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 home 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.
Chapter Thirty-Six
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 called. “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.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
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 searching. 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.