Mr. Softee (15 page)

I strolled around for three minutes, trying to pretend I was a qualified buyer
. Some sweaty guy I guessed from the repair shop strolled in the front door. He wore a uniform of blue pants and a blue shirt. The shirt had a white name tag that read Gary in red letters sewn just above the pocket. He had his nose wrinkled and sort of shuddered to himself as he walked back to what I guessed was the lounge area. It was decorated with brown vinyl couches, dog-eared magazines, and the scent of coffee that had been on the burner for about six hours.

“Jesus, you get a whiff of outside
? Smells like a fart contest, man alive.”

I knew what he was talking about
, I’d been smelling it all day long. Whatever was in the air, it had carried all the way out here. I grabbed a brochure on the Escalade line, complete with color options and walked out. He was right, that same rotted smell just seemed to hang in the heavy air.

I dro
ve home, tossed down a couple more Tylenol, then sat at my dining-room table prepared to do careful scientific analysis while I sipped a Leinenkugel. I opened the Escalade brochure, took the paint chips I scraped off Jennifer’s wreck, and laid them on the brochure color chart. I came up with an exact color match, white diamond tri-coat. Mr. Softee and his thugs.

Chapter Thirty-Five

I was about to
get another beer when the phone rang.

“Haskell Investigations.”

“Hi Dev, Jill. Just checking to see how you’re doing. How’s the head?”

“It’ll
be okay,” I said, not adding “after this beer.”

“Look, I’m running around but I was thinking maybe I could bring you over some dinner, if I wasn’t imposing or anything.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I said, managing to add just a hint of desperation in my tone to suggest it would be a very good idea.

“Yeah, I know I don’t have to
, but if I wasn’t imposing, I’d like to, unless you’ve got other plans.”

“No, no other plans
. I would like that. What time were you thinking?”

“Six okay?”

“Six works for me see you then.”

I had ice cream and gin in the freezer, cranberry juice and beer in the fridge
. I was set, other than clean sheets and hiding the stack of unpaid bills and final-notice warnings.

Jill arrived at six on the dot.

I opened the front door, and she said by way of greeting,

“God
, it smells awful around here,” then gave me a kiss on the cheek.

“
It’s been like that all day, you get it over by you? I think it’s coming off the river, with all the heat and everything.”

“No, it
’s really stinky though. How’s that forehead?” she asked as she brushed past.

I was expecting a pizza and maybe a
six-pack, instead she carried two grocery bags with a lot of little white containers and two bottles of chilled wine. I remembered her mind set the last time she drank two bottles of wine. Things were looking up.

“I hope you like Thai food
? There’s a great takeout over on University,” she said walking into my kitchen.

“I love it,” I replied
unaware of ever eating any before.

“What is that thing?” she asked looking at my stuffed Muskie hanging on the
kitchen wall.

“I caught that a couple of years back,” I said.

“A Muskie, right?”

“Yeah,” I answered, surprised she knew.

“Barely large enough to keep, fact it might be undersized, barely legal. You must not do a lot of fishing, at least not a lot of Muskie fishing,”

“Hey, how about a Cosmo, just to get yo
u started?” I asked, quickly changing the subject then cautioned myself about over-serving.

“I better just stick with the win
e, if it’s all the same, thanks,” she said, taking a final look at my Muskie, shaking her head, and then getting to work on our meal.

Over dinner I showed her the paint chips and the Escalade brochure
. Explained how I thought it had been Mr. Softee’s goons that rammed Jennifer McCauley on the High Bridge. Then I told her about Bernie Sneen, the night I tried to place a bet at the ice-cream truck and the cream-colored Escalade with the two thugs.

“I’m starting to believe you, Dev
. So, just for the sake of discussion, let’s say you’re right. The question still remains, why? I can’t for the life of me think that we offered any competition to him. But, let’s say in some warped way we did. We certainly don’t anymore, not since the fire. So why ram that Jennifer girl’s car? And why tape some guy to the train tracks, that’s just bizarre?” she said, and then held out her glass as I drained the remainder of the first bottle into it.

“It’s not the ice
cream. It’s the operation, Mister Softee, his gambling operation.”

She took a sip
of wine, then swirled her finger in the peanut sauce and licked it off her finger, seductively.

“Okay
. I’m still back to the same question, what does that have to do with anything we know about? It just doesn’t make sense, that’s all I’m saying.”

I couldn’t disagree
. I had all sorts of random ideas, but they all seemed to get more and more disconnected the closer I got to Mr. Softee. He was the key, Softee, it had to be.

A
while later, after I’d cleared the kitchen counter of little white takeout containers, paint chips, and Escalade brochures, I was refilling Jill’s glass, again.

“I
’m not so sure you should drive,” I said trying to sound innocent and sincere all the while calculating her drinks consumed to frisky ratio.

“If I couldn’t before, I certainly won’t be
able to after this,” she said very matter of fact. She nodded a moment then looked up at me, smiled and sipped.

She left sometime after four thirty in the morning
. It was still dark, or the last bit of dark, maybe just a pencil line of gray on the eastern horizon. I pulled my jeans on and walked her out to where her car was parked in front. We had a couple of long passionate kisses in the empty street, a bit of a grope session before she climbed in and drove off.

There i
s something about the beginning of a relationship, when the only time you want to let go is to get a bigger handful of each other. Of course, you could probably say the same thing about a fight.

