Nonetheless, Bohler’s cheery certainty turned my mouth to chalk. For a day or two, I’d been thinking about what I hadn’t thought about at first: carpet fibers. Some could have gotten trapped in the bag Marilyn had been put into and compared to samples from my Jeep. They, too, would be circumstantial, but evidence nonetheless that Marilyn Paul’s body had spent time in a Jeep very much like mine. Circumstantial evidence, piled high enough, can become damning evidence.
Bohler coughed. I’d gotten so lost in the newest of my worries that I’d forgotten she was still on the phone.
‘Anything else, Sergeant?’ I asked, in what sounded like a child’s voice.
She laughed and hung up.
The Wade estate in Winnetka was on familiar turf, a few miles of multimillion dollar homes south of my ex-father-in-law’s ex-digs in Lake Forest. Though the Wade grounds only backed down to a road that ran along Lake Michigan and were not on it, like the late Wendell’s, the Wade property looked to be many times more valuable. The thickly wooded grounds covered at least twenty acres of prime North Shore real estate and had to be worth tens of millions.
The house was set in a clearing at the top of a rise along another road, across from more woods nestled between two upscale housing developments. The Wades’ was a rambling white-frame affair with black shutters and yellow awnings landscaped with precisely trimmed yews fronted with those little yellow and purple flowers rich people buy in small cement urns to let die on their front lawns after the first frost. The rich are odd ducks.
I got stopped at the curved drive by the black-iron gate I’d seen in the satellite photo. The small white security hut behind it looked to have been painted as recently as the house, which might have been that morning, such was its sparkle.
I thought again of the only photo I’d found of Theresa Wade as an adult. It had been snapped with a long lens through the rightmost, second-floor window. Then, as now, a gauzy curtain hung behind the glass. It had obscured the woman sitting behind it into a blur.
A guard walked up to the gate. I stuck my head out through the shreds of my own gauzy curtain, though mine was of yellowed plastic, slashed on several different occasions at the health center by thumpers too stupid to remember they’d already boosted my radio.
‘I’m here to see Miss Wade,’ I said to the unsmiling fellow. He wore a gray uniform and a Glock semi-automatic holstered on his hip.
‘Appointment?’ he asked through the gate.
I got out. ‘Nah; I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop in for coffee.’
‘Get back in your vehicle.’
I complied and he opened the gate just enough to step out. I handed him the envelope I’d brought. ‘Miss Wade will want to see me after she’s read this.’
‘Stay in your vehicle.’ As he reached for the envelope his jacket sleeve slid up enough to reveal the edge of a gold wristwatch, and for an instant I was reminded of the last time I’d seen Amanda’s father, who’d lived not so far away. He’d been wearing a gold wristwatch almost the same color as the guard’s, though Wendell Phelps’ timepiece had been a hugely expensive Rolex.
The guard pulled out a cell phone and made a call. A moment later, another gray-uniformed man came down the drive to retrieve the envelope. The inspiration for the letter was a long shot, but long shots were all I had to fire.
I remained behind the steering wheel as instructed, though the day was warming the interior of the still-drenched Jeep to the humidity of an Ecuadorian jungle. Ten minutes passed, then another ten. I would have played it nonchalant by listening to the radio but I was sweating too hard and the radio had been stolen years before, leaving nothing on the dashboard to look at except the multicolored wires Amanda had braided the time we’d come up to see her father. It was one of the last times I’d seen him alive.
So it went, the guard looking at me sweating inside the Jeep and me looking at the little yellow and purple flowers, destined for death at the first frost. The purple ones were the same hue as the sweatshirts and sweaters worn by the Northwestern alumni I’d spotted on the drive up, as well as the Peeps I’d been nuking lately, and that got me wondering how many other colors the Discount Den might begin offering once they’d gotten too old to be sold elsewhere.
The second guard returned and bent to my slashed plastic window.
‘Plastic garbage bags for seat covers? Clever,’ he said, no doubt in admiration.
