Gumshoe for Two

by Rob Leininger

  I walked.

  An hour passed. Two. Three.

  Julia.

  She would have to run because I was alive. She would have to go soon. A cold, icy fury settled deep inside and seethed within me, allowing me to start thinking clearly again.

  How would she run? Where to? She had the cash she’d used to pacify Allie. Could she put it into an account that would allow her to use a credit card? Could she use it to get prepaid cards? How would she get to that brokerage account, and when?

  Thoughts of Jeri returned. I couldn’t leave her down in that pit. I had to get her, or someone did. And Ma had to be told.

  Ma.

  If anyone could track Julia, Ma could.

  I topped a rise and saw a lone pair of headlights slowly moving through the blackness, heard the distant throb of an engine.

  The highway.

  The headlights slid by, almost without sound, headed north out of Gerlach. Now gone. They’d been about two miles away.

  I kept walking, shivering, loathing Julia. I envisioned another fantastic death for her, listened to her screams as she died.

  Which made me sick and didn’t help.

  I said Ma’s phone number aloud. We’d memorized each other’s numbers while tracking Julia and Leland. I still knew Ma’s but I needed a phone.

  Jeri’s number was . . . she would never answer again. I would never again hear her voice. Tears filled my eyes as I stumbled along in the darkness.

  I had to phone Ma, I had to get to Reno, Ma had to try to track Julia. Julia would leave a trail. Jeri’s brother, Ron DiFrazzia, had to be told. And Sarah, what about Sarah?

  I didn’t know. Jeri had liked her, even loved her like a sister. Sarah would have to be told, but not right away.

  Ma first.

  Call the police? Tell Deputy Roup when I got to Gerlach? Tell Russell Fairchild? Phone the FBI? How could I get to Julia if she was caught by the FBI or Reno police?

  Couldn’t. That would end it. In fact, Julia might skate on all the charges, if charges were even brought against her. Did anything tie her incontrovertibly to the murders other than what she’d told Jeri and me? If so, I didn’t see it. Jeri was gone, so it was my word against Julia’s. Where was the proof that would put Julia away, absolutely, without question?

  There wasn’t any.

  None of us could tell the police, not Ma, not me, not Sarah. Ma would know what to tell Ron DiFrazzia, if anything. Maybe he had to be kept out of it. Whatever happened, I was going to end Julia’s life. I would.

  A faint gleam appeared ahead. Oil on blacktop. I’d reached the highway. Nothing had come along since I’d seen that one vehicle, forty minutes ago. I reached the blacktop and turned right, south toward Gerlach, and started walking. After a hundred yards or so I passed a vertical marker. I put my face six inches from it and slowly made out a number in the dark, forty-four. Mile marker forty-four. I put that in my head and kept walking.

  An hour passed. I went by mile marker forty-seven.

  Another half hour went by, then I heard an engine behind me, a big diesel from the sound of it. Then headlights appeared, red and yellow lights outlining the cab of an eighteen-wheeler.

  I stood at the side of the road as it drew near and stuck out my thumb. It felt stupid. Who out here wouldn’t need a ride? But I stuck my thumb out anyway. I squinted into a blinding crescendo of light. Air brakes came on before it passed me. The rig slowed, came to a stop fifty yards beyond me, lights illuminating the blacktop and sage in muddy color. I jogged to catch up. The passenger door popped open. I stepped up, opened the door all the way, looked in. A guy in his fifties with a three-day growth of gray stubble stared at me in the cab’s yellow light.

  “Hell of a place to hitchhike,” he said.

  “You got that right.” I rubbed my forehead above my left eyebrow, concealing much of my face until the cab’s light went out.

  “Didn’t see a car. Broke down somewhere off the highway?”

  “Uh-huh. About seven miles up in the hills. East.” I told him east instead of west to keep this to myself. Julia was in my head. I was a gun, aimed at Julia. I didn’t want anyone else near her.

  “Name’s Barry,” the guy said.

  “Steve,” I told him. “Thanks for stopping.”

  He got the rig going again. “No problem. Damn sure wouldn’t leave a guy walking out here at night.”

