‘I still don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Tell me again what you’re doing with so much beef.’
‘Meat,’ I corrected, not so much to be literal but to con myself into believing I was lying as little as possible to my best friend. My first obligation was to protect Leo’s option for plausible deniability if my grand plan went haywire, which it was most likely to do.
‘You’ll have it out before my grand opening?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said without asking when that was, and turned onto the street that led to the Vanderbilt Supply building.
My Jeep is ancient, red and rusty. But thanks to Booster Gibbs, a car cleanser and hot parts acquaintance working nights out of Rivertown’s city garage, it now sported an almost-new green top removed from a dead man’s Jeep. The new top is fine and tight but the green atop the rusted red paint draws attention because of its Christmas season colors, as it had most recently from the two men hunting me at the Central Works just days before. But more worrisome than the attention-grabbing colors, that night, was the crystalline clarity of the new plastic side and back windows that came with the green top. It was easy to see out of them, for sure, but worse, it was just as easy for others to see in. I drove away from the abandoned Vanderbilt Supply building petrified that a sudden stop or bounce over a pothole might cause my cargo to rise up, fully visible, and traumatize some closely following motorist should his headlamps be strong enough to penetrate not only my windows but the risen murky plastic as well. A phone call would summon cops. A felony arrest would be made. No explanation would keep me out of a jail; no judge would risk allowing me to live free of an institution. The worry of that, combined with driving in a frigid March night with the heater off for fear of thawing my passenger, would have been enough to make me shiver all the way back to Rivertown.
But there was a greater worry. A pair of unwavering headlamps, far back, began trailing me three blocks after I pulled away from the Vanderbilt Supply. Professionals do that – follow at such a distance, especially when it’s late and the roads are clear and it’s easy to watch a quarry’s taillights a great distance ahead.
It took more courage than I wanted to spend to slow suddenly, going through a well-lit intersection, but I needed a glimpse of the car trailing behind me. It was dark, perhaps a deep blue, but it might have been darker. My mind skittered to black Impalas, the kind detectives like Kopek and Jacks drove.
It was then that I thought I heard my passenger moan.
I squeezed my shaking hands harder on the steering wheel. It was the wind, of course, and the horror of what I was doing. I unzipped my side curtain to hear the certifiably real sounds of my engine and my wheels, loud sounds to drown out a moaning that wasn’t anywhere but inside my head.
No matter whether I sped up or slowed down, the trailing headlamps maintained the same distance behind me, all the way to the western outskirts of Chicago.
I hit the Rivertown line. I knew the town’s streets, its ruined factories, its darkest places where no one worked or lived anymore, places where the street lamps hadn’t been fixed in years because no one ever went there. I cut my lights, ducking onto an unlit side road, and turned onto a side street and then another side street, zigging and zagging through blocks of derelict buildings and live bungalows and some blocks of both, driving dark, watching the rearview. No headlamps followed.
I came up behind a long-shuttered restaurant fifty feet back of Thompson Avenue and parked between it and a Dumpster that some optimist, intent on resurrecting the place, had filled years before with old stools, parts of booths and broken tabletops. The optimist couldn’t get a liquor license, such licenses being available only to those with direct bloodlines to city hall, and so he gave it up. But his filled, forgotten Dumpster remained, a testament to his ruined dream.
I cut my engine and watched the traffic creep along Thompson Avenue, trapped by the long lights and the lingering ladies, but nothing that looked like an unmarked police car passed by. After fifteen minutes, I started up again, swung onto Thompson and drove to the road that led down to the trailer in the clearing by the river. I wasn’t there but five minutes.
It was midnight when I got back to the turret. I’d been shivering for hours. The night was cold, and the building that had once housed Vanderbilt Supply was cold, but the dead man wrapped in the plastic shroud had been coldest of all.
