Jeri’s half-decent idea turned out to be fully indecent and took an hour and a half to implement in its entirety. And that was after the enchiladas had worn off enough that we could move in a reasonably athletic and flexible manner. The upshot was that we staggered out of bed at eleven forty-five the next morning and my eyes wouldn’t focus. I stood there blinking for half a minute, trying to get them going.
“Wow,” Jeri said.
“Synoptic, on target, and you managed to slip a little hussy note in there. Impressive.”
“And I’m starving again.”
“Me, too,” I said. “I could use a stack of homemade waffles.”
“Thing is, putting those little square indentations in pancakes is so goddamn time-consuming.”
“Waffles R Not Us?”
“You got that right.”
It took me three tries to figure out how to hold Jockey shorts to get my legs through the proper holes. Jeri watched for a while, then offered to help. “Just about got it whupped, kiddo,” I said. “Only got one more permutation left to try, but thanks anyway.”
“That’s a big, impressive word.”
“Being educated, I excel in wig birds. I mean, big words.”
“You need coffee.”
“Coffee would help. And which one of us stole my pants?”
Turns out, one of us had only misplaced his pants in the heat of a rapid undressing. That got sorted out and we arrived fully dressed at Ma’s office after we’d teamed up to make toast and omelets, put stuff in the dishwasher, retrieved my Toyota from the parking garage at the Golden Goose and parked it back at Jeri’s place.
Jeri had given Ma the address of the mysterious house the night before. Ma had come up with the name of the person who paid taxes on the place, which wasn’t the same as the owner. The actual owner was First Interstate Bank since the place was purchased less than a year ago with ten thousand down. But Leland, it turned out, who didn’t own 10 percent of the property, paid a hundred percent of the taxes, so FIB was making out like a bandit, as banks do.
“Owned by Leland Bye, Esquire,” I said. “What a surprise.”
“Uh-huh,” Ma said. “Could’ve knocked me over with a feather when I found out.”
“Guy’s had it less than a year, huh?” Jeri said.
“Nine months. Got it last December. Paid a hundred thirty-two five for it. Twelve hundred sixty square feet on a four-point-three-acre lot. Two bedrooms, one and a half baths, built in 1957.”
“As the wife of a presidential candidate, you’d think the Secret Service would know where Julia went and what she did on a fairly regular basis,” I said. “That’s if Harry has Secret Service protection at this point—which, someone chopping off his primary shaker like that, would be a hell of a black eye for the Service—and so soon after that Columbian hooker thing, too.”
Ma stared at me. “I don’t think he was under their wing yet. But if he was, would they consider something like Julia’s cheating to be their business? What I mean is, would they tell Harry or just keep an eye on her?”
Jeri said, “If I had to guess, I’d say the latter. Not sure they’ve quite gone Gestapo yet.”
“IRS is Gestapo, hon,” I told her. “We’ve got a lock on that. No one muscles in.”
Instead of cracking one of my ribs, she kissed me, so I must have done good that morning. “Such a facile little mind,” she said.
“I’ve just been damned with the faintest of praise.”
“Yup.”
“You two should get a room,” Ma said.
I looked at Jeri. “We could do that.”
She shook her head. “Nope. I’m saving myself for my wedding night.”
Ma cackled. “You two.”
I said, “Okay, here’s a thought. An out-of-the-way love nest is purchased. Two fairly good-looking people, both with a lot to lose, meet up when the urge strikes, as urges do. At that point no Secret Service is involved, everything is cool. Then a lying senator upsets the apple cart by suddenly deciding he’s qualified to be the leader of the free world. Julia finds herself in the spotlight. Now the media wants to check this babe out, look into her past, root through her underwear drawer, dig up enough dirt on her and Harry to fill Hell’s Canyon. Suddenly Harry’s cheating trophy wife is thrust onto the world stage. I wonder how that played.”
Ma screwed up her face. “Not so good, I’d say.” She knocked a cigarette out of a pack and lit up.
I checked my watch: 3:45 p.m. “How about we go cruise by the love nest, doll?” I said to Jeri.
