Gumshoe on the Loose Read online

  I watched the wharf rat go, through a backyard, over another fence like he’d pole-vaulted it. Speedy little fucker. I couldn’t have caught him wearing a jetpack.

  The sonofabitch.

  Now what?

  I walked back across the yard, rubbing my shin. I could phone Ma. If she had coverage on the train, she would probably tell me to get the hell out of there.

  Uh-uh. No way. At least not yet.

  Which is when my phone rang. It was Ma. Perfect timing. I know God watches my every move, laughing so hard He or She gets side aches.

  “Hiya, Ma,” I said.

  “So how’d it go with that girl—Danya? Is she as good lookin’ in the morning as she was last night?”

  “How would I know?”

  That stopped her. “What’s goin’ on, boyo?”

  “I phoned her at ten. She told me to come over to her place. When I got there, she was gone.”

  “Well . . . so where are you now?”

  “Her place. I chased a tabloid creep out of her house.”

  “A tabloid creep? What the hell, Mort?”

  “That’s what I thought.” And right then I wondered how the handwriting on the blackmail note Shanna had given me might match that of the creep—although he looked like the kind who would be the teacher’s pet and have terrific handwriting by the fourth grade. And quit growing when he was twelve and still pint-sized. Agile little shit.

  “What tabloid?”

  “Celebrity News. Guy looked like a ferret. Or a wharf rat. More like the latter, I’d say, if you want a professional opinion.”

  “Celebrity News? Wharf rat? What are you gettin’ mixed up in? I told you not to get mixed up in anything.”

  Last thing I wanted to tell her about was Jo-X, strung up in the garage like a horse harness in a barn. “I dunno.” Which was the absolute truth, just a little light on details. “Where are you, by the way? How’s the ride?”

  “The ride’s fine and thanks for askin’ and you sound funny. So I ask once ag . . . what’s goin’ . . . on’t do a . . . thing like . . . las . . . for -od’s sa . . .”

  “You know anyone by the name of Shanna Hayes, Ma?”

  “Sha . . . Ha . . .”

  “Ma? You’re breaking up.”

  But she was gone. I would have to thank Verizon later.

  Don’t do anything, she said. Like what? Don’t leave the house here? Don’t stay? Good enough. I could do whatever I liked.

  So, of course, I stayed.

  Maybe I had a moment. Or not. The garage door was open and it faced the street. The place had no windows. It would be dark if I shut the door, and virulently rank, so I had to leave it open if I was going to do a quick check around Jo-X. With the door open, it was dim inside. He might not be visible from the street, at least I hoped so. As a gumshoe, I was desperate for clues. And I thought I had a pretty good one, too: Jo-X, hangin’ against a wall. And another: a note demanding a million bucks. What I didn’t have yet was a client.

  I hurried over, held my breath because Jo-X dead for several days in June didn’t smell as good as Jo-X fresh, or so I thought. I could’ve been wrong. He was shirtless, his trademark, but he had on a pair of old jeans. I wanted to check his pockets, which would’ve earned me a big slap on the wrist by my favorite Reno detective, Russ Fairchild. But in all fairness, Danya and Shanna were gone, and Jo-X wasn’t, so, as a maverick, which is why Danya hired me, or said she was thinking about it, what choice did I have?

  None.

  I ran into the house, found a pair of rubber gloves under the kitchen sink, ran back outside. No wharf rat in sight.

  I needed information. And I got it. Pulling the wallet out of Xenon’s right rear pocket was like fishing around in a snake pit. I found a driver’s license issued to Aaron L. Butler. Picture looked like him, allowing for decomposition. Credit cards, a receipt for a motel in Caliente, the Pahranagai Inn—good one, Mort—issued to a Nathan Williams, and, in Jonnie’s front left pocket, talk about your basic bingo moment—a flash drive. I turned it over. Written on the back in tidy print was the name “Celine.”

  Jo-X dead in Danya’s garage, flash drive in his pocket with the name Celine written on it, wallet intact, motel receipt, tabloid creep snooping around, note demanding $1,000,000. Up to my ears in clues, a dead body about to get national attention, and no idea what was going on. This was great.

