Beer Money (A Burr Ashland Mystery) Read online

  Beer Money

  by

  Dani Amore

  Praise for Dani Amore

  “Dani Amore writes fast-paced, gripping tales that capture you from Page One and hold you enthralled till the last word. This lady is one hell of a storyteller.”

  -J.D. Rhoades

  “Dani Amore is a sensation among readers who love fast-paced thrillers.”

  -Mystery Tribune

  “Amore is definitely one to watch."

  -Edgar-nominated author Craig McDonald

  "Dani Amore's writing reminds me of the great thriller writers -- lean, mean, no nonsense prose that gets straight to the point and keeps you turning those pages."

  -Robert Gregory Browne

  "… a superbly written thriller...a tour de force."

  -Bookiio.com

  "Dead Wood is a fast-paced, unpredictable mystery with an engaging

  narrator and a rich cast of original supporting characters."

  --Thomas Perry, Edgar-winning author of The Butcher's Boy.

  "As gritty as the Detroit streets where it's set, Dead Wood grabs you early

  on and doesn't let go. As fine a debut as you'll come across this

  year, maybe any year."

  -author Tom Schreck

  BEER MONEY is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the author.

  Copyright ©2012 by Dani Amore

  All rights reserved.

  Also by Dani Amore

  The Circuit Rider

  The Killing League

  Death by Sarcasm

  Dead Wood

  To Find a Mountain

  Bullet River

  The Garbage Collector #1

  Hanging Curve

  Scale of Justice

  Beer Money

  by

  Dani Amore

  “…and beer gushes to be churned to blood…”

  -Virginia Woolf

  One

  Hit the ground running.

  Strong hands held him by his shoulders. Pulled him toward the window.

  The words reverberated in his head.

  Hit the ground running.

  A piece of advice he'd picked up from his father. Or maybe his high school football coach. Maybe a late-night war movie.

  He tried to hold his feet steady against the floor but his legs buckled. His body numb. He blinked away the bloody film covering his eyes. The glass in the window was the heavy kind, with the undulating warped surface and beveled edges. It reminded him of the first house he and Emily had ever owned. An old, run-down Victorian on the East Side.

  He felt the hands shift on his body. One moved to the back collar of his sportcoat, the other grabbed the back of his belt. The memory of the glass windows, of that first house, popped through his mind flashbulb-quick.

  Suddenly, he felt his feet leave the ground and his body was propelled through the air with astonishing speed. He felt nothing as he crashed into the glass. His skull punched a hole in the thick window and then he was pushed through.

  When his shoulders hit the window the entire frame of glass exploded outward. The noise rang in his ears, registered somewhere far away in his mind. Jagged shrapnel buried itself in his chest arms and shoulders. Raked giant, bloody furrows down through his legs.

  And then he was falling.

  Through the numbing gauze of his brain, a distant part of him felt the cold wind on his face. It reminded him of tobogganing in the harsh Wisconsin winters. When he’d once built a ramp of ice-covered snow, imagining himself to be Evil Kenievel flying over rows of motorcycles.

  Now there was no sense of childhood adventure. He was an objective viewer watching the cold unyielding earth rush toward him.

  His body turned in the air, became perfectly vertical. He hit standing up. The force of the fall drove him to the ground. His legs, cracked and broken, folded beneath him.

  He slammed into the concrete. His arms splayed out from his sides.

  Blood seeped from the corner of his mouth.

  His pupils dilated.

  He knew something was wrong. That his body didn't work. And that it would never work again. He thought then of his ex-wife, snapshots from the honeymoon in Jamaica. The first house on Huron Street. A few good years and then the beginning of the end of the marriage. A slow dissolve to black.

  A door banged open in the distance. Footsteps approached. Crunched on the pieces of glass. He heard moaning and realized it was coming from somewhere deep in his chest, bubbling in his throat. He ran his tongue over his cracked lips. Tasted the salt from the sidewalk.

  The visions of his ex-wife left him and now he thought of Julie. Her green eyes. Her smile. Her laugh. She was his new lease on life. In the dim recess of his mind where logical thought hadn't yet been extinguished, he understood the current irony of that thought. A small cluster of agony rose within him. He just wished he could say good-bye to Julie.

  A low fog began to drift over the image in his mind, and through it, he saw a figure standing before him.

  "Please..." was all he could muster. Blackness rained over and around him.

  "Professor Bantien," the shape said. The dying man heard something metallic. Tried to place the sound. Something to do with a gun. Bullets. "Look on the bright side," the shadowy figure said. "All these years studying history…and now you actually get to become it.”

  The barrel of the gun was pressed to the dying man's head. He closed his eyes.

  The gunshot echoed in the darkness.

  Two

  I watched the bartender pour me another beer. It was one of my favorite beers in the whole world, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember its name at that moment. How many had I had?

  Well, there’s strength in numbers, I thought. Who said that? Patton?

