Bite Me (Devlin Haskell 3) (14 page)

I didn’t accomplish much
more then that for the rest of the day, other than I looked longingly out the window at The Spot as the occasional miscreant walked in or stumbled out. The sun shimmered off the asphalt street and the sidewalk looked hot enough to fry an egg on. A little after four I hit on an idea and called Sunnie Einer, my resource for all things computer.

“Hello,” she answered on the second ring.

“Hi Sunnie, it’s Dev, long time no talk.”

There was a long pause, too long.

“Hello, Sunnie?”

“Yes, Dev.”

“How are things?”

Another too long pause.

“Sunnie?”

“Look Dev, you know and I know you couldn’t care less how things are. So get to the point.”

“You okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine. I’m also busy, what do you need?”

“Well, I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind looking something up for me, on the computer? It’s the…”

“Do you still have
that lap top you borrowed from me, for the weekend, I believe it was about six months ago?”

I did as a matter of fact, it was on top of my file cabinet, I’d set the
coffee pot on top of the thing earlier.

“Yes, I’ve got it rig
ht here, meant to bring it back. I guess I’ve been working overtime and it sort of got away from…”

“Is it on?”

“Well actually, not exactly, see it…”

“Not exact
ly? Is it on or not?”

“I
t’s not, I think it might be broken.”

“Broken? Did you drop it?”

“No it just stopped working all of a sudden. Honest. I was typing away on the thing and all of a sudden it shut down.”

“Did you have it plugged
in?”

“Plugged in?”

“Oh God. So you never recharged the battery?”

“How do you do that?”

“You can’t be this… Oh God, look, bring it over here, I’ll give you a basic tutorial. The same one I give to eight year olds, although that might be a little too advanced. You can pick up dinner by the way, and some wine, I’m in the mood for Italian, and make it a nice wine.”

I had trouble just turning on a computer, I hated the things. The last thing I wanted was a tutorial. Then there was the small matter regarding the condition of my release and my schedule allowing just a half hour commute to and from the office.

“How about this,” I said, “you come to my place, I’ll have dinner and the computer all ready for you, that way you won’t have to do any dishes or clean up or anything.”

“You think my h
ome is dirty, is that it? I teach full time, I have my son, Josh, my consulting business. I barely have time to think let alone…”

“Hey Sunnie, I’ve got a problem I’m trying to deal with. No, your house isn’t dirty, it’s always spotless
I never said anything about your place. I’ll have dinner for you, Italian, as requested, with wine, a good wine. But, I need some help, I can’t come to your place, I’ll explain over dinner, if you can make it. If you can’t, no problem, I’ll catch you some other time. Then you can tell me what’s bothering you. You okay?”

Another long pause.

“What time?”

“It’s a little after four
now, how’s six-thirty sound?”

“Fine,” she said and hung up.

Gee, a computer lesson from a woman pissed off at me, I could hardly wait. I wondered if fat Muriel Puehl had anything going on, I could invite her and make the night a complete disaster. I racked my brain to remember what I’d done to get Sunnie so mad.

It was about eight-thirty.
We were sitting in front of the infamous laptop at the end of my dining room table. Remnants of our twelve minute, conversation-less, egg plant lasagna and garlic bread dinner were scattered at the opposite end of the table. I was drinking decaf, my second, Sunnie was on her third glass of wine. The first two had done nothing to improve her attitude. I was manning the controls on the laptop getting the intro tutorial to her computer 101 class.

“You’re kidding me. All I had to do was plug the thing in?”

Sunnie twitched a smile for half a nanosecond, suggesting anything but pleasure.

“Okay, so I want to look up marriage records,
actually a marriage, as in one,” I said.

“Where?”

“Minnesota, I think.”

She sighed.

“Probably Minnesota, yeah, pretty sure, Minnesota.”

“County?”

“I’m guessing Ramsey.”

She stared at me a moment.

“Okay, do a search, type in…”

“Search?”

“Move your cursor up to here.” She pointed with a pen to a box on the screen. “Okay, now type in Minnesota, then Ramsey County, marriage license, do you have a date?”

“No, that’s actually what I’m looking for.”

“Do you happen to have the names of the individuals?” She said this in a tone that suggested she was using quite a bit of her self control.

“Click on this box. Right, now type the names in there.
”

I entered Thompson Barkwell.

Okay, now click here on search, again. Okay.”

I looked over at her, she continued to stare at the screen
, stone faced.

“Sunnie, something’s bothering you, even I’m picking up on it and I’m really bad at picking up on signals from women.”

She ignored me and tapped the screen with her pen. “Thompson Barkwell married to a Katherine Early. That who you’re looking for?”

I nodded, reading the screen.

“There’s your date, looks like a little over a year ago. That all you needed?”

“Yeah, now you want to tell me what’s bugging you?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Thanks for dinner, I’ve got work to do. I’ll expect the lap top back in the near future,” she said, grabbing her purse off the couch and heading for the door.

