The Dead Caller from Chicago

by Jack Fredrickson

The woman with the clanking cane had rounded the front of the station wagon and now leaned against its front fender to catch her breath. “Creeminal,” she yelled, raising the metal cane two-handed like a battering ram at me, the would-be criminal.

  I held up my empty hands. By now, all the windows in the station wagon had been powered down. “Creeminal, creeminal,” everyone but me screamed.

  “No criminal,” I shouted back. “No thief; no murder.”

  The aged woman at the front of the idling car lowered her cane and, leaning on it, pushed herself off the front fender and started hobbling toward me. I recognized her then. She was the friend of Ma’s who ordered the special movies that came in unmarked envelopes.

  “Mrs. Roshiska,” I shouted. “I’m Dek Elstrom, Leo’s friend.”

  The good black wool wrapped around her face fluttered. “Leo? You frenn?”

  “Friend, yes. Dek Elstrom.”

  “Dake?” Behind her, I heard more Dakes, cackled, coming from the car.

  “Elstrom.”

  At last, she recognized me. She lowered her cane. “Where Mrs. Baroomsky?”

  “Away, on vacation.”

  The old woman shook her head. “No goot; mus’ be home. Call today for us come over.” Then she gave me a sly look and added, “Moofies.”

  “Moofies,” the girls in the car chortled.

  It all came clear, then. Ma Brumsky had wasted no time after she returned. With Leo all right, things could get back to normal. She called her friends. Movies would resume. Endora must surely have had to drag her away.

  “Vacation,” I repeated and walked away. I could add no words that would salve their disappointment.

  I drove the long way back to the turret, so I could pass the health center. The old Malibu was gone, safely on its way to becoming parts of other old Malibus.

  Two blocks later, I put fifty dollars in the parking ticket envelope and dropped it in a city box. Now, no Rivertown official would ever have cause to think of the Malibu.

  I parked at the turret, but before going in, I walked down to the river. Broken sheets of ice moved white in the faint moonlight, drifting lazily downstream. They would shatter against each other when they hit the debris trapped by the dam.

  Blue lights were pulsing rhythmically down there, along with two very bright yellow search beams aimed at the far bank. Cops and a city crew had been called out. Something had gotten stuck, impeding the flow of the water. I didn’t envy them, having to work so late.

  The gaps between the ice sheets in front of me were wide enough to take guns that would never fall into the hands of kids. I threw the three automatics into them, one by one, and went inside.

  I treated myself to a cup of cold coffee, sat at the makeshift plywood table, and opened the dead man’s wallet. The bright gold of a badge flashed at me. It had the seal of the State of Illinois set in the center of it, a wide-winged eagle at the top, and said PRIVATE DETECTIVE in letters circling the seal. It was the kind of thing that anyone could buy to impress morons.

  There were two laminated detective licenses, however, that were the real deal. Robert Wozanga, a man who until yesterday had been alive, was licensed by the states of Missouri and Illinois to sniff around. He had an address in a suburb near O’Hare International. The wallet also contained a driver’s license, a Visa card, and a picture of a white Shelby Ford Mustang from the sixties.

  There was a little money, just a few singles, two fives, and one ten. Mixed in with them, apparently forgotten, was the ticket stub for a ferry ride from Mackinaw City out to Mackinac Island.

  I thought back to the three guns I’d just thrown into the Willahock. No doubt their serial numbers had been ground off, like the weapon the cops had recovered from the empty bungalow. For all of Wozanga’s legitimate licenses, he was ultimately just a thug who killed people.

  The question was, for whom.

  I went out and drove north, toward O’Hare.

  Twenty-six

  Robert Wozanga had lived behind a screen of tall bushes next to a 7-Eleven. The other houses on the block were just like his, modest two-bedroom homes painted in conservative whites, beiges, and pale blues that were sure to draw no attention. Wozanga’s was one of the blue ones, perhaps as blue as Wozanga himself was now, lying in the frozen ground beneath what was destined to become a rich person’s rec room.

