“Just look at that fuckin’ moron,” Ma said, blowing an angry cloud of virulent green smoke at the TV—green due to the track lighting that helped to give the Green Room its name. “I know a mineshaft he could get dumped down if someone wanted to get rid of the body.”
“They might’ve filled it in after getting Reinhart out,” I said. Presidential hopeful Senator Reinhart and three others had been removed from a remote mineshaft in northern Nevada last year. Ma and I had found the person who’d murdered them, but the FBI and local police didn’t know that, still didn’t have a clue.
“Hope not.” Ma stared at a clip of Jonnie-X onstage, gutter rapping, every third word bleeped out to get his act past the applicable FCC regulations. “Be a shame not to have a mineshaft when you need one.”
Maude Clary was a battle-axe, five foot four. At last weigh-in she tipped the scale at a hundred eighty-five pounds. My estimate. The actual number was a state secret. Her hair was going gray, but she refused to color it. She was my boss and also my accomplice in that malice aforethought business that took place in Paris, France, last October, eight months ago.
Holiday, on the other hand, was five-eight, slender, a hundred twenty-six pounds, and about as beautiful and curvaceous as a girl can get. She had frizzy light blond hair in a tousled bedroom style, three inches off her shoulders. She’d also flown to France and had played a minor part in the untimely and well-deserved death of Julia Reinhart, Senator Harry Reinhart’s trophy wife. Julia had crushed his skull with a length of iron pipe and dumped the carcass down that mineshaft, something that would give rich old farts with trophy wives a reason to rethink that decision—if they’d known she was the one who’d killed him.
Julia also murdered my fiancée, Jeri DiFrazzia, which still caused me to jolt awake at night with a heart so heavy and black I stayed awake for hours. So, the three of us, Ma, Holiday, and I, were close, sharing the secret pleasure of having sent Julia on a one-way trip down the river Styx from her luxury Paris hotel suite.
Which, of course, made me and Ma murderers and Holiday an accomplice, not that we were losing sleep over it.
Holiday’s real name was Sarah Dellario, Holiday being something of a “stage” name, no longer used now that she wasn’t making the rounds of bars pretending to be a hooker while she searched for her sister, Allie—also murdered by Julia Reinhart.
Holiday and I had been seeing each other in a quasi-informal manner, probably not understandable to outside observers if there had been outside observers. It didn’t involve aerobic activity, but we sometimes ended up soapy in a shower so it was a great way to get clean. For historical and sentimental reasons, this took place on Tuesdays and was a weekly morale booster for both of us even if Ma gave us a lot of good-natured flack about it.
On the other hand, Sarah—Holiday’s alter-ego—was a civil engineering student at the University of Nevada in Reno, with a three-point-eight-five grade point average, able to concentrate for hours on end on things like structural dynamics, eigenvectors, and unholy arcane shit like that. She knew a hell of a lot more math than I did, elementary calculus being not only an oxymoron but something she thought of as a no-brainer. I liked both sides of her, but was able to converse better with “Holiday,” as less math was involved.
“While I’m gone,” Ma said to me, pointing the last two inches of her cigarette at the TV at a clip of Jo-X entering a limo with his latest arm candy, Celine, “you oughta find that dimwit.”
“Who? Celine?”
Ma skewered me with a look. “Jo-X, boyo.”
“I’ll get right on that.”
“It’s what you do, God only knows how.” She paused for a moment, then said, “Just so you know, if you do come across that rancid sonofabitch and cause another one of your uproars, you’re fired.”
“Okay, then, I won’t get right on it, even though that would put Clary Investigations on the map and be fantastic for business. You could up your rate to two hundred an hour, get even more high-end business. By the way, when are we going to make that Clary & Angel Investigations?”
Which, I thought, made sense. My name is Mort Angel. My birth certificate has me as Mortimer Angel—which is wrong and my mother’s fault since—obviously—her handwriting was as bad forty-two years ago as it is now. I don’t know what clown thought that squiggle or flourish she’d put at the end of Mort was “imer,” but all sorts of legal crud ended up in the name Mortimer Burris Angel, which is how I have to sign documents when the IRS gets picky and tight-assed. And, having worked as a field agent for the IRS for sixteen years, I can say picky, tight-assed, and humorless doesn’t begin to cover it. Criminal, however, does. Because I discovered I had a soul, I had to crawl out of that sewer, not that I harbor any resentment. Any place that puts you in touch with your soul can’t be all bad.
Ma looked up at the ceiling. “Well, now, lemme see—what’s the weather like in hell today? How close is it to freezin’ over?”
Holiday laughed softly, then put a hand on my arm. A very nice hand it was, too.
So . . . Jonnie Xenon had disappeared without a trace. Good deal. He’d missed a concert in Seattle and hadn’t been seen in five days—five endless, heartbreaking days that had millions of throbbing little hearts devastated, dying in little teenaged chests. I imagined tens of thousands of fourteen-year-old girls crumpled in their beds, unable to eat, crying their eyes out at the loss. Such is the nature of our world in which a sociopath like Jo-X can become a teenager’s love object—in which perception
