Bulldog (Dev Haskell - Private Investigator Book 9) (17 page)

I don’t know why exactly, but I remembered Heidi obsessing over that cabinet in the closet off the back bedroom and taking a bunch of pictures. She’d referred to the room as the servants’ quarters, or something and said the closet was probably a rear staircase originally. My mind had been on other things at the time.

I went into the closet and stood in front of the cabinet. I couldn’t tell much about it except that it was oak and covered most of the wall. I knocked on the wall like Heidi had done, it definitely sounded hollow behind the thing. I pulled an empty drawer out, and examined the bottom for a note or a treasure map or something. I set the drawer on the floor and went through the same process with the other three and didn’t find a thing. I went to put the drawers back in when I noticed a panel in the back of the cabinet. It was about two feet square with a long brass ridge along the right side indicating the back of a hinge.

I pushed the panel hoping it would spring open, but nothing happened. I pulled my car keys out and slid the little bottle opener I have into the space on the left hand side of the panel then pried the thing open. The panel moved maybe an inch and I reached in and swung it open. There was a blue nylon bag with handles in there, bigger than a gym bag, maybe more like something for hockey equipment or to put soccer balls in. It was heavy and I had to use both hands to pull it out. It tumbled to the floor of the cabinet with a loud thunk then I dragged it out onto the closet floor and pulled the zipper back.

There was a pistol in there, an automatic with black cross-hatched grips that had a clip inserted, I figured it was loaded. It sat on top of a large pile of cash. A very large pile.

I heard a noise down stairs and immediately thought of Bulldog coming back with reinforcements. I zipped the bag closed, pulled the .38 out of my pocket and sat very still. Eventually, I recognized the voices were two of the contractors. I replaced the drawers in the cabinet, stuffed the .38 back in my pocket and carried the bag downstairs to the den. I quickly changed, went out to my car in the garage and locked the bag in the trunk then drove to my office. I took a round about way, checking the rear view mirror every five seconds or so to see if I was being followed. I never spotted anyone.

When I got to the office it was empty, I figured Louie wouldn’t be in for at least a couple more hours. I locked the door then took a chair and wedged it under the doorknob as an added precaution. I looked out the window and studied the street, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. There was still a half-cup of coffee left in the coffee pot and the thing had apparently been on all night. I dumped the sludge down the drain, let the pot cool for a couple of minutes then made a fresh pot.

I sat at my desk sipping coffee, looking at the nylon bag and occasionally scanning the street. Everything seemed to be in order outside. I unzipped the bag and looked at the pistol lying on top. It seemed a pretty safe bet that the money was due to some sort of criminal enterprise and that the pistol had a better than even chance of being related to some sort of crime. Probably a number of crimes if Bulldog was involved and I had no doubt he was.

I thought about Casey and I thought about Dermot. The reason for Casey’s life being torn apart, the reason for Dermot’s murder was on my desk. If the money was the result of some criminal enterprise it was also the cause of Dermot’s murder. I couldn’t prove it yet, but everything seemed to point to Bulldog deciding he would just kill whoever was in his way. But, what he hadn’t counted on was two people being home that night and when Casey began screaming he just ran off into the dark.

I fished a pencil out of my desk drawer and slipped it through the trigger housing of the pistol. I carried the pistol dangling from the pencil over to the file cabinet and opened a briefcase I’ve never used. I set the pistol and the pencil in the briefcase, then closed it and put it back behind the file cabinet.

I started stacking the piles of cash on my desk. They were used bills, all twenties. Each was banded with a homemade paper band, ‘$5000’ was written on the band along with a date, ‘9/14/11’ and then what looked like someone’s initials. I emptied the bag and counted the pile on my desk, twice. There were a hundred bundles at five-grand each which made five-hundred grand. I punched the number into my calculator just to double check. Five-hundred grand, a half-a-million bucks and Bulldog had proven he would do anything to get his hands on it again.

The knob turned and the office door thumped a couple of times. Then the knob turned again and I heard Louie groan, “What the hell?” from the far side of the door.

“Louie?” I called, and began shoveling the bundles back into the bag as fast as I could.

“Yeah, Dev? What’s with the door?”

“I’ll be there in a second, just finishing up here,” I called and shoveled a little faster.

“You okay, Dev? Anything wrong?”

“Nope, no everything is just fine,” I said then zipped the bag closed, dropped it on the floor next to my desk and hurried to the door.

“Well then, what the hell.…” I pulled the chair out from under the door knob and opened the door. “…are you doing in there?” Louie said and then stood there looking at me.

“I just wanted some private time and didn’t expect to see you here so early.” I said.

Louie looked at the chair in my hand and said, “I never realized we had a problem with all sorts of people dropping in unannounced.”

“I didn’t want to be interrupted.”

“You hiding some woman in here?” he said then brushed past me, threw his computer bag on the picnic table and charged over to the coffeepot. He filled his mug, took a sip, dribbled on his shirt then settled into his chair. I saw his eyes register on the blue nylon bag, but he didn’t say anything.

I went over to my desk, wrote down the date 9/14/11 then picked up the binoculars and pretended to scan the building across the street. I could feel Louie’s eyes staring at my back.

I held the binoculars up, but I wasn’t looking at anything in particular. In fact they were trained on a tree in the back yard on the corner. I was thinking of the conversation I had in Aaron’s office the morning I showed up with the caramel rolls. He was telling me about the disappearance of ‘Georgie Boy’ Marcela a few months before Bulldog was sentenced.

“Maybe three months before Bulldog gets sentenced Marcela disappears. There’ve been rumors we pick up from time to time that he skipped town and now he’s in Vegas, LA, maybe Miami, someplace like that, but we never hear anything concrete. When he supposedly skipped town he apparently took a lot of cash with him, close to half a million dollars.”

