“Hop in,” I said.
“My God. This thing still runs?” She sounded disappointed.
“Does it ever. You oughta hear it at sixty. Mirror sounds like Madonna.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve got air conditioning?”
“I sweat, sure.”
She stared at me.
“It’s not about the car, doll,” I said, lowering my voice half an octave. “It’s about the handsome brute inside it.”
At last her mouth twitched, but she still didn’t say anything.
I said, “You want it cool, we’ll roll the windows down and go real fast. You can take off your top if you think that’ll help.”
She gave me one of her looks, the one that meant she was sorry for me, that I was never going to grow up, never going to make it past this stalled adolescence. Well, I’d already topped forty, so she was probably right. If it doesn’t happen in the first forty years, it’s not likely to happen in the second. But at least I have fun. I’ve met guys so serious that a smile would crack their faces like ceramic slamming into a brick wall.
Life’s too short for that kind of shit.
* * *
“Where to?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she answered listlessly.
Her life, the she-and-Jonnie part of it, was a shambles, and every media buzzard within a thousand miles was either on a plane headed this way, on the road breaking speed limits, or already in Reno, trying to photograph or videotape the wreckage for the benefit of an information-starved nation.
“Want to get something to eat?” I asked.
“No.”
Neither did I. I’d eaten half that tuna sandwich, hoping it wasn’t lethal.
“How about I take you to your place?” The suggestion wasn’t overly bright, but I wasn’t tracking a hundred percent.
She shrugged, not yet up to making decisions.
I took off, headed south and west into the hills that overlook the city. My excuse was that it was hot and my brain was addled.
Dallas was rich before I came along, and she was rich after. Good accountants and rock-solid investments, much of it in mutual funds that hadn’t tanked immediately after Enron hit the fan. Before the full extent of corporate greed had been discovered, she’d cashed out and put the whole thing into T-bills and, of all things, gold, which soared to new heights only a few years later, then back into a nice selection of mutual funds again. Financially she was looking better than terrific. If anyone thought Dallas had done in Jonnie, they’d have to come up with a motive other than money. And figure out how a person who faints at the sight of blood could cut off a person’s head, which has got to be a god-awful grisly chore.
But Jonnie had had money too, so money might be a motive for someone. His father, Wendell, had made a fortune in the restaurant supply business and a title company, put some of it into real estate, some into other local businesses, and built himself a modest empire on the fringe of Reno’s gambling community, enough to get a street named after him in the northwest part of town. Jonnie, an only child, had never hurt for money, and had inherited the whole shebang when Wendell died. When you get that silver spoon, you eat caviar, amazed that others aren’t doing the same. I’d always thought of Sjorgen as a self-absorbed, out-of-touch so-and-so, not good, just lucky, and not big into rocket science, as thinkers go. All tanned skin and too-white teeth, nothing of significance up there in the attic, but maybe that was sour grapes.
The house belonged to Jonnie, but Dallas had been living there with him for much of the past two years. Two point eight million at the height of the real estate balloon in ’05-’06, maybe one point seven mil now—stucco, gray slate and river rock, big plate glass windows with a terrific nighttime view of the city. Why two people needed sixty-two hundred square feet is beyond me. I couldn’t have afforded the vacuuming bill. Great place for parties, though. I’d been to a few of them as Dallas’s guest, which had been interesting given my status as her ex. No one put on a party like our mayor Jonnie. All the city’s movers were there, and a few of its shakers as well. And me.
I turned onto Jonnie’s street and pulled over to the curb, fast, aware of my mistake.
Three squad cars and two sedans were parked in the drive and on the street. The front door of the house was open. Crime scene tape was strung all over, like bunting.
Jonnie had no relatives in the immediate area, so the cops had gone in with a hastily signed search warrant to go through the place, hunt for bloodstains. A news van lurked across the street, parabolic antenna on the roof, Channel 8 logo on the side, guys and gals with video cameras hanging around, using binoculars, hoping to get lucky. I was surprised they didn’t have a helicopter in the air overhead. A car was parked behind the van. Gazette-Journal, with a pair of women inside, waiting, cameras no doubt ready, probably praying to some obscure god of newsprint for a chance at that elusive Pulitzer.
“Want to be waylaid by the press?” I asked.
“Oh, God, no.”
“Want to flee the scene?”
She stared at me. “What do you think?”
“Police are going through the house. Probably your stuff, too.”
“Let them. I don’t care.”
So we fled. Dallas put her head back, eyes closed. Her headache pose. The afternoon heat wasn’t helping—or the Toyota’s lack of air conditioning or anything resembling an amenity or dealer upgrade, including variable-speed wipers, which I would’ve liked.
“How about your house?” I asked. Dallas hadn’t yet sold her
