by Mike Faricy
“Grab a seat, Marsha. You want some coffee?” I asked.
“No, I’m on a sugar high just to chase away my hangover. You shouldn’t have gotten me so drunk last night.”
“Actually…”
“Relax, I’m kidding,” she said, then shrugged.
“So you mentioned a plan on the phone?”
She took a moment to lick sugar from her finger tips, while Louie and I just stared, mesmerized.
“What? Oh, God, you two are such pervs.”
“Your plan?” I said, coming back to reality.
“I’m just wondering if maybe this Gaston guy would hit on me if I flirted. Maybe that would help.”
“Interesting. But I don’t think hitting on you would be considered a criminal offense and…how, exactly, do you propose getting in contact with him? I’ve only seen the guy on TV.”
“I was thinking I could do something unusual and maybe find him at his office. Try something clever and unexpected, like call and make an appointment.”
“An appointment?”
“Yeah, never seems to fail.”
She had me thinking, or at least trying to think. “But then what?”
“He’ll want to take me out to dinner and woo me into his bed. Somewhere along the way I’ll learn about Desi and I suspect a number of other women.”
“The guy is happily married.”
“Is that what they call it? Even better. From what you’ve told me he sounds like the type who keeps score. Probably lies awake at night trying to remember the names of all the women he’s conquered over the course of his life.”
Louie swallowed, licked some jelly off his lower lip and said, “The guy’s a model citizen. He serves on boards and donates to charity. He’s a wounded veteran, a pillar of the damn community.”
“Aren’t they all?” Marsha said and paused, not looking at either one of us. She gave the distinct impression she was thinking far beyond our immediate conversation.
“You left out the part where he had Desi as a mistress for close to a year. That he set her up, watched her take the fall, let her do time in prison, lose virtually everything and never even bothered to lift a hand. As far as anyone can tell, he never even bothered to ask if she was okay.”
“I’m not disagreeing, but at best it would be viewed as hearsay, tough if not impossible to prove at this stage,” Louie said as he attacked another jelly doughnut. He seemed oblivious to the glob of red jelly that had dribbled down across the front of his shirt.
“Take it from me…just knowing a little about human nature and certain men,” Marsha emphasized the word ‘certain’. “Desi wasn’t this creep’s first little dabble on the side. She’s just the one we know about. There were most likely women before her and there have been women after her. In fact, if we found out he brought her on board for the express purpose of being the delivery person of those files and taking the fall it wouldn’t surprise me in the least. This guy’s a real schemer.”
I couldn’t disagree, but I still couldn’t see how Marsha getting in the way of my investigation was going to help.
“We’re still back to the same thing, trying to prove any of this ever happened. As it stands now, this is all nothing more than unfounded rumors. Might as well be something we just made up. Old Gaston being attracted to a gorgeous woman like you, Marsha, is one thing. Proving he set up Desi to take the fall is quite another…a huge leap.”
“I’m going to make an appointment with Mr. Driscoll. Not if, but when he places his follow-up phone call, that will be the first indication we’re on the right track.”
“Marsha, the guy is something like a hundred years older than you.”
“Which just makes my job that much easier. He’d like nothing better than a younger woman to remind him he’s still got that old magic. A pillar of the community? Spare me. Pull his pants down and it’s all about him. Look, I’ll keep you posted. I gotta work tonight.”
“You got time for dinner?” I asked.
“Don’t take it personal, but no, Dev. I don’t. I’m still a little bit in the recovery mode from last night. Besides, I want to call this guy’s office after five so I have to leave a message, then I’ll call him again tomorrow. I’ll take a rain check though on the dinner offer.”
“You got it.”
She stood, brushed some imaginary sugar off her front, then gave me a peck on the cheek and looked at Louie.
“You’ve got jelly on your shirt.” She nodded to the blob that had landed on his stomach.
“I’m saving that for later,” he said.
Chapter Nineteen
Marsha phoned the following afternoon, my first call of the day. Louie was napping in his chair and I was staring out the window daydreaming while I waited for buses to begin unloading working girls at the end of their day.
“Haskell Investigations.”
“Hi, Dev. Guess what?”
“You’re back on tequila?”
“Oh, icky, no. But I have an eleven o’clock appointment with the infamous Mr. Gaston Driscoll tomorrow morning.”
“You’re kidding?” I was more than a little surprised.
“I told you.”
“What are you supposed to be meeting about?”
“I just said I was considering making a career change and a friend mentioned him as a top man in his field, someone I should talk to.”
“And that got you an appointment with him the next day?”
“He said he could only give me ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes? You’ll have to wear a raincoat with nothing on underneath.”
“That’s what I was planning to wear for the second meeting.”
“So what do you think he’ll do?” I asked. For some reason I wasn’t thrilled about her getting an appointment with Driscoll.
“What will he do? He’ll sit there and tell me how absolutely wonderful and successful he is while I bat my eyelashes. Then, he’ll either ask me to lunch, call me later in the day or both. I’ll give him my personal number.”
“Your personal number?”
“I use an answering service, sometimes,” she said, but didn’t elaborate.
