A Safe Place for Dying

by Jack Fredrickson

  “Who’s Buffy?” I asked.

  “My secretary.”

  Startled, I laughed, and then said, “Fatigue,” to cover it. That the dour Griselda was named Buffy went beyond misnomer; if she’d been a product, it would have been felonious false advertising. I needed sleep.

  The Bohemian slid one set of the stapled copies across the table to Stanley, the other to me. “Of the one hundred and six contractors we deem to be candidates, fifty-eight are out of business. The forty-eight actives are asterisked, split twenty-four to a page.”

  Each of the two pages had a double column of names, addresses, and phone numbers. Stanley scanned both pages. “I’ll check out the second page, you take the first,” he said to me.

  “Will you have time?”

  “Stanley will have to make the time,” the Bohemian answered sharply, then forced a smile. “Excuse me, I’m beginning to agree with you, Vlodek. This looks hopeless. Too many of the contractors have gone out of business, their worker rosters forever lost to us. Of the ones still operating”—he tapped his set of the copies—“you can bet most of their records will be long gone as well. All of which makes finding our man, assuming he even was one of the workers at Crystal Waters, almost impossible.”

  “You’ve just made the argument for turning this over to the Feds right now,” I said.

  The Bohemian nodded.

  Stanley looked up from his list. “Where’s the harm in checking these first?” He turned to the Bohemian. “If we get nowhere, we’ll go to the Feds.”

  “Nowhere or not, we go to the Feds tomorrow, Friday, at four,” I said.

  “Agreed,” the Bohemian said.

  “What about that list of parolees?” I asked Stanley.

  “Chief Morris said he’d fax it here this morning.”

  The Bohemian leaned toward Stanley. “What did you tell him?”

  “Like you said, that we were receiving minor threats, and we suspect a worker from long ago.”

  “He didn’t make the connection to the Farraday explosion?”

  “He doesn’t want to make that connection, Mr. Chernek. Chief Morris is very appreciative of Crystal Waters’s past support. If he has questions, he won’t risk asking them if he doesn’t have to.” Stanley went out to check on the list of parolees.

  The Bohemian and I sat for a few minutes, listening to each other breathe. It was like straining to hear water drip. After a few minutes, I said, “Maybe we’ll get lucky, find somebody who remembers something.”

  The Bohemian looked at me. “Do you really think so, Vlodek?”

  “Not a chance in hell.”

  We went back to silence.

  Stanley came back with a stack of photocopies. “I had Buffy make a dozen sets for each of us. That way, we can leave the list at the companies if needed.” He handed one stack of sets to me.

  I scanned the list. The parolees were listed alphabetically, along with their ages.

  “I masked out the names of the releasing institutions, so nobody can tell this is a parolee list,” Stanley said.

  “We’re only interested in men old enough to have been at Crystal Waters.” I flipped through the pages. Ignoring the younger parolees still left a few hundred candidates. It looked futile. I stood up, anxious for the next day and a half to be over, and looked at the Bohemian. “Tomorrow at four o’clock.”

  He met my eyes and nodded.

  Stanley followed me out the door, and we rode down in the elevator together. We walked to my Jeep.

  “We can’t give up on this, Mr. Elstrom.”

  I leaned against the fender. “You don’t think we need the Feds?”

  “Maybe. But they won’t come running. They’re being pulled every which way in these times. Better we do the spadework and bring them something they can get their teeth into quickly.”

  He was probably right; suddenly I was too tired to know. There had been too many nights of too little sleep, even before the mess at Gateville started. I unlocked the Jeep and sat with the key in my hand, watching him as he walked across the parking lot to the baby blue Crystal Waters station wagon. His head was down and his shoulders sagged. He looked like a fat, balding child, about to cry.

  Of the twenty-four contractors on my list that were still in business, two were pavers, two were landscapers, three were plumbers, and one was an electrician. The remaining sixteen were a hodgepodge of other things. All had been paid at least five hundred dollars at Gateville, which meant, by our guess, they’d been there long enough to plant explosives in multiple locations.

