Gumshoe for Two Page 4

  I waited her out.

  “Then,” she went on, “after a while, it started to feel good.”

  “Good, huh?”

  She kept her eyes on the road. “Being looked at. Noticed.”

  This was the kind of girl who would be noticed everywhere she went. I told her that.

  “Not like in the bars,” she said. “Not in clothes like this. No one wears anything like this around campus. But really, I’m a very serious student. I get A’s in engineering classes. It’s the English and sociology and stuff like that where I sometimes get B’s. So getting out like this was . . . well, like stepping outside of myself, out of a shell. In sexy clothes I was someone else, someone fun. As Holiday, guys would look at me and, well . . . it just felt good.”

  “Little hint of exhibitionism there?”

  Her mouth turned down. “That’s a word I really dislike. It has such a negative connotation.” She glanced at me. “Do you think it’s wrong, me wearing things like this?”

  “Nope. Don’t see it as a problem, kiddo. Fifty million women in the country would hate and envy you. Millions would do what you’re doing if they could. A lot of women do. That’s how Victoria’s Secret stays in business.”

  “Not sure what to say to that, except thanks.” She turned the heater up a notch.

  “De nada.”

  We went a few miles in silence, then I asked, “How old are you, Sarah?”

  She gave me a look. “Old enough.”

  “Humor me.”

  She sighed softly. “I’ll be twenty-five in a few months. First week in December.”

  Jesus, I was lousy with ages.

  “How old is Allie?”

  “She’ll be twenty-one in May.”

  “Not yet twenty-one, and she’s been hooking in casino bars?”

  “She had a fake ID. And she’s pretty and has a great figure. She told me she was making something like twelve thousand dollars a month. Trying to talk her out of that was like talking to a wall. She got mostly D’s in high school, barely got her diploma.”

  Trying to keep up with her hyper-studious, white-sheep perfect sister, she’d fallen flat on her face. But she was beautiful, too, like Sarah, and she’d ended up making more than a civil engineer with ten years’ experience. Probably rubbed Sarah’s nose in it, too. I could’ve been wrong about that, I usually am, but I wouldn’t have wanted to walk in Sarah’s footsteps either. In college I barely eked out a C in business calculus, which is like real calculus on training wheels.

  “I’ve probably talked to two hundred guys since I started looking for her,” Sarah said. “All ages, all types. I didn’t know what I was looking for.”

  “Didn’t catch a whiff of Allie in all that time?”

  “No.”

  “And you didn’t go out with any of the men?”

  She gave me a sharp look. “No, I didn’t. That’s not me. I mean, I guess I looked the part, even acted it, sort of—at least I think so, after I got the hang of it, but that’s as far as it went, ever. I wasn’t there for that.”

  “All I’m doing is gathering information. I do this every time I get shanghaied.”

  “Well, I thought I’d made it perfectly clear already.”

  We reached the turnoff to Gerlach a few miles before Fernley. Sarah gave me her phone as she swung the Audi onto Highway 447 and headed north on a midnight-black, two-lane road beneath a sky studded with stars. “Hit call back,” she said. “See if you can reach that phone she called from.”

  Ah, a challenge to my technical prowess. Just what I needed. Great Gumshoe fumbled with the damn thing for a few minutes, then said, “I’ll steer. You work the phone.”

  She grabbed the phone, I grabbed the wheel. Good thing the road was a straight shot, empty, aimed right at Polaris.

  A minute later Sarah put the phone down and took control of the wheel again. “Same thing,” she said. “It didn’t even go to voice mail, which is strange.” Her voice was tight.

  I looked over at her again.

  Stunningly beautiful. Curvy as hell. Not a hooker. Studious and repressed, then she’d stumbled on a way to cut loose . . . sort of.

  And here I was, headed north in her car. That old PI magic was still in overdrive, big-time. Man, I wished I knew how to crack my knuckles.

  We traveled in silence for ten miles. Finally, I said, “So what’s the plan here?”

