THE HOUSE WAS eighty years old. A few original windows were single paned. You can’t buy single-pane these days. Two bedrooms, one bath. I’d turned the second bedroom into storage and an office. When my daughter Nicole came to Reno, she stayed with Dallas. On those rare occasions that she stayed with me, she took the couch in the living room. Her choice, but, tonight, after two minutes on the miserable sonofabitch, I understood her preference for staying at her mother’s place. The couch, which had belonged to my parents, was lumpy, short, and still exuded the smell of bulldog, Brutus, even after all these years. God only knows how long that beast had used it as his own personal bed.
I didn’t get to sleep for an hour, and then I didn’t sleep worth a damn. I kept hearing noises—sly footsteps, slender manicured fingers gliding through my wallet, doors opening and closing, papers rustling. All phantom sounds, of course. I checked in on K several times during the night and she was out cold every time. She hadn’t even turned over. Her gentle snore never lost its tempo, like a kind of slow surf.
Nor did the gun beneath my pillow help my peace of mind, partly because I’d never kept it there before. It wasn’t a joke or a toy. It was a featherweight S&W .357 Magnum, fourteen ounces empty, with a titanium cylinder, scandium-aluminum alloy frame. It could punch holes big enough in a person that it kept me up half the night worrying about that fact. One bad dream and who knows who or what I might’ve blown those holes in.
* * *
I was up at the first gray light of dawn, eager to solve my own personal at-home mystery before going out and taking on whatever Greg intended to throw my way.
K was still out. I gave her a shake, testing, but she didn’t stir. I took her pulse. Fifty-two, strong and steady, about what I’d expect of a woman in her physical condition. And I checked her left hand. No ring or ring mark, which made me feel marginally better.
I ran my toothbrush under hot water for half a minute to kill whatever unknown cooties might be clinging to it, then brushed my teeth. Pete’s Wicked Ale the morning after isn’t half as tasty as the night before.
I risked a quick shower. Not that I’m a prude, far from it, I like to think, but visions of the movie Psycho kept intruding, even if my new roomie bore little resemblance to Anthony Perkins and I bore even less to Janet Leigh.
I gathered up clothing and dressed in the living room, then brewed a pot of coffee to put a spark of life into my body. I had a bowl of cornflakes, hoping the crunching would wake her. It didn’t.
By seven I was ready for work, two hours early. I used the time to prowl around in stocking feet, snooping around my own place, hunting for clues. I didn’t find a blessed one. Not a laundry mark or gasoline receipt, postcard or movie stub. Nothing. Just K and her wad of smelly clothes.
I looked at that pretty head a lot. I didn’t peek under the covers again, although the thought crossed my mind every minute or two. I might’ve missed something the night before. And it was possible she had a tattoo that would’ve told me something useful, you never know.
At 8:50 I had to leave. As a parting shot, I shook the hell out of her, managing to get something that sounded like, “Unn-ug-uhhh-Iyuhnn-neh.” It might’ve been Urdu, or possibly a remote dialect of Ethiopia, I had no way of knowing.
I scribbled a note. Basically, “Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my house?” then I got in the Toyota and took off.
* * *
Carson & Rudd Investigative Services was in a blond brick building a few blocks south of downtown, on Sierra Street near the old courthouse, right about where you’d expect to find a detective agency if you were looking for one. I parked around back. I had on jeans and a short-sleeve striped shirt, no tie. I had a suit carrier over my shoulder with the good stuff in it, just in case. But if by chance I was going to end up in a dark alley at night—something I hoped would happen—I wanted the jogging shoes, jeans, and the expendable shirt. I also wore a windbreaker, unzipped, to hide the gun at my hip.
I’m licensed to carry. All IRS field agents are. Nor did the license depend on my being an active agent. It wouldn’t expire until April, year after next, and I fully intended to renew it. I put in enough hours on a firing range four times a year that I can joke about the weapon, after a fashion, but I would never pull it in a “situation” unless I was prepared to use it.
I went through a glass door and up a dingy flight of stairs to an equally dingy hallway with threadbare, curling carpet that ran the length of the office building. Past a tax consultant I’d had a few run-ins with and didn’t much like—a slippery, sleazy bastard who I might have do my taxes next year if I happen to strike it rich—past a firm that refurbished laser printer cartridges, past a dealers school, the usual blackjack and craps—and on to Carson & Rudd.
