Gumshoe Rock Read online

  Warley turned back to Ma. “It’s been a while, Miz Clary. I never forget an audit. What was it? July, five years ago?”

  “That’s right. Do you remember the results of those audits you never forget?”

  “I sure do. You … well, you were … uh …”

  “Overpaid my taxes. So busy I forgot to include a bunch of business expenses. You spent six hours scrambling all over my office, and the IRS ended up owing me four hundred fifty-three dollars and nineteen cents. Good job. Warl.”

  He stared at her, numb.

  Ma gave him a look that would kill gophers. “Maybe you can tell me why the IRS doesn’t pay penalties and interest on the money they overcollect.”

  “We, well … we, uh, couldn’t do that.”

  “Don’t have the money or don’t have the integrity? Which is it?”

  He blinked. Twice. Then, “See you around, Mort, huh?”

  “Mr. Angel. And not here, Sullivan.”

  He hesitated. “Huh?”

  “This has been an IRS-free zone ever since an IRS guy out of Tucson was tracked down, shot, and killed in here by a guy who’d lost his house, job, wife, golden retriever. The IRS even took his white picket fence and sold it on eBay.”

  Warley’s eyes lit up. “You mean a tax dodger. Sometimes they go off the rails like that.”

  “The IRS guy ended up with five bullets in his head, one of which, against all odds, actually hit his brain. I’m just saying, Warley, this might not be your kind of place. Bad luck tends to stick around places where violence has occurred.”

  “Well … you come here a lot?”

  “First time ever. The three of us took a vote. We don’t care for the green. I doubt we’ll ever be back.”

  Warley looked up at the track lighting. “I hadn’t noticed, but now that you mention it …”

  “I prefer the Oasis, down at the Atlantis. IRS guys don’t get bumped off there. We might see you there from time to time.”

  “Oasis, huh? Okay. Good to know.”

  He left, looking a little unsteady on his feet. Out the door. Gone. Good riddance.

  “Oasis?” Lucy said. “Place we’ll never go, right?”

  “Yup. It’s too busy, too bright, and I just gave it a dose of social strychnine.”

  * * *

  “Oh, no,” Lucy said. “No, no, noooo.” She ran over to her car making sounds of anger and dismay.

  We’d left Ma at the Green Room and gone up to the second floor, across the skyway to the Golden Goose parking garage. We had driven over earlier in Lucy’s Mustang convertible. Now the top was slashed, big rip across the top over the driver’s seat, a gash big enough to drop a basketball through.

  “Aw, shit,” I said. Goddamn vandals out getting their kicks on a Friday night. The damage would run seven hundred bucks to fix right or two dollars’ worth of duct tape to fix wrong.

  I had the keys since I had driven over. As it turned out, that was preordained, since I, not Lucy, opened the driver’s-side door and was therefore the one who found the gleaming skull leering up at me from the driver’s seat.

  Me.

  Finding parts of dead people again.

  Really dead.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BUT IT TOOK a while for me to get there. A skull? Seriously? My first thought was it was glow-in-the-dark plastic. A joke. Ha, ha. Buy one at Walmart. A pre-Halloween gift, four weeks early. It was bone white, which sort of figured, but it looked too clean and white to be real, and no one expects a real skull. Ever.

  I picked it up.

  Whoa.

  Heavy. So—not from Walmart since their stuff is cheap. It didn’t have that slick plastic feel. It felt slightly grainy. I put it back on the seat.

  “What’d you find?” Lucy asked from behind me.

  “A skull.”

  “A skull?” She elbowed me to one side and stared in at it. “Seriously? Some dimwit lowlife slashed my roof to drop that stupid thing in my car?”

  I picked it up and gave it to her. She hefted it, then handed it back, wiped her hands on her jeans. “Ick.”

  “Ick?” I hefted it again.

  “It’s … it feels … you know. Kinda real.”

  And, of course, it was. When I held it up and got more light on it, I even knew whose it was. Or whose it once was, now that the previous owner had entirely vacated the premises.

