HISTORICALLY SPEAKING, IN the long line of Angels, Rudds, and others of that ilk roosting in the limbs of our staid family trees, life expectancy of the men runs to about ninety years. Other than my dad—who was so far off the charts he didn’t count—no one had had the imagination to die of anything remotely exciting, once the last Angel plunged to his death on Wall Street way back when. Like Maytags, we simply wore out. During a tepid existence of shuffling paper and managing other people’s money by way of low-risk and no-risk investments, that took a considerable length of time.
Gregory Rudd had had more zip in him than anyone had known, except for Dale. That zip had eventually killed him. He should’ve listened to the centuries-old calling of his genes.
I felt bad for Dale. In her final confession I sensed that Greg was all she’d had, all she thought she ever would have. Statistically, he should have lived another sixty years. And she’d seen him in his final hour, perched on his desk after having run, with blinders on, into that unknown black force moving through Reno’s streets. She shouldn’t have seen that.
And I, in my own unaccountable way, had helped contribute to his death. I felt lousy about that, too.
* * *
God knows why, but I figured Dallas would hate Jeri on sight, or vice versa. It would be a natural, mutual, instantaneous thing. Two gorgeous women, not enough of me to go around. Why wouldn’t they hate each other?
When I’m wrong, I do it up right.
We arrived at Dallas’s suite at the Grand Sierra. I introduced them, stuck around long enough to determine there wouldn’t be any immediate bloodshed, then went down to the casino’s gift shop to wear my silly moustache, buy Dallas a magazine, get myself the kind of shapeless, colorless hat you see on golf courses on the heads of men thirty years my senior—old guys who have given up all pretense of style and just want shade—and give the gals upstairs time to get acquainted, figure out which of them was going to be the alpha dog.
When I got back they were discussing 10K runs, racing tips, and their favorite jogging shoes, having already exchanged several low-fat recipes and a few priceless snippets about me, one of which may have included Jeri’s workout room.
I felt left out. I roamed the room, peeking out windows. From time to time, feminine laughter erupted. Finally I wandered over and stood over them. Dallas looked up, startled, as if she’d forgotten I was there.
“Am I still on the case?” I asked her, surprising myself as much as anyone. Greg’s death and Dale’s pain had done something to me that I hadn’t been aware of until that moment. I no longer wanted out of this mess, even if I had no idea what I could do to help clear it up or get retribution.
“I don’t know,” Dallas said. “You don’t have a PI firm to work out of anymore, do you?”
“You always did ask tough questions, Dal.”
“Maybe you should phone Libby and find out.”
Technically, according to Dale, ownership of Carson & Rudd had passed into Libby’s hands. I didn’t see how she was going to be able to keep it going. It occurred to me—for the first time, which was revealing—that I still hadn’t phoned Libby about Greg. Okay, not all that revealing. Simply put, I’d never cared for Elizabeth Capehart Rudd. We’d never bonded, not even close. At times I wondered if she and Greg had, since they were childless and had never shown the slightest bit of affection in public, though that might’ve been a trait of the Rudds, part of their DNA. I didn’t want to phone her now, but decided I had no choice.
The grieving widow answered on the fifth ring. “Hello?”
“Libby?” Music in the background. It wasn’t a dirge, either. I recognized Roger Miller’s “Chug-A-Lug,” of all the lunatic songs.
“Mort? That you?”
“Yeah.”
A muted voice, Libby’s, then the music clicked off. “Uh, Mort. It’s so nice of you to call.”
“I’m real sorry, Libby. About Greg.”
“Yes, well, thank you.”
She didn’t sound devastated. If she had, I might’ve had an idea where to go with the conversation. As it was, I didn’t have a clue. An awkward silence dragged out. Should I plunge into the subject of the future of Carson & Rudd or console her in a time of deep emotional crisis?
“Was there anything else, Mort?” Impatiently.
Wait around long enough, all your questions will be answered.
“Well, yeah, come to think of it. I was wondering about Greg’s business, what you’re thinking of doing with it.” Dallas and Jeri were watching me, ears perked.
“I haven’t given it much thought.” More whispery voices in the background, then, “Maybe you should know I had the account frozen. This morning.”
“What account?”
“Greg’s. You know, with the bank.”
“Carson & Rudd’s business account?”
“That’s right.”
Blood in the water, that’s what does it. Drives ’em nuts. They’ll snap at anything, even eat their own tails. In fact, my sister had hated Libby, the way Libby had slid in and taken over during Greg’s second year of college. Libby was a looker, but her body temperature, I’d always felt, derived from her immediate surroundings.
