Last Shot (Dev Haskell - Private Investigator, Book 6) (3 page)

“Nine years and two months,
” I said, doing the math and thinking that rounded up to an even decade.

Desi nodded.
“Nine years of going in once a month and peeing in a cup. Nine years of reporting every month to a probation officer. Nine years of idiotic interviews and stupid questions about why I’m washing cars and tending bar in a strip club. You tell me, Dev. Would you hire an ex-con to help design your hundred-million-dollar secure facility?”

“So
, what would you like me to do?”

“I
suppose I couldn’t ask you to kill him.” She laughed, but I had the sense she was only half kidding. “I want you to get the goods on Gaston Driscoll. I want him to be charged. I want him to go down like I did. That creep laughed all the way to the Federal Reserve Bank, or from it. He set me up and I want him to feel what I have to feel, lose what I’ve lost. He took everything from me, Dev. My folks died thinking I was a criminal. I’ve lost everything,” she spat out this last bit in a harsh whisper, verging on tears that caused a couple of nearby heads to turn. Her eyes had watered again and she attempted to blink them clear.

“You want revenge,” I said.

“You’re damn right I want revenge,” she hissed the words out.

“Desi, you seem like a nice woman. But I’m not in the revenge business. Besides
, just looking at it from my end, it’s quite possible I could spend a lot of time and energy on this and not come up with a damn thing. You could be talking thousands here, tens of thousands of dollars in fees and absolutely nothing to show for it.”

She glanced around to make sure she wouldn’t be overheard then softly whispered, “Karla mentioned you might be amenable to
me sort of working off the debt,” she said, then sort of shrugged her shoulders.

I immediatel
y thought ‘Thanks for keeping our secret, Karla.’

“
Look, Desi, not that I don’t find you attractive. You’re very attractive as a matter of fact. But like I said, I think an investigation of this sort could go on for quite some time. And to be…”

“I don’t care
how long it would take. And I could figure something out to get you the money, if that’s the problem,” she interrupted.

“A
ctually, it’s not the money. To be honest, this sort of thing is out of my league. If you need to find out if this Driscoll guy is stealing cars, into insurance fraud or taking bets on the Super Bowl, I’m maybe your guy. But the level you’re suggesting…I don’t really swim in those waters.”

“But if you don’t
take this, there’s really no one else I can ask. You were sort of my last shot. I don’t know, but I just have a feeling.”

“A feeling?”

“Relax, it’s nothing,” she said, shaking her head while pushing back her chair. “I’m sorry to take up your time. Look, what do I owe you for breakfast?” she said, reaching for her purse.

“How about you work it off
sometime?” I joked.

She looked
up at me and stared for a long moment. “Actually, I would have liked that. Well, thanks for listening.” She stood up, draped her purse over her shoulder and put her hand out to shake. “I better get to work. A lot of people probably need their cars washed. Thanks for listening, Dev.”

I shook her hand
, then watched her walk out the door and disappear around the corner.

As per almost always
,
I beat Louie into the office. He washed up on shore a little after the noon hour.

“Late night?
” I asked.

“No
, midmorning court date. I had to plead two DUI’s.”

“You got nailed twice?”

“Gimme some credit,” he said, tossing his computer case on his picnic table desk. “Clients. Seems the grapevine is finally starting to work and I’m becoming the go-to-guy for driving-under-the-influence charges in town.”

“You get them off?”

“You kidding? Maybe in another lifetime, fifteen, twenty years ago, but that ain’t happening nowadays.”

No n
eed to comment. I knew exactly what he was saying.

“You working on anything?” Louie asked, already knowing the answer.

I had been waiting and looking out the window, hoping some good-looking woman would stand at one of the bus stops, so I could check her out. I’d drawn a blank for over an hour. Just then, a woman crossed the street and waited on the corner. She looked to be maybe late thirties, early forties. I’d seen her before and put the binoculars up to continue my research as I spoke.

“Actually
, I turned a case down this morning. A big one,” I said.

“Turned it down?” Louie asked
. He’d just poured himself a coffee and was seated with his feet up on the picnic table. His first sip dribbled coffee down his white shirt and across his tie.

“God damn
, that’s hot. How long has that pot been brewing?”

“What? O
h, now that you mention it…I guess since yesterday. I was in a breakfast meeting, so I didn’t make any this morning. Unless you came in earlier?”

“Yesterday?”

“I guess.” The bus pulled up and the woman climbed on. Not bad, not bad at all. I lowered the binoculars and looked at Louie.

“So you turned down a case?”
he said.

“Yeah, I still feel kind of bad about it
. Nice girl, but it just wasn’t my sort of gig.”

“Insurance?”

“No. You remember that guy they found dead on the steps of the Cathedral a couple years back?”

“If it’s the one I’m thinking of it was more than a couple
years, and he was some sort of escaped savant with cash on him from the Fed or something.”

“Yeah, that’s the deal.”

“Hadn’t he escaped from where, Rochester?” Louie attempted another sip of coffee.

“Yeah, Federal Medical
Facility. Actually, I think he just sort of walked away when no one was watching.”

“So
, who and what?”

“There was a young woman architect who got nailed stea
ling security plans for the Federal Reserve from her firm and apparently passing them on to the bad guys.”

“I kinda remember,” Louie said.

“That’s who I met. She claims she was railroaded and wants to nail the guy who did it. She’ll never be able to work as an architect again. I mean, Christ, she’s washing cars at Karla’s and bartending at Nasty’s, if that gives you any indication.”

Louie nodded.

“Anyway, she wants to nail a guy. Apparently, she was in a relationship with him and she maintains he set her up. After thinking about it for fifteen or twenty seconds, I turned her down.”

“Because?”

“Because even if she’s correct in her assumption it’s going to take a lot of time and energy to be able to prove anything.”

