5 Tutti Frutti (9 page)

“Not exactly,” Aaron said
, returning to his sheet of paper. “She changed her name back in ninety two. Up to that point Swindle Lawless had been her stage name and she just made it official.”

“
Stage name? What was she doing?”

“She
was a dancer. The indecent exposure charge came when she was sixteen, performing under age at the old Buns and Roses. Sometime after that she did a two year stint in Vegas before she fled the scene to Hollywood and waited to be discovered.”

“Was she? D
iscovered I mean?”

“Yeah
, I guess, if you call ten years of playing background roles in porn videos for fifty bucks a day being discovered. She stayed out there until she was replaced by the next generation of wanna-bes so she drifted back to St. Paul. Started working at the Tutti Frutti and got hooked up with Tommy D’Angelo or got hooked up with Tommy first and then started working there.”

I picked up the file and used my fork to scrape mos
t of the chocolate off the back. I licked the fork and stared at Manning.

“Dev,” Aaron said.

“Swindle’s agent contract with Rockett was back in twenty ten. Is he on your radar?” I asked.

“
Rockett? Only as a bit player. He’s handled a couple of bands, a singer or two, couple of strippers with higher aspirations. Usually handles desperate folks sort of on their last chance. Probably his biggest claim to fame was back in the late eighties. Manuel Pastori.”

“Never heard of him,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“I’d guess Rock
ett saw an easy mark or maybe a desperate one with your girlfriend Swindle. Another burned-out party girl past her prime, looked ten years older than her age, hanging by her fingernails. His mistake was he didn’t count on her being tied into Tommy D’Angelo,” Manning said.

“So if D’Angelo is that scary
, why not just give them her money back?”

“I’m guessing they want more than her money, probably a lot more.
It’s been rumored Rockett owed some sort of debt to the D’Angelos, but we could never seem to quite figure it out.”

“What
are we talking a grand, ten grand?”

“No, it would be more
vicious than that, probably his house, car, business, all of the above.”

“Everything?”

“That sounds about right,” Manning nodded. “Hey, they’re your clients.”

“
Just she is, Swindle, and I’m not even sure about her.”

Aaron shook his head
and handed me the sheet with Swindle’s arrest record. “Keep us posted, Dev, let me know how it works out.”

Manning crammed the last bit
of a caramel roll into his mouth. “Be careful, Haskell,” he mumbled and they left.

Chapter Seventeen

Mercifully there was only
one Dudley Rockett in the white pages reverse directory. I was ringing the doorbell and knocking on his front door around eight thirty in the morning. If Dudley was home he didn’t bother to answer.

The house, a
pinkish sort of late fifties rambler with an attached single car garage, had a faded and unkempt look about it. Unkempt if you discounted the high tech security cameras mounted on either end of the house and over the front door. Yellowed shades were pulled down over every window. Peeling paint, untrimmed grass, weedy looking front shrubs or maybe they were just weeds, I couldn’t tell.

A
mail box stuffed with grocery store circulars hung crookedly next to the front door. Candy wrappers and a couple of plastic bags had blown up against the front of the house and looked to have been there for a while.

Through the small rectangular window in the front door I could see what looked like a television screen flickering back in a darkened kitchen. I couldn’t detect any other movement.
I took out my cell and dialed the phone number I’d gotten online. It rang but no one answered and I never got a message option.

I
was sitting in my car trying to come up with some other idea when a kid about fifteen strolled down the street. He wandered up to the keypad on Rockett’s garage door and entered a code. As the door rose up I could see a nondescript black Toyota sitting in the garage. The kid carefully reversed the car into the driveway, climbed out, and began to walk away.

“Hey
, excuse me, son, hold up there,” I called from my car. He didn’t seem to hear me and I called again. “Excuse me, young man, hey.” This time he stopped and stared as I hurried across the street toward him. We were standing in front of the house next door to Rockett’s. I could see a rough looking woman in a ratty bathrobe studying us through her front window as she sipped her coffee.

“Do you live there?” I asked, pointing back toward
Rockett’s house.

“No.”

“Do you know Dudley Rockett?”

He gave a slight nod,
“Sort of.”

“Do you know if he’s home? I tried knocking on the door but no one answered.”

“Yeah, he usually doesn’t. I back the car out for him every day. Don’t know if he’s home, I never see the guy.”

“
You get paid for that?”

“
Yeah, he sends me fifty bucks every month.”

“
Seems a little extravagant.”

“What
ever. You a cop?”

“No, I’m with the Minneso
ta State Lottery. Mister Rockett is registered as the holder of a winning ticket and we wanted to contact him.”

“Cool.”

I heard a car door slam. By the time I turned around the Toyota was backing out of the driveway. Whoever it was didn’t waste any time.

“Mister Rockett, Mister Rockett, Dudley,” I called.

The Toyota quickly backed into the street and drove off.

“
That him, Rockett?” I called back to the kid as I ran to my car.

“I think so, I’m not really sure
. I only saw him once, but that’s his car.”

I pulled awa
y from the curb as Rockett’s black Toyota screeched around the corner at the far end of the block. I raced round the corner, heard some stuff roll across my back seat and then onto the floor as I accelerated. The Toyota was a block and a half ahead of me, the tail lights flashed as it approached a stop sign, but never really slowed and blasted through the intersection.

I approached the sign a moment later then had to slow and finally stop
while a school bus lumbered across my path. Once the bus passed, I couldn’t see the Toyota. He must have turned onto a side street. I accelerated across the intersection, slowed for half a second at the cross street, looked left and right but didn’t see the Toyota. I gambled and raced ahead but couldn’t see Rockett’s car. I suddenly caught the thing in my rearview mirror as it raced around the corner behind me and took off in the opposite direction.

