“I have these blackouts,” I said, moving away from Jeri.
His grin went lopsided, then returned slowly. “Hey, you, what a kidder, huh? You I like, big guy.”
Jeri lifted an eyebrow at me and mouthed “big guy?” then she and Emilio got down to business. I watched over their shoulders, literally. Emilio fired up a computer and brought up a list of all the Holmquists in the area, which included Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, and smaller outlying communities like Conway and Surfside Beach, dozens of others.
They found three Holmquists, but eliminated all of them within minutes.
Furtado had a collection of phone books socked away in a back room, covering most of South Carolina and parts of neighboring states. Fifteen of them were of Myrtle Beach and environs, one every two or three years, reaching back to 1978. Emilio pulled the first one off the pile, three years old. He located two Holmquists, but they were ones they’d already eliminated. Jeri went straight to the oldest book and found a Jewel Holmquist with an address in Conway.
“That was back in the days a woman could put her first name in a public directory,” Emilio observed slowly, miffed that he hadn’t been the one to find it. “Nowadays it attracts every kinda pervert you can imagine.”
“Look up Woolley,” I said to Jeri.
She stared at me, then understood what I meant. In the front room she got the most recent phone book from Emilio’s desk. She thumbed through the W’s, then looked up, smiling. “V. Woolley.”
“Victoria,” I said.
“Same address as Holmquist,” Jeri said. “Got ’em.” She smiled at me. “Good instincts, Mort.”
Emilio said, “You wanna go out there now, check the place out? Conway’s out past Red Hill on 501, fifteen, eighteen miles is all.”
Jeri glanced at her watch and shook her head. “It’s getting late. We’ll go look around tomorrow morning.”
Emilio shrugged.
I picked up the phone and dialed home, direct. Jeri and Emilio could work out the details on the bill. The phone rang.
“Where’s a good place to eat?” Jeri asked Emilio.
“Depends. You want HoJo burgers like you’d find in South Bend or Des Moines, or you lookin’ to find something real? She-crab, bass, lobster pie—?”
“Real,” I said with the phone against my ear. It was Dallas’s money, and I was here under duress. Back in Reno, the phone kept on ringing. No charge, so far.
“Gullyfield’s is good,” Emilio said. “Up north a ways. That or Cagney’s. Or you can drive up to North Myrtle. Lotsa good places up there.”
I hung up. In Reno it was 4:58 p.m. The sun would still be high. Kayla might be miles from home, putting more miles on her shoes.
Jeri took down V. Woolley’s address, thanked Furtado, handed him five twenties, and we went outside to the Mustang. The sun was a last golden sparkle through trees in the west. Thirty seconds later, it was gone.
“Find a place to stay first, or eat?” Jeri asked.
“Let’s get a place. I don’t want to sleep under a park bench tonight. Not with rain coming,” I added.
We got adjoining rooms at the Meridian Plaza Hotel, tenth floor. Nice little suites which included miniscule kitchens and private balconies, but not much else in the way of excitement. If not for the view, you couldn’t tell if you were in Myrtle Beach or Akron, but that suited me fine. Travel wears me out. I wasn’t in the mood for a rustic little B&B with a community bathroom down the hall and a twenty-minute wait for the shower. I was tired, looking forward to some extended sack time.
From my room I had a sweeping view of the Atlantic, dimmer and grayer now, with dark clouds scudding low over the water. Pale condos and equally pale hotels rose up on either side of the Meridian, all of it looking as if it had been cloned from a single pale block of concrete. Tropical white was the color of fun.
I sloshed water on my face in the bathroom, which made me feel marginally better. My beard was beginning to scratch, though. I had a rough look, very Hammer, very PI.
Two minutes later, Jeri knocked on my door.
“C’mon, Mort. I’m starving. Let’s eat.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WE ENDED UP at the Sea Captain’s House on North Ocean Boulevard. So much for Emilio’s advice. At least he’d pointed us in the right direction. On our way out of the hotel Jeri had asked the desk clerk what she recommended. The woman, a cheerful redhead in her twenties, said the Sea Captain had the best food on the Strand.
A former bed and breakfast overlooking the ocean, it had a lot of rambling rooms, dark wood, heavy tables and chairs. By the time we got there the water was purple black, foaming under a sky full of rose and orchid clouds, going black. To the north and south, the condos and nightspots along the Grand Strand had come alive with lights.
I had French bread, she-crab soup, and a platter of crab cakes and bass. Jeri had the soup and baked catfish on a bed of wild rice. And we had wine, a full bottle of Mondavi Chardonnay 2007 that set the tone for everything else that took place that evening.
“To the PI’s life,” I said, toasting us.
“Yeah, right.” She raised her glass, gave me a smile that showed perfect white teeth.
“If not to that, then to expense accounts and filthy-rich clients.”
Her smile widened. “To filthy clients.” She clinked my glass with hers and took another good-sized sip.
I had an excellent crème brûlée for dessert, but Jeri was in a perpetual karate-training, employee-thrashing, waist-watching mode, which apparently didn’t include empty calories. She poured the last of the wine into her glass and watched while I made a pig of myself.
“One bite?” I offered. “A nibble?”
“Nope.”
“Want to smell it?”
She smiled and shook her head, hair dancing, then drained the last bit of wine from her glass.
It was full dark by the time