Before going in, I stood outside for a few seconds, allowing this pivotal moment in my life to sink in. Even though I didn’t have any idea who K was, I was now a private investigator, at least in training. I’d thought about calling the police and having K frogmarched away in cuffs, but something told me I shouldn’t do that. She didn’t look like the type to murder anyone in their sleep or steal the silverware. She’d had her chance and hadn’t taken it, but I’d given her a lot of thought that morning before leaving.
Mystery girl in your bed? You don’t gloss over that kind of weirdness. You don’t ignore it. It makes you think. Maybe it was karma—a cosmic reward for a good deed I’d done in a previous life.
I hoped so, anyway.
* * *
I walked in at 9:06, late. Best to set the tone early, I always say. It’s easier to rise from lowered expectations. Gregory’s secretary, Dale, was at her desk, whaling away at a computer. She’s a secretary-receptionist-PI-Gal Friday. Probably runs the place when Greg’s not looking. Five foot nine, slender and leggy, better-than-average face, reasonably good to look at, thirty years old, and as proper and stiff as a chunk of kiln-dried hickory, which, I figured, is why Mrs. Gregory Rudd—Libby—puts up with her, and Libby doesn’t put up with much. Gregory and Dale could pool their collective imaginations and still not have what it takes to throw the lock on the door and use their mold-green vinyl couch for extracurricular activities. Of course, Libby wasn’t a bad-looking woman herself. Then again, she has a bitchy streak that goes up one side and down the other. I guess the bottom line is, not all guys are pigs or creeps, and Greg was anything but either.
Regarding Dale’s lack of imagination, the half-slice of plain gag-it-down bagel sitting on a napkin by her computer pretty much told the story. She wore earphones, transcribing like mad, or something equally exciting. At least she was efficient.
I stood there, looking around. This outer room had a colorless, aseptic, institutional flavor, cross between a Social Security waiting room and something even less enticing. Dale’s desk, the green couch, two folding chairs, a desktop copier on a gray steel cart, no windows and nothing on the walls. I’d been inside my nephew’s office several times in the four years he’d been a private investigator and knew it wasn’t any livelier, except for a single grimy east-facing window. His office wasn’t too bad, if you like gray in different shades. Part of the problem was that Gregory was color-blind. To him, a standard fuchsia and a chunk of Romaine lettuce are the same shade, and—knowing Ellen’s boy—the same species. By that I don’t mean to imply he isn’t bright. He is. He has gaps in his knowledge, but then, don’t we all? What I don’t know about calculus is used as filler in entire textbooks.
Dale hadn’t spotted me yet. Greg wasn’t in sight. His door was closed, but I could hear a murmur in there, above the muted roar of Dale’s keyboarding.
Gregory—not Greg, except that I call him Greg—was what some people refer to as tight-assed. Anal retentive if you’re into psychobabble and think those fancy high-dollar words mean anything substantive. To me, anal retentive means constipated, something you could fix with any number of over-the-counter remedies.
Maxwell Rudd, my sister’s lesser half, came from an improbably long line of New England stockbrokers and lawyers stretching back to Thomas Paine and the Tea Party and beyond, as tight-assed a clan as you’d ever want to meet. Ellen and I come from a line of office managers, CPAs, and failed bankers that go back to guys who leapt to their deaths in the Crash of ‘29, or should have. For a while I’d thought there was hope for the family when Greg cut loose and became a private investigator, the first sign that maybe we weren’t all doomed, like lemmings, to a preordained end—a waist-deep, Bataan-like march through paperwork to the grave. But in the end, breeding won out. By all accounts, Greg had managed to turn gumshoeing into as dull an enterprise as filling potholes. Or worse—auditing the construction firm that filled the potholes.
That, in effect, was what he’d told me a little over a month ago when I asked if he might consider having a partner, or an assistant.
But that couldn’t be right, I’d thought back then, and still did, watching Dale hammer ninety-plus words a minute into that computer, working on her repetitive stress disorder. How could you possibly get pictures of Mr. X plowing Mrs. Y’s south forty and not at least run a moderate risk of bullets whizzing past your ears when the flash went off? How could sleuthing, which is essentially glorified sneaking around performed by so-called adults, be boring?
