The Principal Cause of Death

by Mark Richard Zubro

  “Why not set the dog on him?” I asked.

  “Didn’t have Fido then. Got him a few weeks later. They retired him from police work. He got hurt pretty bad in his last bust. They were going to destroy him, but with the help of a good vet, I nursed him back to health. I’m sure that over the years he’s helped convince the kid to back off.”

  We left a few minutes later. As we contemplated which houses to go to next to ask questions, Scott asked, “Fido? He named his dog Fido?”

  “Guy that big can name his dog Almathusta Gertrude Gahagen if he wants to. Nobody’s going to argue with him or the dog. Besides, somebody’s got to name their dog Fido.”

  We tried the tan brick ranch house to the left of the Bluefields’. A couple in their late twenties talked to us in their living room. We did the obligatory baseball chat. They hadn’t seen the Bluefields this morning. They repeated the stories about police visits and drugs.

  The woman said, “Sometimes the buyers just drive up in their cars and toot their horns. Whoever’s home—Mom, Dad, the kid—runs out and takes care of business.”

  “And the police do nothing?” Scott asked.

  They shrugged. She said, “We reported them once. The police came, saw nothing happening, took our names, talked to the Bluefields, and arrested nobody.”

  He said, “That’s when we started having trouble. We found garbage, food, all over our front porch. This happened several times over a period of four weeks. We called the police once. We told them we suspected the Bluefields. The police talked to them. We kept watch the next few nights, but even alternating watches, we lost too much sleep. We both have jobs. The second time we didn’t keep watch, we woke to find garbage all over the front lawn.”

  She said, “It was terrible. It took over a day to clean it up. I felt that awful Mr. Bluefield watching me all day long. His son came out and stood a step off our property for over an hour. He didn’t say anything. Just stared and sneered. It scared me.”

  “We didn’t call the police after that. Eventually it stopped. We thought about moving, but we just can’t. We could barely afford the down payment on this place.”

  Next we tried the neighbors on the street directly behind the Bluefields. This turned out to be an older couple, probably in their seventies. The woman had grown up in the house, then come back to live in it after her parents died. Introducing ourselves did not cause a spate of baseball recognition. They weren’t fans. It was refreshing.

  They, too, had their trouble with the notorious Bluefields. Living behind them, they’d missed a lot of the drug-selling that went on out front.

  “Spray paint,” the woman told us. “We’re Jewish. For years we had no trouble. Our kids grew up. We gave them a good Jewish upbringing. Everything was fine, just like you’d expect it to be in America. Then it started. Swastikas on the garage door. Cruel things on the sides of the house. The police were kind, but couldn’t do anything. We tried watching, ourselves.”

  He said, “We talked to some friends who had some trouble at one of the synagogues up in Chicago. I guess I can tell you this.” He looked to his wife for confirmation. She nodded her head yes.

  “They sent some people out to watch for us. People who knew how to watch. They sent us on vacation. When we came back, our garage was totally repainted. We suspected there’d been trouble. The leader of the group reported to us. They’d repainted the garage. They’d also caught who did it: the Bluefields. They told us they didn’t think there’d ever be trouble again, but if there was, to call them. We asked if we should call the police. I remember the man smiled at me and said we could if we wanted, but he didn’t think it would help.”

  The woman smiled broadly and said, “We didn’t ask any more, and there hasn’t been any trouble since. If we ever see the Bluefield boy at the local store or anywhere around town, he goes out of his way to be polite to us.”

  No one answered in the first two houses across the street from the Bluefields. So far people had horror stories to tell, but couldn’t give us a clue to where the Bluefields were, or when they might be back.

  The third house across the street, this one a red-brick ranch, had a different story. When she found out what we wanted, the woman, who was in her early forties, swept us into the house. She had long red fingernails, carefully tended, and wore a Chicago Bulls warmup outfit, right down to a pair of Air Jordans. She sat down and talked with very little prodding from us.

