His house was dark, his sidewalk and front steps still covered with the three inches of new snow. For some people, uncleared snow didn’t matter, and they took their time shoveling it away. Not so Leo Brumsky. He was fastidious to a fault about keeping his walks clean for Ma and her movie-loving friends, and he always attacked the task swiftly. When he was out of town, he had a standing deal with a snow removal service, paying them extra to put his bungalow first on their work list.
Snow lying on a walk, several days after it fell, was never allowed.
I trudged up the front steps and rang the bell. When there was no answer, I knocked, loudly. No one came.
I high-stepped across the tiny lawn to the gangway between his house and the neighbor’s. Leo’s office window, like all the basement windows, was barred. I knelt down. His office was dark, like every other room in the house.
Someone tapped on glass high behind me. I stood up. The gray-haired neighbor babushka looked down from her side window. She jabbed a finger toward the front. I walked back up the gangway.
“You’re awful late,” she said, leaning out past her wood storm door.
“What?”
“I seen you enough since you were a kid to know you’re Leo’s friend. Get shoveling.”
“I just stopped by.”
“Leo’s got to be more careful with his arrangements. We got three more inches.”
“No one’s home. Did he take his mother someplace?” I was worried he’d rushed her to the hospital. Nothing else would explain snow sitting for so long.
“That’s no excuse for not taking care of things so others won’t fall. I use that sidewalk to get to the grocery. Now I have to walk clear around—”
I cut her off. “Is Mrs. Brumsky all ri—?”
Now it was her turn to cut me off. “They’re away, but that’s still no excuse. It always snows in Chicago in March, for pity’s sake. Somebody needs to clear it off.”
“Away? Both of them?” I could only think there’d been a sudden emergency, though Leo had never spoken of a relative out of town.
“Vacation, for pity’s sake.”
My mouth went dry. “Leo told you they went on vacation?”
“Fort Lauderdale, I think. Or maybe Miami Beach. Florida, for sure. Or maybe it was…” She scratched her head, confusion descending like a veil.
“You’re sure: Leo took his mother on vacation?” I asked again, damning myself for not returning Leo’s call when I was in Iowa.
“Of course I’m sure. They left right before all that snow came down. You going to shovel, or what?”
Something was wrong. Ma Brumsky’s idea of a vacation was to cruise a shopping cart at Walmart. Even before she’d become tethered to her front room by the wonders of big-screen television, I’d never known her to want to travel. Leo, of course, took vacations, but only with Endora. They went to exotic spots like Gstaad or St. Barts. Leo was an obedient, loving son, but he’d never expressed any tolerance for vacationing with Ma Brumsky.
Then there was the uncleared snow. Leo was a meticulous planner. His removal service would have come around while he was away.
Unless he’d not thought to tell them they would be away.
I had my cell phone out before the neighbor slammed her door. Leo’s voice answered, telling me to leave a message. I did. “This is Dek. Snow has accumulated all over your sidewalk. I’m going to shovel, but Lester Lance Leamington is advising me to embrace greed, not menial labor. I expect payment of at least a thousand dollars, along with a phone call explaining what’s gotten into Ma, abandoning television to take off on vacation.”
I clicked off. Cracking wise hadn’t made me feel any better.
A snow shovel leaned against the back porch. As I pushed the snow through the gangway to the front, I paused to look up and smile winningly at the neighbor’s window. The curtain fluttered.
I cleaned the sidewalk and the front steps and returned the shovel to the back of the house. Even with the exercise, even wearing two coats, I’d begun to shiver. Something was wrong.
I started the Jeep, turned the heater on high, and called Endora’s cell phone. I got routed to voice mail. I called her office at the Newberry and got her machine. Finally, I tried the library’s main number. The operator said Endora wasn’t in. She wouldn’t tell me anything else.
