The Dead of Winter (The Jacob Lomax Mysteries Book 3) Page 8
“Zeno,” Zeno said.
“Please follow me.”
Angela Bellano led us through the dining room and down a carpeted hallway, past a couple of bedrooms and a bathroom. The air felt close. Not stale or musty, just used, lived in. There was a room at the front corner of the house. The door was closed but not locked.
Angela pushed it open and motioned us in. She stayed in the doorway, unwilling to tread on hallowed ground.
“This is Joe’s room,” she said. “This is where he worked when he wasn’t at the barbershop. The computer was something we bought for Stephanie a couple of years ago. She hardly used it, so Joe took it. Mostly it was just something to play with. If you need anything, I’ll be in the kitchen.”
She left. I closed the door.
The walls were white, broken only by a few framed photographs. Family portraits. Against one wall was a couch that folded out into a bed. Next to it was a rocking chair. There were a desk and chair next to the front window. On the desk was an ultra-sleek-looking computer and printer. Zeno snorted.
“What?”
“Obsolete equipment,” she said.
“Can you work it?”
“Work it?” She made a face at me and shook her head. “Yes, Jake, I can work it. It’s an IBM clone, no problem.” She opened the little doors on the computer’s disk drives to show me they were empty. “But first we need something to put in here.”
We searched the room.
There was a small bookcase between the desk and the table—half a dozen books on the stock market, a few on computers, and some two-week-old issues of the Wall Street Journal. Bellano had told me he dabbled in stocks. There were no floppy disks in sight. I flipped through the books looking for hidden compartments, and Zeno searched the desk. I pulled the cushions off the couch and folded out the bed. We pulled off the mattress. Nothing.
“‘Right under their noses,’ he told me.”
Zeno sat before the computer, opened her bag, and took out a few disks. She shoved one in the left-hand slot and switched on the computer.
“Let’s see what he’s got,” she said.
The machine hummed for a while, then beeped to let us know it was ready. Zeno typed in some instructions. The monitor displayed a few lines:
S SYSTEM BOARD
S 640KB MEMORY
S KEYBOARD
S MONOCHROME ADAPTER
S 2 DISKETTE DRIVE(S) AND ADAPTER
S 1 HARD DISK AND ADAPTER
S PRINTER ADAPTER
“That might be it,” she said.
“What?”
“A hard disk.”
“What?”
“See, right there.”
“I see it. What the hell does it mean?”
“Geez, Jake. Okay, most newer systems have a hard disk and one floppy drive. This is an older system—two disk drives and no hard disk. But the diagnostics routine shows a hard disk, so Mr. Bellano or someone had one installed after it left the factory. But I don’t see a hard drive, do you?”
“Is this a quiz?”
“Okay, okay. There’s no exterior hard drive, so it must be a hard card—a miniaturized hard disk installed inside the main unit. Let’s see.”
She typed in a few more commands.
“There we go. We show drives ‘A,’ ‘B,’ and ‘C’ ‘A’ and ‘B’ are the two floppy drives, and ‘C’ is the hard disk. Let’s see what he’s got on there.”
Zeno tapped some keys, and the screen displayed this:
PROGRAMS
STOCKS
GAMES
“He’s got everything in three subdirectories,” she said. “Here’s PROGRAMS.” She typed “cd/programs,” then “dir,” and the screen filled with things like:
CURSOR .COM
DBASE .SYS
PORT .TST
WP .EXE
WPHELP .FIL
“These are all of his program files. Let’s look at the subdirectory labeled STOCKS.” Now we got lines like:
CHEMEX .NOV
CHEMEX .DEC
KERMCGEE .JAN
KERMCGEE .FEB
KERMCGEE .MAR
“File names,” Zeno informed me. “It looks like each one is a company name and a month.”
