Gumshoe for Two

by Rob Leininger

  Julia licked her lips, trying to figure out what to do next. Given another minute I might’ve tried something, but she looked at Jeri and said, “Turn around, girl. Get on the ground, lie down, face-down.” Her gun stayed on me.

  Jeri hesitated, gave me a look.

  “Do it now, girl, right now, or he’s dead.”

  Lot of shrill emphasis there. Jeri did as she was told. To me, Julia said, “Now you. Turn around. Sit. Legs out in front of you, hands behind your neck and lace your fingers.”

  She’d watched a lot of television. Thing is, it worked. I sat with my back to her, put my legs out, laced my fingers, heard something move behind me, a rustle of something, then the world went black.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I WOKE TO darkness, movement, a rumbling sound, the hum of an engine. My head felt as if it were hanging on by a thread of bone and gristle. I could count my heartbeat by a throb pulsing through my skull behind my right ear. I might have another concussion. Sonofabitching concussions were going to be the death of me yet.

  My eyes were open but I couldn’t see anything. I wondered if I was blind. A minute later, a pale sweep of headlights slid across the roof of the car, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Mort?” Jeri whispered.

  Maybe it was Jeri. It might have been a hallucination, or a breath of wind under an eave.

  “Mort?”

  I decided to answer. “Yeah?”

  “Thank God, oh thank God. I didn’t know how hard she hit you.”

  Plenty hard, honey bun.

  “Mort? You still there?” Her voice sounded like it was inches from my ear. “Don’t go back to sleep.”

  “Yeah, nope.” I tried to sit up, couldn’t. I tried to make sense of the world I was in, couldn’t do that either.

  “Stay with me, Mort. Please.”

  “I’ll . . . try. How long’ve I been out? Where are we?”

  “Hour and a half. We’re in the back of that Mercedes SUV. That thing I saw earlier is in here with us, too.”

  None of what she’d said could be good.

  “Where’d she come from?” I asked. “There weren’t any cars at the house. No one was there.”

  “She was. Leland’s Lexus was behind the garage under a tarp. And, I don’t know, maybe they were keeping the SUV hidden in the garage after she used it so much.”

  “Where’re we goin’? Where’s she taking us?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say. We’ve been on the road for at least half an hour.”

  I tried to move my hands. Couldn’t. They were tied behind me. My ankles were bound, too. “I’m tied up.”

  “Me, too.”

  “How the hell did she get me in here?” I asked. “She didn’t look that strong.”

  “She made me help. I did most of the work. She had a gun on you the whole time.”

  “So you finally got some use out of your powerlifting.”

  “Jesus, Mort—”

  Julia’s voice floated back to us. “Shut up, back there.”

  “Make me,” Jeri said. Her voice was loud in my ear.

  The car jerked a little on the road, then Julia laughed. “Fuck you, girl. Go ahead and talk. Say good-bye to each other.”

  Man, I hated that bitch.

  “Where’re we goin’?” Jeri called out.

  “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Can you sit up?” Jeri whispered to me.

  I tried. Couldn’t. “No. My head hurts like hell. I think I’ve got another concussion.”

  “Shit,” she breathed.

  “Maybe not too bad,” I said hopefully.

  “See if you can roll over, away from me. I’ll try to untie your hands. I can’t get to my knots, but my fingers are free. We won’t be able to talk but we should try to keep her talking.”

  It hurt, but I bent my legs and levered myself onto my right side. Jeri faced away from me, and I felt her fingers scrabbling at my wrists, exploring the knot.

  “Where’s Allie?” Jeri called out.

  “Allie?” Julia said. “That whore child who started all this? I called her Candy, since that’s what she called herself.”

  “Candy, Allie. Where is she?”

  “About fifty feet down, that’s where. You’ll find out.”

  My blood felt icy.

  “Fifty feet’s a long way,” Jeri said. “Probably took you a long time to dig something that deep. When’d you start, around 1998?”

  “You want details, girl? You want to hear a story?”

  “Why not? It’s really boring back here.”

