A Safe Place for Dying

by Jack Fredrickson

  “I don’t want to keep you awake, Elstrom. We’ll check things out,” Till said, and hung up.

  Rivertown hasn’t had a public library since Lyndon Johnson was president, so I drove to the one in Maple Hills and Yahooed, Googled, and Lexis-Nexised on one of their computers the rest of Saturday afternoon. Once again, I scared myself at the information that’s floating out in cyperspace. Pressing the right Internet buttons gets directory listings for anybody in the country who has a published telephone number. Pressing others gets ages, high schools, spouse’s names, aerial photos of their neighborhoods, and maps to their houses. And that’s all for free. Spending a little money gets credit reports, divorce histories, and a lot of other information that shouldn’t be so easily available. The Internet has taken the wear off gumshoes, and replaced them with calloused fingertips. If Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and Sherlock Holmes were sleuthing today, they’d have squinty eyes from staring at computer screens, and carpal tunnel wrists from too many hours spent banging on a keyboard.

  There were twenty-four Nadine Reynoldses listed on the Internet, ranging in age from twenty-six to eighty-one. None of them lived in California, but that didn’t rule anything out. Nor did the ages. They could be the daughter or the mother of the person I was looking for. I printed the list and drove back to the turret.

  I started telephoning the East Coast numbers. The first six weren’t home. I left messages saying I worked for an estate attorney, which was true enough—the Bohemian did estate work—and asked for return calls to my cell phone. I counted on greed to make them overlook the fact that they couldn’t call it collect.

  Nadine Number Seven was home. She’d spent her entire life in Canton, Ohio, and had never heard of a Michael Jaynes. I kept calling.

  At six thirty, I took a break for dinner. I microwaved the last pounds of Ma’s pork, kraut, and dumplings and took it to the city bench overlooking the river. After I ate, I fell asleep, sitting up, like an old rummy with a wine load. At seven thirty, I went up to the turret for more telephoning and talked to Nadines Sixteen, Eighteen, Twenty, and Twenty-one, all in the West. All were wrong. During the evening, three of the earlier Nadines for whom I’d left messages called back. Each said she’d never heard of a Michael Jaynes, and each hung up the instant I said there was no potential for inheritance. I made my last call, to Nadine Twenty-four in Eugene, Oregon, at nine o’clock. She wasn’t home.

  I was at a dead end, except to wait for a few return calls. The A.T.F. would be tracing Michael Jaynes and Nadine Reynolds through the federal database. Things were happening, but for me, there was no place to go. All I could do was sit on the sidelines and wait for the phone to ring.

  I parked in the La-Z-Boy and ate a jelly doughnut and watched microscopic men play baseball on my little T.V. The players looked like gnats, flitting around on the tiny screen. And sometime in the middle of the night, after the baseball game, the seventies sitcom reruns, and the junior college broadcast of introductory economics, I fell asleep.

  Five Nadines called by nine thirty on Sunday morning. Two of them tried very hard to convince me they had a distant relative named Michael Jaynes who, for sure, would have remembered them in his will. After I was certain each had never heard of him, I said I’d called for help with his burial expenses. Both hung up without getting my address for their Christmas card lists.

  At eleven, the Bohemian called, sounding out of breath. “Your cell phone has been busy all morning. Don’t you have a second landline, a regular home number?”

  I told him I only had one cell number, one computer line, and one mouth, and some considered that last a blessing.

  He didn’t voice his agreement. “What did you say to Agent Till yesterday afternoon?”

  I told the Bohemian what I’d told Till about my visit to Universal Electric, Michael Jaynes, and how I was trying to track down Nadine Reynolds. “I asked Till for Nadine Reynolds’s address from Jaynes’s employment application.”

  “Do you think our bomber is this Michael Jaynes?”

  “It’s worth checking out. What’s going on with Till?”

  “He’s riled. He’s called a meeting for tomorrow morning at the Maple Hills police station.”

  “Because of me?”

  “He’s angry that I want you to keep investigating, but the meeting is about Bob Ballsard. He won’t evacuate.”