  My PI training kicked into overdrive. Finally I had a vague idea why Danya might’ve wanted a maverick PI in her life.

  What I didn’t have was a paying client.

  Sonofabitch. I was working pro bono.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  OKAY, NOW IT was hell-for-leather scurry-around time. Ignacio was out there somewhere. I pocketed the motel receipt and the flash drive, returned Jo-X’s wallet to his pocket, looked around, didn’t see anything out of place except me. I couldn’t leave. I had to report this mess. Neighbors might’ve seen things going on over here and taken down my car license, and Vince had my picture, taken right after he got a shot of Jo-X, so leaving the scene of the crime, so to speak, wasn’t an option. Vince’s photographic journalism notwithstanding, God only knows how many fingerprints I’d left inside the house.

  I took out my cell phone and hit 9-1—

  Well, hell.

  Time to slow down and think.

  First thing the cops would do is put me facedown in the dirt and check me for weapons, which they would find if I didn’t do something about that. They would find the Caliente motel receipt, the flash drive, and the note demanding money, which made a little more sense now, but still wasn’t entirely clear. A million dollars for what, exactly? Body removal? Silence? But I wasn’t in the mood to give up any of those things—receipt, flash drive, note, gun—so it was time to scramble around for another few minutes and dig myself deeper into this mess.

  I couldn’t put any of it in my car, parked a hundred feet up the street. They would probably dismantle the entire thing, take out all the bolts and screws, engine, transmission, spread the whole thing out in a forensic garage. Jo-X was hanging in the girls’ garage, not some homeless guy who’d had a little bad luck. Fair or not, that would make a difference. Mort Angel, gumshoe extraordinaire and media darling, was about to get another round of national exposure on prime-time news—talk about your sorry sonofabitchin’ moment.

  I hoped Ma still had a sense of humor.

  I looked around, tried to think how the police were going to go over the place—the house, the backyard, several yards on the other side of the fence. They would scour the place, look under rocks and boards, take the doghouse apart, strip-search the Mort.

  Finally I put the gun, holster, motel receipt, rubber gloves, the thumb drive, Vinnie’s SD card, and the note in a big Ziploc bag I found in the kitchen. At the last minute, I remembered the matchbook I’d seen in the kitchen drawer—Pahranagai Inn—same place as the receipt in Jo-X’s wallet, what a coincidence, so I grabbed it then scooped up the other matchbooks—clues all—and added them to the Ziploc, stuffed it all up a drainpipe at the side of the house, wedged the wad in place with a couple of kitchen towels, shoved everything as high as I could up the pipe without touching the outside of the drainpipe or disturbing the dust outside it. Then I found a short stick and used it to run the wad another foot up the pipe—all of this being a class-A felony, by the way—dropped the stick in the dust and rolled it around with my shoe, carefully put it right back where I’d found it, and looked around.

  I went through the house again. The shower was wet. I didn’t think I could dry it and I couldn’t wait for it to dry, so I was going to have to explain about the shower, which was going to put Shanna in the thick of this. Danya, too, because why was Mort Angel at this house in the first place? Nothing I could do about that, or wanted to. Jo-X’s location alone was going to drag those two neck-deep into this mess. Of course, it was their mess, not mine, or should’ve been—but here I was, up to my own neck. I had the feeling they’d left out a few things t
hey might have explained in more detail, so my sympathy level was running a tad low.

  Five more minutes of snooping around the house didn’t turn up anything useful. Ignacio’s camera had probably put a time stamp on the photo he’d taken of me, so my time was about up.

  Last thing I did was put the knife—without my prints on it—back in a wooden knife block in the kitchen. Shanna had left it on the dresser in the bedroom, and I thought it would muddy the story unnecessarily if they wanted her or me to explain it. And I didn’t know if Jo-X had a stab wound or two in his back, which would have been trouble I didn’t need. But if he did, I was going to double the hourly rate I’d quoted to Danya.

  Finally I punched in 911 on my cell phone and gave the public safety dispatcher the gist of the situation, including Jo-X’s name and a description of his condition to fire up the police, then I sat on the front porch steps to wait, watching the street, thinking how all this quiet was about to go straight to hell.

