I supposed I should call Jarobi, to thank him for the bodyguard, but though it wasn’t much past noon, the thought of trying to do anything except crawl into bed was too complicated to consider.
Fifty
In the middle of the afternoon, Henny Bennett’s lawyer sent me fishing for the prepaid cell phone I’d brought to L.A. It was chirping in the pocket of my khakis, buried under a thin layer of other clothes on the chair next to my bed. I keep my duds close, so I don’t have far to sprint in the cold. Also because I don’t yet have a closet.
It was two thirty, Chicago time, which meant it was lunchtime in L.A.
“You were a bit cryptic yesterday,” Mickey Gare said, oozing affability. Cryptic was hardly the word for the lies I’d spun, but I was too groggy to quibble.
“How’s the weather out there? Sunny and around seventy-two?” I ventured my other hand from beneath the blankets to grab for the trio of sweatshirts.
“There’s no need to play games. We’ve heard nothing from you, and Mr. Bennett remains most interested in acquiring the Daisy.”
“As is the equally lovable Mrs. Bennett.”
He snorted, and I remembered the slight dusting of powder I’d seen under his nose. I’d wanted to dismiss it as a bit of sugar doughnut residue, such were my sensibilities, but L.A., being a land of tight abs and loose nostrils, demanded other interpretations.
“We’d like to offer an enticement.”
“A bribe? Bribes are always fun.” I rubbed my legs with my free hand, to warm them.
He snorted again, and I became certain he was enjoying a lunch of power powder.
“What’s that clicking sound?” he asked.
It was my teeth, chattering. “Hold, please.” I set the phone down and put on the first of my sweatshirts, the XL, in gray. Then, picking up the phone, “How much of a bribe?”
“An enticement to make the final offer.”
The man was a sleazy ass, and my chin was still quivering from the cold. I reached for the second sweatshirt, the plain dark blue XXL. “Last look has already been promised to Mrs. Bennett,” I said, still talking as I slipped in one arm, then the other, as agile as a python.
Two snorts came this time, one loud, one more distant. Gare must have been having lunch with Henny Bennett.
“Hiya, Henny,” I called out.
“No one has contacted us,” Gare bleated. “Not you, not your principal. We’ll pay the highest dollar.”
“You already said that.”
“Rudy Cassone? You do know that name, Mr. Elstrom?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I presume you know he’s the one who claimed the Daisy was stolen from him and threatened to sue anyone who has possession of the picture. We did some research. So far as we can tell, no one has owned that painting since before World War II, and even then its provenance is cloudy.” He paused. “And now he’s dead.” He took a deep sniff that sounded like a tornado sucking a tree out of hard ground.
“Why are you calling?”
“Damn it: Will this Rudy Cassone business wreck things?”
“It certainly did for Rudy Cassone,” I said affably. Cradling the cell phone against my ear, I eased into my thickest jeans, made even thicker in spots by dried paint, and reached for the last of my sweatshirts. It was an XXXL in blaze orange with DEPARTMENT OF PRISONS printed on the back. Leo bought it for me, saying that although he only paid two dollars for it, the owner of the Discount Den assured him it went for more when it was new.
“What?” Gare shouted through the tiny speaker of my cell. “You sound like you’re talking through a pillow.”
And a cloud of cocaine, I wanted to say, but I’d had a better inspiration, born of too little sleep and too much Mickey Gare. “Things have gotten more complicated,” I said.
“Speak up! I can’t hear you.”
I took a moment to enjoy his quickened breathing before whispering, “A third bidder.”
A horrific sound, akin to an entire forest being ripped loose, came through the phone. “You—you—there’ll be an enticement. Huge money for you alone.”
I clicked him away. Amanda was safe, and mending. Leo was mending, too, I hoped. I had other things to resume worrying about. A worthless canvas might have been destroyed in Bruno Robinson’s basement, but a gun most certainly had not—a gun that had been used to kill a man who lay under too little gravel. That gravel would have to be swept again, before the walls and the slab could be poured. Sweeping meant dislodging, and that meant discovering. Likely enough, Robert Wozanga would again see the light of day.
