Gumshoe Rock

by Rob Leininger

  Mike stared at me. His mouth opened, then closed, but no sound came out. Finally, “What? What thirteen thousand?”

  “And six hundred. You tell me.”

  “I … I don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about.”

  I raised an eyebrow. Got that at the mandatory in-service training at the IRS. We had to repeat the training and pass a test every two years or lose our jobs. Twenty-four ways to register disbelief, ranging from subtle to the last method: a brief yelp of involuntary laughter and tears in the eyes. We would gather in a conference room and raise eyebrows at each other, look amused, tilt heads, smirk, purse lips, roll eyes, squint, shake our heads, and snort. Fun day—and we got paid for it. Almost makes me wish I were still back with Uncle’s Stormtroopers.

  Raising a single eyebrow took practice. I was glad to see I still had it. After indicating disbelief, the procedure was to wait, give the suspect time to self-incriminate. So I waited.

  “You … I think you’d better leave,” he said.

  Incriminating.

  “Does Marta know about it? You confide in her about stuff like that?” I asked, glancing toward the hallway. “We could get her back in here if you want.”

  “She … you need to leave. Now.”

  “No problem. But talking with me could mean the police don’t have to get involved. If I leave, next person to bring it up might not be so understanding.”

  That spun him around. Now it could go either way.

  He stared at me. Licked his lips. Glanced at the entrance to the room to see if anyone was listening in. Looked back at me. Made his decision.

  Guilty as a sonofabitch, and what he said was, “I don’t know anything about thirteen thousand dollars. I mean, where the hell did you get a crazy goddamn idea like that?”

  “Good enough.” I stood up. “Expect company.”

  He got to his feet. “Seriously, man. Whatever this is, you’re on the wrong track. I mean, I don’t know what your game is, but it’s … it’s …”

  I smiled benignly, a benign smile being an affectation also on the agenda at those IRS trainings. “But it’s what?”

  “It’s … nothing. Please go.”

  “I’ll show myself out.”

  I left him there and went into the foyer. Precious Kimmi was ten feet down the hallway, staring at me. No sign of Marta. Near the top of the stairs, Derek was sitting on a carpeted step, hugging a baluster, watching me. “Bye, you guys,” I said. No change of expression on either face.

  I went outside. Maybe that was a normal household. Other than Kimmi’s foghorn voice, I had the feeling it wasn’t unusual. Teenagerwise I felt out of touch. It had been six years since my daughter, Nicole, was Kimmi’s age, and there hadn’t been any destructive in-your-face piercings. Those damn snot-nose rings are something else, though. The statement is as simple and clear as ringing a Chinese gong: Fuck You.

  Dad could put a string through it and give it a yank, really get her attention. It might save her life, but, of course, that would be child abuse and land him in jail for ninety days and prove to her, once and for all, that she was in the driver’s seat.

  * * *

  I got in the Toyota and took off. Went two blocks, turned around and came back, parked a block away where I could see the front of Volker’s house and the cars in the driveway. Maybe my visit would spark some sort of result.

  Seven twenty-five. The sun had gone behind the Sierras, temperature into the seventies. I killed the engine and tuned in an oldies station, got a Buddie Holly tune: “Peggy Sue.” Before my time, before gangsta rappers, before heavy metal, acid rock, antiwar songs, shock lyrics.

  I turned it low and watched the house, adding to my hours of training.

  Eight o’clock. Eight ten. Eight twelve. Time crawling like a sloth trying to drag itself out of the suction of a tar pit.

  A pickup went by, covered in dried mud, color uncertain. It stopped, blocking Volker’s driveway. A horn honked. Precious skipped out of the house, circled the truck, and piled in.

  Follow Precious Kimmi or stay put? Watch the guy who lied and told me to get out, or see what his kid was up to? Go with the action or let my butt fall asleep staring at a house?

  Not much choice there.

  I fired up the engine. The pickup hung a U-turn in the street and came my way. I ducked down as it approached and went by. I gave it fifteen seconds, then U-turned and went after it.

  Saturday evening, kids going out as kids do. I probably should’ve stayed on Volker, but tailing is good training.

