Hidden Graves

by Jack Fredrickson

Except for the desk chair being returned to its rightful place behind the desk, the office was the same – spartan and anonymous, empty and ready for anyone who needed a space for a day to impress. Or to fool.

  The management office was at the rear of the first floor. A pert young woman in her mid-twenties sat behind a glossy white desk.

  ‘I had an appointment with a woman in Two-Ten but no one’s answering my knock,’ I said.

  She frowned, and then keyed something into the small computer on her desk. ‘No one is using that space today,’ she said after a moment.

  ‘I met Rosamund Reynolds there just a few days ago.’

  She smiled. ‘The offices on the second floor are for short-term rental. Miss Reynolds is not currently renting.’

  ‘It’s about insurance,’ I said. ‘She’s owed some money.’ I looked around as though I were afraid someone else was listening. ‘Actually, she’s owed a great deal of money.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ the young thing said. ‘It was obvious that she’d recently lost a loved one.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Her voice was rough, from crying.’

  I nodded, remembering the hoarse voice. It could have been affected, a contrivance.

  ‘The black clothes and hat, the veil …’

  ‘She wore a veil?’

  ‘Black lace. Old fashioned, huh?’

  Rosamund had taken no chances in disguising herself when renting the office, though for me all she’d needed was bright backlighting from the sun.

  ‘I don’t suppose anyone accompanied her to help with the wheelchair?’ I asked.

  ‘She managed by herself, poor dear.’

  ‘Even in the elevator? It seems too small for a wheelchair.’

  She stood up. ‘It meets all building codes.’

  I supposed it did, and was especially suitable if one was able to fold the chair and stand to ride up. I wondered if the woman calling herself Rosamund Reynolds had needed her wheelchair only as part of her disguise. I thanked the young woman and left.

  As I was about to drive away, I got a call from Lieutenant Beech in Laguna Beach.

  ‘I’d like you to stop by,’ he said.

  ‘I’m no longer in California.’

  ‘Back in Rivertown, Elstrom?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did you come to Laguna Beach?’

  ‘As I said, one of my carriers learned of the explosion. I was already in California. They asked me to look into the matter.’

  ‘How long ago was the policy opened?’

  Something had gone wrong with his investigation. He was no longer simply interested in the beneficiary. ‘What’s your interest in that, Lieutenant?’

  ‘How long ago was the policy opened?’

  ‘I’d have to check.’

  ‘What’s the name of the insurance company? I’ll call them myself.’

  ‘I’ve got to get their permission to tell—’

  ‘Cut the crap, Elstrom. What’s the name?’

  ‘Why?’

  He took a breath and spoke more calmly. ‘We’ve become more interested in Mr Arlin’s past.’

  ‘Because …?’

  ‘Because he doesn’t have one, damn it. It appears Mr Arlin, one of our most respected citizens, re-invented himself with a new name when he arrived here twenty years ago. I need to know what your insurance company knows about him and I’ll subpoena you to find that out.’

  ‘Surely his ex-wife would know quite a bit.’

  ‘She knew him as David Arlin said she had no reason to question what he’d told her of his past.’

  ‘I’ll pass this along to the insurance company,’ I lied.

  ‘Also, find out who I can talk to about the physical they gave him.’

  ‘Any specific medical concerns?’

  ‘Have that insurance company call me immediately,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll see,’ I said.

  ‘Here’s what I’m beginning to see, Elstrom: a guy who might not represent an insurance company at all, a guy who came nosing around not so coincidentally, a guy who knows one hell of a lot more than he’s saying.’

  ‘As I said, I’ll see what I can do.’

  I hung up. I couldn’t very well tell him that my client had given me a phony name and that I had no idea as to her real identity.

  Or that she was trying to frame me for killing whoever was just found bobbing in a plastic bag, down by the dam.

  SEVENTEEN

  Back at the turret, I meandered casually down to the Willahock like I was intent only on savoring the rainbow of plastic debris caught in the muck and fallen branches on the opposite side. I keep my own side clean, though no one in Rivertown notices, except Leo.

