the bar to him. “Got hers covered, barkeep.”
Rosa smiled. “Hey, thanks. These things cost like six bucks, which is a real rip-off.”
“De nada.”
O’Roarke gave me a cool look, then went off to whip up her drink. I turned to give Rosa the once-over. She looked terrific—the dress was sapphire blue with a plunge that ended an inch below nicely shaped breasts. Her hair was straight, black, all the way to the middle of her back. Holiday told me she got twelve hundred a night or five grand a week and was highly selective.
“How’s tricks?” I asked.
“Wow, that’s old. Bet you heard it sometime around nineteen eighteen, toward the end of the first world war.”
“Ouch. Sorry.”
“No problem. I’ve heard ’em all, every hooker joke ever told and then some.”
“Occupational hazard?”
“You got it.” O’Roarke set her drink in front of her.
“I could tell you proprietary IRS jokes,” I said. “Punch line on a few of them is when someone slits their wrists.”
“Dark, Mort. Very dark. But thanks for the drink.”
We nursed our drinks for a while—Rosa in a Victoria’s Secret dress, keeping an eye out for business opportunities—me in jeans and a polyester shirt from Target. When eleven o’clock rolled around, there was Mortimer Angel in a telephoto shot, being put in the back of Day’s cruiser, Day leaning back against the car while Ginger Haley’s voice-over explained that the “heads guy” from last year, same guy who got Senator Reinhart’s hand in a FedEx package, had been placed in custody after finding the body of bad-boy rapper Jo-X hanging in a garage belonging to the daughter of a Reno police detective by the name of Russell Fairchild.
Uh-oh.
Photos of Danya and Shanna appeared and the voice-over kept up a steady beat. Fairchild would be beside himself. Even at this late hour, the RPD squad room would be a termites’ nest of activity. Phones would be ringing.
Speaking of phones, mine lit up and played “Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett, a ringtone I’d put on the phone right before leaving home, hoping for an occasion just like this. I let it play for a while, until Rosa stared at me and said, “You’re either seventy years old or twelve.”
I swiped the phone. “Yo.”
“Jesus Christ, Angel. You still ain’t heard from Danya? She hasn’t called or nothin’?” Fairchild was bordering on frantic. On TV, a reporter was in front of Jo-X’s Las Vegas mansion, a place worth five or six million bucks, one of the larger houses on the Las Lomas Golf Course with a view of the par-five fourteenth green.
“Nope.”
“Sonofabitch.”
He hung up.
“‘Yo’ and ‘nope,’” Rosa said, looking at me as she stirred her Caipirinha with a tiny red straw.
“It’s all about pithy conversation, Sweetheart. Communicate swiftly, waste no effort, get on with life.”
She smiled. “Pithy.”
“Try it.”
“You, me, a room upstairs?”
“Jeez, I thought you were selective.”
“I am. So . . . upstairs?”
“Only if it’s free and Holiday okays it.”
“Well . . . that didn’t work. Screw your pithy.”
Two ten a.m., Monday morning. I eased down Elmcrest in the Toyota, checking cars parked on the street—anything with a view of the house. Six possibles, five if cops don’t use Zapinos for stakeouts. Russ hadn’t ca
lled, so maybe he’d come through and cleared them out. The nearest streetlight was two hundred feet away, too dark to see much. Not much I could do except stroll back and hit the interior of the cars with a penlight. If I came across a nest of cops, I would say I was looking for my girlfriend. If that didn’t work, Russ would have to bail me out. Pretty good test of our new arrangement, if it came to that.
No cops, so I trotted up the driveway in dark clothing and into the backyard. The garage door was closed, yellow crime scene tape glowing eerily in the night. Same for the back door of the house. But all I wanted was the drainpipe, which wasn’t going to be removed in the recommended Home Depot fashion.
Wearing gloves, I grabbed the sonofabitch. It was forty years old, thin sheet metal. I yanked it off the wall, all eight feet of it, stomped it in the middle, folded it, hustled it out to my car, tossed it in the backseat, got in, and took off. No dark sedans swung out behind me with lights and siren, no helicopters, no SWAT team.
Good enough.
Tomorrow there would be an all-points bulletin, a BOLO, for a missing drainpipe.
