I GOT TO Jeri’s at 8:10 Monday morning.
She was rummaging through a desk. Rainbows glided throughout the room. The vegetation gave off an interesting, musty jungle scent that made me think a rubber tree was exactly what I needed back at my place. Without looking up, she said, “You’re late.”
I removed the wig she’d given me and dropped it on her desk. “Dock me a dollar sixty-seven cents.”
She stared at the wig. “I think I’ll just work you harder.”
“Too late.”
“Oh?” She looked up, suddenly suspicious.
“By the way, how’d your case go this weekend?”
“Could’ve been better, and why am I too late?”
Time to come clean. I’d learned too much to keep it from her. I told her about Stephen Oleson’s secretary, Austin, Emmaline Dorman, even the fact that Kayla had turned up. And I told her about Winter, Victoria, and my talk with Edna, but I didn’t mention the scene with Winter in the gloom of that second-floor hallway. Something about that defied explanation.
I told her about going through the fence into Velma’s backyard to avoid media trolls in front of my house. I thought she’d appreciate that, but evidently not because she gave me a hard look. “Kayla,” she said. “Rosalyn Sjorgen, of all people. You went to Austin with her? Christ, Mort, I told you to lay off the case.”
“Oh, don’t you worry. But you could’ve screwed something up. There’s a nasty killer out there.”
“I didn’t, though. Screw things up.”
“Is that so? Is she pretty?”
“Does it matter?”
“Not to me.” Her voice was like a knife. Her head ducked down and she began pawing through the drawer again. She had on an ivory silk shirt and plum slacks, matching ivory sandals. She looked good. She wore earrings, a hint of makeup, hair nicely done up, poofed and feathery. I caught a whiff of perfume, something I hadn’t noticed before. Kayla was right, she was very pretty—gorgeous, in fact, even if she sometimes doubled as a hydraulic ram.
“Lose something?” I asked.
She slammed the drawer, hard. “No, I didn’t lose anything. You didn’t say anything about a Jacoba or a Victoria, Mort. Or anything about anyone named Winter, either. Not one word.”
“I sort of dropped by that day—at Sjorgen House. I didn’t think it mattered.”
“So, you went all the way to Austin with this Kayla person because it didn’t matter.”
Unfathomable anger. It’s another of their tricks, one more way to keep us rotating over the coals.
“I went because of what Clair Hutson said about Jonnie trying to rape Sarah Jean,” I told her. “About that time, Wendell Sjorgen gave up his house to Edna Woolley. All those events took place in roughly the same time frame. All within eighteen months.”
“So you and Kayla went and saw Oleson’s secretaries. Then the two of you charged off to Austin together for the weekend.”
“Hey, you’re quick.”
She glared at me. I thought she’d take me into her back room and slam me around a while to work off her anger. Instead, she picked up the phone and got hold of Dallas, then told me to please go get her a diet Coke from her refrigerator. I thought it would be a nice gesture if I did what she asked for once. When I got back—without the Coke because there weren’t any to get—Jeri was talking to a travel agent. All I got from that conversation were a bunch of “yeses,” “no’s,” and “uh-huhs.” After a few minutes of that, she hung up.
“Let’s go,” she said, standing, grabbing a purse.
“Where to?”
“Myrtle Beach.”
* * *
I was a hunk of newspaper, caught between two whirlwinds—Kayla and Jeri.
“Myrtle Beach?”
“The plane leaves at 9:20, Mort. In forty-eight minutes. They’ll be boarding before we reach security and they’re probably going to strip-search you, so let’s get going.”
“What about Fairchild?” I asked. “What about my not leaving the city or the county, whatever?”
She grabbed my wig as she came around the desk, rammed it into my arms with almost enough force to crack a rib. “You went to Austin, didn’t you? That’s out of the county. You survived that. What Fairchild doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
I followed her, not because I wanted to but because she had a hand on my wrist and was dragging me out the door. I had no choice in the matter. Christ, she was strong.
She left twenty feet of expensive rubber in front of her house-office-gymnasium, headed in the general direction of I-80.
“We land at Dallas-Fort Worth first,” she said. “Then Atlanta and a hop to Myrtle Beach. Short layovers. My travel agent’s getting all that ticketing hoopla set up as we speak.”
“What’s the rush?”
