“So my involvement is your fault, Russ,” I said.
Danya glared at me. “But I never really hired you. I just told you to phone me so we could talk.”
“Then you hired me,” I said to Russ, “since that maverick thing appealed to you.”
“Big mistake, Dad,” Danya said.
“Or not,” Lucy spoke up. “Mort’s the only one who’s been putting things together. All you two have been doing is hiding out and playing house in that motel room.”
“And,” I said, loud enough to yank everyone’s attention away from Lucy’s comment, “we have a reporter for Celebrity News running around with about eighty percent of the story ready to go, so the shit’s gonna hit the fan sometime soon. When it hits, the splatter is gonna be something else, kids.”
Danya made a face. Probably didn’t like the image.
“How soon, you think?” Russ asked.
“Don’t know. Right now he’s sitting on it, but if he gets a whiff of anyone else on it, it’ll probably be in the next issue or a special edition.” I looked at Shanna. “He knows you’re Celine. He found that out the first two weeks. He knows Jo-X was found in Celine’s garage, and he’s got pictures. There’s not much more to this story, so I doubt he’ll put it off much longer. All in all, the longer you girls stay hidden, the more guilty it makes you look.”
“Keeping out of the public’s eye doesn’t make us guilty, it’s just common-freakin’-sense,” Danya said.
“Right. Tell that to John Deere out in Iowa.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what anyone thinks in Iowa.”
“Well put, but”—I turned to Russ—“you’re the father, but also the cop, and I think a professional opinion is warranted. Should they turn themselves in?”
He didn’t jump to answer that one. He thought about it for a while, then sighed, letting out enough hot air to lift a dirigible. “Probably not, at least not right now. We need to chew on this a while longer. I know where they are. If it comes to that, I’ll take the heat. I can say I told ’em to keep out of sight—not as a cop, but as a father who is a cop.”
“Which could end your career,” I said.
He shrugged. “Maybe I’ll be a private eye, like you.”
Good one, Russ. I heard Spade and Hammer yucking it up in the next booth. “Something I’d like to see,” I said.
“You got any idea how many cops end up as PIs?”
“I’ll have to get back to you on that. And if your advice for Danya, Shanna, and ‘Celine’ is to stay out of sight, fine, I’m on board. But to drag all this back to the issue we’re still tap-dancing around, guess what, folks?—somebody killed Jo-X.”
That shut down the conversation for several minutes.
Finally our food arrived and we tucked into it. That delayed the conversation another ten minutes, but I could feel the cams and wheels working in everyone’s head. Except mine. I was tired of it. Time to let someone else jump out there with suggestions and solutions.
And still Josie wasn’t in it, at least as far as Russ knew. I didn’t know if he had bought Shanna’s explanation for why she’d been Celine, but twenty grand a concert was a pretty convincing reason, if you needed money and didn’t mind being associated with lyrics that had already rotted fifty thousand brain stems.
“He had a ton of enemies,” Russ said, breaking the silence.
“Yes, he did,” I said. “That’ll help. But he ended up in Shanna’s garage and Shanna is Celine, or was. That’s not general knowledge. Let’s hope it stays that way. Not even Xenon knew who she was. But it would be nice if we could figure out who did the world a favor and killed that troll and why he ended up in ‘Celine’s’ garage and not yours, Russ, or mine, or in the empty desert somewhere, which would’ve been the best option.”
Russ tapped the table with a finger. “Someone asked for a million bucks. Whoever it was knew Shanna was Celine. Had to. Then they killed Jo-X and strung him up in that garage.”
“Yet we’re still spinning our wheels,” I said. “Something is missing. Why kill him? Why put him in that garage?”
“Money,” Danya said. “Someone knew about Shanna. They killed him and tried to blackmail us. What’s so hard about that?”
“A million bucks, that’s what,” Russ said. “Who would think you could come up with that kind of money?”
“We should get the Wharf Rat in on this,” Lucy said. “He knew Shanna was Celine. Not that I think he killed Jo-X, runty little guy like that. Of course, he did have a gun.”
Russ stared at her. “Huh? Wharf rat? A gun?”
Lucy bumped my shoulder. “Tell him.”
“That reporter for the News,” I said. “I told you he went over the back fence at the girls’ house like a freakin’ wharf rat—hence the name. He made the connection between Shanna and Celine.” I looked at Russ. “What caliber bullets was Xenon shot with?”
“Thirty-eights. So what?”
“So he didn’t do it. At least not with the gun we saw up at Xenon’s hideout. He had a .45, looked like it would knock him over if he fired it. I doubt that he knows how Jo-X ended up in the garage, but it’s possible he knows something about all this, something obscure, and hasn’t put it together yet.”
“He should be here with us now,” Russ said.
“Like I said,” Lucy muttered.
“I might be able to round him up,” I said. I didn’t tell Russ I’d seen his car at the Midnight Rider Motel on the way past the place last night. I didn’t want a parade headed down that way. Turns out a parade would have been a
