A Safe Place for Dying

by Jack Fredrickson

  “Does all this mean you won’t marry me?”

  “It means I wanted you to see how I must live before you ask.”

  “We’re so different, Amanda.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Of course.”

  She hadn’t bought dessert. We didn’t notice.

  That was in March of last year. Every day, when I think of that evening, it cuts like it happened yesterday.

  Back at the turret, I called the Bohemian before I got out of the Jeep.

  “You’ve got an enemy,” I said. “I just met with the document examiner. The envelope is common, available everywhere, and was computer-addressed with the kind of printer that can be found in every public library. There are no fingerprints on the note, the paper is old, and the lettering looks controlled, not the work of a quick scam artist firing off a false threat.”

  “Thank you, Vlodek,” he said too quickly.

  “Not so fast. A handwritten note makes no sense when your man obviously had access to a computer. It would have been much safer for him to type the letter on the computer as well, not chance leaving fingerprints or other clues. You need the police to puzzle through his motivation for using a handwritten letter.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement,” he said, in a flat tone that meant he would do no such thing. “Send me a report.”

  “You should take the police a list of anyone who might wish to harm Crystal Waters.”

  He sighed. “I can think of no one, and everyone.”

  “Let’s start with everyone.”

  “People who wish harm to Crystal Waters?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pull out the phone book, Vlodek. List everyone who has lost a job, add those who are just barely getting by, along with those who resent wealthy people because they think they never lift a finger. Add in anyone else who feels envy, and for good measure, stir in those people with mental problems and those who hear voices from outer space. Are you understanding this?”

  “Sure, we’re still with every name in the phone book. Let’s narrow it down to people who are familiar with Crystal Waters and who need money.”

  He paused and then said softly, “Like you?”

  It stopped me because he was right. We were looking for people like me.

  “People other than me,” I said. “Like caretakers, contractors, service workers, landscapers, anyone who had access to Crystal Waters recently, anybody who could have gotten close enough to the Farraday house to plant a bomb.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to begin such a list,” he said.

  “My point exactly. That’s why you need the police.”

  “It’s premature.”

  “What about the guards? Are any of them recent hires?”

  “I’ll check with Stanley.”

  “What about the Members? How many of them need money?”

  “I would imagine all of them, given the recent fluctuations in the financial markets. But fifty thousand? Somebody who will risk planting a bomb to extort fifty thousand dollars? I think those Members who are in dire need of cash require a hell of a lot more than fifty thousand. I think you can eliminate the Members from your list, Vlodek.”

  Maybe he didn’t mean it to, but it came across arrogant. “Fifty thousand is a lot of money to most people.”

  “Of course it is, but don’t let us forget that our letter writer never followed up to collect.”

  “All the more reason to look for an amateur, someone who got cold feet and couldn’t follow through with another letter.”

  “It’s not a Member, Vlodek.”

  “Then you’re back to the phone book, and for that you need the police.”

  “The letter either was written by someone harmless or was meant to confuse the Farraday investigation.”

  “So you’ll do nothing?”

  “I will be very deliberate regarding the next step, Vlodek. Please, send me a report.”

  I gave it up because there was nothing else to say. I hung up and went into the crumbling tube I call home, past the table saw, the plastic chairs, and the buckets of roof patch that so far hadn’t done much to keep out the rain. I went up the flaking, rusted metal stairs to the second floor, sat at the ancient card table, and turned on the six-year-old computer that was all that was left of my business. I supposed the Bohemian was right about everything being a matter of perspective. Fifty thousand was chump change to the Members of Gateville, but it would be enough to transform a lot of what was wrong in my life.

  I typed a full-page summary of Leo’s findings about the envelope and the letter and ended it with my recommendation, in capital letters, that the Bohemian take the note to the police immediately, so that they could begin compiling a list of suspects from everyone who had recent contact with Gateville. I printed my report, called a same-day messenger service, and told the girl who answered that I wanted something delivered and signed for that morning. I started to yell when she told me they might not get to it until that afternoon, but then apologized. She sounded nice, like someone to whom fifty thousand dollars would have mattered.