“Marsha, will you call me after you get out of that meeting. Please? I just want to know you’re all right. You said you’re meeting him at his office, right?”
“No, Dev, a pay-by-the-hour hotel room, did I forget to mention that? Yes, I’m meeting him at his office. I’ll call you when I’m out of there, but don’t wig out if I’m not calling you ten minutes later. He may be busy or something and I end up waiting. On the other hand...”
“It’s the ‘on the other hand’ that worries me.”
“Oh, that’s sweet. I’d make a good private investigator. Wouldn’t I?” She laughed.
“Just be careful and call me when you’re out of there.”
“I promise. Bye,” she said and hung up.
“She got an appointment with Gaston Driscoll?” Louie asked. He was tilted back in his office chair with his feet resting up on the picnic table. His eyes remained closed, arms wrapped comfortably across his belly. There was a reddish-pink smear across the front of his shirt from the jelly he’d dribbled yesterday. I’d thought he’d been asleep through my phone conversation.
“Yeah, she’s meeting him tomorrow, but only for a few minutes. She thinks he’ll either ask her to lunch or call her later on. I don’t know. It sounds pretty slim to me.”
“Well, first things first, she got the appointment with him.”
“Yeah, she got the appointment. Say, I’m going to try and do a little research on a name. You interested in meeting at The Spot later on?”
Louie still hadn’t opened his eyes.
“What time were you thinking? I’ll see if I can fit it in.”
“I’ll call you,” I said and headed down to police headquarters.
I’d phoned Aaron LaZelle in advance and he had the proper form signed and supposedly waiting for me at the Sergeant’s desk.
“Haskell, Haskell,” the Desk Sergeant said. His nametag read Suel, P. I knew him as Petey. “No, not seeing anything like that in the file here, Dev.”
“Lieutenant LaZelle said he would have it down here waiting for me.”
“Nope, sorry. Nothing with Haskell on it.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, nothing here. Got one addressed to Hassle. Could that be you?” He smiled.
“Probably. Very funny, Petey,” I said, taking the envelope from his hand. It was an 8 x 10 manila envelope with ‘Hassle’ scrawled across the front in black marker. I checked inside. It was the form I needed and amazingly my name was spelled correctly on the thing.
“We can’t be too careful, Dev. You never know what kind of lowlifes are going to wander in here off the street.”
I couldn’t tell if he was referring to me. I thanked Petey and took the elevator down to the basement catacomb level where Madeline Siedschlag drank in private. That musty basement smell hit me the moment the elevator door opened. Madeline was seated at her desk, and fortunately for me, still awake. I couldn’t spot her thermos anywhere.
“Hi, Madeline. How are you this sunny day?”
“Not that you’d know it from down here. Not so much as a window to save my soul. It could be snowing out there and I’d never be the wiser.”
I really didn’t want to get into the various bleak aspects of Madeline’s life down here below ground level so I just smiled and handed her my properly signed form.
“I just need to hop onto one of your computers and review some information.”
She half grunted without looking up then said, “Cubicles two and four are available. Don’t forget to sign-in. The log book is on the counter, and sign out when you leave. I can’t leave here until four-fifteen.” She made it sound like some sort of sentence which in a way I guess it was.
I settled into the second cubicle, pushed aside the Milky Way wrapper left on the keyboard and logged in. Aaron had given me an ID and password to log in with. I supposed giving me access to state and federal files wasn’t quite following chapter and verse, but on the other hand everything I looked at could be monitored and reviewed. I was denied access to ongoing investigations and a variety of sensitive files. My mission today was to try and locate Helen Olsen, formerly with the HR department at Touchier & Touchier. I wanted to talk with her regarding Desi’s dismissal and frankly any other information I might be able to obtain from her.
In short order it became pretty apparent the conversation was going to be brief and rather one-sided. Helen Olsen was residing in Resurrection Cemetery. She’d died tragically six-and-a-half years ago at age thirty-seven. Apparently she’d driven her car out onto the ice on Lake Minnetonka at about three in the morning on the sixteenth of March. One day before St. Patrick’s Day. The vehicle had fallen through the ice. A follow-up article listed her blood alcohol content as 0.29, almost three times the legal limit at the time. It was amazing she had been conscious enough to even drive.
It turned out a lake resident became suspicious about the large hole in the ice and a day later, on the 17th, her car was located by the authorities. If it had snowed or temperatures had dipped that night she might never have been found. The vehicle and her body couldn’t be recovered for another week until the ice went out on the twenty-third of March. When the vehicle was pulled from the eighteen feet of water, an open bottle stashed under the front seat was recovered.
I used my pen and did the math on the inside of the Milky Way wrapper. Helen Olsen’s accident would have been about a year and a half into Desi’s sentence. Maybe a coincidence, maybe not. She went through the ice on a lake located on the far side of town, a good half-hour to forty-minute drive from her St. Paul home. It led one to at least pause if not question.
I read her obituary. Helen’s picture showed a fairly attractive, slim woman with Scandinavian features, sharp blue eyes, reddish-blonde hair, and prominent cheekbones with a slightly upturned nose. Other than four years away at college she seemed to have lived her entire life in St. Paul.
