Last Shot (Dev Haskell - Private Investigator, Book 6) (2 page)

I walked into Nina’s
ten minutes early. Desi was already seated at a far table and gave me a wave. Her auburn hair was like a flashing beacon in a sea of ‘not-quite-awake’ folks surgically attached to their coffee. As I approached, seeing her away from the noise and blur of the car wash, I noticed she had the sort of figure that garnered a double take.

“Hey, I gue
ss 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. Y
ou 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,” she said.

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.”

“Y
ou 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.” S
he nodded then shoved the rest 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. 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 a
nother 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 my 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 d
idn’t they find money on him?”

“
Yeah, 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. M
ore than one guy I knew didn’t realize he was in a relationship after an alcohol fueled wrestling match in the backseat 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 off her pretty face. “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 grand
parents came from a little village in County Sligo, Ireland. Turns out his family came from the same area in fact 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 her tears.

“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?”

“No
t 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. I was the latest 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 lay
man’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.”