Hidden Graves

by Jack Fredrickson

  And all the while, he did serious social good, chairing or serving on boards devoted to helping young, disadvantaged children, often willing to brandish his own inheritance. Roadblocks disappeared when young Timothy Wade’s checkbook appeared.

  The press on Timothy Wade was overwhelmingly favorable. And, by then, it had long been apparent that Theresa had gone to Medill to learn how to manage media, for the political career of her brother, Timothy. They were long-term planners, the Wades.

  As photos of Timothy began appearing everywhere in the press, pictures of Theresa had completely disappeared. She’d backed away completely from public notice. One columnist speculated that Theresa had suffered some sort of delayed depression over the deaths of her parents. Nobody else speculated much at all. Tim’s star was rising by Theresa’s design. She best served their ambitions by staying out of the limelight.

  I found only one picture of her taken in recent times on the Internet, and it was worthless. It showed her in profile, sitting behind a sheer lace curtain in a second-floor bedroom of the Wade house. It looked to have been taken with a long lens from a hundred yards away. Theresa Wade was a blur, much as Rosamund Reynolds had been the day I’d met her in the day rental office.

  Fatigue found me at three in the morning. I went up to bed, numbed finally by enough information and adrenaline withdrawal to hope to not dream of the living or the dead. Of Amanda, and of Jenny.

  That night, only one dream came, but it came hard. It starred the white Ford Explorer I’d chased earlier. I hadn’t seen much except its taillights but it had been enough. I was almost sure they were identical to the ones I’d seen on the car that had sped away, the night an intruder had left the serrated knife in my Jeep.

  I dreamed the driver wore a black hood and was death himself.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I broke in the next morning because I figured enough time had passed for the cops to quit watching her apartment.

  Marilyn Paul had lived in a beige brick, two-story, four-flat apartment building three blocks from the Eisenhower Expressway. I parked a block away and walked up the alley, slowly. I saw no one who looked like Sergeant Bohler, or any other cop.

  The building was old and didn’t have electronic locks. I couldn’t see any security cameras.

  It had a center hall. I came in from the back. Twenty feet ahead, yellow police tape crisscrossed the door on the right. There’d been no follow-ups in the newspaper on the case; certainly there’d been no mention that she’d been murdered in her apartment.

  I probed the lock with a credit card. The door was locked tight.

  I went out to the back. She’d had a small, low-walled patio. A dozen red clay pots were lined on the cement along one wall. Some held curled flowers that had been dead a long time. Others just held dirt. She hadn’t been a gardener.

  One green webbed chair and one small metal table were set in the center. She hadn’t entertained, either.

  There were deep gouges and dents on the aluminum sliding door. They looked fresh, made by someone who’d been in a hurry. The bent metal prevented the door from locking. I slid the door open and walked in.

  The small living room was a mess of dumped drawers and scattered papers. Until she’d gotten her head bashed and throat slit, Marilyn Paul had prized an ordered life. The only picture on the wall was of President John F. Kennedy. She’d been a reader, but of nothing fanciful. A tall bookcase contained books of history and of fact, biographies of great men and accounts of great wars.

  The bedroom was at the end of a short hall. The bed was rumpled, the rust-colored stain on the carpet beside it dry. It wasn’t hard to imagine her last couple of minutes. She’d been jerked from her bed and cut right there, defenseless in her nightclothes. I hoped she hadn’t had time to fully wake up.

  The drawer on the night table had been spilled. A nail file, a sleeping mask, a tube of hand cream and a pair of reading glasses lay on the floor next to a thick volume of Winston Churchill’s memoirs.

  The clothes in the closet had been yanked from their hangers and tossed on the floor. She hadn’t had many clothes, and most of them were beige and black. A gray wig also lay on the floor. The sun at the day rental office had bleached the color out of everything, but I’d have bet she’d worn that wig the day we met.