She glanced at me. “Miss this flight, the next one’s late afternoon to La Guardia, of all the hideous places. We wouldn’t get to Myrtle Beach until noon tomorrow after a four-hour layover at Atlanta. Who needs that? This way we can be back tomorrow, if things work out.”
“We’re already booked on a return flight?”
“Not yet, but we will be by the time we reach the airport. Don’t worry about it.”
“I don’t have a change of clothes, anything.”
“Neither do I. This comes under the heading of expenses, Mort. You can buy a change of underwear somewhere. Dallas already okayed it.”
She would. She always said clean underwear was important, like in the event of a plane crash. I patted my pockets. No cell phone. Backtracking through the morning, I remembered seeing it on my dresser in the bedroom, but didn’t remember picking it up as I went out. “I’ve got to phone Kayla, Jer.” I thought calling her “Jer” might loosen her up.
“If we have time.” She glanced at her watch and eased off on the accelerator. “Put on the wig. You’re still more recognizable than the vice president of the United States.”
Which wasn’t saying much. The VP could sing the National Anthem at Shea Stadium with a sign around his neck without anyone recognizing him.
We made it through security and into the plane with two minutes to spare before the doors closed and the plane backed out of its slot. No strip search by some nice TSA lady, which made my trip through security quick but bland. I sank back in my seat and closed my eyes. “Jesus Christ.”
“What’s the problem? We made it.”
My brain, such as it was, finally started to catch up. “Why are we going to Myrtle goddamn Beach, Jeri?”
“To find Jacoba, of course. And her child. And Edna’s sister, if she’s still alive.”
“Rooting through the past again.”
“You got it. You’re the one who opened that door, remember?”
“Why not phone someone out there? Turn it over to a PI firm in Myrtle Beach.”
“I don’t like to do that.”
“Greg did, all the time.”
“Well, I don’t. I do my own work. Then I know it’s done right, things don’t get overlooked.”
“How are we going to go about it? What name do we look for? Edna’s sister won’t be part of the Woolley clan.”
“Holmquist,” Jeri said. “Edna’s maiden name.”
“Holmquist?” First I’d heard of it. Things like that make me feel like a three-legged bulldog at a greyhound race. I’d thought I was a mile ahead of her. How’d she get ahead of me?
“I found it on the computer this morning,” Jeri said. “Marriage records go back all the way to 1889. Emmaline Dorman told you she thought Edna’s sister never married. We’ll start there.”
“We don’t know the sister’s first name, Jeri.”
“Holmquist isn’t Smith or Jones, Mort. Trust me, this’ll be a no-brainer.”
A no-brainer. Precisely my speed. I decided to shut up. If anyone could find Edna’s sister, it wouldn’t be me, but maybe I could learn something if I kept my eyes and ears open.
Jeri had the window seat. She looked outside as we taxied toward the runway. I had the impression that she’d torn me away from Kayla. Which was ridiculous, but there it was, a gut feeling that settled in and wouldn’t go away. It was also a conversational gambit I wouldn’t set fire to with a length of fuse and a two-hour head start.
The 737 roared down the runway and lifted off at a steep angle. Two minutes later Reno was five thousand feet below, eight miles back.
* * *
I managed to grab a few minutes of sleep on the way to Dallas-Fort Worth. Jeri stared out the window the whole way. At the airport we had twenty-five minutes to catch our Atlanta connection. I found a pay phone and called my place, but Kayla didn’t pick up. She was sitting tight, not expecting a call from me. Either that or she was out walking another twenty miles. I’d avoided a loathsome answering machine in the house for as long as possible, but it was looking like the time had come.
We gained two time zones. Jeri and I boarded a 757 that lifted off at 2:25, local time. Soon, Jeri was looking more relaxed. Somewhere over the eastern edge of Texas she turned to me and said, “So, Mort, tell me about your family.”
Safe enough. I couldn’t think of one reason why she’d want to stuff me out the window into the slipstream if all I was talking about was family.
“What do you want to know?”
“You know. The usual. Got any brothers or sisters?”
“A sister, Ellen.”
Who proved, like most Angels and Rudds, to be a nice enough person, but a flat, circular track with no distinguishing marks. That may sound cruel, but it’s true. I too am a flat, circular track, or was until I became a world-famous PI. Ellen was a senior CPA for a well-known insurance company. It took a moment to explain that aspect of our plain-vanilla heritage to Jeri.
“That bad, huh? What’s your dad do, or is he retired?”