  “Thanks again. How far is it to Gerlach?”

  “’Bout eighteen miles. I’m stopping there. That suit you?”

  “Uh-huh. Got a cell phone I can use?”

  He got one off a ledge in the console. He hit an icon and handed it to me. It was still attached to a charger cable. I put in Ma’s number, heard it ringing.

  “Yeah what?” Ma’s voice was sleepy, abrupt.

  “It’s me, Ma.”

  “Mort?”

  “Uh-huh. I’m up in Gerlach. At least I’ll be there soon. I need you to come up and get me.” I felt my heart breaking all over again. Suddenly I could barely force the words out without sobbing.

  “Gerlach? Whatcha doin’ up there?”

  “Come get me, Ma. Now.”

  “What’s . . . can you talk?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, I’ll be up there soon as I can. You gonna be in that casino place?”

  “Only place open twenty-four hours. I’ll be there.”

  “Need me to bring anything?”

  I thought about that.

  “Mort?”

  “Can’t think of anything. I just need you.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  I ended the call, handed the phone back to Barry after deleting Ma’s number from the outgoing list.

  “Your mother, huh?” he said.

  “Yup.”

  “I call my mom at one thirty in the morning, she’d have me fried and half-eaten before the sun got up.”

  “Yeah.”

  At the flat response Barry looked over at me. “You okay?”

  “I’ve been better. But I’ll live.”

  Barry pulled into a packed-dirt parking lot behind the Texaco station and left the rig running. If I was going to get Julia, I couldn’t be seen by any of the locals in Gerlach. Barry wasn’t a local guy, but I couldn’t go inside the casino. I wasn’t up here tonight. I’d played no part in anything that had taken place at that abandoned mine. If I was here in Gerlach, the story would unravel and drag Julia into it. The FBI and the police would be involved, and I would never be able to get to her.

  I thanked Barry. He walked to the casino and I stayed outside, waiting for Ma to show up. The night was chilly. I walked between the Texaco station and the casino, keeping in the shadows, trying to stay warm.

  By the time Ma arrived in her Eldorado at three twenty, I was cold, shivering. I figured she’d left two minutes after I’d called her and driven faster than fifty—not a good idea in that car. She must’ve had an idea that something bad had happened. Just how bad, she had no idea.

  I flagged her down between the Texaco station and the motel. I got in on the passenger side and broke down entirely. I sobbed. I howled. My heart tore loose inside my chest. I died in that car all over again.

  “Omigod, Mort. Oh, no. What, what—?”

  “Drive,” I said. “Reno.” The words didn’t sound human. They were something that bubbled up from the depths of the ocean, liquid sounds that tore out of my throat as if I’d choked them up.

  Ma drove. She headed back south, back to Reno, and I just let the tears and the pain flow. We were well past Empire when I came up for air, still barely able to breathe.

  “Jeri?” Ma asked. “Where’s Jeri?”

  “She’s dead.”

  Ma had feared it. What else could do this to me? Yet she had to pull to the side of the road and turn off the engine. She bawled. We performed a duet of pain the likes of which I’d never imagined two people had ever done before.

  It was twenty minutes before she could drive again. We got going, doing n
o better than forty miles an hour. I tried to get my voice to work as I told her the last of it, Julia taking us into the hills, opening the rear hatch of that SUV, shooting Jeri without warning in the first three seconds, just pure outrageous murder. I didn’t tell her what had hit the seats, a red mist of what had been Jeri a hundredth of a second before—the stuff that had been Jeri, that had made her who she was, suddenly blown into eternity by the most evil bitch in the history of the world.

  Ma couldn’t talk. She drove with tears in her eyes, swallowing often, sometimes letting out a faint mewling sound. I gave her a little more of it, when I could talk.

  Finally, on I-80, ten miles west of Fernley, I said, “I want her, Ma. I’ve got to kill Julia. So we can’t go to the police. No one can know I was anywhere around Gerlach tonight.”

  She nodded. “I figured. Don’t worry, we’ll get her. You and me, boyo. I’m in. That bitch is already dead.”

  “Jeri can’t stay in that mineshaft, so . . . so how . . . ?”

