Hidden Graves

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘And, potentially, a president of the United States,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t joke. Mixing the Wades in with whoever killed Marilyn Paul ups the threat to you tenfold. They’re powerful people and all you’ve got are vague suspicions that they know things they won’t tell you.’

  ‘I have suspicions because Marilyn Paul had suspicions. It’s why she planted those bones and the little axe, and someone killed her for it.’

  ‘Fair enough, but right now the case is stuck with a junior-grade cop supervising an impound garage,’ she said. ‘A woman who is trying to blame you for the murder. How quickly can you prove enough to get real police detectives involved who can make you safe?’

  ‘Things might firm up if Laguna Beach PD identifies Runney as the corpse in Arlin’s rubble.’

  ‘Arlin killed him to escape his own money woes and start a new life?’

  ‘If it was Arlin.’

  ‘You really think it could have been that red-headed man that asked for directions?’

  ‘I don’t know. Halvorson is the most mysterious of the musketeers. He’s stayed under the radar for twenty years. He could have been in on the plan with Arlin.’

  ‘Whatever the plan is,’ she said.

  ‘There is that confusion, yes,’ I said.

  ‘Want to go to Tucson?’ she asked.

  I did. I wanted to go there badly, to put my hands around Halvorson’s landlord’s neck and shake everything he knew about his tenant from his head. But more than that, I wanted to get Amanda home, safely away from me. She’d been right. I was messing with a future senator. Guys like him employed people who didn’t smile much.

  ‘Halvorson’s long gone from Tucson,’ I said.

  ‘The grims are waiting,’ Amanda said. She pointed to the two men waiting outside Signature Flight Support at Chicago’s Midway Airport as we taxied up. It was four in the morning. ‘No doubt they’re displeased I gave them the slip.’

  ‘They watch you closely?’

  ‘When I called work, saying I wouldn’t be coming in, they would have checked with security at my condo, found out I’d left and begun tracking me.’

  ‘You can’t play hookey?’

  ‘Sure I can, so long as they can come along. Remember, my father was murdered not that long ago. Today they had to make sure I wasn’t abducted for ransom.’

  ‘Again,’ I said. Amanda had been abducted for ransom when her father was still alive.

  ‘I was wrong to blow off the day on the sly. I was wasteful of their time and that’s company money. I should have notified them.’

  ‘Have they been waiting here all day and all night?’

  She laughed. ‘No. They knew when I’d be landing. There’s a website, free and accessible to all, that tracks all flights by aircraft tail number. They plugged in mine first thing this morning, saw that we were in the air to Oregon then tracked us flying to John Wayne Airport outside Laguna Beach. It was only when they saw us airborne back to Midway that they began to breathe easily.’

  ‘Why didn’t they call your cell?’

  She grinned. ‘I left it in the Toyota.’

  I was amazed and appalled. ‘Cat and mouse? That’s really your life now?’

  She gazed out at the lights of the runways. ‘I’m wealthy; I’m a target. I felt confined and needed to rebel, like a young schoolgirl. But it was wrong.’

  The co-pilot dropped the cabin door and we climbed down into the chill of a predawn, late October Chicago. ‘We’ll drop you in Rivertown,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll get a cab.’

  ‘Take my Toyota, at least.’ It had been pulled up behind a black stretch Escalade.

  ‘Cabbing is easier. Call me tomorrow?’

  ‘If I’m allowed a call from my gilded prison,’ she said.

  I looked out the lobby window as I called a cab. One of her guards got behind the wheel of the Escalade; the other held the rear door open for her and then got in front next to the driver. A third guard followed in the Toyota. Her gilded prison was thickly walled, indeed.

  She’d surely traveled a long distance since we’d first met in that small art gallery on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Watching her taillights disappear into the last of the night, I wondered if it would prove to be too far, or whether I’d simply not traveled far enough.

  FORTY-ONE

  ‘Booster Liss?’ I asked Leo the next morning as I climbed aboard his sparkling silver Dodge Ram van. It smelled strongly of chlorine.

