by Dan Ames
Eventually, a man I guessed to be in his late fifties with obviously colored hair walked to the front of the podium.
“Cheers everyone!” he sang out and took a drink of wine.
“My name is Oscar Shaw and I am the founder of Napa Restorative Services. Let me start off by telling you what my talk will NOT be,” he smiled. And he had a set of dazzling white chompers. I could practically hear some of the older ladies twitter at the sight of his smile. I took a closer look at Oscar Shaw and noticed the tight-fitting slacks and shirt, the ropy musculature of his arms and the expensive watch on his left wrist.
The guy was a player, through and through. If money were even, I’d bet that these older rich ladies from Grosse Pointe were easy pickings for him. And even some of the slightly younger ones, i.e. Katie.
“The session will not be lengthy,” he said and some of the ladies chuckled. “It will not be a sales pitch, because I am not a salesman. I am a wine lover,” he said.
“I will not even be specific about what we do at NRS, suffice to say, we don’t have a website, nor do we publicly advertise. In fact, the program is invitation only,” he announced. His voice was as smooth as honey. “Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t join.”
I almost laughed. It was the reverse selling technique.
This made me ready for the sales pitch that had to be coming.
“Let me just show you a short video of my place in California,” he said.
Ah, the non-sales sales pitch.
What followed was a five-minute video showing breathtaking shots of Napa Valley, an infinity pool, beautiful-looking people getting spa treatments, musical entertainment, gourmet meals and meditation circles, along with yoga and tai chi. All set under a warm sun and blue skies. I half expected to see ghost-like angels flitting in the air above the people.
But like all good salesmen, Oscar Shaw saved the best for last.
I could tell this guy knew how to close a sales pitch.
Because the real selling points were some celebrity testimonials. These mostly B-listers provided short statements documenting how time spent with Oscar Shaw and NRS changed their lives, focused them on their business careers, and revved up their sex lives.
The last part surprised me.
I felt a little tingle at the back of my neck. The cynic in me wondered, is this guy recruiting rich old Grosse Pointe ladies to go out to Napa, drink wine and have orgies?
The servers came around again with more wine, some cheese, and some cards.
I took a card and reviewed it.
It was a request for all kinds of information, including something that seemed a bit personal, like estimated net worth.
“What‘s being brought around now is essentially a card you can fill out, or not, if you don’t want to, and some of my favorite wine,” Oscar Shaw intoned. “A nutty chardonnay from my own personal label. It is accompanied by some cheese I get from an organic farm near the winery, and a card with some information you can provide if you wish.”
He beamed out at his audience. I could tell he’d won the crowd over. People were smiling and laughing, the ladies’ faces were flushed.
“We will review the information and please take your time filling it out,” Shaw said. “There is a blank space in which you can write why you are interested in NRS, and that is one of the biggest things we look at when determining if you might be a good fit for us and vice versa.”
I almost laughed.
I had a feeling the net worth item was the only thing this scumbag looked at.
I saw the majority of women filling out the information. The only other men there, two older guys, were just downing glasses of wine, encouraging their wives to fill out the cards, probably hoping they’d head out west so they could have a couple weeks golfing. Whatever it took in old age, I guess.
At the end, we watched another short video and I felt a little odd from the last glass of wine. The one that had come from his personal estate.
I actually felt myself get a little sexually aroused, especially when the video was playing. Now, some of the people in the video were really quite striking, and there was one pool scene where there seemed to be an abundance of exposed flesh. I wondered why I felt the sudden physical reaction. Was it the video? Or was there something in the wine? An aphrodisiac? Or was it a carefully orchestrated combination of the two?
Once the presentation was over and the ladies in the audience descended on Oscar Shaw, I decided to avoid confronting the guy and Katie, and instead, went out to the car and waited. I had a very good inclination of where they would be going at the end of the program.
My head was pleasantly buzzing from the wine, and I have to admit it felt pretty damn good, even though I was a beer guy through and through.
My hunch paid off because sure enough I saw Oscar Shaw and Katie emerge from the building, get into her Lexus and I followed them back to Katie’s house. Using my phone I snapped some photos of the two getting out of the car and going into the house.
Not only did I now have some fairly good photographic evidence, I had something even more important.
I had a motive.
I was about to put my car into gear when a shadow fell across my window. The door was yanked open and a guy with the face of a slab of granite pulled me out.
Luckily, I had slipped my phone into the compartment below the radio.
“Are you loitering?” he said.
“No, I was about to leave until you did this,” I answered.
“Okay,” he said and let me go. His hands were like giant meat hooks.
“I don’t want to see you around here again,” he said.
It would have been a good time to ask him exactly what he meant. Around here? Like, all of Grosse Pointe?
Instead, I got into the car and shut the door.
