“Morning, Detective,” I said.
Russell stared at me. “Nice wig. I could use one like that at our next Halloween party at RPD.” He leaked smoke as Lucy came up beside me. “Miss Lucy,” he said, giving her a nod and a brief appraising look. “By the way, what’s your last name?”
I’d asked him to check on her birthday, so his question was a bit of misdirection for which I would have to thank him later.
Her eyes narrowed. “What’s it to you?”
“Just wondering.”
“You’re kinda nosy.”
“Sorry about that. I do it for a living.” He turned to me. “Funny, you two showin’ up here. What’s the story?”
“No-o-osy,” Lucy said.
I put a hand on her shoulder. “Take it easy, kiddo. Detective Fairchild here more or less qualifies as a friend.”
“More or less?” Russ said.
“A friend?” Lucy said. “Seriously?”
I was thinking about distributing Valium to get things under control when Danya and Shanna came out of unit nine in wigs, hats, sunglasses, and hot-weather clothing that revealed enough skin to put a father into cardiac arrest. Perfect. Southern Nevada didn’t have that much Valium so I took a step back to let nature take its course.
Danya shook her head in disbelief when she saw the three of us standing there. She and Shanna drifted over.
“How about some breakfast and a powwow, everyone?” I said before Danya could start in on us.
“Powwow?” she said. “You gotta be kidding.” She turned to her father. “I thought you were gonna get a different motel, leave us alone.”
“I am leaving you alone.”
“Yeah, right. There’s a motel the other end of town.”
“So I’ll go. Today.” He turned to me. “Breakfast where?”
“Wherever the locals feed. That’s always best.”
We cruised the main drag and ended up at Dottie’s Kitchen. We went in three cars, Cadillac, Focus, Russ in a dark blue Ford Explorer three years old.
The breakfast crowd at Dottie’s was thinning out. We found a booth away from the remaining customers, Danya and Shanna in one side, Lucy and I facing them, Russell in a chair at the end.
Our waitress was in her forties with big hair, a plastic stick-on smile, five menus. She took drink orders and left.
“My treat,” I said. “Order up.”
After a while, Big-Hair took our orders, left again.
“So, Dad,” Danya said, “you said he’s unprofessional and a maverick and you don’t like him, so what the hell is he doing here?”
“Nice,” Lucy said.
Russ shrugged. “He’s got other qualities I’m finding useful, in addition to the two you just mentioned.”
“Perfect.” Danya looked at me with her usual hint of venom. “So go ahead and powwow, Mr. Useful.”
I pulled out my cell phone. “Got something to show you,” I said to Russ.
“Oh, no. No!” Danya yelped.
“Got a problem with this?” I asked her. “If so, why?”
“What is it?” Russell said.
Danya looked down at her hands. “It’s . . . just . . . shit.” She shot me a lethal j’accuse look, then slumped back in the booth. “Go ahead. Whatever. I give up.”
I showed Russ the two Shanna videos. Twice each.
He looked over at his daughter and his . . . daughter-in-law. “What’s that all about? Where was that taken? Who took it?”
“Someone at this table is the fabled Celine,” I said.
Russ stared at Danya. “How could you?”
“I couldn’t. Did you actually look at that video, Dad?”
Shanna said, “I’m Celine. I mean, I was.” She looked at me. “And thanks so much for bringing this up, Mortimer.”
“Da nada. And it’s Mort. We’ve got a hell of a problem, ladies. You two in particular. It isn’t going to go away until it’s dealt with, so let’s deal with it.”
Russ stared at Shanna. “You’re Celine? The one with Xenon? The missing girl everyone’s talking about?”
“I was. For almost three weeks.”
“Why? I mean how? I mean . . .” He stared at me. “You thought it was Danya.”
“I goofed. It was her bride.”
Lucy laughed softly.
Danya shot her a look. “We’re married. So what? Maybe you could act like you’re at least fourteen.” She used the same look on me. “And ‘bride’? You could clean up your act, too.”
“Sorry. Groom didn’t seem to fit. But if you want to take a stab at it, be my guest.”
