“She’s a college student, not a hooker. An engineering major, so that thing about gluing a rat to the mirror was based on real science. She’s only been playing the part of a hooker. Other than those bits of information, I can’t explain a damn thing.”
“They sure are dressed . . . up.”
I leaned closer, lowered my voice. “You’ve been bartending a long time, Patrick, my boy.”
“By no stretch am I your boy, but go ahead.”
“By now you’re about thirty percent psychologist, right?”
“Closer to forty. I’ve been asked to be a guest lecturer up at the university.”
“What do you know about exhibitionism?”
He smiled. “Know it when I see it, man, and I see my share. In here it’s 99.9 percent women. That’s all I know, but I gotta say, it sure don’t bother me none.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JERI AND HOLIDAY talked for an hour and a half. An hour and a half, while I got barstool rash. I didn’t ask Jeri what they discussed. Some things are better left unknown. But when we got home that evening the lovemaking was slow and meaningful and deeply satisfying.
The next morning, however, I tried to nudge a little information loose. Broaching the subject obliquely, I said, “So, what did you two broads talk about last night for five freakin’ hours?”
Jeri laughed. “It wasn’t even two hours. And it was just broad stuff.”
“That’s the same as girl stuff, right? Only riper?”
“And, you know, the bicycle ride next year.”
“Yeah, well, I expected that. Half marathons and bike rides are important. You have to know things, like tire inflation pressures and what to wear—or not.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And what color body paint to use and what to paint it on?”
She laughed again. “That, too.”
“I’m pretty good with a brush. Point me at a pair of tits and I can really go to town.”
“I’ll bet. She wants to get you on a bike, too. Naked.”
“That’ll be the day.”
That was all I got. They were a sly, slippery, underhanded, and sneaky duo—an entire thesaurus of slick stuff.
And friends, which bordered on eerie.
But that day, Monday, was different—the computer work was a laugh riot, assembling a list of names at a snail’s pace, everyone we could find who had been in Reinhart’s or Wexel’s orbit. We tracked down people who knew their spouses, kids, kids’ spouses—rounded up maiden names, business partners, lawyers, personal physicians, dentists, masseuses. Actually, no masseuses, but that would’ve been a real coup.
Later that afternoon we trudged over to Clary Investigations and passed through a cloud of Camel smoke getting close to Ma’s desk. She was squinting at a computer screen with a hands-free headset on, listening to someone. She held up a finger, making sure we didn’t tip off whoever it was that someone else was in the room.
“I need it by five o’clock, Andy.” Pause. “Hell, yes, today. I’m going like a bat outta hell here. Which means you’re going like a bat, too, if you get my drift.” Pause. “That’s right, snowflake. Clock’s tickin’ so get on it.”
She clicked off, then turned to us. “Andrew Bartlett Hecht. Son of a bitch thinks he can play me, he’s got another think comin’. I got that ol’ boy’s number. What’s up, guys?”
Jeri handed her the list we’d been working on. “Here’s what we’ve got so far, Ma. People close to Reinhart and Wexel.”
Ma looked it over. “This’ll keep me busy.”
“Sorry about that.”
Ma gave her a severe look. “Don’t be. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d . . . well, I don’t know where I’d be. Not here, that’s for sure. One hand washes the other.”
She’d been working the other side of things, tracking down people connected to owners of the SUVs. She gave Jeri a list of the names of people she’d found so far. Jeri and I looked it over. I’d never heard of any of them. Neither had Jeri. I gazed around Ma’s office. She had windows that looked out onto Liberty Street, and a sideboard with what looked like a bullet hole in it. Very cool.
“What we’ll do,” Ma said, “is alphabetize both lists, make it easier to spot anyone who pops up on both. Don’t see anyone yet, but the lists are still fairly short. Keep trying. I’ll probably end up with two hundred names in a few days, then I’ll switch over to your Reinhart-Wexel list and we’ll hit it from that direction.”
Jeri and I left.
“Now what?” I asked when we were outside.
She shrugged. “We got the easy stuff. Now we dig harder.”
