Gumshoe for Two

by Rob Leininger

  “Jesus, Mort,” Jeri said. “But Ma said you found something up there and it wasn’t some girl’s breasts, so what was it?”

  “Oh, that, yeah. Slipped my mind. Just that there’s a good chance the SUV we’ve been looking for is being driven by Julia Reinhart.”

  Jeri and Holiday stared at me. I checked my forehead, worried that I’d grown a third eye, which would’ve put a damper on the evening.

  I had the burger headed toward my mouth when Jeri grabbed my arm and set it down for me—slammed my arm down would be more accurate. Christ, she was strong.

  “You twerp. You went on about some girl’s tits and waited all this time to tell me—us—that little informational gem?”

  “Twerp?”

  She was beautiful, and her face was a study in exasperation. “That’s like shithead, only I can say it a lot louder in public.”

  “Well, I had to get in an informational mood, dear heart.”

  “The shower forty minutes ago didn’t put you in the mood?”

  “That mood was entirely different. It wasn’t informational and nutritional, like this one.” I held up a French fry. “It’s important not to confuse the two.”

  Holiday hid a smile. Jeri sat back and stared at me. Finally, she said, “Okay, twerp, tell us about Julia Reinhart.”

  “There isn’t much to tell. She was on TV in the bar and Sophie said the lady who stayed at the motel looked just like her.”

  Jeri didn’t like that. “That doesn’t mean it was Julia. It could have been someone who looked sort of like her, that’s all.”

  “Entirely possible. But then, you start looking at the big picture and Julia makes sense. A lot more than some random woman who happens to resemble her.”

  “Which still doesn’t make it Julia.”

  “What about Allie?” Holiday asked. She was picking at a bagel in front of her, pinching off sparrow-sized bits.

  “That I don’t know. Sophie said she didn’t see a girl with the woman.”

  “Things are still squirrelly,” Jeri said. “I don’t mean you didn’t do good or get us somewhere, but there’s still a lot we don’t know.”

  “True. But one thing we’ve got is the VIN number on that SUV that went from green to white. It’s the same as the VIN registered to Mary Odermann, so we’ve nailed that down.”

  “Meaning what?” Holiday asked.

  “Meaning,” Jeri said, waving one of my fries around, “we’ve got to track down Julia, see if she’s driving a white Mercedes SUV, then check its VIN number, see if it’s the one registered to Mary Odermann, and if all that checks out, then we’ve pretty much got her. Then maybe we can find out about Allie.”

  “Who no one has seen in a week and a half,” Holiday said. “If it was her.”

  Jeri put a hand on her arm. “We’re gettin’ there. This has been a pretty weird deal. I mean, with Reinhart’s hand being sent to Mort and Reinhart’s chief of staff being murdered. As far as we know, the FBI isn’t even in the game right now. And I don’t think we want them in, at least not yet.” She stole another of my fries, chewed on it thoughtfully, then said, “We know where Julia lives. We have an address. Ma says she can get us into that gated community. What say we give that a try tomorrow?”

  “I’m in,” Holiday said. “My last class is at noon. I can be ready to go at one or a little after.”

  I nodded. “I was gonna go bowling, but I’ll blow it off.”

  “One o’clock it is, then,” Jeri said, then swiped my last fry and dipped it in catsup, smiled at me as she ate it. “Now I want to hear more about that Sophie deal. Sounds like you had fun up there.”

  “Okay, then. Let me tell you about cantaloupes.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. They’re round and about this big and they taste real good with vanilla ice cream.”

  “You didn’t. Please tell me you didn’t.”

  Sarah wasn’t going to be ready until after one p.m., so Jeri and I slept in. By eleven we were at Ma’s office, and by eleven fifteen she had us a pass through the gate into the exclusive neighborhood where Julia and Harry Reinhart lived, not that we expected Harry to show up. Ma knew about fifteen people who lived there, one of whom was a private investment counselor by the name of Nathan Milbarger. Milbarger seemed eager to please. He phoned the gate and told them he had a party of four coming in between one thirty and two, and one of those people would be Maude Clary.

  We went in Ma’s Caddy. Ma drove. We picked up Sarah at her apartment at one twenty and roared off in the Chariot of Fire, south on 395. Sarah was in sandals, black jeans, and a white UNR sweatshirt with the Wolf logo on it, looking very much the pretty college coed.

