Gumshoe Rock

by Rob Leininger

  I guffawed. “As if.”

  Ma smiled. Using one of her investigator’s programs, she found Warley’s private number on her iPad and read it off to me. “Call him.”

  “Think that’s a good idea, Ma?”

  “Yup. If he balks, I’ll sink his canoe.”

  Cool. Now I had two reasons to call. I put his number in, got him on the horn on the third ring.

  “Warl, it’s me.”

  “Who?”

  “Your fellow IRS thug.”

  Silence. Then, “Narrow it down.”

  “It’s Mortimer.”

  “Hey, Mort. Had me goin’ there. We should get together for a drink and talk about old times, huh?”

  “Maybe not. I’ve got a job for you, since you’re the head racketeer now in Northern Nevada.” Doesn’t hurt to stroke that fragile, needy little ego, and “racketeer” would put a glow in his heart. “I need you to run down a tax return for me, get me some information.”

  Silence. Then: “You know I can’t do that, Mort. You’re not in the … the profession anymore.”

  “Not even for an old pal, huh?”

  “Not even. I mean, you know how it is.”

  Ma drew a line across her throat.

  “Okay, Warl. Catch you later.” I ended the call. “What’s up, Ma?”

  “You got that new burner phone with you?”

  “Right here.” I got it out of a pocket, held it up.

  “Gimme it.” She took it, found “Will” in the contact list, punched a few buttons, and motioned us for quiet. “Yeah, Willie, it’s Maude. Yeah, I know, I got it from Mort. It’s just the three of us on this thing. I need a favor.” Pause. “Well, what do you think, since I’m on this burner talkin’ to your burner?” She gave me a wink. “No names, but the man out west here—the guy you gave the top job, if you’ll remember—initials WS if that helps—needs a push to get me some info regarding that job you want us to look into, so I’d appreciate it if you’d give him a call and get his mind right.” Short pause. “Three minutes or he’s fired? Hell, no, I don’t want him fired. What good would he be in the future if you did that?” Longer pause. “Okay, that’s good. Tell him to call Mort.” Pause. “Nope, he’ll know who. He’s got the number, and no, it’s not this number for chrissake.”

  She ended the call and we waited.

  Two minutes twelve seconds later, my regular cell phone rang.

  “Yo,” I said.

  “Is that you, Mort?”

  “Mr. Angel, yeah. What can I do for you, Warl?”

  “Well, uh, what can I do for you? Sorry about that little mix-up a few minutes ago. I spilled coffee on my desk.”

  “No problem. What I need are tax returns, say two years’ worth, for an Esther Soranden, lives in Carson City.”

  “Soranden? That, that’s, you don’t mean Soranden’s sister, do you?”

  “The very same.”

  “Aw, jeez, Mort. What’re you gettin’ me into?”

  “Mr. Angel. You can thank me later.”

  “Huh? Thank you? What the hell for?”

  “Think about it. Think about who asked you to help me out and what that might mean in terms of career enhancement.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. Allow me to spell it out. Think in terms of the fellow who called you and how his request might make him more likely to overlook any future egregious stupidity on your part and therefore less likely to fire you. Warl.”

  Silence. Then: “Oh, yeah.”

  Ball of fire, that Warley. Peter Principle says the guy would be maxed out trying to run a hot dog stand and there he was, top IRS goon in Northern Nevada. What a world.

  “So, what’d you want to know, Mortimer?”

  “Print off her entire tax return for this year and last. I’ll be in to pick them up in about an hour.”

  “Ah, jeez, don’t … don’t come in here. I’ll meet you at the Burger King down the street. In an hour.”

  He hung up.

  “Like candy from a baby,” Ma said. “This is why we got people in our pockets. Okay, boyo, take us back to Reno.”

  * * *

  Warley was in his usual cheap blue suit and tie, sitting at a table with a drink in front of him, sweating. Also in front of him was a manila envelope. He looked around as I came in. In East Germany in the sixties he wouldn’t have lasted forty seconds.

  “Jesus, Mortimer. You got to Munson?” he whispered.

  “Don’t know how you come up with stuff like that, Warl, but you oughta try to control it. Is that my package?”

