by Mike Faricy
The top sheet in the file had four images printed on it. They were centered on the page. Each image was about two-and-a-half inches square. There was an eight digit number written in what looked like red marker on the upper right corner of the page and I took that to probably be a file or case number. There were multiple lines of copy printed below the images, but the print was too small to read, and well, it was upside down.
The images looked like building rubble from somewhere out of Iraq. In one of the images the rear end of a car hung out from beneath a pile of bricks. Since I didn’t know about any car bombings anywhere in the universe I began to relax for just a second or two before Manning looked up.
He stared at me for a long moment without saying anything, suggesting he was in charge, not me and he was just weighing his options on the best way to blind side me.
“So, Haskell. What have you been up to lately?”
“You dragged me down here to learn about my social life?”
“You’re always up to something interesting, just a little curious, is all.”
“Do I need council present? My lawyer?” I asked.
He sort of pursed his lips like he was taking my question seriously. Then his stare seemed to increase in intensity, he lowered his voice an octave and said very matter-of-fact, “I don’t think so, we’re just having a friendly little chat, is all. Just the two of us, you and me. You’re not charged with anything, at least that I know of. I can check if you’d like?”
It wouldn’t make a difference even if he did check. In fact, about all it would do would be to extend the time I’d have to sit in the room. Manning would probably forget about me and just leave me locked in here while he went home for the night.
“I’ve got nothing to hide.”
He nodded, pretending he really believed me.
“Mind telling me where you’ve been the last few days?”
“Always in town. Let’s see, I was at The Spot a couple of nights back, then home. I’ve got witnesses. I had an early dinner with a friend last night, witnesses. Three nights back I was at a friend’s home until the following morning, maybe a little after the noon hour. Most days I’ve been in my office, you know, working.”
“What are you currently working on?”
“Client confidentiality, I’m afraid. I really don’t wish to discuss it any further than that, unless you have some sort of court order.”
He looked at me as if to say, ‘I can get a court order and a lot more, anytime I want.’
Mercifully, there was a knock on the door and the same exhausted guy in the sport coat who brought me up in the elevator partially stepped into the room.
“Sorry to interrupt, I’ve got Mr. Haskell’s attorney out here.”
Louie suddenly squeezed past the guy and waddled in. He was wearing a wrinkled blue suit today, just a hint of bourbon floated along with him.
“I’m Mr. Laufen. Mr. Haskell’s attorney. Detective Manning, I believe, correct?”
Manning nodded, then flipped the file in front of him closed.
“We were just finishing up, here,” he said.
“Don’t stop on my account,” Louie said.
“No, not a problem. Just some general questions on Haskell’s whereabouts the past couple of days. I think we’ve got it sorted out, don’t we, Haskell?”
I could have ranted about wasting my time, about doing this over the phone, about keeping me waiting downstairs in the lobby. Instead, I just nodded and said, “Yes.” And left it at that.
“Can’t thank you enough for your time,” Manning said, then walked over and held the door for us as we exited the room.
Chapter Twenty
“I’ll have another,” Louie said as he pushed his empty glass across the bar, then turned back toward me. “You sure you don’t have any idea?”
“No, I don’t. Honest. Like I told you, I waited down in that stupid lobby for close to an hour, maybe longer. Manning had me in that interview room for all of two or three minutes before you came in. I’m telling you, that guy just has a hard-on for me. Any heinous crime that comes down the road his first thought is how in the hell he can tie it to me.”
“And those pictures you saw in his file?”
“Bombed out building from what I could tell. Looked like something out of Iraq or Somalia. You know I’m not involved with anything or anyone even remotely associated with that sort of political shit. I’ve been checking employment dates on insurance company job applications for God’s sake.”
“What about Renee Paris?”
“That gig was just sort of for a friend. In fact, I told her she’d be better served getting a lawyer and going to court. Not that she has any sort of case to begin with. Last I checked, Paris was still ignoring any request to contact her and, well, that’s where it stands.”
Louie shook his head and sipped. “Something’s up. I know you’re not a fan of Manning, but he doesn’t waste time, he’s good.”
“Well, he sure as hell wasted my time today, that’s for damn sure.”
“And you said you talked to Paris?”
“Well, yeah.”
Louie must have picked up on my tone and he shot me a look. “What the hell does that mean? What’d you do, Dev?”
“Nothing, really. He was just being a prick is all and we may have exchanged some words.”
“Anything else?” He looked at me like my dad used to when he already knew all about whatever stupid stunt I’d pulled.
“I may have sort of pushed him or something.”
“Define something?”
“Okay, he yelled at me, called me names. I sort of grabbed him and maybe splashed some water on him.”
“What?”
“It just sort of happened, the water was running in the kitchen sink, he was being a jerk and well…”
“Water?”
“Yeah.”
“Christ, is he okay? Did you try to drown him? Water board? What? I mean, was he breathing?”