I drove back to the turret, drank coffee, and tried trimming out a window. After ruining five pieces of wood, I gave it up and left three more messages on Leo’s cell phone and two on Endora’s. By now it was well past dinnertime. I microwaved something pictured on its box as looking beige. It came out green. I took it to my electric blue La-Z-Boy and switched on my tiny television with its dangling converter. Though it was just past ten, Lester Lance Leamington appeared, untroubled, optimistic, and chock full of the same crap he’d been spewing late-night and midday.
I carefully resealed the green food in its microwavable container, threw it across the room, and went upstairs to bed.
Four
The next morning, I grabbed for my cell phone before I got out of bed, even though I’d left the ringer on. None of my calls to Leo or Endora had been returned.
I dressed quickly and drove down Leo’s street. Workers were unloading a huge pile of cement forms in front of the new excavation. They were going to be pouring a big basement.
I parked in front of Leo’s bungalow and got out carrying my tool bag, like I’d come to fix something. It was true enough. I hoped to repair my peace of mind.
Even though it was cold, right at freezing, and early, the neighbor woman was out in the snow in her backyard, wearing galoshes and a black down coat. She was hanging laundry. The array on her line, large ladies’ undergarments all, showed that she lived alone. I supposed the wet things would freeze quickly and make sounds like huge thunderclaps when they cracked, should the wind pick up.
“Get hold of Leo?” she shouted through the wood clothespins in her mouth.
“There might be a problem with the hot water heater,” I said, to explain the tools.
“Then why are you going to the garage?”
“Just checking everything,” I said.
“You tell Leo how it’s dangerous to walk around unshoveled walks?”
“He was mortified.”
Her eyes and nose followed me as I walked to the garage. Turning my back to hide my hands, I rummaged in my tool bag for my thinnest putty knife and slipped it between the service door and the jamb. The door popped open on something I hadn’t expected to see.
Leo’s purple convertible was inside. He rarely kept his Porsches longer than two years and always kept them immaculate. No longer. A foot-long scrape of brown paint had been cut into the rear fender on the passenger’s side.
Pa Brumsky’s monstrous old Ford LTD, painted that same brown, was gone. It had been backed out for the first time in a decade, hurriedly enough to scrape the Porsche.
I slammed the service door shut and quickly walked to the house.
The flimsy porch door was unlocked, as usual. Ma didn’t worry about thieves coming for her Diet Dew, prunes, and All-Bran. The barrel of nonsplits rested where Leo and I had dropped it, the object of one of the last laughs we’d shared.
The thick back door was locked. Again the thin putty knife worked fast magic. I stepped inside.
My shoes crunched on pistachio shells. A sparse trail of them had been dragged all the way back from the front room. There’d been another movie night since Leo and I had vacuumed, but this time, impossibly, no one had cleaned up. The trail of shells fit with the scraped Porsche. Leo and his mother had been in a panic to get away from Rivertown.
Leo’s bedroom was at the back. I went in, ducking under the plastic airplane dangling from the ceiling. There’d once been a whole squadron suspended there, painted in psychedelic variations of yellow, purple, green, and pink. Even as a child, Leo had seen the world brightly. Now only one remained, a World War II Spitfire he’d painted in orange and green stripes.
The kitchen was a mess. The sink was piled with supper dishes, and more pistachio shells lay on the wax-yellowed linoleum. The door of one cabinet was open. It was the low, easily reachable one that Leo kept stocked with the tiny, airline-sized bottles of whiskey, gin, and vodka that he thought would slow Ma’s drinking. The shelf had been swept clear. It was a good sign. Ma had been in a hurry, but she’d been lucid. She hadn’t left her booze.
I opened the refrigerator. It was full, as always stocked with store goods and a dozen of Ma’s scratched, opaque Tupperware containers. Two unopened gallons of milk rested on the top shelf. Even after he’d stopped growing at five foot six, Ma always insisted that Leo drink two glasses a day.
Ma’s bedroom opened off the dining room. Her bed was unmade, and two of her dresser drawers had been pulled out. She’d packed fast.
