As if I could kick the ass of a Barbie doll right then.
Rufus stopped me as I was about to go out the door. “Now gimme a Sun Tzu quote,” he said. He’d given me fifty Sun Tzus in the past six months.
“If I do, do I get an orange belt?”
“You’re gettin’ there. Another month or two, you might get your Rokkyu. Now gimme a Sun Tzu.”
“Appear weak when you are strong.”
“That’s a good one. Now get outta here.”
I staggered out into the day, unaware that I was going to use that Sun Tzu in less than twenty-four hours.
* * *
“Nice goin’, Spitfire,” O’Roarke said. “Folks all over the Midwest are hauling out their Rand McNallys, finding Reno on the map, headed this way, wanting to catch sight of what we in Northern Nevada call the Great Gumshoe.”
“Chamber of Commerce oughta give me a bonus.”
The Green Room at five forty-five in the afternoon is a good place to sit and think. I thought about the missing $13,600 and how to approach the Joss investigation. Pete’s Wicked Ale doesn’t help with the thinking, so I sat there with a sarsaparilla in front of me. Sarsaparilla doesn’t help either, but it doesn’t hinder the process quite like Pete’s.
“It’s not six o’clock yet. What’re you doing here?” I asked O’Roarke. “What’d you do with Ella? She’s better lookin’.”
“She called in sick. I’m pulling a double. Speaking of better looking, what’d you do with Lucy?”
“Who?”
He gave me a stare that could frost a mug. “Do not tell me you two are kaput or I’ll poison you and dump you in the river.”
“We are by no means kaput.”
His shoulders sagged with relief. “Give up on that girl like you did on Holiday and you’ll never be allowed in here again. I’d run you out with a fire hose.”
“I didn’t give up on Holiday.”
“Says you. She doesn’t come around anymore.”
“You sort of like Lucy, huh?”
“Unlike you, she’s a real ray of sunshine.”
“Thanks.”
He gave me a one-eyed squint. “A skull, for chrissake? You found a skull last night?”
I shrugged. “It’s a knack. Don’t ask me to explain it.”
“I won’t. I only hope it’s not catching.”
“You can’t catch that kind of thing.”
“What can’t you catch?” Rosa plopped down beside me. Ripe cleavage, long legs, short black dress. She was a hooker, but cute as hell and extremely picky about clientele.
“Knacks.”
“Oh, right. That’d be by definition. Either you got it or you don’t. And, hey, Mort, you came through again. Good for you. How ’bout a pink panther mocktail, Pat?” she said to O’Roarke. She put a hand on my arm. “Mocktail. That’s virgin, like me.”
“Uh-huh. Good one, kiddo.”
Pineapple juice, pureed strawberries, 7 Up, bit of whipped cream, shaken, not stirred. Little more whipped cream on top. If I caught Ella working, I might try one of those. Ella Glover was a good bartender and not as mouthy as some I know. O’Roarke would laugh at my mocktail, make some snide-ass comment.
“A skull this time?” Rosa said. “That’s different. Sounds like you’ve upped your game.”
“Speaking of games, how ’bout those Giants? They’re only one game out.”
Just in time, my phone rang, “Purple People Eater” fired up. Sheb Wooley, ’58.
“What happened to ‘Monster Mash’?” Rosa said.
“I’ve upped my game.”
“Don’t think so.”
Russ was on the horn. I told him where I was. He said he’d be over in ten minutes and to save him a Bud. I hung up.
“Jiggers, the cops,” I said to Rosa.
Rosa stared at me. “Seriously, Mort?” Her cheeks pulled in as she sucked on her straw, then she smiled at her drink. “This is pretty good, but I’ll have to run an extra five miles tomorrow so that kinda sucks.”
“You could return it, get a club soda.”
“Not happenin’.”
Ten minutes later, on the dot, there was Russ. He nodded toward a corner. I got up and followed him with my sarsaparilla and his Bud Heavy. We pulled out chairs and sat at a table.
“Thanks,” he said, taking the beer. “I don’t think Sullivan is the guy. We’ll keep nosing around, keep him in sight, but if he did Soranden, he’s one hell of an actor.”
