by Mike Faricy
“Not exactly, kind of a long story.”
“Try me. I’m just back from pleading a DUI case on behalf of the client from hell and trying to get bail reduced for another idiot on a domestic. I’d love to hear how this happened,” Louie said.
He gave Morton another rub behind the ears before he took his coat off and sat down behind his picnic table desk. Morton wandered back to his bed and settled in.
“I don’t suppose there’s any coffee left?” Louie asked.
“Let me fill your mug and I’ll make a fresh pot.”
“How long has that stuff been on?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe fifteen to twenty hours.”
“I’ll wait while you make a fresh pot, meanwhile you can enlighten me on your friend, here.”
“His name is Morton,” I said. I could hear Morton’s tail thumping on the floor as I poured the remnants of the coffee pot down the sink in the closet. The coffee steamed as it hit the cold, white porcelain sink and I was afraid it was so acidic that it might just melt the enamel on the sink.
“So, I was over at Maddie’s place the other night.”
“That the woman who threatened to file a restraining order? The same gal you panted and barked at on the phone yesterday?”
“Yeah, but that restraining threat was just a little misunderstanding, we sorted it out a while ago.”
Louie didn’t look too sure.
“Anyway, she gets this middle of the night phone call….” I went on to explain how Maddie’s Mom had an accident. Maddie had to grab an early flight back to Atlanta, and my suggestion that bringing Morton along wouldn’t be the most helpful idea. “And so, I got him for just a couple of days.”
Louie nodded at a foot high stack of job applications I was supposed to have finished verifying for my insurance client. “And you thought he’d be able to help you verify employment records on that stack of applications you were supposed to have finished yesterday. I get it, makes sense to me,” Louie said.
“More like I can’t leave the guy at home because he’ll destroy whatever room I put him in.”
“Probably just needs some exercise.”
“You mean like last night?” I said and proceeded to tell Louie about my introduction to Natasha Kominski and by extension, Tommy Allesi.
“God, compared to you I lead an incredibly dull life. This Tommy Allesi, is he the gambler?”
“You know him?”
“You better grab some coffee and let me fill you in.”
Chapter Nine
I was on my second mug, listening to Louie give me the lowdown on Tommy Allesi.
“I’ve never seen a guy as focused as him. I think he spends every waking moment trying to figure an edge to whatever the odds are. They say he once studied roulette tables and determined that after a certain age they were more likely to land on the last four numbers more often than the others.”
“As far as I know he’s been banned by a number of places out in Vegas. He doesn’t win each and every time, but he wins consistently and with the sums he bets, well it’s not very good for a casino’s bottom line.”
“They can ban you from a casino because you win too often?”
“Sure, at the end of the day, they’re just a private business.”
“Everything I read online made it sound like he was still a player.”
“I’m sure he is, but what he does now is he has someone go in and place bets for him.”
“Won’t they just ban that guy?”
“No, because there’s a bunch of guys. He might have forty or fifty different people betting for him on everything from the World Series to some rinky-dink college basketball game. He had some system he came up with, I forget what it’s called, but he uses computers to analyze odds and then he has all these characters go into joints and place bets for him. He could have five guys in the same place betting on different things, baseball, NASCAR, golf. He pays them a percentage. Rumor has it he can bet so much dough that he actually influences the odds.”
“And you know this guy?”
“Know of him, really. He grew up in my neighborhood, but he must be about ten years older than me. Father died at a young age, I hear Tommy was a loner sort of kid who learned early on what he wanted to devote his life to. And, he’s certainly been successful. He owns the Lady Slipper Country Club, a number of commercial properties, God knows what else. Last I heard he was getting into hedge funds and legit investments, guy’s certainly got the head for it.”
“I had no idea.”
“And your way of an introduction was to pull a gun on him?”
“Only because he looked like he was going to come after me with a wine bottle and well, I couldn’t have him spilling good wine.”
“No, of course not, that would never do. To be honest, I haven’t seen Tommy for years and probably couldn’t pick him out of a crowd of two,” Louie said.
“Well, if last night was any indication he likes expensive clothes, he’s wears a heavy gold chain around his right wrist. Dark hair that’s slicked back, a goatee. Ring a bell?” I said.
“That sort of sounds like the guy, the goatee is a new addition in the past decade,” Louie said.
“I just wonder what he wanted with Natasha’s dog?”
“You might want to ask her that question. The other thing is I’d maybe keep a sharp lookout. Like I told you he’s never been convicted of anything I’m aware of, but he’s always right on the edge. It wouldn’t be a huge leap to imagine him making a phone call to some idiot who’d like to get on his good side by doing something unpleasant to you.”
“Maybe we’ll just have to stop by on our walk tonight and ask Miss Natasha Kominski what, exactly was going on?”
“Just be careful, dealing with an unknown quantity who is somehow tied in to Tommy Allesi is maybe not the best recommendation.”
“Then I’ll just have to study up on Natasha.”
Which was exactly what I did for the better part of the next two hours. If Tommy Allesi always appeared to be just on the edge, yet ultimately never charged, Natasha Kominski was his polar opposite.