Christ on the cross, her only decoration on the dark papered walls, was slightly askew. It could have happened when she’d jerked open the closet door beside it.
In the front room, cocktail glasses and bowls of bridge mix and prunes lay on brand-new tray tables facing the big-screen television. Leo must have hid the big tools; only the Home Depot pliers lay on the new tables. Not surprisingly, the pistachio shells were the thickest on the front-room carpet.
Shells on the floors, dirty dishes, swept-away booze bottles, pulled-open dresser drawers, and one swiftly scraped Porsche all pointed to a fast escape.
Ma and Leo had fled.
My footsteps drummed on the old wood steps as I went down to the basement. Not many months before, Ma asked Leo to clear it out so she and her friends could exercise. Ever the positive thinker, he’d dragged the clutter to self-storage.
When she specified shiny dance poles, dimmable lighting, and the red velvet walls of a strip club, he remained optimistic. Anything that fought the arthritis was fine. He even kept a smile pasted on his face when she requested a new big-screen television to play the special high-bass, heavy-drum videos that one of her ancient friends found in a dirty-movies store downtown. When the ladies began sewing costumes of beads and pull-away Velcro, he began to pray for release.
It came, with pain. First, one of Ma’s most imaginative octogenarian friends, Mrs. Roshiska, was carted off to the hospital with a slipped disc. Another of the girls then damaged a rotator cuff, the result of tugging too exuberantly on the pole. Finally, Ma herself took to bed with sciatica.
Leo acted fast. He brought everything back from self-storage: the tiny artificial Christmas tree they used to shake off and put on top of the rabbit-eared television, before Ma got the big screen; the model railroad layout I’d helped Leo set up in seventh grade; the dozen boxes of drugstore china Ma liberated when she’d been young and there’d been such a thing as drugstore lunch counters. In no time flat, Leo restored the artifacts of the lives Brumsky to the same mounded mess they’d been in since I was a kid and would have given anything to live in a place so cluttered with memories of good family times.
That day, though, the pile in the middle of the basement had the musty smell of stuff that would never be needed again. Leo and his mother were gone and unreachable, as though they’d been sucked off the planet, and that made no sense at all.
Leo’s office looked neat and orderly and waiting for work, as always.
I sat behind his desk. The coffee cup of sharpened pencils rested where it had always been. I’d had a cup just like it, festooned with the name of some fool who’d dared to run against one of the lizards for water commissioner. Mine had gotten lost in one of the monthly moves I’d had to make as a kid, shuffling from one aunt to the next. Leo, though, still had his cup, like everything else from his youth. Once he owned something, he kept it for life.
Like me, as his friend.
The last time I’d been in that room, Leo had snapped a pencil he was taking from that cup. He’d gotten a phone call that drained the blood from his face. He’d called the man Snark.
He’d whispered, “But you’re dead,” disbelieving, into the phone.
He’d said something else I didn’t understand, about throwing something out because he thought it was a joke, and he’d mentioned someone named … what was it … Teddings.
I’d asked him about his caller, Snark. He hadn’t answered at first. He’d paused for a long moment and then, in a soft daze, mumbled something about the summer after I’d left Rivertown. I asked him again who’d called.
“A dead man,” he finally said.
I looked across the office. The very wet Bo Derek, sitting in the surf, smiled back. We’d been high school freshmen when he found that particular piece of art rolled up in a big can at the Discount Den. We still joked that was the moment we discovered love, or at least a sufficiently wet and excited approximation of it.
I leaned forward. A picture I’d never noticed before hung above the row of mismatched filing cabinets, barely visible behind the tall art reference books. It was a pastoral scene of a lavender barn and two pink, green-spotted cows against a background of rolling orange hills and leafy red trees, signed with a big “Leo B.” in the corner. He must have done it in fifth or sixth grade. Leo was forever resurrecting stuff from the massive pile in the center of the basement floor.
