“What’s the deal with Nightshade?”
“There’s no deal. I lent some money. I’m waiting to get it back.”
“Who runs it?”
“So you can hassle more of my employees?”
“To be fair, you’ve never actually seen me in full hassling mode.”
Pomp might have been the kingpin of sorts over a seedy financial empire, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t reasonable. “I shudder to think what that might be like.”
Now it was my turn to stay quiet.
“Shane Resznik. He’s the owner, in theory.”
I wrote it down. “Why in theory?”
“He owes everybody a little something, and some people a whole lot. There’s not much left for him to call his at this point. I tried to get ahold of him, both last night and this morning.”
“Is he the type to avoid his boss’s calls?”
“I’m not his boss.”
“Okay, his favorite loan shark, then.”
“He’s a weasely little bastard. So probably.”
“What’s that mean?”
He said nothing for a few seconds, finally adding, “Just a feeling.”
“A feeling you have no intention of acting on?”
Pomp sat up straighter in his chair. “I have no intention of having anything to do with the place long-term,” he said. “I’m just trying to recoup what I lost in a bad fucking deal that’s none of your business.”
“And there was no planned closure or anything?”
“No.”
“The club should’ve been open.”
“Yes.”
“So now what?”
“About the club?”
“Yeah.”
“I guess we wait and see what happens tonight.”
I didn’t especially like the sound of that. “What about the other employees?”
“What about them?”
“Maybe they can clue you in.”
“Shane handles payroll and all that. I don’t know who all he has working under him.”
I showed him a picture of Addison, but his face revealed nothing. I said, “So that’s it? You’re just going to wait till you hear from Shane the Weasel?”
“Believe it or not, Nightshade isn’t high on my list of priorities.”
“I’m going to try to talk to him.”
Pomp shrugged. “Go crazy.”
“There’s literally no one else you can think of to talk to? No employee records or anything?”
“Literally. On your way downstairs, can you ask Nina to come back in here?”
“Is that your way of saying this conversation is over?”
“More polite than ‘Get the hell out of here,’ isn’t it?”
I stood up. He’d given me what I came for. I said, “How’s your family?”
He had one son in prison, no thanks to me. “Never better.”
“You ever hear anything from our friend Leila?”
“If I did, you wouldn’t exactly be the first person I’d tell,” he said. It was something of a joke between us, a line we’d thrown back and forth a few times when we first met. I wasn’t sure what it said about me, that I had an inside joke with a guy like this. He actually almost smiled. “But no. Wherever she is, I’m sure she’s fine. She’s like that.”
He was probably right. Every few months I put an hour or so into tracking down Leila Hassan. She belonged in prison much more than Pomp’s son did. But she’d gotten away last summer, in part because she had fooled me.
Something that was usually reserved for Catherine Walsh and for my own damn self.
“Thanks for the help,” I said.
Pomp nodded. “Please let that be the last of it.”
SIX
Shane Resznik was, as promised, a weasely-looking guy with bleached hair and a scruffy goatee and the general vibe of someone who always yells “Play ‘Free Bird’” at live bands to be funny. He had a full set of social media profiles but didn’t seem to use them much, and he also had a conviction on his record from four years earlier—a first-degree misdemeanor theft charge. That didn’t tell me a whole lot, but Vincent Pomp had said that Resznik was a bit of a weasel, so it seemed like a good bet that his weaseldom and this conviction were somehow related.
I called Tom and wrote down Resznik’s address while the phone rang.
“Please don’t say you have to cancel for tomorrow,” he said in lieu of a hello. In the background, I could hear the sound of various tense conversations around the small cubicle warren that constituted the detective bureau.
“I’m not. This is work.”
“Okay, good.”
“You don’t even know what it is.”
“I don’t care. As long as you aren’t cancelling. Pam set a New Year’s resolution for us to socialize more.”
“The worst.”
I heard a smile in his voice. “So far it’s just been with her friends, though.”
“That is the worst, then,” I said.
“No, the worst is that instead of calling it a resolution, she calls it an intention.”
“Obviously didn’t grow up Catholic.”
“Exactly. That word will never not remind me of Monsignor Maloney.”
The line fell silent. I didn’t like making fun of Pam with him, but I also couldn’t help it. Tom changed the subject. “Anyway, what did you need?”
I explained about Shane Resznik’s record and he said that he’d email the reports right over to me.
“Also,” I said, “do you know a guy, Michael Dillman? He was possibly in the homicide division at some point?”
“Mickey? Sure, yeah. Why?”
“What’s his deal?”
“His deal? He used to be the second-shift supervisor up here, up till maybe three years ago? He kept having issues with his back though, kept going out on leave, coming back, going out, till finally he took a transfer to something in Administrative.”
I thought about that. If Dillman hadn’t been in the homicide unit for three years, why was he still using business cards with that phone number? “Is he still with the department?”
“As far as I know.”
“What’s he do in Administrative?”
