A Safe Place for Dying

by Jack Fredrickson

  My lawyer couldn’t attend. He’d had a zoning hearing for another client who wanted to put up a miniature golf course behind a gas station. I’d told my lawyer no problem; I didn’t want anything of Amanda’s. Besides, I’d sold just about everything I’d owned and had nothing left except five hundred dollars in passbook savings, the three cut-glass jelly jars I’d gotten for opening the account, and a rusting red Jeep that had been my second car. Since I’d already eaten the jelly, and the Jeep was the small model, with stick shift, no air, and a hundred thousand on its odometer, I didn’t anticipate the meeting would last long.

  It didn’t. I was out of there before they could get embarrassed about not offering me coffee. In return for signing a document promising I would make no claim against Amanda’s assets, I got to keep the savings account and the Jeep. Custody of the jelly jars never came up.

  During the meeting, the Bohemian sat alert but silent at the polished table, his fat black fountain pen lying capped next to his closed leather folio, never once checking a note. That’s what large money buys: preparation. If my lawyer had been there, he would have spent the first few minutes fanning the reused, dog-eared folders jammed in his briefcase for one with my name on it, struggling to remember why he was there.

  The meeting lasted twenty-one minutes. I wasn’t sure of much those days, but if I’d thought about it as I left that room full of good-smelling lawyers, I would have been positive I’d never see the Bohemian again.

  The telephone receptionist at Chernek and Associates sounded delighted to hear my voice, but she had the kind of trained, unhurried diction that would have come across pleased if I’d announced I was calling with great deals on burial insurance. My name must have been on the put-through list, because she rang me right in.

  “Vlodek Elstrom.” The Bohemian rolled each syllable slowly and distinctly, with just a trace of Eastern Europe softening the vowels. “Vlodek, such a good Bohemian name. What is the Elstrom—Swedish?”

  “Norwegian.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  I skipped the smooth and tossed him the same question Stanley Novak hadn’t answered: “Why me and not the police?”

  “Discretion, Vlodek. Plus, you know the community.”

  I knew Gateville about the way the whitewash guy knows the White House, but I let it pass. “Stanley Novak said you think the letter either is from a crank or was a ruse to disguise that this was a hit on the Farradays and not aimed at all of Crystal Waters.”

  “Those are the likeliest scenarios. The Board gets threats occasionally—feeble, harmless attempts at shakedowns. It might have been coincidence that this letter was received two weeks before the explosion.”

  “And the Farradays?”

  “There has been speculation that some of Mr. Farraday’s brokerage clients suffered unusually heavy losses in one of the recent stock market downturns. Perhaps one of them became unhinged.”

  “Blow up your stockbroker’s family because he gave you bad advice?”

  “Never underestimate the rage of people who lose significant sums of money, Vlodek. Murders are usually about money.”

  “All the more reason to go to the police.”

  “I showed Mr. Farraday the letter and offered to forward it to the police. He seemed quite sure he was not the target. He’s content to leave the matter alone.”

  “Given that you probably paid him a substantial premium for his property, contingent upon him keeping quiet, he must have been very content.”

  “Vlodek—”

  “What about the third scenario, the one you’re avoiding?”

  “That it’s a real extortion letter?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “The bomb already went off, Vlodek. What kind of extortionist threatens to do something unless he’s paid, then carries it out without first trying to collect?”

  “Let the police figure it.”

  “It’s best to keep the matter quiet.”

  “Because of the potential loss in property values.”

  “Without breaking any confidences, I can tell you that some of the Members are quite leveraged—”

  I cut him off in mid-drone. “Your Members borrowed to buy stock, then pledged those shares as collateral to buy even more stock. Such greedy little piggies they were. Still, it was an OK strategy so long as stock prices went up, but your piggies guessed wrong; the stocks tanked. The value of the shares slid below what they owed for them, forcing them to pledge their houses against the loans, to cover the loss in stock value and keep their snouts above the manure. Now, incredibly, a bomber has shown up. If word of that gets out, those homes they pledged to cover the loans will become worthless—you can’t sell mansions in a minefield—and the brokerages will demand more collateral, which your people don’t have because they’re all tapped out. Your Members will disappear into their own manure.”

