The Dead Caller from Chicago

by Jack Fredrickson

  My mother, a high school sophomore, had taken off the day after my birth, never to be heard from again. My father, supposedly a Norwegian sailor named Elstrom, had moved on long before that. One of my aunts told me he hadn’t been around long enough to learn he was going to be a father.

  My mother’s three sisters, all much older, agreed to raise me. Blood counted thick with them, though nurturing did not, at least not with two of them. A solution to keep me safe was reached … with exceptions. I spent a month with each of them on a rotating basis. By the time I got to kindergarten, I’d become an experienced traveler. I had a fiberboard suitcase and marching orders that required I move on at the first of every month.

  Wires often got crossed. Vacations, doctor visits, and other things arose that sometimes resulted in locked doors. Often I slept outside, hugging my cardboard suitcase, rather than show up where I was not expected, or wanted.

  That changed in seventh grade, when Leo Brumsky became my friend.

  Ma Brumsky never said much to the boy Leo brought home, but she never said no. Many nights I spent in a spare sleeping bag on the floor of Leo’s bedroom. Many mornings I lugged my battered fiberboard suitcase to school, made slightly heavier by two thick sandwiches wrapped in Saran for that day’s lunch. There wasn’t a day, from seventh grade clear through the end of high school, that I didn’t wish I could spend the rest of my nights sleeping on a floor, any floor, in Ma Brumsky’s bungalow.

  The click of a lock echoed loudly through the still house. The back door creaked slowly open. I moved lower behind the big wide TV, smug with relief. I’d been brilliant, and I was going to be brilliant some more. Whatever was going on, whatever the reason he felt he had to hide, I would fix it.

  His footsteps crunched on the pistachio shells as he went into the kitchen. He needed to eat.

  Glass rattled, but no light came on. I’d already noticed that he’d unscrewed the refrigerator bulb. He always thought of everything.

  Cabinets opened; cabinets closed; minutes passed. There was no scrape of a chair; he was eating standing up. Then his footsteps sounded, and again the back door creaked. The lock clicked. He was gone.

  It was as I’d expected, and now I’d hurry to learn where he was hiding. I pushed myself up.

  Footfalls pounded up the basement stairs. I slipped back behind the television, struggling to think. No one else was supposed to be in the house. I’d come in; I’d hidden.

  I’d never imagined someone else was already inside, hiding in the basement. Someone who hadn’t heard me come in.

  The footsteps got to the back of the house. The door creaked open, fast. He crossed the back porch. Then he was outside, in the gangway, crunching the snow below my head.

  It was wrong. There was only supposed to have been Leo, sneaking back to his house every night for food, playing a strange game I didn’t understand at all.

  Instead, there’d been two—and I wasn’t sure which was which.

  I ran to the back door.

  Nineteen

  My teeth had begun chattering when I hit the outside air, but it wasn’t from the cold. It was jitters. I was trailing a man trailing a man, and one of them was sure to be packing a gun.

  I ran up the gangway. I’d shoveled well enough, but there was still too much ice and snow for silence. Each of my footfalls ground down hard, echoing loudly off the bricks in the narrow passageway and announcing that I was there, a third man in the night.

  I stopped at the front and edged out just enough to see. Light came from the streetlight down the block, at the corner past the excavation. At first I saw nothing, but then one of the shadows in front of a house four doors down changed shape. A man was moving there, hunched down, tight against the houses. His feet crunched noisily on the crusted snow. He wasn’t worried about that. The houses were dark. No one would be out.

  Except this night. Another man followed fifty yards behind, tight to the same dark buildings. He, too, moved low, but he was going slower, stepping more deliberately, careful to not alarm the hunched figure in front.

  A loud crack filled the night. The trailing man had snapped a branch.

  The hunched figure in front spun around and rose. In that instant, he was backlit by the pale milky light at the corner, a man wrapped so thickly against the cold he appeared more square than tall. He stood frozen, straining to hear.

  The trailing man melted into the darkness of the bungalows.