“Thanks for your help, Sunnie,” I cal
led. “Nice chatting,” I added after she slammed the door behind her.

Kiki and Thompson were
married thirteen months and eleven days ago. It was a toss up who fled the scene first, my money was on Kiki. Only because Thompson Barkwell struck me as the type of guy who would have put up with a lot, anything as a matter of fact, once he found a woman crazy enough to go out with him twice let alone marry him. ‘Crazy enough’ seemed to sum up Kiki.

I stared at the search window on the laptop screen. I was home for the night with
a table full of dirty dishes, waiting for a computerized phone call from the monitoring service. What to do, what to do? I typed in XXX and clicked search.

The call
from the monitoring service came through about two and a half hours later. Time flies when you’re having fun. A computerized female voice instructed me to; “Please input my personal code, then press pound.” When I did that the voice replied, “Thank you. Goodbye,” and hung up. A second call came through an hour and thirty minutes later and had me do the same thing. It was a good thing I hadn’t gone out, thank God for Internet porn.

The following morning I
picked up a can of coffee on the way to the office, half decaf on the way I drove past the offices of KRAZ, just because. If there was anything to see, I missed it. I drove around the block, pulled into the parking lot and parked at the rear of the lot. A couple of beer cans crackled when I flattened them as I backed into the parking spot. After about twenty minutes of not seeing anything and getting nervous about the GPS capabilities in my ankle bracelet I drove to my office.

I was on my third cup of
half decaf coffee and not the least bit smarter. Granted, Kiki was a lunatic, but what was she thinking marrying Thompson Barkwell? Did I really hit her, tie her up? My toxicology report suggested I was drugged. But why? Was I being set up, royally framed? Again, why?

I plugged in the trusty laptop, turned the thing on and began searchi
ng. I was reasonably adept now, seven hours of intense practice going through porn sites, barely scratching the surface, will do that. I began searching Kiki, then Farrell and Thompson and finally KRAZ. I learned a couple of things, the most immediate of which was I was out of aspirin and had a pounding headache.

In a nutshell, the three were
bit players with spotty histories of scams stretching back eight to ten years, the usual real estate and finance deals, a couple of bankruptcies. Farrell had a bar go belly up out in Las Vegas in 2006, the ‘
Early Bird Saloon
’. In today’s world that was nothing at all out of the ordinary. Well, except maybe for Farrell’s Vegas bar, the Early Bird Saloon, not exactly an original name, but 2006 was still boom year, before everyone got yanked back to financial reality. How could a bar fail in Vegas?

I went to the
Las Vegas Sun website, searched Farrell J. Early, read a handful of articles that suggested maybe more than food and liquor were being dealt at the Early Bird Saloon. To be specific, Ecstasy and Roofies, ironically the same menu as my toxicology report. Things apparently got to the point where even the Vegas authorities were fed up. In the final article, sort of a post mortem round up of the bar’s twenty-two month history, it mentioned that Farrell, along with wife, Katherine ‘Kiki’ Early worked out an agreement where they would not be charged, closed the bar and filed for bankruptcy.

Farrell had a wife with the same nickname as his sister? Kiki?
What were the odds? It seemed the odds were more likely Kiki would have married her brother than there were two women with the same nickname, although it all sounded extreme even for Vegas and even for Kiki. I searched my second set of marriage records in less than twenty-four hours, both relating to Kiki.

Back in 2005 Farrell J
Early married one Katherine ‘Kiki’ Hinz. Katherine was the only daughter of Ottmar “Loopy” Hinz, former president of the Food and Beverage Workers union of Las Vegas. Ottmar Hinz had been unable to attend his daughter’s gala wedding. Unfortunately he had just begun serving an eighteen year sentence at Nevada’s High Desert State Prison, seems old “Loopy” had been convicted of racketeering.

One could only guess why Ottmar was called “Loopy”. Apples don’t fall far from the tree, like father like daughter and all that. None of which got me any closer to being exonerated, or did it?
A further search found nothing of interest. At five I tucked the laptop under my arm and headed home to practice my searching skills, on the way I called my attorney, Louie.

“Lo.” Louie sort of groaned into the phone.

“Hi Louie, Dev Haskell, got a moment to talk?”

“Lo.”

“Hello, Louie, can you hear me.”

“No one there, man,” I hear
d Louie say. His voice faded as he pulled the phone away from his ear. I could hear him mumbling, the background noise of glasses clinking, music, laughter, it all suggested he wasn’t at a church service. Then we were disconnected, meaning Louie hung up. I called back three more times, Louie never answered, his mail box was full so I couldn’t leave a message.

The monitor call came th
rough at about eight-forty-five, interrupting my internet viewing of ‘Double D and Disorderly’.

I’d been sitting in
the KRAZ parking lot for twelve minutes, eating a couple of blueberry muffins and sipping half decaf coffee from my travel mug. I couldn’t taste the difference in the coffee. I was bored, you’d think at a few minutes before nine in the morning someone, somewhere, would pull into the parking lot for work. As far as I could tell, I was the lone source of activity.

