Gumshoe Rock

by Rob Leininger

  She poked at her cell phone a while longer. “Area code 115 for Arnold Anderson is in Davachi, according to Google.” More cell phone tapping. “And Davachi is, get this, in Azerbaijan, and Davachi is its former name. Now it’s called Sabran.”

  “Azerbaijan,” Lucy said. “Cool. I bet not one high school senior in five could tell you which continent that’s on.”

  I said, “Not one high school senior in five could name six of the seven continents, so no bet.”

  More tapping. “Both Sarron girls are in St. Louis,” Ma said. “Same phone number, so they probably live together.”

  “Lot of extensions,” I offered. “All these people are in big office buildings or corporations? Does that seem right to you?”

  “Nope.”

  Ma dialed the number for Donna Sarron. She pulled the phone away from her ear. “Got an old fax whistle.” She stared at the address book listing again. “This ain’t right.”

  “I wonder if the FBI got anywhere with it,” I said.

  Ma shrugged. “You could try asking Fairchild, but my guess is they got squat. Just like us.”

  “Anyone up for a little bowling?” I asked.

  * * *

  Guess not.

  Ma left. She said she’d walk. It was only half a mile to her office. Next up, she would be walking half marathons, losing weight, changing her personality, giving weight-loss seminars.

  “We should ask Mike Volker if he recognizes any of these names,” Lucy said.

  “Anything to get us out of here, huh?”

  “That’s right. And we’ve got to get my car over to Valley Automotive for my new top at one thirty, or did you forget?”

  “Nope. Let’s go.”

  It was only twelve fifteen. We had time to go by Joss & Volker Inc. on the way to Valley Automotive.

  Volker was with a client, but he hurried out when he saw Lucy and me hovering in the waiting room.

  “What’s up, guys?”

  I showed him Soranden’s address book, such as it was. I’ve seen longer shopping lists, mostly for Costco.

  “Recognize any names on this?” I asked him.

  He went down the list slowly. “Couple of Sorandens. I don’t know any of ’em, though. This belong to that blackmailing shithead?”

  “Language,” Lucy said mildly.

  “Sorry.”

  “It does,” I told him.

  He shrugged. “Just those two names. You think maybe he was blackmailing some of these people?”

  “That’s a thought.” Which hadn’t occurred to me. Or to Ma, unless she was hiding it from the staff.

  “At least I’m not on the list,” Volker said.

  “If you were, you’d know it. You would’ve already been contacted by the FBI.”

  “Hell. Hope I’m not on any lists they find. Look, I gotta get back with my client. Do you need anything else?”

  “Not right now.”

  “Okay, then. Let me know if you find anything.”

  He left. Evelyn Joss was busy. Lucy and I went out to her Mustang and she drove us over to Valley Automotive where a woman in her fifties in the office took the car keys and told us the car would probably be ready at four. She would call if there was any sort of a holdup.

  Valley Automotive was on Valley Road, three blocks north of Fourth Street. Lucy and I walked down to Fourth, then west to the Golden Goose Casino, half a mile away. We couldn’t let Ma outwalk us. If Ma started speed-walking, I might never hear the end of it. We went up to the mezzanine and into Miguel’s Taqueria. I had the Enchiladas Plazeras and Lucy had Ceviche Baja style. After we ate, I pulled out the address sheet and we stared at it a while longer. Staring being all we accomplished.

  “He knew people from all over the place,” Lucy said.

  “Including Azerbaijan.”

  “I doubt it. That’s too weird.”

  “I don’t think these are addresses or phone numbers. I think it’s code. And I don’t mean area codes or zip codes.”

  “The phone numbers all have area codes,” Lucy said.

  “Which don’t seem to work. Like Becky Sue Sarron who is or isn’t in St. Louis with sister or wife Donna.”

  “Shame on you.”

  “What’d I say?”

  We puzzled over it a while longer, then gave up. I paid the check and we went down an escalator to the first floor, then into the Green Room to get something to make us smarter. Twenty years ago, that would’ve been a ginkgo biloba cocktail with a little umbrella on the rim. If I’d used ginkgo back then, and if it had worked as advertised, I would’ve remembered Dallas’s and my third anniversary when I was twenty-two and not ended up sleeping on the couch.