‘The interior is drenched,’ I said.
‘I don’t wonder,’ he said, glancing at the rips in the top. ‘Miss Wade doesn’t want to see you,’ he added.
‘Does she ever see anybody?’
He handed me a small notepad and then entrusted me with the kind of pen even the cheapest motels leave lying around everywhere, knowing they won’t be stolen. ‘She’ll email you,’ the guard said. ‘Or not.’
‘Did she read my note?’ I asked, writing down my Gmail address.
‘I put it in the mail slot and then waited for a few minutes. Nothing.’
‘Maybe she’s a slow reader.’
‘Winter’s coming. Your seats might ice over before she gets to it.’
I gave him back his paper and pen and drove away like I’d been victorious.
THIRTY-TWO
It had begun raining by the time I drove back south through Evanston. It happens that way, to the wild palette that is Chicago, every autumn. October rolls in warm and glorious in her bright paint, seeming like it is going to last for forever. Then, in a heartbeat, the winds shift to blow in frigid from Canada and the plains and swirl around the Great Lakes, hunting to suck up water to hurl at the trees. And in a day, maybe two, all the reds and oranges and yellows suddenly become sodden, turn brown and fall heavy and dead from the trees.
The purple people had fled Evanston’s sidewalks to seek shelter. I was quickly becoming sodden myself from the rain sheeting in through the tears in the top. I wanted shelter, too, and warmth. I called Amanda’s office number. ‘It’s a fine day for dinner,’ I said.
‘He calls!’ she said.
‘I’ve been busy.’
‘No; you’ve avoided calling because you knew I’d pester you about that body in the Willahock.’
‘There is that, yes,’ I allowed.
‘I’m having one of my “How could my father stand this?” sort of days,’ she went on, ‘so dinner sounds great.’
‘Your father was born to be a tycoon.’
‘As you were born to dodge a subject,’ she said, meaning the woman in the river.
‘So, dinner?’ she asked, after I said nothing.
‘Pizza,’ I said. Gush as so many do about Chicago’s magnificent skyline, its museums, orchestras, and opera, what truly makes the city sparkle is the grease on its sausage and pepperoni.
‘Perfect.’
‘I’ll bring excellent pizza and reasonable beer.’
She hesitated for only a second. ‘To my place? I thought we were treading carefully.’
‘Careful it will be. I’ll even keep your oven mitts on my hands.’
She didn’t laugh. ‘Why not a restaurant?’
‘I have an ulterior motive.’
‘With oven mitts? Sounds kinky.’
I reached to wipe the inside of the windshield. ‘It’s raining like crazy now and your building has indoor parking.’
‘That makes all the sense in the world,’ she said.
‘It will, when I bring the pizza. Pizza makes sense of everything.’
The guard outside the garage at Amanda’s building remembered me and remembered my Jeep.
‘You’re not, ah …?’ He let the question trail off as his gaze shifted from the maze of rips in the vinyl to the box on the passenger’s seat.
‘Delivering pizzas? No; I’m having dinner with Amanda. This is the cuisine.’
‘Hold up here for a second,’ he said, picking up the wall phone to call Amanda. A moment later, he raised the door that led to the guest parking. A second guard, just inside, step
ped back to allow me through.
Amanda’s Lake Shore Drive condominium was in one of the most protected buildings in Chicago. She moved there after her home, and many of her neighbors’, was blown up in Crystal Waters, a gated community west of Chicago. Coincidentally, my business and professional reputation had blown up not so many months before, along with our marriage. It was a time of explosions all around.
Amanda chose the high-security condominium not to safeguard her few, cheap furnishings, nor her jewelry, of which she had very little. She had art, specifically a large, never-exhibited Monet, a small Renoir and a bronze Remington, paid for with the entirety of an inheritance from a grandfather. They were her passion, worth millions, and they needed the highest level of protection.
