A Safe Place for Dying

by Jack Fredrickson

  He looked out the window at the rain beating against the glass. “When do you want to look at the prints?”

  “Now.”

  He pulled an antique gold pocket watch out of his trousers pocket and flipped open the lid. “You may look, but you must leave them here,” he said, closing the lid with a soft click. “I have to leave. I’m expected at a fund-raiser for our junior senator.” He stood up and looked down at me. “Wendell Phelps, your former father-in-law, will be there.”

  “Tell Wendell I send my love.”

  “Indeed.” He moved to the door but paused, and the corners of his mouth twitched. “Trick or treat,” he said as he went out.

  Griselda brought me the big roll of plans, then went out again and returned with a thermal pitcher of coffee, a pale blue Wedgewood cup and saucer, a little china basket of cream containers, and a bowl of white crystals that could have been sugar or could have turned me into a toad. I gave her a winning smile and told her I didn’t use sweetener. She frowned and left. I poured the coffee and unrolled the blueprints.

  The top sheet showed the site plan for the whole development: the footprints of the residences, road, streetlamps, guardhouse, and school bus shelter.

  Crystal Waters had been built around one elongated oval street, Chanticleer Circle. Ten homes were inside the oval, on wedgeshaped lots that sloped gradually down to a center pond. The remaining seventeen houses were strung around the outside, backed by the brick perimeter wall. The whole plan resembled a doughnut, squeezed at the sides.

  The Farraday house had been the first residence on the outer circle to the right of the guardhouse, driving in. On the blueprint, the inside of the Farraday house outline was slightly lighter than the bluish tint of the rest of the sheet. I bent down closer to the drawing. Someone had penciled, and then almost completely erased, a light X on the Farraday house.

  The small rectangle of the school bus shelter, outside the wall, across from the Farraday house, had also had an X drawn on it and then erased. I studied the two little rectangles for a minute but could see no relationship between the two other than proximity.

  I flipped slowly through the rest of the blueprints. They contained the detailed construction specifications—the material lists, cross-sections, and dimensions that had been needed to build Gateville. There were nine sheets for the road alone, a dozen just for the landscaping. Electrical, plumbing, concrete, sewerage, they all looked normal enough.

  I went back to the site plan on top, and this time I noticed a little triangle of torn paper hanging from the binding. A previous sheet, perhaps a cover, more likely a contents index, had been torn off.

  I went through the prints again. This time I counted pages. It didn’t take long, because the sheets were numbered. Blueprint numbers fourteen, nineteen, twenty-seven, forty-one, and fifty-eight were missing.

  I checked the little list by the conference room phone and called the Bohemian’s extension. Griselda answered on the first ring. She told me he had left. Her hurried tone suggested she’d left her broom idling by the outside door and was anxious to leave, too. Outside, rain was coming down heavy, obscuring the lights from the surrounding buildings. I checked my Timex. It was past nine o’clock. I told her I was finished.

  She was there in a minute and walked me out to the foyer. Once she had me safely blocked inside the elevator, she handed me a thick cream-colored business card, almost the same shade as some of the paint splats on my jeans. ANTON CHERNEK, the card read, in raised dark green letters, along with his office telephone number. There was no address. Another phone number had been handwritten in green fountain-pen ink below the printed number.

  “Mr. Chernek requested you call him when you finished. That’s his private cellular number.” She made no move to step aside to let me back in to use the reception phone.

  I ran through the rain to the Jeep. I tried the Bohemian’s cell phone before starting off, but it forwarded me to voice mail. I left a message saying that I would try back in a few minutes.

  I started the Jeep and put it on the Eisenhower, not wanting to use the cell phone again until I was sure traffic would keep moving. Steering and shifting a Jeep in traffic, especially in the rain, is, at minimum, a two-handed sport, but three hands are needed if a cell phone is being used, and four if it’s all to be done in the proper Chicago style, with one arm waving an upraised finger at the other oblivious morons talking on their own cell phones.

  It’s bumper cars, played with obscene gestures, but I have hope for the future. Evolution ultimately corrects physical limitations, and I have no doubt that in a thousand years, humans will have sprouted cellular antennae and the necessary two extra hands.

  Two miles west of the Bohemian’s office, traffic opened up enough to call. This time he answered right away. In the background, I could hear the clink of heavy glasses and the loud laughter of scotch drinkers.

  “Do you have more blueprints?”

  The clinking and the laughter got softer. He’d moved away from the noise so he could talk. “You have everything I have. What are you looking for?”

  “Some pages are missing.” I didn’t say anything about seeing the X’s drawn on the two bomb targets.

  For a minute the only thing that came through the phone was people talking in the background, and then he said, “Can you tell which pages?”

  “No, just the page numbers. Was there an index page, a cover sheet?”

  “I don’t recall,” he said. “I just keep them in safe storage.”

  “Who has had access to them?”

  “Over the years?” He paused. “All kinds of people. Contractors hired by the Members come over to reference them all the time.”

  “Do they take them with?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “So those prints have never left your offices?”

  For a minute, the only sounds coming through the phone were background voices at his party. “Except for the Board,” he said finally.