  Seventeen

  The Maple Hills police station occupies a redbrick building designed to look like something in Colonial Williamsburg. Parking is in back, because nobody in eighteenth-century Williamsburg parked cars in front.

  I got there a half hour early and waited in the painted cinder-block hall, reading public notices about lawn-sprinkling restrictions while I drank vending-machine coffee from a paper cup that had a losing poker hand printed on it.

  Stanley arrived at quarter to ten, holding the door open for Bob Ballsard. Stanley’s pale blue uniform looked crisp, but the skin on his face sagged like it was falling off of its own weight. Ballsard wore one of his blue blazers, a yellow tie with blue anchors on it, tan trousers, and polished boat shoes with no socks. He looked like he was going to a dockside tent party at the Chicago Yacht Club.

  They paused in the hall.

  “Elstrom,” Ballsard smiled nautically, “the chief invited you?”

  “Actually, it was Agent Till. Seems he’s angry at you and me.”

  His lips closed around his teeth, choking off the smile. I couldn’t tell if he was mad at Till’s impertinence at being angry or because of the indignity of being lumped in with me.

  “We’ll see who’s angry at whom,” he said. He marched down the hall with Stanley following a half step behind.

  The Bohemian arrived five minutes later. He was impeccably dressed as always, but there was a tight look to the skin around his eyes. The days were not being kind to the Bohemian. We walked together into the police department conference room.

  Agent Till sat hunched forward at the end of the narrow folding table, his watch unstrapped and lying on the fake wood-grain table top. He was murmuring something to a red-faced Chief Morris, who sat to his left and looked like he would rather be anywhere but in that room. At the other end of the table, Ballsard and Stanley sat like two spinsters at a rock party, not speaking. Till gave me a quick, annoyed look as the Bohemian and I sat down. He repositioned his wristwatch a quarter inch to the left in front of him and began.

  “Gentlemen, we need to get some things straight, starting with the fact that Chief Morris here is in charge of investigating this case.” Next to him, Chief Morris shifted gingerly in his chair like he had stones in his underwear. “We need all the leads we can get, but the chief, and I as necessary, will chase them down. Outside help is not needed.” Till aimed his eyes at me. “Am I being clear, Mr. Elstrom?”

  “You bet.”

  “That said, tell us how you came across the name of Michael Jaynes.”

  “Actually, it was Stanley. He remembered that at the time the guard shack blew up, there had been a problem with one of the electric contractors. A supervisor had not shown up to do some final wiring, and there’d been concern that it would delay the issuance of the occupancy permits. Stanley wondered if the man’s absence was tied to the explosion. He checked it out, found nothing. We thought it would be worth a second look. I found the contractor, Universal Electric, and asked about him. They remembered sending on his last paycheck, a copy of which you are getting in the mail.”

  “Like Mr. Elstrom just told you,” Stanley said, “I checked with Universal Electric right after the guardhouse exploded. They told me Michael Jaynes had a family problem and had quit his job. Now, I know they lied about that because they didn’t want any trouble getting final payment, but back then, I couldn’t see any connection between Jaynes and the bombing, so I dropped it.”

  Agent Till reached in his shirt pocket for reading glasses, slipped them on, and opened a manila folder. “I don’t know that he is much of a lead, but Michael Jaynes is
interesting. He had an ordinary boyhood in Santa Rosa, California. Only child, average student, ran track in high school. Went to U.S.C., dropped out at the end of his freshman year. Got drafted, Vietnam, 1965–66. Reupped, took another tour over there. Wounded in a firefight, two Purple Hearts, got out in 1968. Got hired by Universal Electric. Good worker, they made him a supervisor. He was in charge of the Crystal Waters project until April 22, 1970, after which he didn’t show up.” He looked at us over the top of his reading glasses. “According to his Army 201 file, he did advanced classes in demolition after basic training.” Till put down the folder and looked at the Bohemian. “Any chance you could pinpoint the day back in 1970 that you dropped the ten grand behind the restaurant?”

  “I could check the old records to find out when the developers withdrew the money.”