  “I know what to do,” Ma said. “You said the turnoff’s at mile marker forty-four?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll handle it.”

  “I’m so sick I want to die, Ma.”

  “I know.”

  “Not until I get Julia, though.”

  She turned to me. It was still dead dark outside. “I’ve got this, Mort. I know what to do. This is pure hell, but I know what to do. Have you got clothes at Jeri’s place?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then. We’ll start there.”

  She drove around back to a detached garage at Jeri’s house, didn’t pull the car inside. We got out and she told me to go to the back door and strip before I went inside.

  “Strip, Ma?”

  “Right down to bare skin. Your clothing will have dirt on it that could be used to prove you were at that trailer. If you’re shy, leave your underwear on until you get inside then toss it out the door. Go take a shower. Scrub everything—especially your hair, fingernails, and get between your toes. Do a damn good job of it, lots of soap. Then get dressed.”

  I did as I was told.

  I came downstairs in jogging shoes, blue jeans, a sweatshirt. Ma was pacing, thinking. She looked up when I came into the room. “Gotta get Jeri out of that hole,” she said.

  “I wasn’t going to . . . to leave her there.”

  “You can’t get her. No way. If you did, you’d get tripped up by a hundred legal issues. It’d be impossible to get her a proper burial unless you brought Julia into it, or tried to. That would be a mess like you wouldn’t believe. Julia wouldn’t be charged and they might put it on you. Only way to get Jeri out of there, is to report this. I’ll do it anonymously. Five minutes after they bring bodies up, fingerprints will be transmitted to the FBI. Ten minutes after that, this place is going to be crawling with cops, so we can’t stay here. Let’s get that shower upstairs completely dry, then clear out.”

  I dried the shower with a towel. Ma packed it into a big plastic bag along with the clothes I’d worn while escaping from Julia. One last look around and no one could tell we’d been there in the past twelve hours, which was all that mattered.

  Ma backed the Caddy out and headed east on Second Street.

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “You want to get Julia, right?”

  “I have to.” Deep inside, in a place that would never fade or be forgotten, I was an unspeakable hell pit of fury. Julia had to die. I knew it was wrong. I knew the thought made me an evil person, a killer, a monster, but I couldn’t rid myself of it until I rid the earth of Julia. Then, maybe, I could be human again—if I could live with the knowledge. And if I couldn’t, then so be it, but Julia had to die.

  “We’re not in too deep yet,” Ma said. “You can still let the cops do their thing.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t think of anything that proves Julia was up there tonight or did the things she told us she did. Nothing implicates her. The Fernley house, that SUV we’ve been tracking, the trailer—none of it was in her name. Nothing is conclusive. If we went to the cops, she would end up untouchable. Right now she’s running. She’s vulnerable.”

  “That’s the way I see it, too.”

  “So where are we going? What’re we going to do?”

  “This’s gonna be hard, Mort. Real hard. But you’ve got to go to Sarah’s place.”

  “Ma—”

  “You need an alibi for the time Jeri was up there when . . . when she was killed.” Her voice caught as she said it and her eyes got bright again. Finally, she said, “It hasn’t been long. They’ll pin down time of death for her pretty close. As soon as they find Jeri, they’re gonna want to talk to you. You can’t have been up there, so you need an airtight alibi, unbreakable. If they put you up there, then Julia’s gonna walk and you’re in the middle of a year-long legal and media circus. You have to have been somewhere else, and Sarah’s your best shot. If she’ll do it.”

  “Is that fair? Bringing her into this mess?”

  “She’s already in it. Not what we’re planning for Julia, not yet, but she has to be told. So about gettin’ involved, we’ll have to let her decide. Now let’s get over there.”

  We arrived at the Sierra Sky Apartments at 6:10. The sunrise was an orange glow above the eastern mountains when we climbed outside stairs to the second floor and paused at the door to number twenty-three.

  “You sure about this?” I asked Ma.

  “No. But it isn’t very damn often that I’m sure about anything, so let’s do this, see how it goes.”

  I rang the bell.

  Waited.

  Rang again.