  “Yes, it’s—”

  “Yeah, thanks. If I need anything more, I’ll let you know. You should get back to busting piggy banks.” I left.

  We drove to Ma’s office, went in, opened the envelope and dumped out Esther’s returns. Lucy and I sat on Ma’s couch and went through last year’s return. Ma took this year’s.

  Didn’t take long.

  “Her income last year was eighteen thousand, four hundred twenty-four,” I said. “Social Security and a dollar fifteen cents annual interest from a bank paying something like point zero six percent. Probably started getting Social Security the year before. She was sixty-six during this return.”

  “Now she’s sixty-seven,” Ma said. “Eight years older than her brother who, by the way, isn’t gettin’ any older. For income, all I’ve got here is what you’ve got—Social Security, pathetic little speck of interest that might let her upgrade to a happy meal every third year. Interest on her mortgage was sixty-one hundred bucks, so she’s probably paying some bank around eight or nine grand a year for the place.”

  “That doesn’t leave much to live on,” Lucy said. “Wonder what her payments are on that Explorer since it’s pretty new. Of course, she could’ve paid the whole thing right up front.”

  “I’m starting to get an inkling of hidden income,” Ma said. “What do you think, Mort?”

  “I think the word ‘inkling’ is underutilized.” At her look, I said, “Also, if the IRS saw what we’ve seen and Soranden wasn’t there to protect her, they might be all over it.”

  “Might?”

  “It would have to be a slow day, although they would most likely back-burner it and go after her in December, try to upend her world right before Christmas. They like to do that. But it’s not as if she has millions, so we—the IRS—wouldn’t expect to come up with a nice juicy tax cheat we could clap in irons and stuff into a rat-infested dungeon.”

  “Juicy,” my assistant said. “And rat-infested. Wow.”

  “So,” Ma said, “we’ve gotta break down that address book of Soranden’s and get those account numbers, see if Esther’s got access to money the IRS doesn’t know about.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Blackmail loot. It’s his address book and he’s a puzzle freak, so it’s likely he came up with the anagrams, not Esther. Nice guy, though, sharing the proceeds of criminal activity with his elderly sister like that.”

  “Esther would need fake IDs to open accounts, wouldn’t she?” Lucy asked.

  Ma nodded. “Absolutely. Not that hard to do if you’ve got the money and know where to go to get good paper.”

  I still had my Stephen Brewer ID, credit cards, and a bunch of wallet stuffers from a trip Ma and I had taken to Paris, a trip that had to be kept forever secret.

  Lucy had mentioned that she has a real ID and two fakes. I would have to ask her about that later.

  “Not much we can do now except figure out Soranden’s address book,” Ma said. “But here’s something. While you two were out fooling around yesterday, I checked out ‘anagrams’ on Google and came up with some good stuff. Get this. An anagram for ‘the presidential cigar’ is ‘a cheap girl inserted it.’”

  “Oh, no,” Lucy said.

  “Oh, yes,” Ma replied. “Also: ‘it replaces a dire thing.’”

  “Wow.”

  “An anagram for ‘Ronald Wilson Reagan’ is ‘insane Anglo warlord.’ So,
had enough?”

  “Yep,” I said. “But good goin’, Ma. You’re the best. Now where do we go from here? I feel like we’re slogging through quicksand.”

  “The key is this thing,” she said, tapping the address book with a pudgy finger. “If we didn’t have this, we’d be nowhere. Like the FBI,” she added.

  * * *

  If the FBI had come up with anything, Munson would have heard about it and let Ma know. That was the deal. And if the FBI had put anyone in handcuffs, it would’ve been shouted from the rooftops. Or ballyhooed, ’cause they do that then expect raises. None of which had happened, so they weren’t any further along with it than we were. I wondered if they’d found the anagrams and were starting to piece any of that together. Anagrams might classify as fun and fun was as foreign to the FBI as honesty is to your average U.S. senator, either party, so I thought not.

  Lucy and I went back to my place. We read the manual for the safe and she changed the entry code from 123456 to 214485. Then she stared at the safe for a few seconds and said, “If we use M. Angel, we get 314752.”

  “And that would be better, why?”

  “All the digits are different.”

  “Not sure that matters, kiddo, but do what you think best.”

