The Dead Caller from Chicago

by Jack Fredrickson

  “Green?”

  “With serious scrapes along the driver’s side. It was Robinson’s car, like I expected.”

  “Red scrapes or black scrapes on the minivan?”

  “Black.”

  “From an Impala?”

  “Who knows, Elstrom? Forget the Impala; we don’t have the money to be CSI Chicago. There were other things, though. A revolver was found lying on the passenger’s seat. Want to know what kind of revolver?”

  “Oh, why not?”

  “Colt Peacemaker, buckaroo. The sheriff is running it down, like there’s a mystery to who owns it.”

  I didn’t see any need to tell him it wasn’t mine, but Leo’s.

  “What about Robinson himself?”

  “Meaning was he found shot with a Peacemaker that had your fingerprints on it? He’s nowhere to be found, though two blood-soaked towels were found on the passenger seat. I suppose there could have been an accident, and he wandered off to get help.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Of course not. Robinson was already wounded, likely from that alley altercation earlier. Those cars weren’t tailing you; they were tailing Robinson, to wound him further.”

  “Friends of Cassone’s?”

  “Angered by the brutal way he was shot and then clubbed postmortem? Maybe, though I’m sensing Robinson had other issues.”

  “What kind of other issues?”

  “Floater issues, though I suppose all sorts of folks in your charming little town might have been responsible for that.”

  “What about that guy?”

  “It was a John Doe.”

  “They have no idea who it might be?”

  “It’s not Snark Evans, if that’s what you’re asking. The floater’s older, a white male in his midfifties. Apparently his fingerprints aren’t on file. They’re going to keep him cool for another week, then bury him.”

  “Without knowing who he was?”

  “They’re dead-ended, buckaroo.”

  “And Robinson?”

  “If he’s not buried in the woods somewhere, chances are he’s running from those two guys who were tailing him. Any ideas?”

  I didn’t know. I knew who did, though.

  I called Jenny. She didn’t answer. I left a message, saying I had questions and wanted to have dinner, but I didn’t mean it in that order.

  * * *

  The cleaning service was already waiting at Leo’s when I got there.

  I’d asked for every person they could provide. Smelling meat, they’d sent ten. They sang in Polish as they vacuumed and scrubbed and polished. I didn’t sing at all as I killed time outside, scraping the last bits of snow from Leo’s walk. The glinting eyes of the next-door babushka, wondering what was going on, were too hot.

  After the cleaning crew left, I took a casual, hands-in-the-pockets stroll down the alley. The excavation sat abandoned, its foundation forms upright and empty. The gravel blanket between them still appeared smooth and undisturbed, and I took that to be a small mercy until I realized that with Robinson gone, Rivertown was without a building inspector, and that meant no concrete work would be approved for quite some time. Surely Wozanga’s patience, cold though it was, would run out before that.

  I needed to push back at the worries, and the Twinkies and Ho Hos that had fueled them through the night. I headed to the health center.

  It was still early, and no thumpers lounged about. Still, after bumping my way across the parking lot to park next to the doorless Buick, I double-checked to be sure my Jeep was unlocked before going in. Prudence dictated that anyone be able to quickly see the dash had already been plundered of its radio, lest he begin ripping at the hundred silver curls of duct tape that made my Jeep look so like an aging Shirley Temple.

  The locker attendant was nowhere to be seen, though two new locks, sparkling and freshly cut, dangled from lockers. I could only suppose he’d gone off to oil his bolt cutters. Like any good craftsman, he took care of his tools.

  After changing into my gym duds and pocketing my wallet and keys, I left my locker door ajar for inspection and went upstairs.

  As usual, the retirees were perched on the rusted exercise machines like kids at story time, as Frankie the Bridge Inspector held forth with the day’s repetition of his twelve-joke repertoire. The retirees listened not in hopes of fresh material but rather for the certainty that the old stuff would be spun up the same as every other day. In a rapidly aging world, Frankie’s old jokes were forever young. There was comfort in that.

