Hidden Graves

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘Working for Timothy Wade?’

  ‘His run for the senate is the most important Democratic race this fall. She was assigned to manage his call center. It’s in Chicago, on the west side.’ Then she asked, ‘That couldn’t have anything to do with Marilyn’s death?’

  I told her I’d be in touch.

  She told me she didn’t believe me.

  I told her that was probably wise and walked down to the Jeep.

  TWENTY

  His name was Anton Chernek but everyone referred to him – often whispering – as the Bohemian. I called him from the Jeep. As always, he said he’d see me right away. And, as always, I was amazed. Except for Chicago’s mayor, certain top-tier titans of local industry like my ex-wife and a smattering of big-name philanthropists, also like my ex-wife, few were allowed to drop in on the Bohemian. He was a counselor to the area’s elite, the go-to man when things got too dicey, embarrassing or tragic for normal retainers. And, ever since my divorce, a counselor to me, whenever I plummeted into a big-time jam.

  It was only midday but traffic heading into the city was jammed on the too-narrow expressway. It’s like that in Chicago. Millions of dollars get approved to improve things but the ‘things’ – the roadways, elevated train lines and schools – rarely get improved as much as the bulges in the pockets of the shiny-lipped supplicants that move in the shadows of Chicago’s city hall.

  The Bohemian knew all about that. He knew about the things that happen in the dark of Chicago, the gray of the Cook County that surrounds the city like a greasy collar and the murk of the entire state beyond that. He knew who moved, he knew who shook and he knew who trembled. He’d know Timothy Wade.

  His offices were on the top floor of a ten-story yellow-brick factory rehab in a trendy outskirt of Chicago’s Loop. Riding up in the elevator, I glanced down at my clothes – the rumpled khakis, blue button down shirt, and blue blazer that have been my uniform since my life went to hell after the Evangeline Wilts trial – and thought of the time, not so very long before, when I’d ridden up in that same elevator wearing the same uniform, except that day I was smeared with blood and likely to be accused of murder. The Bohemian had taken efficient charge of me. He’d hustled me into a private conference room, dispatched someone for fresh clothing and called the city’s best criminal defense lawyer. I’d walked out of the Bohemian’s office three hours later sporting a much-calmed outlook and better duds than I’d ever owned before.

  Now I was returning, likely to be accused of murder again. It was just like old, damned times.

  The elevator opened into a dimly lit reception area of reassuringly creased old green leather, dim lamps and earnest young portfolio and fund representatives anxious to have an audience with one of the people who reported to one of the people who reported to the Bohemian. Because of the high quality of its client list, Chernek and Associates was the most prominent unknown financial management firm in Chicago. If I’d had a net worth beyond what I just invested in a brand new furnace I’d have tried to hire them.

  The receptionist was new, and like all of her predecessors was young, taut and tanned. The Bohemian had an eye for perfect assembly, as did his most discerning clients. His receptionists got hired away regularly to adorn other fine reception desks, and always with the Bohemian’s blessing. It was simply another of his services to the city’s elite.

  Chernek’s long-time executive assistant came for me in an instant. Helmet-haired and creased as deeply as the leather in the reception area, she was less of an adornment than a barbed necessity. She wore a dark navy suit buttoned all the way up to her neck and the grim countenance of someone who might have just buried Jimmy Hoffa with a small shovel without so much as smudging a knuckle. Her name, preposterously, was Buffy, and that was the only giggle she offered the world. She marched ahead of me to the executive offices, tapped on the jamb of the open door in the corner and faded backward toward the cubicles, all without giving me a flicker of recognition or a single word.

  The Bohemian was resplendent, as usual. His shirt was pale lemon, the tie navy and subtly patterned to perfectly complement his chalk-striped gray suit. Every silver hair on his head was brushed neatly back and his tanned skin spoke of a summer spent on the most expensive fairways in northern Illinois.

  ‘Vuh-lo-dek!’ he pronounced from behind his mahogany desk, elongating the two syllables of my Bohemian first name – Vlodek – into three. As much as I found the name irritating he saw it as evidence of our being kindred ethnic, if not financial, spirits. He pointed to one of the burgundy leather guest chairs.

