Gumshoe on the Loose

by Rob Leininger

  “Nope. That was Ma.”

  She stared at me. “Let me know when you wake up.”

  Twelve thirty-five p.m. Temperature 105 degrees and creeping upward.

  The Caddy was a hardtop, a good solid ride with tinted windows, leather seats, navigation system, intermittent wipers. The lockbox was in the trunk. I had on the white wig, matching moustache, golfer’s hat, sunglasses. Lucy wore sunglasses so big they made her look like an insect.

  “And look,” I said. “It even has air-conditioning.”

  “Wowie. Imagine that. I liked the Mustang.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Won’t be much point in me taking off my top in this thing. It doesn’t even have a sunroof.” She was wearing her form-fitting pink tank top from Tonopah, complete with bumps. Latex-thin stretchy cotton was a hell of a good invention.

  “Really?” I said. “That’s too bad.”

  She gave me a smug look. “Thank you.”

  We cruised by Jo-X’s Vegas mansion. The circus had been downgraded to a carnival. One cop car, one forensics van, and four carloads of anguished girls barely old enough to drive, Jo-X rap issuing from three of the cars, polluting the neighborhood. Crime scene tape was still strung up. It had only been five days since I’d found Jo-X and sent a million teenage souls into a death spiral of mourning, sort of like Kennedy’s assassination, which, to keep the record straight, was fourteen years before I was born.

  Five days? It felt like two very long weeks.

  I pulled over a quarter mile away, swapped the white wig for an unkempt brown one so I could dump the itchy moustache.

  “Now what?” Lucy said.

  “You drive. I’m gonna get Fairchild on the horn.”

  She gawked at me. “On the horn? Seriously?”

  “Before your day, kiddo.”

  “You, on the other hand, used a ‘horn’ before they had rotary dial and Bakelite phones.”

  “You’re fired, smart-ass.”

  She smiled. “You didn’t know they used to make phones out of Bakelite, did you?”

  “Tell me why it matters.”

  “It matters because I know a ton of cool stuff so you can’t fire me. That and I’m really good in a Jacuzzi.”

  “Excellent points both. Now are you gonna drive this thing or do I have to fire you?”

  We switched places.

  “Where to?” she asked, fastening her seat belt.

  “Just drive. Jo-X rap is coming through the windows. Lyrics like that will rot your brain stem.”

  I downloaded a new ringtone while we headed back north, then speed-dialed Fairchild. He picked up on the second ring.

  “Yeah?”

  “Bit terse on the howdy there, Russ,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Cali-fuckin’-ente.”

  “You’re breaking up, Russ. When we’re back in Reno, I’ll tell you what it sounded like you just said. It’ll crack you up.”

  “What the hell do you want, Angel?”

  “That lady, Arlene, Arlene’s Diner, what’d you find out?”

  “I put Day on it. That would be your buddy Officer Day. Ask him. You still got his number?”

  “I keep it in a special place in my wallet.”

  Lucy looked over at me, then back at the road, lips lifting in a little smile.

  “Call Day. I’m busy.” Russ ended our horn session the same way Ma did that morning.

  “What’s in a special place in your wallet?” Lucy asked.

  “Officer Day’s phone number. Well, numbers.”

  “I sure hope Officer Day is a woman.”

  “I haven’t told you about Day yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, then, you’re in for a real treat.”

  “Why? She pretty?”

  “You’ll have to tell me when you two meet. Now shush.” I got Day on the first ring, which was great. Now I had two RPD cops in my back pocket. “Officer Day. How’s your day?”

  “Got any idea how many times I’ve heard that dumbass line, Angel?”

  “Nope. I’ll puzzle it out later, get back to you on that. So, tell me about Arlene of Arlene’s Diner.”

  Five seconds of dead air. Then, “I can’t talk here. I’ll call you back.” My phone went dead.

  “Call back,” I told Lucy.

  “Caught her at a bad time?”

  “With Day, there’s never a good time.”

  “That makes her sound like something of a bitch, Mort.”

  “Right. Keep your eyes on the road, woman.”

  My phone’s new ringtone fired up. I let it play for twenty glorious seconds.

