Tagged for Murder

by Jack Fredrickson

  I went up the stairs to the second floor, heated the last of Amanda’s fresh pot of coffee in the microwave and took it to the plywood table. I didn’t want the coffee but I did want its warmth. I put my arms around the cup but I had to leave it on the table. My hands still trembled.

  I sat there for a time, maybe an hour but probably more, trying to feel relief at the death I’d just cheated. But all I could see was the randomness of the things that had kept me alive: a missed first gunshot; a counter-intuitive run back up the other side of the turret; the bramble; the miraculous just-in-time arrival of saviors, whoever they were, who stopped those who wanted me dead, whoever they were.

  I could make no sense of it. I was cold and adrift and afraid. I went upstairs, to the bottles of Liquid Bandage I’d learned to keep ever since I started cutting the turret’s metal ductwork. I painted my face and my arms and my hands and my ankles, everywhere I’d been cut, scraped and punctured. And then I went to bed, not to sleep but to find warmth beneath my blankets. But the chill did not go away, no matter the blankets, no matter the coat I kept on. I trembled until the sun came to light the turret and, at last, to bring me sleep.

  FORTY-SIX

  ‘DRUG WARS: BAD COPS?’ The Chicago Tribune’s bold-faced headline demanded, online. Below it ran a single black-and-white, close-up photo of the burned-out shell of an automobile.

  The car was found in flames at two in the morning, thirty yards in front of the husk of the drug lab I’d torched with a drone.

  Enough accelerant had been used to blister away the paint, melt the tires and char the two bodies inside beyond recognition. Nonetheless, the vehicle was easily identifiable. Its shape defined it as a Chevrolet Impala. The metal VIN plate at the base of the windshield defined it more, as an unmarked car owned by the Chicago police department.

  The two victims had been killed before they were torched, their bodies punctured by multiple bullets. Additionally, one of the skulls showed evidence of blunt force trauma, perhaps by a wooden bat or large club. Or perhaps, I allowed, by a tree limb grasped in panic after a revolver had failed to take him down.

  The Tribune said it was no stretch to call it a message. That two dead men, perhaps police officers, had been crisped in front of an alleged drug lab that had itself been torched just a couple of days before could only be seen as evidence of some sort of ongoing drug war, one that the police should meet head on with every available resource, the Trib said.

  I clicked over to the Argus-Observer’s website to see what muck they’d summoned up. Unsurprisingly, their coverage was virtually the same as the Trib’s, as they often lifted whole paragraphs of copy from their competitors.

  Their photographer, though, had taken a more distanced and editorialized view. He’d photographed the car from a hundred yards away that morning, in color, and centered it against the shell of the torched drug lab.

  The building had been freshly tagged. An eight foot, bright yellow smiley face, with a happy, upturned black line for a mouth and round black eyes, had been sprayed onto the lab’s brick wall. There was no mistaking the tagger’s delight in the destruction of the drug lab.

  My head wanted to reason that Chicago was full of taggers. Any one of hundreds could have left the smiley face. But my gut wanted to wonder whether the artist who’d tagged Central Works had found his way to the building I’d torched.

  To no one’s surprise, the Chicago police turned turtle in those first hours, refusing to speculate about who’d been in the burned-out car. They said the medical examiner’s office would work diligently to determine the identity of the corpses, but that the process would take days or even weeks.

  The city’s television, print, and radio reporters wouldn’t sit back and swallow such poorly cut baloney. They’d pack police headquarters that day, demanding to know who hadn’t shown up for work. Cop kills weren’t unheard of in Chicago, but it was almost always the uniforms in marked cars that got blown away, dropped like ordinary gangbangers and kids and bystanders and motorists just happening along. Detectives – for it was almost always detectives who drove the unmarked Impalas – rarely got murdered and sent up in flames. The story would stay hot until the victims were identified.

  I called the Chicago police department, and asked for Cuthbert or Raines. I was told both had been assigned out and would get back to me at their earliest convenience. I called Kopek. He wasn’t in, either. Only as an afterthought did I call Jacks, his partner. I left a message on his machine.

