Bulldog (Dev Haskell - Private Investigator Book 9) (10 page)

“Sure is there a better way to get in the mood?” she said then nodded at the crabby bartender who was standing behind me at the bar. She pulled an already poured shot off a tray next to the cash register and handed it to Swindle.

Swindle downed the thing in a nano-second, shuddered then put the empty shot glass on the bar.

The bartender took a ten off my stack of cash.

“Woo-hoo-hoo, you got me cooking now, Danny boy.”

“It’s Dev, Swindle, I just wanted to talk to you for a minute if I could.”

She grinned and shook her chest from side to side. “Call it anything you like, baby,” she half slurred then signaled Crabby for another shot.

“Did you used to live on Holly Avenue?” I asked.

She tossed the shot back then looked like she was trying to think for a minute, maybe reach back through her alcohol induced haze. “I don’t know any guy named Holly,” she said then signaled for another shot and downed the thing before I even realized it had been passed to her.

“Oh, God, that is bitching. Come on, Dave, you gotta let me do it, my treat, forty bucks, what do say, baby?” She sort of staggered back a step or two then slid her hand down her hip and inside her thong. “I’m gonna shoot you baby,” she said then attempted to pull her hand out. A ring caught on her thong and she half struggled with her hand then suddenly staggered to the side. I caught her by the shoulder and straightened her up so she didn’t fall.

“Swindle, do you know a guy named Lowell Bulski?” I asked, just as a pair of very large hands grabbed me and put a vice grip on my upper arm.

“No touching the main attraction, douche bag.”

I turned to stare into the muscled chest of a very large man. I looked up into his face and recognized him as one of the thugs that had held the crowd of bankers back a few hours earlier. Tribal tattoos were wrapped around his very large biceps and he increased the pressure on his grip.

“She was starting to fall and I just stopped her from going over. Tubby and Bulldog asked me to come in and keep an eye on her tonight.”

That seemed to get him thinking and he let go of my arm. “We ain’t heard nothing about that,” he said, but he didn’t sound all that sure.

“Go check it out, maybe one of the others knows. Or give Tubby a call. I think Bulldog talked to Fat Freddy this afternoon. I was with him when he made the call, for Christ’s sake.”

“I’ll check it out, ah sorry ‘bout that.” He nodded and slowly backed away.

“Not a problem, I’ll put in a good word,” I said then turned back to Swindle, just as she was handing another empty shot glass back to Crabby.

“Swindle, you were telling me about Lowell Bulski.”

“He’s gonna be with us, too? God, he never pays and I’m not giving both of ya’s freebies,” she said.

“You know him?” I said then saw the bouncer from a moment earlier talking to the other two bouncers, they were shaking their heads and then suddenly all three looked back over in my direction.

“Hunh?”

“I said do you know him? Lowell Bulski?”

“You kiddin’? Bulldog? Everyone knows that prick. He likes it a little rough, but I don’t care he can just…”

The three of them started to move from the edge of the stage and head my way. A table of a half dozen guys in suit coats suddenly started to get up and the three thugs had to wait a half moment. That was all the time I needed to start my traveling music.

I went to grab my money off the bar, there were only three dollar bills sitting there. “Hey,” I said to Crabby. “I had about fifty or sixty bucks sitting on the bar a moment ago.”

“It was sixty, actually. Swindle’s shots are ten bucks each, you owe me another ten,” she said.

The table of bankers had cleared and the bouncers were on the move again. I pulled a folded ten from a wad in Swindle’s garter and tossed it on the bar.

Swindle looked like she might be trying to think of a protest, but her eyes were already glazed over at half mast and she was too far gone. She put her hands on her hips and attempted to strike a pose which caused her to stagger a couple of steps into another table where she knocked over a beer. I didn’t wait to see what happened after that.

I was pulling out of Nasty’s parking lot and glanced in the rearview mirror just as one of those bouncers stepped out the front door and looked around. He did not appear to be happy.

Chapter Twenty-Two

It was seven-thirty
in the morning and I was sitting in Aaron LaZelle’s office, my Lieutenant pal in homicide. I’d brought a couple of caramel rolls from Nina’s just to sweeten the meeting. We were eating them with our fingers, both of us trying to cover the aftertaste from the vending machine coffee.

“So, you were just on your way home from another night of debauchery and decided to stop by?”

I looked around Aaron’s cramped office. The thing was bounded on three sides by windows. One side looked out over the dumpsters behind the building and the other two sides looked into a room full of gray-blue cubicles. All the windows had a four-dollar set of plastic blinds hanging halfway down.

“What the hell do you do if you ever want to be private in here?”

“It’s really complicated, I just pull the blinds. Those babies are down, believe me everyone stays clear.”

I nodded, it seemed to make sense. I’d been on the receiving end of more than one interrogation by Aaron.

“So, is there a purpose to our chance early morning meeting in my office?” he said, and brushed the crumbs off his desk and into his hand, then he tossed them into the wastebasket.

“I’ve been doing some checking around on Dermot Gallagher’s…”

“Damn it, Dev I told you in no uncertain terms not to get involved. Exactly what part of ‘stay the hell away’ don’t you understand? I don’t want you anywhere near…”

“Whoa, will you just calm down. I didn’t do anything other than look at some records.”

“Records?” he asked and the flushed face from a moment before began to return back to normal.

“Yeah, I’m sleeping there, at Casey’s and Dermot’s.”

“Please tell me you two aren’t shacking up.”

