‘Time to retreat,’ he said, getting to his feet. I didn’t understand, but I moved backward to the purses.
‘Now, behold the transformative power of youthful exuberance,’ he said.
Mrs Roshiska staggered the last few feet to the end of the board, bounced up with startling power, grabbed her knees and executed a perfect cannonball into the water. A huge wave shot over the edge of the pool.
The gray heads in the pool shouted, elated. Leo clapped, grinning for the first time since I’d come in. I did, too. Mrs Roshiska’s head rose above the surface to cheers.
Leo motioned for us to bring our seats forward again. His grin had faded. ‘Any news?’
Another gray head appeared at the side of the pool, tossed Mrs Roshiska’s walker up onto the tile and climbed up the ladder.
‘That’s a man,’ I said, surprised. I’d assumed all the swimmers were Ma’s lady friends.
‘Say nothing.’
The aged gent pulled himself out of the water and began walking on stiff-kneed legs toward the diving board.
‘He’s not wearing a suit,’ I whispered.
Leo nodded.
‘Can’t they see?’ I asked, gesturing at the women in the pool.
‘They invite him because he’s forgetful.’
‘Surely they’re not optimistic?’
‘Who knows what aquatic exercise might revive?’
The old gent made it up to the board, walked to the end and belly-flopped off the edge. He hit the water perfectly flat.
‘Ouch,’ I said.
‘At his age, it probably doesn’t matter …’ He let the thought fade away. Too many lines had formed around his eyes. ‘Who the hell is Marilyn Paul, Dek?’
‘A full-time Democratic worker,’ I said. I told him about my trip to Prairie Hill.
‘That’s all you know?’
‘The three men that Marilyn Paul, if it was Marilyn Paul, hired me to look up were friends. They worked together on a congressional primary twenty years ago with Timothy Wade.’
‘The Grain Man?’
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘How is that relevant?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I shouldn’t have dumped her into the Willahock.’
‘Not dumped, Leo; relocated to keep me from getting charged with her murder.’ Then, ‘I went to see the Bohemian this morning.’
His face relaxed, but only a little. ‘How can he help?’
‘I’m hoping he’ll put me in front of someone who knows about that congressional campaign.’
There was faster movement in the pool. The ladies had swum up to surround the naked man, hands alternating between flailing to stay afloat and stabbing beneath the surface. I looked away from the roiling water. The swim party was getting ugly.
‘Have fun,’ I said, standing up.
‘Did you get rid of the box? Cadaver dogs can smell the faintest trace of decomposed human remains.’
‘I’ll burn it when I get back,’ I said.
And so I’d planned.
TWENTY-TWO
I’m still surprised at my luck in spotting it at all, that barest pinpoint of a flashlight aimed so briefly inside my Jeep. It was two in the morning and three stories below my bedroom window. If I’d been looking in any other direction, or simply not gotten out of bed, I’d have missed it.
I’d lain awake for hours, dancing worries in the darkness. Marilyn Paul’s killer had known to leave her dead in my Jeep to get me blamed for her murder. He’d found a file, or notes, that had my name on them. Or maybe she’d kept a copy of the check she’d given me. Whatever it was, it had been enough for her killer to plot to point the cops at me.
I worried, too, about how it all would affect Amanda. She’d been tough enough to survive my falsified document scandal and her father’s murder, but she was on new turf now – moneyed turf. High stakes, big business, accountable-to-stockholders turf. Surely she could do without being linked to an ex-husband accused of murder.
At some point in the night, I decided I might thrash more efficiently standing up, in front of the microwave, nuking a Peep or two. I got out of bed and, as is always my habit, I went first to look out the window.
The pinpoint of light darted about for only a few seconds inside the Jeep, and for those seconds I wasn’t worried. Someone poking around inside would find only Burger King wrappers, my gym duffel and a rats’ nest of loose wires from the ripped-out radio.
And the box, I realized, in the next heart-thudding moment – the cut-down, folded-up furnace box I’d forgotten to destroy. A box that surely contained some last bit of Marilyn Paul’s DNA. And mine. And likely Leo’s.
