Tagged for Murder

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘The tagger returned, this time to spray a fast invitation to see what was inside the building. I was there last night when he did it.’

  ‘Whoa,’ he said, turning to look at me.

  ‘So were nasty people in a high-tired, off-road vehicle with a zillion lights. They must have spotted him, but he’s agile as a cat, and fast. Me? Not so much. They came at me across the grounds. I lost them only by running into traffic on that side street.’

  ‘You’re nuts,’ he said, forwarding to a new picture.

  ‘That’s what the tagger’s open door was inviting me to see.’

  He’d caught his breath, studying the next picture. ‘My God,’ he said finally.

  ‘This is what the tagger first painted outside, then inside after it was scrubbed away.’

  ‘Your client will want color prints of this for the cops,’ he said, standing up.

  We dropped the remains of the coffee and Danish in the kitchen, and went down to his basement workroom. It is filled with a beat-up old wood desk, a hodge-podge of mismatched file cabinets, a light table, multiple magnifiers and a color printer. And the enormous overstuffed purple chair in which his father passed away, years before.

  He printed three copies of the tagged scene and then displayed the photo on the huge wall screen.

  ‘A total of four men are drawn,’ he said, as much to himself as to me as he moved to the screen. ‘Three are inside the window frame. The lowest of those – the poor fellow screaming in the middle – looks about to be pitched out the window onto the railcar shown directly below by the faceless men standing on either side of him. The fourth man is the barest of shadows, pressed against the wall outside an adjacent window.’

  ‘That’s the tagger,’ I said. ‘I left a message for my client, saying he had a witness, someone who could testify it was murder, not negligence, that killed the man on the railcar.’

  ‘Good news.’

  ‘My client hasn’t returned my calls since he texted me, acknowledging receipt of the first batch of photos.’

  ‘Instead he, or the owner, had the tagger’s outside work scrubbed away?’ He shook his head. ‘Makes no sense. One of them should have called the cops and said, “Looka here: a witness who can testify that it was murder, not negligence.”’

  I took the phone and found the pictures of the deep ruts left in the ground past the end of the rail spur. ‘These ruts probably show that the owner knew there was a body on top of that railcar, and that he towed it to the end of the spur, so no one snooping around inside the building could look down and see it before the boxcar got picked up.’

  ‘And once the boxcar was removed, there might be no telling where the body came from,’ he said. ‘Who’s the fool tampering with evidence: your realtor, or the owner he’s trying to protect?’

  ‘The realtor hired me to go take pictures there, so it’s not him.’

  ‘But you saw too much?’

  I nodded.

  ‘That’s why your realtor isn’t calling you,’ he said. ‘You’ve jeopardized the owner.’

  ‘Maybe the guy just panicked.’

  ‘You were almost run down last night. That’s more than just a panicked owner who’d tried to obliterate evidence by tugging a railcar and washing away some graffiti.’

  ‘I need to talk to Herbie,’ I said, turning for the door.

  We walked through his basement, past the model train layout I’d helped him put together in seventh grade. It was still operational, ready for those occasions when Leo needed to run it around its old rails. Leo kept his past close.

  Outside, he said, ‘You’ve tumbled into something that’s safest in the hands of cops.’

  ‘Right after I’ve talked to my client.’ I motioned to his white van, parked at the curb. ‘And you? What’s with that load of lumber?’

  His cell phone rang. ‘Yes?’ He listened and clicked off. ‘My freezer,’ he said.

  ‘What freezer?’

  ‘My secret freezer,’ he said, heading for his van.

  I let it go. I was too full of raspberry Danish and too confused about why Herbie hadn’t called to want to take on another mystery.

  NINE

  I left three messages on Herbie’s voicemail before noon that day, each saying that I’d taken important new photos that I wasn’t going to send until he called. Then I phoned his office. The mouse-voiced woman who answered mumbled that Mr Sunheim was not in. I asked when he was expected. She murmured something about taking a message. I said it was personal. She hung up.

