Gumshoe on the Loose Read online

  Her smile looked a little green, and I didn’t think it was from the lighting. Her skin was a creamy shade of walnut. She was Halle Berry black, maybe one shade lighter, and every bit as beautiful, but taller. I figured her for five-eight, five-nine, with a body that would leave nothing but heartbreak and dreams in her wake. A scent of lilac came off her, so subtle it might have been my imagination.

  “Wouldn’t that be Mortimer Angel, Maverick PI?”

  “Mortimer? Don’t know anyone by that name,” I said. “Sounds like it’d have to be a birth certificate error. There was a Snerd by that name, but he was a dummy.”

  “You’re a maverick, but not a Mortimer?”

  “Right.”

  “So, all that hoopla on the news last year was wrong?”

  “Right.”

  “Right it was wrong—or wrong it was right?”

  “Well, I didn’t say wrong, so it couldn’t have been the latter, but you sound a lot like me when I want to be annoying.”

  She offered up a half-smile. “It’s a knack.”

  “Spooky. I’ve got a lot of cool knacks, too, but I would find it very annoying if you’re as annoying as me. Buy you a drink?”

  The girl slid off the stool. She hadn’t been there one full minute and already she was starting to attract attention, as gorgeous girls do. More heavy breathing was coming from the three losers at the end of the bar. She looked at them, then back at me. “I can’t stay. I mean, now’s not a good time. Those guys are ogling, and it’s likely the two women you were with will be back soon. Do you have a card? Like a business card?”

  I did. Proudly, I got one out of my wallet. It said Mort Angel, Private Investigator, Clary Investigations. I made a mental note to change that to “Maverick PI” as soon as possible and have another five hundred cards printed up.

  She wrote a number on the back as the bartender, Patrick O’Roarke, eased closer to get in on the action. “Call me,” she said. “Tomorrow morning right at ten.”

  “Right at?”

  “Ten. I’ll have my phone on, waiting.” She turned to go.

  “Hey, hold on a minute, Buttercup.”

  “What?”

  “For starters, who’s your dad? The guy who doesn’t like me?”

  “Tomorrow, Mortimer. I can’t talk here.” She cast an eye at O’Roarke, who was hovering, giving her an admiring male look.

  “Mort. At least tell me your name.”

  “Danya.”

  She walked away. I watched her go. I had to—just one of those things that can’t be helped, at least not without special drugs and a lobotomy. The dress was short and tight and she was slender, model perfect, hips like a dancer, legs long and shapely. The weird thing, though, was that I hadn’t gotten a vibe of sexual tension from her, no estrogen mist trying to pull me in. She was a hell of a sight, but that was all. Strange. Maybe my PI aura was on the fritz and this was the first sign of its going dark.

  “Man,” O’Roarke said, voice brimming with awe. “I gotta get me a PI license.”

  “Or a lobotomy,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’d do it. Have to be a good one though, not one of those do-it-yourself lobotomies.”

  Holiday and Maude Clary came back as Danya was leaving. Holiday slid onto the once-again-vacated barstool. “Wow! Who was that?”

  “Danya.”

  “Danya who?”

  “Wish I knew.” I looked at the back of my card. All she’d left was a number. I stuck it in my wallet. Twenty-six years ago, it would have been right next to a never-to-be-used condom.

  “You don’t know her, huh?”

  “Nope.”

  “She just sidled in and sat down next to you?”

  “Sidled? I’m not sure. How about you demo that for me and I’ll let you know.”

  “She was real pretty, Mort.”

  “Uh-huh. How do you know she sat next to me? She leave a ring of fire on the barstool?”

  “Close. It’s that smoldering envy in O’Roarke’s eyes.”

  I gave O’Roarke a look, and he grinned and moved away.

  “So, what’d she want?” Holiday asked.

  “A phone call. At ten tomorrow morning.”

  She smiled easily. “You gonna do that?” Like Jeri before her, Holiday wasn’t the jealous type. It had taken me quite a while to come to grips with that, but eventually I’d had to admit that she had no intention of staking a claim on my hide. Whatever we had wasn’t destined to be forever.

