“Perhaps he simply forgot to tell me.”
“That nice neighbor lady said you broke into his garage, and then his house.” She pulled to a stop in front of a small coffee shop.
The murmuring started as soon as we walked in. Unlike the barbecue joint we’d gone to, the coffee shop was well lit and had only one large room. The hostess recognized Jennifer Gale right off and walked us to a table in the middle of the restaurant. No doubt she’d take a cell phone photo: Celebrities ate there.
I pointed to a booth in the corner. “That one,” I said.
Jenny appeared not to notice. I knew her well enough to know acting nonchalant was just that—acting. She didn’t like being watched. The hostess frowned when Jenny sat facing the wall, and me the craning necks. A waitress fairly raced over with coffee. Jenny ordered whole wheat toast, dry. I ordered Cheerios and skim milk.
“Cheerios?” she asked, but she was only trying to calm herself down.
“Tebbins?” I countered.
“Found dead by the cleaning lady in his rec room. He was tortured with cigarettes, and shot, probably late last evening.” She took a fast sip of coffee. “Where’s Leo?”
I looked around the restaurant, at the faces trying not to look at us.
“I don’t know,” I said and told her only about Leo’s phone call. “I think Snark Evans is key to Leo’s disappearance.”
“And Leo’s vanished, Dek?”
“Tell me what’s going on in Rivertown.”
“It can’t fit with Leo disappearing.”
“Not long ago,” I said, “you first came to Rivertown to cover our illustrious zoning commissioner, Elvis Derbil, being busted for changing stale-dated labels on bottles of salad dressing.”
“Yep.” It was old ground.
“The Feds dropped that case, along with the next thing you looked into, our lizards using citizen committees to extract phony expense reimbursements,” I said.
“Old news, too.”
“Something bigger than dead-ended stories about salad oil schemes and expense report hustles brought you back. When I asked about it, you gave me pap about boredom and features, but I’ve done some Googling, now and again, since you left last fall.”
“Keeping track of me?”
“You’ve been getting great press in San Francisco, Jennifer Gale. They love you. Yet you requested a leave, rather abruptly. You returned to Chicago, but not to Channel 8. Instead, you’ve been sniffing around the construction site in Leo’s neighborhood, a hot dog stand where the construction workers might have lunch, and who knows where else. And now, wonder of wonders, you’ve become Johnny on the spot in the Tebbins killing.”
“Jenny on the spot,” she corrected with a forced smile.
“Tebbins was Rivertown’s junior building inspector, the guy who monitors construction compliance with the city’s building codes. You’ve been staking out the only new construction the town has seen in years. What gives?”
Our waitress came then, with our microbreakfasts.
“I still don’t see how Leo can fit into any of it,” she said, reaching for the toast.
“But…?”
“But I think Rivertown’s going wrong, big-time wrong. I got a tip that something was going on in your lovely little town, and that even more doors than usual were being kept closed at city hall.”
“A tip out of the blue about closed doors was enough to kiss off San Francisco?”
“I hadn’t seen my mother since last fall, and I thought I’d spend some time with her and maybe take a fast look around.”
“What have you learned?”
“Things I don’t understand. Your town fathers are nervous about that new house going up.”
“Who’s building it?”
“The owner is being anonymously represented by a lawyer downtown.”
“Your source is Elvis Derbil. He’s the one you know best in Rivertown.”
“Robinson and Tebbins have issued work-stop orders, citing problems with permits and performance bonds and everything else they can think of. The architect is constantly revising the blueprints to meet the city’s objections. It’s a real battle.”
“You think Tebbins is dead because of that construction?”
She looked at me with unblinking eyes. “You think Leo is missing because he lives right down the block?”
Sixteen
No cops were waiting at the turret.
“I don’t understand,” she said, looking down the street at city hall.
Jenny’s lines into law enforcement throughout northern Illinois had never been the ordinary wires reporters worked at keeping taut. Hers were thick, like bundled high-speed information cables. It wasn’t like her to have gotten wrong information.
“Look,” she said, “your priority’s your friendship with Leo. I understand that. But the Tebbins murder is going to get big. You’re sure Leo couldn’t have killed Tebbins?”
“Leo’s no killer.”
“I like Leo. I hope you’re right.”
She drove away, and I walked down to city hall. The police department was out of sight, around the back. In Rivertown, law enforcement wasn’t so much a civic necessity as it was a payroll to feed lizard relatives. I walked past a municipal Dumpster adorned, like so many things, with the image of my turret, and up to the door.
It was locked.
I peered in the window. There was no desk sergeant inside, but that was normal. There were very few uniformed officers in Rivertown. The department had lieutenants, mostly, because the pay grade was higher. Almost always, they were to be found safeguarding the taverns along Thompson Avenue, no matter what the hour.
The locked door, though, was odd, even for Rivertown.
There was a doorbell, just like a house. I rang it twice.
Nothing happened.
I tapped it two more times. A little speaker scratched to life. “Huh?”
“Dek Elstrom,” I said, like I was delivering pizza.
“Who?”
“Isn’t this a police station?”
“Who is it?”
“Dek Elstrom,” I shouted.
