A Safe Place for Dying

by Jack Fredrickson

  I followed Leo down the stairs and through the basement, past the broken Exercycle, the train set on plywood I’d helped him put together in seventh grade, and the decorated three-foot artificial Christmas tree they shook off and put on the T.V. every December. We went into the space Leo had walled off under the living room for an office.

  There was no door, and he’d never gotten around to priming the drywall or putting tile or carpet on the bare concrete floor. Equipment—magnifiers, three tall gray file cabinets, a light table—took up every available inch. Nothing was out of place. It was all pure Leo: functional and without a nod to aesthetics. Just like his shiny Hawaiian shirts.

  He went behind the scarred, beat-up wood desk he’d found in the alley, sat backward on the listing chair, and wrapped his thin arms around its slatted back like he was hugging it for warmth. I dropped into the sprung green overstuffed chair that must have felt fine under Leo’s bony one hundred and forty pounds but always made me feel like I was bungee jumping.

  On the wall above the light table, shiny photographic enlargements of the Gateville envelope and letter were clipped to a metal holder next to an old poster of a wet but excited Bo Derek.

  “Sorry about taking two days, but I wanted a friend of mine at the I.R.S. forensic lab downtown to take a look.” Leo’s heels started beating a light riff on the cement floor. When Leo is on to something, his feet tap, and his fingers stretch and curl, probing for anything they can pick up. Today he twirled a yellow wood pencil between his fingers.

  He pointed the eraser end at the blowup of the white envelope. “There’s nothing remarkable about that; millions like it are sold in stationery stores and discount places. It’s got a self-adhesive flap, so I doubt there’s potential for saliva D.N.A. It’s postmarked at the main Chicago post office, and so it has plenty of fingerprints, none of which will help us. It was addressed recently with an ink-jet printer, probably a Canon, the kind that’s in every public library.”

  “No typewriter with a raised, cracked e?” I said, doing my growl of Humphrey Bogart doing his growl of Philip Marlowe.

  Leo’s eyebrows crawled up into a tired black arch. “Must I suffer your mimicry?”

  “Forgive me, schweetheart. What about the note?”

  “Much more interesting. Pencil lettering, done with a ruler to disguise the writer’s hand as you suspected. And of course, the paper is from a kid’s tablet, old stock.”

  “Old stock?”

  “The manufacturer discontinued this particular paper twenty years ago.”

  “You’re saying the note was written a long time ago?”

  “That I can’t tell.” He opened a desk drawer, rummaged inside, and pulled out a spiral-bound notepad with a school crest. He fanned the pages to a blank sheet in back. “This paper is old, too. I’ve had it since college. Means nothing; lots of people have old paper lying around. As for the lettering …” He shook his head. “I can’t tell its age. Pencil lead doesn’t change much with time.”

  I pointed at the enlargement of the note on the wall. “Fingerprints?”

  “None.”

  “So nothing can be learned.”

  “Not so fast, Holmes.” His wide lips split into a grin. “To begin with, the lettering is precise, but also the color is consistent on every character. A ruler can help that, but the pencil pressure still had to be controlled throughout.” He stood up, went to the blowup, and used the pencil eraser to draw an imaginary line under the words. “See the evenness of color? Nice and consistent. No urgency, no anxiety. If this had been written by some nut as a quick scam, one might expect evidence of agitation: uneven color, a trailing line, a missed connection between two lines, or any of a number of other things that would suggest haste. But this is precise and controlled. Your letter writer is serious.”

  “Or he’s a shakedown artist on Valium. What else?”

  Leo came back to sit behind the desk. The smile was gone. “Why hand-print the letter at all? Why not type it on the library computer, or wherever, when he did the envelope? Why fool with a pencil and ruler to write the words and risk finger or palm prints?”

  I thought for a minute, came up with nothing.

  “It’s a huge clue,” Leo went on, tapping again with the yellow pencil, “but we’re not smart enough to figure it. This needs to go to the police.”

  “The Bohemian thinks the problem’s over. If the letter’s not from a nut, it was a ruse to keep the focus off the Farradays, and they’re gone.”

  “How fortunate for the Farradays,” Leo said, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

  “No, I don’t think the Bohemian hung them out to dry. He said he showed Farraday the note, let him decide whether it should go to the cops. He said Farraday declined.”

  Leo shook his head. “Somebody’s got to take this to the cops.”

  “The Bohemian won’t allow it unless he’s convinced the threat still exists. There are twenty-six homes still at Gateville. Figuring conservatively at three million each, that’s seventy-eight million worth of real estate that could become close to worthless overnight.”

  “Including Amanda’s.” Leo watched my face.

  “I need a roof, Leo.” I pushed myself out of the folds of the green chair and picked up Stanley Novak’s tan envelope off the desk. “As for Amanda, sure, I want her house to keep its value. Nobody takes a three-million-dollar whack easily.”

  “You betcha,” he said, standing up.

  We went up the stairs. On television, Ma was watching a deeply tanned woman wearing a white towel say something to a deeply tanned man wearing a white towel. It’s always nice when people with similar interests find each other.

  Leo opened the front door. “Will the Bohemian listen to you?” he asked as I stepped out.

