by Mike Faricy
“Actually, I was planning to go to Daryl Bergstrom’s funeral tomorrow.”
“Oh Jesus.”
Chapter Sixteen
On a good day Vaxholm, Minnesota was a town of about eleven hundred people. Probably a third of them seemed to have turned out for Daryl Bergstrom’s funeral service, and judging from their age, I’d guess most, if not all, were there for Charlie rather than Daryl. Including the pastor’s generic eulogy, the service didn’t last forty minutes. Coffee and cookies followed in the Princess Amalia fellowship hall.
Crickett was there, too. She wore a very short, very bright red skirt, with very high heels, and a black bra strap that kept falling off her shoulder. She was attempting to hold court, with little Oliver in tow and not meeting with much success. The friction between her and Daryl’s father, Charlie, felt palpable, and they inhabited opposite sides of the fellowship hall. Just about everyone was crammed over on Charlie’s side. Next to me, I think the only person Crickett spoke with was little Oliver, and he wasn’t answering back.
She gave me a long hug, then stepped back once she had people’s attention. “Oh God, thank you so much for coming, Dev,” Crickett gushed. “Wasn’t that just the most awesome service, since forever?”
“Yeah, I guess, I mean I don’t really know, I’m not that into funerals. You get your nap in yesterday?”
“I did as a matter of fact. Sorry we couldn’t chat any longer, but well,” she cupped her hands, looked down at Oliver, and smiled. “Mommy just needed her time in bed.”
Nothing positive would be accomplished by me responding. “Hate to hug and run, but I’ve got kind of a heavy day, Crickett, and I better get a move on. I just wanted to pass on my condolences. Like I said yesterday, maybe don’t mention anything for awhile, and just let things sort of cool down.”
“As far as I’m concerned, the sooner Oliver and I can put this whole awful affair behind us, the better it will be. We’re going to have a fresh start, aren’t we Oliver.”
A couple of women studied us from the far side of one of the cookie platters, and seemed to somehow communicate with one another without uttering a word.
“Yeah, well I’m going to just pass on my condolences to Charlie, and then I’m heading back down to St. Paul. It’s been nice to see you again. Sorry it was under these circumstances.”
“You mean you’re leaving? Already?” she said and glanced over toward the crowded side of the fellowship hall.
“Yeah, I better get back I’ve got a lot going on.”
She gave me a long stare, suggesting she couldn’t believe it then said, “Suit yourself.”
On some other day with some other person, I may have tried to explain and smooth things over, or just flat out lied. I figured with Crickett that was as good as it was going to get, and so I just smiled, nodded, and beat a hasty retreat through the crowd on Charlie’s side of the room. I had to stand and wait while he finished talking to three or four people, then he turned and got a hug and a kiss from two women.
“Mr. Bergstrom, Dev Haskell, I just wanted to say how sorry I was, and to wish you the very best.”
He studied me for a long moment. The swelling on my nose was gone, but my eyes were still rimmed in fading purple. He extended his hand. “Thanks, it’s been a long week.”
There followed a long pause fortunately brought to an end by another couple tapping him on the shoulder. He nodded at me before he turned to face them, and I took that as my cue to flee the scene.
I was just crossing back into the city limits, when my cell rang. “Haskell Investigations.”
“Mr. Gustafson wants to see you, now.”
I guessed it was Bulldog, and wondered who had helped him dial the phone. “Gee, my last visit ended on such a pleasant note, I think I’ll take a pass. You can tell him the cop who spoke with me was Detective Norris Manning in homicide. I can’t get an answer from them on what the DEA is up to. Nice chatting,” I said and hung up.
I drove past my house, but didn’t see anyone who looked like they were in Tubby’s employ waiting for me. I drove down to the office, Louie wasn’t there, but his computer case sat on the picnic table, so I figured he might be over at The Spot.
I was right. He was hiding behind an open newspaper, and apparently not on his first beverage.
“So, busy day?” I said climbing onto the stool next to him.