“I’m not sure. There are a lot of units under that umbrella.”
“Like R and D?”
“As in, research and development?”
“I guess.”
“Do we even have that?”
“All I know is, I’m trying to reach him but can’t. Or he’s avoiding me.”
“Drop Frank’s name. They were pretty close.”
“Humph,” I said.
“See you tomorrow,” he said before we hung up, “and if you bail now, I’m going to take it as a personal attack.”
I called Dillman again and left another voice mail, this one laying it on thick about my father. Then I stood in the kitchen and slathered some peanut butter on a small stack of crackers while I waited for the email from Tom about Resznik, and when I returned to my desk, there it was. I skimmed the Ohio Uniform Offense report for details; the victim was listed as a beverage distribution company off of Fisher Road on the west side, which had been Resznik’s employer at the time. The complaint alleged that Resznik had stolen nine hundred bucks over the course of a year on his delivery route, by pocketing a little here and there from cash transactions and pulling funny business with his paperwork to make it look like everything balanced out. I raised my eyebrows as I read. I’d done a few embezzlement cases, always well beyond the misdemeanor cap of a thousand dollars. Small businesses rarely tried to press charges for small amounts, opting instead to fire the asshole and be done with it—restitution often took years and years, which meant signing up for the hassle of a criminal complaint without even getting paid back before they went out of business—so the fact that the beverage distributor had done so either meant they were extremely patient or else holding a massive grudge against Resznik.
If he was trying to embezzle from V
incent Pomp, a criminal complaint would probably be the least of his worries.
He lived in a Goodale Park town house, one of the units facing west toward the hideous fountain. On a day like today, its frozen spray of water looked like a glacial formation. When I knocked on the door, though, he didn’t answer. An angry woman did. She had wide blue eyes that were very puffy and very red. “Who the fuck are you?”
I took a small step back. “My name—”
“Like I give a fuck what your name is?”
I said, “You literally just asked who—”
“Shut the hell up. Where’s Shane?”
“That’s why I’m—”
“Where is he?” She practically screamed it, seemingly startling herself. “He’s such a piece of shit.”
No one who knew Shane Resznik was giving him much of a reco.
“Do you know where he is?” She was about thirty, blond, with tanning-bed skin and long, airbrushed nails. “I’ve just been waiting, like a fucking idiot, and I haven’t slept, and I’m just going to go crazy in here.”
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Lisette.”
“I’m Roxane. Can I come in?”
She shook her head. “It’s such a mess.”
“That’s okay.”
“It’s not okay.”
“Well, Lisette, how about we go get a cup of coffee or something. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
“I look like shit.”
“You’re beautiful,” I said. “And besides, it’s winter. Everybody’s just trying not to slip and fall on their asses.”
Lisette gave me a small smile, calming down some.
A few minutes later we were sitting at a table in the back of One Line Coffee with a mug of single-drip for her and a chai latte for me. Lisette insisted on wearing sunglasses, so I felt like I was interviewing somebody famous.
“So you really didn’t sleep with him?”
“Really,” I said. “I’ve never even met him. I just want to talk to him about Nightshade. But he hasn’t been home in a few days?”
“The last time I saw him was when he left for work on Wednesday night. He said he’d be home at the regular time. But he wasn’t.” She paused to sip her coffee. “I know what that place is like. Technically, I’m one of the owners. I gave Shane the money for it, not that he’d ever let anyone know that.”
That didn’t exactly make her an owner. “Oh?”
She nodded somberly. “Couple years ago, I got in a bad car wreck. You know that guy Kevin Kurgis, with the commercials? I don’t get paid unless YOU get paid?” She dropped her voice into a decent facsimile.
“Sure.”
“Well, it’s no joke. I can’t work anymore, I can’t drive, he got me paid, okay? This was when Shane was out of work and he talked me into fronting him most of the money for the stupid bar. Like whose lifelong dream is to own a shitty nightclub?” She cleared her throat. “He said it was a good investment. The place had been in business for years but was struggling under bad management. The way he acted, it would practically be like printing our own money, it was gonna make so much. Fucking idiot. This isn’t the first time, you know.”
“The first time he didn’t come home?”
Another nod. “It’s happened lots of times. He’s probably in some nasty vagina right now, trying—” She cleared her throat again as several other customers looked up at us. “Shane gets carried away. Too much coke, too many pretty girls. He’ll hole up in a motel for a while and then, when he’s out of money, he’ll be back.”
“Any particular motel?” I said, then lowered my voice. “Or a particular, um, nasty vagina?”
Lisette sniffed. “This rathole on East Main, with an old-timey name. East Side Motor Lodge, I think. It’s right by a UPS store. He lived there when I met him, if you can believe it.”
I said, “The UPS store?”
She smiled a little. “The motel. I knew there was something going on with her.”
For a second I thought she was about to say Addison and I felt my heartbeat speed up. “Who?”
“This goth chick from the bar. Long black hair but a real dummy, you know, with the fake tits and no bra?”