  It wasn’t hard to keep after the pickup. One taillight was brighter than the other. We circled around, got onto 395 north, headed toward downtown Reno. Through the Spaghetti Bowl where 395 does a square dance with Interstate 80, still the ugliest freeway interchange in the western hemisphere, and got off at Sierra Street, went south, then into a parking garage on First Street. I went up after them, parked on the top floor, the fifth, nothing but stars above, Venus bright over the Sierras. I found a slot forty feet from Precious and her date, who turned out to be a six-foot-one skinny guy who might run about a hundred fifty-five pounds, shoulder-length greasy hair, black jeans, oily-looking denim jacket, hand up under Kimmi’s shirt for a good long feel and a sloppy kiss beneath a lamp. It ended with a girlish giggle, probably hers but you never know, then off they went toward the stairs.

  By then I’d put on a blond hairpiece, an unkempt thing that partly covered my ears, Giants ball cap, nonprescription glasses with heavy black rims, an L.L. Bean field coat in saddle brown, and took off after them, stuffing my wallet in an inside pocket of the field coat. I Velcroed the pocket shut, put a second wallet in a back pocket. It held five one-dollar bills and no ID. This was, after all, downtown Reno.

  Down four flights of stairs to ground level. I hurried to catch up on the last flight, looked both ways on the sidewalk, saw them headed west on First, forty feet away.

  All of which counted when it came to accumulating hours as a world-famous private investigator, but I was probably right on the outer rim of those hours, following a high school girl with the apparent intelligence of a box of dead batteries.

  I could still be wrong about that, but who wears a nose ring that glistens moistly below their nostrils if they don’t have to? Kimmi was essentially parentless, on her own. Volker had lost all control, but that wasn’t unusual these days. Given our “nanny state” court system, controlling the toughest kids was no longer possible. Touch them and you end up in front of a judge, then in mandatory counseling, social workers dropping by to ensure that you don’t parent your precious kids the way your grandparents parented your parents, then everyone wonders how society’s youth got so feral. And, of course, if your kids turn out bad, it’s all your fault, not that of the courts or the System. The nanny state is all-wise, all-powerful, and is never at fault.

  Kimmi and the denim jacket turned right at the corner, walked up a block to Second Street, turned right again, then disappeared into a nightclub second door down. Cacophonous noise that no one in their right mind would call music rumbled out into the street. “Wildcat” was inscribed in bright yellow neon above a door painted flat black. The sign was yellow, but small, just fifteen inches wide, which is one reason I hadn’t noticed it before, the other being that Millennial and iGen clubs on Second Street had a tendency to change names every few months.

  I went in cautiously, not wanting Kimmi to see me, see through the disguise, then consider the coincidence that here I was in disguise less than an hour after I’d spoken with her father eleven miles and a universe away.

  The interior of the room was painted black, packed with the kind of human crush found at English soccer games where they riot if the team loses and a dozen or so end up trampled to death. The music, if that’s what it was, was loud enough to whip brain cells into a froth, prohibiting all thought. This was “compressed” sound, one continuous blast of atonal crap that was like sticking your head in a jet engine. A month in there and a teena
ger would be stone deaf, wondering how it had gotten so quiet, why all the screeching had faded into a faint white-noise hum. A sign on the front door read: No persons under 21 allowed. In my naiveté I expected Kimmi to be rousted and hustled out the door, in which case I might not be deaf before I turned forty-three. No such luck. A bouncer gave her ID a perfunctory glance and handed it back. Fake ID might’ve cost her twenty bucks. She was good to go, sixteen going on forty, gaining the kind of life experience that might prepare her for a career as a common streetwalker. Thank you, Nanny State.

  I sidled up to the skinny guy she was with, put him between her and me. I had three inches and fifty-plus pounds on him, but what he lacked in bulk, he might make up in weapons. I was still in Borroloola shape after digging holes for fence posts with a sixteen-pound iron bar for nearly a mile in Australia, one hole every eight feet in ground that felt like cured concrete. I figured I could arm wrestle this guy and toss him across the room, but he didn’t look like the “let’s-arm-wrestle” type.