Back home, I emptied the pipe—everything was still there—then I mashed the pipe flat, folded it into a two-foot wad of scrap covered by scaly bile-green paint, drove it across town to a dark neighborhood, and left it in a weed-enhanced ditch. I stuffed the gloves coated with bits of green paint in a trash can outside an all-night convenience store and went home.
Maude Clary called at eight ten the next morning from somewhere in the mountains of Colorado, west of Denver.
“Jesus, Mort!”
I tried to open my eyes. The left one finally flipped open, but the right one was glued shut. “Yeah? Who’s this?”
“Jo-X? You found Jo-X?”
“What can I tell you? I don’t half try. It’s not a teachable skill, so don’t ask.” Finally, my right eye popped open, and the world was three dimensional again but still blurry.
“The train stops in Denver, boyo. It’s the nearest place with a decent airport. I’m comin’ home.”
“No you’re not.”
“I’m not?”
“I’ve got it under control. You’ve got a kid to visit. Grandkids, too. I’ll bet you’ve even got gifts for the precious little ones.”
“They’re not so little and not so precious, but of course I’ve got gifts. I’m their grandma. I’m duty-bound.”
“So, stay. Go. Have fun. Relax.”
“You’ve got it under control? You? Make me laugh before my first cigarette in the morning an’ I’ll collapse a lung.”
“This was just a hiccup. Anyway, Jo-X is dead. Been dead five or six days, so it’s not as if you could resuscitate him. No one’s that good at CPR. So, stay. Have fun.”
Silence.
I sat up, put my feet over the side of the bed, blinked at the morning glow behind the curtains. “You still there?”
“For hell’s sake, Mort . . .”
“Anything else I can do for you, Ma?”
“Yeah. Long as you’re on a roll, where’s that girl—Danya? They say she’s missing, too. And Shanna someone.”
“I’m workin’ on that.”
“Don’t.”
“Okay, then, I won’t.”
More disbelieving silence. Then: “They didn’t arrest you?”
“Nope. Just like last summer, all I do is find ’em. After that it’s up to them to figure things out. They sometimes don’t, which you and I both know is a good thing.”
“You didn’t say anything about all this when I phoned you last night.”
“I didn’t want to ruin your trip. Now I want you to keep going east and have yourself a mighty fine time.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
No response needed, so I waited. Sometimes it’s better to let it come to you.
“Anyway, are you okay, Mort?”
“Never better. Slept like a baby last night.” Except when I tore that drainpipe off the wall, which was sort of fun. Reminded me of something I did when I was fourteen. I might tell her about it when she got back home, but now was not the time.
“Well . . . okay, then. Now stay out of it, okay?”
“Fairchild might have a few more questions for me, but I’ll do my best.” I figured I was safe with the lies of omission now that she was a thousand miles away.
“I’ll give some thought about firing you while I’m away. I’ll let you know when I get back.”
“That’s my girl, always on the job.”
We hung up. I stood, stretched, didn’t feel like hitting the day yet, since I’d been up late, so I went back to bed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I FINALLY ROLLED out of bed at ten twenty, feeling pretty good after last night’s successful clandestine operation. But getting up in the morning is like turning on a computer. Hit the switch and it takes a while to boot up, load memory, move the cobwebs out, get the cursor blinking.
So—coffee first.
Then the morning paper, which I thought would be a hoot.
And there was Reno’s very own Mortimer Angel, PI, above the fold on the front page, in full stride, headed for the camera with a lethal gleam in his eye. Ignacio’s snapshot. And a nice story—not particularly accurate and missing a lot of critical information—but it had the basics down reasonably well: Mortimer Angel, age forty-two, finding gangsta rapper Jo-X strung up in the garage of the twenty-two-year-old daughter of Reno police detective Russell Fairchild. The New York Times would have the picture. And Le Monde in France, Der Spiegel in Germany, and a paper somewhere in, say, the middle of Colorado for Ma’s amusement. Since I may have left out a few details earlier that morning, I expected a call back at any time.
And I figured Ignacio was good for at least a quarter mil after selling those pictures, so my lawsuit was looking quite a bit better now.