I walked to the window. Jarobi’s guard detail was gone.
I grabbed my regular cell phone. I’d gotten no messages, especially one from Jarobi saying Robinson had been found dead.
“Oh, boy,” I said to myself. Then, realizing that talking to one’s self is a sign of deteriorating mental health, I went down to talk to the coffeemaker.
While I waited for Mr. Coffee to embrace the day, I switched on the little kitchen radio I keep tuned to the news. I listened for ten minutes. There was no account of a building inspector being found shot to death on the West Side.
I called Amanda’s cell phone. I got jettisoned right to voice mail. Understandably, she was not taking calls.
I then tried the never effervescent Wendell Phelps at his office. His secretary said she’d have to take a message.
Finally, I called Jenny. Dinner with her seemed like the most important thing I could do, even though she’d have questions, not the least of which would be why I’d taken twelve hours to return her call. I got routed to her voice mail, too.
As I poured coffee, my phone rang.
“Good afternoon, buckaroo,” Jarobi said.
“Buckaroo,” I repeated, clueless.
“Buckaroos are cowboys, remember?”
“No.”
“Buckaroos carried Colt Peacemakers like yours. Got it?”
“All of life is about loss.”
“What?”
“Never mind,” I said. “How’s Amanda?”
“Her father put a wall around her. Without a complaint, I can’t get a warrant issued on Robinson.” He cleared his throat. “That is, if he’s still alive.”
I was awake now, and fully nervous. “He’s got to be dead.”
“You’re sure it was Robinson following you?”
“I recognized his burgundy Escalade.”
“And him? You recognized him?”
“I think so. He had a towel…”
“What are you saying?”
“He must have gotten burned in his basement and grabbed a towel to stanch the bleeding. I didn’t actually see his face.”
“The car, we found. The windshield was smashed in, and there was blood on the steering wheel and the front seat. No Robinson.”
“What’s Rivertown City Hall saying?”
“The Escalade was stolen. They don’t know when.”
“They’re covering up,” I said.
“You hope.”
“You bet. I don’t want Robinson alive anymore. We have issues.”
“If you were sure it was Robinson chasing you, I could summon up some actionable charge, here in Chicago. If all you saw was someone holding a towel to his head…”
“No corpses, no Caprice in that alley, either?”
“Some fresh scrapes on a garage but that’s all. Be careful, buckaroo.”
I put on my coats and went out. The sun was bright; the day had warmed into the low forties. No ice glistened anywhere.
On my way to Leo’s, I called Endora. “Amanda is safe,” I said.
“Thank goodness,” she said. Then, “It’s over?”
“Not by a long shot.” I braced for anger. She must have been going crazy, cooped up in some discount motel with Ma Brumsky and her own mother, sweating whether Leo would ever summon his head back to full life.
She said nothing. There was no anger, no rage.
“I’m going by his plac
e to pick up some of his most outrageous clothes and a few CDs,” I said. “They might prod some memories.”
She forced a laugh that came out flat and hung up.
Leo’s neighbor was on her front porch with a broom. “About time,” she called out.
“For what? The snow is melting.”
“About time anyway,” she said.
I stepped through the slush to the back.
Grabbing clothes to bring to Leo took no time at all, because any combination of patterns and colors, no matter how unharmonious, always made him look normal. I grabbed shockingly colored shirts and pants from his closet, and a shockingly endowed Brazilian songstress’s CD from the Bose system on his dresser, and went back out to the Jeep.
Before heading north, I swung past Robinson’s bungalow. A Rivertown police cruiser and the fire marshal’s red sedan were parked in front. No fire damage was visible on the outside. I supposed that meant little had been destroyed inside, either, especially not the fingerprints on a revolver.
