Tagged for Murder

by Jack Fredrickson

  I turned from the glare. A last glance up at the building showed the tagger had left only a faint tangle of lines against the bricks. He’d already be out of a front window by now, running away from the other side of the building.

  I ran for the four-lane road to the west, the lights bucking up and dropping behind me, growing brighter as what was surely a massive off-roader bore down, closing the distance between us. It would have a high, hard bumper, that beast. The men inside would have guns.

  I wanted to scream, I wanted to yell, to get the attention of the cars passing by in front of me, but they were late-night cars, kids and drunks and workers getting off second shifts, speeding along too noisily to hear.

  The engine grew deafening behind me. I could hear its tires crunching broken glass.

  I got to the curb and ran into the street, willing the speeding drivers to see me. A horn blared; another car shot past, just inches away, hands reaching out to flip me off.

  Brakes squealed from the other direction. I didn’t look; I could only run straight. More horns blared; a pair of headlamps swerved. A mass of metal brushed my arm.

  And then I was across.

  I chanced a fast look around. The Central Works grounds were dark, but that meant nothing. They could have switched off their massive rows of lights. And the traffic speeding by would mask any rumbling of the big engine.

  An auto body shop was closest. I ran between the building and a chain-link fence, back into its storage lot. A dozen wrecked cars were lined up in a row, bleached colorless in the bluish glare of two security lights.

  I climbed the six foot fence and dropped into the rear lot of the plumbing supply next door. A driveway was on the other side. I came up along its shadows to the front sidewalk.

  The Central Works grounds were still dark. The off-roader might still be there, idling dark, or the driver could have come across the street on foot.

  Or he could have driven down the street, to wait.

  The plumbing supply was at the corner of a residential block. My best chance was to escape into the blackness of the houses. I sprinted out into the glow of a street lamp, then raced around the corner and into a block of bungalows. I ran through the darkness at the middle, through the light at the next intersection and into the dark past that. At the end of that block I turned and ran south.

  The highway was thick with passing cars. I saw no vehicles with roof-mounted lights but that didn’t mean they weren’t there, parked out of sight along the highway.

  The Jeep was only fifty feet away. I ran to it, jumped in and sped away. I got back to the turret twenty minutes later. After barring myself safely inside, I violated the very first rule I made when I first moved in. I poured wine.

  Ever since I’d moved into the pigeon-infested turret, drunk and broke, I’d kept a gallon of red Gallo on the unfinished floor of my kitchen as both temptation and resolution. Temptation, because I needed to be reminded how far I’d once slid. Resolution, because I’d arrested that skid. The dusty old jug had rarely been opened, and then only to share, sparingly.

  That night, I granted myself a waiver, a solitary splash to calm my shaking hands. I poured two inches into my travel mug and took it up to the roof to stand in the cold and watch the lust and the lights sputter along Thompson Avenue. And to try to figure out what I’d just escaped at the old Central Works.

  There was no knowing for sure, but as I stood at the balustrade, I first tried out the hope that I’d simply overreacted to kids tooling around in some daddy’s over-lamped off-roader – punks who’d spotted fun in scaring someone skulking along those ruined grounds that would make for good posturing the next day at school.

  But that hope depended too much on roaming teens just happening by and choosing those old grounds for some sport. A man had been pitched to his death there, a murder that a tagger had witnessed and had returned to paint, twice. Far more probably, the driver waiting in the monstrous off-roader was watching out for the same tagger I’d come looking for, to make sure that scene never got depicted again.

  The agile tagger had gotten away. I almost hadn’t.

  The familiar tapping jerked me from these thoughts, sounding down on the river side of the turret much earlier than ever before. I crossed the roof and looked down. Clouds had covered the moon. I could see nothing along the limestone or on the ground.

  But the tapping was still coming, hard and sharp, rising up the side of the turret. But something else rustled beneath it, closer to the ground.

  I hurried to open the trap door, but it is heavy and it fell closed with a bang behind me as I clambered down the ladder to the fifth floor. I raced down the next ladder and the wrought-iron stairs to the door and ran around to the river.