“Let’s look at the GAMES subdirectory,” I said. It looked more interesting:
ANDREWS .BAS
ANDREWS .BSK
ANDREWS .FBL
ASOTTI .BAS
ASOTTI .BSK
ASOTTI .FBL
BROWNE .BAS
“Proper names,” Zeno said. “With extensions, BAS might mean BASIC.”
“I’d say it means baseball, BSK is basketball, FBL is football. Can we look inside all these files?”
“Now?”
“Is there a problem?”
“How much time do we have?”
“I don’t want to overstay our welcome,” I said.
“Then I’d better copy this subdirectory and work on it at home.”
“Go ahead.”
Zeno began transferring data onto a blank diskette.
“Okay,” she said finally, removing the diskette.
“Now, can you wipe out the GAMES subdirectory on the hard disk?”
“Wipe out? You mean delete the files?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Sure. But are you sure?”
“Yes.” Bellano was gone, and his sins might as well join him. His widow had enough to grieve over.
“I can delete the files, Jake, but with a little work a computer person could probably retrieve them. Unless I reformat the hard disk. But that would destroy all the subdirectories.”
“Then do it.”
The process took about ten minutes. When it was done, Zeno typed, and the screen looked like this:
C> dir
Volume in drive C has no label.
Directory of C:
File not found
She looked up at me. “All gone.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
Angela Bellano met us in the living room.
“Did you find anything?”
“Possibly. Zeno’s going to work on it.”
Angela got our coats. I told her I’d be in touch.
CHAPTER 11
IT WAS STILL SNOWING. Zeno helped me brush snow off the Olds. Then I drove her toward MicroComp. The streets were slick where they hadn’t been sanded. Zeno told me it might take a while to print out all of Bellano’s files, since her personal printer was relatively slow.
“There’s a high-speed printer at work,” she said.
“I think you should do it at home. I’d rather we kept this to ourselves.”
“Okay.”
“How long will you need?”
“I don’t know exactly. I’ll do some tonight and tomorrow after work. Maybe by tomorrow night.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “What about dinner tonight? I’m kind of hungry.”
“Milton’s taking me out.”
“Oh. Good.”
“You’re welcome to come along.”
“Thanks, anyway.”
When I got home, it was dark. It was still snowing, and I was still hungry. I didn’t feel like eating alone, so I phoned Rachel Wynn. After all, I’d promised her we’d talk after I’d returned from San Diego. No answer. Maybe Milton was taking her out, too.
I opened a beer, then dumped a can of chili in a pot. I turned on the TV to catch the results of the Bronco game. I’d been so busy during the week, I’d forgotten to get down a bet.
Lucky you, said the sportscaster. Bears 42, Broncos 17.
I went back to the kitchen, stirred my chili, and opened another beer. The TV sounds droned from the next room. After the sports, I half listened to the weather. Heavy snow in the city and more in the mountains. Travelers’ warnings. Chain law in effect. Some of the passes were closed. After the weather came a special report. I heard a word that caught my attention.
Bellano.
I stood in the doorway and watched.
The screen was filled with Bellano’s bombed-out garage. The voice-over alluded to this as file footage, not news; there’d been no new developments in the murder case. This was a special series. Part one of seven.
The narrator’s face came on the screen. Gary Rivers. It said so underneath.
I’d heard him before on the radio, but I’d never seen him. His talk show was a hot item, if you go for that kind of thing, which I don’t. He got listeners stirred up over all sorts of things, from gun control to parting your hair on the wrong side. One thing, though, he generally did his homework. Now it looked as if he were pushing into a more lucrative market.
“Gambling is not a harmless pastime,” he said, then paused dramatically. “It can kill.”
Rivers went on to describe the many ways that gambling destroys lives and families.
Rivers had a good voice, but I wasn’t sure he had the face for television. Sure, he was good-looking—even features, perfect hair, strong jaw, and a nice suit. But his expression was too stiff, too controlled. He looked like a mannequin.
On second thought, he was perfect for television.