  Ten seconds in, Lucy stared at me. “What on earth is that?”

  “‘Purple People Eater,’ by Sheb Wooley.”

  “Wow. When did that come out?”

  “Nineteen fifty-eight.”

  “People must’ve been totally schizo back then.”

  “Here’s a thought. When was your father born?”

  “Well, poop and a half. Nineteen fifty-seven.”

  “Right. Eisenhower was president. Ike founded the CIA. I know cool stuff, too. Now shush.” I answered the phone. “Sorry about the delay, Officer. Had a little ringtone issue. So what’s the poop on Arlene?”

  Lucy looked at me and mouthed, “Poop?”

  “Arlene Faye Hicks,” Day said. “Fifty-nine. Got a son thirty-four years old, Buddie Hicks. Buddie with an ‘ie,’ not ‘y’, no middle name. She owns the diner, motel, too—been there going on fifteen years. Place made just over seventeen thousand last year, diner and motel combined. She didn’t pay a nickel in federal taxes, income that low. Sounds like a high-end goddamn place out there, Angel.”

  “You should go there on vacation, check out the fishing and boating. What about her son? He runs a backhoe.”

  “Buddie’s Excavating. Guy made thirty-one thou last year, paid his taxes. No kind of a police record. Her either. They’ve got the same address so the kid’s still living with his mama.”

  “They own any other property?”

  “Didn’t find any. She’s driving a 2005 Impala worth about a buck thirty-nine. She’s got a storage unit in North Vegas. T&T Storage. Unit seventy-two. Sixty-five bucks a month.”

  “TNT, like the explosive? Classy.”

  “You could drop by, tell ’em you don’t like the name.”

  “Oh, but I do like it.”

  “I’m glad. Makes this a damn good week. What else you want to know, Angel? Checking out this lady and her kid was as boring as watching bat shit pellets harden in the sun.”

  “Not an image I would’ve come up with.”

  “So you’re unimaginative. You should read more. If that’s all, I gotta get back in the station, keep Reno’s streets safe.”

  “A sense of humor. Who woulda thunk—” The line went dead. People hang up on me a lot. Don’t know why.

  “Totally weird conversation,” Lucy said.

  “You should’ve heard the part about bat shit pellets drying in the sun.”

  “Bat shit pellets? Seriously?”

  “That’s Officer Day. We have an interesting relationship.”

  “Still do? I wouldn’t want to get in the middle of anything. If, you know, you’ve got something goin’ on with her.”

  “Trust me, you don’t have to worry about that.”

  “She find out anything good?”

  “T&T Storage, North Vegas. Arlene’s renting a unit there, number seventy-two, sixty-five bucks a month. Which is where we’re headed, kiddo. And her full name is Arlene Faye Hicks.”

  “That’s all your Officer Day got? Arlene’s not wanted by the police or anything?”

  “Nope. But that Impala she’s got parked behind the diner is a 2005 model. How about that?”

  “Talk about a sucky car . . . and your new ringtone.”

  “Give it time. It’ll grow on you.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  I got
into Google Maps, typed in T&T Storage, got a map and an address, got Lucy aimed in the right direction on I-15.

  “‘Purple People Eater,’” she said.

  “I wasn’t born yet, but Mom says those were America’s best years. After Korea, before Vietnam. American Graffiti years, if you saw the movie. Of course, the Soviets had hydrogen bombs, so there’s that. She described hiding under her desk at school. They taught you how to duck and cover, kiss your ass good-bye.”

  “A one-eyed, one-horned . . . what?”

  “Flying purple people eater.”

  “People eater. That’s a little bit gross, actually.”

  “In fact, it’s funny and tame. You want gross, listen to Jo-X’s lyrics. That’s like scuba diving in a backed-up sewer.”

  She made a face. “I get your point, and that’s an image I’ll spend the next month trying to forget. So, here we are, headed off to check out a storage unit. That’s exciting.”

  “Arlene made all of seventeen thousand dollars last year. She pays nearly eight hundred for storage. That’s a pretty good percentage of net. I wonder what she’s got worth storing for eight hundred a year.”

  “Maybe it’s where she keeps her gold bars.”

  “Yeah, that’d be my guess.”