The electric lock clicked open, and I stepped inside.
A chair scraped in back, and feet landed hard on the linoleum. Footsteps started up the hall, grew louder, and stopped. Someone was pausing to make sure it was I before coming further.
“Hello?” I shouted. “Dek Elstrom here to see somebody.”
The footsteps resumed, and finally Benny Fittle emerged from the gloom of the hall. He was about thirty, short and big-bellied. He wore his usual cold-weather outfit of a hoodie sweatshirt, sagging cargo shorts, and scuffed running shoes. It was the same as his hot-weather outfit, except then he swapped the hoodie for a T-shirt.
Everybody in town knew Benny. He patrolled the city’s parking meters—one dollar for fifteen minutes—bagging the quarters and making sure the timers were running fast. Though he was naturally slow moving, the lizards prized Benny for his efficiency. He rarely paused to distinguish between meters that had already expired and those he was certain were likely to do so sometime soon.
He was no police officer, but Benny was pleased with his role in law enforcement. The last time he’d ticketed me, for being parked in front of a meter whirring in overdrive, its clock gone berserk, he’d given me a business card. BENNY FITTLE, it read. PARKING ENFORCEMENT PERSON. It, too, was adorned with the image of my turret.
Benny’s was an outdoor job. Never had I heard of him being left in charge at the police station.
“Hey, Mr. Elstrom,” he said, rubbing too hard at a sugary crumb stuck to the uppermost of his unshaven chins. Benny was never far from a doughnut.
“Tebbins,” I said.
“He was kilt,” he said, looking over my shoulder at the entrance door.
“I know. I heard I might be a person of interest.”
“A what?” he asked, his eyes still on the door.
“Someone the police want to talk to about
a crime.”
He swallowed hard, and for once I didn’t think it was from processing a doughnut.
“Benny, are you all right?”
“There’s nobody here now.”
“They’re all at Tebbins’s house?”
He shook his head. “Only two. The rest might be in a meeting.”
“Here?”
“No way.”
“Should I go there?”
“Where?”
“Where they’re having the meeting.”
“Someplace on Thompson Avenue is all I know.”
Thompson Avenue was code. The first-shift officers were at a bar, drinking like on every other day. Even in Rivertown that made no sense. On such a day, the cops should have been out combing the town for leads in the killing of one of their own.
“Tebbins’s house? I’m a person of interest.”
“You could go there.”
“Where is it?”
“Tebbins’s house?”
“Yes.” He was looking at the door again, and I realized it was fear that was worrying his eyes, like he was afraid someone bad was going to charge into the police station.
“I’ll get the house’s address,” he said. He fairly ran to the back and returned with it written jerkily on one of his cards.
I was barely out the door before the electronic lock clicked on.
Seventeen
Tebbins had lived in one of the modestly upgraded bungalows in Rivertown. Its bricks were glazed and beige instead of the usual smudgy brown, and the roof was covered with green barrel tiles instead of curling asphalt shingles. In spite of what Benny had said, I’d still expected a swarm of cops, but Benny had been telling the truth. Only one Escalade was parked in front.
A lieutenant in a beige suit that almost matched the bricks opened the door a crack. I told him I was expected. He looked at me like I was nuts.
“My name’s Elstrom,” I said. “I live in the turret across from city—”
He slammed the door.
I waited so they could take a good look at me from a window. After they realized I wasn’t going away, the door was opened again, this time by another cop. This one I knew.
“Are you having a mental episode?” he asked.
“A fit of good citizenry,” I said. “I heard you think I might know something about the murder of Mr. Tebbins.”
He stepped out onto the brick porch and looked up and down the street. “We already checked out your little shouting match. You’re clear.”
“The secretary overheard?”
“The secretary is hysterical. She said you and Tebbins got into it, screaming about a Leo Brumsky and someone named Shark.”
“That would be Snark, not Shark. And we weren’t screaming.”
“Whatever. We already checked out Brumsky. He’s off on vacation, and besides, a shouting match doesn’t mean murder.”
“Tebbins was upset,” I said. “Red faced and sweating. Something agitated him before I got there.”
“You can run along.”
“What happened here?”
He looked up and down the street again. “A burglary gone bad. Tebbins caught a bullet, right to the head.”
“A burglary, really?” Like murder, burglary was unheard of in Rivertown. Out-of-town thugs knew to stay clear of the locally connected cadre of car boosters, dope peddlers, hookers, and pimps who kicked back to the lizards like franchise operators.
When I didn’t turn to leave, the cop said, “Look, Elstrom, we’re figuring some itinerant, probably a druggie, was passing by on foot and broke in. Tebbins caught him; the burglar shot him.”
“Isn’t it unusual, an itinerant burgling a place, then hanging around to torture the homeowner?”
“We know where you live,” he said, “like everybody knows where you live. If we need you, we’ll find you.” He took a last look up and down the street and stepped back inside.
It was a relief. And not. Not only did the cop not suspect me of the killing, he hadn’t pressed me about anything Tebbins and I had been shouting about. One thing was certain: It wasn’t some drifter the lieutenant’s eyes had been nervously looking for, up and down the street. The cop had been looking over my shoulder for someone else.
