by Shane Lusher
Pretty shaky, to say the least. Actually, the whole line of thought was ridiculous.
What I’d discovered wasn’t much, after all, unless Darcy could get her mother to shake some more information out of her newly clean brain.
I left Baba Ghannouj with a full stomach and a beginning case of heartburn, most likely owing to the Lebanese coffee. This had started in the middle of the meal, and though I didn’t want to take the shawarma with me, Walid had insisted on wrapping it up.
I went out to my car. Across the street was a gas station, and next to that, a sprawling public housing project full of homeboys and mothers with children. A few of them glanced in my direction and looked away.
Just another white man in a suit.
As I was unlocking the door, I noticed the long line of motorcycles parked behind my car in front of a bar on the corner, and, right next to Baba Ghannouj, a tattoo parlor.
I looked at that for a moment and then thought, what the heck. How many could there be in the Tri-county area? They’ve got to all know each other. I needed to finally speak to someone who’d been with Colby Trueblood on the last night of her life, and Meredith Pinnel was, if the case file could be believed, studying to be a tattoo artist.
She was also the one who’d been screwing Colby’s fiancé. I wasn’t entirely convinced that the “ex” part was final.
I told my stomach I would pick up some antacids at the gas station as soon as I came out, and then I went up onto the sidewalk and opened the door to the brown-painted clapboard building.
I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting—a bunch of bikers, people with dog collars, the smell of sweat and beer, a fat guy with a frazzled and graying beard—but what I met with inside was something else entirely.
The floor was dark hardwood, the furniture in the waiting room, though sparse, white and Scandinavian-looking, and the lights hanging from the ceiling were sleek, cylindrical, and minimalistic.
The framed prints on the walls were German and seemed all to be from the same artist, a person obsessed with bottle caps and fur hats. Each had the same address at the bottom and the name of a museum in Berlin.
There was a tall counter with a bell on top. I rang it with my palm, suddenly aware that my shawarma in its take-away package was stinking up the place.
A white door opened up behind the counter and a woman emerged, as sleek and white as the room. She was wearing an oriental-looking black silk shirt that was, in spite of the lack of air conditioning, long-sleeved and buttoned to her neck. Her long black hair was done up in one of those ponytails with several spaced holders, giving her the impression she was wearing a wig with something a Pharaoh might hold dangling off the end of it.
“Can I help you?” she asked, giving me a once-over. Her eyes came to rest on the wad of aluminum foil I held in my hand.
“Hi,” I said. “I was wondering if I might ask a few questions.”
“Are you with the police?” she asked.
“Private investigator,” I said.
“I see,” she said. “What is it you need to talk to me about?”
“Well, I’m not really looking for anyone here, I just happened to be next door-”
“At Baba Ghannouj?” she asked, looking at the package in my hand. “I was just going to ask you: if you’re going to be here for much longer, would you mind putting that outside?”
She crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows, plucked, pencil thin, and, of course, black.
I shrugged and walked back outside and put the package in my car. Then I returned, half expecting the door to be locked.
She was there where I left her, leaning on the counter, which almost seemed to have been custom made for her, as it was positioned so that she could rest her weight on her palms without leaning over.
“I’m actually not looking for this place,” I said. “I was just wondering if you’re acquainted with the tattoo parlour across the river. The one in East Peoria.”
She wrinkled her nose again. It seemed to be her general expression of distaste. “I know of them,” she said. “I don’t go there.”
“Can you tell me what the legal age is in Illinois for tattooing? How old do your patrons have to be in order to get a tattoo?”
She paused for a moment before her face finally cracked into a curious look.
“What’s this about?” she asked. “Did Pete get caught?”
“Who’s Pete?” I asked.
“Pete Glover,” she said. “I thought you knew who ran the place. We are talking about Pete’s Tattoos, down on Fourth?”
“Are there any other tattoo parlors in East Peoria?”
“We prefer to call them studios,” she said. “And no, there’s just the one.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay. Well then, what makes you think Pete might have a problem?”
“You can guess why,” she said. “If you’re here asking about it. And to answer your question: you have to be 18, but minors may be tattooed in Illinois with written consent of the parents.”
“So this guy Pete, he tattoos minors without parental consent?”
“Let’s just say he’s not too particular about checking out who’s doing the consenting,” she said. “Now. Tell me what this is about.”
“Do you happen to know someone named Meredith Pinnel? I’ve been told she works with Pete, and that she’s studying to be a tattoo, um, artist.”
The woman looked at me for a moment, her brow scrunched up into a V. Then she let out a loud laugh, her lips parting for a moment. She had a slight gap between her upper incisors that I seemed to recognize from somewhere.
“Are you serious?” she asked. “Who the hell are you?”
“My name is Dana Hartman,” I said. “I told, you, I’m a private investigator.”
“Can I see some ID?”
I shrugged and handed her my driver’s license. She studied it for a moment and then handed it back.
“That says nothing about you being a private investigator,” she said. “Aren’t you supposed to have some kind of a license?”