  Lights still flashed down by the dam, but there were only two now and they were blue. The reds belonging to an ambulance had disappeared, the body snagged and taken away. I went inside to kill an hour on the Internet until it got dark.

  Several news sites reported the discovery of the body in a bag at the dam but none offered anything more. Elsewhere, there was nothing new about David Arlin or Dainsto Runney, and nothing at all about Gary Halvorson.

  I crossed the hall to the would-be kitchen, put two Peeps – one green and one purple – belly to belly in the microwave and turned it on. In no time they puffed up to more than twice their size and then their round, beaked heads completely disappeared into their bloated bodies. When I shut off the microwave the inflated creatures collapsed into flat green and purple smears that came within an inch of leaking out of the gap at the bottom edge of the ill-fitting glass door. I ate what I could unstick from the bottom of the microwave. The Peeps tasted excellent and the carnage fit my mood.

  By now it was dark. I drove to the dam, stopped fifty yards in front of the flashing blue lights and walked the rest of the way.

  No cop was visible until I got right up to the cruiser. And even then, no cop was visible. It was Benny Fittle who sat reclined behind the steering wheel, mouth agape, eyes closed, sound asleep.

  Dressed in his usual rock band T-shirt and cargo shorts, Benny clattered around Rivertown in an aged orange Ford Maverick as the town’s parking enforcement officer. The town treasurer prized his PEO’s productivity, for Benny didn’t waste time waiting for meters to actually expire. Rather, he wrote tickets based on his intuition that they might flash red before being replenished with coins. In this manner, Benny contributed mightily to the town’s coffers, and for that he was cherished.

  I cleared my throat. Benny’s unshaven jowls quivered but his eyes did not open. I cleared it again. This time his right eye opened, but it went first to the Dunkin’ Donuts box lying on the seat beside him. Once it satisfied itself that the box was empty, the eye closed.

  ‘Wake up, Benny,’ I was forced to say.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Wake up.’

  He pushed his bulk a little forward, but not upright, and gave me a powdered sugar grin. ‘Hey, Mr E, what’s shakin’?’

  ‘What are you doing down here, Benny?’

  ‘Keepin’ a watch for who shows up.’

  ‘What for?’

  He yawned. ‘Suspicious behavior.’

  ‘They pull a body out?’

  ‘Floater in a bag, pretty banged up. Nobody knows nothin’ yet.’

  ‘Then why were you assigned to watch the dam?’

  ‘To see who shows up, like I tol’ you.’

  ‘You know your lights are flashing, right?’ I asked.

  He yawned again and nodded as best he could, being reclined so far back on the tilted seat.

  ‘Those flashing lights would alert any criminal that an officer of the law was waiting, ready to pounce,’ I said, though the idea of Benny pouncing on anything other than a doughnut was laughable.

  He took a long moment to process my observation before summoning the energy to switch off the lights. ‘Good thought, Mr E,’ he said, slumping back.

  ‘Any identification on the guy?’

  �
��Nah,’ he said. ‘Just a Jane Doe.’

  My mouth went dry, like it was chalked. ‘A woman, Benny?’ I managed. ‘The floater was a woman?’

  He tried to nod, gave it up and closed his eyes.

  I don’t think I said another word. I only remember concentrating on walking away.

  EIGHTEEN

  Leo called me at seven the next morning, out of breath and half out of his mind. He was yelling something about the Argus-Observer’s website. The Argus-Observer was the cheesiest of Chicago’s gossip rags and the fastest at reporting the city’s most torrid news.

  ‘Speak slowly,’ I said. I was half out of my mind, too, but it was from worrying most of the night that the corpse stuffed in my Jeep had been my client and that I wouldn’t figure out who was coming at me until it was too late.

  ‘The body they found in the Willahock …’

  ‘A woman,’ I said. I stuck legs into jeans, arms into a sweatshirt and beat it down barefoot to the second floor to switch on my computer. ‘They have a name?’

  He spoke a name too fast for me to understand.

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘Marilyn Paul.’

  I didn’t know the name. I told him I’d call him back in an hour. The Argus-Observer website had come up. In its usual big point type, the headline screamed loud: BAGGED BABE BOBBER SLASHED!

