“I found out the hard way Lucy is familiar with handguns,” I told him, putting a hand on the safe.
“She didn’t shoot you? That’d be the hard way.”
Good one, Ed. “No, she conned me, then outshot me.” I gave it a moment, then said, “Not to bring up what might be an unpleasant topic, but you’re aware that we were buried in the trunk of a Cadillac in the desert and left for dead, aren’t you?”
His face got serious. “I am.”
“And she got shot. Nicked, actually.”
“That too.”
“Got any comment about any of that, now that we’re down here?”
“Not sure what to say, except I’m damn glad the bullet only grazed her and that you two got out of that car. I might like to hear the full story about that car deal sometime, but not now, not yet. Maybe in another year or two.”
“Anything else? As a father? Here’s your chance to let ’er rip if you’re so inclined.”
He looked me in the eye. “I appreciate that, but I’ve got nothing to let rip. Lucy is her own person. Has been for a long time. And I’d trust her intuition over mine any day of the week. She’s in love with you. She didn’t say as much, but she didn’t have to. I know my girl. And I know what you do for a living. I see you in the news all the time. So I hope she remains safe and happy. I think that’s about all any father can hope for. Birds leave the nest, then they’re on their own.” He took a sip of his drink. “Got a gun safe at your place in Reno, Mort?”
“No. But I’ve been thinking I should get one.”
“I’ll have one delivered. For Lucy. For you too, obviously, but we’ll call it Lucy’s. You okay with that?”
“Sure. But I can afford a safe.”
“The one I have in mind is kinda pricy. It’ll be a gift. For Lucy. I know she’s got her own apartment, but I don’t think a gun safe is appropriate in a place like that. Will your floor take a big safe? A thousand-pounder? Be pretty unusual if it wouldn’t, but it seems as if I oughta ask.”
“If it doesn’t, I’ll check the basement, see if the safe ended up down there, or if it made it all the way to the water table. But the floor took me okay when Jeri picked me up and slammed me down onto a sparring mat. Twice.”
“Jeri?”
“Jeri DiFrazzia. Former boss, former fiancée. She weighed a hundred thirty-two pounds at the time. Took first in her weight class in the women’s power lifting nationals last year.”
He grinned. “Girl put you down hard, huh?”
“She cheated. She used judo.”
Ed laughed. “I heard you and Lucy are taking judo. How’s that going?”
“Real fine. I’m sore after every lesson. On the other hand, after a lesson Lucy touches the soles of her feet to the top of her head while she’s in a handstand. You can’t do that, can you?”
“Christ no. She got those octopus genes from her mother then took it to a whole different level.” He paused, then said, “So you were engaged a while back?” He watched me as he took another sip of bourbon.
“Yes. Jeri was terrific, an absolutely wonderful person. She was murdered a little after Senator Reinhart went missing last year. Presidential candidate. You probably heard about him.”
“I did, yes. You get into some pretty dangerous stuff.”
“Not intentionally.”
“Still. Lucy ended up buried alive. And you.”
“Again, not intentionally. Look, if any of that is meant to imply that Lucy and I shouldn’t continue to see each other, now would be the time—”
“No. Oh, no, Mort. No implication at all. I want what Lucy wants, that’s all. Like I said, she’s her own person. And it speaks well of you that you can tell me that that gal you knew, Jeri, was a wonderful person. Means you can say the same about Lucy.”
“She’s incredible. ‘Incredible’ doesn’t do her justice.”
“So you get it. Get her, I mean.”
“I do.”
“Just … try to keep her safe, if you can.”
“Will do.”
“Her wanting to do private investigation. That never would have occurred to me. But, you know, it suits her somehow. She’s been happier these last few months than I’ve seen her in years.”
“Good to know.” I waved a hand at the room, indicating it and the rest of the house. “This is a surprise. She never hinted at anything like this.”
“She wouldn’t. Not if she’s serious about you, and there’s no doubt about that. None at all.”
