Gumshoe for Two Read online

  She grabbed my arm and almost pulled me off the barstool. “Oh, jeez, c’mon.”

  “What’s up?” I asked, bracing myself.

  “I . . . I need . . . I want you to . . . please. C’mon.”

  Well, yeah. A hooker wanting to hire me. Beautiful one, too. And desperate. I figured something like this was only a matter of time. If he weren’t fictional and therefore technically impotent, Sam Spade would be eating his heart out.

  “Hire me?”

  “Yeah, I . . . I guess so. Right now.” She tugged harder.

  “Well, sure,” I said. “Why not?”

  This was great, just great. I couldn’t wait to tell Jeri. A hooker offering me money? Maybe I was already an urban legend. I said as much to Holiday.

  She turned loose of my arm, backed off an inch, and gave me The Look. “Jesus, Mort.”

  “What?”

  “Talking with you is like . . . I don’t know.”

  “Fun? Interesting? Educational?”

  “None of those.”

  “Well then, drink up. Booze produces adjectives.”

  She pushed her Tequila Sunrise away. “No time. Let’s go.”

  Huh? We? She was serious about hiring me? “Where to?” I gave the television a nod. “Game isn’t over yet. Padres are up by two, and I’ve got twenty bucks on the other guys.”

  “I . . . I really need your help. Right now.”

  “Slow down, hon. I haven’t seen any money yet.”

  “We’ll work it out. C’mon.” She grabbed my arm again and finally succeeded in dislodging me from the stool.

  I looked back at O’Roarke. “Remember this moment.”

  He lifted an eyebrow at me. Holiday hadn’t touched her drink and here we were, headed for the door.

  Outside, the sun was behind the Sierras, clouds lit up in red and gold, starting to lose color. The temperature was into the seventies, down from a high of eighty-four.

  I yanked her to a halt on the sidewalk. “What’s this all about? Who was that on the phone?”

  “You find missing persons. I mean, you’re good at it?”

  “I am, yes.” Although luck had played a part, and every one of those people had ended up dead, so there was that.

  “And detectives are, well, tough.”

  Jeri was. I wasn’t. “Some of ’em, yeah,” I said, not particularly liking the direction the conversation was headed.

  “Okay, then. C’mon.” She tucked my arm against her waist and led me to a nearby parking garage at a trot that made conversation difficult. I went, of course, since my arm felt cold and the warmth and the feel of her waist were making it happy.

  In the garage she hit a remote and a new Audi A3 Prestige convertible answered with a chirp and flashing lights, putting my Toyota to shame. The car was fire-engine red and sleek, not top-of-the-line, but damn nice, and I guessed its mirror didn’t howl. We got in. “Nice heap,” I said before she fired up the engine.

  She stared at me. “Please tell me you didn’t say that.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You—you’re still impossible to talk to. Heap? You called my great little car a heap?”

  “For you, I’ll up it to jalopy.”

  “Unbelievable.” She started the engine and backed out.

  It didn’t howl, at least not at forty miles an hour, which is what we did up Virginia Street to University Terrace, then over to Ralston Street where I live, tires complaining at the corners.

  She slowed near my house while I was still chewing on that “detectives are tough” comment that implied I might have to be tough sometime soon. I stared at her. “How do you know where I live?”

  She shrugged. “Research?”

  Which didn’t answer the question, but she had me worried. The only thing in my house a hooker might use that required me to be tough was my bed, and that wasn’t going to happen. She turned into my driveway, stopped two feet from my Toyota’s rear bumper, and said, “Go get your gun.”

  I felt my eyes bug out. “My gun?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to slur my words like that.”

  “How the hell do you know I’ve got a gun?”

  “Seriously? You’re a private eye and you’ve got testosterone oozing out of your pores. No way you don’t have a gun.”

  Okay, she was holding her own. She was a hooker with a brain. I mentally bumped her IQ up another ten points. “So I’ve got a gun. Why am I going to need it?”

  “Well, I hope you won’t, but the point is you never know, so go get it, okay?”