He lowered his paper, looked me up and down, then took a sip. “All dressed up and nowhere to go?”
“No, just got back from that Bergstrom kid’s funeral.”
He shook his head like he couldn’t believe it.
“Will you relax, I was just cutting the cord, making sure I was done with everyone.”
“And are you?”
“Mostly, I think, maybe. I gave my condolences and said good-bye to Charlie, the father. Spoke briefly with Crickett, and made it pretty clear I was finished. On the way home, I got a call from one of Tubby’s associates. I gave him Manning’s name and told him I couldn’t get any info on the DEA taking possession. I think that’ll pretty much bring things to a close.”
“You need a place to stay, tonight?”
“I hadn’t thought about that, but it might not be a bad idea.”
Louie nodded then slid his glass across the bar. “You’re buying.”
Chapter Seventeen
My phone woke me about ten the following morning. I could hear Louie down the hall in the shower. I was nestled in his duct-tape covered recliner, next to a pizza delivery box, and the better part of a case of empty beer bottles. I’d slept in the clothes I’d worn to yesterday’s funeral.
“Haskell Investigations.”
“Hope I’m getting you up,” the voice said, then followed with the snap from a wad of gum, Detective Norris Manning. “It’s been suggested you might like to grace us with your presence, oh say in the next forty-five minutes.”
“What?”
“Just get down here. Amazingly your name has come up in an ongoing investigation.”
I figured Manning must have gotten wind of the fact I passed his name onto Tubby Gustafson. Now I was going to have to spend the better part of the next few hours denying that fact. At that point, Louie waddled out of the bathroom, and toweled off more or less in front of me. Things seemed to be going steadily downhill.
The interview room consisted of cinder-block walls painted neutral gray. I was seated at a scratched and cigarette scarred Formica table on a nuclear orange plastic chair. I wasn’t cuffed or shackled, not that Manning wouldn’t have enjoyed that. I’d already been in here for the better part of an hour cooling my heels, when Manning strode in with a file under his arm.
He attacked the ever present wad of gum with his front teeth. There was a fringe of reddish hair wrapped around his pink dome, and unpleasant past experience had shown me that his icy blue eyes could grow even colder. He tossed the file onto the table, pulled out his chair, and sat down. He took his time opening the file, then straightened the edges, and aligned it with the edge of the table just because he knew it would drive me nuts.
I tried not to react which made him take even more time. Finally I asked, “So, Detective Manning, to what do I owe the pleasure of this meeting?” I was hoping he’d tell me one of Tubby’s thugs let the air out of his tires, or lit a paper bag full of dog shit on his front steps. Instead, he pulled a small plastic bag from out of the back of the file, and placed it in front of me. “What can you tell me about this?”
The bag contained a business card that read, ‘Haskell Investigations, Devlin Haskell Chief Investigator,’ my office address and phone number were printed just below my name.
“Okay, you got me, it’s mine. I confess. What’s the charge, littering?”
“Always gotta be the wiseass, don’t you, Haskell. We pulled this off one of your clients. A little higher up the food chain than the normal lowlifes you seem to be most comfortable dealing with.”
“Oh really, who was that?”
“A
gentleman by the name of Duncan Nixon.”
I think I did a double take. I must have because Manning half tilted his head and reappraised me.
“You mean the guy that slit that Bergstrom kid’s throat while in custody? How the hell did he get my card?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you.”
“What did he say?”
“Gee, you know I asked him, but he seemed to be having trouble speaking. I don’t know, it may have been the belt around his neck and the T-shirt crammed into his mouth. What do you think?”
“What?”
“An apparent suicide.”
“Two deaths in your facility in the same week. Is anyone on duty down there? A T-shirt crammed in his mouth? This wasn’t some suicide, Manning. You know that. Hell, the guy was murdered by Tubby Gustafson.”
“Oh really? And you know this how?”
“Because Tubby does that sort of shit. Come on, you know as well as I do that he probably did this just to shut Nixon up. ”
“Unfortunately, when it comes to factual evidence, we have to adhere to slightly higher standards than you do, Haskell.”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head in disbelief.
