by Mike Faricy
“Hey, I guess the early bird gets the worm. Been here long?”
“Only a minute or two. I just sat down,” she said.
If she’d just sat down she must have drunk her large coffee standing up, her mug was empty. She was dressed in blue jeans and a sort of v-neck T-shirt. The T-shirt had sharply creased sleeves and looked to have been ironed. A Claddagh dangled from the gold chain around her lovely neck; hands holding a heart with a crown, the Irish symbol for friendship, love and loyalty.
“I’m gonna get a coffee. You want another or something to eat? I was actually thinking of ordering some breakfast.”
“A coffee would be great. Just black. Nothing else for me.”
There was something in her look. I’d been in these situations before and maybe picked up on her starving eyes. If we were dating she would have wanted just ‘one little bite’ of my dessert, then inhaled the entire thing. I got two coffees, ordered two omelets and a caramel roll.
“Thanks for the coffee,” she said as I sat down. “Wow that looks really good.” She nodded toward my caramel roll.
Oh-oh.
“I hope you don’t mind. I took the liberty of ordering you an omelet. I didn’t want to be my usually piggy self and eat in front of you. Here, you gotta try half of this. They’re really good,” I said, cutting the caramel roll in half.
“Oh, no, I really couldn’t,” she said at the same time she grabbed the larger half.
“Go ahead…the omelets should be out in just a couple of minutes.”
“You sure you don’t mind?” she said, then crammed a good portion of the piece into her mouth, not waiting for my answer.
“So, you mentioned a situation. How can I help?”
Desi quickly chewed, then swallowed and glanced longingly at her remaining portion before looking up at me.
“Well…see…I didn’t always wash cars and tend bar at a strip joint.”
I shook my head and gave a little shrug suggesting it wasn’t important where she worked or what she did.
“No, really, I was somebody. I went to school and even made the Deans List in grad school. I was an architect here in town. I was making something of myself.”
“An architect?” I didn’t mean to sound so surprised.
“Yeah.” She nodded, then shoved the remainder of the caramel roll into her mouth.
“Why aren’t you working as an architect now?”
“Have you read the papers? You remember that little thing called the great recession? No one was building anything for about five years, let alone looking for someone to do design work.”
“So you went from being an architect to washing cars?” That sounded pretty drastic and I wasn’t quite following.
“Not quite that direct a route, but then that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Karla said you were someone who would understand.”
“You two friends?”
“We were friends in high school, but drifted apart when I went off to college and then grad school. We were out of touch for years, then when I hit rock bottom Karla was one of the few who didn’t turn their back on me.”
Two large omelets arrived. I thought Desi held back from immediately stuffing hers into her mouth.
“God, this looks absolutely fabulous, but I’ll never be able to finish it all,” she said.
“Well, do your best. They’re even better than they look. Dig in. So you were telling me about learning the car wash business from the ground floor up.”
She smiled a sad smile, shoveled a forkful of omelet into her mouth and chewed for a moment.
“I graduated from Clemson and got hired by a firm in town, Touchier and Touchier.”
I nodded, pretending I was familiar with the firm.
“You know them? Most people don’t, but then again I suppose in your line of work you would.”
“Give me the short version,” I said.
“Well, as you know, we were into the security thing, financial institutions, a couple of high security detention facilities, the occasional federal building.”
I nodded knowingly, not having the slightest idea what she was talking about.
“Anyway, that’s where I met Gas. He was one of the senior partners.”
“Gas?”
“Gaston Driscoll,” she said off-handedly like the name needed no explanation.
“That rings a bell, but I can’t tell you why.”
“Probably because I was charged, tried and convicted, and that bastard got off without so much as a slap on the wrist.”
I suddenly got it. “This have something to do with the security system at the Federal Reserve Bank?”
“That was part of it, along with the security system at the Federal facility down in Rochester.”
“Minnesota?”
She nodded and shoveled another forkful of omelet into her mouth.
“Oh, yeah, there was an escape or something. That sound right?” I said.
She nodded, followed with another forkful, then said, “Yeah, literally a genius. The media called him Little Jimmy Fennell. He was some sort of savant, only about four-foot-three. I don’t know what the politically correct term is, height challenged or something. Anyway he’d been transferred to the Federal Medical Center in Rochester for health reasons.”
She stuffed another forkful of omelet, chewed a moment, thinking and then swallowed.
“I could say he escaped. Actually that’s the official story, but the truth is he just walked away from the Federal Medical Center one day. No one thought him capable of ever getting out of his wheel chair. Apparently, he’d been successfully fooling everyone for a couple months. Then one day he just got up and walked out the door wearing an orange jumpsuit. I guess there was a car waiting for him.”
It was ringing a bell. The story was like something out of a bad movie.
“Yeah I sort of remember this. Someone ends up with the security plans to the Federal Reserve Bank, right? They bypass security with that Little Jimmy guy’s help, make a big haul…and didn’t something strange happen to this Little Jimmy character?”
