He nodded. “He's at the Health Center sometimes, too."
I was starting to like Brockhouse. He didn't make me beg for information.
"How about the dead guy? Petak have any link to him?"
"You never know. Sometimes one gets on another's nerves, next thing knives are out, or bottles are broken. Or, I suppose, fires started. Scrappers have their own rules."
I thanked him for his time, started to leave, but stopped at the door. Brockhouse wasn't a Rivertown name. “College man?” I asked.
He grinned. “Northwestern. Bachelor's in Criminology."
It didn't make sense, not in Rivertown. Unless...
"What's your mother's maiden name?” I asked.
He gave me the name of the mayor, and the village clerk, and the two village trustees.
I left, grinning too. Maybe there was hope for Rivertown if the lizard DNA was beginning to get washed by universities.
* * * *
At first glance, the Sherman Stamping Works squatted low in the heart of Rivertown exactly as it had for eighty years, a four-block long, dark brick building hard by the railroad tracks. But then the eye picked up the double row of shattered windows, the rust on the hundreds of yards of rail siding. And the newest indignity, the rubble of scorched bricks lying where an entire wing had stood.
I walked through an opening made jagged by its doors being ripped away, and entered one of the main stamping rooms. It was a huge brick cavern, at least two hundred feet long. Fenders and floor pans had been punched out of sheets of steel there once, but now puddles of rain water lay between the square concrete islands where the presses had stood. High up on the dark trusses, pigeons fluttered at my intrusion, and then went silent. There were no light fixtures, no hardware on the windows. The gutted building still stood because land wasn't worth anything anymore, not in Rivertown.
The pigeons started fluttering again. Above the rustling of their wings came a slight pinging sound. Somebody was hammering.
The huge room led into another great hall, identical to the first except that the concrete pads were smaller and set closer together, for smaller machines. A man in stained, torn clothing was using a claw hammer and a chisel to loosen the clinker bricks on an interior wall. A scrapper.
I gave the room a cough.
The scrapper turned. I raised my hands. “Got somebody who likes old bricks?"
He gave me the once-over, decided I wasn't a cop, and nodded his head. “A couple of snazzers in a Mercedes Benz. They'll give me twenty bucks for a hundred of them."
"If you load them in their trunk?"
He looked at me, confused. “Sure."
They must have been real snazzers if they were throwing around money like that.
"You know Wildcat Ernie?” I asked.
"This about Albert?"
I pulled out a twenty—a trunkload of bricks, in the current currency of the realm—and handed it to him. “Ernie fingered Albert for setting the fire."
"Lots of guys come here. Could have been anybody set that fire."
"Did you know the dead guy?"
"Never seen him, and I been around here plenty. I think he just wandered in that night. Bad luck, him getting dead."
"Ernie around?"
"Not since the fire. Heard he came into some jingle. He's roosting at the Health Center."
"How well do you know Albert?"
"People keep to themselves."
"Albert set fires?"
"If he did, he had a reason."
I thought about that, walking out: A man has to have a reason.
* * * *
The Rivertown Health Center used to be a residential YMCA. That was back when people came to Rivertown to make new things in the factories and new starts in their lives. Nowadays, the factories were dead, and all that got made in Rivertown were the girls who worked the curbs along Thompson Avenue, and the bets in the barrooms behind them. But the Health Center still served as a transient center, except now its guests were in transition either to the viaducts or to the afterlife. I'd stayed there for a night, once, in a room just vacated by someone who'd expired in the remains of his supper. One night had been enough.
"Wildcat Ernie,” I said to the grizzled gentleman at the desk.
He shook his head. Whether in refusal or incomprehension, I couldn't tell.
I flashed a five-dollar bill. Everything is cheap at the Rivertown Health Center.
"Four-twelve,” he said.
I didn't bother with the elevator. Even if it was operating, there was no certainty its ancient motor would hum all the way up to the fourth floor. And there was the likelihood it was already occupied by a passed-out resident, similarly unable to hum his way up to his room.
Four-twelve was two damp spots past the stairs. The door was slightly open.
