Last Shot (Dev Haskell - Private Investigator, Book 6) (14 page)

Even
when the toys were scattered across the front yard, the house had that sense of being a neat and well tended home. I got out of my car and made it across the street almost to her front sidewalk before she casually glanced up at me.

“Miss Cole
?”

She frowned as
soon as she heard my voice. “You’re the man who called this morning. I told you there was nothing I care to discuss if Touchier & Touchier is involved.”

“If I could just get a moment of your time. I’m a private investigator and my client has been involved in a situation that I think might show a pattern. Anything you could tell me would be a help.”

“What I can tell you is run, don’t walk, back to your client and tell them to get away from that place as fast as possible. That’s all I have to say on the matter,” she said, then stood and turned to climb the three steps and escape inside her house.

“I wish I could do that
, but I can’t. You see, my client is dead.”

She was on the top
step when she stopped, but she didn’t turn to face me.

“See
, she lost her job at Touchier, things went from bad to worse and finally someone murdered her.”

“Desi Quinn,” she said
, but still kept her back to me.

“Yeah
, that’s right, Desi,” I said, trying not to sound too surprised. I took a gamble. “She had an affair with Gaston Driscoll, not that I can prove it, but she trusted him, and I think he set her up. She lost everything, including her life, eventually. I’m just trying to sort things out right now. I don’t have any proof, but I was hoping you might be able to help. Maybe you know something that seems insignificant, but it might be the one thing that would make a difference. If we could just talk for a bit. If you’re uncomfortable, I could give you my number and we could talk on the phone.”

“What
did you say your name was?”

“Haskell, Dev Haskell. I’
ve got my card here. You could call a friend of mine in the police department if you wanted to check me out,” I said, pulling out my wallet and grabbing a card stuffed next to the lone dollar bill resting in there. “Here,” I said, taking a couple of steps closer.

“
That’s far enough,” she said, then looked up and down the street. “I’ll tell you what. You go around that side gate and meet me at our picnic table in the backyard. I’m going inside and I’ll have someone join us just to make me feel safe. I’ll know soon enough if you’re on the level.” With that she stepped inside her house, closed the front door and then snapped the lock.

I walked around the side of the
house. The heat from the sun bounced off the stucco wall and raised the temperature a good twenty degrees. The sidewalk was barely a foot wide and looked like it had probably been poured a hundred years ago. At the back of the house was a picket fence painted white, the gate was coated with dirt and grime. Beyond the gate was a swing set, with two green swings and a yellow plastic slide with green ladder steps attached to the back end. A tan stucco garage was in the back of the lot maybe ten feet beyond the swing set.

I went through the gate and pushed it closed behind me.
A brick patio flowed off the back of the house and took up maybe a third of the back yard. There was a metal table with a glass top and six chairs on the patio. An open umbrella was planted through a hole in the middle of the table. With the afternoon angle of the sun, all the shade was on the far side of the table. I walked around and pulled a chair out to sit in the shade and wait.

I
was looking around the yard, not really noticing much. There was a large oak tree in the far corner of the back yard. Two squirrels were chasing one another, as they ran they seemed to always remain the same distance apart. The one not wanting to catch, the other not wishing to be caught, they ran round and round the large tree trunk a half dozen times, then down across the yard and under the picket fence. I was focusing on a rather large pile of dog shit back near the fence just as the door opened and a big German Shepherd bounded out the door. The thing took two or three steps toward the garage before it caught sight of me, turned and picked up speed.

“Halt! H
alt, Gunny!” Daphne screamed and the dog did just that. But he never took his eyes off me and I had the distinct impression he was cocked and ready to spring.

“This is
Gunny, Mr. Haskell.”

“
Gunny?”

“My husband was a handler in the Marines. He was at the battle for Fallujah
, then did two more deployments in Afghanistan,” she said, putting a glass with some sort of light-colored liquid and clinking ice cubes down in front of me.

“I was in
Iraq,” I said.

“Where?”

“Most of the time I couldn’t tell you, just a lot of sand and not too many friendlies.”

“Marine
s?”

“No
, Army, Second Infantry.”

“Too bad.” S
he smiled.

“Spoken like the wife of a Marine
.” I raised my glass to toast her, and took a sip. It was lemonade.

“How’s he doing
, your husband?”

“We’re getting there. H
e’s out now, and he’s been practicing law for a few years. His contemporaries are always complaining about the work load. He thinks it’s a cakewalk after his time in the Corp.”

I nodded.

“Anyway, Gunny came home with him.”

“How’
s Gunny with the baby?”

“
Babies, plural. We were blessed with twins. With Gunny around, the kids and I are the safest folks in town.”

“I don’t doubt it.”
Gunny hadn’t taken his eyes off me. “Is there anything you could do to maybe get old Gunny there to stand down?”

“We’ll see, y
ou said you wanted to talk.”

“Yes.
” I tried to focus on Daphne’s face. She was pretty, with eyes so dark you almost couldn’t see her pupils. Prominent cheek bones, a long thin nose. Her skin looked incredibly smooth. I was afraid to glance anywhere below her chin for fear old Gunny would tear my throat out. I could feel his breath, or was that just a warm breeze? I wasn’t sure and had no desire to check it out.

Chapter Twenty-Five

I began
to tell
her about Desi. Once again I didn’t mention Karla or Marsha and certainly not Marsha’s pending appointment with Gaston Driscoll. I did tell her about my earlier conversation with Catherine Lindquist. I touched on Helen Olson going through the ice and I mentioned Driscoll’s wife Bernadette and the late-night boat explosion out on the same lake.

