Gumshoe Rock Read online

  GUMSHOE ROCK

  Also By Rob Leininger

  The Mortimer Angel Series

  Gumshoe on the Loose

  Gumshoe for Two

  Gumshoe

  Other Novels

  Richter Ten

  Sunspot

  Killing Suki Flood

  Maxwell’s Demon

  January Cold Kill

  Olongapo Liberty

  GUMSHOE ROCK

  A MORTIMER ANGEL NOVEL

  ROB LEININGER

  Copyright © 2019 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 978-1-60809-330-4

  Cover Design by Christian Fuenfhausen

  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 Rana and Lorna, world-class sisters and friends

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks once again to the entire Oceanview Publishing team for their professionalism and dedication to excellence. And thanks to John Lescroart for his continuing friendship and support.

  GUMSHOE ROCK

  CHAPTER ONE

  ON THE FIRST page of the Internal Revenue Service form for those seeking employment—right after name, address, phone number, social security number, and date of birth—there is a question followed by a yes/no checkbox:

  Do you have a soul? Y☐ N☐

  Before they look at anything else, they look at those two boxes. If you indicate “y” they quit reading and toss the form, go on to the next. It’s a new form. If they’d had it when I started out, I never would have gotten a foot in the door. When I was twenty-five I suspected I had a soul, hadn’t given it a lot of thought, but after sixteen years as a field agent for the IRS I knew it for certain, so I got out of the business of state-run thuggery and became a world-famous private investigator.

  In training.

  * * *

  Eleven fourteen p.m. in the Green Room, a bar tucked into a remote corner of Reno’s Golden Goose Casino.

  As usual, the place was all but deserted, having not yet been discovered and ruined by hordes of raucous Millennials—“Echo boomers.” The only other person in the room was a late-middle-aged guy on a stool at the far end of the bar—a gloomy silhouette hunched vulture-like over a drink. He’d been there when the three of us came in. If he hadn’t ordered another martini ten minutes ago, I would have thought he’d expired and hadn’t yet fallen off the barstool, he was that still.

  I had the eerie feeling I knew the guy. He had a celery-stalk neck supporting a small head above bony shoulders. Maybe it was the faint nimbus of evil wafting off him. I’d known evil in the IRS, and afterward, as a PI. Evil was tracking me around like a Yeti hunting meat. I wondered what I’d done in a previous life to deserve it.

  Virulent green track lighting above the bar put a faint ghoulish glow on our faces—Lucy, Ma, and me. It might have been the lighting that kept the Echos at bay. The three of us were used to it, but a lot of folks stopped at the entrance and did U-turns. It’s hard to look cool and impress a potential pickup with luminous green skin.

  Channel Four news was segueing into weather and sports without having run so much as one story about the ongoing and mysterious disappearance of anyone, which meant—

  “Dodged a bullet there, boyo,” Ma said to me, reading my mind. “No one’s missing.” She blew a plume of green smoke at the TV above the bar. Ma—Maude Clary—was sixty-two years old, five foot four, something of a fireplug, with a well-deserved reputation as the best private investigator in the state of Nevada. I, on the other hand, was recognized as the preeminent locator of famous missing persons in the entire country. People who, as luck would have it, were either dead but intact, or dead missing body parts, dead being the common denominator there.

  “Whew,” I said. Beside me, Lucy laughed quietly. She was thirty-one but looked like an eighteen-year-old cheerleader. Or seventeen, which was both frightening and useful, depending. A scar on her upper left arm had been made by a .38-caliber bullet that grazed her three months ago—same revolver that had clipped the top quarter inch off my right ear, blown a hole through my shoulder, and put me in the hospital for five days in Las Vegas.

  “Wouldn’t have time for anything like that anyway,” Ma said, stubbing out the last inch of an unfiltered Camel in a glass ashtray with the Golden Goose logo on it. “We’ve got two cases, Galbraith and Joss. I had to turn down a guy who runs a motel on East Fourth wanting to find out who’s getting into rooms and stealing stuff. Which would’ve been easy money.”

  She gave me a sidelong look. “Got that, boyo?”

  “Yup. Easy money. No one is missing.”

  She shook her head, lit up another Camel.

  I made her nervous. I was hell on wheels when it came to stumbling across missing people. Last August, fourteen months ago, I found Reno’s mayor and district attorney, both missing for ten long days, and acquired the kind of national fame your basic run-of-the-mill PI’s can only dream about since the two men had been decapitated and I found their heads. My notoriety was greatly enhanced in that the mayorly noggin had turned up in the trunk of my ex-wife’s Mercedes.

  Two months later, middle of October, I found the primary shaking part of Senator Harry Reinhart’s presidential campaign—his right hand, severed and FedEx’d to me by his loving trophy wife, Julia—which eventually led to his bludgeoned body being discovered fifty feet down an abandoned mineshaft in northern Nevada.

  Late June this year I’d come across a dead gangsta rapper by the name of Jonnie Xenon and annihilated the dreams of untold millions of fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls throughout the country.

