Tagged for Murder

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘You betcha,’ I said, because that’s what we’d learned to say to each other since out divorce. It implied that there would be a tomorrow, no matter what.

  The county recorder’s office was on Clark Street, not far from the Art Institute where Amanda had happily worked for years. Local news reporting had it that, even in tough budgetary times, the county recorder had managed to create dozens of jobs, though all of them had gone to relatives and other connected people. Such employment practices were common in Cook County, and had been known for forever as hiring ‘somebody who somebody sent.’ Along with the killing and the corruption and the pie-eyed real estate developers, Chicagoans accepted that thousands of such somebodies would forever be feeding at the public trough.

  Unsurprisingly, the recorder’s office had the feel of a county agency designed for such people, hushed and dimly lit for the slow, zombie-like movement of the walking dead. Though no one was in line, it was twenty minutes before a woman responded to the relentless clearing of my throat, and another thirty before she came back with the name written semi-legibly on a slip of paper. The Central Works property was owned by a real estate trust named Triple Time Partners. Its address was only blocks away.

  It was one of the first warm days of March and the sidewalks were filled with earnest young people escaping the tall buildings on one pretext or another, to bustle from sunny patch to sunny patch along the cement. Though I was only a few years older than them, I could not recall a time when I’d ever felt like bustling, let alone been earnest.

  Triple Time’s street address was in an old but stylish former jewelers’ exchange set beneath the elevated rail tracks along Wabash Avenue. It was not listed on the first-floor directory, but the suite number I’d gotten at the recorder’s office was on the fifth floor and belonged to something called Dace Property Management. I stepped in.

  The glassed-off reception area was tiny but stylish as well. Two chrome and black leather chairs and one glass table sat on a bright red rug that was almost the same color as one of Leo Brumsky’s more subdued pair of pants. A glass door set in a glass wall separated the reception area from the equally stylish young receptionist, filing her nails. I opened the glass door and asked if I might speak to someone about one of their properties.

  A lean, middle-aged man came out into the reception area smiling. He was about forty, wore a brown, houndstooth-checked jacket, beige slacks, white shirt and a yellow bow tie that contrasted nicely with the ruddy, healthy glow of his skin. I thought about telling him that my ex-wife, Amanda, had bought me a yellow bow tie as well, but that I’d worn it only rarely, since knotting it required consulting a YouTube instruction video each time I put it on.

  He introduced himself as Walter Dace and led me back to the lone private office. We sat on silver mesh chairs around a small, round glass table. With all the glass in the reception area, and now his table, I imagined the man’s Windex budget was enormous.

  He’d noticed me looking around the small suite as he led me back. ‘You’re wondering how large we are?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Large enough,’ he said.

  ‘You manage properties for multiple real estate partnerships?’ I asked.

  ‘Which property are you inquiring about?’

  ‘The one where a man fell to his death.’

  He stood up. ‘Thank you for coming.’

  He walked me out past the receptionist, who was still filing her nails, and held open the glass door. I went through it without yielding to the childish temptation to leave a smudge, crossed the reception area to go out the hall door and rode the elevator down to the lobby, an exit as smooth as sliding down a greased chute.

  An ‘El’ train rumbled overhead as I stepped out onto the sidewalk. Normal confidentiality concerns would have made Walter Dace reluctant to talk about any property he managed, and my asking about the one where a corpse was found certainly warranted my getting the bum’s rush. But the tempo of his little enterprise nagged. I’d been in plenty of property management offices, and all were hectic with concerns about leases, janitorial issues, equipment malfunctions and such.

  Dace’s operation offered up none of that. Nothing seemed to be going on there. The place felt like a front, a name on a door.

  It felt like a brick wall.

  I’d struck out chasing the last of the leads I imagined Herbie might find productive and by now his voicemail was full. Without his permission, I couldn’t take the next logical step, which was to point the cops to the mural I’d discovered on the top floor of the Central Works. So I stopped at a sporting goods store on my way back to Rivertown and then swung down the river road to Kutz’s clearing.