  I couldn’t suppose I was no longer in danger. Whoever had come for me the night before had been killed, dumped and burned in the Impala, but they’d been underlings, minions like Means and Herbie and Dace, and maybe even the assistant with the well-tended fingernails. Maybe, too, like Violet Krumfeld.

  Minions all, minions dead, while those that pulled the strings, the partners behind Triple Time, got to live on.

  I leaned back in my chair. And remembered the revolver.

  I’d tossed it aside in panic, desperate to be rid of it for something blunter, heavier, more sure. Incredibly, I’d not remembered it, but now the image of that gun lying on top of some mound of leaves, where some kid might find it, flashed hot in my mind. I ran downstairs in my shirtsleeves, unbarred the door and hurried across the street.

  The bramble offered up signs of the killing that had been done there. Specks of blood lay on flattened spots on the ground by the tree where I’d hidden, and faint drag paths led from there to the street. I saw no brass casings, which meant everyone there had been firing revolvers, like me, and not semi-automatics.

  The brush by the big tree where I’d hidden was still flattened. The revolver lay between two long branches, five feet away. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.

  The chunk of tree limb I’d swung lay in plain sight, close to the base of the tree. In the daylight, it looked ordinary, just another three-foot section of tree limb, decayed by rot at one end. Except for the smear of blood that was embedded into that rot.

  I picked it up and walked through the bramble. The patch where my first shooter had been dropped was easy to find. There were drag marks there and blood spatter, too. It would all be washed away by the next hard rain.

  I left the spit of land, crossed the street and went down to the river. I threw the tree limb into the water and watched the Willahock carry it down toward the dam. It would bang about there for a time, bobbing and sinking and breaking up, until the dam tired of it and sent the smaller fragments, significant of nothing now, farther downriver.

  I reached into my pocket, to throw the revolver in after it, but then I had a minor inspiration. That gun might have a story of its own. If so, it would not tell it to me. I went back up to the turret, wiped the revolver clean of my fingerprints, put it in a shoebox and wrapped that in a tan paper shopping bag. I typed a big label on my computer and addressed it to Chicago’s main police headquarters on South Michigan Avenue. I used Anonymous for the return address because Chicago cops would accept things marked that way.

  And then I hesitated, unsure who to designate as the intended recipient on the lower left corner of the label. I’d first thought to type in all their names there – Kopek and Jacks, Cuthbert and Raines – because I didn’t really know who, if any of them, was still alive to open the package. But labeling it that way would be sloppy, because it absolved me of the hard thinking I had yet to do about who’d tried to kill me and who’d come to save my life.

  I made new coffee and went out to the bench by the river to force away bad guesses. After a couple of hours, I was left with one good guess. I went back to the computer, typed in the names, and printed out the label.

  I drove to the cab stand on Thompson Avenue that the City of Rivertown provides for those late-night revelers too wobbly to drive. I found the cabbie that drove Rivertown’s chief lizard, the mayor, to places where the man didn’t dare to be seen driving himself, and handed him the package and fifty dollars. I told him I wanted a simple, fast drop-off.
r />   And then, before heading into the city, I swung into The Hamburger for a grilled cheese and a Coke because I never had touched the ones I’d ordered the night before.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  ‘Tomorrow is Leo’s grand opening,’ I said to Amanda on the phone later that afternoon, as I was stuck in traffic on the expressway back to Rivertown.

  ‘I knew you were safe because I sent someone around this morning. He saw you handing a package to a cabbie.’

  She’d caught the news, seen the picture of the burned-out car. ‘To see if I was still alive?’ I forced a small laugh. ‘Things are no longer dire,’ I said, trying to sound sure.

  ‘Why no call?’

  ‘I thought we’d talk later. So, Leo’s?’

  ‘I’m looking forward to going …’ Amanda said, and then stopped.

  ‘Why the pause? There will be ice cream, at last.’

  It elicited no laugh.