  “Don’t know yet,” I said.

  On the stool to my left, Ma said, “We’re between cases. Might be business we could use.”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  “Yeah, well, if it’s business, it’s my business, so don’t scare her off.”

  “Scare her off ? A big old pussycat like me? I don’t know how you come up with off-the-wall stuff like that, Ma.”

  “Like I said, don’t scare her off.”

  Holiday took my hand again. “Yeah, don’t scare her off. Just remember I get you on Tuesdays.”

  I put an arm around her waist and gave her a squeeze. “Not the kind of thing that slips my mind, woman.”

  Ma stared at us. “You two don’t quit horsing around, I’m gonna unroll a fire hose or call 911.”

  “Settle down, Ma,” I said.

  “Right. Me settle down.” She knocked an empty glass against the bar. “Hit me again, Pat, you doll, you,” she said to O’Roarke. She gave me a look. “That Danya girl . . . whatever she wants, don’t go makin’ headlines again, boyo. She looked like the type.”

  “What type is that?”

  “Beautiful, busty, slinky, trouble.”

  “I’ve learned not to trust that sort of thing, Ma.”

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  “Holiday here. It’s her fault. She’s beautiful, busty, slinky, pretended to be a hooker last year, which is sort of like trouble, and turned out to be an engineering student with an IQ off the charts. I’ve got Danya pegged as a nuclear physicist.”

  “Possible,” Ma replied. “But I play the odds, so I’m not thinking physicist. With me off to Memphis on Amtrak tomorrow morning, I don’t want to see you in the news by the time I get there, which won’t be for two and a half days.”

  “Check your cell phone on the way, Ma. Maybe you won’t have to wait that long.”

  Holiday laughed, then she slid off the barstool and took my hand. “I wonder if we could make an exception to . . . to Tuesday.”

  “An exception?”

  “Yes. Like . . . tonight. Call it a Special.”

  “Well, I don’t know. It’s only Saturday. I’ll have to check my appointment calendar, see what I’ve got going.”

  “Uh-huh. Lots of things to do between now and tomorrow morning. Maybe you could cancel something.”

  “Life is a whirlwind of responsibilities and obligations.”

  “I’m glad you understand that. Which means we should go.”

  “Yeah? Where to, and do what?”

  Her eyes sparkled. “I want to . . . show you something.”

  Ma laughed. “You two. Just don’t forget you’re gonna drive me to the station tomorrow, Mort. Train leaves at seven fifty, so you better come by the house by seven, if you can get on your feet that early.”

  Ma was headed to Memphis to visit her kid, Taryn Curtis, thirty-six years old, married, two kids about to become teenagers. Taryn was in real estate, working on her second million dollars. Ma was going to be gone for two weeks.

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  “Make sure he’s up and on time,” Ma said to Holiday.

  “I’ll get him up, Ma. Give me half an hour.”

  Ma waved us away.

  We went to Holiday’s apartment, which was a ten-minute walk from the university. In April, I’d sold the Ralston Street house and bought Jeri’s place on Washington Street between First and Second, half a mile west of downtown Reno. Her brother, Ron DiFrazzia, sold it to me. Giving up the house on Ralst
on Street felt weird. I’d lived there all my life except for a seven-year period when I’d rented it out after Dallas and I had been married for three years and moved into something bigger. After the divorce, I moved back in.

  But things were different now. It was taking me a while to adjust to it, all my stuff in the large, well-maintained, two-story house Jeri had owned. The house on Ralston now belonged to a couple in their twenties with a year-old baby. Now I had a house with elbow room—and a home gym, which I used frequently, religiously, in fact. I could do twice as many chin-ups as I could in college. After digging post holes when I was recovering in Borroloola, Australia—recovering from Jeri’s murder—I was in better shape than I’d ever been. No point in letting it go to seed. I’d done roughly ten million foot-pounds of work digging those holes in tough red earth. According to Holiday, I had a Thunder Down Under look. Who was I to argue with that?

  She opened the door to her apartment and we went in. “How about a shower?” she said, unbuttoning her blouse.

  Again—who was I to argue with that?

