The Dead Caller from Chicago

by Jack Fredrickson

  The waitress took away our plates, and Jenny asked, “Why didn’t you call after you got back from Indiana?”

  “Actually, I did,” I said. “I just clicked off before sending the call through.”

  “I wouldn’t have pressed,” she said.

  We’d both been hunting the same woman. She could have been talking about that. Or she might have been referring to my relationship with Amanda, my ex-wife.

  “The papers said you pushed to get transferred,” I said, not ready to press, either.

  “It seemed an opportune move. Fewer features, more investigative reporting.” She said it with a smile, but there might have been a bit of hurt behind her eyes. My not calling wasn’t the major reason she went to San Francisco, but it still made me an ass.

  “Remember the night we lit my fireplace?”

  “We took a warming romantic possibility and invited in our ghosts to cool things down.”

  “Your husband, my ex-wife, and us. It was crowded.”

  “We weren’t ready.”

  “I’ve needed the months since last fall to understand that.”

  “Now you’re embracing your future?” Her face had relaxed to its loveliest.

  “One that’s looking considerably warmer. I’ve got a new client, two assignments so far. Soon there might be central heat.”

  “What a shame. You have such fine fireplaces.”

  I let that thought hang in the air for a long moment, then asked, “Your ghost?” Her husband, a newsman, had been killed in Iraq.

  “He’s not coming back.” Her eyes were clear and unblinking. “And yours?”

  “I’ve not spoken to Amanda in weeks.” Even now, the finality of the words about my ex-wife startled me. I headed for safer ground. “Speaking of ghosts,” I said, “the stories you were chasing in Rivertown about Elvis’s salad oil scheme and the lizard relatives collecting unearned expenses and travel reimbursements? Channel 8 has reported nothing since you left.”

  “I kept my notes. How’s Leo?” She’d met Leo the previous summer. Like everyone, she’d been charmed in an instant.

  “You mean in general?”

  “Why does his house need watching by a man sitting in the dark?”

  “As I said, he’s away.”

  She laughed. I laughed. At least we were being honest with each other, about not being totally honest with each other.

  We left and drove back to the turret in silence. I wondered if she, like me, was going over things we could have said at dinner, or even before that.

  She pulled to a stop in front of the turret. “Well, we’ve established you should have come charging back from Indiana, intent on seeing me.” She smiled, hugely. “I forgive you, and so you can see me again, and soon.”

  For that, and for everything else I wanted to fix with her, I reached over and kissed her, quickly, before I got out of her car and went up to the turret.

  Eight

  I switched on my computer first thing the next morning. Endora’s boss had e-mailed at 3:17 A.M., probably about the time I finally found sleep:

  Dek, It’s too damned late, or too damned early, to be sending e-mails. I’m still in my office. For the last hour, I’ve done nothing but sit. And think. And now, at last, I’ve summoned a vague conclusion that begs for another conclusion, which will be up to you to provide.

  I combed every newspaper, television, and law-enforcement Internet archive available to us here at the Newberry. As you can imagine, I found numerous citations for men named Evans—under almost every given name you can think of. There were thousands!

  And now, I think I found him in a regional summary of tiny newspaper clips from central Illinois. Attached is the death notice from the Center Bridge Bugle. It reports that Edwin G. “Snark” Evans, of that town, died many years ago.

  Center Bridge is two hundred miles southwest of Chicago. It has fallen on hard times since the John Deere assembly plant, fifteen miles away, closed. The local funeral home and a number of Center Bridge’s businesses have also folded, along with the Center Bridge Bugle, presumably, since I can find no other references to it. I would imagine many of the town’s inhabitants have moved away, though someone might remain who remembers your Mr. Evans.

  Now, as to that conclusion that begs for another conclusion: Though the death notice appears to be straightforward, something about it feels wrong. And that’s what’s kept me up until this late (or early) hour.

