Stateline (34 page)

We all stood in the suite silently. Through the window I could see the skies were dark and heavy, and the cold seemed to wait outside patiently, knowing it could outlast any mortal circumstance. Bascom nodded at me grimly. Cody and I turned to leave, but before we could, Nora Bascom stepped in front of the door.

“Thank you for killing him,” she whispered, her eyes shiny and wet. “I hope he rots in hell.” Then she pressed a folded piece of paper into my hand. I unfolded it with the fingers of one hand. It was a check for $50,000. I accepted it without any philosophical musings. I’d earned it.

“Hope he rots in hell,” Nora Bascom whispered again, as if it was an invocation. I nodded and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

• • •

It was four o’clock and snowing by the time we were packed and ready to leave. Cody’s ribs were hurting, so I found the two-year-old bottle of codeine I’d taken from Samantha Nunez’s apartment. He snatched it out of my hand and swallowed enough pills to sedate a horse, then cracked a beer and tried to get comfortable in the passenger seat.

The clouds resting on the granite ridges above the westbound pass were battleship gray when we rolled out of town. I drove slowly, the truck’s tires crunching over fresh snow, the pines blurred in the haze, the alpine lake choppy and black. Behind us the lights of the casinos glowed steadily, as if even the fiercest winter storm posed no threat.

Cody fell asleep as we went over Echo Summit, his beer can resting half full between his legs. When I stopped at Placerville an hour later, it was dark and the snow had turned to rain. I called Wenger and left him a voicemail saying I’d be in the office sometime the next day. Then I called Beverly Howitt. Her cell voice mail wasn’t working, so I left a message with the clerk at the hotel where she was staying.

Cody’s chainsaw snoring mercifully downshifted to occasional snorts, leaving me alone with my thoughts for the long drive. I stared past the rhythmic cadence of the wiper blades, out to a world sectioned in black corridors, white lines, and bursts of red light. When I pulled up to my apartment it was ten o’clock. I woke Cody, and hauled my gear inside as he drove away. “Home sweet home,” I muttered, but the apartment seemed empty and lifeless. I went to bed, weary and dead tired, my body aching in a hundred different places.

• • •

I walked into my office in San Jose the next morning, the office of Wenger and Associates, me being the associate. Or so I thought. A man perhaps sixty sat at my desk.

“Well, hello, Dan,” Wenger said. “To what do I owe the honor?”

“Sorry I’m late, Rick. I’ve been tied up.”

“Oh, yes. Late. Of course. Let’s see.” He ticked the days off his wall calendar. “Yes. You are indeed
a little
late. Seven working days late. But seven hours, seven days, hey, who’s counting? They’re only numbers, right? It could be seven dollars, seven hundred dollars, seventy thousand dollars, maybe even
a hundred fucking thousand dollars.
Is that what you are, Dan? The Hundred-Thousand-Dollar Man?”

“Are you feeling okay, Rick?”

“Yes, indeedy, I am. Just fine, thank you. By the way, meet Jim Phelps. You see, Jim wants a job. He wants to work. He’s used to working hard. Comes in on time. Works hard. Comes in early. Leaves late.”

Wenger’s eyes were wide, and his manic chatter wasn’t normal. If I didn’t know better, I’d have assumed he was coked to the gills. Either that or he was suffering some sort of psychotic episode. Jim Phelps looked stunned and uncomfortable. “It’s my first day,” he said with a shrug.

“Sorry, can’t talk, Dan. Money, money, made five grand in the stock market yesterday. Dotcom sector’s on fire. Time is money.” Wenger held his hands in front of him, flapping them side to side from the wrist joint.

“What’s up with my desk?”

“Oh, yes. I almost forgot. How very, very inconsiderate of me. You, Dan, are fired. Terminated. Eighty-sixed. Adiosed. Eighty-osed. You are the weakest link. Bye-bye.”

His phone rang, and he picked it up and started chattering like a monkey on a crack binge. A box with my personal effects sat next to my former desk. In the box was my bottle of CC, a Rolodex, two pens with the ends chewed, a stack of Styrofoam cups, and an individually wrapped dose of Alka Seltzer. My final paycheck was taped to the bottle.

“I’ve never seen him like this,” I whispered to Jim Phelps. “He sounds like he’s lost his mind.”

“What have I got myself into?” he said under his breath.