“He was also an accountant. Had a brain like an adding machine. Genetically speaking, it’s what he was made for.”
“Was?”
“He’s dead. The only Angel to have gone out with a bang.”
Her smile was hesitant. It made her look younger, as if she wasn’t young enough. I had slightly more than a decade on her. When they’re that age, and attractive, I start getting nervous.
“A bang?” She sipped orange juice—the synthetic kind that only airlines buy. It’s a distinctive, metallic flavor, one you would never mistake for actual orange juice.
“My dad was playing golf,” I told her. “Part of a foursome over at Arrow Creek. Clouds had been building all afternoon. Big black numbers. It started raining, huge drops that hit on asphalt leaving splats the size of silver dollars, thunder rumbling off to the south, and one of the guys suggested they call it quits. So right there at the sixteenth hole my dad pointed his putter at the sky and said, ‘Up to you, Big Guy!’ or words to that effect.”
“Oh, no.”
“Uh-huh. He took a bolt. That might seem rather biblical, except it’s not that uncommon. Dozens of people are killed by lightning every year. Most of them aren’t waving pointy metallic objects at a threatening sky at the time, either.”
“Jeez-us, Mort.”
“That was nine years ago. Two of the others in the foursome were knocked unconscious by the hit. Both are dead now, one by suicide, the other by cirrhosis. As my mother says, it wasn’t a good day for the game of golf.
“I kind of admired him for it, though. He didn’t go in his sleep or facedown at his desk, like almost every other Angel has since Martin Angel stepped out a sixteenth-story window over Wall Street in ’29 and landed on a milk wagon.”
Jeri smiled. “And you say your family has no color.”
“What? Martin’s Wall Street dive?” I shrugged. “Call it color if you like.”
“It’s something.”
“It was over in seconds, like putting an exclamation point at the end of a very dull sentence. Mystique-wise, it didn’t put much of a dent in a lifetime of stockbrokering. There’s absolutely nothing else to say about him, except he went to church every Sunday of his life.”
“What about your mother?”
“What about her?”
“How’d she take it, your dad dying like that? By lightning, I mean.”
“Like a Mack truck. Or maybe a Kenworth. Something like that.” In fact, she’d taken it like a Peterbilt, but I left that conversational gambit for a future time.
Jeri pursed her lips. “Care to explain that?”
“My mother was tickled pink, in an understated way. She was the very antithesis of the Angel clan. She had ideas, dreams. My father had only a succession of paydays that was going to follow him to the grave. His death turned her loose.”
“What kind of dreams?”
I told her. Doreen Thompson Angel, age fifty-six at the time of Harold Angel’s tragic end, suddenly found herself moderately rich. Good old Harold had been as conservative as he was unimaginative. He’d taken out a life insurance policy on himself for $250,000. Dori had picked up double indemnity on the policy, since lightning strikes are considered accidental even if you’re talking to God and waving metal clubs around at the time. I didn’t know all the details of how she got in contact with Ethan Armitage—a name that sounded made up to me—or how he’d found her, but suddenly the two of them were business partners in something called PET, Inc. Pet Entertainment Teleplays, Incorporated.
Armitage was an eager-eyed old fart, all bone and gristle, with TV-evangelist hair, who could talk a mile a minute and sound almost sane. He’d had the idea of making dog and cat videos for pampered housebound pets of the rich and not-so-bright while they were at work, and was trying to rustle up investors.
I met him once, at Harrah’s Steak House over dinner. The only thing I didn’t get was that Mom appeared to have her eyes wide open, yet she couldn’t see this disaster unfolding. Armitage was going to skip, I just knew it. Why he had consented to meet me was beyond my powers of comprehension. For what he was doing to my dear mother I might’ve broken his back. Once they get the money, they’re gone, and by then Armitage had the entire $500,000 and an additional $25,000 of Mom’s savings besides. He’d cleaned her out, all with a harebrained get-rich-quick scheme about dog videos. The sonofabitch even had the gall to ask me if I wanted in on the ground floor, which was probably the real reason he’d agreed to meet me. I turned him down, of course. It was all I could do not to haul his ass into the men’s room and use his skinny body to pound porcelain fixtures off the walls.
They went national a year later. Mom octupled her $525,000 in twenty eight months, paid her taxes, reinvested in Treasury bills and mutual funds at a time when the stock market was going bonkers, and was off to Hawaii. She never looked back. Certainly not at me, who’d told her in no uncertain terms that she was throwing her money down a rat hole.
