Tagged for Murder

by Jack Fredrickson

‘Kopek and Jacks.’

  ‘The names of the cops? I don’t know. They opened wallets, showed me identifications or something. I didn’t look closely. They were nice. They brought strudel. Apple, with raisins.’

  ‘That was Kopek for sure. He’s in his mid-fifties, gray-haired and heavy. Jacks is mid-thirties and thin.’

  ‘The older one was very nice, like I said. The younger one had nothing to say very much.’

  ‘You told them yesterday that Herbie is often gone for extended periods, like it was no big deal.’

  ‘Herbie likes his privacy.’

  ‘So today they wanted to talk about Central Works?’

  ‘Mostly what Herbie said about that property. I said nothing. I’ve been looking through everything here since they left, and there’s nothing on Central Works. If Herbie is working it, he’s working it like he worked your retainer, out of his car or something. There’s no file in the office. Then they asked if Herbie might be working with anybody else on Central Works, and of course, then I got to thinking about you, Mr Elstrom, and what you’re not saying you’re working on. I asked them if they knew you. They said yes, and asked what you were doing. I said I didn’t know exactly, and you never asked about this Central Works, but you sure got more questions than answers.’

  ‘I told them Herbie hired me to take pictures at the Central Works. It’s true.’

  ‘Pictures Herbie could have taken himself with his cell phone?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘This is about the guy who flopped,’ she said.

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘And that retainer Herbie gave you? Was it for anything else?’ This time she didn’t laugh. This time she sounded scared.

  ‘He hasn’t said but it must concern the property owner’s liability. You’re sure Herbie never mentioned Central Works?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  It all fit with him paying me in greenbacks. Herbie didn’t want anyone to know what he was up to.

  ‘How about Triple Time Partners, or Walter Dace, or Dace Property Management?’

  ‘Not a peep. Is Herbie hiding?’ she asked.

  ‘Maybe just from his wife. I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Is there money in your company checking account?’

  ‘Now you sound like his wife,’ she said. ‘She called again this morning. She said the cops called her like they called me, wanting to know whether Herbie was missing, and that it was real urgent they talk to him. That got her a little panicked, I think, but she really didn’t want to talk to me about that. She called because she wants a check. I tell her the same thing I tell her every morning and every afternoon. I tell her I don’t have the checkbook.’

  ‘But you do.’

  ‘I told her that besides, even if I did, I don’t have signing on the account, and that part’s true. She said that’s OK, and to just give her the checkbook.’

  ‘Is there money in the account?’ I asked again.

  ‘Seven thousand, two hundred and sixteen dollars and fifty-four cents. Herbie didn’t run away, at least not far, because he didn’t loot the account.’

  ‘Does his wife ask you why Herbie isn’t returning her calls?’

  ‘Not once, the bitch. She wants the checkbook so she can forge his signature on a check. She says she has a right to company money because Herbie is behind on what he owes her. Apparently, he got into some goofy deal with a car dealer.’

  ‘I told you about that.’

  ‘That Caddy you were asking me about? I thought you were joking. Cadillacs don’t sound like Herbie. She’s smoked about that, because the dealer told her to make the payments if Herbie doesn’t.’

  ‘Those cops this morning – did they mention anything specific that happened at the Central Works?’

  ‘They didn’t mention the flying stiff, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘They were nice and casual, and let me keep the rest of the strudel and all. And then I got to thinking that they really didn’t say anything at all. They were full of questions and no answers, like you.’

  ‘The Central Works was torched early this morning, professionally.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said.

  ‘Why are you still there, Violet?’ I asked, remembering her empty desk. ‘Maybe Herbie really did take off and won’t ever pay you again.’

  She hung up.

  Dace’s receptionist had finished filing her nails since my last visit and was now applying red polish. Her face turned the same shade as the polish when she looked out through the glass wall and saw me crossing the small reception area. She yelled my name back toward the private office just as I opened the glass inner door and smiled winsomely.