The phone on the desk rang. Out of habit, I picked it up. “Investigations.”

“I was given this number. I’m looking for my boyfriend,” a female voice said.

“Hello, Samantha.”

“Who is this?”

“I came and visited you at the Cat’s Meow last week. We had a nice conversation. Cost me two hundred bucks.”

“So it’s you,” she said.

“Nice to hear from you too.”

“Whatever. I’m calling because I hear my boyfriend Dean is dead, and I don’t believe it.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Can you tell me where he is?”

“Tell me first what kind of scam you and Michael Dean Stiles and Julo Nafui were running on Sylvester Bascom.”

“Who?”

“Sylvester Bascom was the man you watched Julo Nafui murder after you let him in the room.”

“Oh,” she said. I heard her exhale a hit off a cigarette.

“I know everything that happened in the room. I know you let Stiles in to rob Bascom, and then Sven Osterlund came out of the closet and punched out Stiles. Then you let Nafui in, and he stabbed Bascom to death.”

“Okay,” she said slowly.

“Nafui’s dead, Samantha. You don’t have to worry about him. My investigation of Sylvester Bascom’s murder is done. I’m not working with any police agency, and I assume South Lake Tahoe PD will close the file on the murder since Nafui’s dead. It’s probably a good idea for you to stay out of the area, though.”

“No shit. What other kind of brilliant free advice do you have for me?”

“You want to know what’s up with your boyfriend, you tell me what was going on.”

“Fuck that.”

“I guess this conversation’s over.”

“Wait. This is ridiculous. I’m not going to incriminate myself over the phone. You’re probably recording this conversation.”

“Wrong,” I said tiredly. “Let me give you a few other things to consider. The drug ring ran by Jake Tuma? It’s going down big time. The crooked cops protecting it, including the sheriff at the top, are going to take a major fall. And I know Michael Dean Stiles was dealing for Tuma.”

“Just tell me where he is,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I have to go. I can’t use this phone.”

“Hold on,” she said urgently. “Don’t hang up. Give me your word, for whatever that’s worth, that you won’t screw me over.”

I laughed out loud. “Haven’t we had this conversation before? This is like
d
éjà vu. And what about your word? You owe me a night of sex for killing Nafui.”

“
You
killed him?”

“Yes.”

“I would have liked to have seen it,” she said.

“I doubt that.”

“I heard Nafui’s dead. But I don’t know for sure.”

“Call the Carson City Coroner’s Office.”

“All right, listen,” she said. “I let Dean in because I suspected this guy Bascom was a high roller. Every now and then I’d get a john who didn’t hesitate to pay a premium price, talked about tipping big, that sort of thing. So I’d have Dean wait outside until the right moment, then let him in to roll the chump.”

It was a typical Murphy scam, a crime that probably occurred in every major American city on a regular basis. “What about the drugs?” I said. “What’s Stiles’s connection with Bascom or Osterlund?”

“Osterlund?”

“He was the guy in the closet.”

“I never saw him before. Listen, Dean may have been dealing, but it had nothing to do with what happened that night.”

“Tell me why Julo Nafui was there,” I said.

“He and Dean had become fast friends. They worked together and hung out. He’s probably the only man on the planet tougher than Dean, with all that mercenary shit he’s done. Talk about a stone-cold killer. He scared the shit out of me and I hated his fucking guts. I thought he was the devil. You sure he’s dead?”

“Very sure. Why did Nafui stab Bascom? What was the reason for that?”

“I told you, Nafui was a natural killer. He enjoyed it. He would whip out his big knife and brag he could stab all the way through a person. I guess he wanted to prove it.”

“He stabbed Bascom just to prove that?” I asked. “For no other reason?”

“That’s right,” she said. “Now, where’s Dean?”

I cleared my throat. “He’s dead, Samantha.”

“I don’t believe that. I feel him.”

“Call the Truckee Sheriff’s Office if you want,” I said. “They’re probably looking for kin to claim the body.”

• • •

Wenger was still on the phone when I hung up. I picked up my box and walked out onto the damp sidewalk. Jim Phelps followed me.

“Hey, I didn’t know I was taking someone’s job. I’m a retired marketing manager from Hewlett Packard. I don’t need the money. I took this job so I could live the life of a private investigator for a couple months. Then I want to write a screenplay.”

I smiled. “Good luck. I suggest you make it a comedy. Wenger ought to give you plenty of material to work with.”

