Hidden Graves

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘Living arrangements?’

  ‘Of course.’ She reached into the center drawer, pulled out an unmarked plain white business-sized envelope and slid it across. Inside was a cashier’s check, payable to me, for two thousand dollars. There was no bank name or address printed on the check.

  ‘This now, then another two thousand when you complete the assignment. Plus your expenses, but those you must keep reasonable.’

  There was a quiver in her voice – an urgency. I wondered if this seemingly commanding woman was afraid.

  A phone number was typed below the three names. ‘I’ll contact you at this number?’

  ‘Yes. Check on these men in the order I’ve listed. Start in Tucson and report in from there. Similarly, notify me before you leave California for Oregon.’

  There was one more thing to say, always. ‘I’m not licensed to be an investigator. I work for insurance companies, photographing accident scenes, checking out phony claims. It’s research.’

  I always said it, and I always said it just that way. For the most corrupt of states, Illinois had oddly strict rules for licensing private detectives. A criminal justice background or a law degree is needed. I had neither, and the press had made much of my lack of a license when I’d gotten caught up in the phony evidence scheme – that and the fact that I’d been married to the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Chicago. Recovering from all that remained arduous; I did not need a second brush with that sort of difficulty. Nor did Amanda, my ex-wife, who’d become one of Chicago’s richest and most prominent business executives.

  ‘We’ll play along with your little game, Mr Elstrom,’ the woman calling herself Rosamund Reynolds said. ‘We’re hiring you to do research.’

  Her use of the plural was revealing. She had a partner. ‘Who gave you my name, Ms Reynolds?’

  ‘You’ll head west immediately, of course.’ She drummed her fingers on the desk, impatient, anxious.

  ‘I have other client work,’ I said.

  The fingertips drummed faster. ‘How long?’ she snapped.

  ‘I need today and tomorrow,’ I said, as though I was committed to more than readying tinwork for the delivery of a furnace the morning after next.

  She caught her breath. It was barely audible. I had no doubt the woman was frightened.

  ‘See that you do,’ she said.

  I left, amazed that her office had remained bright amid the thick fog of lies we’d both sent up.

  FOUR

  I breezed into the shadowy old marble of Rivertown’s only bank – a place purposefully kept as dark as the town’s city hall – to see what I could learn about Rosamund’s check. And perhaps to enjoy a bite of a chocolate chip cookie, if luck was holding.

  The bank’s president, a brother-in-law of Rivertown’s city treasurer and a man who knew to do as he was told, sat at the only desk with his back to the lobby. Except for the ancient teller behind the old-fashioned gilded cage, who was his mother, the lobby was deserted. The bank rarely drew retail customers. It served mostly to launder cash bribes collected at city hall.

  I wanted to know something – anything – factual about Rosamund Reynolds.

  I set her check on the president’s desk. ‘What can you tell me about this payee?’

  He looked up from a newspaper crossword puzzle entitled ‘Just for Kids,’ set down his stub of chew-pocked pencil and shrugged. ‘It’s a cashier’s check. It’s good.’

  ‘Why is there no bank name printed on it?’

  ‘Not printing a bank name makes customers think cashier’s checks are private. It’s phony baloney. The routing number at the bottom always identifies the bank.’

  ‘What bank issued this one?’

  He sighed and typed the routing number into his computer. After a minute, he handed up the check. ‘Chicago Manufacturers Bank and Trust,’ he said.

  ‘Never heard of them.’

  ‘They probably never heard of you, either.’ His laugh was more of a squeal, appropriate for a man who spent his days with his mom in a deserted bank lobby. He picked up his stub of pencil, anxious to get back to the intellectual combat of the child’s crossword puzzle.

  I walked over to the teller window, filled out a deposit slip and handed the check to the ancient. ‘I’d like a thousand in fifties back.’

  My account contained twelve dollars. Rosamund’s check wouldn’t simply moisten the parched bottom of my well; it was about to drench it like a tsunami. I braced myself for the wave.