I was about to find out.
Dale glanced up. “Oh, Mr. Angel.” She pulled an earphone off one ear and throttled back to about forty WPM. “I mean, Mortimer.”
“Mort,” I said, wincing. I drew back a flap of my windbreaker, exposing the flyweight .357. “Should I check this thing at the door, or are you expecting trouble?”
Dale’s face turned white. Her typing stopped altogether.
“Just kidding,” I assured her, concealing the weapon again. In fact, there was a point to my showing her the gun, other than yanking her chain a little, which I’m prone to do. If I was going to work for her and Greg, they might as well know I intended to carry, because I’ve done so for a long time and wasn’t about to quit now, about the time things might finally get interesting, with car chases, bullets flying around in the dark, and all that.
“Greg in?” I asked.
She pointed toward his door. “He’s with a client.”
“Uh-huh. Want I should take any dirty photos?”
Her eyes widened. “What?”
“Someone cheating on their significant other, maybe? I can bust down a door like nothing you ever saw.”
She was aghast. “We…we don’t take those kinds of cases, Mr. Angel.”
I shrugged. “Mort. So, here I am. Guess you’ve been expecting me, right?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Great.” I looked around. “Now what?”
She pulled a paper-clipped wad of papers from a desk drawer. “I gathered these up for you on Friday. If you could fill them out…”
I sifted through them. Federally mandated health insurance form, request for PI trainee status, a bond questionnaire, 401(k) plan.
And a W-4 withholding form. I held it up, waved it at her. “This one’s unconstitutional, sweetheart.”
She gawked at me. Not sure if it was the sweetheart or the form, but the gawk was pure Dale.
“I oughta know,” I informed her. “Government can’t take one dime of my money before I know how the hell much I’m gonna make during the year. I mean, what if I lost my job, or changed jobs and started making less? Which I am, by the way.”
“I…I…but, you’ve got to…”
“Just kidding. Where do I fill these out?”
She sat me on the couch with a ballpoint pen and a clipboard, and I did my civic duty, adding to the paperwork mill that’s choking the life out of this country.
When I finished up, Greg was still in there with the client. Dale’s phone rang once. Wrong number, but I was impressed. Carson & Rudd was doing a land-office business, or might at any moment. Tom Carson of Carson & Rudd had been dead for eight months—liver failure at age fifty-eight—which is why I’d thought Greg might be in a position to hire another PI. All this turmoil and stress had probably driven Carson to drink and other forms of excess, God rest him.
In fact, the excitement of my new job was beginning to stiffen my joints, so for all I knew I might be headed for the same untimely end. Back home, I had a naked girl in my bed, the dream-stuff of every 24-carat, bonded PI in America, and here I was with W-4’s and 401(k)s in my lap.
“Done,” I said. Dale was Xeroxing stuff that had whirred out of a laser printer. “What’s next?”
She shrugged. “Gregory’ll be out soon.”
“Am I getting paid for all this sitting around?”
“Well…yes. You’re hourly, at least for the time being.”
I sat back. “Pretty easy work. Easier than slamming tax dodgers upside down against a wall and picking up nickels.”
Finally she smiled. At least I think it was a smile.
“I’m serious,” I said.
Her smile, if that’s what it was, faltered.
“Kidding,” I said, putting her on an emotional roller coaster. “We never picked up anything smaller than dimes.”
The inner door creaked open. Greg held it for a fiftyish woman the size of a minivan.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Newman,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll hear something in a day or two.” He gave her a smile. She smiled back, lifting pounds of flesh to do so, then glanced at me with dead gray eyes as she went out the door.
“Hear what in a day or two?” I asked.
“Missing person,” Greg said. He was an inch under six feet tall, a shrimp. Skinny but tough. Wiry. He ran marathons. Nice suit, though. He looked good. I, on the other hand, looked more like a potential client. “Her son,” he added.
“Now we’re talking. What’s his name? Want me to go track him down?”
Gregory’s lips quivered, as if he didn’t know whether to laugh, smile, or cry. “She thinks he’s somewhere in Wisconsin or Michigan. I’ll contact an agency out there, have them look into it. It’ll cost her less in the long run. Local firms know the territory, have their own connections.”
