Gumshoe for Two

by Rob Leininger

  “Doll. I like that, Ma.”

  “Men’s room?”

  “Don’t have to go, but thanks for takin’ care of me.”

  She gave me an exasperated look. “See if there’s a back way out, like a window.”

  “Oh, right. Good to know in case of fire. I’m on it.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  The bathroom had a window a dwarf could go through. I went back to the bar. “Small window,” I told her. “I could maybe cut off my head, toss it out.”

  “Sounds like a good idea.”

  Back outside, I checked my watch: 6:10 p.m.

  “Let’s eat,” Ma said. “Drive around. First place we come to that looks like it might have a half-decent steak, let’s go in.”

  Which was Buck’s Chuckwagon. Posters of New York steaks and curly fries in the windows pulled us in.

  I had mushroom sirloin tips and a cold-water lobster tail from the North Atlantic. Ma got a steak on cilantro lime rice. Steaks and beer—I told her she was my kind of woman. She patted her stomach and said, “I’ve given up the fight, doll. I’m no one’s kind of woman anymore. Screw both Jennifers and the Kardashians, and a shitload of others who’ve set impossible standards.”

  Which put a little damper on the evening. Read between the lines, Ma wouldn’t mind being somebody’s type. I could only guess at the sort of low-level undertow of depression that formed the day-to-day of her life—wanting what she no longer expected to have.

  Like Holiday—the thought crept into my head. Holiday needed what damn few men would be able to give her.

  Then there was “gifting”—Ma’s word, and a concept I was having trouble assimilating into my worldview. Gifting was—what, exactly, if not loaning or sharing? No doubt something subtle, which put it well out of my reach.

  “You about done there?” Ma asked.

  I stared at my plate. Yep, clean. “Guess so, unless we want to order up another round of steaks.”

  She tossed three twenties on the table. “Let’s go.”

  “Hey, I can get it.”

  “Don’t know why, since it’s paid for already. What you can do is drive me to a grocery store where I can get some cigarettes and a six-pack, pick up a book. I’ll be damned if I’ll watch television, all that mind-sucking ‘reality’ horseshit, not even as real as hobbits.”

  My thoughts exactly.

  At a Safeway she bought John Sandford’s latest Virgil Flowers novel, a six-pack of Coors, and a carton of Camels, all of which ended up costing more than our steaks. But I was quick on the draw this time, so I paid.

  “You ain’t paying for my smokes, boyo,” she said. “I buy my own cancer.”

  “Too late, Ma. And you’ll live to be a hundred.”

  She looked away. “Last thing I want is to live to see a hundred.”

  I didn’t say anything. There was that depression again. Maybe it was a nighttime thing, a shadow that falls over the soul when the day is done. A line of burnt orange showed above the hills and a few stars were out in the east. No moon. It would be a dark night.

  We went to our rooms at Motel 6. She unlocked her door, then looked at me. “Be careful with that chickadee, Mort.” She was in the room, door closed, before I could respond.

  “Yeah,” I said to the night. “I’ll . . . do that.”

  Next on my bucket list, I’m gonna replace Leno.

  The chickadee came in at ten fifteen wearing shiny red calf-length boots, a black leather miniskirt and a black leather halter top, bare midriff showing, fresh lipstick, liner, and eye shadow, shiny black hair four inches below her shoulders, a red flower in her hair.

  Whoa.

  She had perfect brown skin. She was a bit stocky, but it all looked solid and ready. Her hips were wide, arms strong, legs good all the way up into that short skirt. Her breasts cantilevered out from good shoulders, full, erumpent, majestic. That Cascade Lodge shirt had hid more than I’d suspected. I guessed her waist at thirty inches, which isn’t slender but isn’t bad, either. Tucked beneath that impressive chest, her waist looked almost small.

  She sauntered up and kissed my cheek. “Hi, Steve.”

  Steve, right. Gotta remember that. I’d blanked on my name at the sight of her. She was looking like a handful, and all I wanted was to find out about the lady in the SUV. Tonight looked like it was going to be one of those personal sacrifices we gumshoes make when the going gets rough.

  “Evening, Sophie. Uh . . . nice outfit.”

