Hidden Graves

by Jack Fredrickson

  THIRTY-THREE

  The rain had stopped and I drove back to Rivertown leisurely enough to keep an eye on the road behind me. One particular pair of trailing headlamps mimicked my every lane change, speed-up, slow-down and turn. The guard at Amanda’s building had been right. Bohler hadn’t fallen for his story.

  Likely enough, too, Bohler wanted another chance to examine my Jeep.

  I drove to the Rivertown city garage. Booster Liss operated there. Daytimes, he worked for the city, for cash, cleaning the fleet of Cadillac Escalades that the city purchased, for cash, for its elected officials, who drew modest paychecks but prospered mostly from bribes, in cash.

  Night-times, Booster and a small crew used the city facility for private work, cleansing vehicles of fingerprints, identification tags, and worse. Some cars were freshly stolen, on their way to being disassembled for saleable parts in one of the chop shops in the abandoned factories across town. Other vehicles were tainted differently, with evidence of hit-and-runs and gun-shot murders. Those were headed for even more careful disassembly and the crushing of their more worrisome parts. In either case, a wash by Booster was always the first step.

  After I knocked, he peered through the small dark glass set in the steel side door and then eased himself outside. He was a big bear of a man, clean shaven, likely scalp-to-toes, so as to not leave his own incriminating evidence, and wore a surgical mask, scrubs, little cloth booties and thin latex gloves. Such caution inspired confidence among his understandably nervous clientele.

  ‘Dek! Long time, man,’ he said, grinning.

  He always welcomed me like an old friend. We’d gone to high school together, or at least until the end of our sophomore year when he dropped out to join the legion of thumpers being mentored at the health center parking lot by seasoned thieves. Ultimately, but not unfortunately, that led to a short stretch in a prison downstate for grand theft auto, which in turn led to a broader circle of acquaintances and a new career. Already a devotee of colon cleansing, Booster saw the possibilities of extending that devotion to stolen automobiles. He began cleansing cars.

  ‘I’ve been followed here,’ I told him, though the trailing headlamps had vanished after my last turn. They’d probably just been switched off.

  ‘You’re worried I’ll duck inside and bolt myself in?’ He laughed. He operated with impunity, being connected not only by blood to the lizards that ran Rivertown but also by the services he provided to others even better connected throughout Cook County. Should a clueless cop arrive, Booster would remain safely locked inside until the proper corrective phone calls sent the cop away.

  ‘I need a cleanse,’ I said, looking up and down the street.

  He noticed. ‘In a hurry?’

  ‘The tail I caught is police. I didn’t see the vehicle, only the headlights.’

  He stepped up to finger the shreds of the vinyl top. ‘Full cleanse?’

  ‘The best, starting with a long power wash.’

  He opened the door to look inside. ‘Already wet in here.’

  ‘Rain, through the rips.’

  ‘When we’re done with the shampoo, we’ll bake it in the paint booth to get rid of anything organic.’

  I supposed by that he meant skin, or blood.

  ‘Two hundred, ready at dawn.’ It was a bargain rate. He got in the Jeep, tapped the horn and started the engine. The big garage door shot up fast; someone was watching from inside. Booster barely got across the threshold before the door began to drop, just as quickly.

  Efficiency can run rampant in Rivertown.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I’d just stepped out at nine the next morning to walk to the bank and then to the city garage when two sets of flashing police lights turned off Thompson Avenue. I tensed, thinking they were sheriff’s cars, coming for me.

  But when they got closer, I saw they were Rivertown cars, not Bohler’s, and a different worry took hold. The two squad cars were boxing in a silver Dodge Ram window van between them. I knew that van. It was Leo’s.

  He passed by, the middle of a tiny parade, staring straight ahead, his arms straight out and tense on the steering wheel.

  Sitting beside him on the passenger’s seat, Ma Brumsky stared straight ahead as well. Her face was every bit as rigid as her son’s.

  Never since seventh grade had Leo not flashed one of his huge-toothed grins if he was within a mile or so of my eyes. For sure, he couldn’t have missed seeing me standing so close to the curb. Something was wrong.