“And you’re obviously very busy,” Louie said
.

I was back to staring through my binoculars
, studying a woman pushing a stroller with two little kids in it.”

“Yeah
, well, that and the fact she didn’t have any money.”

“I never realized you were that mercenary.”

“I’m not. I just got a negative vibe on the whole deal, to tell you the truth.”

“
Negative vibe,” Louie said, shaking his head.

“I’m not taking her case, man.
I don’t need that kind of trouble. Whatever it is, I don’t need it.”

“Probably the wise move.”

“No, there’s no probably about it. It was definitely the wise move.”

A couple
of days
later I got a call from Karla.

“Haskell Investigations.”

“Hi, Dev, Karla.”

“Karla,
been a long time, lady. What can I do for you?”

“Did you ever meet
with that employee of mine, Desi Quinn?”

“Quinn,
is that her last name? I guess in the course of our conversation it never really came up.”

“So
, you did meet with her?”

“Yeah, didn’t she mention it?”

“Actually, I haven’t seen her for the past few days. She never misses work, so I let the first day go. Yesterday I was really worried and called her a couple of times, but never got an answer. I’m tempted to call the cops, but she’s been such a sweetheart I don’t want to get her in trouble with her parole agent. I’m not sure what to do.”

“
Has this ever happened before?” I asked, not liking the sound of it.

“No,
she’s been a model employee. I’d have her doing something else if I had the opening. I mean, with her education and she’s washing cars alongside my collection of deadbeats, not that she ever complained. Anyway, she didn’t say anything to you?”

“No, she sort of explained what she wanted me to do and basically I turned her down.”

“Turned her down? Why? She’s so sweet.”

“No doubt, but as I explained to her I co
uld spend a lot of time and energy, not to mention her money, and still come up with nothing. I couldn’t begin to guess what the bill might run and I just figured she was better off dropping the whole thing now, rather than ten grand down the road.”

“She was willing to work it off.”

“Come on, Karla, its one thing when we’re dealing with an employee of yours doing a workers comp scam. Desi’s deal was in a whole different league. Not a reflection on her, by the way.”

“God, I don’t know
. I really hate to call the police. I don’t want to get her in any sort of trouble,” she said then just let that last statement sort of hang out there.

I waited what seemed like an exceptionally
long time, hoping Karla would blink first. She didn’t.

“Look
, you want me to check on her?”

“God, would you mind? Ar
e you doing something right now? I mean maybe I should just drive over to her place and see?”

“Karla
…”

“I don’t know
. I’m kind of nervous going over by myself. I suppose I could get my sister or my mom, one of them to…”

“Karla.
I’ll go over to her place and check it out. Give me her address. I’ll call you back if I find anything. No, wait, better yet, I’ll call you back either way.”

“Thanks
, Dev. I owe you. Maybe have to work it off, you know?”

“Yeah,
by the way, thanks for mentioning our little secret to Desi. You tell anyone else?”

“Maybe just a few
dozen of my closest friends,” she said.

“What?”

“Somehow, I didn’t think you’d mind that kind of advertising.”

I hung up with Karla and drove over to
Desi’s address. She lived in a nondescript apartment building that looked like it had been built about 1960. It was a three-story structure with long thin bricks and large square picture windows. It was probably very trendy fifty-plus years ago, but like the surrounding postwar neighborhood, it had clearly fallen on hard times.

The house next door was vacant and had been boarded up. R
ed and blue city inspection notices were posted on the grey sheet of plywood covering the front door. Two phone books sat on the front stoop. Yellow and weathered, they looked to have been there for months.

In today’s world of triple deadbolt locks, security systems and passwords
needing upper and lower case letters plus at least a four-digit number, Desi’s building was a rarity. There was no security, absolutely none. I pulled the front door open and just walked in.

The hallways needed airing. On second thought
, they needed a lot more. There was graffiti either spray painted or scribbled with some sort of marker all over the stairwell. It was almost illegible and looked to resemble some form of Arabic. I hated that. What appeared to be a torn mattress was leaning against a wall down at the far end of the hallway. I could hear a rheumy cough rattling from somewhere behind a closed door.

Desi’s unit was 204.
As I climbed the stairs, I grabbed the wrought iron banister. The thing wobbled in my hand and felt like it could break loose at almost any moment. I made a mental note not to slide down the thing on the way out. I could say the stairway carpet was worn, but that would be an understatement suggesting there was actually a semblance of carpeting left. What remained was grimy, threadbare and could probably serve as a Petri dish at the Center for Disease Control.

There was a baby crying in one of the
second floor units, and either someone had the television on too loud or a domestic was heating up in another unit. There were two overflowing white trash bags next to one of the apartment doors, the smell of garbage suggested they needed to be taken out yesterday or the day before.

Desi’s door was the second one on the right.
Slightly off-center adhesive numbers identified the unit, although the ‘2’ had been partially torn off. An area the size of a dinner plate around the door knob was coated from a half century of grimy hands rubbing against it. There were a number of scuffs and two large boot prints on the lower half of the door. I momentarily thought back to the night Lydell made his memorable entrance at Annie’s by kicking in her front door.

I placed my ear to the door
, but couldn’t hear anything. I knocked, waited then knocked again. Still no response. I turned the knob and the door pushed open. This was definitely not the sort of building where I would choose to leave my door unlocked.

“Desi? Desi, it’s Dev Haskell,” I called
out.

She didn’t answer back, but I knew she was
there. I’d smelled death before. I was suddenly aware of the flies, lots of flies and the sound of buzzing. I had a momentary flashback to a hut we’d opened up in Iraq where we found a family. I would have given anything right now to have an M-16 and a-half dozen guys backing me up. As it was, all I had was my phone, so I made the call.