Back to her place. More computer work. She only had that one computer so I watched and learned. Then she sat me down and gave me instructions. After two hours my eyes started to cross. I got coffee and used it to wash down a caffeine tablet, blinked a few times, then gave it another hour. This was a hell of a lot less exciting than an IRS field audit. At least there I’d had a concealed weapon under my coat for when greedy disgruntled people wanted to keep what they’d worked hard to get. Only thing I was likely to shoot now was the computer.
So that was how Monday went—and Tuesday, Wednesday, all the way to Sunday afternoon at one fifty-five when Maude phoned and told us she finally got a hit. Good thing, because I was fed up to here with computer work. I’d been traveling or at Jeri’s ever since Reinhart’s hand had turned up, hadn’t been inside my house since I’d gotten my gun for Holiday, which I hadn’t needed except to back off Dell and his buddy. Friday I’d driven by and the media ghouls had cleared out. It’s hard to stake out a place for a week and sit on your hands while the world moves on. My bed had a forlorn look, wondering when I’d be back. The house looked sad, too. I gave a moment’s thought about selling it, but with single-pane windows and roof shingles fifty years old, it had become a family heirloom. It would’ve been like selling the family dog just because it farted too often and had a little mange.
Jeri and I trooped over to Ma’s office. She’d been working the Reinhart-Wexel side of things for the past three days. She looked drained when we went in, but exultant, too, now that a name had finally floated to the surface.
Sort of a name, sort of floated, as we soon learned.
“Martin Harris,” she said. “He’s on the list of registered SUV owners—a former executive director of the Nevada chapter of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. The chapter’s current secretary is one Inez Brooks, wife of Nolan Brooks, Reinhart’s campaign finance officer. Martin and Inez’s tenures at the Foundation overlap by four years, so it’s certain they’ll know each other.”
“Sounds thin, Ma,” Jeri said.
“It is thin. It’s tissue paper, but right now it’s what we’ve got. If I keep digging, odds are something else’ll come up. Connections between people are rich beyond imagining. You ever heard of ‘six degrees of separation’?”
“No. What’s that?” Jeri asked.
“Except for the Unabomber, everyone on the planet is connected to every other person by no more than six separations. A friend of a friend of a friend—like that. So it’s likely I’m going to find more connections if I keep at it a while longer, dig deeper.”
“Except for the Unabomber,” I said.
“That’s right. Teddy’s not even connected to himself.”
Jeri smiled. “So where is this guy, Martin Harris?”
“Tonopah. He retired there two years ago.”
Jeri closed her eyes and thought for a moment. “Tonopah. Not a big place, but it’s bigger than Gerlach.”
“Yep,” I said, not yet connecting two whole dots.
“Keep at it, Ma, and thanks,” Jeri said. She led me out the door and onto Liberty Street, a block west of the municipal courthouse.
She hauled out her cell phone.
“Who’re you calling?” I asked.
She held up a finger. Into the phone she said, “How would you like to go to Tonopah?” She looked up at me. “With Mort.”
<
br /> Uh-oh.
“That’s right. We might finally have a lead. Uh-huh. Nope. Uh-huh. Okay, then, great. He’ll be over in about an hour.” She ended the call.
“He will, will he?” I said.
“He will, or should. And you’ll never in a million years guess who that was.”
“Whoopi Goldberg again? Man, you two.”
“Oh, so close. Take another shot at it?”
“My favorite hooker?”
“Got it in only two tries. You’ll be a flatfoot yet.”
“And we’re headed to Tonopah. Won’t get there until nearly dark. Sure you want me back in that girl grinder again?”
“She’s not fun to be with?”
“Fun, yeah. The view’s something else, but I don’t—”
“Are you tempted to go beyond viewing, Mort?”
“Well, let’s see . . . it’s hard to dredge up some of the really boring stuff that happened up in Oregon . . . okay, you said tempted, didn’t you? No, can’t say that I am.”