The earliest record and mug shot I came across was from 1969 in a newspaper article covering her protest and then arrest for supposedly pouring blood over records in the St. Paul Courthouse. She was a senior in high school and it wasn’t actually blood, but rather strawberry Kool-Aid thickened with corn starch and enhanced with food coloring, none-the-less, against the law.
She and her accomplices, four individuals all told, had gained access to files and were protesting the military draft. Unfortunately, it seems they had taken a wrong turn in the court house and poured the mixture over building permits rather than draft records. They were labeled the ‘Misdirected Four’ in the newspaper. Even in her mug shot from almost fifty years ago she looked intriguing.
In 1970 she was photographed in the early morning hours at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC listening as President Richard Nixon, with his butler in tow, addressed fellow student protestors.
She was back in St. Paul again in 1974, this time arrested and charged with indecent exposure in a ‘burn the bra’ protest. The accompanying arrest photo showed an outraged Natasha on an apparently cold day surrounded by a large number of smiling cops all vying for position to get a good look at the ‘protestor’.
Things were quiet for a decade until the breaking and entering charges in January of 1985 when she made her way into the medical labs at the U of M and set free one hundred lab rats. Unfortunately, the rats were a special hairless variety used in a unique kind of blood research. They all froze within minutes when Natasha released them outside on a minus forty degree Minnesota night.
She was arrested twice more in Washington DC, once for protesting President George W. Bush’s 1989 invasion of Panama and again in 1998 for protesting what became known as the Monica Lewinsky scandal. During a tour of the White House, where she was attired in a blue dress similar to the one Lewinsky wore, Natasha atte
mpted to enter the First Family’s private quarters and confront then President Bill Clinton about his behavior. He wasn’t home at the time.
In 1999 in California and again in 2002 in Colorado, Natasha was arrested, charged and fined for operating a medical marijuana facility without the proper license. Actually, in both instances she had no license what-so-ever. She had simply opened a store front which the authorities promptly closed that same morning.
She was arrested for trespassing when she attempted to free the wolves in St. Paul’s Como Park Zoo in 2012, not the best idea in the middle of a seven county residential area. She had scaled two separate fences and entered the zoo’s ‘Wolf Woods’, a natural habitat enclosure for grey wolves, only to learn the wolves weren’t really interested in her political views or her attempt to free them. Natasha was rescued after having to climb a tree to save herself from the intended beneficiaries of her enlightened viewpoint.
Since then things appeared to have been quiet, which based on Natasha’s history, gave one pause.
Chapter Ten
Morton ignored his health food and looked longingly at the cheeseburgers I’d just taken off the grill. We were in the kitchen and I had just placed two cheeseburgers on my plate, along with some lime flavored Dorito chips. I was in the process of opening a beer.
Morton sat next to my stool just beneath my plate. He kept staring back and forth with his big brown eyes looking first at my cheeseburgers and then at me. I was working to ignore him.
“Don’t even think about it, buddy.”
I don’t know how he did it, but he somehow managed to look even sadder.
“No way, man, besides Maddie would kill me.” As if on cue my phone rang.
“Hi, Maddie.”
“How are things going?”
“We’re just having dinner before we go on our walk. He’s doing fine, we’re getting along famously. How’s your Mom?”
“She can come home tomorrow, but she’s confined to bed. We’ve got a therapist coming in tomorrow afternoon to get her started back on the road to recovery. Can I talk to him?”
“Yeah hang on, he’s right here.” I placed the phone up to Morton’s ear and he listened while Maddie said “Hi Morton” a half dozen times. Morton wagged his tail and stuck his tongue out. I got back on the phone after a minute, Maddie was still talking to him in her annoying little girl voice.
“I guess he’s involved with dinner,” I said.
“Is he eating okay?”
“Seems to be,” I said and tossed a couple of lime flavored Dorito chips onto the floor for him.
“Well, okay just checking in. Don’t forget he’s got his therapist appointment tomorrow afternoon at two.”
“Yeah, I was going over your instructions this morning and saw that. I check them out every morning, right before our hour long walk,” I lied.
“I like to arrive at the appointment a few minutes early, just to let Morton become acclimated to the surroundings and give him a moment to clear his mind, maybe take a cleansing breath, so to speak.”
“I’ll be sure to do that, Maddie it sounds like a really good idea.”
“Okay, well I guess I’ll talk to both of you tomorrow,” she said.
“Talk then,” I said and hung up. “You know, Morton nothing personal, but that kind of hovering would drive me nuts.”
Morton remained in place, watching me eat my cheeseburger. I finished the first one and started in on the second. I tossed a couple more lime chips his way, he snatched one before it hit the floor then attacked the second one a moment later. I really didn’t have the appetite for the second cheeseburger and Morton kept giving me the sad eyes so I set the plate down on the floor.
It was gone before I stood up. “We’re pals now, Morton. Come on, let’s go for that walk.” His tail started to wag at the mention of a walk. “We’ll stop and see if we can spend some quality time with Princess Anastasia,” I said and Morton suddenly jumped and drooled at the sound of her name.
Chapter Eleven
It was our third time walking past the house before Natasha called out to us from the front porch. Morton had assumed his ‘person’ persona and ignored absolutely every dog we’d passed along the way.