“As long as it’s just the two of us and the walls, mind if I ask where all this came from? If you do mind, then I never asked and I have no curiosity at all.”
He smiled. “Mostly from patents. Half a dozen of them. You might say I’m an inventor. Which is simplistic, but more or less accurate.”
“Patents?”
“The main one, the real cash cow, is over twenty years old. I came up with a better way to join pipe in offshore oil drilling. Stronger, faster, less chance of a blowout. It’s used all over the world now.” He gave me a long look. “There’s something I want to tell you, feel I need to tell you, but if Luce ever finds out she would kill us both, which would defeat the purpose, so it’s got to stay between the two of us.”
“Which might mean you shouldn’t tell me.”
“Your saying that means I should, because I can trust you, and because it’s something you ought to know, considering how Lucy feels about you. She uses very little of our money, Val’s and mine. Lucy wouldn’t tell you this, but she’s worth about twelve million. I kick in another million every year or so.”
I blinked. Huh.
“I mean, it’s hers if and when she wants it, or any part of it for any reason. It’s in all three of our names—hers, mine, and Val’s. But so far … Lucy is her own person, and I respect that more than I can say, since I grew up poor and I’ve seen what can happen to people when life is handed to them on a silver platter. A lot of them turn out worthless and stupid, like movie stars who think they’re God’s gift. Lucy didn’t go that route. In the past eight or nine years she’s taken some godawful menial jobs and lived within whatever means that’s given her. She’s one of the strongest people I know. Maybe the strongest. A lot stronger than me, I have to say.”
“And one of the luckiest, Ed.”
He grinned. “You’ve run into that, have you?”
“Head-on.”
He shook his head. “I don’t understand it, that business about four planets lined up, but I wouldn’t play poker with her if I were you.”
“Got that, but lately roulette seems to be her thing.”
“Roulette, huh? Casino roulette? Casinos are touchy about winners. They’ve got no sense of humor when it comes to their money walking out the door.”
“Uh-huh. But she knows how to work it. Like you wouldn’t believe. She’d go viral on YouTube. So far, money hasn’t been an issue. In fact, we can afford a gun safe, and it’s a good idea.”
“We’ll make it a gift. Early Christmas present if that’s what it takes. And I want her to have this, too.” He hit a six-digit code on a keypad on the safe, a light turned green, and he opened the safe. Big safe. It wasn’t nearly full, and it had two rifles that gun haters would call assault rifles even though there’s no such thing since you can be assaulted by someone wielding a flyswatter and no one calls them assault flyswatters. But that’s neither here nor there. The safe also held three hunting rifles with scopes, a .22 rifle, scoped, a shotgun, and six or eight handguns. Ed got out a Ruger .22 SR22 automatic with a black polymer frame, popped out the magazine, worked the slide, and handed me the weapon, empty.
“Magazine holds ten rounds,” he said. “Very little recoil. For self-defense I’d recommend hyper-velocity bullets.” He got three boxes of CCI Velocitor rounds, gave them to me. “Plink and practice with the basic stuff, but have her load up with this if the two of you might get into a … situation.” He hesitated, then said, “I’m not really a gun freak, Mort, but defe
nding yourself is just plain smart and this doggone world’s getting more and more dangerous, year after year.”
“So I’ve noticed.” I didn’t mention my recent knife fights. And I didn’t think a gun would have solved the problem in that crowd in Wildcat the other night. Guns and crowds don’t mix. But knife fights might make Ed nervous, and I’d had my fill of them, or so I hoped—so I kept that to myself. I handed the gun back to Ed and he slapped the magazine back into it.
Carrying the booty, we took the elevator back up, got off at the living room, didn’t take it all the way to the penthouse.
“Guns,” Lucy said, eyes bright. Not every girl lights up at the sight of weaponry, but mine does.
“All yours, hon,” Ed said, handing it to her.
She popped the magazine, worked the slide, released it and put the magazine back in, sighted the gun at a gondolier on an oil painting of Venice. “Adjustable sights. Very cool.”
“And cool ammo,” I said, showing her the Velocitors.
