“Sorta?” Mr. Swifty said before I could stop him.
Ma laughed. “Irony ain’t your thing, is it?”
Well, shit. These two women were gonna make sure I didn’t make my next Mensa meeting. Time to shut up and listen, especially since this was entirely for my benefit. Jeri already knew the story.
Ma said, “You probably oughta know what those two drive, in case you gotta follow ’em. According to DMV records, Leland Bye owns a 2017 blue Lexus SUV, and Bob Odermann has an old Honda Civic, 2004, red. Unless, of course, he’s using Mary’s Mercedes.”
“So,” Jeri said to me, “we go nose around Odermann, see if we can get a line on that SUV since it’s in his deceased wife’s name.”
“We, to be clear, meaning you, me, and Ma, right?” I asked.
“Close. You, me, and Sarah, if she has time. Ma’s gonna keep working on the lists. Odermann might not pan out.”
“Great. I was hoping you and Sarah would get together and talk over that Tuesday loan program, get the kinks ironed out.”
This time my ribs were backhanded, kinda hard, too. But then Jeri patted my cheek and said in a matter-of-fact tone, “We’ll see.”
Sonofabitch. If only I could figure women out. They toy with me and I don’t think that’s right.
“Tuesday loan?” Ma asked. “Kinks?”
“Tell you later,” Jeri said. She took me by the arm and led me out of the office.
“You wouldn’t run that nonsense past Ma, would you? She’s brutal. I’d never hear the end of it.”
“Who said it was nonsense? Anyway, I was gonna loan you out to Ma, not Sarah. Well, maybe both of them, but Ma’s got dibs. Now come on.”
It was Monday, late enough that Sarah’s classes were over. She was eager to go with us. Jeri drove us over to her apartment without asking for directions, so they’d done a passel of talking, getting to know each other—and I like the word passel, don’t feel as if I get to use it often enough.
“Hi, Jer,” Sarah said. Jer. Then to me, a subdued, “Hi.”
“We talked,” Jeri said to her. “Everything’s fine.”
Sarah smiled and Jeri hugged her. Said something in her ear I didn’t hear, and Sarah’s smile got wider. She gave me a happy face.
Women. Can’t live with ’em.
“So what’s up?” Sarah asked.
Jeri said, “We might have a lead on Allie. And Reinhart, if he’s in the mix, which looks likely. It might not be anything, but it looks better than the one in Tonopah.”
Sarah’s face fell. “God, I wish Allie would call again. Or text, Facebook me. Something. I hate this not knowing.”
We piled into Sarah’s Audi—we’d taken Jeri’s Porsche to Sarah’s apartment—with me in back where the leg room can be measured in meters, not inches, so my turning sideways in the seat was just theatrics. Jeri told her about Bob Odermann and the SUV registered to Bob’s dead wife as we drove to the address in Sparks that Ma had come up with. In fact, Ma had supplied us with four addresses, the home and business addresses of both Odermann and Wexel’s lawyer, Leland Bye.
“His wife has been dead for two years but the new car was in her name?” Sarah asked. “That’s gotta mean something, doesn’t it?”
“Uh-huh,” Jeri said. “It could mean Bob’s really unobservant.”
Damn, I wish I’d thought of that.
But then the talk turned to such amiable chatter about health food and where the best organic produce could be found in Reno that it was as if Oregon and Tonopah had never happened, or was such a non-issue that none of it warranted discussion—or that there was a hulking pile of ears in the backseat that didn’t need to hear any of what they might really want to talk about.
Well, they were wrong. The ears craved information.
Anyway, we arrived safely in a residential neighborhood in Sparks and cruised slowly past a nondescript one-story house that was well maintained but . . . nondescript. Like hiding an egg in an egg carton, it blended in with the rest of the houses on the street to the point that it hardly existed: light blue vinyl siding, off-white trim, aluminum-frame windows, asphalt roofing shingles, front door with a small glass insert at eye level, fourteen hundred square feet, all on what looked like a sixth of an acre with a forty-foot poplar tree in the backyard, leaves just starting to turn color. Net worth, no more than a hundred sixty-five thousand. It didn’t exactly shout, “My dead wife can afford a new Mercedes SUV.” But then, how many dead wives in the neighborhood could?
