Gumshoe on the Loose Read online

  GUMSHOE

  ON THE LOOSE

  Also by Rob Leininger

  The Mortimer Angel Series

  Gumshoe for Two

  Gumshoe

  Other Novels

  Richter Ten

  Sunspot

  Killing Suki Flood

  Maxwell’s Deamon

  January Cold Kill

  Olongapo Liberty

  GUMSHOE

  ON THE LOOSE

  A MORTIMER ANGEL NOVEL

  ROB LEININGER

  Copyright © 2018 Rob Leininger

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-60809-274-1

  Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing Sarasota, Florida

  www.oceanviewpub.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  For my wife, Pat,

  who puts up with a lot.

  A lot.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novel wouldn’t exist without the dedication and expertise of the Oceanview Publishing team: Pat and Bob Gussin, Lee Randal, Emily Baar, Lisa Daily, and others. Many thanks to all of you.

  Thanks also to my “readers,” Tracy Ellis, Madelon Martin, and my wife, Pat, for making it appear as if I know what I’m doing.

  And a special thanks to fellow writer and best-selling author John Lescroart for his unflagging support, for making me smile with almost-daily e-mails, for believing in the Gumshoe series, and for his gift to the world of the Dismas Hardy novels.

  GUMSHOE

  ON THE LOOSE

  CHAPTER ONE

  I AM A murderer.

  Technically speaking.

  One of these days I’ll have to look up the applicable statutes to get a better handle on that, see if there’s any wiggle room, but I don’t think the wording offers much in the way of latitude when you remove someone from this earth with malice aforethought—so, yeah . . . technically I committed a good-sized felony, not that I’m about to give myself up. On the other hand, the Bible says something about an eye for an eye, and it was written centuries before the Nevada Revised Statutes, so I think I’ll be okay during check-in at the Pearly Gates. If not, I’ll have Maude Clary—Ma—for company in the other place.

  Saturday evening I was sitting at the bar in the Green Room in Reno’s Golden Goose casino with Ma to my left and Holiday to my right, so I had the only two women in the place all to myself, a situation with cosmic underpinnings. As a gumshoe, a PI, albeit in training, women have flocked to me like pigeons to a statue. I had no control over that. I didn’t encourage it. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it—not that I wanted to, since it put a little extra spring in my step. Ma was my new mentor and boss, sixty-two years old. She could drink me under the table any day of the week, not that we ever gave it a try. And Holiday, perched beside me, was a hell of a sight, twenty-five years old, a gorgeous girl with three inches of tight tummy showing, and enough pneumatic cleavage to cause a riot.

  Pneumatic? I know from experience that if you remove the inner tube from a bicycle tire and pump it up for a while, it gets big and firm. I did this when I was twelve. I kept pumping and it eventually popped, made a hearty bang—the bicycle tire, just to be clear. But I’m older now and more worldly, able to compare over-inflated bicycle tires to other things. In life, this is called growth and sophistication.

  “Don’t look now, but you’re getting more than your share of attention,” I said to Holiday, referring to three college-age guys at the far end of the bar, drooling in her direction.

  She gave them a cursory look. “Yep.”

  “I said, ‘Don’t look.’”

  “I heard you. In case you didn’t know, ‘Don’t look’ means, ‘Hey, look.’ Also, Mort . . .”

  “What?”

  “In bars, you’re still impossible to talk to. Other places, too, like in cars, restaurants, airports, but bars are the worst.”

  “Anyway, kiddo, nice big smile at the lads. It’s likely they’re athletes. They’ve got a team salivation thing going. I think the guy in the Eddie Bauer polo shirt is in the lead.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You don’t sound impressed. This is your thing, remember?”

  “Not like it was before. I mean, it’s okay, but it doesn’t have the kick it used to. Right now, it’s practically gone.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Don’t be. What I’ve got with you is a lot better.”

  “Okay, then, I’m not sorry.”