  She managed to push her tits out another improbable half inch without tipping over. Lipstick made her mouth look ripe, somehow reminding me of strawberries and cream. “Glad you like it. I change at where I work, come right over, see you. So, what you drinkin’?”

  “Moose drool.”

  She made a face. “Drool from the moose?”

  I smiled. “Good stuff. What can I get you?”

  The same bartender was still on duty. Sophie said to her, “I like a pink lady, not so much gin please, and double grenadine.” Then to me she said, “We go sit in the booth, okay?”

  “Perfect.” I got off the stool and looked at the booths, none of which were occupied. “Let’s take the one over there with my two buddies, Hammer and Spade.”

  She stopped dead. “No one there, Steve.”

  “Sometimes I hallucinate. But don’t worry, it’s fun.”

  She frowned. “What is this ’lucinate?”

  “Never mind.” I headed toward a booth, but she took my hand and led me to the farthest booth from the door. I got her seated then sat across the table from her where I could keep an eye on the front door, a safety measure that’s right there in the PI manual.

  She frowned again. “Why you sittin’ over there?”

  “So I can see you better.”

  A glow appeared in her eyes, then faded. “You should sit next to me. You can see everythin’ okay.”

  “I’m good.”

  “Okay, I sit over there.” Which she did. Bumping me with a sturdy hip, she shoved me farther into the booth.

  The bartender came over, set the pink lady in front of Sophie, then went back behind the bar. One old guy was at the far end of the bar, drinking shots. Two women in their forties were at a table twenty feet away, heads together, talking earnestly in low tones. Just those three people.

  Sophie put a hand on my thigh, which gave me choices. I could remove it and reduce the odds of having a meaningful discussion about the SUV lady, or I could leave it where it was and maybe give the chickadee the wrong impression.

  I left it there. It was warm and a bit high, so I thought I’d better get the ball rolling before this gumshoe-girl thing kicked itself into a higher gear.

  “That lady I mentioned earlier,” I said. “Did you see her? She might have been in a blue dress.”

  The hand on my thigh crept an inch higher. “We have to talk ’bout her now?”

  “Yes, now. She might have come into your motel and gotten a room last week, Wednesday or Thursday.”

  Sophie pouted. “She not your wife, girlfriend?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why she so important?”

  “I think maybe she’s a bad woman, Sophie. I’m trying to find out.”

  “What kind of bad woman? What she do?” Her hand started making little circles an inch or so from my crotch.

  I cleared my throat. “I don’t know. Mail fraud, maybe.”

  The circles slowed for a moment, then started up again. “What frawed mean?”

  “Shipping biohazardous material. It’s a federal offense.”

  The circles stopped again. “Fed-e-ral?” she said in a Spanish accent with a hint of wariness.

  “I’m interested in how she looked, any marks on her face like moles, scars, color of her eyes, thin face, big nose, things like that.”

  “I din’t see no scars, like yours, which is very . . . sexy. I theenk maybe her eyes is blue, like her dress.”

  “How about her hair color?”

  “Is
dark, except I theenk maybe she was wearing a, you know . . .” She patted her hair. The accent was picking up speed.

  “A wig.”

  “Yes, a weeg.”

  “Was anyone with her?”

  “Like who?”

  “A girl. Younger than you. Pretty.”

  “No. She was all alone.”

  “How did she pay for the room?”

  “Juss money. She gave me a beeg bill, a hunnerd dollar.”

  Cash. Sounded like our gal. And, I hated to admit it, but Ma was right, this wasn’t getting us anywhere. In fact, so far I’d say it was nothing, other than that hand now gently kneading my crotch—which was light-years away from getting us anywhere near the lady in the SUV.

  “You didn’t get a license plate number, did you?”

  “She was . . . no car. She say it was being feexed. Steve?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I show you sometheeng, okay?”

  “Sure, what?”

  “This.” She popped a couple of snaps on her halter and placed my hand on a warm, firm, luxurious, Spanish-speaking breast—the left one, if I wasn’t mistaken—and held it there.

  Choices: One, cough and pretend you don’t notice. Two, jump up and yell something. Three, squeeze. Four, fake a heart attack.