  Walter Dace, the fellow who’d given me the bum’s rush the last time, materialized behind her in an instant. It was his face I’d come to see react.

  ‘A green bow tie today,’ I said, noticing, by way of an opening pleasantry. ‘As for my yellow one, it’s still draped on a nail, though other things have changed since I was last here.’

  Though I remained in the open doorway, the receptionist hurried to twist the brush tightly back in the little bottle. Perhaps that was so she could listen more attentively. More likely, she’d noticed the darkening of her boss’s face and was afraid he’d spill her polish, grabbing for her stapler to throw at my throat.

  Mercifully, Dace moved slowly around her desk, disturbing nothing but air. ‘You again,’ he said, coming up to stop a short six inches away. I had six inches and fifty pounds on him, maybe more after the kolachkys, and stayed still in the threshold, neither in nor out.

  ‘I thought I’d drop by to offer condolences and congratulations.’ And agitation, but I figured he’d already sensed that.

  ‘Are you nuts?’ he demanded, breathing hard on my shirt collar.

  ‘Condolences on your building. It blew up and burned.’

  He worked his lips and watched my eyes, but he said nothing.

  ‘You know, that building you didn’t bother to insure? The one where a man came out of a window head first?’

  ‘Your point?’

  ‘Insurance requires an inspection.’ I used to do that sort of thing, now and then, before I tanked my wife and my life. ‘Every property manager on the planet knows that.’ I smiled. ‘Everyone except you, apparently.’

  ‘The building had no value. We care about the land.’

  ‘Then why bulldoze all the others on the site except that one? And why ready the place for new electrical service? Why race to power wash it if it was coming down?’

  He leaned forward to push against me. I let him move me back a couple of inches but kept my foot in the door.

  ‘You haven’t heard the congratulations,’ I said to the top of his head.

  He tried to push the door closed but my foot and shoe were persistent. ‘Say them and leave.’

  ‘Congratulations on hiring a torch who was too obviously professional. He wired all four floors to destroy whatever you didn’t want looked at anymore.’

  ‘I … I hired nobody,’ he said, stepping back. His mouth trembled, trying to stop a stutter.

  ‘Then you know who did,’ I said, ‘and that might be enough to interest a fire inspector. You should have stuck with a punk toting a few gallons of gas and a matchbook. That kind of thing is much less noticeable than explosives and accelerant.’

  ‘Bug off,’ he said.

  My visit had been sufficiently enjoyable. I withdrew my foot and bugged.

  FIFTEEN

  The inspiration for a fishing expedition came right after I left Dace’s office, triggered not by crafty thinking but by remembering the pole net I had yet to remove from the Jeep. My mind often dances sideways like that, to no productive end, but this time it triggered a new thought. I needed to scoop the waters, to see what I could snag about Walter Dace. I hoofed it over to the county recorder’s office.

  Productivity had not invaded its dim hush since I’d last been there. With my arrival, there was on
e visitor: me. And there was one county worker: the same woman who’d helped me the time before. She sat at her desk eating something that smelled like a tuna sandwich and flipping the pages of the day’s Chicago Sun-Times. Since there was no little busboy bell on the counter, all I could do was clear my throat like last time. Since this time I was in her full view, I figured I’d only have to do it once. I figured wrong. She kept chewing and flipping pages, not once looking up.

  I called across to her. ‘Can you help me?’

  She looked up. ‘It’s lunchtime.’

  ‘Who’s filling in?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s my turn today,’ she said, like that made sense.

  ‘You’ve got lunchtime counter duty today?’

  ‘You got it.’

  ‘Then help me,’ I said.

  She groaned, pushed all of herself out of her chair and ambled over. ‘Like it here, do you?’ she asked, with the warmth of granite.

  ‘It’s quiet and comfortable, a welcome respite from the distracting goings-on of live people,’ I said. ‘How can I find out all the properties owned by two particular entities?’