None of what I said seemed to
faze her. About the only reaction she ever gave was an occasional, almost imperceptible nod.

“So that’s about all I know. I think there’s a pattern
, or at least the sense of a pattern, but like I said, nothing I can go to the police with. At the end of the day it all amounts to hearsay, pretty thin hearsay, at that.”

She nodded
, looked at the dog, which I didn’t think had blinked over the course of the last twenty minutes. “Gunny, drop,” she said and the dog immediately laid down. “At ease,” she said. Gunny stretched out at her feet and placed his head on top of his paws. He gave me a quick glance, just to let me know he hadn’t forgotten I was there.

“I can see why you feel safe with him around.
Amazing.”

“Yeah, and everything you’ve been saying is one of the reasons he’s here.”

“Have you had problems? Been threatened? Anything like that?”

“No, not
directly, but it was sort of an understanding. If you get what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“When you’re fired, when Gaston Driscoll basically tells you you’re used up and he no longer finds you desirable, you are in complete, total, absolute shock. By the time he threatens you with exposure, public humiliation, or worse…good God, you just want to get out of there alive. Fired from your job? That’s the least of your problems. At least you might have half a chance of getting another job, as long as you don’t make waves.”

“Tell me about his threats.”

She took a couple of deep gulps of lemonade. “Let’s just say, when you’re crazy in love, you do all sorts of things. He tells you you’re the one and you think to yourself, no, actually you convince yourself that you’re the luckiest girl in the world. Of course, he’s got all the images and the DVDs he made of you, of me, everything. Plus those extra little payroll bonuses I got at year end for those ‘special’ little projects…turns out they were all written on checks from the wrong account.”

“You mean your bonus
checks bounced?”

“Oh
, no, he’s a lot smatter than that.”

“Hu
h?”

“That bastard w
rote me, I don’t know, maybe a half dozen checks over twenty months to the tune of about sixty-six hundred dollars total. That doesn’t really sound like much, does it?”

I shook my head. “I suppose it depends on your circumstances at the time.
”

“You’re exactly right. See, I’d just started there. After I finished grad school I had the national debt for student loans and Touchier was my first real job. So, six grand plus, it was like ten-percent of my take home. Turns out he wrote the checks on some bogus account that was used for, I don’t know, paying the water bill or something. Anyway, he had it set up to look like I’d stolen the things and made them out to myself. His signature wasn’t forged. It was from a damn rubber stamp, so it looked like I could have printed the things off myself.”

“You didn’t figure this out?”

“Your boss, the man you’ve been sleeping with and going out of town with on business trips hands you a check for fifteen-hundred dollars and says you’re doing a great job. You tell me, who in their right mind was going to look at that check and say ‘I don’t think I should cash this?’”

I nodded.

“You know what sixty-six hundred comes to over the course of twenty months? Don’t try and figure it out, Dev. I’ll save you the time. I got it right here.” She slid her watch, a small little silver thing, up her left arm. Where the watch had been was a small red tattoo, ‘333’.

I looked at her puzzled.

“Yeah, I know. Three-hundred-thirty-three. That’s what the sixty-six hundred, my big bonus payments were.” She sat up, raised her voice slightly and shook her head. Gunny suddenly half rose and stared up at me. “That’s what it turns out to be, three-hundred-and-thirty-three dollars a month for twenty months. My ass was cheaper than any old crack-whore he could have found on any street. I was a hundred times better than he deserved and always sitting by the phone waiting for his next call. You got any doubt just call him. He’ll be happy to show you the DVD, and then I’ll lose my husband and my babies.”

I shook my
head. “That’s blackmail, just for starters.”

She snorted
, then said, “Oh, really? Call it what you will, but when it happens and he pulls that old trigger, you just want to get the hell out of there. And suddenly, all the rumors you’d heard and dismissed, Helen Olson, Desi Quinn, Amanda Richards…good Lord even the man’s wife. What’s her name?”

“Bernadette?”

She nodded. “Yeah right. All those rumors you knew couldn’t possibly be true, because he was Gaston Driscoll. A good, decent man and he loved me and chose me to be his one and only, and suddenly all of that is just so much bullshit. He tells you to just leave quietly or be exposed as a whore and someone who stole from the firm, and, oh, by the way, there’s a good chance you’ll be going to jail. That sixty-six-hundred dollars, five grand is the cut off. Sixty-six hundred makes it a felony. Now we’re talking some serious time, even if it’s your first offense. And there wasn’t anybody who was going to believe me, because after all, he’s Gaston Driscoll.”

“He’s got tapes of you, or the women he’s been with?”

She nodded. “Oh yeah, DVDs. He’s got a way of sorta getting you to think you’ve awakened something in him and I’m guessing we all made those DVDs. He took pictures of me and everything. Jesus, if my husband knew, he’d leave me and take the kids. I would never get my babies back if anyone ever saw those damned things.”

“Was this when he was deployed
, your husband?”

She nodded. “We weren’
t married then. Believe me, I get it, okay? I know it was so incredibly stupid. But Driscoll is so good at getting you to think you’re the one. That you are so special and the two of you are just made for one another.”

“Would there be some sort of trail? You must have
traded emails and phone calls.”

“Y
ou’d think so, but no. There were never any emails, for exactly that reason. He didn’t allow it. Funny, but I think if I’d sent him some torchy email, he probably would have dropped me on the spot. Of course, looking back, now I understand why.”

I nodded
. It sounded like Driscoll had a system in place and he just inserted a new victim whenever he tired of his current one.