For a brief moment, I considered backing up and running the giant over, but I figured my car might end up being the loser in that confrontation.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I called Ellen and said I wanted her to swing by my office for a beer before the end of the day.
After a quick check of my watch, I realized it was time to meet with Nate and pay him for his research services.
He had asked to change the location from Green Dot Stables in Detroit to the Thai place in the village since he was on his way home.
There was a booth available so I took it, along with two menus. I was determined to have the tofu salad. I read that tofu was supposed to take cholesterol out of the blood stream. Not that I had a problem with cholesterol, but mostly because I wanted to show Nate how someone with restraint eats.
He had always been a big guy, but lately the pounds were adding up and I was worried about him. He had a beautiful wife and daughter and although he was a grown man capable of making his own choices, I wanted to help however I could. The direct approach hadn’t worked in the past. It just pissed him off and now I was forbidden by him to say anything about his weight, even though we were each other’s best friend.
Right on time, he walked into the restaurant and joined me in the booth.
We ordered our food and then the first thing he said took me by surprise.
“Brian Fairbanks,” he said. “Do you know anything about him?”
I told him what I’d learned. That he was a rich guy, involved in auto stuff, and eventually developed a lot of environmentally friendly car things and started his own company. His car was one of the leading candidates to revolutionize the electric car industry.
Some of the big, national magazines had done profiles on the guy.
“Yeah, that’s all accurate,” Nate said. “But before all of that, Brian had some problems,” he said, spearing some fried rolls our server had just placed on the table.
Screw my tofu, I thought, and took a couple of the rolls. Damn they were good.
“He had a reputation for fighting, a lot,” Nate continued. “And then he got into some drug issues in college, dropped out, and dis
appeared for awhile.”
“Disappeared where?” I asked.
“Eventually, he surfaced in Europe, working for Fiat,” he said around a mouthful of spring roll. “That’s where he had his turnaround and then he came back. When he met Colleen, he had a lot of ideas. She helped fund his shit, and then all of that really took off.”
I noodled that around, along with some spicy noodles. I asked the waitress to take away the tofu monstrosity. If I wanted something like it, I could go home and eat some cardboard from our home office.
“But he’s been clean ever since?” I asked.
Nate nodded.
“So do you buy he’s a changed man?” I wondered.
“I do, but if I were you, I would find out for myself,” Nate said. “He does most of his work at a building near Chrysler headquarters. Couldn’t be too hard to arrange a meeting.”
After we finished, I called and did just that, explaining who I was, and requiring a couple of callbacks to verify my identity. It was to be tomorrow morning.
Nate and I finished our meal and talked about family stuff, setting the details of the two crimes aside. It was always good to see him.
We said our goodbyes and then I went back to my office, organized all of my thoughts on the case and ran through a lot of scenarios.
By the time I was done, there was a knock on the door and Ellen walked in.
“Beer me,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Oscar Shaw,” I said, and then proceeded to tell Ellen what I’d discovered about Katie, the guy from Napa, and although it was a good story, my sister summarily dismissed most of it.
“Doesn’t sound like the kind of guy that would set up two long-range sniper shots,” she said. “Besides, it would be fairly easy to check out where he was at the time of both murders, if he’s traveling back and forth from Napa. Something tells me he’s going to have an airtight alibi.” She took a sip of her beer and looked at the picture I’d grabbed from the Internet of Shaw.
She laughed. “What did he do, use a crate of wine as his tripod to rest the rifle?”
She had a point.
Oscar Shaw didn’t really fit the scenario as the actual shooter, but that didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t involved somehow.
When it was her turn, she told me what they’d found. The .223 bullets were in fact impossible to trace. She’d gone over the crime scene photos from the Colleen Fairbanks killing and it was almost exactly the same as Nick’s. No evidence. No one had seen anything. No hard evidence. Just a ballistics match.
They’d already known about Colleen Fairbanks’s husband, as well as his criminal background.
“I think you’re wasting your time on that one,” she said. “He wasn’t even in the country when his wife was killed. The financial guys who worked the case went over all of his money, looking for a murder-for-hire scenario and came up with nothing.”
She did have one surprise for me though.
“We were given some footage from Colleen Fairbanks’s office from the day before she was killed,” Ellen said. “It wasn’t great quality but very interesting nonetheless.”
“And?”
“It was Nick Giordano. At her office,” Ellen said. “He spent at least a couple of hours, and then they left together. It was around lunchtime. But they didn’t come back the rest of the day.”
Finally, proof that Nick and Colleen Fairbanks had some kind of relationship.
It clicked right into place, I had to admit. It sure looked like Katie had found something to do with Oscar Shaw out in Napa, and it made sense that Nick might have been looking for some companionship as well. I had a question.
“So do you think it was business, personal, or both?” I already had my opinion, but I wanted to hear hers.