“Well, if it isn’t my hero’s, hello you two. Might I interest you in a glass of Vino?” Natasha’s voice called to us from somewhere behind the unkempt bushes hiding her front porch.
“We’d love to,” I said.
I turned toward the sidewalk leading up to the porch and Morton took off, straining at the leash, nearly yanking my arm out of the socket in the process. I was able to more or less rein him in by the time we reached the steps. He was panting and drooling, no doubt thinking of Princess Anastasia. I had to admit, I knew the feeling.
“How very nice to see you again,” Natasha said. She’d been sitting on the wicker couch and stood as we climbed the steps. She was barefoot, wearing a pair of baggy, worn, blue jean bib overalls, and a black T-shirt that had ‘Proposition 501’ stenciled in white letters across the front. The words were surrounded by a red circle with a line through it. She looked sexy in a casual sort of way, like she didn’t care or was just unaware of the fact. I was afraid to ask what the proposition was about.
“How’s everything tonight?”
“Everything is fine,” she said. Princess Anastasia sat next to her on a wicker chair with a little navy-blue beret perched on her head. She gave Morton a brief, disdainful look.
Morton immediately drooled when she glanced his way.
“Would you have time to join me in a beverage?” she asked.
“Yes, I would, that would be nice, as long as we’re not imposing.”
Her wine glass was almost empty; the wine bottle on the wicker coffee table was empty. A large glass ashtray that looked to be cut crystal was on the coffee table and filled with ashes. Two small roach clips lay along the edge of the ashtray. Next to the ashtray was a small bottle of red nail polish and I noticed that her toe nails looked to have been recently done.
“You’re not imposing at all. In fact, I was just about to open another bottle. Please have a seat,” she said and indicated a corner of the wicker couch with her hand. “I’ll be right back.”
She gave some sort of hand signal to the princess who immediately leapt off her chair and pranced alongside Natasha into the house.
Morton strained at his leash and then whined when he couldn’t follow. He seemed to focus on the princess’s tail as they left.
Natasha popped her head back out of the doorway and said, “I do have some beer in the refrigerator, if you would prefer that.”
“A beer would be perfect.”
There were two table lamps turned on in the front room that faced out onto the porch. The room looked like a museum setting with a twelve foot high ceiling that could have come out of the Sistine Chapel. It was painted in a sun with clouds and a vivid blue sky sort of affair. The ceiling mural was reflected in the large gilt edged mirror hanging over the fireplace. The large, elaborate fireplace was centered on the exterior wall with a carved, white marble mantel. A window was on either side of the fireplace and the top half of both windows were stained glass. A large landscape painting framed in an exotic looking gilt frame hung over a couch on the wall directly opposite me. The large entry to the room could be closed off by massive sliding doors that disappeared back into the walls.
The entire room, doors, windows, ceiling and floors were trimmed in what looked like walnut or cherry. The floor was a light colored oak with a design pattern of inlaid walnut running around the entire room about eight inches from the wall. A thick, plush red and blue oriental carpet covered most of the floor. The two couches and four chairs that I could see were all carved the same and looked like a matching set that probably cost somewhere in the neighborhood of what my entire house was worth.
“I hope this will be to your liking,” Natasha said as she set a round glass tray onto the wicker coffee table. The tray had an etched glass botto
m with silver sides and two ornate silver handles, an empty pint glass and a silver ice bucket were positioned on the tray. The bucket was filled with ice and held a bottle of wine and three beers. Princess Anastasia was nowhere in sight.
“I’m sure this will be perfect.”
“Would you do me the honor of opening the wine bottle? I can never seem to get that damned corkscrew to work properly.” She sat down on the opposite end of the wicker couch and held out her wine glass expectantly.
I proceeded to open the bottle of wine. The corkscrew was the kind where you twist the top and the two arms on the side gradually rise. I pushed the arms down then pulled the cork out the final half inch. It made a loud popping sound as it left the bottle.
“May I pour you a glass?” I asked.
“Please do, it’s one of my favorites, Portuguese, sparkling. I buy it by the case and absolutely adore this wine.”
I smiled.
“Vinho verde,” she continued. “Green wine, from the northwest corner of Portugal. Have you ever been there?”
“The northwest corner? Gee, no, I don’t think I have.”
“Quite a verdant area, cool, hilly. You really must make an effort to get there.”
The wine bottle was clear glass and had a peacock on the white label. Right now I felt like hitting myself over the head with the thing, just to end the geography lesson. Instead, I filled her glass then used the end of the cork screw to pop the bottle cap off one of the beer bottles, a Stella Artois. The stemmed beer glass was emblazoned with the Stella logo and I wondered if she’d stolen it from a bar.
“Here’s to you, both of you,” she said raising her wine glass and giving Morton the nod. “I trust you enjoy French beer, it’s really some of the best there is.”
Got you, I thought. “It’s a very nice beer. I guess I’ve always been sort of partial to German beer, and then all the local micro-breweries that are popping up around town.”
“Yes,” she nodded dismissively, “but the French, well, c’est la vie.”
