[Devlin Haskell 06.0] Last Shot Read online

  “I’m not kidding, Marsha. Don’t go off like the Lone Ranger here. I can be watching you if he wants to do anything. He doesn’t know what I look like.”

  “Whatever. Okay, hey, gotta go.”

  “Listen, Marsha, I don’t want you…”

  “Dev, that’s my intro they’re playing. Gotta fly. Bye.”

  I wondered what Gaston Driscoll’s reaction would be if word got out his highness was expressing interest in a stripper. He’d probably come back with some line about saving those less fortunate.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I couldn’t find anyone named Daphne Cole in the phonebook, which probably put her age somewhere under fifty. From what Catherine told me last night at dinner, I figured she might be more around thirty-five. I found a half dozen Daphne Cole’s when I looked online. There was a slim chance I might be able to locate the woman I was looking for after a day or two of long hours and some lucky guess work.

  I decided instead to call the Department of Motor Vehicles, the DMV, and talk with my friend Donna, who owed me an eternal favor. Then I could look out my office window at women boarding the bus while Donna searched the DMV records for Daphne Cole’s phone number.

  “Good morning, Minnesota Department of Motor Vehicles. This is Donna. How may I help you?”

  “Hi, Donna, Dev Haskell.”

  There was a long pause before she half whispered. “What do you want? I could lose my job talking to you.”

  “You’d lose it for sure if I report your torrid little night with that summer intern, but you begged me not to and promised to help me and be polite whenever I called.”

  “I did not say I would be polite, you jerk,” she hissed.

  “True. Hey, look, Donna, I need the address and phone number of a Daphne Cole. That’s C-O-L-E. Her marital status would have changed about ten to eighteen months ago. I’d guess she’s between thirty and forty years of age.”

  “I can’t be acting as your dating service. You’re putting me at risk here.”

  “Oh, okay. I’m sorry about that, let me ask your husband. I’ve got his number here somewhere.”

  “All right, all right. I’ll call you back,” she said and hung up.

  I had my feet resting up on the window sill, scanning the street with my binoculars when Louie came in.

  “Wow, you’re already working. Gee, amazing.”

  “Just keeping this corner of the city safe,” I said when my phone rang.

  “Haskell …”

  “I have two potential numbers. Do you have a color crayon handy so you can write these down?” Donna said. There was not a drop of humor in her voice. She proceeded to read me the numbers then growled, “Satisfied?”

  “Let’s hope these work,” I said.

  “Give the poor woman my condolences,” she said and hung up.

  I tossed the phone on my desk and shook my head.

  “Problems?” Louie asked. He was pouring the last of yesterday’s coffee into his mug and then putting the empty pot back on the burner.

  “No, my pal, Donna down at DMV.”

  “No offense, but it didn’t sound like she was really your pal.”

  “You’re telling me. Look, I did her a favor, a big favor. So from time to time when I need a little help, she has to come across.”

  “She doesn’t seem too happy about it.”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say she’s never very happy. Hey, turn that burner off, will you? The pot’s empty.”

  “Just drying the thing out.”

  “Sure you are.”

  I phoned the first number Donna gave me, and the recording told me to; ‘Please check the number you have dialed, the number you have reached is either out of service or out of the area.’

  I called the second number. A woman picked up on the fourth or fifth ring. I could hear a baby crying. The kid sounded close, like she may have been holding it.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi, I’m trying to reach Daphne Cole.”

  “This is Daphne. Who’s calling, please?”

  “My name is Devlin Haskell. I’m trying to reach a Daphne Cole, who at one time was employed by an architectural firm, Touchier & Touchier.”

  “Yes.” Her response was drawn out and you could hear the caution rushing in.

  “You worked at Touchier & Touchier, Miss Cole?”

  “What is this about?” she asked, then tried to quiet the baby who ignored her and kept right on crying.

  “It’s a bit of an involved situation. I wonder if there might be a convenient time to meet, I’m…”

  “To tell you the truth, no, there isn’t. In case you can’t hear, I’ve got a baby with an ear infection and there is nothing convenient for me where Touchier & Touchier is concerned. Thank you,” she said and hung up.

  I shook my head again, tossed my phone back on the desk and picked up my binoculars.

  “You seem to be having that effect on women of late,” Louie said.

  “No, I’ve always had that effect on women,” I said and went back to scanning the street.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It was almost two in the afternoon. Nap time. I watched the woman on the other side of the street pulling a wagon up next to the front steps. She walked back across the front yard and pushed a stroller with side-by-side seats up next to the wagon. She wandered back again and gathered up the half dozen toys scattered across the lawn and dumped them in the wagon. She looked around the yard, gave a half satisfied nod, then sat down on the steps, took out her phone and started punching keys.

  The two-story house was a tan colored stucco affair with chocolate-brown trim and a fire-engine-red front door. Given the neighborhood and the design, I guessed it would have been built around the late 1920s. The steps and door were perfectly centered on the front of the house. About eight feet on either side of the front door was a pair of double windows. The pair on the right would be the living room, probably with a brick-front fireplace. The windows on the left were most likely the dining room with maybe two built-in corner cabinets and a swinging door leading into the kitchen. The staircase to the second floor would be just a few feet beyond the front door.

  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 na
me 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! Halt, 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.”

  “Marines?”

  “No, Army, Second Infantry.”

  “Too bad.” She 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. He’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, you 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 Daphne 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 smarter than that.”

  “Huh?”

  “That bastard wrote 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 th
ing, 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.”