She smiled, sort of, but took a couple of steps back anyway.
I looked down at the picture Leo was drawing. It wasn’t much, just a hundred red dots in several clusters.
“What are you drawing?” I asked.
He began attacking the paper in front of him with more red dots.
I looked over at Dr. Feldott and shook my head. I had no idea what he was trying to draw.
“Are you going to give this nice man your drawing?” Dr. Feldott asked him. She hadn’t asked my name because she expected I’d give her something phony.
“Not nice man; gun man,” he said.
Apparently satisfied with the hundreds of dots he’d put on the paper, he put the stub of the red crayon back into the flip-up box and studied the other colors. Like the red crayon, many of the others had been worn down to stubs. His fingers dug deep into the box, pulling out a lavender crayon even shorter than the red one.
“That’s one of your favorites, isn’t it?” Dr. Feldott asked.
“No time.” He drew a rectangle on the sheet of paper and began filling it with broad strokes of lavender.
I knew then, as surely as I’d ever known anything.
“You’re going to give your friend this drawing?” I heard Dr. Feldott ask again.
“The gun man,” Leo corrected, running the lavender crayon back and forth.
I turned to the doctor. “You said there are other pictures?”
“All the same,” she said. “Can the gun man see some of the others?” she asked Leo.
His coloring hand stopped in the middle of a stroke. “Excellent!” he shouted. He opened the table drawer and pulled out a sheaf of papers. Thrusting them at me, he yelled, “Gun man.”
“Gun man?” Dr. Feldott persisted, but it was so unnecessary.
He’d handed me the sheaf upside down. I turned them over. As Dr. Feldott had said, the picture on top was the same as the one he was now drawing. It had hundreds of the same red dots, meant to show leaves. The lavender was there, too; broad swipes of plenty of it, all over a barn; along with pink, green-spotted cows against a background of orange rolling hills. The only thing missing was the “Leo B.” in the lower right corner, and that was only because he couldn’t yet recall his own name.
“I understand,” I said quickly, though I didn’t, at least not all of it.
Dr. Feldott looked alarmed. Leo looked up from his coloring and smiled.
I jabbed the sheaf of pictures back at the doctor and ran out of the room and down the hall. Dr. Feldott came running after me. She knew the electronic locks on the door would stop me.
She demanded to know nothing as she punched in the code to make the doors swing free.
“You’ll call me?” she shouted, as I sprinted into the reception area.
“I’m the gun man,” I yelled back, running for the Jeep.
Thirty-one
I’d started the day establishing a burglary explanation for anything of Leo’s the cops might find in the empty bungalow. Then I’d stuck signs in Leo’s yard, hoping to lure one of Wozanga’s compatriots, or maybe even his boss, into revealing himself.
I’d won. I could explain anything of Leo’s that popped up anyplace inconvenient, and I’d flushed out Rudy Cassone.
I’d lost, too, because the picture that had caused Leo to get lost, and Snark Evans to get dead, was likely to get stolen away before I could use it to figure what was going on.
Traffic was a gnarled nightmare southbound on 294, a twisted jumble of obstinate idiots hell-bent on keeping me from Rivertown. I bobbed, weaved, and swore, and none of it did any good at all. It took over an hour just to get to O’Hare, and another thirty minutes to thread east through the last of the day’s rush on the Eisenhower Expressway. By the time I charged onto Leo’s block, it was dark, and it had started to snow.
A corner of my eye took in the unchanged excavation. Every day that passed without progress meant another day that Wozanga’s corpse might be discovered. It was a worry for later. My fear now was I was getting to Leo’s too late to act on the only signal he could send me.
I cut my lights and coasted to a stop across the street. The lamp on Ma’s timer was on, casting a soft, semitransparent glow in the front room behind the lace curtains. I could make out the shape of part of the big-screen television, just to the right, and the high back of the sofa that Ma had kept pristine with so many generations of white-piped clear plastic slipcovers. I wanted to hope that the light from the front-room lamp, or the threat of my make-believe security system, or even the potential of drive-bys by the Rivertown cops would keep Cassone away.
