Death of an Escort (18 page)

I drove to Mickey's condo address. There was
time to kill, but this was what I was a natural at. It felt like a
stakeout, and that was my specialty.

There were probably six or seven hours to go
before he'd show up. That was fine by me, and I started doing my
mental tricks that I did to keep myself from going crazy.

My favorite involved imagining a giant
whiteboard. An imaginary black marker hovered over it. I closed my
eyes for a moment to make the image clearer in my mind.

With the image clear in my head, I opened my
eyes again.

Now I drew a large mathematical problem on
the board. It was a huge problem and it involved dividing fractions
and solving for two different variables. I even had one of the
variables with a negative square root.

Time passed, and I mentally worked on solving
the problem. In my head, the whiteboard filled up with writing. The
more I mentally wrote on it, the harder it all became to remember
all the contents of the whiteboard.

It kept me occupied until the sun came up and
morning came.

About seven o'clock Mickey's front door
opened up. He came out and headed to his car.

I honked my horn. He looked up, and I waved
at him. Watching him visually start when he saw me was worth
it.

Chapter 17

He whipped a cell phone out and started
making a call. I started my car and crept forward. Working the
controls on my door, I rolled the window down on the passenger
side.

"Hey, Mickey!"

He covered the cell phone with his hand and
lowered it. "What?"

"I'm going to follow you to your office. Not
only that, but the cops know where I am and what I'm doing. Call
your goons off. They can't finish the job today."

His face became paler. He turned away from me
and spoke hurriedly into the phone, and then he put it in his
pocket.

He got in his car and drove off. I followed
tightly. Perhaps he drove this way every day, but he was really
slow. Most likely the whole thing was shaking him. That was exactly
what I wanted.

It took more than twenty minutes to reach his
office because of the speed he was driving at.

He parked in his preferred parking spot, and
I parked right next to him in a visitor spot. We walked in
together. He was stiff as a board, but I wasn't having the same
problem.

He made his way back to his office, and I
followed him. Inside I shut the door. He went to his desk and sat
down behind it, and I waited.

For several minutes we were there in silence
together.

"What is this?" he finally said.

I walked over to his desk and leaned over it.
I kept leaning until I was inches away from his face. He leaned
back to give himself more room.

"I need you to understand something," I said.
And then I said nothing else.

He waited. "What?"

"Promise me something. Promise me, you'll
stop having people try to kill me," I said.

He looked confused. "Are you crazy? What are
you talking about?"

"It had better stop," I said. "Or I'll find
you, and I'll do to you what you've been trying to do to me."

He shook his head. "I have no idea—"

I jumped over the desk. It made my surgery
wounds hurt. I crashed into him and knocked him and his chair
over.

Then I took him by the hair and pulled him to
his feet. I slammed him against the wall. "I'm really not messing
around here," I said. "There were four attempts on my life in the
last day. That's a little excessive, don't you think?"

He started blathering something
incoherently.

I slapped him hard across the face. "Shut
up."

He quieted down.

"You've tried and failed. See? I'm still
here. I'm damn hard to kill. Got it?" Now I wrapped my fingers
around his neck. "But I'd guess that you're not so hard to
kill."

My fingers constricted around his neck to the
point where his face was red and he was wheezing and whistling for
air. His fingers clawed at mine.

"One more lousy attempt to kill me, and
you're a dead man." I let go. "Tell me if you understand."

He nodded. "I understand."

I took him by the neck and threw him to the
ground. He crashed loudly to the floor and groaned on impact.

"And if I find out it was really you who did
Kelly Brandt, I'll be back."

With that I left. The receptionist was
hurrying to Mickey's office and ran right into me.

I lowered my shoulder and took her off her
feet. Papers and doughnuts flew like a fountain up into the air.
She screamed. I walked right out and got to my car.

I'd had it with Mickey, and hopefully he got
the point.

At this juncture, I wasn't exactly sure what
to do. Honestly, I felt disoriented. The whole bomb in the office
thing really messed me up. Like I'd lost my whole train of
thought.

There was no real point in going to my
office. I didn't have a computer or notes there. That was all gone.
So, I tried to think back and remember where I'd been in all this
before things got crazy on me. I remembered my interview with Macy,
and I thought of the button.

The maid. The maid might know something that
could help this break loose. It all felt like a log jam. Something
was there waiting to be discovered, but I needed to clear out the
mess so I could see it.

Maria Vasquez was the maid's name. I headed
to my favorite motel, the Sleep EZ Inn.

There was yet a different person behind the
counter at the Sleep EZ Inn.

The person stared at me as I walked up to the
counter. I stopped in the worn spot in the carpet in front of the
counter.

The young man looked sullenly at me.

"I'm looking for Maria Vasquez," I said.

He shook his head. "She doesn't work
here."

"Are you sure?" I asked.

"Yep," he said. "I was here when she got
fired."

"So, she did work here?"

"Yep," he said. "Are you going to book a
room?"

"No," I said. "Can you give me Maria's
address?"

"Nope," he said and turned away from me.

"Is that because you don't have it or because
you don't want to?" I asked.

He sighed. "Both."

"Does anyone still work here who was a friend
of Maria?"

He looked back at me. "Yep."

"Could you call one here for me?"

He looked at me like I was asking way too
much of him, but eventually he reached for the phone and mumbled
something into it. Shortly a small Hispanic woman stepped into the
tattered lobby.

"Hi," I said. "You are a friend of Maria
Vasquez?"

She looked at me suspiciously.

"I have something that I want to return to
her," I said. I held up the button. "It's an expensive, handmade
button. She lost it working here."

The woman held out her hand. "I can take it
to her," she said in clear English.

"I'd really rather do it myself," I said.
"Could you tell me where she lives?"