  Ella Glover was behind the bar. O’Roarke wouldn’t come on until six. “Pete’s?” she said when I told her what I wanted. “Kinda early for that, isn’t it, Mort?”

  “It’s never too early for Pete’s Wicked Ale, kiddo. I put it on Cheerios right after that first cup of coffee.”

  “Ugh.” She turned to Lucy, narrowed her eyes. “I still don’t believe you’re older than me.” I thought my English Nazi might jump all over that grammar lapse, but she didn’t.

  “Mort makes me feel young,” Lucy said. “Works wonders on my arthritis.”

  “Huh.” Ella stared at her, then sent a bottle of Pete’s to me like a shuffleboard puck, whipped up a tonic and lime for Lucy. Under the bar’s green track lighting, Lucy and I went over that damn address sheet one more time. I took out my cell phone and dialed AAA Cal’s number, got an “out of service” message.

  “Another dead end,” I said. “Phone that Triple-A and you’d end up pushing your car or walking home.”

  “Got two Sandolons,” Lucy said. “Eric and Darren. Same area codes, but the phone numbers are different.”

  “Yup. Maybe they’re married, living apart.”

  “You’re a jerk. Where’s area code 632?”

  I looked it up on my cell phone. “It’s not a United States area code. Google has it for Manila, the Philippines. But only as a maybe. Didn’t know Google did maybes.”

  “Sandolon. That sounds kinda Filipino. Not sure about Eric or Darren, though, but I guess it could happen.”

  “Yup. GIs were plentiful there in the nineteen forties and during Vietnam.”

  “So if this isn’t some sort of coded stuff, Soranden knows people all over the world. And don’t say ‘yup’ or I’ll hit you.”

  “Yes’m.”

  She punched my shoulder anyway. “Testy,” I said.

  “Yup.”

  * * *

  We walked back to Valley Automotive, got there fifteen minutes early, and the Mustang was waiting, ready to go, nice new black top on it. Lucy put her cheek on it, like it was a black lab looking for love.

  She drove us home. We dressed in running gear and hit the River Walk, jogged five miles west to Mayberry Park and back, ten miles. Good training run, getting us ready for our judo lesson with Rufus tomorrow morning since, as usual, he would do his best to kill us. I figured I was in for an especially ugly workout after that bar fight in Wildcat. Maybe I shouldn’t have fessed up to Rufus.

  Six p.m. I turned on the news, saw no sign of Mortimer Angel or any mention of Soranden’s skull, so I turned it off.

  “Now what?” my assistant asked.

  “We’re not always on the job, sweetheart.”

  “Good to know. Now what?”

  “We could see if Ma wants to go out to dinner.”

  “I like that. I think maybe she’s lonely a lot.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. Last summer when we were up in Gerlach and Bend, I got a bunch of mixed messages. And this summer in southern Nevada when Ma showed up at Arlene’s Diner just in time to get me shot while trying to save her—long story—she was with Officer Day, who ended up saving my life. But the point is, Ma had … boyfriends. Here and there. But then she sometimes gave off lonely vibes.

  I phoned Ma. “What?” she answered. Lot of noise in the background.<
br />
  “Hell of a way to answer the phone, Ma.”

  “It’s loud as Hades in here. Talk fast or hang up.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “What’s it to ya?”

  Okay, that wasn’t right, though Ma didn’t sound as if she was in trouble. But it wasn’t like her to go stealth on me, either.

  “Sounds like you’re in a freakin’ disco,” I said.

  “Disco’s been dead since I was thirty-five and you were in diapers.”

  “I was fifteen when you were thirty-five so that diapers circumlocution thing didn’t cut it.”

  “Where the hell did you learn a word with twelve fuckin’ syllables?”

  “Ma?”

  “Gotta go, Mort. Catch you later.”

  She hung up. I stared at my cell phone in disbelief.

  “Disco and diapers?” Lucy said.

  I shook my head. “Forget that diapers thing. And it wasn’t disco. She’s in Wildcat.” Then I expanded on that by saying, “Dirty sonofabitch.”

