Bite Me (Devlin Haskell 3) (20 page)

I’d never been to
Louie’s office, but I knew where it was located. The building was just across Fourth Street from the Ramsey County Courthouse, in the City Hall Annex. Another former commercial building the city took over as business receded and the downtown area went on life support. The Annex sat next door to the former Lowry Hotel, another Real Estate scam some developer had been milking for the past fifteen years and the city would ultimately pay a high price for their naïveté.

Whoever did the layou
t for the Annex didn’t have romance as a strong suit. The walls were painted a sort of puke green, it might have been government olive drab at one time, now thinned out to stretch coverage and look even more unattractive. Louie’s office was up on the sixth floor, behind an eighties style glass door labeled 613. The numbers were rectangles, black with a silver background. The kind of peel and stick address numbers that used to be popular in hardware stores until the buying public judged them as too ugly. At which point the city apparently loaded up.

T
here was a small lobby just inside the office door. Mismatched plastic chairs against two bare walls, two black women sat on one side, a fat white girl with a swollen eye madly texting on her cell sat across from them.

A heavy set woman with dyed black hair, a bouffant h
airdo and bad skin sat hidden behind a computer screen at the receptionist counter. I approached the counter and waited politely until she had finished typing, only she never finished, she just kept typing.

Eventually I said,
“I’d like to see Mister Laufen, please,” I had aged just standing there.

She typed just long enough to where I though
t she might be deaf then glanced up at me.

“And you are?”

She turned away, answered the phone, forwarded a call to some place, probably the wrong place. As she spoke on the phone I recognized her voice. I’d left probably a half dozen messages with her over the past two weeks. She hung up the phone, glanced at me again and looked surprised.

“Yes?”

“I’d like to see Mister Laufen, I’m a client of his, Devlin Haskell.”

If she picked up on my name she was doing a good job of hiding the
fact. She returned to the phone, punched in four numbers, waited, presumably listening to it ring for a good long while, then hung up.

“Do you have an appointment
?” she seemed to be staring about a foot to my right at the wall behind me.

“No, I don’t, but he’s representing me on a matter and I…”

“He’s not here.”

My tax dollars at w
ork. If this is what they offered as a first impression of the place, rumpled, bourbon soaked Louie was beginning to look stellar.

“Do you know when he might be back?”

She shook her head, still seeming to stare just to my right. I moved a half step in that direction.

“Could I leave a message for him? Have him call me when he returns?”

She suddenly shrugged her shoulders, not in an ‘I don’t care’ sort of way, more like a nervous twitch. She returned to her computer, clicked through a half dozen screens, then waited, hands poised for the attack just above the keyboard.

“Could I leave a message?” I spoke slowly, deliberately.

“Yes.”

I guessed that was my cue.
“Please have Mister Laufen call me.”

“
Name?”

“
Devlin, D-E-V-L-I-N. Haskell, H-A-S-K-E-L-L.” I spelled it out carefully, slowly.

“Message.”

“Please. Have, Mister. Laufen. Call. Me. It. Is. Important.” I paused between each word.

Her finger
s raced across the keys, she paused a second, then hit the enter key, then returned to her typing, apparently I was finished.

The fat girl
was still texting, frantically, I smiled at the two black women, “Good luck,” I said and left.

Outside on the street I phoned Louie, his message center was full. I was positive I’d have a coronary if I phoned his office.
Instead, I drove to a self-car-wash down on West Seventh Street that featured high pressure hoses. I washed my car three times over the course of forty-five minutes. I crammed the nozzle behind the dented bumper, shoved it inside the broken headlight, along the grill, spent a lot of time washing under the wheel wells. I knocked a good deal of rust off the frame and hopefully any traces of whoever had been hit.

I remembered waking up last night, thinking I’d heard a car in my driveway. Had it been mine? The night before, someone trying to get in, the thong on my front doorknob. I was thinking Kiki. If she had drugged me, tied me to the bed, it seemed reasonable she could have made a copy of my keys.
I just couldn’t figure out why?

I drove
back to my office, but kept going when I saw two squad cars from a couple of blocks away. They were parked at an angle, almost in front of the door, one facing against traffic. As I passed the building there was another squad down a ways on Victoria Street, a cop standing near the fire escape at the end of my building. It looked like they had me surrounded, except I wasn’t there. I kept going, no point in heading home.

I swung by an Ace hardware store, the one down on lower
Grand Avenue.

“Can I help you?”
a guy asked, he was in a red polo shirt, Ace Hardware monogrammed on the left breast. I was maybe four feet inside the door.

“No I know what I need, thanks.”

He nodded, then directed his attention to the woman behind me who said she was looking for bird seed for songbirds.

