by Mike Faricy
“I just might next time. Anyway, interesting sort of coincidence, don’t you think?”
“Yeah. Is he scheduled to work today?”
“Pauley? Bear with me here a minute. I’ll check.” I could hear her keyboard clicking in the background. “Yeah, we’ve got him on one till seven every day this week.”
“Does he usually show up for work?”
“Yeah, he’s okay. I think I told you he just made the transition from the half-way house to his own place. That’s potentially a difficult change for them. Like I said, I’m half expecting the other shoe to drop. They usually do something like throw a party for some girlfriends and pals and things tend to go downhill rather quickly from there.”
I was deep in thought.
“Dev? You still there?”
“Sorry, just thinking for a moment.”
“Look, I’d appreciate it if you decide to talk to him, that you did it off our premises. I don’t want any repercussions coming down on me or the business.”
“Repercussions? I’m a nice guy.”
“Yeah, you are, but you’re in tune with the, shall we say, social pool my employees come from.”
“Yeah, I get it. I won’t talk to him there, Karla.”
“Thanks. Hey, I better get back to work. Keep me posted.”
“I will, see ya.”
“Bye,” she said and hung up.
Pauley, Pauley, Pauley, I thought for a while. Then figured if I could look at the police file, I could study up on him, especially in relation to Amanda Richards and then maybe just take a peek around his new pad while he was at work this afternoon.
Chapter Thirty-Five
“In relation to what?” Aaron LaZelle asked. I’d phoned him as soon as I hung up with Karla.
“I told you I just wanted to see a file on a low-life named Pauley Kopff.”
“Wiseass with spiked hair? A four or five-time loser?”
“Oh, I don’t know, that number sounds a little low.”
“And let me ask again…this is in relation to…?”
“Like I said, the Desi Quinn murder. I’m still gathering information, but there seems to be a consistent pattern here with Gaston Driscoll flittering out there somewhere on the horizon.”
“Driscoll? You’re still on that kick. Dev, you’d have better luck trying to nail the Governor.”
“Yeah, believe me, I know. It’s still all circumstantial and I feel like I keep going around in circles, but the circles seem to be getting a little tighter.”
“How so?” Aaron asked.
“Again, all circumstantial,” I said, then told Aaron pretty much everything I knew, including Pauley stopping in at Dawn Miller’s home last night. I left out Marsha getting close with Gaston Enterprises, Pauley following Marsha home and me almost shooting him. As I was talking, I wished I’d gotten a license number on the Corvette parked in front of Pauley’s car. It may have been Gaston Driscoll’s. I made a note to have a romantic conversation with Donna at the DMV as soon as I was off the line with Aaron.
“I suppose we could bring him in, and I could have Manning sweat him for a couple of hours. He can be pretty good.”
I knew from some very unpleasant personal experience what it was like to be opposite Detective Norris Manning in an interrogation. The guy would like nothing better than to lock me up for life, just on general principles. I didn’t want to go anywhere near Manning.
“No, I don’t think that would be such a good idea.”
Aaron half laughed. “You still holding a grudge?”
“A grudge? Me? No, I just think the guy is a little too ‘by the book’ for my taste.”
“This coming from someone who has no book whatsoever,” Aaron said.
“And I’m not sure what it would accomplish. Pauley Kopff has probably been on the wrong side of an interrogation table since he was twelve. As good as Manning might be, I don’t think it would turn up anything new. If, as I suspect, Pauley is somehow working for that squeaky clean Driscoll, it would just serve to alert the two of them that something is up.”
“And you want to review our information on Pauley Kopff?”
“Yes. Maybe you could put one of your team on Kopff.”
“Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Let me see, the department is two investigators short and can’t replace them due to city-wide budget cuts. Did I mention everyone over here is working under a mandatory no-overtime policy? The team I have working Desi Quinn’s murder in normal times would have a caseload of seventeen other cases, all hanging fire. These days it’s probably double that.”
“Okay, okay, look, everything I’ll see in that file is probably public record stuff, but it would save me half a day of digging it out.” I waited a long minute. “You there, Aaron?”
“What? Yeah, sorry, just filling out the file review card. Stop in and see Madeline. This will be down there waiting for you in the next hour. Gotta run.” I heard him say to someone, “Come in, have a seat and close the door.” Then he hung up.
I wrote Louie a note on the bottom of the note he left for me, telling him I’d get coffee and doughnuts. I stopped at the grocery store on my way to see the always smiling Madeline down in the records department.
When the elevator doors opened to the musty basement, Madeline wasn’t smiling, but she was bleary-eyed. She never mentioned the file review card Aaron said would be waiting for me. Instead, I just wrote down Pauley’s name on a post it note and handed it to her. She more or less directed me with a clumsy wave of her hand toward the bank of cubicles, then swallowed, smiled and walked unsteadily back into the file area using the counter as a support, guide or both.
After fifteen minutes of waiting, I was ready to call out to her when she suddenly appeared with a three-inch file. She attempted to set the file down on the desk top, but as she did so, she sort of lurched forward and the contents fanned out across the Formica top like a deck of cards.