  Which was actually a good answer, given that I didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on. When in doubt, go armed. You don’t have to fire a gun just because you’ve got one.

  “Okay, slow down,” I said. “I’m not gonna get a gun unless you tell me what the fuck is going on.”

  I guess the intensifier didn’t take because she leaned across me, unlocked my door, and shoved it open.

  “Go,” she said. “I’ll explain later, I promise.”

  “I get fifty bucks an hour.” But as my boss, Jeri gets thirty-five and I get fifteen. That’s the deal. I was going to renegotiate after we were married and I had more clout. I’m worth sixteen an hour, easy. Of course, she has overhead—home office, phone, Xerox, wear and tear on the Porsche, contributions to my 401(k).

  “Fine. Go.”

  So I went. In the house I got a .357 Magnum off a shelf in my bedroom closet, not the flyweight S&W Magnum I’d had earlier that year. I grabbed the Ruger since it has more heft. At the firing range a week ago that damn flyweight kicked more than I’d remembered. I wanted something I could fire more than once without having to haul it back down between shots. You never know when you’ll need more than one hunk of flying lead to get the job done.

  For a moment I stood there, gun in hand, testosterone oozing out of my pores, wondering what I was getting into, then I put on a shoulder holster, snugged the gun in place, donned a wind-breaker to hide it, and left.

  Coming out the front door, I noticed a package off to one side. FedEx. That would be another book from my mom. She often sends me books with anti-IRS themes. The first was Let Us Prey by Bill Branon, then it was IRS Whistleblower by Richard Schickel. Others followed. Mom took great delight in denigrating my former career, and she has a sense of humor like a steam shovel. I grabbed the package and went back to Holiday’s Audi, tossed the package in back, got settled in the passenger seat, and patted the Ruger in its shoulder holster. “You should know I’m not gonna fire this thing at just anyone. What the hell’s going on?”

  “It’s my sister.” Holiday chirped the tires backing out, which jerked my head forward.

  “That call you got. That was your sister?” said Mr. Swifty.

  “Uh-huh. Allie.” The tires squealed again as she headed south, toward I-80. Nice. Wish my Toyota could do that.

  “This’s a pretty powerful gun. What’d she do to you when you were growing up?”

  I guess that didn’t warrant a response because Holiday glanced at me, then back at the road. “What’s in the package?”

  “Who knows? My mom has a lethal sense of humor.”

  Which earned me a faint smile but no comment.

  “So, where to?” I asked. I had visions of more hours spent in one of RPD’s interrogation rooms, once again explaining things to my favorite detective, Russell Fairchild. Last time I’d seen him he’d given me the finger in the hospital, a few days after I’d solved Reno’s biggest case for him, biggest pile of related felonies the city had seen in a hundred years. Which was gratitude for you.

  Holiday took more corners too fast, and for a moment I slowed things down by considering what had happened in the past twenty minutes. In effect, I’d been hijacked by one of Reno’s most beautiful girls, even if she was a roundheel. My being an impressionable pig gave her an almost insurmountable advantage, but Jeri probably wouldn’t accept that as an excuse. I looked at her as she took us down a ramp and onto
Interstate 80, headed east. The top of the convertible was down. Wind whipped at Holiday’s silk blouse as she took the car up to seventy miles an hour. Her hair whipped around, too, its frizzy style getting more frizzed than usual. I could think of worse things than being hauled out of a bar by a girl this great-looking, but when we passed the last exit in Sparks and headed into the empty desert east of Reno, I decided I’d had enough. Another minute and I was going to pull my gun and get a few answers.

  “Okay,” I said. “This’s fun, but where are we goin’?”

  She dug the cell phone out of her purse, hit the screen a few times at eighty miles an hour, and handed it to me. “Listen.”

  I listened. A girl’s voice said, “Sarah, it’s me. I’m in Gerlach. I got some money, a lot, so maybe I can—” squawk. “Hey, what—?” then the call ended.

  I listened to it two more times, then handed the phone back to her. “Who’s Sarah?”

  “Me.”

