“Give me twenty minutes.”
“Make it ten, I don’t have that much time,” Aaron replied and hung up.
I levitated out of bed, threw on a semi-clean golf shirt, last night’s jeans, and a sport coat from a few nights back that I hadn’t hung up yet. Just to be nice I tossed four or five Tic Tacs in my mouth and chewed them up as I stuffed the Nikki beach photo in my pocket and walked down the block to the Donut Hole. It was barely past nine in the morning and the cloudless sky held the promise of becoming beastly hot.
The Donut Hole occupies the corner of a five-story red stone building built as a hotel in 1889. The building sat derelict for most of 1970s before getting revamped into designer condos in the ‘80s. The place, the Donut Hole that is, has excellent latte’s, fantastic high-cholesterol pastries, and a pleasant female staff more tattooed than not. Aaron had just finished ordering when I walked in.
“Make it a double latte, and two of those French donuts. He’ll pay,” he nodded in my direction.
I nodded back to girl at the counter. She was pretty without makeup, and might have been prettier had it not been for the sky blue hair, a five-pointed star tattooed on either side of her neck, and what looked like a bouquet of a dozen roses that covered her chest.
“Another double latte and one French donut,” I said.
“On a diet?” Aaron asked.
“You must be working undercover this morning, you’re dressed so nicely. Or, are you appearing in front of Internal Affairs, again?”
“Jesus, don’t even joke about those guys.”
I’d known Aaron since we were kids. He’d been working vice for the past three or four years. One of those cops on the way up, destined for bigger things. He made lieutenant a year ago.
“You called yesterday,” he said once we sat down. The donut in his hand fluttered close to his mouth, and he inhaled almost half of it before I had a chance to answer.
I nodded, my own mouth full.
“These things are great,” Aaron said, spitting crumbs.
“Yeah. Hey, I’m looking for someone. A woman, but…”
“You giving up on dating guys?”
I ignored his comment and continued.
“But it’s gotten screwier. I have that funny feeling I’m not being told the whole story.”
“This professional or personal?”
“You think I’d call you on a personal deal?”
“Never stopped you before,” he stuffed the last half into his mouth, then picked up the second donut.
“Yeah, true, but this is professional, maybe in more ways than one. Looking for someone’s sister, supposedly.” I wiped my hands off on a napkin, pulled Nikki’s photo out of my sport-coat pocket, and handed it to Aaron. I felt something else in my pocket, reached in, and pulled out the corner of a green thong. Kerri. Small world.
“Nice tan lines on the boobs. You know these people?” Aaron commented as he studied the photo.
“The redhead’s name is Nikki Mathias. Her sister hired me to find her. Supposedly been missing for a couple of months, according to her sister anyway. But things aren’t adding up. Maybe a bit of professional working girl, here. I don’t know anyone else in the shot.”
“That why you called me?”
“Not at first, I called you for this.” I opened my wallet, took out the dry cleaning receipt with Kerri’s car description and license number written on the back, handed it across the table.
“I suppose you want to know who this is? Not caring that I would jeopardize my career were I to give you that sort of information.”
“Something like that. Actually it’s my client, the sister, Kerri. That’s her car, or at least the car she was driving. I just wondered who it was registered to is all.”
“And you think it’s not hers?”
“I don’t know. Like I said something’s just not adding up.”
“Nice set of wheels, when did you become a car buff?” he asked reading my note.
“I was at the dealership yesterday. By the way, sixty-one g’s and some change worth of nice wheels. Just wondering if it’s hers. What about the photo recognize anyone?”
“Where’d you get this?”
“From my client. Like I said I’m supposed to find the redhead.”
“And this is the only picture she had of her sister?”
“Makes you sort of wonder, doesn’t it?”
“Cash in advance?”
“Well, a retainer, and then she…”
“I don’t want to know,” Aaron shook his head.
“You recognize the other woman?” I indicated the photo with my chin.
“The Asian gal?”
“No the other woman you can’t see. Yes, the Asian gal, the only other woman in there.”
“Oh sorry, I hadn’t looked at her face yet,” Aaron reappraised the photo.
“Jesus.”
“Actually, I do recognize the two guys.”
“Really? Great, maybe they can point me in the right direction, any direction would help.”
“Well, not unless you’re clairvoyant. They’re both dead,” Aaron said glancing up at me from the photo.
“Dead?”
“This guy, in the back, he’s Dennis Dundee,” Aaron pointed to the heavier of the two men in the photo.
“Should that mean something to me?”
“Kind of a player, heavy into girls, some drugs, but always a step or two away from the action if you get me. Then, remember that meth lab, blew up maybe late February?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, it blew the front of the place halfway across the street. Burned down what was left of the house. Luckily no one was killed, at least that’s what we thought. Turns out your boy Dennis was in there. Only the postmortem suggests he was dead prior to the explosion. It’s inconclusive because there wasn’t a piece of the guy big enough to properly examine.”
“Great, and the other award winner?”
“Humph, Leo ‘Pugsley’ Tate, man! A real sweetheart, had an alleged appetite for underage little girls. He was never too far away from whatever the latest bit of sleaze was rolling into town. Your girl here can sure pick ‘em.”
“You said he’s dead, too?”
“Yeah, assisted suicide.”
“Assisted suicide?”
“Back in maybe late March, early April of this year. He apparently blew his brains out with a colt.45, then put a second round in what was left of his skull just to be sure. 45 still in his hand, an unsigned, typewritten note stuffed in his pocket.”
“That said?”
“That said some bullshit about seeing the error of his ways, a life of sin, asking forgiveness. If I recall it was about three sentences long.” Aaron licked donut crumbs from the tips of his fingers.
“And you’re not buying it?”
“Well, for starters all the words were spelled correctly and it wasn’t written with a color crayon.”
“So, what do you think?”
“I think the guy intended to keep the hot date he’d arranged for the following weekend with sixteen-year-old twins and the.45 slugs ruined his plans.”
“For real, the date I mean?”
“Yeah, they were regulars. He’d paid their druggy mother in advance.”
“God. Suspects?”
“You kidding? We’d have to rent the Xcel Center just to hold ‘em all. Both of these guys aren’t exactly missed by anyone. Like I said, your lady friend here could set the bar a little higher when it comes to guys she wants to stand around with when she’s naked. These guys were mid-range players in the whole Internet escort-service thing. They were killed before we got a chance to nail them. You find this girl, you’ll be lucky if she isn’t really messed up.” He handed the photo back to me.
“Hunh?”
“If she’s involved with these two clowns or anyone like them, be lucky if she’s not dead from an overdose in twenty-four to thirty-six months. That’s the upside. These creeps, they’d look at gals like this, just fresh meat as far as they’re concerned. They’d want to get them out there hustling just as fast as possible.”
“Charming.”
“That’s why I love my job. Every once in a while we nail one of these bastards.”
Chapter 9