JERI DROPPED ME off downtown at the corner of First and Virginia and sped away. I watched her go. I still hadn’t asked her about the judo, not that it mattered. I pretty much had the gist. She turned a corner, gone, and I headed up north on foot, through the heart of Reno’s gaming district.
The golf hat didn’t suit me, so I shoved it in a pocket and bought a cheap black cowboy hat at a tourist ripoff joint on the corner of Second and Virginia. Reno’s transient and tourist population is eclectic enough that you can get away with that wild west, drugstore cowboy look without drawing stares, even if this wild west is one of used car salesmen, crack dealers, fast food, and massage parlors.
It was nearing three o’clock when I got to the Golden Goose. O’Roarke was just coming on shift, tying on an apron. He stared wordlessly at the hat. I took it off, knowing by his smirk that buying it had been one more mistake in a long line. I set it on the stool next to mine, ordered a plain Coke.
“How ‘bout a sarsaparilla, pardner?” he drawled. “Cuts trail dust like nothin’ you ever saw.”
“Aaaaand, there goes your tip, smart ass.” I stuck my moustache on a jar of beer nuts again. Made it look like Groucho, or Hitler.
“You haven’t tipped me in two years, Angel.” He slid a Coke in front of me.
“Not true. February I told you tomato paste gets out skunk odor.”
He went to the other end of the bar and waited on three elderly ladies who were waving drink coupons at him. He didn’t return for ten minutes. So much for giving him cool tips.
I sat there in the gloom, thinking about this deal with Jeri, letting the week’s events wash over me.
K.
Three people dead.
And me, right in the thick of it, with no more idea of what was going on than your average teenager knows about Kurds in Iraq or border tensions between Mexico and Guatemala.
How close was the danger? More to the point, how close was it to Dallas? Or to K, or Jeri? Or even Dale, though she was probably safe now, on her way to New Hampshire.
Questions without answers. The danger might already be past. It could have been a transitory horror that had swept Greg up in one final blaze of glory and was over now.
I closed my eyes and…saw rage. At a gut level, penises hacked off and stuffed into holes cut into skulls equates to rage, hatred of an astronomical order.
Or not. Colombians in the drug trade might do that on a whim, a warning to the competition, or as a way to amuse themselves on a slow night, but I didn’t see Colombians anywhere near this. Or drugs. Nothing like that.
Fact is, I didn’t see much of anything in it. Nothing added up. Milliken might have been the initial target and Jonnie and Greg had somehow ended up on the tracks when the train went by. The enemies of Reno’s D.A. would number in the hundreds. An imaginative psychopath might’ve been sprung from the state prison down in Carson and come north to settle a score. Things like that happen. If so, it was strictly a police matter. I wouldn’t have a hope in hell of finding a lunatic with prison tattoos and a smoldering grudge who might already be off in the Great Smokies of Tennessee working as a dishwasher in a rowdy little no-name roadhouse.
And, was I fooling myself?
Was I a gumshoe, or just an early middle-aged ex-IRS agent on a barstool fooling himself, headed down one more dark road to an unknown destination?
Some questions don’t have easy answers.
* * *
Four Cokes and four hours later, I left, regretting the choice of drinks. Coke doesn’t have the ongoing appeal of beer. It doesn’t cloud the mind, so you can’t even fool yourself into thinking you’re getting somewhere. The only diversion of note was the national news on TV at five thirty, in which one bulky and almost certainly dangerous Mortimer Angel—unquestionably a household name by this time—out for his morning jog, had led news vans into a parking garage, jogged downstairs to an exit, and, minutes later, was more or less responsible for the collision of an L.A. news wagon and a Citifare bus—to which O’Roarke, still smirking, said, “And to think I knew you when.” The jerk.
By seven fifteen I was on the sidewalk, facing east. The day was cooling but still hot, still in the nineties, bright sunlight slanting in from the west. A stink of exhaust overlay Virginia Street. The tourists had a worn, glazed look. Even normally alert panhandlers were lethargic.
Across the street, Sjorgen House was a grayish-brown hulk rising into the shadows of overhanging elms. Light glinted off a rickety TV antenna on the roof, near a canted, copper-green cupola topped by a weathervane.
Sjorgen House.
Or Woolley House, depending. A dark, haunted-looking thing of old gables and cornices, dormer windows, square columns supporting an empty porch that ran the full width of the front. The place should have been painted New England white. It would’ve transformed it.
Whose was it now? What was its legal status, and what would happen to it and to Edna Woolley now that Jonnie was gone? Would the Huns of Progress bribe someone on the historical society and a few council members, raze the mansion and the rest of the block, and put up another gleaming six-hundred-million-dollar casino or a new parking garage?
A dormer window was open on the third floor, a yellow curtain hanging limp over the sill. The yard was deserted, the grass dry and gone to patches of bare earth and weeds. Thick shrubs grew along both sides of the house, and a climbing rose had reached the second floor, putting out bright explosions of yellow.
I jaywalked over, cowboy hat tilted at a jaunty angle. The front yard was unprotected by a fence. Cigarette butts and gum wrappers were ground into the dirt near the sidewalk like the aftermath of a double-A baseball game.