  I ran across the broad lawn that separates city hall from my turret. It had all been my grandfather’s land once but the lizards that ran the town had seized most of the land after he died. They’d seized the enormous pile of limestone he intended for his castle as well and used it to build an enormous city hall of dark hallways and shadowed rooms.

  I got around back to the police station door, just as the three vehicles pulled to a stop. The two officers in the rearmost car got out quickly, as though anxious to avoid whatever was coming next. They reached into the back of their car, tugged out huge armloads of wet garments and ran into the front door of the station without a glance at either the van or the leading squad car.

  The two officers in the lead car were in no such hurry. They stayed in their car, facing one another. They shook their heads and waved their arms; they were arguing. Finally, they got out and began moving, with zombie-like slowness, back to the Ram van. The younger of them suddenly stepped in front of his more senior partner and reached to open the front passenger door.

  The move infuriated the older cop, who shouldered the younger man aside so he could pull open the passenger door himself.

  Ma Brumsky began pivoting on the passenger seat slowly because of her arthritis and turned her knees toward the open door. Her hair was damp and she’d wrapped herself in one of the yellowish threadbare towels they set out – rarely washed, just refolded by someone wearing thick gloves – at the health center.

  Sliding down from the seat caused the towel to ride up higher on Ma Brumsky’s hips. And as it rose, it became obvious that she was wearing nothing underneath. Mercifully, she paused to yank the towel down before proceeding. And so it went, for a few more minutes and many more tugs, before Ma inched down enough to get her bare feet planted on the sidewalk. Without a glance at anyone, she headed for the police station door, clutching the towel safely around her.

  The younger officer, having witnessed this at close range, stood frozen, as if in shock, until the older officer, pressed safely behind the still open front passenger door, yelled at him: ‘Open the damned sliding door!’

  The young cop raised a trembling arm, grasped the handle and slid the center door back.

  Mrs Roshiska, Ma’s best friend and the woman I’d recently seen cannonballing at the health center, stood bare-legged and bare-footed just inside the opening, hunched like a precision sky diver about to hit the silk. She was older than Ma by at least five years. More relevant that day, she was fifty pounds heavier.

  The health-center towel could not completely encircle such girth. The two frayed edges were separated by at least a foot of puckered, white, septuagenarian skin.

  Bless the woman; she tried. She tugged both sides of the towel as close together as she could before aiming a bare leg down toward the running board. But then she teetered and had to let go of one edge of the towel to shoot an arm out onto the shoulder of the young officer. The towel fell limp and dangled uselessly in her other hand like a flag drooping on a windless, humid day.

  ‘No!’ the young cop shouted, desperate to duck out from under the suddenly naked old woman’s hand pressing down hard on his shoulder.

  ‘She’s turning!’ shouted his more experienced partner, who’d doubtless seen other, perhaps equal, terrors.

  And indeed she was. Still maintaining a steel grip on the young cop’s shoulder, Mrs Roshiska grinned at all the eyes on her and released the towel from her other hand, to reach behind her for her walker. Turning back, she droppe
d the aluminum contraption gently to the ground in front of her, stepped almost daintily down to the pavement and aimed her walker toward the front of the station, covered by nothing but autumnal air.

  The young cop looked like he was about to cry.

  The rest of Ma Brumsky’s swim-club ladies emerged. All wore towels, and only towels. The elderly gent I’d seen swimming with them exited last, ever a gentleman.

  There was no need to wonder further about the police escort. Rejuvenated by whatever hung suspended in the health-center pool, Ma’s happy little group had been busted for ditching their suits in youthful abandon.

  Once the last of the swimmers and the cops had disappeared into the police station, I walked around to the driver’s side of the van. Leo had not moved from his perch behind the steering wheel. His normally pale face, now as red as if he’d spent some hours being boiled, was buried in his hands.

  I pulled open his door. ‘Surely this isn’t as bad as floating a corpse,’ I whispered before I noticed that his lips were moving. He was murmuring into his phone.