  “I don’t have one. You’re the PI.”

  Great. Now was not the time to tell her I was in training, still working on my first thousand hours. There never seems to be a good time to bring that up.

  “Gerlach’s a little place,” I offered.

  “Uh-huh. I’ve been through it a couple of times.”

  “Why would she phone from there? You know anyone up that way? Friends, family?”

  “No. No one. She might know someone, though. It’s not like we’ve been super close lately.”

  I shrugged. “So we’ll go up and look around, see if there’s any sign of her.” Hell of a plan.

  Sarah didn’t say anything.

  I said, “She indicated she has money. A lot of it.”

  “She’s been hooking for nearly a year. She might have a hundred thousand dollars saved up.”

  “I got a different impression. She was cut off. She was about to say more, then it’s like someone took the phone away. Which pretty much means she’s with someone. Someone who didn’t want her talking to you, or maybe to anyone.”

  “I know. That has me worried more than anything.”

  “Any idea who she might be with?”

  “She’s been gone a long time. Two months. I haven’t heard a word from her in all that time. And given what she was doing . . . I really wouldn’t have a clue.”

  I did, sort of. Girl tries to phone her sister, gets cut off. That was a clue. Not a happy one, either.

  So here we were, headed for Gerlach, a town with a population of maybe two hundred. The place was littered with hot springs, some of which were lethal. In the past, people had died jumping into hundred-eighty-degree water, which gave me the willies. It was also the only town in the region, about as isolated as any place in Nevada. Hunters would stay at Corti’s Motel, eat at the restaurant in Corti’s Casino. I’d been through the town a few times on IRS field audits. It wasn’t the kind of place you hankered to go to unless you wanted to get away from it all and vegetate for a while, maybe regroup. During the Burning Man Festival, however, the population nearby in the desert would run into the tens of thousands. Then it was a place to avoid, although it did have unclothed girls running hot and cold the entire week. Lots of nudity going on in or around those hot springs about then.

  We passed through the town of Nixon on the Paiute Indian Reservation, last sign of civilization that we would see for the next sixty miles, then on into some of the emptiest desert in the state.

  Sarah was quiet, alone with her thoughts. I didn’t interrupt. I was still trying to catch up with all of this. I gave her attire a glance or two in the glow of the dash lights to stay awake. Worked, too.

  Finally, I said, “Is Dellario your real name?”

  “Why? Doesn’t it sound real?”

  That wasn’t an answer. “I don’t know how your ‘real’ name would sound. How’d you come up with Holiday Breeze?”

  She laughed softly. “I don’t know. I started out using the name Susan Smith, but that sounded boring. So ordinary it could hardly be real. Then I was Ginger, no last name. That lasted a week. But I never felt like a Ginger, so then one day I just thought ‘Holiday,’ and for some reason it felt right.”

  “What about Breeze?”

  “I don’t know where that came from. It’s like it fell out of the sky and landed on me.”

  “And ‘Holiday Breeze’ sounded real?”

  She laughed again. “No. But I liked it. It fit what I was doing, the way I felt when I dressed up and went out.”

  “Free.”

  “Uh-huh. And a little bit sexy.”
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br />   “Ever been married?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “No.”

  She stared at the headlights boring a tunnel through the night. The hills were black against black sky. She held the Audi at seventy, which would put us in Gerlach in a little under an hour. With Nixon behind us, civilization was a gazillion miles away and receding rapidly.

  “I had a boyfriend once,” she said. “In my sophomore year. It lasted about two weeks.”

  “Two whole weeks? And one whole boyfriend?”

  “How many should I have had?”

  “I don’t know. I have this image of a line going twice around the block.”

  We drove without speaking for five minutes. She was more complex than I’d thought. Maybe during these pauses she was doing calculus problems in her head. Finally she said, “So what do you do in that bar all the time? You don’t look like a big drinker. I mean, you don’t act like it, and I’ve been around a ton of ’em lately.”