  I shut off my computer and stared at the dark glass screen. It was a document job, I told my reflection. I’d done what I was supposed to do.

  Four

  I live in a limestone turret because my grandfather was a bootlegger. There are other reasons—a courtroom scandal, a tanked business, a vaporized marriage—but it remains that, were it not for my grandfather, dead decades before I was born, I might still be tiptoeing around the fragrant puddles on the upper floors of the Rivertown Health Center.

  My grandfather would have insisted he be called a brewmeister, because that’s how he apprenticed in Bohemia, but there were no brewmeisters in America in the twenties. Prohibition had made them all outlaws. Bootleggers.

  As bootleggers went in those days, he was small time. He worked out of a dozen garages in Rivertown, brewing pilsner the right way for the Czechs and the other Slavs who lived on Chicago’s west side. Family lore had it that some weeks he made money, other weeks he lost. It depended on how often his operations got trashed by the police or his bigger competitors. He had more bad weeks than good, though, and died broke, of a heart attack, in 1930. But not without marking me. I would get his first name, Vlodek, and I would get the beginnings of his castle.

  In the spring of 1929, six months before the stock market crashed, the illicit, big vat brewers and whiskey runners in Chicago started killing each other in a vicious series of gang wars. The police weren’t particularly distressed, viewing the wars as a kind of weeding, but they had to make a show of trying to stop it. For months, with the outfits and the cops so occupied, no one had time to raid my grandfather, and he enjoyed a season of unrivaled prosperity. He must have thought it was going to rain money forever. Because, flush for the first time, he did what anyone with too much money and a lunatic sense of grandeur would do: He began building a castle on the bank of the Willahock River in Rivertown. He had grand plans and bought a pile of limestone big enough for twenty rooms, four-foot-thick walls, and a five-story turret at each corner.

  But within weeks of the delivery of his small mountain of limestone, the gangs reached an accommodation, and they and the cops slipped back into their old, comfortable routines of preying on tiny rivals like my grandfather instead of each other. And the money quit raining. My grandfather got only one turret and a small wood storage shed built before he died, broke, a year later.

  My grandmother tried to sell the turret, the shed behind it, and the pile of limestone, but the Great Depression was in full fire by then, and the demand for limestone, let alone single turrets and medieval dreams, was nonexistent. The turret and the heap of blocks sat neglected until the end of World War II, when the city fathers of Rivertown, as slimy a bunch of lizards as had ever scuttled down a dark alley, raised up their heads and sniffed the coming of postwar prosperity. They would need a proper city hall from which to dispense building p
ermits and accept donations and appreciations. And so it went. They condemned my grandmother’s pile of stone and the two acres on which it sat and built a four-story limestone city hall of magnificent executive offices and tiny public rooms, all set on terraced stonework leading down to the Willahock River.

  They hadn’t wanted the rat-infested turret a hundred yards away, with its skinny windows, nor its rickety storage shed, and they sat empty for another six decades as ownership passed from my grandmother to my uncle and then to his widow, my aunt. Each tried to sell it, but always, the fees for clearing an old title clouded with murky, vague city liens were more than the property was worth. My aunt, in a last act of maternal protection, left the property not to her own four children but to me, her least favorite nephew.

  In my right mind, I would have viewed the inheritance the way the owner of white carpeting sees the arrival of a St. Bernard suffering intestinal distress. But I was broke, exiting a ruined business and a failed marriage, and I needed a place to live. Of such is born delusion. I figured I could fix up the turret, clear the title, and sell it for a tidy profit, to get a grubstake for a new life.

  I was full of new optimism, that day after Halloween, as I walked across the grass from the turret to city hall to get an occupancy permit. It had been less than a month since I’d met with Amanda’s lawyers and the Bohemian to dissolve my marriage, but it was a new day, a sunny day, bright and warm.