  I went back into the living room and poked my toe at everything that had been tossed on the floor. They were ordinary papers, though I suspected she’d had a file of some sort on the four musketeers. If the cops had discovered it, they would have paid me a visit before Bohler got tipped that something was in the Jeep. Chances were, Marilyn’s killer found the file. It was how he’d known where to leave her body, and the blame.

  Everything in the kitchen had also been dumped on the floor. Even the smallest boxes of her dry food had been spilled out. Her milk and orange juice containers had been emptied in the sink. Somewhere in that mess, or the messes in the bedroom and living room, her killer had found her burner phone. He’d done me a favor by taking it away before the cops could check its incoming call history.

  The door to the front closet was ajar. Likely her killer had paid no mind to the contents of the box on the shelf. I guessed the cops ignored that box, too.

  It was black, with a ghoulish white skeleton pictured on it, dancing in front of a jack-o’-lantern face on a blood-orange moon. The description said the whole thing could be easily assembled in minutes with the wire clips provided.

  Marilyn Paul hadn’t been interested in assembling the whole thing. She just wanted the few bones of a forearm, wrist and hand to put in a silo. I looked inside to make sure. Those plastic parts were missing.

  I went back out the patio door and slid it shut behind me. I headed down the alley toward the Jeep sure of only one thing.

  Marilyn Paul should have left those plastic bones in the box.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I drove north and west again. Lena Jankowski said on the phone it was either face-to-face or no discussion at all. She said she wanted to watch my face when I lied.

  ‘One fib and the door gets slammed,’ she said, stepping out onto the concrete stoop.

  ‘Sometimes truth is the only recourse,’ I agreed, affably enough.

  ‘John Shea is dead,’ she said. ‘I Googled the name he was using, David Arlin, after you left the last time. John got blown up in a house explosion.’

  ‘I don’t know all the details. The Laguna Beach cops are playing things cagey.’

  ‘And Willard Piser has been passing himself off as a preacher, Dainsto Runney, in Oregon.’

  I’d mentioned Runney’s name the last time. ‘You Googled him?’

  ‘It figures, Willard pretending to be a preacher. He liked to talk, and being a preacher means he can lock the doors and trap people into listening. I called that church of his. A woman said he’d left town.’

  ‘You then checked on Halvorson?’ The woman was thorough.

  ‘I thought I’d have better luck with him since he sends me Christmas cards, but the Internet shows nothing.’

  ‘Did Halvorson have relatives in Chicago?’

  ‘Willard and John were from out east, though they didn’t know each other before the campaign. But Red is a Chicago boy. He had a brother in the city somewhere, though he said they hardly ever spoke.’ She studied me for a moment, then said, ‘Zero for three, Elstrom. Three musketeers have disappeared or died. That’s why Marilyn hired you?’

  There was no doubt; the woman was sharp. ‘I’m not sure what she was up to. She disguised herself to meet me.’

  ‘She was afraid of getting killed?’

  ‘She sat in a wheelchair, where she could be obscured by bright sun.’

  ‘Marilyn didn’t use a wheelchair.’

  ‘Theresa Wade does.’

  ‘You’re saying Marilyn disguised herself as Theresa Wade? That makes no sense.’

  ‘Maybe she was trying to point a finger as insurance in case something went wrong.’

  ‘At Theresa Wade
? No chance. She and Tim are saints, philanthropists. They do good all the time and they’re rich enough to be destined for big things. Next month, Tim will become our senator-elect and then he’ll get tapped to run for president.’

  ‘How well do you know Theresa Wade?’

  ‘I don’t know her at all. Tim used to call her every night from the Bean headquarters, asking her to come down, to hang out, stuff envelopes, go out for beer and pizza afterward. He was trying to get her out of the house. He was afraid she’d become what … well, what she did become – a total recluse.’

  ‘To be sure, when you talked recently with Marilyn Paul she never expressed any concerns about Theresa or Timothy Wade?’

  ‘Never. What aren’t you telling me?’

  ‘Delman Bean blames Marilyn Paul for his loss,’ I said, changing the subject again. ‘He said she wasn’t prepared when John, Red and Willard quit suddenly. He said lots of sympathetic voters never got to the polls because there was no one to drive them.’

