A Safe Place for Dying

by Jack Fredrickson

  I turned off of Belmont into the narrow side alley next to Ann Sather’s. It led back to a parking lot. All the spaces were taken, and several cars filled with spaghetti-string tops, purple makeup, and hormones were circling, so I threaded past them and out the main alley that ran parallel behind the restaurant. I had to drive a mile west before I found a spot in front of a used furniture store. The proprietor, no fool he, had put a hand-lettered sign on an aluminum lawn chair in the window: AND ANTIQUES. I walked back east into the crowds tightening along the sidewalks.

  Ann Sather’s Swedish Diner looked like any of the blue-plate restaurants that dot Chicago’s older neighborhoods, the kind of place that always has good meat loaf. It had a pale brick front with full windows facing the sidewalk, offering views of people in booths miming various levels of table etiquette.

  I went in. Thirty people, waiting for tables, pressed around a glass case filled with cinnamon buns and loaves of fresh-baked bread, talking loudly to be heard above the clatter of plates and metal silverware. Every few seconds, the window-aisle waitress, who looked like she ate there for free, cut through the throng like Moses parting the waters, balancing plates of omelets and thick-cut potatoes.

  I made my way into the long dining room. The back exit wasn’t visible, which meant it was normally accessible only to employees. That, and the window card saying the restaurant was closed Sunday night, ruled out the possibility that the extortionist, posing as a patron, was planning to snatch the money from the Dumpster and come back through the diner to escape out the front.

  I went back to the foyer and looked in the glass case. For camouflage, I bought a dozen cinnamon buns in a blue and yellow box, the colors of the Swedish flag. It was necessary that I look like a day shopper, and the expense might be tax deductible. Compelling reasons like those don’t come along every day. I tucked the receipt in my wallet and took the buns outside.

  I walked around back, taking out a cinnamon bun to activate my disguise. The bun was moist, fresh, nothing like the varnished, petrified, pseudo-cinnamon horrors sold at shopping malls and toll road plazas. I ate the bun slowly, a guy killing time, eating a lard pill, waiting for his wife. My favorite cover.

  The small blue Dumpster where Stanley would drop the money the next night was just outside the back door of the restaurant. It looked like it would hold ten garbage bags. I took another bite of the cinnamon bun and let the last bit fall from my hand. I bent to pick it up, opened the hinged Dumpster lid, and tossed it in. There was one white plastic bag of garbage inside the Dumpster.

  To maintain my cover, I ate another cinnamon bun as I scanned the backs of the buildings lining the main alley. All were classic Chicago four-flats, yellow-brown brick, with latticeworks of graypainted wood stairs hung on their backs like external vertebrae. Any of those buildings would offer a safe, hidden view of the Dumpster the next night.

  I walked down the long back alley, turned the corner, and went around to the parallel street behind Belmont, the one fronting the four-flats. I was looking for an apartment for rent, a place I could put down a deposit to get a key, but there were no signs in the windows. At the end of the block I turned left and came back up the alley from the other end, almost full circle. And got saved.

  An old woman in a faded beige housedress was hanging clothes on a line in one of the tiny backyards. I stopped at her chain-link gate.

  “Do you know of any apartments for rent around here?”

  She had four wood clothespins in her mouth. She shook her head.

  “How about garages?”

  The wet blue towel she was raising to the line went still. The clothespins came out of her mouth.

  “Yah,” she said in a heavy Polish accent. “Mine.”

  She dropped the towel into her basket and motioned me to come through the gate. She met me at the service door to the garage, pushed it open, and stepped aside.

  I went in.

  There was just enough light coming from the dirty side window to see. The cement slab was cracked into a dozen pieces, and the wood smelled damp from mildew and rot. I felt the wall along the side door for a light switch.

  “No electric,” she said from outside.

  I walked across the broken slab to the side window, took a quick casual look, and went on to the overhead door. The big door was swelled shut, probably from the rot I smelled. I jiggled it loose enough to muscle it up, as if I cared that it worked. I’d already seen what I wanted. The side window had an unobstructed view of the Dumpster behind Ann Sather’s.