“Great judge of character, Mort,” Jeri said.
“Oh, yeah. I can spot ’em, all right.”
She laughed. “And now? What’s your mom doing these days?”
“Enjoying herself immensely. Investing money. Spending it. She’s worth around eight million. Maui suits her. Every few months there’s another stud twenty or thirty years younger than she is. It’s a revolving door. She brings them to Reno sometimes, mostly to flaunt them, I think.”
“Studs, huh?” Jeri looked out the window.
“That’s conjecture on my part, but none of ’em have been mental giants. I don’t think she keeps them around as chess partners.”
By then I guessed we were somewhere over Mississippi. Dark-blue sky above, clouds and haze below.
“Tell me about judo,” I said, wondering if she’d mention karate championships and Hawaii.
She took another sip of synthetic orange drink. “I grew up with it,” she said. “Dad’s an instructor in San Francisco, fifth degree black belt in judo, fifth degree in Aikido.”
“Aikido. I’ve heard of it, but I haven’t heard it mentioned in a long time. I thought it was dead, at least here in the U.S.”
“It’s not as big as it once was, but it’s still around. It’s about self-defense, using another person’s strength and weight against them.”
“Someone like me.”
She nodded, smiling faintly. “Aikido wouldn’t be your first choice to attack someone. Until I moved to Reno, I trained a lot with my brother, Ron. He’s in Sacramento. Ron is two years older than me. He placed second in the North American Judo Championships last year, eighty-six kilogram class.”
“Sounds like a bad guy to jump in an alley.”
She grinned. “Like you wouldn’t believe. An alley would be the worst place to tangle with him. You can do things in an alley that you can’t do on a mat with judges watching, and Ron knows a lot of that. A lot.” She paused for a moment, then said, “He taught me quite a bit of it. For a martial arts guy, he’s not what you would call pacifistic. He has the idea that self-defense is supposed to mean something more than defense. His philosophy is no second chances if someone attacks you. Go for the kill.”
“Which means you’d be bad news in an alley too, huh?”
“Not a lot of fun, no.”
“Have you ever competed?”
She stared out the window. “Women’s Nationals three years ago, New Orleans. In karate. I placed sixth. Different rules. Karate’s not my thing. Judo holds aren’t allowed.”
“Yeah? Sixth? That’s great, terrific even. Anything more recent?”
She faced me. “Okay, just say it, Mort.”
“Say what?”
“If you don’t know what, then I’m going to listen to music.”
“Just…you looked pretty darn good on TV on Sunday.”
“Hell.”
“Third in all of North America and Asia. That’s great, more than great. I would have placed around ten or twenty millionth.”
She closed her eyes. For a while she didn’t say anything. Then, “I’m too short. It’s my reach. Mobley’s five-ten. I’m stronger, faster too, but she gets through, scores points. Even that doggone Korean girl is four inches taller than me.”
“Christ, Jeri, you took third.”
“Third doesn’t cut it. Not with me. I’m better at powerlifting. Not body building, which is narcissistic nonsense, but pure lifting. Putting weight over my head.”
“You said you took—what?—fourth in the U.S.”
“That was last year. The difference between first and fourth was only twenty-two pounds total on all three lifts. I’ve picked up nineteen pounds since then. And that last 10 percent isn’t strength, it’s pure technique. By the time the Olympic trials come around, I ought to be right up there.”
I said, “Only world-class thing I do is find heads.”
She gave me a look, then put on headphones and kept them on for the rest of the flight.
* * *
The plane landed at Atlanta. Our connecting flight didn’t leave for half an hour so I had time to phone home again. Still no answer. I didn’t like that, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Jeri also phoned, different direction, and got hold of a PI firm in Myrtle Beach called Furtado Investigations. We boarded the plane at 5:52 for the last leg to Myrtle Beach, got hung up on the tarmac waiting for six or eight planes to take off ahead of us, then roared off almost due east, headed for the Atlantic seaboard.
It was a short flight, fifty-two minutes. I took the window seat. We were forty miles from the coast when I saw dark clouds to the southeast, a squall line building. Over the intercom the pilot told us it was tropical storm Beryl, still a hundred forty miles from shore and about due east of Savannah, but headed toward the Carolina coast at twelve miles an hour with sustained winds of sixty-eight MPH. Second named storm of the season, and bigger than the first, Agnes, which had wimped out.
