“Well, if she did run, I guess she wouldn’t want to do so in her own car,” noted Archer. “You talk to the cab companies yet? Maybe she took one to the train or bus station or the airport.”
“Working on it. But first things first, we need to identify the stiff, and the sooner the better. So, where’d you meet her?”
“At Chasen’s last night. I was having dinner with a friend of hers and she showed up and dropped her story on me when she found out what I did for a living.”
“Chasen’s, huh?” He slipped out the stogie and looked at his colleagues. “You two ever been to Chasen’s?” They shook their heads. “Me neither. Out of the range of my salary. Didn’t know you moved in such uppity circles, Archer. You on the take or what?”
“What do PIs have to offer?” Archer countered.
“You still drive that fancy car? The one with the steering wheel on the wrong side?”
“Yeah. But I basically won that playing roulette in Reno.”
“You that lucky?”
“I was that night.”
Oldham lazily scratched his chin. “And she thought someone was trying to kill her?”
“Yeah. I was going to go by her office this morning to talk to her.”
“And why didn’t you?” said Oldham sharply, going in for the kill now. “And how the hell did you know to call Barry in the first place about this? Come on, gumshoe, spill it. I don’t have time to kick the shit around with you or anybody else.”
“Heard the call out about a body being found at Lamb’s address on the police radio.”
That merely inflamed Oldham’s inferno. He chest bumped Archer. “That call came in well before dawn. You called Barry this afternoon and said you heard from a friend of a friend. You sure it wasn’t you who called in the body?”
Archer was ready for this. “I was nowhere near. What I meant was a local associate of mine heard the call out and didn’t think anything of it because he didn’t know Lamb had retained me. I was actually supposed to meet Lamb at her office this morning. I called there, like I said, just to make sure we were still on. When no one answered, I started to get worried. I talked to my associate and that’s when I found out. Then I called Barry.”
“What’s the name of this local associate?”
“I start answering those sorts of questions, I might as well turn in my license, Phil.”
Oldham didn’t seem convinced by this, but he also didn’t seem inclined to pursue it. He put the stogie back in his mouth and clamped down on it.
“Any of the neighbors hear anything?” asked Archer.
“Old lady named Danforth didn’t. Said she was sound asleep. She looks to be a hundred, so I tend to believe her. The neighbors on the other side are out of the country. Danforth says they’re in France.” Oldham put the stogie in his jacket pocket, unwrapped a stick of chewing gum and stuck it in his mouth. “I was in France once. Only there was a war going on.”
“Yeah, me too. It was a real kick.”
At that moment a short, white-haired, flabby man in a three-piece dark suit with a soiled shirt collar and a straight black tie appeared from somewhere looking tired and uninterested. “All right, Phil, we can get the body outta here now.”
A stretcher had been leaned against the wall and the two plainclothes were about to lift the body onto it when Archer bent down to help. “I got this side, fellas.”
They heaved and the body went on the stretcher and was carried out by the two men.
The coroner turned to Oldham. “I’ll do the postmortem this afternoon. I’ll take a leap and say a bullet to the head killed him.”
As Archer watched the coroner leave he flexed his fingers. Rigor mortis had completely passed on the body. Archer calculated that the man had been dead no later than around two or three in the afternoon yesterday, or around five hours before Lamb had approached them at Chasen’s.
He looked up to see Oldham staring dead at him. The homicide man made a show of glancing in the direction of where the stretcher had disappeared and then looked at Archer’s hands.
“Guess you got your answer on when he bought it, Archer.”
“You going to file a missing person’s report on Lamb?”
“Not up to me.”
Archer turned to leave.
“Oh, and Archer?”
“Yeah?”
“Happy fucking New Year, you prick.”
Chapter 14
Outside, Archer lit a lucky and walked over to the coroner, who was standing next to the meat wagon, while Oldham’s boys loaded the corpse in, loudly cursing its corpulence. To them he wasn’t a dead man, just dead weight.
“Damn shame,” said Archer.
“What is?” said the coroner.
“The guy getting murdered,” said Archer, snatching a look at the man.
“Hell, if they didn’t there goes my job. Homicide is a thriving business in these parts.”
This guy reminded Archer why he didn’t like hanging out with coroners. “Understand it was maybe a .38 or larger caliber.”
The man lighted a stubby cigar pulled from his side jacket pocket and took a few puffs before hacking up maybe some leftover tobacco from his lungs and spitting it into the graveled driveway. “Looks to be. I’ll dig it out. Hey, you working the case with Phil?”
“My client owns this place. Me and Phil are trying to find her.”
“Private dick, then?”
“Who works with the cops pretty regularly, yeah,” said Archer vaguely because he needed to be vague but he also needed information. “Think we’re looking at least twenty-four hours on the time of death?”
“Sounds about right, little more, little less. Always tricky. Usually the stomach tells me a lot. We are what we eat, in life and in death.”
“Did you guys impound a car on this one?” Archer asked this because, despite what Oldham had said about there not being a car, he didn’t believe anyone without corroboration.
“Car? Nah, nothing like that. Just the body.” He flicked his ash into the grass. His fingers were so thick Archer wondered how he could hold a scalpel, much less use it to slice precisely through human tissue. But maybe he wasn’t that precise.
“They got coyote and even bears up here, you know.” The coroner cleared his throat and waggled his wide head, taking his two chins along with the gesture. “Would not have been pretty if the body had been outside, no siree.”
“It wasn’t pretty inside,” replied Archer curtly.
A minute later the meat wagon pulled away with one of Oldham’s men driving while the other one went back inside. The coroner’s somber car trailed the wagon, with him idly flicking cigar ash out the window.
Archer ground out his smoke, glanced back at the house, and then walked across the street. He stretched and took out his pack of Luckys, but then dropped it. This was intentional because he knew Oldham’s junior-grade man might be watching. He knelt down to pick the pack up and got a good look at the oil slick on the asphalt. It was relatively fresh, which made sense being there from at least the night before. On either side of Lamb’s house, but separated by about a couple hundred feet both ways, were her neighbors, Danforth and Bonham. He didn’t know which was which, so he took the one on the right first.
The place was large and done in what Archer had come to learn was the Colonial Revival style because there was a lot of that around here. It had a main block and two wings with a brick chimney stack sprouting from one of them; another chimney stack soared into the sky from the rear. The porch was covered and had a wooden railing atop it, and there was a line of dormer windows fronting the roof. The yard was mostly rock and desert ground cover with a few gnarled scrub trees taking up space. He knocked and then knocked again. He heard nothing from inside.