“Yeah, he’s found on the top steps of the Cathedral, prostate and dead. It was around the time of that book, The Da Vinci Code, and people went crazy thinking there was some sort of message because of the way he was laid out. I think in reality he was just a guy who’d eaten one too many White Castle’s and happened to be walking past the Cathedral when he suffered a major heart attack.”
“But the money was never recovered, and it was a lot of money,” I said, remembering.
“Millions,” Desi said, then scraped up the last bit of omelet from her plate and looked longingly at the remaining portion of caramel roll.
“Go for it,” I nodded.
“Thanks,” she said, quickly stuffing it into her mouth. “Anyway, right. In fact, if not for his association with bank security systems there was a good chance no one would have even linked Little Jimmy to the robbery.”
“But didn’t they find money on him?”
“Nine, crisp one hundred dollar bills with consecutive serial numbers. Poor little fool had them hidden in his sock. They suspect he probably passed one at the White Castle, but they never found it.”
“And your involvement? How did you know this guy?”
“I didn’t know him at all. I just read about him in the paper. My involvement? I can sum it up in two words, Gaston Driscoll. We sort of had a thing going…at least, that’s what I thought. Turned out he was just using me as a delivery girl. Well, and his mistress.”
“Was this a one time get-together over too many drinks or was it more of a relationship?”
“It was a relationship, definitely a relationship,” she said, then seemed to reconsider. “At least, that’s what I thought at the
time.”
I was treading carefully. More than one guy I knew didn’t realize he was in a relationship after an alcohol fueled wrestling match in the back seat of a car.
“How long did the relationship last?”
“Until the day he had me fired. He had me escorted out of the building by a woman from HR who seemed to be about as thrilled with the situation as I was. Jesus, we were both in shock and tears.”
I just nodded.
“Gas and I had been together for maybe ten months if that’s your question. He told me he was making plans to divorce his wife. He told me he’d been trapped in a loveless marriage for years and I was like an open window that let the sunshine in. Of course I wasn’t adding two and two. Jesus, they still lived together. They were actually on vacation in Florida when he had me fired.”
“Did he ever try to contact you?”
“Since the day he had me fired, I haven’t heard so much as a peep from that creep.”
“Can you prove any of this?”
“The mistress part?” she asked and then brushed a stand of hair back behind her ear. “You mean do I have love letters, or the home videos he took of us making love? A book of photos from our beach trip? No. He bought me gifts, lingerie, a lot of lingerie. Gave me a set of pearls one time. He surprised me with diamond earrings on Valentine’s Day. He promised to take me to Ireland where my grandparents were from. But no, nothing I can document.”
I nodded and continued to listen. Desi was looking at me, but I didn’t think she could see me. She was remembering candlelight dinners and that crazy, wonderful head-over-heels infatuation that came with falling in love. The fact that you just couldn’t believe your incredible good fortune at finding the world’s most wonderfully perfect partner, that was usually just before everything went to hell in a hand basket.
“Funny, my grandparents came from a little village in County Sligo, Ireland. Turns out his family came from the same area. He owns a house over there. Well, at least that’s what he told me. He pointed it out to me on the map one time. Course, stupid gullible old me, I thought it was some sort of celestial sign, like we were made for one another.” She was looking through me seeing something else, something not actually there. Her lips formed a slight smile, yet somehow she looked sad. Then she blinked and seemed to come back to the here and now.
“When the bank foreclosed on my home, I still had his favorite wines laid out in my pantry. The CDs he liked were still in my living room. Oh, and a giant jar of chocolate topping was in the drawer next to my bed,” she said, but didn’t elaborate.
“The map of Ireland was spread out on the dining room table with my grandparent’s village circled and a red heart I’d drawn around the town his family came from. He told me we were going to travel there once his divorce was final, not that he ever filed for divorce. It was going to be just the two of us loving it up in Ireland for a couple of weeks. Maybe we’d begin to decorate the house he owned. You know, make it our own little private vacation spot. Jesus Christ, sorry.” She sniffled, then blinked back a tear.
“Anything you can document?” I asked, moving on.
“He’s got a tattoo of the Ace of Spades on his ass. I used to think that was really cute.”
“He’s a poker player?”
“Not really. It was from when he was in Vietnam. I guess they used to leave an Ace of Spades on enemy bodies. At least that’s what he told me. Anyway, that’s about the only private info I have on him. He’s got a white scar on his chin…shrapnel he said, except he lied about everything else, so I can’t be sure. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was pretty cautious. I’ve come to understand I probably wasn’t his first love scam and certainly not his last. One more stupid head-in-the-clouds girl falling for a rich, sexy older guy. I just think I’m the only one who ended up going to jail because of it.”
She said this very matter of fact, with no emotion, like she’d had plenty of time to think about it. Time served, I guessed.
“And you mentioned you were the delivery girl?”
