The Dead Caller from Chicago

by Jack Fredrickson

  I ran to the Prius and tried to pull back the ruined driver’s side door. It was bent back flat against the front fender and wouldn’t budge.

  I slipped behind the wheel. “Follow me.”

  She didn’t protest. She ran to the Jeep.

  We ran without lights, seeing only by the moon. I hugged the right side of the road; odds of a head-on collision between two cars running dark were good, if they didn’t find us first by the sound of the Prius’s ruined door. It banged against the front fender like a big steel drum at every ripple and heave in the road.

  Luck rode with us. We got to the neighborhoods without passing anyone. I stopped so she could pull up alongside.

  She reached over to roll down the Jeep’s window. “What now?” Her voice was high, but she was in control.

  “Is there anything in this car you want to keep?”

  Her face froze, and then she understood about the blood that must be smeared all over the front bumper, a concern for any body-and-fender shop. She got out. “My damned camera, Dek. My notebook, and my purse.” She came around to the other side, swept papers from the glove box into her purse, and grabbed her notebook and camera.

  She ran back to the Jeep. “Do not pull in behind me,” I called out.

  I drove to the health center. This time I stopped right in the middle of the parking lot and got out holding the last of the cash from my wallet. After a moment, two of them sauntered over, zippered in black leather and smelling opportunity like wild things sniffing meat.

  I handed them the money. It was a little more than a hundred and fifty dollars. “There will be no report of a theft for a week,” I said.

  I walked out to the curb and got in the passenger’s side.

  She tried for a smile. “My car’s been stolen?”

  “In a week, no sooner, though I expect it will become parts tonight. Let’s get you home.”

  For an instant, she stared straight ahead, out the windshield. Then she drove to the turret.

  The sensor lamps switched on the moment we stepped inside, lighting the two white plastic chairs, my table saw, and all the fears and promises in the world on her lovely face.

  Once before we’d had such a moment, supercharged, as hot as the sun. Though it had been July, it had been cold from fear and horror, just like now. We’d let that moment go; our ghosts were too close.

  Now she moved a few miles closer to me and looked up. A fine grin spread wide across her face. “You’ve got wood?”

  I nodded. For sure I had wood.

  “Then let’s have a great fire,” she said.

  Fifty-nine

  The sun had not yet risen when my cell phone rang from someplace cold, under the bed.

  “You’ve got to get over here,” Leo said, when I fumbled the ringing thing on.

  “Why?” I whispered, rolling over. Surely I’d been dreaming.

  It had been no dream. Jenny was sitting up in bed, watching me, impervious to the cold on so much of her skin.

  I took the phone from my ear, but not her from my eyes. I was not at all impervious to the cold on so much of her skin.

  The phone display said it was four thirty. We’d only been asleep for two hours.

  “I’m always amazed at what can happen in Rivertown,” Leo said.

  “I’m certainly thinking that way, too,” I said, agreeably.

  “I was coming home from Endora’s,” Leo chattered on, “and, well, jeez, you’re not going to believe it. You’ve got to get over here.”

  There were heavy diesel noises in his background. “There’s construction at this time of night?”

  “A backhoe and a bulldozer, hoeing and dozing like it was the middle of the day.” The diesels had gotten louder; he’d gotten closer to them. He shouted something unintelligible, and then the connection went away. He’d hung up.

  I’ve always trusted Leo’s instincts, but there, in my bed, in the middle of the night, embers still smoldering in the fireplace across the room, and so much closer … Jenny and I hadn’t so much sought to banish the memory of what had happened at the excavation and the bridge as we’d lunged to claim what we’d let slip away the previous July.

  “That was Leo?” Jenny, ever the newswoman, asked. “You’ve never told me the whole story about Leo.”

  “You never told me how tattooed Russians fit on his block,” I countered, warming even more beneath the covers.

  “Why would Leo call in the middle of the night?” she asked. The cold had finally touched her consciousness. She reached to pull the blanket up.