So, too, were Wildcat Ernie's eyes. But the rest of him had closed down for good. He lay on the thin mattress, a dead man in a flannel shirt, clutching an empty bottle of Gentleman Jack. The pockets of his stained blue pants had been pulled out. He'd been tossed, post-mortem, probably by another resident. Death, too, was cheap at the Rivertown Health Center.
I saw no marks, no blood. I rolled him onto his side. There was a second bottle of Gentleman Jack beneath him. This one was full. Whoever had plundered Wildcat Ernie had missed it.
I looked around the room. It seemed to be furnished identically to the blur in my memory of my own stay: metal bed, chipped pine dresser, one small bulb hanging from the ceiling, a ripped vinyl shade drooping, unsprung, over the window.
There was another empty Gentleman Jack bottle lying in the corner.
A three-pack of Gentleman Jack. Booze enough to float Wildcat Ernie into oblivion.
I went down the stairs, walked past the desk to the front stoop. I had to call the cops. But first I had to call my client. The Queen of France put me right through.
"Big news, Harry: I just found the guy who fingered Petak dead at the Rivertown Health Center."
He fired up his smoke-eating fan, then his lighter. “Won't help,” he said, exhaling. “The cops didn't take a chance on Ernie disappearing. They videotaped him making his statement.” He took another drag. “Cops there?"
"I called you first."
He blew smoke at our connection, but no more words.
"He drank himself to death, Harry. With Gentleman Jack."
"What are you saying?"
"Gentleman Jack, Harry. That's the good stuff, twenty-five bucks a bottle. He had three bottles. That took jingle."
"Obviously he made some money, if he could afford Gentleman Jack."
"Booze like that never makes it into the Health Center. The residents buy cheap, to stretch the buzz."
"Whatever."
"Somebody gave him those three bottles."
"Doesn't matter. We're screwed. No hope now of tripping up his testimony."
I left him to his little fan and clicked off.
Brockhouse was in. I told him I'd just found his chief witness drowned in whiskey. He muttered something appropriately profane. I said I'd be outside, waiting.
The ambulance siren came in less than two minutes. Brockhouse was right behind it. He let me follow them up the stairs. The medical techs took a second to verify that the spirit of Wildcat Ernie had indeed left the building, and then stepped back to allow Brockhouse to look around. He was thorough, and respectful of the man dead on the bed.
As he finished, he shook his head at Wildcat Ernie's pulled pockets. “Whatever he had has been plucked."
I pointed to the full bottle on the bed. “Except for Gentleman Jack."
He turned to look at me. “What do you make of that?"
"Twenty-five bucks a bottle."
"I wouldn't know. I'm still paying off my college loan."
"Three bottles of that stuff doesn't fit here."
He nodded slowly, then said, “Good thing your man Petak is locked up solid with an alibi. He has motive."
"Harry Ruffino says thi
s screws Petak. Now there's no chance to take apart Ernie's videotaped identification."
"There is that tape; yes.” Then, nodding at the dead man, he said, “We'll autopsy."
"You're kidding.” Drunks never got autopsied in Rivertown.
"He was the chief witness in a murder case. But like you, I'm seeing alcohol poisoning."
"Good alcohol,” I said.
"Too good, if it's twenty-five bucks a bottle."
"It took jingle,” I said.
* * * *
I met Albert in the same basement room. Again he scanned the corners, too concerned with vermin to be interested in the pack of Marlboros and book of matches I'd set on the table.
"Wildcat Ernie is dead,” I said.
His eyes worked the baseboards between the corners. “There's rats here."
"So you said, the last time. I need more, Albert."
He looked down, saw the cigarettes. He picked them up, put them in his pocket. “There is nothing more. I didn't set that fire."
"Why did you get fingered?"
"I was convenient."
"For what? Why would Wildcat Ernie give a damn?"
He smiled a little as he stood up. “Thanks for the smokes.” He went to the door, knocked, and was let out.
I started to reach for the matches he'd forgotten. But I didn't need them. I left them on the table.
The Queen of France told me Harry was gone for the day. I asked her to give me his voicemail.
"You can tell me,” she murmured Frenchly.