I rummaged through his desk. Pens and notepads and checkbook and envelopes and green Pendaflex file folders. Everything looked normal.
I went up the stairs thinking that I should bring out the vacuum and the broom and the dustpan. The Brumskys, Ma and Leo, kept their modest place neat. To see it a mess seemed somehow a sacrilege.
A thought then stabbed: There might be a need for cops and forensics people to see things exactly as they were now.
I went out the back way and tried to lock the door tight against that kind of thinking.
Five
Besides the caller, Snark, the other name Leo had mentioned during the phone call was Teddings. It sounded as though Leo had known them both, that first summer of college.
The city’s maintenance garage was a cinder-block building, two blocks south of the bars along Thompson Avenue. A man in blue overalls was inside, toweling a black stretch Cadillac Escalade. Another two Escalades were inside, along with a Cadillac Seville, waiting to be washed. Rivertown might have been the greasiest town stuck to the west side of Chicago, but it could never be said that its Cadillacs were allowed to get as dirty as its reputation.
“Is there a man named Teddings here?” I asked the man wiping down the Escalade.
He pointed to a man working beneath the open hood of a dark green city pickup truck. The image of my turret was emblazoned on the truck’s door, there in exchange for the forgiveness of old tax bills and a sleazy bit of rezoning.
“Is Teddings here?” I asked the mechanic.
He kept his head under the hood of the truck. “You mean Tebbins.”
“OK,” I said. “Is he here?”
“He’s a building inspector now. Try city hall.”
I drove back to the turret, parked, and walked down the street to city hall. I’d never liked living close to where the lizards scuttled, but an advantage was that the street was always immaculate during snow months. I supposed that was because lizards moved close to the ground and didn’t like ice rubbing their swollen bellies.
The building inspectors were at the end of the hall, just past J. J. Derbil’s office. The name on the glass said a man named Bruno Robinson was the chief inspector. The department secretary was also named Robinson. She looked up from the National Enquirer spread out on her desk. At least three years of back issues were piled on a low bookcase next to her. I asked for Te
bbins. She asked if I had an appointment. I said no. She pointed to a private office and told me to go right in. As I passed her desk, I saw that she was reading a report of aliens taking over the Pentagon. I wanted to hope that Rivertown would not be next but feared I was several decades too late.
Tebbins was in his late sixties. Officeholders don’t retire in Rivertown; they collect both salaries and pensions until they drop in their offices from the greasy weight of doing too little for too long. Like the department secretary, he read, too, to pass the time. The day’s Sun-Times, open to the sports section, was on his desk. Apparently, he was not worried about aliens.
His mouth turned down when I told him my name. “Elstrom … Elstrom … the name is familiar…” He snapped his fat fingers in recognition. “Aren’t you that nut that lives in the turret across the lawn?”
“The very same,” I said, preening. “I’m here about someone named Snark.”
A flash of recognition raised his fat chin for a second before he made his face go blank. “Snark who?”
“Snark somebody; I don’t have a last name. I think he used to work for you at the city garage. Leo Brumsky worked there that same summer.”
“Leo I remember,” he said, his face brightening. “Odd little guy, but conscientious, the way he used to climb up on those trucks.” He leaned back. “We didn’t often get good help to wash trucks.”
“And cars?”
“What?”
“Lots of kids are needed to wash all those Cadillacs?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Sure he did. He knew about Cadillacs, like he knew about someone named Snark, whoever he was.
I started to turn, then stopped with a thought. “Good news about that new house going up, right?”
“What the hell does that mean?” Rivertown’s building inspector asked, of the only new construction begun in years.
I named Leo’s street. “Big one, too. Got to be a million dollars going up on that property.”
His face darkened. “I can’t help you, Elstrom.”
I passed a larger private office on my way out. According to the nameplate next to the door, it belonged to Chief Inspector Robinson. His desk had a newspaper, too, but he acted a lot friendlier, giving me a smile and a wave as I walked by.
The Dead Caller from Chicago Page 3
