The Dead Caller from Chicago

by Jack Fredrickson

  “Robinson was killed in retaliation for Kostanov?” I guessed Jenny would make perfect sense of it, when she finally called.

  “Tit for tat. What’s for sure is my boss is pulling me away from all this, now that Mr. Phelps has shipped his daughter off to Europe.”

  When I said nothing, he asked, “You knew that, right? That Amanda Phelps is now in Europe?”

  “No, but that explains why she didn’t answer my call.”

  “Without her, there will never even be a complaint of kidnapping, and therefore no official file.”

  “So Robinson’s case will die like Robinson?”

  “I’m not so sure. There’s press interest. Your county ME told me some reporter is hot on the floater. He referred her to the Rivertown PD, probably with a laugh.”

  “Her?” I asked, like I didn’t know who she was.

  “Some woman. Why? Is there a woman reporter in your life?”

  “Go on,” I said, but I said it too slow.

  “Be careful, Elstrom. Your crooked little town has always been small-time, right? Stolen cars, hookers, backroom dollar slots, but never murder. Things might be changing. You’ve had a tattooed Russian and now one of your own building inspectors bob up in your river. Another building inspector got shot in his home. Throw in a dead mob boss last seen alive in Rivertown, and you’ve got a crooked little town that’s suddenly gotten quite lively.”

  He paused, then said, “Here’s the worry: I can think of only one person who has links to both Robinson and tattooed Russians. Want me to spell out why each side might be angry with him?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Keep your eyes open, Elstrom. Dig a moat. Start boiling oil to throw out your skinny windows in case you’re attacked.”

  He hung up. He’d meant it well, but he’d been wrong.

  I wasn’t the only person who had links to both Robinson and the Russians.

  Fifty-seven

  I called Jenny again, and again got sent to her voice mail. By now it was the eighth time.

  I had two other calls to make. Demons were demanding to be let into the light.

  I phoned Amanda’s office first. “Any word from the tycoon?” I asked Vicki, her assistant.

  Vicki and I had always gotten along on a superficial level. Used to be, Amanda always took my calls, and that meant it was OK for Vicki to laugh, a little.

  Not today. “She’s out of the office, Dek.”

  “Out of the country,” I said, as though I hadn’t learned it from a cop instead of the woman I’d once loved. “I was just calling to see how she was.”

  She softened, a little. “She’s been working awfully hard. She needs a rest. Taking some time off will do her loads of good.”

  “Absolutely,” I said to the vagueness.

  “I’ll tell her you called, when she phones in?”

  “That would be swell,” I said and hung up.

  I had to make the second call, even though it made me smaller.

  “Rudolph and Associates,” the receptionist said.

  “Mr. Rudolph’s office, please.”

  “Mr. Rudolph’s office,” his secretary, presumably, said.

  “I’m calling, really, to leave a message. He’s in Europe, right? Vacationing?”

  “Well yes, but—”

  I hung up. Richard Rudolph, the silver-haired and no doubt silver-tongued commodities broker who’d been waiting so solicitously when I drove her back to her condo, hadn’t just been Amanda’s social escort. He’d been there waiting, right with her father. Now he was escorting her to Europe.

  Oddly, I did not feel anger, or hurt. Mostly, I felt relief, though I wasn’t ready to probe at that.

  I called Jenny again, thinking to leave a ninth message.

  “Yes?” she asked abruptly, whispering.

  “I’m wondering—”

  “Yes. Dinner. Next week?”

  “I’d like that, but let’s also talk now. I’ve got questions about a tattooed Russian man, maybe three.”

  I was expecting a laugh, as a mask, but what I got was a curt “Can’t talk” before she hung up.

  It might have been nothing; it might have been more.

  I sat down in the La-Z-Boy to watch a Chicago news show and promptly fell asleep. I didn’t wake up until after eleven. I was famished. I slipped into my peacoat and went out. Even though it was late, the night was unseasonably warm. The last of the drab dirty snow had melted, revealing a drab brown tinged green by the sickly yellow of my outdoor lamp. The glory of spring was on its way.

  A drive to the Hamburgers was in order. A late-night, venerable fast food location on Thompson Avenue, it routinely changed owners and offerings, from hot dogs to Chinese, tacos, southern barbecue, and even once to fried fish, though images of things snagged whiskered and weeping from the Willahock killed that incarnation even quicker than the others. Never, though, had any of the owners been confident enough to gamble good money on a new rooftop sign, and so the place remained the Hamburgers.

  Leo would be fine company, if he were home. He’d be up for grease and whatever laughs might be needed to settle unsettled thoughts about what was going down in Rivertown.

  I’d just turned onto his block when a tiny white light flickered in a window next door to the excavation. There was no power in the empty bungalow. Someone was inside.

  I drove on. A lamp was on in Leo’s front room, but there were no reflected images from the big-screen television. Ma and her friends must have been putting in bingo time at the church to salve their consciences about the movies that were soon to be flaring up again.

  I edged forward a little to see down the gangway. There were no lights coming from Leo’s basement office either. He must have been at Endora’s, putting in bingo time of a different nature.