  “Board members have taken them out?”

  “Why is this important, Vlodek?”

  “I don’t know.” I went on. “Does anyone think the D.X.12 was buried outside the house, or could it have been inside?”

  “Nobody has established that.”

  “Nor will they, given that you bulldozed the site. Our best shot now is the lamppost. Because of the depth of the hole, I’m thinking the bomb must have been buried two or three feet down, under the base.”

  “You told Stanley it could have been left by a guy faking a flat tire. Would he have had time to dig that deep without being noticed?”

  “I don’t see him taking the risk, but it’s still my best guess. You’re sure there are no other sets of blueprints?”

  “They don’t exist, not anymore. The developers numbered each set and then made sure those drawings were seen only by the contractors who really needed them. When the project was done, I got them all back. I destroyed them myself, except for my own set.”

  “You covered every base, didn’t you?”

  “Good security comes from absolute attention to detail. Electrical, plumbing, and sewer pipes are all ways into Crystal Waters, even if some of the pipes are less than a half inch thick. We tried to think of everything.”

  “The Farraday bomb might have been planted by someone posing as a landscaper, squatting behind a bush,” I said, “but the lamppost, lit up, out in the open, bothers me. Someone planting a bomb there, even with the car jacked up and a spare tire on the ground, took a big risk of being seen digging, and that doesn’t fit with the caution our man has been using.”

  “Unless the explosive was pushed through a pipe or something, from inside Crystal Waters?”

  “It’s a speculation,” I said.

  “Surely not that electrical conduit pipe beneath the lamppost? It was too small to push anything through.”

  “As I said, it’s just a speculation.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

  In the rain, in th
e traffic, I couldn’t make out the inflection in the Bohemian’s voice.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, exactly,” I said.

  The snakes came again that night. All colors of them, backlit by the orange flames of the burning houses, writhing and contorting as first one house, then another and another, blew up like monstrous firecrackers on a long string, sending sparks and flaming roof rafters high into the night sky. Until, at last, all the houses were gone, and the ground was flat, scorched black, and nobody was left alive.

  Eleven

  I shifted so I could see Leo’s reaction to what I was going to say. It was eight thirty Tuesday morning. We were drinking coffee from Ma’s scratched porcelain mugs, sitting on his front steps. The rain had stopped in the middle of the night. After emptying the buckets and wastebaskets out the windows on the fifth floor, I’d spent the rest of the night on top of the turret, riding my lawn chair, spinning fancies, and I wanted Leo to tell me I was crazy.

  “We’ve got old explosives and old paper. The first explosion occurred in 1970.”

  “Right.” He sipped his coffee.

  “The note they received last June, just before the Farraday explosion, demanded fifty thousand dollars. Small change by today’s standards.”

  “But big dough in 1970?”

  “I’m getting there.”

  He motioned for me to continue and took another sip of coffee.

  “The last amount demanded, the five hundred thousand, is bigger money, but is it big enough?”

  His eyebrows arched. “Meaning?” But he knew where I was going.

  “Three-million-dollar homes, Leo, and all the guy wants is a sixth of the value of one house?”

  “Half a million is still a lot of cabbages.”

  “Is it a lot of money to the Bohemian?”

  “Dek, you’re a dog chewing one meager bone to death. If the Bohemian’s got money problems, he needs a lot more than a half million.”

  “That’s what I’m starting to think, too. Maybe the relatively small amount of the money demanded exonerates the Bohemian—”

  “Hallelujah.”

  “—and clears people inside Gateville as well. Because the half million is only a fraction of what any of those houses is worth.”

  “And that in turn leads you to … ?”

  “Somebody from the past.”

  His eyebrows crept up another inch.

  I asked again the same question I’d called him with a half hour earlier. “Tell me one more time how impossible it is to date the writing on those extortion notes.”

  “Pretty damned impossible. Pencil lead is graphite crystalline carbon with binders and hardeners. You can separate these components chemically to isolate the waxes, resins, and clays, but you need a known reference sample to date them. Pencil lead is very stable, unlike ink, which evaporates over time. So, without a comparison sample, pretty damned impossible.”

  “But the letters could have been written years ago?”

  “Or yesterday.”

  “Stay with me on this, Leo.”

  “All right. Yes, the letters could have been written many years ago.”

  “That would explain the relatively small amounts demanded in the letters—the fifty thousand that was never arranged to be picked up, and the half million that was. Those demands were valued in 1970 dollars, because the notes were written in 1970.”

  “O.K.”

  “We’ve passed through dot-com times, Leo. Things have gone up. Why hasn’t the guy upped the dollars to keep up with the times? Why hasn’t he written new notes, used a library computer?”

  “My point at the beginning.” Leo shrugged. “Maybe the best we can assume for now is he’s a guy who sticks to his plan.”

  “Exactly. Because he meticulously laid this whole thing out in 1970.”

  Leo watched my face and waited.

  I set my coffee cup down on the steps. “What if he also buried the D.X.12 back then?”

  He didn’t react at first, not visibly, but I knew the signs: rocksolid stillness as his mind shot into warp speed, analyzing the permutations. Then the agitation, the twitching eyebrows, the tapping fingers.