  I was too late. Whatever had come to rustle on the ground and peck at the turret was gone. I stood motionless out in the night for a moment anyway, straining to listen, and thought of Herbie’s forthcoming check for five hundred dollars. I decided I’d spend some of it on those little solar-charged lights people stick in their yards to show nighttime passers-by where their landscape needs weeding. Such little lights wouldn’t deter the occasional wino from staggering down to the Willahock to relieve himself before a night’s slumber on the bench, but they might scare off a crazed bird from disturbing my own rest.

  I was tired enough now to sleep. I doubted any more tapping would come; it seemed to happen only once a night. But there would be nagging, whether I was awake or dreaming, about why a man had come to be tossed from the old Central Works, and how a tagger had come to see it, and who had come to chase me away.

  And, most of all, why Herbie Sunheim still hadn’t called.

  SEVEN

  I’d set my alarm for six o’clock the next morning and got to the Central Works before any power washers could show up. The memory of the bank of lights that charged at me was still strong, as was the possibility that someone might be around, watching. So I slowed only long enough, coming off the highway, to snap a quick photo of the new graffiti before turning up the side street to park two blocks north of the Central Works site.

  I brought up the photo before I got out of the Jeep. Snapping that quick picture had been enough.

  The tagger had left only eight straight white lines. The front four formed a simple rectangle – an opening. Drawn inside them, angled back in perspective, was another rectangle.

  Eight straight lines, precise and effective. It was a door swung open, inviting someone to take a look inside.

  I hurried south to the front of the factory building, quickly pulled back the loose plywood panel I’d peeked through earlier and crawled inside. As I’d seen before, the pipes and wiring bundles had been ripped out for saleable scrap, leaving only ragged holes. Now, though, I noticed that two fresh wood wall studs surrounded a shiny, new industrial-sized electrical conduit that ran from floor to ceiling – evidence that the building was going to be renovated.

  I passed several large reddish-brown stains on the floor, crossing to the rail side of the building. They were patches of dried blood spill. Like torn-out wiring and cigarette burns, they were no rarity in Chicago’s deserted buildings.

  There had been stairs at the back, but they’d been ripped out, too. Similarly, cut-outs for a long-gone elevator yawed open above me like a string of black holes, all the way up to the top floor. Grateful there’d only been a single sugar cookie for breakfast, I went up the tagger’s way – and perhaps the victim’s and the murderers’, though I couldn’t imagine why they’d climb just to kill – chimpanzee-like, cross-stud after cross-stud, up through the cut-out to the second floor.

  Nothing there was out of the ordinary, just more punched-out walls, empty old electrical boxes and a continuation of the shiny new electrical pipe I’d noticed on the first floor.

  The third floor would have been the same as the first two, gutted except for that shiny new electric conduit, save for the open window where the tagger had leaned out the night before. The plywood he’d unscrewed was
propped alongside it. I wondered if this was the window from which the homeless man had been pitched.

  Footsteps crunched on the gravel along the rail siding below. Two men’s voices sounded up through the open window.

  ‘You’re sure that’s his?’ one asked, barely above a whisper. They must have been directly below. I eased farther away from the open window.

  ‘How many red Jeeps have a green top?’ the other said, just as quietly. ‘‘I’m telling you, it belongs to the guy who’s been snooping around.’

  ‘It’s parked a half-mile north. It could belong to someone in the neighborhood.’

  ‘It’s his. He’s being careful.’

  ‘We go in the building?’

  ‘No need,’ the other one whispered. ‘The building looks securely boarded up, except for that one window up there. He’s not here yet. I’ll stay here in back and listen for him coming along. You go watch that Jeep but stay out of sight. Whoever sees him first calls the other. Oh, and get the license plate number so we can find out who he is.’

  One man waiting by the door, the other keeping watch on the Jeep – neither sounding like they were interested in casual conversation – and me, a rat in a box.