Her father’s recent murder passed down an inheritance of all of his business, real estate and other investment holdings. She’d become worth hundreds of millions of dollars and now it was her very self that had to be protected. Her choice of residence had been prophetic.
A man in a suit cut large enough to conceal a gun stood a discreet few feet from the elevator door on her floor. Amanda was chatting with him when I walked up bringing pizza, beer and residual raindrops.
‘The hunter-gatherer returns, damply,’ she said of my rain-spotted clothes as she held her door open with a flourish.
I hadn’t been in her place since we’d met with a rigidly officious federal agent days before her father had been found dead. Nothing had changed. The scratched, chipped enamel table she’d had since college still looked like a lost pauper in the high-end, stainless-steel and black gloss kitchen. The expansive beige sofa in the living room was still oriented to face a gallery wall. And the dining-room furniture she’d reluctantly bought for the Art Institute donor dinner parties she’d laughingly called ‘gab and grabs’ still looked too new and out of place.
The art, of course, was unchanged. I’d gone into her collapsing house to rescue that art.
We sat at the kitchen table, opened cans of Coors and for a moment simply savored good beer and the best pizza on the planet.
It was only as I was reaching for my second slice that she asked, ‘What’s going on with you?’
‘Bipsies,’ I said, because she knew about my sorority clients.
‘Baloney,’ she said, grinning just like old times.
‘Bohemian?’ I asked.
‘Barely.’ Chernek had told her nothing of the case I was working on, though she was a client. He respected everyone’s confidences in complex relationships.
‘Blessfully,’ I threw out.
She pounced: ‘I win! That’s not a real word.’
It was a game we used to play, one-word give-and-takes beginning with the same letter. Indeed, they were good old times.
‘A woman, passing as one Rosamund Reynolds, hired me to look in on three men out west,’ I began. ‘The first, Red Halvorson, of Tucson – nicknamed for his red hair – appears to have not lived in his rental house for quite some time and is nowhere to be found. The second, David Arlin, of Laguna Beach, got himself killed in a gas explosion at his house just days before Rosamund hired me. The cops out there are playing close to the vest but something about Arlin’s body has raised questions. Interestingly, a red-haired man was seen outside Arlin’s house the night before the explosion.’
‘Red Halvorson?’
‘Or someone trying to appear as Halvorson,’ I said. ‘The third man, Dainsto Runney, was a one-time preacher. He’s disappeared from his church in Oregon. I’ll go out there, see what I can learn.’
‘Two men have disappeared and at least one is dead? How are the three linked?’
‘They were friends twenty years ago, volunteering on a political campaign here. All three quit just days before the election, supposedly to take oil rig jobs in California. They did not. They scattered – Halvorson to Tucson, Arlin to California and Runney to Oregon. Arlin and Runney changed their names. They were known here as Shea and Piser. Their buddy, Halvorson, did not change his name. He went underground, became invisible, perhaps for all of the past twenty years.’
‘Any clue to what made them scatter and change their names?’
‘Rosamund Reynolds suspected something but she didn’t share it with me. Her real name was Marilyn Paul.’
‘The woman found downriver from your turret?’
‘And the very same woman you called Chernek about, to ask if I was somehow involved.’
She merely smiled.
‘She worked with those three young men on that old campaign. She’s worked for the Democrats ever since.’ I paused, then said, ‘She rigged those bones and toy axe in that silo that so unnerved Timothy Wade.’
‘My God! Why?’
‘She wanted to send a message to the future senator. My rootling around in the fog surrounding her murder to find out what that was might come back at you because of your membership in Wade’s Committee of Twenty-Four. I could cause you embarrassment.’
‘And that’s why you brought pizza and beer?’ Her smile widened.
I raised and lowered my eyebrows swiftly in a most lascivious fashion.
‘We agreed to wait, remember? No fever to cloud our judgment?’
‘They were such glorious clouds.’
‘Tell me what you’re going to embarrass me with,’ she said.
‘The three young men were part of a tight little group called the Four Musketeers. Know who the fourth was?’
