Dead Wood - By Dani Amore Page 0,31
good police officers of St. Clair Shores this particular memory had yet to surface. Somehow, now that I’d had some time to recover from the initial shock, it had just popped right back up. I’d even been with my sister and still hadn’t remembered it then, either. Coincidence or had some small part of me repressed the idea until I could act on it alone?
Go figure.
But since I had failed to remember this little detail during my official questioning, it didn’t seem like a terribly significant slighting of protocol if I were to look into this Randy angle by myself.
I may not be the best listener in the world, but I am one hell of a rationalizer.
• • •
My first challenge was to find out just who this Randy guy really was and where I might be able to find him.
I pulled up across the street from St. Clair Salvage. I didn’t feel any post-traumatic stress from my near brush with death, but I wasn’t exactly doing cartwheels over being back. And having finished going through Jesse Barre’s workshop and apartment, I wasn’t thrilled at being back at another murder victim’s place of work. Again, I’m not the most sensitive guy in the world, but this case was really starting to get to me.
In the gray light of early morning, with a fog rolling in from the lake, the bright yellow police tape over the front door of St. Clair Salvage made the message pretty clear. Everyone stay away. Especially nosy private investigators.
In the old days, I suppose a ballsy investigator might pick a lock or slip through an old window into Hornsby’s office and check his employee records. But I had a couple problems with this. One, I wasn’t anxious to break any laws. The guys at Jackson State Prison just a half hour away would love my soft white ass. It’d be like chucking a Krispy Kreme donut into an Overeaters Anonymous meeting.
Second of all, and not quite as anally intrusive, I figured Nevada Hornsby’s records were about as neat and organized as a frat house after Rush Week. In fact, I highly doubted that Hornsby kept any employee records at all. No W-2s, no problems from the IRS, right? I pictured him paying cash under the table, along with a few beers and a greasy burger at the café across the street.
The café across the street. It was a Ram’s Horn. I’d eaten once at a Ram’s Horn. Runny eggs, soggy hash browns, weak coffee. It was one big room with no dividers between the tables. The culinary equivalent of a pig’s trough to an uppity Grosse Pointer like myself, but Nirvana perhaps to Hornsby and his crew.
I locked the Taurus, crossed the street and went through the restaurant’s fingerprint covered glass door. A cute, chubby waitress took my order of coffee with a pleasant little smile. She had a dimple and a nametag telling the world her name was Gloria. I sipped my coffee. It was weak, all right. Kind of like coffee-flavored water. When she returned to refill me, I ordered the Hungry Man special, figuring she might be a little more cooperative if a slightly larger tip were at stake. 15% of a fifty-cent coffee wasn’t about to loosen her up.
When Gloria came back in an astonishingly quick five minutes, burdened down like a pack mule with my Hungry Man special, I said, “Hey, I was supposed to meet a guy for breakfast. He worked at the salvage shop across the street. His name is Randy. Do you know him?”
Gloria’s face blanched a little bit. “Did you hear about the accident?” she said.
“What accident?”
“Their boat blew up. The owner and one other guy died.”
“Was it Randy?”
“I don’t know.”
She unloaded her arm full of platters onto the table. It was like a dump truck raising its bed and a ton of gravel sliding down to the pavement. The smell of grease was intense and in a morbid kind of way, somewhat alluring. I made my face good and thoughtful. “I wonder how I could find out if Randy’s okay.”
“Don’t you have his phone number or something?”
I shook my head. “I bumped into him at a bar. I overheard him telling someone he worked for some place that salvaged old lumber. I’m remodeling my kitchen and the better half wants something fancy for the cabinets, so I introduced myself and he said he could hook me up with a good price, but we’d have to make