Ellen shrugged. “It could mean a lot either way. But the fact they never came back to the office that day suggests it was either a long meeting, or something much more than that.”
The fact that she invested in medical-type things made sense it was business, but I hadn’t been able to find evidence that suggested Nick was creating anything she was interested in.
Unless Colleen Fairbanks wasn’t focused on something Nick was inventing.
Maybe she was just interested in Nick.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
There was another conversation I had to have, even though I felt bad putting him through it all again. But there was no choice. I drove into downtown Detroit and knocked on the door of Frederick Giordano’s condo. I checked my watch. 7 p.m. and the door opened.
I instantly caught a whiff of marijuana smoke. And his eyes looked a little red.
“Uncle John,” he said with a mixture of surprise and what my intuition determined might be guilt. Frederick stepped aside to let me in.
I walked into the condo and saw Paul Giordano lounged in a chair.
He got up and shook my hand.
“This is great,” I said. “I really wanted to talk to both of you.”
There was a girl standing in the kitchen area, a dark-haired beauty who excused herself and went into another room.
I sat down and Frederick offered me a beer, which I took.
Whoever had been smoking pot had hidden the evidence.
“I thought you were in Chicago,” I said to Paul.
“Yeah, I came back,” he said. “Just to check out an investment we might make in a building here in town. And to keep an eye on Frederick, you know. He’s trouble.” Paul smiled his easy smile and I was reminded again of how much he looked like his father. Paul had such an easy charm about him.
Frederick nodded. “I’ve gotten really good at picking out distressed properties, and there’s an old factory here that used to make wheels for Ford. Perfect property to convert to lofts.”
There was no good way to ask it so I just got down to business.
“Do you know if your Dad’s relationship with Colleen Fairbanks was anything more than just business?”
Frederick looked at Paul, who looked away from the television set and out the window.
Frederick stood up, went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of wine.
Paul looked back at me, then at Frederick.
Finally, he sighed.
“Yeah,” Paul said. “We think he was in love with her.”
Chapter Thirty
“We don’t have proof,” Paul continued. “But Frederick and I both agree that he was a different guy during the past year or so.”
“Different how?”
Frederick shrugged his shoulders and looked at Paul.
“Dad didn’t really talk to us about any of that kind of stuff. He always talked about us, pushed us to be successful. His private life was private. But he acted like he was in love. We both agree to that.”
Paul looked at Frederick and Frederick nodded in agreement.
We talked for a little longer but I could get nothing more from either one of them. I believed they were telling me the truth.
With the suggestion to call me if they thought of anything else, I left and decided to throw caution to the wind and drive out to talk with Brian Fairbanks directly. Nate’s research provided me the address and when I pulled up to the expansive home in the sprawling Bloomfield Hills neighborhood, I wasn’t surprised. It looked exactly like the kind of place a successful venture capitalist would live with her auto executive husband.
Brian Fairbanks answered the door wearing slacks, a sport coat, and holding a glass of scotch.
“Mr. Fairbanks? I’m John Rockne, a private investigator looking into the murder of Nick Giordano.”
He looked at me, almost a bemused smile on his face. He was a big guy, with a ruddy complexion and a fairly good-sized spare tire hanging over his belt.
“I’ll give you two minutes,” he said.
He leaned against the doorframe and waited for me to ask my questions.
“Okay,” I said.
“This is going to be a really short conversation
,” he said before I could even get out the first question. “I’m going to answer most of your questions with one word. So ask wisely. This interview will be over as soon as I decide it’s over.”
He had a deep, baritone voice and he spoke with the kind of casual authority that told me he was very used to being the boss and in complete control.
“Was your wife having an affair?” Hey, if I was going to be limited in my questions, I figured I should start with a doozy.
“Yes.”
“With who?”
“Unknown.”
He took a drink of his scotch and for a second I thought he was going to slam the door shut, so I hurried along with my next question.
“Was she having more than one affair?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Were you going to divorce?”
“Yes.”
“Was one of the men she was seeing Nick Giordano?”
He actually thought for a moment.
“No.”
“Did you kill her?”
“No.”
“Did you have her killed?”
“No.”
Now it was my turn to hesitate. These one-word answers weren’t going to help me in the long run. So I tried to ask a question that required more.
“Who do you think killed her?”
“Unknown.”
So much for that strategy.
He drained the rest of his scotch.
“Interview is over.”
He turned and grabbed the edge of the door.
I held up my hand.
“You only hesitated on one question,” I said. “I asked you if one of the men was Nick Giordano. You said no, but you hesitated first. Why?”
He looked through the doorway toward the street out front. Just when I thought he was never going to answer he turned to me with a tired smile.
“He was way too old for her.”
Chapter Thirty-One