  Unless …

  I had an inspiration. I padded quietly across to the opposite wall and texted Leo, my pal of pals. With luck, he was in town. You around?

  What’s shakin’? he texted right back.

  Still got Jeep key?

  Not that many months before, he’d demanded a duplicate of my ignition key after discovering a corpse in my Jeep. Leo, a worrier, called it a time-saver, saying it had taken him unnecessary anxious seconds to unlock my turret with his key, go up to the kitchen and snag the spare to the Jeep from the hook. I called it a needless precaution because, so far, there’d only been the one stiff. Nonetheless, I relented. Now that I was trapped inside the Central Works, it appeared giving Leo his own Jeep key might save me anxious seconds this time around.

  Que? he asked back, in Spanish, I believed, though it is a language that neither I, nor he, knew.

  In trouble. Hurry. Need you drive up street west of Central Works. Pass Jeep half mile up, park farther north, leave your key under mat, walk south, drive Jeep to your house.

  Que?

  There was no time to explain. Text when you’re away.

  I clicked off. He’d do it, and quickly.

  There were no voices down below. They’d split up.

  Even from across the floor, the open window above the rail spur made me feel exposed. I eased to the back again and took care to climb silently up to the top floor, as if the extra distance from the ground would make me safer.

  And saw what the tagger had invited me to see.

  Driving home. Raspberry cheese, Leo texted, forty long minutes later.

  I photographed what I’d been staring at and climbed gently down to the third floor so I could hear my watchers outside. With luck, one of them had seen Leo driving away in the Jeep, and would now leave themselves.

  Five minutes later, a voice directly below called out to someone farther away. ‘No luck?’

  ‘It wasn’t his,’ the other voice answered, from a distance. Gravel crunched as he walked up.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘It belongs to a tiny bald guy, dressed like a parrot, which figures. He just drove away.’

  ‘What do you mean – “dressed like a parrot”?’

  ‘Jungle colors. Reds and blues and greens on the shirt, bright orange pants. And yellow shoes. I’ve never seen a grown man dressed like that, except at a circus, though even clowns show more restraint. The guy was exactly the sort of oddball who’d drive a red Jeep with a green roof, all done up like Christmas. He must live or work around here.’

  ‘Did you get his license plate?’

  ‘No need. It wasn’t the guy who came around here to take pictures.’

  ‘There can’t be two Jeeps like that,’ the man who’d stayed by the building said. I was sure about his voice now. He was the gelled man who’d come up to me the first day, demanding to know what I was up to. And the man who’d been around the next day as well, watching. ‘It would be nice to know who he was, just in case,’ he said.

  ‘What about that fresh paint up there?’ the one who’d gone to watch the Jeep asked.

  I pressed against the wall, holding my breath. If it occurred to them that the tagger had drawn an open door, an invitation, they’d find their way inside. And find me.

  ‘I’d like to know who the tagger is, and what it means.’

  I exhaled more easily. They hadn’t seen the tag as an open door.

  Their voices faded. I didn’t dare get close to the window the tagger left open. A sliver of sunlight showed at the edge of one of the plywood board-ups farther down. I edged over to it and peered through the crack. The two men were crossing the field, walking south toward the highway. They were both dressed in dark suits, both moved lightly and both had shiny hair. From the back, either could have been the one who’d confronted me by the No Trespassing sign the first day I’d come to take pictures, or the one leaning against the fender of the partially visible black car when I’d come back. Cops, thugs, or owners’ men; there was no way of knowing what they were.

  I climbed down to the first floor, slipped out through the loose plywood and hurried to the sidewalk I’d run across the night before when I’d been fleeing from an over-lit, off-road vehicle. Turning right, I walked quickly north until I found Leo’s ride. It was not the Porsche I was expecting, but rather the white van he used to cart Ma Brumsky and her septuagenarian friends around. Oddly, for Leo was no handyman, the back two rows of seats had been pulled out and the space was loaded with lumber.

  I called him once I was safely a mile away. ‘I wanted the Porsche, not your van. And what’s with the wood?’