“Oh yeah, nothing like that. He might have been, you know, burned, sort of, a little bit pink, maybe. But he was alive and mostly okay when I left.”
“Exactly how hot was it? Scalding?”
“I guess it could have been.”
“Are you kidding me, scalding? Where did you do this, his house? His office? A men’s room?”
“Casey’s.”
“Casey’s?”
“That joint that closed a couple of years back, you remember? Turns out jerk-off Paris owns the place, or at least the building. He was in there cooking up his Bar-B-Que sauces. See, apparently he’s started this business called LuSifer’s…”
“Wait a minute, Casey’s, you mean the place that just burned down the other night?”
“Huh?”
“Oh, Christ. Casey’s burned down a couple of days ago. The whole thing, the fire, it’s under investigation.”
I suddenly remembered the images in Manning’s file. One of them had the tale end of a car sticking out from beneath a pile of rubble. Had I seen a Mercedes logo on the trunk of that car? I wasn’t sure, maybe I was making that up. After all, I’d been looking at the damn images upside down.
“Perfect timing once again, Dev. You’re there, assaulting the sleaziest con-man in town and the next thing you know the place gets burned to the ground.”
“How would Manning even know I’d been there?”
“Gee, let me think, maybe for starters Renee Paris told him.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Danielle still hadn’t answered any of my phone calls. I placed two more last night while Louie and I sat at the bar and tried to figure out what in the hell was going on. We never did come up with anything. I sent her a text message before I went to bed and another one w
hen I woke up this morning. I got nothing back in return for my trouble.
I was beginning to wonder if maybe Renee Paris had somehow gotten hold of her. Maybe he was desperate enough or just plain mad enough to break into that museum she lived in. Or, maybe he followed her to one of her ‘beautiful people’ soirees and chose a convenient place to grab her. I decided to drive over to her house to see if she was okay, check the place out and well, offer any other service she might be in need of.
Danielle’s red-brick Victorian barn sat on the corner lot of a street filled with similar Victorian barns. When the place had been built, over a century ago, it had been situated on a bluff that overlooked the rooftops of a tranquil working class neighborhood made up of German and Czech families. They worked in the breweries, green houses and bakeries. They built churches, raised families and in general added to the quality of life in our growing river town. Their tree lined streets beneath the bluff flowed lazily off in the distance toward the Mississippi river.
Forty years ago the state, in its wisdom, slashed through the tranquil neighborhood with a four lane freeway and thirty foot high concrete sound barriers. The din from the traffic of folks racing past twenty-four/seven provided a constant undercurrent of mechanical screech. Thirty years ago Dutch elm disease wiped out all the trees along the streets and denuded the entire neighborhood. The view of the river valley was cut in half ten years ago by a new hundred-foot concrete tower belching smoke from the power plant. Such is progress.
The heater was working in the Lincoln as I pulled in front of Danielle’s home. I phoned her from the comfort of my front seat.
“Hi, thanks for calling, but I’m unable to take your call right now. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you just as soon as possible. Bye, bye.”
“Danielle, Dev Haskell. Give me a call. I want to make sure you’re all right,” I said, then hung up. God, I didn’t want to step outside my car. It was about eight degrees below zero and windy. The wind chill was something like minus twenty, but out I went anyway, just to be a good guy.
I damn near died of exposure on her front porch after ringing the doorbell a half dozen times and waiting for someone to answer the door. Then I walked around the entire house. The place looked secure, no open or broken windows, the back door and a side door were securely locked. There weren’t any footprints in the snow suggesting someone had been casing the place or had tried to break in. I attempted to look in the garage, but the windows had been blacked out and both the overhead and the side garage doors were locked.
I went back onto her front porch and rang the door bell again. Her mail dropped into a slot next to the front door. I peered into the front entry through the beveled glass panels on either side of the door, but I couldn’t spot anything that looked like a pile of mail. I don’t know, maybe she was at a yoga class or she had scurried back to Tuscany with girlfriends. I was just about frozen stiff so I hurried back into my car and fired it up. Thankfully, the heat came on a minute or two later.
I decided I would drive past Casey’s and look at the rubble. I was thinking about the news cast I caught for all of a few seconds the other night. The images of the firemen with the icicles hanging from their helmets must have been the fire at Casey’s.
I circled the block where the building used to stand. I drove around twice. There wasn’t much to see. We’d had an inch or two of snow each of the past few nights, not much, but enough to cover everything. Now the site was just a series of gently rolling little piles of rubble. The occasional beam stuck out a few feet into the air, but there was nothing that would really grab your attention.
One thing caught my eye. There wasn’t the rear end of a car to be found, anywhere. I guessed the police probably pulled the thing out and brought it to the crime lab to run more tests.
