He stopped, surprised.
“I put something in the garbage by mistake,” I yelled out, slowing to a walk.
The driver must have heard the commotion, because he had shut off the engine and was coming around the side of the truck. I pulled out a twenty and handed it to the tailgate man standing by the Dumpster.
“It’ll only take me a minute.”
The driver and the tailgate man looked at each other and shrugged. The tailgate man stuffed the twenty into his overalls and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. The driver climbed back in the truck cab.
I looked in the Dumpster. And lost the air in my lungs.
Three white bags, lumpy with food garbage, lay at the top. I pulled them out, threw them on the ground. But the bags underneath were white, too.
The black bag of money was gone.
I ripped open the top bag in the Dumpster. Pork chop bones, dinner rolls, half heads of rotting lettuce embedded in strands of blood red spaghetti, glistening and exposed in the glare of the back-door light like the viscera of a corpse. I tore at the second bag. More garbage, just as wet. Frantic, my heart banging, I bent in and tore at the rest of the bags in the Dumpster. Every one was filled with decomposing food. I dropped to the asphalt and pulled at the tops of the bags I’d thrown on the ground, ripping at them like a crazy man. It was no use. There was nothing there but food waste.
I rocked back on my heels. Something bright glinted high, to my right, above the rooftop. The sun. I stared up at it, uncomprehending. Until, disbelieving, I thought to look at my watch. It was five fifty-eight in the morning. I’d been asleep for over three hours.
And the five hundred thousand dollars was gone.
Eight
I drove out of Ann Sather’s alley fast, and angry, with the windows down. I needed the fresh air to force away the stench of damp-rot garage, spoiled food, and failure. I’d slept right through the one opportunity to stop the bombings at Gateville.
I got to the health center at seven, put a quarter for a towel on the counter next to the greasy head of the sleeping attendant, and headed for the showers. I wanted a long soak to draw the disaster out of my pores. I turned the water on hot and reran the night.
A couple of kids bouncing a basketball, Stanley Novak, an angry Hispanic girl, two men in a garbage truck—and a Dumpster bathed in white light the whole time. Everything had been in plain sight, and that’s what nagged. He had to know someone would be watching. Sure, he could have come at the Dumpster from the back of the restaurant, moving low to stay hidden from anyone at the fringes of the parking lot, the garages, or the four-flats beyond, but why take the risk at all? It had been a lousy place to pick up extortion money, too well lit for someone who’d been as cautious as a church mouse with his delays and his careful, ruler-printed letters.
I toweled off and got dressed. None of that mattered anyway. I’d fallen asleep. I still stank of failure.
At the turret, I made a cup of weak coffee and called the Bohemian because he would have been suspicious if I hadn’t.
“How did Stanley do with the drop?”
The Bohemian sounded ebullient. “He called me from his van about ten thirty last night. Everything went smoothly.”
“Now what?”
“Now we pray the matter is over.”
“It might take more than prayer.”
“Vlodek, Vlodek.” He paused. “You don’t sound like your usual chipper self. Been getting enough sleep?”
If it was a veiled inference that he knew I’d been watching the Dumpster, it was either daring or astute. I let it go because I was too tired to think. I mumbled something about staying in touch and clicked off before he could pick up on anything else.
I went upstairs to the cot and dreamed of nothing at all.
Loud banging woke me at one thirty. I threw on a T-shirt, paint-splattered Levi’s, and Nikes, and clanged down the metal stairs to open the door. Leo stood outside in the bright sunshine, wearing an enormous purple shirt and khaki shorts. In the glare of the midday sun, the purple made his white skin look translucent, like he’d been bled out in a medical experiment gone wrong. He hurt my eyes—but he had hot dogs from Kutz’s. I grabbed sunglasses, and we walked down to the bench by the river.
“I brought back your Jeep to save you the trip,” he said as we sat down. “But I really came to find out how the surveillance went.” He handed me a hot dog and pointed at the smaller of the two soft drinks on the bench.
“I think I slept through the pickup.”
He set down the hot dog he was unwrapping and stared at me. “Jeez, you must feel stupid.”
“Thank you, Leo, for the salt for my wounds. I was worried I might not have enough of my own.” I took a bite of hot dog. Stupid people need to eat, too.
“What happened?”
I chewed for a minute before I spoke. There was no good way to put it. “I don’t know. Stanley showed up behind the restaurant a little before ten and put a black garbage bag full of money into the Dumpster. He did everything nice and slow under the light. Then he drove away.”
“And then you fell asleep?”
“No.” I told him about the couple in the beater Ford. “My guess is the guy dipped a little too deep, the girl took off on foot, and the car pulled away a few minutes later.”
Leo chewed through two more hot dogs, looking at the river. “You’re thinking the girl was a diversion, to draw your attention while somebody else made a move on the Dumpster?”
“Could have been, but the car was close enough to the Dumpster to keep both in sight. Even so, I didn’t take the chance. I kept my telephoto lens on the Dumpster, ready to take a picture. But nothing approached it. I suppose a pickup man could have come from behind the restaurant then, low, but with all that light from the back door, he took a big risk getting spotted.”