  “Inelegantly put, perhaps, but that’s it exactly.” His voice softened. “Vlodek, we’re not being irresponsible. The police are already involved. They’re telling us the D.X.12 was most likely left behind by a landscaper, blasting tree stumps long ago, and that somehow it got triggered.”

  “Knowing you received that letter just before the house blew up might change their minds.”

  “Yes, though incorrectly, and at great expense to the Members, as you’ve pointed out. All I’m asking you to do is check for fingerprints, find out about the printing and the typing, perhaps learn where the paper and the envelope might have been purchased, and from where it was mailed.”

  “You’re using me to cover yourselves with your insurers.”

  “Of course, but where’s the harm? If we think it’s a real threat, we’ll bring the matter to the police, after we’ve conducted our own investigation, discreetly.”

  “You know I’ll have to hire a document examiner. You could do that yourself, skip the middleman.”

  “We trust you, Vlodek.”

  He meant he could control me. He knew I’d keep a lid on it because Amanda owned one of the houses in Gateville.

  I looked down at the check lying on the card table I use as a desk. “One more thing. If there’s another bomb, and this becomes public, using me to show your insurers you took action could backfire. I’m tainted goods.”

  He made a laugh. “Stop trying to talk yourself out of a job. You were exonerated. Life goes on. Find out what you can.”

  We hung up. I’d told him to go to the cops. I’d pressed it enough to almost convince myself I was a stand-up guy, not some schlump on the make for a roof. He said enough to convince me he wasn’t telling me everything. I picked up the check from the table, folded it, and put it in my shirt pocket. One thing was sure: It was going to rain again.

  I called Amanda’s home phone, said hello to her voice mail, and left a message. We hadn’t talked in months. Then I called Leo Brumsky and told him I’d buy him a hot dog.

  Leo reclined in the driver’s seat of his black Porsche roadster, his pale, bald head angled at the sun, his eyes hidden behind enormous sunglasses, tapping his fingers as Astrud Gilberto sang about the girl from Ipanema. It was one thirty, and the gravel lot in front of Kutz’s Wienie Wagon was empty of construction workers and truckers. I stopped next to him, revved the tinny Jeep engine like a greaseball going home alone after a no-score Saturday night, and killed the ignition.

  He didn’t open his eyes. “You’re late,” he said above Astrud’s seductive voice.

  “I’m worth the wait.”

  He nodded, shut off the C.D. player, and eased his five feet, six inches out of the Porsche. He wore pilled gray polyester slacks and a drooping, shiny blue Hawaiian shirt with red parrots on it that I hadn’t seen before.

  “How much did you pay for the shirt, Leo?” I asked as I got down from the Jeep.

  “Four bucks, on closeout, at the Discount Den. They only had double XLs,” he added, as if I hadn’t noticed the way the shoulder seams hung down to his elbows.

  “Could be handy,�
�� I said as we started across the lot, our shoes crunching the gravel. “You can invite people inside your shirt if it starts to rain.”

  He nodded, all chin-up cool behind the sunglasses, and veered off to scope out the ancient picnic tables around back. Kutz lets the squirrels and the pigeons do his cleanup, but sometimes they get bloated from the peppers and the onions and start ejecting more than they pick up. Then it can take a while to find a dry table. While Leo searched, I walked up to the trailer window and ordered.

  Kutz’s—first the old man, and now Young Kutz—has been selling hot dogs out of the peeling white wood trailer under the Thompson Avenue overpass since the days when the trucks rumbling above were delivering hootch to the speakeasies in Rivertown. Oldtimers say nothing about the place has changed much since then, except perhaps for some of the water Young Kutz uses to boil the hot dogs.