  “How long you been gone?” the building commissioner asked. His name was Elvis, and I remembered him from high school. He’d been the mayor’s nephew. He’d slathered lots of Vaseline on his hair back then, and I used to wonder if a fly landing on his head could free itself before it dissolved. Now, it appeared he enjoyed hair spray, scented sweet, like coconuts. His hairline was in full retreat, but what was left, halfway back on his head, was sprayed straight up, like a little wall meant to hide the patch of shiny skin behind.

  “Since high school, Elvis. I lived in the city while I went to college, stayed there when I got a job.”

  “Heard about your job.” He smirked with his mouth open so I could admire his bad teeth.

  “I was cleared.”

  “Put your ass out of business, I heard. Got you throwed out of Gateville, too.”

  A month earlier, I would have gotten in his face. Now, though, I was showering at the Rivertown Health Center while standing in what I hoped was just water. I needed the occupancy permit.

  “Damned right,” I smiled. “I prayed I could be returned to my own kind.”

  The top of his head glowed crimson all the way back to the hair wall, quicker than he could think. Instinct must have told him there’d been an insult, but the words had come too fast to process. He bent over the counter, head still glowing, and began filling out a form. When he was done, he hit it with a rubber stamp and pushed the permit across the counter.

  I looked down. He’d stamped “Historic” in red ink at the bottom. “What’s this?”

  “Your property is a historical. No changes.” He laid a dirty fingernail on a tiny drawing in the upper right corner of the permit.

  It was a rendering of the turret. The City of Rivertown was using my turret as its symbol.

  “What do you mean, no changes?”

  “Check with us before you do anything, so’s you don’t spoil the integrity of the structure and we make you rip out what you done.”

  “I want to make it into a residence.”

  He shook his head. “No can do, even if it wasn’t a historical. It’s zoned municipal.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Mean’s the property’s only approved for city buildings.”

  “I know what municipal zoning is. I meant, how can private property be zoned only for public buildings?”

  “Your aunt approved it after she took sick.” The corners of his mouth twitched; something funny had penetrated his consciousness.

  “Why the hell would she do that?”

  “Might have been because of us waiving sixty years’ worth of unpaid taxes and penalties. Municipal property don’t pay tax, so there’d be no liens against her estate.” He showed me his bad teeth again, in the kind of feral grin hyenas give to fresh meat. “You been away a long time.”

  “Does this mean I can’t live there?” I was struggling to maintain an even tone.

  “It’s a municipal. Still, I suppose I could give you a temporary exception, so’s you can repair the place and all.” He batted his eyelashes like a virgin bride, dropped his head, and started making a notation on the permit. He wrote slowly, giving me time to fish in my pocket for a fifty to express my gratitude.

  I didn’t have the fifty. Nor the gratitude.

  He finished writing. I scooped up the permit before he noticed I wasn’t flashing any green and started for the door.

  “Hey!”

  I stopped and turned.

  Elvis had his index finger in the air. “Just you can live there, and only to fix up the place on the inside. No wives,” he snickered, “no girlfriends. I catch wind of anybody else living there, you’re gone.”

  I went out quickly, before I got stupid. Like the movie cop said, a man’s got to know his limitations, and mine were screaming to be let loose, all over Elvis’s oily head.

  The next afternoon, I saw a zoning lawyer who told me, for a billable hour, that I’d been away a long time. Rivertown was under new management, he said. Grandson and granddaughter lizards had taken over, and the new lizards were college educated, not to be satisfied with small-change pimp and pinball money. They wanted Mercedeses, not Cadillacs, and for that they needed condominium developers with big, greasy wads of building application and zoning variance cash. But to get those developers, they first had to shake off the old Rivertown tank-city image of wet-floor bars, gambling houses, and strip joints. So they hired consultants who came up with a marketing campaign. Rivertown Renaissance, they called it. To kick it off, they chose the turret—my turret—as the symbol of the rebirth of the town. They put it on the town’s stationery, police cars, fire trucks, and municipal Dumpsters. They even put it on the portable toilets in the town’s one park.