“Terrific. There’s money in handing the work to someone else, is there?”
“She pays us, we pay them and keep 20 percent.”
“So you’re…we’re, what, middlemen?”
“Sometimes. Not that often, but it happens.”
“Uh-huh. Pretty heart-stopping stuff.”
His look told me he didn’t get it. He was a literal kind of guy. “I told you about that, Uncle Mortimer. Investigative work isn’t anything like what you seem to—”
“Mort. So…got anything for me?”
He rubbed his hands together. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, it was something his great-great-grandfather might’ve done. He looked eighty years old, like Scrooge, but it wasn’t in anticipation of firing anyone or ripping a drumstick out of their mouth. This, then, whatever it was, was what passed for high drama in my nephew’s life.
“I’ve got just the thing,” he said. “Came in last week. Thursday afternoon. We’ve been saving it for you. It’s right up your alley.”
I pulled my gun and swung the cylinder out, checked its load and peered down the barrel. No obstructions. Good.
“Uncle Mortimer—”
“Mort.” Four gleaming rounds, one empty chamber under the hammer. Perfect. If you can’t get the job done with four bullets, that fifth bullet isn’t likely to matter. Yanking Greg’s chain was part of the point—okay, a big part—and now he was aware I was carrying, in case he’d forgotten. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen the gun before.
“Uncle…Mort.” His voice was strangled, half an octave high. “You are not going to need that.”
I swung the cylinder in, shoved the gun into its holster and let the windbreaker fall back in place. “You never know. What’s the job?”
* * *
If I’d known before I put the gun away, I might’ve…okay, lucky for him, I realized I would’ve had to clean the gun. I’m picky about that. A dirty gun is an unreliable gun. Of course I could have pistol-whipped him. There’s more than one way to use a gun. But after hearing about the job I left the revolver at Greg’s. Just as well, considering how the afternoon went.
By ten twenty I was in the Toyota, northbound on Kietzke Lane, headed for Skulstad Meat Co., a wholesaler in the city of Sparks. Sparks is to Reno what a person’s left buttock is to their right. The two towns started up four or five miles apart, grew, finally slammed up against each other until they became RenoSparks, and there’s not much more to say about that. Happens all the time now, all across the country. Pretty soon it’ll be wall to wall from coast to coast, one big fun place, like the mess around L.A. I could hardly wait.
As mayor, Jonnie Sjorgen had been doing his part to make it happen as soon as possible, backroom deals and kickbacks under the table, slippery damn folks scratching each other’s backs, which is one reason I’d never voted for the guy, even before he started running around with Dallas. What voters want doesn’t mean shit to politicians once they get in office. They lie as effortlessly as they breathe.
Two years ago, when Tom Carson was still at the helm, Skulstad Meats had been a client of Carson & Rudd. Pilferage. Now they had an accounting problem. Normally that wouldn’t be PI work at all, but Humphrey Skulstad, now in his seventies, had consulted with Greg and, lucky me, Greg had told old man Skulstad he had just the guy for the job, a veritable accounting genius.
I wondered…is it homicide if it’s your own kin, or is there a lesser charge?
It wasn’t entirely my fault I ended up an IRS agent—or auditor, if you prefer. Goon is also popular. Working for the IRS was almost certainly the result of the same genetic accident that had produced much of the Angel family and its unremarkable offshoots, the least auspicious of which was the Angel/Rudd union nearly thirty years ago that had given the world Gregory Rudd.
IRS auditing is the world’s most boring work and, relative to plumbing which is its metaphorical equivalent—unplugging drains to get things flowing—it doesn’t pay for shit. You get an accounting degree and think that’s it, you’ve got it made. Then, somehow, instead of turning right toward the golden glow of money, you turn left and enter this long dark tunnel. Strangely enough, it looks okay at first, you’re doing good work, it’s necessary, you’re needed, or so you’re told—then one day you wake up and find you’re in too deep. You’ve learned too much to turn back. The tax code, in all its shifting, side-stepping glory, becomes your life. Twenty thousand La-Brea-Tar-Pit pages of it. A horse couldn’t eat the index of that son of a bitch in a week. You can’t think past that kind of thing, past noncompliant and frivolous returns, tax delinquent accounts and “nonfilers.” There is a phrase, “Tax Professional,” but we on the inside know there’s no such thing. No one knows the tax code in its entirety. It isn’t possible. Phone the IRS with a simple question and there’s a fifty-fifty chance they’ll get it right. Make it a hard question and you’re on your own—just don’t get it wrong or you’ll need a lawyer, and good luck finding one who has a clue regarding the pride and joy of the IRS: the Federal Tax Code. So, numb and blind and part of a bureaucratic system that would’ve made Stalin weep with joy, you find yourself slogging waist deep through the archeology of people’s lives, dust flying off old ledgers, a confetti of receipts kept in random order in shoeboxes, bored out of your skull, lunging at trivia like a Black Lab at chicken bones.