  “No need, Mr. Chernek,” Stanley said. “I remember. It was the night of April 22. It was Earth Day; there were protesters all over Chicago that evening. I was worried I wouldn’t get through all the traffic tie-ups.”

  “Jaynes disappeared the next day.” Till looked at Stanley. “Yet you say you saw no connection?”

  “Not after Universal Electric explained it as a family problem.” Stanley dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief.

  Agent Till looked at Stanley for a long minute before he turned back to his folder. “As I said, gentlemen, Mr. Jaynes is an interesting man. He has not been seen, or heard from, since. No G.I. Bill applications, no claims for Army medical, no filing of income tax returns. For all intents and purposes, the man known as Michael Jaynes disappeared from the world when he quit Crystal Waters, the day after ten thousand dollars was left in the Dumpster.”

  “He changed his name and disappeared,” the Bohemian said.

  “And that’s consistent with the facts,” Till said. “If it was Jaynes who blew up your guardhouse in 1970, he extorted your money and high-tailed it out of here. His parents were dead, he wasn’t married, he didn’t have any kids we know of. He saw a chance to score, took it, and vaporized.”

  “All for the huge sum of ten thousand dollars,” I said.

  “Ten grand was a lot of money back then,” Till said.

  “Not to a guy who had bigger plans. We don’t have the 1970 letters, but Stanley and Mr. Chernek think the notes they received this summer are identical—same pencil lettering, same paper. It’s not that much of a reach to think he wrote those back in 1970, too. And as we know, those demanded fifty thousand, and the five hundred thousand Stanley just paid.”

  Till shrugged. “He got scared after the guardhouse, so he took the money and ran. Change of heart. It happens.”

  “Come on, Till. It takes him all those years to get to thinking of the painless way he scored the ten grand, of the plan he put in place back then, of the notes he wrote, and don’t let us forget all that D.X.12 he planted in the ground, before he decides to come back for another helping?”

  Till looked at me over the top of his reading glasses. “Your point?”

  “Our man never planned to quit at ten thousand dollars. It was a test run, just for openers. Then something stopped him, caused him to abort the plan. That’s the key. Find what stopped him all those years ago, and you’ll find your man.”

  “Like from this?” He held up some white sheets of paper. “Your fabled parolee list?”

  “Just because he isn’t on the Illinois list doesn’t mean the idea’s not worth trying. You can do parolees for the whole country.”

  “We did. Too many names to chase down.”

  “What about Nadine Reynolds?”

  Till looked at me, his face momentarily blank. “Who?”

  “The woman Michael Jaynes listed as a contact on his employment application. I called you for her address.”

  Till nodded and flipped through his file folder. He came to a photocopy. “Nadine Reynolds. General Delivery, Clarinda, California. I forwarded an interview request to our San Francisco office, asking them to check her out.”

  “That’s it? You forwarded a request?”

  He took off his reading glasses. “Between us, the F.B.I., and local and state cops, we get hundreds of reports of terrorist sightings, bomb threats, and what-have-you, every day. Some days it seems like every Jordanian cabdriver, Egyptian flight student, and Saudi college kid around Chicago is reported doing something suspicious. Our reality is we have to check them all out. To say we’re short-staffed doesn’t cover the half of it.” He rubbed his eyes and looked around the table. “Do I believe there’s a real threat at Crystal Waters? Yes. Does it rank with the other threats we get every single day, the bomb threats against big buildings, somebody overhearing something on the train about a plan to poison the water supply, or the hourly incidents at Milwaukee, O’Hare, and Midway airports? Maybe. I don’t know. Without concrete evidence linking these notes”—he tapped his manila file—“to the two explosions you’ve had this summer, I’m limited in what I can do.”

  “What about ground-penetrating radar?” Stanley asked.

  Till shrugged. “You can hire private contractors, if you want to waste the money, but my guess is that G.P.R. will never find it all. I certainly can’t provide federal resources for that.”

  The Bohemian spoke. “Then what are you telling us? We’re not to chase down our own leads, yet you’re too busy to offer us help?”