  “I’ll have a few beers. Sometimes more, sometimes less. And lately I’ve acquired a taste for sarsaparilla. And the bartender gives me the remote for the television, the beer nuts are free, and the place is a ten-minute walk from home so there’s no chance of a DUI.”

  “So, what? Going there is mostly a social thing?”

  “Where else can I strike up conversations with hookers? Who, by the way, are fun if you don’t take them too seriously.”

  She laughed. “All right. Touché.”

  Another ten minutes of not-uncomfortable silence went by, then I said, “When we get there, you probably oughta stay in the car, let me go scout around.”

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  “That top you’ve got on. They probably haven’t seen anything like that in Gerlach in years.”

  “Actually, when we get there, I better find us a gas station.”

  I leaned over. The needle was hovering a sixteenth of an inch above empty.

  “This thing gonna make it another forty miles?” I asked.

  “Hope so. I should’ve filled up before we left. Guess I was in too big a hurry after Allie phoned.”

  “Uh-huh. If we run out, I’ll steer, you push.”

  “Seriously? I had it figured the other way. You’d generate more horsepower.”

  “Fuckin’ engineer.”

  If the convertible top had been down, her laugh would have carried half a mile into the desert.

  More silence. I had my thoughts, she had hers. I was wondering what Jeri would think about all this and when I should tell her. I didn’t want to distract her from the power-lifting competition, which wasn’t a self-serving rationalization. I was going to tell her—might not bother with a detailed description of what Sarah was wearing and how much of her it didn’t cover—but only when the time was right. Tomorrow in Atlantic City would be low key, elimination stuff, but knowing about Holiday-Sarah might throw Jeri off. It wouldn’t take much. If she lost the competition by three lousy pounds she would probably—

  “Can I tell you something?” Sarah said.

  I swam back to the present. “That’s what I’m here for.”

  She hesitated. “It might be . . . I don’t know, sort of awful.”

  “Awful is my forté, kiddo. If I told you all the things I’ve done with the IRS, all the mayhem I’ve caused . . .”

  “When we find Allie, or . . . or what’s happening with her, I don’t think I’ll quit. At least not for a while.”

  “Quit what?”

  “You know, going to bars. Doing what I was doing, am doing.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, offering up that deep insight.

  “I mean—it’s like I’ve got two lives now. I don’t know if I want to give this one up, the fake hooker one. At least not right away. The attention is . . . well, addictive. I know it’s a little out there, but I like not being me all the time, the Sarah me. I like dressing up and, you know, feeling sexy.”

  “Yeah, well, pardon the trailer-park observation, but I don’t know how you wouldn’t feel sexy twenty-four seven, all year long.”

  She made a face. “Calculating the moment of inertia of beams and their deflections under loads isn’t the least bit erotic.”

  “Don’t I know it. Every time I calculate stuff like that it feels like I’m under a cold shower.”

  She smiled. “Studying my ass off in a library is one thing, but when I go out and . . . and guys look at me like this, I get a shivery feeling.”

  “Shivery, huh? You don’t get that with beam deflections?”

  “Hardly. So here I am, trying to find my sister, but wearing things like this feels good anyway, like I’m in a play. For a while I get to be someone else, someone different.”

  A sudden thought occurred to me, the kind of epiphany that hits me every other decade. “You’re shy.”

  She stared at me for a moment. “Yes.” She looked back at the road, then back at me. “How . . . how . . . ?”

  “Sarah is shy, Holiday isn’t.”

  “Omigod, yes. You get it. I mean, you really get it.”

  “Yep. Except right now, I’m not sure who I’m talking to, Sarah or Holiday.”

  “Hey, I’m both. It’s not like I’m schizo or anything.”

  “I didn’t say you were. But we’re talking engineering and hot outfits all in the same breath, so there’s a lot of ambiguity floating around this car.”

  “Well, I’m . . . I’m . . . oh, Jesus. I’m Sarah, but I feel . . . right now with you . . . oh, hell. Never mind.”