But there’s an element of danger in it, too, wondering if this or that John Doe has finally reached the end of his rope and is going to whip a shotgun out of a nearby closet and start blasting. Field audits are stressful times, hence the license to carry. You sit with your back to the wall and check people’s eyes, looking for that final, murderous spark. That might have been all that kept me going during my sixteen years with the IRS, that sweet hint of danger, but in the end it wasn’t enough.
I pulled up in front of Skulstad Meats and left my Toyota—faded to an indecisive shade of yellow—to broil in the sun.
Humphrey Skulstad met me at the door and whisked me into his office before I could give his secretary my phone number. A nameplate on her desk said Rachel Cabrera. Thirty-five, give or take, beautiful, nicely filling out a knee-length summer dress. No ring on her finger. And she’d given me a wink. Several winks, in fact. Either that, or she had something in her eye the size of a number two pencil. Skulstad hauled me into his office before I could determine which.
The place reeked of hamburger, animal fat, and cheese—the anteroom, Humphrey’s office, all of it. The aroma at Skulstad’s was part of the job.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” he said, pale-blue eyes darting between his office door and my face. He looked well-scrubbed, pink-faced and tidy, even in shirt sleeves.
“We don’t?”
“You’re my newest employee.”
“I am?”
He stopped and stared at me, growing wary. “You are from… ah…that is…”
I could tell he wanted me to say it first. Or get the hell out of his office. “Carson & Rudd,” I said.
He relaxed slightly, but kept up a squint. “Mr. Rudd told me he’d have a man out here this morning about this time. When you came in the door, I assumed it was you.”
“It is. Didn’t Dale phone?”
“His secretary? Yeah, but to be honest, I thought you’d be better informed.”
“I know our mayor and district attorney are missing,” I said. “I know every local issue on the upcoming ballot, I get the newspaper, and my subscription to the Wall Street Journal is good for another six months.”
Bless him, he smiled.
“And I know you’ve got an accounting problem,” I said, showing off a little. I sat down in a leather chair, facing him.
“That I do, Mister, ah…?” He started rummaging on his desk for something.
“Angel. Mort Angel.”
He sat back. “Right, good, Mr. Angel.”
“Mort.”
“Right. Mort. I shouldn’t keep you here too long. Wouldn’t look right. Besides, there’s not an awful lot I can tell you. You’ll be posing as a new employee. In accounting.”
“Bottom-line problem, huh?”
He nodded. “Five, six months ago my gross dropped .6 percent. Like a rock. Doesn’t sound like much, I know, but—”
“But .6 percent of”—I did a quickie calculation, based on what I’d seen so far, and experience, which was considerable and might prove useful even if I didn’t want to admit it—“say, five million five, is…thirty-three thousand a year.”
“Close. Five million eight.”
“So, thirty-four eight. Are you sure it’s not a normal fluctuation?”
“I’ve been rock steady the past two years, percentage-wise, adjusted for the season. Then it dropped, stayed dropped. No reason for it that I could see.”
“So you think someone’s cooking the books?”
“It took me a while to come to that, but…yeah, that would be my guess.” He looked unhappy.
“But, you’ve got no proof?”
“No, just the sudden drop in gross.”
Which, as a small-business owner, would eventually find its way into Skulstad’s take-home pay. “Have you hired any new accountants lately?” I asked.
“Nope, although I lost one eight months back. Retired. Mike Anderson, head of the department. Good man. I didn’t replace him.”
Which might have opened a door of sorts.