‘Obviously, you’re about to say Tim Wade,’ she said, ‘since you just mentioned my membership in his committee.’
‘Marilyn Paul worked for his campaign, she planted the bones and axe at his speech and she hired me to look into three of his old friends. It seems obvious she suspected him of being mixed in something.’
She thought for a moment, then said, ‘No way Tim’s involved in anything gamy. I might have inherited my father’s political obligations but I didn’t take them on blindly. I checked Tim out. Despite his abysmal response at that farm, he’s a level-headed, good guy. And speaking of commitment, what’s yours now? If your client is dead, why go on? Leave this investigation to the cops.’
‘For one thing, there seems to be only one cop interested in the Marilyn Paul murder at all – a sheriff’s deputy who runs an impound garage, of all things.’
‘And for another thing …?’ she asked. She knew me well enough to know there was more.
‘Whoever killed Marilyn Paul wants me framed for her murder. He put her corpse in my Jeep.’
She set down her beer too fast, spilling some onto the chipped enamel.
‘The surest way to stop any investigation is to put the jacket on me as the killer.’ I filled her in on most of the details.
‘Leo,’ she said, smiling.
‘Lucky for me he came along before that Cook County sheriff’s deputy was tipped about the corpse.’
‘Still, according to your own timeline,’ she said, ‘you were out in California, dining with the extremely attractive Jennifer Gale, when Marilyn Paul was killed. Isn’t that a good enough alibi?’
‘I think there’s a problem with establishing time of death if a body’s been submerged for any length of time. The cops could say she was killed before I left for California.’
She pursed her lips. ‘But the Willahock is a long, wide river. Seems to me a cop would have to assume the body could have been dropped anywhere upriver.’
‘Agreed, and the killer realized that. So once news came that Marilyn had been found by the dam, he came back to put the murder knife in the Jeep. This time, he called the sheriff right away and stayed around to keep watch. But again, I got lucky. I saw him plant the knife. I threw it into the Willahock. He must have been frantic, having now struck out twice. After the sheriff’s cops showed up to impound my Jeep, he called them back to say I’d thrown the knife in the river.’
‘Creepy, him watching you so closely.’
‘This could be much worse than the Evangeline Wilts mess.’
‘No. Last time was the worst. It cost us our marriage.’
For a moment, we hid behind the pizza and beer, saying nothing. And then I said, ‘Earlier today I dropped off a vague note for Theresa Wade, saying only that she and I had a similar interest in my being framed in a recent matter. It’s a long shot, that note.’
‘No chance she’ll respond. Tim is cunning but well-meaning, outgoing and friendly. Theresa’s secretive to a fault, obsessive about her own privacy. I’ve never met her, never even talked to her, but I know she’ll never let you get close to her or to Tim.’
We got up and headed for her door. I lingered for a moment and told her about the man I’d chased the previous night.
‘Your stalker,’ she said.
‘You’ll keep your own guard close by?’ I asked, gesturing to the hall outside.
‘Maybe I’m not the one who needs him,’ she said.
The building’s security guard had a surprise for me when I got off the elevator by the garage. ‘You might be attracting the law, Mr Elstrom,’ he said.
‘Occupational risk,’ I said.
‘I think a cop followed you this evening. Plain-clothes. She walked in a half-hour after you got here, flashed her badge and asked to look around the garage. She didn’t say why and she didn’t mention you by name.’
‘Good looking, short-haired blonde?’
He nodded.
‘Did you let her in?’
‘I thought it best. She had a badge. But she only stayed a minute. She seemed most interested in your Jeep, though she tried not to show it. I made a joke. I told her the top had always been ripped up like that. It wasn’t funny. She laughed. I told her the owner left it here to dry out indoors, that he caught a cab out the side door. She gave me a look like she thought I was lying.’
‘If I had any real money, I’d give you a tip.’
He laughed. ‘Save it for a new top,’ he said.
Hidden Graves Page 11