  I eased back a little into Leo’s gangway, still watching.

  The bundled-up man dropped back into his hunch and hurried toward the end of the block.

  The trailing man stepped out from the shadows and followed.

  I moved behind them. I didn’t know who was leading, or following, or what I could do. It was a fool’s mission I was on, and I’d come unarmed.

  The bundled-up man stopped just before the excavation, at the house slated for demolition. Again he turned to look back. Satisfied that he was alone, he ran up the stairs of the vacant house.

  The trailing man reemerged from the shadows and began running across the frozen lawns. No longer was he worried about being heard; his quarry had gone inside. He turned and ran up the stairs of the empty bungalow. A door banged loudly against an interior wall.

  I was still two houses back when flashes, bright and blue, lit the front windows, one, two, three. Gunshots, muffled by thick old plaster and old glass.

  I ran up the steps. The old door, stripped of its knob and latch, was ajar. I slammed through it and stopped.

  A man stood in the center of the room, indistinct in the haze of gunpowder lit faintly from the streetlamp outside the window. His body was rounded by the coats he wore, probably two. A long-barreled revolver dangled heavy in his right hand.

  He turned slowly to look at me, seemingly unsurprised by the new intrusion.

  Behind him a man lay with his back against the wall facing the dining room, where a small sofa or a piano topped with graduation pictures might have once stood. Three spots made black by the gauzy gray light showed on the blank wall, higher up. Bullet holes, surrounded by splatters made large by the heavy gun.

  Relief touched at my chest. I took a breath, then another.

  I said his name. “Leo.”

  “You’re here for your friend?” he asked, in a slow, soft monotone I’d never heard. He was in shock.

  “What?”

  “You’re here for your friend?” he repeated, in that same chilling, slow voice.

  “Leo!”

  “Leo?” He did not know the name.

  “Damn it, I’m Dek. Dek Elstrom.”

  He might have made a smile. By then, I wasn’t watching his face. He’d raised the heavy, long-barreled revolver. His knuckles got larger as he began to squeeze the trigger.

  I dropped and charged; the gun fired. I hit him low at the knees, not knowing whether I’d been shot. There’d never been weight to him, and he crumpled like rags. Something thudded a few feet away. The gun, coming loose from his hand.

  I flipped him over, waiting for pain, but he’d missed me. I got him in an easy chokehold. He didn’t fight; he didn’t yell. None of his senses were working fast enough for those.

  I got up to my knees and leveraged us both up to stand. He was dead weight and barely breathing.

  “What the hell have you been doing here?” I managed, loosening my arm a little around his neck.

  He shook his head, heavy with shock.

  “Walk with me,” I said.

  He offered no resistance. I removed my elbow from his neck, and we walked slowly toward the back of the house. The layout was identical to Ma’s, built in the same fast binge in the late 1920s when America, and Rivertown, were solid in their hope for the future.

  We walked through the kitchen. The cabinets, counters, and doors had been ripped away.

  As I thought, his clothes were piled in the back bedroom, the bedroom that was his in another bungalow, just a few houses down. He was a man of habit. I’d have to come
back for them.

  I put an arm across his shoulders and turned back toward the front room. His revolver glinted dully on the floor. I picked it up and jammed it in my peacoat.

  We walked outside, my arm ready to grab him if he tried to bolt. But he went passively down the steps and down the blocks to the Jeep, and got in as solemnly as a scolded child.

  He sat erect, unseeing, as we drove away. His eyes didn’t flicker as we passed the neon carnival that was Thompson Avenue, nor did anything within them flash in recognition when I got to the turret. This Leo had never been there before. We climbed the wrought-iron stairs to the second floor.

  I sat him in the La-Z-Boy. His head fell to his shoulders. He was asleep.

  He wore two coats. I inspected the thick wool outer one for signs of blood splatter. There seemed to be none. A thin insulated windbreaker was underneath. There appeared to be no blood evidence there, either, but that didn’t mean a crime lab examiner wouldn’t find some. I unbuttoned his topcoat but left it on. Later, I’d get him to change clothes and ditch what he was wearing.

