“Her plane?”
“Her name, name.”
Velma peered at me through one eye. “You don’t have to shout. Whose name? Not your lady friend, I hope?”
“Yeah. Her.”
“You mean to tell me you don’t know?” Her look darkened.
“It, uh, slipped my mind.”
“I would think, Mortimer…” she said in an admonishing tone.
“Yeah?”
“You know.” She frowned at me, then at the fence. “Why you two think you’ve got to go through this fence is beyond me.” Her look became faintly pugnacious, challenging me to explain.
“It’s a long story.”
“I bet it’s a doozy.”
“It is. So, you don’t know her name, huh?”
Her eyes dropped away. “It was something like Kelso, or Callie, or…or, you know, Mortimer, I believe she said one thing, then another. So I asked, and I swear she came up with another—Kelly.”
It sounded as if Velma’s hearing aid needed new batteries. Either that, or K was intentionally muddying the waters.
“What’re you two doing?” she asked. “You duckin’ her husband or something?” The gleam returned. Her voice lowered, becoming conspiratorial. “You kin tell me.”
“You’re too sharp for us, Velma.”
“I knew it, I knew it!” she said joyfully. Then she cut that off and pursed her lips. “That’s an awful risky business, boy.”
“Don’t I know it.”
Her bony shoulders lifted in a shrug. “Well, you kin use my yard, I reckon. Anyone asks, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout nothin’.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“Fact is, a feller came nosing around yesterday, long about dusk, asking about you.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“I already tole you.” She waved an arm, slinging around bits of honeysuckle. “Nothin’.”
“Thanks. It’d probably be best if you kept it that way.” I edged past her shears, then bent down and kissed her cheek. “I’ve gotta get going.”
Velma nodded toward my place. “She in there?”
“Not right now.”
“She’s a beauty. I can see how she turned your head, Mortimer.” Her look became wistful. “There was a day when…well, if I see her, I’ll show her the boards you got loose here. Pretty girl like that shouldn’t be hiking herself over fences.”
“You do that.” I went around the side of her house to the street, then walked downtown in my disguise, keeping an eye out for roving vans.
* * *
Give up or go on? Floating for the moment on one of life’s cusps, I found myself faced with a choice. Nothing said I had to pursue Jonnie’s death. I could bail out any time I wanted. And, I thought…I would. My stride slowed. By God, I would do exactly that. For one glorious second a dozen paths opened up ahead. Fifty. Light shone down. I felt illuminated. I could do whatever I damn well pleased. I was free. I came to a stop right there on the sidewalk. Free.
“Do it for Dallas, Great Gumshoe”—the idiotic words of the bartender, Patrick O’Roarke, rattled around in the perfect vacuum of my skull.
Hell.
Love is a trap.
And, I admitted, if I quit now that would be the end of it. The spark would go out. I would go back to being an IRS agent. The tax code would bubble up past my eyes and blot out the sun. I would get a paunch, turn gray, end up on a porch fussing with my medications, yelling at kids as they whizzed by on skateboards, calling them whippersnappers or something equally demented.
In an instant the light winked out and all those paths ahead disappeared. Except one.
So much for cusps. I kept on walking.
The Yellow Pages had listed fifteen detective agencies, including Carson & Rudd, the status of which was in grave doubt now that both Carson and Rudd were dead. I’d gone through the remaining fourteen and picked one within walking distance that sounded like more than a one-horse operation: Rix & Associates, Inc.
Rix was on Arlington in a low, stone-and-glass building next to the Arlington Tower. I removed the porkpie and the moustache as I pushed through a glass door and went in.
A young woman was talking on a cordless headset while making coffee. She was hassling with whomever about a delinquent account and the terms of a revised payment schedule. She was slender, pretty, nicely dressed, curvy, and I figured those attributes were minimum requirements for working as either a PI or a PI’s secretary.
The place looked profitable. The outer office had more pizazz than Gregory’s—not that it mattered, now. Potted plants, magazines on a table, framed prints on the walls, pleasant mint-green wall-to-wall carpeting, even an old-fashioned water cooler, complete with a stack of four-ounce paper cups in a holder that gave the place a nice retro look.
The girl looked at me. Her eyes widened, and she doubletaked, or doubletook, whatever, then terminated the call with a quick, “Gotta go. Call ya back. Bye.”
She stared at me. “You…you’re…”
“Yep.”
“…that guy…I mean…”
“Your ad in the Yellow Pages said discreet. Your sign, too, right there on the door. This place is discreet, isn’t it? Confidential?”
“Why, yes, of course.” An offended note crept into her voice in spite of being face to face with the most successful locator of missing persons in all of North America. Of course, some people might think that didn’t count since I was most likely the one who’d caused them to go missing in the first place.
“Then I was never here,” I told her. “And I’m not even who I am, so you don’t have to keep staring at me like that, right?”
My words broke her paralysis. She pressed a button on her desk, twice. A moment later, a door opened and a man in a hundred-dollar haircut came out, power tie loosened, shirtsleeves.
Mike Grissom. One look at me and he waved me inside without a word and shut the door. In his office, which overlooked Arlington and a gaggle of workmen, one of whom was jack hammering a hole in the street, I explained what I wanted.
He grinned at me from across a cluttered desk. “You’re shittin’ me. One PI hiring another.”
“Nope. Happens all the time,” I said with some authority. But maybe