  ‘Someone is trying to frame me for murder,’ I said.

  ‘Marilyn Paul’s?’

  It wasn’t a surprise. ‘You do stay informed, Anton.’

  He smiled, though not as broadly as I would have expected, having made such an accurate guess. ‘Given that the woman was found in the Willahock, just downriver from your, ah, circular abode, it seemed possible I might hear from you.’

  ‘And when I called …?’

  ‘It could have heightened my self-regard,’ he said, but his eyes didn’t crinkle with amusement. Something else was going on behind them.

  ‘Somebody alerted you,’ I said.

  He smiled more broadly. It must have been Amanda, the only client of his that would have cared.

  ‘Marilyn Paul, heavily disguised and calling herself Rosamund Reynolds, might have hired me. It was an odd assignment—’

  ‘Aren’t they all, with you?’

  ‘It paid two thousand dollars up front to look in on the situations of three men in Arizona, California and Oregon. The men in Arizona and Oregon have disappeared. The man in Laguna Beach, who changed his name to David Arlin, also disappeared but into fragments when his house blew up. I passed myself off as representing Arlin’s insurance carrier to the cops out there. It was a mistake. They want to know the details of the mythical insurance policy, which does not exist, including medical records. Apparently they have questions about the corpse.’

  ‘You’ve tangled yourself up in quite a web.’

  ‘I thought, for a time, that Marilyn Paul, if it was Marilyn Paul, hired me to take the rap for one or more of their murders.’ I slumped deeper in his chair. ‘I changed my mind when she got stuffed in the back of my Jeep, dead, while I was out in California.’

  ‘You did the transfer to the river cleanly?’ The Bohemian was never indelicate.

  ‘Yes.’ There was no sense in mentioning Leo’s involvement.

  He sensed it anyway. ‘Someone else helped?’

  ‘Someone who can be trusted.’

  ‘No idea who is trying to frame you?’

  ‘None.’

  I told him of going to see Lena Jankowski. ‘David Arlin’s real name is John Shea. The man in Oregon, perhaps born Willard Piser but passing now as Dainsto Runney, is a man of God, or maybe he’s just a hustler in a sham church. He’s either in the wind like Halvorson or dead like Arlin. As for Halvorson, he’s the only one of the three who never changed his name. He’s simply lived underground for as far back as I can find out.’

  ‘These three – they’re linked, how?’ he asked.

  ‘They were friends, part of a quartet calling themselves musketeers, working on the congressional campaign of a man named Delman Bean. They quit the campaign to take oil rig jobs out west, though I don’t think those jobs ever really materialized.’

  ‘Your client, perhaps Marilyn Paul, knew all this before hiring you, of course?’

  ‘As would the fourth of those old musketeers, Timothy Wade.’

  ‘The candidate for US Senate?’ he asked. His well-tanned forehead had not wrinkled. He was masking his surprise. ‘I suppose you’re here to ask me to arrange a meeting with him?’

  ‘He can explain the links between the other three.’

  ‘I can’t set that up.’

  I knew enough to not ask if Wade was one of his clients. ‘Because he’s still avoiding personal contact with everyone after that b
arnyard meltdown?’

  He nodded. ‘His sister has put out the word that it’s a matter of his personal safety.’

  ‘His sister?’

  ‘Theresa Wade is directing the campaign and she wants him protected until they find out who planted those plastic bones and rubber hatchet in the silo.’

  ‘They were plastic and rubber, not real?’

  ‘Harmless for sure, but a real threat all the same.’ His eyebrows arched. ‘You know, of course, who’s gotten close to the Wade campaign?’

  ‘You’re referring to one particular member of his Committee of Twenty-Four?’

  ‘Two dozen very influential people he assembled to serve as an advisory committee. Their financial contributions are large, but their concerns and hopes are also considered respectfully. That one particular member might be able to arrange such a meeting.’

  ‘I won’t ask her.’

  He nodded, approving. He was always on full alert for anything that might threaten Amanda. She’d been a client of his since the moment she was born, because of her father.