  ‘Those guys were fresh out of college and broke. John worked in an appliance store and Red stocked shelves somewhere. I think Willard worked part-time at a grocery store. Naturally, they jumped at a new opportunity. Nobody could see that coming.’

  ‘But it was sudden? They didn’t talk about it beforehand?’

  ‘They certainly didn’t say anything the night before. I’m sure of that because we were so shocked the next evening at campaign headquarters when Tim said they took off for great jobs out west.’

  ‘You were all out together, that last night?’

  ‘Not Marilyn, just the volunteers. We went out most nights for pizza and beer.’ She laughed, remembering. ‘Truth is we volunteered in that campaign more for companionship than out of any mission to improve the world. Well, most of us except Tim. He was always high-minded and purposeful. He really did want to change the world through politics.’

  ‘Did anything unusual happen that last night?’

  ‘Not that I recall. It would have been too much beer as always. Probably, we staggered—’ She stopped, frowning in concentration. ‘No, we didn’t stagger out like always. We got thrown out, I think. We must have gotten obnoxious.’ She laughed. ‘It happened sometimes. We were young.’

  ‘Where was your usual place?’

  ‘We had several usual places, all within a couple of blocks of Bean headquarters, depending on whether we wanted pizza, burgers or just cheap beer. Mostly it was about the beer.’

  That would prove true enough.

  THIRTY

  There were over thirty Halvorsons listed in the online white pages for Chicago. The woman who answered the phone at the seventeenth number said, ‘Try Tucson,’ before hanging up. Her address was just east of O’Hare Airport. I drove over.

  ‘You the one who called an hour ago?’ the woman demanded through the glass louvers on the front door. The house was about forty years old, made of gray bricks and was jammed tight on a twenty-five-foot wide lot. She looked ten years older than the house but just as solid, and her hair was just as gray. She wore a pale blue cleaning company shirt and dark blue slacks and rubbed red eyes like I’d just woken her from a nap.

  ‘The very same,’ I said, beaming like I was proud of it. ‘I just have a couple of questions about your brother.’

  ‘This look like Tucson to you?’

  ‘I only need a minute.’

  ‘Gary is my brother-in-law, not my brother, and I ain’t seen him in years,’ she said, starting to close the door.

  I leaned against the wrought-iron railing like I was prepared to wait.

  She held the door half open. ‘Is Gary in trouble?’

  ‘I thought everyone called him Red.’

  ‘Everyone called my husband Red, too. Same color hair.’

  I gave her a card. ‘An insurance matter,’ I said. It was always such a handy lie.

  ‘Can’t help you. Like I said, I ain’t seen him in years.’

  ‘How about your husband?’

  ‘My husband is dead. Heart attack, six years ago.’

  ‘They were close?’

  ‘They never saw each other, but that doesn’t excuse Gary from moving out of state without telling us. Upset my husband no end. A Christmas card was the first we heard.’

  ‘From Tucson.’

  ‘You’re sure this is really about insurance and not some old political campaign?’

  ‘Why do you ask about a campaign?’

  ‘I don’t believe in coincidences. A very rude woman called the week before last, saying she was an old friend of his from a congressional campaign twenty years ago and needed to get in touch. She didn’t sound like she’d ever been a friend to anybody. She said he angered a lot of people because he quit the campaign right before the election and asked if I knew why he quit that sudden. I told her what I just told you, that we didn’t know he’d even moved to Tucson until we got a Christmas card from him in December.’ Her face tightened. ‘He never called, he never wrote a letter. He just sent us a card, printed with just his name and a computer addressed label on the envelope, like you insurance people use.’

  ‘Did you try to contact him?’

  ‘The second and third Christmases, I sent a card with a note to his return address, also on a printed label, but Gary never once replied. Just kept sending the same old printed card, year after year. I still get one, addressed to the Halvorsons, every Christmas. After five or six years I quit bothering to send him one back.’

