Ting-A-Ling (3 page)

I’d been sitting in my desk chair looking out the window at a cold, gray, empty street for the better part of the morning. Occasionally someone would hurry into The Spot, but with the temperature hovering right around arctic for the past few weeks people were so bundled up I couldn’t recognize anyone. At this rate it would be months before there were any women on the street worth leering at.

My cell interrupted any otherwise unproductive day.

“Haskell Investigations.”

“Dev?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Danielle,” she said, sounding like I should be excited to hear her voice.

“Hi, Danielle.” I tried to hide my disappointment.

“I’m calling to discuss your employ,” she said, then proceeded to rattle off a laundry list of names, addresses, phone numbers and suspicions. Basically, it boiled down to Danielle lending a guy named Renee Paris fifty-grand about a year ago. She wanted it back and he suddenly didn’t seem interested in talking to her. Aside from the fact that his name sounded like something out of a 1960’s movie I didn’t think she had a leg to stand on.

I actually knew the guy, or rather, I knew
of
him. Usually when someone talks about what a rat a particular person is there’s a good chance a listener might just chime in with,
‘Yeah, but he’s got a sick kid, the business is going bad or there’s been a death in the family,’
in an effort to explain away pain-in-the-ass behavior.

No one ever countered in that manner when the name Renee Paris popped up. They usually listened to the tale of abusive chicanery and then countered with,
‘You think that’s bad, you should hear what that bastard did to us.’

Renee Paris is what’s politely referred to as a
developer
. I’m sure there are some very good people who fall into that category. In the case of Renee Paris, he’s also a jerk, a cheat, a liar, short of stature and a self-absorbed asshole with a long history of dubious business and real estate undertakings.

If the cops ever found him sitting behind the wheel of his car with a bullet between the eyes, they’d have to rent the Xcel Center just to hold all the suspects.

That said, it still seemed no matter how bad his reputation, he was always able to find the next person to fleece. I figured Danielle was just the latest victim in a long line of victims.

Well, and of course, there was one more thing about Renee Paris. I had a childhood acquaintance, Jimmy White, not a pal anymore, but only because I hadn’t seen him since we were in high school. Jimmy died a few years back. He’d apparently gotten involved with Renee Paris in some sweetheart sort of real estate deal.

After Jimmy filed for bankruptcy, lost his business, lost his home, and then his reputation, he felt he had nothing else left to lose and so he took his life. I didn’t know a lot of the facts and I’m sure it was more complicated than one jerk pushing Jimmy over the edge, but I wasn’t a fan of Renee Paris right out of the starting gate.

“And Danielle, I’m guessing you don’t have any sort of signed agreement, letter of intent, stock options, anything like that. Correct?” I asked.

“Well, yes, I guess technically that’s correct. But, he knew I wanted to be paid back. I told him as much when I gave him the money and he promised me he was good for it.”

“The fifty-grand. Was that in the form of a cashiers check?”

“Actually, he said that cash would work better.”

“Of course,” I said.

“He said he’d pay me back just as soon as he could.”

“But cash?”

“He said it would be better for tax purposes, you know, not having to report it and all. I don’t know much about that sort of thing and well, Renee does. He knows all that technical tax sort of stuff.”

“You got anything in writing, maybe a phone message or a text that attests to the fact you loaned him money?”

“Not really. Renee thought it would be more personal, you know if we looked one another in the eye and shook hands.
‘My word is my bond,’
he always said.”

“How’s that working?”

“Not all that well, I guess.”

“I’m not exactly sure how I’ll be able to help. Frankly, Danielle, it sounds like you may be better served hiring some junkyard dog attorney who could go after him in a court of law. About all I could do in an investigation would be to tell you where he’s having dinner and maybe who he’s with.”

“From what I know of him, if he actually had an inkling that I hired a private investigator and he was being followed, I think that might go a long way in getting him to respond to my requests. He can get kind of paranoid.”

“Paranoid? Like he could go crazy? I don’t want to push him into doing something violent.” I didn’t add
‘toward me’
.

We spoke for another minute or two. She passed on Paris’ address and phone number to me. None of our conversation seemed to point to a very successful undertaking, but then again it was two-fifty a day plus expenses.

“Okay, Danielle, terms are four days in advance to put me on retainer. Plus expenses, I verify all expenses with receipts. I don’t mark up expenses, I just past the cost along to you. And just so I understand, you want to know where he goes and who he’s with. I’ll report that to you what, daily, weekly?”

“Daily would be good.”

“Okay, I’ll begin just as soon as you get that retainer to me.”

“Give me your office address and I’ll have it to you within the hour.”

She did get it to me, although it was more like three hours, and in cash, ten crisp hundred dollar bills. I wrote out a receipt for her, but she just waved it off saying, “I trust you, Dev.”

I tossed her receipt in my desk drawer.

Chapter Six

The first thing I
did was call my contact down at the DMV.

“Department of Motor Vehicles, how may I direct your call, please?”

“Donna, extension four-one-three.”

“One moment, please.”

“DMV, this is Donna.”

“Hi, Donna, Dev Haskell.”

There wasn’t so much a long pause as it was just dead silence. I finally blinked. “Donna? Hello?”

“What do you want?” she whispered, then sighed as if to suggest she couldn’t believe her bad luck.

“Just need a little information on someone.”

“I’ve told you before, you can’t continue to do this. I’ve just been moved up a civil service grade level and your call is putting all of that at risk.”