  I parked behind the 7-Eleven, went in to get coffee like that was the objective, and took it to the bare tendrils of the privet hedge that bordered Wozanga’s property. Without leaves to block the light, his backyard was as bright as the parking lot. I set my coffee down at the edge of the asphalt and pushed through the branches. I was still fifty feet away when I saw I wouldn’t need to take out his keys. The back door was ajar, its window smashed. I slipped inside the kitchen and stopped.

  No sounds came from the rest of the house. I hoped that meant whoever had broken in had left.

  The wattage from the convenience store seemed to light the whole of the house as brightly as the backyard. Wozanga looked to have lived neatly, and apparently alone. There was one dirty bowl and one milk-smeared glass in the sink. Nothing cluttered the counters except for one yellow box of Cheerios, and that gave me pause. The little life-extending O’s might have been Wozanga’s last meal. He’d been disciplined, eating for better health. Yet the low-fat cholesterol-scrubbing O’s had ultimately done nothing to prolong his life. Somehow, that seemed like a cruel irony, even on a killer.

  The living room was as tidy as the kitchen. A three-seat sofa was set against a long wall. A worn upholstered chair was placed next to it, alongside a scarred low table that held a dozen car magazines stacked neatly. A big flat-screen television was hung so it could be seen from both the sofa and the chair.

  There were two bedrooms. The largest had a queen-sized bed, a lamp table, and a dresser. The bed was made, but the drawers and accordion closet doors had been pulled open in a hurry. The room had been searched.

  He’d used the smaller second bedroom as an office. It was trashed. The desk drawers had been pulled out and upended. File folders lay on the floor in front of a black four-drawer cabinet. A computer keyboard rested on the desk, but there was no computer. Whoever had ransacked his office had carted it away, perhaps along with some of the paper files.

  A shelf hung from brackets on the wall. It held two tiny cacti in little clay pots, a larger framed version of the picture of the Shelby Mustang, and a three-ring binder imprinted with the name of an office furniture store, set upright next to the picture of the car.

  The binder was meant to hold catalogs. It was a good binder and would be useful to a frugal man for holding more than catalogs. Wozanga had been such a frugal man. Inside were copies of the invoices he sent clients. It was what I needed.

  I went out to the garage. I didn’t need the door opener I found in his Malibu. The side service door had been kicked in, like the door to the kitchen. Inside was the Mustang, pristine in white with two wide blue strips running trunk to hood. I guessed the car was worth more than his house.

  Behind the car, a lawn mower sat next to a snow blower, two shovels, and some quarts of weed killer. Like the Shelby, he’d never need them again. I crossed the brightness of the lawn and pushed through the branches to the parking lot.

  The coffee was still warm. I took a sip as I stepped back to study the hedge. I’d left marks where I’d pushed through. So had someone else, a few yards down. The man who’d ransacked Wozanga’s had left not long before. Since Wozanga was less than twenty-four hours dead, the other person was likely either a mystic or someone who’d found out fast that Wozanga was dead.

  That meant either he’d been tailing Wozanga or he was his client, come to remove any link between the killer detective and himself.

  I wondered, then, if that also meant that the intruder knew about Leo killing Wozanga. And about me, thumping the man’s corpse down front stairs and into the frozen ground of an excavation.

  Twenty-seven

 
I was fresh with new inspirations early the next morning. I drove to Leo’s, smashed his back-door glass, called the cops, and settled back smug in the Jeep.

  Delightfully, I had a cement truck to watch while I waited. It had beaten me to Leo’s block and was churning in front of the excavation as two workers set up chutes to pour the foundation walls. After that, it would only be two or three more days before they did the basement floor. Then I could breathe deeply, free from the worry that Robert Wozanga might get jostled out of the gravel and point a frozen finger at Leo and me for having put him there.

  A burgundy Escalade roared up to the excavation and skidded to a stop. Robinson jumped out and started waving his arms at the cement truck, the chutes, and the excavation. Worse, he was shaking his head.

