Mr. Softee (10 page)

“
Detective Manning, returning your call.”

“Thanks fo
r calling back, Detective,” I said trying to wake up and sound helpful at the same time.

“What can I do for you?”

“I wonder if we could meet, maybe away from your office. I have some questions.”

“You have questions
? Interesting. I’m awfully busy, I really don’t have that kind of time, but I’m down here in my office the rest of the afternoon if you wanted to add anything to your statement.”

“You ever grab coffee in the morning?”

“Possibly.”

“I’ll be at
Nina’s, Selby and Western, tomorrow morning.”

“How early?”
he asked.

“You name it,” I said.

“Seven.”

He was yanking my chain, seven in the damn morning
was a lot earlier than I had planned.

“I’ll be there,” I said, hiding my disgust at the early hour.

Chapter
Twenty-Three

Trying to think positive
on a hot evening, I showed up at Jill’s with two bottles of chilled wine. She hadn’t been kidding on her location. She was directly across the alley from the now boarded-up Giant Scoop building.

Her
home was a neatly kept, Cape Cod-style house with a redbrick front, two dormers on the second floor, dark green siding with gold trim. I guessed it had been built about 1948.

“There you are,” she said
at the front door. She was barefoot, wearing white shorts and a pink T-Shirt with the Giant Scoop logo across the front. She gave me a peck on the cheek then relieved me of both bottles of wine.

“God, who have you been talking to?” she laughed
.

“What?”

“Lucky guess,” she said, but didn’t comment further.

I followed her into the
kitchen. The cabinets were probably original to the house, birch, with a recent high gloss finish. White Formica countertops against soft yellow kitchen walls, a cozy but efficient room. She picked up a platter with chicken breasts marinating in something dark.

“Wine glasses are in that cupboard,” she nodded
. “Open one of those and pour me a glass, please. Then, if you could put the wine in the fridge. Oh, help yourself to beer if you’d prefer.”

I poured
her a glass of wine, took a bottle of Summit beer out of the fridge for me. I wandered out the back door onto a very nice deck. The backyard sloping gradually down toward the alley was contained within a white picket fence. Well-tended flower gardens ran along three sides of the yard. A rear gate with an arbor way opened to the alley. Some sort of vine thing with pink flowers wound around the arbor. I knew it wasn’t a rose, but didn’t know much more than that. I handed her the wine glass, condensation was already dripping down the sides.

“
Oh, god I need this, what a day,” she said after a healthy swallow.

“I’ll bet
. It looks like you’re never very far from work.” I nodded toward the Giant Scoop. Other than the plywood over the windows and rear door there was no real outward sign of damage in the back.

“Yeah well, I was raised in this house, that place was always there
. I think I started working at about age five.”

“Five,” I chuckled.

“Really. I would go over there and help my grandpa count stock, arrange the boxes. I was a good little worker.”

“I bet you wer
e. And you just stayed with it?”

“Yeah, more or less
. You know, went away to college, the U, accounting if you’re wondering. A marriage that failed after a few years and here I am with a boarded-up building over there that represents thirty plus years of my life. Thank god this place is paid for,” she said looking around the yard, then washed her statement down with some more wine.

“Yeah
. Hey, I talked with that Jennifer, the waitress.”

“
What’d you think?”

“About her
? I think she’s like a lot of kids, seems nice enough. Works just enough to pay the rent, parties, tans, and right now doesn’t have to take life too seriously. She’s cute and has a lot of guys more than happy to buy her drinks.”

She
took another sip, then said,

“
I meant, what did you think about what she saw?”

“Oh that
. Well, it could just be two guys going home and they glanced up and then watched the show. Apparently she was getting ready for bed and hadn’t drawn the shade. So that’s possible. There are a couple of things kind of odd, though. Their vehicle was pulled in front of one of the garage doors, and they were out of the vehicle. I don’t know, they could have been checking their tires. They could have been trying to get a better view of Jennifer. Or, they could have been setting a fire. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to read your copy of the arson report. They’ll have some more details. Not the least of which is where the blaze started.”

“Just inside the west door, I already read the report
. Think it means something?”

“How the fire started?
”

“Yeah.”

“It definitely means something. I just don’t know what, exactly, yet. It’s sounding pretty slim, two guys just happen to be there innocently, at four in the morning, then sometime later someone else wanders by and sets the fire. I doubt it.”

We had a pleasant dinner on h
er deck after which I helped carry the dishes back into the kitchen.

“Than
ks, anything left in that bottle of wine?” she looked hopeful.

“It
’s empty, but there’s a second one,” I smiled, attempting to sound harmless.

She studied me for just a moment.

“I shouldn’t,” she said and held out her glass.

“You
’re right, you shouldn’t, but you might as well because I’m going to sit down and read that arson report and you’ll be bored.”

“You talked me into it.”

As reports go it was clinical. Which was fine with me. I read through it, then reread the pertinent sections twice more. Cut down to the basic facts the fire had been set using a small butane tank and a little timing device held in place with duct tape. Remnants of a tank consistent with the type used in a small camping stove had been recovered on site. The device had been placed in close proximity to flammable substances that served as additional accelerant, blah, blah, blah.

In other words
, someone crammed this thing next to gas and turpentine cans stored close to the door, set it to go off, and ran.

