Hidden Graves

by Jack Fredrickson

  He led me inside and down a short hall, past stairs with a chairlift mounted on the wall. Oddly, a retaining bolt at the bottom had worked itself out from the base molding.

  We went into a living room comfortably furnished in cloth-upholstered furniture, mostly beiges and pale greens, and sat opposite each other on settees in front of a properly-sized fireplace burning real logs. My own fireplaces, one on each of the five floors of the turret, were preposterously larger, big enough to burn whole chunks of trees. And once again, for an instant, I wondered what my lunatic bootlegging grandfather had been thinking.

  On the table in front of us was a bottle of whiskey, a small glass bucket of ice and two plain water glasses no fancier than those average people had in their average kitchens.

  ‘As you might know, my family is reverential toward Canadian whiskey,’ Wade said, grinning.

  ‘My grandfather was in the trade, too,’ I offered up. ‘Beer, brewed in garages.’

  He nodded like that would bond us forever, and asked, ‘Ice?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘How did you get my cell-phone number?’

  ‘Amanda Phelps, your ex-wife and very strong admirer, gave it to me.’ He handed me my drink. ‘My sister directs all potentially alarming emails to Jeffries, our security chief. He researched you and reported your relationship to Ms Phelps. I called her and asked her for your number. She was hesitant to give it to me but when I read her the contents of your email she relented. Though she acknowledged nothing, I got the feeling she shares your concerns.’

  I turned to look out into the hall.

  ‘There are no guards inside,’ he said. ‘We’re alone except for my sister, who spends most of her time upstairs.’ He smiled again. ‘It was Theresa who thought it best if we spoke face-to-face.’

  ‘Because I threatened to go to the media?’

  ‘That, of course, but also we’re worried about losing Ms Phelps’ support. She’s part of my Committee of Twenty-Four. Though a newcomer to my political world, her counsel is well received.’ He paused to take a sip of his drink. ‘Concerns on her part could become contagious, perhaps spread to other members of the committee, and that could affect all sorts of things. So, from a very practical point of view, you can ask me anything about John, Willard and Red, as long as my responses are kept confidential, for your ears only. Most especially, that includes not saying anything to Miss Jennifer Gale.’

  ‘You saw that Internet photo of Jenny and me.’ It had been taken at a television news awards banquet the year before.

  ‘My sister found it, actually.’

  ‘I can’t control Jenny,’ I said, ‘but I’ll respect your confidence. Let’s start with that silo business.’

  He winced. ‘Not my finest hour.’

  I nodded.

  ‘The police believed it was just a prank. My sister thought otherwise. So did I, at least at first. We get all sorts of nasty surprises, though that was the first that actually had a weapon, such as it was.’

  ‘That little axe.’

  ‘That little rubber axe,’ he said. ‘We thought it a threat all the same. My sister put out the word that it was a security issue, which was truthful, at the time. Now we think it was simply a prank related to absolutely nothing, since nothing ever came of it.’

  ‘Nothing to do with your old friends?’

  ‘Will, Red and John, as you mentioned in your email to my sister?’ He shook his head. ‘I haven’t heard from Will and Red in years, though unfortunately I did hear from John, and very recently. He made several disturbing telephone calls to our campaign office, demanding to speak with me personally.’

  ‘For what purpose?’

  ‘Blackmail, I think.’

  ‘You never spoke to him?’

  ‘No. My campaign office manager, Marilyn Paul, did. We dismissed it. There is nothing in my past that’s problematic.’ He held up the whiskey bottle. ‘You have to go back to my great granddad to catch the Wades doing something illegal.’

  ‘Have you wondered if Shea murdered Marilyn Paul?’

  ‘Impossible. She only intercepted his calls. And besides, John has since died, out in California.’

  ‘As did Marilyn Paul, only she was killed here in Illinois.’

  He stared at his whiskey for a long moment before looking back up. ‘I don’t understand your inference. I don’t see a link between John and Marilyn.’

  ‘You just said she intercepted his calls to you.’