  “That boy dated my daughter last year. I didn’t say anything. You know how contrary kids can be at that age. Tell them yes and they want no, or vice versa. Makes no difference. If Mom likes it, it’s got to be awful. So I kept my mouth shut. My girl went through hell. I watched as carefully as I could. I knew the stories about drugs over there. Sheer chance that she took a camping trip with some friends and met a nice boy from Mokena. She broke up with Dan Bluefield. He started harassing her. We called the police. We started getting obscene phone calls. We got a tap in here, but you know the phone company will only put one in for two weeks.”

  I hadn’t known that.

  “The fifteenth day, the calls started again. I went nuts with the phone company. They put on another tap. Of course, you know what happened. Day fifteen, they started again. Then I guess Julie, that’s my daughter, told her boyfriend. He’s on the football team at Lincoln-Way High School. Julie wouldn’t tell me the whole story, but from what she said I guess her new boyfriend got some of his buddies, and they paid Dan a visit. The calls stopped after that.”

  She didn’t know where Dan or the parents might be.

  “Would Julie know?” I asked.

  “She won’t be back until late this afternoon. You’re welcome to come back then and ask her.”

  We thanked her and told her we’d drop by later.

  We stopped for lunch at the McDonald’s on LaGrange Road in Frankfort. It was two-thirty, so the place was uncrowded. One fan asked for an autograph. None of the teenaged servers recognized Scott. When you pitch two no-hitters in the World Series and bring a baseball championship to Chicago for the first time in decades, it’s an oddity when you aren’t recognized.

  It took us three minutes to drive to Meg’s in Frankfort. She lives in one of the beautiful Victorian homes in the old section of town.

  She fussed over us, concerned about how we were coping with the aftermath of the fire. I told her I was concentrating my emotions on investigating the Bluefields, and that apart from being tired from lack of sleep I was okay. We sat in her living room, which was done in blue, the couch and love seat a deep navy with minute stars grouped in rectangles, the rug a light blue tending to turquoise. There was one large framed print of a sailing ship on each wall.

  We told Meg about talking to the Bluefields’ neighbors. She said, “I’m not surprised about what you found. A totally dysfunctional family.” Then she added, “I’ve got the information on where everybody was.”

  “That quick?” I asked.

  She patted my hand. “My dear, used to be half the time I knew things before people even did them. The old gossip-gathering skills aren’t that rusty.”

  I smiled at her. She went on: “We’ve got everybody present and accounted for. Everybody has a solid alibi. None of the murder suspects could have set the fire.”

  “Except the Bluefield kid,” Scott said.

  “I couldn’t find out anything about any of the Bluefields,” Meg said.

  Scott said, “A couple of the neighbors, and the girl Julie’s boyfriend and his buddies, managed to successfully scare Bluefield. Now he’s graduated to attacks like those on Tom.”

  “He’s maturing,” Meg said. “Maybe his next level is full-time drug dealer or hit man. Who knows?” Then she added, “Kurt Campbell and I have been doing some checking together, trying to find out if anybody besides the teachers you’ve talked to had problems with Jones.”

  I’d been concerned about the possibility of a teacher whose difficulties with Jones we didn’t know about, or even someone total
ly unrelated to who and what we’d found so far, having simply showed up at school, killed Jones, and left undetected.

  “We couldn’t think of one, or find one. We did some pretty extensive and very discreet checking. Of course, Kurt would know most of the problems anyway.”

  I thanked her for the help. We stayed until it was time for us to go back to talk to Dan Bluefield’s ex-girlfriend.

  We drove slowly past the Bluefields’. It was nearly six and beginning to get dark. No cars in the driveway and no lights on in the house.

  We pulled up to the girlfriend’s. She met us at the door. Hair cut short, she wore jeans and a pale orange sweatshirt. Her mother joined us in the living room. The seventeen-year-old took a while to get over the fact that Scott Carpenter was sitting in her living room. I didn’t recognize her from school, which isn’t unusual in a school with over three thousand kids.

  We explained what we needed to know.