“Might get wet later tonight,” I said.
“Uh-huh.”
She’d lapsed back into moody silence, staring past me out the window. I left her to her thoughts. We started losing altitude, going into a low-power effortless glide, bleeding off air speed, flaps down a notch. We banked northward, easing down over cypress and tupelo swamps, tobacco fields, pine forests, salt marshes and tidal creeks, all of it so green it was enough to make a Nevadan’s eyes bleed. You get used to a world of grays and browns—low, tough vegetation that survives on seven inches of rainfall a year. If Beryl kept coming, this place might get seven inches an hour.
We passed right over Murrell’s Inlet, for many years the home of Mickey Spillane, a ragtag little backwater of homes and fishing boats. Then coastal forest, swampy inlets, more cypress, a few more fields, swampland, then we were racing over asphalt and concrete. The tires touched down at 7:25, local time.
Jeri checked reservations for our return flight while I located the car rental area, still wearing my wig. In spite of Beryl, the sun was bright, temperature in the low eighties, but a breeze was up, smelling of ocean. Jeri got a midnight-blue Mustang at Hertz, a poor man’s Porsche but with plenty of zip if you own a Tercel. Jeri drove. We exited the Jetport and circled around on a few loopy roads and finally ended up on Ocean Boulevard, headed north.
A wall of high-rise condos and hotels blocked much of the view of the Atlantic. Traffic was sluggish. We passed an amusement park with a wooden roller coaster, girls in bikinis on the sidewalks, kids on skateboards and rollerblades. You could smell the tropical greenery and salt in the air, catch whiffs of hot dogs, cotton candy, cocoa butter and coconut-scented suntan lotion.
We stopped at a light. Two teenage girls wearing maybe eight square inches of material between them crossed in front of our car, bobbling, showing off what nature had recently given them.
“Nice view?” Jeri asked me.
“Terrific, if you like bubble gum and low SAT scores.”
She smiled at that. “You ever been here before, Mort?”
I shook my head. “Nope. You?”
“Once. It’s been a while. I was sixteen. It’s bigger now than I remember, more built up.”
“Progress.”
“Like hell.”
The light changed. The Mustang shot ahead, then slowed at the tail end of a line of slow-moving cars, mostly driven by old folks in their eighties. We went about ten jerky blocks like that.
“This thing at…what’s it called? Furtado’s?” I said.
“Yeah. What about it?”
“I thought you said you do all the work yourself.”
“I do. But local access and resources are a big help. Keeps you from thumbing through phone books in hotel lobbies.”
I nodded. Fell silent again. Learning.
To the right, a gap opened up in the condos and I saw whitecaps on the ocean, a curved beach with lots of flesh still on it, lifeguard towers. To the west was an amusement park called the Pavilion, with a steel frame corkscrew roller coaster and several other wild rides. Farther north, a pier reached a thousand feet into the ocean. Overhead, a slow-moving single-engine plane trailed a banner that read: Crazy Zach’s - North Myrtle Beach.
“Where is this Furtado’s?” I asked.
“Thirty-sixth Avenue North.”
We were passing Tenth. This was going to take a while. I sat back and took in the town. Like Reno, it was experiencing growing pains. Another retirement Mecca, like West Palm Beach, Orlando, Tampa, Tucson. They crowd in until the place goes to hell and the murder rate doubles, then doubles again, then again. Those with the means to get out, do. They crowd in someplace else and repeat the cycle.
Furtado Investigations was in a squat cinder block building sandwiched between a locksmith on one side and a cut-rate appliance store on the other where everything in the place had to go! go! go!—at unbelievable, never-to-be-repeated prices.
Emilio Furtado was in his forties, dark-skinned, thirty pounds overweight, with shiny black brush-cut hair and ancient acne scars, green slacks, tassels on white shoes and half a dozen gold chains around his neck, half-hidden in a thick nest of chest hair. He smiled when he saw Jeri, still looking good in her pale silk shirt and plum pants. The smile faded when he got a second look at me.
“Rain’s comin’,” he said in unaccented English to her chest, where his eyes were glued at the time. He was evidently a breast man. “Got us a storm brewin’ out there. I hope you got somethin’ else to wear when it comes in.”
“We’ll manage,” Jeri said.