Now someone had come, most likely a cop, tipped to the existence of the box by someone keeping an eye on the turret. Stupid, stupid me.
Unless the visitor was not a cop but Marilyn Paul’s killer.
I slipped on jeans, a sweatshirt and running shoes, and went down the wrought-iron stairs in the dark to the first floor. I am no hero. I was not about to charge out to confront a prowler. Nor was I anxious to converse with a cop. I peeked out the window closest to the Jeep. For a moment I saw nothing, but then a vague shape moved away from the Jeep and started hurrying toward the short street that led to Thompson Avenue.
I flipped on the outside light, a lantern-shaped affair as old as the turret, and ran out the front door. The shape of whoever was out there began running. A few instants later, headlights lit the short street. A car pulled away, too fast for me to see what kind it was. All I saw were taillights.
It was a relief, of sorts. And not. The prowler had been no cop. Rivertown detectives can’t run. They’re overweight from the free booze they lap up along Thompson Avenue.
That meant whoever had come in the night was there for the frame.
I opened the Jeep’s tail door. The flattened furnace box was still inside; it had not been taken. I brought it inside and put a match to it in the second-floor fireplace. It caught nicely.
I went into the soon-to-be kitchen, made coffee and was about to irradiate a Peep when a new thought twisted nasty. No one but a cop would want the box. My intruder had come not to take something but to leave something behind.
I ran out into the night to paw inside the Jeep. I felt it, almost right away, in the mess of Burger King wrappers under the passenger’s seat. It was an eight-inch serrated kitchen knife. I held it up to my outside light. It was covered with dried blood. Having failed to frame me with her corpse, Marilyn Paul’s killer had returned with the blade that had killed her.
A blade I’d just made more incriminating with my fingerprints.
There was no time. My visitor had surely called the cops. I scooped the knife and the wrappers out from beneath the passenger seat and ran down to the Willahock. The river is wide where it passes the turret. I threw the knife as far as I could into the rapidly moving water. It splashed in the middle and sank.
I knelt to plunge the Burger King wrappers deep into the frigid muck at the shore, then released them to float free with the rest of the debris headed downriver. I grabbed more muck and rubbed it around my fingers and deep under my fingernails. Only after a full five minutes did I rinse my frozen hands in the water. Then I went inside and up to the kitchen, where I scrubbed my hands with dishwashing detergent, scalding water and a touch of bleach.
My breathing had calmed, but only a little. I’d stopped whoever was coming at me for a second time, but that worry was for later. For now, the second act was sure to play out in what was left of the night.
TWENTY-THREE
I put on my pea coat, took a travel mug of coffee up the stairs and the ladders and eased through the trapdoor out into the night. I keep a lawn chair on the roof for when things haunt too closely for sleep.
Across the spit of land, the gas was being let out of the greasy old balloon that was Thompson Avenue. The neon lights were flickering off; the cruising headlamps were speeding away. Curbside girls were wobbling home, a few bucks ri
cher, a few hundred years older.
My night, though, had surely just begun. I pulled my pea coat tighter, sipped my coffee and waited.
Twenty minutes later, headlamps turned onto the short street off Thompson, turned again onto mine and began weaving toward the turret. Plenty of people, tipsied, used the short street and my street in the middle of the night. Frugal, last-hour johns liked them because they were dark and saved the cost of a room. And night-shift cops used them because they led to the police station, hidden at the back of Rivertown’s city hall, where its pretense of law and order wouldn’t give pause to the commerce of the town.
The car bumped softly to a stop against the curb below. It was a Rivertown police cruiser. Two uniformed officers pushed themselves out.
I bent over the wall and called down. ‘Good evening, or perhaps it’s good morning by now, gentlemen!’
‘What the …?’ one of them shouted as they both looked around, confused.
‘Up here!’ I saluted them with my travel mug.
They looked up to see me backlit by the moon. ‘That you, Elstrom?’ one called up.