  The first two capers earned me mixed reviews nationwide, but finding Jonnie-X, known in the tabloids and to teen girls as “Jo-X,” sent my approval rating through the roof since he was dead and his lyrics had been as toxic as an upstream mercury-lead-arsenic dump in the Ohio River.

  Ma Clary was seated to my left, Lucy Landry to my right. Lucy and I had turned Clary Investigations into a three-person operation. As was often the case, Patrick O’Roarke was tending bar. He wasn’t on the team, but he was good for a bunch of free-drink coupons whenever any of us got wounded in the line of duty.

  Ten thousand
hours of training are required to become a licensed PI in Nevada, which is a bitch of a mandate that weeds out the wannabees by the truckload. Having topped fifteen hundred hours, I was on track to become a fully qualified investigator in another six years, two years shy of my fiftieth birthday.

  Lucy was curvy and beautiful, breasts on the small side so she almost never wears a bra, and as flexible as your basic boa constrictor. She could stand on her hands, arch her back, and put the soles of her feet on top of her head. She claimed to be my assistant, which to my mind made her my assistant trainee. To the licensing board, however, she was a full-fledged trainee, not merely my assistant, with four hundred hours of sleuthing under her belt, which meant her degree in Art History was really coming in handy.

  So—today’s excitement on TV was as follows:

  Weather: about what one expects in Reno the last week of September—no rain, patchy clouds, highs in the low to mid-eighties. Sports: the Dodgers were ahead in the National League West, Padres and Giants tied, only one game back, so it was a close one, still anyone’s race.

  About that time, the scrawny hunchback planted at the far end of the bar slid off his stool and came weaving toward us. He slowed as he got near, stopped behind me, a bit off to starboard.

  “Mort? Mort Angel? Is that you?”

  Aw, shit. I knew that voice. Pitched a quarter-octave high with a peculiar note in it like someone just starting to strangle a chicken. He was three feet away. I turned. He had on an ugly brown suit that looked as if he’d slept in it the past week.

  “It’s Mortimer to you, Warley.”

  My name is Mort Angel. I usually correct anyone who calls me Mortimer, a mistake that ended up on my birth certificate due to my mom’s wicked sense of humor or faulty handwriting. But some people don’t have the right to call me Mort, Warley being a prime example.

  “That right? You changed your name?”

  “Nope. It’s always been Mortimer to you, Warley. But now I think ‘Mr. Angel’ is even more appropriate.”

  That slowed him down for two full seconds. Then: “Well, hell, Angel, this is a doggone nice surprise, running into you like this. First time I’ve been in the place.”

  “That’s Mr. Angel, Warley. Try to remember that.”

  “Uh-huh. Anyway, it’s good to see you. Been a while. We kinda miss you down at the office.”

  Proper manners and ordinary politeness dictated that I should return the pleasantry. Reality dictated otherwise. “Yeah,” I grunted, hoping that would cause him to disappear in a cloud of sulfurous smoke. Of all the people to ruin the ambience of the Green Room, Warley Sullivan, IRS, a man truly lacking a soul, was the worst possible choice now that Manson was dead.

  Long fibrous pencil-neck, a beak of a nose that looked like the blade of an ax, six foot two and rail-thin, slender fingers with lumpy knuckles. At the IRS, an organization with no discernible sense of humor, he was known as Ichabod. Two years ago, at an IRS Christmas party—IRS party being a world-class oxymoron—Warley bragged that he had forced a recent widow to sell off one of her children, a blond girl seven years old, to pay off eight hundred fifty-four dollars in back taxes along with the inevitable fine and interest. He waited five seconds too long then said, “Joke,” slapped his knee, guffawed, and spilled his punch.

  Ha, ha. Good one, Warl. Really had us going there. Watch out for lightning.

  In fact, that might have been the moment when I realized I had a soul, so, sonofabitch, maybe I owed Warley one.

  “And, hey, who might this be?” he said, giving Lucy a long look. “This your daughter? What’s her name?”

  And he wonders why women avoid him the way they avoid people foaming at the mouth and waving guns.

  But Lucy doesn’t take shit off anyone, including me. She once hit me in the chest with thirty-six thousand dollars’ worth of gambling chips that had recently belonged to the Luxor in Las Vegas, then said something about ripping my heart out. Little bit irate at the time, she was, but she got over it.

  She popped off the barstool and poked his pot gut, the size of an eight-pound ham below his sunken chest. “I’m his wife, Warley.” Little lie there—okay, big—but I let it go because I like my heart right where it is.

  “Hey, hey, Mort. Robbing the old cradle, eh?” Warley said, unaware of the proximity of death.

  Lucy poked him again. “I’m old enough to be in this bar. He’s forty-two. So what? Have you ever seen Funny Face?”

  His mouth flopped open. “Funny Face? What’s that?”

  “A movie with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. They got married at the end, and when that movie was made, Astaire was fifty-eight, Hepburn was twenty-eight. You should try to keep up, even if you’re developmentally challenged.”