"I'll bet,” I said. “Tell Harry that I got nothing from Albert Petak. Tell him I still owe him a few hours."
"Merci."
"I'll bet."
* * * *
That evening, after microwaving something that was pictured to taste like haddock but went down like paneling adhesive, I brought coffee up to the roof to sit in the night air. I was hoping the coffee would cleanse the chemical taste from my mouth and the mud from my mind.
It wasn't just the Gentleman Jack that was nagging. There was the motive for the fire. The homeless man who'd burned to death was new to town; nobody alleged that Albert had even known him. That made the dead man an accidental victim. And that left the more obvious, and the more usual, motive for the fire: jingle.
Looking out that evening at the jumble of neon from the honky tonks, and the headlights of the slow-cruising parade of johns looking for fast love on the cheap, it was easy to see an insurance motive. Crime for money, big and small, made Rivertown run. Someone had paid Albert to torch the husk of the stamping works, to collect on a policy.
But it didn't explain Wildcat Ernie's bottles of booze.
And it didn't explain Albert's almost insolent indifference.
I knew a guy who worked for the county. First thing the next morning, I called, asking him to find out who carried the insurance on the Sherman Stamping Works. Then, switching gears in my clever brain, I spent the rest of the morning sanding wood.
He phoned me back before noon. “You owe me, Elstrom."
"I'd have it no other way."
"The Sherman Stamping Works has been in bankruptcy for years, but the factory was never seized. Call it...” He paused, not wanting to offend me by being honest about my hometown.
"...the fact that Rivertown real estate is worthless? Who carries the insurance?"
"No insurance."
My certainty vanished like smoke into Harry's machine.
"However, I did discover something interesting,” he went on. “All the back taxes were recently paid up."
"How recently?"
He gave me a date that was two days after the fire.
Paying up the taxes made sense if the property was about to be sold. Arson without the promise of an insurance payout made sense if the motive for the fire was to kill.
But that both had occurred within two days of each other was too coincidental.
I thanked him and hung up.
I switched on my computer, searched through the Internet for any business news on the Sherman Stamping Works. Other than the news of the fire, there was none. In the world of business, the stamping works was dead.
Noodling, I clicked into one of the newer satellite photo sites, and brought up the aerial view of Rivertown. I saw Thompson Avenue, the Willahock River, city hall, and the turret. Saw, too, the railroad tracks that ran like a spine down the center of Rivertown, broken only by the spur onto the railroad siding alongside the long building with the blackened mound of bricks at one end.
And saw motive.
I called back the man at the county. “Was it a lawyer who paid the back taxes on the stamping works?"
"Yes."
"Was it Harry Ruffino?"
He put me on hold for a minute to check. When he came back, he said, “I'm impressed, Dek."
"It wasn't me,” I said. “It was Gentleman Jack."
* * * *
Neither Harry nor the Queen of France picked up his line, and after three rings I got sent to his voicemail. “I've tripped over the game you're running, Harry. My guess is that Petak doesn't know about the game. My guess is that Wildcat Ernie did. You stink on this, Harry. Try to get to me before I get to the cops."
It was unethical, bluffing a client. But my mind kept seeing Albert Petak twitching at the Rivertown jail, scanning the corners for rats.
I spent the next hour trying to cut wood trim for one of the turret's slit windows. Carpentry normally calms me, because there's a sureness to it, a logical route to a certain conclusion. But that afternoon, I kept making bad cuts because my mind was too tensed for the phone to ring. Finally, I gave up on the wood and went upstairs to the second floor, to what will be an office, which is across the hall from what will be a proper kitchen. All I need is money, and the stomach to keep encountering people like Harry Ruffino.
I sat at my card-table desk and called Harry's office. Again I got routed to the tape. “Harry, I'm going to get rough. Call me."
I got Harry's home address and phone number from an Internet service that offers thorough privacy-invasion for a modest monthly fee. He lived in one of the better burbs northwest of Chicago. I aimed the Jeep there and arrived in a half-hour. A black fastback Mustang with its door ajar was parked in the driveway of Harry's two-story colonial. I stopped a couple of doors back and cut the engine.