“Why’d you do that?” I asked.
“Just…security, a precaution. Until everything can be sorted out. You know.”
I did know. “How much was in the account?” I asked, feeling a hollowness in my gut.
More voices. Then, “I have no idea why that would be any of your business, Mortimer.” Her voice was calculated sweetness.
“Okay. Your call, Lib.”
“You caught me at a bad time. I wonder if we might talk about this later?”
“Sure, kid. Why don’t you call me?”
She hung up. I figured there were moving vans in front of her house that very moment. Roger Miller would segue into “King of the Road” and Libby, and whoever she was with, would be off in a cloud of champagne bubbles.
“Call your bank,” I said to Dallas, handing her the phone. “Stop payment on that check.”
“She wasn’t sobbing in your ear?”
“Hard to tell. I couldn’t hear over all the tap dancing.”
Dallas got through. The check hadn’t cleared yet. She stopped payment. Once Libby found out, she would be the very essence of fury. I wished I could be a fly on the wall.
I got a four-dollar can of Coke from the room’s refrigerator and sat on the couch with it. “Carson & Rudd is gone. It’s been deboned and eaten.”
“It was gone regardless,” Jeri said. “With your nephew and Dale gone and you without an investigator’s license.”
“Which means what, exactly?” Dallas asked her.
“No access, for one.” Jeri turned to me. “A license gives you certain privileges. Without it, you either do a quasi-legal maverick thing with desperate quasi-clients, or go into another line of business.”
Dallas lifted an eyebrow at me.
“I’m through with the IRS,” I said. “No way I’m going back to that god-awful scutwork mill again, grubbing for pennies.”
Dallas shrugged. “Well, maybe you could work for Jeri.”
Some bombshells explode in slow motion. This was one of those. Shrapnel tore through the room at a snail’s pace, ignoring gravity and logic.
Jeri stared at me. Then Dallas stared at me. I quit breathing. Then I quit smiling. I saw problems piling up like nuclear waste. I saw Jeri start to grin.
“No way,” I said.
Dallas tossed that day’s newspaper in my lap. “Then you’re in luck. Casino workers are in demand. You can deal blackjack, stand over a crap table, run the chuck-a-luck.”
I would kill myself first. I looked at Jeri.
“You might do,” she said thoughtfully. “You kept us out of jail today. That’s a marketable skill.”
I wanted to say something. Words scrambled around in my head like drunken rats. Trouble was, I didn’t have the slightest idea which ones of them to use or how to string them together. While I was doing that, Dallas took out her checkbook. “I’ve got to pay somebody. I imagine that would be you.” She was looking at Jeri, not me.
“Mmm,” Jeri said.
“Three thousand okay for now? Expenses and all that? You can let me know when it’s used up.”
“That’d be fine.”
Dallas wrote out the check and handed it to her. “What about Mr. Angel here?” she said.
Jeri gave me a slow, contemplative look. “I’ll have to think about that. Could you drop by my office tomorrow, Mort? Say, ten-ish? I’ll let you know.”
Throwing my words back at me.
The day had started out okay. Best I’ve had since Monday. I’d managed to cause two well-deserved fender benders and hadn’t come across more heads. Now, suddenly, I was Jeri’s employee, or might be. She had her own private dojo. She might want a judo dummy to keep her skills up.
Shows how fast any given day can go downhill.
* * *
On our way downtown, Jeri and I passed Sjorgen & Howard Title Company, Jonnie’s closest foray into the murky world of law. S&H Title was reputed to be his most successful business venture, the cash cow from which all else had sprung. In fact, to give credit where credit is due, it was Wendell Sjorgen’s cash cow, not Jonnie’s, started in 1958 when Wendell was two years out of Harvard Law. Be that as it may, Jonnie hadn’t managed to run the business into the ground after his father’s death, which either meant Jonnie had a head for business, or enough sense to leave well enough alone and let others run the place. Probably the Howard of Sjorgen & Howard.
Jeri parked on Mill, half a block from the title company.
“You up for a little sleuthing?” she asked.
“Oh? Am I invited?”
“I asked, didn’t I?” She got out. “Consider this an employment interview.”
I was still miffed about being bandied about, unemployed and vulnerable, at least until tomorrow, say around “ten-ish.” She hadn’t said more about that, only that she couldn’t give me the final okay without looking into a few things first.
Well, maybe she did. Maybe I would’ve, too. It still felt like a hazing stunt, watching me squirm on the hook, dangling over the water.
