Armitage was an eager-eyed old fart, all bone and gristle, with TV-evangelist hair, who could talk a mile a minute and sound almost sane. He’d had the idea of making dog and cat videos for pampered housebound pets of the rich and not-so-bright while they were at work, and was trying to rustle up investors.
I met him once, at Harrah’s Steak House over dinner. The only thing I didn’t get was that Mom appeared to have her eyes wide open, yet she couldn’t see this disaster unfolding. Armitage was going to skip, I just knew it. Why he had consented to meet me was beyond my powers of comprehension. For what he was doing to my dear mother I might’ve broken his back. Once they get the money, they’re gone, and by then Armitage had the entire $500,000 and an additional $25,000 of Mom’s savings besides. He’d cleaned her out, all with a harebrained get-rich-quick scheme about dog videos. The sonofabitch even had the gall to ask me if I wanted in on the ground floor, which was probably the real reason he’d agreed to meet me. I turned him down, of course. It was all I could do not to haul his ass into the men’s room and use his skinny body to pound porcelain fixtures off the walls.
They went national a year later. Mom octupled her $525,000 in twenty eight months, paid her taxes, reinvested in Treasury bills and mutual funds at a time when the stock market was going bonkers, and was off to Hawaii. She never looked back. Certainly not at me, who’d told her in no uncertain terms that she was throwing her money down a rat hole.
“Great judge of character, Mort,” Jeri said.
“Oh, yeah. I can spot ’em, all right.”
She laughed. “And now? What’s your mom doing these days?”
“Enjoying herself immensely. Investing money. Spending it. She’s worth around eight million. Maui suits her. Every few months there’s another stud twenty or thirty years younger than she is. It’s a revolving door. She brings them to Reno sometimes, mostly to flaunt them, I think.”
“Studs, huh?” Jeri looked out the window.
“That’s conjecture on my part, but none of ’em have been mental giants. I don’t think she keeps them around as chess partners.”
By then I guessed we were somewhere over Mississippi. Dark-blue sky above, clouds and haze below.
“Tell me about judo,” I said, wondering if she’d mention karate championships and Hawaii.
She took another sip of synthetic orange drink. “I grew up with it,” she said. “Dad’s an instructor in San Francisco, fifth degree black belt in judo, fifth degree in Aikido.”
“Aikido. I’ve heard of it, but I haven’t heard it mentioned in a long time. I thought it was dead, at least here in the U.S.”
“It’s not as big as it once was, but it’s still around. It’s about self-defense, using another person’s strength and weight against them.”
“Someone like me.”
She nodded, smiling faintly. “Aikido wouldn’t be your first choice to attack someone. Until I moved to Reno, I trained a lot with my brother, Ron. He’s in Sacramento. Ron is two years older than me. He placed second in the North American Judo Championships last year, eighty-six kilogram class.”
“Sounds like a bad guy to jump in an alley.”
She grinned. “Like you wouldn’t believe. An alley would be the worst place to tangle with him. You can do things in an alley that you can’t do on a mat with judges watching, and Ron knows a lot of that. A lot.” She paused for a moment, then said, “He taught me quite a bit of it. For a martial arts guy, he’s not what you would call pacifistic. He has the idea that self-defense is supposed to mean something more than defense. His philosophy is no second chances if someone attacks you. Go for the kill.”
“Which means you’d be bad news in an alley too, huh?”
“Not a lot of fun, no.”
“Have you ever competed?”
She stared out the window. “Women’s Nationals three years ago, New Orleans. In karate. I placed sixth. Different rules. Karate’s not my thing. Judo holds aren’t allowed.”
“Yeah? Sixth? That’s great, terrific even. Anything more recent?”
She faced me. “Okay, just say it, Mort.”
“Say what?”
“If you don’t know what, then I’m going to listen to music.”
“Just…you looked pretty darn good on TV on Sunday.”
“Hell.”
“Third in all of North America and Asia. That’s great, more than great. I would have placed around ten or twenty millionth.”
She closed her eyes. For a while she didn’t say anything. Then, “I’m too short. It’s my reach. Mobley’s five-ten. I’m stronger, faster too, but she gets through, scores points. Even that doggone Korean girl is four inches taller than me.”
“Christ, Jeri, you took third.”
“Third doesn’t cut it. Not with me. I’m better at powerlifting. Not body building, which is narcissistic nonsense, but pure lifting. Putting weight over my head.”
“You said you took—what?—fourth in the U.S.”
“That was last year. The difference between first and fourth was only twenty-two pounds total on all three lifts. I’ve picked up nineteen pounds since then. And that last 10 percent isn’t strength, it’s pure technique. By the time the Olympic trials come around, I ought to be right up there.”
I said, “Only world-class thing I do is find heads.”
She gave me a look, then put on headphones and kept them on for the rest of the flight.
* * *
The plane landed at Atlanta. Our connecting flight didn’t leave for half an hour so I had time to phone home again. Still no answer. I didn’t like that, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could