The time was three thirty-five p.m. No car in the driveway. The door was rolled down on a two-car attached garage. No sign of life.
“Now what?” Sarah asked.
“Let’s go see where the guy works,” Jeri said. She gave Sarah the address of a print shop on Kietzke Lane.
The shop was small but it looked clean and was in a fairly decent location. I didn’t think it would support a Mercedes SUV, but that was only an impression. Bob might’ve paid off the mortgage and could now afford a car worth two-thirds as much as his house. Not a great financial move by any stretch, but his kids might be grown, wife gone, insurance policy kicked in a hundred grand, and he might be feeling upwardly mobile again.
The Fine Printing Company—a great name that probably took a lot of thought by a passel of big brains—shared a parking lot with a Jiffy Lube next door. It was impossible to tell which cars belonged to the owners or customers of which businesses, but none of them was a Mercedes anything—SUV or otherwise. The only green car on the lot was an aging Saturn SL2.
“Now what?” Sarah asked again. We were parked on the street, almost in front of the place.
“What do you think, Mort?” Jeri asked, looking not at me but at the print shop.
Ah, finally bringing the backseat into the loop. “Looking for a little professional advice, are we?”
She turned and stared at me. “I was under the impression that someone in this car is training to be a gumshoe, so I thought I’d give that person a chance to shine like a freakin’ beacon.”
“Was that irony? I have trouble with irony. Although that rhyme at the end was totally awesome, dude.”
“Mort—”
“How about I go in and order up ten thousand fliers? See if good ol’ Bob is in there.”
“How about you go in and ask what ten thousand fliers would cost, maybe save us a couple thousand dollars?”
“That’d work, too.”
“Got your wig and moustache?”
“Yup.”
“Then go get ’em, hotshot. We’ll wait.”
Man, that was a lot of irony. I put on my disguise, such as it was, and went into the shop. Two guys were there, both in their fifties, so I had a fifty-fifty shot of picking out our suspect—if you get both ways that worked out. If I wanted to really screw this up, I could ask which one of them was Bob.
Or not.
“Hey,” I said. “Which one of you’s Bob?” I had to half-shout over a printer that was chucking out paper by the ream.
A mostly bald guy in overalls looked up. “That’s me. Who wants to know?”
“I do. Name’s Steve. Earl said you do good work here.”
“Earl who?”
“Earl Johnson.”
“Don’t know an Earl Johnson, but we do good work here so it don’t matter. What can I do you for?”
“I need ten thousand fliers. I’m looking for a cost estimate.”
He stared at me. “Ten thousand?”
Well, shit. That would weigh about a hundred pounds. I caught the disbelief, read his body language, and did a gumshoe shuffle that would’ve made Jeri proud. I would describe it to her later, see if it got me more chicken soup, or maybe something better. “Christ, did I say ten? I meant a thousand. Ten thousand and I could stuff nine thousand of ’em in my walls for insulation.”
He snorted a laugh. “Okay, a thou. CMYK? Black and white? Can’t give an estimate if I don’t know what you’re after.”
“CMYK?”
&nbs
p; “Four-color printing.”
Well, shit. I didn’t know crap about printing. But I am a trained professional, so I said, “I don’t know crap about printing, Bob. Do you have something like a brochure or a chart? Maybe I can pick out what I’m looking for.”
“Uh-huh. Right here.” He tapped a finger on a well-worn price sheet with little sample images on it, taped to the countertop.
I stared at it, tried to check out the shop while I was at it, and finally decided a thousand CMYK fliers for two hundred ten bucks was just the ticket. Inspired, I said, “Fliers are for a Mercedes SUV I’ve gotta unload. Damn thing’s not even a year old, too.”
He stared at me for a moment, eyes locked with mine. “Huh,” he said, then sort of shook himself and said, “I’d put an ad in the paper, but that’s just me.” He gave me a curious look. “A thousand fliers to sell a car like that? Man, that don’t sound right.”