  “Oh, don’t,” I said, a man of immediate need.

  She grinned and let the blanket drop, knowing the cold would only improve the view. “Tell me why Leo called.”

  “Something’s going on by the excavation.”

  “What?”

  “Bulldozing.”

  Her face froze, remembering what she recorded. “Oh, no,” she said, scrambling out from beneath the covers.

  I remembered Robert Wozanga. I scrambled, too.

  “You can’t take your camera,” I said needlessly, opening the timbered door. The camera wasn’t in her hand anyway. “No one from city hall can ever think you might have been filming at the excavation.”

  “Understood,” she said.

  We had to park beyond the cross street. Rivertown police cruisers had blocked off both ends of Leo’s block. Their lights flashed blue across the furious faces of two hundred people, rousted from their sleep by the noise of the diesels and the glare from the enormous construction lights.

  They’d worked fast. The backhoe had already demolished the vacant bungalow and its foundation, dumping the debris into the new hole and on top of the splintered forms that lay ruined in the excavation next door. The bulldozer hovered attentively behind it, pushing in dirt from the mounds piled at the back of the lot.

  Dozens of the neighbors shouted from behind the cordon of cops, demanding to know why things had to be smashed in the middle of the night. I doubted the rank-and-file cops had been allowed to know.

  The original plan must have been to wait until first light for the demolition and filling. Little scrutiny would be attracted that early, and their first shallow burial would have lasted well until then.

  That was before Jenny’s anonymous phone call about another man, at the bridge. There wasn’t time to scrape more gravel, dig more clay. People would be headed off to work soon.

  Worse, no one knew who’d made the call, or what the anonymous woman knew. No one knew if she’d called the sheriff.

  Things couldn’t wait until dawn now. The plan was moved up.

  “Where is city hall?” one of the bravest of the neighbors shouted. Nothing in Rivertown was allowed without the approval of city hall.

  Nothing indeed, I thought. It was brazen, quite lizardly. It was perfect.

  Jenny moved forward, mercifully without her camera. I stayed at the back of the crowd, resisting the thought that I should break into song and dance. Rest at last, Mr. Wozanga.

  Leo found me a moment later. In the bright of the lights from the construction lamps, his hat, traffic jacket, and pants were a blur of muddy greens and oranges, except for the purple pom that now looked black and appropriately funereal on the top of his knitted hat.

  “Why are you grinning so broadly?” he asked.

  “I’m merely reveling in the spectacle that is Rivertown.”

  “You and the press arrived together,” he said, struggling to produce as much of a leer as his clownish outfit would allow.

  “The press is everywhere.”

  “If it satisfies you, then I find it deserved, and delightful. What’s going on here?”

  “I told you: I just arrived.”

  Four large haulers rumbled up, loaded with extra dirt, and everyone in the street had to back away to let them in.

  “Obfuscate if you must,” he shouted above the new engine noises. He pointed to a man stomping through the crowd. “He’s the general contractor. He’s
going crazy.”

  I put on one of my dumb faces. I have several. “Trying to find the person in charge here?”

  He tilted his pommed head back in mock concentration. “Let’s see. Mr. Tebbins, the building inspector, is dead. His boss, Mr. Robinson, is dead. That leaves…”

  “Yes? Yes?” I taunted, laughing at his antics, sure, but more in final relief that he was there at all, prancing, clowning, the old Leo, close enough to being as good as new.

  “Our newest building and zoning commissioner, soon to be our mayor!” he pronounced, raising his arms like a boxer victorious in the ring. People nearby looked and, despite the chaos, smiled. They loved Leo; they were his neighbors.

  “Interestingly, she’s not here, enraged at what’s obviously a violation of Rivertown working-hour statutes and instructing our inert police force to stop these goings-on.”

  “I still don’t get it,” he said, suddenly serious. “Why a demolition?”

  “This isn’t a demolition,” I said. “This is a burial.”