  I put him at twenty-four or -five, perfectly reasonable age for a girl of sixteen. Sallow complexion, thin face, cheekbones that looked like misplaced shoulder blades, dark, deep-set eyes, face pierced in a dozen places; earlobes gauged—stretched—out to hold black onyx rings an inch and a half in diameter—the kind of antisocial, in-your-face disfigurement that would prevent him from getting any sort of a job that might require him to look more intelligent than a low-grade meatball.

  But I could be wrong about that too. The world is changing, and not for the better. I have the awful feeling that I’ll run into a bank vice president one day with a Harvard degree and earlobes gauged out to hold silver dollars. His reassuring speech will be enhanced by a tongue pierced by a stainless-steel bar. My only remaining hope was that he wouldn’t be sporting a snot-ring.

  Kimmi’s guy, Max—had to call him something—was turned away from me, shouting in her ear to be heard. A kind of buzz came from his mouth, but I couldn’t catch a single word of it. If they used sign language they could communicate better, and in fact, American Sign Language, ASL, would probably be their primary mode of communication in the coming years, once their hearing loss was up around ninety decibels, a loss that, of course, would never, ever happen to them. Hearing loss was for old people, really old, like … forty-two.

  Already my ears felt as if they’d been packed with cotton. The place was giving me a headache. We were there for three minutes when a guy tapped Max on the shoulder. Something passed between them. The guy was in his late twenties, early thirties. Jet-black hair, moustache, four-day beard stubble, inch-long soul patch, the kind of whippet-thin guy who would carry a switchblade and know how to use it. The exchange wasn’t particularly subtle, not up to CIA standards. I saw a flash of bills at waist level, the glint of a baggie, and the switchblade guy, dressed all in black, melted into the crowd like a puff of smoke after giving me a fleeting look that would compare favorably to that of an airport scanner.

  I gave it another minute. When I turned to leave, I felt a tug at my back pocket, like a bass taking bait, right side. I clapped a hand on my pocket, trapping a hand, got my left hand around a wrist, didn’t look to see what species I’d caught, and bulled my way through the crowd, dragging someone or something behind me like a poodle on a leash.

  Outside on the sidewalk I discovered I had a girl with short purple hair in tow, and she wasn’t happy. Five-seven, a hundred five pounds, black eye shadow applied with a spray can, more fucking piercings, black lipstick, eyes that spoke of a life in total disarray. Beneath all that Gothic crap, she was pretty. Thin but very pretty, and probably not over twenty years old.

  She tugged her arm, trying to free herself. When that didn’t work, she kicked my left shin, staggered a little when she missed, so I wrapped her in a bear hug, gave her a Borroloola squeeze that emptied her lungs and kept them empty. Into her ear I said, “You don’t have to be like this. You’re not a pickpocket. You can do better, honey.”

  But I’m not a social worker so I had nowhere to go from there. She wasn’t my problem. I turned her loose. She coughed once, got her lungs working again, then said, “Can … can I borrow a dollar, mister?”

  Crazy.

  Kimmi and Max came out the door. I turned away from them and backed the girl against a wall as they went by. I pulled out the spare wallet and gave her two bucks, let Kimmi and Max get to the corner, then went after them.

  They turned left at the corner, went south on West Street. I followed. Halfway down the block, they jaywalked across West to the other sidewalk. I crossed the street after them. Heard light footsteps behind me, turned, and, of course, it was the girl from Wildcat, following me like a stray puppy.

  “You goin’ after Dooley and that girl?” she asked.

  “Shush.”

  “I mean, if you are, what for?”

  I got her by the arm and kept going. “So the guy’s name is Dooley, huh? What’s yours?”

  “Mira. If you don’t know him, why are you following him? You’re not gonna, like, try to take his drugs or anything, are you? That wouldn’t be smart.”

  “Keep your voice down, Mira.”

  Ahead of us, Kimmi and Max—now identified as Dooley—turned right at the corner and disappeared around a building. I hurried to catch up. Mira followed.

  “If you are,” she said, “you should know he’s real mean even if you are kinda big …”

  “Quiet.”