  “What, for me?” I said as she slid the glass of pure deliciousness in front of me. Her name was Kimmie. The bartender. Not the beer. The beer’s name was something that ended with the word Pilsner.

  “Thirsty today, Burr?” she said to me. Kimmie smiled and I thought she was awfully cute. Which was strange, because I seemed to recall only yesterday that she sort of looked like a cross between Fidel Castro and an alpaca.

  “I’m getting over a cold, need plenty of liquids,” I said.

  Kimmie nodded and moved off to take the orders of a couple of newly arrived customers.

  I checked my watch.

  It was almost ten o’clock. I tried to remember if I had any appointments the next morning. No, I did not. And then I tried to remember if I had any appointments at all the next day. Maybe.

  I looked at my glass. How could it be half gone already? Damn beer thieves, they were the worst. Probably used a long straw when I wasn’t watching.

  I quickly drank the rest before the thieves returned and ordered another. This would be my last.

  “Close out my tab, too, please,” I said to Kimmie.

  As I was signing the bill and appreciating the beauty of the new beer, so much sexier than the old beer, my cell phone buzzed.

  "This is Burr." My name is Michael Ashland, but “Burr” was my nickname from high school, given to me by my football coach. I had been a defensive back and my coach had liked the way I attached myself to the opponent's wide receivers.

  Quite literally, the name stuck.


  "Burr." The nervous voice on the other end of the line belonged to Fred Pip, a low-budget local commercial director, and a friend from way back.

  "I'm worried," he said.

  "Of course you are Fred." I said. "That's what you do for a living. If you didn't have something to worry about, you couldn't survive. It'd be like Mother Theresa suddenly deciding she needed to pamper herself for a change."

  "Burr, I'm serious. And worried." Fred did in fact sound very serious and quite worried.

  Fred was a sweet guy; there was no getting around it. I read once that altruism is the highest form of human development. Whether or not it's true, I don't know. But there were two things I could say about Fred Pip with the utmost certainty. He was gay. And a better man than I would ever be.

  "So what are your worried about, Fred? Studios in Hollywood tracked you down?" Fred had the biggest movie collection I'd ever seen in my life. He’d gone from illegally taping them to illegally downloading them. He was always shoving DVDs and hard drives full of movies at me. And then, at his insistence, I would have to call him the minute I finished watching one so we could 'discuss.'

  "Have you heard from Tim?" he asked.

  "'About a week ago." I said.

  "Well..."

  "What?" I asked.

  "Uh, we were supposed to have lunch yesterday...he should have called me." Fred sounded hurt and worried. Like the parent of a wayward child.

  "Well let's get his face on a milk carton right away, Fred," I said.

  "I've been trying to track him down," Fred said. "He's nowhere to be found." His voice was rising, heading for the Panic Zone.

  "I'm really worried, Burr," he said.

  "He's probably at the library, trapped in a study cubicle," I said. I giggled a little, then let a beer belch slide out through my nose.

  "And he sent me something weird, like, two days ago," Fred said. He'd lowered his voice. "It makes no sense because he was going to see me yesterday," Fred said.

  "What is it?” I asked. "Some type of masturbatory accessory? "

  "It looks like film...I haven't watched it yet."

  "Okay," I said. "Did you try Emily?" Emily Lyons was Tim's ex-wife.

  "No."

  I sighed. I had just finished up a divorce case. Photos of the client’s wife with the reserve center for the Milwaukee Bucks had sealed the deal.

  “Okay, I’ll stop by tomorrow,” I said. “Put some beer in the fridge.”

  Three

  It had been a rough night. I silently cursed Kimmie the bartender. Why had she kept shoving those beers at me? What kind of masochist was she?

  From the bed, I could see snowflakes falling on the Dutch Elm tree outside my window. Big splotchy flakes that fell with nearly audible plops.

  I swung my feet off the bed and sat upright. The pounding in my head was persistent but had no rhythm. Like a country band on its first rehearsal.

  The clock read just past nine.

  I went into the kitchen, started the coffee, then started the shower.

  The doorbell rang while I was shampooing my hair. I got out of the shower, toweled off, threw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and answered the door.

  Oh no.

  The woman facing me was Detective Gabby Engle. She was a homicide cop with the Milwaukee Police Department. We had crossed paths several times on other cases, and the experience had always been pretty unpleasant. Don’t get me wrong, she was wonderful to look at. She was into marathons and triathalons and all that crap, a total hardbody. And her face had the kind of chiseled beauty that wouldn’t fade, but I wasn’t exactly a charter member of the Gabby fan club. Because she was a hardass, both literally and figuratively.

  “Hello Mr. Ashland,” she said.

  I could see something in her face. And suddenly, I knew she was here about Tim.

  "What happened?" I asked.

  "Tim Bantien’s been murdered," she said.

  "How?" I managed to ask. I felt dizzy, like I’d entered some kind of alternate reality.