  A light came on inside, then an outside light. Seconds later, the door opened and Sarah was there in a robe, staring at us.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “What . . . ?”

  “We need to come in,” Ma said quietly.

  Sarah looked terrified as Ma went past her. I put an arm around Sarah’s shoulders, got her away from the door, then closed it behind us. Ma took one of Sarah’s hands. “Jeri . . . It’s Jeri,” she said. “She . . . she . . .” Then Ma started to bawl all over again.

  Sarah let out a little cry and started to fall. I took part of her weight, then suddenly had to take all of it when she passed out.

  I picked her up and carried her into a bedroom I’d never seen before. A queen-sized bed was rumpled, covers thrown back. I set Sarah down and pulled the covers over her.

  She only stayed out for a minute, then her eyes popped open. She tried to sit up. “Jeri . . . Jeri, she’s not . . . oh, please, no—”

  Ma sat beside her. “She’s . . . gone. Allie is, too.”

  Tears almost splashed out of Sarah’s eyes. Her lips quivered and she started to wail. Ma did her best to keep her from making too much noise. She held her—didn’t say a word, just held her, which was all anyone could do. I stood there like an ox, feeling useless, which of course I was.

  It took twenty minutes before we could talk to Sarah and start to get things under control.

  “I . . . I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. She got up, went through a door, closed it. Ma went over and opened it, went inside. They came out a few minutes later, Sarah still in her robe, eyes red, still snuffling, and Ma guided her back to bed. Ma took Sarah’s robe as she got under the covers again. I stood there and watched all of this, still feeling perfectly male and useless.

  “You two are gonna have to trust me right now,” Ma said. She looked at me and said, “Get into bed and hold her, Mort.”

  “Ma—”

  “I don’t have time for a big discussion. I know what I’m doing. Take off your jeans and that sweatshirt and get in. I want to see two people with arms around each other in twenty seconds or I’m gonna kick some big tall PI ass all over this room, and I mean it.”

  So I stripped down to underwear and got in bed with Sarah and held her. As soon as her arms were around me, she was crying again and I was, too. It barely registered that she was
naked, something of a first for me.

  Ma gave us a moment, then said, “Okay, I’ve got things to do. It’ll take me a while, at least two hours, probably more like three. When I get back, I’ll let myself in, and if I don’t see you two right where you are now, there’s gonna be hell to pay. You two need each other. You need someone to hold on to. I’ve got another reason for you to stay together, but no time to get into it. When I get back we’ll talk turkey, but right now this is what you need, so stay put.”

  She left.

  What I learned is that holding another human being is a way of sharing life. Ma left us like that to make us know we weren’t alone in the world, that our lives still meant something because we could give and receive comfort with another human being. It wasn’t sex. It had nothing to do with sex. It was human contact—skin on skin—and it kept us from slipping away. I think if Ma could have been in there with us, she would have, but Ma was tougher than we were. And, like she said, she had things to do. I wasn’t tough. I didn’t know how near I was to death, but suddenly I felt that Sarah was keeping me from sliding over an edge into a place from which I would never return, never be able to reach Julia. And maybe I kept Sarah from sliding over that same dark edge. This was a nightmare that wouldn’t end. There was no end to it because Jeri was dead and that was impossible.

  So we held each other and cried and shared the only contact that made sense right then, someone warm, breathing in your arms, keeping you going, and Ma, the toughest person I’ve ever met, did what needed to be done.

  She left the house and drove all the way to Fernley, to the house on Old Aspen Road, approached the place with a .38 police special in case Julia was there. She checked the house, then went into the garage and found my gun where I’d dropped it in the dirt. The gun was a loose cannon, no pun intended. Its serial number would put me in the thick of all this. The police would connect Bye with the house since it was in his name and he was in that mineshaft with Jeri and the others. They would go out to the Fernley house, look around. I didn’t know what they would find, but at least Ma had removed my gun. Julia had probably gotten Jeri and me out of there as quickly as possible yesterday evening and hadn’t gone back. Leland’s Lexus was still there, under that blue tarp. No telling where the Mercedes SUV would eventually end up. Last thing I would ever do is ask Detective Fairchild about it.