I’d kept him out of Leo’s office. Surely he’d not yet seen the supposed child’s fanciful drawing of a lavender barn, pink and green cows, and red-leafed trees.
Still, my gut said to stay in the Jeep for a time, be cautious, and watch. Cassone, after all, was likely a killer, just like his man Wozanga. So I stayed behind the steering wheel and squinted at the light behind the lace. I watched for five minutes, and for ten more.
Then the faintest of shadows moved quickly by the big-screen television, right where I’d hidden the night my friend killed Wozanga.
The shadow retreated from the light behind the lace.
I’d been a fool. I should have brought Leo’s gun. Not to fire, but simply to use to threaten.
I remembered the aluminum baseball bat I’d picked out of the snow the morning after Ma and her friends had gone berserk trying to open pistachio nuts. I reached behind the passenger’s seat, felt its cold opportunity.
I grabbed it and eased out of the Jeep.
Every room in the babushka’s house next door was lit up brightly, an old woman’s defense against the night. I moved low through the gangway, trying for invisibility. I turned the corner at the porch and moved to the shadows next to Leo’s outer door to wait. There were no basement windows back there, so I could not see the movement of a flashlight, but surely he’d go down there, and into Leo’s office at the front. He’d look behind the cabinets and under the desk and behind the huge overstuffed chair. He’d look at the walls, at Bo Derek. At some point, he’d notice the painting above the file cabinets, with its oddly colored cows and barn and leaves. He’d know it not by the colors it was now but simply by its size. I didn’t understand why, but I knew: The intruder would smile.
A half hour passed, in minutes each longer and colder than the one before. I huddled against the back of the building, ten feet from the door to the porch, too afraid to stomp my feet to keep warm. The snow was falling harder, big flakes, wet flakes.
The kitchen door creaked, cracking the hushing cover of the falling snow. Footsteps thudded across the porch floor. He paused at the steps, and then he came down, softly because the babushka next door might be in her backyard, having sensed a disturbance in the night.
The flimsy wood door at the bottom groaned as he slowly pushed it open. He came out, carrying the rectangle.
I swung as he turned toward the gangway, slamming the tip of the bat square between his shoulder blades, at the base of his neck. He dropped onto the cushion of snow with a soft thump and was still.
I dropped the bat. I tugged to roll him over, to be sure of the face. He wheezed, unconscious, a sack of live bone and meat that was Rudy Cassone.
I grabbed the rectangle. He’d wrapped it in layers of cloth, a sheet torn from one of the beds.
He moaned and shifted a little on the snow.
I ran through the spill of light in the gangway, across the parkway. Grabbing at the Jeep’s door handle, I jumped in. My trembling fingers searched my pocket, found the keys, and dropped them like they’d been greased. Fumbling, frantic, I ran my hands around the floor. Surely the babushka had heard me pounding through the gangway and raced to a front window.
I found the keys, poked the rubber-headed one into the ignition, and was off. It was only when I reached the corner that I thought to switch on the headlights.
I saw the black Mercedes as I made t
he turn. Cassone had parked on the side street. He’d known to be cautious.
I unwrapped the rectangle on the card table, on the second floor. As I expected, several pink, green-spotted cows were standing in front of a lavender barn, looking right back at me.
They didn’t look like they knew anything at all.
Thirty-two
A nightmare jerked my hand off the side of Leo’s revolver the next morning.
I dreamed my feet were encased in hardened concrete, as tons of thick cement cascaded down from the chutes of a dozen monstrous churning trucks, into the excavation. Rudy Cassone was up above, running from truck to truck, working the levers, and laughing as I swung my bat futilely at the block of concrete trapping my feet. The block wouldn’t chip. It was too hard. And the concrete kept coming, a dozen thick rivers filling the hole like a tub, up to my ankles, up to my calves, up to my arms until I could swing no more.
I pushed myself out of bed and into cold clothes and went to the window still groggy enough to fear seeing cement trucks lined up, churning. Mercifully, there was only new snow, six inches of fresh fluff lying on top of the Jeep.