  I gave the boys a wave and ran the track. Two newcomers, no doubt the unknowing owners of the clipped locks downstairs, ran more haltingly, slowed less by the rips and the tears than they soon would be by the loss of their money, credit cards, keys, and cars. I quit after a mile, gasping, took my keys and wallet down for a shower, dressed, and went outside.

  Two dark-haired, middle-aged businessmen, dressed ordinarily enough in tan trench coats and brown fedoras, stepped out from the side of the building. There was nothing ordinary about the speed with which they moved up on me, one in front, one behind.

  They had fast hands. The one behind, whom I now think of as Mr. Red, pinned my arms back so that Mr. Black could hit me with a fast rabbit jab to the gut. I dropped to the asphalt, certain I’d never breathe again.

  It was Mr. Red who bent down to speak, bracing himself with his knee on my back and his hand next to my face. He had a small tattoo, three stars in a tight cluster, just behind his thumb. “You done with Robinson.” His accent was Slavic, maybe Russian.

  “Is he done with me?” I asked the crumbles of asphalt in front of my nose.

  “Persistence bring pain.” He straightened up, and the two men disappeared around the corner of the building, presumably to where one of their cars, either the red or the black, was parked.

  “What the hell did he mean?” I asked the asphalt, when I was able to take longer breaths.

  The asphalt had deteriorated too much to offer up anything. I pushed myself to my knees, then to full standing, surprised that I could. Mr. Black was fast enough to have hit me two or three more times, going down, and those would have done real damage. Instead he’d only punched once.

  He was a professional. He’d meant only to drop me, and to warn.

  About what, I wasn’t sure.

  Fifty-five

  I’d just balanced the little television on my lap, about to let the noon news entertain my recovering solar plexus, when Leo called.

  “I’m going to take a cab if you don’t come to pick me up,” he said, “and I’ll instruct the cabbie to bring me to your cylinder to collect the cartage charges, since I have no cash.”

  Lester Lance Leamington’s smiling face appeared on the tiny screen, likely about to advise me to embrace my future. Without thinking, I turned the volume down.

  “What about the two hundred I gave you as an unsecured loan?” I inquired.

  The television screen switched to a wider shot. Lester Lance Leamington was being perp-walked in handcuffs from an office building.

  It was no infomercial. “Shush,” I said, dialing up the volume.

  “… where today,” an announcer intoned, “he was arrested and charged with multiple counts of money laundering and distributing pornography. Sources say he needed the money to cover the losses he incurred in the stock market…”

  “Get me out of here,” Leo yelled into my ear.

  “Have you heard anything about Lester Lance Leamington?”

  “Busted this morning for covering his past with dirty money and dirty movies.”

  “Ma and her friends aren’t involved, right?”

  “Right now,” he yelled.

  “Robinson’s still loose.”

  “I’ve already checked myself out, and I have another of Pa’s guns hidden at home.”

  There was no arguing with that, and so I drove north.

  Leo was waiting inside the front door. “What’s the matter with your stomach?” he asked, g
etting into the Jeep.

  I must have been hunched over the wheel. I leaned back, with pain, and gave his outfit the fisheye. The glare was almost overwhelming. He wore an orange shirt festooned with silver and green flamingos and lime-colored pants beneath his orange traffic officer’s jacket.

  “Slight indigestion, though it’s nothing compared to the pain in my eyes.”

  “You got slugged in the gut.”

  I drove us away, in need of something to do.

  “I think I’m on the verge of remembering what sent me here,” he said, watching the side of my head. When I stayed rigidly focused on the road ahead, he said, “OK, so instead tell me how you got slugged.”

  “I have to make a call,” I said, and I did. Jenny hadn’t returned the call I’d made, though it had only been a couple of hours.

  Once again, I got transferred straight to her voice mail. This time I said nothing.

  “The press?”

  I nodded.

  “Who slugged you?” he then asked.

  There would be no dodging Leo. If he didn’t know something, he stayed at it until he pried out the truth. “Two guys who I think are not friends of Robinson’s.”

  “Don’t obfuscate.”