  ‘She intercepted many crank calls. His got passed to her as would any other. He’d used his personal number for the first one and she did a reverse look-up. She learned he was living under an assumed name – David Arlin – but recognized his picture on the Internet. She knew John from way back, as did I, of course. She confronted him, demanded to know what he was up to. He hung up on her.’

  ‘Did you wonder if she planted the plastic bones and rubber hatchet?’

  He looked genuinely shocked. ‘For what end?’

  ‘I’m hoping you’ll tell me.’

  ‘Marilyn wouldn’t have done that thing with the bones. She had no reason. And anyway, those bones and that little axe meant nothing, as I said. They were just a prank that I overreacted to, which we then covered up.’

  It was impossible not to like the man’s straightforwardness. Yet something – his overwhelming earnestness, maybe – held me back from telling him it had been Marilyn who’d salted the silo with the bones.

  ‘Maybe John said something on the phone,’ he went on, ‘that she never passed along to us. Perhaps she thought all three of the old gang were involved in shaking me down; I’m wealthy, I’m running for office. I’m vulnerable. Above all, Marilyn must have believed that we weren’t taking John’s vague threat seriously enough. And that says a lot about her, that she’d use her own funds to hire you to get to the bottom of a threat aimed at me. I’m going to miss her.’

  He smiled at my lack of a response and went on: ‘No, Marilyn did not tell me she’d retained you but it’s obvious from your two emails. First, you contacted my sister saying you and she have a mutual interest in something for which you are being framed. After we learned you live just up the river from where Marilyn’s body was found, it was simple to assume you were being framed for her murder. Then you wrote, demanding to know what we know about John, Willard and Red. That connects you to her because Marilyn had those same concerns, or at least about John. I’m guessing now she was concerned about all three of them, since you’re concerned about all three.’

  He held up the bottle, offering to freshen my drink. I shook my head. I’d taken only one sip.

  Wade leaned back. ‘We were the Four Musketeers: John, Willard, Red and me. I don’t remember who tagged us as such but the name stuck. We worked on the Delman Bean campaign years ago and we had fun. We were young, single, liked to drink and liked to laugh. They were good times. And then it was over. John and Willard and Red got great jobs with some oil company in California.’

  ‘They quit so suddenly.’

  ‘Who could blame them? They had lousy jobs here and they saw a great opportunity.’

  ‘It was so sudden that not even you, their fourth musketeer, had any inkling they were about to take off?’

  ‘They never said a word, and for a long time I was a little hurt by that. Now I realize they didn’t think I’d understand because our economic circumstances were so different.’

  ‘They gave you no hint, whatsoever, that last night you were together?’

  ‘Beers as usual. I was shocked all to hell when John called me the next morning.’ He looked out the window for a moment. ‘It sure screwed Delman Bean. We were depending on them to chauffeur voters to the polls. Bean lost by just a few votes.’

  ‘You never heard from any of them again? Not a word, not a card?’

  ‘Not until John called my campaign office a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘Only John Shea?’

  ‘Red sends a Christmas card every year but it’s a preprinted, imp
ersonal thing – something a mailing service could do.’ He picked up a cell phone from the lamp table beside him, made a call and asked for the security man he’d mentioned, Jeffries. ‘I’d like to send someone over to talk to you,’ he said to whoever answered. ‘Tell him about Marilyn and John Shea. Hold nothing – repeat, nothing – back.’ He listened for a moment, and then clicked off.

  ‘I don’t expect you to take my word for anything, Mr Elstrom,’ he said.

  FORTY-FIVE

  A dour-looking, heavy-set man was standing on the sidewalk when I pulled up to Wade’s campaign headquarters on Chicago’s near west side. ‘Name’s Jeffries,’ the security man said, eyeballing my khakis for anything weapon-like.

  We went inside. ‘Lousiest-looking campaign shop in the Democratic Party,’ he said, sounding proud, as we walked past stained fabric panels enclosing young people staring at computer screens and talking into telephone headsets.

  ‘Yet your candidate is rich,’ I said.

  ‘He never acts it. He’s just a regular guy.’ We went into a small conference room. A young woman, about nineteen, was sitting at the table reading a dog-eared copy of Time magazine.

