Greg couldn’t have said it better.
We sat in silence for a while, scanning stories, finding nothing, then an idea occurred to me. I turned to Jeri, keeping my voice low. “Greg didn’t have a penis in his skull.”
“Jesus, Mort. So what?”
“So maybe his killer was a copycat.”
She looked at me for several seconds. “I guess that’s possible. What’s the point?”
“Maybe someone took advantage of the situation, knew he’d been hired to look into Jonnie and Dave’s murders so they killed him the same way, but that person didn’t know about the penis thing so they blew it.”
“You mean like Dale.”
“Not hardly. I was thinking his wife, Libby. Greg might’ve told her what he was up to.”
“Do you have any idea how much easier it is to divorce someone in this state than to cut off their head? You’re thinking zebras, Mort.”
“Greg goes out, then winds up dead, but he might not’ve run into Jonnie’s killer.”
“Terrific. But the fact is we’re trying to find Jonnie’s killer, so I repeat, what’s the point—other than if we follow in your nephew’s footsteps it might not lead us in the right direction?”
“Well,” I said, “that’s the point.” At least I hoped so. Sometimes I don’t make points. Sometimes I ramble and, with luck, points appear.
“Which doesn’t help us one bit with Jonnie and Milliken, does it? Do you have an attention-span problem, Mort? A.D.D., maybe? Can I get you coffee or a Red Bull?”
“I’ve tracked tax evaders through two-hundred-page forms using a sixty-pound tax code jam-packed with redundant and conflicting information.”
“Good work. Try to harness that pent-up concentration, huh?”
I went back to the computer. Jeri wrote on a notepad. Cracking this thing wide open, no doubt, while I was staring at a development deal okayed by the city council in which Jonnie Sjorgen had cast the deciding vote—a subdivision in north Reno, slated for 160 homes.
I kept reading. The moustache itched like a sonofabitch. I was thinking about stuffing it up someone’s ass, but that someone would probably body slam me into next week if I so much as hinted at where the moustache rightfully belonged, let alone tried it.
The subdivision developer was W. B. Rennie. Milliken was a junior partner in W.B. Rennie, Inc.
“Ah-hah.”
Jeri looked up. “Ah-hah?”
I showed her the article. When she had the gist of it, I said, “Jonnie ends up okaying a deal in which his old friend Milliken has an interest. The good-old-boy network pisses off a rabid no-growther who happens to own a Craftsman sabre saw.”
“Possible,” Jeri said doubtfully.
At least she didn’t laugh outright in my face. “What’ve you got?” I asked.
“Nothing yet.”
We kept at it for another hour and a half, then called it quits. One item of note: Milliken’s office had dropped burglary charges against one Jason Kimball, age nineteen, who happened to be the nephew of one of Reno’s city council members, Janet Cushing. Earlier, I’d come across a picture of Jonnie and Janet and others at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a newly renovated bridge across the Truckee River.
“It’s thin,” Jeri said. “Practically vapor.”
Felt that way to me, too. But vapor isn’t exactly nothing, it’s just the next best thing.
We went outside, blinking in the sunlight. The temperature was up around a hundred. I walked with her across heat-softened asphalt to her car.
“Where to now?” I asked as we got in.
The top was down on the Porsche. Jeri sat there, engine off. We were chilled from the news morgue, which was kept cool to keep the computers happy. She looked at me. “I’ve been thinking… Jonnie and Milliken went to Reno High together.”
“Yep.”
“Maybe there’s something in that. A connection of some kind.”
“Long time ago. Forty years. It’s been in the news ad nauseam. There’s nothing new in that, if we’re looking for something new.”
“Maybe they were more than friends.”
I laughed. “No way. Jonnie was about to marry my ex. The evil bastard.”
“I don’t mean friends like that, dummy.”
“Okay. How do you mean?”
“You never know till you find out.” She fired up the Porsche and headed out of the lot, turned left onto Kirman. “Hungry?”
“I could eat.”
“I know a place. Since it’s your first day on the job, I’ll buy.”
* * *
Here’s a rule of thumb: never eat at a place that has six different tofu entrées on the menu. The Dancing Hippo on California Avenue was one of those mom-and-pop health food places, run by a hippyish couple in their sixties who’d most likely named it while in the throes of something psychedelic and illegal, like non-standard mushrooms. The Hippo serves nothing but twelve-grain breads, alfalfa sprouts, sautéed tofu and veggies, things like that. Forget beef. Forget anything substantial. Forget anything a reasonable person might call food. The work of local artists festooned the walls, for sale at prices that made my eyes bulge. The clientele was anorexic, rich, pampered, neurotic, 97 percent female, encased in silk and leather, and wearing shoes that would make a convention of podiatrists rise up en masse and sing hallelujah. At least no one in the place was smoking.
The restaurant also sold T-shirts with pirouetting hippos on the front, like the one Edna had been wearing in that attic bedroom. I kept looking around, expecting to see Victoria and Winter walk in and take a table.
I had something called a Haight-Ashbury, if that tells a story. It tasted okay, but it didn’t fill me up and it wasn’t fun trying to shove it past my moustache, either. I didn’t tell Jeri it wasn’t filling because she might’ve bought me some form of tofu, which is what she had. It looked like processed, bleached pond scum with a side of crabgrass.
At two