It had been a nightmare like all nightmares, built of a jumble of a few very real blocks. The cement, Cassone, the bat …
The bat.
I pounded down the stairs and out to the Jeep. I pawed through the Burger King wrappers, beneath the gym bag, and under the towel I keep to wipe the inside of the windshield when it’s raining and the defroster has gotten too bored to work. I searched everywhere. The bat wasn’t there.
I’d clubbed Cassone; I’d dropped it; and then I’d forgotten it, anxious only to get away, to protect the painting.
I hustled back into the turret, shivering from cold but more from fear, thinking that Cassone had likely regained consciousness in something of a foul mood and interested to know who clubbed him. He’d have grabbed the bat, and although Rivertown was small-town cheesy crooked, Chicago wasn’t. Outfit guys knew cops, and cops could check fingerprints. Mine had been on file since the court case that had ruined me.
Still, he might have hobbled away, without noticing the bat. There was the snow, too. Enough might have fallen to cover it up after I’d knocked him unconscious.
I sped over to Leo’s thinking I’d surely appear innocent, coming only to shovel the walk. No attacker, any right-thinking person would reason, would have the nerve to show up after beating a man senseless at that very place just a few hours before. With luck, I’d fish the bat out of the fresh snow and toss it away somewhere.
The babushka was on her front porch, dressed in dark clothes for another dark day. She moved her head back and forth, making a pointed comparison between her own neatly shoveled walk and Leo’s, covered thickly with new snow.
“Wonderful day, is it not?” I asked, pasting on what I was sure was a fine wide grin.
She frowned. “Last night was disturbing.”
I lessened my smile, fearing I might resemble a crazed jack-o’-lantern. “All the new snow?” I asked, hoping it was only the snow. “Not to worry; I came to shovel.”
“Odd soft noises, coming from the Brumsky place.” She pointed at Leo’s bungalow as though I didn’t know where it was.
“Noises from the snow?” I asked, an idiot, but an innocent.
“Not from the snow, you fool. There was a shout, like people were fighting in the backyard. By the time I could get to my back room to look out, someone was escaping up the gangway. I got to the front just as a car started. The snow was falling thick, and the sneak was crafty. He pulled away without turning on his headlamps. I couldn’t see dink squat.” Pausing for air, she stared at me, then, “Only one person’s been interested in coming around much, lately.”
“I’ve been working here, rigging up a burglar alarm, checking the furnace and the hot water.”
“That’s another thing about last night,” she said. “I didn’t hear any alarm.”
“I’m not done,” I said. “See anything else?”
“You’d best get shoveling, then,” she said.
“Oh, you bet.” She’d seen nothing, called no one.
I high-stepped to the back and saw that the snowfall had obliterated any signs of my clubbing Cassone. I got the shovel from the garage, came back, and began stabbing at the new blanket of snow, hoping to hear the clink of aluminum.
“What on earth are you doing?” the neighbor shouted across the chain-link fence. She’d made no sound coming out her back door, a true stealth-babushka.
“Chipping ice off the shovel.”
“Shoveling the walk will get rid of it quicker.” She went back inside.
I shoveled my way to the front, did the walk and the steps, and returned to the back to take more stabs at the snow. Nothing clanked; the bat was gone. He’d taken it with him.
I went up the back porch stairs. There was no broken glass, but the door was open. Cassone had jimmied the new high-security lock I’d installed. I went inside.
He’d not trashed the house. He’d known the dimensions of what he was looking for. The clothes in Ma’s and Leo’s bedroom closets had been pushed to the sides, so he could peer behind them, but he’d been unhurried and orderly, a professional.
I went down to the basement. The clutter had been spread farther out and gone through carefully. Nothing appeared to be broken.
He’d found what he wanted in Leo’s office, of course, on the wall above the file cabinets. I went upstairs.
“I suppose I should call the police,” the babushka said from her back step.
I stomped across the snow to her fence, one last probe for the bat. “About that ruckus last night?”
“They could search the property, like maybe you’ve just been doing.”
“I came to shovel and thought I might as well check the furnace and the hot water heater,” I said.
“Why are you standing in deep snow?”