  She looked thoughtful, tucked a leg under her, and then said, “I dated that creep for three months. I don’t know what I saw in him. He was hateful so much of the time.” She shuddered. “Then I met Darren.” She gave us much the same version of the breakup with Bluefield and subsequent harassment as the mother had.

  “Where could he be right now?” I asked.

  “A couple places he hangs out with friends.”

  I asked if she could give us the names and addresses. She did so with alacrity. “I hope you make the creep miserable,” she said as she wrote them down.

  At the door while we were leaving she said, “If you try those and he’s not there, you might try the forest preserve on Route 30 just east of Wolf Road. Him and his buddies sometimes got together there to hang out, drink beer, and harass people.”

  We thanked her and left. The addresses she gave us were in Frankfort Square, Tinley Park, Orland Park, and Mokena. We struck out at all of them.

  “Want to try the forest preserve?” Scott asked.

  “Why not? Although I think it closes at dusk.” It was nearly eight and full dark.

  At the entrance to the park a chain barred our way. Scott turned the Porsche around, prepared to leave, but I caught a light among the trees. “Somebody’s there,” I said.

  He let the car idle and looked back. “Where?” he said. “I don’t see anything.”

  I pointed.

  “I don’t see anything,” he repeated.

  He began to turn back, but I said, “Wait.” We both stared for a few minutes, then it came again.

  “Glow of a cigarette being puffed,” I said. “Never forget how that looks in the dark, not after being in the Marines. Let’s investigate.”

  Scott said, “There can’t be any cars in there. The chain’s on. Or if there is somebody, it’s got to be official people who have a right to be there.”

  “It’s our last lead,” I said. I opened the door and got out.

  “Will you wait?” he asked. “I’m going to move the car away from the entrance. I don’t want the police coming in and investigating what the hell we’re doing here.” He drove the car about thirty feet down the road and parked it behind a screen of trees.

  The area of the forest preserve closest to the road was mostly open field, with picnic tables interspersed around outdoor grills. We crossed this quickly. Lights from the cars passing by on Route 30 lit the way enough to the edge of the trees so we didn’t trip over ourselves. As we entered the woods and got deeper inside, we moved more carefully. Leaves rustled underfoot. A light breeze had sprung up, carrying a stray leaf or two with it. The perfect autumn weather held.

  We found a road that wound through the woods, and tied to stay on its edge. This way we avoided rustling leaves with our passage, but could leap into the foliage if someone came along. Taking the road made the search longer, since it wasn’t a direct route toward the light we’d seen.

  Finally we spotted a car in the distance, but no lights around it.

  “Careful,” I whispered to Scott.

  We crept up on it quietly. Ten feet from the rear bumper, I said, “I don’t think there’s anybody in it.” We made it all the way to the back fender without arousing any suspicion or seeing anyone. Up close a rack of lights on the top gave us the news.

  Scott found it necessary to say, “It’s a cop car.”

  I rested a hand on the fender and peered into the darkness surrounding us. “What’s it doing here?” I asked.

  “Sitting parked,” he said. I love him dearly, but there are times the man could use a good whap upside the head.

  I inched around to the side door and raised my head slowly until I could see inside. It was empty.

  I returned to him and reported its uninhabited state.

  He whispered, “Then let’s get the hell out of here before the cop returns.”

  Suddenly a light flashed in the distance on the right side of the road. We heard a giggle. The light stayed on. We could make out a path toward where the light shone. We moved slowly along the dirt, fortunately a well-used way, with few leaves. After a few yards we saw a clearing and two people. A man and a woman, both mostly naked. We saw him fumbling in the light in his discarded pants. He murmured, “I know I have a condom in here somewhere.” We heard a sigh of satisfaction, and he reached over and snapped off the flashlight. In the darkness I saw a tiny ember of ash nestled in a hollow of dirt. We waited several giggles’ worth and backed away.

  “Well, Sherlock,” Scott said as we strode carefully farther down the asphalt drive, “your ability to track the evildoers seems to be a little rusty.”

  I whispered back, “Light of my life, angel of my existence, true love forever: Shut the fuck up.”

  He had the nerve to chuckle.