“Now I’ve got three bean counters,” Skulstad went on. “All of ’em have been with me more than three years.”
“Thirty-five thousand is a fair amount of beans.”
He nodded, then ran fingers through graying hair. “You got that right. My margin on gross here is only three and a half, four percent. Point six percent is a lot.”
“So…which one of them is doing it?”
He gaped at me. “That’s what I want you to find out.”
“It wasn’t a legal question, Mr. Skulstad. It’s just between you and me. If you had to guess, which one would it be?”
“Well, Phil Galloway, if I had to pick one. But I wouldn’t want that to get out of this office.”
“It won’t. Which one of them is driving a new car?”
He gaped again, then smiled slowly. “Iris. Iris Kacsmaryk. Now, why didn’t I think of that?” He gave me a look that told me I was one damn fine detective. I didn’t tell him about K in my bed.
“Might not mean anything at all,” I said. “It’s just another place to look.”
He checked his watch, then stood. “I take it you know all about ledgers, computer spreadsheets, that kind of thing?”
“Christ, do I. I’ve seen goddamn quadruple books.”
“Well, I don’t. I’m into the buying end of it. And quality. Means I do a lot of traveling and evaluating. I have to trust my staff. The money end…Mike used to handle that. I can’t do it all. But I’m not a fool, Mr. Angel. Someone’s got their hand in my pocket here. Or maybe I’m getting old.”
“So I’m the new accountant?”
“If you want to work it that way. I didn’t know how you’d want to do it. I’ve been telling ’em I was thinking about hiring another person, just in case. Betty is the department head now. She’s been with me going on twenty years.”
I shrugged. “We can do it that way, sure. No problem. But if I ask for time off, I’ll want it, no questions asked, even from this Betty. I might need to do some outside surveillance, and I can’t do it sitting at a desk. I want to be all set to go when your people get off work.”
“I understand,” Skulstad said. “I’ll let Betty know you might need personal time off for a while, until you get settled in.” He put a hand on the doorknob, then paused. “I don’t want to fire anyone, Mr. Angel. I only want it to stop.”
“It’s like one big happy family here, huh?”
He smiled. “You understand, then?”
I didn’t, but I nodded anyway. Some families need a dose of tough love now and then.
Skulstad opened the door and ushered me into the anteroom, into Rachel’s presence again. For her benefit, he shook my hand and said, “Rachel will take care of you, Mr. Angel. It’s good to have you on the team.” He went back into his office and closed the door.
I smiled at Rachel. “Take care of me.”
She handed me a sheaf of papers. “Fill these out, please.”
Another sonofabitching set of W-4s, 401(k), insurance. I couldn’t believe it. “You’ve gotta be kidding,” I said.
She stared at me. “What’s wrong?”
“Christ, not again.” I glared at the paperwork.
“Again?” she echoed.
Okay, so that wasn’t terribly swift of me. It’s just that I saw my future flash before my eyes, and it was an entire vaudeville act of filling out W-4s and 401(k) shit, no offense to Greg.
“You can fill them out in there.” She aimed a wine-colored nail at an empty room.
I went, emerged twenty minutes later a tiny bit angrier than when I went in. Rachel smiled as I handed back the paperwork that’s killing this country, so I returned the smile and said, “How would you like to have dinner?”
“I almost always have dinner, thanks.”
Sharp. “I mean, with me.”
“No, thank you.”
“Wine? Reno’s finest pasta?”
“And where might that be?”
“Olive Garden?”
“Not even close.”
“Pasta Maniacs?”
“They closed ten years ago. I see you’re right on top of things, pasta-wise. And, my ‘no’ was generic, Mr. Angel.”
“Mort. So, okay then, what’d you have in your eye?”
She gave me a startled look. “What?”
“Forget it. Where do the bean counters count the beans around here?”
She stood up. And up and up. Man, was she ever leggy. “This way.” She headed down a short hallway, past a lunchroom, toward a big back office space. She had a nice walk, very distracting, and I took full advantage of it.
Back there in the depths of the building, the smell of meat grew stronger. Rachel handed me off to a woman with an artificial mass of flaming red hair, the kind of thing you could use to stuff a mattress. Reminded me of my mother, which was eerie.
“This is Mr. Angel, Betty.”
“Mort,” I said.