“To hear you clearly,” I said, giving her my best smile.
She snorted and turned her back.
Thirty-three
By most accounts, my grandfather was a courtly, small-time brewmeister, a guy looking to make good beer and, of course, a castle. Part of his being in the bootlegging business during Prohibition must have required a place to stash money and perhaps long guns, because I’d come across his hiding place, a large cavity tucked into the floor, quite accidentally only months before.
I lifted the fitted planks and brought Leo’s painting down to the lighted Luxo magnifier on my card table desk.
At first glance, it was nothing more than a kid’s painting, eighteen by twenty-four inches, done by a child fated for a career in anything but art. The lavender barn was lopsided. The pink, green-spotted cows had misshapen legs, each of which was a different length, and the tree trunks were tendrils, too spindly to support so many red leaves. He’d signed it “Leo B.” in the lower right corner.
I turned the painting over. Always a stickler for detail, he’d written “To Ma, from Leo,” in a big, looping child’s hand.
Something irregular caught my eye. I moved the magnifier and saw that a tiny seam had opened up along the inside edge of the wood frame. An artist’s canvas was always stretched around a wood frame and tacked in back. A seam inside the frame made no sense.
I used my fingernail to pull gently at the seam. A tiny speck of glue fell away, revealing what looked like an older piece of canvas underneath.
It was obvious what Leo had done. He’d painted a ridiculously colored farm scene right over another picture. He’d thought to disguise the back of the old painting as well, by gluing on a piece of new canvas.
It was enough to build a scenario: Snark Evans, installing a security system at Cassone’s house for Tebbins, had stolen a picture. Likely enough, Snark didn’t know what he had, other than a raging case of second thoughts. He dumped the picture on an unsuspecting Leo, thinking maybe he’d come back for it when things cooled. Snark hightailed it out of Rivertown, going so far as to fake a repo
rt of his own death so Cassone wouldn’t come hunting for him. Leo, a kid finishing his first year of college, probably thought nothing of adding a picture to the pile of other artifacts mounded in the middle of his basement.
For years, Snark’s ploy worked. Snark drifted on to new things under a different name. Cassone settled into believing his picture was gone for all time. Leo forgot about the painting in his basement.
Then, just a week or a month before, something triggered each of them into action. Snark called Leo, wanting his picture back. Cassone hired Wozanga, who ultimately traced the painting to Leo. Leo dug out the picture and saw something he hadn’t seen before, something that needed camouflaging with a child’s version of a lavender barn and pink, green-spotted cows.
My scenario was sure to have big holes, but I knew one thing: Leo was the most honorable of men. He would have researched the painting and likely found out it belonged to Cassone. He would have returned it to him, whether or not the man was a hood. That he hadn’t meant he’d learned something that prevented that.
I called Jenny. “I need a favor.”
“How’s Leo?” Jenny asked.
“Improving.”
“Are you going to take me to someplace memorable if I do this favor for you?”
“I took you to the beach once.”
“You took me to a trailer park near the Indiana dunes. We found a corpse covered with flies.”
“Wasn’t that memorable?”
“What do you want, Elstrom?”
“I want you to call your police friends and find out whether Rudy Cassone ever reported a theft from his house in Falling Star.”
“Rudy Cassone, the big-time gangster?”
“Yes.”
“This has to do with Leo?”
“Yes.”
She hung up without waiting for me to dodge a next question. I told myself it was gamesmanship.
I looked across the room to admire the black char in the fireplace, the residue of the only fire that had ever been lit there. Jenny and I had inaugurated that fireplace, not two hours after we discovered the corpse in Indiana. Shivering, although it was July, we’d spoken of our ghosts, her dead husband and my ex-wife. Sometime into the night, the adrenaline gave out, and she fell asleep in the electric blue La-Z-Boy as I sat beside her, alert, lecherous of thought but virtuous of action, until I became too aware of myself watching her breathe, and I covered her with a blanket and went upstairs to the bed across from another fireplace, one that I’d inaugurated with Amanda, my ex-wife.
The Dead Caller from Chicago Page 15