  ‘She can’t be involved,’ I said. ‘Do you know anyone other than the Wades who might remember the Delman Bean campaign from twenty years ago?’

  ‘I might know just the man.’

  My cell phone rang while I was driving back to the turret.

  It was Lieutenant Beech from Laguna Beach. ‘You live on the Willahock River in Rivertown,’ he said, right off.

  ‘Come out sometime. We’ll fish for trash.’

  He didn’t laugh. ‘And corpses. A woman was just found downriver from you.’

  ‘Don’t believe everything you find on the Internet. Floaters are rare.’

  ‘I’m close to having you picked up for questioning.’

  ‘I’m working on the insurance records,’ I lied.

  ‘You’d better hurry.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A television reporter from San Francisco is getting interested in this case. Before she can embarrass me I’ll feed you to your local cops to sweat you for things you won’t tell me. Play ball, Elstrom.’ He clicked me away.

  My cell phone rang again, just a minute later.

  ‘Dek Elshtrom?’ a woman slurred.

  ‘Who’s this?’ I asked, like I didn’t know.

  ‘Bipshie,’ she said, with a gin-swollen tongue. ‘Howsh our sishters?’

  ‘Going great,’ I said ‘I just found another one.’

  ‘Whatsh her name?’

  ‘Bipsie,’ I said.

  ‘Schwell,’ she slurred. Her phone clattered and went dead.

  I wanted to laugh but I was too worried about who was still out there, building a new frame to hang around my neck.

  I called Jenny’s cell phone. ‘Beech from the Beach just called. You were going to call me right after you talked to him.’

  ‘And you were going to let me know what was going on as soon as you got back to Rivertown,’ she countered. ‘It was a woman found dead in your … in your river?’ she said, catching herself before she said ‘Jeep.’ ‘The story’s in the Chicago papers. It’s fair game for all reporters now.’

  ‘No one knows the things I told you.’

  ‘Except the killer.’ She sighed. ‘Don’t worry, I got nothing from Laguna Beach. The good Lieutenant Beech was very tight-lipped. He told me to contact their press officer and hung up.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I called back. They don’t have one.’

  ‘He keeps pressing me for the name of Arlin’s supposed insurance company. He wants medical records. Something’s wrong with the corpse.’

  ‘I should poke around?’

  ‘Use your wiles, discreetly.’

  ‘Ah, those wiles,’ she said, dropping her voice. And then she, too, hung up on me.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I swung by Leo’s ma’s bungalow. Leo knew I knew the Bohemian and he’d relax more knowing Chernek was involved, if only peripherally. The Bohemian could fix so many things.

  No one answered my knock. I called him from the curb.

  ‘Give me good news,’ he said tersely, amid thunderous whoops and shrieks that sounded like kids playing in a cave.

  ‘Let’s not talk on the phone. Where are you?’

  ‘Health club.’

  ‘You’ve joined a health club? Exercise is good for stress.’

  ‘Not me. Ma and her friends won free memberships at bingo.’

  ‘Free? Where, Leo …?’ An ugly thought reared up like a stallion spooked by a snake. ‘Certainly not in Rivertown,’ I ventured, needing to be wrong.

  ‘It’s free,’ he repeated, with what sounded like defensiveness amid the background whoops.

  I paused to think the unthinkable, that he’d brought his own mother to the Rivertown Health Center. Built decades earlier, when young Christian men, new to town, needed cheap rooms, Rivertown’s YMCA was disenfranchised for filth, locker-room theft and drunken inhabitants even before the last of the town’s manufacturing companies toppled to foreign competition.

  The lizards that ran Rivertown wanted the land. They seized the property, much as they’d seized my grandfather’s, but when they found the building too expensive to demolish they dubbed it a health center and kept it running on a shoestring, though those few seeking exercise were far outnumbered by the welfare winos living upstairs and the hoodlums lounging in the parking lot. The health center was no place to bring Leo’s septuagenarian mother and her friends.

