Broken Doll by Burl Barer Page B

and I have a receipt that says the second, that was seven minutes after midnight, so it would be Sunday, so I know it was Saturday night that I saw him.”
    Despite his acknowledged intoxication, Jaaskela’s recollection was remarkably clear. “The Sports Center was closing, so it must have been at least ten or ten-thirty, thereabouts. I know the time because the bartender took a half hour to get me a beer. I was sitting there and I asked Kevin for another beer, but he wouldn’t serve me because I was already drunk. I ordered a beer and it took about a half hour before he would give it to me.”
    The loquacious inebriant downed his beer and was preparing to stumble toward the door when his old pal Richard “Animal” Clark came in. “He had his aunt Vicki with him,” recalled Jaaskela. “They were told that they couldn’t order a drink ’cause the place was closing.
    â€œThe three of us proceeded to go down to the Aaron’s Restaurant and Lounge so we could have some drinks down there. It was me, Richard, and Vicki, and we probably got there between ten-thirty and quarter to eleven. We stayed long enough for two drinks,” explained Jaaskela. Realizing not everyone conceptualizes time in relation to alcohol consumption, he added, “About half an hour is approximately enough for two drinks.
    â€œActually, to be precise,” he clarified, “I had one drink, Richard had a beer and a straight shot of tequila, and Vicki had a beer, two rum and Cokes, I think. I’m pretty sure. I had a rum and Coke myself.”
    Richard Clark and Mike Jaaskela left Aaron’s together. “We were walking by the First Interstate Bank and I asked Richard, ‘Should you be leaving your aunt alone?’ I asked if she had any money, and he said she did. I asked him if she had a hundred, you know, he said no. I said, ‘Well, she have two hundred?’ He said no. I said, ‘Well, does she have three hundred?’ And he said yeah, she has about three hundred dollars, and I said, ‘Well, you’re leaving her with some guy down at the bar that you know that could peel her for all her money’. I said she’s about three-sheets-to-the-wind drunk, she’s literally plastered. And I said, ‘Well, why don’t we go back and peel her for her three hundred dollars? Let’s scam her or steal her three hundred dollars.’”
    Richard’s response, Jaaskela reported, was uncharacteristically conservative. “He seemed really distant or something. He didn’t want to do it. That struck me strange because other times he would have took it. Boom! He would jump at the chance to rip somebody off for three hundred dollars, you know.”
    Perhaps the prospect of peeling his beloved Aunt Vicki violated Clark’s moral code. “Oh no, that wasn’t it,” said Jaaskela. “He don’t have one of those. Anyway, I kept on trying to get him to come back and try to go get Aunt Vicki. Why leave her there with three hundred dollars? I stopped him about three times to make sure that he didn’t want to go back.”
    The main reason for Richard Clark’s reluctance, Jaaskela believed, was Clark’s increased paranoia of the Everett police. “He said he was just afraid the police might get him or pull him over. He was really paranoid at this point about the police pulling him over. He’s never been paranoid before about being pulled over, you know, because he don’t have a driver’s license, he don’t have no insurance. He had nothin’ to worry about anyway, but he just didn’t want to see the police. He didn’t want to see the police, period, at all.
    â€œNow, by this time, he was really buzzed. He was pretty well drunk. He was legally drunk,” asserted Jaaskela. “From that point, we kept on walking down to his aunt Carol’s house and we got in his van and he chopped up some