  Ma lit a cigarette and blew a cloud of carcinogens toward the ceiling. “You two oughta get a room.”

  Holiday gave me a look. “Not the worst idea ever.”

  “Can’t. This is Saturday.”

  “Rules were meant to be broken.”

  “If you break rules, you have no rules.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  The trio of hopefuls looked like poli-sci grad students, early to midtwenties, preppy in a modern-era way, shooting me dirty looks, no doubt wondering what a girl like Holiday was doing with an old coot like me, forty-two years old. At their age, I would’ve done the same. They would have stared bug-eyed at us if they knew what redlined her engine.

  The television above the bar was tuned to a local station. News at Eleven came up on Channel Four. First up, no surprise, was the ongoing story of Jo-X’s disappearance. Jonnie Xenon was Nevada’s very own “gangsta” rapper, an opportunistic, foulmouthed piece of shinola, twenty-four years old, who had taken advantage of all the flaws and loopholes in the First Amendment to make millions while encouraging kids to kill their parents and rape their hoes—a ho being pretty much any female in the vicinity who still had a pulse, not that a pulse was an absolute requirement according to Jo-X. He was pulling in something like five or six million a year, another reason I didn’t like the guy, but not the main one.

  “Just look at that fuckin’ moron,” Ma said, blowing an angry cloud of virulent green smoke at the TV—green due to the track lighting that helped to give the Green Room its name. “I know a mineshaft he could get dumped down if someone wanted to get rid of the body.”

  “They might’ve filled it in after getting Reinhart out,” I said. Presidential hopeful Senator Reinhart and three others had been removed from a remote mineshaft in northern Nevada last year. Ma and I had found the person who’d murdered them, but the FBI and local police didn’t know that, still didn’t have a clue.

  “Hope not.” Ma stared at a clip of Jonnie-X onstage, gutter rapping, every third word bleeped out to get his act past the applicable FCC regulations. “Be a shame not to have a mineshaft when you need one.”

  Maude Clary was a battle-axe, five foot four. At last weigh-in she tipped the scale at a hundred eighty-five pounds. My estimate. The actual number was a state secret. Her hair was going gray, but she refused to color it. She was my boss and also my accomplice in that malice aforethought business that took place in Paris, France, last October, eight months ago.

  Holiday, on the other hand, was five-eight, slender, a hundred twenty-six pounds, and about as beautiful and curvaceous as a girl can get. She had frizzy light blond hair in a tousled bedroom style, three inches off her shoulders. She’d also flown to Fra
nce and had played a minor part in the untimely and well-deserved death of Julia Reinhart, Senator Harry Reinhart’s trophy wife. Julia had crushed his skull with a length of iron pipe and dumped the carcass down that mineshaft, something that would give rich old farts with trophy wives a reason to rethink that decision—if they’d known she was the one who’d killed him.

  Julia also murdered my fiancée, Jeri DiFrazzia, which still caused me to jolt awake at night with a heart so heavy and black I stayed awake for hours. So, the three of us, Ma, Holiday, and I, were close, sharing the secret pleasure of having sent Julia on a one-way trip down the river Styx from her luxury Paris hotel suite.

  Which, of course, made me and Ma murderers and Holiday an accomplice, not that we were losing sleep over it.

  Holiday’s real name was Sarah Dellario, Holiday being something of a “stage” name, no longer used now that she wasn’t making the rounds of bars pretending to be a hooker while she searched for her sister, Allie—also murdered by Julia Reinhart.

  Holiday and I had been seeing each other in a quasi-informal manner, probably not understandable to outside observers if there had been outside observers. It didn’t involve aerobic activity, but we sometimes ended up soapy in a shower so it was a great way to get clean. For historical and sentimental reasons, this took place on Tuesdays and was a weekly morale booster for both of us even if Ma gave us a lot of good-natured flack about it.