  The ancient smirked, cutting a hundred more wrinkles into her wizened face. ‘The check’s got to clear first. You can have twelve dollars.’

  ‘Your son said cashier’s checks are solid. I want to deposit one thousand into my account and take a grand back in cash.’

  ‘How do you want the twelve?’

  ‘In twenty fifties,’ I said, furious. The woman wouldn’t know a tsunami if a hundred foot wall of water smacked her in the face.

  She handed across a ten, a single and four quarters, slammed her cash drawer shut and shuffled away.

  A last insult waited. One lone chocolate chip cookie lay in the discolored plastic dish by the window, but someone had taken a bite out of it and put it back, rejected.

  I felt like the cookie. My trip to the bank had been no triumph.

  Rivertown, being Rivertown, offered ready alternatives for getting cash. The handiest was the Discount Den, one of the hot goods emporiums in the darker blocks off Rivertown’s main sin strip.

  My friend Leo Brumsky bought his outrageous Hawaiian shirts and luminescent slacks there, but most of its offerings are of a more sporadic nature and depend on what has recently fallen out of a truck or rail car. Cash, though, is always in stock at the Discount Den. One does not purchase warm goods with Discover or American Express.

  ‘Ding Dongs? Twinkies?’ I asked in time with the dangling bells I’d set jingling, stepping into the gloom. The Discount Den also did a fine business in stale-dated sugary goods, thanks, in part, to me.

  The crafty little owner, noticing the bandages flapping on my hands, set a box of happy-colored Flintstones bandages on the counter instead and shook his head. ‘Can’t keep them in stock since their bakery went bankrupt for a time.’

  ‘Peeps,’ a woman said.

  I hadn’t noticed her in the shadows in the back, bent over a carton. ‘Pardon me?’ I asked.

  She straightened up and came to the counter clutching an armful of small, pastel-colored packages. Each contained marshmallow bunnies, lined up like bright little corpses preserved beneath cellophane. By now they would have hardened to rocks since Easter was seven months’ gone.

  ‘Peeps,’ she said, ‘for when there are no Twinkies.’ She smiled, exposing one tooth. It looked to be dark yellow but in the gloom I supposed it could have been gray. For sure, it looked insufficient for rock-hard marshmallow.

  Jangling the bells, stepping out, she paused. ‘Microwave,’ she said, and took her treasures out into the sunlight.

  I am always interested in any research that involves sugar and beat it to the back for two packs of purple bunnies and one of the green. I set them on the counter next to the Flintstones bandages and took out my checkbook.

  The owner knew me and knew my check for a thousand dollars would be good. He only nicked me five percent, counting out nine hundred and forty-nine dollars, keeping a buck for the weakly adhesive Flintstones bandages. He threw in the Peeps for free, either because some small part of him wanted to make a grand gesture or because he figured I’d noticed that the stiff little rabbits, petrified like driftwood, were past their sell-by dates by not one, but four, Easters.

  FIVE

  Back at the turret, I logged on to Google, the electronic nose. I expected to learn nothing of the disguised woman who’d just hired me and wasn’t disappointed. Google reported that Rosamund Reynolds didn’t exist. That was acceptable for the time being; her cashier’s check was existence enough for me for now.

  I then Internetted w
est to Tucson, Arizona. Gary Halvorson was the first name on the list. Satellite photos showed his address to be a small, white stucco ranch in south Tucson but the county assessor’s website listed someone else as owning it. Halvorson was renting the place.

  He had no other online mentions. Living under such relentless, giant magnifiers as Google means that making a donation, coaching a kid’s team, signing a petition or simply owning a landline phone gets us posted onto the Web permanently. Even the most careful of recluses gets tagged for something.

  Not Gary Halvorson of Tucson. He’d escaped notice completely, perhaps striving for the same anonymity as Rosamund Reynolds. I wondered how she’d found him when I couldn’t.

  I had better luck, of a sort, with the second name on the list. David Arlin of Laguna Beach was divorced, had owned a kitchen hardware wholesaler and lived in a four-million-dollar home set on a hill. In dozens of pictures taken at business gatherings and local charitable events he looked to be about forty, with hair so black it might have been dyed, and he had a good tan. He’d not worked at all on becoming invisible.