  She flipped open her notebook. "Well, it appears that he was beaten first, then thrown out of a three-story window," she said. "It's hard to tell, though, because he’d been worked over pretty thoroughly. Plus, the glass cut him up real bad.”

  It was hard to imagine. I felt dizzy, the struggle to picture one of my best friends dead.

  "And then it looked like he was shot," Gabby continued. "Although, the coroner says so many of his bones were broken that there was a chance he was already dead.” She flipped her notebook closed. Watched me.

  "You were listed at the university as the person to contact in case of an emergency,” she said, her voice sounding even, but somehow accusing.

  “Suspects?” I said, forcing myself to stay calm.

  Gabby shook her head. “Do you have any idea why someone would've wanted to kill him?"

  “Are you fucking kidding me? Tim is-“ my voice caught - " an overgrown Boy Scout. He doesn't have a mean bone in his body."

  "You have no idea what your friend would have been doing around midnight in an abandoned building near the Third Ward?" Her voice sounded almost skeptical.

  “No.”

  "Relax, Mr. Ashland,” she said. “I’m not here for you. I’m just trying to find out what happened to your friend. I'm not even going to ask you where you were the night Bantien was murdered."

  She looked at me. I didn't respond.

  "Was anything going on in his personal life that you knew about?” Gabby said. “Major upheavals?"

  "Tim got divorced a year and a half ago,” I said.

  "Anyone new in his life?"

  "Not that I know of."

  "Was he under any kind of financial strain?'

  "I don’t think so."

  She put her notebook away.

  "Then I guess that's it for now, Mr. Ashland,” she said. “I may have some more questions for you later. Are you planning on leaving town during the holidays?"

  "No."

  "You know, my chief is a stickler for details. I probably should ask you where you were last night. Sometime between eleven and one in the morning."

  "I was here. At home."

  "Any witnesses who can verify that?"

  "No."

  She waited.

  "People," she said finally. "They're never around when you need 'em."

  Four

  Hoopin' Productions, Fred's company, was in an 1850 Italianate on Jefferson, across from the foul Ed Debevic's that filled the air with the smell of overpriced and undercooked hamburger.

  There was a law firm on the first floor, and a special effects company on the second floor. I took the elevator up to the third floor.

  The doors opened onto Fred's lobby, which stood in stark contrast to the one downstairs. Modern sculptures on white pedestals held prominent positions throughout the lobby. The sculptures were busts. Distorted faces with bright colors and warped images.

  It being Saturday, the place was empty. I turned to the left, went through a doorway, then down another long hallway to the kitchen.

  A second hallway branched off from the kitchen to the main editing suite. All of the offices were empty and dark.

  My footsteps echoed in the empty space. I got to the last door in the hallway. Through the smoked glass door, I could see that a light was on inside, so I opened the door and stepped in.

  The room was large. A bank of monitors and editing equipment took up one wall. Facing it was a long, irregularly shaped desk. Panels overlapped at strange angles. A Cubist desk.

  A single chair sat empty in front of the main controls. A four-foot section of desk jutted out from the main console, where two chairs were placed side-by-side, for Fred's clients. On the desk was a pad of paper and a pen, as well as a telephone.

  The light in the tape room was on. It was a small room just off the editing suite.

  I could hear someone moving around, flipping switches and closing plastic cases.

  A moment later, Fred emerge
d from the room and closed the door behind him. He had on blue jeans, snowmobile boots and a thick, gray sweater. His skin was pale, his face pinched and drawn. His light brown hair was pressed down as always, and his eyes peeked out from behind his big, thick black glasses.

  Today there were dark circles under his eyes. The same kind that were under mine. We had already talked and I’d told him about my visit from the Gabby Engel.

  "This is awful, Burr," he said.

  I sat down in a chair across from his editing console. "The only way it can get worse," I said, "is if we can't nail the bastard who did this." I was thirsting not for vengeance, but simply to figure out what had happened. Once I had a name, the vengeance part might come into play, but I needed to focus on first things first.

  "The cops..." Fred said.

  "...are going to get some help," I said. " Whether or not Gabby likes it, she’s got two new partners. Three heads are better than one.”

  “But-“ Fred started.

  “The fact that she was asking me questions, asking me where I was when Tim was murdered? That tells me she doesn’t have a fucking clue who did this. Now, she’s not the kind of cop who’s going to ask for help. So I’m going to take the initiative and provide it to her, free of charge.”

  Fred faced the equipment that represented at least a quarter of a million dollars worth of film editing technology. I could see him hesitate. Noticed the slump in his shoulders like he was already defeated. I thought of pushing him, of lighting a fire under him, but I knew he had to do it himself. Finally, he let out a long sigh, sat up to the console, punched a few buttons and several of the monitors blinked.

  “I don’t think it’s such a good idea,” Fred said. His voice was soft, but almost paternal. I realized he needed to say it to satisfy his conscience, that he’d gotten it on the record. It would make him feel better, and that was the important thing.

  “Duly noted,” I said.