  ‘Earlene,’ he said, ‘tell Mr Elstrom everything you told me about those calls you and Marilyn took.’

  ‘About two weeks ago,’ the young girl began, ‘I took a call from a man who sounded drunk. He said he wanted to get a message to Mr Wade. I said I could take down the message because that’s what we’re supposed to say, even though the only people who call here wanting to talk to the candidate are nut jobs. This man says to tell Tim – that’s what he called him, “Tim” – to leave his private number with us here for when he calls back. I said I most certainly would, and then I asked him his name. He said never mind and asked me my name. I said it was Mindy, which was a name I made up just for him. He hung up. I thought he was just another wacko and forgot about him. But then the next night, one of the other girls stood up above her partition and asked if any of us knew anyone working here named Mindy. Nobody said anything for a second, and then I remembered the call from the previous night. I said it was me and took the call, more curious than anything. It was the same guy, except he didn’t sound drunk this time. He asked if I’d passed along his message. I said not yet. He said to tell Tim that if he wanted to keep the hatchet buried Tim better give me a private contact number I could pass on. That sounded a little more serious so I got up and told Marilyn about it, because she was my boss and that was procedure.’

  She looked at Jeffries, who said, ‘Go on.’

  She looked back at me. ‘Marilyn said we ought to write it up since the guy called twice, and came back with me to my cubicle. We have computer histories of all the incomings and we were able to figure out which were the two calls from this guy, though they came from two different numbers. Marilyn wrote them both down and told me to alert her if the guy called again. Which he did, the very next night, again asking for Mindy. I told him what Marilyn told me to say, that I was transferring the call to my supervisor who could better assist him. I switched him over to Marilyn and that was the end of it for me.’

  Tears had formed in the girl’s eyes. Jeffries thanked her and she left.

  ‘She feels responsible for turning the calls over to Marilyn,’ he said, ‘though I told her that was procedure, just as she said, and in any case those calls had nothing to do with Marilyn’s death.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘If course I’m sure, damn it.’ He took a breath and went on more calmly: ‘Or almost sure. Marilyn had decided to do a little investigating on her own before reporting the calls to me. She was like that: always had a strong faith in her ability to handle every damned thing, bullheaded to the extreme. So she did a reverse lookup on both numbers and hit pay dirt on the first one, the call he’d placed when he was tipsy. It was from his own number out in California. Turned out she knew the guy from way back. When the guy called again she told him a few things about himself that he probably didn’t like to hear, namely that she knew he was an old buddy of Mr Wade’s.’

  ‘John Shea of Laguna Beach.’

  ‘Calling himself David Arlin. When Marilyn looked up Arlin on the Internet she saw Shea’s face, someone both she and Mr Wade knew from long ago.’

  ‘Blackmail, that business about keeping the hatchet buried?’

  ‘Some sort of shakedown of Mr Wade, it seemed. I told him about it but he wasn’t concerned. Whatever this Shea-Arlin fellow had, it couldn’t have been much. Mr Wade told me to forget about it.’

  ‘What about that silo? You think it was coincidence, Shea mentioning a hatchet and that rubber axe business?’

  ‘It crossed my mind that they were related, but “bury the hatchet” meant the same thing as “let’s forget about our disagreement,” and probably nothing more.’

  ‘So you did nothing about Shea?’

  ‘Marilyn wasn’t happy about that, but like I said, Mr Wade said to drop it. I told her there was nothing I could do until the guy presented himself as a problem, here in Chicago. That’s when she mentioned you.’

  ‘She mentioned me by name?’

  ‘Nothing so direct. She said she knew of a private investigator she could hire cheap, and that if I didn’t get off my dead ass she’d hire the fellow herself. Which,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘she obviously did.’

  ‘She told you this before Shea got blown up?’

  He stared at me, surprised. ‘What the hell, man? There’d be no need for an investigator after the explosion, right? I mean, the threat was gone when Shea got killed.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, but he had it wrong. She’d hired me right after she thought Shea got killed.