  “Uh-huh. What about Holiday?”

  “Just a name I was using.”

  “Right. I should’ve known.”

  I waited for more. Venus was becoming visible in a sky going dark as we passed through a cut in the surrounding hills. Holiday-Sarah remained silent, concentrating on the highway, so I pulled my gun, aimed the muzzle at the sky.

  “Hey!” she yelped.

  “Hey yourself.”

  “Jesus. What’re you doin’?”

  “Getting answers. Slow it down to seventy and start talking or let me out. And you owe me twenty-five bucks for the past half hour.”

  She didn’t say anything for several seconds, then she let up on the gas. “My name is Sarah Dellario and I’m not a hooker.”

  Dellario. Figuring I wouldn’t have to shoot her right away, I holstered the gun. “Yeah? So what are you?”

  “A student. Civil engineering at UNR. I’ll graduate next year if I can keep it together in all of this.”

  Aw, shit. Engineering of all things. Right then I knew I was going to have to glue a rat to that mirror on my Toyota. If I didn’t, Holiday was going to make my life a living hell.

  Not Holiday, Great Gumshoe.

  Sarah.

  Dellario.

  CHAPTER THREE

  GOOD NEWS, BAD news. Good, she wasn’t a hooker—bad, she probably knew more math than I did. But she was dressed in full hooker garb—meaning half-dressed, ready for action—and I was in her car, headed out of Reno into darkness and the unknown. No doubt Jeri would be thrilled.

  “If you’re not a hooker,” I said, “what’s with the outfit?”

  She glanced down at herself, then at me. “Pretty great top, huh? Great as in awful.”

  “Depends on your point of view. I’m good.”

  She smiled, said, “Thanks,” which was interesting. Headlights came toward us on the divided highway, interstate traffic headed west into the city. “I’ve got a few things like this. I bought some at Victoria’s Secret, some on the Internet. I had to play the part.”

  “Of a hooker? Why?”

  “I’ve been trying to find my sister.”

  “The voice on the phone.”

  “Uh-huh. Allie. Allison. She’s been missing for two months. A little more, actually.”

  Ah-hah. “And I find missing persons.”

  Her eyes darted toward me, then she looked back at the road. “Early July, I hadn’t seen her in a week and her car was still at her apartment. I have a key to her place. She wasn’t feeding her goldfish. So I filed a missing person report with the police, but they checked out her apartment then pretty much blew it off. A week later I hired a private detective. Fifteen hundred dollars later he hadn’t found anything, so I had to pull the plug on that. Then I didn’t know what to do, so I did my own thing, making the rounds of casino bars pretending to be a hooker, see if I could get any hint of her or what might have happened to her. The police wouldn’t do that, or that investigator guy.”

  Or me, I didn’t tell her. I look dreadful in a dress.

  “I started hitting the bars around the middle of July. School was out, which made it easy. Now I’m juggling school and bars, which isn’t. It was creepy at first, trying to act like a hooker. I didn’t know what I was doing. After a while, though, it got to be . . . well, interesting. Fun, actually. I remember you, that time you told me you knew a Mexican girl in Tijuana—”

  “El Paso.”

  “Right, El Paso. A girl who could blow square smoke rings—which, by the way, is impossible—and then that idiotic story about the mirror howling on your car.”

  “Idiotic? At sixty, that mirror sounds like Madonna.”

  “I’ll have to hear it sometime. Anyway, the mayor and district attorney were missing for over a week and the police weren’t getting anywhere—like with Allie. Then you found them. You were all over television. Then, half an hour ago, Allie phoned. It was like, I don’t know, some sort of weird serendipity, you being there right when she called. So I thought it must mean something, that this was the best chance I would ever get, if you would help.”

  “Not that I was given a chance to say no.”

  She looked at me. “You can still say no. If you want. I hope you don’t, though.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind. But none of that answers the big question—which is why you were posing as a hooker, of all things.”