“Tomorrow night,” Rivers said, “I’ll have part two of my series, ‘Gambling in Colorado—Sport? Or Sickness?’ Back to you, Bob.”
I went back to my chili.
I wondered if Rivers had been the one who’d scared Stephanie. I also wondered what a hip character like him had been doing in a neighborhood barbershop in North Denver. Researching his series on gambling? Maybe I’d ask him.
In fact, if I didn’t find Stephanie soon, I’d talk to all four customers. Not that I thought they’d confess to anything, at least not directly. But maybe they’d tell on each other.
Rivers wouldn’t be hard to find. Neither would Stan Fowler or Johnny Toes Burke, for that matter. In fact, the only one of the four customers that I still knew nothing about was Mitch Overholser. Well, not nothing. I knew he was a gambler.
I opened another beer and got out my phone book. There were three bookies I knew in the city, but Eddy Natiele was my main man. I called him at home. After all, this was Sunday.
I didn’t know what bookies did on Mondays. Maybe shoveled snow off their driveways. But Tuesdays they collected from the losers. Wednesdays they paid off the winners. Thursdays through Saturdays they took bets. And Sundays they stayed home with their families.
I apologized to Natiele for bothering him at home.
“No problem. What’s up?”
“Do you know a player named Mitch Overholser?”
“Sort of. Why?”
“Tell me about him?”
“I’ve taken a few bets from him. But he usually wants more action than I can safely handle. I mean, without laying a lot of it off with another book. I’ll tell you what, though. Me and most guys I know have shied away from him lately. He’s been getting slow about paying when he loses.”
“That can be dangerous,” I said.
“Not as much as you might think, Jake. None of us use leg breakers.”
“Except Fat Paulie DaNucci.”
“Well, him, yeah. But that’s a different league. Of course, I do know a book or two who’s sold his overdue markers at ten cents on the dollar to guys like DaNucci, guys who enjoy beating up some poor slob for his last few bucks. None of my friends, though. We’d just stop taking bets from the guy and swallow the losses.”
“About Overholser …”
“Right, I digress. Mostly, he’s a gambler, and not a very good one. I heard he lost his job, his house, and his family. I don’t mean he dropped his family on a bet; they took off. Of course, given the right odds, he might’ve tried it.”
“What does he do when he’s not gambling?”
“Last I heard he was working, if you can call it that, at his brother-in-law’s used-car lot on West Colfax.”
“What’s the name, do you know?”
“Honest Somebody-or-other.”
“That figures.”
“Harry’s,” Natiele said. “Honest Harry’s.”
It was still snowing Monday morning.
Getting up to Big Pine Lake today looked doubtful. Even getting around the city didn’t look too good. The radio said the “snow law” was in effect, which meant that on specified streets the city was towing away cars stuck in the path of snowplows. The owners had to pay for the tow and the impound. On unspecified streets, if they were plowed at all, your car only got buried under a five-foot drift.
The radio began listing school closures. I didn’t hear Loretto Heights, but I tried Rachel Wynn at home first. She answered on the second ring.
“Playing hooky today?” I asked.
“No, in fact, I was just about to leave. Have you located Stephanie?” Her voice was hopeful.
“No.”
“Oh, I thought maybe that’s why you’d called.”
“Just thought I’d give you an update,” I said. I told her about my visit with Stephanie’s sister, Diane, and about Big Pine Lake. “Maybe I can find this girl Chrissie up there.”
“You’re not going to drive up today, are you?”
“I doubt it.”
“Good, because the roads are terrible. It took us over four hours to drive down from Vail last night, and it looked like things were getting worse.”
“Ski trip?”
“What? Oh, yes. My friend Pat and I spent the weekend up there.”
“How nice.”
She paused. “Are you being sarcastic?”
“I don’t think so. Only …”
“What?”
“Is Pat a Patricia or a Patrick?”
“Good-bye, Mr. Lomax.” She hung up before I could tell her that skiing is bad for the knees.