  I continued to the end of the block, bothered by the flicker I’d seen in the empty bungalow. I was bothered, too, by Jenny’s abruptness on the phone.

  I turned the corners. Sure enough, Jenny had parked on the next block over. I parked twenty feet behind and got out, pulling up the collar of my peacoat, tugging down my watch cap, and looking, I supposed, like a thug out for an evening stroll.

  I continued around the block to the excavation and ducked behind a stack of extra forms that hadn’t been needed for the still-unpoured basement walls. After a moment, I snuck a look at the bedroom window across the hole. No tiny white light flickered from it now.

  What I’d seen might have been a faint reflection of my own headlights or a lamp in a house nearby. I decided to give it ten minutes before taking my misfiring, suspicious mind down to the Hamburgers and feeding it something besides unfounded fantasies.

  I only had to wait for half of those ten minutes before a van coasted silently to the curb, fifteen feet from where I was hiding. It had pulled up like a ghost ship, without headlamps or even brake lamps. Somebody had worked to make it run invisibly in the dark.

  A door creaked open, and another, and then both were softly closed. Another set of doors opened. I eased up to look around the pile of forms. Two figures, one tall, one shorter, stood at the back of the van, silently sliding out an aluminum extension ladder. They carried it to the edge of the excavation and set it down gently. The shorter of them hurried back to the van and returned with a long-handled shovel and laid it next to the ladder. Both then walked back to the van and, together, tugged something out of the back.

  It looked like a roll of carpet, wrapped in plastic. They each took an end and began lugging it to the excavation. By the way they struggled, it was heavier than carpet.

  A woman’s voice softly counted out, “One, two, three,” and they heaved the bundle into the hole. It hit the gravel with a soft thud.

  And perhaps a last gasp of outrage, though that was likely my imagination.

  I tucked back behind the forms. They’d see me if they looked around.

  The soft creak of aluminum against aluminum came next, as the ladder was extended past the forms. It ratt
led as it was set down into the hole and hard-soled boots began climbing down.

  “Hurry, damn it,” the counting voice called softly. I’d heard that voice before.

  From down in the hole came the faint sound of metal scraping at stones. I’d made those same sounds, the night I buried Wozanga. The person in the hole began grunting as the digging got harder, into the frozen clay. Several times the shovel clanked against rocks, and finally the person in the hole swore at the noise. I was sure of his voice, too.

  Then, in less time than I’d taken, the sound of gravel being shoveled came again as the hole was being covered up. He’d not dug as deep.

  Footfalls climbed the ladder. It was pulled from the hole. They took it to the van, and slid it inside. The woman hurried back for the shovel and put it in the van, and they were gone. Only at the corner did they switch on their headlights.

  I stayed low, waiting. Less than a minute later, footsteps hurried down the front steps of the bungalow next door, growing louder as the woman’s shape came toward me. It could only be Jenny.

  She stopped at the far side of the hole. Bright light from her video camera flashed into the excavation for an instant, and then she was done. She hurried down the block.

  It was no time for a reunion. I waited until she got to the haze of light at the corner before I straightened up. I’d let her drive away before I headed to the Jeep.

  She disappeared around the corner, and I stepped onto the sidewalk … and froze. A man had emerged from between two parked cars and was following Jenny from the street. He, too, was backlit by the streetlamp when he got to the corner. He wore a fedora. Few men wore them anymore. Except for two, outside the Rivertown Health Center.

  I moved into the street, staying low and close to the cars like he was doing. He turned at the corner, toward where Jenny had parked her Prius.

  I got there just as lights flashed briefly halfway up the block. Jenny was in the street, using a remote to unlock her car.

  He was beside her in an instant. She stiffened. I could only stop, three cars behind them.

  He reached around her, opened the driver’s door, and pushed her into the bright light of the interior. He gestured with something in his left hand; no doubt he had a gun. She scrambled onto the passenger’s seat, and he got in behind the wheel. The interior went dark.

  I was only fifteen feet away but would be powerless against a gun.

  He switched on the headlights. The Prius moved silently from the curb.

  I slipped into the Jeep, waited until they got to the next corner, and started my engine.

  Fifty-eight

  I ran without lights, two blocks behind, as they drove east through the bungalow neighborhoods. Then, abruptly, they turned onto the dark old road that led to the factory district.

  Old-timers at the health center still talked about how that narrow old road used to jam up tight with factory workers, three shifts, six days a week. They said the big-ton stamping and molding presses used to pound the road so hard that cars shook clear up through their steering wheels, and a man couldn’t hold his beer right until he’d been home fifteen minutes and the shakes went away.

  No more. Now it was pitch black nighttimes, because there was no sense replacing burned-out bulbs on a road that went nowhere. The asphalt had crumbled, giving in to years of the brown husks of weeds, some as tall as late-summer corn, that ran in arrogant abundance down the center of that nowhere road. Mr. Black, or Mr. Red, pushed Jenny’s headlamps through them like he was bulldozing used-up crops, filling the night with the gunshot sounds of dry stalks snapping fast beneath the Prius’s front bumper.