  We were waved through the gate by a guy in his midtwenties as soon as the name Milbarger floated out the driver’s-side window. Up and around we went through a maze of streets, none of which went in a straight line for more than a hundred feet. We never did see Milbarger’s house, but a map and some backtracking got us to a three-million-dollar mansion with a million-dollar view of Reno and Sparks spread out below in the valley and a pretentious fountain in a front courtyard—a half-naked maiden pouring water out of a jug into the water at her feet. So this was where Nevada’s lying senator lurked when he wasn’t lurking in his Washington D.C. townhouse, chuckling about his latest taxpayer rip-off. Nice. Wish I could pull strings and have money come in under the table—as long as I didn’t end up in Hades in molten lava, which might be where Harry was even as we sat in the car and thought about what to do next.

  “Two cars are registered in Julia’s name,” Ma said. “A Lexus IS 350 Sport in her name alone, and she and Harry have an Audi Q7 SUV in both their names.”

  “How about Harry alone?” I asked.

  Ma checked her cell phone. “Lexus IS 350 Sport. They got his and hers. His is black, hers is red.”

  None of which was in sight now. The house was on a dead-end street with a wide turnaround at the end, so traffic was nonexistent. Doors on the four-car garage were down. We were in a brown 1963 Cadillac Eldorado idling at the curb, a car Hispanic kids in a gang might drive—which was a very politically incorrect observation, but accurate, as politically incorrect observations often are. I wondered how long we could stay there before a politically incorrect police car or two pulled up behind us. Another multimillion-dollar house was across the street, so I gave us ten minutes, fifteen tops.

  “Time to roll,” I said.

  “Right-o,” Ma said. She swung the car around at the end of the street, then stopped. The street ended at a sidewalk and a low rail fence. Beyond that, a hillside of dry sagebrush went on for miles, nothing but empty scrub and rocks. No big fence, no barbed wire, no razor concertina wire to keep undesirables out.

  “What do you think, Jeri?” Ma asked.

  “Doable,” Jeri said. “Might be worth the risk.”

  “Better if there was a moon out.”

  “City lights ought to be enough.”

  “Huh?” I said, obviously out of an important loop. Then I said, “Well, yeah. City lights oughta be plenty.”

  Jeri laughed. “Plenty for what, Mort?”

  “Uh . . . pinochle?”

  Ma guffawed, then put the Caddy in drive, and pulled away. “For a little nighttime recon, doll,” she said.

  “Yup,” I replied. “That or pinochle, either one. There’s a place on Virginia Street that sells cards that glow in the dark.”

  “But are they pinochle decks?”

  “Well . . . shit.”

  The day was still young, however, so we decided on a Denny’s Restaurant for a late lunch and strategy session. We took a booth. I sat across from Jeri and Ma, next to the fresh-faced coed.

  “Okay,” Ma said, once we’d ordered and had drinks in front of us. “Two things. We can try to track down Julia and follow her, see where she goes, what she’s doing, or we can try to find that SUV.” She kept her voice low to keep the conversation private.

  “The car might be at her hou
se,” I offered. “Two birds with one stone.”

  “Hence tonight’s recon, boyo, if it becomes necessary.”

  “Why wouldn’t it? Not that I’m into skulking since the last time I did that it almost got me and Jeri killed.”

  “If we found that Mercedes somewhere else we wouldn’t have to get into that garage, which is iffy, that’s why. So if we go after that SUV to check its VIN, what’s another way we might find it?”

  We thought about that in silence for a while.

  Finally, Jeri said, “It’s registered to Mary Odermann, who no longer exists. Bob Odermann does, however, and Mort got a little bite when he mentioned a Mercedes SUV to Bobby. But we’ve also got Leland Bye, Mary’s brother, who happens to be a lawyer, and you can’t trust a lawyer farther than you can lob a politician.”

  So we thought about that for a while.

  Finally, I said, “I wonder if the fish and chips I ordered was the right choice.”

  I got a few hisses from that, so I said, “And I wonder what Bob would do if someone went back to that print shop and asked him point blank about his wife’s SUV.”

  We gave that some thought.

  Then Sarah said, “I could do that. He’s never seen me. I don’t have to tell him my name. But what would be the point, exactly?”

