He went to the other end of the bar and waited on three elderly ladies who were waving drink coupons at him. He didn’t return for ten minutes. So much for giving him cool tips.
I sat there in the gloom, thinking about this deal with Jeri, letting the week’s events wash over me.
K.
Three people dead.
And me, right in the thick of it, with no more idea of what was going on than your average teenager knows about Kurds in Iraq or border tensions between Mexico and Guatemala.
How close was the danger? More to the point, how close was it to Dallas? Or to K, or Jeri? Or even Dale, though she was probably safe now, on her way to New Hampshire.
Questions without answers. The danger might already be past. It could have been a transitory horror that had swept Greg up in one final blaze of glory and was over now.
I closed my eyes and…saw rage. At a gut level, penises hacked off and stuffed into holes cut into skulls equates to rage, hatred of an astronomical order.
Or not. Colombians in the drug trade might do that on a whim, a warning to the competition, or as a way to amuse themselves on a slow night, but I didn’t see Colombians anywhere near this. Or drugs. Nothing like that.
Fact is, I didn’t see much of anything in it. Nothing added up. Milliken might have been the initial target and Jonnie and Greg had somehow ended up on the tracks when the train went by. The enemies of Reno’s D.A. would number in the hundreds. An imaginative psychopath might’ve been sprung from the state prison down in Carson and come north to settle a score. Things like that happen. If so, it was strictly a police matter. I wouldn’t have a hope in hell of finding a lunatic with prison tattoos and a smoldering grudge who might already be off in the Great Smokies of Tennessee working as a dishwasher in a rowdy little no-name roadhouse.
And, was I fooling myself?
Was I a gumshoe, or just an early middle-aged ex-IRS agent on a barstool fooling himself, headed down one more dark road to an unknown destination?
Some questions don’t have easy answers.
* * *
Four Cokes and four hours later, I left, regretting the choice of drinks. Coke doesn’t have the ongoing appeal of beer. It doesn’t cloud the mind, so you can’t even fool yourself into thinking you’re getting somewhere. The only diversion of note was the national news on TV at five thirty, in which one bulky and almost certainly dangerous Mortimer Angel—unquestionably a household name by this time—out for his morning jog, had led news vans into a parking garage, jogged downstairs to an exit, and, minutes later, was more or less responsible for the collision of an L.A. news wagon and a Citifare bus—to which O’Roarke, still smirking, said, “And to think I knew you when.” The jerk.
By seven fifteen I was on the sidewalk, facing east. The day was cooling but still hot, still in the nineties, bright sunlight slanting in from the west. A stink of exhaust overlay Virginia Street. The tourists had a worn, glazed look. Even normally alert panhandlers were lethargic.
Across the street, Sjorgen House was a grayish-brown hulk rising into the shadows of overhanging elms. Light glinted off a rickety TV antenna on the roof, near a canted, copper-green cupola topped by a weathervane.
Sjorgen House.
Or Woolley House, depending. A dark, haunted-looking thing of old gables and cornices, dormer windows, square columns supporting an empty porch that ran the full width of the front. The place should have been painted New England white. It would’ve transformed it.
Whose was it now? What was its legal status, and what would happen to it and to Edna Woolley now that Jonnie was gone? Would the Huns of Progress bribe someone on the historical society and a few council members, raze the mansion and the rest of the block, and put up another gleaming six-hundred-million-dollar casino or a new parking garage?
A dormer window was open on the third floor, a yellow curtain hanging limp over the sill. The yard was deserted, the grass dry and gone to patches of bare earth and weeds. Thick shrubs grew along both sides of the house, and a climbing rose had reached the second floor, putting out bright explosions of yellow.
I jaywalked over, cowboy hat tilted at a jaunty angle. The front yard was unprotected by a fence. Cigarette butts and gum wrappers were ground into the dirt near the sidewalk like the aftermath of a double-A baseball game.
I remembered seeing Edna Woolley on television a few years ago, during her ninety-sixth birthday. By now she would be nearing a hundred.
How had she come to live in Sjorgen House? I had a rough idea of when, but didn’t know any of the particulars. Either I hadn’t paid enough attention to the news of late, or the subject hadn’t been brought up. Wendell and Jane Sjorgen—Jonnie’s parents—had vacated the place, and Edna moved in. I did know that Jane Sjorgen divorced Wendell a few months after that, which carried the scent of scandal, but there wasn’t a hint that a scandal or anything like it had occurred.
Now, I was or wasn’t a private detective. If I wasn’t, I could turn in my badge, symbolically speaking, go home, shower, circle job openings in the paper, catch another of Leno’s Mortimer Angel jokes, crawl into bed and dream sweet dreams. If, on the other hand, I still had dreams of another kind, I could go nose around Jonnie’s holdings, shake the trees, see if anything interesting fell out. And I was standing in front of one of his holdings right now.
So, Great Gumshoe, what’s it gonna be?
I strolled up a concrete walk toward the house, hands in my pockets, not yet committed to anything. Who knows? I might’ve been an encyclopedia salesman in a cowboy hat. Come to think of it, that might be in