She wasn’t amused. She put her hands on her hips with pique in her stance. “We’ve already had this discussion. One more time and I’d like this to be the end of it, although knowing you . . . Anyway, I trust you. And I trust her—”
“Jeri—”
“Just listen, Mort. I trust her for reasons in her past that she told me in confidence and that I have no right to tell you. But she had an interesting childhood that might explain things—a little anyway. Not traumatic or horrible, but . . . interesting. She can tell you about it if she wants to, that’s up to her. Thing is, you don’t need to know, and that’s all I’m gonna say about that.”
“She’s pretty free about what she wears around me. Or doesn’t wear.”
“I know. It might have something to do with that thing in her past. I don’t see it as a problem. I’m not threatened by it. It doesn’t hurt us and it gives her something . . . well, something she doesn’t get otherwise. It took a while to convince her I was okay with it, but I finally got through.” She looked into my eyes. “When you came back from Bend, did you feel as if she’d taken part of you away from me? Like there was less of you for me than there was before?”
“No. Not at all.”
“There you go. Isn’t that what’s important? She wants to help find Allie—which she can. If her sister is in Tonopah, Sarah would be more likely to recognize her than you. I’m going to stay here and keep working on our lists. You two go check out this guy, Martin Harris, see if there’s anything there.”
“It felt awfully thin. Like you told Ma.”
“It might very well be nothing, but you never know. And if this Martin guy goes out, like to a bar or someplace, even a post office, Sarah—Holiday—might be useful. There’s no telling what she could find out that you couldn’t.”
Hell, yes. Holiday could wring information out of a washrag, if that washrag were male.
We took the Toyota. She wanted to take her Audi, but I told her it was possible we’d end up on a stakeout. Tonopah isn’t a big place. That hot-red Audi would stand out like a flamingo in a bird bath.
“Here we are again,” she said as we headed toward Fernley on the interstate. She was wearing a T-shirt with Pi are not square, Pi are round, cornbread are square printed across the front. Another pi shirt. Engineers were hilarity incarnate. Who would’ve guessed? The shirt was easy to read, too, stretched as tight as it was.
“Yeah, here we are,” I said. “Which means I’d give a month’s pay to know what you and Jeri talked about the other night in the Green Room.”
She laughed. “Be worth it, too.”
“How ’bout I bribe you? One month’s pay. Cash.”
“Not a chance.”
“Underhanded, Machiavellian broads.”
“Uh-oh. You figured us out. That’s trouble.”
“I don’t have diddly-squat figured out.”
She gave me a look. “Jeri and I agreed that . . .” Her words slid off into silence. She looked out the side window.
“What did you two agree? Keep talkin’, college girl.”
“Anyway,” she said, apparently losing track of what she’d been about to say. “Your stupid mirror’s whistling. It’s really annoying. Either pick up the pace, or slow down. Something.”
I picked it up to seventy. Tonopah was two hundred forty miles from Reno. Might as well get there, see if we could get a handle on Martin Harris. It was, after all, Sunday, the day retired folk typically cut loose and really paint the town, right after church and a nap.
We arrived at seven fifteen with the sun half an hour above the western hills. We traveled up a miles-long incline coming in from the north. The town sprawled over the hillside, over 6,000 feet above sea level—no surprise that the day was starting to turn chilly.
We’d ridden in silence ever since passing through Fallon, sixty miles east of Reno. Sarah was in full-blown study mode with a textbook open on her lap, chuckling at all the fun stuff in there. Or maybe chuckling was only my imagination. Snarling might have made essentially the same sound.
On the way south I interrupted her only once.
“Holiday?”
“Mmmm?” Still nose-deep in her textbook.
“What is this with you and Jeri? And me?”
“God, I hate eigenvectors. I mean, calculus is easy. This crud is something else.” She pulled her nose out of the book and gave me a perplexed look. “Huh? What’d you say?”
“Nothing.”
She went back to her textbook. I looked at her and thought I caught a little smile. Not entirely sure about that, though.
“Almost there,” I told her.
Sarah put her papers and book aside. We were a mile north of the town limit, slowing to forty-five.