“Whoopsie.” She giggled, then staggered out to her desk where she picked up her thermos and disappeared into the ladies room.
I looked at my watch. It was eleven-fifteen in the morning.
I straightened the stack of forms, investigations, reports, interviews and assessments that made up the file on Pauley Kopff and began reading. It was modestly interesting and very depressing at the same time.
Pauley had been born Lester Palti Kopff in 1980. His mother was listed as a woman named Ruby Kopff, born in 1964. Which made her just sixteen when Pauley was brought into the world. Things went downhill from there. There was no mention of a father, responsible or otherwise.
I had been incorrect when I suggested to Aaron that Pauley had been on the wrong side of an interrogation table since he was twelve years old. He’d actually been eleven when he was hauled in on an arson charge for attempting to burn down his school. Juvenile sentencing was staid and Pauley was remanded to the custody of his grandmother, Emerald Mebbs. Emerald was back five months later, petitioning the court to take Pauley off her hands. Her petition was the last mention in the file of either Pauley’s mother or grandmother.
In and out of foster homes for the next three years, Pauley apparently tried the patience of some extremely patient people. At fifteen, he was sentenced to the juvenile facility in Red Wing, Minnesota on a series of burglary charges. He escaped from the Red Wing facility three weeks later. At age seventeen, he was sentenced to the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Saint Cloud where along with honing his criminal skills he learned the art of license plate stamping.
He was released in February of 1995 and promptly returned in November of that same year for possession with intent to distribute. This seemed to suggest a recurring pattern in Pauley’s life. Namely that if anyone was going to be caught, it would be him. Unfortunately, Pauley seemed incapable of ever lea
rning this basic lesson for himself.
There seemed to be nothing in the file that would suggest anything as serious as the murder of Desi Quinn, let alone Helen Olsen’s car falling through the ice or Bernadette Driscoll’s boat exploding. Still, there was a graduated series of offenses that over the course of a quarter of a century created a lot of problems for a good many people and in general made their life experience a lot less than it could have been. Collectively, the societal problem could be summed up in one word, Pauley.
It was close to two in the afternoon when I finished reading Pauley Kopff’s depressing biography. I needed to get out of the musty catacomb of the records area, out into the sunshine and maybe spend some time chasing down Pauley.
I carried the file out to Madeline’s desk, but she was nowhere to be found. I was tempted to take the file with me, but then I would have to kiss my access down here goodbye. I placed the file on her purple desk chair and then pushed the chair in so the file wasn’t just left sitting out in the open.
Chapter Thirty-Six
I drove past Karla’s, and couldn’t spot Pauley’s car, so I drove through the state lot across the street. There it was, parked in the middle of the lot, lost in an ocean of state employee vehicles parked around him. The LeSabre was still sporting stolen South Dakota plates. Once again I was tempted to let the air out of one of his tires, but decided to take the high road and drove over to his apartment to break in.
When I pulled up in front, there was a hopscotch game drawn on the sidewalk and the door was wedged open with a kid’s shoe, burgundy with neon orange laces. The shoe was the kind where the heel lit up every time a step was taken.
The dozen doorbells were all labeled, except for one, unit 205. I didn’t see Pauley’s name listed anywhere, so I gambled and went for the unlabeled unit. The apartment was up on the rear of the second floor, the last of three filthy doors on the right hand side of a dingy hallway. Apartment 205 had, by far, the filthiest door and was located next to a rear stairwell spray painted with some sort of illegible gang graffiti.
I knocked twice and nothing happened. I put my ear to the door, but couldn’t hear anything through the grime. I quietly turned the knob. The door was locked, but seemed pretty loose in the door frame. I felt around the molding above the top of the door for a key and came up empty handed. I pushed softly against the door, and it moved maybe three-eighths of an inch before it stopped. I could see the latch catch in the door frame, so with the assistance of my expired VISA card, I slipped the latch in under five seconds and the door suddenly creaked open.
I listened carefully and then called a soft “hello” before I stepped in and closed the door behind me. It was a small compact unit with a no-smoking sign tacked onto the back of the door. The place reeked of stale cigarette smoke and dope. Against the far wall was a grimy grey couch with navy blue trim around the seams of the three cushions. The end cushion on the right hand side was torn along the seam and yellowed foam rubber seeped out from a gaping slit. On the opposite end of the couch, a thin bed pillow, grayed and soiled was wedged in the corner. The whole affair looked like it should have been out on the boulevard with a sign marked “FREE”, which was probably how Pauley got it in the first place. Opposite the couch was a forty-two-inch flat screen TV that looked shiny and brand new. The flat screen was sitting on a stack of a half-dozen boxes, each one holding a brand new flat screen. Next to the flat screens was a pile of maybe a dozen iphones, and behind them a number of Toshiba laptops piled against the wall. Funny, I’d never pegged Pauley as the hi-tech type.
The wood floor was well-worn oak, long devoid of any finish, let alone wax, not that you could really tell with all the clothes scattered around. There were two empty Budweiser cases stacked at either end of the couch serving as an end table of sorts. A table lamp sporting a bare bulb and no shade sat on one of the beer case stacks. A coffee can filled with cigarette butts rested on top of the other.