  “Fred Astaire …”

  “I never actually knew him since he died before I was born, but you and he could’ve been drinking buddies, depending on his tolerance for gloom and boredom. And,” she went on, “I’ve heard you’re the troll who delights in terrorizing widows and old people.”

  Warley smiled. Actually smiled. “Terrorizes, huh?”

  “Ugh.” Lucy turned away and got back on her barstool. “Totally ugh.”

  Warley’s smile faltered slightly. Then he gave me a closer look and said, “Huh, your ear, Angel.”

  Ah jeez. “Mr. Angel. What about it?”

  “It’s … the top of it is missing, isn’t it?”

  “Is it? I hadn’t noticed.”

  “It is, yeah. I mean, holy Toledo, Mort. That doesn’t look like the kind of thing a guy would miss.”

  In the mirror behind the bar, Lucy mouthed “Holy Toledo?” I eased an arm around her waist just in case.

  “So what’s the story there, Mort?” Warley said.

  “It’s Mr. Angel to you. Try to remember that. You ever see those Bennihana commercials, Ginsu knife speed cutting? I was whacking Romaine lettuce, got a little carried away.”

  “You … really?”

  In the mirror I saw Lucy’s slow smile.

  Then Warley noticed Ma, seated on the other side of me. “Well, hey, if it isn’t Miz Clary of Clary Investigations. We met a few years back, remember? Fancy meeting you here. You with this Mort character?” Unable to focus on anything for long, he turned to me again. “Been hearing about you in the news, Mort. Looks like your new job is treating you good, huh? Finding all those … well, all those dead people.”

  “They were suicides. Right after your audits.”

  “Ho, ho, ho, hee, hee.” Warley let it all out in soprano. “Good one, Mort. I gotta use that down at the office.”

  “Mr. Angel to you, Warley. You still there at the IRS?” In fact, I could tell he was by the bad skin, the black light in his eyes, the halitosis, the conspicuous absence of a soul.

  “Hell, yes.” He puffed up, pulled his shoulders back an inch, neck size went up to twelve inches. “I’m the Man, now.”

  “Wow,” Lucy breathed.

  “The man?” I said to egg him on.

  “Yep. When Soranden disappeared, I was next most senior person in the place. I ran it for a month, but Soranden never turned up so the IRS commissioner himself promoted me. That would be William V. Munson,” he said with enough pride and hot air to re-inflate the Hindenburg.

  “The Toad disappeared?” I said. To everyone in the office, Ronald Soranden was The Toad, just as Warley was Ichabod.

  “Sure did. Second week in July. I filled in, then took over full-time starting August tenth.”

  I hadn’t heard about that, which made sense. Second week of July, I was in the hospital with a drain in my shoulder and a catheter I’m still trying to forget. At the time, a missing cretin in Reno wasn’t my first priority. But a missing cretin, especially a local cretin, was right up my alley. Soranden had gone in a puff of smoke? Probably the devil’s work. I was sorry I’d missed it.

  “Where’d he go? I mean, where’d he finally end up?”

  Warley shrugged. “No one knows. Didn’t end up an
ywhere anyone knows. But I’ve been the head honcho since the tenth of August.” He grinned. “The Big Cheese, as it were.”

  Jesus. Warley was now the “honcho.” And that Big Cheese thing was vintage Warley. It was always all about Warley. Ronald Soranden’s disappearance was a minor side issue. Warley was one of those leeches who attach themselves to conversations and drain essential fluids.

  “Got fifty-four people under me now.” Warley put a hand on my shoulder. “It’d be fifty-five if you came back. I’d give you your old desk, old cubicle. Just like old times.”

  “You shouldn’t touch me,” I said. “Bat bit me a week ago and gave me rabies. I’ve still got two shots to go. Doc says I’m no longer contagious, but this afternoon when I coughed, he ran out of the office.”

  Warley removed his hand as if scalded and backed up a foot.

  “So you’re in charge of Terrorism R Us,” I said.

  “Ho, ho, ho, hee, hee. I gotta use that too.”

  “When Soranden went missing, was there any indication of how or why? No hint of where he might have gone? Suicide note or a ransom demand for ten bucks?”

  “Nope. Lucky me, right?”

  “Oh, yeah. Lucky you. Bet that made your day.”

  Warley Sullivan’s smile was a show of yellow-green teeth under the lighting. “It made my entire month. Fact is, it’s been a hell of a good year. As Head of Office I get an extra eighty-one hundred thirty-six dollars and forty-seven cents per annum.”

  “Crossing over the River Styx is gonna be a bitch, Warl. I hear it has a hell of a heat problem and the air-conditioning is always on the fritz.”

  He gave me a blank look. “Hah?” Then in typical Warley non-sequitur fashion he said, “Say, you find people, don’tcha?”

  “As you’ve already noted, I’ve found my share. More than, if you must know.”

  “You oughta find … or, well, maybe not … I mean, if you did, maybe with some of these new tax laws, he wouldn’t be up for taking back his old job …”

  It was like conversing with a bottom feeder as it scavenges for decomposing meat. I’d been trying to enjoy a Pete’s Wicked Ale, but it was starting to sit in my stomach like acid.