“Je-sus, you’re . . . you’re . . .”
“Let’s back up,” Russ said quickly. “Who took those videos you just showed me?”
So, with Shanna butting in from time to time, the two of us told him about Arlene, Arlene’s Diner, Shanna’s night at Xenon’s hideaway, and the super-gluing of the rapper appendage.
He stared at Shanna in wonder. “You super-glued his . . . his . . . but why?”
I knew why. I leaned closer, wanting to hear this. She wasn’t going to put Josie into this, so what was the lie this time?
“Because,” Shanna said, “he never said anything about sex before he got me up there. Then that’s what it turned into, and it was hard to get him to back off, take no for an answer.”
“But he did,” Russ said. “Back off, I mean.”
“Eventually. He was drinking and I helped that along. I got him really drunk, but before that, it was like attempted rape. It’s a good thing I’m strong. After a while he finally passed out, but I was still super pissed off.”
“Man, I guess so.” He shook his head. “So you’re the one who did that. Jesus. This’s getting complicated. Who else knows you did it?”
“Far as I know, everyone at this table, no one else. I figure he got separated from himself at some doctor’s place, but I doubt he’d tell his doctor who glued the dork to the dork.”
Lucy laughed. “Perfect.”
Separated from himself. I would have to remember that if the situation ever came up again.
“You went up there with him,” Russ said. “Why would you even risk doing that?”
Shanna shrugged. “Everyone thought he had a place, a secret hideout. If he did, I wanted to see it, that’s all. He never said anything about sex. I told him up front that wasn’t gonna happen, then he comes onto me like a freaking maniac.”
“So, now you’re caught up, Russ,” I said. “The issue now is, what’re we gonna do about all this?” I looked at the two girls. “Jonnie-X was in your garage. It’s become public knowledge that you two are married, although the world at large doesn’t know you were Celine, Shanna. You’re both wanted for questioning. Your father and father-in-law is a cop.” I couldn’t resist that. No way. I think I caught Lucy’s chuckle with an elbow right before it leaked out.
The father-in-law thing went by without comment. What I’d laid out was serious, and it was evident that no one had a ready solution to put out there. In fact, it wasn’t easy, in thirty words or less, to say exactly what the problem was.
“Your thoughts, Russ,” I said.
He let out a breath, as if he’d been holding it for the past twenty minutes, then he gave Shanna a piercing look, as cops do. “Why? Why were you Celine?”
Right to the crux of the matter. It wasn’t my place to bring Josie into it, tell Russ that one of the world’s greatest lowlifes had raped his youngest daughter. That was up to Danya. Or Josie. I gave her a silent questioning look. One word and Russ would turn into Vesuvius, but how could Danya explain Shanna’s being Celine without bringing Josie’s rape into it?
I was about to find out.
“For the money,” Danya said. She gave me a rock-hard look that warned me to keep my mouth shut or die.
“What money?” Russ said.
Shanna took up the lie. “Money for school and like a decent car since mine is old and always breaking down. Jonnie gave me twenty thousan
d dollars a concert, and a thousand a day. Just to go places and be seen with him and be up there onstage to . . . to wear what I wore and show myself off.”
“Twenty thousand . . .” Russ stared at her. But he shook it off quickly and said, “Then the guy ends up in your garage with bullet holes in him. How’d that happen?”
“That’s the totally insane part,” Danya said. “We don’t know a thing about it, who put him there or why.”
That “why” couldn’t go unchallenged. It left too much up in the air. Time to bring more into it, now that the Josie factor had been sidelined. “There was a sort of weird blackmail note, Russ.”
“A note? Blackmail?” His head whipped between Danya and me. “What for?”
For an instant, she gave me a cold stare, then she shrugged and slumped in the booth. The note was their out. The note made her and Shanna innocent. “It was left in our mailbox,” she said. “Some idiot demanded a million dollars.”
I got a Xerox copy of the note out of my wallet, handed it to Russ. He read it twice and I read it again: 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.
Russ set the note on the table. “Mind if I keep this?” he asked me.