The woman at the next table got up in disgust. It was possible that I could never come back here.
“And she works at Nightshade too?”
“She’s a bartender.”
“Know her name?”
Lisette shook her head and pushed up her sunglasses to rub her eyes. “So why do you want to talk to him about Nightshade?”
After almost thirty minutes of talking about him, she was finally curious as to why. “Well,” I said, “I’m actually trying to find someone else who works there. Addison Stowe? She’s a deejay.”
Lisette shook her head. “I barely ever go there anymore. I just know that something’s going on with this one chick, because we ran into her at the movies and he wouldn’t really introduce me. I never heard of any girl deejay. So you just want to ask Shane about that?”
I nodded. “That, and the club was closed last night, and I’m curious about why. Like, if something happened.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. But this woman, Addison, was very upset about something early Thursday morning near Nightshade, and now she’s AWOL, the club is unexpectedly closed, and Shane is AWOL too. It’s a little strange.”
Lisette didn’t say anything for a while, just sipped her coffee. Finally she said, “Well, that’s a little weird. Maybe they got busted again. For the IDs.”
“Is that what you think happened?”
“I think that Shane’s a piece of shit.”
“I gathered that,” I said.
SEVEN
My plan had been to talk to Shane and get an answer one way or the other about whether or not something had happened at the club, but I now had even more questions. The database on the Division of Liquor Control’s website was very revealing; it cited no fewer than seventeen various violations of Nightshade’s liquor license in the past three years. Their misdeeds included: sale and/or furnishing to a person under twenty-one, improper advertising encouraging excessive drinking, illegally advertising price of beer, permit not posted in conspicuous place, fine not paid, suspension in effect, and, most curiously, gambling raffle or drawing. But whatever that was almost certainly had nothing to do with Addison; the most recent offense was six months ago and I could find no evidence of the club being shut down by any authority in the time between Wednesday night and now, and nothing that helped to explain why both Addison and Shane Resznik seemed to have had a bad night.
I found the motel—as promised, next to the UPS store. The place seemed mostly deserted, with just a half a dozen cars spread out around three long, low buildings.
I grabbed a paper bag from my backseat and went into the office. “Hi,” I said to the woman behind the counter, “I got a delivery for Shane Resznik, but he didn’t put a room number.”
She looked at me. She had green and purple hair in tangly white-girl dreds and she wore a plaid flannel over army-drab cargo pants and Doc Martens eight-eyes. Her feet were propped on the desk, exposing a gun holstered at her ankle. It was impossible to tell how old she was. “We don’t collect registration,” she said, “and you’re not Uber Eats.”
“You got me there.”
“What’s in the bag?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I just need to talk to the guy.”
“You a cop?”
“Private detective.”
“No shit? I’m going to Columbus State part-time, criminal justice.”
“Yeah? What do you want to do?”
“Find motherfuckers who skip bail and mess up their women’s lives,” she said, clearly speaking from experience. “If I can scrape enough money for tuition on what they pay me, anyhow. Your guy, you know what he looks like?”
“Blond, goatee, kind of a weasel?”
The woman nodded. “One-sixteen.”
I ope
ned my wallet and pulled out a twenty. “Congrats, you got a partial scholarship.”
“Right on.”
I went back outside and followed the arrows to the end of the building that ran parallel to Main. There was a rusty old Jag parked next to the door of room one-sixteen. Shane hadn’t taken care of it, but it still made me miss my blue tank.
I knocked on the door.
Shane Resznik himself answered—dressed only in velvet Santa Claus boxers and mismatched socks, a handful of one dollar bills outstretched. He was either expecting pizza, or drugs. “Uh,” he said when he saw I had neither, and started to close the door.
“Hey buddy, hang on,” I said. “I just want to talk.”
“Not to me you don’t.”
“You don’t even know why I’m here.”
He had the door shut by now, but he stood just inside it and said, “And I don’t care. You a cop?”
“Where’s Addison?”
He opened the door a crack. “Addison?” His voice went up a little, like this inquiry confused him.
“What did you think I wanted?”
“I told you, I don’t care.”
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
Now he opened the door the whole way and glared at me. “I don’t know. The other night.”
“Wednesday.”
“Sure.”
“How come the club was closed the last few nights?”
“Jesus, who the hell are you?”
I gave him a big smile and a business card.
“Someone hired you to find out why the club wasn’t open last night? Damn, I kind of love it.”
“Babe, who is it?” said a soft female voice.
“Nobody. Go back to bed.”
“Is that her? Is that Lisette? Because—”
Resznik slammed the door closed and the rest of the argument was muffled. Finally, the woman seemed to go away and Resznik sighed behind the door.
“I’m still out here,” I said.
He opened the door an inch or so. “What the fuck do you want?”
“I want to know what’s going on at your club.”
Continuing to glare at me, he said, “Plumbing issue. Pipes burst. No running water. This fucking weather, you know?”
The Stories You Tell Page 4