Double Trouble (Dev Haskell - Private Investigator Book 10) (6 page)

She looked more than a little surprised. “Are you kidding? Why, I’m an escort of course. You pay and I’ll play,” she said then wrinkled her nose at me. “What did you think? Why the hell else would I be dealing with Roy?”

The two women next to us quickly slid off their stools, left their coffees on the table and marched out the door.

Chapter Thirteen

You’re an escort?” I
said and immediately decided I
would do my utmost to help Ashley in any possible way.

“Yeah, what’d you think I do, teach kids or work in an office or something?”

“No, no, actually it makes sense, sort of. I mean I didn’t know Royal, Roy, was involved.”

She nodded and took another sip. I noticed the lipstick on her coffee mug matched the color of her nails.

“He does your website?”

“Sort of. No one actually has a website like you’re thinking. Roy’s got a number of sites, all over the world broken down by country. Like in the case of the US, the site lists the state and then the city. So for someone like me, well, I can go to Florida and Arizona in the winter or even London or Paris, if I want. Roy’s service posts a visiting notice for me and I get to work as much or as little as I feel like. It’s pretty cool.”

“And this works, I mean you get business, customers, clients?”

“Yeah, course it’s all specialized, I mean they’re vetted, you know, on his contact sites. Besides, we can list a complaint and if the customer turns out to be some kind of jerk they’ll get black balled and then they can’t use our services.”

“Contact sites?”

“Yeah, before you can respond to my posting and set up an appointment, one of Roy’s sites checks you out, makes sure your credit is good, you’re not some lunatic or serial killer or God help me, a cop. They assign you an id number so you, as the customer, remain anonymous and all the transactions go through the site, no cash is exchanged, well, except for the tip,” she said and raised her eyebrows. “Keeps us legal and safe.”

I was curious. “What’s your going rate?”

“Three-fifty an hour, goes up from there, depending,” she said then looked at her watch. “Look, we should finish up, Tony’s gonna be here any minute. Here’s the deal, I’m down about fifteen percent over the last two months. This shit is hitting me right wear it hurts, in my pocketbook. I told Roy, ‘get it fixed baby or I gotta cut you loose.’ You know?”

I nodded like I did know, although nothing could be further from the truth. “Let me do some brainstorming, Ashley. I’m thinking just an old fashioned second pair of eyes might do the trick.”

“Huh?” she said with a very blank look on her face.

“I plan to follow you around, see if we can’t get whoever is taking all those pictures.”

“Oh yeah, got it. Of course I don’t want you getting in the way. My clients are pretty high class and very private. It could be bad for business if they saw you lurking behind a palm tree in the hotel lobby or something. You know?”

A guy suddenly walked up behind Ashley, “Hey, baby, everything all right here?” he said giving me the cold stare as he spoke.

“Hi, Tony, yeah, don’t worry he’s okay. This is that investigator guy Roy called about. He’s gonna find out who’s been jacking me around.”

“That so,” Tony said looking at me sideways, nodding with a half smile on his face like he wasn’t about to believe it.

“Hi, I’m Dev Haskell,” I said and extended my hand. I didn’t like the guy already and he’d only been here for a couple of seconds.

He half snorted then said, “Haskell, I heard of you, you’re the movie star.”

“You’re in movies?” Ashley half shouted.

Heads turned. “No, no it wasn’t anything, believe me and it was a long time ago.”

“It was what you might call one of them cameo appearance deals, a reality video before reality shows. And now you’re supposed to find out who’s been doing this shit? Yeah, right,” Tony said.

“I’m gonna try. It appears no one else has been able to do much. That’s most likely why Mr. Baker contacted me. You wouldn’t happen to have any ideas, would you, Tony?”

“I’m working on a couple of things. Yeah, I’ve got some ideas.”

“Well, if you come up with anything, please be sure to share it with me. Look, Ashley I’ll be in touch, I want to get back to Royal and go over a couple of things. Is it all right if I give you a call tomorrow?”

“Let me call you, I’ve got your number. Grab my bags there will you, Tony?” she said and indicated the shopping bags scattered across the floor.

“All that shit, what’d you…?”

“Just pick them up, Tony and let’s go. God, you don’t have to make a federal case out of it. I’m the one who had to go shopping for the last three hours, I’m beat and my feet are killing me and I could use something just a little stronger than this latte right now.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Come on,” she said then slung that gigantic purse over her shoulder and marched off without saying goodbye. A number of heads turned as she strutted past, all the while continuing to read pain-in-the-ass Tony the riot act over her shoulder. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I recognized the body language, and what a body.

There was something, make that a number of things, I didn’t like about Tony that had nothing to do with his movie star comment.

Chapter Fourteen

I left a message
for Royal the following morning. Marilynn had let me know in no uncertain terms that she was the keeper of the gate and I wasn’t getting past. While waiting, I checked out Ashley’s online presence. I visited five different sites, all listing escorts available in major cites around the world.

Ashley’s profile name was exactly that, “Ashley,” which led me to believe that wasn’t her real name. She was willing to travel for a “to be determined” price and available in the twin cities for in-call at $350 per hour or out-call starting at $450. She was more expensive than any plumber I could think of, but then again. She would accept men, women, couples, two men or two women with commensurate price increases.

You had to submit your credit card and list references to Royal’s various sites and then, upon approval, you would be able to contact her using a numerical ID and schedule an “appointment.” Ashley was one of maybe twenty women listed in the Twin Cities area.

Royal’s sites provided a secure vetting process as well as a variety of credit card and PayPal billing options. I guess the business had moved a long way from just the simple “Buy me a drink?” line.