“All yours. The original is in Reno if you need it.” I got out my cell phone and took a picture of the note. My copy.
“At first we thought it was a joke,” Danya said. “The kind of stupid thing kids do. But then I thought it might not be a joke since Shanna was Celine, or had been. By then she’d left Jo-X, but it would be a big huge deal if it got out. The note didn’t make sense. We didn’t know Jo-X was in our garage, but Shanna had super-glued him. Maybe he told someone. But ‘get him down, take him away’? And a million dollars? That was just crazy. So I kind of hired Mortimer—Mort—to look into it since”—she gave her father an accusing look—“you said he’s a maverick.”
“So my involvement is your fault, Russ,” I said.
Danya glared at me. “But I never really hired you. I just told you to phone me so we could talk.”
“Then you hired me,” I said to Russ, “since that maverick thing appealed to you.”
“Big mistake, Dad,” Danya said.
“Or not,” Lucy spoke up. “Mort’s the only one who’s been putting things together. All you two have been doing is hiding out and playing house in that motel room.”
“And,” I said, loud enough to yank everyone’s attention away from Lucy’s comment, “we have a reporter for Celebrity News running around with about eighty percent of the story ready to go, so the shit’s gonna hit the fan sometime soon. When it hits, the splatter is gonna be something else, kids.”
Danya made a face. Probably didn’t like the image.
“How soon, you think?” Russ asked.
“Don’t know. Right now he’s sitting on it, but if he gets a whiff of anyone else on it, it’ll probably be in the next issue or a special edition.” I looked at Shanna. “He knows you’re Celine. He found that out the first two weeks. He knows Jo-X was found in Celine’s garage, and he’s got pictures. There’s not much more to this story, so I doubt he’ll put it off much longer. All in all, the longer you girls stay hidden, the more guilty it makes you look.”
“Keeping out of the public’s eye doesn’t make us guilty, it’s just common-freakin’-sense,” Danya said.
“Right. Tell that to John Deere out in Iowa.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what anyone thinks in Iowa.”
“Well put, but”—I turned to Russ—“you’re the father, but also the cop, and I think a professional opinion is warranted. Should they turn themselves in?”
He didn’t jump to answer that one. He thought about it for a while, then sighed, letting out enough hot air to lift a dirigible. “Probably not, at least not right now. We need to chew on this a while longer. I know where they are. If it comes to that, I’ll take the heat. I can say I told ’em to keep out of sight—not as a cop, but as a father who is a cop.”
“Which could end your career,” I said.
He shrugged. “Maybe I’ll be a private eye, like you.”
Good one, Russ. I heard Spade and Hammer yucking it up in the next booth. “Something I’d like to see,” I said.
“You got any idea how many cops end up as PIs?”
“I’ll have to get back to you on that. And if your advice for Danya, Shanna, and ‘Celine’ is to stay out of sight, fine, I’m on board. But to drag all this back to the issue we’re still tap-dancing around, guess what, folks?—somebody killed Jo-X.”
That shut down the conversation for several minutes.
Finally our food arrived and we tucked into it. That delayed the conversation another ten minutes, but I could feel the cams and wheels working in everyone’s head. Except mine. I was tired of it. Time to let someone else jump out there with suggestions and solutions.
And still Josie wasn’t in it, at least as far as Russ knew. I didn’t know if he had bought Shanna’s explanation for why she’d been Celine, but twenty grand a concert was a pretty convincing reason, if you needed money and didn’t mind being associated with lyrics that had already rotted fifty thousand brain stems.
“He had a ton of enemies,” Russ said, breaking the silence.
“Yes, he did,” I said. “That’ll help. But he ended up in Shanna’s garage and Shanna is Celine, or was. That’s not general knowledge. Let’s hope it stays that way. Not even Xenon knew who she was. But it would be nice if we could figure out who did the world a favor and killed that troll and why he ended up in ‘Celine’s’ garage and not yours, Russ, or mine, or in the empty desert somewhere, which would’ve been the best option.”
Russ tapped the table with a finger. “Someone asked for a million bucks. Whoever it was knew Shanna was Celine. Had to. Then they killed Jo-X and strung him up in that garage.”