  ‘And Ma Brumsky and her septuagenarian friends in short poodle skirts,’ I said, seeking to entice further.

  Still, she remained silent.

  ‘Best of all will be the goat race,’ I said, playing my trump card. Surely no one could resist watching goats race.

  ‘Are you safe?’

  ‘As I said, things are no longer dire.’

  ‘Because two bodies were found burned beyond recognition in front of a building that, uh, some unknown person might have previously torched because it was being fitted out as a drug lab? They’re saying it was cops in that burned-out car, but bad cops or good cops, nobody yet knows.’

  ‘Bad guys, for sure.’

  ‘You know this?’

  ‘They came to the turret with guns.’

  ‘My God!’

  ‘I was saved by others.’

  ‘You didn’t—’

  ‘No, it wasn’t me. My rescuers lit that car.’

  ‘What kind of rescuers—?’

  ‘It’s time to look forward to better things, like hot dogs, ice cream and, best of all, goat racing,’ I cut in, to get us back to banter.

  ‘What if there are others?’ she asked, having none of my attempt at flippancy.

  ‘There surely are,’ I said. ‘Bad ones and good ones, and some that are mixes of both.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘You’re being cryptic, which is what you always do when you’re dodging.’

  ‘I’m not dodging so much as mulling. There’s still much I need to think through.’

  ‘At least tell me this: were the bodies in the car a message, as the news folks are saying?’

  ‘Very strong, very pointed, just like the torching of those other two buildings the same night that anonymous fellow did the lab,’ I said. ‘Taking back; people taking things into their own hands. Maybe it’s going on all over and I just haven’t been aware of it. But for now, I need to concentrate on hot dogs done right, ice cream served up from a power-washed freezer, and goat races.’

  ‘You did see the Argus-Observer’s website?’

  ‘That smiley face? Might be the same tagger; might not.’

  ‘Either way, it’s happy art,’ she said.

  ‘Delighted for sure,’ I said. ‘About Leo’s tomorrow?’

  ‘Pick me up at work, eight tonight?’

  ‘Even better.’

  ‘I’ve got another address,’ she said, giving me a number on a street in a rehab district a mile south of the expressway.

  ‘I already know where it is.’

  ‘Ah, my secretary? She adores you.’

  ‘As well she should,’ I said, without correction. ‘Oh … your guards, they will be there tonight?’

  ‘Sadly, yes,’ she said, her voice gone wary. ‘Why on earth would you ask that?’

  ‘I never like to be wrong, is all,’ I said, really meaning that until I was sure who’d gotten crisped in the cops’ car, guards were good folks to have around.

  Rivertown has only one bank – a veiny marble pile with the warmth of a mausoleum. Only two people work in the gloom inside. One is the bank president, who sits at the lone desk in the lobby. He is the mayor’s brother-in-law, and a man who knows how to do as he’s told.

  The other is a batty ancient that perches behind the gilded teller window except for the hours she spends in the restroom, rinsing the seeds from the pomegranates she adores out of her teeth. She is the bank president’s mother.

  Rivertown’s bank does not seek retail trade. It offers no teaser rates for new depositors, pays no interest on passbook savings and carries no mortgages for anyone not a member of the town’s extended ruling family. It exists simply to channel the relentless river of crinkled green that oozes in each day from city hall and the tonks along Thompson Avenue. The bank’s president knows how to get around the federal restrictions on accepting unexplained cash deposits.

  ‘Ah, Elstrom,’ he said, looking up from one of the ever-present, Just for Kids newspaper crossword puzzles he struggled with to stave off Alzheimer’s.

  A slight ping sounded from the teller cage across the vast marble floor. His mother had spit another seed into her metal wastebasket.

  I’d brought in a medium-sized plastic garbage bag. He looked inside and shrugged. He’d seen such bags, and such contents, before.

  I repeated the gist of my conversation with the downtown landlord and gave the banker the man’s address. A check from an out-of-country bank managed by his nephew would be mailed at the first of every month.