  Which it did.

  Sirens from two directions—stereo, God love ’em. Three cars. I was flat on my stomach and cuffed by the time the next two cop cars pulled up. I was sitting up on the porch with my back against the front wall of the house when my buddy, Russell Fairchild, arrived in an unmarked car, no siren, and pushed his way through the four cops who had me surrounded.

  “You,” he said when he saw me.

  “I,” I said. Our standard greeting under these circumstances, which was getting to be routine.

  He was wild-eyed, eyes jittery, hands trembling. Not his usual unflappable self when I came across bodies or body parts of political figures or celebrities.

  “You, you, you, what’re you, you—”

  “Might want to keep the media trolls out of here, if any show up,” I said. “And comb your hair ’cause those rotten sons of bitches use telephoto and they won’t give you a do-over.”

  He grabbed me by an arm, got me to my feet, and hauled me around behind the house and across the dusty yard to the back fence. I stumbled along, still in handcuffs.

  “What the hell are you doin’ here, Angel?” he hissed, hitting me with a fine mist of spittle. He’d taken me far from the proliferating mass of cops now flooding the place.

  Something of an overreaction, I thought. Then again, he might still be recovering from last summer’s media circuses in which I’d played a prominent role and he hadn’t.

  “Sleuthin’,” I said.

  “What, why, why, why, why here?”

  Lots of anxiety, and a powerful emphasis on the here. I looked around. “Why not here? Seems like as good a place as any. And these cuffs are pretty tight, Russ. I promise I won’t sprint off and leave you in a cloud of dust.”

  He spun in place. “Je-sus Christ, Angel!”

  Uh-huh. Big overreaction, and he hadn’t even seen the body yet. Something was up. “How about we go talk to the other guys, Detective?” I didn’t like the look in his eyes, or the gun on his hip.

  He hauled me into the farthest corner of the yard. “What the fuck is goin’ on?” he whisper-shouted. “This is my kid’s place.”

  “Your kid?”

  “My daughter, asshole. She lives here.” Oh, shit.

  “Shanna’s your daughter?”

  He slammed me up against the fence. He would’ve put his face an inch from mine if he’d been seven inches taller, but he got up on his toes and gave it a good try.

  “Not Shanna—Danya. Where is she, you son of a bitch?”

  Danya? She was at least half black. Half, Mort. Might give that another pass through the brain. Well, son of a gun. Twenty minutes ago, this day was looking bad. Now it was worse. Danya had said her father didn’t like me, said I was an unprofessional maverick. And dear old dad was my good buddy, Fairchild. Perfect. Last summer, about the time I’d stumbled across my third decapitated head, I thought he was going to hook me up to a transformer and turn out my lights right there in the interrogation room, say, “Oop,” and call it good. Now, I thought his stare might accomplish the same thing.

  “How about you dial it down a notch, Russ,” I said.

  Officer Day—last summer’s behemoth—lumbered around the corner of the house, gun and a nightstick on his belt, cuffs, baton, radio, sandwich. Five minutes late, but coming on strong.

  “Detective Fairchild,” one of the responding officers called to us from the garage. “You better take a look at this.”

  Officer Day—Clifford—lumbered over to Russ and me.

  I turned my back to Russ and looked over my shoulder, held my wrists out a few inches. “Cuffs?”

  Fairchild’s eyes were like marbles. “I oughta keep ’em on you till day after tomorrow.” He stared at me for a moment, then said to Day, “Yeah, take ’em off. He ain’t goin’ nowhere, but Taser him if he blinks.” He headed for the garage.

  “He was just kidding,” I told Day.

  “Don’t blink, Angel,” he said, but I think he smiled, sort of. He popped off my cuffs. He was six-six, three hundred thirty pounds. Every time I saw him, he’d gained another ten. I rubbed my wrists. Now that he had me by a hundred twenty pounds, I didn’t think he would need a Taser to put me on the ground—if he could catch me, which wasn’t likely.

  “You oughta go see what’s in the garage,” I told him.

  “In a while. Right now I’m watchin’ you.”

  “You ever heard of Jo-X?”

