A Safe Place for Dying

by Jack Fredrickson

  The question was whether that was important—and why.

  Nine

  The sky had turned overcast while I was on the phone with the Bohemian. After I hung up, I set out my buckets, pans, and wastebaskets on the top floor, guessing at the drip points. Then I called Stanley Novak and told him I was driving out to Gateville. I was guessing at that, too, figuring ace investigators substituted movement for thought when they didn’t know what to do next.

  The sky to the west was black when I got to Gateville. A heavy, studded steel beam hinged to a thick iron post had been installed in front of the decorative wrought-iron gates. The tuckpointers were gone, but there was a man up on a ladder, cleaning the glass globe of one of the lampposts. I would have bet there was a Glock in his plastic tray, next to the Windex. I pulled off the road and parked next to the entrance.

  Stanley and another guard hurried out of the guardhouse as I shut off the engine. Stanley recognized the Jeep, motioned for the guard to go back, and came over. He wasn’t wearing his usual smile.

  “Mr. Chernek called after he spoke to you. He said you staked me out.”

  “Not you. The bomber.”

  “You took a big risk.”

  “We’re all taking a big risk, Stanley.”

  “Mr. Chernek said you didn’t see the pickup.”

  There was nothing to say to that.

  “So what are you going to do now, Mr. Elstrom?”

  “Chernek told me to follow my nose, but to do it with my mouth closed.”

  Stanley smiled, a little. Things were thawing.

  I opened the door and got out. “I thought I’d start with 1970.”

  Thunder clapped far in the west.

  “The guardhouse explosion?”

  “Or before.”

  Stanley shook his head. “We never found any link to anything, back then. There was the first note, then the guardhouse bomb, then the second note with the payment instructions.”

  “Then the ten-thousand-dollar payment, and the bomber went away.”

  “That’s it, Mr. Elstrom.”

  A few drops of rain fell. Fifty feet away, the guy on the ladder continued polishing the lamp glass. In the rain. Clever, that disguise.

  The lights on the entrance pillars and the row of lampposts came on, bright as surgical lamps. I turned away from the glare.

  “Have you upped the wattage on those bulbs?”

  “No.” Stanley gestured at the guy on the ladder. “But as you can see, we’re keeping the glass really clean.”

  “I don’t remember these lights being so bright.”

  “You only saw them from your car, Mr. Elstrom, coming or going at night. They’re brighter when you stand next to them.”

  Ten feet away, the lamppost that had been blown out of the ground sat on a new metal base, on new concrete, surrounded by fresh sod. I walked over to it.

  “Our man could have pulled off the highway, faking a flat tire,” I said. “He could have dug down with a little collapsible shovel or a garden trowel while he was hunched down by the tire, twisted a dial or pressed a button and dropped the device into the hole, then scooped the dirt back in and taken off. What would you guess that would take? Two or three minutes if he’d practiced, from the time he pulled off to the time he got back on the highway?”

  He nodded.

  The raindrops started falling heavier. Stanley looked up at the darkening sky.

  “But none of your guys saw anything like that?”

  “No. I had to be careful how I asked, because they don’t know about the letters or the D.X.12, but they didn’t see anything. Remember, we weren’t watching outside the walls back then,” he said, his gaze shifting to the man on the ladder. He held his palm up to catch a few drops. “It’s raining, Mr. Elstrom.”

  “Here’s my question, Stanley: There are five of these iron lampposts strung out along the wall on each side of the gate. Why blow up the one closest to the entrance?”

  He wiped a raindrop that had fallen on his nose. I couldn’t tell whether he was thinking about my question or worrying about the approaching storm.

  I touched the repaired lamppost. “At night, this one’s not only illuminated by its own bulb but also by the lights from the entrance. Why risk burying a bomb under the best-lighted lamppost? Why not plant the bomb in the shadows at the end of the wall”—I pointed down the road—“where it’s darker and less visible?”