  Young Kutz, who’s pushing eighty and is mad about it, piled the five hot dogs, the double-large cheese fries, a huge root beer, and a small diet cola on the flimsy red tray and pushed it through the window. I could feel his eyes hot on my hands as I picked up the tray by its underside, palms up, fingers splayed. I paused to look through the window at him, mano a mano. He gave me the nod, a gesture of respect from one warrior to another. Young Kutz uses thin, cheap trays that flex in the middle and are easy to drop. It’s how he builds repeat orders. But not with me; I haven’t dropped a tray since high school.

  I went around back. Leo sat at a brown plank picnic table near the dented, galvanized trash cans. He’d chosen well; there were very few white clumps on the table. I took one hot dog and the small diet off the tray and pushed the rest across the wood.

  Leo Brumsky was already balding the summer we graduated from Rivertown High School. That was when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, and much had been said about him being the oldest man ever elected president. Maybe so, I remember thinking that summer, but Reagan, with his impossibly brown hair and rouged cheeks, still looked younger than Leo Brumsky did the day he graduated high school.

  “How’s Ma, Leo?”

  He was already through half of his first hot dog. He kept chewing until the swelling in his cheeks went down, then set the half-eaten dog on the tray next to the others he’d lined up like torpedoes.

  “The usual.” He picked up a French fry oozing with the yellow stuff Young Kutz tells everybody is cheese. “Ailments.”

  Leo lived with his mother in Rivertown in the house where he’d grown up. He was a provenance specialist, authenticating and dating items for the big auction houses in New York, Chicago, and L.A. When he wasn’t traveling, he worked out of the basement of her brick bungalow and made upwards of four hundred thousand dollars a year. His Porsche cost double what his mother’s house was worth, but the pilled, too-loose clothes hanging on the one-hundred-forty-pound frame and his worried, thin, pale face made him look like he slept under cardboard and foraged for dinner in alley barrels.

  “And Endora?”

  “Mercifully, also the same.” He smiled around the French fry. Endora was Leo’s twenty-five-year-old girlfriend. She was thin, quirky, dark-haired, and gorgeous and had an upper-register I.Q. to match Leo’s. She was a researcher at the Newberry Library and dressed for it, in shades of charcoal and black that kept everything tight and controlled. But in the summers, after work, on the beach or on the sidewalk, she wrapped things lighter. Then even the birds stopped to witness. I will go to my grave wondering what incredible good deeds Leo did in a previous life to merit Endora.

  He picked up the half-eaten hot dog and took another big bite, replenishing his cheeks. “How’s the turret coming?”

  I told him I was going to buy a new roof. He nodded, chewing. Sometimes we joked that thirty years from now, he’d still be living with Ma, and I’d still be working on the turret.

  “I’ve got this document job, Leo.”

  He tapped his bulging cheek. “I figured there was a reason for the big spending,” he said through the food.

  “It’s about that explosion last week at Gateville.”

  Leo’s eyebrows, thick and black, moved up his pale forehead, almost touching, like caterpillars about to mate.

  I’d brought Stanley Novak’s tan envelope. I pulled out the freezer bag and set it on a clean spot on the table, out of range of his cheese fries. “This arrived a couple of weeks before the house blew up.”

  Leo leaned over to read through the plastic.

  “They think it’s either a coincidental scam attempt or a ruse, disguising the real objective of killing the people who lived in the house. My fear is it’s neither, that the letter is a threat aimed at all of Gateville, with more explosions to come. Whatever it is, there’s been no follow-up to collect the money demanded.”

  He looked up from the freezer bag. “They gave you the originals?”

  “They haven’t gone to the cops.”

  “Jeez.” He started to shake his head, then stopped when the obvious hit him. “Why hire you?”

  “To show their insurance company they acted responsibly in case the threat proves to be legit. Plus, they think they can control me because of Amanda.”

  “Ah, Amanda.” His eyebrows kissed at the top of his forehead.

  “It’s a job, Leo. I need a roof.”

  “You betcha.” He glanced down at the hot dog wrappers and sodden French fry tray that now held only a tiny, coagulating puddle of the cheese-colored substance. “How much are they paying you?”

  “Three grand.”

  “And my cut?” He smiled, because we both knew he wouldn’t take a dime.

