Ting-A-Ling (10 page)

“Oh, thanks, Dev. That was nice of you. Did you have fun?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you. Did you have a good time?”

“I had a great time.”

“I’m thinking it’s late and we’re actually closer to my place. Want to sleep over?” I tried not to sound too overly hopeful.

She got this snide little smile on her face and said, “Sleep? Really? I think we might be able to think of something better to do than sleep.”

‘Yes!
’ I thought.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Ten minutes later we
were pulling into my driveway. I gently shook Heidi awake. “Heidi, come on. There’s a nice warm bed upstairs we can both climb into. Wake up, honey.”

“Oh, God, bed sounds wonderful,” she said, but she said it in a way that made me think we were suddenly on opposite wave lengths.

She was sound asleep when I came out of the bathroom. I heard that deep Prosecco induced breathing, remembered the elbow she gave me the last time I’d attempted to wake her and knew there was no point in trying. I’d have to wait until morning.

“Dev, Dev, wake up. Come on, wake up.”

It was music to my ears as she gently shook me awake, no doubt unable to control her passion and wait any longer. My patience was finally paying off and this was going to be worth it. I rolled over and focused on Heidi sitting on the edge of my bed. She appeared to have showered and was completely dressed. In fact, she’d already pulled on her winter coat.

“What time is it? What the…”

“Come on, get dressed, you have to drive me back to Bunnies so I can get my car. I’ve got a client coming in at nine this morning and I have to go home and change.”

“Could we just take a few minutes here and…”

“No, come on, I mean it. Besides, I’ve already showered. I gotta get going,” she said and stood up.

I lay in bed for half a second, thinking
‘This can’t be happening. I don’t believe it.’

“Dev, come on, I told you I’m not kidding, get going,” she said. She checked herself briefly in the mirror before she walked out of my bedroom. She called again as she headed downstairs. “Dev.”

Heidi was the first one to finally speak as we drove to her car. “Oh, God, you big baby, will you please quit pouting. I’ll make it up to you,” she said. We were just a minute or two away from the parking lot at Bunnies. Heidi was brushing on makeup using the mirror hanging from the back of my passenger seat visor.

“Sure, not a problem. I mean, I interrupted my night. I stopped working. I drove down to Bunnies. I gave all your girlfriends a ride home. My ears are still hurting from the noise level in the car.” I shot her a glance.

“Maybe if the heat had come on we wouldn’t have had to talk so loud. God, everyone was frozen half to death. We had to talk just to stay warm.”

“Hey, you called me. Like I said, I was working.”

“Sure you were,” she said and just let that hang there for a couple of blocks. “Hey, you know what? Did I tell you about the ladies room? Remember you told me you got that client because your name was written on the door of the bathroom stall?”

“Yeah, Danielle. She’s the one who called me from Bunnies.”

“Well, it isn’t there now. We checked.”

“Not there? My name and phone number? They probably wiped it off when they were cleaning.”

“Could be, but if they wiped it off they didn’t bother to remove any of the other stuff written in there.”

“Maybe you were in the wrong stall.”

“There’s only three. We all traipsed in there to check it out. I told the girls about it and they thought it was so funny they just had to see it. We looked all over and never found it.”

“So you didn’t see my phone number and then it said,
‘call for a good time’
?”

“Nope.”

“She said it was just below the hook on the door, where you hang your coat.”

“Nope, honest, we really checked. Karen wanted to take a picture of it and post it on Facebook. Oh, hey, there’s my car, see? Over by the side of the building.”

There were two other abandoned cars in the lot. I knew Heidi’s. It was a white Lexus. It was the only white Lexus in the lot and I pulled alongside of the thing.

“Have a great meeting,” I said, not meaning a word.

“Oh, get over it. I said I’ll make it up to you.”

“If it wasn’t really good I wouldn’t care, okay, Heidi. Just saying.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “You’re sort of sweet, in your own warped little way. Is that all you ever think about?” She leaned over and gave me a quick kiss, ran her hand suggestively up and down my inner thigh right before she grabbed me, then quickly jumped out of my car.

“That’s not fair,” I shouted.

She leaned back in, blew me a kiss and said, “Get the heater fixed in this bomb.” Then she gave a quick wave, jumped inside her Lexus and locked the door.

Chapter Twenty-Four

I didn’t feel like
going back home and cooking breakfast, so I pulled into Moe’s. On the way in I bought a copy of the Pioneer Press from the box out on the sidewalk.

“Just coming home from last night?” Bruce asked. He was Moe’s manager and he was standing at the cash register, greeting all the working stiffs who didn’t have to be in their office until nine.

“I wish. No, I enjoy the below freezing temperature so much, I decided not to miss another minute and came down to see you.”

He smiled and shook his head like I’d just confirmed a number of his misgivings. I sipped some coffee before I unfolded the newspaper. The front headline glared back at me.
Human Remains Discovered
. There was a photo, similar to the ones Manning had the other day in his file. It looked just like what I’d seen when I’d driven back over to Casey’s, some snow covered rubble with a couple of beams sticking out.

The article didn’t say much, other than evidence of human remains had been found. Well, that and the fact that the intensity of the blaze was leading firefighters to believe some form of accelerant had been used. In layman’s terms that meant someone had set the fire. And then either they got caught up in the thing and burned, or quite possibly some idiot had set the fire in an attempt to dispose of a body.

