“Help you?” she asked.
“Got a reservation for Angel?”
She checked her computer. “Don’t see one.” She looked up at me, frowned, and said, “You, uh, you look sort of like—”
Hell. “Yeah, I look kinda like some troublemaker in the news. Causes me no end of grief, lemme tell you.”
“But your name . . . Angel . . .”
“Angel’s my first name. It’s never suited me. I’ve gotta get it changed.” I pointed at her computer. “Try DiFrazzia.”
She gave me a doubtful look, then went back to the computer, chewing on her lower lip. “Uh . . . nope. Nothing like that.”
“Try Dellario,” Holiday said.
The girl’s face lit up. “Ah, yes, here it is.”
Sonofabitch. Dellario? I was going to have to have a talk with Jeri. She’d already forgotten my name, and we were about to get married. What’s up with that?
We got a King Room, cleverly named because it held a single king-sized bed. Holiday had wanted the “Lady in Red” suite, but it was taken. It was said to be haunted by the ghost of a lady in red, a prostitute named Rose who’d been murdered by a volatile gambler who found her in bed with a client. The world in 1914 had its share of geniuses, too, since the guy appears not to have known or cared what Rose did for a living until it was thrust in his face. Of course, the guy might have been preoccupied with text messages on his cell phone and not always been aware of what Rose was up to. Sad to say, I think I could shoot that theory by a bunch of today’s teenagers and get a lot of bland looks.
Holiday bounced on the bed, all of her, which is what she does, then we gave the place a quick once-over, used the bathroom, then hiked down three flights to the lobby. At a gift shop I bought her a pastel purple sweatshirt with “Mizpah Hotel” across the front above a rendering of the hotel with a setting sun in the background.
“Really?” she said. “You want me to cover up?”
“I know it doesn’t have a blessed thing to say about pi, but hang onto it anyway.”
“At least it’s a nice color. Nice picture on the front, too.”
“Glad you like it. Let’s go see what Martin’s up to.”
We went outside. Sarah shivered in the dusk, put the sweatshirt on twenty feet out the door. “Okay,” she said. “Good call.”
I had Martin Harris’ address, but the streets were a tangled mess of spaghetti looping through the hills. I bought a local map at a Chevron station. Harris had a place on Goldfield Road, half a mile out of town, east of the highway.
We went a quarter mile uphill, turned left onto Goldfield, went past a few trailers sitting on dead, patchy yards, then around a low knob of rock fifty feet high. A few houses came into view, one of them the Harris place—single-story clapboard in a fenced-in yard. A shed was in back, three stunted pines out front, a three-car detached garage with its doors down, a four-wheel ATV with fat tires at the east side of the garage. The front windows of the house had a view of fifteen or twenty miles of brown rock and scrub sage in the valley to the north.
Martin Harris might take exception to people watching his house from a parked car, but knocking on the door and asking about Reinhart’s hand wasn’t an ingenious option either. I drove slowly past the place while Sarah and I took it in, didn’t see an SUV of any description, then kept on going.
I turned around at a wide spot in the road a quarter mile away and came back.
“This isn’t working,” Sarah said as we passed the place again.
“No shit, Shirley.”
“We don’t know what’s inside that garage, Mort.”
“At least we found the place,” Great Gumshoe replied.
“Good goin’. Be nice if we knew what this guy looked like, huh?”
“Yup.”
“You’ve got that moustache on, and that nasty wig.”
“Nasty?”
“Actually, it suits you. But the point is, you could go knock on the door and ask something, like does he know the . . . the . . . well, pick a name, like the Dellarios. Which of course he won’t, but least that way you could get a look at him.”
“Or you could go ask.”
She shook her head. “Nope. I might have to talk to him in a bar or a Laundromat or something. He might talk to me, but not if I’ve already knocked on his door. Especially if he’s hiding something.”
Well, shit. She was already a greater gumshoe than I was. I was going to have to rethink this career move.
“Let’s go back to town,” she said.
I thought about that, then did as she suggested. I dropped her off at a Scolari’s supermarket on U.S. 95 and Air Force Road.
“Be cool,” she said.
Advice from an expert. I waved, headed down 95 then east on Goldfield, pulled into Martin’s driveway, got out and went to the front door, rang a bell. Behind me, the last rays of the sun were giving some high cirrocumulus a faint pinkish cast.
A woman answered. Late sixties, gray-haired, heavy, pleasant face, in jeans and a work shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway to her elbows. “Yes?” she said. “Can I help you?”
Expecting Martin to answer, I thought fast, which took a while. “I’m looking for the Dellario place, ma’am. Thought it was here on Goldfield Road, but it’s been a while—nine years—and I don’t have the house number, so . . . I can’t find it.”
“Dellario? I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard of them.”
“Him, unless he got remarried. Guy I knew in college. I, well, I guess it’s a long shot, but maybe your husband might know him.”
“Marty’s out right now. I sent him off to buy milk. He’ll be back soon, if he doesn’t get to talkin’ with anyone, which is