I clutched the wrought-iron railing and pulled myself up the two flights of stairs to crawl into bed; it was too cold to take off my peacoat and my sweatshirt. At some point, perhaps after an hour, perhaps after two, I drifted into a sleep.
But Herbie had followed me up those stairs, and into my bed, my head and my dreams.
All night long, I heard him moan.
EIGHTEEN
I woke late the next morning and, for an instant, I was calm. And then I remembered.
Or rather, I did not.
Almost every excruciating moment of my late-night trip came back in that instant: the mildewed, dusty smell of the building; the sound of my footsteps echoing across the floor and up and down the stairs; the frigid feel of the weight in the plastic; the relentless steadiness of the headlamps behind me; the sureness of the electric plug fitting into the trailer’s socket to set the freezer humming; the gentle thud as I lowered the top of the wooden freezer enclosure; and the moans, most horribly the moans, that I imagined coming in protest from the dead man.
But I did not remember the click of the padlock snapping closed.
I was out the door in a flash, only to get stopped cold by the maze of long lights along Thompson Avenue. It took fourteen excruciating minutes to free myself and get down to the clearing.
Leo’s white van was parked next to a much larger green van that was emblazoned with a veterinarian’s name and pictures of a laughing horse and a grinning cow. Leo was standing with a man, likely the animal doctor, at the back corner of the trailer, not ten feet from the freezer enclosure that, by now, I was sure I’d left unlocked. They were laughing, those two men, just like the animals on the vet’s van. I could only hope that meant nothing – or rather, no one – horrifying had been discovered. Yet.
I jammed my hands into my coat pockets and made like I was happy merely to stroll about, admiring the progress Leo had made in the compound. And progress had indeed been made. The fence posts surrounding the bulldozed oval were now connected by three rows of long white rails, identical to the fencing that enclosed the small area near the trailer that Leo had yet to explain.
Leo and the vet began walking to the vet’s van. It was my chance. I started toward the back of the trailer but Leo intercepted me. ‘Hold up for a minute, Dek,’ he called out. ‘We’ll walk the track.’
‘Ah, yes, the track,’ I called back.
The vet clapped Leo on the back, got in his van and headed toward the river road.
‘Aren’t you just dying of curiosity?’ Leo asked, coming up. Like last time, he was wearing his empty tool belt. Like all times, he was several rainbows of bright colors, except for the toque on his head, which, inexplicably, had remained white.
‘Curious about what?’ I asked.
‘My new track.’
At that moment, I wouldn’t have much cared if the ground had spontaneously erupted into flames, such was my need to be sure that I’d locked the enclosure surrounding the freezer. But I couldn’t tell that to Leo.
‘Surely you remember the sign?’ he asked.
Some dim part of my mind – there are several – nudged me into an appropriate response. ‘You mean the “thoroughbred racing, maybe” part?’
‘Those would be the pertinent words,’ he allowed.
‘You said you would explain in due time.’
‘Next week, when I’ll be handing out free ice cream from my new freezer.’
‘Ah, yes, let’s look at that new freezer.’
‘Did you catch my drift?’ he asked, not moving.
‘What drift?’
‘That part about next week, wh
en I’ll be handing out ice cream from my new freezer?’
‘You’ll need that freezer next week?’ I asked, trying to sound casual.
‘Or sooner.’
I gave that a nod, because I was afraid to open my mouth.
‘Come on, we’ll go around the track.’ He opened a gate in the fence. ‘Counter-clockwise, like they do at all the great courses.’
We set off counter-clockwise, as would any thoroughbreds that knew great courses.
‘This is going to revolutionize Rivertown.’ He was walking maddeningly slowly, as if he wanted to savor the feel of his yellow canvas shoes on the flattened ground one meandering step at a time.
We passed the Jeep, but as soon as we rounded the turn to head down the short stretch toward the river, he stopped to admire the small fenced-in area.
‘And that’s for …?’ I made myself ask, having to stop as well. Surely it was too small for horses.
‘The thoroughbreds,’ he pronounced.