Three unmatched dishes were on the floor in front of the couch. The one with the fork had remnants of what appeared to be chili or very old pasta. The other two held spoons and a grayed substance that had probably been milk at one time. An empty half pint of Jim Beam lingered just underneath the couch.
A light blue four-drawer chest stood against a wall leading into the kitchen area. A bottle of Phillips gin, two different cheap vodkas and a bottle of orange-flavored schnapps with barely a swallow remaining were scattered across the top along with what looked like a tuna fish can filled with more cigarette butts. The remnants of a large teddy bear sticker decorated the front of the top drawer. There was a rectangular mirror hanging on the wall above the dresser, the wood frame around the mirror was missing on one of the sides.
The kitchen consisted of an overflowing sink full of dirty dishes and dirty paper plates scattered across a small greasy counter. I cautiously opened the refrigerator. The light was out, but I could see an open bottle of ketchup, three hotdogs in a package that once held eight and a half bottle of Mountain Dew. I closed the refrigerator door using my foot.
The bathroom was at the rear of the small kitchen. I guessed I needed a whole slew of inoculations just to step inside the place. There was a dirty little sink with a dirtier little cracked mirror hanging above it. The tub had a shower surrounded by three walls of white plastic tile stained a rust color. Mold was growing along an area where half-a-dozen tiles were missing from the top course. Instead of a medicine cabinet there was a dusty, white metal shelf with circles of rust probably from wet cans of shave cream or bug spray left sitting there. Pauley had deodorant, an aftershave named Bad Boy, shave cream, toothpaste, a tooth brush, a razor and a container of Spiked Up Max Control that was missing the cap.
I went back to the blue dresser and searched the drawers. A couple of T-shirts were tossed in the top drawer. I guessed they’d been worn for maybe a day or two, then thrown back in there. The second drawer held boxers, a belt without a buckle, three photos of a much older woman lifting a grey sweatshirt over her head to expose herself, socks and one sandal.
The next drawer contained more clothing, none of it folded. The bottom drawer held two pairs of blue jeans, a tube of KY Intense Arousal Gel for Her and two rather large vibrators still glistening with lubricant. I decided not to touch any of it.
Hanging on the corner of the mirror were three plastic bead necklaces, the sort of necklace one either earned or gave away on Mardi Gras. Next to them hung a gold chain with a small gold Irish Claddagh medallion… hands holding the heart with a crown.
There was a small closet in the corner next to the couch, but nothing was on hangers. There were three jackets and another pair of jeans hanging from hooks attached to an unpainted board across the back wall. Two pairs of boots, three shoes and a sandal matching the one in the dresser drawer were thrown in a corner. Two baseball caps sat on the shelf and next to them was a silver roll of duct tape.
The duct tape got me thinking, and I went back into the bathroom and removed the top of the toilet tank. There was nothing in there but rust and water. I checked the back of the tank… nothing.
I looked beneath the little bathroom sink, and there on the backside of the sink was a plastic bag taped in place. Vintage Pauley, only the second place everyone would look.
The plastic bag held a small black pistol, a Beretta 950. It was maybe four-and-a-half inches long, three-and-a-half inches high, a .25 caliber. The sort of weapon you’d use for concealed back up, maybe in a coat pocket, on your ankle or in a purse.
I remembered when they wheeled Desi’s body out the ME had said to Aaron, “Looks to be a small caliber, if I had to guess I’d say maybe .22 short or a .25.”
That got me thinking about the gold Claddagh medallion on the mirror. There was no way I could ever prove it, but it sure looked like the one Desi had worn the day I turned her down. I left it hanging on the mirror and decided to flee the scene before
I contracted some weird disease.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I hadn’t taken more than two steps back into the hallway when I heard laughing and heavy stomping coming up the front stairwell. I ducked down the back stairs and out of sight just as the voices entered the second floor. One of them sounded stupid enough to be Pauley.
“Just playing hard to get. I know she wants it.”
“What she wants is to be left alone,” another voice said, followed by guffaws and giggles.
I heard the apartment door creak open and Pauley said, “Hey, what the fuck?”
“You don’t lock your door?”
“Pretty sure I did. You guys notice that de Ville parked out front?”
“De Ville?”
That was my cue to get out of there before I was spotted. I stepped into the first floor hall just as an apartment door opened and a rather obese woman in a purple T-shirt waddled out using her walker.
“Who are you?” she snarled.
I smiled, nodded and kept on moving.
“I said, who are you? Hey, you, what are you doing in here? I’m going to call the police,” she screamed after me.
As I picked up speed, I heard footsteps thundering down the rear stairway.
“Stop him, I think he wanted to rape me,” the woman growled.
“There he goes,” a voice yelled just as I flew out the front door, running toward my car. I had just slipped behind the wheel when the front door to the building burst open. Pauley and two exceedingly large guys screeched to a stop and looked up and down the street searching for their prey, me.
They zeroed in on my car as I fired up the engine. Pauley yelled something, but I couldn’t make out what he said and didn’t see any wisdom in asking him to repeat himself.