My cell
phone rang, as usual I glanced at the numbers, but couldn’t read them.

“Haskell Investigations,” I prayed it wasn’t the monitoring folks picking up on the fact I was outside KRAZ.

“Dev?” a groggy voice rasped, then cleared the throat a couple of times.

“Yeah.
”

“Dev?”

“Yeah, Louie, that you?”

“I
was working and missed a call from you late last night.”

“Y
ou weren’t working, Louie, and it wasn’t late, it was a little after five. You were…”

“That’s late.”

“You were in some bar somewhere, it sounded like you’d been there for quite a while.”

“
I was doing some research.”

“Yeah
, sure you were.”

“Anyway,” again
with the clearing of the throat, I have to admit it actually did make his voice sound better. “I missed your call.”

No point in arguing.

“Yeah, thanks for calling back. Look, I’ve been doing some research myself and investigating on my own and I’ve come up with some things.”

“Please
don’t tell me you’re stupid enough to go anywhere near that Kiki Barkwell chick or her brother, I really don’t need to hear that.”

“
Give me a break, how stupid do you think I am, relax.”

“Thank God. Okay, investigating what?”

“I was online…” I went on to tell Louie what I’d learned, especially the Vegas stuff, Kiki married to Farrell. The Early Bird Saloon closing then finishing up with the drug sales, the same concoction my toxicology report indicated had been fed to me. As I spoke I watched a sleek, dark blue BMW pull into the lot and glide into a parking place close to the front door.

“Look
, I’m driving right now man, can you ...”

Farrell climbed out of the driver’s side
of the BMW. He had a white gauze bandage around his index finger and right hand. I could only hope he’d slammed the thing in his fancy car door. A half second later Kiki climbed out the passenger side, looking fabulous and taking a bite out of an apple. He waited for her, gave her an extremely unbrotherly across her rear. She smiled, tossed her shiny brunette hair, then glanced over in my direction, I couldn’t tell if she recognized the DeVille or noticed me. If she did, she didn’t seem to react or say anything to Farrell. Twenty seconds later they’d disappeared inside the building.

“Dev, you there?”

“Sorry about that, must have hit a dead spot, you know, no phone service.”

“Okay, look, I’m driving too, can you call me in about fifteen minutes, let’s go over this shit when I can pay attention
, take some notes. Jesus, lady, signal or get off the God damn road. Oh, sorry ‘bout that. Give me a call in fifteen, okay.”

“Yeah, I’ll call you.”

I waited until we disconnected before I started the car, sat for a minute, took down the license number on Farrell’s BMW, then drove to my office. I phoned Louie’s cell, phoned again after twenty and then twenty-five minutes. I phoned his office number at the half hour mark and left a message. Louie returned my call about an hour later.

“Yeah Dev, man its crazy here, took forever just to find some aspirin. Got a pounding headache, God I hope I’m not coming down with the flu or something,” he said, slurping what I hoped was coffee.

At the moment I was gazing out the window at what I guessed were three co-eds waiting for a bus across the street. One of them wore tight shorts and a gray t-shirt with purple letters, UST, University of St. Thomas, stretched across the front. She had on purple flip-flops to complete her ensemble. They all looked like they’d be a lot of work.

“Tell me again what you’ve got. I’m probably
gonna interrupt, I’m taking notes,” Louie cleared his throat.

“Oka
y, I started doing a search, online,” I bragged, “starting with Thompson Barkwell’s marriage.” I went on from there, told him about the Vegas information, the Early Bird Saloon, Loopy Hinz, Kiki’s marriage to Farrell. We went back over things, every time Louie asked a question and he asked quite a few, it brought up new questions. After a good half hour we were more or less finished.

“I’m thinking I should get in touch with Detective M
anning, let him know this stuff,” I said.

“You didn’t contact him, did you?”

“Not yet, that was gonna be my next call.”

“Bad idea, Dev, very bad idea.”

“You kidding, this stuff puts a whole new spin on things.”

“If Manning
had his way you’d be in the electric chair by now.”

“But this stuff could really…
”

“You get where I’m coming from? T
he guy is not your biggest fan. Past history I’m guessing.”

“May
be a little,” I saw no point in going into any detail.

“Look, let me get this to Manning. I want to have someone
from our office verify this information and…”

“How long will that take?”

“It shouldn’t be that long. I know you’re hot to get this over with, Dev, but let’s do this properly, then we can walk away, free and clear of all charges. Someone has a burr up their ass to get you, so let’s just get everything nailed down, okay.”

“Yeah, okay, it’s just that…”

“Just that nothing, this is why you pay me, so listen up. Continue investigating, online. Stay away from Farrell Early and his sister, or wife or ex-wife, Kiki, whatever in the hell she is, just stay away from her. Your job, and I know it’s tough, but your job is to look like a model citizen right now. Try and fool everyone into thinking you’re a decent guy. Got it?”

“I’m not sure I can pull that off.”

“Humor me.”