But then, so is sitting around the house all day. I had to get out and about. Big Pine Lake was out of the question, though, at least for today.
I pulled out the phone book and called Honest Harry’s. No answer. It’s tough to sell cars when they’re covered with snow. I phoned radio station KNWZ and asked for Gary Rivers. He wouldn’t be there until later, I was told. His show was from noon until three. I called Stan “the Man” Fowler’s TV & Appliance Center. Open for business.
Fowler’s place was just off Bryant Street in the northern shadows of the Sixth Avenue viaduct, an area of warehouses and wholesalers. It was still snowing when I got there, though not heavily.
I pulled into the nearly empty parking lot.
There was a guy bundled up like an Eskimo riding a little tractor with a plow on the front and doing his best to keep part of the lot cleared. I nosed the Olds up to a pile of snow packed tight by the plow. Then I pushed through the double glass doors of Stan “the Man’s.”
Although I’d never met Fowler, I was irked by his nickname.
See, the real Stan the Man, Stan Musial, was one of my childhood heroes. He was one of the greatest hitters of all time. And he was one of the few ballplayers I’d ever heard of who could see the seams on a baseball as it came hurtling at him at ninety miles an hour—actually see those little red stitches and tell by their rotation whether he was being delivered a fastball or a curve, then react accordingly, all in less than half a second, and drive it into the gap for a double. Now that’s “the Man.”
The store was about two blocks long.
The block on my right was jammed with pastel rows of washers, dryers, stoves, and refrigerators. The block on my left was filled with television sets, all tuned to the same channel. John was telling Marsha that he was running off to Rio with Carlotta, the maid.
A salesman approached.
“Looking for a new TV?”
He was a small middle-aged guy with razor-sharp lapels, cuffed pants, and a bow tie. His mustache was hardly worth the effort. “Whatever you want, we’ve got, and don’t worry about price, because we can finance.”
“I’m looking for Stan Fowler.”
One corner of his mouth tu
rned down.
“He’s busy right now,” he said. “Can I help you?”
“Sorry.”
The other corner turned down. “This way,” he mumbled, another sale lost.
I followed him along a row of pink dishwashers and through a cluster of avocado stoves to a door marked Employees Only. He held it open for me. We stepped into a cement-floored expanse of crates and boxes. A forklift whispered toward us. We got out of its way, then walked around two beefy dudes wrestling with a blue refrigerator the size of an outhouse.
The salesman knocked on the door of an office with no roof. He went in and I stayed out. There was some mumbling and some angry ass chewing. It ended with, “All right, all right, Roberson, send the son of a bitch in.”
I guess he meant me.
Roberson came out, looking a few inches shorter than when he’d gone in.
“Mr. Fowler can see you now,” he told me, then slunk away.
I went in and closed the door. The office had thick carpeting and expensive, if tasteless, leather chairs. The desk was huge, with gaudy fittings. It looked like a whorehouse for elves.
“Howdy,” Fowler said, standing, smiling. “Stan Fowler.”
He stuck out his hand and I shook it.
Fowler was a big man, a few inches taller than I and a good seventy pounds heavier, but a lot of that was from gin and roast beef. His face was flushed, with a web of purple capillaries on his cheeks and across his thick nose. He had the piercing blue eyes and thickly lacquered dark blond hair of a TV evangelist. His suit and vest were brown, his pinky ring was gold, and his Rolex was fat. I’d give odds the watch was fake, if only because I wouldn’t trust Stan the pseudo-Man as far as I could spit.
“Jacob Lomax,” I said. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”
“That depends, Jake, my friend.” He sat back on his leather throne, making the air hiss out of the seat. “You buying or selling?”
“I’m a private investigator,” I told him, “working for the widow of Joseph Bellano. Her daughter Stephanie has been missing for over a week and—”
“You’re not here to buy a stove?” There was an exaggerated look of innocent surprise on his beefy puss.
“I thought you might be able to help me since you were one of the last people to see her.”