  ‘Careful, or else I’ll make you drive Ma and the lovelies next time they want to go bowling,’ he said.

  ‘They’ll have to sit on the wood.’

  ‘You’re making conversation. Your voice sounds shaky.’

  ‘The past few hours have been a shaky,’ I said.

  ‘Bring raspberry cheese,’ he said. ‘We’ll sit on the front stoop and you can tell me about the latest mess you’ve gotten into.’

  I told him I’d be there in thirty minutes.

  ‘Raspberry cheese,’ he said.

  EIGHT

  ‘Jungle colors,’ I said, trying to nod wisely at Leo’s assault of fire engine reds, neon greens and blaze oranges when he came to the bungalow’s front door.

  He motioned with the hand holding the knife for me to open the door. His other hand carried coffee in two of the chipped china mugs Ma Brumsky had liberated from a Walgreen’s lunch counter, back when drug stores had lunch counters and no video surveillance.

  ‘You have the gall to suggest I clash with your rusting red-and-green Jeep?’ he asked, carefully stepping out onto the concrete stoop.

  ‘No, it was the observation of a man I was hiding from, watching you get in the Jeep. There was nothing wrong with his eyes.’

  ‘A man I rescued you from,’ he said, bending to set the coffee down on the cement.

  We sat on the steps we’d been roosting on together since seventh grade and I tore open the long white bag holding the Danish.

  ‘No cheese,’ he observed.

  ‘Nothing wrong with your eyes, either,’ I said, leaving his formidable intelligence to conclude that the bakery didn’t have his favorite combination.

  He sighed, and cut the Danish five times. He set down the knife and took a slice. He’d eat the biggest four of the six slices, and none would add an ounce to his 140 pounds, adding further proof that life was unfair.

  ‘So, what’s the latest intrigue?’ he asked.

  ‘From the beginning,’ I said, clicking on my phone and bringing up one of the pictures I’d taken the first morning I’d gone to the Central Works.

  He took the phone with his free hand. ‘A railroad ca
r and, farther away, a boarded-up old factory,’ he said. He turned to me and arched his formidable eyebrows. ‘Seems to me I saw this scene recently, on the news.’

  ‘A realtor representing the building’s owner hired me to take pictures the day after the body was found on top of that boxcar.’

  ‘Negligence liability concerns?’

  ‘That made the most sense.’

  He nodded, and thumbed forward. ‘Now we have an unhappy, stylishly dressed younger man with shiny hair pointing angrily to a No Trespassing sign,’ he said. ‘He was not charmed by your presence?’

  ‘I thought he might be a representative of the building’s owner that first day, but there is that slight bulge beneath his suit jacket, at the left hip.’

  He squinted and nodded. ‘He’s packing. A cop?’

  ‘He didn’t flash a badge. I saw him again yesterday, and then this morning, only today he was with another guy. I could hear them talking. I don’t know what they were doing there, but they were interested in my identity, which made me anxious, hiding as I was upstairs in that old factory. The first one remembered my Jeep, from when I’d been there earlier. You driving it away threw them off my scent.’

  ‘So maybe not cops, but thugs? You set me up to have thugs with guns watch me drive your Jeep away?’ He took a third slice.

  ‘Better you than me, I figured. And I did bring you a Danish as compensation.’

  ‘Idiot,’ he said. He forwarded to a new picture.

  ‘Day two, yesterday,’ I said.

  He studied the picture for a long minute. ‘Men are power washing away graffiti. Art added the night after the body was discovered?’

  ‘At some risk to the tagger, not knowing who was watching the building.’

  ‘Chancing to tag a crime scene.’ He nodded admiringly. ‘That’s a wall artist with stones.’

  I motioned for him to skip over the sketches of the head and the one hand I’d filled in roughly for Herbie, since they were no longer necessary, and told him to stop at the first picture I’d taken that morning, the one I’d snapped from the Jeep.

  ‘All the old graffiti is gone, replaced by …’ He paused. ‘A rendering of an open door?’