“Stay on him. IRS is full of two-faced characters.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t him.”
“It isn’t, but the IRS could use payback. Warley especially. Keep on him, and make sure he knows it. So, what’s up?”
His smile looked a little gray. “I was wondering if you had any of your half-assed maverick ideas. Back in July and August the FBI was all over Soranden. Internal Revenue guy disappears, the Feds go bananas, terrified it might be the start of a civilian uprising. But that investigation didn’t go anywhere.”
“Couldn’t come up with any suspects, huh?” The inanity of the thought made me smile.
“They came up with about eighteen hundred of ’em.”
“That few? They must not’ve been trying. Of course, we are talking about the FBI.”
“People with what looked like good-sized gripes with the local IRS in the past two years. List looked like a phone book. Nothing panned out, but it’s impossible to go through that many people and not miss something. And whoever killed him took out the head guy, not some guy who got in their face. Soranden was a desk jockey, not a … what do you call ’em?”
“Field thug,” I said.
“Yeah. One of those. So now that Soranden’s skull showed up the feds are on it again, but it’s in my ballpark too—I mean, RPD’s. They made it a joint op, us and the fibbies, which means they’ll blame us if we strike out, and they’ll take all the credit if we catch some guy.”
“Not your case, is it? I thought it was Kreuger’s.”
“It is, but, hey, a feather in my cap couldn’t hurt. And you’re a maverick, which I think is what we’ll need here.”
“That mean you’re hiring me again?”
“Not per se. Especially not after you’re the one who stirred up this hornet’s nest. But … you know, if you happen to come up with an idea …” He wound down, stared for a moment at his beer, then took a gulp to re-pressurize his neurons.
Last few days of June, Russ hired me to try to locate his daughter, Danya, and find out who killed rapper Jonnie Xenon. Things got a bit complicated, but the upshot was that the FBI had missed a few critical details so Danya was still free. Now here I was, back on the FBI’s radar having found Soranden’s skull. This did not make Russ happy, if I was reading his body language correctly.
“The thing is, Russ, I don’t catch ’em. All I do is find ’em. Well, mostly.”
“I wouldn’t be here if that’s all you did. You caught those two crazy women who killed the mayor and the D.A.”
“They caught me, Russ.”
“That’s sort of semantical—not sure if that’s a word—kind of a chicken or the egg deal. Those two broads are dead, Victoria and, and …”
“Winter.”
“Yeah, weird name. But they’re dead and you were onto them, which is what counts.”
“You check out Soranden’s family? Most likely person to kill some guy is a disgruntled family member.”
“Only disgruntled, huh?” He smiled. “We were all over that back when he went missing. ‘We’ being RPD and the feebs.”
He pulled out a pocket-size spiral notebook. “Soranden was divorced, ex-wife Debbie Combs, living in Minneapolis, hasn’t seen him in twelve years. Older sister in Carson City, Esther Soranden, never married. Another sister in Ogden, Utah, one year younger, Alice Ann Loomis. Two kids by the ex, a daughter in Maryland, Kate, dental hygienist, and a son in the Army, John, a major who hasn’t been out of Korea in about six months, since his last leave. We check
ed ’em all eighteen ways from Sunday when you came up with that skull, but the trail’s so cold we didn’t come up with shit. So if you’ve got any ideas, or come up with anything that, you know, shines a light …”
“You’ll be the first to know, my good friend.”
Irony.
* * *
However …
Side trip, distraction, detour. The Green Room was a trove of well-traveled diversions. I knew that before I got there, knew it wouldn’t get me one step closer to figuring out why Volker had boosted over thirteen grand from Joss & Volker’s operating account. This was like putting off mowing the lawn until small children get lost in it, then you have to do something.
What better time, as Ma said, to hunt for missing persons than a Saturday or Sunday? Although Evelyn Joss was missing money, not a person. But it was Saturday evening, Lucy out of town, me with nothing to do but switch to Pete’s Wicked Ale or work on the Joss thing. So—Joss. I finished the sarsaparilla and got out of there to go hunting. I didn’t expect to do more than go through the usual unproductive motions since I’m a trainee, not a qualified investigator. But even wasted hours add up and I had eighty-five hundred to go, so … onward.