“You kidding, give the woman some credit. She’s got a little higher standards than sleeping with someone like me. No, she was just uncomfortable being there and then she was worried about someone casing the place and breaking in so I told her I’d stay there.”

“You actually did something nice?”

“Yeah, I know, even I was kind of surprised.”

“And you were there reviewing records?”

“Yeah, but not there, I went down to PRR to check out their records.”

“And?”

“The name Lowell Bulski ring any bells?”

“The Bulldog? You ran into that ass at PRR?”

“What? No, of course not, but I did find out that he was the guy that sold the house to Casey and Dermot. Let me rephrase that, he was the owner of record, he wasn’t at the closing. He was represented at the closing by an attorney, Jackie Van Dorn.”

“God,
that
sleaze bag.”

“That seems to be the general consensus. I just thought if you guys weren’t aware of that it certainly seems to be an interesting little bit of trivia. Maybe a direction you might consider looking into if you haven’t already.”

Aaron nodded. “They had been in that place for a couple of years, right?”

“Almost two-and-a-half. It was pretty torn up when Dermot was murdered, some sort of a major project going on in just about every room and they were the worker-bees, if that translates.”

Aaron nodded.

“It’s even crazier now, she’s got to sell the place, can’t make the payments on her own and well, frankly, I think she’s just damn uncomfortable there. She’s staying at one of her brothers’ for the time being. Contractors are in there from seven-thirty in the morning to five at night, banging, sawing, welding, God, I’ve been at the office before nine just about every morning.”

“Gee, starting at nine, you early bird. I’m sure you’re loving that.”

“Not really. Anyway, I was sort of wondering if you’d have anything on your pal Bulldog.”

“Have anything?” Aaron asked then started clicking keys on his computer.

“Yeah, like where he might have been when the sale of that house was going down. Why he wasn’t there.”

Aaron sort of gave a disgusted smirk then nodded and clicked a few more keys. “Here we go, Bulski, yeah, I’m guessing they maybe bought that place in late 2012 or early 2013?”

“Yeah, sounds about right.”

“Bulldog was on a sabbatical.”

A sabbatical?”

“Yeah, Lino Lakes, he was doing eighteen months for a possession with intent to distribute charge.”

“Eighteen months seems like kind of a light sentence for him.”

“You can thank the winning combination of our enlightened judiciary and the lawyerly skills of Councilor Van Dorn.”

“So that’s why he wasn’t around?”

“Might also be why he sold.”

“How’s that?”

“He’s locked up for a period of time, even so he’s got some obligations I would guess, on and no doubt, off the books. It may be why Van Dorn was involved although I’d be willing to guess the association with Tubby Gustafson probably had more to do with it. You remember a thug named George Marcela?”

“Yeah, wasn’t he called Georgie Boy?”

“That was his nice side, his other name was ‘Chopper,’ for obvious reasons.”

I gave Aaron a look.

“Lets just say he had a fetish for hands, you crossed him and he’d cut off your hand.”

“Charming.”

Aaron nodded. “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.”

“Let me guess, the money belonged to Tubby Gustafson.”

“Right, or that’s at least who we think it belonged to.”

“I got two problems with that, the first is that’s a nice bit of change to you and me, but its chump change for these guys. Five hundred grand? And you’re on the run? Where is he gonna go and be safe, nowhere. I don’t think a guy like Marcela would do that for ten times the amount, it would be stupid. And then, what does this have to do with Bulldog?”

“Supposedly Marcela was the supplier, it’s how Bulldog actually gets involved with Tubby’s inner circle business. Marcela disappears, Bulldog serves eighteen months because he won’t cop a plea and finger Tubby’s organization, by the way he does the time standing on his head. So, he gets out and immediately steps into Marcela’s old job as enforcer for Tubby Gustafson.”

“Nice work if you can get it,” I said.

“Not really. Just for the record, suppose Bulldog took out Marcela and grabbed Tubby’s five hundred grand. I’m guessing that would put him on some pretty thin ice, probably get him killed.”

“One can only hope they’d give him a long, painful death,” I said.

“Nothing has ever been proven, in fact, a lot of it is just supposition on our part. I mean a flip side of it could be Tubby asked Bulldog to take out Marcela with the promise of making him enforcer and sweetening the pot with the five hundred grand.”

“I’ve never really thought of Tubby as being that generous,” I said.

“Well, there is that. Look, I had better get to work, was there anything else?” Aaron asked.

“No, I’d just encourage you guys to take a long, hard look at Bulldog on this thing and just pursue it until you get whoever the bastard was that killed Dermot.”

“That’s exactly what we’ve been doing, Dev.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

“So that’s what they’re
going to do, check out Bulldog’s perfect alibi?” Louie had to shout so I could hear him.

We were sitting in a far back booth at The Spot. There was a large crowd of women drinking glasses of white wine or pink and blue drinks and they were all clustered around the bar. Some sort of pre-party to a twenty-year high school reunion. They all looked like they were glad to flee the kids and leave the little darlings with their husbands for the night. The noise level was about ten decibels above permanent deafness.

“There has to be a tie-in somewhere, it’s just too coincidental, Bulldog owning the place they end up buying and then Dermot’s killed,” I said.

“But what would be in it for him?”

“What?”

“What’s in it for him, for Bulldog?”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged.

“You think he wanted the house back?”

“I think if he wanted it back he could have made them an offer and they would have at least entertained the idea. Just looking around over there, I’d say they were overwhelmed with major projects throughout the entire house. Probably no time to finish them and even less money.”