  “Anyway, I like your name.”

  “Mangel?”

  She made a face at me, then changed the code to 314752. “Also, because it’s in your house,” she said.

  Okay with me either way.

  “Let’s go to a gun range,” she said. “I want to get used to this little guy.” She held up the SR22 autoloader her father had given her.

  So we did. At Reno Guns & Range we paid the $15 fees, donned hearing and eye protection, and Lucy put three hundred basic .22 long rifle rounds through the sturdy little Ruger and a hundred of the hyper-velocity Velocitor rounds. After sighting it in, she was looking pretty deadly out to twenty-five yards. I put three hundred rounds of .357 through my Ruger revolver.

  “I’m gettin’ a feel for it,” she said when we were finished. “Another thousand rounds and then I’ll go for a concealed carry permit with it.”

  Back home it was gun-cleaning time. Out with Hoppe’s 9, patches, gun oil. All of this was fun, and necessary when you’re a world-class gumshoe, but it didn’t get us one bit closer to Volker’s missing hundred thousand dollars, though as a former IRS agent with residual goonlike memories that still gave me nightmares, I was aware that Volker had cheated on his taxes and therefore wasn’t exactly an innocent party in all of this.

  Which, as luck would have it, is about the time Ma gave me and Lucy a call and told us to get back over to her office.

  * * *

  “What’s up, Ma?” I asked. I walked over to the sideboard and touched the bullet hole Isaac Biggs had put there when he’d come hunting for Ma because she’d fingered him sixteen years earlier and he’d ended up in prison.

  “Check this out,” Ma said, waving a hand at the computer monitor on her desk.

  Ads for Title Nine clothing, Kraft Mayo, hot dates, and all kinds of “trending” crap filled up the right-hand side. Pictures and text occupied the left.

  “You better point it out,” I said. “That looks like the kind of social media manure I don’t go near without gloves and a ten-foot non-conducting pole.”

  “It’s manure, but sometimes useful. This’s Kimmi Volker’s Facebook page. Scroll down forever through the kind of trivial crap that makes you wonder if this country will still be here in twenty years and you finally get to this.”

  It was a point-and-shoot picture of her father, Mike, and her brother, Derek, in front of a fake old-time trading post out in the desert, scorched dry hills in the background.

  “Yup,” I said. “Nice picture of the boys.”

  “Read the caption,” Ma said.

  Lucy and I got closer. The caption read, “Dad and Derek at a stupid torist place in Arizona, July 2. Shoot me now.”

  “Arizona,” Lucy said. “Where you find harvester ants.”

  Ma nodded. “Exactly.”

  “Useful if you have a skull that needs cleaning,” I put in. “Nice spelling on tourist, too. She could get a job writing stuff on the internet for small-business owners.”

  “But the point is … Arizona,” Ma said. “The Volkers were down there this summer.”

  “Puts Mike Volker back in my sights,” I said. “Bet he and his wee tykes caught sight of one of those giant anthills. Maybe he did more than give Soranden a hundred grand. Maybe he didn’t want Soranden coming back for more, which blackmailers tend to do, so he took out a onetime insurance policy.”

  “Possible,” Ma said. “Mostly I think this gives us a reason to keep an eye on him. And Esther, who we might not have picked up on if Lucy hadn’t come up with those anagrams with women’s names.”

  I looked at Lucy. “This would be a good time to say, ‘Aw shucks, it weren’t nuthin.’”

  “Aw shucks, it weren’t nuthin’,” she said.

  Ma shook her head. “You two. Okay, we need to get eyes back on Volker. And another good look at Esther wouldn’t hurt because I’ve got an idea about that.”

  “How about Luce and I take Volker?” I said.

  Ma pursed her lips. “I think Lucy should go with me. If Esther goes into a store or something, Lucy can follow her but I can’t since she’s seen me.”

  “How much time we gonna give this?” I asked. “A day or two or three?”

  “Not sure. But I have the feeling we’re one step closer to whoever killed Soranden, and if we get there before the FBI, we get Willie Munson’s twenty-five-thousand-dollar bonus. That’s worth putting in some time and effort.”