“We’ve been expecting you, Mr. Angel,” Betty said, giving me a guarded smile and limp, damp fingertips to either grab or shake, it was hard to tell which.
Yes, they had. Betty Pope. Phil Galloway. Iris Kacsmaryk. All of them were staring at me. Every hand in the place turned out to be limp and damp except mine, so, no clue there if I thought I was going to act as a mobile lie detector.
After “hi’s,” vague smiles, “gladt’meetcha’s,” Phil and Iris went back to their screens. These days, computers count the beans and bean counters oversee the counting. And maybe one of them jiggles a number or two in a spreadsheet that modifies the end result ever so slightly—say, to the tune of 0.6 percent. Just greedy enough to be stupid. Skulstad might not have noticed 0.2 percent.
Betty was in her fifties. She looked like a former Soviet shot-putter by the name of Tamara Press. Phil was roughly my age, lank blond hair, the freckles no longer boyish. I had him by seventy pounds and half a foot. He didn’t look overjoyed to see me. Iris was in her mid- to late-twenties, pale, thin, pretty in an overly delicate way that reminded me of a not-yet-filled-out Mia Farrow. With the IRS, I’d once had a paperweight—a bronze bust of Nixon with “I am not a crook” inscribed on the base—that might’ve outweighed Iris Kacsmaryk. If a gust came through, I could maybe slam her down on my desk to keep the loose stuff in place.
Nothing overtly unfriendly. Iris, in fact, had given me a glimmer of a smile. But bean counters are a naturally serious lot. Numbers are serious, not to be trifled with. They aren’t subjective, except on Wall Street, in and around Washington, in the hands of tobacco-company statisticians and lobbyists, and out of the mouths of pathological liars—if you can tell the difference between any of those groups.
But they can be juggled, if one is adroit enough and has the inclination.
I was given a squeaky chair and a desk facing Iris, or, more accurately, the top of her head with its pale-white part right down the middle. She was currently plowing through a stack of well-thumbed, slightly greasy tally sheets from the warehouse, from whence, I assumed, issued the heady aroma of meat.
I began to take stock of my surroundings.
I had a computer and a nineteen-inch Samsung flat-screen monitor, all my own, and what looked like coffee stains on the keyboard.
I had a phone. Ext. 41—my age, what a stroke of luck. With it, I could probably get hold of Rachel in an instant. Maybe Zozo’s Ristorante would do the trick. She’d caught me off guard with that bit about Pasta Maniacs having gone out of business. I oughta get out more.
I had a framed picture of a cat on my faux ash, sheet-metal desk, and a brownish water stain on the desk itself that looked remarkably like a portrait of Lenin. Or Marx. Or maybe Engels. I can never keep those guys straight, but they’d been a dour-looking bunch.
Twenty seconds later, I had a three-ring “procedures” binder full of tabs that explained certain company policies and outlined what I was supposed to be doing there, courtesy of Betty Pope.
My phone rang.
I stared at it. Everyone else did too, waiting for me to pick up. New guy gets a call. Right away, things are getting interesting.
Figuring Rachel, I caught it midway through the second ring. “Hello?”
“Mort?” A woman. I knew that voice.
“Yeah.”
The ex-wife, being hassled and harried by the media even more than I, now that our beloved mayor, Jonnie, had flown the coop. I had a choice of responses, a few of which might blow the lid off my cover, things like: “How’d you find me here?” So I said, “What’s up, kiddo?” Kiddo to throw off the ears in the room, but I call her that from time to time to keep her loose.
“Who’s the girl?”
“What girl?” I asked.
Iris’s head hitched up half an inch. Both Phil and Betty’s fingers slowed on their keyboards.
“The girl at your house.”
“Uh, K.”
“Kay?”
“Yeah, K.”
“Not especially bright, is she?”
“Why do you say that?”
“It was a bit like talking to a fence post.”
“At least you got through.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s kind of tired.”
“Oh? Did you wear her out? If I remember correctly, you have a way of—”
“Is there a point to any of this, Dal?” Ears twitched at the name. No one looked up, however.
“I have a flat.”
“Yeah? You looking to rent it out or sell it?”
That stopped her. “A flat tire,” she expounded.
“Flat all the way around or only on the bottom?”