“Doll, huh? You looking to get laid again, hotshot?”
“Pretty soon, yeah.”
“Je-sus, you two,” Ma said. “Get outta here.”
All was quiet at the nest. We rolled by at four thirty-five and scoped the place out. The Lexus was gone. No other cars were in sight. In daylight we could see how remote the house was. The nearest house was back up the road, a quarter mile away. Farther along, nearly half a mile away, a two-story house sat at the end of the lane. It looked as if Leland and Julia had valued their privacy. We hung a U-turn and came back. Jeri stopped near the cobra-chain mailbox, and we watched the place for a while.
After a while, I said, “Drive in, walk in, or keep watching since this is so much fun?” I settled my gun more comfortably in its holster.
She chewed on her lower lip. “How about we give it an hour, maybe two, see if anything moves. If not, then I say we drive in, see what’s what.”
“You’re the boss.”
We sat there with the engine ticking as it cooled. A breeze walked a few dead leaves across the road.
Minutes passed. Silence settled in and grew heavy.
Finally, I said, “A word has come up recently. It came up last night at the restaurant. It’s giving me fits, thinking about it. Even trying to think about how to think about it is giving me fits.”
Jeri smiled. “Sounds like you. What word is that?”
“Gifting.”
She stared out the window. We were a mile from Fernley’s main street. Nothing was moving. After a while she said, “It’s kind of a big word, Mort. I believe Ma came up with it, at least in the context currently afoot.”
“I thought . . . as long as we’re sitting here on an empty road, an intellectual conversation might keep us from drifting off into irreversible comas.”
“Intellectual, huh?”
“Don’t know what else to call it, even if it’s not.”
She blew out a breath. “Two weeks ago, nothing like that was in my head. Gifting, I mean.” She didn’t say anything for another minute. Then, “I really like her, Mort.”
“I know. I do, too.”
“She’s . . . different, but so am I. She’d like to have something the world isn’t prepared to give her.”
“Know that, too.”
“It’s about experiencing sexual feelings, not actual sex.”
“Yup.”
“When that gets bottled up, it can hurt. A lot.”
“Yup again.”
“But . . . it’s not up to you to fix it. It’s not your problem.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But, you could, on occasion. Almost like you were watching television.”
“Television, huh?”
“I guess it would be pretty live TV, but yes.”
“Live, all right. Thing is, that feels complicated.”
She closed her eyes and scratched her forehead with a finger. “It could be, yes, if we let it. I think it puts you on the spot. I think you’re feeling damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
“Nailed it.”
“So you’re between a proverbial rock and a hard place, except that depends on how all of us think about it. I mean, how each of us views the situation.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So . . . what if it’s all right with me?”
“That’s pretty much where I get stuck. Still.”
“Because you think I’d be jealous. That if I ag
ree to it, it would only be because I’m being nice. That in truth I’d hate it.”
“Nailed it again.”
She turned to me. “Jealousy is a kind of sickness, Mort. It declares ownership. It turns people into property. It denies their right to be who they are. I’m not that way. I don’t have the jealousy gene. The tighter you hold on to someone, the less of them you get. If you’re happy, I’m happy, and if you and I are happy together, then what’s the problem? Anyway, this thing with Sarah isn’t just my decision. I mean, if we’re talking about decisions it would be up to you, too. You’d have to want to do it. Which brings up another big problem. For you, I think.”
“What’s that?”
“How do you say yes, you’d like to give her what she wants if you think I’d hate it? How do we even have that conversation?”
I sighed. Couldn’t do anything else.
“So it’s up to me,” Jeri said. “I’m the one who has to make it okay, and it’s like I don’t have the words to do that.” She hesitated. “Except . . . I want to try something, and I need for you to trust me. I mean, trust me completely. I’m going to ask you one question, just one, and I want a completely honest answer and I don’t want you to try to figure out what I want that answer to be. Will you trust me? Please?”
“Okay, yes. Ask away.”