  Three won, because it was a round, very supple boob the size of a large cantaloupe and I’m a peeg. Oh—and cantaloupe is great with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in it. Just sayin’.

  She smiled. “Is nice, yes?”

  “Very nice.” And Jeri would hear every detail about this, too—except for the hard nub of nipple against my palm, which seemed irrelevant and more than she really needed to know.

  “Sophie?”

  “Yes?”

  “I need to know about this woman. Anything you can tell me. Anything more.” I started to pull my hand away, but she gripped it in both hands and pressed it harder against her.

  “I’m theenking,” she said.

  Far be it from me to break the concentration of a witness, so I waited. She started moving my hand around on her breast. We were facing the room with a view down the length of the bar. We could see everyone in the room, two flat-screen TVs over the bar, the front door. No one was paying any attention to us.

  “Steve?”

  “What?”

  “I have not had a man for two weeks.”

  “Two whole weeks? And you’re still alive? How is that?”

  She smiled. “You make the joke, yes?”

  “You could go into shock at any moment. If you do, we’ll need to elevate your feet.”

  She stared into the room. Her hands stopped moving my hand on her breast, which meant I had to do all the work. Which I did.

  “Like that,” she said. She pointed at one of the two televisions. “The woman in the blue dress, she looked juss like that.”

  I leaned toward Sophie for a better look. On the television, a lady in a beige suit was in front of a bouquet of microphones. The sound was turned off, so I couldn’t hear her words, but, just like me, Julia Reinhart had gone well beyond her allotted fifteen minutes of fame.

  Julia.

  Which meant Ma was wrong about Sophie not being useful.

  Man, was she gonna be pissed.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  BUT IT WAS late and she was probably asleep by now, so telling her about my latest success as a gumshoe would have to wait until morning. Meanwhile, I had a breast filling my right hand and then some, success of a somewhat different kind, directly related to my new career—it never once happened when I was terrorizing citizens with the IRS—and I had to find a way to extricate it since Sophie still had a death-grip on my hand, holding it in place.

  “We should leave,” I said.

  “My place only four blocks away,” she purred.

  “I gotta hit the men’s room,” said the dwarf.

  “You hurry, Steve. I am so hot—like you wouldn’ believe.”

  “I’m on it.”

  That bathroom window wasn’t looking any bigger than it had earlier. I hoped the Jaws of Life wouldn’t be needed. I remember a guy on TV who crawled through an unstrung tennis racket. I say it was unstrung to avoid confusion whenever I tell this. He stuck an arm and shoulder through, then his head, dislocated the other shoulder, took half a dozen deep breaths and let it all out because he couldn’t squeeze through the racket with a lungful of air, couldn’t take a breath with that thing around his chest either, so the entire operation looked like an interesting form of suicide, but right now I was glad I’d taken notes.

  I put one arm through, then my head, didn’t bother with that dislocate the shoulder part, wormed my chest through sideways, let out some air, felt the frame at my front, back, sides, and popped out, hung upside down for a moment, then dropped to the ground trying for a tuck and a cool-looking somersault, which didn’t work out, then lay on the ground and said hi to Sophie who was eight feet away at the end of the alley staring at me.

  “You are a shithead,” she said.

  “Yes I am.”

  “For all night, I only coss fifty dollar.”

  “Only fifty smackeroos? A bargain at half the price.”

  She turned on her heel and left. I got in the Caddy and took off. Later when I told all this to Ma, she about busted a gut.

  “Julia,” she said in the morning at an IHOP over French toast. “Makes sense, sort of—a lot, actually—but what the hell, Mort.”

  “My words exactly.”

  “We gotta phone Jeri, let her know.”

  “Nope.”

  Ma stared at me. “Nope?”

  “You know Jeri. She might go out and tackle this dame on her own. But we don’t know what’s going on. Reinhart’s hand chopped off, shipped to me, Wexel dead, burned to a crisp. If Julia Reinhart is involved, we’ve got to check her out as a team.”

  “Dame?”

  “And,” I went on, “if Sophie was just blowing smoke to keep my hand on her tit, then checking out Julia might not be dangerous or productive. Either way, it can wait, so we don’t call Jeri.”