  “How much?”

  “Tree hunnert.” Her dentures clicked.

  When a neighborhood is in play, when the developers come and start bidding everything up, garage rents are among the first to rise. Forget the faded housedress and fractured English; this babushka had her ear to the ground.

  “I just want one stall.”

  “Tree hunnert, cash.”

  “I’ll give you one seventy-five.”

  She shook her head. “Tree hunnert.”

  “Two hundred cash.” It was all I was packing.

  “Two fifty, plus two fifty security. Five hunnert, up front.”

  I pulled down the overhead door and walked across the cracked concrete. The hinges of the service door wiggled in the spongy door jam as I started to close it. “Two hundred cash, no security,” I said as I stepped out.

  She nodded, put the clothespins back in her mouth, and extended her hand, palm up.

  I gave her four fifties. It was all transacted Chicago style: no lease, no signed receipt. The money disappeared into the pocket of her faded housedress. We were done.

  From the Jeep, I called Endora, Leo’s girlfriend, at the Newberry Library. She usually worked Saturdays.

  “You still driving that little purple ’94 Grand Am?”

  “My lilac-mobile.”

  “Can I borrow it tomorrow night?”

  “Got a date you want to impress, Dek? Some new lovely you don’t want to bounce around in your Jeep?”

  Endora had many interests. Resurrecting my love life was in the middle of her list.

  “No. I need your car for surveillance.”

  “No problem. Listen, there’s a new lady who’s been coming here, doing research for her dissertation. I think she’d be perfect—”

  “Can I just borrow the car?”

  “Leo will switch with you tomorrow.”

  Leo was a lucky man.

  “A stakeout? Isn’t that over your head?” Leo shot the basketball. It arched over the backboard, bounced off the top of a rusty metal upright, and rolled across the crumbled asphalt into the corner of the rusty chain-link fence.

  “I should go to the Feds instead?” I called as I ran to get the ball.

  “No,” he said as I came huffing back. “You rat out your clients, you’re done working for lawyers.”

  “Then what do I do?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s just that if you need a car your own clients won’t recognize, you’ve got a problem.”

  I’d called Leo after I talked to Endora, to arrange to swap cars and to ask him to make a few phone calls. He suggested a workout late Sunday morning at the outdoor basketball court behind Rivertown High School. We’d been shooting bull and hoops there since freshman year, though neither of us had ever learned to drop a basket. A game of horse could run three hours and end scoreless. The workout came from fetching the ball.

  I turned around for my over-the-head backward shot. Leo snickered, but I could hear the fear in it. I rarely dropped such a shot, but when I did, it was a marvel to behold. I leaned back and sighted upside down at the backboard behind me. Some poet had spray-painted EAT SHIT in neon green letters on the gray, flaking plywood. I aimed at the space just to the right of EAT, held my breath, and let the ball fly. It hit the underside of the backboard, banged against the fence, and skittered along a rut toward the far end of the blacktop.

  “Haven’t lost your touch,” Leo yelled, but it was in relie
f. He ran to stop the ball before it rolled into a puddle.

  “People could die,” I said when he came back.

  “And you staking out the drop site will prevent that?” He put the basketball into the small of his back and used it to lean against the rusty fence. A cut from that fence needed a tetanus shot. “Look, I checked around as you asked. Chernek’s lost some clients, and a couple of his analysts have quit, but those things happen when the market takes a tumble. Financial guys get blamed, they lose clients, and the junior associates take off for other pastures.”

  “The Bohemian is hurting for money.”

  Leo wiped his forehead with his T-shirt sleeve. “Like almost everybody, including thousands of brokers. But they’re not going around setting off bombs. Besides, you’ve got a direct link with the bomb that went off in 1970. Same paper for the note, same kind of explosive. Why not concentrate on that?”

  “I don’t like the way the Bohemian’s so willing to fork over half a million dollars to whoever it is. Maybe he doesn’t mind because he’s giving the money to himself.”

  “He’s doing what he’s told. He’s taking his orders from the board of rich people, like you are taking orders from him.”

  “What if the bomber is one of them?”

  “One of who?”