I drove to the tollway. As I was about to get on, I chanced a look in the rearview and saw an older green Chrysler minivan. It had been a hundred yards behind me on Thompson Avenue and was lagging the same hundred yards now.
Paranoia, I told myself. Paranoia from a hellish few days. Still, I drove past the northbound entrance ramp and headed west.
I passed Crystal Waters just as I had the morning I’d driven to Falling Star to deliver a canvas to Rudy Cassone. Now, though, the latest snow had made the gated community’s ruined grounds pristine and white. Even the enormous husks of the few houses that remained, waiting for last inspections by explosives experts before they could be torn down, looked whole and livable, as though their owners were snugged up safe inside. It was an illusion. Those houses sat on ground riddled deep with live explosives. Perhaps that’s what Crystal Waters had always been, a facade, an illusion of a good life that could be exquisitely and securely lived. It had certainly been that for the months Amanda and I had been married. Until we, and it, blew up.
The minivan was still behind me, and gaining. The gap between us was less than fifty yards.
Spider feet prickled up my neck. Only one hand gripped the steering wheel. The other held a white terry towel pressed to his face. It was splotched all over with red.
The driver was leaking. He was from hell.
Fifty-one
He followed my every turn, not caring if he was noticed. Even tipped into crazy, his head a wet mess oozing red into a towel, he was Superman. He survived fire and, somehow, an alley full of guns. Now he wanted only me. He wanted revenge.
I made more turns, and so did he. I pulled onto a main highway, three lanes running north, and so did he. He had to be thinking about a big move. So was I.
We came to a forest preserve. Thick old trees lined the shoulders on both sides of the divided highway. Traffic had thinned. Timed right, he could charge up now, if I got slowed by another vehicle, and cut me into a crash. Or perhaps he was simply looking for a clear line of sight for his gun.
His green minivan still filled the same two inches in my rearview. He must have been familiar with the road and known there was a better place, farther up.
I was looking for a good place, too, a spot to do a quick U-turn, but there was too much deep slush in the median. Even in four-wheel drive, I’d sink to the tops of my wheels.
There’d been more colors; the thought slapped into my mind. I checked the rearview again. Sure enough, the green of the minivan had not been the only constant since Rivertown. Two more colors had been there as well, hanging back as precisely from the minivan as Robinson was staying behind me. That’s why he’d been hanging back. He knew they were there. No bigger in the mirror than pencil erasers, one was red, the other was dark, perhaps black. Black, like that Impala I’d noticed the day Jarobi first came around.
I could evade the minivan with a U-turn, or at least swerve back into him if he tried to run me off the road. Three cars was a different deal. They were using cell phones to coordinate their moves, waiting for the right time to box me in, one car in front, one in back, to slow me enough for the third man to pull up alongside to shoot. Zigs, zags, and U-turns would buy me nothing. I could not outrun three vehicles.
Too late, I passed by an access road into the forest preserve. There might have been a chance to go off-road in there, between the trees, but not for long. The woods were too thick.
A traffic signal appeared ahead, its light green. I dropped down a gear, to slow the Jeep and to pick up the torque I’d need. The few cars behind me began catching up, but not the green minivan, and farther back, not the small shapes of red and black.
The light turned yellow. If I stopped, they’d come up behind, on foot.
I blew into the intersection just as the light turned red. The intersecting road was much narrower, only one lane in each direction. Nothing was coming from the left, but a white convertible was starting up on the right. I swung left, barely missing the ragtop. A blond woman was driving. She hit the brakes, and then she hit the horn. I didn’t look back, but I supposed she got a finger up as well.
The road ahead of me was empty. Except for a couple of driveways, there was nothing. Then I saw why. In the distance, orange striped barricades dead-ended the road. There was construction. The road was closed.
I needed to ditch the Jeep and run. I looked behind me. The white convertible was turning into one of the driveways. There was no one behind her. No one had followed.
I made a U-turn and stopped, looking at the way I’d come. The traffic light remained green, stopping the northbound traffic, stopping them. Escape lay southbound on that same multilaner, if they remained stuck in the tangle of northbound cars stopped by the light.