  “Remember that little parade I led through the woods, before coming up to see you?”

  “Where you so cleverly gave three cars the slip?”

  “That would be the one, yes, except now I think my cunning wasn’t involved.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Robinson’s van was found in a shed in those woods, with a fresh scrape indicating it may have been run off the road.”

  “Meaning that the drivers of those lagging two cars were anxious not to catch up with you, but rather Mr. Robinson?”

  “There’s more: There was an old revolver on the front seat.”

  “Just like Pa’s?” He turned to look at me. “Or was it exactly like Pa’s, right down to the fingerprints?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll testify you were institutionalized under a false name, loony as a bluejay, when it got stolen.”

  “How much are you holding back?”

  “I cleverly staged a burglary,” I said.

  “You’re talking in circles.”

  “Once more around and you’ll be too confused to care. Those two guys tailing Robinson might be the ones that just found me at the health center. The one who spoke sounded Russian. The other was nonverbal.”

  “What does this have to do with Pa’s gun?”

  “I think Robinson had it when he was chasing me beside the woods. The Russians left it in the van.”

  “You’re leaving too much out. This is all going right past me.”

  “I believe they’ve done him wrong, which is the only reason I’m bringing you home. I think Robinson’s angered the wrong people, and he’s out of the picture, for forever.”

  He turned to look out the window. “I don’t get any of this. All I know is, Mr. Robinson was always so nice.”

  “Something made him desperate to get out of Rivertown.”

  “Something more than greed for a valuable painting?”

  “Jenny tells me nasty things are percolating in Rivertown. I need to talk to her.”

  He gave it up, and we drove in silence until we got to his block.

  “Police tape?” he asked.

  He was looking at the bungalow where he’d killed Robert Wozanga.

  “Cops found blood on the steps. The tape’s a precaution to keep the curious out.”

  He shifted in the Jeep so he could look directly at me. “That’s where I was hiding. How do I fit with that blood?”

  “You don’t.”

  I parked in front of his house. He made no move to get out. “You told me you had my gun. How did Robinson get it?”

  “Remember that clever staged burglary I just mentioned?”

  “Damn it, talk sense.”

  “Trust me awhile. There’s a lot I don’t yet understand.”

  “Then how about this: There’s nothing going on at the new house. Is that because of the blood where I was hiding?”

  “No. Our town fathers have been hassling the contractor, and that’s part of what I don’t understand.”

  I got out before he could ask more questions, and we went inside.

  “Jeez Louise. What’s that smell?” he asked, stopping in the tiny foyer.

  I gave a theatrical sniff. “Essence of Pine-Sol.”

  “Ma doesn’t use Pine-Sol. You had the place cleaned.”

  “You had intruders.”

  “Cassone, looking for his painting. Who else?”

  “Maybe Robinson, looking for the same thing. I figured you and Ma would feel better if any traces of them were washed away.”

  “What else?” he asked. He used to say that all the time, when we were kids. He was relentless then, and he would be relentless now. He was going to bombard me with questions until he understood exactly what had sent him to a clinic with amnesia.

  We walked into the kitchen. “They even ran the dishwasher,” he said.

  “Actually, I needed the practice. I aspire to owning one myself someday.”

  “You’d need dishes that won’t dissolve in hot water.” He continued down the hall. Just inside his room, he bent over. “Odd,” he said.

  “What?”

  He dropped to his knees and sniffed the carpet. “There was a stain here, but it’s been shampooed away.”

  “The cleaning service was most thorough.”

  “It wasn’t just a simple cleaning. You had this place scrubbed,” he said, standing up.

  “I told you: I thought it would make Ma feel better.”

  His eyes were unblinking. “Ma said she and Endora cleaned the place before you made them go away again.”

  “I told you that Rudy Cassone was in here. Likely Robinson, too.”

  “And the bat with yours and Robinson’s fingerprints on it, along with Cassone’s blood, is where?”

  I beamed, as though to a dull child. “A police lockup. I’m hoping that since Cassone was killed by gunshot, and not clubbing, no one will think to print the bat. Even if they do, thanks to clever me, there will always be that burglary I reported, to explain away a missing gun and bat.”