I tried to look dumb and innocent. I think I got the first of those right. “Two ten, huh? Maybe we don’t need a thousand. I’ll talk it over with the wife and get back to you on that.”
“Got to keep that ball and chain happy, uh-huh.”
“Don’t we all?” Thought I’d see if he would mention he’d been cut loose. But he didn’t, and I didn’t want to have to come up with any specifics about my Mercedes, such as engine size or how many wheels it had, so instead of a manly knuckle bump, I rapped Bob’s countertop twice and got the hell out.
I headed down the street so he wouldn’t see that I was in a car with two potential ball-and-chains in it, neither of whom had come in with me. Sarah pulled to the curb a block away and I got in.
“What’d you find out?” Jeri asked.
“A thousand full-color fliers’ll cost us two hundred ten bucks, honey bun.”
Sarah laughed. And it was a damn good thing I was in the backseat, out of reach of people with short arms.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“WHAT TIME IS it?” Jeri asked after I’d given them the rundown on Bob, not that there was much to run down.
I checked my watch. “Four fifteen.”
“Let’s see if Leland Bye, Esquire, is at his office.” She gave Sarah an address on California Avenue, several blocks west of the federal courthouse in Reno.
Sarah parked kitty-corner across the street from a two-story glass-and-steel office building that had a sign out front for five lawyers and two CPAs. Jeri stared at the building, evidently thinking like an investigator. I stared at Jeri, thinking like a guy who might like to toss her into bed later that evening and rough her up.
Jeri won that round, but I wasn’t giving up hope.
“Okay, looks like I’m up,” she said. “You two wait here.”
She got out and walked over to the building. I got in front with Sarah and watched Jeri disappear inside.
“How’re you doing?” I asked.
“Okay, good. Better now. She . . . when we hugged, what she said was, ‘Good for you.’ Which I guess means she’s fine with—with what you and I have been doing.”
“And I got chicken soup, so we both made out like bandits. Oh, and I brought up that lend-lease thing you mentioned. We’re on for Tuesday evenings.”
“What lend—oh, Mort, you didn’t! I wasn’t serious. You know that, don’t you? I mean, I wasn’t . . . really . . .”
Truth lies in the hesitations. Hope springs eternal. Sarah took my hand and kissed my palm. “One in a million,” she said. “But don’t bring it up again, okay? It was just kind of a joke. Really. I mean, if she says anything . . .” She fell silent.
“Yup.”
Jeri came back out. She stopped at the car and looked in at me, in her seat, maybe deciding if she could haul me out and dead-lift me before packing me in back, so I beat her to it and packed myself.
“He’s there,” Jeri said, getting in. “And there’s a small parking lot at the side of the building. I didn’t see a green SUV of any kind there, but I saw a dark blue Lexus SUV, so I think we could follow him easily enough if he leaves.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Attractive white-haired guy, slender, looks like a runner. Hair is pure white, like snow, so he’s either prematurely white or has it dyed, since Ma says he’s only fifty-one.”
“Did he look guilty?” I asked.
“Well, of course he looked guilty. He’s a lawyer.”
“What I think I meant was, is this getting us anywhere?”
“Right now we’re scouting the territory, Mort. Now I know which office in there is his and I know what he looks like. You’ve had a look at Odermann. We might try following Bye if he leaves, see where he goes. Or we could go check out his residence right now, fill in that gap.”
Which we did, more or less unsuccessfully.
Leland Bye lived in southwest Reno in a gated community, which probably had something to do with Shakespeare’s line: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Jeri pursed her lips as she contemplated what to do about the guard and the gate, then she shrugged and said, “We better not push our luck. We’ve got Bye and Odermann in our sights, but we don’t want them to know it.”
“I’m sort of confused,” Sarah said. “Who is this lawyer? How does he fit into all this again?”
“He’s Wexel’s lawyer,” Jeri said. “We’re giving Wexel a close look because he was Reinhart’s chief of staff, and he died recently. Suspiciously, too. Mary Odermann is—was—Bye’s sister. She died two years ago, but a green Mercedes SUV was registered in her name in May, using Bob Odermann’s home address.”
