“Why don’t you ask her?” I said. Dallas would’ve ripped him a brand-spanking new asshole before the entire sentence was out of his mouth.
Then they went to work. They were almost cordial before they learned I was Reno’s newest private investigator, or might be in the future. Before that moment, Fairchild even managed to find me a tuna sandwich. “Seafood,” he said, tossing it on the table in front of me. It landed with an appropriately dead plop, one day past its expiration date, having stewed in a vending machine for the last three days. And, I learned later, Shannon got salads for both her and Dallas from somewhere, although Dallas just picked at hers.
When Russ asked what I’d done before I joined the firm of Carson & Rudd, both he and Officer Day got a little more serious, a bit less smug. IRS agents live in a world of forced smiles and artificial goodwill. I suspected the two of them of having been creative with their 1040s a few months back. When it comes to taxes, almost everyone’s an artist, including cops. Especially cops, I’d learned early on in my career. They never report bribes as tip income.
My questioning didn’t take as long as I’d thought it would. Five minutes of scintillating background stuff, then we went through Dallas’s phone call, my trip to Meadowood and the subsequent discovery of the body—or head, corpse—twice in maybe another ten. The story was simplicity itself. The second time around was a carbon of the first, not so much as a change of syllables, same during the third go-around, so after consulting with someone in another part of the building, getting my story one last useless time and instructing me not to leave town in the next few days without notifying RPD, Fairchild and Day cut me loose. Total time, one hour twenty minutes.
Later, armed with forensics data and pathology reports they might haul me in again and dig into things farther back in time, like motive and opportunity, alibi—if they could pinpoint time of death, which I didn’t think likely. Jonnie’s last known body temperature was up around a hundred forty degrees. Without a body or the actual murder scene, which the trunk of Dallas’s car was not, I didn’t think they’d come up with a time of death, much less a murder weapon or any of that stuff that so impresses juries. And it wasn’t lost on them that the district attorney, David Milliken, was still missing or at large—unaccounted for was the current, politically correct term—not that his absence necessarily had anything to do with Jonnie’s even if it had looked that way right from the start. Nor was it clear how Dallas or I were connected to Milliken, even to detectives eager to solve a case and look like heroes before a bug-eyed public now holding its collective breath. Indictments were a long way off and they knew it, evidenced by all the long faces I saw, everywhere I turned.
I hung around, waiting for Dallas in a room that hadn’t been cleaned anytime that week. It had vending machines, worn-out chairs and tables, a bulletin board for the cops to buy things from each other, and wire-reinforced windows that looked out on a dingy hallway with green linoleum tiles on the floor.
Shannon and a burly cop, Mary, took a lot longer with Dallas. All the way from when she’d last opened the trunk of her car: yesterday afternoon. And was Jonnie’s head in there at that time: no, she was certain she would’ve noticed. Where, if anywhere, she’d gone the night before: nowhere. When she’d gotten up that morning: 6:20 a.m. Where she kept the car at night: in her garage. And was the garage locked: yes. Had she heard anything unusual the night before: no. When she’d had breakfast, showered, dressed, and left the house. Every stop she’d made before ending up at Meadowood Mall: none. Did anyone else have keys to her car: Jonnie, but chances are he hadn’t used them to put himself in the trunk. And why, exactly, had she phoned her ex-hubby for help and not Triple-A or any other person or organization? Later, according to Dallas, there’d been a lot of that ex-husband kind of thing. Evidently they liked the idea of a big guy with a possible motive—jealousy—right there on the scene when Jonnie had finally turned up.
After I’d cooled my heels for an hour she came out, looking pale and drained. The damage to her mascara had been repaired, however. Women understand the importance of such things. I asked Russ for a ride back to my car. Dallas’s, too.
He shook his head. “Been impounded. Might get it back in two, three days. Maybe four.”
“What? Both of ’em?”
“Nope. Just hers.”
He led Dallas and me out a back door. The temperature was 102 degrees. My Tercel was baking in the heat in a parking lot with its windows up. “All yours,” he said, handing me my keys. “We’ve been through it already. Nice rig, by the way.”
“Hey, thanks for rolling up those windows nice and tight,” I said.
“Don’t mention it. You wouldn’t believe the amount of crime in this neighborhood.”
Wrong. The lowest 10 percent of IQs in society are responsible for 90 percent of the break-and-enter and violent crime. Average prison inmate intelligence quotients are in the low- to mid-eighties. At such lofty levels of cogitation and analysis, the police station itself would be viewed as a Grade-A burglary opportunity, all the computers they’ve got in there, not to mention boxes of paper clips, hole punches, pencil sharpeners, things like that.
“You remind me of someone,” I said to Russ, just to spin him around a little.
“Clinton?”
“No…someone in the movies.”
“Charlton Heston, probably. I get that a lot.”
“Nah. I remind people of Heston.”
“Don’t you wish.”
We left it at that. He went back into the station. I opened the