  Except now he was dead. His house had blown up, with him in it, just four days earlier.

  I creaked back in the tired red vinyl chair I’d found in an alley. Unlike Halvorson, Arlin was out there, Internet-wise. He’d been involved in his community, visible. And now he was dead. Surely Rosamund Reynolds had known that, yet she’d instructed me to check him out anyway. I doubted I could learn much of anything in the short period of time she wanted.

  The last man on the list was Dainsto Runney. As with Arlin, the Internet offered up immediate results. He lived in something called The Church of the Reawakened Spirit, a nondenominational organization in Reeder, a small town along the Oregon coast. There were two pictures of him on the Internet, both taken about twenty years ago, which meant he was about the same age as the late David Arlin.

  The first picture showed a short fellow with a pale face pocked by long-ago skirmishes with acne. He was dressed in a red vest and a straw hat and was standing cocked in a song-and-dance man’s pose, a preacher trying too hard to be cool.

  The second photo was taken from a greater distance and was even more comical. He was dressed in a flowing white robe, holding his arms outstretched as he blessed, or beseeched, a group of cyclists racing for some charity. Nobody was paying attention to him: not the racers, not the bystanders. He looked like a fool begging for attention.

  Rosamund Reynolds had hired me to check out three men. One was invisible, one was dead and one was a preacher in a get-right, private church. They seemed an odd sort of trio for a secretive woman to be interested in.

  My phone rang. ‘Anticipating heat?’ Amanda, my ex-wife, asked, though the ‘ex’ part, blessedly, seemed to be diminishing.

  ‘And, perhaps, even an expensive, programmable thermostat. I’m employed again.’

  She laughed. ‘You already told me: Bipsies.’

  ‘A second client,’ I said. ‘A woman who gave me a fake name. She wants me to head west to Arizona, California and Oregon to chase down three men. One has no Internet presence at all, another just got himself blown up and the third is a preacher in an oddball church who enjoys acting like a jackass.’

  ‘Sounds like a match to your skill set. Lucrative?’ asked one of Chicago’s richest women.

  ‘Two grand retainer and another two when I finish the job,’ I said, wishing I were with her so I could pirouette.

  ‘Huge, indeed.’ Then she said, ‘I have to cancel tonight.’

  We were treading cautiously, focusing on our friendship. Careful dinners, only once a week and only in restaurants that had no past romantic associations for us was part of that.

  ‘Business intrudes?’ I asked, trying not to sound tensed for any worrisome inference in her words.

  ‘Even worse. Politics. I’ve inherited too many of my father’s friends in the Democratic Party. The elections are less than a month out and nervousness prevails. They’ve called another advisory meeting. We get a make-up dinner or two next week?’

  It was a relief. I told her I’d call her from out west, set out my new package of Flintstones bandages and went back to slicing my fingers on tinwork.

  SIX

  My furnace arrived at eight o’clock two mornings later. The driver helped me to slide it into place behind the table saw and the two white plastic lawn chairs that were the first floor’s only other adornments. After he was gone, I lifted off the cardboard box as gently as if I were unwrapping a giant Fabergé egg and sat in one of the chairs to imagine the squat beige wondrous thing humming come November, warming every cragged chunk of limestone on all five of my round floors. The thought continued to warm me in the cab all the way to Midway Airport.

  The Halvorson address was ten minutes from Tucson International. I motored up silently, having rented a mostly electric Prius at the airport as a sort of cap-and-trade restitution for the occasionally oil-vaporizing Jeep I drove at home.

  I’d gotten enough Internet views of the neighborhood to feel like I’d been on the block many times before. Type in an address and see enough in an instant to zero in a missile; such fast availability of images from satellite peepers used to bother me. Now I’m troubled more by how easily I get seduced by it and how little I worry about the future as drones seem set to darken the skies in unfathomable numbers.