  On my way out, I checked the scratched plastic plate on the table against the wall. There used to be chocolate-chip cookies there, before the batty ancient switched to pomegranates. Now there was only one cookie, and it had a bite taken out of it. I remembered that cookie from months before, when I’d stopped by hoping to learn the true identity of a strange woman who gave me a cashier’s check. The strange woman was now dead but the bitten cookie was set to live on, apparently, for forever.

  I swung by Weasel’s on my way back to the turret. I was still furious with him for setting me up but a small, annoying part of me was accepting how frightened he must have been, getting his front door – and potentially his head – shot at. Weasel wasn’t much evolved from a cockroach, morality-wise, and I allowed he’d simply exercised the same instinct for self-preservation that had enabled cockroaches to survive for countless millennia.

  His old Taurus was gone from the curb. More surprisingly, I saw faint smudging around the edges of the front windows. There’d been a fire, or rather several small ones, inside. I drove around and into his alley.

  There were a dozen bicycles and tricycles back by his garage, seemingly left for the stealing. I got out, walked up to the kitchen door. It was unlocked, as he’d left it the last time. Then, it had been to fool. Now, I wondered if it had been left unlocked because Weasel, or someone else, no longer gave a damn.

  The dampness that pervaded every cranny of the house – that mix of must and mildew – had gone acrid. A fire had been attempted at the back wall in the kitchen, next to the door that led down to the basement. The flames had not caught beyond smudging the vinyl wallpaper. Likely the wall was too damp to burn.

  Two more fires had been attempted in the living room. The smallest of the cardboard shipping containers Weasel had hunted and gathered in various Chicago neighborhoods had been emptied and lay somewhat scorched in two piles, also too damp to burn.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine the scenario. Weasel had left the bikes and trikes he’d stolen out back for others to steal, and tossed whichever of the smaller stolen goods he could later sell into the trunk of his Taurus. He’d then tried to destroy all that damnable packaging, imprinted with other people’s names and addresses, by torching his house – a valueless house in a burned-out neighborhood where nobody, except Weasel, had lived for years. It had been a last-gasp effort to shake off pursuers angry about Austin, more imagined than real, along with cops, more real than imagined, who were bound to come knocking eventually to inqu
ire why his Taurus kept popping up in surveillance footages recorded in neighborhoods suffering rashes of package and bicycle thefts.

  Yet, typical of the lack of fortune Weasel got from the world, his house refused to burn. Years of leaking shingles, un-caulked windows and wind-driven rains had dampened the house too much to ignite. Like Weasel himself, it had simply sputtered for a time, and then quit.

  I sniffed at the thickening inch of milk in the half-gallon on the kitchen counter before I walked out.

  It, too, had spoiled.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Even if I hadn’t been there that afternoon, trailed by Herbie Sunheim’s spirit screaming in outrage, it would have been easy to spot the place in the yet-to-be rehabbed district, south of the expressway. A green Volvo station wagon, a black Chevy Suburban and two yellow cabs were parked in front of what, ordinarily, would have been a vacant storefront in a block full of empty storefronts. I pulled up behind the second cab and got out. I was fifteen minutes early, curious though fairly sure of what I was about to see.

  Even though I believed the world had only one rusting red Jeep crowned with a green top, a large man in a black suit immediately stepped out from the passenger’s side of the Suburban to eyeball me pulling up. He was one of Amanda’s bodyguards. He recognized me and gave me a sort of half-wave.

  I told him Amanda and I would be heading to Leo’s grand opening the next morning, and to tell the day shift that there would be hot dogs and maybe even lime gelato in it for them if they dressed less like guards and more like guys simply showing up for hot dogs. No sense being noticeable, I said. He smiled and said he’d pass along the message.

  I walked up to the store window and looked inside. The place was brightly lit. Two pairs of eight-foot-long folding tables ran down the center. Eight black teenagers – four girls and four boys – sat facing each other. Long strands of multicolored wires lay in the center of the tables. Small blue trays of red, gray and white plastic connectors, and clear plastic tubs of shiny, plated metal parts rested in front of each teen.