  We proceeded in silence for fifteen minutes. Finally he said, “I think the path is doubling back toward the entrance. It must make a complete circle. Only those two lovebirds are here.”

  I grabbed his arm. “There.” I pointed to a spot in the distance.

  He hesitated. “It’s just them again,” he said.

  “No car on the road,” I said. “It’s somebody else. This is a wavering light, not a steady one from a flashlight. But it’s not from a cigarette either.”

  We found no path this time, so our progress through the leaves was slower. As we neared our goal, we heard raucous voices with a background of the thump of softly played rock music. They kept no watch, obviously feeling that they were alone. Fortunately, they were loud enough so that the leaves we disturbed didn’t arouse any suspicion. We inched our way forward and crouched behind a tree at the edge of the light.

  Up close we could observe the group. The light came from two candles sitting on top of a boom box. I also saw the glow of two cigarette butts, cupped in sheltering hands. I quickly corrected that observation when both butts were passed around: pot. I counted six people. They talked and laughed unconcernedly. Being observed or caught seemed the furthest thing from their minds. Three sat on a blanket on the ground; the others perched on top of a picnic table. The one closest to me on the table was maybe ten feet away. I saw him in profile. Razor-thin, with his hair permed. Had to be Dan Bluefield. This was confirmed a minute later when he said, “This is great stuff. The new shipment we got in today is the best we’ve gotten in a while.”

  A female voice I didn’t recognize issued from one of the people on the ground.

  “Your dad is so cool. I wish mine was like that. Getting drugs any time you want.”

  Bluefield gave a contented laugh.

  Another voice, this one male, said, “I think it’s even better the way he came to school to try and get that faggot Mason fired. It’s so great when your dad backs you up against those stupid teachers.”

  “Don’t say faggot,” a third voice said.

  He got hooted and sneered at and called several names. He defended himself by saying, “Lay off. My uncle’s gay. He’s cool. You shouldn’t talk that way.”

  The rest spent several minutes belittling the concept of toleran
ce.

  The first female voice switched the topic slightly when she said, “Did you guys hear about Mason’s house burning?”

  “The faggot got what he deserved,” Bluefield said. “You should have seen what I did to him yesterday.” The teenager explained in vivid detail about depositing the dead rat and other debris on my desk. He got a few squeals of “Yuck!” amid the general sounds of approval.

  As I listened to his casual explanation and mocking laughter, I felt horrific anger building inside me.

  They discussed the fire. The conclusion they came to was, Too bad I didn’t die in the fire too.

  “The hope of America,” Scott murmured.

  He spoke softly and next to my ear, but the six teenagers were immediately silent.

  “What was that?” one said.

  “Quiet,” another said.

  Someone blew out the candles. The radio clicked off.

  It was difficult to see in the dimness, but I thought one of the figures moved toward where we were hidden. I reached back for Scott and found he wasn’t there. I hadn’t heard him move. Suddenly his voice rang out from ten feet to my left. “Everybody freeze.” His deep voice rang with the authority of any television cop. The teenagers only hesitated a second. Bluefield yelled, “Run!” A figure came right toward me. As it ran past, I reached out from my hiding place and grabbed.

  The person struggled fiercely. I felt a cast on one arm. Bluefield. My anger flared. I slammed the body against the ground. Moments later I heard footsteps close by. Scott said, “Tom?”

  “I think I’ve got Bluefield,” I said between gasps.

  The kid heard our voices and his struggles redoubled. He got the arm with the cast on it loose for a second and swung it at me. I caught it and began to twist. He squealed in pain, and stopped struggling.

  I listened carefully. No sound of the others. None of them had stayed to see the aftermath. A minute later we heard the sound of a truck or van starting.

  I said, “There go your buddies.”

  Bluefield snarled at me. Scott held the kid while I made my way to the picnic table, stumbling only once in the dimness. I felt the surface of the table. I knocked something over, patted the tabletop, and picked up an object. Seconds later a wavering flame from a cigarette lighter lit the area. I swung it around to get a view of the clearing.