There was a small lobby just inside the office door. Mismatched plastic chairs against two bare walls, two black women sat on one side, a fat white girl with a swollen eye madly texting on her cell sat across from them.
A heavy set woman with dyed black hair, a bouffant hairdo and bad skin sat hidden behind a computer screen at the receptionist counter. I approached the counter and waited politely until she had finished typing, only she never finished, she just kept typing.
Eventually I said, “I’d like to see Mister Laufen, please,” I had aged just standing there.
She typed just long enough to where I thought she might be deaf then glanced up at me.
“And you are?”
She turned away, answered the phone, forwarded a call to some place, probably the wrong place. As she spoke on the phone I recognized her voice. I’d left probably a half dozen messages with her over the past two weeks. She hung up the phone, glanced at me again and looked surprised.
“Yes?”
“I’d like to see Mister Laufen, I’m a client of his, Devlin Haskell.”
If she picked up on my name she was doing a good job of hiding the fact. She returned to the phone, punched in four numbers, waited, presumably listening to it ring for a good long while, then hung up.
“Do you have an appointment?” she seemed to be staring about a foot to my right at the wall behind me.
“No, I don’t, but he’s representing me on a matter and I…”
“He’s not here.”
My tax dollars at work. If this is what they offered as a first impression of the place, rumpled, bourbon soaked Louie was beginning to look stellar.
“Do you know when he might be back?”
She shook her head, still seeming to stare just to my right. I moved a half step in that direction.
“Could I leave a message for him? Have him call me when he returns?”
She suddenly shrugged her shoulders, not in an ‘I don’t care’ sort of way, more like a nervous twitch. She returned to her computer, clicked through a half dozen screens, then waited, hands poised for the attack just above the keyboard.
“Could I leave a message?” I spoke slowly, deliberately.
“Yes.”
I guessed that was my cue. “Please have Mister Laufen call me.”
“Name?”
“Devlin, D-E-V–L-I-N. Haskell, H-A-S-K-E-L–L.” I spelled it out carefully, slowly.
“Message.”
“Please. Have, Mister. Laufen. Call. Me. It. Is. Important.” I paused between each word.
Her fingers raced across the keys, she paused a second, then hit the enter key, then returned to her typing, apparently I was finished.
The fat girl was still texting, frantically, I smiled at the two black women, “Good luck,” I said and left.
Outside on the street I phoned Louie, his message center was full. I was positive I’d have a coronary if I phoned his office. Instead, I drove to a self-car-wash down on West Seventh Street that featured high pressure hoses. I washed my car three times over the course of forty-five minutes. I crammed the nozzle behind the dented bumper, shoved it inside the broken headlight, along the grill, spent a lot of time washing under the wheel wells. I knocked a good deal of rust off the frame and hopefully any traces of whoever had been hit.
I remembered waking up last night, thinking I’d heard a car in my driveway. Had it been mine? The night before, someone trying to get in, the thong on my front doorknob. I was thinking Kiki. If she had drugged me, tied me to the bed, it seemed reasonable she could have made a copy of my keys. I just couldn’t figure out why?
I drove back to my office, but kept going when I saw two squad cars from a couple of blocks away. They were parked at an angle, almost in front of the door, one facing against traffic. As I passed the building there was another squad down a ways on Victoria Street, a cop standing near the fire escape at the end of my building. It looked like they had me surrounded, except I wasn’t there. I kept going, no point in heading home.
I swung by an Ace hardware store, the one down on lower Grand Avenue.
“Can I help you?” a guy asked, he was in a red polo shirt, Ace Hardware monogrammed on the left breast. I was maybe four feet inside the door.
“No I know what I need, thanks.”
He nodded, then directed his attention to the woman behind me who said she was looking for bird seed for songbirds.
I walked down the aisle, took a left just before the last nail and screw section. Tools hung on racks, pliers, wrenches, screwdrivers. At the far end of the aisle were three different sized bolt cutters. I chose the medium size, raised the leg of my jeans and snapped off my monitor bracelet. I returned the bolt cutter to its hook and left.
I took Kellogg Boulevard through downtown, turned to cross the river on the Wabasha bridge. About halfway across I tossed the monitor bracelet out the window and over the railing into the Mississippi river. I briefly wondered how much stuff was down there on the bottom of the river, guns, knives, a car or two and now my monitor.
Chapter Fifty-Three
“What the hell are you doing here?” Heidi asked, she was halfway up her front walk.
It was about seven-thirty and the bottles of chilled wine I’d picked up a couple of hours ago were now lukewarm, at best. The condensation from the bottles had made the paper bag useless, so I had lined them up against her front door in the evening shade.
“Nice way to talk to someone who shows up with a peace offering.”
“Yeah, why are you suddenly acting so nice?”
“I can’t do something nice without being hassled, how’s that work?”
“It’s just that it’s so unlike you, you caught me a little off guard.”
“Look, I thought you might like a glass of wine, maybe some laughs. I wanted to get that spot you mentioned in your bedroom taken care of, you know, by the outlet cover.”
“Really?”
“Hey, I can take off if you got something going, I didn’t mean to barge in on your night.” I stood to leave.
“No, no, that’s okay, yeah come on in, I can use the company. Been a brutal couple of days.”
We were in her kitchen, sitting at the counter. It had taken me longer to wash the paint brush than it did to touch up around the outlet cover. She seemed to be relaxing after the second glass. She’d kicked her shoes off, dialed in some nice music, laughed a couple of times.
“So, ever find out who left their underwear on your door?”
“I got a couple of ideas,” I said.
“I can’t believe you blamed me.”
“I didn’t blame you, I was just hoping, that’s all.”
“You’re so full of it.”
“Not kidding.”
“Really?”
She got up, went to the refrigerator for another wine bottle. It was sometime after midnight when we staggered into bed.
“Gotta run, meeting,” Heidi whispered in my ear the following morning. “Help yourself to breakfast and lock the door on your way out.”
She was dressed, just putting on earrings and then she was gone. I drifted back to sleep for a few more hours When I woke I lounged in bed for a long moment smacking my teeth and assessing the extent of my hangover. I got dressed, wandered into the kitchen, I should have known better than to look for food. There was a half package of cream cheese in the back corner of the refrigerator. On the bottom shelf something in a white Styrofoam container was growing a fuzzy science experiment. I wasn’t hungry enough to risk it. I took four aspirin from the bottle she’d left on the counter, then locked up on my way out.
I phoned Louie’s cell and amazingly he answered, actually he coughed a number of times.
“Louie?”
“Hello.”
“Louie?”
“Dev?”
“Yeah, listen can we meet?”
“I think we better. I got a call from your close personal friend Detective Manning, he’s looking for you, along with the rest of the department.”