She was single, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Madison and had received an MBA at the University of Minnesota. She was survived by a younger sister, Catherine Lindquist living in Minneapolis. I made a note. Helen had apparently been involved in her church choir, local girl scouts and volunteered in the Big Brother’s and Sister’s program. One had the impression she was a disciplined individual who would have taken her employment rather seriously.
The picture I got from her obituary and the follow-up articles presented a contradiction. On the one hand was a serious, accomplished, dedicated successful woman. On the other, a woman who was miles from her home at three in the morning, all alone, drinking and driving with an open bottle. So intoxicated, she was almost three times beyond the legal limit. She drove her vehicle out onto the lake a full month after ice fishing houses and everything else in the entire state of Minnesota had been ordered off the ice.
At a time when everyone in the upper Midwest was welcoming warming temperatures and the melting of snow and ice, this woman, born and raised here, obviously smart, thought it would be a good idea to drive out to the middle of one of the larger lakes in the region. Maybe she was just drunk and stupid. Or, maybe there was something more to the story. I remembered Desi mentioning that the day she’d been fired, Helen Olson had seemed very uncomfortable escorting her out of the building. It seemed like it might be a good idea to talk with Helen’s sister, Catherine Lindquist.
Chapter Twenty
I read through the rest of the online information regarding Helen Olsen, then started to wade through the volumes regarding Gaston Driscoll.
In the negative column, I didn’t find so much as a ticket for jaywalking. Born and raised in the city, he had served or was serving on most of the boards of directors worth serving on. He was the quintessential successful businessman, a senior partner at Touchier & Touchier, one of the regions most highly-regarded architectural firms and now called Gaston Enterprises. He was an elder in his church and served on the school board. He donated time, money and his expertise to a variety of community organizations. He supported, funded and advised the local and state arts community. He’d been a stalwart of the business community for years and in general, seemed to represent exactly the sort of individual any city would love to brag about.
It turned out Gaston was also widowed. His wife, Bernadette, had died in a solo boating accident about five years back. The accident was attributed to the unfortunate combination of a cigarette and a leaky fuel line. Interestingly the accident had occurred at night out on Lake Minnetonka, the very same lake where Helen Olsen’s car had gone through the ice just a year-and-a-half earlier. It was a large lake, used by a lot of people all year round, but still a curious coincidence. I decided to learn what I could about Bernadette.
I found a grand total of four articles from which to glean Bernadette Driscoll information. One was her obituary. She’d been born in Buhl, Minnesota a small town up north on the Mesabi Iron Range. It seemed her claim to fame in life had been she was married to Gaston Driscoll. Where Gaston was an extrovert with a thumb in uncountable pies, Bernadette Driscoll, from the little I could find, seemed to come across as damn near a recluse.
They had been married for forty-two years. No children. Apparently she loved her English Springer Spaniels. Other than her obituary, she was mentioned only in passing in three other articles. Based on what I read, her most notable accomplishment had been her attendance at an American Kennel Club show back in 2007.
My cell phone rang and as I answered I stood and glanced over the grey cubicle walls to see if I could spot Madeline. I could not.
“Haskell Investigations.”
“Hi, Dev, I’m just checking in so you can relax. I’m out of my meeting,” Marsha said.
“How’d it go?” I asked then checked my watch. It was close to two.
“What a charmer!”
“Really?”
&n
bsp; “Yeah, if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m not, especially under these circumstances.”
“So he took you to lunch?”
“Actually, no, he didn’t. He tried, but I told him I had an appointment, then we proceeded to chat. Let me rephrase that, he proceeded to wax eloquent about how wonderful he was. I just had to sit there and pretend to be interested for the better part of an hour.”
“You learn anything?”
“Only that he’s a more pompous butt-head than I thought. I expect to hear from him in a day or two.”
“You made another appointment with him?”
“No, but I gave him my card and wrote my private number on the thing while he tried to look down my blouse. He’ll call.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because, you’re all the same. The only time he took his eyes off my boobs was when I was crossing my legs.”
“He was probably trying to figure out what bra color you were wearing.”
“Red, date underwear, not that it’s any of your business.”
I was beginning to understand why Marsha was so sure Driscoll would call her back.
“Look, I just wanted to check in and give you the update. You learn anything?”
“Maybe, nothing earth shattering, but I think I’m beginning to see some coincidences and I don’t really believe in coincidence. Driscoll mention his wife?”
“No, but I really didn’t expect him to. Why?”
“She died in a boating accident a few years back. Might just be an unfortunate incident, I don’t know…”
“Gee, just like on CSI. Cool. Look, I’m dancing the dinner hour, four ‘til midnight so I better run.”
“Dinner hour goes ‘til midnight?”
“You’d be surprised,” she said and hung up.
I went back to my research. I couldn’t find anything else on Bernadette Driscoll. That left me feeling sorry for her, although I couldn’t describe exactly why. I read a couple of dozen more rave reviews about Gaston before I decided to pack it in and rejoin society as I knew it, at The Spot. Madeline was nowhere to be seen, so I signed myself out in the log book and left. On the way over to The Spot I phoned Catherine Lindquist and left a message.