  “You had your hands on the chickadee’s tits?”

  “One hand, the right—so only one tit, the left. And you’re picking up on the most insignificant details here, Ma.”

  “Tits are insignificant? I can see why Jeri trusts you. Raises a few other questions though.” She looked at me with one eye.

  Jesus H. Christ. Women.

  “Gifting,” I said, breaking a twenty-minute silence. The word was giving me fits.

  “Uh-huh. Speaking of insignificant details.”

  We were thirty miles south of Bend, roaring south at fifty miles an hour. Every hour that passed, we went fifty whole miles, by God. I was thinking Chariots of Fire.

  “Doesn’t feel insignificant to me,” I said.

  She shrugged. “If I had some hot guy gifted to me, even if all I could do is look, you wouldn’t hear me complaining about it, boyo. Been a long goddamn time since I’ve seen a guy buck naked.” She gave me a challenging look. “Think I’m too old to care?”

  “Not even close, Ma. But this thing with Jeri and Holiday has me spinning in circles.”

  “Christ, I haven’t heard a guy whine so much in forever.”

  “You’re no help.”

  “Can’t say I didn’t try. It’s like gettin’ through a brick wall.”

  So I shut up.

  To Reno from Bend via Gerlach was some four hundred fifty miles. We left Bend at nine twenty, keeping an eye out for a white Mercedes SUV. With a stop in Lakeview for lunch, a quick bite in Gerlach, we pulled into Reno at eight forty-five p.m., full dark, nine hours on the road, so there was another day shot. Ma phoned Jeri from Gerlach, gave her an update on our progress as we neared Fernley, then called again as we reached the eastern edge of Sparks.

  I parked the Caddy at Ma’s place. Jeri was already there in her Porsche, waiting for us.

  “Learn anything useful?” Jeri asked.

  “You tell
her,” Ma said to me. “I’m beat. Anyway, you’re the one that got the chickadee hot an’ talking. Be sure to tell her about that window thing, too. If you don’t, I will.”

  “Chickadee?” Jeri asked. “Hot? Window thing?”

  “Thanks, Ma,” I said. “I owe you one.”

  Ma waved and went into the house. I smiled at Jeri. “I am a gumshoe like no other.”

  “I believe that. What’d you do this time?”

  “I’m hungry. How about we go home, get something to eat, and I’ll tell you about it?”

  “How about we go to the Golden Goose where Sarah’s waiting for us? You can choose the restaurant, how’s that?”

  “Is that Sarah or Holiday?”

  “She didn’t say. We’ll see how she’s dressed.”

  We stopped by Jeri’s place first. I took a five-minute shower to freshen up. Jeri took a five-minute shower at the same time, which, as luck would have it, made it easier to get my back scrubbed. Then there was another ten-minute delay caused by the shower delay, then another quick freshen-up splash in the shower, then we got dressed. Jeri wore tight pants that hugged her butt nicely, and a tight top that hugged the rest of her. Damn, she looked good.

  When we walked into the Green Room, Jeri and I looked at each other and said, “Holiday,” at the same time.

  She was sitting at the bar with a guy in his thirties, showing two inches of tight tanned tummy in a shimmery two-piece outfit. The lower part was a skirt that ended above mid-thigh; the top revealed as much as it concealed. She slid off the stool when she saw us, and she and Jeri hugged again. Buddies.

  “Mort found something,” Jeri said.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “We should hit a restaurant first,” I said.

  Holiday said good-bye to Ryan, no last name, thanked him for the drink, then we left. Ryan, NLN, watched us go out the door. He gave me a look that said I was a selfish son of a bitch, for which I didn’t blame him, but some of us are gumshoes, and some of us aren’t.

  We settled for a light meal in a coffee shop. Over a burger and fries I told them about Bend, the body shop, the white paint job on the green SUV, then the Evergreen and Sophie and someone’s hand on what prudes and malcontents might say was an oversized boob. Then the boob in the bathroom, escaping through the window, and Sophie in the alley calling me a shithead, a moment I will hold dear in my heart until the day I die.