  Leo’s white van was parked alongside the wienie wagon with its rear doors open. Only a little of the lumber I’d seen inside remained. Most of it was now stuck upright in the ground around the oval that had been graded into the clearing. They were fence posts, like those surrounding the small clearing to the side of the trailer that I’d noticed the last time I’d stopped by.

  Leo was marching along inside the graded oval. He waved and came up as I parked.

  The day’s outfit was the usual medley of colors so outrageous they’d clash in a pitch-black cave. And once again he was topped by his chimney-like chef’s toque that, because it was white, almost looked normal. But that day, Leo had embellished his wardrobe even more bizarrely. He wore a carpenter’s tool belt. It was obviously new; there wasn’t a smudge on its gold faux suede. Nor did it look like it would get dirty soon, for the belt held no tools. No hammer hung from its loop, no nails, tape measure, screws, screwdrivers or any other thing bounced in any of the heavy-duty pockets.

  ‘Why are you wearing a tool belt?’ I quite naturally asked.

  ‘It’s just like yours.’

  ‘Identical to mine, in fact, when it was new.’

  He nodded, as if my question had been answered.

  ‘I ask again: why are you wearing a tool belt?’

  ‘Look around,’ he said. ‘There’s much work to be done.’

  ‘But you have no tools.’

  ‘I have Pa’s, remember? You used them to put together the enclosure behind the trailer.’

  ‘I remember you wouldn’t say what the enclosure I built was for.’

  ‘That will now be revealed.’

  ‘And Pa’s tools? Where are they?’

  ‘In the trailer,’ he said, starting to lead me around to the back of the trailer.

  ‘Why wear a tool belt if you’re not going to carry tools?’

  ‘I’m no good with tools,’ he said.

  It was nonsensical dialogue. I gave it up and followed him around to the back of the trailer.

  A glossy white freezer the size of a fat man’s coffin had been set inside the hinged, slatted enclosure I’d built. He raised the wood lid and opened the freezer. ‘We’re going to offer six flavors of ice cream.’

  ‘Magnificent,’ I said of the freezer that looked just like every other large freezer I’d seen. ‘Now, what’s with the fence posts surrounding what’s obviously a track of some sort?’

  ‘That’s still a secret,’ he said.

  ‘You’re advertising thoroughbred racing on your sign,’ I said, reminding him.

  Ever since we were kids, Leo could not keep a secret from me. Every time he’d tell me he was keeping a secret, I’d feign indifference. That made him turn purple, and always he’d spill within a minute. Not this time. There was no purple; there was no spill. Leo pursed his lips, staying mum about whatever he was planning to set loose to run in circles within his oval.

  ‘Speaking of secrets, how are you getting on with your case?’ he asked.

  I told him I’d still not heard from Herbie Sunheim, and had struck out with Herbie’s wife and his office assistant about where he was living.

  ‘You don’t suppose something bad has happened to him?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m hoping he’s just taking a breather from life, living somewhere else becaus
e he’s on the outs with his wife. I’m going to try and chill.’

  He laughed. ‘You never let anything chill. You’ll pick at it, over and over, until you find out why Mister Sunshine isn’t calling, and why he sent you the extra five large.’

  I told him I’d checked on the ownership of the Central Works and gone to see its property manager, who’d thrown me out.

  ‘You’ve been thrown out of plenty of places,’ he said, accurately.

  It was true enough. We walked to the Jeep.

  ‘What’s with the big fish net?’ he asked, pointing to my sporting goods purchase, visible through the clear plastic curtain on my new green top.

  ‘That’s for night fishing,’ I said.

  ELEVEN

  ‘Where’s Herbie living?’ I asked Violet Krumfeld on the phone first thing the next morning. Nothing had come tapping in the night and I’d slept straight through. Now I was rested, at my sharpest and convinced that the woman knew more behind her mask of purple ditz than she’d been revealing.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she murmured.

  ‘Why don’t you call the cops, report Herbie missing?’

  ‘I’ve been telling that to his wife,’ she said.

  ‘What does she say?’

  ‘She wants his checkbook.’