  I pulled a metro map out of the glove box and circled the locations of the companies on my list. They were scattered all around Chicago and its suburbs. The closest, something called The Tillotson Partners, was less than a mile away.

  I drove south through the old factory district. Cement mixers, flatbed trucks loaded with lumber, construction vans, and pickups clogged both sides of the dirt-crusted old street, reducing it to one lane. Huge, bright banners hung on half of the old factories and warehouses, advertising residential lofts starting at four hundred thousand dollars per unit. ONLY A FEW LEFT, many read, and I didn’t doubt it. Chicago was full of people ready to plop down big scratch to look like they were starving artists. It wasn’t for me, and not just because I didn’t have the four hundred thousand dollars. The closest I’d ever gotten to art was a paint-by-number canvas of an owl an aunt had thrown away out of sheer embarrassment. Even as a child, I’d had difficulty operating inside the lines.

  The rehabbers had not yet gotten around to the ancient, sootstained building that housed The Tillotson Partners. There was no elevator, and my footsteps echoed loudly on the linoleum steps, nicked and scuffed dull from decades of commerce.

  The gray-haired lady behind the scarred wood desk on the third floor told me they made signs. Interior and exterior. Road signs, street signs, and washroom signs. That’s all they’d ever done since 1956, she said: make signs. She’d never heard of Crystal Waters, but she thought it quite possible they’d made the lettering on the brick wall and the fancy, filigreed iron posts and name signs for Chanticleer Circle. She did not know if the company kept old payroll records. The woman who did the payroll wasn’t in; she only came in twice a month. I left my card and asked that the bookkeeper call me. As I went down the stairs, I wondered how the developers of Gateville had chosen the name, Chanticleer Circle, for the project’s only street—and, for that matter, why they had bothered to erect signs at all. When there’s only one street, and it’s a circle, there’s not much potential for confusion about where one is.

  In the Jeep, I checked the Bohemian’s master list. Safe Haven Properties had paid Tillotson forty-eight hundred dollars back in March of 1970, a month before the guardhouse explosion. That was at the end of the project, when the paving was done and the grounds had been smoothed over and landscaped. Still, Tillotson had had access, and nobody would have questioned them digging holes. I put a question mark next to Tillotson and pulled away.

  If even the signage installer was a potential, the hours until the next afternoon, at four, were going to be the most futile of my life.

  I hit two more places—a plasterer and a roofer, neither with records or recollections—before my stomach reminded me I’d been up for hours and had never had breakfast. I pulled into a true Chicago-style hot dog stand, authentic right down to the flies and the red-and-yellow-striped awning, and scanned the menu painted on the flaking plywood for quick, morning food that would be easy on a nervous gut, like scrambled eggs and whole wheat toast. They didn’t have that, so I ordered a hot dog, French fries, onion rings, and a diet Coke to neutralize the calories, and ate off the fender of the Jeep, standing up.

  The hot dog had two peppers, plump, fresh green ones. For as long as I could remember, Kutz offered only one, a shriveled, brown little thing that regular customers, when they forgot to tell him to hold it, threw into the bushes so they wouldn’t have to look at it. I’d always suspected Kutz offered only the one
tiny pepper because he knew his customers would toss the grizzled thing anyway, and, rodent lover that he was, he didn’t want to cripple the tender stomachs of the rats that foraged in the hard dirt of his dining area with too many peppers.

  I finished greasing my palate, got in the Jeep and spent the rest of the morning and all of the afternoon working my way west, paralleling the Eisenhower Expressway. I stopped at an outfit that made planters, geese, and ducks out of cement and, after them, a drain-tile manufacturer, a curb installer, and an asphalt seal coater. None had people who remembered the Gateville job; none had payroll records from back then. But all had had access inside the gates, and none could be ruled out. As with the companies that morning, there was no point in leaving the list of parolees.

  Nobody knew anything; not anymore.

