Inside there was virtually nothing I recognized on the shelves. All the shelf labels and canned goods were in Russian. There was a pungent smell of fish, cooked cabbage with maybe some body odor thrown in the mix. The man behind the meat counter looked like he could have been a distant cousin of Leonid Brezhnev. Stocky, ruddy cheeks, a day-old beard, salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back accenting his prominent widow’s peak. He sized me up through bloodshot eyes set beneath heavy eyebrows and a forehead that looked about a half inch high and six inches thick. His plastic nametag read Tibor.
“How’s it going?” I smiled, hoping to thaw some of the icy greeting.
“Mrumph,” he grunted in my general direction, then sniffled.
My attempt at charm didn’t seem to work, he just blinked his bloodshot eyes at me, expression unreadable.
“You’re Tibor, yes?” I said reading his nametag and using my best “I’m a good guy” smile.
I watched him process my question. You could almost hear the rusty wheels beginning to turn inside his thick skull. Eventually he gave a slight nod, probably wondering how I knew.
“Karina Vucavitch said you’d help me if I needed to get in touch with her. I’m trying to return some things of hers. Can you tell me where I can find her?”
That got a reaction, but not the one I’d hoped for.
“I no know Kerri,” he said, then folded fairly heavy arms across his chest, sniffled again. He had a blurry blue tattoo on his right forearm, an anchor, three lines of Russian scrawled beneath, all in Cyrillic script. His hands were chapped pink, with scared knuckles, the right hand missing most of the ring finger. The hands looked like they’d be able to form pretty solid fists, not for the first time.
“Well, you know she goes by Kerri, so you must know her. Where can I find her? I’ve been doing some work for her. I found someone she was looking for.”
Another blink and vague look.
“Okay, look, have her give me a call. I’ve got information for her. Get it, information?” I raised my eyebrows, nodded, wishing I knew the Russian for asshole.
He waved me off with his three-fingered right hand, shaking his head like he couldn’t be bothered anymore, and began to shovel ground rat or something into a section of the refrigerated counter, mumbling in Russian all the while.
“When you talk to her, pal, give her this card and have her call me.” I pulled a business card out of my wallet, wrote “call me” on the back with my pen and left it on the meat counter. “Nice chatting with you,” I said and headed for the door.
Once outside I looked around for the escort office Da’nita had said it was right next door. I found it, actually two doors down. There was a grimy hallway with a series of fairly solid office doors numbered 1–9. No name on the doors but a roster of tenants just inside the entrance listed number 5 as the office for Lee-Dee. That seemed close enough.
Number 5 was locked and from what I could tell there was no noise coming from the other side. The hallway had a drop ceiling and I was sure the wall rose just a few inches above the ceiling, not that I intended to climb. I walked out to my car, made a show of driving off for my new pal Tibor, then parked around the corner. I grabbed my pick set out of the glove compartment and strolled back. I was inside the office in under three minutes.
Chapter 22
The room was dark, windowless, and smelled of Kerri’s perfume. I hit the light switch and an overhead fluorescent above a plastic ceiling panel flickered on. I relocked the door then headed to the gray desk four feet inside the office. A laptop with a screen saver of fireworks bouncing around sat on the desk. I moved the mouse, and the screen came to life. It looked like an appointment calendar, numerical codes in date blocks. I printed the page.
My thought was to navigate around the computer and find out where Kerri was, where Nikki was hiding, who took a shot at me, and who ran over Da’nita Bell? I learned I wasn’t going to get very far without passwords. There was a rolodex on the desktop, next to that a coffee mug with maybe an inch of coffee and an oily slick on the top. Nuclear red lipstick lined the edge of the coffee mug. Two semi-clean mugs sat in a desk drawer along with a box of Tampax, a pack of cigarettes and seventy-five cents. I pocketed the three quarters.
There were no file cabinets, no files, no checks, nothing. Which I guessed meant just about everything was done electronically. I noticed there wasn’t an office chair, and I remember Da’nita complaining that Kerri rolled her out into the hall and left her to sit there. It made sense that this was Da’nita’s desk. There were two other doors off the room.
The first door I opened was a small walkin closet, nothing of interest unless you were looking for the coffeepot, which I turned off. A metal shelf, the only other occupant in the closet, held four reams of paper for a printer. I turned the light off in the front office and opened the second door.
I entered a slightly larger, windowless office, Kerri’s, I guessed. There wasn’t a thing to suggest the office had actually been occupied by anyone with a personality in the last year. A couple of cords ran across the desk where a computer used to sit. There was a printer on the corner of the desk, still plugged in and on. It meshed with Da’nita’s version of things. Kerri running in, taking about a minute to unplug her computer, push Da’nita out the door, and drive off. The desk revealed nothing of interest as I went through the drawers. I was looking around the room hoping something might jump out at me but nothing did. I was probably frowning when I heard the hallway doorknob jiggle. I could see the shadow of two feet through the crack at the bottom of the door. I quickly turned the office light off, then stood there in total darkness with my hand on my right hip, taking a little comfort from my pistol. The handle jiggled again, then the shadows beneath the door disappeared, and a muttered voice faded down the hallway.
I remained still for what seemed like four or five hours, probably five minutes in reality. Heart pounding in my ears, willing myself to take normal breaths I eventually made my way in the dark to Da’nita’s desk. I shut down her computer, unplugged it, and walked out the door. I scanned the dismal parking lot for a long minute but didn’t spot anyone sitting in a car and watching. As a matter of fact I didn’t see a living soul. I walked back to my car, checking the reflection in the storefront windows for signs of anyone behind me. I didn’t spot anyone.
I took a roundabout route home, didn’t notice a tail. Just to play it safe I drove into a pay parking ramp downtown, circled up to the top floor, then drove back out on a side-street exit, still no one behind me.
Chapter 23
I can do a lot of things on the computer: write letters, invoice clients, email, download i-tunes, and watch porn. I had no business thinking I could get into the files on Da’nita’s laptop so I took the thing over to Sunnie Einer.
Sunnie’s done some projects for me over the years. If she had been a guy she had a great name for a gangster, maybe someone who ran with Tony Soprano. Sunnie wasn’t a gangster. She had a doctorate in Education and another one in Computer Science. She was a tenured professor at the University of St. Catherine’s and had a sixteen-year-old son, named Josh, who was driving her nuts. I phoned her enroute.
“Hey Sunnie, Dev Haskell. You interested in a little project?”
“Possibly, is it legal?”
“Sort of,” I hedged. “I can be over in about ten minutes.”