  Underneath was a grainy black-and-white photo of the dam and beside it Rivertown’s own Benny Fittle lounging against the hood of a police cruiser. The picture had been taken when the body was first discovered, when it was still daylight and there were still doughnuts. His mouth was closed but his cheeks bulged; he’d been snapped mid-chew. Surprisingly often, the Argus-Observer’s photographer caught the essence of any given moment.

  The short paragraph that followed was written in the Argus-Observer’s typical, terse, details-to-follow style. The sheriff’s police theorized that Marilyn Paul, fifty-four and wrapped in a large black plastic bag, had been dumped into the river somewhere east of the Rivertown dam and was carried downstream. The police were investigating. The county’s medical examiner was examining. Cause of death was preliminarily thought to have been from a slashed throat. Details to follow.

  Google had fourteen listings for Marilyn Paul. Only the Argus-Observer reported her death, which wasn’t surprising since Chicago’s other news sites insisted on double-checking stories for accuracy before posting them. The other thirteen were old mentions of her full-time, professional political work for the Democratic Party, most memorably as a call center manager during the Illinois gubernatorial campaign that elected the mop-haired jackass who was now doing time in a federal prison.

  There was one picture of her, taken at a gathering of former workers from that campaign. Two dozen of them, loyal Democrats to a fault, had drafted a letter requesting leniency at an appeal of the mop-head’s sentence. The men were done up well in conservative dark business suits and reasonable neckwear. The woman were done up even better, in bright dresses and glittering jewelry. By the tight look on most of the faces, the event had the frivolity of a wake.

  Marilyn Paul was round-faced and had brown, softly spiked hair. She wore a blue business suit, a white blouse, no jewelry and projected no nonsense. She was the only attendee who had not forced a smile for the camera.

  I tried to imagine a gray wig, lots of thick makeup, tinted large glasses and cheeks puffed with cotton. It could have been her in that day-rate office. Or it could have been any other woman, disguised just as heavily, backlit so blindingly in such a bright sun.

  What I couldn’t imagine was why such a woman would have obscured her identity to hire me.

  And whether someone had wanted to kill her for that.

  NINETEEN

  Prairie Hill had sat, mostly unchanged, for a hundred years alongside the railroad tracks that ran northwest out of Chicago. Most people knew the small burg only as a blur to blow through on their way to weekends on the Chain O’Lakes along the Wisconsin border.

  Not me. I knew Prairie Hill better. Amanda and I had stopped several times at the Dairy Queen there, summers when we used to go boating on Lake Marie. Those days, I was a magnificent blur of my own, breezing in my stick-shift Jeep while consuming cherry-dipped, double scoop, soft-serve chocolate ice cream. Only once did I launch the ice cream from the cone, and then only because a fresh pothole appeared unfairly out of nowhere. Fortunately, little was lost. The glob of ice cream had lingered, stuck to the windshield, long enough to be mostly retrieved by my smooth and swift upward scoop of the cone, leaving only a smear of cherry and chocolate, which I removed within days. Amanda was enchanted by my dexterity.

  I was headed now to Prairie Hill to talk to Lena Jankowski, a woman standing next to Marilyn Paul in one of the photos taken at the mop-headed jackass’s leniency petition gathering. I’d called, saying I had an urgent matter to discuss that involved one of her fellow campaign workers. She asked which one. I said Marilyn Paul. She asked if I were a cop. I said no. She said she didn’t know Marilyn well, that she’d been a volunteer and Marilyn was a career professional. I said anything would help. She said I could come to her home, but only for a few minutes. I said yes.

  She lived four blocks behind the Dairy Queen in a white clapboard single-story house on a block of identical small white houses. That sort of lapsed architectural imagination reminded me of Rivertown, though the unvarying bungalows where I grew up were gloomier, made of brown brick darkened even further when the factories were alive and pumping soot into the sky. Prairie Hill looked to have a more vibrant pulse. Her block was littered with tricycles and small plastic wagons, the stuff of a new generation keeping the town alive. An oversized child’s white plastic baseball bat lay on the lawn next door.

