“How are we going to go about it? What name do we look for? Edna’s sister won’t be part of the Woolley clan.”
“Holmquist,” Jeri said. “Edna’s maiden name.”
“Holmquist?” First I’d heard of it. Things like that make me feel like a three-legged bulldog at a greyhound race. I’d thought I was a mile ahead of her. How’d she get ahead of me?
“I found it on the computer this morning,” Jeri said. “Marriage records go back all the way to 1889. Emmaline Dorman told you she thought Edna’s sister never married. We’ll start there.”
“We don’t know the sister’s first name, Jeri.”
“Holmquist isn’t Smith or Jones, Mort. Trust me, this’ll be a no-brainer.”
A no-brainer. Precisely my speed. I decided to shut up. If anyone could find Edna’s sister, it wouldn’t be me, but maybe I could learn something if I kept my eyes and ears open.
Jeri had the window seat. She looked outside as we taxied toward the runway. I had the impression that she’d torn me away from Kayla. Which was ridiculous, but there it was, a gut feeling that settled in and wouldn’t go away. It was also a conversational gambit I wouldn’t set fire to with a length of fuse and a two-hour head start.
The 737 roared down the runway and lifted off at a steep angle. Two minutes later Reno was five thousand feet below, eight miles back.
* * *
I managed to grab a few minutes of sleep on the way to Dallas-Fort Worth. Jeri stared out the window the whole way. At the airport we had twenty-five minutes to catch our Atlanta connection. I found a pay phone and called my place, but Kayla didn’t pick up. She was sitting tight, not expecting a call from me. Either that or she was out walking another twenty miles. I’d avoided a loathsome answering machine in the house for as long as possible, but it was looking like the time had come.
We gained two time zones. Jeri and I boarded a 757 that lifted off at 2:25, local time. Soon, Jeri was looking more relaxed. Somewhere over the eastern edge of Texas she turned to me and said, “So, Mort, tell me about your family.”
Safe enough. I couldn’t think of one reason why she’d want to stuff me out the window into the slipstream if all I was talking about was family.
“What do you want to know?”
“You know. The usual. Got any brothers or sisters?”
“A sister, Ellen.”
Who proved, like most Angels and Rudds, to be a nice enough person, but a flat, circular track with no distinguishing marks. That may sound cruel, but it’s true. I too am a flat, circular track, or was until I became a world-famous PI. Ellen was a senior CPA for a well-known insurance company. It took a moment to explain that aspect of our plain-vanilla heritage to Jeri.
“That bad, huh? What’s your dad do, or is he retired?”
“He was also an accountant. Had a brain like an adding machine. Genetically speaking, it’s what he was made for.”
“Was?”
“He’s dead. The only Angel to have gone out with a bang.”
Her smile was hesitant. It made her look younger, as if she wasn’t young enough. I had slightly more than a decade on her. When they’re that age, and attractive, I start getting nervous.
“A bang?” She sipped orange juice—the synthetic kind that only airlines buy. It’s a distinctive, metallic flavor, one you would never mistake for actual orange juice.
“My dad was playing golf,” I told her. “Part of a foursome over at Arrow Creek. Clouds had been building all afternoon. Big black numbers. It started raining, huge drops that hit on asphalt leaving splats the size of silver dollars, thunder rumbling off to the south, and one of the guys suggested they call it quits. So right there at the sixteenth hole my dad pointed his putter at the sky and said, ‘Up to you, Big Guy!’ or words to that effect.”
“Oh, no.”
“Uh-huh. He took a bolt. That might seem rather biblical, except it’s not that uncommon. Dozens of people are killed by lightning every year. Most of them aren’t waving pointy metallic objects at a threatening sky at the time, either.”
“Jeez-us, Mort.”
“That was nine years ago. Two of the others in the foursome were knocked unconscious by the hit. Both are dead now, one by suicide, the other by cirrhosis. As my mother says, it wasn’t a good day for the game of golf.
“I kind of admired him for it, though. He didn’t go in his sleep or facedown at his desk, like almost every other Angel has since Martin Angel stepped out a sixteenth-story window over Wall Street in ’29 and landed on a milk wagon.”
Jeri smiled. “And you say your family has no color.”
“What? Martin’s Wall Street dive?” I shrugged. “Call it color if you like.”
“It’s something.”
“It was over in seconds, like putting an exclamation point at the end of a very dull sentence. Mystique-wise, it didn’t put much of a dent in a lifetime of stockbrokering. There’s absolutely nothing else to say about him, except he went to church every Sunday of his life.”
“What about your mother?”
“What about her?”
“How’d she take it, your dad dying like that? By lightning, I mean.”
“Like a Mack truck. Or maybe a Kenworth. Something like that.” In fact, she’d taken it like a Peterbilt, but I left that conversational gambit for a future time.
Jeri pursed her lips. “Care to explain that?”
“My mother was tickled pink, in an understated way. She was the very antithesis of the Angel clan. She had ideas, dreams. My father had only a succession of paydays that was going to follow him to the grave. His death turned her loose.”
“What kind of dreams?”
I told her. Doreen Thompson Angel, age fifty-six at the time of Harold Angel’s tragic end, suddenly found herself moderately rich. Good old Harold had been as conservative as he was unimaginative. He’d taken out a life insurance policy on himself for $250,000. Dori