Six fifteen p.m. After hours. No one answered at Joss & Volker, Inc. in a little suite tucked away in a business park on a winding street in southwest Reno, but I wanted to see the place, get an idea of who these people were. The building was crescent shaped, one of four such semi-interlocking crescents in the park, home to accountants, chiropractors, therapists, insurance agents, others of that ilk. Concrete walkways looped through manicured lawns and plantings. Pleasant, but sterile pleasant. Joss & Volker was just one small business among sixty others.
One of Ma’s special programs on an iPad got me home and cell numbers for Evelyn Joss and Michael Volker. Evelyn didn’t answer. I didn’t leave a message. I drove to her house in the northwest. Old frame house in good condition, yellow with off-white trim. I rang the bell, no one home.
I got an answering machine at Volker’s, again left no message, but sleuthing hours added up so I drove over to his place near Damonte Ranch High School, southeast Reno, and parked on the street. His was a two-story house in pale desert stucco, about $400,000 worth even after the ongoing housing debacle, now in its second decade and finally crawling out of the doldrums. Three-car garage, two cars in the driveway, a five-year-old BMW 3, silver, and an old red Honda Civic sporting multiple dings and scars. It looked like people were home, so that answering machine was guarding the portal, keeping the riffraff out. Riffraff like me. I parked on the street, went up the driveway, through an arch into a courtyard with rose bushes and a dry four-foot waterfall, and rang the bell. Didn’t hear anything, so I rang it again.
The door opened and there was a standard teenager, a girl of sixteen, twenty pounds overweight like a lot of them are these days, ugly nose ring that glistened below her nostrils like a little hunk of snot, eyebrows pierced, underdressed in a crop top that put too much emphasis on a lightly tanned Michelin Man jelly roll around her middle, vapid expression, entitled to everything life gave her and to things she hadn’t yet acquired, so bored the moment she saw me that her eyes almost rolled up in her head. Except, wait … I caught a little flutter in her eyes, a brief instant of recognition, so she might have recently passed by a television at a time when the news was on. I figured she was six or seven weeks into her junior year with a D-minus average, F-minus in math, no upcoming high school diploma on the distant horizon, might acquire a GED about the time she hit thirty. But I could have been wrong about all that since I very often am.
She stared at me for half a second then turned and walked away, across a tiled foyer toward a hallway. Stairs led up to the second floor. Formal dining room to the left, part of the kitchen visible beyond that. “D-a-a-a-a-d! It’s for you!” Voice that could loosen roofing tiles. I stood outside the open door, waiting.
“No need to yell, Precious,” a man called out, not far away. “I’m right here.”
“So why didn’t you answer it then?” she hollered from the depths of the hallway. Precious indeed. I could already hear her when she was forty. She would sound like a chainsaw trying to cut through a galvanized garbage can.
Mike Volker emerged from a room to the right. He was in jeans and socks, shirt pulled out at the waist. Early forties, five-eight, carrying thirty extra pounds, balding. A question stayed in his eyes until he got a good look at me, then a flicker of interest and caution overlaid the question.
“Mr. Volker?” I asked.
“Yeah. You, you’re the guy who found that skull yesterday, aren’t you? Saw you in the news.”
“I had that misfortune, yes.”
His eyes grew wary. “And that rapper. You found him, too, earlier this year. And that senator’s hand last year. Reinhart.”
“What can I say? It’s a knack.”
“Well, uh, what can I do for you?” He looked past me, out at the street. Expecting squad cars with flashing lights?
“I wonder if we could talk for a few minutes.” Behind him, at the hallway entrance, Precious stood watching us.
“What about?” Good-sized hint of paranoia in his voice.
“How about we talk inside, Mr. Volker?”
“This can’t be about Soranden, that skull you found.”
Interesting comment. “It isn’t.”