“So tell me about Duncan Nixon,” Manning said.
“I don’t know anything. Honest, I never even met the guy. I never met the Bergstrom kid, either, for that matter. Nixon murdered the kid before I even had a chance to talk with him.”
“Why were you going to talk with him, Bergstrom?”
“Doing it as a favor to his, what would you call her, his significant other.”
“And Nixon?”
“Never heard of him until he murdered Daryl Bergstrom. Once that happened, I knew I wouldn’t be able to see him. Didn’t you guys have him under lock and key, or on some sort of watch or something?”
Manning ignored my question. “And the girlfriend?”
“Bergstrom’s? I knew her some time back. She contacted me after his arrest and wanted me to find something that would get all the charges against him dropped.”
“Pretty tall order,” Manning replied.
“You’re telling me. You saw me in here reviewing those tapes actually, the ones showing him driving the van into the parking ramp. You remember? It was when you so graciously kicked me out of the viewing room the other day. For the record, I still think the kid was just plain stupid and set up. Someone gave him a ‘C’ note to drive that van into the parking ramp. At this juncture, I don’t think his involvement was anything more than that. I don’t know any specific history, but I talked to his father, and he alluded to some pretty bad choices being made in recent years.”
“The significant other, what was her name?”
“When I knew her it was Karen Riley, R-I-L-E-Y.” I spelled it out for him. “I hadn’t seen her for close to a year and a half, maybe two years, when she ran into me just the other night. Told me she was calling herself Crickett now, and that her boyfriend or husband or whatever had been involved in this bust and that the drugs had been planted on him.”
“Two pallets stacked with about five million in cocaine? It gets pretty tough to plant that much on someone without them knowing.”
“Yeah, that’s what I told her. Of course there is that mitigating possibility that maybe the individual is a trusting, naive idiot who’s just happy to make a hundred bucks, and didn’t bother to look under a couple of tarps in the back of the van he was driving from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’.”
“You saw the arrest tapes?”
“Yeah, I did as a matter of fact. I’m sure you have, too. Come on, the kid didn’t try to run. My understanding is he was unarmed. At best, I’d say he looked confused wondering what all the fuss was about or he was just stupid enough to think he could joke his way out of trouble. Hey look, Detective Manning, when was the last time you heard of someone transporting that much illicit material, and they don’t have so much as a sling shot on them? This whole thing, especially that kid’s arrest, just stinks and you guys know it. Was he driving? Yeah, obviously. Did he have any idea what he was transporting? I sincerely doubt it. Now it’s even more complicated by his murder, a murder that occurred while he was in your custody. One of two murders, I might add.”
Manning made a sort of loud exhale, and I figured the entire incident had been nothing but a series of screw ups from start to finish. Aaron LaZelle had alluded to as much the other day, and we were just talking about Daryl Bergstrom then.
“You guys still got that stuff stacked up in the evidence room?”
“Thankfully, the DEA is taking charge of it later this afternoon. They’ll put it under lock and key in their facility, eventually dispose of it accordingly,” Manning said, absently. He sounded almost relieved before he returned to the task at hand.
“When did you meet with Duncan Nixon?”
“I just told you, I never met the guy. I never met him before and I didn’t meet him after his arrest. I did meet with a woman he was sharing a room with. I’d say they had a ‘working’ relationship. Her name, or at least the name she gave me is Destiny Meyers, lives over on the East side in some illegal flop house joint. I talked to her for maybe all of ten minutes. I’d say Nixon was pimping her, had her working the street and probably used her for a punching bag from time to time.”
“Yeah, we were over there after the Bergstrom thing went down.”
“She mentioned that, said you guys tore up the place, and she hadn’t had time to clean up the mess.”
Manning ignored my comment. “What’d you talk to her about?”