  * * *

  None of the Volkers had seen Ma’s brown Cadillac, and Esther Soranden hadn’t seen Lucy’s Mustang, so I sat in the Caddy watching the Volker residence and Ma and Lucy watched Esther’s place. We put in the time and effort—and came up dry.

  Six thirty p.m., back at Ma’s. “That’s PI work,” she said. “Get used to it. We’ll switch cars and give it another try tomorrow.”

  “How about dinner at the Goose and a nightcap or two in the Green Room?” I suggested.

  Ma nodded. “Suits me. I could use a hot toddy.”

  I gave her a look. “A hot toddy?”

  “That’s right, boyo.”

  “And me,” Lucy said. “Except probably not a toddy since I don’t know what that is.”

  We ended up at the Silver Lode Steak House in the Golden Goose. Ma and I had steaks, Lucy had a Caesar salad, and at the bar in the Green Room O’Roarke whipped up hot toddies, which turned out to be whiskey in hot water with honey, herbs, and spices. Lucy had one too, but with rum instead of whiskey, and light on the rum.

  “You haven’t made national news in a week,” O’Roarke said, shoving a Pete’s Wicked Ale my way. “Not running out of gas, are you, Spitfire?”

  “Not hardly. Stick around.”

  We settled in with our drinks. Ma and Lucy chatted, and I quickly lost track of the conversation. I starting thinking about this entire Soranden-Volker deal, still not exactly sure what we were doing in it, what we hoped to accomplish.

  Find Soranden’s killer? The chance of that was remote at best, even if it was worth twenty-five grand.

  Get Volker all or some of his money back? Same odds, if he even deserved to get his money back considering that he had cheated on taxes. Guess I still had that gene in me that doesn’t approve of larceny.

  My mind ping-ponged around, neurons playing toss and fetch with trivia. I should have the oil changed in the Toyota. It was about due. And Lucy was driving a six-year-old Mustang. Bought it used when she was worth twelve million bucks. Living within the means of what her job brought in. Maybe she and I could stake out Esther’s tomorrow, but that would make it hard for us to get to Rufus’s dojo on time, so we might have to go in shifts if we were going to keep tabs on Esther. I didn’t remember the code to the gun safe, but I knew how to re-create it using the name M
angel. M was the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, so the first number of the safe’s code was 3. And so on.

  Trivia.

  Lucy had used my name for the code because all six digits were different. And … and …

  Epiphany.

  Insight.

  A light went on. Maybe.

  Digits were a key. Digits were the key. Maybe the Pete’s had helped. If so, then beer is grossly underrated.

  Soranden’s address sheet needed a decoding key, and Lucy had changed the code to the gun safe to all different digits, and we’d been staring at that address sheet for hours. In my mind’s eye I saw the number after AAA Cal, top of the sheet. All the digits were different. The odds of a random ten-digit number or phone number having all different digits seemed pretty remote.

  “Got it,” I said.

  And, of course, the womenfolk kept chatting because “got it” might’ve been a burp or acid reflux, and if not a burp it still might not be important, coming from me, so I took Lucy by the shoulders and gave her a kiss to stop her mouth, which didn’t work, but it sure changed what her mouth was doing.

  “Wow,” she said after ten seconds of that. “Not that I’m complaining, but what was that for?”

  “I gave myself a gift for maybe breaking Soranden’s code. His address sheet.”

  “Coolarama. But … really? And only maybe?”

  “I think so. It’s nothing like a hundred percent yet. Either of you have that address sheet with you?”

  “I do.” Ma got a folded copy out of her purse.

  I sat between them with the sheet on the bar in front of me. “I think this Triple-A Cal number is a key,” I said. “It’s not like the rest of the stuff, and all the digits are different.” I looked at Lucy. “Like that code you put into the gun safe.”

  “Okay. Groovy. So how do you think it works?”

  “I haven’t gotten that far yet.”

  “Groovy redux. But if you’re right, let’s figure it out.”

  We stared at it. AAA Cal’s number was 9163824750.

  “It’s got all ten digits,” Ma said.

  “That’s what I just said,” I told her. “In case that got by you with the assistance of that hot toddy.”

  “Bank routing numbers have nine digits,” she said with a faint alcohol-enhanced snarl. “This number has ten.”