  ‘Full cleanse,’ he said, grimacing. ‘All those naked old people …’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Leo, the most optimistic of men. ‘They said they wanted to do field trips to the zoo, the Arboretum, Chicago Botanic, Ma and her lady friends, even that guy—’

  ‘The one I saw in the pool – the one without his suit?’ I asked, unable to resist. ‘The guy who I then saw exiting this very vehicle, again without his—?’

  He groaned. ‘I’d only stepped out into the hall for a minute, to take a call, when up walked the lizard that runs the health center. He’s with two sour-looking fellows. I smiled nicely, thinking the sour guys were considering membership. They walked into the pool area and I went back to talking on the phone. Next thing, I heard shouting. I ran back into the pool area. What did I see? It isn’t Ma who’s doing the yelling, or her lady friends, or even the old gent whose applesauce I suspect they’re dosing with Viagra. No, it was the sour guys. They were going ballistic, yelling, pointing at Ma and her friends in the pool. They pushed me aside in a panic to get out. One of them was on the phone, calling the cops. Turns out the two sours were from the government agency that approves funding for senior rehabilitation facilities.’

  ‘Ma and her friends: they were, ah …?’ There really was no delicate way to probe.

  Leo nodded. ‘Buck naked, the lot of them. Especially the old guy in all his chemically re-erected glory. Ah, jeez.’

  ‘I still can’t believe the cops busted them.’

  ‘Public lewdness. They said they had to because those two sours were federal representatives.’

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘I hired the Barracuda. He fixed it.’

  Jerry Lopes, the Barracuda, was one of Cook County’s most flamboyant lawyers. He’d gotten rich representing Rivertown’s lizards, though he rarely entered a courtroom. He worked the dimmer parts at the backs of the courthouses, passing cash.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Five grand because there were multiple defendants, but he got the case dismissed.’ Then he asked, ‘You don’t think leaving your Jeep at the sheriff’s garage is provoking them unnecessarily?’

  ‘Amanda’s worried about that, too.’

  His face relaxed into a smile for the first time. ‘Spending more time together, are we?’

  ‘We flew out to Reeder and Laguna Beach yesterday,’ I said, sidestepping his nose. ‘I needed to leave the Jeep where nobody could plant something inside.’

  ‘Baloney. You’re taunting that Sergeant Bohler. And when she arrests you I’ll have to get you a lawyer.’

  ‘Call the Bohemian, not Jerry Lopes, though I don’t think either will be necessary. Remember, Booster did a cleanse for me, too.’

  He raised his nose to sniff his own chlorine-scented air and nodded knowingly. ‘What else is Amanda worried about?’

  ‘Timothy Wade.’

  ‘Just because he was the fourth musketeer?’

  ‘She genuinely likes the guy. Plus, she thinks I’m poking at a very powerful future presidential candidate, someone with resources to hit back hard.’

  ‘I’m with her. I don’t know Wade but I like him.’

  ‘I think Marilyn Paul suspected him of something. She planted the bones and the axe in the silo.’

  ‘Jeez!’

  ‘That was Amanda’s reaction, too.’

  We turned the last corner and headed to the impound garage down the street.

  ‘Actually, it’s Halvorson who bothers me the most,
’ I said. ‘I can’t get a lead to where he’s been for the past twenty years.’

  ‘If Bohler asks I’ll vouch that you have trouble figuring things out,’ he said, trying for light.

  He slowed. ‘My God. The Jeep. The top has gone green. And look what’s on the bumper.’

  It was Sergeant Bohler on the back bumper, sitting, waiting. She knew we were coming.

  ‘I didn’t think to look for a tail behind us,’ I said as Leo pulled to a stop.

  ‘Would it have changed anything?’

  ‘No.’

  Bohler scuffed the cement with the heel of her sensible cop shoe and stood as I walked up. ‘My cop friend in Laguna Beach says I should play along for now,’ she said, reaching into her jacket pocket, ‘but first, a DNA sample.’ She pulled out a small kit sealed in plastic and a pair of thin latex gloves.

  ‘You got usable DNA off Marilyn Paul, even though she’d been banged around, submerged, at the dam?’

  She took a long cotton swab from the kit. ‘Don’t forget, she scratched at you before she died. Lucky for us, you were nice enough to put the poor woman in a really thick, big plastic bag. The bag stayed watertight and preserved her fingernails. God bless thick plastic, and God bless you, Elstrom, for being such an idiot.’

