The windows were also clear and overlooked Erie Street. It was a mesmerizing perch for observing one of the city’s newest and most ingenious kill zones, the newly reconfigured traffic lanes down below. The two center lanes had been left as traditional stretches for automobiles. But now, running on either side of them, were newly striped lanes for cyclists, some of whom wore helmets. Others, less veteran, merely adorned their heads with the confused grins of the soon-to-be-dead, for the outermost stretches of pavement, along the curbs, remained reserved for automobile parking, as always.
Thus was mayhem ensured.
A car driver desiring to park would stop, as usual, in his center automobile lane. But now he’d have to angle back across a new bicycle lane to get to the curb. If, by some miracle, he struck no cyclist charging up from behind, he was afforded a second chance when he swung open his car door to get out. Looking down at the swerving and horn honking along Erie Street, I could only marvel at how Chicago’s ruling class kept coming up with ways to thin their herds.
‘Dek?’ Amanda prodded.
I turned away from the impending carnage below and offered the world’s loveliest woman a smile.
‘You’ve got work?’ she asked.
I told her about Herbie Sunheim’s assignment to photograph the Central Works grounds.
‘Isn’t five hundred excessive for snapping phone pictures?’ asked one of Chicago’s richest women.
‘Particularly for a mega-tightwad like Herbie. I can only think that both he and his client are too petrified to go near the grounds themselves, for fear of being spotted showing concern.’
‘If that’s true, their reasoning is thin.’
‘For five hundred dollars, I can cater to the thinnest of reasoning.’
She managed only a small laugh.
‘And you, today?’ I asked. ‘What are you catering to?’
‘I’ve been thinking about kids killing kids,’ she said.
‘Ouch,’ I said.
‘Chicago,’ she said.
I waited.
‘I’ve come to what you always call an “inspiration,”’ she said. ‘I think people like me can do something about it. No …’ She shook her head. ‘People like me must do something about it.’
‘Now we’re on familiar turf.’
The Amanda I’d fallen in love with viewed teaching others to appreciate fine art as her life’s mission. She’d lived in an almost totally unfurnished multimillion dollar mansion in a gated community solely to safeguard the valuable artwork she’d inherited from her grandfather’s estate. She loved art. She loved curating it and writing about it in large books. But teaching classes at Chicago’s Art Institute, preaching the gospels of Matisse, Monet and Manet – that was her purpose, her life.
Until her long-estranged father, the CEO and majority shareholder of Chicago’s largest electric utility company, had made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. He’d offered to appoint her to direct philanthropy in his company’s name. She’d accepted. It was an offer to do good things on an enormous scale.
It did not last because her father did not last. Within months, Wendell Phelps was dead and Amanda, his sole heir, became principal shareholder of the utility company and, nominally, its CEO. Overnight, she became one of Chicago’s most influential executives. And one of its most obligated, on behalf of the corporation and her late father, to a large number of political, philanthropic and social commitments. So, while simultaneously excited by her new challenges and humbled by her lack of business training, her life became one of short attentions, bouncing from commitment to commitment, never landing long enough to honor any of them really well.
‘Jobs,’ she said now. ‘I’m trying to focus on jobs. Jobs for kids. Benchwork, hand assembly, low-skill work.’
‘Jobs that you could create through your company?’
‘It’s said that jobs can stop bullets.’
‘Some on your board of directors will accuse you of ignoring the company’s core business.’
‘Dek, I’m the CEO in name only, there because I own a ton of stock. I don’t understand the utility business. But this little idea I can wrap my arms around. I’m going to pitch it as being beneficial for the company. Not only might bringing jobs to the worst of Chicago’s neighborhoods tip the tide against the killing, it will burnish our company’s reputation. We’d get glorious press.’
‘Your company would go it alone?’
‘No. I want to build a coalition. Ask other Chicago companies to join us. That way nobody’s balance sheet will be hurt too much and the plan will take on the aura of a movement. Chicago’s corporations rising up, united and all that.’
‘Giving back?’ I asked.
Down below, brakes screeched and horns blared; another near miss. She paid it no mind.