  It was over in a minute. Robinson stormed back to his Escalade and drove off, one of the workers made a slashing motion to the truck driver, and the cement truck rumbled away. The workers took apart the chutes, and they left, too. There’d be no pour. Wozanga, the unknowing Leo, and I would have to wait for another day.

  Two of Rivertown’s rarest—cops in uniform—arrived thirty minutes later. “I’m the one that called,” I said, getting out of the Jeep.

  The two officers stayed in the car. They smelled of whiskey.

  “You go in?” the driver asked, looking up through the open window.

  “No.”

  He nodded but made no move to get out.

  “Aren’t you going to investigate?”

  He shut off the engine, and they got out. Both of them had mud on their shoes.

  “Sloppy morning?” I asked.

  “Up all night. Floater, by the dam. Took forever to snag him out.”

  The buzz in my brain came from remembering the blue lights I’d seen the night before, as I’d stood by the Willahock, throwing in guns. The tingle in my neck came from remembering Jenny saying that bad things were beginning in Rivertown.

  “Drowning?” I asked.

  “Guy had a bad smash to the head that could have come from banging against the dam.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Medical examiner’s working on that.” The driver turned to scrutinize the front of Leo’s bungalow. “Everything looks OK,” he ventured, his eyes shifting nervously between the front porch and the gangway.

  It was a wrong response. They should have been moving toward the house.

  “The break-in occurred around back,” I said.

  “You go in?”

  “Not on your life. I saw the broken glass and said to myself, this is evidence of a crime. The perpetrator might still be inside, armed and dangerous. Being unarmed and not dangerous, I called you.”

  The driver looked at his partner uneasily.

  “Surely you can’t think this relates to Tebbins,” I said. It was a wild shot, but something more than the possibility of confronting a burglar had to be making them so nervous.

  “No one knows shit around here anymore,” the partner said.

  I recognized him. A few years back, he’d been a thumper, one of the junior-grade punks hanging out at the health center. He’d had a spiky haircut that made him resemble a porcupine, aroused. Certainly it was nothing that would fit under a normal cap. Yet here he was, in uniform, wearing a glossy-brimmed police cap. I shifted to see if there were any spikes pushing up at the fabric.

  He looked at me, alarmed by such an odd, obvious inspection.

  “Let’s go around back.” I started toward the gangway.

  They had no choice but to follow, both of them looking up as though someone dangerous might be in the windows, watching. I led them to the flimsy wood door that went to the wood porch and stopped.

  “This is as far as I go, gents,” I said.

  “You’d best come in with us,” the former porcupine snapped. “You’re the one who called. Besides, we might need you to identify stuff.”

  I put on a look of horror. “You mean like corpses?”

  “He means like damage,” the driver said.

  I winced appropriately and shook my head, a coward through and through. “I’m staying outside, back by the garage.”

  “Just exactly what is your relationship to the people who live here?” the porcupine asked. It was a legitimate cop question, but I wondered if he’d asked it simply to delay having to go up into the house.

  “Leo Brumsky lives here with his mother. He is a friend of mine. They’re gone on a trip, and I’ve been keeping an eye on the place. I came over this morning, saw the shattered back-door glass, and called you brave young men.”

  The neighbor’s door banged open. “What the hell’s going on?”

  We stepped back into the yard. The ever-vigilant babushka from next door had come out, done up in her black down coat and a red watch cap.

  “Nothing, ma’am,” the former porcupine said.

  “Well, what about down the block? Bad enough there’s an empty house just sitting there, waiting to attract prostitutes, thieves, and drug dealers, without you using yellow tape to advertise this block as being unsafe. And just this morning, a cement truck drove up and took off, too afraid to stay long enough to deliver its load. I watch TV. I know when a whole block’s gone bad.”

  “Precautions, ma’am,” the driver cop said. “We were only inspecting unusual stains in that empty bungalow.”

  “I heard blood,” the woman said.

  “Probably nothing to it,” the former porcupine said.

  “What about those bullets dug out of the front-room wall, and that gun they found?” she asked, no one’s fool.