“Did you get the license number of the Ford?”
“No plate, just a sun-bleached temporary tag in the back window. I turned the telephoto lens on it as the car pulled away but couldn’t get it focused in time to snap a picture.”
“Jeez, Dek, if you’re going to do this kind of work, you need to get a rig with an automatic lens.”
“Too expensive right now.”
“It’s cheaper than guilt. Why won’t you let me loan you money?”
I said nothing to that.
“When did you start falling asleep?” he asked after a minute.
“Sometime after two thirty.” I shifted on the bench to look at him. “I’d planned for it, Leo. I brought a chair, sat tilted on the back legs so I would wake up instantly if I dozed and the chair started to move.” I paused, going over it again in my mind.
“And?”
I shrugged. “The night passed. I got the nods, but plenty of times the chair wobbled and woke me. The problem is that I don’t remember checking my watch until after a garbage truck showed up just before six. Since I’d seen nobody approach the Dumpster, I broke my cover and hoofed it across the parking lot to grab the money before they could haul it away as garbage. But when I opened the Dumpster, all I saw was white bags. The black bag wasn’t there. I slipped the back-end man a twenty to let me go through the bags anyway. I ripped every one of them apart. The money was gone.”
Leo looked across the water. “Did you tell Chernek?”
I looked at the water, too.
He turned on the bench. “You’ve got to tell him, Dek.”
“I don’t like him keeping out the cops and the Feds.”
“You don’t like him having money problems, either, but none of that puts him behind the bombs.”
“I don’t like that he’s using someone like me instead of a pro.”
Leo waited for a minute, then spoke softly. “You’ve considered, of course, that you were spotted before the money was picked up?”
“Sure, but that doesn’t explain how he got away with it. My eyes were on that Dumpster all night.”
“Except for lapses.”
I t
urned to look at him, ever Leo, ever my friend, trying to spin my screwup.
“Is that what I can call falling asleep for three-plus hours? A lapse?”
He shrugged.
“It gets worse, Leo.”
“Worse?”
“It could have been the garbage guys, inadvertently. They might have already tossed the top bag from the Dumpster into the truck as I was charging out of the garage. I didn’t think of it at the time.”
“Jeez.”
“Exactly. That money might be landfill now.”
Leo spoke slowly. “Chernek is your client, Dek. He needs to know all this, regardless of your concerns about him. Unless …”
The word dangled. Leo took a slurp of his Coke and picked up another hot dog, but it seemed like a forced move. He didn’t look hungry anymore.
I looked over at him. “Unless what, Leo? Unless I’m worrying about more than the Bohemian? Like about the Tribune?”
Leo didn’t answer. He was too good a friend.
There’s a Guy Clark tune that compares life to taking candy from a gorilla. Grabbing the candy’s not tough when the gorilla’s not around—but get used to the easy grabbing, start taking easy pickings for granted, that’s when the monkey shows up.
I’d gone to a city college in Chicago, majoring in getting out of Rivertown. I hustled for nickels and dimes, busing tables, washing city trucks, cleaning classrooms. And I started a gopher service, mostly for lawyers, picking up take-out dinners, or going for pizzas. They worked late; I worked cheap. It was a perfect marriage, and soon I was getting enough daytime work, running documents between law offices and courthouses, photographing accident scenes, and looking up information in the newspaper morgues, to quit my other part-time jobs.
At graduation, the best my marketing degree got me was an offer to sell toilet components for half of what I’d been making as an undergrad, so I rented a third-floor walk-up office four blocks beyond the fringe of what was respectable real estate in downtown Chicago, got some raised-ink letterhead, and expanded my list of services to include document traces, missing persons location, and a bunch of other things I hoped I could do. It was an odd-job little research business, not all that far removed from the pizza pickups I’d begun with, but by the time I met Amanda, I had three employees, a heavily mortgaged condo overlooking Lake Michigan, a five-year-old Mercedes ragtop I’d bought used, a stainless Rolex, and comfortably diminishing memories of Rivertown. It might not have been much by rich-folk standards, but from my Rivertown-fed point of view, the candy grabbing had been good enough.
But then, two months after Amanda and I married, the monkey showed up.
She came named Evangeline Wilts. She was the mayor of a small suburb just outside of Chicago, and she was on trial for taking kickbacks for steering city funds into a mob-controlled insurance company. Her lawyer hired me to trace canceled checks that he said would prove his client’s innocence. The checks showed the proper endorsements. I testified to that in court, and based on my findings, Mayor Wilts was acquitted.
But I’d been set up. The checks I’d traced were dummies, processed by a bought-off bank vice president with a fancy set of rubber endorsement stamps he’d used to mask the path of the real checks.
A Tribune reporter discovered the scam. There were rearrests and more charges, and a new trial was scheduled, this time sure to convict Ms. Wilts. Because of the egg I’d left dripping on the prosecutor’s face in the first trial, I was charged briefly, as an accomplice. Nobody believed I was involved in the deception, but it was a way for the prosecutor, a Republican appointee, to vent anger—and get a lot of press. For I was, as was pointed out on the front page, the son-in-law of that Democrat powerhouse Wendell Phelps.
