Shane Resznik was, as promised, a weasely-looking guy with bleached hair and a scruffy goatee and the general vibe of someone who always yells “Play ‘Free Bird’” at live bands to be funny. He had a full set of social media profiles but didn’t seem to use them much, and he also had a conviction on his record from four years earlier—a first-degree misdemeanor theft charge. That didn’t tell me a whole lot, but Vincent Pomp had said that Resznik was a bit of a weasel, so it seemed like a good bet that his weaseldom and this conviction were somehow related.
I called Tom and wrote down Resznik’s address while the phone rang.
“Please don’t say you have to cancel for tomorrow,” he said in lieu of a hello. In the background, I could hear the sound of various tense conversations around the small cubicle warren that constituted the detective bureau.
“I’m not. This is work.”
“Okay, good.”
“You don’t even know what it is.”
“I don’t care. As long as you aren’t cancelling. Pam set a New Year’s resolution for us to socialize more.”
“The worst.”
I heard a smile in his voice. “So far it’s just been with her friends, though.”
“That is the worst, then,” I said.
“No, the worst is that instead of calling it a resolution, she calls it an intention.”
“Obviously didn’t grow up Catholic.”
“Exactly. That word will never not remind me of Monsignor Maloney.”
The line fell silent. I didn’t like making fun of Pam with him, but I also couldn’t help it. Tom changed the subject. “Anyway, what did you need?”
I explained about Shane Resznik’s record and he said that he’d email the reports right over to me.
“Also,” I said, “do you know a guy, Michael Dillman? He was possibly in the homicide division at some point?”
“Mickey? Sure, yeah. Why?”
“What’s his deal?”
“His deal? He used to be the second-shift supervisor up here, up till maybe three years ago? He kept having issues with his back though, kept going out on leave, coming back, going out, till finally he took a transfer to something in Administrative.”
I thought about that. If Dillman hadn’t been in the homicide unit for three years, why was he still using business cards with that phone number? “Is he still with the department?”
“As far as I know.”
“What’s he do in Administrative?”
“I’m not sure. There are a lot of units under that umbrella.”
“Like R and D?”
“As in, research and development?”
“I guess.”
“Do we even have that?”
“All I know is, I’m trying to reach him but can’t. Or he’s avoiding me.”
“Drop Frank’s name. They were pretty close.”
“Humph,” I said.
“See you tomorrow,” he said before we hung up, “and if you bail now, I’m going to take it as a personal attack.”
I called Dillman again and left another voice mail, this one laying it on thick about my father. Then I stood in the kitchen and slathered some peanut butter on a small stack of crackers while I waited for the email from Tom about Resznik, and when I returned to my desk, there it was. I skimmed the Ohio Uniform Offense report for details; the victim was listed as a beverage distribution company off of Fisher Road on the west side, which had been Resznik’s employer at the time. The complaint alleged that Resznik had stolen nine hundred bucks over the course of a year on his delivery route, by pocketing a little here and there from cash transactions and pulling funny business with his paperwork to make it look like everything balanced out. I raised my eyebrows as I read. I’d done a few embezzlement cases, always well beyond the misdemeanor cap of a thousand dollars. Small businesses rarely tried to press charges for small amounts, opting instead to fire the asshole and be done with it—restitution often took years and years, which meant signing up for the hassle of a criminal complaint without even getting paid back before they went out of business—so the fact that the beverage distributor had done so either meant they were extremely patient or else holding a massive grudge against Resznik.
If he was trying to embezzle from Vincent Pomp, a criminal complaint would probably be the least of his worries.
He lived in a Goodale Park town house, one of the units facing west toward the hideous fountain. On a day like today, its frozen spray of water looked like a glacial formation. When I knocked on the door, though, he didn’t answer. An angry woman did. She had wide blue eyes that were very puffy and very red. “Who the fuck are you?”
I took a small step back. “My name—”
“Like I give a fuck what your name is?”
I said, “You literally just asked who—”
“Shut the hell up. Where’s Shane?”
“That’s why I’m—”
“Where is he?” She practically screamed it, seemingly startling herself. “He’s such a piece of shit.”