  Sixty

  Jenny was in a dark mood as we drove back to the turret. She didn’t speak until I pulled up in front.

  “Can I use your car? I want to check what I’ve got on professional equipment.” I assumed she was talking about what she’d recorded earlier at the excavation but figured, too, that she wanted to get far away from Rivertown.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll run in and get your camera.”

  I started to get out but sat back when she didn’t move to come around to the driver’s seat.

  “Did I get a man killed tonight, Dek? Should I have known not to call the Rivertown police from the bridge?”

  “You mean to protect the man who abducted you and took you to that bridge to kill you and dump you in the river, for what he thought you knew? You think you should have protected that man, Jenny, so he could try to kill you again?”

  “I should have known to call the sheriff, not the Rivertown cops.”

  “That was my instinct, too, until I realized they’d simply have passed it on to Rivertown. That’s why we’re lucky you called anonymously. Rivertown’s city hall will do anything to hush this up, including bringing in dirt movers in the middle of the night. They’d kill you, Jenny, for what you know about what’s been going on.”

  “You’re sure of the voices at the excavation?”

  “J. J. Derbil and brother Elvis, dumping Mr. Red.”

  “And it was J. J. and Elvis who went to the bridge tonight, not the cops?”

  “You’d never be able to prove it, because no one will ever get permission to dig at that excavation site again.”

  “I’ll see you later,” she said.

  “I’ll get your camera,” I said.

  She managed a small smile as she patted the pocket of her coat. “I kept it low so no one would see.”

  * * *

  A clatter outside woke me at noon.

  The Jeep had been returned. A stake truck was parked behind it. Two men were off-loading firewood and carrying it around to stack in back.

  I dressed, went down, and, thinking that everything in life was temporary, used fresh grounds for the coffee. By the time I had two cups the truck was gone.

  I went outside. The day was gray with the promise of new snow, perhaps lots of it. I was cheered by the hope that Jenny had seen brightness in so much gloom, and by the prospect of so much new wood.

  I drove to Leo’s neighborhood, anxious to see amazements. Which I did. The excavation and the bungalow were no more. The entire three-lot property had been overfilled with new dirt swept into gentle mounds.

  Leo answered the door wearing a bright yellow sweatshirt adorned by a SpongeBob SquarePants holding a surfboard.

  “Come in. We’re having coffee and apricot Danish,” he said.

  I followed him into the kitchen. Two Rivertown lieutenants, still wearing their tan trench coats, sat perched on Ma’s gold-flecked vinyl chairs.

  Pa’s revolver lay in the middle of the table, next to the Danish.

  “I love impromptu parties,” Leo said, pouring coffee into another of the scratched porcelain Walgreens mugs Ma had liberated, back when she’d been a full-time working girl and part-time lunch counter thief. He set a matching Walgreens plate, like the ones the officers had, on the table next to it. Ma liked everything on her table to match.

  “I was just telling my friends here that they ought to go over to your place and arrest you, for your fingerprints are surely on Pa’s revolver, along with mine,” he said.

  One of the bruisers smiled as he brought the last of a four-inch slice of Danish to his mouth.

  “That true?” his partner asked me, because he could. His mouth had cleared.

  “I’ve held that gun several times since I was a kid. You’re aware I reported a burglary here, while Leo was on vacation?”

  The partner nodded, but it might have been in anticipation. His eyes had drifted to the remainder of the Danish.

  They were big men. Quick as lightning, I cut off two inches and dropped it on my plate.

  “You got my fingerprints from the index?” I asked. My fingerprints had been on file since the Evangeline Wilts trial.

  The first cop raised his eyebrows, surprised. “No,” he managed, chewing.

  The partner’s plate still held only crumbs. He looked at Leo. Leo nodded. The second man cut off another wide slice of Danish. There was but an inch left. Wide slices can kill a Danish in no time.

  “Any other prints on the gun?” I asked.