  I had rope that I used to secure my ladder when I climbed more than two stories. As he softly snored, I tied him loosely to the La-Z-Boy, around the chest, around the legs. He didn’t stir even when I duct-taped his wrists together.

  I knew that if I paused to think, I’d realize I was acting like a crazy man. Leo needed medical help. I had to go out again, though, and I couldn’t risk leaving him loose, perhaps to wander over to Thompson Avenue and announce he’d just killed somebody.

  I tugged at the rope. It was taut.

  Now I had to clean things up.

  Twenty

  The sky was dark, and clouds obscured the moon. Nothing moved in Leo’s neighborhood, yet I was sure I felt a hundred pairs of knowing eyes watching as I parked around the block from the empty bungalow where the dead man lay.

  I dropped the shovel I’d brought next to the excavation and hurried up the steps of the vacant bungalow. Now hidden in the shadows of the front porch, I chanced a look at the dig next door. The wall forms still lay piled outside the hole, but the cement footings had been poured, and gravel had been roughly spread between them. All that remained was to pour the basement walls, and then the basement floor. With luck, it would all be done within a week.

  All I had to do was make sure the dead man was a part of all that.

  I went inside. The air still stank of the gunpowder from Leo’s revolver.

  The dead man facing the wall was huge. He wore a leather jacket, dark jeans, and black sneakers.

  I bent down. His was the face I’d seen by the ticket shack in Mackinaw City, the last face Arnie Pine had seen before he crashed his boat onto the rocks on Eustace Island.

  I patted his pockets and found a penlight clipped on a key ring containing an electronic remote and a single car key. He carried no cell phone and no wallet. That was no surprise. The man was a professional killer.

  I patted him down again, to be sure. He had no gun. I swept the beam of his penlight low across the floor, thinking it must have fallen out of his hand when Leo shot him. I saw nothing. There was no gun.

  There was no more time, either. I jammed the key ring into my pocket, grabbed the man under his arms so I wouldn’t smear blood from his chest or his back on the floor, and began dragging him toward the front door. He was every bit as heavy as he looked, two hundred and fifty pounds at least.

  I tugged him over the threshold and paused to look up and down the block. No lights were on, but here and there a glint came off a car parked along the street. The sky had lightened. A sliver of bright moon was peeking out from the clouds.

  I went backward, pulling him behind me, and dropped him.

  I was exposed now, out in the faint moonlight, and had to get him out of there fast. I grabbed his ankles, turned him around, and tugged. Air banged out of him as his back and head hit each step, gasps from a dead man.

  At the bottom, someone started humming the heavy bass line of an old Bob Seger tune, Night Moves. I wanted to giggle. It was me.

  I dragged him to the edge of the excavation, switched ends, and pushed at his shoulders until he tipped over the edge. He hit bottom with a horrible grunt. I grabbed the shovel, rolled onto my belly, and dropped into the hole.

  Something moved on the gravel. I froze, unable to breathe until I realized it was my shadow. A bigger piece of the moon had slipped out of the clouds and was lighting the whole excavation with milky blue light. The good darkness was gone.

  I bumped him over the low concrete footings to the center of the excavation and ran back for the shovel. After scooping away the surface gravel, I began digging like a crazy man. I had to go down four or five feet.

  At two feet I hit hard clay, rock solid and frozen. Furious, panicked, I stabbed the shovel harder at the frozen ground. It was no use. Only tiny bits broke free.

  The gravel around my shadow was getting whiter. The moon was now half free.

  I dropped to my knees. Raising the shovel high over my head, I brought it down with all the force I could muster. Over and over, I attacked the frozen ground. Again and again, the shovel fell from my bloody hands, unable to cut in at all.

  “Hey?” someone yelled. A house door slammed across the street.

  I found a foothold in the dirt and pushed up just enough to see. A man was walking toward the street, a dark shadow in the moonlight. He was looking at the excavation. I held my breath. If he came over, he’d see the corpse lying uncovered in the moonlight.