  * * *

  Now what? Wildcat wasn’t a good place for me. Or Lucy. Or Ma, but Ma was just an elderly lady who could walk from here to Colorado and back in a day or two and put down more booze than your average college football team. It wasn’t likely that anyone would recognize her or connect her to me.

  I hoped.

  But what the fuck? Wildcat? What did she think she was doing?

  “Wildcat?” Lucy said. “Why?”

  “With Ma, one never knows.”

  “Should we go and, I don’t know, help her?”

  “Not sure she needs help.” Then again, I wasn’t sure she didn’t, or wouldn’t in the next half hour. Precious Kimmi and Dooley could be there. They wouldn’t know Ma from an alien just in from Jupiter. Mira might be there, but she wouldn’t know Ma either. Would Ramon Surry be at Wildcat showing off his shoulder cast? That didn’t seem likely, but who knows?

  “We should go,” Lucy said.

  “I agree. But in disguises. I don’t want anyone there having any idea who we are.”

  In the back of my mind a little voice softly whispered that someone had put Soranden’s skull in Lucy’s car, which might’ve been my car. So someone somewhere knew more than I wanted them to know; therefore the disguises had better be damn good.

  Lucy looked different in a long black wig and a tight black top with a good amount of cleavage showing. The top had huge decorative safety pins down the front, designed to look as if they were holding it together. A short black skirt, black knee-length boots. Not the same outfit she wore when she took the Grand Sierra Resort for over three thousand bucks, but the face was the same with its black makeup. Might be perfect for Wildcat.

  I was old and gray in an ancient duffer’s outfit, white shirt, blue and gray Goodwill sports coat left unbuttoned, white hair in disarray over my ears, a salt-and-pepper moustache, glasses with gold wire rims. Under the shirt I wore the foam-filled polyester barrel gut that got me up to three hundred pounds.

  “Totally bitchin’ outfit,” Lucy said, staring at me.

  “You too. One thing did occur to me though.”

  She tilted her head. “What?”

  “If I ever grow my hair out like this except longer and you see it up in a man bun, don’t ask questions, just shoot me. And don’t laugh until after you pull the trigger.”

  “Got it. No man bun, no laughter, just bang.”

  A man bun. What a world. Why would a guy want to look like Aunt Bee?

  We drove over in the Toyota, parked it three blocks away, walked over to Wildcat, and went in.

  The music—hard to call it that because it was like fifty garbage cans full of car parts rolling downhill in a thunderstorm—wasn’t quite as loud as the night I was there tracking Kimmi, maybe because it wasn’t yet seven p.m. But it was Friday so the place was a third full and the crowd was thick around the bar. I got a few strange looks—three-hundred-pound antique geezer in a Millennials bar with a Goth chick on his arm who looked hot, hot, hot. Maybe attracting that much attention hadn’t been the way to go. Too late now.

  Ma was on a stool at the bar, big surprise.

  We headed that way, but before we reached her, Mira put a hand on my arm and said, “Is it you?”

  Well, shit. So much for weighing as much as an average NFL tackle. It might have been because I was the tallest person in the place. “I’m me, yes. Always have been. Who’re you?”

  “Mira. Don’t you remember? You bought me dinner.”

  I wasn’t going to bluff her away, so I got Lucy beside me and the two Goth girls checked each other out. Finally, I said to Lucy in a half-shout, “This is Mira.”

  “Figured.” Then Lucy gave Mira a hug. Damn, that’s what happens when girls who know me meet each other.

  Lucy half shouted to Mira, “Hi, I’m Lucy.”

  Further conversation appeared to be all but impossible. A person could go hoarse and/or deaf in five minutes. Time to get out of there. I deftly bulled my way in to where Ma was trying to order another drink.

  “How ya doin’, Ma?”

  She turned. “Trying to get this bozo’s attention and what the hell are you doin’ here?”

  “That’s what I was wondering about you.”

  “I’m undercover. Sorta. Checking the place out. You and that girl all in black beside you should leave. I’ll be fine if I can get another freakin’ drink anytime this week.”