  I’d squinted at enough police dramas on my four-inch television screen to know the procedure. She swabbed the inside of my mouth and put the swab inside a long plastic container. Everything then went in a plastic bag and back in her pocket.

  She gestured at the Jeep. ‘Cute, you leaving the insult of a Cheese Whopper wrapper stuffed in the dash,’ she said, ‘along with two entire Whoppers, though cheese-less, under the front seats.’

  ‘Ah, jeez,’ Leo muttered from a couple of feet behind me.

  ‘I knew I forgot to eat something,’ I said to Bohler. It was a lie; I’ve never forgotten to eat anything. Along with the wrapper, I’d left the burgers to foul the noses of any interested dogs, though my confidence in Booster Liss’s cleansing protocol was supreme.

  ‘You might be able to fool one of our dogs but not us two-legged cops, not forever,’ she said. ‘Anyway, in the spirit of friendship, I repositioned your Jeep several times while you were gone, to keep your burgers warm under the fullest force of the sun. Everyone likes hot, festering burgers, right?’ She offered up a smile. ‘Especially raccoons, those nocturnal foragers who can slip into cars if their doors have been carelessly left open by someone like me. Nothing’s ever wrong with raccoon noses, that’s for sure.’

  I opened the driver’s door and released the stench of the sergeant’s vengeance. Raccoons had found the hamburgers. Worse, they’d lingered long enough to complete their full digestive processes before leaving.

  ‘As for me, Elstrom,’ she went on, smiling, ‘from now on, I’ll have to keep an eye on you from afar. The Paul murder was transferred, officially, to our detectives.’ She started toward the door of the garage.

  ‘Time for the grown-ups to investigate?’ I called after her.

  ‘Damn it, Dek!’ Leo whispered, moving up right behind me. ‘She’ll arrest you just on the basis of your attitude.’

  Bohler stopped and turned around. She’d heard. ‘Tell your friend not yet,’ she said. ‘In fact, I didn’t tell our dicks anything about you, because I’m reserving the honor of arresting you for myself.’

  She turned back around and went into the garage.

  FORTY-TWO

  I needed links.

  After an hour spent removing the Jeep’s seats and carpets, hosing it out and reinstalling everything to pre-raccoon freshness, I sat at my computer, as I did so ever-increasingly.

  Election Day for Delman Bean was November 8, 1994. That meant that three of the four musketeers – Shea, Piser and Halvorson – had left Chicago sometime right after the first of November, seemingly to take good-paying jobs.

  It took less than four minutes to find the right county database to confirm what the old man told us in Reeder. Willard Piser, as Dainsto Runney, had paid cash for his church. He’d paid fifty-eight-thousand dollars for it on December 5, about a month after he quit the Bean congressional campaign. It meant Willard Piser had come up with a significant amount of money in less than a month.

  I called Lieutenant Beech. ‘Your pal Bohler is off the case. It got transferred to real sheriff’s detectives.’

  ‘Don’t relax. That firecracker will hound you until she learns what you know about that Marilyn Paul, even if it means arresting you.’

  ‘You don’t think I’m a killer?’

  ‘She does. Me, I just think you’re withholding a ton of information.’

  ‘When did Arlin arrive in Laguna Beach?’

  ‘Early to mid-November, 1994.’

  ‘Did he come with cash?’

  ‘I doubt it. He went to work selling kitchen and bath hardware on straight commission and lived in a tiny apartment miles from the water.’

  ‘Straight commission means no advance for living expenses up front?’

  ‘I suppose he could have arrived with money and just didn’t flash it around …’ He paused, thinking. ‘Three years later, he had enough to buy out the distributorship.’

  ‘For cash?’

  ‘There’s no way to trace purchase details back that far. The owner is dead. Arlin is dead … I mean, Arlin is supposed to be dead.’ He stopped to consider what I wasn’t saying. ‘Why are you asking about cash? And if Arlin came here with cash, why would he bide his time before spending any of it? What was he hiding? And where did he get the cash?’

  ‘I don’t know, yet. You found that Crown Victoria?’