  * * *

  Depending on how bold or snarky editors had become, the lead paragraph in the Reno Gazette-Journal story might read that the head of the Head of Northern Nevada’s IRS office had been found at last, literally. Maybe they wouldn’t go that far since the rest of him was still missing—so, fifty-fifty odds on that.

  Ronald Soranden hadn’t smiled often, a basic requirement of IRS employment—not smiling, since it would give the wrong impression—but on those rare occasions when he had, his smile revealed a gap in his upper incisors big enough to hold a number two pencil. The late Terry Thomas had had nothing on our man Soranden. It was said that The Toad could flick his tongue out through that gap in his teeth. Also, Soranden’s left incisor was badly chipped and the right incisor was discolored. The effect was similar to identification by fingerprints. Call it a skull print or tooth print. However that would go, this hunk of bone was once the very personal property of Ronald Soranden, missing, according to Warley, since the second week of July.

  Having made that identification, I set Ron back where I’d found him and wiped my hands on my jeans, just as Lucy had.

  “Soranden,” I said.

  “You know this guy? I mean … knew him?”

  “Worked with him. He was my boss at the IRS. Top man in the office. More or less a satanic shithead. The guy Warley told us had disappeared.”

  “Oh, great. Now we’re gonna get audited for sure.”

  * * *

  Which might put us in contact with Warley Sullivan again. Just my luck. Soranden wasn’t coming back, not that I would miss him, but Warley was The Man now, and the one glaring flaw of the Peter Principle was that those above him who had risen to the level of their incompetence would, as a result of that incompetence, promote Warley two or three levels beyond the level of his incompetence. Call it the enhanced Peter Principle.

  In life, Ron Soranden had been five-six, two hundred fifty pounds, surly, given to favoritism to a select few of those below him as long as they regularly kissed his ass and didn’t pose a threat, obsequious to those above when they happened to drop in from the West Coast Internal Revenue Center in San Francisco, or were one of the big guns in from D.C. Bald as an egg, with close-set squinty eyes behind Coke-bottle glasses, damp rosebud lips—now missing—Soranden was the quintessential IRS goon, which, unlike an FBI agent, was something that squatted behind a desk and had the power to grab property and ruin lives without a trial, lawyers, or a court system, none of the foolishness that might slow down or even terminate an overzealous and illegal government operation. In 1941, Soranden might have sat at a desk at Dachau, smiling to himself as he made out lists.

  Okay, that’s dark. But Dachau was a dark place, and Nazis found people willing to run it, and the IRS finds people willing to grab Uncle’s reins and go, so there’s that. I still have old IRS dreams that cause me to wake up in a cold sweat.

  But now I had to give the good news to my buddy at Reno Police Department, Detective Russell Fairchild. I’d done a job for him earlier that year and wound up protecting his daughter, Danya, from what would have been a slam-dunk murder charge if all the facts had come to light. That had put Russ in my debt, and therefore in my pocket. In fact, we had the goods on each other, so our working relationship was a bit unusual for a homicide detective and a PI-in-training. According to him, my best qualities were that I was a maverick and unprofessional.

  I pulled out my cell phone. Got him at home and sound asleep since it was now pushing midnight.

  “Whozis?” he answered groggily.

  “Your favorite PI, Russ.”

  “Aw, no. Now wh
at?”

  “Got a live one for you … well, not a live one, not in the sense civilians use it, but it’s something you might want to get on soon, not that I think there’s a big rush. An EMT would really be at sea with this one since chest compressions wouldn’t be an option—”

  “What the hell, Angel.”

  “Call me Mort, now that you’re in my pocket. Lucy and I are in the parking garage at the Goose.” I looked around. “Third floor, east side. You can’t miss us.”

  “And I want to come all the way over there, why?”

  “Got something that’s right up your alley, Russ. You like talking into microphones on TV, answering reporters’ questions, don’t you?”

  I hung up.

  “Cool,” Lucy said. “He’ll be here in like half a minute.”

  “In his skivvies, or not even that?”

  “Okay, maybe not. Hope not, anyway.” She crouched down and looked Soranden in the eye or would have if he’d had eyes. “You sure this is that guy?”

  “Take a closer look, kiddo. It’s not all of him. Not even Weight Watchers is that good, but, yes, it used to be a critical part.”