  At the Amtrak station at seven twenty the next morning, Maude Clary and I sat in the waiting room downstairs. The tracks were thirty-three feet below ground level in “The Trench,” a 265-million-dollar rectangle of ugly concrete that ran east–west through the heart of Reno’s gambling district and was still causing untold financial trouble for the city. Even paying the interest on the loan was a headache. The Trench was an enduring monument to the hubris of elected officials who’d rammed the project through, even though sixty-five percent of the voters had opposed it. And, of course the voters were right, and the officials were wrong, but since when was that a surprise? And since when did voters—your basic know-nothing citizens—have the right to tell brilliant, infallible elected officials what they wanted or what made sense?

  At seven thirty-five, the train pulled in. Minutes later, Ma and I went aboard, and I helped her get her luggage settled in a sleeper car.

  “That Danya girl,” Ma began, then stopped.

  “Yup,” I prompted.

  She stared at me for a moment, then sighed, as women often do around me. “Lemme know what she says. We’ll see if it’s anything we want to get involved in.”

  “Will do.”

  “She was one god-awful beautiful girl, boyo.”

  “She was? I don’t notice stuff like that.”

  Ma punched my chest. “Don’t let that spin you around.”

  “Me? Spun around by a dame? You kiddin’?”

  Ma shook her head. “Jesus.”

  “I’ve got Sarah,” I said. Sarah, Holiday—Ma and I called her either or both.

  “Right. She’s god-awful gorgeous, too.” Ma patted the bed she would be sleeping on the next two nights. “This thing’s kinda hard. Hope I sleep okay.” She turned and faced me. “What we do, Mort, is we investigate stuff. So, see what this Danya girl wants, but don’t do nothing ’til I give you the go-ahead.”

  “You’re the boss, boss.”

  “Damn right.” She gave me a look. “You’ve got my number. Keep me in the loop all the way. If this girl’s gonna be trouble, we don’t touch it.”

  “In the loop. Got it.”

  About then a guy came by and told me to get off the train or buy a ticket, they were leaving in five minutes. I kissed Ma on the cheek before I left, then watched and waved to her from beside the tracks as the train pulled away.

  Right on time at ten a.m., sitting in my Toyota Tercel in the parking lot of an IHOP after breakfast, I phoned the number Danya had given me. The Toyota was a vintage piece of shit twenty-some years old that I couldn’t get rid of—not after selling the Ralston house. I get attached to the past in strange ways. Maybe it was that the side mirror of the Tercel howls when the car reaches sixty miles an hour. If I got a new set of wheels, it probably wouldn’t do that unless I gave it a mirror transplant.

  Danya didn’t answer. The call went to voice mail—a generic message that gave me no information. I checked the number, tried again. Nothing. I left a message that I’d called as requested, then put the car in gear and took off.

  Women. Easy come, easy go. Danya wasn’t going to be a bit of trouble, so Ma could rest easy.

  I was rolling north on Kietzke Lane doing forty miles an hour when my cell phone rang. I picked it up and answered it—illegally. I had a hands-free headset somewhere. Maybe in the glove compartment or under a front seat. I wasn’t on the best of terms with the Reno police department, in particular, a detective named Russell Fairchild, whom I’d embarrassed last summer by solving his big case for him—finding the two women who had decapitated Reno’s mayor and district attorney. Oddly enough, when Senator Harry Reinhart’s right hand had been shipped to me via FedEx two months later, which was a big breakthrough in that missing-person case—that still hadn’t patched things up with him. Fairchild was a hard man to please.

  “Mort,” I said.

  “Mr. Angel? Mortimer?” A woman’s voice.

  “Wrong number, kiddo. I don’t know any Mortimers.”

  “I mean . . . Mort.”

  “Speaking. Is this Danya?”

  “Yes.”

  Sometimes new relationships are like this. Awkward before they blossom. But I had a nice three-dimensional image of her in my head, the way she’d filled out that dress the night before.

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “I . . . well, last night I was going to have you come over to my place today, my house, so we could talk. In private.”

  She got that far, then stalled.

  “I hear a ‘but’ in there. You were going to have me drop by.”