I walked down the aisle, took a left just before the last nail and screw section. Tool
s hung on racks, pliers, wrenches, screwdrivers. At the far end of the aisle were three different sized bolt cutters. I chose the medium size, raised the leg of my jeans and snapped off my monitor bracelet. I returned the bolt cutter to its hook and left.

I took
Kellogg Boulevard through downtown, turned to cross the river on the Wabasha bridge. About halfway across I tossed the monitor bracelet out the window and over the railing into the Mississippi river. I briefly wondered how much stuff was down there on the bottom of the river, guns, knives, a car or two and now my monitor.

“What the hell are
you doing here?” Heidi asked, she was halfway up her front walk.

It was about seven-thirty and the bottles of chilled wine I’d picked up a couple of hours ago were
now lukewarm, at best. The condensation from the bottles had made the paper bag useless, so I had lined them up against her front door in the evening shade.

“Nice way to talk to someone who shows up with a peace offering
.”

“Yeah, why are you suddenly acting so nice?”

“I can’t do something nice without being hassled, how’s that work?”

“It’s just that it’s so unlike you, you caught me a little off guard.”

“Look, I thought you might like a glass of wine, maybe some laughs. I wanted to get that spot you mentioned in your bedroom taken care of, you know, by the outlet cover.”

“Really?”

“Hey, I can take off if you got something going, I didn’t mean to barge in on your night.” I stood to leave.

“No, no, that’s okay, yeah come on in, I can use the company. Been a brutal couple of days.”

We were in her kitchen, sitting at the counter. It had taken me longer to wash the paint brush than it did to touch up around the outlet cover. She seemed to be relaxing after the second glass. She’d kicked her shoes off, dialed in some nice music, laughed a couple of times.

“
So, ever find out who left their underwear on your door?”

“I got a couple of ideas,” I said.

“I can’t believe you blamed me.”

“I didn’t
blame you, I was just hoping, that’s all.”

“You’re
so full of it.”

“Not kidding.”

“Really?”

She got up, went to the refrigerator for a
nother wine bottle. It was sometime after midnight when we staggered into bed.

“
Gotta run, meeting,” Heidi whispered in my ear the following morning. “Help yourself to breakfast and lock the door on your way out.”

S
he was dressed, just putting on earrings and then she was gone. I drifted back to sleep for a few more hours
When I woke
I lounged in bed for a long moment smacking my teeth and assessing the extent of my hangover. I got dressed, wandered into the kitchen, I should have known better than to look for food. There was a half package of cream cheese in the back corner of the refrigerator. On the bottom shelf something in a white Styrofoam container was growing a fuzzy science experiment. I wasn’t hungry enough to risk it. I took four aspirin from the bottle she’d left on the counter, then locked up on my way out.

I phoned Louie’s cell and amazingly he answered, actually he coughed a number of times.

“Louie?”

“Hello.”

“Louie?”

“Dev?”

“Yeah, listen can we meet?”

“I think we better. I got a call from you
r close personal friend Detective Manning, he’s looking for you, along with the rest of the department.”

“What’d he say?”

“Oh you know, the usual first thing in the morning sort of phone call. You’re missing and in violation of your release agreement.”

“
Anything else?”

“
He casually mentioned since you’ve disappeared and aren’t wearing the ankle bracelet anymore there’s a warrant issued for your arrest. They’ve posted a BOLO, Be On The Lookout for you. He sort of wondered if maybe I knew anything. Since apparently as your attorney, I’m the last guy to know anything, I really couldn’t help him out. Care to enlighten me?”

“I’m not sure
, but I’ve got some suspicions…” I went on to tell Louie about my damaged car, the cops at the office.

“So let me get t
his straight. You wake up and discover your car has been in an accident. And you have no recollection?”

“I know it d
oesn’t sound too good.”

“Possibly the understatement of the year.
Does the term absolutely horseshit have any connotation?” Louie said.

“That a legal term?”

“I think we better meet, but probably not at my office and definitely not at yours.”

“You name the place
, I’ll be there,” I said.

“There’s a bar
, the Coal Bin, over on…’

“I know the place
.”

“I got a motion in court late
this morning I gotta deal with. Can you be at the Coal Bin about one-thirty?”

“I’ll be there.”

“And Dev, keep that car out of sight. They’ll be looking for it.”

I
knew one of
the dumbest things I could do right now would be to go to the KRAZ parking lot. At least that’s what I told myself as I sat parked in the far corner. Farrell’s BMW was in its usual place. Kiki’s Audi was parked two spaces away.

I climbed out of my car, walked over to F
arrell’s BMW. I didn’t touch the thing, but I did notice sand collected beneath the wheels, I’m guessing washed up there after the rain the other morning. Lodged on the grill was a round plastic lid, a small hole in the middle like it might have been from a soft drink cup. The BMW hadn’t been moved in a couple of days.