Once the coffee took hold, I got a good look at the stuff from the drainpipe. “Celine” was written on the back of the flash drive in a somewhat flowery style. I fired up my computer and stuck the drive in, waited for it to be recognized, then found that it contained two video files. The first was short and shaky, no sound. A time stamp gave the date, which was nine days ago. In a desert field, a helicopter landed not far from a big industrial shed, blowing up clouds of dust. There was a sharp break in the video, then a slender blond girl was walking away from the camera, headed toward the helicopter, dressed in white shorts and a yellow halter. A man in a flight suit walked beside her, several inches taller. The video ended. I started up the second clip. The time stamp showed that it was the following day. In it, Shanna was indoors, at what looked like a restaurant table, wearing the same yellow halter top as in the first clip. A big plate-glass window was beside her with a view of dry gravel in front of the place and a fifty-yard stretch of deserted two-lane highway. She was in profile, staring at something outside. Daylight glare had darkened her features, but I had no doubt that it was Shanna—blond hair with the same pink streak, same lips and eyes, same extraordinary figure. The video bounced around as the camera approached. She looked up with an empty, distant expression as a menu was put in front of her, then the clip ended abruptly.
Shanna.
Alone at a table in what looked like a roadside restaurant or café.
I didn’t know what to make of it. Was the name on the flash drive supposed to mean lily-white Shanna was ebony-skinned Celine? Maybe it was body paint. How good was the best body paint these days? Good enough to fool a nation of TV viewers? Maybe. I’d read the book Black Like Me years ago in a college sociology class, but the country had moved on and this was an entirely different era. No comparison.
I played both clips again but couldn’t make anything more out of them. They had no sound, so that didn’t help.
I watched the café video again, looking at the surroundings. The table had the kind of napkin holder you’d see in a small café or roadside diner. The tablecloth was cheap checkered plastic. A ceramic coffee cup was in front of her, still upside down, f
latware wrapped in a napkin, salt and pepper shakers off to one side. Across the highway the land looked like flat desert scrub, the day hot and bright, low mountains miles away.
Collectively, the matchbook covers I’d seen at the girls’ house had a theme that sang southern Nevada—Las Vegas, Hiko, Caliente, Searchlight, Indian Springs, a few no-name places I’d never heard of. Most of them had addresses on US 93 or 95. One was for a tourist trap on the strangely named Extraterrestrial Highway, State Route 375 between Rachel and Crystal Springs.
But, Caliente. I had matchbooks for the Double Down Motel and the Pahranagai Inn, and a Pahranagai room receipt in the name of Nathan Williams.
The SD card I’d pulled from Ignacio’s camera held pictures of the girls’ house, yard, and inside the house, nothing else.
So—flash drive, a note demanding a million bucks, a motel receipt, matchbook covers. Good stuff, illegally removed from a crime scene that was getting national attention, and I had been at said crime scene, a PI who also got national attention. I thought Police Chief Menteer, Russell’s boss, might eventually think to get a warrant to search my place. Russ probably couldn’t block something like that. He might not even try, so I put everything in a paper bag and drove over to Velma’s place, which took a while due to my fame and the media wolves—three vans had camped out on the street, hoping for a shot of North America’s premier finder of missing famous people who turn up dead. I’ve gotten better at shaking the media, but it still requires effort and finesse. Turns out it’s easier to lose them on foot, down one-way streets and alleyways, but today, after twenty minutes of amusing and provocative driving, I was free.
Velma’s house backs up to my old place on Ralston Street. I used to go through or over the fence to get there, but this time I parked off the street, on a driveway that runs beside her house, and knocked on her back door.
Velma Knapp is four foot ten, eighty-six years old, a terror for juicy gossip, especially when the conversation gets anywhere near the possibility that I might be getting laid. As a result, she likes Holiday a lot, not that she gets details. She’s utterly reliable when I have to duck the media and hide stuff from the police. Last summer she was delighted that I was having an affair—which I wasn’t—with a stunningly beautiful woman thirty-four years old, Kayla, ducking her husband—who, thankfully, didn’t exist—and the two of us were using the fence between Velma’s property and mine as an escape route to avoid trouble—which was true, but not the kind of trouble Velma was rooting for. From time to time, even though I’ve moved, I mow her lawn and do odd chores and repairs around her place since she’s been widowed for fourteen years.
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