He looked at me a moment longer, then stood to one side. “C’mon in.” He shut the door behind me, then directed me to the room he’d been in, a living room, two steps down. To one side, a steel ramp topped with rubber sloped into the room. A television was on, sound turned low. Gray carpet, couch and a love seat in rich black leather, La-Z-Boy recliner in dark green fabric, big bookshelf laden with trophies and pictures—bowling trophies and photos of the team—no books. “Be right back,” he said. I heard him padding away up the stairs to the second floor.
A boy of ten with a moon face and glasses leaned his head past the doorway and gawked at me for several seconds, then turtled back out of sight. Precious came in, gave me a murky, empty smile, the kind of thing modern teenagers give strangers, straightened a maroon afghan on the back of the couch, plumped up two pillows, one on each end, then left.
And there I was on TV. Great timing. I saw myself going into the police station with Russell Fairchild and Officer Day. I was the “heads guy” again. They liked that phrase. Catchy. As I watched, it occurred to me that anyone with a need to dispose of a head or any other inconvenient body part might, after all this and previous publicity, be inclined to palm it off on me due to the confusion factor, and to be certain it got on TV so they could record it on TiVo and play it back later, chuckling as they rolled doobies and got high. I was getting too much attention. Ma was probably right about that. Soranden’s skull had been dropped into Lucy’s car, which was more or less ours and might therefore qualify as the “heads guy’s car,” a dumping ground of sorts. And it was a ragtop, convenient if you had a knife. Soranden ending up there could hardly be a coincidence, so maybe someone had followed me and Lucy to—
“Sorry ’bout that,” Volker said. I was standing, looking at the bowling trophies and pictures, not really seeing them. Volker indicated the couch and took the love seat at a right angle to it in front of a glass-topped coffee table. He’d put on slippers and his shirt was tucked in.
A gaunt woman in her late forties, early fifties, rolled to the living room entrance in a wheelchair, small fleece blanket on her lap, and looked in on us. Volker looked over at her, then at me. “This is my sister, Marta Geer. Marta, this is Mr. Angel.”
“Mort,” I said.
“I know who you are,” she said to me. Polite. Soft voice that held no judgment, one way or another.
“We should probably make this private,” I told Volker.
“Anything you have to say, Marta can hear it. This is her home too.”
“You might make that determination later. I’ll leave that up to you. For the moment, however …�
��
He didn’t like that, but Marta turned the wheelchair around. “I’ll be in my room.” She left.
“I hope that was worth it,” Volker said tersely.
“We’ll see.” I waved a hand at the bookshelf. “Looks like you bowl better than I do. Been at it long?”
He didn’t like me, but he liked to bowl. I wanted to get him talking. “Fifteen years. We’re the Alley Cats. Team had two-oh-two average this year. Best in the league by eight points.”
“I once bowled a one seventy-three. That was ten or twelve years ago. Got two strikes in a row that game, first time ever. And I had only two open frames. I’ve still got the sheet. I had it laminated.”
A faint smile broke through, sort of a grimace. I figured he wasn’t going to invite me onto the team anytime soon to suck them down into last place.
“That BMW get around okay in the snow? I was thinking about getting that same model myself and winter’s coming.”
He gave me a look. “It’s okay. Studded tires help.”
“Wife drive the Honda?”
“I’m divorced. I bought it for my daughter in June, soon as she turned sixteen. Gotta say it’s been nice, not having to drive her everywhere.”
“Great kids,” I said. Maybe the boy, but the girl appeared to be anything but precious. “Girl’s name is Precious?”
“No. Sometimes I call her that. Probably shouldn’t when someone’s at the door. I’ll hear about it later. That’s Kimmi. If you saw my boy, that’s Derek.”
“Saw him. We didn’t bond.”
No smile. “He’s curious, kinda skittish though. Straight-A student, fifth grade. How about we get to the point, Mr. Angel? What can I do for you that Marta can’t hear?”
“Just wondering what you did with that thirteen thousand six hundred dollars, Mike.”
Hit ’em right between the eyes. See if they break. We did that at the IRS. It made eyes jitter and sweat break out, skin go pale and clammy. Best reaction was when they fainted dead away and didn’t come to for over five minutes. Five minutes was worth bonus points back at the office.
Gumshoe Rock Page 4