  “Shake things up,” Jeri said. “It’s not the worst idea out there. If Odermann is involved somehow and if he’s trying to keep a low profile, he might do something, make a mistake. If Sarah went in and shook Bob’s tree, it might rattle him enough to make him go somewhere, do something. If so, we could follow him, see where that takes us.”

  “Except it’s hard to imagine a print shop guy being involved in the assassination or death of a presidential candidate,” Ma said, so we thought about that for a while. Then she said, “But then there’s Bye. We could do the same thing there. One of us goes in, says something about an SUV registered to his dead sister, then walks out, see if anything falls out of that tree.”

  We were thinking about that when the food arrived, so we dug in and thought about Bye and Odermann while we filled up. And I wouldn’t be having fish n’ chips at Denny’s again but that’s another story, nothing to do with mystery SUVs or lawyers.

  “Okay,” Ma said. “Suppose we shake a tree and Julia gets a phone call and takes off, or worse, ditches the SUV. Shaking a tree could end up hurting us. We’d better have eyes on her at the time we rattle either Odermann or Bye.”

  “Gettin’ complicated,” I said.

  “How about this?” Sarah said. “I’m walking in the hills and I get thirsty, so I hop over that little fence we saw and ring the doorbell at Reinhart’s house. If no one answers, then . . . well, then I don’t know. But if Julia is there I can ask for a glass of water then leave, phone it in. I could watch the house from the hillside right as someone asks Bye or Odermann about that SUV. If Julia leaves, I could see which car she’s in. Someone could wait along the road outside that guard gate and follow her if she takes off.”

  “Spreads us a little thin,” Ma said, “but it’s doable. It’d take you a while to hike up to the house. It’d take me a month. Oughta have some binoculars with you, too, just in case.”

  More silence. Jeri got out her cell phone and got into Google Maps, figured out the closest overland approach to Reinhart’s house, which turned out to be 2.6 miles, a quarter mile or so up Court Shoe Lane in southwest Reno, then a hike southwest through sagebrush into the hills.

  “So,” Jeri said. “Who do we shake, Bye or Odermann? And if we’re gonna do it today, we gotta get going. It’ll take Sarah a while to get into position.”

  “Most likely snake in the grass is Leland Bye,” I said.

  “Weakest link might be Odermann,” Ma said.

  “Or,” Sarah suggested, “one person could hit them both, five or ten minutes apart.”

  “I like that,” Jeri said. “I’ll do the shaking. But if something does fall out of a tree, we might not know which tree did the trick.”

  “Unless,” Ma said, “you hit Bye first, then wait half an hour before hitting Odermann. If something shakes loose, it’ll probably happen pretty quick, won’t take half an hour.”

  Sarah stood up. “If we’re gonna do this, I’ve got to get going. Court Shoe Lane. I’ll find it, but I need a ride back to my place, and I’ll need some binoculars.”

  “When you’re ready, I’ll shake Bye and Odermann,” Jeri said.

  “I’ll wait outside the gate and follow Julia if she bolts,” I said, sliding out of the booth.

  “Hit Bye first,” Ma said to Jeri. “I’ll watch his place, follow him if he leaves. Once you talk to Odermann, hang around and keep an eye on him. Everyone know what to do? Everyone’s cell phones charged up? Everyone got everyone’s number?”

  We all nodded, I tossed money on the table, and we headed for Ma’s Eldorado. She made a quick trip to Jeri’s, dropped all of us off. Sarah got Jeri’s binoculars, then the two of them headed off to Sarah’s apartment in the Porsche. I tossed two wigs and a moustache in the Toyota and took off. Nothing was going to happen for a while, not until Sarah got in position, so I parked down the street from Bye’s office building and watched the entrance. His ride was a dark blue late-model Lexus SUV. I spotted it in a side lot, so odds were he was in. Maybe I’d get lucky and he would go somewhere, like to Julia’s.

  Twenty minutes later, Ma parked down the street the other way and reported that Sarah was out of her car, hiking into the hills. I waited a few minutes longer, then headed for the road—Parkway, actually—that wound up into the hills toward the gated community.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I WAITED.

  Sarah hiked.

  Jeri parked down the street from Bye’s office. She had Ma’s Caddy in sight.