  ‘It’s difficult.’ Words like those were the usual opening gambit in that age-old tribal custom in Chicago – the grabbing of the grease.

  I patted my pocket, the second part of the age-old custom.

  ‘We don’t take bribes,’ she said.

  Like most in Chicagoland, I’d heard the public proclamations of clean-ups in county government and gave them the respect I give wind chimes and other things that make meaningless noises in the wind. Multimillion dollar bribing scandals had recently been uncovered at the highest levels in the city’s public school administration and its red-light ticketing program, signifying that while bribes might now be forbidden to the lowest level of municipal employees, it was only so that larger numbers could be squeezed, like toothpaste from a dwindling tube, to the very top. It was the little payrollers like the tuna consumer that always got hurt first by Chicago’s occasional reforms.

  ‘Of course you don’t take bribes,’ I said.

  She held out her hand, palm up. Once the third part of the old rite, now she wanted only names. I gave her the card on which I’d written Dace Property Management and Triple Time Partners.

  Shockingly, she was back in five minutes with a computer-printed sheet. She’d found nothing for Dace, which made sense since he was just a manager, and not an owner, of real estate properties. But she’d found four properties owned by Triple Time Partners. I left her and her tuna and took the sheet out to the hall to read.

  Listed with the Central Works were three other properties in old factory districts on the west and south sides of Chicago. All four parcels had been purchased in the last six months.

  The printout showed additional information I hadn’t thought to ask for. In all four cases, Herbie’s Builders’ Complete Realty had provided the initial down payments in cashier’s checks, on behalf of Triple Time. That seemed unusual, but it wasn’t necessarily a surprise. Realtors often forge ongoing, wide-ranging relationships with purchasers.

  The lawyer representing Triple Time at every closing was Richard Means, Esquire. That might not have been a surprise, either, except for the fact that Means was a small-time case chaser, too low tier to be working on larger real estate deals. Complicating things even more, of course, was the fact that, as Triple Time’s lawyer, he’d been pitched out of one of their properties.

  One more nugget of information caught my eye. No mortgage banks were shown as holding mortgage liens, which meant the properties had been acquired for cash. That was most unusual. Commercial real estate was almost invariably bought on credit. Leveraging small down payments to buy big properties was the name of their game.

  I called Herbie’s office while driving south out of Chicago’s central Loop.

  ‘I haven’t heard from him,’ Violet Krumfeld might have whispered when she picked up.

  ‘Triple Time Partners, the folks who bought Central Works through Herbie, worked with him on buying three other properties at roughly the same time.’ I read her the addresses.

  ‘I told you before, I never heard of Triple Time.’

  ‘How about those addresses? You would have typed them on four purchase agreements in the last six months.’

  ‘Same as with that name, Triple Time. I never heard of those addresses before. Like I also told you, Herbie must have been doing deals outside the company.’

  I would have asked her to research her files for those addresses anyway, but she’d already hung up.

  SIXTEEN

  According to the barely legible lettering on its yellow bricks, the first of Triple Time’s other three buildings was once operated by something called Bureski Auto Parts. Like the Central Works, it looked to have been vacant for quite a long time, was securely boarded up with graying plywood and sat alone in the middle of a square block otherwise leveled by bulldozers. Also like the Central Works, at least just before it exploded, new red and white No Trespassing signs had been screwed onto the building’s corners. Triple Time seemed to be doing what it could to fight future negligence liability issues.

  I left the Jeep and walked up to the building. None of the plywood sheets covering the window and door openings would bend enough for a peek inside. I didn’t suppose that mattered.

  The second of Triple Time’s other three buildings was two miles farther south. Letters cast in the concrete cornice at the top of the brown brick building meant it to be forever known as the Vanderbilt Bakers Supply Company, which I took to mean it had once supplied salt, confectioners’ sugar, flour and other items to local bakeries. Like the Bureski and Central Works buildings, it sat alone in the middle of a bulldozed clearing. It, too, had new No Trespassing signs, and the graying plywood covering its doors and windows looked tight.