“Lovely,” she said as we passed by weedy lots and run-down buildings. Everything looked sunbaked, frost-heaved, weathered, old. The place had been losing population slowly but steadily the past two decades. Median income was down, the median age of its residents was up. It had become a retirement mecca, “mecca” being a relative term. It was a place for people who’d had their fill with the crime, traffic, noise, foul air, and chaos of the cities. Add drive-by shootings to that list. Given all that, the mecca thing was working for many of Tonopah’s residents. A quick getaway from a crime spree here would take three to five hours at high speed. Might as well drive straight to the county jail, save everyone a lot of time and aggravation.
We passed McGinty’s Diner and a fifties motel, the Stargazer. A Texaco station was next door. Farther on we passed a gaudy place called the Clown Motel.
“Now there’s a fun-lookin’ place,” Holiday said.
“Ain’t it, though.”
“Where’re we staying?”
“Mizpah Hotel and Casino. Jeri made reservations.”
“Reservations? Plural?”
I sighed. “She might’ve said a reservation.”
“Jeez, Mort. You almost stopped my heart there.” She gave me a Cheshire cat’s grin.
I pulled around to the rear of the Mizpah, a five-story edifice of reinforced concrete and brick built in 1907, now registered as one of the Historic Hotels of America.
Recent events had made my face one of the more memorable ones in the country, so I put on a blond wig that felt dumb and a big blond moustache that felt even dumber, then dumb and dumber and Holiday went in the rear entrance of the Mizpah and down a short, wide hallway of blood-red fleur-de-lis wallpaper into a good-sized lobby with more blood-red wallpaper, mahogany trim, and balusters. I looked around, felt history oozing out of the walls. My mother was younger than this place. A dozen or so people were sitting in chairs, chatting in groups, standing around. The last few minutes of sunlight came through cut-glass windows and put a glow on the red carpet, potted plants, burnished wood, crystal.
Holiday ducked into the Wyatt Earp Bar, gave it a look, came back out. “Promising,” she said. I didn’t ask.
We went to the hotel desk and I rang a bell.
Seconds later a girl in her twenties showed up. Short dark brown hair, a gap-toothed smile, a little stud in her nose that might have been put there with a blowgun. I was thinking a recent trip to the Amazon hadn’t gone as well as the brochures made out.
“Help you?” she asked.
“Got a reservation for Angel?”
She checked her computer. “Don’t see one.” She looked up at me, frowned, and said, “You, uh, you look sort of like—”
Hell. “Yeah, I look kinda like some troublemaker in the news. Causes me no end of grief, lemme tell you.”
“But your name . . . Angel . . .”
“Angel’s my first name. It’s never suited me. I’ve gotta get it changed.” I pointed at her computer. “Try DiFrazzia.”
She gave me a doubtful look, then went back to the computer, chewing on her lower lip. “Uh . . . nope. Nothing like that.”
“Try Dellario,” Holiday said.
The girl’s face lit up. “Ah, yes, here it is.”
Sonofabitch. Dellario? I was going to have to have a talk with Jeri. She’d already forgotten my name, and we were about to get married. What’s up with that?
We got a King Room, cleverly named because it held a single king-sized bed. Holiday had wanted the “Lady in Red” suite, but it was taken. It was said to be haunted by the ghost of a lady in red, a prostitute named Rose who’d been murdered by a volatile gambler who found her in bed with a client. The world in 1914 had its share of geniuses, too, since the guy appears not to have known or cared what Rose did for a living until it was thrust in his face. Of course, the guy might have been preoccupied with text messages on his cell phone and not always been aware of what Rose was up to. Sad to say, I think I could shoot that theory by a bunch of today’s teenagers and get a lot of bland looks.
Holiday bounced on the bed, all of her, which is what she does, then we gave the place a quick once-over, used the bathroom, then hiked down three flights to the lobby. At a gift shop I bought her a pastel purple sweatshirt with “Mizpah Hotel” across the front above a rendering of the hotel with a setting sun in the background.
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