It took no time at all to deduce that the Mustang belonged to the Queen of France, because she was banging on Harry's front door. Even from two hundred feet away, I could see the flush on the back of her neck, though it was not quite as red as her hair.
Her fist wore out after a couple more minutes and she marched back to the Mustang. The way she peeled out of there led me to believe her neck was going to stay red for some time.
I tried Harry's office number again, gave his machine another yell. “Harry, I'm coming for you.” Next, I called his home phone. “I'm outside your house. I'm going to bang on your doors until I crash my way inside.” Then I pulled into his drive and revved the tin engine of the Jeep loud enough to rattle its failing muffler and, I hoped, his windows.
My cellular and automotive tantrums didn't work. Harry didn't call, and he didn't come outside. So I got out, walked up to the house, and picked up where the Queen left off. I banged on his front door, and on the huge front window. Then I went around back and pounded on the kitchen door long enough to satisfy myself he wasn't home. On my way back to the Jeep, I noticed a dark brick lying in the flower bed at the side of the house. It looked to be a clinker from the stamping factory. I wondered if Harry had picked it up as part of his guise in getting to know Wildcat Ernie.
To let Albert squirm much longer at the Rivertown jail, perhaps cowering from the sounds of little feet scratching near his head, was unconscionable. But so was short-circuiting Harry's chance to go to the cops. I decided I'd give him the afternoon to get back to me.
I called Leo Brumsky and suggested lunch. He has been my friend since grammar school. He makes me laugh.
&
nbsp; "I'll even pay,” I added.
"You must be agitated."
"I'm packing large. I got a five-hundred-dollar fee."
Leo made that much in a morning as a provenance specialist for the nation's largest auction houses. That morning, as he always did whenever I earned anything, he expressed amazement. “You rob a bank? If you did, I want to stay home and watch you being arrested on television."
I told him I'd meet him at Kutz's.
Fifteen minutes later, Leo's Porsche, top down, rolled onto the few remaining bits of gravel in front of Kutz's, filling the air with the intertwining of modern, muscular German exhaust and the soft echoes of forty-year-old Brazilian bossa nova. I recognized the murmurings of Elis Regina and Tom Jobim. It was one of Leo's favorite albums.
"Behold the diminishment of the sun,” he shouted, as he popped his five-foot-six, 140-pound frame out of the Porsche. Then, thrusting his hands out, V-fingered like Richard Nixon, he twirled slowly so I could admire the outrageous double-XLs flapping on him like bed sheets hung in a breeze. Leo's girlfriend selects his suits, normally Armani. But for casual, he shops alone, with the flair of the truly colorblind.
I laughed a much-needed laugh. The brightness of his overlarge duds—a neon-yellow shirt billowing above orange trousers—did indeed diminish the sun. In fact, except for the dark fur of his eyebrows—caterpillars cavorting in mirth—they almost made his bald head, always as pale as a skinned, newly boiled potato, invisible too.
We walked across the parking lot to join the cabbies, cops, and construction workers lined up in front of the flaking wood trailer. Kutz's Wienie Wagon has been resting on flat tires, under the viaduct, since Young Kutz's old man opened the place during World War II.
When the person ahead of us stepped away, making us next up, Leo inhaled suddenly. “Damn,” he muttered.
"You jerks going to order?” Young Kutz's unshaven face snarled from the order window. Young Kutz is on the wrong side of eighty, but he'd wasted not a minute of all those years developing people skills.
Leo ignored the greeting and tapped the glass at the side of the order window. “For real, Mr. Kutz?"
"You going to order?"
"Indeed, Mr. Kutz; indeed,” Leo said.
"You're not,” I said, but I knew they were wasted words. Like Leo, I'd noticed the fresh sign taped behind the opaque residue of old grease fires. On a sheet of white paper, Kutz had drawn the outline of a paper boat. Inside the boat, he'd drawn several red squiggly circles, then scribbled over everything with a yellow highlighter. He'd titled his art, at the top, “New Menu Item."
EQMM, May 2009 Page 12