  I got to the first plumber on the list just as he was closing up. He was outside his storefront, a block from the expressway, fumbling with a metal accordion security fence. He was about sixty, with a three-day beard stubble, gin on his breath, and a case of the shakes. We talked on the sidewalk as his trembling fingers struggled to snap the padlock. He’d installed the underground sprinkling system at Gateville with three other fellows but hadn’t seen them in decades. He made a quick show of looking at my list of parolees, but his eyes kept straying to his watch. He was late for a tavern. He finally got the padlock snapped, told me he had to leave, and took off down the sidewalk as fast as he could aim his wobbling legs.

  I scratched him off the list. If that man had just pulled five hundred thousand dollars out of a Dumpster behind Ann Sather’s, he’d never have opened his storefront again. He would have stayed home, curled around a bottle, and drunk his way through as much of the money as possible before the reaper punched his ticket.

  It was five thirty. I got in line outbound on the Eisenhower and called the Bohemian to report I had nothing to report.

  “No likely suspects?”

  “Most of them were likely suspects. All had access to the grounds. All could have done a little extra digging and dropped devices into the dirt. The only one I can scratch is the plumber.”

  The Bohemian sounded tired. “Are we wasting our time?”

  “Yes, along with wasting your money. But if we’re getting you closer to calling the Feds tomorrow, it’s progress. Have you heard from Stanley?”

  “He visited two of his names before he had to get home. He got nowhere, as well.”

  “I’ll start up again first thing in the morning, but it’s going to be the same, so use this evening to convince yourself this thing is too big for us.”

  “That’s what I told Stanley,” he said.

  Fourteen

  The first of the two landscapers was a mile and a half north of the turret, on a side street off LaGrange Road. It was just getting light when I pulled into the gravel lot Friday morning. I parked between a flatbed truck loaded with balled shrubs and a rusty black Chevy Nova that had been old twenty years before.

  The owner was behind the wood trailer office, making marks on a clipboard as two Mexicans loaded evergreens onto another flatbed truck. He was in his early forties.

  “Sure, I remember Crystal Waters. I was a kid, but I worked on the job with my dad and the crew. There were workers everywhere. It was a big deal for my dad, getting hired to work on a major site like that one.”

  “Do you still have records from that job, employee lists?”

  He looked at me, reappraising the story I’d given him. I’d said there were sewer leaks at Crystal Waters and I was looking for anyone who might know about changes to the original blueprints. That didn’t explain wanting employee rosters, and he’d caught it. “Employee lists?”

  “We think there were deviations from the sewer plans that might have caused you to change your own ground work. We’re hoping some of your old employees would remember.”

  He didn’t believe me. I wouldn’t have, either.

  “We don’t keep payroll records that long.”

  The dim bulb that’s loose-wired in my head flickered weakly as I realized my mistake. Landscapers don’t always keep names. Some of them hire workers for cash, undocumented people up for the summer.

  He put down his clipboard. “We’ve got nobody here from that long ago, except for me.” He made a laugh with his mouth. “But I was more interested in Little League than landscaping in those days.”

  He walked me around front to make sure I got back in the Jeep. He probably didn’t figure me for Immigration and Naturalization, because my story was too cheesy, too full of holes, but he knew I wasn’t telling the truth. I gave him one of my cards. It has my name, the word RESEARCH underneath, and my cell phone number. I asked him to call if he remembered anything.

  As I pulled away, I looked in the rearview mirror just as he dropped my card into the trash barrel.

  The electrical contractor worked out of a whitewashed converted gas station in a rundown section on the western edge of Chicago, next to Oak Park. I pushed open the peeling green wood door and stepped into the dank dark of what had once been the gas station office. An old man sat behind a dented metal desk, reading a tattered copy of Popular Mechanics in the dim light of a gooseneck lamp. He put down the magazine, pulled his feet off the desktop, and smiled up like he was grateful for the interruption.

