Gumshoe Gorilla (13 page)

Skye agreed to the terms, and left us with a week's retainer. Drew showed our new client to the door.

As it closed behind her, I turned to him.

"First, thank you. Second, what in your quaint Christian notion of Hell is going on here?"

He shrugged.

"I changed my mind. We'll find a way to handle it."

"You changed your mind?" I repeated. "May I ask why?"

"I don't know. Intuition, I guess."

He tried to turn away, but I grabbed him by the shoulder.

"Drew, men don't have intuition. You get seventy five percent of all income from professional sports, two-thirds of the votes in congress, and a metabolism that doesn't retain water once a month. You don't get to have intuition, too. It's nature's way of evening the score."

"Whatever. Can we get started on this? There's a lot of research to do before we hit the set tomorrow. Which --in case you weren't paying attention-- is at 7 AM, sharp. As I see it, we need to finish the background check on our client and dig up anything we can on Rockland. Which piece do you want?"

It was a sucker split. There would only be a trickle of information about Skye out on the web, but pages and pages of stuff on Rockland. Still, Drew knew which piece I would take.

"Have fun reading up on Ms. Phillips," I said.

And then I settled in to read everything ever written about the mysterious Mister Charles Rockland.

I finally got out of the office. I walked across the parking lot, shivering in the night air. It was late in the year for a cold snap, but apparently no one had mentioned that to Mother Nature. Maybe Jen could take it up with her at the next Wiccan shindig. I found my car, got my leather jacket out of the trunk, and started the drive home.

I was still trying to figure out why our new client was having dreams about a certain gorilla in a trench coat. I tried to convince myself that it was just a coincidence. After all, Gumshoe Gorilla had been a popular show. And Ms. Philips does work in television. Maybe her brain went looking through old reruns when it realized that she needed a detective.

Around 10th street, I told Sherwin to turn on the radio and find the Microsoft News Network. I listened to the reporters drone on as the street signs rolled by. The lead story was the Stonewall trial, of course. Not that anything had happened. But you know how reporters are-- once they get into a feeding frenzy, they'll keep talking even when there's nothing new to say.

The Stonewall case wasn't going anywhere in a hurry. The lawyers had been wrangling with each other for three months now, and so far they hadn't even managed to pick a jury. Apparently, they were still trying to find twelve people who hadn't already seen the footage of Senator Stonewall stabbing that artist to death. Which was gonna be tough, because the news services replayed it every time they reported on the story. I don't know. Maybe the DA could find twelve eskimos who didn't own television sets.

Elsewhere in the world, Brazil was still trying to clean up the mess from that EMP that went off in Rio de Janeiro last week. It had fragged every silicon chip in the city. Which meant that there wasn't a working computer, car, or microwave oven anywhere in Rio. A bunch of folks had died pretty quickly-- patients in hospitals whose life support stopped working, drivers on crowded highways, anybody with a pacemaker. But now the real trouble was starting. Disabled cars were blocking the roads. Stores couldn't run credit cards to sell food or medicine. Electricity and water was still offline. The Brazilian army was doing its best, air dropping supplies and moving troops in to try and keep the peace. But it sounded like things were getting really ugly, just the same.

Tonight, the reporter was interviewing some talking heads, trying to figure out who had set off the pulse. One of them thought it was an eco-terrorist group protesting the destruction of the Amazon. The other thought it was the Colombians, getting even for their loss in the last border war. Neither guy had a shred of evidence to back up his position, so they just argued back and forth, trading guesswork as if it was news.

I finally got sick of their chatter and switched off the radio. I had done enough thinking for one day. I drove on, letting my mind slide into neutral. I passed a couple prostitutes working their corner. The remains of a dog that hadn't quite made it across the street. A bag lady in an old prom dress going through a trash can.

I got stuck at a red light on 14th street. While I waited, I noticed the big billboard on the side of the Metro Tower. It usually runs some ad of shirtless guys selling tanning products, but tonight it was scrolling through the lines of a poem. I had time to read a couple stanzas before the light changed.

And the lies that we were told,

When our innocence was sold

By the men who market soap and jeans and Gods

Are we really so naive?

That our hunger to believe

Can be sated by such simple minded frauds?

Buy this cologne, it makes you thinner!

Use this douche, And you're a winner!

Chew this gum! And you will drive all men to lust!

And buy this God, as we've defined him,

(Just don't try too hard to find him)

He's a private guy, and he only talks to us."

Cute. Someone running an advertisement against advertisers? Well, I'm sure they had an angle. The light turned green, and I drove on.

I got lucky and landed a parking space in front of my building. It's an old house that's had more work done than an aging movie star. Over the years, people have added several new rooms to it, and then the latest owner chopped it up into apartments. The resulting floor plan is a little odd. For example, the windows in my living room offer a stunning view of... the inside of my bedroom. I'd love to know what contractor was responsible for that.