  T&T Storage was a low-rent place behind a rusting chain-link fence topped with a languid coil of rusting razor wire. A pushbutton entry pad would roll a gate open for vehicles. The office comprised part of the perimeter fence. A door gave access to the office, and a door inside the office gave access to the yard. The office windows looked like LA smog had been concentrated, compressed, and baked into translucent plates.

  We went in. I kept sunglasses on, but Lucy settled hers on top of her head.

  A guy in his forties was behind a gouged countertop with a hoagie in one hand, a Danielle Steel paperback novel, Magic, in the other. Half a dozen tottering stacks of romance novels sat on a table beside him, ninety or a hundred novels. A rackety air conditioner had taken the temperature down to the mid-eighties. The hoagie was leaking vinegar and oil onto his T-shirt. All in all a fine tableau. The guy had four or more chins. Easy to lose count. His gut flowed and sagged around him, much of it in his lap, but five hundred pounds will do that.

  Five hundred.

  Easy.

  “Hi, there,” Lucy said to him. “What’s your name?”

  Prettiest girl who’d spoken to him in twenty years. He stared at her with a bit of lettuce hanging out of his mouth, made him look like a cow that had paused while grazing.

  “Stan.”

  “Well, Stan. My dad here wants me to get one of those storage shed thingies, so whatcha got?”

  Dad? Shit. We’d talked it over, how to do this. If it was a guy, she would do the talking. If a woman, I’d take over. That was as far as we’d taken it. She hadn’t said anything about me being billed as her father. But, of course, it worked since she was in shorts, that skintight tank top, looked about nineteen, and I had “good-old-dad” written all over me.

  Pinned down by gravity, Stan struggled to his feet. It took him half a minute to get in position behind the counter. “What size unit you lookin’ for?” His eyes lingered on her chest for five seconds before finally getting up to her face.

  A partly open door to a back room showed an unmade bed, clothes on the floor, a kitchen counter buried beneath fast-food containers. A popcorn and dirty-clothes smell hung in the air.

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said. “How ’bout you show us around? I need to see how big they are to decide.”

  In spite of the little she was wearing, movement—showing us around—evidently didn’t appeal to Stan. Maybe his forklift was parked too far away. Or the hundred-seven-degree outside temperature was daunting. He glanced at a wall-sized diagram of T&T’s facility, covered by a yellowing sheet of Plexiglas. Units were marked up with grease-pencil.

  He said, “You kin go have a look around. Available units are open, so check ’em out. Bay six is small, thirty-five a month. Fifty-one is a medium, fifty bucks. Seventy is large, sixty-five a month. If you want to store an RV, it depends on size.”

  “Yeah? How much for an eighty-foot yacht?”

  He gaped at her.

  “Kidding, Stan.” She tittered like a girl I sat next to in first-year algebra, freshman year. Stan grinned, eating it up.

  He gave us a sheet with a map of T&T’s yard on it, put Xs on the units he’d mentioned, and pointed at the door to the yard. “Out thataway. Have yourselves a ball.”

  We went outside. Stan had a golf cart parked outside the door. It had a substantial frame, beefed-up suspension. Lucy gave it a little pat as we went by. “Hi, ho, Silver,” she said quietly.

  Without sunglasses, two minutes in the yard would have liquefied my retinas. The place was doubling as a blast furnace, all one and a half acres. No shade, dark asphalt, glare off steel-sheet doors.

  “Holy cow,” Lucy said. “Must be a hundred fifty out here. You oughta at least take off your shirt.”

  “You, too. At least.”

  “Yeah, right. In case you hadn’t noticed, Stan has cameras all over and a monitor in his office to keep an eye on the place.”

  “You could probably get yourself a nice discount.”

  “That would be so worth it, Daddy.”

  “Which reminds me. Dad?”

  “Worked, didn’t it? So where is this unit of Arlene’s?”

  I checked Stan’s map. “Down this way. Number seventy-two. Look for security cameras. I’ll mark them on the map.”

  “Security cameras?”

  “They could be a problem. Later.”

  “Groovy.”