  “One of the Members. I told the Bohemian the bomber could be an insider, a Member.”

  “I’ll bet he loved that.”

  “He brushed it off.”

  “Of course he did.”

  “I don’t like it, Leo. The Bohemian should be looking at everybody as a potential suspect.”

  “He’s doing the obvious, paying off the guy like last time, hoping he’ll go away for another few decades.” Leo shook his head and pushed himself off the fence. “What are you going to do tonight when it’s collection time? Jump out of your garage and yell, ‘Stop, bomber’?”

  “I’m going to take a few pictures. Get the license plate number, maybe follow the car.”

  “What if he spots you? What if he’s got a gun?”

  “I’ll stay well back. The important thing is not the tail, it’s the license plate and the description of the man.”

  Leo stepped in front of the basket and prepared to shoot. “Dek, half the things I see are forgeries. I do my analysis, make my report to the people who hired me, and that’s it. What they do with the information is up to them. Sometimes, a bad piece I’ve examined pops up later at a different house, with a fake attribution. I don’t second-guess my clients, I don’t rat them out, don’t announce they’ve passed off a forgery. I just do what I’m hired to do.”

  “No one dies because of that.”

  Leo aimed the ball and fired. It hit the backboard and dropped onto the metal rim, where it teetered for a full five seconds before, incredibly, wobbling and falling through the hoop.

  “Yes,” Leo shouted, waving his skinny white arms like a scarecrow on speed. “Game called on account of victory.” He snatched the ball before I could grab it, tucked it tight against his stomach like a wide receiver hugging a miracle catch, and started running for the opening in the fence. I hustled to catch up with him.

  “Didn’t you tell me Chernek has increased security at Gateville?” he asked as we slowed across the hard dirt and tufts of crabgrass.

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t that doing the right thing?”

  “Of course.”

  “Isn’t paying off the bomber the most reasonable thing they can do? Especially since the last time they paid off, the guy stayed away for close to forty years?”

  There was nothing to say because he was right. We got to Endora’s purple Grand Am.

  Leo’s worried eyes scanned my face. “You’re sure it’s wise to watch the drop behind their backs? What if you scare the guy away, and that causes him to blow up another house?”

  “What’s my alternative?”

  “Let it alone. You’ve done what you were hired to do, which was to have the letters examined.”

  I held out the keys to the Jeep. He shrugged, shook his head, and gave me the keys to Endora’s Grand Am.

  I got to the parking lot behind Ann Sather’s at five thirty. Though the temperature was still in the upper eighties, I wore my blue Cubs cap, dark Ray-Ban sunglasses, and a tan jacket with the collar turned up. I looked like a pervert.

  I pushed up the overhead door, drove the car in, got out, and pulled the door down. The mold cultures in the garage were fetid from steaming in the sun all day. I took off my jacket, cracked open the service door for some air, and tried not to breathe. Stanley had said he would make the drop right at dark. I had three hours to kill.

  I’d done a couple of dozen surveillances. Most of them were for insurance companies, on people who’d filed false injury claims, but two were for runaway kids, and one was on a guy suspected by one wife of having another wife. All were agonizing, hours and hours of looking at nothing. I like surveillance like I like warts.

  I pulled out a small, old wood kitchen chair from Endora’s trunk and sat in the shadows of the side window with my beat-up college copy of Thoreau’s Walden. I need to read Thoreau every few weeks because he chucked it all and went to a rustic cabin in the woods to think. For him, life got understandable when he realized that rich people were herd animals. I wondered what he would have thought of people lumbering along in mammoth S.U.V.’s, chatting on cell phones about luncheon plans or tennis games with other people lumbering along in their own big S.U.V.’s. Thoreau was a pacifist, an environmentalist, and a nonviolent person, but I like to think that he would have been mightily tempted to drive the whole herd, still chattering, into Walden Pond.

  I read Thoreau until eight thirty, when it got too dark to see the words. I put the book back in the car, took out my ancient Canon F.T.Q.L. with the long lens, set it on the folding tripod I’d brought, and checked the focus. It was just about dark. I pulled the chair closer to the window to wait.