  The postman came at two-fifteen, bringing me a plain white envelope with no return address. Inside were ten one-hundred-dollar bills folded in a blank sheet of white paper. The envelope was postmarked the day after I’d first gone to the Central Works, likely just hours after Herbie had texted early the next morning to say he’d received my photos.

  The envelope could only have come from Herbie, but a couple of things were troubling. For starters, the money was double the already inflated amount Herbie, the nickel-hoarder, had promised. And he was paying me in cash, which might have been a tip-off that whoever owned Central Works was used to paddling in murky waters and was accustomed to paying for illicit things, like trying to run me down or tossing a guy out of a window, with untraceable greenbacks.

  I called Herbie again, thanked his voicemail for paying so promptly, and added that if I didn’t hear how he wanted me to earn the surplus, I’d use my own imagination.

  And then I drove into the city.

  I’d met with Herbie several times, but always at one of the properties he was involved with. I’d never been to his office. Builder’s Complete Realty was located on the seediest fringe of the city’s west side, in a red brick pile that looked old enough to have housed failing garment and shoe manufacturers at the beginning of the previous century. I parked around the corner in a two-story cement garage that was puddled outside from snow melt and inside from roof leaks and dragged-in slush. Herbie’s office was on the fourth floor, at the end of a hall of green-and-black floor tiles that might have been clean or might have been dirty. It was hard to tell because half of the hanging globe light fixtures were either burned out or simply missing. No doubt Herbie had been enticed by cheap rent.

  His company name was hand-lettered on cardboard taped to the frosted glass on one of the oak doors halfway down. It opened into a space not much larger than a maintenance closet. Up front, a scratched black plastic visitor’s chair was jammed between the wall and a beige metal desk. The woman jammed between that desk and the one behind it was about thirty years old, had tight, purplish-brown curls, purple eyeglasses as thick as Leo’s magnifiers, and wore a purple sweater. Were it not for the thick orange rouge caked on her face, the woman could have passed for a grape.

  I remembered Herbie telling me his wife did his clerical work. ‘Mrs Sunheim?’

  ‘She doesn’t work here anymore,’ the woman said in the same mousy voice I’d strained to hear on the phone.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Violet Krumfeld.’ She held up her right hand to show me a solder-encrusted purple ring. ‘Violet, see, like the flower.’ Indeed, the ring had a flower, of sorts – a painted clump stuck in the middle of all the solder.

  ‘That’s a lovely ring,’ I said.

  ‘My sister made it in class.’

  ‘What sort of class?’ I asked of the lumpy thing that looked as if it had come from a welding shop.

  ‘Jewelry arts, when we were kids,’ she said, touching a finger to her eye, as if to brush away a tear.

  There were no papers on her desk. Nor was there a computer – only a red IBM Selectric typewriter of the kind popular forty years earlier. I wasn’t surprised Herbie hadn’t spent large on technology.

  The back desk was as messy as hers was neat. It was heaped with papers, as if the two filing cabinets next to it had been emptied onto it and pawed through by someone with failing eyesight. That desk must have belonged to the reclusive Herbie.

  I play
ed dumb – an easy role – and asked for Herbie as though my eyesight was failing, too, and I hadn’t swept the whole of the tiny office with one glance.

  She played smarter. ‘You just called,’ she said, batting fake lashes like push brooms behind her thick glasses. ‘I told you he wasn’t in.’

  I dropped onto the scratched black plastic chair. ‘It’s important that I talk to him.’

  ‘I could tell,’ she whispered in her mouse voice.

  ‘He’s got me on retainer.’

  A smile cracked the rouge on either side of her mouth, and then she laughed, sort of. ‘Ret … ret …?’ She sniffled. She couldn’t finish the word because apparently she was laughing too hard, though it was almost inaudible – more of a series of soft convulsions that screwed up her face.

  ‘I need direction,’ I said.

  ‘I could tell,’ she murmured, opening a side drawer to extract a Kleenex to dab at the brooms behind her glasses.

  ‘He’s not returning my calls,’ I said. ‘Can you call him for me, Violet?’