I had history with the Rivertown police, going back to when I’d been briefly suspected of murdering my girlfriend at the end of high school. ‘I’ll be right there,’ I shouted and went down the ladders and the stairs, stopping at the second floor to check the fireplace.
The cardboard had burned down nicely. Only ash remained. I continued downstairs and opened the timbered door.
‘What’s up?’ I asked, like I didn’t know.
‘Cook County got a tip-off – asked us to help check it out,’ the one who’d been driving almost steadily said.
‘Yesh,’ his partner slurred.
‘Regarding?’
‘Someone said you got evidence in your car about that broad floater.’
As if on cue, an unmarked police car drove up followed by a white sheriff’s forensics van and a flatbed car hauler. My nighttime visitor had been persuasive, no doubt from a disposable cell phone.
A woman got out of the car and a man with a dog on a leash got out of the van. Pulling on purple plastic gloves, the man sidestepped the whiskey-misted Rivertown cops and followed the dog, straining now on its leash, directly to the Jeep. The woman came over to me. She was about forty, had short blonde hair and grim tidings on an otherwise pretty face.
‘The door’s open,’ I called over to the man with the dog. There was no point in locking a door that had so many rips in its plastic window.
He switched on a flashlight and pulled open the door. The dog jumped up into the Jeep like it was rocket propelled and began thrashing around in frenzy. The handler tugged at the leash, trying to restrain the agitated animal. The dog snarled, desperate to be free. It took the man ten hard pulls at the leash to drag the beast out of the Jeep. He swore, slamming the door.
The blonde officer turned from the spectacle. ‘You’re Elstrom, of course,’ she said. Behind her the dog kept on barking at the Jeep’s closed door.
‘And occasionally proud of it,’ I said.
The two Rivertown cops, uninterested in any of the goings-on, strolled back to their cruiser and bumped their way along the curbs back to Thompson Avenue.
The flatbed driver backed up to the front of the Jeep and tilted back the bed.
‘Got a warrant for my car?’ I asked the woman.
‘That a deal breaker?’
‘Nah,’ I said. If I demanded a warrant she’d simply phone someone to have one forged and delivered within the hour, it being Cook County. I gave her the key.
She walked the key over to the flatbed driver and came back, looking up toward the top of the turret. ‘I smell fire,’ she said.
Chains clanked as the flatbed driver began attaching them to the Jeep’s bumper struts.
‘I thought a fire might help me sleep,’ I said. ‘Want to come in and look around?’
‘Probably too late, if you’ve had a fire. Besides, the Jeep’s what we want.’
‘Why is that?’
She shrugged. ‘Oh, just curiosity.’
That and an anonymous telephone call, I thought.
The driver began winching the Jeep onto the flatbed. Behind him, the handler was still tugging at the dog’s leash. The beast was desperate to follow the Jeep up onto the flatbed.
The blonde cop smiled. ‘We’ll let you know if you can have your vehicle back,’ she said and headed for her car. In a moment, she, the flatbed and the van were gone.
I walked inside. The fine ash in the second-floor fireplace was stone cold but there was no doubt that things were about to get hotter.
TWENTY-FOUR
It took the Bohemian little time to find someone familiar with the congressional campaign that Marilyn Paul, Piser, Shea, Halvorson and Timothy Wade had worked on together twenty years earlier. Nor did he settle for a minor operative. He arranged for me to meet the failed candidate himself, Delman Bean, in a small anteroom at the Chicago Enterprise Club at eleven-thirty the next morning.
I had to take the train into the city because the Cook County Sheriff’s Police had my Jeep. That was worrisome. Experts might well find transfer traces of Marilyn Paul’s DNA in the back, where the box had been, and her blood under the front seat, left by the knife.
The train was almost empty. I sat by a window. It didn’t relax my mind. The day was dark, wanting to rain. It matched my mood.
I arrived at the lobby of the Enterprise Club early. It was a place of brass elevator doors, veiny gray marble and veiny gray old men.
The former candidate rolled down the marble staircase twenty minutes late, presumably from the bar two flights up. ‘I can give you five minutes,’ Delman Bean said.