  This thing we were winding up was beginning to store energy.

  At four thirty-five, Sarah told Ma she was in position. She didn’t see any sign of life at the house. She was about to ring the bell, see if anyone answered. Ma reported all that to Jeri and me.

  I waited.

  Ten minutes later, Sarah reported back. Julia was home and Sarah had gotten a glass of water. Julia was cold, brusque, not happy to see her. She’d gotten Sarah out of the house as soon as possible. Sarah was headed back into the hills to keep an eye on the place, see if anything happened when Jeri started shaking trees.

  I waited.

  Jeri hit Leland Bye’s place first, which, according to Jeri, went something like this:

  Jeri (in front of Bye’s desk having blown by a secretary who’d failed to tackle her): There’s a Mercedes SUV registered in Mary Odermann’s name, Mr. Bye. Your sister Mary, just to be clear.

  Bye (startled): Who the hell are you?

  Jeri: But Mary is dead, has been for two years, so . . . what’s up with that?

  Bye (settling back in his chair with a jittery, calculating look): I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. How’d you get in here, anyway?

  Jeri: Just thought you ought to know someone is using your deceased sister’s name. You might want to let the DMV know, see if they’re interested. (Exit stage left)

  Jeri reported the contact to Sarah, told her to watch the house. She said Bye had looked squirrelly.

  Four minutes later, Julia Reinhart took off in the red Lexus IS Sport. Sarah reported hearing a chirp of tires as she left. She said she was going to jog downhill, that she’d be back at her car in less than thirty minutes in case she could still be useful.

  Ma phoned me. “Bye left his office, Mort. I’m following in my car. Jeri is on him in hers. Son of a bitch is driving kinda fast. Keep an eye out for Julia. Sarah says Julia is headed your way in that red Lexus. Oughta be past the guard gate in two or three minutes.”

  “On it,” I told Ma. I started the Toyota—an invisible car, but it was going to have to compete with a Lexus. Maybe I should’ve shaken the trees while Jeri watched the gate. Too late now.

  But we had two people on the move. I
didn’t know about Ma in her Chariot, but I doubted that Bye could lose Jeri. Thing is, she was in a hot Porsche, and Bye might be checking his rearview mirror more than usual. I would give a bundle to know if he and Julia were on phones to each other right then. If so, I’d pay double to listen in.

  Ma hooked all four of us up in a conference call, which would wear batteries down faster but looked necessary with everything that was going on.

  Julia went down the forty-five-mile-an-hour Parkway at sixty. Side mirror howling, I stayed two hundred yards back hoping she would get the ticket, not me. We crossed South Virginia Street and got on 395, headed north. She picked it up to seventy. I stayed on her tail, a quarter mile back. I had a Bluetooth in my ear for hands-free driving. Safety first.

  Looks like we’d stirred up a hornet’s nest. Bye and Julia were acting guilty, all right. Of something, and it was obviously related to Mary Odermann’s SUV, which, adding another layer of sneakiness, had been painted white. I still wanted to see Julia in or around that SUV just to be sure, but for the moment all of us were having a grand old time.

  In fact, we didn’t have any proof that Mary Odermann’s SUV was the one that had been spotted in Gerlach, or that the young girl Deputy Roup had seen in the SUV was Allie, but this was all we had, and it was looking better all the time.

  Ma’s voice buzzed in my ear. “Bye has slowed down. Maybe tryin’ not to get pulled over. We’re going north on Arlington, crossing Second Street now.”

  I told everyone that Julia was still rolling north on 395, so it looked like she and Bye were about to get together.

  Leland Bye ended up in the parking garage of the Golden Goose Casino, which I thought was perfect. Odds were that he and Julia were going to meet there, in a room or a restaurant. Jeri had gone past Bye in the garage and parked nearby on the third level. She was on him, following in a shoulder-length big blond wig and black-frame glasses, bright red lipstick, wearing a red cardigan. Bye hurried along a skyway above Sierra Street and into the Goose. In his office Jeri had been in a white shirt, black pants, dark glasses, no lipstick. She trotted to catch up and was ten yards back when he went through a wide lobby toward a bank of elevators. She’d put on a double strand of fake pearls and had a Macy’s bag in one hand that held a ball cap and a bulky blue sweatshirt.