  “You just ate it.” I put the freezer bag back in the tan envelope.

  “Not quite,” he grinned. “I’d like another root beer.”

  After lunch, I went to the bank drive-up, pleased that I remembered the way. It had been two months since my last deposit. I put the Gateville check in the scratched plastic canister, punched the button, and watched the vacuum suck it up like a Kansas tornado. The gray-haired lady behind the bulletproof glass gave me a wink and a grape lollipop with my receipt, and I motored out of there, sucking on my lollipop, knowing exactly what it was like to be Bill Gates.

  All I could do was wait for Leo’s examination, so I drove to the Rivertown Health Center. I fight to keep my weight at the plumpness of an overinjected Thanksgiving turkey, but it’s a battle I lose. Still, I go to the health center to keep the dream alive. And to take hot showers. A water heater is on my list for the turret, but it’s halfway down.

  The parking lot was nearly empty, except for the usual dozen abandoned cars rusting on their axles. I crept along the rutted, weed-spotted asphalt to my regular space next to the doorless ’73 Buick by the entrance. I got out, checked my doors twice to make sure they were unlocked, and went in. My Jeep has a vinyl top and plastic side windows, and I don’t need anyone slitting them to verify I don’t have anything worth stealing.

  The Rivertown Health Center had once been a showplace Y.M.C.A., with a big exercise room, an indoor pool, and five floors of temporary rooms for good Christians new to town. That was in the 1950s, when there’d been manufacturing jobs in Rivertown. Now the sheet metal on the roof streaked tiger stripes of brown rust down the yellow bricks, the last of the paint had flaked off the gray, sun-rotted wood windows, and the good Christians had fled, leaving the upstairs rooms to trembling winos hanging on for the salvation of fresh pints at the first of the month, when the disability and public aid checks arrived.

  Downstairs, the pipes leaked, the running track was a greasy, crumbling obstacle course of silver-taped rips, and the locker doors had all been beaten in by punks hunting for watches and wallets. But it was cheap, the water was hot, and so long as I got out of there before the punks came to hang out in the late afternoon, it was safe enough for a workout and a shower.

  I changed into my blue Cubs T-shirt and red shorts and went upstairs. Barney, Dusty, Nick, and the rest were there, roosting on the rusted fitness machines like crows on fence p
osts. Old men, retired from the tool cribs and stamping rooms of the factories that used to be in Rivertown, they came early every afternoon to reassure themselves that they were all still alive. Nick told me a joke, the same joke he told every Tuesday. I laughed. He smiled, proud of his wit. It was ritual.

  I left them to their talk and ran laps and did maybes. Maybe the Bohemian was too practiced at telling his clients money could make their problems go away, maybe the threat in the letter was real, maybe there would be another bomb, maybe somebody would get killed. Maybe I should not let myself be used, insist instead that the Bohemian take the note to the cops. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about Amanda’s house. After six laps I staggered off to hug the wall, sucking air. There was no maybe about me carrying too much weight.

  I hit the showers and thought about the only thing that wasn’t a maybe.

  The Bohemian was holding something back.

  Three

  Leo called at 9:00 A.M., two days later.

  “Can you come over?”

  I could hear something tapping, his heel maybe, or a pencil.

  “You don’t want to extort another gourmet meal?”

  “I don’t want to waste any time.”

  I told him I’d be right over.

  Leo’s mother’s place was seven blocks away, a narrow dark brown brick bungalow in the middle of a block crowded with narrow dark brown brick bungalows. They had been built in the late 1920s, when Rivertown had Florida bungalow fever. And hope.

  Blue television light flickered behind the lace curtains as I went up the cement stairs to the porch and rang the bell.

  Leo opened the door almost instantly, as if he’d been waiting with his hand on the knob. Ma didn’t look up as I stepped into the living room. On the big-screen television, a woman was interviewing a man sitting on a couch next to a chimpanzee. The chimp looked life-sized on the forty-five inch screen. “So nice Leo has friends,” Ma murmured, her eyes fixed on the television. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. The chimpanzee smiled. Leo and I walked through to the kitchen.