“Gone,” I replied.
“Gone?” She lifted a glass of white wine with a racquetball-sized strawberry in it and took a sip.
“Missing. Vamoosed. But I think she’ll be back.” I indicated the wine. “Any more where that came from?”
“Out there.” She waved a hand. “Vamoosed?”
“She asked for money. That’s a sign, isn’t it?”
“Of what?”
“That she’ll be back.”
Her lips moued into a disapproving frown. “Or possibly that you owe her for something. I wonder what that could be?”
“Yeah, me too.”
“So, how long have you known this person, Mort?”
“I still don’t know her.”
She struggled to keep up. “How long have you not known her, then?”
I had to think. Time had dilated recently. “About twenty-two hours, give or take.”
“Twenty-two…oh, Mort…”
I used to get a lot of Oh, Mort’s when we were married. Three or four a day. I went off in search of the wine, came back with a glass in hand, no fruit.
“Hungry?” I asked her.
“Yugoslavia.”
She could slam them back pretty hard. I grinned. “You’ve still got a great backhand, Dal.”
She held out her glass, looked me straight in the eye. “Fill me up?” I managed not to say anything stupid by not saying anything at all.
I got the bottle and refloated her strawberry. “You ought to eat something,” I said. “We could have something sent up.”
“Go ahead and order. Surprise me. Just make it something light.”
I found a menu, ordered her what they called the sunburst platter, cut fruit and banana nut bread with yogurt. It sounded like Dallas. I knew it was light because I wouldn’t have eaten it on a bet. I ordered the prime rib. I was ravenous. I hadn’t had anything to eat since risking my life at the police station on Russ’s sandwich.
Back in the bathroom—or spa, whatever it was—the bubbles were starting to thin out. Okay by me.
“Might want to think about getting out of there,” I said. “Food’ll be up in a few.”
“This Kay, does she have a last name, or is she a one-namer like Cher or Beyoncé?”
“Who knows?”
“You’re being uncharacteristically close-mouthed about this one, Mort.”
“Uh-huh.”
“She must be something special.”
“She is that.”
“And in only twenty-two hours,” Dallas marveled. “No telling where you’ll be by the end of the week.”
“Truer words were never spoken.”
She was fishing. I didn’t have anything to give her so she reeled in an empty hook, stood up and headed for the shower to rinse off the suds. I went back to the living room to slow my racing heart—there’s something about a wet, naked woman covered in bubbles—and read another paragraph of Sandford, over and over and over. It wouldn’t go in and stick.
The rift between Dallas and me, such as it was, was partly cultural in nature. There was a time when she would drag me off to symphonies by the Reno Philharmonic. I have nothing in particular against Schubert, Beethoven, any of those guys, other than that I don’t enjoy their music, but I balk at the idea of conductors, which Dallas finds amusing. I once saw Victor Borge in one of his memorable skits that proved what I’d long suspected: the conductor isn’t necessary. He or she waves a stick, but doesn’t play so much as a tin whistle. As a conductor, Borge did everything wrong—hilariously, I must admit—and the orchestra played on… in spite of him. They knew what they were doing. Right then I decided a conductor could wave a pair of black panties to the beat of “Light My Fire” and the oboes and violins wouldn’t miss a beat.
Dallas, of course, disagrees.
A knock sounded at the door as she came out in a Grand Sierra robe and a towel turban. I gave the kid a ten for his tuition—he looked about that age—and said “Voilà!” as I whipped the lid off Dallas’s sunburst platter.
“Looks lovely, but…I don’t know. I don’t think I can eat,” she said. In spite of her words she was eyeing the food like a wolf eyes a rabbit. After all, life goes on.
“How ‘bout I cram it down you, kiddo?” I said.
“Well, since you put it that way.”
* * *
News at eleven. Jonnie Sjorgen’s startling reappearance got top billing, of course. We’d missed the five o’clock coverage and the six o’clock repeat, but the furor and suppressed journalistic joy of the late-night rehash was a page taken straight out of the O.J. romp of yesteryear.
Dallas looked great on camera. I looked like a poorly trained ape. We didn’t have any lines, so all we got was an insinuating voice-over identifying us as the grieving girlfriend and her non-grieving ex, the two of us, lo!, finding a critical body part of Reno’s long-lost mayor in the boot of her $110,000 automobile. The incriminating shot of the two of us being packed into a police car and whisked away was a nice touch. Police Chief Menteer gave an interview, answering brain-dead questions with predictable, off-the-rack answers.
As the nearest living relative of the deceased, Jonnie’s daughter, Rosalyn Sjorgen, got a fifteen-second honorable mention. There was a shot of her two-story maple-dappled clapboard house in Ithaca. I’d never met her, but she was a dance instructor at Ithaca College, which is why my daughter, Nicole, was out there in New York, nearly three thousand miles away. Nicole’s dreams and Rosalyn’s profession were a match. Once Dallas tied up with Jonnie, Nicole’s choice of colleges was a foregone conclusion. Rosalyn wasn’t available for comment. No one had seen her in almost a week, and the media was making hay out of that, too, unearthing mysteries and disappearances every time they turned around.
“We are in the eye of the storm,” I said. “You and