  Unit seventy-two was twelve feet from seventy. Seventy was marked on the map as a large unit, available. I tested the handle before grabbing it. Good thing. Best guess, it was running about two hundred ninety degrees.

  “Shirt,” Lucy said.

  “Come again?”

  “Take off your shirt, use that.”

  “You just want me out of my shirt.”

  “You’re being difficult because you want me out of mine.”

  So I took off my shirt, folded it, used it to lift the articulating door to unit seventy since Stan was probably watching. We went in for show, looked around.

  “I totally love it,” Lucy said. “I could like live in here.”

  Ten by twenty-four feet, dust on the floor, ten-foot ceiling, interior running a hundred forty degrees. Lots of things wouldn’t survive a summer in there.

  Back outside.

  “Now what?” Lucy said.

  “Have you noticed that the padlocks on the sheds are all the same?”

  “Uh-huh. So?”

  “So, I’ll bet you fifty bucks he won’t allow any other kind of lock on a door and that he sells ’em in his office.”

  “Why? You want one?”

  “Two of ’em, yeah. Now that I’ve seen ’em.”

  “Don’t know why. But that fifty-dollar bet reminds me I still owe you fifty for when that girl ended up in Caliente.”

  “You can pay me later. But getting back to the locks, which are the issue here—they look pretty goddamn husky.”

  “Means you’re thinking of getting into Arlene’s unit, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But probably not with Stanley watching, so tell me we’re coming back tonight.”

  “We’re coming back tonight.”

  “Groovy.”

  We went through T&T’s yard, noting the placement of cameras, checked the small and medium units for show, looked at the chain-link fence and the desert scrub beyond it, then I put on my shirt as we walked back to the office.

  “See anything ya like?” Stan asked.

  “Still thinking about it,” Lucy said. “But probably.”

  “You sell locks here?” I asked.

  “Sure do.” He set one on the counter. “Only padlock I allow in the place. This one’s one secure son of a gun, lemme tell you. I haven’t never had a
nyone break into a unit.”

  “That’s a double negative,” Lucy said, elbows leaning on the counter. “So you’ve had break-ins in the past, right?”

  “Huh? No. I just said—”

  “Don’t mind her,” I told him. “She’s an English Nazi, thinks she’s gonna be a lawyer. Prosecutor. I’ll buy two locks.”

  “Two?”

  “Got a backyard fence that could use one.”

  “Hell of a lock for a backyard. So, which unit you want?”

  “We’re leaning toward a medium. Have to get back to you on that, though. For now, I’ll just take the two locks.”

  He shrugged. I paid fifteen dollars each for the locks, then Lucy and I went back to the Caddy.

  She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. “English Nazi. I like it.” She got behind the wheel again. “Where to now?”

  “Home Depot. I saw one a few miles back, where we passed a Target, Walmart, Best Buy.”

  “Home Depot. That’s like my all-time favorite store.”

  “Ever been in one?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, you’re in for a treat. Table saws, plumbing supplies, tile flooring, pressure-treated lumber, cordless drills.”

  “Perfect. My idea of heaven.”

  We went in and I took her to the tool department. I went straight to the biggest bolt cutters they had, ones with three-foot handles. I picked up a Klein, hundred forty bucks, and tried to cut one of the locks I’d bought at Stan’s. They made a fair dent in the locking bar, then stalled. Lucy followed me to the pipe department. I found two three-foot lengths of iron pipe, slid them over the handles of the cutter to give me four-foot handles, gave it a try, grunted like a guy trying to lift the front end of a ’47 Chevy to impress his girl, turned my face red, and that fuckin’ lock finally gave up.

  “Wow,” Lucy said. “I could use a lock like that on my chastity belt.”

  I gave her a look. “Little late for that, Sugar Plum.”

  She hooked an arm through mine. “Now what?”

  “Now we run around town, buy more stuff.”

  I bought the bolt cutters and the iron pipe, paid cash to keep it off my credit card since the cutters could be misconstrued to be a burglary tool.

  Behind the wheel of the Caddy, Lucy said, “Okay, more stuff to buy. Where to?”

  I pointed across a busy four-lane street. “Walmart, then back to air-conditioning, a shower, Jacuzzi, maybe catch a little nap.”