  Except for one. The screws on one of the sheets over a side door had been backed all the way out, leaving the plywood barely secured by only one screw. Anyone – a building inspector, a workman, a cop looking for a drug bust, or most likely, a dealer – could have left that plywood barely secured, intending to come back. I untwisted the screw, set the plywood on the ground and stepped inside.

  The interior looked like the Central Works. Plaster had been broken away to rip out valuable copper wiring and electrical boxes for metal scrap, and old doors and windows had been torn out for chic reuse in modern buildings. There was blood on the floor, old and stained like at Central Works.

  I thought, then, of the young black kid, Mister Shade, that Weasel had brought around. Rickey Means had paid him, sometimes, to rid a building of a casualty – until Rickey had become a casualty himself. In Chicago, too often, the horror went round and round.

  A glint in the gloom caught my eye. It was a shiny bright main conduit through which new wiring would be run. Just like at the Central Works.

  Just like at the Central Works, too, the elevator had been ripped out, leaving gaping squares in the ceilings all the way up to the top floor. The Vanderbilt Supply building, though, still had its stairs, tucked into a corner.

  I pulled my peacoat tighter around me, suddenly chilled. The little light seeping in through cracks in the brickwork and the edges of the plywood window covering was fading fast. The sun was sure to be down in minutes.

  I wanted a fast look to see if the new conduit ran all the way up through the building and, since there were stairs, I went up to the second floor.

  And found the body.

  It rested, half sitting, against the base of the stairs leading up to the third floor, wrapped several times around in the milky thick plastic that cement contractors sometimes lay down before pouring basement floors. I pressed down hard on the plastic and felt below the faint scratch of beard stubble for a pulse, but that was only for the protocol of it. He was cold – long cold. Rigor had come and gone.

  I undid enough of the silver tape at one end to peel back a corner of the plastic. Herbie glared back at me, sightless, unblinking, accusing
.

  I ran down the stairs, spooked enough to want to be out of that building before the last of the day’s sunlight disappeared, and sprinted to the Jeep. Safely behind the wheel, I started the engine, revving it to speed the heater, and took out my phone to call the police. And then I stopped.

  Rickey Means was a typical Chicago casualty. A small man, an unnoticeable man, he was a man of too little significance to warrant two detectives spending much time investigating his murder.

  Herbie Sunheim was a small player, too. Like Means, he was a man of too little importance to warrant much police interest in his disappearance. Yet Kopek and Jacks had come out to the turret within just a few hours of my first calling the police to report his disappearance. And before they’d even gotten to me, they’d contacted Violet and the soon-to-be ex-Mrs Sunheim, and swung by Herbie’s rooming house, wherever it was, to talk to his landlady. They’d acted fast and thoroughly, as if they’d already been primed to go hunting for Herbie.

  Across the bulldozed field, the side door I’d left uncovered was now lost in shadow. Another night was coming, not that I imagined Herbie minded anymore. I guessed he hadn’t minded tucking that thousand dollars into an envelope for me, either. He’d wanted something more than just a few cell phone photos.

  The vague mist of an inspiration was forming – perhaps the most bizarre of any I’d ever had.

  I took a breath, and then another, and then I made myself shut off the Jeep and hurry across the field in the darkness to slip that loose piece of board back into place.

  And then I hustled back to the Jeep and drove away, hoping the drive back to Rivertown would cleanse my head of what I was thinking of doing.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘No problem,’ Leo said when I called him from the car, ‘but there’s no way to lock it up.’

  It was much later that night, past ten o’clock. I’d had to ponder for quite some time, in part to convince myself that I wasn’t going mad.

  ‘I already stopped at the hardware store for a fine hasp, which you’ll need anyway,’ I said, because that, at least, was true. What I didn’t say was that I’d already installed it on the wood enclosure I’d built and was now on my way back to the south side of the city.