  “Oh, sorry. That’s what Allie was doing.” Her voice took on a sad note. “Hooking, except she was doing it for real.” She was silent for a while, then, “Allie was always the dark sheep of the family. I tried to talk her out of it, but she said she was making way too much money, that she’d quit in like a year or two. That’s the kind of thing that happens in other families, not mine. I thought it was crazy. Allie couldn’t be doing that, but she was. Anyway, I knew it was a long shot, me going out like that, sort of following in her footsteps to see if I could find out anything, but I had to try.”

  “More than a long shot. It was dangerous and had zero chance of success,” said Mother Mort.

  “Hopeless, maybe, but not all that dangerous. All I did was talk to guys, try to steer the conversation in a direction that might point toward Allie. I never left the bars, the casinos, with any of them, ever. The federal government doesn’t have that much money.”

  Probably a subtle dig at my failed IRS career. Sonofabitch.

  We passed the power station at Tracy, fifteen miles east of Sparks, cooling towers laying down a skein of fog between the hills. The lights of the station were bright spots in the growing darkness.

  “And . . .” Sarah said quietly, then looked out her side window, away from me.

  “And?”

  Her fingers flexed on the steering wheel. “I have a three point eight five grade point average. I even took extra classes in calculus and diffy-q—that’s differential equations—that weren’t required by my major.”

  “Meaning—you’re a serious student.”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “And something of a nerd?”

  She looked at me, then back at the road. “It’s a time-honored engineering curse. Pretty much true, though. You should see some of the guys in my classes, how they dress and how they talk—then they wonder why they can’t find girlfriends.”

  Great, just like IRS agents.

  “You said it got to be interesting—pretending to be a hooker. How’s that work? Cut you loose from all that serious study, set you free for a while?”

  “I guess. At first it was scary. I didn’t know what I was doing. After a while, though, yeah, it was fun, going out in clothes like this, having guys look at me. For a few hours I was someone else. But I still really want to find my sister.”

  “Which is why we’re headed to Gerlach.”

  She glanced at me. “Wow, you’re really good at this.”

  “You have no idea.”

  She laughed quietly. “You’re funny. And . . . well, nice.”

  “And engaged.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t worry. I�
��m not . . . you know. After anything like that.”

  “Uh-huh. Just trying to find your sister.”

  “That’s all, yes.”

  “Mind if I point out that the top is down on this car and it’s getting kinda chilly? Dressed like that, I don’t know how you’re not freezing.”

  “I run pretty hot.”

  I smiled. I would’ve cracked my knuckles in a gesture of placid indifference, if I’d known how.

  She gave me a look. “Oh, uh, I didn’t mean that . . . not the way it sounded.”

  “I forgive you. You’re an engineering student.”

  She grimaced. “Socially inept. A dork.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Well, I guess it’s pretty much true. Was, anyway. It still is when I’ve got a textbook open. I can concentrate for hours. It’s been harder this semester, but I go out and do the bars when I have a little free time. I still can’t believe I was with you when Allie called.”

  “Yep. Lucky us. Actually it’s a cosmic thing—maybe I’ll explain later. So how about we put the top up on this thing? My sword wound’s starting to ache.”

  “Sword wound?”

  “You didn’t hear about that?”

  “Guess not. Whatever a sword wound is.”

  “It’s when a sword—foil, actually—is run through your chest. Tell you about that later, too. There’s a place up ahead you can stop.”

  A minute later she pulled into a scenic view turnoff, not much to see at night. She punched a button and the top snugged down.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got anything else to put on?” I said as she pulled back onto the interstate. She wouldn’t, of course. It was that Spade-Hammer thing, operating in high gear.

  She looked down at herself. “No. Sorry. I wasn’t thinking the evening would turn out this way. I hope this doesn’t bother you.”

  “The second it does, I’ll let you know.”

  Her lips lifted in a faint smile. “It’s been so weird, dressing like this, pretending to be something I’m not, being stared at. At first, anyway. It took a while to wear off, the strangeness I mean.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I let her talk.

  “The first time, it was like an out-of-body experience, like it wasn’t real, like I was in a dream. I would look in a mirror and see someone else. But then . . .”