“Yet we’re still spinning our wheels,” I said. “Something is missing. Why kill him? Why put him in that garage?”
“Money,” Danya said. “Someone knew about Shanna. They killed him and tried to blackmail us. What’s so hard about that?”
“A million bucks, that’s what,” Russ said. “Who would think you could come up with that kind of money?”
“We should get the Wharf Rat in on this,” Lucy said. “He knew Shanna was Celine. Not that I think he killed Jo-X, runty little guy like that. Of course, he did have a gun.”
Russ stared at her. “Huh? Wharf rat? A gun?”
Lucy bumped my shoulder. “Tell him.”
“That reporter for the News,” I said. “I told you he went over the back fence at the girls’ house like a freakin’ wharf rat—hence the name. He made the connection between Shanna and Celine.” I looked at Russ. “What caliber bullets was Xenon shot with?”
“Thirty-eights. So what?”
“So he didn’t do it. At least not with the gun we saw up at Xenon’s hideout. He had a .45, looked like it would knock him over if he fired it. I doubt that he knows how Jo-X ended up in the garage, but it’s possible he knows something about all this, something obscure, and hasn’t put it together yet.”
“He should be here with us now,” Russ said.
“Like I said,” Lucy muttered.
“I might be able to round him up,” I said. I didn’t tell Russ I’d seen his car at the Midnight Rider Motel on the way past the place last night. I didn’t want a parade headed down that way. Turns out a parade would have been a good thing. Hindsight, as they say, is 20-20, but when you’re on the front line, vision runs about 20-800.
“See if you can do that,” Russ said. “We’ll be here.” He looked at Danya. “Somewhere in Caliente.”
“Sundowner Motel,” Danya said. “Or the Double Down. I saw ’em on the way over here.” She put a hand on his arm. “It’s not like we don’t want you staying at our motel, Dad, but . . .”
“But you two don’t need me right next door.”
“Something like t
hat. But actually, now that you’re here, I’m glad you are. I mean, we don’t know what’s going on. You’ve got my cell number and you’ll be less than a mile away since this is a really small town.”
After a moment of silence, Russ looked at Shanna. “I never got a chance to welcome you to the family, but . . . welcome. I’m still not sure about that Celine business. Looks like it attracted attention none of us needed, but we’ll deal with it. Somehow.”
“Not sure how this fits, if at all,” I said, “but I think those two at that diner, Arlene and her kid, Buddie, stole some stuff from Jo-X’s hideaway up in the hills before or after the place burned down. Most likely before. In fact, they might’ve burned it down to cover their tracks. I can’t tell when that happened, but it might’ve been right after they heard Xenon was dead. Soon as they heard that, they’d be at his place within hours, loading up.”
“What stuff? What’d they take?”
“A good-sized generator. Eighty kilowatts. And maybe a safe they can’t open. Probably a bunch of other stuff, as much as they could cart away. The woman who took those videos, Arlene, probably knew the helicopter pilot was Xenon. I think it would have been almost impossible for him to have kept that a secret. If I had to guess, I’d say he was paying her to keep quiet.”
Russ stared at me. “Christ, Angel, she probably killed him. Her and what’s his name again—Buddie? What’re we doing, tap-dancing around here?”
“It’s certain they’re opportunists and thieves, not necessarily murderers though.”
“Break one law, it’s easier to break another. Kid breaks into a house, next thing he’s pulling armed robberies in a parking lot and someone ends up dead.”
“If Xenon was paying her to keep quiet, killing him would have cut off the money spigot. Don’t see that happening.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t look convinced. “So where’d you learn about that generator thing? How’d you get that?”
“Officer Day dug up information on Arlene. She’s got a shed in a storage facility. I went in and had a look—”
“We had a look,” Lucy said.
“You weren’t there if I say you weren’t there,” I told her. “And you weren’t there.” I turned to Russ. “There’s an eighty-thousand-watt diesel generator in there. A generator is missing from Jo-X’s place in the hills. Two and two, Russ.”
Gumshoe on the Loose Page 27