Ashley also had fifteen different images on her “photo album.” The photos left nothing to the imagination as far as what, exactly, one would be paying for. All the images had the look of professionally-done studio shots and for just a nanosecond I wondered if the photographer had to pay the model.

There was a sixteenth image on Ashley’s album, a bit out of focus and obviously not part of the professional photo shoot. Ashley looked a tad bit disheveled while sitting in the passenger seat of a fairly trendy car. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it was her thug pal, Tony behind the wheel, but he was out of focus and partially cut off so it was tough to tell.

Based on all the vehicles in the background, the photo looked to have been taken in a parking ramp of some sort. I made a mental note to ask both Ashley and Royal if the image had been posted recently. I was thinking it could have even been taken yesterday at The Mall.

I looked at sites for a half dozen other women, all equally beautiful, the women that is. None of them had anything like Ashley’s amateur car image which suggested she, specifically, was being targeted for some reason.

“Haskell Investigations,” I said tearing myself away from a half dozen images of a redheaded beauty in a bubble bath.

“Please hold for Mr. Baker,” a no-nonsense voice replied.

“Happy to do that, Marilynn,” I said, but she’d already put me on hold.

“Royal Baker.”

“Hi, Royal, it’s Dev Haskell. I met with Ashley yesterday.”

“How did that go?”

“I suppose okay, amazingly she didn’t want to come home with me.” I waited a few moments, but didn’t get a response from Royal so I pushed ahead. “Based on what she told me, I think some old fashioned monitoring with another pair of eyes might be in order. Let me ask you something. I just checked out her photos on your site, and….”

“Which site?”

“It’s Compatibles,” I said looking at the address bar on my screen.

“Let me get it up here in a moment. There we go, and you’re in her photo album?”

“Yeah, there’s fifteen studio shots then this one that.…”

“Oh, damn it. God, how in the hell are they doing this? You’re talking about this image where she’s in the car and looks like she just pulled an all-nighter?”

“Yeah, I mean it’s not so bad. It’s just obviously not in line with the other studio shots she has, very nice by the way. I’m guessing it was taken on the fly, looks like a parking ramp of some sort.”

“Yeah. Hell, it looks like she’s working out of the back seat of a car.”

“I met her out at The Mall of America yesterday afternoon. It could have been taken right after we met.”

“Or before.”

“To tell the truth, she was pretty well put together when we met. She looks like she’s been through the mill in this shot. Any idea how long this has been up there, hours, days?”

“We’re doing sweeps of her site twice a day, every day. So, this had to have been posted just in the past hour or so. Damn, that suggests whoever is doing this is aware of our schedule.”

“So, you think they posted it sometime after ten?”

“Yeah, late morning to early afternoon are busy booking hours for evening appointments, we’ve been doing our sweeps just before that. Did you mention this to Ashley?”

“No, I’m waiting for her to call me.”

“Dev, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t say anything. I’d certainly make it worth your while. She can be somewhat temperamental, we’re all at our wits end over this, and having Ashley fly off the handle again would only serve to satisfy whoever is behind this.”

“No need to do anything, Royal. I won’t mention it, but there’s a good possibility she may have already seen it.”

“Well, I haven’t received one of her screaming phone calls, thankfully. I’m emailing someone as we speak, he’ll have this removed within the next few minutes, barely eleven o’clock so there’s a pretty good chance she’s still asleep.”

I wanted to ask Royal about Ashley’s butthead friend, Tony. I wanted to ask Royal about his business. I wanted to ask what his wife thought. In the end I settled for, “Okay, Royal, I’m going to see about lining up some surveillance time around Ashley, I plan to coordinate with her, she said she’d call me, anything develops I’ll let you know.”

“Stay in touch,” he said and hung up.

Chapter Fifteen

It had been a
long day and I knew if I headed over to The Spot it would only serve to make the day even longer, much longer. So I just went home. I was planning on making myself a decent dinner, meaning I would warm up some cold pizza and garlic bread. I was sure I’d left some in the fridge, but the garlic bread was nowhere to be found and although the pizza delivery box was in the fridge, it was empty. I decided to watch a movie of no redeeming value and turn to the liquid diet, in my case, a glass of Maker’s Mark bourbon on ice. Only there wasn’t any. I could have sworn I had a fifth in the liquor cabinet. I ended up just eating candy bars.

My phone woke me the following morning. I was still on the couch, the candy bar bag was empty and the sun was fairly high in the sky.

“Yeah,” I answered, just sort of coming awake.

“Dev?”

“That’s me.”

“Andy Lindbergh, did I catch you at a bad time?”

“No, Andy, sorry, just on another line wrapping some business up.”

“Want to call me back?”

“Nope, all taken care of. What can I do for you?”

“I’ve got a problem over here, wonder if you wouldn’t mind stopping by.”

“You want to tell me about it over the phone?”

“I’ve got some inventory items missing, special order stuff. I think if you could come over it might be easier to show you what I’m talking about. That will answer some questions and probably prompt some others.”

I immediately thought Tommy Flaherty, but didn’t say anything. Idiot was probably doing a two-bit score on drugs of some sort, injecting embalming fluid or some stupid thing, blowing his chance at a good job and putting himself back on the road to another conviction and more jail time. “You name the time, Andy.”

“Well, the sooner the better. Can you make it sometime today?”

“Let me cancel my meeting and I’ll be over there in an hour.”

“You sure, Dev? I hate to be a pain.”

“Not a problem, Andy. See you in an hour.”

“Thanks, buddy, I appreciate it.”