Either option and maybe a half dozen others were possible, especially when you threw that sleaze ball Renee Paris into the equation. None of which seemed to work in my favor. I figured it was a pretty safe guess this was what had been behind Manning’s phone call and brief interview the other day. The question was how had he come up with my name? I had to be one of at least a thousand people who wanted a piece of Renee Paris and most of them would have a better reason than me to put the guy down.

Before I had my jacket hung up in the office, Louie started giving me the third degree. He was attired in a slightly less-wrinkled pinstripe suit. The suit coat was hung crookedly over the back of his chair in such a way that the left-hand sleeve dragged along the floor. The wheel of his desk chair had come to sit squarely on top of the sleeve. The knot on his tie hung loosely a couple of inches below his chins.

“You hear the latest, Dev?”

“We’re out of coffee?” I replied, staring at the empty pot.

“No, I was just hoping you’d show up to make some. But, did you hear the news? About that fire?”

“I read it in the paper this morning.”

“You’re kidding?” he said, sounding more than a little surprised.

“I read the paper, I keep up on things.”

“Yeah, sure. Anyway, I’d say that was behind your pal Manning’s little inquiry yesterday.”

“Probably, although he never mentioned it specifically. Still, those images I saw in his file…”

“Yeah, that was planned. He wanted to see if they’d get you talking, maybe make you say something incriminating.”

“Like what?
‘I did it.’
Not likely. Besides I didn’t do anything. If it was Paris they found in that rubble half this city probably has a better motive than anything I could come up with.”

“I’m thinking it was Paris who got fried in that place. You didn’t smell anything like propane, see a stack of newspapers or something by the stove, maybe a gas can?”

“No, I told you, he was cooking Bar-B-Que sauce. Had five or six of these big containers on the stove when I got there. The things were on the boil, place smelled great, actually.”

“I think it would be a good idea, I’m speaking as your lawyer here, to call Manning. Make a statement as to what you saw. Let him know you were there and that there was an incident.”

“An incident. Christ, he’d love to run with that. I’m already guilty of every crime in the book with that guy. I don’t know, as far as he’s concerned it’s just a matter of time before he nails me.”

“This whole thing ain’t sounding right, Dev, and he knows you were there. Did you ever hear back from that woman?”

“Danielle?”

Louie nodded.

“No. I’ve left about a hundred phone messages. I sent her text messages. Even went over there and checked the place out. She wasn’t there. Hell, she could have left town or just gone to the grocery store. I don’t know.”

“You’d think she would at least return a phone call.”

“Maybe. She’s sort of one of those ditzy types.”

“Ditzy types?”

“I think she’s got a trust fund. You know, she wakes up in her inherited mansion on the first of every month and there’s money in the bank. Then she tells you how busy she’s been shopping or traveling and she’s clueless to what working stiffs have to do day in and day out.”

Louie nodded like he knew the type. “It would still be a good idea to phone Manning. Get your side of the story on the record. I’ll go down there with you.”

“My side of the story? There isn’t even a story.”

“Pretty safe bet the cops think there is. Probably no way they’ve gotten an I.D. this fast on whoever got roasted in there. Hell, that could be weeks or even months, depending on what they’re dealing with.”

“Like I said, I’m thinking its most likely Paris.”

“Maybe, maybe not. The fact is you, me, the cops, no one knows at this stage. Let’s just get out in front of the problem and get this nailed down before you have someone working off all sorts of speculations that seem to land on your doorstep. Speculations that we can eliminate right here and now once you get a statement on the record.”

“Does it have to be Manning?”

“You said it yourself that he’s the one out to get you. Wouldn’t it seem to make the most sense to point him in a different direction?”

“I guess, Jesus. Okay, okay, let me make some coffee and then I’ll call him.”

“I tell you what, you call him and I’ll make the coffee.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Up to this point
my dealings with Detective Norris Manning had pretty much been less than positive. Once he learned it was me on the phone his usual routine was to keep me on hold for ten or fifteen minutes just for fun before he hung up.

“Who shall I say is calling?” the woman asked in a slight accent. I guess she was the switchboard operator. The call was probably routed through India or some distant place so the city could save money and not employ a local.

“Devlin Haskell. I spoke to Detective Manning the other day. I’m calling to try and set up an appointment with him.” I looked over at Louie. His back was to me. Part of a wrinkled shirt tail hung out over his belt and he was nodding as he dumped a half dozen measured spoons of coffee grounds into the machine sitting on top of the file cabinet.

“I’ll see if Detective Manning is available. One moment please.”

I waited for ten seconds and was about to hang up when the sound of snapping gum crackled across the line and a voice half-yelled, “Manning.”

“Detective Manning, this is Dev Haskell.”

Louie pushed the ‘ON’ button on the coffee pot then turned to face me, nodding his support.

“Haskell, how nice,” Manning said, sounding like he didn’t mean one word.

“Listen, Detective. I read the morning paper.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, the front page article about the fire that happened at the Casey’s site.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, sir, I’d like to make an appointment with you so I can come in with my attorney, Mr. Laufen, and…”

“I remember your attorney, Mr. Laufen.”

“Yeah, I figured you might. Anyway, I’d like to come down and set the record straight.”

Louie shook his head and placed a finger to his lips, signaling me to be quiet.

“Which record are we talking about, Haskell? I really have trouble keeping up where you’re concerned.”

“We’d like to make an appointment to come down there, Detective. The sooner, the better,” I added.

Louie nodded approval.

“I can fit you in at, oh, how does twelve-forty-five sound?”