Ma took off, thinking Caribbean beaches. That left me, Jeri, and Sarah—and, surprise, they wanted to talk alone again. So I sat at the bar and tried to chat up O’Roarke about low-fat recipes and color coordinating our clothing, but he wasn’t interested.
Sonofabitch.
So I used another Wicked Ale to help nudge my thoughts about this Reinhart-Allie-Odermann-Bye mess. I gave that up after about thirty seconds. We didn’t have enough information. Did Odermann have the SUV, or didn’t he? Did Bye have anything to do with any of this, or was his dead sister a dead end, leaving Bye out of it? Was Bob a criminal mastermind? And Jayson Wexel, forty-nine, chief of staff to the High Priest of Prevarication, cremated in his house. Was that an accident or murder? I hadn’t heard the official result of that yet. And Reinhart’s hand. Was the good senator dead or alive? What about Mortimer Angel? What was he in all of this?
“Do you think I might’ve killed Reinhart and shipped his hand to myself in a fugue state?” I asked O’Roarke as I ran a bead of moisture around the bar top with the tip of a finger.
“I wouldn’t put it past you.”
I turned on the barstool. Jeri and Sarah had their heads eight inches apart, talking quietly. Maybe some sort of lending program was in the works. Maybe they were comparing notes.
“Think I’m paranoid?” I asked O’Roarke.
“Hell, no. People really are out to get you, spitfire.” He nodded at Jeri and Sarah. “Those two especially.”
Well, shit. Enough of this. I went back and sat with the girls. “What’s up?” I asked, always a great opening line.
“Jesus Christ, Mort. She asked if you wanted to shower with her and you turned her down? You didn’t tell me that part.”
“I didn’t want to brag. When you’re done chatting you’ll find me at one of the roulette wheels.”
I got up and left.
The three of us ate dinner at the Peppermill buffet, one of the top three buffets in Reno. They allowed me to choose the venue—probably a consolation prize. I chose the Peppermill because the parking was easy and I could have roast beef and other fine cuisine, and they could have salads with chickpeas and beets and other stuff that wasn’t meant to support life—though looking at those two gorgeous broads, I might’ve been wrong about that.
When we left the casino, the sunset was a band of golden fire above the Sierras. A discussion ensued, resulting in Sarah driving us back to her apartment so Jeri and I could retrieve Jeri’s Porsche and Sarah could entertain herself with a textbook and a report that was due on Wednesday, day after next.
“Where to?” I asked Jeri when we were alone, headed south on Valley Road.
“You didn’t shower with her? Wow.”
“We could talk about something else. That salad you had at the Peppermill looked mighty tasty. Beets and sprouts, yum.”
“Seriously, Mort? You wasted water?”
“Yup, nope. I mean, I showered later, so I guess yup.”
“Jesus.” She shook her head, then reached over and rubbed my neck, gave it a little massage. “You’re something else.”
I didn’t say anything. She was right, of course, but I decided to let my natural humility shine through.
“How about we swing by Odermann’s place?” Jeri said.
“You’re driving, kiddo.”
She smiled, hit I-80 and headed east, got off at Vista, looped through an aging subdivision, and pulled to the curb across from Bob’s house. A glow behind curtains suggested someone was home.
We sat there for a while, then Jeri turned off the engine.
“Stakeout?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“Be a lot faster if I go kick in the front door, ask him about that SUV,” I said.
“You should do that, see how it turns out. The essence of PI work is experience.”
Okay, she had me there.
We settled in and began to talk in earnest. An hour passed, then another. Somewhere during the third hour I was finally convinced that all the antics with Sarah—Holiday—was not an issue with Jeri. If there was an issue, it was undetectable, a sneeze in a hurricane. Something about Holiday had gotten under Jeri’s skin, something about shared loneliness, frustration, desire, fear, repression—a real potpourri of emotions, too tangled for me to sort out. But Jeri kept at it—what else are stakeouts for?—speaking quietly, doing her best to explain it to me, and, I thought, to herself. I think she knew what she felt, but hadn’t known why—not entirely. Talking it out seemed to help. Finally she blew out a gust of air and said, “Anyway, Mort, I understand all of this. I get it.”
“Not sure I do. Yet. I mean, your acceptance of it.”
Her voice remained serious. “Maybe you will and maybe you won’t. This thing about not owning you. It feels . . . deep.”
“I’m not a deep guy.”
“You’re deeper than you think. Anyway, Bob’s lights have been out for over an hour and stakeouts are ten percent boredom and ninety percent having to pee, so let’s get the hell out of here.”
Which we did.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MA SAID, “I found another connection with those lists, but I don’t like it. I like the Odermann thing.”
“What’d you find?” Jeri asked.
Tuesday morning in Ma’s office, with bagels. Mine could’ve used a breakfast steak and a fried egg on it, but no such luck.
“Okay, try to follow this,” Ma said. “Reinhart’s wife—her name is Julia—has a married brother living in Alaska. The brother’s wife has a sister named Lana who married a George Szupello and they live in Vegas. In case you’ve forgotten, Szupello is on the list of those SUV owners. If the name hadn’t been so far out there, I never woulda found it. Szupello of all things.”
“Jesus H. Christ, that’s thin,” I said. I didn’t know how the hell she’d found it. Jeri had said Ma was good, but maybe she was too good, coming up with stuff like that.
“It’s
