“I get that way,” I called out.
“Shouldn’t.” Her voice came back muffled. “I thought we had this pretty much settled.”
“I’m not confused about this room-sharing thing.” I held up the shirt she’d tossed in my lap. “It’s this shirt with this god-awful equation on it, the one with pi on it.”
eiπ+1=0
“E raised to the i pi power plus one equals zero.”
I looked at it. “That’s the one.”
“Euler figured it out. Leonhard Euler, like two hundred fifty years ago. Five of the most famous numbers in all of mathematics, all in one amazing equation.”
“E is a number?”
“That’s the base of natural logarithms.”
“I is a number?”
“Square root of negative one.”
“Is that how they talk on the planet you’re from?”
She came out in a black thong and set neatly folded jeans on a chair a few feet from me, then got into bed. So that was the “like” panties she’d mentioned earlier.
“Question,” I said.
“Shoot.”
“Are thongs classified as underwear or accessories, since they apparently cover fewer than three square inches?”
“I don’t know. You should Google it.” She wiggled a little and set her thong on the night table beside her. “Also, you should turn out the light and get some sleep. It’s late.”
I’m reasonably good at following instructions if they’re simple enough, so I turned out the light, got mostly undressed, climbed into the other bed, fluffed up a pillow, and went right to sleep.
Almost.
“Mort?”
“Yup?”
“When Jeri and I were talking, figuring things out, she said you were in bed three different nights with a really pretty girl, Kayla, showered with her once, and never got laid. Is that true?”
Sonofabitch. “It might be. And thanks for reminding me.”
“Were you ever a Boy Scout? You know, the salute, making fire by rubbing sticks together, the oath and everything?”
“No!” I’d been a Cub Scout for two years, but so what? And what business was it of hers?
“I just wondered,” she said. “Anyway, good night.”
And that’s why it took me an hour to get to sleep.
CHAPTER NINE
WE GOT TO the FedEx shipping center on Jamison Street at nine twenty the next morning. It wasn’t a big facility because Bend isn’t a big place, but it had half a dozen employees—a girl up front and the rest of the crew out back sorting boxes into bins, loading them into vans backed up to a loading dock, getting ready to head out and deliver presents.
Sarah and I went in. She was in her first pi T-shirt, the yellow one. The girl behind the counter, late twenties, looked first at Sarah, then at me, at which time her face lost most of its color.
“I-I shouldn’t talk to you,” she said, looking around to see who might be watching us.
“Oh? Who am I?”
“Mortimer Angel. You got that package, the one sent from here with that guy’s hand in it. I saw you on TV.”
Well, hell. I was going to have to wear that itchy damn wig and moustache after all, like I did in July and August with Jeri. “Mort,” I said. “And why can’t you talk to me?”
“Not just you. I was told I shouldn’t, you know, talk to anyone about it.”
“Shouldn’t, or couldn’t?”
“Well, shouldn’t.” Her eyes shuttled between Sarah and me. “I mean, it was federal agents that said it.”
“But not the SS? They didn’t say ‘Sieg Heil’ and click boot heels before leaving?” Which, of course, we did in the IRS at the end of every closed Monday morning meeting.
“Huh?”
“You shouldn’t talk to anyone—but in fact you can, the First Amendment still being what it is, and pieces of Reinhart not being a legitimate national security issue.”
Her eyes darted toward the door then back to me. “Look, I go on break at ten. I can see you over across the street at the Dunkin’ Donuts for a few minutes, okay? I usually get myself a Colombian in the morning about then. That’s coffee. Keeps me awake in here.”
I looked out the window. A Dunkin’ Donuts was visible a few doors down. “Okay. What’s your name?”
“Cathy.”
“Okay, Cathy. See you there at ten.”
Sarah and I went outside.
“She was scared,” Sarah said.
“Feds, IRS—they’re about the same, except your basic Fed can only scare you shitless. At the IRS, we laugh at shitless. Really bugs us, though, when people die and cut off our percentage.”
We sat in the Audi and kept an eye on the FedEx place.
“Was that true?” Sarah asked. “About Kayla? She was really pretty and willing and you weren’t engaged to anyone at the time, not even going with anyone, and you still didn’t get laid?”
“Don’t want to talk about it, kiddo.”
“So it’s true.”
“No comment.”
“That’s almost sad. Except . . .”
“Except what?” I said, falling for it.
“Except it explains why Jeri trusts you so much. You must have a conscience or something like a big dense block of iron.”
“Iron is dense by definition. It’s redundant to say so.”
“A salient point for sure, but the prosecution still rests.”
“We could go get a donut. I’ll buy.”
“You get one. I’ll watch you bloat up.”
Which we did, although I didn’t bloat up. Much. And at 10:01 Cathy came in. At 9:59 I’d ordered a Colombian to speed things up. I handed it to her as she came in the door.
At a table in back she said, “You’re really famous.”
“Yup,” I said, false modesty not being my style.
“Wow. I never thought . . . I mean, this’s really cool. But I can’t stay very long, so—what did you want to know?” She sipped her coffee and looked at me over the rim of the cup.
“Who shipped the hand?”
“Well, that’s what everyone wants to know, obviously.”
“Obviously, but do you remember what the person looked like who came in with it?”
“It came from a drop box. No one saw who put it in there.”
Exactly what I’d thought last night—but what else would one expect of a gumshoe of my caliber?
“So the Feds drew a blank?” I said.
“Guess so. No one here knows anything at all. It’s not like we open packages before we ship them. Everything gets sent through a