  Julia laughed again. “Ballsy little bitch, aren’t you? Well, maybe you deserve to know. How ’bout you, Mort? You up for a story while I drive you two off the edge of the world?”

  “If it’ll keep you awake. Fall asleep at the wheel and it’d ruin my whole day.” I hate it when I lie like that, so I said, “Actually, if you hit a tree, I hope your air bag doesn’t inflate.”

  More laughter. She was in control. But the laugh had a nervous undertone to it, so this wasn’t her everyday self. She was operating outside her comfort zone, like most people when they decide to solve life’s little problems with murder. She was in this thing up to her neck and everything had to go just right from here on out or her life was over. Which made her dangerous as hell, but there was nothing Jeri or I could do about that. Yet.

  Jeri’s fingers plucked at a strand of what felt like quarter-inch sisal rope around my wrists, the kind of coarse blond stuff used to make a cat’s scratching post.

  “Since Candy started this mess, let’s start with her, shall we?” Julia said. “My Harry had a fondness for young pussy, but what guy doesn’t?”

  Had, I thought. That answers that, not that I thought Harry was still kicking around somewhere, still lying, shaking with his left.

  “Including Leland,” Jeri said. “Which, against all logic would be you, Julia, considering your room-temperature warmth. Did you shed your skin several times a year, growing up?”

  Silence from up front. Then, “I could pull over. Give that man of yours another whack on the head—harder. I’ve still got that hunk of wood I used in the garage. Just let me know, girl.”

  Jeri remained silent.

  “Thought so,” Julia said. “So . . . darling Candy. Jayson Wexel was Harry’s go-to guy when it came to rounding up girls. He’d been Harry’s right-hand man for nearly twenty years. Not many people knew Jay by sight, not like Harry. Jay had been supplying Harry for years. Harry was too scared and too well known to pick up girls on his own, so Jay became the middle man. He was good at it, not that picking up hookers requires great skill, but Candy was his crowning glory. She was a lovely thing, a hooker, true, but she wasn’t blown out and scabby like most of them get in no time at all. According to Jay, Harry was quite taken with her. She was twenty years old. A smart girl, but also stupid and greedy. She got seven hundred dollars for each of Harry’s visits, which would only run an hour or two, five minutes of which was the banging part since that’s all he was good for, but when he announced his candidacy she saw a million dollars. A million, like that was a magic number, like that would set her up for life. So right out of the blue she told him she wanted a million or she’d go to the newspapers, TV, maybe the police, she didn’t really know, but whoever she told, it would sink his bid for the presidency before it got an inch off the ground. She made a video during their last meeting, so it wasn’t going to be a ‘he said, she said’ deal. She showed him the video, even gave him a flash drive with the two of them on it to keep him terrified. She had him cold and she knew it.

  “Harry freaked out. He told Jayson, his chief of staff. Then Jay told me, since we’d been seeing each other for a while. He wasn’t a bad lover for a guy closing in on fifty. He kept in shape, ran half marathons. We managed to keep our arrangement from Harry for the two years he and I were together.”

  “Jayson,” Jeri said. “Who is dead. Murdered. Found burned to a crisp in his own h
ouse.”

  “Yes, that was unfortunate but necessary,” Julia said. “But that would be getting ahead of things, so how about I come back to it?

  “So—Candy and her blackmail scheme. We couldn’t undo it, not after she’d made that video. We couldn’t talk her out of it. Jay and I had to think fast to keep it under control. It wasn’t going to play itself out quickly, not with the kind of money involved, and Candy was a loose cannon, maybe with a loose mouth, so we had to do something about her. Years ago, Jay had been to an abandoned mine in the desert north of Gerlach. He was something of a rock hound, had a pretty good collection. We needed an out-of-the-way place and didn’t have time to find anything better. Jay went back, scouted the place, decided it was as good as any we were likely to find, so he checked ads in the paper and came up with a nice little travel trailer for cash, towed it out there, set it up.