  She looked up at me. “You’re always like that, aren’t you?”

  “Pretty much. Can’t help it.”

  “I would still marry you within two hours if you ask.”

  Same thing she’d told me earlier that summer in Tonopah, less than an hour after we met. That was the first of July, and it was only the twenty-eighth of September now.

  “Even though you were recently buried alive and got hit by a bullet, for which I take full responsibility?” I said.

  “The bullet only nicked me, and getting buried wasn’t your fault, so, yeah, ask me to marry you and I’ll drive us to a twenty-four-hour chapel, get us hitched up mosso.”

  Reno. Gotta love this place. “Mosso?” I asked.

  “That’s music-speak for fast.”

  Married to Lucy. I could think of worse things. In fact, I couldn’t think of many better things. But this PI gig was nothing like what my nephew Greg had told me it was. When I first escaped the IRS and became a PI trainee at his firm he told me private investigation wasn’t exciting, that it was dull, plodding work, plowing through records, phone embedded in an ear, nothing to make the heart race. Three days later, I found his decapitated head on his desk in his office. Third head in as many days. Since then, I’ve nearly been killed three times in the line of duty, and my fiancée, Jeri, was murdered by a psychotic lady we were tracking, so I was leery about Lucy getting into the business. I was having second thoughts about staying in it myself. I think it would be better all around if people would quit trying to kill us.

  “What’s that?” Lucy asked. She was crouched beside the Mustang looking in at Soranden’s primary head bone.

  “What’s what?”

  “This.” She pointed to something dark on the driver’s seat. Three somethings. I took a closer look.

  Ants. Big sons of bitches, too. Dark brown, over an inch long.

  “Ants,” I said.

  “That big? Where the hell’d they come from? They’re not alive, are they?”

  I poked one with a finger. “Not alive, and, best guess, they were rattling around inside Soranden’s otherwise empty skull.”

  “Oh, great.”

  My thought exactly. I got a Kleenex and picked up the ants, wrapped them loosely, and said, “Open your purse, kiddo.”

  “What? Oh. O-o-oh, no. Not in my purse, Kimosabe.”

  “Yup. Open up.”

  She did, not happy about it, but I reminded her that she was a gumshoe-in-training and this was part of it.

  “Part of it how?” she asked.

  “Gathering evidence. Goin’ with the flow.”

  “You mean tampering with evidence. Which means now I am. We might end up in San Quentin.”

  “Which is an all-boys institution, so you’re out. Okay, we’ll leave one for the fuzz.” I put one back on the seat, kept two—one for us, one for Ma since she could use a proper paperweight. “You good now?”

  “Not really. I’ve still got two giant ants in my purse.”

  “Don’t let them out of your sight.”

  Finally, Russ showed up. He had the behemoth in tow, so the Force was out in force. The behemoth was Officer Clifford Day, Russ’s ex-brother-in-law, all six feet six inches, three hundred thirty-five pounds of him. He’d gained another five pounds since mid-July, working his way toward four hundred.

  “What’s the story?” Russell asked as he and Cliff ambled toward us from where he’d parked his Ford Explorer, forty feet away. Day fired a finger-gun at me as they drew near, as if to remind me that he’d sat in the back of Russell’s Explorer that summer and kept me from bleeding to death while Ma drove me to a hospital in Vegas at a hundred miles an hour. Which meant I owed him one. Not sure how to pay something like that back. Maybe chocolates or a decent bottle of wine.

  “In the Mustang,” I said. “Which is Lucy’s car, not mine,” I added. “Just sayin’.”

  “Gee, thanks.” Lucy bounced an elbow off my ribs, then got up on tiptoe and brushed my lips with hers.

  “Aw, jeez,” Russ said, which is what he says around Lucy when she looks eighteen and kisses me.

  He looked into her car, did a standard Looney-Tune double take, then looked up at me. “What the hell is that?”

  “It might be a what, but I tend to think of it as a who. That is Ronald Soranden.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Head IRS honcho in Northern Nevada who went missing sometime in July. Which, by the way, I just found out.”