She shook her head, perhaps angrily. ‘Taking back, damn it. Seizing what was taken away. Taking back lives that have been relinquished, taking back futures stolen from kids in Englewood and Austin and all the other nightmare neighborhoods.’ Her eyes glistened.
‘How much?’ I asked. ‘That’s what your directors are going to ask first.’
‘At the absolute most, and that would be down the road, capital costs would be ten million dollars to rehab some old factory for production. Then fifteen bucks an hour, six hundred a week, per kid. For a hundred kids, that makes sixty grand a week, plus medical and payroll taxes. Call it a hundred grand a week with utilities. Here’s the beauty of it: if ten big companies participate, it costs each one only ten thousand a week, or a half a million a year. Companies the size of ours spend way more than that on PR and advertising now, and this would get them far better press.’
‘And that’s just outlay?’
‘Exactly! We’d offset that with income from whatever we are assembling. Granted, it might not be enough to pay for all the expense, but bottom line? This could be a cheapie for all concerned.’
‘It sounds so simple. Why hasn’t it been done before?’
‘The feudal fiefdom mentalities of our corporations, my own included. Each wants sole credit for accomplishments; no one wants to share.’ She sighed. ‘Maybe I’m being naive, but I’m also going to push the mayor for free city college tuition for the workers, and free books and free passes for bus and rail transportation to get to those schools.’
I thought for a moment. ‘The mayor wants prominence, a role in Washington. He might go for this if he thinks it will help his national reputation.’
‘I’m going to suggest he create enterprise zones on those south and west sides. Tax breaks to rehab deserted old factories might spur big development in the city’s worst neighborhoods, like maybe what you’re saying is going on at the Central Works site.’
‘All the buildings have been bulldozed away except the one in the middle.’
‘Perhaps for parking, or lots of greenery, or for new construction,’ she said.
‘They must have big plans for such a large site. Certainly, there is a lot of redevelopment going on in the city right now.’
‘So it would appear, but some think it’s already slowing, thanks to Chicago’s reputation as the killing and taxing capital of the country. Add in the fact that Illinois is the worst state in the country, financially, and you wonder how the mayor can get any businesses to invest here.’
It was a lot to mull, and we sat for a moment in relative silence, save for a new round of squealing brakes and blaring horns coming from down below.
She checked her watch. ‘I’ve got to get back,’ she said.
I glanced across the room. One of her ever-present guards, a bulked-up fellow in a dark suit, put down the jar of ten-dollar marinara he’d been pretending to examine for the past half hour. For sure, he hadn’t risked trying one of the undulating, clear plastic chairs.
We went to the escalator. Only when we got outside did we realize we’d not gone to the counters to enjoy multiple dining opportunities.
That didn’t seem so important that afternoon.
FOUR
The tapping woke me again, just before dawn. It had been happening on and off for a week, always in the dark and always higher up, faint against the turret’s river side. I’d been figuring it for a bird, perhaps a deranged woodpecker unable to discern glass and limestone from wood or, more fitting for Rivertown, a crow or even a vulture, a scavenger, searching for something to snatch.
That morning, the tapping seemed to sound more sternly, as if nagging me to remember something I’d overlooked. I’d gone to bed vaguely bothered by the thought that I’d not taken the right pictures at the Central Works.
I got out of bed, cranked open the narrow slit window that faced the river, and looked up. Like always, by the time I opened the window, the tapping had stopped. I heard only silence and saw only moonlight. Down below, there was only more moonlight, glinting off the debris in the Willahock River as it rippled toward the cleaner towns to the west. Upriver, the recycler was recycling.
I closed the window, knowing that I’d never get back to sleep. I’d lie awake, tensed for the tapping to start up again – tapping that never did. And this night, I’d lay tensed as well by whatever it was at the Central Works that I couldn’t remember.
I slipped on jeans, a sweatshirt and my peacoat, and went down to the kitchen to run hot water through yesterday’s coffee grounds, then took my travel mug up the stairs and the ladders to the roof. I eased the hatch open as silently as I could, on the chance the tapper had returned, and climbed up into the night. I went to the balustrade that faced the river.