  On the other hand, Sarah—Holiday’s alter-ego—was a civil engineering student at the University of Nevada in Reno, with a three-point-eight-five grade point average, able to concentrate for hours on end on things like structural dynamics, eigenvectors, and unholy arcane shit like that. She knew a hell of a lot more math than I did, elementary calculus being not only an oxymoron but something she thought of as a no-brainer. I liked both sides of her, but was able to converse better with “Holiday,” as less math was involved.

  “While I’m gone,” Ma said to me, pointing the last two inches of her cigarette at the TV at a clip of Jo-X entering a limo with his latest arm candy, Celine, “you oughta find that dimwit.”

  “Who? Celine?”

  Ma skewered me with a look. “Jo-X, boyo.”

  “I’ll get right on that.”

  “It’s what you do, God only knows how.” She paused for a moment, then said, “Just so you know, if you do come across that rancid sonofabitch and cause another one of your uproars, you’re fired.”

  “Okay, then, I won’t get right on it, even though that would put Clary Investigations on the map and be fantastic for business. You could up your rate to two hundred an hour, get even more high-end business. By the way, when are we going to make that Clary & Angel Investigations?”

  Which, I thought, made sense. My name is Mort Angel. My birth certificate has me as Mortimer Angel—which is wrong and my mother’s fault since—obviously—her handwriting was as bad forty-two years ago as it is now. I don’t know what clown thought that squiggle or flourish she’d put at the end of Mort was “imer,” but all sorts of legal crud ended up in the name Mortimer Burris Angel, which is how I have to sign documents when the IRS gets picky and tight-assed. And, having worked as a field agent for the IRS for sixteen years, I can say picky, tight-assed, and humorless doesn’t begin to cover it. Criminal, however, does. Because I discovered I had a soul, I had to crawl out of that sewer, not that I harbor any resentment. Any place that puts you in touch with your soul can’t be all bad.

  Ma looked up at the ceiling. “Well, now, lemme see—what’s the weather like in hell today? How close is it to freezin’ over?”

  Holiday laughed softly, then put a hand on my arm. A very nice hand it was, too.

  So . . . Jonnie Xenon had disappeared without a trace. Good deal. He’d missed a concert in Seattle and hadn’t been seen in five days—five endless, heartbreaking days that had millions of throbbing little hearts devastated, dying in little teenaged chests. I imagined tens of thousands of fourteen-year-old girls crumpled in their beds, unable to eat, crying their eyes out at the loss. Such is the nature of our world in which a sociopath like Jo-X can become a teenager’s love object—in which perception trumps reality, even for so-called adults to the point that politicians can lie their way into office then do as they damn well please. Jonnie Xenon had become Jo-X in the brave new patois of the rich and famous that gave us JLo, A-Rod, and Kim K. It didn’t always pan out, however. Barack Obama would have been B-Ob, or BOb, which would obviously have become “Bob,” which lacked the requisite pizazz—Bob being a neighbor who forgets to return borrowed tools and shrugs when you tell him his dog craps in your front yard.

  Jo-X was six-five, a hundred and sixty-four pounds, looked like a two-by-four with limbs. Onstage he was bare-chested, glinting with body piercings, blond hair whirled in a blender—a stringy punk with a sunken chest and a mouth so foul Clorox wouldn’t get the stench out, although I’d be willing to give it a try. A hundred million adults in the country wished him ill, so I think Ma was wrong about firing me if I came across him—which wasn’t going to happen. But if I did, it would be because he was dead, since that’s my MO, even though it has never been my fault, at least not in the state of Nevada. I wasn’t the one who decapitated Reno’s mayor and district attorney last summer, nor did I chop off the hand of our lying senator, Harry Reinhart, and FedEx it to myself, then chuck him down a mineshaft, all of which are other stories. Good ones, too, as far as they go.