“I’m actually not a licensed PI,” I said. “I’m just doing some work for the Tazewell County Sheriff’s Department.”
“I see,” she said. “Aren’t sheriff’s departments supposed to give everyone working for them some kind of identification? You could be anybody.”
She moved back from the counter and leaned against the wall, her arms crossed. She raised her chin in my direction.
“Why are you here?”
“I told you, I’m looking for Meredith Pinnel,” I said.
“You should know that there are two very large and very mean men back there.” She stuck a thumb toward the wall behind her. “Bikers. I understand they’ve done some prison time.”
“Hey,” I said. “I’m just looking into some things.”
“What things?” she said. When she spoke again, her voice had taken on a more heartland accent. “I think you oughtta get outta here before I call the real fuckin’ police.”
“Whoa,” I said, holding up my palms. “Look. If you want to, you can call the sheriff in Tazewell County. Speak to detective Percy Trueblood. I’ll check out.”
She looked away out the window, when I mentioned his name, but then she recovered, and when she spoke, her voice was once again all peaches and cream. “I’ll do that. I’ll be right back. And don’t touch anything. There’s a camera. Right. There.”
She pointed to a security camera I hadn’t noticed but was very conspicuous. It hung from a bracket not three feet away from my head, in the corner.
She opened the door, and I listened. No music, and no sounds of human life. She’d been bluffing about the bikers. Not that it mattered. I wasn’t planning on harming her. That was one thing I did know.
When she returned, five minutes later, she planted her hands on the counter again and looked at me.
“Five minutes,” she said.
“That’s all I’ve got,” I said. “Good. So. Do you know Mered
ith Pinnel?”
“I’m Meredith Pinnel,” she said. “Next question.” She’d crossed her arms again.
“You’re-”
“That’s what I said.”
“How old are you?” I asked, looking closer. Her demeanor had led me to believe she must have been around thirty, but on closer inspection I realized she couldn’t be more than twenty.
“I just turned twenty-one,” she said. “And I’m not studying to be a tattoo artist, I am one. I just opened this place last week. As far as Pete goes, well, I’m not going there.”
“I’m really not all that interested in Pete,” I said.
“Good.”
“I’m interested in you.”
She leaned forward into her crossed arms and then raised her head to look at me directly.
“Are you here about Colby?” she asked. Her lips were pressed together, her mouth a thin red line.
“Yes,” I said.
“Then I don’t have to talk to you after all,” she said. “I have a lawyer, and I know my rights.”
“It would be better if you did talk to me,” I said.
“Or what?”
“Nothing ‘or what’,” I said. “I’m just trying to figure this out. I know where you were that night. I also know what you were doing. I don’t care about that. I know you couldn’t have gotten all the way up to Metamora in that time span — it was pretty amazing you got up there in that time at all — to do, ah, what you were doing-”
“Fucking her ex-boyfriend,” she interrupted.
“Fucking her ex-fiancé,” I said, “Which I’m not interested in.”
“Fine,” she said. “Then what the hell are you interested in?”
“I want to hear your take on the whole thing.”
“I already told the police everything I know,” she said. “Trevor was over her. And he was never engaged to her, that was just something Colby told her dad because he wouldn’t have approved of him going out with her otherwise.”
“Were they sleeping together?” I asked.
Meredith laughed. “Colby? With that promise ring? Daddy’s in possession of my vagina until he gives it away on my wedding day? Hardly.” She looked up at me again. “Why do you think she lost him to me?”
She cleared her throat and flipped her head, bringing her pony tail up over her shoulder. “Anyway, Trevor is gone. Turns out I only wanted him for one thing, too. He joined the Marines, the stupid shit.”
“Tell me about the cocaine,” I said slowly, not taking my eyes off of hers.
“I’m not talking about that,” she said, and made a move toward the door.
“Wait,” I said. “I don’t care about the cocaine. I just want to know who she got it from.”
“So, you can tell the sheriff?”
“No,” I said. “So I can finally find out who the hell killed her. If Miss Promise Ring was doing coke, then she was probably coming into contact with people who might have more violent associates.”
“People like me?”
“You don’t look violent to me, Meredith,” I said, and pointed toward the door. “And I know there aren’t any big, scary bikers behind that door, either.”
“No,” she said. “But there is a loaded .22 on a shelf two feet away from here.” She placed a manicured hand down flat on the drywall next to the closed door. “You’re about six feet away. Question: can you hop this counter before I open this door and grab the pistol?”
“Ah, Jesus Christ,” I said, and walked over to the front door. I put my hand on the doorknob and turned. She looked surprised.
“You’re awful skittish for somebody proclaiming her innocence,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be better for everybody if the people you’re afraid of just went away? Maybe then you wouldn’t have to have that .22 back there.”
“In this town?” Meredith said. She took her hand off the wall but remained where she was, next to the wall.
“Meredith,” I said. “I’ve talked to quite a few people now who seem to think that more was going on with Colby’s death than just some crazy felon who decided he liked what he saw. Problem is, nobody’s talking.”