“Seeing Sarah—Holiday—not fully dressed. Would you like to keep doing that for a while?”
“Yes.”
She sagged, and I knew I’d blown it. Her shoulders slumped. She took a deep breath. “Oh, thank God,” she said. “We got through it. No one died.” She pulled my head down and gave me a kiss. It lasted awhile and got sloppy. When we came up for air, she said, “Then do it. It doesn’t hurt us. It doesn’t. It really doesn’t. I’m not a jealous person, and that’s me being honest, too.”
I shivered.
Jeri held one of my hands in both of hers. “I don’t know why I like her so much. I just do. I’ve had, quote-unquote, best friends before, but nothing like her and not for a long time. It’s like I can tell Sarah anything. Maybe it’s because I was a lot like her for so long. Seven years, after Beau. That was a dark place. You got me out of it. Now Sarah’s in a place that feels pretty much the same—and, if you’re willing, maybe you can help her to get out of it, too.”
“I’m not sure about that. I don’t think she’s trying to leave that place. She’s trying to . . . to stay there, enjoy being there.”
“People change.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And even if she didn’t, she would still enjoy it and you’d have fun.”
“Yep. Can’t deny it. You got me there.”
“I don’t ‘have’ you, Mort. I’m not trying to put you on the spot. I’m just saying—she would like it and you would like it and that’s all right. I mean, if you didn’t like it, that would be pretty weird.”
“Well, no one’s ever accused me of being weird before. I am the freakin’ epitome of normal. I am on the highest tiptop part of a bell-shaped curve of pristine twenty-four-carat male normalcy.”
She laughed, a nice musical sound in the car. “There. That’s the Mort I know and love. Sarah likes to show herself, that’s all. It makes her feel alive. She can’t really do it in a bar, but she can with you. Then I get to fix you, which I have to say is a blast.”
“Ah, an ulterior motive eases out of the fog. The world begins to make sense.”
“Well, good. You figured it out.”
I took a deep breath. “You really want this, Jeri?”
“For Sarah, yes. For you, too.”
“Okay, then. I’m not going to hold you to it. If things change and you want it to stop, tell me. Just because that train is rolling doesn’t mean it can’t be brought to a halt.”
“Got it. Thank you.” She smiled. “So . . . when?”
“When what?”
“When do you want to . . . fire her up again? It’s been a while since you two were in Tonopah.”
“How ’bout a week and a half from Friday after next?”
“Je-sus, Mort—”
“Tonight? Tomorrow night? What’ve we got coming up? Last thing I want is to miss poker night with the boys.”
“Tomorrow night would be good. If that’s okay, I’ll let her know, let her start getting that pump primed.”
“That’s not a pump that needs priming, Jeri.”
“Maybe not, but trust me—she’ll be dancing on air.” She got her cell phone out, tapped the screen, got on with Holiday.
Dancing on air. That was nothing like my time in the IRS, so maybe I was making progress. I don’t remember dancing on air or making anyone else dance on air the entire time I was unloading people’s bank accounts, garnishing wages, threatening to take their homes, sell their children. Dancing on air wasn’t the image that came to mind in the morning when I laced up my jackboots to go out and rake in Uncle Sammy’s hard-earned dough. Uncle’s boys, of which I used to be one, had a lot in common with old-time muscle wielding baseball bats who raked in protection money to protect store owners from . . . from old-time muscle with bats who raked in the protection money. Gimme money or I’ll break your legs. That sounded familiar, except breaking legs was replaced with garnishing wages.
But how had I arrived at this place? I tried to follow the path that led from Holiday telling me to stuff my mirror in the bar two weeks ago to this point, this discussion with Jeri in her Porsche as we kept an eye on Leland and Julia’s love nest. I couldn’t do it. The path had too many twists and turns. But I did get something out of a few minutes’ thought while Jeri was on the phone with Holiday. What I got from this entire female tsunami rolling over me was—women are a hell of a lot more complicated than men.
Well, I’d already known that, so the truth was I hadn’t learned anything at all. The knowledge just got driven deeper into what I jokingly refer to as my brain.