  “I talked to Candy, told her who I was—Jayson introduced us since he was the one who’d picked her up in a bar—and I convinced her she was on the right track with this blackmail thing, that Harry and I were finished and I wanted in on the money, too, but for it to work it needed our help, that she needed people on the inside to keep Harry calm, keep him rounding up the money without doing something that would blow up his bid for the presidency, which would mean no one would get a dime, including Candy.

  “Jayson wasn’t a fool, either. When Harry said he was going to announce his candidacy, Jay knew it wasn’t going to happen. Harry wasn’t going to quit with the girls. He was eventually going to get caught. Like Clinton, he couldn’t keep it in his pants. I could just see him in front of a bunch of microphones telling the world ‘I did not have sex with that woman’. Last thing I wanted was for anyone to think I should do some sort of wretched Hillary apology—which I wouldn’t have. Before doing that, I would have set Harry on fire. I mean literally. Gasoline and a match.

  “But none of that was going to happen. Harry wasn’t going to be president unless a miracle of some kind happened. I knew it, but he didn’t. He was a self-deceiving, self-aggrandizing fool who often believed his own lies. In their desire for power, politicians can be some of the dumbest halfwits in the country.”

  Jeri was still working on the knots around my wrists. I thought I felt them loosen a little. My shoulders were burning with the effort of holding my wrists up to where she could reach them.

  “But back up,” Julia said. “One way or another I was going to leave Harry. I had to. I mean, First Lady? Seriously? What if that miracle did occur? Who the hell with even half a brain would want to be First Lady? Who would want to get stuck under that miserable fucking microscope? Not that Harry was headed that way. A liar and a skirt-chaser? He was a caricature of a man who just happened to be good at fooling voters—not that that’s a formidable skill these days. My skin crawled whenever he touched me, so it’s not as if I disapproved of his adultery. He was a jowly, out-of-shape, larcenous old man with a pot gut that looked as if he had a thirty-pound ham in his shirt.

  “I had to leave, get out. Due to a ridiculous prenup I’d had to sign, I was going to get next to nothing—two hundred fifty thousand dollars. But if Harry died, I would get what Harry had managed to steal from taxpayers and turn into millions more with his shady land deals and insider trading. In spite of that, I wasn’t thinking about bumping him off, not until Candy found out who she was balling and decided to turn it into what she thought was real money. The hookers he’d been with didn’t know who he was, just some rich old guy with a hard-on the size of his index finger. The few who found out were happy to keep quiet for an extra thousand or two. Stupid, but maybe not. At least they’re still alive.

  “Anyway, Jayson wanted out, too, and he wanted out with more than a severance check and a damp handshake. Harry didn’t see Candy after she demanded the million. Jay acted as the go-between, and he told Harry the darling little hooker had figured out what the presidency was worth and had upped her demand to five million, in cash. We did that to keep Harry scrambling, keep him off balance. Of course, Harry couldn’t come up with that much in cash, so Jay told Harry that he had explained the real world to Candy, that it couldn’t be cash, bills, but it could be in a brokerage account in her name, but even that would take time—liquidating that much in real estate and other holdings couldn’t be done overnight. Jay told her some of that. He spun her silly little head around, telling her about the difference between a cash account and a margin loan account in a brokerage house. He told her he’d already set up a cash account for her and money was coming in. He faked papers showing that she was getting rich. I pacified her by bringing a little actual cash to the trailer every few weeks, three or four thousand dollars at a time, just to keep her happy. And fresh food, water, beer, whatever. And I talked to her since she got lonely. I became her friend. We were in this thing together. I kept her there and kept her happy because Jay and I didn’t know if we would need her at some point to keep the scheme going. She had a generator so she had power. She had lights, a microwave, a little refrigerator. She could watch DVDs. I went up at least twice a week to be with her, bring her gasoline and supplies, let her know Harry was coming up with her million dollars and all she had to do was be patient, give it time.