  “Sounds like a crime wave to me,” I said, smiling at her.

  “Damn it.” The former porcupine’s eyes flashed as he bit his lip, looking at me

  “Don’t forget Tebbins,” I went on. “And now a floater’s been found murdered in the Willahock.”

  “I left my front door unlocked,” the babushka said, hotfooting it back inside. I’d ruined her day. It was wonderful.

  “Thanks a bunch, Elstrom,” the driver cop said, half tugging his partner through the flimsy door and up into Leo’s porch.

  I went across the yard to the garage, but wasn’t alone for more than a minute when my cell phone rang. “Mr. Elstrom?” It was my new insurance client, the fellow that was about to set me on the same road as Lester Lance Leamington. “We’d like you to go to Lincoln, Nebraska, as soon as possible. We’ve got an insured that’s reporting unusual inventory losses. They think it’s internal—”

  I cut him off. “Employee theft?”

  “That’s the supposition, but we’ll wait for your report.”

  “I’m tied up.”

  He cleared his throat. “Pardon me?”

  “I’m tied up,” I said again.

  “We discussed putting you on retainer,” he said.

  “I’d like that, very much.”

  “But?”

  “But I’m tied up—”

  Now it was his turn to cut me off. “Retainer means you drop everything for us.”

  “Ordinarily—”

  He gave me a long, loud sigh. “We’ll get back to you, Elstrom,” he said and hung up.

  Maybe he would, when pigs flew. Right now, the only things flying were my prospects for further income from that client, right out the window.

  The cops came out in less than five minutes.

  “When’s the last time you were here?” the former porcupine asked.

  “You mean, do I know how long the door glass might have been broken?”

  He nodded.

  “Not long; a day at most.”

  “We can’t tell if anything is missing,” he said. “Best you look around, and best you get that window glass replaced.”

  They left like rockets.

  Other than my financial future vaporizing, the morning had transpired magnificently. Leo had had no keys when I hauled him out of the abandoned bungalow. Yet he’d used a key when he snuck home for food. If he’d left his keys or anything else in the empty
house, the cops had it by now. A phantom burglar was ideal for explaining away anything of Leo’s they might find there.

  I’d also had another objective for my faked burglary: bait.

  I drove to the hardware store for a new lock and glass for the back door. Next up was the signage shop in a suburb south of Rivertown. The rush order I’d phoned in, for two outdoor-quality signs, was ready. Back at Leo’s, I drove both into his small front yard. I’d gotten the idea from Robinson, recalling Tebbins’s little side business.

  The signs were big, the same size Realtors used. The first was ordinary, and read ELSTROM SECURITY SYSTEMS. AFFORDABLE PROTECTION. I’d been more creative with the second: BURGLED ONCE? SHAME ON THE THIEF! BURGLED TWICE? SHAME ON THE HOMEOWNER … FOR NOT USING AN ELSTROM SECURITY SYSTEM!

  I went inside and installed the new lock and door glass.

  My tool bag contained small spools of different-colored wire, black electrical tape, and the doorbell I planned to hook up one day at the turret. I hoped they looked like the components of a security system. I left it on the kitchen table and went home, to think about my vaporized financial future and wait for someone to call.

  Twenty-eight

  Someone called less than an hour after I got home.

  “I’m inquiring about your security systems.” He spoke smoothly, but there was an element of rough behind it. He was a Chicago guy, probably South Side.

  “Yes?” I asked, a businessman anxious for clients.

  “I’d like to look at a current job.” Definitely, he was smooth.

  “I’ve just begun installing systems. I’ve got a friend, see, who was recently burgled—”

  “Oh, no,” he said, with almost no inflection. “Was anything taken?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “My friend’s gone, off on a trip with his mother. I found the door glass broken. Lucky for him I’ve been reading up about security systems, what with the economy and all, and me needing work of any sort. I offered to rig his place right away, so long as I could use it as a showplace. He wasn’t crazy about the showplace part, but he needs a system fast. I’m already hard at work and only came home to make a sandwich for lunch later.”