She kissed her father on the cheek. “Thanks. To carry it, I’ll have to get qualified with it.”
“Do that, soon. Just be safe, hon.”
“Always.”
“Now,” Ed said, “isn’t it about time we got something to eat? I know I’m hungry. How about Saison? Or Jardiniere?”
“Uh-uh,” Lucy said. “How about pizza? We can walk down to Two Guy’s. No valet parking, no big production.”
Ed scratched behind an ear. “Words of wisdom.”
So we walked the six blocks to Two Guy’s Pizza. Got two medium pizzas—a basic pepperoni and cheese, and one loaded with the works, including anchovies.
The high point of the meal was when Lucy said, “Mort rode in the WNBR this year. In March.”
I sighed. World Naked Bike Ride.
Val gave me an amused look. “Did you?”
“I was talked into it.” And it looked like I was never going to hear the end of it—riding around San Francisco on a bicycle wearing nothing but a little red body paint. Holiday, of course, rode stark naked at the time with a bit of paint on her back that read 4 Jeri. She was still on forty thousand Facebook sites.
“Someone twisted your arm, did they?” Val wasn’t going to quickly turn loose of something that delicious. This was great, the conversation rolling around to me touring the city in the buff. Ed was smiling, looking down at the table, so I was on my own.
Lucy said, “His boss, mine too now, has a poster on her office wall of Mort standing beside his bicycle. It’s very cool.”
“A poster,” Val said. “How interesting.”
“Laminated,” Lucy said.
I held up a slice of pizza. “This pizza isn’t half bad. And it’s within walking distance of the house, too. You’re lucky.”
All three of them laughed. What a family. We were sitting at wooden tables with bench seats in a room that got noisier with an influx of kids in soccer outfits as we sat there. Just your basic, normal neighborhood adults in for a sit-down, no sign that three of them, in total, were worth a little over three hundred forty million dollars and the fourth one was worth, in total, about a hundred sixty thousand.
Three hundred forty million.
Ho-ly shit.
* * *
Seven twenty p.m., headed east toward Oakland on the Bay Bridge, we passed through the tunnel on Yerba Buena Island and Lucy said, “Whatever you say, please don’t make it about money.”
“They’re just normal folks, kiddo. Don’t sweat it.”
“You don’t care?”
“Hell yes. Given any say in the matter, I’d prefer my girl to come from nice, normal, sane, pizza-lovin’ folks. And you do.”
She stared at me, then said, “Omigod. I love you so, so, so, so much.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LUCY WAS WRAPPED around me like an eel. I thought she was asleep, then she jerked and cried, “Oh, oh, oh, oh!”
“And I wasn’t even touching any volatile parts,” I said. “I am a god.”
“Yes, you are. But … anagrams, anagrams, anagrams!”
“Anagrams?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Multiple times, too. If your needle’s stuck I can bump the player to get you back on track.”
“How very retro, but, anagrams, Mort. Soranden was into that, so get up.”
“Get up? We just got to bed. Well, forty minutes ago. And, hey, look, it’s one twenty in the morning and really dark out. I mean, freakin’ dark out, like nighttime already.”
“Up,” she said, tossing the covers off us. In the dim light she said, “Oh. You are. But I meant like putting your feet on the floor.”
“So this other way ain’t happening, is that correct?”
“It did happen, not that long ago either, so forget it, Zeus. I want another look at that address book.” She lofted herself out of bed, not something I was capable of right then.
“Zeus,” I said. “Never forget you called me that. Oh, and you look mighty good naked and tousled, Sugar Plum.”
“Up.”
So I got up, donned a bathrobe and slippers, as did Lucy, and we trooped downstairs to the office—and, like I told her, it was still dark out. Lucy got Soranden’s doodle sheet and we sat side by side on a hunter green couch with a fancy-ass hyper-modern light hanging over us on a chrome fixture that might have to go to Goodwill since it didn’t look the least bit noir and being hard-boiled and cynical I was all about noir.