‘Just like your sign exclaims,’ I said. I started walking, desperate now to see a padlock snapped tight on the freezer enclosure.
‘Don’t you want to know what kind of thoroughbreds?’ he asked, catching up to me.
‘Judging by the size of the paddock, I’m guessing mice,’ I said. We were about to round the turn to the backstretch along the river. I was just seconds from knowing.
He jumped ahead and stopped in front of me, a courageous move for someone that weighed only a hundred and forty pounds.
‘Dek!’
I stopped, just an inch before knocking him over. Maddeningly, his head, long and pale and topped with a damned-fool white cloth chimney of a hat, blocked my view of the top of the freezer enclosure fifty feet down.
‘I know what’s got you so preoccupied,’ he said, his face solemn.
I managed a shrug and started to ease around him.
‘The body,’ he said.
I froze, sure now that I’d forgotten to padlock the enclosure and that he’d gotten a look inside his new freezer.
‘Uh, listen …’ I began, but then the words fell away.
‘Right here,’ he said, pointing to the river bank.
I exhaled. He was talking about the other corpse, the one he’d discovered bagged inside my Jeep some months before.
I might have mumbled something appropriate; I don’t remember. I stepped around him. I had to see.
A new hasp – my new hasp – gleamed on top of the freezer enclosure, tightly secured by the shiny new padlock I’d remembered to snap on it after all.
I let out a breath. ‘Jeez, Leo, we can’t be talking about her anymore,’ I said of the woman who’d gone into the river at the very spot where we were now standing. But, in truth, all I wanted to do was giggle with relief.
He pointed to the freezer. ‘Let’s see the beef,’ he said.
‘Meat,’ I thought to say, but maybe after too long a pause.
He looked up at me. ‘What’s wrong? Your voice went weird.’
‘I, uh, uh, don’t have the combination here.’
‘New lock?’
I nodded.
‘Don’t forget, I need that emptied by next week,’ he said.
‘I gotta go,’ I said, heading back up the way we’d just walked, clockwise, the way even the dumbest of trained thoroughbreds knew not to go.
Hours were flashing by. A week didn’t seem long enough to discover exactly what I’d been thinking when I’d abducted the corpse I’d dumped in his freezer.
NINETEEN
In the dark of the night before, abducting Herbie Sunheim’s corpse seemed the only way to flush out his killers – at least two, shown in the tagger’s mural – out into the open. His disappearance had alarmed his ex-wife, his assistant, the cops, and maybe even his landlady, all for different reasons. But only his killers might become stupid. Unlike Rickey Means, whose murder might have been a spontaneous, unthinking pitch out of a window, Herbie’s killing and disposal had probably been carefully planned. Likely enough, they’d parked him inside the Vanderbilt Supply temporarily as a prelude to hiding him where he’d never be found, and where his corpse could not be probed for evidence that would identify his murderer. And so, my genius of the night before had reasoned, abducting Herbie’s body before they could hide it permanently would disrupt that plan and force the killers to expose themselves trying to retrieve it.
Except that now, in the clearer light of a new day, that thinking smacked of twisted lunacy. I had no idea what next step to take to agitate Herbie’s killers into sight.
Mostly to kill time until I was assaulted with intelligence, I sat at my computer and Googled the last of Triple Time’s properties, the one on the west side that I’d not yet visited. Its satellite image was taken in some previous late spring or summer, when the trees were green with leaves. It showed a flat-roofed, multistoried old building like the other three Triple Time had acquired. But unlike the others, which sat by themselves in the middle of acres of cleared ground, this one stood in a congested block of other old commercial buildings.
I zoomed in for street views. At five stories, it was Triple Time’s tallest building. Its windows were open holes; high weeds grew all around.
The buildings on either side, along the street, were empties, too. The whole neighborhood looked to have been deserted for years.
My cell phone rang. It was Weasel Wurder, and he was out of breath.