  He jumped up from the stoop and went down the six steps to pace on the sidewalk, his mouth struggling to verbalize what was flaring in his mind.

  “Put there by a construction worker at the site,” he said, looking up.

  “Yes.”

  “Jeez, it’s perfect.” He grinned up at me like he’d discovered gold. “Fricking beautiful. The Gateville developers were paranoid about security from day one. Yet during construction, one of their workers was planting D.X.12 like a guy hiding Easter eggs, so he could come back, attach a fuse, and start setting off bombs. Fricking beautiful,” he said again, still pacing back and forth. “They hired a fox, with bombs, to build the henhouse.”

  I looked down at him. “But why wait so long to put the plan in high gear? Why did he quit after the first little bomb at the guardhouse?”

  He stopped pacing and looked up. “Cold feet?”

  I shook my head.

  “The ten grand was enough?”

  “Not when he’d already written other notes demanding more.”

  He came up the stairs two at a time and sat down. “Then tell me,” he said, watching my eyes, ready to play.

  Even when we were kids, he’d loved the mental sparring. But this time, I was ahead of him. I’d spent most of the night on top of the turret, working my way through it. I might have been a little light on sleep, but I was rehearsed and I was ready. And I had a plan.

  “Either we’ve got the world’s most lethargic extortionist,” I began, “taking decades to get his letters in the mail and do the crime, or …”

  “Or?” Leo’s black eyebrows tangoed on his forehead, prompting.

  “Or the bomber has been away for a long time.”

  “Like where?” He leaned closer, almost leering.

  “Like prison,” I almost shouted.

  Leo beamed. “Excellent. It explains the long lapse between the bombs. In 1970, the guy comes up with a plan. He writes the notes, plants the D.X.12, sets off the first explosion behind the guardhouse, and collects ten thousand dollars. But that money is only supposed to be the first installment, the test run, the priming of the money pump. There’s going to be more, a lot more.”

  “But something happens,” I cut in, percolating with brilliance now. “He gets sent to prison for something else, and his big Gateville caper gets put on hold. Until recently, when he gets out and puts everything in motion again.”

  “Precisely.” Leo nodded approvingly.

  “The only thing I can’t figure is, why bother with the old notes he wrote long ago? Why not punch out new letters, with bigger dollars, when he’s using the computer to address the envelopes?”

  “A trifling issue. You’ll come up with an answer.”

  “So now,” I charged on, “all we have to do—”

  Leo held up his palm, his lips moist. “Allow me to speak for the great Sherlock. All you need do is assemble a list of the people who worked construction at Gateville, who then got sent to prison, and who recently got out.”

  I nodded quickly. Damn, I was good.

  Leo smiled a particular half-smile, and the coffee in my stomach roiled. I knew that smile. It was his executioner’s smile, given to those who’d overlooked something as they dared to match speed and wits with him. I’d seen it a hundred times, right before he tripped the blade.

  He spoke. “Since at least half the contractors who worked at Gateville must have gone out of business by now, and the other half threw out their old payroll records decades ago, you will be forced to try to reconstruct employee names from interviews with hundreds of older people who may or may not remember who they worked with back then. If you skip lunches and don’t sleep more than an hour a night, you ought to be able to come up with an inaccurate, incomplete, and completely erroneous starting list of candidates in four or five years.”


  The guillotine blade had plummeted, severing my empty head.

  I started to open my mouth, to protest, but no words would come. There were no words; Leo was right.

  “What do I do?” I finally asked.

  “Go to the Bohemian. Tell him that the D.X.12 might already be in the ground. Tell him that no amount of security is going to keep the bomber out forever.”

  “I don’t trust the Bohemian, not completely.”

  “Dek, you’ve got to abandon the deranged money manager theory.”

  “It’s not that. It’s that he knew the significance of the lamppost.” I’d told Leo about the X erasures on the blueprints.

  “And didn’t tell you right away? That proves nothing. He’s your client.”

  “He was around Gateville when it was under construction, and since then, he’s had the only set of blueprints.”

  “Jeez, Dek. He’s protecting his own clients. You’ve got to go to him, convince him to bring this to the Feds.” Leo looked into my eyes. “You don’t really believe he’s involved, do you?”

  “I like my recent parolee theory a lot better.” I stood up. We walked down the steps, and I got in the Jeep.

  Leo leaned close to the driver’s window. His small, dark eyes were worried. “If that ground is laced with D.X.12, they’re going to have to change the name of the development.”

  I waited.

  “They’re going to have to call it Bombville,” he said.

  I wasn’t armed enough to spar with the Bohemian. I drove to the Maple Hills Municipal Building instead.

  The big guy with the pocket rainbow of colored felt tips was alone in the Building Department, like before. Unlike the last time, though, it was early, only ten in the morning. He was still on the front section of the newspaper. He raised his eyes and scowled across the empty desks at me. “Back again?”

  “I’m not here about blueprints this time,” I said, fighting my own joy at seeing him. It’s never manly to gush. “I need the names of the contractors that worked at Crystal Waters. They must have applied for permits.”