  ‘I’ve been trying. Mr Sunheim is not taking calls.’

  ‘Call him at home,’ I said.

  ‘Where’s that?’ she asked.

  ‘You don’t know where your boss lives?’

  ‘You call him at home,’ she said.

  The lashes beat on, up and down.

  I left her my card.

  Despite Violet Krumfeld’s cryptic confusion about where Herbie lived, finding his address was simple. It was listed in the online white pages as being in Chicago, two miles north of Midway Airport.

  Getting there was more complicated. I left the city just in time to get caught in the clog of rush-hour traffic, and got to enjoy, close-up, the eating, phoning and hygiene habits of my fellow motorists. The drive took an unbearable hour.

  Parked cars, all older models but certainly newer than my Jeep, crammed Herbie’s narrow street. His house was a tiny, single-story, white-frame place squeezed onto a tiny lot, identical to the other tiny wood houses on the block, except his had a For Sale By Owner sign stuck in the front yard.

  Two airplanes, both Southwest Airlines 737s, darkened the yard in fast succession as I walked up the front stairs. An unsmiling, heavy-set man in gray pants and a black down jacket watched from the porch next door as I rang the bell. No one came.

  ‘Marge is at work,’ the man who kept tabs on his neighbors called over.

  ‘How about Mr Sunheim?’ I asked, ringing the bell again.

  ‘You a friend?’

  ‘A contractor.’ It was true enough.

  ‘For the house?’

  ‘For his business,’ I said.

  ‘Try his office in the morning.’

  ‘They moved?’

  ‘Just him.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ he said, and went inside his house.

  I turned on the stoop and looked at the worn houses and the tired cars strung along the street. It wasn’t hard to see Herbie, always a slump-shouldered guy, behind an eight-ball, sweating every day to make ends meet. Maybe the sweating got to be too much.

  And maybe talking about anything got to be too much, too, and that’s why he hadn’t called. He might have just chucked his past life and taken off, though sending me an extra five hundred in greenbacks on his way out of town made no sense at all, especially for a guy so intimate with his wallet. Herbie could have squeezed a lot of life out of the extra five hundred dollars he tossed me.

  A new beige Cadillac Escalade pulled to the curb as I walked down to the sidewalk. ‘May I help you?’ the stern-faced woman getting out demanded, implying no desire to do any such thing. She was middle-aged, dark haired and attractive enough, if one liked frown lines and hawk’s eyes. She wore a pink blouse that had come untucked beneath the hem of her short brown jacket.

  ‘I’m looking for Herbie Sunheim.’

  ‘He moved.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘The soon-to-be ex-Mrs Sunheim. And you are?’

  ‘A business associate of Herbie’s.’

  Her eyes narrowed even more. ‘You owe him money?’

  ‘Just the opposite. He owes me,’ I lied to those hawk’s eyes. Likely the woman had hawk’s talons, too, where money was involved.

  ‘He owes me too, pal,’ she said, her interest in me fading to zero. ‘If you find him, remind him.’

  ‘You don’t know where he’s living?’

  ‘He’s never there.’

  ‘Let me try,’ I said.

  She pushed past me on her way up her walkway. She wasn’t going to help anyone get to Herbie and his wallet before she could.

  ‘Nice car,’ I called after her of the big-dollar Cadillac.

  She turned. ‘That’s something else he owes me for. He leased it, the jerk. Us? A Cadillac?’

  ‘He must have done it out of love,’ I said without laughing. More than likely, he’d done it out of spite.

  ‘Herbie’s always been small change,’ she said. ‘Small change for years, and then he goes and leases something like that.’

  She climbed her steps and let the door slam behind her.

  TEN

  An automobile backfired at four-fifteen the next morning, not waking me up because I wasn’t asleep.

  I got out of bed and went to the window in time to see it clatter off Thompson Avenue and cut its lights and its engine on the short street that led to mine. Few cars could sputter that loudly and still move, so had it been a little earlier, I would have taken its driver to be the most frugal of the johns. They favored the dark of that short street. End-of-shift bargains could be gotten there from the hardiest of the late-night hookers that worked Thompson Avenue, Rivertown’s road of lust. But four-fifteen was too late for professional ministrations, even in Rivertown. The neons and the girls had flickered out over an hour before.