  First, who would use the nickname “Snark” in a death notice? Certainly, nicknames appear in news reports and in obits, but they’re more of the garden variety—a “Bud” or a “Bob” or a “Skip.” To me, something about the nickname “Snark” seems, well … a little “snarky,” if you’ll allow my joke. The nickname seems pejorative, a little distasteful.

  I consulted an online dictionary and found the term was coined by Lewis Carrol in 1874, to refer to an imaginary animal. Certainly, there’s nothing distasteful about that. Still, the nickname bothers me.

  Then there’s that lack of detail in the obit. Contrary to custom, the death notice does not report how he died, only that he was survived by a sister, whose whereabouts are not mentioned. Nor is there any mention of a wake, service, or funeral, or where he was buried. Again, I got my information from a summary, so perhaps that’s their practice. Still, it feels bothersome.

  Finally, there’s the Center Bridge Bugle itself. As I’ve written, I could find no other mention of that newspaper itself. It’s not listed in any of the reference sites for defunct Illinois newspapers. That’s more than odd, and it’s triggered an outrageous thought: Was Snark Evans’s the only death they ever reported?

  I told you: It’s late (or early) and I’m probably making no sense at all.

  If it weren’t for worry about Endora’s safety (and of course Leo’s, and his mother’s), I would have enjoyed my little sleuthing assignment. One enjoys a challenge away from Chaucer, my current project. Sorry I didn’t find out more.

  I stared at the screen. He’d uncovered almost nothing … and perhaps so much more.

  Fifteen minutes later, I was pointed downstate. The sky was dark, the wind was strong, and the Internet weatherman offered the likelihood that more snow was headed right across my path. Still, I figured the first hundred of the miles to Center Bridge would be an easy cruise, since it was an interstate.

  I figured wrong. The wind advancing ahead of the snow was too riled. A hard wind can test patience in any car, but in a Jeep, it can summon frothing lunacy. Jeeps present a stubborn, flat wall to the road; there’s nothing aerodynamic to part the wind around them. Add a semitattered vinyl top that’s been poorly patched with silver tape, and a Jeep becomes a bucking, flapping mess, akin to a sailing ship in a hurricane the moment the sheets give way. The noise was deafening; the cold coming in, freezing; and the wind resistance so strong that I couldn’t get above forty-five miles an hour. I endured it only by tucking in behind several semitrailer rigs as they came up to pass me. I was relieved when I finally got off the interstate south of Champaign.

  I figured wrong on that, too. The second leg was two lanes of bad asphalt, cratered by potholes and sheeted in the smooth spots by invisible black ice. The storm had found full strength by then, raining down fine bits of semisleet and hail the size of tiny marbles. Even in four-wheel drive, I was Barishnikov at the ballet, gliding and occasionally pirouetting toward the west.

  Single pairs of headlamps popped up behind me now and again, but they quickly disappeared. No one had need, that day, to go to Center Bridge. Nor did any lights at all come toward me. I wondered if that meant that those who’d intended to leave had done so, years before.

  That seemed all the more likely when I finally arrived, at three fifteen, a full five hours after I’d left Rivertown.

  The business district, both blocks, had been vaporized by hard times. One car and four pickups were angle-parked along its main street. A tavern and, strangely, a Salvation Army resale shop were the only places showing
light. The rest of the storefronts were dark, or boarded up.

  I went into the tavern. The bartender and his two patrons looked up.

  I ordered a Diet Coke and asked, “Any of you know Snark Evans?”

  “He’s dead,” the bartender said.

  “Good riddance,” one of the patrons on the stools said.

  “Never finished high school,” the other patron said. “Took off freshman, sophomore year. Folks were surprised he even bothered to start.”

  “What do you want to know for, anyway?” the bartender asked.

  I handed him one of my cards. “A minor insurance policy was taken out a long time ago. One of their managers heard I’d be driving past Center Bridge and asked me to stop in to update his records.”

  “How big is the policy?”

  “That’s not my department. Any of Snark’s relatives around?”