I made a U
-turn, tearing across some poor guy’s front lawn in the process. I sped up to try and catch Rockett. He was maybe two blocks ahead of me. I accelerated and blasted through an intersection my horn blaring, my engine roaring. I was gaining on him, I’d cut the distance almost in half. I could hear the sand and gravel pinging off the undercarriage of my Fleetwood. We raced along a winding residential street as I continued to gain on him. We were little more than a block apart when I first heard the siren and saw the flashing lights in my rear view mirror. I raced down the street for maybe another half block before I realized my situation could only get worse so I pulled over.

I turned off my engine and
watched in the rear view mirror. The squad car stopped, the driver’s door opened, and a uniformed officer knelt down behind the open door.

“Step out of your vehicle. Place your hands
on top of your head,” a voice blared out over a loud speaker.

This wasn’t
going my way. I did as directed and waited there, standing in the middle of the street.

“Kneel down. Keep
your hands on your head.”

As I knelt
, I could feel the pea gravel, that the city uses for resurfacing grinding into my knees. The street had recently been tarred, oiled, and then dusted with a coating of the gravel. The fresh oil worked its way into the knees of my jeans. They were ruined in short order, but at least I didn’t have to lie down in the stuff.

“Lay face down on the street,
keep your hands on your head and spread your legs.”

I thought about that for a long moment.

“Face down on the street, place your hands on your head, and spread your legs. Do it now!”

I saw another squad car with flashing lights racing toward us. From somewhere behind me I hear
d a car door slam. Not that it made any difference, but I guessed there were possibly four to six officers on the scene. I lay down in the freshly tarred street and ruined my shirt.

Chapter Eighteen

“I trust
you found
the accommodations to your liking,” Manning looked across the table at me. We were seated in one of the department’s interrogation rooms, nice place if you were into brown cigarette burns worming their way across Formica, dull gray walls, and Manning’s ever-present bottle of Maalox. He seemed to be enjoying himself, and his eyes literally sparkled.

“To be honest, no, I didn’t like the accommodations. I would have been better off sleeping in my car.”

“Except that we had to impound it. Towing fee, yesterday and now today in the impound lot. Gee, it starts to add up. Funny you didn’t contact your legal representation, Mister Laufen. I suppose…”

“Come on
, Manning, quit yanking my chain. You know I called him last night. He was unable at the time to come down here, so I…”

“I believe the
technical term is shit-faced.”

“
If you say so. Look can I go? You know I didn’t do anything.”

“Speeds of up to seventy-five miles per hour
on a residential street in the city of St. Paul, that’s pretty serious. School kids present, that’s going to cost a little additional. Four nine-one-one calls from tax paying citizens. Resisting arrest, not the best…”

“Resisting arrest?
Come on, I didn’t resist arrest. I pulled over, laid down on a freshly tarred street. I mean look at me, my clothes are ruined. When did I resist anything?”

“Just reading the arrest report. O
bviously I wasn’t present to witness this latest incident.” He leaned back and smiled, attacked his gum a half dozen times causing it to audibly snap, then reached for his bottle of Maalox and took a gulp.

“I
admit I was speeding, foolishly. But I didn’t resist arrest, Manning, you know that.”

He shrugged,
“Mister Rockett has filed a restraining order against you. Would you care to explain?”

“A restraining order? We
already talked about this. My client…”

“Miss Lawless?”

“Yeah, Swindle is going to sue the guy or something. I just went to Rockett’s house to chat with him. You can ask that kid.”

“David Kenn
ey?” he asked, reading from the file in front of him.

“If you say so, I didn’t get the kid’s name. He told me Rockett pays him to start his car every morning. I’m
standing there minding my own business when Rockett sneaks into the car and speeds off. He’s the one you should be charging.”

“So you were
, what thinking citizen’s arrest or something?”

“I just want
ed to talk with the guy. I told you before about Joey Cazzo and my new client Swindle. You know all this stuff already, Manning. It’s not like I’m some sort of public enemy.”

“Public nuisance might
be more like it.”

I didn’t respond for a moment. “Besides, what kind of guy has a kid start his car every morning and back it out of the garage?”

“The kind of guy who’s worried about a car bomb and figures if everyone knows the kid starts his car they won’t place a bomb in there.”

“No shit?”
I said. It had never occurred to me.

Manning
just snapped his gum a number of times paging through the file. Eventually, he looked up at me. “Anything else you’d like to add?”

“Only that I’d like to go home and take a shower.”

“So noted, I think that would be an improvement, a shower I mean.” He wrinkled his nose. “Would you care to comment on impersonating an officer of the state?”

“Impersonating? What are you talking about?”

Manning flipped a number of sheets of paper back one by one. Then ran his finger down the page like he was looking for something. ”Oh yes, here it is,” he said and read out loud. “The guy said he worked for the Minnesota State Lottery and that Mister Rockett had a winning ticket.”

“You got to be kidding,” I said. “So it makes sense to spend taxpayer’s money just to keep me locked up in here over night? Come on, l
ook, you’ve had your little joke. Now how about letting me go home? You know there’s nothing there.”

Manning look
ed at me for a long moment then shook his head and closed the file. “One of your problems, Haskell, is that you just never learn. All right, go forth and sin no more.” With that he stood up, graciously bowed and grandly swept his hand toward the door.