Hard Rock (A Hardboiled Private Investigator Mystery Series): John Rockne Mysteries 2 (7 page)

Chapter Eighteen

On the wall across from me, an African tribal mask looked at me.  Watched me struggle with the strange emotions sparked by seeing my ex-fiancé.  The eyes of the mask appeared white, as they were hollow and showed the wall behind them.

A blank stare.

I know the feeling, buddy.

My cell phone rang in my pocket and I dug it out.  Thankful for the interruption.

“I’ve got three names for you.”

It was my pal from the Detroit Lions. He had come through, like I knew he would.  After men bond through suburban landscaping efforts, the connection is unbreakable.

“Let me have ‘em,” I said.

“Greg Jenkins, Eddie Starks and Desmond Jamison.”

I hustled over to the information desk, grabbed a pen and wrote down the names and addresses.  The security guard didn’t even look up at me.  I kept the phone pressed against my ear and walked toward the lobby doors.

“All three of them live in that neighborhood?” I asked.  It wasn’t a very big geographic area I had asked him to look into.  Really more of an intersection.  I was surprised that there were three professional football players living in that tiny section of Grosse Pointe.

“All three.”

“But different houses, right?” I asked.

“Yeah, these guys don’t need roommates with the money they’re making.”

Maybe it wasn’t so crazy, I thought.  Sports teams are a fraternity.  Perhaps living on the same street was good for them.  They could share rides.  Keep an eye on each other’s houses. 

I didn’t really follow football with any regularity, so the names didn’t mean much to me.  I believe I had heard of Eddie Starks.  The named seemed familiar.  I wanted to say that he was one of the better players.  A running back, I believed.

I thanked him and we disconnected after agreeing to meet for beers without the wives attending.  Even though we both knew it would never happen.  The part about the wives attending, that is.

I made my way back to Grosse Pointe.  I had bailed on my idea of crashing the office of UAM to confront Tripp Collins.  The fact that Elizabeth appeared to be one of his clients, or maybe the Foundation was, had thrown me for a loop.  I wanted to take some time to think about it before I talked to him again.  Going in and confronting Tripp Collins now, while being distracted, was a recipe for disaster.

The drive back gave me a chance to go over the brief chat I’d had with Elizabeth but I quickly realized there wasn’t much worth reflection.  A brief conversation between former lovers who hadn’t seen each other in years.  Awkward. Superficial. Pointless, even.

To tell Anna or not to tell?  That was the question.  The answer, of course, was to tell her.  Secrets were bad for a marriage.  They were like the little metal wedges you used when splitting logs.  You just drive it in a little bit, whack it with an axe and the whole thing breaks apart.

Anna really wouldn’t care anyway.  She wasn’t the jealous type.  Although the fact that Anna had just seen Elizabeth too would probably raise her suspicions that I had somehow tracked her down. But she knew me better than that.  Plus, Anna would tell you she was too busy with the kids and life to worry about my little shenanigans.

I exited at Vernier Road off I-94 and drove along Lake Shore Drive.  I passed the yacht club; saw the lake churning under a pretty stiff wind.  A freighter was out in the shipping lane, heading toward Detroit.  Lake St. Clair was actually a pretty shallow lake, considering how big it was.  It only averaged a depth of eleven feet or so but at some point they’d dredged the shipping channel.  That ran closer to thirty feet deep.  From one end of the lake to the other.

The first name and address on my list belonged to Greg Jenkins.  As I pulled up to the house, I was surprised by the lack of a gate.  But then I realized that there weren’t any gates on most of these properties.  Must have been some kind of code that prohibited it.  The few that had gates must have put them in before the rules were put into place.  Grandfathered.

The lack of a gate was great for me.  One less obstacle to talking with people who probably had very little desire to speak with a private investigator.

I parked in front of the house and walked up the long drive to the main door and rang the doorbell.

A black Ferrari sat just beyond the door and I studied it.  It was incredible how low to the ground it was.  That was why I had never bought one.  I didn’t think it would be very comfortable for me.

The door opened and a man wearing a track suit and with sunglasses perched on top of his head looked out at me.

“Yeah?”

“I’m looking for Greg Jenkins.”

“What do you want with him?”  He looked me up and down.  Probably wary of autograph seekers.

“Just a couple of quick questions,” I said.  “It won’t take long.”

“I don’t think so, bro’,” he said and started to shut the door.

“Okay, wait,” I said.  I had a few options.  I could make up some crazy-ass story to get Jenkins out of the house to talk with me.  The fact was, I loved improvising.  But for some reason I went with the truth.  “Can you please just ask him if he works with a financial consultant named Tripp Collins with UAM?”  Then I decided to throw in a little fiction.  “I’m with the Players Union and we’re investigating them for possibly embezzling former players.”

The man looked me over like I was something clinging to the bottom of his three hundred dollar sneakers.  He shut the door.

I waited.  Looked at the Ferrari some more.  Yep, not my style.  The Taurus, however, was all me.

The door opened a crack.  Same guy.

“Nope. Don’t know the dude.”

The door shut again.

Okay, then.

I crossed the street on foot and walked to the second house.  This was Eddie Starks’s place.  It still seemed odd to me that all three players lived so close together. But if all three were friends it made a kind of sense.  A house pops up for sale next door, you’ve got a friend who just moved to town and is looking for a place, you tell him, right? 

And real estate in Grosse Pointe changed hands more often than most people would think. 

It turned out that Eddie Starks wasn’t home but I was able to leave my cell phone number with his assistant, along with the same story I’d given Greg Jenkins.