When I got back to the office I went online and watched the archive footage of the news reports, then went through the articles in both the St. Paul and Minneapolis papers. I didn’t read anything I didn’t already know. The building was a total loss. There was no mention of Renee Paris anywhere in the articles or the newscast.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I searched online to try and get a handle on where Renee Paris may have landed. The only thing I could find was outdated information directing me to the vacant, soon-to-be foreclosed structure over by the Witches Hat tower.
A sleaze ball like Paris, there had to be a million places he could hide. The only thing I was pretty sure of was, wherever he ended up, it would be high class. I fooled around online for another few hours and came up with absolutely nothing. I didn’t want to be a pest, or a bigger pest than I’d already been, so I didn’t phone Danielle. If she hadn’t responded to the half dozen phone messages or any of my text messages I figured one more wasn’t going to do the trick. I phoned Heidi instead.
“Hi, Dev, and no, I’m busy tonight.”
“What?”
“You heard me, I’m busy. I’m out with the girls.”
“The girls? Or some new, self-absorbed flake who’ll drive you nuts before the night is over. Who was the last guy? That Waldo character.”
“Oh, jealous? His name was Destin, by the way, and yeah, he did kind of look like Waldo, didn’t he?”
“He always wore that stripped shirt that even said, ‘Where’s Waldo?’. I don’t know, you tell me.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter. The answer is still no. Really I’m going out with the girls. We’re all meeting at Bunnies.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Why? Don’t tell me you’ve been there? It’s kind of classy. I didn’t think it was the sort of place you would…”
“No, I haven’t been there. As a matter of fact someone called me from the ladies room there.”
“No thanks, I don’t need to hear another one of your perverted stories, Dev, so just stop right there.”
“That’s it, she just called me. Said my name was written on the door of the stall in the Ladies room. One of those ‘For a good time call’ sort of deals.”
“Oh, you’re kidding, that is sort of funny. Why did you do that? Write your name in the Ladies room.”
“I didn’t write my name in the Ladies room, some other idiot did.”
“Hmm-mmm, we’ll have to check it out. Anyway, some other time, darling.”
I’d fallen asleep on my couch watching a rerun of a Netflix movie I hated the first time I watched it, when my phone rang.
“Hello, Haskell In…”
“Oh, good, you’re still up.” It was Heidi. Guessing from the ‘Woo-hoo-hoo’ noise in the background she was still out with her girlfriends.
“Umm, yeah, just going over some files here.”
“Sure you were. Hey, are you okay to give me a lift? I just think I probably shouldn’t drive. I mean, as long as you haven’t been drinking. If that’s okay?”
Not really, but it beat sleeping on the couch, in front of this stupid movie. And of course the added potential of a Heidi benefit. “Yeah, where are you? You still down at Bunnies?”
“Yep,” she said, then I heard her taking a very large sip of something I figured wouldn’t be lemonade.
“You just stay there, I’m on the way. I’ll come in and get you.”
“Thanks, bye, bye, bye,” she said and returned to the festivities.
I walked into Bunnies about a half-hour later. The place was just about empty, after all, most normal people were either working tomorrow or looking for work and they’d all gone home by now.
“Sorry, sir, we’ve already had last call,” the bartender said. He carried two stacks of pint beer glasses, one in each hand. Each stack looked to be about thirty glasses high and rose above his shoulders. He kept moving toward a corner of the bar and added the glasses to the dozens already arranged on the counter.
“Not a problem, just
here to pick someone up,” I said, then pointed at the group of five women seated at the only occupied table in the place.
“Oh, thanks, man.” He sounded like he really meant it and continued stacking glasses.
Their table was littered with a number of different colored paper bags with bits of fancy tissue hanging out of them. The bags probably contained little gifts they could all complain about when they got home. I noticed what looked like a number of empty Prosecco bottles scattered amongst the bags and thought, ‘Oh-oh.’
“Hi, Heidi,” I said. I had to repeat myself over the high pitched laughing. “Heidi, your limo awaits.”
Heidi turned, looked up at me bleary eyed and slowly focused. “Hi, Dev, perfect timing. It’s your turn to buy.”
Everyone giggled and reached for their glasses.
“Yeah, not that I didn’t already try, but unfortunately they’ve had last call and I can’t. I really wish I could, honest. Nothing I’d like to do more than buy a round.”
“You sure?”
“Very.”
“Well, come on girls, our ride is here. We’ll just go somewhere else.” She giggled, then drained close to half a glass. They all followed suit and slowly got to their feet, pulling on coats and hats. Apparently, I was going to be everyone’s designated driver.
“Where are you parked?” Heidi asked.
“Outside,” I said, which seemed to satisfy her.
“Thank you, thanks, bye, bye,” they all chorused to the bartender as they filed past on the way out the door.
“Thanks ladies,” he said. Then looked at me, nodded and seemed to wish a silent ‘good luck’.
Paper bags and tissue rustled as they made their way into the winter night. Once outside the fifteen below temp slapped us in the face. Everyone scurried across the parking lot toward my car, giggling.