No one who knew Shane Resznik was giving him much of a reco.
“Do you know where he is?” She was about thirty, blond, with tanning-bed skin and long, airbrushed nails. “I’ve just been waiting, like a fucking idiot, and I haven’t slept, and I’m just going to go crazy in here.”
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Lisette.”
“I’m Roxane. Can I come in?”
She shook her head. “It’s such a mess.”
“That’s okay.”
“It’s not okay.”
“Well, Lisette, how about we go get a cup of coffee or something. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
“I look like shit.”
“You’re beautiful,” I said. “And besides, it’s winter. Everybody’s just trying not to slip and fall on their asses.”
Lisette gave me a small smile, calming down some.
A few minutes later we were sitting at a table in the back of One Line Coffee with a mug of single-drip for her and a chai latte for me. Lisette insisted on wearing sunglasses, so I felt like I was interviewing somebody famous.
“So you really didn’t sleep with him?”
“Really,” I said. “I’ve never even met him. I just want to talk to him about Nightshade. But he hasn’t been home in a few days?”
“The last time I saw him was when he left for work on Wednesday night. He said he’d be home at the regular time. But he wasn’t.” She paused to sip her coffee. “I know what that place is like. Technically, I’m one of the owners. I gave Shane the money for it, not that he’d ever let anyone know that.”
That didn’t exactly make her an owner. “Oh?”
She nodded somberly. “Couple years ago, I got in a bad car wreck. You know that guy Kevin Kurgis, with the commercials? I don’t get paid unless YOU get paid?” She dropped her voice into a decent facsimile.
“Sure.”
“Well, it’s no joke. I can’t work anymore, I can’t drive, he got me paid, okay? This was when Shane was out of work and he talked me into fronting him most of the money for the stupid bar. Like whose lifelong dream is to own a shitty nightclub?” She cleared her throat. “He said it was a good investment. The place had been in business for years but was struggling under bad management. The way he acted, it would practically be like printing our own money, it was gonna make so much. Fucking idiot. This isn’t the first time, you know.”
“The first time he didn’t come home?”
Another nod. “It’s happened lots of times. He’s probably in some nasty vagina right now, trying—” She cleared her throat again as several other customers looked up at us. “Shane gets carried away. Too much coke, too many pretty girls. He’ll hole up in a motel for a while and then, when he’s out of money, he’ll be back.”
“Any particular motel?” I said, then lowered my voice. “Or a particular, um, nasty vagina?”
Lisette sniffed. “This rathole on East Main, with an old-timey name. East Side Motor Lodge, I think. It’s right by a UPS store. He lived there when I met him, if you can believe it.”
I said, “The UPS store?”
She smiled a little. “The motel. I knew there was something going on with her.”
For a second I thought she was about to say Addison and I felt my heartbeat speed up. “Who?”
“This goth chick from the bar. Long black hair but a real dummy, you know, with the fake tits and no bra?”
The woman at the next table got up in disgust. It was possible that I could never come back here.
“And she works at Nightshade too?”
“She’s a bartender.”
“Know her name?”
Lisette shook her head and pushed up her sunglasses to rub her eyes. “So why do you want to talk to him about Nightshade?”
After almost thirty minutes of talking about him, she was finally curious as to why. “Well,” I said, “I’m actually trying to find someone else who works there. Addison Stowe? She’s a deejay.”
Lisette shook her head. “I barely ever go there anymore. I just know that something’s going on with this one chick, because we ran into her at the movies and he wouldn’t really introduce me. I never heard of any girl deejay. So you just want to ask Shane about that?”
I nodded. “That, and the club was closed last night, and I’m curious about why. Like, if something happened.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. But this woman, Addison, was very upset about something early Thursday morning near Nightshade, and now she’s AWOL, the club is unexpectedly closed, and Shane is AWOL too. It’s a little strange.”
Lisette didn’t say anything for a while, just sipped her coffee. Finally she said, “Well, that’s a little weird. Maybe they got busted again. For the IDs.”
“Is that what you think happened?”
“I think that Shane’s a piece of shit.”
“I gathered that,” I said.