  Thunder boomed closer in the west. Big raindrops started falling, dotting Stanley’s pale blue uniform shirt. We started toward the entrance.

  “Is that important, why he chose one particular lamppost?” he asked over his shoulder as I opened the door of the Jeep.

  “Beats me.”

  The rain came down then, hard. Stanley ran for the guard shack. I shut the door of the Jeep, started it, and pulled away.

  I drove a half mile west, took a right, and went north through the woods, past the sculpted yews of the golf club that stretched down to the road. It cost a hundred grand to drive through those yews, and that was just for openers. The rain was falling in sheets now; the golfers were inside, deepening their sun flushes with gins, tonics, and limes. I doubted that any of them had set out pickle buckets before coming to the club.

  The Maple Hills Municipal Building is a single-story, redbrick confection with stubby white pillars and black shutters, meant to look like it’s been there two hundred years longer than it has. It holds both the library and the village hall. I parked and ran through the rain to the arch that opened into the library. Two old men in pastel shorts, National Geographics spread open on their laps, dozed in big nubby chairs across from the reception desk.

  I asked the sturdy woman behind the counter for old issues of local papers. She led me to the microfilms of the Maple Hills Assembler. I remembered the Assembler; I’d leafed through a couple of issues Amanda hadn’t gotten around to throwing out. It was a ten-page local shopping and good news rag, just right for the bottom of a hamster cage, so long as the hamster wasn’t looking for much beyond wedding announcements, real estate ads, and recipes for dishes that blue-haired old ladies could eat with little spoons. I threaded the spool for the 1960s and forwarded it to 1968.

  The first mention of Crystal Waters came in September. The Assembler reporter—a woman with the same last name as the publisher, and whose own recipe for corn soufflé took up half of page three—gushed with the news that Maple Hills, population 868, had been selected as the site for a new, high-security residential development. Coming so soon after the “unfortunate events of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and those riots,” she wrote, “it is welcome news that occurrences such as those will not be taken lying down. Crystal Waters is going to be the state of the art, a virtual Tomorrowland of personal security.”

  The rest of the article read as though it had been lifted intact from a sales brochure. Twenty-seven homes, each in excess of five thousand square feet, each with a library, a three-car garage, multiple alarm systems, and access to a bomb shelter, among other amenities too numerous to mention, were to be designed by name architects and constructed on one-acre lots. The exteriors would be of brick, with cement tile roofs, to make them impervious to fire, and had been carefully designed to blend with one another to create a “harmonious whole.” An unnamed representative of Safe Haven Properties, the developers, said the homes would have features that would make them virtually impregnable, details of which, of course, could not be released. Surrounding the development would be a high brick wall with a guard structure at the only entrance. The Assembler article ended with the news that potential purchasers had already been invited to submit applications to the new development, and construction was expected to begin the following spring.

  Safe, snobbish, and selective. No wonder the corn soufflé lady had gushed.

  I slow-forwarded through the next issues. The year 1968 may have been a rough one for America—assassinations and “those riots,” as the reporter had put it—but in Maple Hills, a
ll the news was good. A vegetable market opened, a flower show was well attended, and the developers of Crystal Waters donated a new fire truck to the village. Even the recipes I read, in case I ever graduated past Lean Cuisines and microwaved macaroni and cheese, sounded positively delightful.

  The next mention of Crystal Waters came two months later, just before Thanksgiving. The corn soufflé lady reported that over four hundred applications for the twenty-seven homes had been received, some from as far away as Europe. All, she noted, had been accompanied by the requisite one-hundred-thousand-dollar deposits. I wondered how the reporter came up with such a tidbit. Good, hard journalistic investigation, I supposed, or perhaps she’d bribed one of the Safe Haven developers with a soufflé.

  The vetting process must have been extensive, because it wasn’t until March of 1969 that the Assembler reported that twenty-seven families had completed their final interviews with the developers and had been notified that their one-hundred-thousand-dollar deposits would be retained. It must have been a grand day for all.