I hired a lawyer, who hired experts. The prosecutor dragged out the pretrial period, milking the publicity until the press got weary of it, at which point he dropped the charges against me. I was guilty, though—of being a fool. It didn’t matter that the setup had been professional, virtually undetectable. I was in the accuracy business; all I had to sell was accuracy. Without that, I wasn’t in business.
After the Tribune stories, none of my lawyer clients would risk using me, and my little company blew away like a twig hut in a tornado. The Lake Shore Drive condo, the Benz, the Rolex, and anything else I could sell went for to pay the legal bills and the remaining months of the lease for an office where the phones no longer rang.
So, too, went my ability to function. The sudden loss of my business and my money, my public humiliation, and maybe most of all the shame I’d brought on my new wife left me a zombie, prowling the empty rooms of my bride’s house. Amanda tried as hard as she could, offering to fund a restart of my business, but we’d been a whirlwind thing created by two people from vastly different cultures. She was inherited rich. I was stained Rivertown, with all the resentments that could bring to a suddenly untethered mind. I started drinking and did stupid things like giving away my books and most of my good clothes. I needed to shed everything I used to value, like I was no longer worthy of anything. And, with the perfect clarity of a newly practicing drunk, I started rearranging facts. In a matter of days, I had my downfall blamed on the fact that I’d married a big Democrat’s daughter.
In my disorientation, I needed to shed her, too.
Amanda tried. She hugged me and screamed at me and hugged me some more. When that didn’t work, she invented a reason to go to Europe, hoping I’d snap out of it if left alone. But she came back to a house littered with empty whiskey bottles, discarded pizza boxes, and a husband, beached and numb, alternately yelling and staring at the walls.
She got me sobered up enough to talk. She told me she loved me enough to throw me out while I could still leave on my feet. I loved her enough to know she was right. She went back to Europe. I packed what I hadn’t sold in garbage bags. Then I sat, until I went trick-or-treating on Halloween.
Leo pulled me out, spoon-feeding me charity assignments he could have skipped altogether. At first, he had to work like a man tugging a mule from a tar pit, coaxing and pleading, and when I began to stagger on my own, he put the arm on a few lawyers who needed him more than he needed them, and I started photographing accident scenes and running down addresses again. It was a beginning.
But if the good, gray, Republican Tribune ever got wind that Wendell Phelps’s ex-son-in-law was somehow involved in a bombing extortion at Gateville and had slept away the stakeout of the money drop, the news would get sprayed on the front page, and everything would start spinning again. No lawyer would ever dare think about hiring me again.
And I could never tell Amanda again that I loved her.
“I staked out the money drop last night.”
The Bohemian inhaled sharply at the other end of the connection.
“I hid in a garage and watched Stanley drop off the money, and then I watched the Dumpster for the rest of the night.”
“What did you see?” His words were terse, clipped. If he was acting, he was good.
“I fell asleep.”
“What do you mean, you fell asleep?”
“I didn’t see anybody pick up the money.”
“Damn it, you don’t think the garbagemen—?”
“I don’t know. They showed just before six. I broke my cover, went through all the bags. The money was gone.”
“So it was picked up.” His breathing came easier.
“That’s what I think, but I’m worried the bag got tossed into the garbage truck before I got to the Dumpster.”
“For God’s sake, Vlodek. What are we to believe?”
“That the bomber got to it sometime between two thirty and six, when it was still dark.”
“When you were asleep.”
“Yes.”
“What were you doing there, Vlodek?”
“Trying to get a photo of the bomber, or a license plate number.”
“Did Stanley authorize this?”
“No.”
“You took the
initiative to jeopardize Crystal Waters by yourself?”
“No extra charge.” I sounded hollow. And stupid.
“Yet you saw nothing?”
“Nothing.”
He stopped talking. If he was involved in the extortion, he was relieved that no one had seen the money get picked up. If he was innocent, he was furious—and might spread the word through the legal community that I was unreliable and should not be hired. Even if I were sitting across from him, watching his face, instead of waiting at the other end of a phone, I doubted that I’d be able to tell what was running through his mind.
I was right. He surprised me.
“What is your billing rate?”
“One hundred twenty-five an hour for research; one fifty for field work, plus expenses.”
He had enough style to not laugh. Even when I had a fullfledged office, I rarely got my clients, insurance companies and lawyers, to pop for more than sixty-five an hour.
“Start your meter now, Vlodek. You will report to me on everything pertaining to this case. You will also keep me apprised, beforehand, of your steps.”
“What about the Board?”
“Your contract with them was completed. They hired you to analyze the notes.”
“What are you really hiring me to do?”
“Follow your nose, as I said. But don’t risk Crystal Waters again.”
I told him I’d think about it. He was shrewd, and maybe a bluffer of the highest order. He wanted to know what I was thinking, up front, before I made a move. He wanted me in a bag, tied tight by the double knot of forewarning and client confidentiality.
A Safe Place for Dying Page 9