If I was fast.
I sped back to the intersection, glancing at the congestion to my left only after I’d turned onto the wide multilane highway heading south.
They’d disappeared. All three vehicles were gone.
I didn’t dare slow, but I didn’t dare believe. Yet I was sure: There was no one back at the traffic light. It was like they’d been sucked into space.
I pressed down on the accelerator, watching ahead, watching behind. They had to show up somewhere.
Fifteen minutes later, I turned east, passed Crystal Waters, and got on the Tollway.
I called Jarobi. “I think Robinson’s been tailing me for the last hour. I think I lost him.”
“Green Chrysler minivan?”
“Yes.”
“I imagined he’d be out of state by now.”
“I imagined him dead,” I said. “No reports of gunshot victims on the West Side?”
“There are always gunshot victims on the West Side, but no young adults like you described. No trashed burgundy Escalade, either.”
“Robinson had two friends along today, in red and black cars.”
“That black Impala you keep asking about?”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“I’ll pass all this on to your county sheriff. Tell you what, Elstrom: I’ll put out a bulletin, saying Robinson is wanted for questioning in an art theft.”
“Think any of it will work?”
“To find a green Chrysler minivan, accompanied by two cars of unknown make and model, one red, one black?” He laughed. “Nah,” he said.
Fifty-two
Dr. Feldott was puzzled by what I was carrying.
“Flags, or rags?” she asked, smiling.
“Mr. Smith’s dress clothes.”
She pursed her lips. “That’s a shame.”
“I thought they might trigger a memory or two.”
“Why not? I’m afraid we’ve tried everything. We can only be patient. He doesn’t speak much, but we hear him whispering when he’s alone. Patients sometimes do that; it’s a means of trying to communicate, if only to themselves. He smiles a lot, though. We think he’s happy.” She motioned for me to go in first.
Leo wore a white shirt and tan trousers a
nd sat at the small desk. He swept something small into his lap.
“Do you know me?” I asked.
He gave me a nod, of sorts, but his eyes had been drawn to the magnificent songstress on the CD. I set it on the desk.
“Would you like a player for that?” the doctor asked. She’d followed his eyes.
“Oh yes,” he said.
She nodded approvingly and left. It was progress.
I spilled the clothes out on the bed. Holding up one of his most atrocious Hawaiian shirts, a bright orange number decorated with red pineapples dangling from palm trees with pink fronds, I asked, “Excite you at all?”
He frowned. “Bright.”
“Excellent,” I said. “A lack of enthusiasm for this garment is surely a sign of a correcting mental attitude. You might become better than new.”
His brow wrinkled. “Huh?”
“This is one of your favorite shirts.”
He winced and turned to the CD on the desk. A leer spread across his pale features. “This is mine?”
“Yes.”
“I like this,” he said.
I sat on a chair next to the bed. “I came to tell you a story.”
“Good.”
“Once upon a time, in a crooked little village not so very far away…” I began. Then I stopped. “No, forget that. This isn’t funny.”
I began again. “Years ago, a young thief named Snark Evans worked at the Rivertown city garage for a man named Tebbins. He also worked for Tebbins after hours, helping to install residential security systems. One day, Evans stole some jewelry and a painting from a house where they were installing a system.”
Leo’s eyes had remained on the CD.
I cleared my throat loudly. He looked up.
“The painting belonged to a Chicago mobster named Rudy Cassone,” I said.
He showed no reaction.
“OK so far?” I asked.
“OK.”
“Almost immediately, Snark realized he’d stolen from a wrong guy, so he decided to get out of town quick.”
“Quick?”
I nodded. “The jewelry he could take with him, to hock later. He decided to leave the painting behind, maybe because it would be difficult to fence, or maybe because he thought it wasn’t worth much. He gave the picture to a friend, for safekeeping.”
The Dead Caller from Chicago Page 22