I remembered seeing Edna Woolley on television a few years ago, during her ninety-sixth birthday. By now she would be nearing a hundred.
How had she come to live in Sjorgen House? I had a rough idea of when, but didn’t know any of the particulars. Either I hadn’t paid enough attention to the news of late, or the subject hadn’t been brought up. Wendell and Jane Sjorgen—Jonnie’s parents—had vacated the place, and Edna moved in. I did know that Jane Sjorgen divorced Wendell a few months after that, which carried the scent of scandal, but there wasn’t a hint that a scandal or anything like it had occurred.
Now, I was or wasn’t a private detective. If I wasn’t, I could turn in my badge, symbolically speaking, go home, shower, circle job openings in the paper, catch another of Leno’s Mortimer Angel jokes, crawl into bed and dream sweet dreams. If, on the other hand, I still had dreams of another kind, I could go nose around Jonnie’s holdings, shake the trees, see if anything interesting fell out. And I was standing in front of one of his holdings right now.
So, Great Gumshoe, what’s it gonna be?
I strolled up a concrete walk toward the house, hands in my pockets, not yet committed to anything. Who knows? I might’ve been an encyclopedia salesman in a cowboy hat. Come to think of it, that might be in my future, or going door to door with Electroluxes.
For forty years Edna had lived here. Last I’d heard, she had a live-in housekeeper or nurse taking care of her, something like that.
I climbed four warped treads to the front porch and came face to face with a recently written note on a three-by-five card that read: No solicitors, no interviews, no reporters. Do NOT Ring the Bell! This means you! It was thumbtacked to the wood above the doorbell.
Evidently the Sjorgen-Milliken saga had also reached this place and the occupants were fed up with it. I knew how they felt.
Roadblocks, decisions. I turned and looked back at the street, fifty feet away. What would a real gumshoe do at a time like this?
Ring the bell, of course, see who answers, try to strike up a conversation, apologize if necessary, wing it, backpedal if anyone pulled a gun, pretend to be a Mormon, hand out tracts.
Or maybe come back at two in the morning, climb in through a window and skulk around. A real gumshoe might do that.
I compromised. I knocked.
Waited half a minute, knocked again. Waited a full minute, then rang the damn bell. Nothing. I listened to the dead quiet of the house, stared at the blank, empty gaze of its windows.
So much for Plan A. Plan B, skulking in the wee hours of the morning, didn’t have much appeal. If a Plan C were in the works, I’d have to invent it.
I stepped off the porch, went around the side of the house and looked down toward the back. High above, the attic window still stood open, curtain across the sill as if a gust of wind had blown it there. A sound of jazz floated on the air, as faint as a memory.
Toward the back, a separate garage sat in the backyard, also in a state of disrepair, low and shadowy beneath the leafy elms. Along the outer wall of the main house, a phone line dangled from loose, rusty staples and disappeared through a badly puttied hole. I looked up. The siding was stained where water had leaked from a damaged gutter. Big discoveries, these.
Between the shrubbery, whatever foundation the house had was partly hidden by latticework, two-inch-wide cedar strips crisscrossing in diagonals, forming diamonds beyond which lay blackness, exuding a cool moist odor of dark earth and worms.
The first-story windows were eight feet off the ground, too high to peek inside, so I stepped between two bushes and crouched down, peered through the latticework into the darkness beneath the house. At first I saw concrete piers, supporting the house. Then I jerked my head back sharply. Inside, six inches from my eye, was a glistening black widow spider, fat as a plum. I’d never seen one so big, hanging there upside down in the gloom, waiting for meat, for flies that sought that rank, undisturbed coolness beneath the house.
Bright red hourglass, so shiny it looked freshly painted. My skin crawled. I don’t care for alien critters: spiders, scorpions, centipedes, earwigs, potato bugs, but there’s nothing worse than black widows. Things can move fast as hell. I was glad they didn’t have wings. I glanced to one side and saw another, then another. A dozen of them—
“Hey, you.”
I turned, looked up. Not four feet away stood a gorgeous girl with straight black hair hanging to the small of her back, pale-green nylon jogging shorts and an off-white crop top with a ragged lower edge, as if she’d hacked off a sleeveless T-shirt with scissors. She was a real beauty, twenty years old, maybe only eighteen. Hard to tell when they’re that young. The bottom edge of her top was cut off high, too high. The fabric stood well out from her body, riding the swell of her breasts. From that angle I could see two inches of sweet curving undersides, where a woman’s skin is softest.
The nudity was jarring. Pale rounded globes, as unexpected as ghosts. The thought darted through my mind that there’d been a lot of this kind of thing in my life lately. Greg’s fate notwithstanding, this PI gig was still right on track.
The girl’s feet were planted well apart. No shoes. Her stomach was flat. Cute little pierced bellybutton sporting a silver ring that held a green stone. She was slender, approaching skinny, ribs so prominent I could have counted them, if I’d been so inclined.
“You rang the bell,” she said accusingly.
“Guilty as charged.”
“Can’t you read?”
“Read what?” When in doubt, feign ignorance. For me, that’s never a stretch.