  ‘Right where you said, in Ajax’s lot and registered to Dainsto Runney. It’s too soon to compare DNA from the car to the corpse but our medical examiner just got something almost as good. He located a doctor in Oregon where Runney went with a broken arm. The doctor is a genuine small-town practitioner, a few miles from Reeder. He still had Runney’s X-rays. They show a break that matches the one in our corpse. Who is Dainsto Runney, Elstrom?’

  ‘A man who showed up in Oregon about the same time Arlin arrived in Laguna Beach. Runney paid fifty-eight-thousand dollars in cash for a church. He tried passing himself off as a preacher, holding services before spending the next twenty years chasing other ways of making a buck, like a mini-golf course and selling used cars. Nothing worked. He mortgaged his church and borrowed from everybody else he could tap. He slunk out of Reeder, dead broke and owing everybody, a few days before Arlin’s house blew up.’

  ‘You’re thinking his money trouble links him to Arlin?’

  ‘I think if you check out Runney you’ll find out he has no past, just like Arlin. And both of them were in financial distress at the time Arlin’s house exploded.’

  ‘You’re convinced it was Arlin who blew up Runney?’

  ‘Him or that red-headed man you refuse to look for.’

  ‘We’ve gone door-to-door in Arlin’s neighborhood. No one other than that old lady saw the red-headed man but she backed up what you’re suspecting. He lingered.’

  ‘Lingered, I think, to be remembered.’

  ‘So you said last time.’

  ‘Or, the man might have been Gary Halvorson, an old pal of Arlin’s and Runney’s from Chicago. His friends called him Red. Or …’

  ‘This Halvorson, he doesn’t have a past either?’

  ‘Just the opposite. He’s got a past but no visible present, at least not for twenty years. He probably arrived in Tucson about the same time Runney hit Reeder and Arlin landed in Laguna Beach.’ I gave him Halvorson’s address. ‘You should make a friend in the Tucson police department.’

  ‘I still don’t get the connection.’

  ‘I don’t either,’ I said, and hung up.

  FORTY-THREE

  ‘Dear Ms Theresa Wade,’ I emailed again to the campaign’s website. ‘Thank you for responding to my previous inquiry. I’m confident that you and your brother know much about John Shea, Willard Piser, and Gary “Re
d” Halvorson. Let’s meet before the story appears in the television news.’

  I hit ‘Send’ and fired my note into cyberspace, hoping it was a rocket and not another dud.

  My phone rang two hours later.

  ‘Mr Elstrom?’ a pleasant voice asked. It was a voice I’d heard on television.

  I admitted it.

  ‘This is Tim Wade. You wrote the magic words.’

  ‘Shea, Piser and Halvorson?’

  ‘No.’ He laughed. ‘“Television news.” Those are magic words, especially to my sister.’

  ‘You’re avoiding the media.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘How about stopping by for a drink?’

  FORTY-FOUR

  ‘You’re back,’ the guard at Wade’s driveway said through the gate. And with little enthusiasm.

  ‘And drier,’ I said, waiting for admiring words about my new green top, clear plastic windows and even the little green, pine-tree-shaped air fresheners I’d hung festively from the exposed wiring to kill the lingering reminders of the raccoons that had done dinner and more inside my Jeep.

  Smothering his enthusiasm, the guard noted the time on a clipboard. And that gave me a better look at the gold watch I’d noticed him wearing the last time. It was a gold Rolex Day Date like the one my former father-in-law had worn at the moment he’d been murdered. A watch like that went for at least ten thousand dollars and must have been a gift from the Wades, brother and sister, maybe at Christmas. Ten-thousand-dollar Rolexes make excellent stocking stuffers from the rich.

  The guard stepped back into the shack and pushed a button. The gate slid back and I drove up the circular drive to the house.

  The front door opened before I came to a complete stop. Tim Wade himself, and not some servant or butler, was coming down the steps to greet me.

  ‘Mr Elstrom, it’s a pleasure,’ he said as I got out.

  ‘Likewise,’ I said, surprising myself by really meaning it. The guy had an air of non-pretension about him as well as the grace to not stare at a Jeep sporting a green on its top that surely clashed with the color of his carefully tended yews.