  Which is when I felt a tap on the shoulder. I turned and Ramon Surry stuck a short knife in my belly and ripped upward. Sonofabitch. He had a long black coat over his cast, right sleeve flapping loose, nasty little three-inch blade in his left hand, surprised look on his face when I didn’t appear to be fazed about the knife. We were inches apart so a standard punch was out of the question. I twisted and shot an elbow into his face, caught him on the left cheek hard enough to spin his head a full quarter turn. He went down, so I went down too, put a knee in his groin, got the knife out of his hand. We were on the floor in a forest of legs. Surry was out cold. I made sure of that by slamming the back of his head against the floor. It made a nice hollow wok sound, like his skull was empty. I did it again, hard, because I liked the sound and this was the second time the sonofabitch had tried to kill me, then I stood up. None of this appeared to have been noticed by those around us. The music was too loud, the crowd too close, and drunks passing out was probably the norm, but Ma had seen what I’d done.

  “Let’s go, Ma,” I said.

  “Nope. I’ll stay, see what happens, if anything. Scoot.”

  No time to argue or haul her off the stool. I got Lucy by an arm, led the way through the press of people and out the door, and, of course, Mira was right behind her when we reached the sidewalk. I thought Lucy had seen some of what had happened in there. Probably not Surry’s knife since he was right up against me when he’d struck, left-handed, but it was likely she’d seen me putting an elbow in his face and him going down. Mira had been behind Lucy, so she might not have seen anything.

  “How about a movie?” I said in what I hoped was a jovial way. Mr. Cool, after his second knife fight in under a week.

  Which was when I saw Renner and Bledsoe at the corner, Munson’s goons. Great. First chance I got, I would have to call Slick Willie, tell him to get them away from me or the deal was off and he could piss up a rope.

  I hustled Lucy and Mira away. The sun was down, but it wasn’t dark yet. I had palmed Surry’s knife. I stuck it in a pocket and glanced down at my stomach. The knife had torn the shirt, buried itself in the foam padding. Sometimes disguises are worth their weight in gold, but I’d lost a perfectly good shirt.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I FASTENED TWO buttons on the coat to hide the torn shirt.

  “Don’t tell Rufus,” I whispered to Lucy as we headed west toward the car. Old duffer with two young Goth babes in tow. I might’ve been able to attract more attention with a portable siren and flashing lights, but maybe not.

  “Why not?”
Lucy said. “He would be impressed.” She had an arm through mine. Mira was beside her, trailing along, silent.

  “No, he wouldn’t. He’d kick my butt. Except maybe for this.” I showed her the knife, making sure Mira didn’t see it.

  Lucy’s eyes widened and she stopped dead on the sidewalk. “Where’d you get that?”

  “Guess.” I pocketed the knife and got her moving again.

  “Wow. You took that away from him? Okay, let’s go eat since that’s what we planned earlier.”

  “Nice segue. But it’s hard to eat with a pint of adrenaline in your system.”

  “Why? All you did was deck him, right?”

  Mira was in her own world, not taking any of this in, so I showed Lucy the torn shirt. “I decked him ’cause of this.”

  She stopped again. “He did that? With that knife?”

  I got her moving again. “Guy’s got a one-track mind. And let’s keep motoring here. The blade didn’t get through this fat-pad I’m wearing. I’m fine. But he’s starting to piss me off.”

  We walked a block in silence, then Lucy turned to Mira. “We’re gonna get something to eat. Want to come along?”

  “Okay.” Again, no force behind the words. She was a leaf on the river of life.

  We piled into the Toyota and ended up at the Peppermill. Ever popular was the buffet. We could get prime rib, crab legs, stuff like that, or zero-calorie salad with beets and sprouts and other yummy roughage, so I paid for three and in we went.

  Lucy helped Mira figure out the buffet. It appeared that she hadn’t been through a buffet since Bush Two was president, if that. I ended up with real food and they ended up with … okay, surprise, a mix of stuff you could find on a riverbank, but also egg rolls and two kinds of fish and even some chicken.

  “Um, thanks,” Mira said. “For this.”

  “De nada.”

  For a while, we ate without a lot of talking. I went back for seconds, and, surprise, so did Lucy and Mira.

  Finally, we slowed down enough that talk was possible.

  “Your father’s really nice to do this,” Mira said. “I mean, if he’s your father and not … well, you know.”

  Lucy coughed, then covered it up with another little cough that helped to stifle laughter. “He’s a dear. We had so much fun in Disneyland when I was eight.”