  Only a killer would have need for such a road.

  The Prius flashed its brake lights, lighting the night red. I cut my engine and coasted to a stop a hundred yards behind, careful not to tap out any red of my own.

  He’d stopped in front of the old wood bridge crossing a bend in the Willahock and switched off the headlamps. The Prius faded into the darkness, and for an instant, the night went silent. It was March; it was cold.

  The Prius’s interior light snapped on as the passenger door flew open. Jenny lunged out of the car, hugging something. A gunshot sounded loud as the man in the fedora fired through her open door. She disappeared into the darkness. Running, or down.

  Mr. Black, or Mr. Red, twisted toward his door, to get out and finish his kill.

  I turned the key and gunned the Jeep forward, switching on my high beams.

  He rolled out of the Prius, throwing up his left arm to shield his eyes, and raised his gun with his right to fire into the blinding light.

  He was too slow. My bumper hit his knees, slamming him back against the Prius’s open door. He went down like the dry stalks he’d just mowed over. I threw the Jeep into reverse, spinning my wheels backward to see how bad I’d hit him.

  He was flat on his back, unmoving in the light of my headlamps. Blood ran from his nostrils, gashes on both arms, and one leg. His gun arm was extended at crazy angles, broken at least twice. His automatic had flown out of his hand and lay on the crumbled asphalt a yard away. He was Mr. Black, the man who’d dropped me with one punch at the health center. I killed my engine, but left my lights on, and got out.

  “Jenny!” I yelled into the night.

  A twig snapped past the shoulder of the road, and she came up on skittish legs to stand trembling beside me. “Is he … is…?”

  I kicked his gun well off the road and knelt to feel his neck. There was a pulse. It was faint. He might live.

  He might wake up.

  “Let’s get to the Jeep,” I said, straightening up.

  “I have to find my camera.”

  “In a minute.” I grabbed her arm and tugged her to the Jeep.

  “The camera’s all I have,” she said.

  I fished behind the seat for a roll of silver tape, grateful that every financially challenged Jeep owner must carry at least one, for those moments when previously taped tears in the vinyl roof open up to greet the sun. Or more usually, the rain.

  “The key’s in the ignition,” I said, bringing out the roll. “Take off if he wakes up.”

  “I threw it down the bank,” she said, making no move to get behind the wheel.

  “So someone would find it, after you were found dead?”

  “Brilliant, right?” Her voice was shaky, no matter the cool of her words.

  “Let me take care of Mr. Black, then we’ll look.”

  The Russian still lay motionless, but broken arm or not, I figured him for having more in killer instinct than I had in ingenuity. I worked feverishly, winding tape from his good wrist up to his neck for a once-around, then down to finish it off around his broken arm. One yank with either arm would send him to the moon in pain, if it didn’t choke him.

  I taped his ankles together, and his knees. I wrapped his eyes and his mouth, reasoning that if he couldn’t see and couldn’t yell, he wouldn’t try to hobble off, and he’d stay put long enough for the sheriff to get there. When I was done, I did it all again, until I’d trussed him into something that looked mummified in shiny silver linen. By then, I’d run out of rational. I walked back to the Jeep only when I ran out of tape.

  I took out my cell phone to call the sheriff.

  “They’ll be here any minute,” she said, heading toward the Prius. “I need a flashlight.”

  “Who’ll be here?”

  “The Rivertown police, of course.” She stopped, noticing the look on my face. “Dek, what’s—?”

  “I was at the excavation, too, Jenny. I saw, same as you.”

  “OK; good,” she said, like it was no problem.

  “No, not good. I recognized the bray, Jenny, and I recognized the sister’s voice.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When you called, did you give your name?”

  “Some kid answered. His mouth was full. I told him there was a killer bound up at a bridge on a dark road and hung up.”

  We’d gott
en lucky, at least for a few minutes. Benny Fittle had pulled night duty. He’d have to call somebody. That would take time.

  “They can’t have witnesses, Jenny. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  She stared at me for a moment, wanting to ask a hundred questions, but then she ran toward the Prius. “Not without the camera,” she yelled.

  She grabbed a flashlight from the glove box and disappeared down the embankment.

  The road toward town was still black, but they wouldn’t come with their lights on.

  Please, Benny Fittle: Be confused. Be slow to call.

  I ran after her. By now, she was halfway down the embankment, moving her flashlight beam side to side through the weeds.

  She stopped. The camera lay on the mud, five feet from the ice at the edge of the river. It was small, almost pocket sized, and I was surprised she’d found it.

  The bank of the Willahock was still dotted with slippery splotches of frozen snow, and it took too many minutes to reach the camera. It was light and didn’t rattle when I picked it up.

  She turned to look up toward the road. “No one’s coming.”

  “They won’t use their headlamps.”

  “No witnesses?” she asked, suddenly shivering.

  “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  We scrambled up the embankment.

  Mr. Black lay immobile. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing, decided it didn’t much matter.

  “Your fingerprints are on the silver tape,” she said, looking at him.

  “They might not worry about that,” I said, thinking of the speedy digging job earlier, at the excavation.