I took off the golf hat and left it in the car. It was starting to make me feel like a gigantic leprechaun.
“Christ, Mort. Ditch the moustache, too,” Jeri said.
I peeled it off as we approached the two-story building, stuck it in my shirt pocket, opened the door for her.
As she went through, I said, “Think I’ll need my gun?”
She chucked me in a rib with an elbow as neatly as Jackie Chan as she passed by. Which reminded me, I still hadn’t asked her about that judo or Aikido stuff.
I held my side as we approached a secretary wearing a headset phone, tucked behind a three-quarter circle of blue Formica. She greeted us with a toss of glossy, black ringlets and a tremendous smile. The smile congealed into an uneven grimace when she saw who I was. Blood drained out of her face, an interesting thing to observe.
Jeri said, “I’d like to speak to the most senior person here, please.”
Heather—according to the nameplate on the countertop—gave me a nervous look, then tried to make sense of Jeri’s request. “What?”
Jeri ran it past her again. Heather said, “Uh, that would be Mr. Howard.”
Not the original, from what I’d picked up on the news, one of those fast-flying tidbits on the periphery of the case. Jefferson Howard would be about a hundred ten years old if he were alive today, which he wasn’t. The Howard Heather was offering us was almost certainly not even Jefferson’s son. His grandson, maybe.
Heather hit two numbers on a console and spun partway around in her chair for privacy. I took a quick look around. Dark-blue carpet, small waiting room with faux Period wing chairs in gold damask, Max Warner lithographs on the walls: geese flying into pastel sunsets. The phrase “cash cow” went through my mind again. Heather hung up. “He’ll be out in a minute.”
All through the office, people were staring.
At me. Work had come to a standstill at Sjorgen & Howard as everyone gawked at the genius who’d located their missing boss.
I turned to Heather. “I don’t suppose a Mr. Rudd stopped by the other day? Tuesday?”
She looked at me, eyes wide. “Yes, he did.” Her voice was airless and breathy. “He also spoke with Mr. Howard.”
Of course she remembered him. He’d made the six o’ clock news. And, having watched the news, she remembered what had happened to him. And there she was, trapped behind a desk—
Jeri bumped me with a shoulder as a man in his late twenties, five foot eight, wearing a three-piece tailored suit, emerged from a hallway and approached the reception desk. He wasn’t smiling. “I’m Peter Howard,” he said. “Come with me, please.”
Jeri followed him. I followed Jeri. “Right to the top man,” I said sotto voce. “That was easy.” And the top man was a boy, abrupt, and a tight-assed little priss, from the look of him.
“It was my smile,” she whispered over her shoulder.
“Might’ve been mine.” I glanced back at Heather.
“Not in a million, Mortimer.”
We went down the hall and up a flight of stairs to where the carpet was spongy and plush, russet gold, the walls paneled in walnut, the lighting indirect and expensive. Past a desk where a young, gifted pneumatic doll of a girl named Amyee was filing her nails, not papers, and into an office. Peter shut the door. Much of one wall was a tinted plate glass view of the traffic and ruined asphalt on Mill Street, a Laundromat, and a graffiti-covered corner store across the street that probably did a land office business in specialty condoms, wine, and nudie mags. There may have been a time when this had been a prime location, but that time was long gone.
We all sat down, Peter behind his desk, Jeri and I facing it. The surface of the desk was almost bare, so I figured the secretaries and actual title agents ran the business—except for Amyee, who didn’t look as if she could load a dishwasher, though she might have had other skills. In this place, it was likely that Peter was nothing but an annoying figurehead who needed appeasing at frequent intervals. In a corner of the room I saw an electric putt returner, and a putter leaning half out of sight against a mahogany bookcase that held golf trophies. Man-child Pete was twenty-some pounds overweight, with pudgy fingers and longish brown hair. He probably had a handicap of two, whereas mine was unknown, but likely to be into three digits.
“Know why I agreed to see you two?” he said. Neither Jeri nor I answered, but we exchanged looks. It seemed like a trick question.
“Because of you.” Peter Howard stared straight at me.
“My smile,” I said to Jeri.
“You were disrupting the staff,” Peter remarked sourly. He wasn’t even remotely afraid of me. Too bad.
“Oh? Were there complaints?” I asked.
“What do you want?” Peter asked, eyes shifting between Jeri and me.
“We’re investigating Mr. Sjorgen’s death,” Jeri said.
“I thought the police were doing that.”
“It’s a free country.”
He pursed his lips. “I don’t know anything at all. I have no idea how I could be the slightest help to you.” His tone was stiff and flat, indicating he was already bored with us, wanting to get back to his putter, make the PGA tour.