T
he afternoon after Wenger fired me I rode my bike to the gym and worked out harder than I had in months, pushing my muscles to the limit, trying to sweat the booze, cigarettes, and sordid memories out of my system. My answering machine was blinking when I got back to my apartment, still dripping from the light rain that began to fall as I rode home. I hit the button hopefully, waiting for Beverly Howitt’s voice, but it was Jim Phelps from the office. He said Wenger had just been taken to the hospital, apparently suffering an extreme reaction to an overdose of allergy medicine.

I spent the next few days drying out and running various errands. Wenger called me the following Sunday. He said he had recovered and was resting at home.

“What the hell kind of medicine were you taking?” I asked.

“Some pills to help with my allergies to my goddamned cat.”

“What did you do, take the whole bottle?”

“Very funny,” he said, then spent a half an hour trying to convince me to come back and work for him, and also to let him invest my money in the stock market, since he claimed to be getting rich on dotcom stocks. I answered no to both requests, and when he continued trying to convince me, I gently hung up on him. Then I dialed the number I had for Beverly.

“Hey,” I said when she answered.

“Is this…who is this?”

“It’s Dan, Dan Reno. How are you?” I felt awkward, feeling a sense that whatever there was between us in Salina may have been a drunken illusion on my part. She had been scared and vulnerable, and I had treated her kindly. Maybe there was no more than that.

“I didn’t think you were going to call.”

“I left a message at your hotel a couple days ago.”

“You did? I never got it. But that’s understandable, since the clerk here is a hopeless alcoholic.”

“There’s always hope,” I said. “How’s your mom?”

“The doctors give her two weeks.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” she whispered. “Are you still investigating your case?”

“It’s over, for the most part. I was concerned you might have eventually been called to testify, but that won’t happen now.”

“Why?”

“The man who committed the murder has already been dealt with.”

“Is he in jail?”

“No, but he’s not going to bother anyone again.”

• • •

February turned unseasonably sunny in San Jose. Wenger continued calling, mostly to babble about his obsession with the stock market. The computing sector was red hot, and he stopped paying much attention to his investigation business and poured every penny he had into local technology stocks.

In my abundant free time, I found myself spending a ridiculous amount of hours talking to Beverly Howitt. As we grew closer, I became plagued by a nagging loose end: the possibility that a tape of Sylvester Bascom’s murder might eventually surface. Beverly and I had just hung up on a Wednesday afternoon when I decided I needed closure on the tape. I had no way of knowing for certain where Osterlund’s supposed video camera and tape might be, but I had a few ideas.

I dialed the number for Jane Osterlund, and a recorded voice said the number was disconnected. I then called the only number I had for Brad Turner, his parents’ phone number. His mom answered, and after she got over her surprise from hearing from me—it had been at least ten years since we’d talked—she told me Brad had checked into a drug-and-alcohol rehabilitation center last week. It was his third go at rehab, and this time it was a ten-week in-patient program. Mrs. Turner was embarrassingly candid about her opinions of her son and his habits, but after listening to her lament for ten minutes, I interrupted to ask if she had Whitey’s number.

Whitey answered on the first ring.

“This is the San Jose Police Department,” I said. “I’m calling to investigate Brad Turner escaping from Trembling Hills Recovery Center.”

“Huh? Come on. Who is this, man?”

“It’s Dan Reno, Whitey.”

“Shit. What, you heard about Brado?”

“I just talked to his mom.”

“Yeah, she checked him in after Brad got fired from his job.”

“No kidding.”

“Yeah. Ten freakin’ weeks, no booze, no smoke.”

“Maybe it’ll be good for him.”

“I think he’ll probably have a nervous breakdown in there. I know I would,” Whitey said.

“Everyone’s got to dry out sometime,” I philosophized.

“Yeah, but not cold turkey.”

“Whitey, did you ever talk to Osterlund’s mom when you came back from Tahoe?”

“Yeah, I did. And let me tell you, she is one messed-up lady. Rumor has it she’s been using her psychic gig to bilk people out of a lot of dough. She’d have them give her money so she could invest it for them in the stock market. Anyway, she bought into this one company that went from around two dollars a share to thirty bucks in two weeks, but then the NASDAQ suspended trading because they think the company is a fraud. When trading started again, the stock fell to twelve cents. I heard she lost almost everything. The bitch screwed over a lot of people.”