He was power dressed in a light gray suit, white shirt and solid purple tie, and smelled strongly of musky cologne overlaid by too much whiskey. According to the Internet, he’d used his political connections to make a fortune fronting for a road construction contractor, certainly much more than he would have gotten chiseling as a US congressman from Illinois.
‘Marilyn Paul,’ I said.
‘So Anton told me. Bossy bitch in charge of our phone bank but not bossy enough to get out the vote.’
‘John Shea, Gary Halvorson, Willard Piser.’
‘Punks. They bailed on me just before the election.’
‘All three at the same time?’ Lena Jankowski had said merely that they’d taken jobs on an oil rig, not that they’d quit so abruptly as to leave the campaign in a lurch.
‘Quit with no notice, the three of them. We’d rented vans for them to pick up old people and get them to the polls. They were reliable votes, those old people. Hell, we thought of everything, right down to putting goody bags in the vans, soft chocolate, apple sauce – the crap old people can eat. We gave our drivers routes all planned out, names and addresses of people to be picked up and when. But we didn’t think of our drivers quitting so sudden, taking with them the lists of people to be driven. And there went the whole shootin’ match. We didn’t do much with computers back then and nobody else had the lists. We lost by a lousy five hundred votes.’
‘Timothy Wade volunteered for you in that campaign?’
‘And now the Wades are a shoo-in for the senate because they’re worth millions and self-fund his campaign. Once in they will be solid party supporters. No worries about them.’
‘You’re including his sister?’
‘She calls most of the shots. Reclusive, an invalid, probably half-insane from never leaving her house. But everybody says she’s sharp as a tack.’ He looked at his watch. He’d respected the code he shared with the Bohemian – to supply a minimum of information without asking why anyone would need it. Now he was done.
I was only beginning.
TWENTY-FIVE
The first few drops of rain fell as I ducked into Union Station. I called the Bohemian. ‘You’re sure I can’t get in front of Timothy Wade?’
‘You got nothing from Delman Bean?’
‘
He’s angry with Marilyn Paul and jealous of Timothy Wade. But he’s downright furious with Halvorson, Shea and Piser. They quit his campaign just before the election. He blames their desertion for his loss.’
‘You’ll never get in front of Wade.’
‘Isn’t staying incommunicado a big risk?’
‘Especially after running scared from a toy axe and plastic bones? I would think so, but Theresa Wade knows more than I do about politics. As I said, she’s passing it off as a security issue, which it probably is. And, don’t forget, he’s polling twenty-five points ahead of his Republican opponent. Tim Wade’s your next senator.’
‘Can you get me in to see the sister?’
‘To discuss a twenty-year-old congressional race?’ He laughed. ‘I’ll see if I can find someone who knows her and forward your request, but she’ll say no.’
My cell phone had beeped with a missed call. I called back. A Sergeant Bohler of the Cook County Sheriff’s Police answered. I recognized her voice from the middle of the night.
I took a breath, waiting for her to tell me to come in for questioning. Instead, she said, ‘We’re done with your vehicle.’
‘I’m downtown, at Union Station, not at home.’
‘There’s a train stop four blocks from us.’
Thunder sounded in her background as she gave me her address. I stepped out and looked at the sky. It was black in the west. ‘It’s raining there?’
‘If there’s to be justice.’
A fast-driving rain was beating down by the time I got to her stop. There was no station building, just a flat, unprotected platform. And there were no cabs.
I got drenched running to the overhang of a gas station across the street. I called the sergeant. ‘It’s raining buckets,’ I said, so she could say she’d send a car.
‘That’s the least of your worries,’ she said, and hung up.
I remained under the overhang, worrying about what she’d just said. She sounded like she’d found ripe evidence, blood or DNA traces. I tried to tell myself that was impossible, that she’d only had the Jeep for a few hours. And then I told myself I’d only grabbed the knife and a few Burger King wrappers. I hadn’t looked for anything else Marilyn’s killer might have left.
Hidden Graves Page 8