That wasn’t necessarily true, of course. Nobody had told me anything of the sort. But I had to get some information out of her somehow.
“Now,” I said. “I’m going to reach into my back pocket for my wallet. In that wallet is a business card, which I’m going to give you. If you decide you want to stop worrying so much, you give me a call.”
She didn’t move when I set the card down on the counter. I waited a moment and then turned to leave.
“Hold on,” she said. “I know where she got the cocaine.”
“Okay,” I said.
She hesitated a moment, looking down at the sleek wooden floor. “She actually got it from Trevor,” she said, looking back up when she said it.
“Who’s where now? In basic training?”
I wasn’t sure if the location of new recruits was public or not, but I thought it probably was. It wouldn’t be difficult to find, at any rate. That kind of thing went into the papers.
“What?” she said. “Are you going to call them or something? Don’t call them. Seriously. They won’t tell you anything anyway, but he could get kicked out. He could get sent back here.”
She’d slouched a bit, her constraint gone, and now she looked twenty-one again.
I smiled. “And that’s the last thing you’d want, isn’t it?”
She sighed. “I got it.”
“What?”
“I got the cocaine,” she said.
I looked around at the studio. “Is that where you got all the money for all of this?”
“No,” she said, straightening her back again. “I just smoke pot every now and then, and that night I thought it might be cool to try coke. Somebody started making fun of Colby, because she never did anything, and I think she thought maybe Trevor would get back with her if she did it.”
“Peer pressure’s a bitch,” I said.
“Fuck off, I’m serious.”
“So am I,” I said. “Who’d you get it from?”
She bit at her lip and pulled on her pony tail. When she spoke, it came in quick bursts, all at once. “I know a guy. He deals. He gets it from somebody else around here. He says he can get anything, when he’s not nodded out.”
“Heroin?”
“Methadone,” she said. “And crystal meth.”
Christ, everyone was on it nowadays.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Don’t tell him I told you,” she said. “He’s not dangerous or anything, but he’s creepy. And I really do not know who he’s dealing with. So don’t ask me.”
“Name?” I asked again.
“Jasper Stevens,” she said. “Lives in a trailer park, over in North Pekin.”
I nodded. Bingo.
“Thanks,” I said. I turned and opened the door.
“Wait,” she said. “Are you going to tell anybody about it?”
“You keep a stash around here?” I asked.
“I told you, I don’t do coke,” she said.
“What about the pot?”
She drew herself up, pressing her lips down around the gap in her teeth. Her stoic, Hunnish face was back.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Then I guess you have nothing to worry about.”
Thirty-Four
I got into my car. Thinking more food would qualm the pain in my stomach, I took a bite of the shawarma, which promptly oozed tahini sauce all down the front of my suit. Cursing, I wadded up the rest of it in its foil package on the seat next to me.
Then I turned the ignition and drove toward I-74. I crossed the Murray Baker Bridge into East Peoria and hung a right down onto Route 29 towards Pekin, musing about how before I’d reduced my drinking and quit smoking cigarettes, I rarely had an upset stomach.
I certainly had never had what was going on in my bowels just at that moment.
I pulled into the Dane Burgers parking lot at one-thirty, parked in the back, and was looking up at the bluff that led up to Fon Du Lac park, when Kelly called.
“My kind of town,” she said.
“You got off work?” I asked.
“Yup. When do you want to go?”
I told her I’d pick her up at five, which she thought was too late, since we wouldn’t hit the Loop until nearly eight, but I told her about Hannah Trueblood and promised her that anywhere worth eating would be open late.
“Don’t forget we have nine-year-olds,” she said.
“So, we have to go to the Hard Rock Café?”
“And you have to buy them T-shirts,” she said.
I groaned and hung up. I stared at the mixture of yogurt and brown stuff trickling down the front of my dress shirt. I removed it and sat there in my T-shirt, thinking I probably looked like a complete idiot, but who at Dane Burgers would care?
I still had a half hour until Hannah was supposed to show up, and I didn’t know if she was even going to do that. She’d agreed to meet me, but she also hadn’t seemed to be in any kind of planning condition.
To take my mind off the confusion, I pulled up the internet on my smart phone and Googled hotels in the Loop and then, remembering that only tourists hung out in the Loop on the weekends, I looked for something up closer to Lincoln Park.
The first one that popped up was a transient hotel I remembered from late night drinking bouts at the Rover, so I ran down the list until I found something that looked like it at least would have no visible stains on the rug.
That happened to be a Red Roof Inn on Ontario, off Michigan Avenue, a much higher price category, listing at four hundred dollars total for two nights.
“Screw it,” I said to myself and keyed in the reservation. Once that was through, and I’d received my confirmation mail, I called and reserved a table at the Hard Rock Cafe for eight-thirty that night. If I drove fast, and everybody didn’t have to pee more than twice, we would be on Lakeshore Drive by seven-thirty.