  I left him there, slumped forlornly in his brand-new silver Ram van, and headed off to the bank.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  I spotted no police surveillance tagging along as I walked on to the bank. I could only think that Sergeant Bohler had given up in fatigue and headed home to sleep.

  Inside the bank, it was business as usual, meaning there was no business, as usual. The gloom; the ancient behind the teller window; the son sitting, indifferent to the lobby at his back as he puzzled over a child’s crossword puzzle; even the bitten, lone chocolate-chip cookie lying unclaimed on the plastic plate were all as they’d been the last time I was there. This time, the ancient could find no reason to deny me my cash, so I withdrew the last of Marilyn Paul’s retainer and headed down the few blocks to the city garage.

  The Jeep was parked outside. Its lower half glistened red and rusty and normal in the morning sun, but higher up things had changed. The faded black tatters and discolored plastic windows were gone, replaced by a new vinyl top with new, clear windows. The new top was bright green.

  Booster must have seen me walk up. He came out, bleary-eyed. ‘Nice, huh?’ he asked, a bit tentatively.

  ‘Christmassy,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, the red … and the green, I get it.’ He managed a hopeful smile. ‘Your Jeep is a work in progress,’ he said, pointing to the rust. ‘That will eat up more of the red paint, and in four or five years your Jeep will be mostly green and brown, like camouflage, in the woods. Then it won’t be so Christmassy.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, warming to the notion of motoring about in something that was itself more warming than the flapping shreds of my previous top.

  ‘We drove the Jeep out back and removed the seats and the carpet for the power-washing phase. The kid doing it was new, and not practiced with a nozzle, though in fairness your vinyl had deteriorated past fragile and was mostly a collection of ribbons. The kid blew your shreds right off the metal bows. Some of them went in the river and, well …’ He pointed up into an old oak by the water.

  I followed his gaze. There, flapping proudly high in the tree, was a strip of sun-faded vinyl, a remnant of my former top.

  ‘Fortunately one of my clients had an inexpensive replacement,’ he said, meaning a chop shop.

  ‘Green?’ I asked him. ‘I’ve never seen a green top. And won’t such an unusual one be easy to trace, and tie my Jeep to another crime—?’

  He stopped me with a raised hand. ‘Out of state situation, Dek. The owner and what’s left of his green-topped Jeep are long gone.’ Then he added, ‘I’m only charging an extra fifty for the top, and that includes installation. Plus, you can now see out of windows that are clear and not fogged like severe cataracts. You’ll be dry and safe for years.’

  The improvements were a bargain, indeed. I peeled off two hundred and fifty dollars and gave it to him. ‘Did a tail ever show up last night?’

  ‘That’s another reason why installing the new top was wise, if it was a cop. Someone pulled up across the street after you left.’

  ‘Unmarked sedan?’

  ‘Someone in a bad-ass black Ford pick-up truck, thousand dollar chrome wheels with big off-road tires. It was a fifty-thousand-dollar ride, at least.’

  ‘Too flashy for a cop?’

  ‘Cop or not, whoever was watching maybe thought you brought your Jeep in for a new top instead of a cleanse, so that’s a good thing, too. Speaking of cops, we put your Jeep up on the hoist to do the underside. Want to guess what else we blew off with the power washer?’

  ‘A button?’

  He nodded. ‘A nice little GPS transmitter – expensive, better than the cops typically use to keep track of someone. I threw it in the river. Don’t get cocky. They’ll find a way to attach another one.’

  I drove home, red bodied and green topped, tempted to break out singing ‘Silent Night’ in salute to my wonderfully silent new top. And when I pulled up to the turret, things were even better. Amanda’s old white Toyota Celica was parked at the curb.

  I found her sitting on the bench down by the river. ‘You still have the Toyota,’ I said in obvious admiration. It was the car she’d owned when we first met.

  She gestured at the water flushing debris to the west. ‘I’ve missed this.’

  ‘I’ve missed you missing this.’

  She leaned closer to me. ‘I’m playing hooky,’ she whispered, as though someone might be listening.

  Her breath warmed my cheek. I missed that, too.