  The first cop reached over and stabbed the last inch with his fork. “This is really good Danish,” he said.

  “Where’d you find the gun?” I asked, as though Jarobi hadn’t already told me it had been in Robinson’s minivan. I wanted to know what Rivertown’s cops knew

  “In some woods, I heard.” That was the way it would go down: A gun with nobody’s prints was found in nobody’s car in nobody’s woods. The two bruisers came to return it, so nobody would think to wonder what nobody had been up to. Robinson needed to be erased.

  They finished their Danish and stood up. They left the Colt on the table.

  Leo walked them out and came back. “Pa registered the thing, can you believe it? All I can think is a cop must have lifted his head off the bar one of the nights Pa brought it in. He liked to wave it around the tavern. It was a real antique.”

  “A Peacemaker,” I said.

  “A what?”

  “A Colt Peacemaker, the gun that won the West,” I said slowly, savoring the fact that I knew an irrelevant bit of minutiae that he did not.

  Standing, his eyes were at the same level as mine, though I was seated. His didn’t blink.

  “So far as anyone need know, it was stolen in the supposed robbery here?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “How did Robinson get the Colt, Dek?”

  It was time to give him another installment. “He kidnapped Amanda.”

  His face got stricken. “She’s all right?”

  “She’s fine, off on a vacation, actually,” I said quickly. I told him everything about the kidnapping.

  “How could you drop the gun in Mr. Robinson’s basement?” he asked when I was done.

  “It was a time of some nervousness. Now, thanks to Robinson getting pushed off that highway alongside the woods, you got your gun back. I’m so tired of being chased.”

  “Where he was abducted by those two hoods?”

  “Russian hoods, exports from New York.”

  “Why?”

  “It has to do with that excavation that just got filled in, and a floater they found in the Willahock. To understand that, I need to talk to Jenny.”

  “Those Rivertown lieutenants said nothing when you asked about other prints on Pa’s revolver.”

  “Robinson’s were all over that gun. By wiping it down, they distanced city hall from anything he’d been up to, on their behalf or his own. They brought it back and blew you off. Now it’s something sto
len in a robbery, nothing more,” I said.

  “I think you want me to forget about that gun, too.”

  He was right, of course. I never wanted him to wonder about that gun either.

  “I know you, Leo,” I said.

  “Yes?” he asked, about to be victorious.

  “I know you never buy just one Danish.”

  He sighed and went to a cabinet, coming back with a long white bag. Opening it to reveal a second Danish, truly a miracle of golden crust, bright orange apricot, and sweet white drizzle, he said, “There are so many holes in the stories you’re telling me.”

  I cut a fine wide slice of the Danish.

  “My second night at the clinic,” he said, “I had a vague dream about someone chasing me into that empty bungalow. I shot him with Pa’s gun. I’ve had the same dream four more times since then.”

  “You should fantasize about better things,” I said, raising the Danish to my mouth.

  “You know what they say about dreams,” he said.

  “What?” I stuffed the tip of the Danish into my mouth so nothing unnecessary would come out.

  “Ultimately, they tell the truth.”

  Sixty-one

  That evening, Jenny answered on the first ring.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” I said.

  “More than our friend by the bridge?” she asked.

  “Lustful thoughts pushed him away.”

  “I’m batting my eyelashes furiously, trying not to blush.” Her voice was high, tight, working at trying to be funny.

  “Want to have dinner?”

  “Oh, be still, my beating lashes,” she said, still tight.

  “I could pick you up, wherever you live.”

  “I’m closer to you.”

  “How close?”

  “I’m just turning off Thompson Avenue.”

  I ran upstairs, found a reasonably unwrinkled shirt and an unstained pair of khakis, and was out the door in no time flat. She was waiting in a black Ford Edge.

  “You look…” she began.

  “The same?”

  “Always.” She laughed. This time it was genuine.

  “Since you’re driving, I’ll give the directions?”