  Ground was broken the next month, and the Assembler carried periodic updates and photographs throughout 1969 and early into 1970, all of them on the front page. In May of 1970—the month students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State had been shot by nervous National Guardsmen, an event that went unreported by the Assembler—the paper ran a photo of a group of deliriously happy Mexicans laying the last bits of sod outside the wall at Gateville. There had been no report of the guardhouse explosion, as I’d expected.

  I advanced the film through June, the month the Members moved in, and then through July and August. The next mention of Crystal Waters came on the Wednesday after Labor Day, in a photograph on the front page. It was a grainy close-up of a dozen children waiting for a school bus in front of a brick shelter outside the wall of Crystal Waters. I stared at the photo, only dimly aware that my heart had started pounding like an oil derrick.

  I leaned closer to the microfilm screen. To the left of the shelter stood a lamppost, and immediately to the left of that, in the upper corner of the photograph, appeared a fragment of an ornate shape. I stared at that shape in the corner of the photo for a full minute, then fed a dime into the printer and ran a copy of the picture. I rewound the spool and went out into the hall connecting the library with the village offices, trying to tell myself that odd little ornate shape might mean nothing.

  I followed the signs on the wall, every one of my footfalls echoing loudly down the green tile stairs. I turned the knob on the frosted glass door marked BUILDING DEPARTMENT. Only one of the six gray metal desks inside was occupied. A three-hundred-pound man in a plaid shirt, with a plastic shirt-pocket protector full of different-colored felt tips—an assortment I would have killed for in third grade—looked up from the newspaper spread out on his desk. By the hard set of his jowls, he didn’t appear delighted by the interruption.

  “What do you need?”

  The security of a city job, I almost snapped at him, but that would have been the knots in my gut talking. “I’d like to look at the site drawings for Crystal Waters,” I said instead.

  His oak swivel chair creaked as he shifted his attitude to look at the wall clock. It was ten to five. “Can’t do.”

  “Can’t do or won’t do?”

  “Can’t do, won’t do, whatever. We don’t have them.”

  “I thought site plans had to be submitted to get building permits.”

  He took another look at the clock. Only nine minutes to quitting time now. He was probably thinking he still had to throw away his newspaper.

  “You a resident of Crystal Waters?”

  “I used to live there. I want to check an easement.”

  He leaned his bulk back. The chair groaned. Oak is strong, big grained, but if it’s stressed too much, it’ll give up. Just like people.

  He picked up his newspaper and started folding it. “Crystal Waters is like a separate country. They convinced the mayor their security would be breached if we had their prints.” He snorted, shaking his head. “You people. Always special needs.”

  “I told you, I don’t live there now.”

  “Whatever.” He dropped the newspaper into his wastebasket and shifted his girth. He was preparing to stand up.

  The clock ticked loudly, echoing off the gray metal of the desks. A site plan would have been good, but only to double-check what my fear already knew, and I did have the microfilm photo. I went out, letting the door slam, and up the stairs.

  It had stopped raining, but the air was hot and thick and gray, as if it were holding the drops suspended, ready to unleash them in one sudden torrent of fury. To the west, lighting crackled in the dark sky, signaling the next storm front that was about to come through. I unzipped the driver’s-side plastic window and drove back to Gateville, parking across the road from the entrance. I got out and waved at the guard who had moved out from between the pillars. He was the same one who had come out with Stanley earlier. He waved back in recognition but remained by the gate, watching me.

  I held up the photocopy of the Assembler photo and studied the brick wall across the street. There was no bus shelter there now, nor had there been when I’d lived at Gateville with Amanda. But I wasn’t looking for that, I was looking for the fragment of the ornate shape in the upper left corner of the picture.

  I found it right away, as I knew I would back at the library. It was the finial atop the marble column to the right of the entrance to Gateville. I moved a few paces until I was looking at the exact perspective the photographer had used.

  Thunder crackled then, and the sky let go, pelting me with hard, cold rain.