She looked at me but said nothing.

"Okay," I said. "Let's do it this way. Can
you call her now and tell her to meet me at a grocery store?"

She nodded. "Which one?"

I named one that was close.

"I will call her," she said.

I thanked her and left.

At the grocery store, I waited near the front
entrance for anyone Hispanic looking.

About ten minutes later, a very rusty car
pulled into the lot. A Hispanic woman got out. She was about thirty
or thirty-five years old. I walked over to meet her.

"Maria?" I asked.

"Si?"

"I'm the guy who has the button." I held it
out for her to see. She reached for it, but I pulled it back.

She looked confused.

"Before I give it to you, I want to ask you
some questions."

She shook her head no.

"But you don't even know what I'm going to
ask," I said.

"No questions," she said, and she turned to
leave.

This was odd.

"Maria, hold on," I said. But she kept
walking. "Maria, you were there when Kelly Brandt died?"

She walked faster.

"Maria?" I stopped following her and she
hurried to her car.

I went to mine, and then I followed her
without letting her know that. She lived close in an ethnic part of
the town. Almost no one owned a house in this area. Everything was
some kind of apartment. Even the houses that had been normal houses
before were now duplexes with the first floor and basement
separated.

Every building needed some kind of paint or
maintenance. She parked her car in front of a dingy building that
looked very similar to the one that Carlie lived in.

I parked my car, and I went up to the door
she'd gone into. I knocked.

Maria answered, but when she saw it was me,
she started to close the door. I put my hand out and stopped the
door from closing.

"Maria," I said. "I want to know what you
saw."

She put her shoulder into the door and forced
it closed suddenly. I heard the deadbolt snap shut.

My cell phone rang.

"Hello?"

"Ray. This is Father Patrick."

"Yes?" And then I remembered. I'd asked him
to look into the website YouDisgustMe.com that had rape videos of
Kelly Brandt on it.

"I asked some family members to look into the
matter you asked me about."

"And?"

"They found connections to an organization in
Chicago," he said.

"Oh," I said disappointed. That didn't help
much.

"There's more," he said. "The trail led to a
restaurant in Chicago."

"A restaurant?"

"It's called MiMi's Pizzeria and Pasta," he
said.

"Okay?"

"I also have some family in Chicago," he
said. "And there is reason to believe that the restaurant has mob
connections."

"Mafia?"

"Yes," he said. "Ray. You need to be careful
if you go poking around there."

"I'm Italian," I said. "I'll be fine." I
wasn't really Italian. Believe it or not, I was actually German
mostly by ancestory.

"I think you should leave that one alone," he
said.

"Thanks," I said. We hung up.

That got me to thinking. Maybe there really
was a mafia connection with all this. That would explain why
everyone was so close-lipped about everything.

Say too much and you get whacked. Still, I
had to look into this. There was no way not to. I'd be taking a
trip to Chicago. It wasn't that far away. It only took about an
hour to drive there.

I filled up my gas tank, and I headed out
right away. On my way to the Windy City, I thought about my
strategy.

It wouldn't really do to go charging into the
restaurant and start asking about rape porn websites. That was
probably a quick way to getting whacked myself.

At the same time, I couldn't go looking up
some made man in the family. It wasn't like they had a listing in
the phone book. You didn't look them up like that.

Which opened up the question, how I was going
to find someone that would know anything? How would I do that?

I had no idea, so I drove into Chicago. There
I found someone at a gas station who knew about the restaurant.
However, it wasn't anywhere close to where I was, and I had a forty
minute drive to get to the part of the city where it was.

Instantly, I could see that it had been a
Pizza Hut building at one time. It had that odd roof shape where
it's all normal until the top and it gets that pointy-Mohawk
look.

The building itself had been painted white,
but the roof was red. A sign said the name was MiMi's Pizzeria and
Pasta. I parked and went inside.

Still I had no idea what I was going to do. I
was totally winging this.

Inside a woman greeted me. She showed me to a
seat and gave me a grease stained menu. I guess that helped
perpetuate the atmosphere. I ordered a small pepperoni pizza,
featuring hand cut pepperoni and homemade mozzarella cheese. A
small cola came with the pizza.

Ten minutes later the pizza came. The
waitress had a low cut blouse on, and when she bent down to set the
pizza on my table . . . well, I got a good view down her shirt.

The way she looked at me afterwards, I
wouldn't be surprised if she did that on purpose.

Anything for a bigger tip, I guess.

That was it. That inappropriate view the
waitress gave me, it totally gave me the plan I needed.

Now, I knew how to get to someone higher up
in the mob. Quickly, I ate the pizza. Without question, it was
fantastic. And the price was much lower than I expected.

After eating and paying, I hurried out to my
car. I'd driven through a seedy part on my way over to the
restaurant. I headed back right that way.

My gun was with me and loaded, as always.

I entered the less desirable section, and I
turned off the main road and headed deeper in.

This wasn't a recommended strategy, but I
figured it was the fastest way to get to who I wanted to talk
to.

I saw a woman standing on the curb. She had a
thong on, and that was all she wore on her lower half. Her shoes
had heels that had to be at least six inches tall.

Her top was revealing and clashed in color
scheme with the little bit of material she had covering her lower
section.

I slowed and edged the car over towards her.
I rolled the window down.

She walked to the car and bent down so she
was looking inside. "Hey Sweetie," she said. "Want me to get
in?"

"Come on," I said.

She opened the door and got in. My wife would
have a fit if she knew I had a hooker in the car.

"I see you got out-of-state license plates,"
she said. "So, if you're not familiar with the area, there's a good
place up the road." She pointed ahead.

"What is it?"

"Motel. Good rates," she said distractedly.
"And I'm going to need cash before we go up to our room."