I was pretty sure I’d found Georgie Boy’s half million bucks. I doubted I or anyone else would ever find Georgie Boy and it was a safe bet he wasn’t in Vegas, LA or Miami. It all made sense in some weird way, Bulldog hides the money, goes to jail and his house is sold while he’s locked up. Two innocents buy the place and Dermot ends up paying the ultimate price.

Louie made a couple of phone calls, worked on a file and dribbled more coffee on his shirt. I sat there looking out the window and thought of one more conversation I had. This one was with Casey out at the airport.

“I am so not kidding. I want that bastard killed, Dev. I don’t want him arrested. I don’t want him to go to trial. I want him to be dead, Dev, he doesn’t deserve to live. Dead. Promise me.”

“I’ll see what I can do, Casey.”

“I’m not fucking around, Dev.”

“I gotta take off man, I’m pleading a DUI right after lunch. You gonna be around this afternoon?” Louie asked as he stacked a couple of files into his computer bag. He had two very similar coffee stains on his shirt, one on either side of his tie.

“I’m not sure, I’m working on something and might have to take off.”

“Promise me you won’t barricade yourself in the office again. Okay?”

“I promise.”

He shot a quick glance at the blue bag lying on the floor then said, “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, thanks for asking, just thinking through this thing I’m working on.”

“Okay, catch you later, wish me luck,” he said and closed the door behind him.

I watched him walk out of the building a moment later. He crossed the street to his car then hopped in and headed for downtown.

I set the bag back on my desk. I walked over to the coffeepot and turned it off, then opened the bottom drawer of the file cabinet. Just to play it safe I slipped on a pair of surgical gloves then went back to my desk and printed off a number ten envelope addressed to Tubby Gustafson in care of Jackie Van Dorn. I slipped one of the bands with the penciled ‘$5000 9/14/11’ and the initials into the envelope then taped the envelope closed and stuck a stamp featuring a Purple Heart on the envelope. I kept the gloves on and walked the envelope out to the mailbox across the street.

It was probably overkill, but then again with Tubby Gustafson I wasn’t going to take any chances. It would be just like him to have access to a fingerprint data base or some form of DNA testing. I could only hope the currency band would get him thinking back to the half million dollars someone stole from him.

There’s an old adage that says something like
‘the best place to hide an item is out in the open.’
Yeah maybe, but I didn’t think that applied to cold cash. I drove over to the wine store by my house, a place called Solo Vino. Its run by a guy named Chuck. As I walked in the door he looked up from behind the counter.

“I know, you want something with a nice bouquet that will make them lose all self control after just a couple of sips. Oh, and you want it for under five dollars.”

“If you had something like that I’d buy a case. Actually, I was wondering if I could grab a box from you. I’m just packing up a couple of things.”

“Help yourself,” he said and sort of nodded toward the back cooler where a stack of empty boxes stood.

I waved thanks on my way out and Chuck nodded then went back to ringing up someone’s purchase. I checked both sides of the street then opened the trunk and stuffed the nylon bag in the wine box. I had to reposition some bundles inside the bag, but after some fooling around it fit. I closed the trunk and drove over to my local bank.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

I rented the largest
safety deposit box they had, one-hundred-and-twenty-five bucks for a year. The manager used two small keys to unlock the metal box in the vault. Then she pulled it out and I followed her into a small private cubicle with a door.

“You can just come and get me when you’re finished in here and we’ll put that back in the vault,” she said then glanced at my box touting ‘California’s Best Wine.’

“Just some old prayer books of my mom’s, I keep them for sentimental reasons,” I said.

She nodded as if somehow this made perfect sense then closed the door behind her.

I checked the ceiling for cameras and didn’t see any. I opened the box, pulled the nylon bag out, unzipped the thing and began stacking bundles of cash in the safety deposit box. I was afraid there wouldn’t be enough room, but in the end it all fit. I stuffed the loose bundle of bills I’d removed the band from into my front pocket, and then got the manager to return the box to the vault.

“Wow, a lot of prayer books,” she said as she hefted the box back into its space in the vault.

“Yeah, she was very religious, went to church all the time.” I smiled.

I felt a lot more relaxed after I left the bank. I drove over to Casey’s house and parked in the garage. Two of the contractors were sitting at the kitchen counter looking at a couple of color swatches when I came in.

“Oh, just in time,” one of them said. “We’re going to be painting on the first floor starting tomorrow. You don’t happen to know which colors go where, do you? She told us, but we must have tossed the note,” he said then pushed three swatches toward me. One of them was a gray the color of concrete and the other two were similar, but different sort of blues.

It seemed pretty obvious. “This one should be the dining room, this one would look good in the den and then this concrete looking stuff is probably the front room.”

“We just put them on the wall and never comment,” the other guy said then they both laughed.

I chatted with them for a while. They mentioned they were on schedule and would probably wrap the job up in the next week.

“This is where that guy was killed, right?”

“Yeah, he was a pal of mine, both he and his wife, actually.”

“They ever get the guy that shot him?”

“Nope, as far as I know the cops got no idea who it was, or even why for that matter.”

“What a shame,” one of them said and just shook his head.

“Yeah, everyone loved the guy, just a real nice guy and some jerk does that. It doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

“There are some folks walking around, that there’s really only one way to deal with them. You’re not going to rehabilitate them or save their soul. They’re the dregs of society.”

“Seems to be a lot of that going around,” I said.

They nodded and left after a few more minutes. I grabbed a beer and settled in for a quiet night. I was coming out of the shower the next morning and they were already spreading drop cloths getting ready to paint.