Schemers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels) Read Free Page A

again?”
    “Oh, yeah,” she said, grinning.
    “Huh?”
    “I finally got laid.”
    Well, what do you say to that? If she’d been a man, I might have made a mildly bawdy observation. As it was, all I could manage was a lame “Oh.”
    “Four times altogether,” she said. “Last night and this morning.”
    “Uh.”
    “That’s why I took the morning off. Been so long, I figured I was entitled.”
    “Mm.”
    “Almost a year since the last time, can you believe it? I’d almost forgotten what it feels like.”
    “Ah.”
    “His name’s Lucas Zeller,” she said. “I met him at Vonda’s wedding reception, knows her brother James. Not exactly a brother himself, though.”
    “No?”
    “Fudge swirl,” she said.
    “Huh?”
    “Mostly dark with a little white mixed in. Like fudge swirl ice cream. Hot fudge sundae!”
    The conversation was making me uncomfortable, as personal conversations with Tamara sometimes did. As outspoken and uninhibited as she was, she was liable to launch into a blow-by-blow—literally, God forbid—description of her evening and morning activities with the fudge swirl, and that was information I had no desire to tune in.
    “Anyhow,” she said then, sparing me, “nothing clicked between us that day at the reception, not for me, but Saturday he called up out of the blue, said he had tickets to the Zombie Boys concert yesterday—”
    “The which?”
    “Zombie Boys, they’re a hard-rock blowout band, very cool, usually you can’t get tickets.”
    “Ah.”
    “So I said sure. We went out to dinner first, then the blowout, then back to my place and the rest is sweet history. That man is something fierce in bed, you know what I’m saying?”
    I said quickly, “Serious, you and this Lucas?”
    “Doing the nasty is always serious when you haven’t been doing it.”
    “You know what I mean. Potentially serious relationship.”
    “No way. I had enough of that with Horace. All I’m looking for is some fun, a little action. Lucas feels the same. Besides, I think maybe he’s Mama’s boy.”
    “Uh?”
    “Thirty-four, salesman for a company that sells electronic
equipment, still lives with his mother. Can you believe it? She was all he talked about at dinner, what a great person she is, all that—almost spoiled the mood. But once we got between the sheets, Mama wasn’t there anymore.”
    “I should hope not.”
    “Whooo! That man’s a real dawg when it comes to—”
    The telephone rang just then. Thank you, Lord, I thought.
    The call was for me, a minor matter I disposed of in less than a minute. Tamara was still standing there, grinning and glowing, when I hung up. To forestall any more discussion of her sex life, I said, “Busy morning here, too, while you were playing. One new case and one surprise call, both oddball.”
    “How so?”
    I told her, the Henderson business first, then about the call from Barney Rivera’s assistant.
    “Rivera, huh?” she said. “You think maybe he’s up to one of his little tricks, for old times’ sake?”
    “I wouldn’t put anything past him,” I said. “Whatever he’s up to, I’ll know in about an hour. And it better be legitimate business. If it isn’t, he’ll be ingesting those peppermints of his through a different orifice than his mouth.”

2
    B arney the Needle hadn’t changed much in half a decade. He kept me waiting for fifteen minutes before he sent his assistant out to fetch me, and as soon as I walked into his office he showed me his salesman’s grin, pumped my hand, clapped me on the shoulder, and said I was looking pretty good for an old fart—all as if it had been five days instead of five years since we’d last laid eyes on each other.
    We sat down and did some mutual measuring across his big blond-wood desk. He looked the same except for a little less hair and a little more gray at the temples of what was left—a roly-poly little bastard with a cherub’s face, a pit bull’s heart, and a borderline