  ‘Let’s go someplace like we used to do. Let’s just get up and go,’ she said, watching my eyes for enthusiasm. It was a major step forward, coming over so spontaneously, and must have taken some courage. ‘Or … you already had plans,’ she said, grinning.

  ‘I need to go somewhere.’

  ‘Last night you said you had to go to Reeder, Oregon and the trail of Willard Piser posing as Dainsto Runney?’

  ‘It’s even more of a horse race now to see whether it’s Bohler or Marilyn’s killer that gets me tagged for Marilyn’s murder. Bohler followed me after I left your place.’

  ‘Oooh,’ she said, ‘your plans fit so nicely with my plans.’ She told me exactly how.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll fly coach,’ she said, and linked her arm in mine.

  We walked up the hill to the street and she laughed her good laugh at the sight of the Jeep. ‘Your Jeep …’

  ‘Elegant, yes?’

  ‘Santa will retire his reindeer, for sure,’ she said. ‘A green top on a red Jeep.’

  I could only preen.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Sergeant Bohler was not at the county impound garage. Neither was Sniffy the wonder dog, whose nostrils had imploded from whiffing too many Burger King wrappers. Their absence – the sergeant’s more than the dog’s – simplified the lies I needed to get away with.

  ‘I’m dropping off my Jeep,’ I said to the young officer sitting at Bohler’s desk.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Sergeant Bohler thinks I’m a murderer and she impounded my Jeep.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘She’s desperate to prove it was used to destroy evidence and will want new noses, canine and otherwise, to examine it.’ I did not add that Bohler might want the opportunity to install a new tracking device.

  The young cop started to nod at the nonsense before he caught himself and stopped. ‘You’re nuts,’ he offered reasonably.

  ‘Perhaps, but new meds are being developed every day. May I have a receipt?’

  ‘Sergeant Bohler wouldn’t want this. Suspects don’t bring in evidence.’

  ‘She’s got a nose for thoroughness,’ I said cleverly. ‘She won’t turn down a redo.’

  The young cop shrugged, grabbed a pad from Bohler’s office and followed me outside.

  He laughed when he saw the top. ‘It’s green.’

  ‘You’ll be envious, come Christmas,’ I said.

 
His smile disappeared. ‘And that?’ the cop asked, pointing at the yellowish bit impaled on the braided wires protruding from the dash.

  ‘More interesting than an ordinary air freshener, don’t you think?’ I said of the Cheese Whopper wrapper. It was the second-to-last touch of my inspiration, a restoration of the scent that had driven poor Sniffy mad.

  The cop gave me a receipt and I walked away as though headed for the train station.

  Amanda was waiting around the corner in her Toyota. ‘You’re sure that was wise, poking so arrogantly at them?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t want to leave the Jeep outside the turret if I’m not around, for fear of a new deposit. I won’t leave it at Leo’s, for fear I’ll link him to this mess.’

  ‘What about my building? Best guarded garage in town.’

  ‘You don’t need cops hanging around your condo.’

  ‘We’ll see who I want hanging around my condo,’ she said, and pointed her comfortably clattering old Toyota toward the airport.

  Instead of continuing down 55th Street to the long-term regular parking garage, she turned south on Central Avenue and pulled beneath the portico of Signature Flight Support.

  ‘Support?’ I asked.

  ‘For the rich,’ she said. She held out her hand, palm up.

  As we agreed before we left the turret, I gave her the $482 my coach seat would have cost to fly Southwest Airlines round trip to Portland, Oregon. It was a pittance and absolutely necessary.

  ‘I’ll have my secretary email you a receipt,’ she said.

  We walked into the lobby. A center cluster of black vinyl and chrome lounge chairs faced a big-screen television. Another row faced windows that looked out onto the ritzier runways of Midway Airport. Amanda stopped at the main desk to hand a woman her car keys and we went outside onto the cement bordering the closest runway.

  We walked past a Rolls-Royce pulled up to the closest jet and down fifty yards to where two pilots in white shirts, dark ties and black trousers were standing next to a sleek, small white jet trimmed in burgundy and gold. They smiled as Amanda introduced me. A door with stairs was dropped on the left side of the fuselage and we stepped up into the cabin.