“Gregory Rudd was in here yesterday,” I said.
Peter Howard looked at me as ten seconds went by in silence. Finally he said, “I wasn’t any help to him either.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.” His look hardened. Not easy, with his smooth, baby face, chubby cheeks, and pale-blue eyes, but he tried. It made him look like a pouty kid who wasn’t getting a toy he wanted, that kind of hard. A big spoiled kid, used to getting his way.
I looked around. A diploma hung on a wall. Peter had an MBA, purchased from Yale. He’d been to the ball, and the next morning the glass slipper had fit, lucky him. I doubted that he knew the first thing about title companies. If Peter Howard drove anything less than a top-of-the-line Audi, I would eat an adobe brick. He looked like the Audi Quattro type, sitting there in a $1500 suit, class ring on one finger. I thought the horsepower-to-weight ratio of a Porsche 911 would scare the lad spitless.
“Are you his grandson?” I asked. “Jefferson’s, I mean.”
“Great-grandson.” He must have figured that Jeri was the senior partner because he looked at her and said, “I don’t have time for this. The police already asked their questions.” He shrugged and added, “I didn’t have anything useful to tell them, either.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Why do you say that?”
He stared at me, frustrated. “What would I know? Jonnie had an office here. He came in every two or three weeks. He’s been the firm’s senior partner for the past four years, ever since my dad retired. As far as I can tell, that has nothing to do with anything.”
Probably. If it were true. No reason for it not to be, but I was feeling antagonistic toward the guy. I didn’t like him. Too smooth, eyes too close together, who knows? Maybe bad chemistry. That or I sensed he wasn’t a carbon-based life form.
“You want to see his office?” Peter said. Hoping to get rid of us, no doubt.
“How long was Mr. Rudd here?” Jeri asked.
“No more than five minutes.”
“Did you see him leave?”
“Not personally, no. The girls out front would have.”
The girls who did all the work, I thought churlishly. Like a true capitalist, Peter Howard was getting rich off the labors of others. But of course, that’s how it’s done. That’s what makes this country great. Soviet-style communism was the most visible political flop of the previous century.
“About Jonnie’s office,” Peter prompted.
“Sure,” Jeri said, standing. “Let’s go have a look.”
We trooped out past Amyee and down a short hall to an office twice the size of Peter’s, but without a secretary posted out front. Better view, too. A huge west-facing window showed casinos rising against the Sierras. At night it would be quite a sight, impressive. I was surprised Peter hadn’t moved in yet.
“Mr. Sjorgen didn’t have a secretary?” I asked.
“He had no need for one,” Peter said. “At least not here.”
“But you do?” I glanced back down the hall to where Amyee was busy with her manicuring chores.
“Of course. I’m here every day.”
“She looks like a whiz with a computer,” I said. Jeri kicked me in the ankle then spun me around to face the room. My employment interview wasn’t going well. Come tomorrow, after ten o’clock, I was likely to find myself in a county government building somewhere, filling out unemployment forms.
Jonnie’s desk was a big important slab of polished rosewood. It probably weighed four hundred pounds, even more than the behemoth, Officer Day.
“Anything in that?” I asked.
“The police went through it,” Peter said, yellowish teeth gnawing at his lower lip. “They took some stuff, logged everything they took.” He leaned against a wall. “I’ll have the rest of it boxed up for his daughter when I get a chance.”
“You should put Amyee on that,” I said, moving out of range of Jeri’s feet.
Peter remained silent.
Jonnie’s daughter, Rosalyn Sjorgen—Nicole’s dance instructor at Ithaca, New York. Floating out there on the far edge of this uproar. Which was hardly her fault. It sunk in then, standing there in Jonnie’s office, that one way or another, guilty or innocent, Rosalyn Sjorgen wasn’t that far out on the edge. She was Jonnie’s daughter, his closest relative. His only relative, in fact, since Jonnie had no siblings and hadn’t gotten around to marrying my wife. Okay, ex-wife. Rosalyn stood to inherit everything, every last dime. Maybe even this corner office, and the desk. A better motive than mine. I ought to run that past Russell Fairchild.
Family. Family member. Rosalyn was his family. I wondered if that might mean anything, given Fairchild’s pearl of wisdom the other day: The ones who know you best…
I wondered if she’d locked her doors in Ithaca, disconnected her phone, burrowed in to wait out the storm. Or if she was aware that he was dead. Like my daughter Nicole, she might be in Europe, roping her way up a craggy Alp. She might be in India, passing out alms.