  I could fight, the attorney said, but that would take money I didn’t have. Since I’d already moved in, he recommended I rehab cautiously on the inside and, when I could afford his three hundred an hour, take the City of Rivertown to court to change the turret’s zoning into something I could sell. Until then, he suggested I keep a low profile. Don’t provoke.

  My hour expired. I left the lawyer’s office mumbling to myself. The dominoes of my life were still tipping over.

  In the beginning, it wasn’t difficult to follow the lawyer’s advice. As November changed into winter, I had more pressing things than a zoning conversion to worry about. Like heat. I got a small personal loan at the bank, bought pipes, electrical conduit, and wiring—and three space heaters—and spent the winter clearing out seventy years’ worth of pigeon droppings and squirrel carcasses and repairing the rudimentary plumbing and wiring my grandfather had installed. With a used microwave oven and plastic washtub sink, the turret, with its bad roof, had all the comforts of camping out in an abandoned house, but as I reminded myself on an almost hourly basis, at least I was not at the health center. The zoning lawyer would have been pleased; through that winter and spring and into the summer, my profile was lower than a garden snake’s.

  Late one afternoon, I was on top of the turret, leaning against the stone wall that rose five feet above the roof, arguing with Elvis. A long week had passed since I’d messengered my report to the Bohemian, and I’d stayed busy by calling every roofer in the yellow pages and trying to convince myself that the Bohemian was right in not going to the cops.

  Elvis had seen the roofers’ trucks coming by all week, and each time one pulled away, he came blustering over to make sure I wasn’t violating any of his rules.

  “A membrane roof is a big rubber sheet,” I said for the fourth or fifth time. I kicked at the loose stone
pebbles on my roof. “It won’t leak like this tar and gravel. Besides, this wall hides it. I could put a pink roof on, and you’d never know.”

  “I’d know.” Elvis touched a large dark red pimple on the tip of his nose. “I’d know.”

  “You saw the buckets downstairs. This place leaks.”

  “I’d know.”

  The loving way he was fondling the zit was mesmerizing.

  “I’d know,” he said again.

  “What?” Engrossed by the way he was caressing his apple red nose, I’d lost the thread of what he was saying.

  “If you were putting a pink roof on this place,” he said.

  I’d paused, searching for the right one-syllable words, when my cell phone rang. A crisp British voice introduced herself as the Bohemian’s secretary and said, “Mr. Chernek requests that you go to Crystal Waters immediately. Mr. Novak will be outside the front gate.”

  My heart started banging like an old pump. “What’s this about?” I shouted into the phone.

  “Please go there, Mr. Elstrom. Immediately.” She hung up.

  Elvis’s lips were working under his inflamed nose, but I couldn’t hear his words. Guilt had shut down my sound as my mind raced. Thirty pieces of silver, three grand; I’d been Judas. I’d sold out, hadn’t forced the Bohemian and Stanley Novak to go to the cops. For money, for a roof. Jesus. Now there’d been another bomb, and maybe somebody had died.

  I hustled the startled Elvis down the five flights, mumbling something about a family emergency, jumped in the Jeep, and aimed it west.

  I couldn’t risk getting stuck in the trucks clogging Thompson Avenue; I ran the stop signs on the side streets, past the bungalows and the dark shells of the abandoned factories, and shot back onto Thompson Avenue by the Fronts at the outskirts of Riverton, where the highway widens to four lanes. I raced along the highway, swerving around the slow-moving trucks, dodging the occasional car pulling out of one of the long driveways. Cars horns blared; drivers fumbled to lower their windows to scream at my recklessness. I didn’t care. I was Judas, and now people had died.