  “Hey?” he called again.

  He’d stopped by a car. A minute passed, and then, satisfied he was alone in the night, he opened the car door and set a rectangular lunchbox inside.

  He was so close I was sure he could hear me breathe.

  He looked over at the excavation a last, long moment and then got in and pulled the door closed. A second later, he drove away.

  My arms were shaking too badly from nerves and pain to strike at the earth anymore. I pulled the big hulking man into the shallow grave, spaded him over with frozen clay, and covered it all with gravel.

  The moon was now as bright as an examining lamp. There was a slight mound where the dead man lay, but it cast no shadow. I could only hope the cement men wouldn’t think to work at leveling the gravel further.

  I threw the shovel out of the hole, scrambled out after it, and shuffled across the snow to the abandoned bungalow. I’d never be able to get rid of the holes in the wall, or the splatter, but obliterating the drag marks might buy enough time to get the body cemented over without anyone thinking to inspect the inside of the bungalow.

  I scooped up Leo’s clothes from the back bedroom, snatched up the shovel, and ran around the block to the Jeep. Five minutes later, I was back at the turret.

  Leo still slept, in spite of the uncomfortable way I’d bound him. I cut away the tape and undid the rope. I left him in his coats. I was too tired to do anything else.

  I left myself in my own coats as well and lay down in front of the stairs. He’d wake me if he tried to leave the turret.

  In the brief seconds before I crashed into sleep, I supposed I’d been as cunning as I could be, in trying to hide a corpse in frozen ground.

  Twenty-one

  His slight cough woke me.

  Leo’s hands were clasped primly in front of him, as attentive as a small child in a museum, as he stood facing the curved wall. First-time daytime visitors to the turret are always dazzled by the way the sun streaming in through the slit windows changes the hues and the shadows on the limestone blocks every few minutes. It’s quite a show.

  Leo had seen it before, hundreds of times.

  I got up off the floor. “Coffee?” I asked.

  He turned at the sound of my voice, his face as blank as it had been the night before. Leo, the Leo I knew, was still checked out from the trauma of his gun work.

  “Follow me,” I said.

  He understood. We crossed the hall to my almost-finished kitchen. I p
ulled out a chair, told him to sit at the plywood table.

  I had Cheerios, and I had bowls. I mated one into the other in front of him. The fact that I had no milk didn’t concern him. I gave him a spoon. He just stared at everything.

  It chilled me worse than anything the night before. I tugged at my peacoat, to pull it tighter. I saw dirt and grime—and blood.

  “Damn it,” I said. I had the thing off in an instant.

  Leo watched me like he’d watched the limestone—silently, with mild interest, nothing more.

  I laid the coat on the counter, sloshed Tide on the dark wool, and scrubbed it with my fingers. After a minute, I put it in the sink, ran water on it, and rubbed at it some more. It wasn’t just the blood I was trying to wash away; it was the memory.

  I set the coat on the back of a chair to dry and looked again at Leo. He was eating the Cheerios, uninterested in my sudden laundering.

  Amnesia was supposed to give the brain time to heal from trauma, but amnesia meant Leo couldn’t tell me anything to make him safe. I was certain the man he’d killed hadn’t been the only cranky monkey in the circus. That bruiser had worked for someone who would simply hire another cranky monkey, but for what, I could not imagine.

  I set a cup of coffee in front of Leo. Invariably, he refused to drink my coffee, claiming I brewed the worst stuff on the planet. It was true enough, since I rarely indulged in absolutely new grounds. Now he was drinking it slowly, passively, without expression.

  I called the Bohemian.

  I’d known Anton Chernek since the day my marriage to Amanda Phelps was dissolved. He was a CPA and certified financial manager and worked out of a fancy factory rehab full of licenses, degrees, and awards, but the wall shingling told only a small part of Chernek’s story. Mostly, he was a quietly influential adviser to many of the wealthiest people in Chicago and their offspring, of which my ex-wife was one.