‘Who’d you tell?’ he shouted.
‘About what?’
There was silence at his end of the line, and for a moment, I thought we’d lost connection.
‘About what?’ I said again.
‘About asking me to nose around about Rickey Means?’ he asked, calmer now.
‘Nobody. Why do you ask?’
‘That kid I brought around? Mister Shade? The kid that said Rickey was gone, meaning dead?’
‘What are you saying, Weasel?’
‘The kid’s gone missing.’
The phone went dead.
I ground the gears, shifting fast over to Weasel’s place. His heap wasn’t at the curb, no bulb burned behind the filthy glass in the basement, and no amount of banging on any of his windows, front or back, roused him. He’d called from somewhere other than home.
I went back to the Jeep and tried to breathe deeply enough to reason that it wasn’t me who’d caused the kid’s disappearance. I watched Weasel’s house for an hour, sitting in the car, calling his phone every five minutes. I only got voicemail.
I became too fidgety to just sit. I drove to Triple Time’s fourth building to busy myself away from bad thoughts. All the way into the city, I kept redialing Weasel’s phone, but still only got his voicemail.
Instead of the factory building I’d seen on the Internet, nestled among similar structures and trees, Triple Time’s fourth building sat by itself in the middle of land bulldozed since the satellite photo had been taken.
Unlike the other locations, this one had activity. A large yellow Penske rental truck was backed up tight against the loading dock at the side, and two more identical yellow rentals idled on the wide, side driveway, waited to be unloaded.
This building had guards – at least two – standing at the corners, watching the cleared ground, the traffic passing by … and me if I slowed noticeably. I sped around the corner, parked on the next block and walked back up on a cross street. Half of the buildings I passed were vacant, though others were being used – one as a machine shop and three as storage facilities. I slowed up, coming up to the intersection, and pressed into the shadows of the building at the corner.
Glints from the truck being unloaded showed that shiny things were being taken off, perhaps long, stainless-steel sinks or counters. Something else sparkled across the intersection, a hundred yards beyond Triple Time’s building. It was off the windshield of a car parked on the same side street that I was on. The car looked to be a black Impala. That needed to mean nothing; the world is full of black cars. Or it needed to
mean that cops were staking out Triple Time’s fourth property, or that the car I’d thought was tailing me belonged to what was being unloaded.
I turned, went back to the Jeep and headed for Rivertown. But five miles before the city line, something I’d already pretty much known needed confirmation. I pulled to the curb and took out my phone.
I hadn’t paid much mind when the fire chief at the Central Works said it had been Dace who’d bulldozed the buildings there, other than to question why one had been left standing when, despite having been prepared to be rewired, it too was slated for demolition. I took it for the changing whim of a developer; in commercial real estate, things change.
Now I’d just finished seeing the same thing, sort of, at Triple Time’s other three properties. Though satellite photos are refreshed fairly regularly, the last Triple Time property was still being shown as nestled among trees and other buildings. It meant the grounds surrounding that building had been bulldozed recently, probably by Dace as well.
I brought up the Internet on my phone and Googled the Bureski site. I needed only a glance before moving on to the Vanderbilt location. Same thing.
Triple Time Partners had bulldozed all four of their properties since acquiring them, leaving only one building standing at roughly the center of each multi-acre site. Reason told me that didn’t need to be odd. Triple Time, likely a canny developer, might simply have wanted to unclutter its new sites, to provide space for parking, snappy landscaping and expensive new construction.
Still, Rickey Means, their lawyer, had been tossed from one of their buildings and Herbie Sunheim, their realtor, had been left dead in another. That was two too many dead in too many buildings for real estate developers, no matter how canny.
Something more was at play, something that Herbie Sunheim had paid an extra five hundred dollars for me to see.
Weasel banged his front wheels against his curb, killing his engine, at ten o’clock that night. I’d been waiting down the block for three hours.
Tagged for Murder Page 9