  “Guy’s a shitbug. If it turns out you squashed him, I’ll buy you lunch.” He looked around. “Where’s your partner?”

  “Maude? On her way to Memphis.”

  “Too bad. Unlike you, she brightens up the day.”

  “Ma? Maude Clary? You gotta be kiddin’.”

  “She and I go back a ways. You don’t.”

  Maude and Officer Day? Maybe I just got some dirt on her. If so, and I tried to use it to get a raise, she would just laugh at me, so this was going to take some thought.

  “You two go back a ways? How far back?”

  Day stared at me. “I haven’t Tasered anyone this week yet.”

  “That far back, huh?”

  Fairchild exited the garage and walked over to us. He looked shaken. “That is . . . one ugly fuckin’ sight in there.”

  “Thought you’d like it,” I said. “How’s the air in there?”

  “Seventh circle of hell.”

  He’d calmed down a little, but his eyes were still jittery. He jerked a thumb at the garage and said to Day, “Have a look, but take a deep breath before you go in.”

  Day went. Fairchild glared at me. No one else was within forty feet of us. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “Gettin’ tangled up with you again.”

  “If you think this is a karmic tie, Russ, you’re wrong. This is your fault.”

  “My fault? How’d you come up with that?”

  “You told your kid I was an unprofessional maverick. Turns out that’s what she thought she wanted, so maybe she listens to you, God only knows why. She came into the Golden Goose last night, the Green Room, and asked for help. Didn’t say what for, and I still don’t know, but it looks like she and Jo-X have got—”

  He shoved me against the fence again, hard, but couldn’t figure out precisely why or what to say. He turned and looked at the garage. “Aw jeez, Angel. What the hell . . .”

  “Anyone know this is your daughter’s place?” I asked.

  “That’ll come out soon enough.”

  “What I mean is, does anyone know you are connected to this place? Someone who doesn’t like you?”

  He stared at me. “What? You think someone’s tryin’ to get at me through my kid?”

  “It’s a thought, you being such a nice guy and all.”

  “Doesn’t make sense. That’s too . . . complicated.” He stared at the garage again. “Je-sus Christ. Jo-X of all the nightmare sons of bitches. Guy’s been missing for what now, a week?”

  “Six days, I think. Celine, too.”

  “Celine? Who’s that?”

  �
��You don’t keep up with the latest in gangster rap?”

  “I’d rather pluck out my eyes.”

  “Celine is Xenon’s latest girlfriend, sidekick, squeeze, whatever. She was with him for three weeks before the two of them vanished. It’s been in the news. A lot.” I watched his face as I said it, but nothing registered.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Might’ve heard somethin’ about his girl gone missing, too. It’s not the kind of thing I pay attention to.” He stared into space, then said, “Sonofabitch.”

  A forensics crew arrived and trooped into the garage. A few of them came out a minute later and began to spread out, through the yard, into the house.

  Fairchild handed me to Officer Day. “Put him in your car.” Before Day hauled me away, Russell grabbed my arm and said to me in a deathly whisper, “Don’t say nothin’ to nobody. And I mean nothin’.”

  Several local news crews aimed telephoto lenses at us as Day put me in a squad car, in back where the handles don’t work, and I tried to decipher the true meaning of Fairchild’s triple negative. Get it wrong and I’d be in trouble. Day leaned against the car, folded his arms across his chest, and watched the hum of activity around the house.

  Alone in the quiet, I had time to summarize the situation and determine that, even though I was in the thick of all this and in for a grilling, it wasn’t likely that they would hold me beyond an interminable, boring afternoon. Jo-X was partially decomposed, so he’d been dead a few days, no more than six, and he’d been strung up in Danya and Shanna’s garage. A garage that came with a rented house, so they would have to check out the owner, Thelma Johnson, see if she’d been nursing a grudge against Jo-X and was using her garage for . . . shall we say, storage.

  Continuing my private summary of recent events—Danya was the beautiful daughter of Reno PD’s most senior homicide detective. Both Danya and Shanna had run, Danya having more or less hired Mortimer Angel, a gumshoe, for reasons unknown the night before Jo-X had turned up in what the police would take to be her garage as much as Thelma’s.