  “And, of course, he was, not that Candy was ever going to see it. It had to be kept quiet, so Harry stayed out of it. He let Jay handle things. Jay got his attorney on it, Leland Bye, who hired another attorney to manage the sales, and a broker who set up the account to receive funds as they became available. I knew Leland. About a year ago, Jay put me in touch with him to try to break my prenup.”

  “And to stick his tongue down your throat from time to time,” Jeri said. “At that house in Fernley. And maybe to stick other things in other places.”

  “My goodness, aren’t you a crass little bitch?” Julia said. “Once everything was over, Leland and I were going to be married.”

  “A fairy-tale ending for sure.”

  “If I were you, I’d watch my tongue, girl.”

  The road rumble went on and on. I wondered where we were, where we were going. I asked Julia.

  “To the trailer. We’re about thirty miles from Gerlach. It’ll take us another hour and a half to get to where we’re going. But are you enjoying the story? Are the pieces coming together?”

  “It’s psychotic but interesting. Of course you’re going to have to tell the whole thing again after the FBI rounds you up.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  “We found you. They’ll find you.”

  That slowed her down. She thought about that for a mile or two, then said, “How did you get onto me, anyway?”

  “We put two and two together and came up with four. The FBI can put two and two together and come up with five or six, but they’ll eventually whittle it back to four and put you away.”

  Julia laughed. “Two and two. I don’t think so. But you will tell me, Mr. Angel, I promise you that. Anyway, to continue, the money kept coming in, but eventually it slowed. The attorney Leland hired did what he could with Harry’s assets, even short-selling some of it, but couldn’t break much more loose. Sales of some holdings would take too long, at least a year. By then we’d accumulated close to four million in the cash account, so it was time to end it, which meant getting rid of Harry . . . for all kinds of reasons. To inherit, I needed him dead. Jay needed him dead because Harry knew about Candy, the blackmail, Leland, the money. Harry could have blown everything up, unraveled the whole thing—if he found the courage. Not likely, but it was possible. And we were due to get Secret Service protection in a few weeks. Harry was doing well enough in certain polls to warrant it. If we ended up with a pack of agents keeping an eye on us, I figured we’d be screwed.

  “Jay knew about Leland and me. He and I ended our fling about the time I met Leland. Jay also knew about the Fernley place. I told him to take Harry there, tell Harry Candy was there, that she wanted to talk to him, make some sort of a deal. Jay knew this was it, end of the line. He
dropped Harry off, didn’t come inside. I was in the house, alone. I told Jay I would let him know when Harry was gone. Harry had a duffel bag with a hundred thousand dollars in it he was going to give to Candy. It was supposed to appease her, keep her quiet, buy Harry a little more time. As instructed, he came in the house without knocking, and I crushed his skull with a length of iron pipe. I’d practiced on a tree outside, hitting it at about the right height. One hit as he came through the door and Harry was gone. Not just out, but gone from this earth.

  “And, God, was I happy. I stood over him for five minutes, weeping for joy. For a while I couldn’t see through my tears.

  “But then Jay was the problem. The brokerage account was in my name alone. I had nearly four million dollars and Jay was going to want half. If he didn’t get it, I knew he would blow the whistle on both of us and damn the consequences. We’d been close once, but as far as I was concerned, he couldn’t be trusted.”

  Still working on my hands, Jeri snorted. “Speaking of people who can’t be trusted.”

  Julia chose to ignore that. “I went to his house. I had my Glock and the pipe and I went in with a key I had from the time we were together. He was drinking. He was about half drunk when I pointed the gun at his head and told him to turn around. I didn’t want to shoot him because of the noise. Goddamn Glock is loud, but I would have shot him if I had to. He was stupid and turned around, so I hit him with the pipe—not too hard, just enough to put him down. He was out, not dead, but he was after I wrapped a plastic bag over his head and kept it there for an hour while I did other things.”

  Suddenly the rope was off my wrists, but my hands didn’t come free. Which made no sense. Then Jeri shifted and whispered in my ear, “Bitch put one of those plastic ties around our wrists, too. I can’t do anything with that. I’m going to turn around and try to free your legs.”