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’d better. He’s got to call the police,” he said through the screen.

  I checked my phone for messages as I pulled away from Leo’s. Amanda had returned my call a half hour earlier and had left an international phone number. I swung back to the curb, shut off the engine, and called. She answered right away. It was a lousy connection, but there was no missing the wariness in her voice. It was the third time we’d spoken since our divorce. The two earlier times had been the previous October. I’d been drunk.

  “I’m not pickled this time, but I’m going to sound just as foolish.”

  In the background, I could hear cars and trucks, and people shouting in another language.

  “Amanda, where are you?”

  “Paris, in a little café across the Seine from the Louvre, drinking American coffee from a yellow cup on an orange saucer.”

  The tight spot in my neck relaxed. She was nowhere near Gateville.

  “What time is it there?” It was all I could think of to say.

  “Just past five in the afternoon. Dek, are you all right?”

  “Are you going to be over there long?” I asked, counting on the background noise to make my question sound casual.

  “Through the fall. I’m doing an art history book for middle schoolers. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Is your business coming back?”

  “Slowly. You know lawyers, cautious as mice. I sent them all copies of the exoneration story in the Trib. It was two paragraphs long. You’re sure you’ll be away for a while?”

  “Yes.” She paused, waiting. She was tensed, afraid I’d suggest I come to Paris.

  When I asked a couple of quick questions about her book project instead, the relief in her voice was louder than our words. We filled another minute talking about the crowds of summer tourists, and then she asked, “What were you going to say?”

  “What?”

  “You said you were going to say something that would sound foolish.”

  “I did? That was foolish. I just called to hear how you are. Paris for the summer sounds great. I’ve got to run.” I clicked off. There was no need to fumble with an explanatio
n of why she should stay away from Gateville; she was going to be safe in Paris. Still, I wouldn’t have minded talking some more. There were plenty of other foolish things I wanted to say.

  It’s the little stuff that haunts. The sound of her laughter, as it made something I’d said sound wittier that it was, or the way the burgundy highlights in her dark hair caught the fire of the sun. Little stuff, that comes at me in the middle of the night.

  I first saw her on an unseasonably balmy February evening the year before. Chicago weather does sometimes, tosses out a lily of a springlike day in the middle of winter to lull everybody before burying them in a ton of snow in April. That night, the false spring made the walls of my tiny condo so tight they almost touched. I’d gone outside and walked west, restless, to Michigan Avenue.

  She was standing just inside one of the small art galleries, a beige trench coat draped over her arm, frowning at an oil painting on the wall. She was about my age but wore it better. She had short, dark hair, a pale complexion, and lips that looked like they could offer salvation.

  She must have felt my eyes. She turned, smiled, pointed at the oil on the wall, and surprised me by motioning me to come in. I did, not pausing to wonder why she’d beckoned. Opportunity of that sort rarely knocked on my dusty door.

  “What do you think?” she asked, pointing again at the painting she’d been staring at. Her voice was soft, lilting.

  “My taste in art runs to blues festival posters.”

  “Does that prevent you from forming an opinion of other art?” Her brown eyes sparkled mockingly.

  I pretended to study the painting. It was abstract, I supposed; a mess of indeterminate shapes, mostly green.

  “There’s a lot of green,” I offered finally.

  She laughed. “Anything else?”

  I bent closer to the frame. The little card said it was being offered for one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. “It’s obviously very good green.”

  “Actually, it’s not very.”

  “Very what?”

  “Good green. It’s just very expensive.”

  “Do you want to have a drink?”

  She surprised me again. She said yes.

  We drank beer in a dark booth in an empty ersatz Cockney pub on the ground floor of one of the shopping towers. She told me she wrote art history books that were too expensive to sell anywhere but to libraries. That was good enough for her, because of the potential that some kid might pick up a copy and get a switch turned on that would lead to a lifelong interest in art.

  I told her I ran an information service, chased down records and photographs for lawyers and insurance companies. That was good enough for me, because it got me out of Rivertown where most of the art was spray-painted in four-letter words, on the walls of abandoned factories.

  We talked until the Cockneys threw us out at midnight. By then, I’d been enchanted, captivated, bottom-line crazy-in-love for three hours.

  We met the next four times by the bronze lions in front of the Art Institute. She was teaching a class there that semester. We’d walk to one of the small places for dinner and we’d talk. We didn’t do the theater, or the movies, or the clubs. There wasn’t time; we were both in too much of a hurry chasing something we’d each thought had passed us by. And we had too much to say about not much of anything, before we ended up at my condo closet on the lake, where we wouldn’t talk at all.

  I proposed on our fifth date, at a little trattoria three blocks west of Michigan Avenue.

  “I want you to have dinner at my place before I give you my answer,” she said.

  Things froze in my mind then. It had been too fast, too wonderful. She read it on my face.

  She smiled and reached across the red-checked tablecloth to squeeze my hand. “Just have dinner at my house, Saturday night.” And then she told me she lived at Crystal Waters.

  I hadn’t put it together that she came from huge rich. She dressed simply, wore little jewelry, and drove an old Toyota. She’d told me once that she lived west of Chicago, and that had been enough. We were in a hurry, and there were other things to talk about. Or not.