  Anyway, Maude Clary was my new boss. I was working on my ten thousand hours of training to become an actual PI, not a PI-in-training, which is what I’ve been for the better part of a year. She and I get along well even though she has a poster of me on the wall of her office in which I’m standing with a smiley grimace on my face, wearing nothing at all but a little red body paint on my . . . body that looks more or less like a lumpy jock strap, at least from a distance. Body paint, by the way, that Holiday brushed on that critical region a few minutes before she and I participated in San Francisco’s World Naked Bike Ride in March, three months ago—over fifteen hundred nude or seminude people riding bicycles through the streets in what was theoretically a protest, but was actually a happy, smiling bunch of people who wanted to ride naked through the streets. The slogan for the WNBR is “As bare as you dare,” which pretty much tells the story of how and why. Ma took the picture from the sidelines and turned it into an eleven-by-seventeen laminated poster. She keeps it hidden behind another poster that she can swing out of the way on a little hinge arrangement whenever she needs a laugh or to remind me of who’s the boss in the place.

  “Check this out, Mort,” she’ll say, then voila! there I am, in the buff except for that body paint, listening to her cackle. If she wasn’t twenty years older than me, I’d beat the tar out of her. Thing is, I’m six-four, two hundred eight pounds—pretty much all muscle after digging six hundred fence post holes in Australia in four and a half months during a “summer down under”—so getting a jury to see my side of things would be tough. Worse, to explain roughing her up I would have to make that poster exhibit número uno in my defense, so . . . forget it.

  Jo-X’s disappearance was wrapping up on the television. His latest girlfriend, “Celine,” mysterious, tall, beautiful, with skin so smooth and dark it was like fine obsidian, was also missing. She was just Celine—a one-namer like Cher and Madonna. I had no particular opinion about Celine other than typical male awe at her wardrobe and the size of her breasts, and disgust at her taste in boyfriends, but Jo-X’s disappearance was the best news I’d heard in a long time. Even better if he remained forever among those never heard from again.

  “Ladies’ room?” Ma said to Holiday, sliding off her barstool.

  “Sure.”

  Off they went. I don’t know what women do in there, but they often go in pairs. Possibly a woman alone risks mugging. More likely, they talk about the guys they leave behind, then have to fix their mascara once they’re finished laughing. I’ll have to ask. All I know is that I’ve never s
aid, “Yo, Earl, want to go to the men’s room with me?” If I did—and, worse, if Earl took me up on it—we’d arrive back to a pair of empty chairs.

  But tonight, I stayed when they left, as I generally do, and this time it paid off. An incredibly beautiful black girl came in the door ten seconds after Ma and Holiday went out, looked around, then came over and settled onto the pre-warmed barstool to my right.

  Which figured.

  As a field agent for the IRS, one of Uncle Sam’s goons, women had avoided me as if I had signs of late-stage bubonic plague—not a big surprise since the IRS has a reputation for ruthlessness and a tool with which lawless administrations go after political enemies. On a more daily basis, Internal Revenue is used as an instrument of domestic terror. But a year ago I’d quit the IRS to become a PI, a gumshoe, and my life changed overnight—literally. Arriving home the night before my first day on the job, I discovered a naked blond in my bed. Friendly one, too. Now this sort of thing—the girl wandering into the Green Room and taking a stool next to mine—had become routine. I’d become a babe magnet à la Mike Hammer. Better than, actually.

  The girl, probably not two years into her twenties, turned to me and said, “Mr. Angel?”

  Damn—magnet theory right out the window. “I hope that was just a lucky guess, kiddo.”

  “Hardly. My dad doesn’t like you. He says you’re a maverick and unprofessional. But, I think, maybe . . . that’s what I need.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  A MAVERICK. I liked that. And unprofessional, so I was two for two. I didn’t know her dad from Bill Cosby, but that maverick thing was just great. I could see putting that on a pebbled window on my noir office door in a dim hallway—a door with a bullet hole or two in it for the feng shui. Or . . .

  “I should have a sign in front of my office with a bullet hole in it,” I said. “Mort Angel, Maverick PI.”