The air was still. There was no flap of wings, no caw of a hunter. The crazed creature that had been nipping at the turret was gone.
I keep a lawn chair on the roof, for restless nights, hot or cold. This one was cold. I sat down anyway and did what everyone seems to do when the mind defaults to vacancy. I thumbed my phone into life.
Herbie Sunheim had texted me during the night, thanking me for the photos and promising swift payment. I answered by offering to work my way through the railroad’s departments to see where the railcar had been previously, on the chance that previous stops might blur the dead man’s link to the windows at the Central Works. I did not end by noting that his five hundred dollars was unlikely to ease my long-term prospect of remaining broke, and that I was desperate for more work.
By now, the sun was beginning to rise. I leaned back and watched the workday traffic start to stutter along Thompson Avenue. Unlike the parade of johns that slow-cruised Thompson after sunset, daytime drivers always tried to hurry through Rivertown, as if worried they’d get stained by just passing through.
They could hurry no more. The lizards that ran Rivertown had installed four new traffic signals along Thompson Avenue, slowing traffic to a crawl twenty-four hours a day. Spaced in short succession and timed to stay mostly red, they’d been intended to give nighttime visitors adequate opportunity to survey the meat aligned along the crumbling curbs, and the girls, themselves crumbling beneath clumps of mascara and caked rouge, time to describe the delights that could be enjoyed by generous gentlemen.
An instant hit with the ladies of the curb, the long reds proved to be popular with the town’s treasurer as well. Daytime drivers, used to speeding through Rivertown on their way to and from work, were now trapped along Thompson Avenue. Desperate for escape, they began running the red lights, only to get stopped by Rivertown cops issuing hundred-dollar traffic tickets. Thousands of new dollars, mostly in cash, began pouring into the city’s coffers at city hall every day. The lizards called it serendipity.
To me, restless on the roof that morning, the impatient tapping of brake lights along Thompson Avenue only made whatever I couldn’t think to remember about Central Works pulse harder. I was too edgy to stay on the roof. I went downstairs and out to the back of the turret, to see if my tapping visitor had left traces of white on my yellow limestone.
When I’d moved into the beginnings of my grandfather’s lunatic castle dream years before, the long-abandoned turret had been streaked so white, inside and out, that a solid week of power washing had been needed to remove it all. Ever since, I’d worried that the descendants of the pigeons I’d evicted, imprinted with the strafing needs of their ancestors, would return, bent on splattering what would be, for them, a fresh canvas. But that morning, all was well. The tapper had left no fresh whiteness on the limestone.
I’d just turned to walk up the rise to the front of the turret when my foot got caught by a half-buried, rusty old soup can that some wino from the health center across town must have dropped weeks, or maybe years, before. They do that, those winos – leave bits of bottles and other junk when they stagger down to my stretch of the Willahock to nurse pints and watch the rubbish drift by.
But at that moment, I wasn’t thinking winos. I was seeing rust. Rust lying unnoticed on the ground; rust that had been trying to trigger my subconscious.
I went inside for cold coffee and clearer thinking. And then I went out to the Jeep.
The Central Works had been tagged.
Two men in rubber coveralls were up on a scaffold, power washing the side of the building that faced the railroad spur, removing the graffiti that had been painted there overnight. A third man worked the compressor and water tank on the ground.
I supposed it was no surprise. The old factory had become news with the discovery of the corpse on the railcar, and that must have presented an irresistible target to some daring wall artist. Taggers had been crawling up into the undersides of Chicago’s viaducts and on to the sides of its buildings for decades. Most left crude gang memorials – monochromatic, semi-literate testaments in gangsta lingo to fallen comrades, done in funereal blacks or blues – but, scattered around the town occasionally, were also impressive bits of art.
What little had not yet been washed off the Central Works looked to be of quality, a rendering of what might have been part of a window surrounding some snatches of color. Glistening in bright reds, blues, yellows and beiges, the rendering must have taken some time and presented some risk to the tagger, having to hang partway out of a third-floor window to complete.
I took distance photos from the highway and more as I moved up across the field; freebies for Herbie to nudge him into considering me for more work.