  All six of their shoulders shrugged. “None of that damned family is left,” said the second patron.

  “They was all bad apples,” the bartender said. “The father got killed in a bar fight in Champaign, early on. The daughter was trashy, strutting herself while she was still in grammar school. The mother, she just plain wore out and died.”

  “The girl is gone?”

  “Finished high school, at least. But then she took off, pregnant, most likely.”

  “Snark was bad news?” I asked the bartender.

  “Burglaring, breaking into cars and houses. Everybody knew him and disliked him.”

  The second patron stood up quickly and went to the window. The sound of a car engine came from outside. “Damn fool, running without lights,” he said.

  The first man got up and went to join his friend. “I can’t see who it is,” he said, peering out the window.

  “Damn fool, that’s who it is. He’ll get run up on, if he doesn’t turn on his lights.”

  The engine noise moved on and disappeared.

  “The funeral home is closed?” I asked the bartender.

  “Why do you want to know that?”

  “Official death record, for the file.”

  “Never was no funeral home in Center Bridge. Closest one was ten miles north, but it closed in the nineties,” the bartender said. “Now we got to get shipped almost to Champaign upon expiration.”

  “Don’t matter. He didn’t die here,” the bartender said.

  “Somewheres out west, or down south,” the first patron said.

  The other two men laughed at that, moving back to the bar.

  “The newspaper’s gone, too?” I asked, when the mirth subsided. “The Center Bridge Bugle?”

  “The what?” the first patron asked.

  “It might have been that ad sheet down at the Super Food,” the bartender said. “It folded ten years ago, with the Super Food.”

  There was nothing left to ask. I went out into the snow.

  Before starting the Jeep, I called Jenny. “I need a favor. I’d like you to call your police contacts, see if anyone has anything on an Edwin G. ‘Snark’ Evans.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m striking out on something I’m looking into.”

  “Does this have something to do with why you’re keeping an eye on Leo’s place?”

  “Haste will be appreciated,” I said.

  The wind and the sleet were endurable for five miles, and then a key piece of silver tape gave way, freeing my vinyl top to billow like a brake chute on a dragster. I pulled off to the shoulder on a side road, cut the engine and the lights, and got out with one of the rolls of duct tape I carry.

  I’d just stepped up on the doorsill when I heard an engine sound above the wind. A vehicle passed on the highway. It was running without lights, and I couldn’t see it for the storm. It was heading east, though, and I had the chilling thought its driver might have been hoping to run unseen behind the lights of a red Jeep.

  I took my time retaping the roof, straining for the sound of the engine returning. There was only the wind, swirling around me. After a decent amount of time had passed, I drove back up onto the road.

  I’d poked at a nerve, picked up a tail.

  Nine

  I slept until early afternoon, and awoke shaky. I tried telling myself that my muscle trembles came from fighting the Jeep against the wind, five hours down to Center Bridge, more than that back. I didn’t believe myself. The trembles came from knowing Leo and his mother and Endora were in a bad place, hiding, held captive, or worse, and someone willing to drive blind in a snowstorm had taken an interest in my interest in that.

  I pushed out from under my blankets, slipped fast into frigid jeans and sweatshirts, and stomped to the window, as much to warm my legs as to see outside. Rivertown was whiter, but barely. The snowstorm had deposited little more than a new dusting on the old, dirty snow before moving on to the more worthy suburbs in the west.

  Down the road along the river, almost out of sight from the turret and farther still from city hall, the hood of a bronze-colored car stood out stark against the new snow. A car tucked in at the end of the river road didn’t need to belong to someone who might have tailed me down to Center Bridge. Daytimes, lots of men used that spot, like they used the side road leading to the turret, to enjoy the services of the girls who worked Thompson Avenue or the back of the bowling alley.

  I went down to the kitchen, added water to the previous day’s grounds, and ignited Mr. Coffee. I had no Twinkies, I had no Ho Hos, so I shook out a handful of my old Cheerios. I supposed they’d lost some of their taste to age, but the little circles had certainly kept up their robust circularity. Not a one gave in to dust the instant it hit my tongue, and I had the hope that my own old age, still decades into the future, would also be accompanied by such comforting rigidity.