  Conversely, four-fifteen was too early for some overserved Rivertown cop to be bumping his car along the curb, feeling his way to the police station behind city hall. Shift change didn’t happen until six. Besides, Rivertown police cars never clattered like the one that had just stopped on the short street. They were kept in tip-top shape, daytimes, by the mayor’s uncle’s crew over at the city garage.

  I beat it up the stairs and the ladders to the balustrade in time to hear a car door open and slam, though no interior light had flashed on. A second later, another door opened and slammed.

  Two sets of footsteps grew louder, running onto my street. Giggling. Kids, I figured, intent on the bench by the river, perhaps to watch the plastic debris glint as it bobbed by, or more probably to touch love.

  The street went silent as the kids crossed onto the grass directly below me, and then more giggling arose, approaching the bench. My mind wandered, then, to my own old young times down by the river with a girl who was now dead. Now I would be a voyeur, and I didn’t want that. I turned to go back inside.

  The familiar banging and tapping began, rising up alongside the turret. The last time I’d been on the roof when it came, I’d let the trap door drop loudly behind me as I charged down the ladder, scaring the tapping thing away. This time I would wait.

  The banging and tapping got louder, rising. And with that came a new sound I’d not been close enough to hear before: a soft whirring.

  In the next instant, whatever was whirring whirred itself over the top of the balustrade, almost cuffing my ear as it passed by. I swung at it but I was too late. It disappeared over the opposite balustrade.

  It had a small light.

  I hurried to the street side to look down. The light had been extinguished and the night was too dark to see anything else, but there was no missing the sound of footsteps pounding the pavement toward the short street. The creaking car doors opened; the clattering car started up. It switched on its lights, turned around, and headed back to Thompson Avenue.

  I climbed down into the turret, understanding the tapping at last. It would be simple to stop it.

  But I had only
the barest idea of what to do about Herbie Sunheim.

  Violet Krumfeld, the Herbie Whisperer, remained evasive when I stopped in later that morning. ‘I told you, I don’t know where Herbie is,’ she said, somewhat audibly.

  ‘Look, he hired me to take some pictures—’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘That’s confidential, but he sent along a—’

  ‘Ah, yes, that retainer,’ she said, starting to sniffle at the preposterous hilarity of that.

  ‘He’s not checking in with you?’

  ‘We discussed this. I can’t help.’

  ‘Where’s he living?’

  ‘I can’t give you his home address.’

  ‘He moved out of his home.’

  She sighed. She knew. ‘I don’t know where he is now, and his wife pretends like she doesn’t know, either.’ She whispered so softly I couldn’t hope to tell if she was lying.

  ‘She knows; she just won’t say. What was he working on most recently?’

  She shook her head.

  I called Amanda on my way over to the county recorder of deeds. ‘I’m twice as flush as the last time I evaded buying you lunch.’

  ‘How come?’ she asked, but it sounded perfunctory. She was distracted.

  ‘My client sent me double the agreed-upon amount, and in greenbacks.’

  ‘Hold for a moment,’ she said, and covered her mouthpiece. Then, coming back, she asked, ‘He paid you a thousand bucks in cash for snapping phone pictures?’

  ‘To do more, I’m almost sure.’

  ‘You still haven’t talked to him?’

  ‘He’s been incommunicado since I sent him the first photos, but a skinflint like Herbie Sunheim never overpays. Fortunately, I had an inspiration, and went back to take more photos.’

  ‘Ah, your inspirations.’

  ‘Let’s discuss them, yours and mine, over lunch.’

  ‘Can’t. Lemon pants,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry, that’s my new shorthand. I pitch to the board this afternoon.’

  ‘You’re optimistic?’

  ‘Guardedly; I still have selling to do. I just finished two hours with our marketing and advertising people, trying to get prepared. Raincheck on lunch?’