“Guess you should have thought about that before you started luring underage interns into your bed. Not so sure the state HR department will look too kindly on that sort of activity, or your husband for that matter. I don’t know, what do you think?”

“I’m not discussing this any further.” Her whisper ended with a hiss.

“Good, because I need any information you have on someone named Renee Paris.”

“The developer? Is he the one who stuck the city with that empty department store?”

“Among other things. I’m guessing he’s aged middle to late forties. Violations, date of birth, prior addressees, anything you can find.” I spelled out his name and gave her the address Danielle had given me. “There can’t be too many guys in your files with that name.”

“This sort of thing is going to take some time. Don’t call me.”

“You’ve got my number?”

“Unfortunately,” she said and hung up.

I didn’t hear from Donna until the following morning. Maybe not so amazingly I was busy doing the same thing, basically nothing. I was sitting in my office chair staring out the window at a cold, gray, empty street. I’d counted two people scurrying into The Spot in the past hour and a half.

“Haskell Investigations.”

“I’ve got that information for you. You’re going to need a pen and some paper.”

“Who is this?” I joked then spun the office chair around. The only thing that had moved on my desk in the last few days was my coffee mug. I picked up the pen I’d pocketed at the liquor store. There was a blank yellow legal pad on the desk and I sort of brushed my hand across it to remove some of the dust and doughnut crumbs.

“Do you want this information or not?”

“Yes, Donna, sorry, just closing the file I was working on. Okay, let me have it.” There was another one of her long pauses, but I could sense her mind working. I’m sure she was envisioning a variety of ways she would like to
‘let me have it’
.

“Renee Paris, the address you provided is the same one we have on record. DOB twelve August, 1968. Two moving violations, one a minor speeding charge, sixty-nine in a fifty-five, that was in 2005. An accident in 2011, he was found at fault, speeding, no proof of insurance, license suspension for ninety days before reinstatement. That’s standard. I found four prior addresses, the first in 1987…” She read off his previous addresses, mentioned he was listed as an organ donor on his driver’s license and gave me his height at five feet four inches and his weight, one hundred and eighty-five pounds. Short and kind of stocky.

“Can you email me his license photo.”

“No.”

“What do you mean no?”

“I don’t want any sort of trail suggesting I’ve ever had contact with you.”

It was my turn not to say anything. I waited for close to a minute before she finally spoke.

“Give me your address and I’ll mail it to you, but this is the last time. I really mean it. You’ve certainly gotten more than your pound of flesh from me. Honestly.” She wasn’t yelling, but she was close to it. Judging from the background noise I guessed she’d found one of the few remaining pay phones in town and had called me on that. I gave her my office address.

“Is there anything else?”

“No, Donna. I appreciate…” She hung up before I could finish.

I looked over the notes I’d taken. At least from the stand point of the DMV Renee Paris looked like your basic upstanding citizen. I knew better and went online to search his business activity.

Chapter Seven

LuSifer’s Treats. It took
me a moment to put it together. Renee Paris was either a lousy speller or too clever by half. LuSifer, a take off on Lucifer, I guessed. Being a former banker and lawyer turned real estate developer I thought the whole devil aspect was more than a little appropriate. It appeared that based on some moderate success at regional fairs and food competitions Renee had put together a business selling sauces, rubs and about a hundred different articles of clothing. The site sold everything from aprons, to T-shirts, to little red-satin devil’s horns and, of course, his Bar-B-Que sauces. Amazing how far a borrowed fifty-grand in cash could take you. His online store was just that, online, so no physical address was available. I decided to take a drive past his home address and check it out. I figured he was probably working the online business out of his house.

The address on his driver’s license had Renee Paris’ home located in the neighborhood surrounding a 1913 water tower referred to locally as the Witches Hat tower. The area of hundred-year-old homes is roughly triangular in shape and bounded by the interstate, the Mississippi river and busy, commercial University Ave. Many of the homes now serve as rental properties for college students, which leads to a constant coming and going. That fact made the address I was checking on stand out all the more.

I spotted the property almost a block away, although I didn’t know it at the time. The front sidewalk was unshoveled and judging from all the snow on the six steps leading up to the front yard the place hadn’t been entered for at least the past month. It looked like shopping circulars had been stuffed in the mail box until it overflowed. Then they were attached to the front door knob with rubber bands and left to suffer the elements. A number of city inspection notices were attached to the front door and the front picture window.

I was familiar with the notices. Nowadays everyone in town was familiar with them. They were red, blue or white. Basically, they declared the property vacant, the utilities disconnected and the place unfit for habitation. They also threatened a pretty serious fine if you attempted to remove the notices or to enter the property. If Renee Paris owned this place he certainly hadn’t been here for a while.

The heat was coming on in my car, finally, and I couldn’t see any advantage to trudging around the place through the snow. I tried to phone the number for Paris that Danielle had given me, but the recording said the phone number was no longer in service. I drove back to the office to do what I should have done to begin with, check the county tax records.

Six minutes after sitting down at my desk I knew the property was listed as a category three nuisance. Basically, that meant there had been enough citizen complaints that the city tagged the structure. The place couldn’t be sold unless it was brought up to code, and unless it was brought up to code in one hundred and twenty days it could be slated for demolition. Interestingly enough the taxes had been paid through June of next year.

It had always struck me as a short-sighted city policy, but even a city our size had something like twelve thousand abandoned buildings on its hands after the Great Recession. Not the best setting in which to make long range municipal plans. I wondered if the beautiful, but flakey Danielle was aware of the place being abandoned.