Jonnie’s house alone was worth a bundle. I wondered how much equity he had in it, how much his estate was worth, all told—
“Mort?”
I popped out of my reverie. Jeri was seated at Jonnie’s desk, giving me a questioning look. “Huh?” I said sluggishly.
“I said, let’s go through this thing, okay?”
“What, the desk?”
“That’s what I said.”
“The police already did that.”
“Now it’s our turn. C’mon.”
She was in his chair. Thing probably cost eight hundred bucks. I crouched down next to her and opened a drawer on the right while she opened the one in the middle. Peter watched for a moment, then said, “Hey, if you need anything.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Jeri mumbled without looking up.
Peter shrugged, went out.
The drawer I’d opened contained a bunch of Sjorgen & Howard business forms, letterhead, general office memos, some of which were five years old. Jeri was into paperclips and old pens, a staple remover, rubber bands, scissors, seventeen cents in change.
A photograph on the desk caught my eye. Walnut frame, glass. Jonnie, twenty years ago, squinting into the sun on a beach somewhere. With him was a bony girl twelve or thirteen years old with Jonnie’s black hair, wearing a droopy green bikini, glasses, braces on her teeth. Rosalyn again. Had to be.
I’d never met her, but it was hard to imagine that gawky kid as Nicole’s dance instructor. The picture was probably taken about the time Nicole was born. Time marches on, carrying kids along with it into adulthood, adults into various kinds of oblivion.
“Find something?” Jeri asked.
“Nope.”
“Then keep looking.”
“That mean I’m on the payroll?”
“Keep looking, Mort.”
I made a show of it, but in my heart I knew it was hopeless. The desk had been sterilized. No way was it going to harbor a packet of death threats from a psycho written in a childlike scrawl, with inky fingerprints, DNA-laden drool, and a return address.
In time, even Jeri called it quits. Ignoring Amyee’s squawk of protest, I stuck my head into Peter Howard’s office unannounced and told him we were leaving. Having missed a putt, he wasn’t thrilled to see me, but he was elated to have us out of his building and out of his life. Me, especially. He might’ve put up with Jeri, one on one.
Outside, walking toward the car, Jeri said, “You’re like a rhino in a china shop, Mort.”
“You mean bull, don’t you?”
“No. Rhino suits you. You need to lighten up. Peter Howard might have told us something.”
“Yeah, well, he started it with that get-outta-here-and-don’t-bother-me attitude of his.”
“Oh, say, that’s an enormous help.”
“I didn’t like the look in his eyes, Jeri.” I had to hurry to keep up with her. Women and aerobics will be the death of tens of thousands of men in the U.S. in the coming years. In droves, we will have heart attacks trying to keep up.
“What look?” she demanded.
“Something squinty. Sneaky.”
“So, based on that, you think what? That he killed and beheaded Jonnie? And worse, used a sabre saw on him? That wimp?”
“I didn’t say that. I doubt if the useless prick knows what a sabre saw is. I think we ought to give him another look, that’s all.”
She stopped at the car and faced me, talking across the width of her Porsche. “Motive, Mort.”
“He wanted Jonnie’s office.”
“Try to get a grip.”
“In L.A. they’ll murder you for jogging shoes. An office with a view is better than shoes, especially if you think it would impress little Amyee darlings.”
“I said, try to get a grip. She’d be impressed with gum.” She got in behind the wheel.
I flung my hands in the air. “Motive? How would I know? Maybe Peter Howard’s got illegal land deals coming out his ass, and Jonnie found out and was about to blow the whistle. Or muscle in. We don’t know what’s going on in that place. And we don’t know how the business is set up, either. With Jonnie out of the picture, maybe it’ll just be Howard Title Company now.”
“Terrific, now work our dead district attorney into this surreal little theory of yours.”
I stared at her for several seconds. “It’s not a theory, it’s a possibility.”
“Technically, that would make it a hypothesis, and a weak one at that. Now get in. Or do you want to go back and paw through Jonnie’s desk for another hour or two?”
“Not on your life.” I hopped in, wedged into the seat like a two-hundred-pound woman into size seven panties, then stuck the moustache back on again.
Jeri fired up the engine and took off, looked over at me. “Offhand, I don’t see any compelling reason to uproot Sjorgen & Howard, Mort. We need a helluva lot more than squinty eyes and darling Amyee. Unless what you really want is her phone number.”
“Maybe I do. Gum’s a cheap date.”
She laughed, then snapped my head back shifting the Porsche into third.