“For God’s sake, Mort…”
“Exactly what do you want me to do, Dal?”
“I…What are you doing at…at that place? Skulstad Meats? I spoke with Gregory.”
“Then you know,” I said. Iris flicked her eyes up at me, then down.
“Oh. Sorry. Private investigation stuff, right?” A hint of irony in her voice. “You can’t talk right now, can you?”
“Now you’re cookin’, kid.”
“Well, I was hoping…maybe if you could get off for an hour, like for lunch?”
“That depends. Are you buying?”
“To change my tire, Mort.” She was starting to sound weary. Jonnie’s absence was probably getting to her. That and the media, going through her bank account, underwear drawer, crawling through her life like a bunch of roaches in the name of truth and the public’s Right To Know, which, as sheer luck would have it, coincides with ratings, market share, advertising revenue, and end-of-year bonuses.
“What happened to your Triple-A?” I asked.
“I, uh, sort of let it lapse.”
“Good move. Where are you now?”
“Macy’s. Meadowood.”
Macy’s. Of course. Where else? What kind of a gumshoe was I? “Where at?”
“The east side. North of the Sears extension.”
“I’ll get there soon as I can. Say, fifteen, twenty minutes?”
“Great. Thanks, Mort.”
I hung up. Three pairs of eyes looked up, then down. The chair squawked as I got to my feet, announcing my departure.
“Family emergency,” I said to Betty. “Try to keep me on the payroll, okay?”
She didn’t smile as I left, but I thought Phil looked hopeful that maybe I’d blown it and wouldn’t be back.
The Toyota was hot enough to broil salmon when I opened the door. I let it cool a little before getting in. It’s too small for me, but on IRS wages, and with a double mortgage, and stashing the maximum allowable into a Roth IRA, it was all I could reasonably afford. Well, okay, I can be cheap. Perhaps it was one of those final straws, the reason Dallas finally split—me buying that car, used, already scarred by battle. Once she got the name Angel and figured out where I was headed, how far I was likely to go, and Nicole was in her freshman year of high school, there wasn’t much to hold her. I couldn’t blame her. Turns out there wasn’t much to hold me either, once I’d hit forty and saw that long empty stretch of road ahead. It had just taken me longer to figure it out, or at least to do something about it.
Dallas was standing beside her Mercedes when I pulled up. No TV crews were hanging around filming the event, which made me think Jonnie’s disappearance was winding down even more than I’d thought. Later she told me she’d raced through an almost-red light somewhere on South Virginia Street to give two news vans the slip.
She looked good. Dallas always looks good. At the breakfast table, asleep, mucking in the garden, sweating on a StairMaster, Dallas looked terrific. She would look good mud wrestling Tommy Lasorda. Hell, she would make Lasorda look good, not a mean trick.
She had on a green skirt, a sleeveless pearl-colored blouse, gold necklace, gold bangles. Even in all that clothing you could sense the Playmate body underneath. I could, at least.
“Nice outfit,” I said, squeezing out of the Toyota like a circus clown. “I can see why you didn’t want to change the tire yourself.”
“What I can’t understand is why you don’t have a line out here,” I added, looking around. The lot was about half full this close to the building. Farther out it was empty, rippling with heat waves. The asphalt felt slightly squishy under my shoes.
“A line?”
“Of drooling hopefuls, fighting over who gets to change the tire and impress the gorgeous lady.”
“Oh, Mort.”
Oh, Mort, what? She thought I wasn’t serious? I crouched by the tire. She didn’t have to tell me which one, sleuth that I am. Left rear. It was one flat sonofabitch. I even spotted the gash where the knife blade had gone in.
I stood up quickly and looked around. I didn’t see anyone staring in our direction, but someone knew where Dallas was. Either that or it was one of those random things. Some people don’t like Mercedes, or Mercedes owners. Maybe she should’ve been driving a Smart Car, or a Zapino. Something that would fit in her purse.
“Got a spare?” I asked.
She shrugged, handed me a set of keys, singling out the one for the trunk.
She stood a few feet away as I popped the lid and looked in, my eyes goggling and double taking at the sight of Jonnie Sjorgen’s head staring milky eyed up at me, blackish tongue protruding. Just his head. Nothing else.
Dallas screamed. I caught her a quarter second before she fell.