  “But . . . there’s a guy snooping around my house. I don’t know what he wants, and . . . he looks kind of creepy. Right now I can’t . . . can’t . . .” Her voice drifted off.

  “A guy?” I was suddenly on high alert, which is what gumshoes like me are known for. Damsels in distress and all that. In the IRS we took damsels for all they were worth, young, old, didn’t matter. Things had changed since King Arthur’s day.

  “I was in the kitchen,” Danya said. “I looked toward the front of the house and saw him peering in a living room window. I went out the back and over our back fence. My car was parked on the street. I . . . well, I took off. I can’t talk to anyone right now. Except for you, I mean. Anyway, I’m pretty sure I forgot to lock the back door when I went out, so now I don’t know what to do.”

  “Call the police.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  Okay, that was fishy, but being a sensitive guy I didn’t tell her that. Last night she’d wanted a maverick PI, which was also fishy, but fishy was a big part of my growing repertoire as a PI. And that maverick thing really had me going. I wanted to explore it further—which meant I might not live to see fifty, but . . .

  “Am I on the payroll yet, kiddo?” I asked.

  “We’ll have to talk about that later. Right now, there’s that guy skulking around.”

  Skulking. The plot and the prose was thickening.

  “What’s the address?” I asked. “I’ll come check it out.”

  Exactly as if I hadn’t learned a goddamn thing last year, having almost been murdered twice in less than three months, but in the category of slow learners I reign supreme. Or . . . it might’ve been that Hammer-Magnum-PI thing—getting tangled up with stunning women. Now that I was a gumshoe, I attracted them like white cat fur to a black wool suit.

  She gave me a street address on Elmcrest Drive in northwest Reno. “Hang tight,” I said. “Where are you now?”

  “I . . . well, I’d rather not say. I mean, I don’t know what’s going on right now, and there’s that creepy-looking guy.”

  Still fishy. Perfect.

  “Keep your phone on,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  I hit the interstate, I-80, and took the Toyota up to yodeling speed—sixty miles an hour. At that velocity, the side mirror sounds a lot like Madonna. Jeri’s house—mine now—was
more or less on the way, so I got off the freeway at Keystone, swung by and got a .357 Magnum revolver, stuck it in a shoulder holster and covered it with a dark-blue windbreaker, then continued north and west on surface streets—up West Seventh, right on Stoker, left on Elmcrest, a residential street that meandered up into the foothills, and started checking house numbers.

  The house was set back about twelve yards from the street, dark beneath good-sized elms. A driveway went along the west side of the single-story house, ending at an unattached garage in back that had a slight lean to the left. The house itself was an older ranch-style affair, gloomy-looking with brown siding and dark-green trim. A gutter was loose in front, awkwardly wired to an eave. The lawn was patches of grass struggling to survive, but most of it had given up long ago. Reno was in the midst of yet another drought. With population growth out of control, lawns were becoming a thing of the past. It didn’t look like the kind of place I’d expect a girl like Danya to live in, as beautiful and intelligent as she was. Which was a kind of prejudice, I know, but there it was all the same. The house didn’t seem to fit her.

  I drove by slowly, didn’t see a creep hanging around, peering in windows. That didn’t mean there hadn’t been one. I parked two houses up the street and walked back, loosening the gun in its holster, keeping it out of sight under the windbreaker.

  The neighborhood was quiet, no kids running around. Maybe they were still in bed. It was the end of the last week of June. School was out for the summer, but no kids? Maybe all their electronic shit was keeping them indoors and obese. No cars were moving on the street. About that time, it occurred to me that Danya had said “our” back fence. Our? A slip of the tongue? A live-in boyfriend? I turned left and ambled up the driveway beside the house with a faint chill humming in my spine, keeping my eyes on the house and its windows, flicking them to the backyard and the canted garage every few seconds. Last year I’d done something like this—twice—and both times I’d come across murderous psychos.

  I rounded the corner at the rear of the house, and goddamn if there wasn’t a creep coming out the back door. At least I thought it was a creep, but the species has so many faces that this was only a guess on my part. Until, that is, a sneaky, startled look gave him away.