  I skipped the story about sewer leaks and just said I was trying to track down people who’d worked at Crystal Waters.

  “I remember that job.” He offered me coffee from a scratched aluminum Thermos. I shook my head. He poured some for himself into a clear plastic cup and went on. “Never worked in a place so fancy. I was hired at the last minute to wire the marble fountain in the pond. Job only took two days.”

  I remembered the Bohemian’s comment about hiring only big contractors to work at Gateville. “Weren’t you a little small for a project like Crystal Waters?”

  “You bet,” he laughed. “Those projects always go to the big boys. I’ve always been small time, adding outlets in somebody’s home, putting in patio lights, or some such. That, and fixing electric motors.” He pointed at the doorway to the old auto service bay. I looked, and saw shelves piled high with dozens of small, oily black motors and dusty spools of colored wire.

  “One of the main electrical contractors at Crystal Waters had a problem at the last minute,” he continued. “Somebody quit sudden or something, just as the job was almost finished. They called me, on the hurry-up, to finish the wiring to the fountain so they could get the final city inspection and people could start moving in. I figured they got me out of the yellow pages,” he said, pointing to a wood sign on the wall: A-1 Electrical. “My name’s Ziloski, so I go with A-1. I get a lot of calls because I’m the first name in the book.”

  As he talked, I turned to look again at his inventory of electrical motors and coils of colored wire. Something about them nagged at me, a question I should know to ask, but I couldn’t think of it.

  “Need a motor?” Ziloski chuckled, his voice nudging me. “I got plenty.”

  I laughed at that and asked him more questions to keep him talking. I wanted time to think of the question I couldn’t grasp.

  “I never worked around buildings so posh,” he said again. He sounded like someone who’d caught a glimpse of a movie star as he described the fountain, the houses, and the expensive, mature trees that were planted to make the development look like it had been there for years. The details were as fresh in his mind as if he’d seen them yesterday.

  I was only half-listening; my mind was still clutching for the question that would not come. I gave up, finally, after an hour of jawing, and left him to his ragged magazine, rusted motors, and dusty coils of colored wire. I doubted he’d been at Gateville long enough to do much of anything, but I had to give him a question mark on the list because I didn’t have solid reason to cross him off.

  I visited another landscaper and then one of the generic names that turned out to be a fertilizing operation. Neither seemed a likely candidat
e, but each had had access. I gave them angry question marks, too. I was getting nowhere.

  I went east, then north up Western Avenue, to the second plumber on my list. I pulled off the street in front of the white frame building and parked between two vans.

  “I need some help with a plumbing project you guys did in 1970,” I said to the black-haired man working at a cluttered desk in the paneled front office.

  “Warranty ran out yesterday,” he said over his reading glasses. Then he laughed. “Which project?”

  “Crystal Waters, in Maple Hills. Is there anybody here who worked on that job?”

  “I did, start to finish. Over a year.”

  I looked at him more closely. I’d thought he was in his early forties when I walked in, but the lines around his eyes made him older than that. He could have been at Gateville.

  I didn’t bother with coy. “There have been a couple of recent disturbances that we think might date back to the construction of the development.”

  “The house that blew up earlier this summer?”

  “No, not that.”

  “They’re thinking someone planted explosives in the plumbing when that house was being built?”

  I looked out the window. He was reading me like I had a digital display wired on my forehead.

  He whistled. “I’ll be damned,” he said, not at all bothered by my lack of a response. “We had ten, fifteen guys on that job, all told. Had the contract for the rough and the finish plumbing for all the houses. Mister, that place was crawling with all kinds of workers, so it could have been anybody, not just plumbers. Unless you’re telling me you’re sure the explosives were planted in the plumbing?”

  “I’m not talking about explosives.”

  “Bet your ass you’re not,” he grinned. “Well, hiding explosives on that job would have been easy enough. There was so much going on, nobody would have paid attention. That jerkweed Maple Hills building inspector sure wouldn’t have caught it. He didn’t look for much except where the doughnuts were.”