  ‘Like I told you the last time we spoke, she knows where he is but she’s not telling,’ I said. ‘She’s afraid others will get to his money before she can.’

  ‘She calls here twice a day, crazy about that checkbook.’

  ‘It’s not there?’ I asked.

  ‘If you’re thinking he ran off to the Bahamas or somewhere with the corporate cash, forget it. Herbie’s too morose, and his clothes are so shiny they’d blind anyone on a beach.’ She paused, I thought, to sneeze, but then I remembered she made such a sound when convulsed with hilarity. Her own wit had cracked her up.

  ‘This operation’s a shoestring, a shiny shoestring,’ she finally managed.

  ‘Did Herbie ever talk about getting a Cadillac?’

  She started taking short, fast breaths, succumbing to riotous laughter again.

  ‘Herb … Herb … Herbie buying a Cadillac?’ she finally whispered. ‘Herbie won’t spend for a new shirt.’

  ‘He leased a new Escalade for his wife. Escalades are big money.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘I don’t believe you don’t know where he is,’ I said.

  ‘How about you telling me the truth?’ she countered.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About you getting a retainer. I looked through the checkbook. Herbie cut no payment to you.’

  ‘So you do have the checkbook.’

  ‘Of course it’s here, but I’m not letting that witch near it. So, how did he pay you a retainer, Mr Elstrom?’

  ‘Obviously with other funds,’ I said, not adding that Herbie had sent me greenbacks.

  ‘Yeah? Like Herbie had a secret stash?’ Again she sniffled faintly. ‘Listen, if Herbie had money, he’d hide it, for sure. But like I said, the man barely gets by from what we get here. No way could he build up a stash.’

  ‘Call the cops.’

  ‘Call the cops yourself, Mr Elstrom,’ she said and hung up, which she was becoming so prone to doing.

  So I did.

  Surprisingly, two Chicago detectives knocked on the turret door just after noon.

  ‘Elstrom?’ the heavier one asked as they showed badges. Gray-haired, he was in his middle fifties and had a gut large enough to keep his belt dry in the worst of downpours. His name was Bruno Kopek, which was an accurate name for a Chicago cop, and the tie bar clipping his unfashionably wide gray tie to his patterned white shirt sported a White Sox logo which, in Cubs-crazy Chicago, made him for a south-sider, and defiant about it.

  ‘I’m Elstrom,’ I said.

  He held up a small white bag, the kind that came from bakeries, like he was dangling bait. ‘The Vlodek Elstrom that phoned in asking if an unidentified corpse had been found in the past few days?’

  ‘Welcome,’ I said, which is what I always say to folks dangling bakery bags, as bait or not.

  His partner, barely thirty and short and lean, was named Henry Jacks. They stepped in.

  I offered them the two plastic lawn chairs and took the empty orange roof tar can for myself. The can is acceptable seating for short conversations, and the orange color goes well with the new beige furnace I’d hooked up but had yet to enclose.

  ‘Nice table saw,’ Jacks said, gesturing at the room’s only other adornment.

  ‘I’ll be moving it up to the fourth floor when I figure out what to do with the fourth floor,’ I said. Finding a purpose to any room on a fourth floor was tricky stuff because reasons to climb so many stairs were always in short supply.

  Kopek opened the bakery bag and extracted an apricot kolachky, square and folded in at the corners, as authentically Bohemian as the cop himself. ‘Your first name –Vlodek – it’s Czech,’ he said, passing the bag to me.

  ‘A guy who understands kolachkys would certainly know that,’ I said, snagging an apricot kolach for myself. ‘My father supposedly was Norwegian, my mother Bohemian.’

  ‘Half-breed,’ Kopek said, with no malice.

  They took out identical small blue wirebound notebooks, no doubt to record identical thoughts. ‘So, this man you inquired about,’ Kopek began.

  I passed the bag to the lean Jacks, who passed it on to Kopek without extraction. It figured.

  ‘Non-black, non-kid, non-gang affiliated, obviously non-identified middle-aged male, not found on top of a railcar at Central Works,’ I said. ‘That should narrow it down.’