Jill sat
in her living room, just on the other side of a large archway, watching back to back episodes of Sex in the City and drinking wine. She’d gotten up twice to refill her glass, carrying the bottle back in with her the last time. She was curled up in the corner of the couch, looking very lovely, and at the tail end of close to two bottles of wine.

“What are you watching?” I asked
as I got up from her dining-room table.

“Sex in the City
. I love it.”

“Is this the one where
Charlotte pisses off Miranda, Miranda gets kind of bitchy, Samantha has weird sex with a young guy, and Carrie screws up her date with Mister Big?”

“You’ve already seen it?” she asked, surprised.

“No, just a wild guess.”

“Come here and watch it with me,” she said patting the cushion next to her, then taking a sip of wine.

The offer was very tempting.

“Thanks, but I better not, I’ve got an early morning meeting.”

“Really? Afraid to mix business with pleasure? Or are you just playing hard to get?” she asked, then sipped some more, staring at me over the rim of her glass.

The bottle on the coffee table was empty
. Being a guy, I made a mental note after calculating her drinks consumed to frisky ratio.

“
No, really, I do have a meeting. As a matter of fact, I’m talking with a detective on some aspects of the fire and I wanna be sharp. So, if I could take a rain check?”

“Okay, your loss.”

“I don’t doubt it, but I better not. Thanks for dinner, I really enjoyed it. I’ll keep you posted.”

She set her glass down on the coffee table, maybe just a
little too heavily, then got up and walked toward the front door.

“Okay
, you’ll call me tomorrow? After your meeting?”

“I’ll call you
.”

She stepped up, gave me a long kiss,
then followed me aggressively with her tongue for a half moment as I attempted to pull away.

“Thanks
,” she grinned, then opened the door, and stood partially blocking the way so I had to brush past her.

“Enjoy the rest of the night,” she laughed
as I walked toward my car.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Nina’s Coffee Shop, at
the corner of Selby and Western, sits in the shadow of the Cathedral and almost within sight of my front door. It’s the only beverage establishment I frequent that does not dispense alcohol. At seven in the morning a constant stream of customers came in the front door and lined up to place orders. Upwards of thirty people were seated around the place conversing and tapping keys on laptops. Everyone seemed just a little too perky and positive for my early morning taste.

Twenty minutes later,
Detective Norris Manning walked in, nodded, and then took his place in line. He ordered a large latte, two large caramel-slathered pastries, and pointed at me when it came time to pay.

I nodded at
June, the owner, who just rolled her eyes.

“Thanks,” Manning slurped his
latte as he sat down across from me.

“My pleasure,” I lied.

He wore a dark suit, and as he sat down I caught the briefest glimpse of a black leather shoulder holster. A waft of aftershave drifted in with him. The top of his bald head was a decided pink from a recent shower. His tie was loosened, and the top button of his white shirt was undone.

“Face seems to have healed up,” he said looking at me.

“Thank you, I wasn’t aware you cared so much.”

“So
, what have you got for me?” he asked, then crammed more than half a pastry into his mouth. He proceeded to noisily and purposefully lick caramel from the tips of his fingers.

  “
Good?” I asked as he sucked his little finger just a moment longer.

“The best,” he smiled.

“I had a question on the Willard B. Sneen case.”

“You mean Bernie?” he asked
.

“Yeah, Bernie
. Do you guys have any theories? I mean are you thinking suicide, a drunken accident, or murder?”

“
Actually, it’s still an ongoing investigation. Why do you ask?” he said, then stuffed the remainder of his first pastry into his mouth. He smiled at me like a kid on Halloween night.

“Hey
look, Manning, I know you spoke with Aaron LaZelle. You know we’re friends, he and I. I may have come across something that would help. I don’t know. I do know this, it’s early in the morning for me and I don’t need to play games. I do know that when I last saw Bernie he was not stable. He was intoxicated, may have been on drugs as well, and seemed at best to be agitated. Not a good mix. I also know, or at least think, that he would not take his own life.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Nothing specific, just a general sense. Was the guy nutty? Absolutely. A drunk? Yeah. Drugs? Most likely. Did he seem to be harboring some sort of darkness that might get the better of him? I don’t think so. From what I hear he’d been a mess most of his life, never really done anything other than screw up. I’m just not sure there would be anything that could have set him off, pushed him over the edge and into the deep end.”

Manning nodded, seemed to think about that as he tore
off a relative dainty third of the remaining pastry and tossed it into his mouth.

“He was pret
ty bombed when they led him out,” I continued. “The nearest train tracks are about a mile from The Spot. I’m not sure he could have made it that night, at least not on his own, for starters. Can you guys check and see what the train schedule is, maybe that would…”

“Nice thinking,
master sleuth. You know, occasionally we do check on things like that. He was hit at approximately eleven fifty-seven. By the way, I’m guessing you think this was probably over at about Sheppard Road and Randolph, right?”

“That’s
the most likely train crossing. It’s in the general direction of the rooming house where he lived. ‘Course there’s another one over…”

“
Actually, he was found in the switching yard, just east of downtown.”

“The switching yard
? What is that five miles? And he’s on foot? I know he couldn’t have made that, even if he was sober he wouldn’t have been able to get that far’ especially in just under an hour. The guy couldn’t run a block, let alone five miles.”