  “You’re kidding.” He stared at me. “You’re not kidding.”

  “Nope. Really, I just found out.”

  He gave me a police-look. “That ain’t what I meant. This thing’s real? It’s a real skull?”

  “Hell of a fake if it isn’t, Russ. Pick it up.”

  “Jesus. And you think you know who it is?”

  “Head of the head of the IRS. Local. Ronald Soranden.”

  He stared at me, then shook himself. “Sonofabitch. You didn’t pick it up, did you?”

  “Both of us did.”

  “Well, shit, Angel. Fingerprints?”

  “We didn’t think it was real. I mean, who would? It looks like it came from Toys “R” Us. I never picked up a skull before. It was dropped through the roof, like a joke or something. Which it still might be.”

  He stood up, checked the slashed roof. “You think it might be a joke?”

  “Sort of. Not real funny, though. Like Senator Reinhart’s hand being FedEx’d to me.”

  “Christ, let’s hope not. That was a fuckin’ circus. Hasn’t been solved yet, and it’s been almost a year.”

  “Language,” Lucy said.

  Russ looked at her. “Sorry.” Then he turned to me. “What makes you think this is that guy, Soranden?”

  “The teeth.”

  “The teeth?”

  “I’m a forensics wonder, Russ. And this parking garage has a hell of an echo.”

  Day smiled, snorted a laugh that sounded as if it had come out of a barrel in a cave full of bats.

  “Check the teeth,” I said to Russ. “Upper incisors.”

  He looked. “How do you know this isn’t Terry Thomas?”

  “The gap’s too wide. This is Soranden, no doubt.”

  “Guy had a butt ugly smile, huh?”

  “It’s an IRS qualification. With a friendly smile, you don’t rise up in the ranks. You should see the head IRS guy in Reno now. So, are you gonna call this in, get a crew out here before sunrise?” I glanced at my watch. “You’ve got about five hours.”

  “Well … sonofabitch. I didn’t want to get any more sleep tonight anyway.”

  * * *

  So the circus returned to Reno, and I got more than another fifteen minutes of Warhol’s fame, and Ma threatened to fire me again, which is what she does whenever I go behind her back and find stuff. Soranden had been ne
ws for a few days when he disappeared in July, but good news doesn’t have the legs of bad news, and the local IRS mafia chieftain wasn’t well known so he’d quickly fallen off the radar. I was the “heads guy,” finding yet another head, so the media brought out the calliope and the cartwheeling clowns and once again I was a national sensation. As it should be.

  Now that Soranden had turned up, it was time to prospect around for suspects. Warley had left the Green Room twenty minutes before Lucy and I found Soranden’s skull, and Warley had taken Soranden’s top spot at the IRS when Soranden went missing. All of which caused Russ’s homicide antenna to twitch violently. As a result, at ten a.m. the next morning I ended up on the other side of the one-way mirror in the interrogation room at RPD, looking in on the room with the third-world ventilation system in which Russ and I had spent many hours last year getting to know one another. But on this side of the mirror the coffee was better and the chairs weren’t bolted to the floor. Detective Don Kreuger was taking lead on the case, same as he did on the Jo-X thing three months ago—a case that still had Russ nervous, wondering if the FBI was still poking at it, hoping they wouldn’t get lucky and take his kid down.

  We looked in on Warley Sullivan. He was alone, staring at the walls like a Russian inside Lubyanka Prison fearing that the back of his head was about to stop a bullet. Sweat beaded his forehead.

  “Think he did it?” Russ asked me.

  “Nope.”

  “Nope? No back-and-forth here, no doubt?”

  I shrugged. “Guy’s a vampire, not a killer. His joy in life is bleeding you until you pass out, but if you die there’s no more blood, no more all-important revenue, so there’s no percentage in taking it all the way to murder.”

  “Except that he took Soranden’s place, got his job. This might be an internal IRS malfunction.”

  “Okay, there’s that, though Warley wouldn’t call it a malfunction. More like a cause for celebration.”

  “Man, it sounds like you got out of there just in time.”

  “Soon as I realized I had a soul, I was gone.”

  Silence for ten seconds.