  I recognized Lena easily when she came to the screen door. She was in her early forties, younger than Marilyn. She wore her dark hair short, and that reminded me of Amanda, as so many women did.

  ‘Insurance investigator, really?’ she asked, opening the door to take my card but remaining inside.

  ‘Regarding Marilyn Paul, as I said when I phoned.’

  ‘I’ll go along with this, but you’d have to tell me if you’re a cop, right?’

  It was myth; cops lied about not being cops all the time. ‘I suppose, but I’m not a cop,’ I said anyway.

  ‘Marilyn is dead,’ she said, watching my face. ‘They just found her in the Willahock River, in Rivertown, where you live.’

  She’d checked me out, so easy in the Google age. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘What do you know about her death?’ she asked, her eyes still steady on mine.

  ‘Not enough. It’s why I’m here,’ I said.

  ‘You didn’t say who you’re working for.’

  ‘I can’t divulge that.’ It sounded smarter than saying I wasn’t sure. ‘I saw a picture of you and Marilyn on the Internet, taken when you were petitioning to get the ex-governor’s sentence reduced.’

  ‘Last May,’ she said.

  ‘Rocky evening?’

  ‘The man we helped elect turned out to be corrupt. Even so, his fourteen-year sentence was excessive.’

  ‘You knew Marilyn long before that?’

  ‘We met on Delman Bean’s congressional campaign twenty years ago.’

  ‘Delman Bean?’ I remembered the name vaguely.

  ‘He lost, narrowly. He should have won, narrowly.’

  ‘How did she seem last May?’

  ‘She acted normal, which is to say testy and self-righteous. To her, being a Democrat was holy work. Our ex-governor violated her sense of ethics.’

  ‘Do you know this man?’ I pulled out an Internet photo of David Arlin taken in Laguna Beach.

  She reached out to take the photo and studied it for a full minute before passing it back. ‘The caption calls him David Arlin.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘That’s John Shea, not David Arlin. And that’s troubling.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because two we
eks ago Marilyn called, asking about the whereabouts of two other musketeers. I sort of keep track of the old gang, updating addresses when they bother to let me know.’

  ‘Other musketeers?’

  ‘We called them the Four Musketeers – four young guys that volunteered on the Delman Bean campaign. They hung out together. John Shea was one of them.’

  ‘Was Gary Halvorson another?’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘What are you here for, really?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I’m sure.’

  She considered it for a moment and nodded. ‘Yes, Red was one of them.’

  ‘Red?’

  ‘Everybody called him that because of his hair. I told Marilyn I get a Christmas card from him every year. He lives in Tucson.’

  ‘How about Dainsto Runney?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Just another name on my list. Who was the other musketeer Marilyn asked about?’

  ‘Willard Piser. He went west with the others. The three of them – John, Red and Willard – got huge paying jobs working on an oil rig on the west coast. Apparently that fell apart almost right away. Red sent me a Christmas card from Tucson a few weeks later and Willard went to Oregon.’

  ‘You have an address for Willard Piser?’

  ‘Nothing so specific. Willard had been sweet on one of the girls in the campaign and sent her a Valentine’s Day card three months after he left. The girl saw it was from Oregon by the postmark. He’d written no return address.’ Then she asked, ‘Why would John Shea change his name?’

  I couldn’t answer that, like I couldn’t tell her my gut was sure that Willard Piser had changed his to Dainsto Runney. All I was sure of now was that Marilyn Paul had pressed Lena for information about Halvorson, Shea, and Piser, and then, as Rosamund Reynolds, she’d hired me to find out more.

  ‘You said there were four musketeers? Who was the fourth?’

  She smiled. ‘He didn’t have to head west. He didn’t need money. He was Tim Wade.’

  Timothy Wade, dubbed the Grain Man by many in the press: the candidate who’d fled a skeleton in a silo.

  ‘It’s a shame, him freaking out like that,’ she said. ‘He’s such a sweet guy.’ She stared at me through the screen. ‘Marilyn was working for him this season, you know.’