“Uh-huh. Right here.” He tapped a finger on a well-worn price sheet with little sample images on it, taped to the countertop.
I stared at it, tried to check out the shop while I was at it, and finally decided a thousand CMYK fliers for two hundred ten bucks was just the ticket. Inspired, I said, “Fliers are for a Mercedes SUV I’ve gotta unload. Damn thing’s not even a year old, too.”
He stared at me for a moment, eyes locked with mine. “Huh,” he said, then sort of shook himself and said, “I’d put an ad in the paper, but that’s just me.” He gave me a curious look. “A thousand fliers to sell a car like that? Man, that don’t sound right.”
I tried to look dumb and innocent. I think I got the first of those right. “Two ten, huh? Maybe we don’t need a thousand. I’ll talk it over with the wife and get back to you on that.”
“Got to keep that ball and chain happy, uh-huh.”
“Don’t we all?” Thought I’d see if he would mention he’d been cut loose. But he didn’t, and I didn’t want to have to come up with any specifics about my Mercedes, such as engine size or how many wheels it had, so instead of a manly knuckle bump, I rapped Bob’s countertop twice and got the hell out.
I headed down the street so he wouldn’t see that I was in a car with two potential ball-and-chains in it, neither of whom had come in with me. Sarah pulled to the curb a block away and I got in.
“What’d you find out?” Jeri asked.
“A thousand full-color fliers’ll cost us two hundred ten bucks, honey bun.”
Sarah laughed. And it was a damn good thing I was in the backseat, out of reach of people with short arms.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“WHAT TIME IS it?” Jeri asked after I’d given them the rundown on Bob, not that there was much to run down.
I checked my watch. “Four fifteen.”
“Let’s see if Leland Bye, Esquire, is at his office.” She gave Sarah an address on California Avenue, several blocks west of the federal courthouse in Reno.
Sarah parked kitty-corner across the street from a two-story glass-and-steel office building that had a sign out front for five lawyers and two CPAs. Jeri stared at the building, evidently thinking like an investigator. I stared at Jeri, thinking like a guy who might like to toss her into bed later that evening and rough her up.
Jeri won that round, but I wasn’t giving up hope.
“Okay, looks like I’m up,” she said. “You two wait here.”
She got out and walked over to the building. I got in front with Sarah and watched Jeri disappear inside.
“How’re you doing?” I asked.
“Okay, good. Better now. She . . . when we hugged, what she said was, ‘Good for you.’ Which I guess means she’s fine with—with what you and I have been doing.”
“And I got chicken soup, so we both made out like bandits. Oh, and I brought up that lend-lease thing you mentioned. We’re on for Tuesday evenings.”
“What lend—oh, Mort, you didn’t! I wasn’t serious. You know that, don’t you? I mean, I wasn’t . . . really . . .”
Truth lies in the hesitations. Hope springs eternal. Sarah took my hand and kissed my palm. “One in a million,” she said. “But don’t bring it up again, okay? It was just kind of a joke. Really. I mean, if she says anything . . .” She fell silent.
“Yup.”
Jeri came back out. She stopped at the car and looked in at me, in her seat, maybe deciding if she could haul me out and dead-lift me before packing me in back, so I beat her to it and packed myself.
“He’s there,” Jeri said, getting in. “And there’s a small parking lot at the side of the building. I didn’t see a green SUV of any kind there, but I saw a dark blue Lexus SUV, so I think we could follow him easily enough if he leaves.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Attractive white-haired guy, slender, looks like a runner. Hair is pure white, like snow, so he’s either prematurely white or has it dyed, since Ma says he’s only fifty-one.”
“Did he look guilty?” I asked.
“Well, of course he looked guilty. He’s a lawyer.”
“What I think I meant was, is this getting us anywhere?”
“Right now we’re scouting the territory, Mort. Now I know which office in there is his and I know what he looks like. You’ve had a look at Odermann. We might try following Bye if he leaves, see where he goes. Or we could go check out his residence right now, fill in that gap.”
Which we did, more or less unsuccessfully.
Leland Bye lived in southwest Reno in a gated community, which probably had something to do with Shakespeare’s line: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Jeri pursed her lips as she contemplated what to do about the guard and the gate, then she shrugged and said, “We better not push our luck. We’ve got Bye and Odermann in our sights, but we don’t want them to know it.”
“I’m sort of confused,” Sarah said. “Who is this lawyer? How does he fit into all this again?”
“He’s Wexel’s lawyer,” Jeri said. “We’re giving Wexel a close look because he was Reinhart’s chief of staff, and he died recently. Suspiciously, too. Mary Odermann is—was—Bye’s sister. She died two years ago, but a green Mercedes SUV was registered in her name in May, using Bob Odermann’s home address.”
“So we ought to keep an eye on this Bob guy, right? I mean, if he’s got the SUV.”
Jeri thought about it for a moment. “You and Mort found three people who said a woman in her thirties was driving that SUV. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Mary, and I’m almost as sure it wasn’t Bob in drag. Although these days that’s not something you