“I wondered if she knew anything about the Bergstrom kid. She told me she didn’t. To tell you the truth, I got the impression she would have trouble remembering anything from about fifteen minutes before. She seemed to be on a pretty steep downward slide. You might say she’d hit rock bottom some time ago and seemed to like it there.”
“What else did she tell you?”
“Nothing. I did give her a couple of business cards, told her to call me if she could think of anything. I never expected to hear from her, and I haven’t. She was pretty out of it when I met with her, and it was just a little after ten in the morning. She even hit on me a couple of times.”
“Hit on you? She’d have to be out of it.”
I was on my way home from my interview with Manning about an hour later thinking it made more sense to head home, shower, and change clothes. I drove past my place, but kept on going when I saw the car parked across the street from my front door. Some sort of SUV with dark, tinted windows, and the silhouettes of two guys with no necks who looked an awful lot like they might be waiting for me.
I pulled over around the corner and dialed the ‘unknown’ number from the day before. Someone grunted after a half dozen rings. “Yeah.”
“Let me talk to Bulldog.”
“You got me, Haskell. What the hell do you want?”
“I think I got the information you wanted about the transfer of that material into DEA custody. Tell Mr. Gustafson not to worry, the police are turning it over this afternoon, and the DEA is gonna eventually destroy the stuff.”
“Mrumph,” he grunted and hung up.
I sat in my car for another ten minutes, then drove around the block, and back past my place. The SUV was gone. Maybe they hadn’t been waiting for me, and were just two innocent thugs who pulled over to make a phone call. Maybe they were checking their GPS to see where the nearest gym was so they could go lift weights. Maybe, but I doubted it.
Chapter Eighteen
I was online trying to learn what I could about Big Boy Enterprises, the company that held the title to the Mercedes with the BeniBoy license plates parked in front of Crickett’s house.
Big Boy’s website consisted of a single page listing all sorts of vague enterprises; historic office buildings, restaurants, a couple of bars, two fitness clubs, catering services, along with resort condos in Minnesota, Florida, California, and Las Vegas. I knew for a fact that Tubby owned one of the
bars. A number of the properties were classified as being ‘In the process of restoration.’ One of them was the address where I’d met Destiny Meyers. Based on what I’d seen, the only restoration going on there had been returning the place back to the days of cave dwellers.
The web sight neglected to mention any of Tubby’s brothels, massage parlors, betting sites, nor his alleged drug distribution operation that encompassed a five-state area. I felt reasonably sure the legal end of his business probably laundered the funds from Tubby’s illegal undertakings.
I was tempted to fill out the bogus inquiry form on the site, but quickly decided the less Tubby knew about me the better. I still wondered what the relationship was between Tubby’s kid and Crickett. If you put those two together as an item, the arrest of Daryl Bergstrom and his subsequent murder in the shower suddenly started to sort of make sense.
I decided to return to Tubby’s sleazy restoration project over on the East side and see if Destiny Meyers could tell me anything. At the very least, I might be able to confirm she was the one that handed dearly-departed Duncan Nixon my business card.
Given the state of the place, when I pulled up I wasn’t too surprised to see someone walking out the front door in a hazmat suit. Based on what I’d seen the other day, we were all lucky there hadn’t been something along the lines of an Ebola outbreak at the address. Then I saw the medical examiners van in the driveway parked next to a discarded boat and a collection of aluminum ladders. Suddenly an Ebola outbreak didn’t seem quite so funny.
There was a squad car parked across the street, and I saw another one in the alley. An unmarked car was parked on the street directly in front of the place. I pulled in front of the unmarked car, took my ‘Police Vehicle Official Business’ sign out of the glove compartment and slid it onto the dash.
As I walked across what passed for the front lawn, a uniformed officer stepped out of the front door escorting a guy whose hands were cuffed behind his back. I nodded at the cop like we were on equal terms and kept moving. He glanced at me as I passed by, but was preoccupied with his charge and kept going. He helped the guy in handcuffs into the back seat of the squad car then talked into his radio. I climbed the front steps and walked in, acting like I actually belonged there.