“Anagrams,” I said, stifling a yawn, trying to get my retinas to fire up.
“Right. Look at this. Arnold Anderson. I was sort of semi-drowsing half-asleep when it sort of hit me—”
“That’s a lot of ‘sort ofs,’ kiddo.”
“Be quiet. It hit me that Arnold is an anagram of Ronald. So maybe—”
“Anderson is an anagram of Soranden.”
“Exactly. Which it is. And that means Arnold Anderson is Ronald Soranden. There is no Arnold Anderson—well, there might be a few thousand of ’em in the United States, but not—you know what I mean. Which must mean these numbers after Anderson’s name are code for something, not phone numbers.”
“Like bank accounts.”
She kissed me. “Exactly. Like bank accounts.”
“Good work. I never would’ve thought of anagrams even though they were like two-by-fours.”
“Two-by-fours?”
“Lumber—used to get the attention of mules.”
She gave me a doubtful look. “Right, sure. So, how does it work? I mean, I’ve had bank accounts but I’ve never given much thought to what all those numbers mean.”
“A bank account has a routing number that identifies the bank, and a person’s personal account number in that bank. In combination, those two numbers get the job done so you can pay rent and mortgage and buy Fritos.”
“Okay. So what about these?” She indicated the numbers following Anderson’s name.
“Routing numbers are nine digits long,” I said.
She frowned, put her finger on 115-242-1803. “This one has ten digits.”
“Maybe it’s the personal account number.”
“Which would make 288-101-0134 the routing number, but that has ten digits too. And it has an extension.”
“The extension might be window dressing. Misdirection.”
That got me another kiss. “Let’s go with that,” she said. “I get the feeling misdirection is Soranden’s thing.”
“First, let’s check the area codes. Make sure it makes sense that these aren’t phone numbers.”
“Ma did that already.”
“Double-check before you floor it, kiddo.”
“Was that like a race car metaphorical-similarity thing?”
“Your English is pretty marginal at”—I glanced at a clock on the wall—“one forty-two in the wee frickin’ hours.”
“As if I care.” She got up and turned on a computer. After it booted, she said, “Give me an area code.”
“Try 115.”
She Googled 115. “Wow, talk about your sucky English. It says, ‘The 115 area code appears to be a invalid.’” She scrolled down. “Another entry says it might be in the United Kingdom.”
“I think we’ll go with ‘a invalid.’”
She made a face. “Who on earth writes this fertilizer?”
“Number-one qualification to write ads and internet stuff is not to have made it past the eighth grade.”
“I believe it. The difference between it’s and its is college level English. Okay, what’s that other area code?”
“288.”
She typed it in. “Same thing. It doesn’t exist.”
“So these numbers are likely to be coded accounts. Now we can floor it.”
She plopped down beside me. “Groovy. He liked puzzles. Let’s figure it out.”
“If this first number is routing, it has one too many digits. Which might mean one of the digits is camouflage.”
“Could be the first number. Or the last. How do we check routing numbers?”
I found the URL for a directory of routing numbers that Ma had given me, among a zillion other things. Lucy got us into the site, then entered 115242180 after stripping off the last number.
“No such bank,” she said.
“Dump the first number. That’d make it 152421803.”
After a moment she said, “Still nothing.”
Then we went through it, omitting one number each time, and still came up empty.
“Well, poop,” said my assistant. “Maybe it’s not a routing number. Maybe it’s the account number and the second one is the routing number.”
So we tried that and came up dry again.
“Well, poop,” said someone whose cussing was apparently limited to palindromes. “But, then, look at these other names.” She ran a finger down the list, stopped on Donna Del Sarron. She studied it for a moment. “That’s him again.”
“Ah. He’s a cross-dresser,” I said. “Why am I not surprised? The Toad always did seem a little off.”
She made a rude noise.
I shrugged. “Hey, if some guy calls himself Donna, I think tutus, ballet slippers, and expensive hormone therapy.”
That got me another rude noise. She continued down the list. “Darren Sandolon. There he is again.”
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