“So we ought to keep an eye on this Bob guy, right? I mean, if he’s got the SUV.”
Jeri thought about it for a moment. “You and Mort found three people who said a woman in her thirties was driving that SUV. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Mary, and I’m almost as sure it wasn’t Bob in drag. Although these days that’s not something you can count on.”
Another round of silence settled over us.
“Might be Mary’s sister, if she’s got one,” Sarah said.
“Or,” Jeri said. “Bob’s girlfriend, a close neighbor, the wife of a friend. Or Leland Bye’s wife or a girlfriend, one of his secretaries, or maybe his daughter if she looks a little old for her age.”
“Well, shit,” I said. “Aren’t you a pip, raining on this parade?”
More silence.
“I wonder if Bob Odermann even knows there’s a Mercedes SUV registered to his wife,” Sarah said uncertainly.
“I think he does,” I said. “When I mentioned that I wanted the fliers to sell a Mercedes SUV, he stared at me for a moment like I’d sprouted wings. Took him a few seconds to shake it off.”
“So he’s probably involved somehow,” Jeri said. “Now what we need is something like that with Bye. See if a similar comment gets a rise out of him.”
“Back to his office?” Sarah asked.
“Maybe we oughta hold off on that, think about this for a while. We might get Ma’s advice while we’re at it. She’s probably at home by now. We could go over there, talk to her.”
“Or,” I said. “We could sit around a table in the Green Room where they’ve got beer and beer nuts.”
Jeri turned and looked at me. “Beer has nuts? I didn’t know.”
“Well, aren’t you a pistol, sweetheart?”
Jeri smiled, then shrugged. “Ma would probably go for that. I’ll find out.” She pulled out her cell phone.
We held a powwow in the Green Room. O’Roarke was just coming on duty so I gave him two free-drink coupons—I still had about twenty left from the fistful he’d given me in the hospital—and we sat around a table, Jeri and Sarah with Cokes—free, no coupons needed—Ma and I with Wicked Ales straight from bottles like real men. Sarah was in a modest T-shirt and jeans, Jeri in a yellow blouse and white pants, so things had settled down, at least for now.
“I’ve been all over that SUV, trying to get at the financial end of it,” Ma said. “Not gettin’ anywhere, though,
but Bob’s last 1040 had his gross income at only fifty-four grand.”
I perked up when I heard 1040. It’s hard to turn that shit off. Ma put a hand on my knee and said, “Take it easy, boyo.” To everyone—including me—she said, “Mary Odermann owns that Mercedes outright, so maybe you can take it with you in spite of what everyone says. Anyway, if she owns it, then so does Bob. How that happened, I don’t know. I don’t see a lending institution of any sort giving him—or her, God rest her—a loan for a hundred-twenty-thousand-dollar car. And, I’ll bet she doesn’t drive much.”
“What if he didn’t buy it?” Jeri asked. “What if he doesn’t have it and never did? It looks like he knows about it, but . . . what if?”
Ma cocked her head at Jeri. “My, what interesting thoughts.”
Jeri took a sip of her Coke. “I think Leland Bye is in this thing up to his waist, if not to his neck. Maybe he put up the money.”
“Got us a conspiracy by the tail, huh?” Ma said.
“Could be. In what, exactly, I don’t know, but we’ve got two women, Allie and this other one, driving around doing stuff it looks like they don’t want anyone knowing about. Like shipping the hand of a presidential candidate to Mort, which I have to say I don’t like one fucking bit.” She gave me a look.
“Same here,” I said. “It’s been a real drag.”
“Jesus,” Jeri said. She turned to Ma again. “I get scared when he gets serious, so right now I’m good, but you should try to dig a little deeper around Leland Bye. Try to find out who’s got the car now, how it was paid for.”
“Leland I can do, but that car ain’t easy, hon. Especially who’s got it now. If it hasn’t been reported stolen, anyone can drive it. If they don’t get pulled over or get in an accident, there’s not gonna be any record of who’s been behind the wheel lately.”
Gumshoe for Two Page 18