  That Saturday evening, I got off the Eisenhower Expressway at Rivertown. I drove past the houses where I’d lived growing up, past the graffiti-blighted high school, past the abandoned, ruined turret that had been my grandfather’s dream and folly. Rivertown was less than fifteen miles west of my lakeshore condominium, but I hadn’t been back in twenty years.

  I didn’t linger. I took Thompson Avenue out of Rivertown and followed it to where it widened to four lanes and the shallow, cookie-cutter colonials began. Red brick facades, skinny white pillars, little green ribbons of side yards. “Fronts,” people in Rivertown call them, but they say it with envy.

  The money real estate begins a mile farther west. That’s where the houses get big and different from one another, each one set back from the road, framed in its own setting of full, rich trees. Gateville is three miles west of there, six total from Rivertown. But that’s as the birds fly. Measured by money, it’s as far away as the moon.

  A half mile east of Gateville, I drove up the hill that always seemed like it had been put there to give pause before the beauty of the good life down below was revealed. I’d looked at Gateville plenty of times but had never known anyone who lived inside.

  The guard at the gate checked my name on a list, gave me a half salute, and waved me through. As I pulled past the guardhouse, I saw him pick up the phone.

  Amanda was waiting outside her front door. “I’m not here much,” she said as I got out of the car. It sounded like she was apologizing.

  “Quite a house to not live in very much,” I said as we went through the huge walnut double doors. And it was. Beige brick, gray tile roof, three-car garage, and lots of tinted windows around what I later counted to be ten rooms.

  She led me through an unfurnished foyer to the center hall. She bypassed the arched entry to the living room and started the tour in the dining room. It was a bare room, empty of anything except a lone oil portrait of a man’s face hanging on an interior wall, where it couldn’t be seen from the hall. It was a stern face and looked vaguely familiar.

  “This used to be my father’s house,” she said, her voice echoing in the empty room. “He took all his furniture except for the stuff in the living room when he moved to the North Shore.”

  “That was recently?”

  She laughed and led me out to the hall. “No.”

  We walked through to the kitchen. White tile countertops, stainless steel refrigerator, big restaurant-sized stove—and, strangely, a junk-store porcelain-top table and two white-painted chairs. The table had been set with white plastic plates.

  We continued through an unfurnished family room and a cherry study whose built-in bookshelves were crammed with art books but which also had no furniture. We came back to the foyer, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and walked down the hall past four empty bedrooms. At the rear of the house she stopped. “My bedroom, growing up.” It was the smallest of the bedrooms, and the only one that was furnished, with a twin bed, a dresser, a nightstand, and a student desk with a computer. It looked like a room in a college dorm. She cocked her head up at me and smiled. “Any questions at this point in the tour, Dek?”

  I had about a hundred but narrowed them to one. “Why live here?”

  “The answer is downstairs.” We went down to the arched entry off the first-floor hall. Unlike the rest of the rooms on the first floor, the living room was nicely furnished. “Mostly Louis XIV reproductions,” she said of the cream-colored chairs, the tables, and the two settees. “My father left them. He was going for a different look in his new place.”

  She paused in front of a small oil painting hanging above a Chinese lamp on a little table. The oil was of a woman in a long white gown, reading a book. “Pierre-Auguste Renoir,” she said. She turned and pointed to several other small oils, naming artists I’d never heard of. The two-foot bronze of a cowboy, t
hough, I knew was by Remington.

  “You asked why I live in Crystal Waters?” She moved to stand in front of a larger painting, perhaps two feet by three, of water lilies on a placid pond. It hung above the fireplace, in a gilt frame with hexagonal corners. She looked at it for a minute without speaking, as if she were seeing it for the first time. “Claude Monet. It has never been shown publicly.” After another minute, she smiled at me. “If there were ever a fire, I would get the Monet out of the house before I’d call the fire department.”

  She led me to one of the antique white sofas. “These were my grandfather’s favorite pieces. Collectively worth nine point eight million dollars, at last appraisal.”

  I’d been worrying she had money. I hadn’t let myself fear she had that kind of money.

  “Was that your grandfather’s portrait hanging in the dining room?”

  “No. That’s my father. He left it behind when he moved. He said it would remind me he was keeping an eye on me.”

  Then I had it. I’d seen that face in the newspapers. He headed Chicago’s largest electric utility, along with being a big time fund-raiser in Democratic circles.

  “Your father is Wendell Phelps?”

  She nodded. “We don’t get along.”

  Over dinner of bakery baguettes, marinara heated in the jar in the microwave, and undercooked pasta, she filled in the blanks. She was one of eight grandchildren of an enormously wealthy steel magnate. “My share of my grandfather’s estate was just over twelve million. I didn’t want his money; I wanted his art.”

  “So you gave up your share for the pieces in the living room?”

  “And used the rest to buy this house from my father,” she smiled. “Strange?”

  “Not the art part. But I don’t understand why you live here in this big empty house.”

  “Security. Constant surveillance, monitored neighborhood, the gatehouse. It costs every dime of what I make to live here, but it’s the safest place for the art.”