“Okay,” Jeri said. “That really made her day. Let’s go look the place over.”
“Expecting to find what, exactly?”
“Won’t know until we find it. But a white Mercedes SUV in that garage out back with the VIN number we’re looking for would be a real winner.”
She started the Porsche and pulled into the driveway. The time was 6:20 p.m., the sky gray with clouds, a breeze making tree limbs sway, dislodging early fall leaves. I watched the house as we drew near. Nothing moved. Curtains were pulled across the windows. The love nest was empty. Even so, I loosened the .357 in its holster.
Jeri pulled up in front of a detached garage—a wide single-car structure circa 1957 with a flat-panel door, slightly warped, that would swing up and inward on twanging hinges—I knew the type.
We got out. I glanced at the house. Still no movement. From this angle I could see a door in the side of the garage and a single dirt-grimed window. Jeri and I went to the door. It was locked, but just like it says in the PI manual, that old lock yielded to the dumb-ass credit card trick, first time I’d ever tried it. Before we went in, I went behind the garage. Junk was piled against the back wall, and what might have been a good-sized woodpile was beneath a blue tarp. Another house stood three hundred yards away across an empty field of dry weeds, half-hidden by scraggly lilac bushes.
I went back to the door, shook my head at Jeri. We went in . . . and there was a white Mercedes SUV.
Sometimes life gives you a break.
“Got it,” Jeri breathed. “This is why we never saw it around town. She kept it out here.”
The car had been driven in with its hood almost touching the back wall. The sides of the place were taken up by shelves with junk on them: old coffee cans of screws and nails, shelf brackets, piston rings, rusty tools, moldering magazines. I pulled my gun and looked the place over while Jeri checked the VIN with her little flashlight. First she shined the light into the cargo hold of the SUV. “Back seats are down. There’s a bundle of rags or something in there.”
“VIN number,” I replied. Light in the garage was dim
, coming through two windows clouded by dirt that had been building up since Eisenhower was president.
She shined the light through the windshield on the driver’s side, then grunted. “This’s it,” and maybe her words were the reason I didn’t hear the footsteps behind me, but it might have been that the garage floor was old soft dirt, almost like powder.
“Don’t move.” Julia’s automatic made a nasty ratcheting noise as she chambered a round. “You with the flashlight, get over here.”
I looked at her, framed in the doorway. The gun in her hand looked like a cannon, muzzle aimed at my chest. I felt my breathing stop dead. Her eyes bored into mine.
“Well, if it isn’t Mortimer Angel,” she said quietly.
“Mort.”
“Drop the gun . . . Mort. Now.”
It plopped into dirt near the garage wall.
Julia glanced at Jeri as Jeri rounded the back of the SUV. “That’s far enough, girl. Unless you want this big old boy to die right where he’s standing.”
Jeri stopped moving. She looked at me, then back at Julia. She was twelve feet from Julia, on the far side of the SUV. I was six feet from Julia. For a moment, all three of us stayed like that.
Why was it always me who kept Jeri from going after the one with the weapon? Why was I the chosen patsy? In Jonnie Sjorgen’s old mansion in August it was that psycho girl, Winter, with a deadly foil buried half an inch deep in my back, who kept Jeri at bay.
“This gun’s got a four-pound trigger pull,” Julia said. “I’ve got three on it already, so don’t anybody twitch or anything.” She was more than a little nervous. Her voice was shaky, which wasn’t good. One little spastic jerk on that trigger and I’d be gone.
She had on jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, running shoes, no jewelry except for a diamond ring on her left hand the size of an aspirin . . . or an Easter egg.
“Take it easy,” I said.
“You take it easy.” She looked around, eyes wild, but beneath that surface uncertainty was a murderous look. Right then I should have jerked sideways, dropped to the ground, tried to take out one of her knees, given Jeri a chance to drop her with one good kick. But I didn’t do any of that. I just stood there with the bore of what looked like a .45 locked on my chest. In fact, it was a 10mm Glock, which was the next best thing.
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