Someone who he feared was coming back.
* * *
I drove to Leo’s bungalow, thinking I’d give the place another once-over. I wasn’t optimistic about finding something I’d missed earlier. I needed something to do.
Once again, Leo’s back door yielded to my thin scraper. I walked in and immediately saw different.
The wide ribbon of pistachio shells that had been dragged from the front room toward the kitchen looked pretty much the same, but the trail from the kitchen and out the back door had been almost pulverized. What had been a trail of solid shells was now, in spots, little more than thick beige dust. Someone had broken in and walked over the shells since I’d last been in the house.
Leo’s bedroom looked the same. His closet door remained wide open; his shirts and slacks still hung neatly inside. Ditto, Ma’s bedroom. Her closet was in the same order, and the same two drawers remained tugged out as before. I quickly checked the dining room and the front room. They were unchanged as well. Whoever had broken in hadn’t disturbed anything but the floor in the kitchen and the path to the back door.
I went down to the basement. No shells at all had been dragged down there. I thought that odd: Someone prowling a house would surely explore down there as well.
I went into Leo’s office and sat behind his desk. Every piece of furniture was in its proper place. Bo Derek was as wet and beautiful as when I’d first laid eyes on her. Leo’s childhood ideal of a bucolic farm scene, done up in lavenders, pinks, and greens, still brightened the wall, half obscured, above the light table.
Nothing had changed in the house, except everything. New footfalls had ground the shells lying between the back door and into the kitchen.
Bo Derek smiled back, wet and ripe and taunting.
“Well, damn it all,” I said to her and to Leo, suddenly inspired. I hustled up the stairs to the kitchen to be sure. I opened the refrigerator door. I always remembered food.
There was new disarray. Certainly there was less milk.
I left, savoring the possibility of relief.
Eighteen
Still, I decided on caution.
I waited until eleven o’clock, that hour when even the most nocturnal of the working folks in Leo’s neighborhood were sure to be asleep. I parked three blocks away and came up to the bungalow on the front sidewalk, slow and purposeful and out in the open, like someone with nothing to hide, just coming home late. I’d decided against the alleys because Leo and I had spent too many summer nights out on his front stoop, drinking his fine Czech Pilsner Urquell, talking about not much of anything at all, and laughing every time a marauding raccoon set off a backyard security light. Rivertown was too lousy with backyard security lights to come up the back way.
I’d just walked onto Leo’s block when headlamps switched on, farther down. A car pulled from the curb, sweeping its lights across the stacks of cement forms piled in front of the excavation. It was only as I bent down, as though to tie my shoe, that I realized I couldn’t hear the car’s motor. I turned my head just enough to be sure. It was a Prius passing by. I couldn’t see the driver, or be absolutely sure of the car’s color in the dark, but I knew it was green, the color of Jenny Galecki’s. I wondered what needed watching, that late at night.
I straightened up and ducked into the dark of the gangway next to Leo’s house. The back door was locked, as I’d left it. I slipped the bolt with my thin scraper and stepped inside, as quietly as I could. My shoes ground into the shells on the floor. I stood still for a moment. The house was silent, a tomb.
I didn’t need to be stealthy. I didn’t even need to slink in the dark. I could turn on the lights, dance around, sing show tunes. I knew who would be coming.
It was his game that was be
ing played, though, not mine. I left the lights off and tiptoed silently through the darkness to the front room.
I’d decided on the triangular space behind the big-screen television. When he’d first brought it home, Leo had pushed it flat against one wall. But once Ma discovered what could be found on her new television, and in such glistening clarity, she insisted that the new set be angled in the corner, so that all her lady friends could come and behold the miracle of naughty pay-per-view.
Leo and I had laughed at that, too, on more than one of those summer nights, when the girls were over and we were relegated to the lawn chairs in the backyard, safely away from any moans that might slip through the front-room screens. “Can you believe it?” he’d ask. “Septuagenarians and octogenarians, primly munching bridge mix and prunes, cranking up their hearing aids to catch the softest of the grunts?”
“Every old lady should have a son like you to destroy her morals,” I’d said, more than once.
He’d shake his head at the absurdity of it all. Then we’d laugh again.
I slipped behind the television and settled on the floor. Soon I’d know what he was up to.
A car door slammed outside. Two voices sounded and then went away. Neighbors, coming home.
I relaxed against the wall, and my mind drifted to the last time I’d done late-night surveillance, and how Leo never let me forget it. It had been summer. I was perched in a vacant garage, watching a Dumpster behind a restaurant. I’d set up my long-lens camera carefully, at the ready to snap proof of a money drop. Then I’d fallen asleep. Leo loved that, and he rarely went a month without slipping some reference to my ace surveillance skills into a conversation.
This night, there would be no nodding off. Surely I’d be able to help, as soon as I understood what sent him into hiding.
The familiar tick of the banjo clock across the room, bingo booty Ma lugged home from church, brought back the times I’d spent in that house as a kid—the after-school hours, the dinners, the hundreds of unanticipated sleepovers when there’d been confusion, or perhaps it had just been indifference, about where I was supposed to be staying.
The Dead Caller from Chicago Page 9