Something else was new on the old factory besides the graffiti. New, large red and white No Trespassing signs were screwed to both corners of the building’s rail side. Herbie and the property’s owner were worried about the legibility of the rusted sign by the front entrance, and had hurried to put up more legible ones, as if that would keep out undesirables. It was a panicked, stupid response, too late and too little to offer any protection from a legal judgment.
‘Washing the whole building?’ I asked the man working the water tank and the compressor.
‘Nah. Rush job. Just the tag,’ he said.
‘Won’t that leave the building looking splotchy if only part of it is clean?’ It didn’t figure, if the building was about to be rehabbed into something upscale. All four walls should have been washed.
He shrugged. ‘Guy called this morning, offering to pay double to get it removed fast. The paint’s fresh, a bitch to get off.’
I snapped another dozen photos of the wall and walked down to the railcar at the end of the spur, paying particular attention to the rust on the steel tracks. It was where my subconscious had been trying to direct me earlier.
Fresh scrapes of bright steel showed through the rust on the rails. The railcar had very recently been moved to the end of the spur. Unfortunately for Herbie and his owner, the fresh scratches probably confirmed that the railcar had recently been directly beneath a window on the factory.
More confirmation of that lay in the mud beyond the end of the spur. Two deep, wide tire ruts had been cut into the ground. They, too, were fresh, uncluttered by debris or the beginnings of weeds. The boxcar had obviously been towed to the spur’s end by a vehicle with large tires very recently. And that meant the unknown ma
n had come out of a window at the Central Works.
To be sure, I followed the tracks back to the building and a little beyond. As I’d expected, the scratches on the rails past the building were significantly duller than those from the building to the end of the spur. The railcar had been delivered to the building and left to sit there for some time before it was towed to the end of the spur. I took more pictures that were sure to make Herbie unhappy.
I started back toward the Jeep, but didn’t spot him until I was halfway across the field. The well-dressed, gelled man who’d confronted me the day before was standing close to the edge of the highway, leaning against the fender of a partially visible black car. He was watching the men wash the building. And, I supposed, he was watching me.
He’d shown no ID the day before. He’d offered no explanation of who he was, or what he was doing there. Like yesterday, I could only figure him for an owner’s representative.
I waved. He didn’t wave back.
Back in Rivertown, stopped by the first of the long-timed traffic lights along Thompson Avenue, I happened to glance down the street that ran alongside the bowling alley. The front end of an ancient orange Ford Maverick was jutting out from the curb, as though either parking or leaving. I knew that Maverick.
It didn’t move. It remained angled out, immobile. Alarmed, I swung onto the side street and pulled up alongside. The driver was slumped over the steering wheel.
I jumped out. ‘Hey, Benny!’ I yelled, thinking of a sugar-and-lard-induced heart attack as I tugged his door open.
Mercifully, his eyes opened. ‘Oh, hiya, Mr E,’ he mumbled. But then his eyes widened and he jerked to an upright position. ‘Oh, jeez, Mr E,’ he then blurted. Apparently, I’d frightened him awake.
Like most Rivertown residents, I’d known Benny since his second – or perhaps it was his third – junior year of high school, when he became the town’s part-time parking enforcement officer. The job paid little but it came with the creaky Maverick and a daily dozen of municipally subsidized doughnuts. That was fine with Benny, because the doughnuts were always fresh and because everything was always fine with Benny. He was known for his laid-back, happy disposition. And he surely brightened the disposition of the town’s treasurer as well, for Benny rarely waited for a violation to actually occur. He had only to suppose that a meter was about to expire before writing a ticket. Like the almost perpetually red lights that would come later, Benny became a fine source of cash almost instantly. So fine, in fact, that when Benny reported to the treasurer that he was likely to repeat his junior year yet again, the treasurer supposedly hurried to reach a cash agreement with the high school principal to graduate Benny before the start of the next school year. The principal was happy; Benny’s teachers, who’d gotten to know him too well, were happy, and Benny himself was happy. But it was Rivertown’s treasurer who was the happiest of all, for now Benny would be ticketing meters, expired or not, full-time.
Tagged for Murder Page 2