  She went silent. The ride was like traveling inside a coal mine, except with stars. She ran it up to eighty for a while, black jagged mountains off to the right, temperature dropping outside, thrum of tires on asphalt, me unable to think of a single thing to say in this minefield of conversation. Twenty minutes later we passed a small convenience store at a place called Empire. A minute after that we topped a rise, and Gerlach’s lights were visible four or five miles away, a little sprawl of lights beneath the dark bulk of Granite Mountain.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WE PULLED INTO a Texaco station at the east end of town. Its lights were off, but the sign was illuminated. Sarah stopped beside a row of pumps. No one came out. I got out and checked the pumps. No credit card readers. They looked forty years old and their nozzles were padlocked in place. A sign on the door said the station would open at six a.m.

  “That’s it for gas in this burg,” I told her, getting back in.

  “Great.”

  My sentiments exactly. Maybe I could find someone to open the place up. If not, we were stuck here for the night. I heard Spade or Magnum chuckling in the dark, one of those guys. When it came to women, they were a riot.

  Corti’s Motel was a hundred yards west of the Texaco station. Beyond that, Corti’s Casino was a low cinder block structure next door, lit up in neon. A market up the street was another little neon spark, closed for the night, but the rest of the town was dark except for two or three streetlights. The sidewalks, patches of hardscrabble dirt, had been rolled up and put away till morning.

  Pickups and several utility trucks were nosed into slots in front of the motel—a well digger, plumber, Department of Transportation, a power company rig with a bucket lift.

  Sarah pulled up in front of the casino and cut the engine. The time was 9:50, Wednesday evening.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Got a picture of your sister?”

  She dug a photo out of her purse. It looked like a high school yearbook picture—pretty girl with blond hair, big eyes, pouty lips, generic abstract background of swirly colors. She looked a lot like her sister, almost as beautiful but not quite. Even so, she would turn heads. People would remember her.

  “Stay put,” I said. I unhitched my shoulder holster, shoved it and the gun under the seat, then got out. Sarah got out on the other side. I stared at her. “What part of ‘stay put’ wasn’t clear?”

  “Just stretching my back,” she said, stretching her back. Which did amazing things to t
hat filmy top of hers and put the problem of feminine attire in a small town at night in sharp relief.

  Jesus.

  “Stay put.” I went into the casino and waited by the door. When she came in, I took her by the arm and escorted her back to the car. “Stay put must mean something different where you come from.”

  She gave me an accusing look. “You waited for me in there.”

  “I get these premonitions.”

  “Maybe we could look around separately. No one has to know we’re together.”

  “ ‘Stay put’ has a pretty much standard colloquial meaning in the United States. It means, stay the hell out of the casino, sugar, and let the PI do what you hired him to do.”

  “Really? ‘Stay the hell out of’ and ‘sugar’? ‘Stay put’ implies all that?”

  “You come bouncing in in that top and no one would hear a word I had to say.”

  “Bouncing?”

  “Don’t know how else to describe it.”

  She gave me a sultry look. “Gosh, thanks.”

  Jesus. She’d metamorphosed into Holiday the minute we hit town. “How about you sit in the car and wait?”

  “I could scout around out here, look the place over.”

  “How about you sit in the car and wait?”

  “This place has a terrible echo.”

  “In the car.” I opened the driver’s-side door.

  She made a face. “You sound like you mean it. The thing is, I might see something useful. I mean, Allie was here, right? At least that’s what she said.”

  “Okay, kiddo, you asked for it. Now I’ve gotta tell it like it is. Your tits are magnificent and that top isn’t covering half of what tops generally cover. It’s hunting season so this can be a rough little place, and I don’t see how any of that’s gonna help us track down your sister right now.”

  She looked down at herself. “Magnificent? You think so?”

  Sonofabitch. “Now isn’t the time to get all shivery, Holiday.”

  She wrinkled her nose at me, then shrugged. “Okay. Don’t get bent out of shape. Just don’t be too long in there, all right?”