  “I’m telling you to quit being such damned fools,” Till snapped. “I don’t want you chasing down anything, making things worse, like your man Elstrom might have done last Sunday night.” He looked around the table. “Have any of you considered that Elstrom was spotted and scared away the bomber from the pickup? And that now the money is rotting somewhere, buried under tons of food waste and household trash, while your bomber is angrily planning something worse?” He glared down the table at Bob Ballsard. “But even more, I want you to quit being negligent with human lives. What is it about evacuation you don’t understand? You might have bundles of D.X.12 wired together all over your little community, wanting just one spark to turn you all into ash. And don’t tell me about your security; it’s for shit. Get the people the hell out of Crystal Waters.”

  Till grabbed his wristwatch from the table, jammed it in his suit coat pocket, and stood up. “I’m done. Any questions, direct them to Chief Morris.” He turned quickly and left the room. Chief Morris got up before anybody could ask him anything and followed Till.

  “Bob—” the Bohemian began, but Ballsard, red faced, was already marching out of the door. Stanley made a move to follow him, but the Bohemian motioned for him to stay.

  “We must trace this Nadine Reynolds on our own,” the Bohemian said to both of us.

  “You just heard what Till thinks of that,” I said.

  “I also saw him fumble the lead about Nadine Reynolds. The man has too much on his plate.”

  I looked at Stanley.

  “Stanley has other commitments, Vlodek. You have to be the one to go to California to find Nadine Reynolds.”

  “Chances are, she’s long gone,” I said.

  “What other leads do we have?”

  “Till said he forwarded the information to the A.T.F. office in San Francisco,” I said. “He’ll follow up.”

  The Bohemian nodded, watching my eyes.

  The clock ticked on the cinder-block wall.

  “Surf’s up,” I said.

  Eighteen

  “How are you going to start?” Leo yelled into the phone.

  I pressed the cell phone harder against my ear. I was next to a window at an unoccupied discount airline gate at Midway Airport, trying to get away from yelling kids, hysterical parents, and the bobblehead on the loudspeaker, so in love with his own voice he’d been paging the same guy for the past half hour. I like discount flyers; they’re cheap, and they take off the same day they’re scheduled. But sound bounces around their end of the concourse like monkeys banging on drums, and it’s always tough to talk on the phone. I moved behind a vacant check-in counter and crouch
ed down.

  “Say again, Leo.”

  “Do you have a plan?” he yelled.

  “Drive up to Clarinda, ask at the bank, start trolling the town looking for people who know her.”

  “Why fly all the way to California? Hire a local. Or better yet, why not have A.T.F. do it?”

  “That’s what I told the Bohemian. He doesn’t want to wait. Since Nadine Reynolds is our only lead, he wants me out there, Johnny on the spot, to pursue it right away. Besides, A.T.F. is easily derailed these days, getting tons of threat alerts.”

  “At least the Gateville people are no longer buying the idea that the matter’s over, since the payoff’s been made.”

  “No. Now they’re realizing that if getting five hundred large is that easy, this Michael Jaynes, or whoever, is coming back for more. What scares me is he’ll blow up something else first, to get us frantic before he sends another note. Next time he goes for a million, the A.T.F. agent said.”

  The bobblehead was back on the P.A. system, this time with four new names.

  “I told you, Dek,” Leo said when he heard the bobblehead pause for air.

  “Told me what?”

  “Told you you’d get lucky with a lead. I just didn’t think it would be this quick.”

  “Or this good. A bona-fide link to a name.”

  The boarding call for my flight came over the loudspeaker. I told Leo I had to go.

  “Dek?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t let the California beach babes touch your privates.”

  I laughed, sort of.

  If I’d owned a surfboard, I would have been angry I’d packed it. San Francisco Airport was cold, fifty-five degrees, and rainy when my flight landed at three that afternoon. I took the shuttle to the car rental building and stood in line at Avis. When it was my turn, I told the blond lady I wanted a convertible. It’s been raining for days, the lady said. They had plenty, Mustangs and Sebrings. What did I want? I said red.