  ‘Did you try calling?’

  ‘Directory assistance said no phone.’

  ‘You mean his number was unlisted?’

  ‘I mean no phone period. Maybe he has a cell phone by now.’

  ‘Are there other relatives he might have stayed in closer touch with?’ I asked, trying to sound casual. ‘Blood kin? A cousin or an uncle?’

  She shook her head. ‘Gary’s the last of the line, unless he has kids.’

  And there went any hope of identifying the reddish-brown scrapings from the Tucson house as Gary Halvorson’s blood spill, though certainly something bad must have happened there for the landlord to have used so much bleach to clean the place up.

  I thanked her, started down the steps, stopped and turned with a new thought. ‘Did you send him a note when your husband died?’ Surely Red Halvorson would have responded to that.

  ‘Yeah. The jerk never replied.’

  ‘Yet you still get a card every Christmas?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Addressed to the Halvorsons, like always?’ Meaning both of them.

  She understood. ‘He didn’t bother to change his computer program, even knowing his brother was dead.’

  I started for the Jeep.

  ‘Don’t bother to call if you learn anything,’ she called after me.

  I nodded without turning around. By now, I didn’t think I was going to learn anything she’d want to hear.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The next morning I followed the shore of Lake Michigan north.

  It was one of the finest of the October days we get in Chicago, crisp at sixty degrees and so deeply colored with magnificent reds, oranges and yellows in the trees that we almost forget the excesses of our other three seasons. It even made me forget that I was the target for a murder frame and I found myself whistling in counterpoint to the rhythmic flapping of the loosened shreds of my vinyl top.

  In seemingly no time at all, I got to the college town of Evanston. A homecoming football weekend was approaching and the season’s bright hues were joined by an abundance of the purples and whites of the Northwestern Wildcats. Staggering among them, I supposed, were more than a few returning Northwestern sorority Bipsies, though they were deeply purpled year-round, from lives of long lunches.

  My cell phone rang. I clicked it on.

  ‘You there, Elstrom?’ a woman’s voice yelled.

  ‘I am!’ I screamed back.

  ‘This is Bohler. I can barely hear you.’

  I dropped it on the passeng
er seat. ‘In accordance with Illinois law, I’m operating a motor vehicle and therefore unable to pick up a hand-held phone to communicate,’ I shouted to the policewoman. ‘Plus, you separated my vinyl top into many pieces. Each one is flapping and slapping now, letting in deafening traffic noise.’

  ‘Pick up the damned phone!’ she shouted.

  I picked it up. ‘How’s Sniffy?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sniffy, the wonder dog.’

  ‘I like you, Elstrom.’

  ‘Me, too,’ I said, agreeably.

  ‘No. I mean I really like you. For Marilyn Paul’s murder.’

  ‘The woman in the river?’

  ‘Don’t act dumb.’

  There were ninety-nine ways to respond to that, most of them truthful, but I chose the hundredth and said nothing.

  ‘You dumped that woman in the river,’ she said.

  ‘What lies have you manufactured to prove that?’

  ‘You screwed up. You bagged her watertight. She’s giving us DNA to compare to those bits of hamburger we took from your Jeep. Plus, someone called who can tie you to Marilyn Paul’s murder weapon.’

  ‘The same anonymous tipster that sent you to grab my Jeep?’

  ‘A charge of destroying evidence material to a murder investigation will be just for openers.’

  ‘What evidence, exactly?’

  ‘The knife that killed Marilyn Paul. We’ll be dragging the river.’

  Whoever I’d scared off after he’d planted the knife in the Jeep hadn’t run very far. He’d circled back to watch and had seen me throw the knife into the river.

  I figured recovering it, even so close to the turret, would only offer circumstantial evidence. Fingerprints and blood evidence are fragile. On cardboard furnace boxes, they don’t withstand fire. On knives, I doubted they’d withstand long immersion in polluted water, even if the knife was recovered from the debris at the bottom of the Willahock.