  The Internet photos had shown Halvorson’s stucco cottage to be jammed in tight in a row of identical white cottages but they hadn’t shown its dinginess. Its stucco-board siding was more gray than white, except close to the ground where it was brown from dirt splashed up by rain.

  The front yard had no grass but rather a scrabble of gravel, hard dirt and three discarded Coke cans. A ‘For Sale by Owner’ sign was stuck in the middle of it, slapped with a ‘Price Slashed’ sticker. Both the sign and the sticker looked new.

  I parked the Prius across the street and walked up like I was in a buying mood.

  No one answered the bell. I knocked. No one responded to that, either. I headed around to the back.

  There was a side window on the one-car attached garage. I rubbed away enough of the dirt to look in. An old beige Chevrolet Impala was parked inside. Both right-side tires were flat.

  I walked around to the back. The window on the kitchen door was covered with fresh plywood. I knocked.

  ‘You got to call the number,’ a man said from next door. He was Mexican, hand polishing a steel car wheel on a portable workbench.

  ‘I was just passing by and saw the sign.’

  His eyes narrowed. The man knew how to smell a lie.

  ‘You got to call the number,’ he said again.

  ‘There’s a car sitting on flat tires in the garage. Is anybody still living here?’

  ‘Call the number, man.’ He bent back to the wheel but not so low that he couldn’t keep an eye on me.

  I went to the front and called the number on the sign. The owner said he lived close by and would be there in five minutes. He pulled up in a pale blue minivan in four.

  He was gray-haired, wore a shiny tan shirt, black jeans and nervous hope on his face. ‘You’ll love this house.’ His hands shook as he unlocked the front door.

  ‘Nobody’s home?’

  ‘It’s priced lower than right,’ he went on quickly, like he was afraid I’d bolt. ‘I know a banker. You got any kind of credit, you can move right in.’

  We stepped into a small living room. The floor was glazed brown tile. A grease-stained, two-seat orange couch and a cracked black vinyl recliner better than the blue one I had at home were pushed against a windowless side wall. A low, plastic wood-grain table where a television might have once sat was set against the back wall, absolutely devoid of dust. Despite being in dry desert air, the house stunk of dampness and bleach. It had been scrubbed recently.

  ‘Is the place unoccupied?’ I asked.

  ‘You can move right in,’ he said. Then added, ‘I just cleaned,’ like my nose didn’t work.


  The smell of bleach was giving me a headache. No landlord was that thorough. He hadn’t just cleaned; he’d tried to eradicate something. I wondered if that explained his bad nerves.

  ‘You had a tenant?’ I asked, trying to sound casual.

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘When did he leave?’ I started toward the back of the house. The smell of disinfectant was strongest there.

  ‘Recent,’ the owner said, following.

  I got to the kitchen. The refrigerator door was rusted at the bottom and a ragged corner of the white laminate counter was broken off. ‘What about those?’ I asked, pointing to tiny scratches on the brown-painted back door an inch above the threshold. The exposed wood was raw and clean. The scratches were fresh.

  ‘I can fix.’ His eyes were restless, looking everywhere but at the scratches.

  ‘And that?’ I pointed to the fresh plywood screwed to the kitchen door.

  ‘Punks broke in. I got to get new glass.’

  ‘Does the Impala in the garage come with the house?’ I smiled like I was making a joke. A car sitting flat, not drivable, was bothersome.

  He forced a smile so broad it must have hurt his ears. ‘I’m having it towed this afternoon.’

  ‘You want nothing to do with it?’

  ‘Ain’t mine to do nothing with.’

  Except to tow, to make it go away. ‘You’re sure your ex-tenant doesn’t want his car?’

  ‘Maybe it don’t run.’

  No tenant leaves behind a car. Even as scrap, cars were always worth something.

  There were two bedrooms. The largest held a double bed stripped to its stained mattress and a chipped dresser. A spot on the beige carpet was almost white. It had been scrubbed recently.

  I went to the closet. Not even a hanger remained. Maybe that was odd, maybe it was not, but it seemed like further proof that the whole house had been hurriedly emptied and scrubbed down in a panic.