  I took a bite. The kolachky was marvelous. Pure Bohemian for sure.

  ‘Name of Herbert Sunheim, which narrows it down to zero,’ he said. ‘He’s not been reported missing.’

  ‘You could call his wife or his assistant at work. They’ll tell you he’s not around.’

  He shrugged, chewing, more enthused about the kolachky than my answer. ‘You told our desk officer that Sunheim was a realtor, perhaps representing the owner of the Central Works.’

  ‘Central Works is why you’re here in record time for a non-missing persons case.’

  ‘No,’ he corrected. ‘First we stopped for kolach.’ He reached in the bag for another, this time cheese-filled. ‘According to the information you gave our officer, Sunheim hired you to take photos of the railcar and the abandoned factory at Central Works the day after the body was found.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kopek passed me the bakery bag. In fishing out the cheese kolach on top, I noticed that three of the remaining four pastries were prune-filled.

  ‘Prune?’ I asked Kopek.

  He shrugged. ‘It’s traditional.’

  For me, prune was the most marginally enjoyable of Bohemian fillings; not for nothing were sour people termed prune-faced. I reached back in the bag for the last of the non-prunes – mercifully an apricot – in case the rest of the interview did not go well, and passed back the bag.

  Kopek smiled at my discernment. ‘You said you went back the next day to take even more pictures?’

  ‘There were power washers there,’ I said, to see his reaction.

  Neither of their faces gave notice that they knew of the tagger.

  ‘I went back because I’d not photographed the tracks in usable detail,’ I added.

  ‘Don’t be coy, Elstrom.’

  ‘I wanted to see if the scratches on the rails at the end of the spur were fresher than those leading from the main line to the building.’

  ‘Signifying that the boxcar had been moved away from the building? We already figured that.’

  I brought out my cell phone and showed him a picture. ‘I was looking for some clue as to who moved it.’

  ‘Tire ruts. Big deal.’ He looked in the bag, saw the darkness of prune and closed it back up. Only briefly did his eyes flicker to the apricot I was holding in reserve.

  ‘Look,
Elstrom, I get it that the building owner might have been inside his property, looked down and saw the corpse. I get it that he found a way of tugging that boxcar to the end of the spur, hoping there’d be a snow or something and it wouldn’t get noticed before the rail carrier came to take it away. We’re not interested in going after the owner for that. You can tell Mister Sunheim to tell his owner they got nothing to worry about, negligence liability-wise.’

  ‘I can’t tell Herbie anything. He’s disappeared, remember?’

  ‘Maybe he’s got a tootsie.’

  ‘You know this?’ I asked.

  ‘Call it an educated guess,’ Kopek said, looking at his watch, as if about to get up.

  ‘There’s more,’ I hurried to say. ‘Remember that power-washing crew I saw at the Central Works when I went back the second day? The day I photographed the rails and the ruts?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  ‘The building had been freshly tagged.’ I pulled up the photos of the scrubbing crew. ‘I went back again that night—’

  ‘Your third visit to the Central Works,’ Jacks interrupted. It was the first time he’d spoken since his crack about the table saw. ‘You like crime scenes, Elstrom?’

  ‘I went back to see if the tagger had returned to replace what had been scrubbed away.’

  ‘Now why the hell would he do that?’ Kopek asked, making a show of adding another fold to the top of the closed bakery bag. He was ready to leave.

  ‘The tagger had a story to show. He was there the night the victim got pitched out the window. He risked coming back right after the corpse was discovered, to paint what he’d seen.’

  ‘Which got power-washed away?’ Kopek grimaced. ‘Damned shame; the picture, the tagger, both gone.’

  ‘No. He brought his paints back again, late in the night after his first rendering was scrubbed away. As I said, I was there. I got chased away by some huge vehicle with big tires.’

  ‘Tires you’re saying could have made those ruts you photographed?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said quickly, needing to find Herbie but unsure how far I should back away from any linkage to his client. ‘What I do know is that the tagger was there for a second time. He sprayed this on the outside.’ I brought up the photo of the eight straight lines.