  We reached the corner and turned right. The sidewalk was empty. Only a hundred feet back and I’d lost them.

  Great Gumshoe.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MY PHONE RANG as I was gazing at the empty sidewalk. At the ringtone—“Purple People Eater”—Mira took a step back and gave me a wary look. I dragged the phone out of an inside coat pocket. Traffic was sporadic on the street. A streetlight halfway down the block made the shadows deep and dark around us.

  “Hey, Ma,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “I called four minutes ago. Where were you?”

  “In Wildcat getting my ears hammered.”

  Silence for a few seconds. “I’m gonna let you talk to Lucy since she apparently understands you.”

  More silence, voices, then, “Ma says your speech is slurred and she can’t make it out. Why is that?”

  “It’s her ears. She’s losing high frequencies.”

  “I’ll let her know. Where are you?”

  “First and West, down by the river looking west.”

  “At?”

  “An empty sidewalk.” “Groovy. Why?”

  “I was following Kimmi and Dooley, but they vanished into thin air. Like smoke.”

  “Okay, maybe Ma was right.”

  Mira tugged my sleeve. “They went in there.” She aimed a finger at a building that took up half the block.

  “What’s in there?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “Just a bunch of apartments.”

  “Who’s that?” Lucy asked.

  “Mira.”

  “Uh-huh. Mira who?”

  “Dunno.” I looked at Mira. “What’s your last name?”

  “Tanaka.”

  “Mira Tanaka,” I said to Lucy.

  “Groovy redux. Sounds Japanese. Who is she?”

  “Sort of a long story, but the short version is I’m on a case and you’ve got nothing to worry about, kiddo.”

  “I never worry unless someone’s trying to kill you. Or us.”

  “That sounds more or less Zen, but no one’s trying to kill me at the moment.”

  “Me either,” she said.

  “So we’re good.” Mira was listening, waiting with infinite patience, as if this slice of reality was as good as any other slice.

  “You sure they went in there?” I asked her. The building was nineteen-fifties brick, four stories tall, yellow light glowing behind a few windows that faced the street. I’d seen the place a hundred times in passing, never paid it much attention.

  “Of course. I live ther
e. Well, sort of.”

  I didn’t know how anyone “sort of” lived anywhere, but now was not the time. “So have you caught up with Megan yet?” I asked Lucy. Galbraith’s missing kid.

  “Well, jeez, Mort. We barely got here. I mean, in all the traffic from the airport in a rental car and checked into the hotel and everything. We’ll start looking tomorrow. Right now, we’re in a restaurant down the street. Chinese.”

  “Which reminds me. I haven’t eaten for eight hours. I’ll get something after I look into this Kimmi and Dooley thing.”

  “Who the heck are they?”

  “Volker’s sixteen-year-old daughter and her boyfriend who looks mid-twenties and might have a few years of prison under his belt. If he doesn’t, I’d say he’s due.”

  “None of that sounds good.”

  “It’s our country in this great new millennium. It might not be much of anything, either. Mostly I’m piling up investigation hours. I’ll fill you in later.”

  “About Mira, too.”

  “Will do, but it’s nothing. She’s a pickpocket.”

  Mira stared at me, face suddenly tragic, then turned to walk away. I caught her arm, kept her from leaving while I ended the call.

  “I’m nothing,” she said. “Just a pickpocket.” Her voice was flat, more empty than mad.

  “Everyone is what they’ve decided to be.” Well, shit. Right then I decided not to pursue a career in politics or work a crisis call line.

  “Yeah, right.” More mad than empty this time, but low-key mad, as if she didn’t have the energy to really get into it.

  I’d exhausted my social worker skills and had nothing to fall back on except IRS banter, which only works if you’re trying to intimidate. “You think they went in there?” I looked up at the building. “This place got a name?”

  “Truckee River Apartments. He lives there.”

  “And you?”

  “Not with him, no. Just, I’ve seen him there. I stay in like four different places with people. Robin and Gayle let me crash on their couch. They share an apartment. I don’t like to stay with them too much in case they end up thinking I’m in the way and tell me no more. So I try to sort of circulate.”