She frowned. “What’re you doin’ down there?”
“Pest control,” I stayed in a crouch and waved a hand toward the latticework, took another peek at her breasts even if she was way too young for an old codger like me.
She smiled, pushed her chest out another quarter inch and said, “So, sport, what d’you think?”
Any number of things, an entire murky galaxy of things, none of which seemed right for the moment, so what I chose to say was, “Be sure to get your oil changed every three thousand miles.”
She blinked. Finally she said, “You’re an idiot.”
Okay, she didn’t fool easily.
Another woman came up beside her. Older, but they looked enough alike to be sisters, or mother and daughter. “That’s no way to talk, Winter, honey,” she said.
Winter. A chilly name, but appropriate. I got slowly to my feet. The women were the same height, about five foot five. Winter had an incredibly tiny twenty-three inch waist. I guessed her weight at a hundred pounds, if that, but she looked wiry enough. Her stomach was flat, hard with muscle.
“John Wayne here is checking out bugs, Mom,” she said, still looking at me.
John Wayne? Swiftly—or maybe not so swiftly—I removed the hat.
“And here I thought you were a private investigator, Mr. Angel,” the older woman said. She was a looker, too, mid-thirties, wearing blue denim shorts and a yellow shirt with bits of redwood bark or mulch clinging to them. A two-way radio was attached to her belt.
“You’ve been watching television,” I said. My moustache, now that I thought of it, was still stuck to that jar of beer nuts in the lounge across the street. I might’ve fooled her with that.
“They’d recognize you in Atlanta. Or Miami, Chicago, you name it. You’re quite the celebrity, Mr. Angel.”
“Mort. Guess you got me,” I said, catching an eerie little smile on Winter’s face, in her eyes.
“So…bugs?” Winter’s mother asked.
“Spiders.” I shrugged. “Black widows. There’s a bunch of them under the house.”
Winter’s eyes widened. She took a step back. “Oh, ugh.”
“Pretty damn big ones, too,” I said, trying to give the kid’s chain a little extra yank, now that I’d found a chain.
“But,” the older woman said, “are they any concern of yours?”
“Only if one bit me.”
She ignored that. “Nor did they bring you here, onto our private property, all the way to the side of our house.”
Our property, our house. Did I see a hint of Edna Woolley in this woman’s face, or was I only imagining it? “Uh, no.”
“Mr. Sjorgen’s death did, however.” A question filled her eyes, but it was a question whose answer she already knew. Might’ve meant she was a lawyer.
“Sort of.”
“More than sort of,” she pressed, in pursuit of a confession, truth, possibly even justice. It was hard to tell.
“Yeah, okay.”
“And right now you’re wondering who we are.” She put an arm around Winter’s shoulders.
“The thought crossed my mind.”
“I’m Victoria, Edna’s granddaughter. And this is my daughter, Winter.”
Something filled Winter’s eyes, like amusement. If it was, it was very chilly humor. Strange kid. I didn’t much care for her, I have to admit. And yet, I was aware that if I were to crouch down to tie a shoelace I’d have an interesting view if I wanted one. She would let me look. She wanted me to. She knew she looked good. Her arms and legs were hard. Not like Jeri’s, though. Winter was more the slender type, more like a dancer, someone into ballet.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“Now,” Victoria said, “go away.”
As abrupt and as hard as a slap in the face. Winter stared at me, registering nothing.
Get pushed though, and sometimes you push back. Suddenly I wasn’t ready to go. “I was hoping to have a word with Edna.”
“You and everyone else. You’re the last person on earth I’d let see her right now,” Victoria said.
“Is that your call to make?”
“Mine alone, Mr. Angel.”
I thought about that and decided it was time to fold the hand. She was right, I had no business there, or at least no legitimate way to get past the Minotaurs guarding the portal. And, what was the point?
“Who is it, Victoria?” an elderly voice called down from above.
I looked up. Edna Woolley was peering down at us from that third-floor dormer. Her eyeglasses reflected light, turning her eyes into shiny disks.
“No one, Grandma,” Victoria said loudly, still looking at me.
“Send him up.”
“It’s no one. Just an exterminator.”
“Send him up. He wants to see me. You never send anyone up.” Her voice had a thready complaining quality, but it wasn’t as frail as I’d imagined it would be.
I looked at Victoria. “Is that right? Is there a reason you never send anyone up?”
She studied me, then in a surprise move she stepped back and indicated the way with a sweep of her hand. “Go right ahead, Mr. Mortimer Angel. Be my guest.”
“Mo-o-o-m,” Winter said, her voice suddenly that of a typical whiny teenager.
“Let him.” Victoria’s eyes bored into mine. “Go. Have a nice visit. She’ll like that. Just don’t mention Jonathan.”
“Jonathan?”
“Jonathan Sjorgen.” Victoria’s nose wrinkled in distaste. “Jonnie, as everyone seems to call him. Grandma doesn’t know anything about what’s happened. It would only upset her to find out. If you do…”
She let the thought hang. Still, just like that, I was in.
Like Thomas Magnum, like Hammer.
Well, almost.