I left the parking lot, tun
ed in seven-forty on the dial to listen to the KRAZ broadcast. Farrell, sounding as dull as ever, appealed for cash donations, followed by the cautionary reminder not to send checks lest the Communists and Anarchists in Washington monitor your active support of freedom. He stammered over the word anarchists, he seemed to do that a lot, the stammering.

The Coal Bin was a
dismal little neighborhood joint that sat on a bleak corner of a back street, in sight of the old Northern States Power plant and the river. It had been pouring drinks since at least the beginning of prohibition. The sign above the corner door, illuminated in the middle of this muggy summer day, proclaimed Rusty and Marge as the proprietors. Rusty’s name had been spray painted over so long ago that you could read it again.

I pulled into the small rear parking lot
a half hour early, parked on the far side of a large green dumpster. In order to see my car, you’d have to drive in the lot and somehow hit it.

Inside
, the Coal Bin was what you’d expect, four guys sitting down the length of the bar on red vinyl and chrome stools, three stools apart, all staring at their beers. There wasn’t a hint of conversation. I felt like asking if the glass was half empty or half full?

A
large woman, north of sixty, nodded, then wiped the bar, sort of directing me where to stand when I ordered. She had glow-in-the-dark red hair and didn’t smile. I guessed she probably doubled as the bouncer.

“A
Summit,” I said

She grabbed a mug, pulled the tap, set the beer in front of me. Not a wasted motion.

I retreated to a dark booth in back and sat facing the door. I was on my third mug when Louie finally arrived.

“Louie,” the
red headed bartender/bouncer squealed as he walked in.

“Marge, my beauty, how’s it going?”

They exchanged insults, and then she pushed a mug and a shot he’d never ordered in front of him.

“Gotta meet with this guy,”
he said, and waddled over in my direction, sloshing beer.

“Been here long?” he asked, then drained a third of his beer
before he sat down. It was close to two-thirty.

“Not to worry.
She seems a fan,” I glanced toward the bar.

“I’m in here once in
a while, kind of off the beaten path, allows me to sit in here and sort of think uninterrupted and shit, you know.”

“I do.”

“Okay, Dev, tell me what’s going on,” he took another healthy sip, dropped the level of beer to about the halfway mark.

“Well, I came home the other night, found a thong on my doorknob…”

Louie listened as if he heard this sort of thing everyday, nodded occasionally, sipped the bottom half of his beer. I told him everything, seeing Kiki at the U. The newspapers stacked up at Doctor Deaths house. I described Doctor Death dead and taped to the chair. Told him how I spotted the dents in my car, my suspicions about Kiki. I finished up with, “So, once I saw the cops at my office, I figured my chances were slim to none and kept on going. I cut the monitor bracelet off, dumped it and called you.”

Louie nodded
for a moment before he tossed his shot back. He didn’t so much as blink when it went down.

“Well, let me tell you, you’re M
ister Popular, seems everyone wants to talk with you. I already told you about the BOLO. Manning issued an arrest warrant for you, although that seems kind of fast if you just dumped the bracelet late yesterday. I’ll check it out, I’ve got to pick up the autopsy report on Barkwell later this afternoon, anyway. They’ll do an autopsy on that guy from the U, what’d you say his name was, Kevork?”

I nodded.

“They’ll do an autopsy on Kevork, when they find him. To my knowledge they haven’t, yet.” He looked at Marge, signaled another round with just a slight nod. “Gotta tell you, Dev, you could use some help in the girlfriend department. Man, I thought I was screwed up.”

I couldn’t disagree.

“Talk to me about the car. You washed the thing, found hair and threads, you said?”

“And blood,”
I nodded.

“Not good, man
, not good. Probably a smart guy would disassociate himself from that vehicle. I’m not suggesting get rid of it or hide it, that would be illegal, but you catch my drift. With the sort of testing they can do today, you could wash that thing a thousand times, they’d still be able to find something.”

I nodded, message delivered.

Marge arrived with a tray, two beers, and another shot, Louie handed her a ten.

“What is that shit?” I nodded at the shot glass.

“Sambuca, calms the tummy,” he said, then drained close to half his mug.

“The key is Kiki,
” I said.

“Well, yeah, and the husband, her first one,
that Farrell guy. It’s just not adding up, why go through all this bullshit? And then of course, if we ever figure out why, the question is how to get them? They seem to have been way ahead of everyone thus far.”

“Life insurance?”

“You mean on Barkwell? Nelson checked, the guy didn’t have any. Probably thought insurance was some sort of pinko plot.” Louie shook his head, suddenly snatched his beer and drained it, then eyed the shot of Sambuca.