“In layman’s terms, the plans for secure federal facilities are kept under lock and key. Gas basically prepped me so I could override the firm’s security using his access code, copy the plans, deliver them to his contact…oh, and then take the fall. I lost my job, my home, everything I’d ever worked for. I was charged, tried, convicted and did six years of a ten-year sentence in a woman’s facility. I’ve got nine years and two months left to go on probation.”
“Nine years and two months,” I said, doing the math and thinking that rounded up to an even decade.
Desi nodded. “Nine years of going in once a month and peeing in a cup. Nine years of reporting every month to a probation officer. Nine years of idiotic interviews and stupid questions about why I’m washing cars and tending bar in a strip club. You tell me, Dev. Would you hire an ex-con to help design your hundred-million-dollar secure facility?”
“So, what would you like me to do?”
“I suppose I couldn’t ask you to kill him.” She laughed, but I had the sense she was only half kidding. “I want you to get the goods on Gaston Driscoll. I want him to be charged. I want him to go down like I did. That creep laughed all the way to the Federal Reserve Bank, or from it. He set me up and I want him to feel what I have to feel, lose what I’ve lost. He took everything from me, Dev. My folks died thinking I was a criminal. I’ve lost everything,” she spat out this last bit in a harsh whisper, verging on tears that caused a couple of nearby heads to turn. Her eyes had watered again and she attempted to blink them clear.
“You want revenge,” I said.
“You’re damn right I want revenge,” she hissed the words out.
“Desi, you seem like a nice woman. But I’m not in the revenge business. Besides, just looking at it from my end, it’s quite possible I could spend a lot of time and energy on this and not come up with a damn thing. You could be talking thousands here, tens of thousands of dollars in fees and absolutely nothing to show for it.”
She glanced around to make sure she wouldn’t be overheard, then softly whispered, “Karla mentioned you might be amenable to me sort of working off the debt,” she said, then sort of shrugged her shoulders.
I immediately thought ‘Thanks for keeping our secret, Karla.’
“Look, Desi, not that I don’t find you attractive. You’re very attractive as a matter of fact. But like I said, I think an investigation of this sort could go on for quite some time. And to be…”
“I don’t care how long it would take. And I could figure something out to get you the money, if that’s the problem,” she interrupted.
“Actually, it’s not the money. To be honest, this sort of thing is out of my league. If you need to find out if this Driscoll guy is stealing cars, into insurance fraud or taking bets on the Super Bowl, I’m maybe your guy. But the level you’re suggesting…I don’t really swim in those waters.”
“But if you don’t take this, there’s really no one else I can ask. You were sort of my last shot. I don’t know, but I just have a feeling.”
“A feeling?”
“Relax, it’s nothing,” she said, shaking her head while pushing back her chair. “I’m sorry to take up your time. Look, what do I owe you for breakfast?” she said, reaching for her purse.
“How about you work it off sometime?” I joked.
She looked up at me and stared for a long moment. “Actually, I would have liked that. Well, thanks for listening.” She stood up, draped her purse over her shoulder and put her hand out to shake. “I better get to work. A lot of people probably need their cars washed. Thanks for listening, Dev.”
I shook her hand, then watched her walk out the door and disappear around the corner.
Chapter Four
As per almost always, I beat Louie into the office. He washed
up on shore a little after the noon hour.
“Late night?” I asked.
“No, midmorning court date. I had to plead two DUIs.”
“You got nailed twice?”
“Gimme some credit,” he said, tossing his computer case on his picnic table desk. “Clients. Seems the grapevine is finally starting to work and I’m becoming the go-to-guy for driving-under-the-influence charges in town.”
“You get them off?”
“You kidding? Maybe in another lifetime, fifteen, twenty years ago, but that ain’t happening nowadays.”
No need to comment. I knew exactly what he was saying.
“You working on anything?” Louie asked, already knowing the answer.
I had been waiting and looking out the window, hoping some good-looking woman would stand at one of the bus stops, so I could check her out. I’d drawn a blank for over an hour. Just then, a woman crossed the street and waited on the corner. She looked to be maybe late thirties, early forties. I’d seen her before and put the binoculars up to continue my research as I spoke.
“Actually, I turned a case down this morning. A big one,” I said.
“Turned it down?” Louie asked. He’d just poured himself a coffee and was seated with his feet up on the picnic table. His first sip dribbled coffee down his white shirt and across his tie.
“God damn, that’s hot. How long has that pot been brewing?”
“What? Oh, now that you mention it…I guess since yesterday. I was in a breakfast meeting, so I didn’t make any this morning. Unless you came in earlier?”
“Yesterday?”
“I guess.” The bus pulled up and the woman climbed on. Not bad, not bad at all. I lowered the binoculars and looked at Louie.
“So you turned down a case?” he said.
“Yeah, I still feel kind of bad about it. Nice girl, but it just wasn’t my sort of gig.”
“Insurance?”
“No. You remember that guy they found dead on the steps of the Cathedral a couple years back?”