I took off the wig and rubbed my scalp. The thing was driving me nuts. Emilio stared at the wig, then at me, then he grinned. “Hey, you’re that guy from Reno, right? That heads guy—Angel.”
“Give that man a giant stuffed panda,” I said.
Jeri elbowed my ribs. Emilio looked at Jeri, back to me. “Hey, this about that? It is, ain’t it? Man, everybody’s talkin’ ’bout that.”
“Everybody but you,” Jeri said. “We weren’t here.”
Emilio’s grin widened. “Oh, yeah, sure. All I meant was, hey, this’s great.” His face changed subtly and he looked at me. “You, uh, didn’t like do it, didja, man?”
“I have these blackouts,” I said, moving away from Jeri.
His grin went lopsided, then returned slowly. “Hey, you, what a kidder, huh? You I like, big guy.”
Jeri lifted an eyebrow at me and mouthed “big guy?” then she and Emilio got down to business. I watched over their shoulders, literally. Emilio fired up a computer and brought up a list of all the Holmquists in the area, which included Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, and smaller outlying communities like Conway and Surfside Beach, dozens of others.
They found three Holmquists, but eliminated all of them within minutes.
Furtado had a collection of phone books socked away in a back room, covering most of South Carolina and parts of neighboring states. Fifteen of them were of Myrtle Beach and environs, one every two or three years, reaching back to 1978. Emilio pulled the first one off the pile, three years old. He located two Holmquists, but they were ones they’d already eliminated. Jeri went straight to the oldest book and found a Jewel Holmquist with an address in Conway.
“That was back in the days a woman could put her first name in a public directory,” Emilio observed slowly, miffed that he hadn’t been the one to find it. “Nowadays it attracts every kinda pervert you can imagine.”
“Look up Woolley,” I said to Jeri.
She stared at me, then understood what I meant. In the front room she got the most recent phone book from Emilio’s desk. She thumbed through the W’s, then looked up, smiling. “V. Woolley.”
“Victoria,” I said.
“Same address as Holmquist,” Jeri said. “Got ’em.” She smiled at me. “Good instincts, Mort.”
Emilio said, “You wanna go out there now, check the place out? Conway’s out past Red Hill on 501, fifteen, eighteen miles is all.”
Jeri glanced at her watch and shook her head. “It’s getting late. We’ll go look around tomorrow morning.”
I picked up the phone and dialed home, direct. Jeri and Emilio could work out the details on the bill. The phone rang.
“Where’s a good place to eat?” Jeri asked Emilio.
“Depends. You want HoJo burgers like you’d find in South Bend or Des Moines, or you lookin’ to find something real? She-crab, bass, lobster pie—?”
“Real,” I said with the phone against my ear. It was Dallas’s money, and I was here under duress. Back in Reno, the phone kept on ringing. No charge, so far.
“Gullyfield’s is good,” Emilio said. “Up north a ways. That or Cagney’s. Or you can drive up to North Myrtle. Lotsa good places up there.”
I hung up. In Reno it was 4:58 p.m. The sun would still be high. Kayla might be miles from home, putting more miles on her shoes.
Jeri took down V. Woolley’s address, thanked Furtado, handed him five twenties, and we went outside to the Mustang. The sun was a last golden sparkle through trees in the west. Thirty seconds later, it was gone.
“Find a place to stay first, or eat?” Jeri asked.
“Let’s get a place. I don’t want to sleep under a park bench tonight. Not with rain coming,” I added.
We got adjoining rooms at the Meridian Plaza Hotel, tenth floor. Nice little suites which included miniscule kitchens and private balconies, but not much else in the way of excitement. If not for the view, you couldn’t tell if you were in Myrtle Beach or Akron, but that suited me fine. Travel wears me out. I wasn’t in the mood for a rustic little B&B with a community bathroom down the hall and a twenty-minute wait for the shower. I was tired, looking forward to some extended sack time.
From my room I had a sweeping view of the Atlantic, dimmer and grayer now, with dark clouds scudding low over the water. Pale condos and equally pale hotels rose up on either side of the Meridian, all of it looking as if it had been cloned from a single pale block of concrete. Tropical white was the color of fun.
I sloshed water on my face in the bathroom, which made me feel marginally better. My beard was beginning to scratch, though. I had a rough look, very Hammer, very PI.
Two minutes later, Jeri knocked on my door.
“C’mon, Mort. I’m starving. Let’s eat.”