  “Want to know what I think?”

  “No.”

  “I think you’re worried there were even more fingerprints in this house, fingerprints that would implicate me in something I can’t remember.”

  Like Wozanga’s death, but I hoped to spend the rest of my life never having to say that.

  We walked down the basement stairs.

  “You even cleaned the mound of things Brumsky?” he asked, pointing at the orderly pile against the wall.

  “Top to bottom, professionally wiped. No telling where Cassone was.”

  We went into his office. Everything sparkled in the light from his desk lamp and, like the rest of the house, stank sickeningly of Pine-Sol. I took the green overstuffed chair; he sat behind his desk.

  He pulled a pencil out of the cup and began walking it between his fingers as he looked around the comforting familiarity of his office. Surprise lit his face in a half-smile when he got to the space above the mismatched file cabinets. He got up and went to finger the lavender barn. “You really left it here?”

  Perhaps later, on a summer night, sipping a Czech beer, I’d give him more partial answers.

  For now, I said, “No one dangerous knows its history. Cassone’s dead; Robinson’s missing, likely dead; and the Bennetts don’t know about you at all, or where I came from. It’s yours to do with what you want, with impunity.”

  His face had gone sly, an expression I’d seen plenty of times, right before he pulled a figurative ace from his sleeve. “I so love impunity,” he said.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “Perhaps one last step, to be sure,” he said.

  “Sure of what?”

  “Sure of that last step.”

  Then
he laughed.

  Fifty-six

  Driving back to the turret, I watched the rearview as much as the road ahead. It was a new habit that had gotten old.

  I called Jarobi. “I have news, I think, about the drivers of the cars that tailed Robinson. Two guys in trench coats slugged me earlier today. One of them told me to quit poking around about Robinson. He had a Slavic accent and a tight cluster of three stars tattooed at the base of his thumb.”

  “Three stars and a Slavic accent?”

  “They mean something to you?”

  “Why do you think they warned you to stay away from Robinson?”

  “You’re the cop. You tell me.”

  “Are you at your castle?”

  “Turret, but yes.”

  “Walk your cell phone out to the river and look west.”

  I went down to the water. Blue police lights flashed down by the dam, just like the night they fished out John Doe.

  “See me waving?” he asked.

  “Of course not; you’re too far away. What’s going on?”

  “Robinson.”

  “Drowned?”

  “Two shots behind the ear, plus he’d been burned pretty badly.”

  “What kind of gun?”

  “It wasn’t your Peacemaker, buckaroo, but I have other interesting news. I called your county ME this morning. He was surprised he hadn’t heard anything on the identity of the John Doe, so I called your cops and offered them the use of my own people to assist in their investigation.”

  “Our cops are turtles.”

  “Not this morning. They called me back within a half hour, with the miraculous news that they’d just identified the floater. He was Dimitri Kostanov, age fifty-three, a midlevel player who moved from a Russian gang in New York to fashion a new life in Chicago. They’re becoming influential here, into all sorts of nasty things.”

  “As I said, our cops are turtles.”

  “Your cops are liars. Kostanov’s prints were in the system, which meant your cops had him identified right away. Plus, Kostanov had another distinguishing characteristic. Want to know what it was?”

  “A tight cluster of three stars tattooed at the base of his thumb, just like the man who slugged me.”

  “Rivertown is suffering an infestation of Russians, and that’s making your cops nervous. For some reason, they’ve wanted to keep the floater anonymous. When I forced them to give up the ID, they tried explaining it away by saying Kostanov was simply the victim of a gang rivalry, spilled downriver from Chicago. They also said they were done with the case—and that, buckaroo, is where things get real wrong. It’s an unsolved homicide. They’re supposed to be telling everybody that they’re sifting through leads, putting the word out to the community, the usual nonsense we puke out when we’re utterly nowhere on a case. You’re following me, Elstrom? They don’t want me nosing around. Those Russians who accosted you don’t want you sniffing around, either.”