  ‘And then she got murdered,’ he said. Something in his eyes had changed. He had cops’ eyes, hungry for what I knew that he didn’t.

  ‘That got you worrying?’

  ‘You bet. If her murder hadn’t resulted from something else entirely, it meant Shea had an accomplice who killed Marilyn to destroy any evidence that might link back to him.’

  ‘Or the accomplice was set to pick up where Shea left off,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘Sure, except nothing’s happened since. No phone calls, no threats, nothing at all. It’s over, Mr Elstrom.’

  ‘You never thought to tip the cops?’

  ‘I had nothing to give them except speculation,’ he said, which meant it was campaign season and he didn’t want anything nasty sticking to Timothy Wade.

  ‘You’re sure the accomplice hasn’t contacted Wade without you knowing?’

  ‘Mr Wade’s got plenty to lose. He would have gotten me involved right away.’

  ‘You’ve been with the Democrats a long time?’ I asked.

  ‘More years than I like to think.’ He made a point of raising his arm to check his watch, an ordinary rubber Casio quite unlike the multi-thousand-dollar gold timepieces Wade’s personal guards wore.

  ‘I’d stay on guard,’ I said.

  He dropped his arm. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Call the cops in Laguna Beach and check on their investigation of the Arlin explosion.’

  ‘There’s something new?’

  ‘Marilyn Paul’s killer is still loose in Chicago. That’s new enough.’

  FORTY-SIX

  ‘Such is the fear you engender in politicians,’ I said on the phone. I was standing by a second-floor window, looking out into the night. No one appeared to be lurking.

  ‘The power of my father’s purse,’ Amanda said. ‘Was Tim helpful?’

  ‘Everything he said sounded reasonable.’

  ‘But …?’ She’d caught the hesitation in my voice.

  ‘He sounded too reasonable. He admitted being friends with the other musketeers, back in the day. And both he and his security chief believe Shea initiated some sort of blackmail scheme but that it blew up with Shea, out in Laguna Beach.’

  ‘You didn’t tell them it wasn’t Shea who got killed?’

  ‘I told the sec
urity man, Jeffries, to call the Laguna Beach Police Department directly. I don’t think he will. He doesn’t want to see past the Democratic campaign office.’

  ‘What did they say about Marilyn Paul?’

  ‘That’s what’s most puzzling. Wade and his sister are sharp. They figured out she’d hired me but neither Timothy nor his security man, Jeffries, pressed me much about it. They took her to be a busybody, someone best forgotten.’

  ‘Did you tell them Marilyn planted the rubber axe and the bones?’

  ‘I suggested it as a possibility to Wade. He acted appropriately shocked.’

  ‘So they’re seeing no link between John Shea and Marilyn Paul’s murder?’

  ‘No, despite the fact that both Wades surmised Marilyn hired me to look in on all three of the old musketeers.’

  ‘Maybe Tim’s got other, more pressing things on his mind, like getting elected to the United States Senate.’

  ‘I admit that’s very likely.’

  ‘Have you stopped?’

  ‘Merely awaiting inspiration,’ I said.

  Leo Brumsky’s girlfriend, Endora, was almost a foot taller than he was but they shared the same high IQ. She’d made a pile as a fashion model, bought a condominium with a view of Lake Michigan and quit modeling for a low-paying research job at the Newberry, Chicago’s quirkiest private library.

  I called her cell phone an hour after I hung up with Amanda. ‘That fellow who helped me find the Confessors’ Club, Mickey …’ I’d forgotten the man’s last name.

  ‘It’s Dek,’ she said to someone nearby.

  ‘Hang up on him,’ Leo told her from a distance. Likely, they were at Endora’s place.

  ‘Mickey Rosen,’ she said to me. ‘He knows everything about Chicago history.’

  ‘Does he like to drink?’

  ‘What a strange question.’

  ‘I’m looking for the names and locations of bars that were in Chicago twenty years ago.’

  ‘That’s a tall order for a drinking town like ours.’

  ‘Hang up on him,’ Leo said again.

  ‘I can narrow the search area to a three-block radius of a specific address,’ I said.