  I stood unmoving, letting the rain hit. There was no doubt. Across the road, immediately to the right of the entrance column, the repaired lamppost stood gray and indistinct, ghostlike in the downpour.

  Right where those kids had stood in the newspaper photo.

  Ten

  Monday night rush hour traffic jammed the four inbound lanes on the Eisenhower, every driver frantic to beat the next wave of the storm slinging in from the west. The radio said it was still ninety-four degrees at six o’clock. I was soaked from standing in the rain at Gateville, the inside of the Jeep was dripping like an Indian sweat lodge, and the closest I was to air conditioning was the 7 Series B.M.W. in the next lane, driven by a suit talking on a cell phone. I wanted to kill him but supposed it was because I was angry about other things.

  I’d called the Bohemian’s office as I raced away from Gateville. The British-voiced secretary said he was on another call and was already late for a dinner engagement—a dinner with important people, she added. I told her to stuff a candy bar in his face and tell him to wait, then hung up before I got even more personable. Finding out I’d been handled had not made for a mellowing afternoon.

  I got to his building at seven o’clock. In the elevator mirror, my damp hair, soaked T-shirt, and paint-splattered Levi’s made me look like a guy who didn’t have any money. Or one who had too much.

  The reception area was empty, but the Bohemian’s secretary, whose name I didn’t know but decided must be Griselda, materialized at the side door before I could drip much on the oriental carpet. She must have heard the elevator chime. She led me back to the conference room, left, and returned with a roll of paper towels, all without uttering one articulated word. No doubt she was smoked by my tone on the phone, though it could have been she was afraid I’d cause the furniture to mold. I dried off my hair and blotted at my T-shirt with the paper towels.

  The Bohemian came in five minutes later, resplendent in formal black trousers with a silk stripe down the side, a pleated white shirt with a high collar, and a black bow tie with enough irregularity to it to show it had been hand-tied. Guys in his crowd don’t wear clip-ons. He looked every bit the man off to an important dinner, as Griselda had said. If I’d worn that outfit, people would assume I was a waiter in a French restaurant.

  “Vlodek.” He said it as a necessary pronouncement of
fact, without enthusiasm, like something he’d discovered stuck to his shoe. He sat down without offering to shake hands.

  I pushed the damp picture of the kids at the bus shelter across the table. It left a wet streak. “That was target number two.”

  He barely glanced at it. “The children don’t take the bus anymore. A van picks them up at their homes. That shelter was torn down in 1982.”

  “You knew the significance of that site. It wasn’t just some damned lamppost, outside the wall.”

  He shrugged. “I checked the old Crystal Waters blueprints. As I said, the shelter was torn down in 1982.”

  “Your bomber was telling you he can blow up kids.”

  He leaned forward abruptly, both meaty forearms on the table, and glared. “I know no such thing. You can’t assume that’s the message he was sending.”

  “Let the police decide.”

  “He’s been paid, Vlodek.”

  “We think he’s been paid.”

  “That’s right. Thanks to you, we cannot be sure. However, I continue to believe the matter is over.”

  “Like 1970?”

  He leaned back. “Exactly.” His wide, Slavic eyes didn’t blink.

  “You said you checked the blueprints for Crystal Waters. I went to the Maple Hills Building Department today. They don’t have site plans for Crystal Waters.”

  “For security, I have the only set.” He folded his big hands. “Why were you looking for them?”

  “To verify the location of that.” I pointed at the picture of the bus shelter. “I want to see those prints.”

  “For what?”

  “For the next strategic target.”

  The skin around his eyes tightened. “Strategic target?”

  “That lamppost was not a randomly chosen little reminder. It was a strategic target, as you well knew, blown up to send a very specific, and frightening, threat: He’ll kill children.”

  “We’ve done what the man demanded, Vlodek. We’ve paid.”

  “An installment. If getting five hundred thousand is that easy, he’ll be back for more.”