“It’s not sexist. I just want it perfectly clear, right up front.”
I rubbed my rear. She must’ve bounced me off that, too. “I’m not the only one making unwarranted assumptions, Jeri.”
“Okay, fine.” Her jaw jutted belligerently. “I won’t mention it again. Just remember, I’m not part of the deal.”
I shrugged. “Never thought you were.”
CHAPTER NINE
WHY SHE FELT she had to get that on the record, I didn’t know. Maybe she’d had trouble with clients in the past. I could see how that might happen. She was gorgeous, stunning.
But a roll in the hay with Jeri might be like a trip through a threshing machine. Was I missing anything, her laying down the law like that? And who said I had “ideas” about her? Not I. She was attractive, in a lean, powerlifting way, model beautiful, but all I could see was that jagged line in her ceiling. Maybe her house wasn’t settling. She might have caused the damage herself, slamming ex-football players around.
We ended up in her car, a 2013 flame-red Porsche 968 Cabriolet with the top down, me in my moustache, one hand holding onto my dumb-ass porkpie hat as she laid a nice strip of rubber. As Porsches go it wasn’t top of the line, but it had my Toyota beat to hell and gone.
Oh, the inequity: Jeri’s Porsche, Dallas’s Mercedes, my yodeling Toyota—now on its third transmission. A depressing look at what it was like to be stalled on life’s tracks, but at least Jeri’s car wasn’t known to the press, and it was a less embarrassing species were I to suddenly find myself on television again. Which could happen at any moment.
As we roared down First Street, I marveled at all the changes seventy-two hours had wrought in my life. With the IRS, I’d never done fifty in a twenty-five zone, and nameless blondes hadn’t passed out naked in my bed or soaped up in my shower. I’d never found heads before, not one, and women half my size hadn’t slammed me around without breaking a sweat. Greg had been wrong about the PI life—dead wrong, if you must know.
“Where to?” I asked. “Want to talk to Dallas?” It was my first real stab at conversation since Jeri had gone into a back room and changed into black jeans and a dove-gray sleeveless shirt, then led me out a back door to her car. Off we’d gone. I was still having trouble getting enough air.
“Coroner’s office,” she replied. “Might as well. It’s on the way. We’ll see if we can get autopsy reports.”
“Jonnie’s?” I asked, lighting up like a hundred-watt bulb.
She nodded. “And Milliken’s.”
“What for?”
“You never know till you ask. It’s called gathering information, Mort.”
At least we were still on a first-name basis. “You mean clues?”
“You could say. Kinda melodramatic, though. Very Perry.”
“How would you put it?”
“What I said. Gathering information. You are new at this, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, but you oughta see me in action when people turn up missing. It’s a sight.”
She gave me a look like the ones Dallas gives me, then turned her attention back to the road. She jinked around a drifting taxi like a fighter pilot, tore through the tail end of a long yellow light, powered into a right turn, and raced down to Mill Street in time to catch the light there too, making me feel old and out of touch, knowing I wouldn’t drive like that even if I had the car.
I sank back in the leather, aware of the bite that something had taken out of my hide a year ago in May, the day I turned forty. And today in Jeri’s gym, if you must know. Maybe that was what this unexpected funk was all about.
Funny, though, how Dallas had avoided all that, the entire age-angst thing, while every year, like clockwork, I got one year older.
Driving one-handed, still jinking, Jeri handed me a penny from a cup holder that held loose change.
I gave her a questioning look.
“For those deep, deep thoughts, Mortimer.”
Mortimer. I pushed the penny back at her. “You don’t want to know, Geraldine.” I was going to let it go at that, then my big mouth added, all on its own, “It’s a forties thing.” It just came out. Saying it was practically an out-of-body experience, watching some other fool spill his guts to what amounted to a virtual stranger.
She maneuvered around a wallowing UPS truck, then said, “I’ve put great big guys in their twenties on their backs, Mort. It wasn’t you.”
“Yeah? It sure felt like me.”
She chirped the tires braking for the light at Wells Avenue, then looked over at me and smiled. “Hey, you look good for forty, fella. Most men’ve lost it by then, only look good in Italian suits, and only if they’re rich.”
“Yeah, thanks.” I thought her comment harbored a fair amount of that sexism she’d gone to such lengths to quash in me.
“And, I’ve got a black belt in judo. Fourth degree. Third degree in Aikido. And I know a lot of back-alley stuff.”
“Huh?” I said. “You—?”
The light changed and the coroner’s office was only a few blocks away on Kirman Avenue, one block north of Mill. She barely got it up to fifty-five and back down again before we were there.
But even in that short space of time the fog was lifting. I wasn’t all that old yet, and, hell, if Paul Newman could do it, maybe I could drive like Jeri. Only two days ago, in a Toyota giving off palpable rust vapor, I’d left that pre-yuppie news gal in the dust.
I smiled, remembering her spinout. The doldrums might come a little more often these days, but they don’t last long, thank God.
* * *
Jeri told me to stay in the car. She ducked inside. Judo? Hell, I didn’t know that stuff was still around, thought it had died in the seventies, done in by tae kwon do and Ninja Turtles, Jean-Claude Van Damme. No one used judo