When I got to the third house, the door was answered by an older black man.  He had on a Nike dri-fit shirt with the initials NFLPA.  Oops.  I’d called it the Players Union to the other guys.  It appeared to be the Players Association.  Oh, well.

“Hi,” I said.  “I’m here because I wanted to ask if Desmond has any association with a company called United Asset Management, or UAM.  I work for the Players Association and we’re investigating the company for possible fraud.”

The man squinted his eyes at me.

I stuck out my hand.  “My name’s John Rockne, by the way.”

He shook my hand.  His fingers enveloped my entire hand like it belonged to a baby.  His hands were the size of catcher’s mitts.

“Melvin Jamison,” he said.  “I’ll ask him, but I’m pretty sure we’ve never dealt with them.”

The old guy was pretty sharp.  I could tell he wasn’t totally buying my story. 

But I gave him my card anyway and thanked him.  I went back to my car, got inside and fired it up.  Did a U-turn and drove down until I hit Lake Shore again.  I paused at the stop sign facing the lake.

I checked my watch.

It was time to go to the office and do some work on the computer. 

Something wasn’t sitting quite right with me.  I was pretty good at spotting people who weren’t being truthful.  I had felt that Tripp Collins, while more than fitting the bill in terms of being an abrasive drunk, had at least seemed like he wasn’t hiding anything.  If any of these guys turned out to be his clients, it could mean that he simply wasn’t aware of exactly where they lived.  That it was literally on the same street where his nephew had been murdered.

The possibility was very real that he wasn’t lying.  That maybe he was just missing something. 

Or maybe I was missing something, too.

Chapter Nineteen

Note to self: invest in an air freshener.

My office smelled like a rec room at an old folks home.  Maybe some senior citizens had broken in and staged a Greco-Roman wrestling tournament.

I cracked a window, let in some fresh air and then fired up my computer.  I walked over to a built-in closet by the little fridge and looked for something to munch on.  There was a bag of sweet potato chips.  Those count as vegetables, by the way.  Five servings a day, right.

I grabbed the bag and carried it back to my desk.  Plopped into my chair.

Where to begin?

I leaned back, put my feet up on the desk, and cracked open the bag of chips.  Started munching. And thinking.

The chips made me think of how nice it would be to have a sandwich, too.  But the chips were good.  Who knew vegetables could be so tasty?

The computer screen popped to life and I reached forward, clicked on my Internet browser and launched it.  Then stared at it for awhile.

I wasn’t so much engaged in brainstorming as brainwandering.

And then my cell phone rang.

It was a woman claiming to be Eddie Starks’s assistant.  She informed me that her employer had no connection with United Asset Management.  While I tried to think of anything else to ask her, she hung up.

Okay. Two down, one to go.

A funny thing how the mind works.  When you start running out of ideas, the vacant room is quickly filled with doubt.  I had a sinking feeling that my hunch about a connection to Tripp Collins was wrong.  How many guys are on an NFL team?  Fifty? A hundred?  And how many cycle in and out every year?  Over the last ten years what was that, maybe a couple thousand players?  If you’re a local wealth management company, you’re bound to get one or two of them, right?  It’s a statistical probability, not a hot lead in a murder investigation.

My phone rang again.

“John Rockne,” I said.

“Hi, this is Melvin Jamison.  You stopped by asking about some company, right?”

“I sure did.”

“Yeah, I talked to Desmond and we never heard of them. Our investment guy is in Chicago, where we’re from.”

I wasn’t surprised.

“When we came here a few years back, we made a point of sticking with our roots, you know?” Melvin continued.  “Why are you asking, by the way? Are you really with the Players Association or you got something to sell?”

The idea hit me that Melvin Jamison was bored.  He was no doubt a part of his son’s management team but maybe he probably didn’t have a lot to do.  He also seemed like a pretty sharp guy.

“No, nothing to sell.  Like I said, I’m just following up on an issue related to this financial management company.  I personally don’t have an issue with them but there is the distinct possibility others do.” It sounded pretty good, I thought.  I’d pulled back a little on the accusatory tone of my original pitch.  No sense in word getting back to Tripp Collins that I was slandering his company.  Grosse Pointe Investigations didn’t have a very robust legal plan.  In fact, it didn’t have one at all.

“Well hell, there’s more of those people around here than anything else,” Melvin said.  “All this money floating around Grosse Pointe, everyone wants a piece, right?” 

“That’s for sure,” I said.  This was going nowhere, but I was short on ideas.

“How did all three Lions players come to live in that little area?” I asked.

“We like to joke it’s so we can keep tabs on when the other guys are getting home, but it just happened,” he said.  “We all knew each other and so when a house came up for sale, we’d tell the others.  It’s a good location, a quick drive down to the field.”

Melvin Jamison was a straight shooter.  I was about to ask him if had ever played but then something occurred to me.

Why hadn’t I thought of that before?

I literally threw the bag of chips down on the desk, swung my feet down and grabbed a pen and paper.

It was a struggle to keep my voice even, but I did.

“So you said you bought the house a few years back, right?” I asked.  “So were you the first to buy in the area?”

“Yep, we sure did,” Melvin answered.  “Both Greg and Eddie just bought their places last year.  The same realtor had both properties listed so it was a no-brainer.”

The next question was the big one.

“And about when did you buy your place?” I asked, my voice as even and as casual as I could make it.

“Hmm, now, let me think.”

I waited.

Looked at the computer.  Felt a gust of fresh air breathe into my office.

Finally, Melvin Jamison told me the exact date.

I wrote it down, but my head was spinning.

The date was a week after Benjamin Collins had been murdered.