  ‘The lizards can get federal funding if this place qualifies as a rehabilitation center for seniors, so they’re handing out free memberships,’ Leo went on as I sped along Thompson Avenue toward the health center, passing the usual handful of daytime working girls, veterans all and some seriously arthritic, milling along the curb.

  ‘Your ma will get tetanus from the rust on the equipment,’ I yelled into the phone. It was why I used only the duct-taped running track that surrounded the exercise machines.

  There was silence.

  I thought perhaps he hadn’t heard. ‘Leo? The machines? Tetanus?’

  By now, I’d gotten to the parking lot. I shifted the transmission down into low four-wheel drive, the hill-climbing gear, to creep over the potholes. Leo’s Porsche was nowhere to be seen but a brand-new silver Dodge Ram window van with a temporary handicapped card was parked in the restricted zone.

  ‘No worry,’ he said. The odd echoes in his background remained deafening and confusing. The fitness room had never sounded like a cave to me.

  An impossible thought flared into my head as I came to a stop in my usual spot next to the doorless Buick. ‘Not the pool, Leo. You didn’t put your mother in the pool.’

  ‘They assured us it’s been power-washed,’ he said, adding, ‘three times.’

  I paused only for a second to make sure the Jeep’s doors were unlocked, in case the younger hoodlums – the thumpers – needed to verify they’d already boosted my radio, and hurried inside. Three residents lounged on the torn vinyl chairs in the lobby, filling the portal to health and fitness with blue cigarette smoke. I hustled past them and down the stairs with my phone still pressed to my ear.

  ‘They didn’t just use Lysol and bleach,’ Leo was saying. ‘Industrial etching acids, too.’ He sounded proud of what he’d not overlooked.

  No amount of Lysol, bleach and acids could eradicate the memory of why the pool had been closed ten years earlier. One of the upstairs residents had gone missing. No one thought much of it; residents often wandered off and were usually found semi-upright near one of the town’s liquor stores, asleep on one of benches along the Willahock or propped up against my turret. But this one particular fellow remained missing for a full week, until at last a hardy swimmer, having lost his goggles, dove deeper into the pool’s murky water to retrieve them and touched something soft. It was the missing resident, spongy but mostly intact. Wags said he died of malaria.

  The county health department made the town’s lizards drain the pool and for ten years it remain
ed dry, if not particularly clean. But now, according to Leo, there was an opportunity for federal tax dollars if they filled it back up. The lizards always seized opportunities, even when they were legal.

  ‘Aren’t you concerned the locker room attendant is rifling their purses?’ I was just a few feet from the pool door now.

  ‘Au contraire,’ he said, slipping into French, a language he does not know. ‘I’m watching the purses.’

  And so he was. Looking through the glass door, I saw Leo sitting on a folding chair in front of a row of purses lined against the wall. Water was puddled at his feet. I opened the door and went in.

  ‘Welcome to my world,’ he said with no trace of a smile.

  ‘Where’s your Porsche?’

  ‘At home, in the garage. Ma made me buy a stretch van to bring the ladies here to get healthy,’ he said, with no trace of irony on his face. He motioned for me to grab the stool next to the door.

  I brought it over, sat down and looked around. There was no lifeguard.

  ‘There’s no lifeguard,’ I said, observantly.

  ‘That’s another reason I’m here.’

  Six gray heads bobbed in the water as a seventh – Ma’s octogenarian friend, Mrs Roshiska – pulled herself up on the ladder beneath the diving board, grabbed her wheeled walker and began pushing it toward the board. Her one-piece black bathing suit was wool and looked to have been enjoyed more than once by hordes of moths. Dime-sized spots of puckered white flesh protruded everywhere.

  ‘She’s not going to dive …’ I let the thought dangle.

  ‘Oh, but she is.’

  It took Mrs Roshiska five excruciating minutes to negotiate the twenty feet to the diving board. When she got alongside it, she threw her walker at her friends in the water, rolled her ample belly onto the diving board and began crawling toward the end of the board. Five feet from the end, she pushed herself up to a shaky standing. The whole process wanted to trigger thoughts of the moment ancient life first slithered from the sea.

  ‘She might fall, Leo.’