GUMSHOE
FOR TWO
Also by Rob Leininger
Gumshoe (A Mortimer Angel Mystery)
Richter Ten
Sunspot
Killing Suki Flood
Maxwell’s Demon
January Cold Kill (A Gabrielle Johns Mystery)
Olongapo Liberty
GUMSHOE
FOR TWO
A Mortimer Angel Novel
ROB LEININGER
Copyright © 2017 Rob Leininger
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 978-1-60809-232-1
Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing
Longboat Key, Florida
www.oceanviewpub.com
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
For everyone who read GUMSHOE.
This one’s for you.
Acknowledgments
MANY THANKS TO my “readers” who spotted numerous errors and typos in the next-to-final draft: Madelon Martin (who loves to spot errors); Tracy Ellis; and my wife, Pat. You guys chuckle at me almost silently, but keep me from being laughed at out loud. A special thanks to Tracy Ellis who believed in the first novel, Gumshoe, told a friend about it, who told someone at Oceanview Publishing and got this snowball rolling downhill.
I am further indebted to the people at Oceanview Publishing: Bob and Pat Gussin, Lee Randall, Lisa Daily, and Emily Baar. Your expertise and professionalism makes it all happen.
Finally, to John Lescroart (pronounced “Les-kwah”), incredible friend and New York Times best-selling author of the Dismas Hardy novels, thank you for believing in me as I believe in you. And may we, and our wives, meet again in Banff for more good food and talk. Or at Bouchercon. Bouchercon would be nice.
GUMSHOE
FOR TWO
CHAPTER ONE
“SHAKE THE HAND of an honest politician.”
Harold J. Reinhart, senior U.S. senator from the great state of Nevada, had found himself a battle cry that apparently resonated with voters. Enough of them, anyway, that his polling numbers were up 5 percent in the past month. If you thought political polls had the slightest bearing on reality—never a good idea—this proved you could fool some of the people all of the time. But when you head out to conquer the world with an unbeatable oxymoron like that, it’s like playing chicken with the devil.
“Omigod,” Jeri said, grimacing at the television above the bar. “Can’t we turn him off?”
“You kidding?” I said. “Brilliant orator like that?”
“Uncle Harry,” sixty-two years old, was making a bid for the presidency. With numbers in his own party trolling below15 percent, it wasn’t as if the guy was on fire. But he was in the news, front page above the fold in the Gazette-Journal, second story on television behind a hotel fire in Vegas. He’d missed a noon rally at Wingfield Park on Saturday where he was scheduled to shake hands with an estimated two thousand supporters—good luck rounding up fifty warm bodies, I thought—and hadn’t been seen in three days.
Tuesday night, 11:06 p.m., Jeri and I were sitting at the bar in the Green Room of the Golden Goose Casino watching a week-old clip of our very own lying senator on Channel 8 as he delivered his now-famous campaign slogan, when—
“Omigawd, lads, we have found paradise!”
Six drunken Shriners tumbled into the room like moonshine sloshing out of a Mason jar, turning what had been a reasonably pleasant atmosphere into a 90-proof circus. I heard them coming ten seconds before I saw them.
A Shriner convention was loose in Reno. This piece had broken free of the larger mass and discovered the Green Room. I’d always thought of the place, tucked into an odd corner of the Golden Goose Casino, as the city’s “best kept secret,” but maybe it was the track lighting that turns skin and teeth an unsettling shade of green that kept the hordes away. If a guy was hoping to get lucky, this was the last place to bring a date. Green is an easy skin tone to overdo.
Jeri DiFrazzia was my boss, business partner, friend, lover, and fiancée. This was only the third time she’d been in the place. For me it was something of a second home, especially nearing the end of baseball season. This evening the Cubs had whipped the Pirates six to five in extra innings, just in time for News at Eleven.
Mid-September, Jeri and I were using free-drink coupons the bartender, Patrick O’Roarke, had given me five weeks ago when I was in the hospital recovering from fencing wounds. A gorgeous but unfortunately psychotic twenty-year-old girl half my size had run a foil through my chest and out my back, missing my subclavian artery by a quarter inch. Up till then I didn’t even know I had a subclavian artery. She’d also stabbed my foot and slashed my face. For the rest of my life, I would have a scar across the bridge of my nose and my left cheek, an inch below my eye. If I’d still been working for the IRS, the enhanced intimidation factor would have been worth a nice raise. The various holes and slashes were the first fencing wounds reported in the state of Nevada since it was admitted to the Union in 1864, but the national celebrity I’d received was for locating Reno’s missing mayor and district attorney, not the puncture wounds. That near-death experience had taken place the first week of August. Since then I’d been in recovery mode, taking it easy. Jogging still put twinges in my chest.
My name is Mort Angel. Not Mortimer—although that mistake was made forty-one years ago on my birth certificate and was never corrected, causing me no end of