The temperature and humidity had dropped at least for the moment
, but that smell was still in the air. I decided it might be a good idea to get back to sleep before my hangover had a chance to kick in. I swallowed two Tylenol tablets before I climbed back into bed. I slept where Jill had been, the bed still warm from her body, the covers frantic from our combined assaults, the pillow smelling of her perfume. I drifted off hoping for more sex in my dreams.

Chapter Thirty-Six

I could tell by
the way the sun was frying the far side of the window shade that it was going to be another beastly day. I lay in bed and revisited my torrid late night with Jill. I rolled out of bed around noon and noticed her gold hoop earrings on the nightstand. Good, that meant she’d have to come back and get them.

I
showered the last of her perfume off, dressed, made coffee, gazed out the front window sipping my first cup still thinking about last night. Not just the sex, but Mr. Softee as well. I had to find a way to get to him.

I half paid attention as a squad car pulled
up across the street and parked. They’d glanced at my place. I didn’t think much of it at first, but a minute or two later a second squad car arrived and parked directly in front of my house. One of the officers walked across the street and chatted with the guys in the first car. He looked back over at my place a couple of times as they talked. Something was up, and I didn’t like it. I set my coffee down, grabbed my wallet, and walked out the back door.

That same smell was in the air, and a lot of flies
. I wondered if I’d stepped in dog shit or something. I went over my back fence, walked across Mrs. Muller’s yard and then down the street. By the time I’d reached the corner there was a squad car parked in front of the Muller house, two uniforms walking up the driveway. I turned right and walked back on Arundel, looked to my right once I reached Selby. I was just three doors from my house.

There were four squad cars
parked in front. Two uniforms stood on the porch at my front door. They were pounding loud enough that I could hear them as I stood on the corner. The rest, five officers, were gathered in the driveway, standing around my car.

I crossed
Selby Avenue, then stopped and leaned against the corner of La Grolla, the restaurant directly across the street from my house. Hoped I looked like an innocent bystander. The officers were discussing something, or a number of things. One of them, a sergeant, was continually talking on a radio. About ten minutes later a van arrived, white, City of St. Paul, Crime Scene Investigation Unit stenciled on the sides. On its heels came a hearse with a chrome plate in the side window that read Medical Examiner.

A man and a woman stepped into hazmat suits at the rear of
the Crime Scene van. Once they were zipped in, they pushed a red, two-wheeled dolly up my driveway and proceeded to erect a small tent over my car. The cops were milling around. I could just make out snippets of nervous laughter. By now a half dozen curious people lingered on the streets. A couple of people walking dogs stopped to watch the proceedings.

Another car pulled up,
almost in front of me. A handmade sign, shirt cardboard and what looked like Magic Marker placed on the dashboard, POLICE. Some baby-faced kid got out, needing a shave and wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt. He was carrying a video camera, a backpack, and had two more cameras strung around his neck.

This was not looking good.

The camera guy was greeted with more nervous laughter from a couple of cops. The guys on the front porch remained at the front door. I guessed they were past the point of hoping I might answer and were now waiting for a warrant to enter. I realized that smell I couldn’t seem to shake all day yesterday wasn’t from the river but from me, or at least my car. Garbage? Half right, rotting meat in this heat, or to be more precise, rotting body. Someone was in the trunk of my car. I just had no idea who.

I didn’t recognize any of the cops lingering a reasonable distance from t
he tent over my car. One young-looking guy, close cropped hair and muscles suddenly walked quickly away from the tent, down my driveway. He staggered a step or two, grabbed his knees, and then vomited in my front yard. He was followed by three or four other guys making a hasty retreat down the driveway. None of them got sick, but they clearly saw no reason to hang around my car any longer than necessary.

I guessed that meant they’d opened the trunk
. Whoever was in there, it didn’t matter at this point. The only thing that mattered just now was getting the hell out of here before someone recognized me. I was in serious trouble and for once I hadn’t done anything to deserve it.

I started walking away, trying to think where I could go
. Someplace I wouldn’t be expected. Someplace I wasn’t a regular. Someplace they wouldn’t come looking for me. That left out a number of bars, Heidi, and probably Jill, too.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

I’d first met Tony
Colli in the army, though I didn’t know it at the time. Actually it was during our final days, when we were mustering out. We’d been in Iraq at the same time, almost the same place, but only learned that in a later conversation. It was one of the little things that bound us, sort of.

The army
, plus the fact he had been arrested, charged with murder, and was looking at a life sentence. I’d found the two women he had paid to be with the night he was supposed to have strangled a bank manager over in Wayzata. It didn’t clear him absolutely, but was enough to raise doubt with a jury that eventually wouldn’t convict him.

He went by the nickname
Dog. He was the type of person you wouldn’t call except as an absolute last resort. Not really the type of guy you wanted to see on a regular or even an irregular basis. He was Anthony to his mother and Dog to everyone else who knew him. Trouble seemed to follow Dog.

I didn’t know exactly how to get in touch with him but I knew who
would. She wore her hair in a flaming red, tight perm. She was kind, gentle, wore too much lipstick, awful perfume, smoked nonstop, weighed about three hundred pounds, and baked wonderful pies. Della Colli, Dog’s mother.

“Hello
, Mrs. Colli, this is Devlin Haskell.”

“Who?”

“Devlin Haskell.”

I’d taken the bus out to
Como Park and was sitting on an out-of-the-way wooden bench talking to Dog’s mom on my cell phone. I was constantly looking around to make sure no one was paying attention to me.