  At nine, a big, square light went on behind Ann Sather’s, likely from a timer. It flooded the area around the Dumpster with bright light, and I wondered if the bomber had thought to check out the back of the restaurant at night before he sent the note. When he came for the money, he was going to be lit up like Wrigley Field during a night game. It was dumb, and he hadn’t made dumb moves before.

  At nine twenty, two kids came out of the shadows of the side alley, bouncing a basketball. It echoed loudly off the brick walls of the buildings. The kids moved diagonally across the empty parking lot, passing the ball back and forth in one-bounce shots, and disappeared down the main alley.

  At five minutes to ten, a blue full-sized Chevy van fitted with a wheelchair side lift pulled into the east edge of the lot. It cruised slowly behind the buildings until it nosed to a stop next to Ann Sather’s Dumpster, right under the light. The driver’s door opened, and Stanley Novak, wearing red plaid shorts, an untucked dark knit shirt, and a yellow baseball cap, got out. He reached back into the van and pulled out a filled black garbage bag. He carried the bag slowly around the van to the Dumpster, lifted the lid, and set the bag inside. The bag didn’t go all the way down. He bent into the Dumpster and moved things around until the bag disappeared. He closed the Dumpster lid, got back in the van, and drove out of the lot.

  All of his actions had been slow and easily visible in the bright light. Stanley had made sure that the bomber, wherever he was hiding, had gotten a good look at him leaving the money.

  I peered through the lens to check the camera focus once more and sat back to wait.

  At eleven fifteen, an old green Ford sedan with a faded cardboard temporary license taped inside the rear window pulled into the lot and rolled to a stop in the shadows a hundred feet from the Dumpster. I swung the telephoto lens on the car, but it was too dark to read the numbers on the temporary license. I turned the lens back to the Dumpster sitting isolated in the white light, double-checked the focus, and lifted my head to watch the Ford.

  No one got out. Ten minutes
passed, then twenty. I left the camera aimed at the Dumpster but kept my eyes moving back and forth between it and the green Ford. Another thirty minutes passed. Then, suddenly, a woman’s voice yelled out angrily in Spanish. A Hispanic girl, nineteen or twenty, clambered out of the Ford, furiously tugging at her skirt. She spun back to the open door, screamed something else, and stomped off, hips swinging, across the lot. I watched the Dumpster through the telephoto lens, my index finger resting lightly on the shutter button. Nothing moved. A couple of minutes later, the engine of the old Ford started up. I spun the camera on the tripod and tried to change the focus to the car, but the Ford had disappeared into the dark at the end of the alley before I could snap a picture.

  Nothing happened for the next three hours. Everywhere else, people made love, argued, slept, worked night shifts, as the planet turned. But in my little part of the universe, a rotting garage across a parking lot from a Dumpster, time stood still. Nothing moved. I’m sure of it.

  At least until sometime past two in the morning, when I got the nods.

  No honest person who does surveillance will say it doesn’t happen. It does, and often. Surveillance is grinding monotony. For someone like me, who doesn’t sleep well at night anyway, it’s impossible to stay awake for extended hours.

  That night, in that molding garage, I fought it. I sat tilted on the back legs of the chair I’d brought, my best old trick, knowing that when I nodded off, the chair would start to move and that would wake me.

  I remember I looked at my watch at two fifteen. At two eighteen, I checked the view of the Dumpster through the telephoto lens. I checked it again at two thirty. Then I leaned back on the rear legs of the chair, steadying myself with the back of my head against the garage wall. It wasn’t comfortable, but I didn’t want it comfortable.

  The big diesel engine boomed off the brick walls of the entry alley, jolting me awake. My chair crashed down on its front legs as the headlights swept the parking lot. The garbage truck turned and rumbled to a stop next to the Dumpster. I pushed out of the chair, my neck throbbing from being jammed against the wall, and hobbled on stiff legs into a contorted run across the broken garage floor. I ran out the service door, pulled at the chain-link gate, then sprinted across the empty parking lot, my legs loose now, shouting at the man in coveralls standing by the open lid of the Dumpster.