On my way in, I ran into Ms. Georgia DeJungle. She was dressed for work, in a leopard print dress and a huge hat shaped like a palm tree with a little animatronic monkey waving from it. She was struggling with a couple of costume bags, so I carried them out to her car for her. (I like to stay on her good side. When she's not performing, she goes by Joe and handles the repairs on this place. A good person to know when your toilet stops working at three in the morning.)

I got Georgia safely off, and headed back into the building. My apartment is on the ground floor, past the stairs and the fusebox. I reached my door and was about to place my thumb on the lockplate when I glanced down and saw the first sign of trouble. The small piece of tape that I'd placed on the door that morning was broken.

It's a trick that I picked up from an old movie. There's no way to stop someone from breaking into a cheap building like this. There are just too many weak points. Even if I replaced the lock and put in a solid steel door, they'd just come in through the windows. And if I put bars on the windows, they'd break into the apartment next to mine and come in through the walls. The interior of this place is nothing but old plasterboard. You can cut through it with nothing more than a pocket knife and a little determination.

Well, if I can't keep intruders out, I at least want to channel their efforts. So I'd put a really cheap lock on my front door, making it the obvious weak point. It saves on broken windows. And coupled with the broken tape, it gives me a little warning when I have unexpected company.

I quietly backed away from my door.

Out on the porch, I had Sherwin run a crosscheck of recent prison releases against the names of felons that I'd busted back when I was a cop. He came up with two matches. But one of them was an embezzler, nonviolent. And the other one was a guy in his sixties who'd poisoned his wife for the insurance. Neither seemed like the type to try and hunt me down for a face to face confrontation.

Still, better safe than sorry. I called in a favor with a friend on the force and had her check the location of the parolees' transponders. The embezzler was up in Marietta, the poisoner out in Stone Mountain. That pretty much ruled out an old beef from my days as a cop. So whoever was in my apartment must be someone that I'd pissed off as a PI. I drew up a list of all the people from recent cases who might be mad enough to do me physical harm. It was longer than I'd like. But on the bright side, there were only two clients on it.

I went out to my car. I got the taser out of the glove compartment, and the toy grenade out of the trunk. And then I headed back to find out who was in my apartment.

The most dangerous part of this kind of operation is opening the door. All you need is some crazy on the other side with a shotgun to ruin your whole day. I stood to the side and had Sherwin trigger the lock remotely. The door unbolted and slowly started to swing open. --I'd like to claim that I rigged it that way, but the thing was already off balance when I moved in.-- When no one came running out, I tossed in the toy grenade. I got it from one of those stores that caters to children with paramilitary tendencies. It's just a hunk of plastic molded into a convincing facsimile of a fragmentary grenade. So it doesn't really do anything. Except scare the bejesus out of anyone who sees it. I gave whoever was in there two seconds to register the presence of the grenade and start running, and then I burst into the room with my taser out.

There was no one there. I checked the corners, then the blind spots next to the door. Nope. No one. There was however, a large trunk sitting in the middle of my living room.

Oh, no. Not this again.

I swept the rest of the apartment. There were no intruders lurking in my bathroom or my closet, or under my bed. I went back and opened the trunk.

Dresses. Piles and piles of women's dresses. Three in buckskin, plus a couple of slinky black numbers, and a bright red business ensemble. Oh, and shoes. Two sets of black pumps and a pair of moccasins.

This really isn't funny anymore.

Well, I couldn't leave it all sitting in the middle of my living room. I carried the trunk back to my bedroom, and added it to the growing pile of crap that the crazy indian had left for me. I was gonna have to figure out something to do with all this stuff. Maybe Georgia could take it off my hands. Put that on my "to do" list.

The apartment was a little chilly, so I went into the kitchen, opened the oven, and set it to 450 degrees. In theory, the building comes with central heat and air. But since the landlord pays for the utilities, the heat never comes on for anything less than a blizzard.

While I waited for the place to warm up, I read over the information on our new client, Skye Philips. Most of it was basic stuff: where she was born, where she went to school, that sort of thing. Sherwin had also been able to find a couple of paparazzi shots of her and Charles Rockland at a restaurant, looking pretty cozy with each other. So at least I knew the whole relationship wasn't taking place in her head.

There was also a short article about her in
Sign of the Times,
a magazine for the hearing impaired. It was one of those "She made it big and you can too!" articles, but it did have a good explanation of her job. Apparently a "plot coordinator" is the person on a TV show who keeps track of all the different scenes that they shoot for different interest groups, and makes sure that they can be put together in any combination. So that the show will make sense whether you're watching a "family oriented" Christian cut, or the "guns and tits" version favored by teenage boys, or the pro-environmental Hindu S&M version with the extra car chases.