  I thought about what little I knew. Leo had gotten a phone call from Snark Evans, someone he’d thought was dead. It had triggered panic. Leo had run, taking along those he loved. He’d tried to call me, to tell me what was going on—but only once.

  It nagged, his calling only once. He should have called again, and again, if he were in trouble. Unless, of course, he couldn’t call.

  I pushed the thought away; it would bring scenarios of forced abductions, and I couldn’t give in to those. I considered again, for perhaps the thousandth time, whether I should report Leo missing. Not in Rivertown, where the cops were as bent and lazy as the river, but in Chicago, where I could lie and say Leo and his mother and his girlfriend had been abducted, say, from Endora’s condo. That would make it a Chicago crime, and that would bring in better, or at least less crooked, brains.

  Except the case would be dropped as soon as the cops questioned Leo’s neighbor and learned he’d said he was going on a vacation.

  I got up to check the window. The bronze car was still at the end of the road. It had been there longer than was required for a curbside quickie.

  I called Endora’s boss. “Did you get in touch with Endora’s mother?”

  “I left three messages yesterday afternoon, and one just now. All contained variations of the word ‘Urgent.’ She’s returned none of them.” Then, “I trust you went to Center Bridge?”

  “Dead or not, Snark and kin are long gone. Leo’s in trouble. So’s his mother. So’s Endora. I need to talk to Endora’s mother.”

  He didn’t hesitate. “Her name is Theodea Wilson. She lives in Blenton, in northern Michigan.” He gave me the phone number and address.

  I tried the phone number. It rang and rang without cutting to an answering machine.

  The bronze car was still down the street, and the mild twinge of paranoia about that was still in my gut. I skipped the duffel bag, put my change of clothes and shaving kit into a paper shopping bag, and went out hoping I looked like I was off to return something to a store.

  I drove west, watching the rearview. There were too many cars behind me to tell if one was bronze. Two miles up, I had an inspiration. A traffic light was turning yellow. I slowed, as would any law-abiding driver
, but then I punched the Jeep through the intersection just as the light turned red.

  There was silence for an instant. Then horns honked behind me. The bronze sedan had followed me through on the red.

  I drove on sedately, giving him time to slip back out of my sight, behind other cars. I passed increasingly wider lots and houses of affluence, then got to the weed-choked rubble that was Crystal Waters, the once-gilded, gated subdivision where things had gone so horribly wrong. Amanda and I had lived there during our marriage, in the house she’d bought from her father. She’d never much cared for the place, but walls and a gatehouse surrounded the grounds, and the house had a state-of-the-art security system. It was good for protecting the eleven million dollars’ worth of art she’d inherited from her grandfather’s estate. Her house and her art, like our marriage, were no longer there.

  As I’d told Jenny, Amanda and I hadn’t spoken in months, and those last conversations had taken on the sounds of last gasps. She’d given up the last vestige of her former life, teaching at the Art Institute, to head her father’s philanthropy. I saw her mostly in the society pages of the Chicago papers now, a glittering brown-eyed vixen, usually on the arm of one particularly distinguished-looking silver-haired bastard. Looking happy to have gotten past the sort of fumbler who would live in a turret.

  Leo had helped me through all of that.

  I pulled into the parking lot of a Home Depot, went in, and watched from behind the door glass. The bronze car, an older Chevy Malibu, had pulled in to park between two panel vans, three rows from where I’d left the Jeep. I bought a box of finish nails to have something to carry out, got into the Jeep, and turned north.

  A mile up, there was a huge shopping center that must have been designed by an angry architect. It had a particularly vexing layout, consisting of six octagonal clusters of stores separated by green spaces with small trees. And speed bumps. The crazy quilt of interconnected parking lots had tons of speed bumps.