It took him a full two minutes to work the car-door handle and lurch out. By then, I’d moved up on foot. I caught him as he staggered into the blackness of the gangway between his house and the burned-out shell of the one next to it. He stunk of whiskey and, oddly, of spoiled milk. He turned at the sound of my footsteps and took a roundhouse swing at me that missed by a good two feet.
‘You idiot, Weasel!’ I yelled, grabbing him by both shoulders. ‘It’s Dek!’
He tried to swing again but I had his arms pinned.
‘You called me and then hung up, remember?’
‘You’re going to get me killed!’ he shouted.
I slammed him back against his house and forced myself to speak slowly and clearly. ‘Tell me about the kid, Weasel. Tell it fast, tell it all, and tell it true.’
‘It’s all your fault,’ he said in a strange monotone. ‘You’re the one had me ask around for who knew Rickey.’
I shook him hard by the shoulders. He was talking gibberish. ‘Make sense!’
He took a breath, but all it did was make him shudder. ‘I found a lawyer who knew a guy who said there was a kid who sometimes worked for Rickey—’
I shook him again. ‘Faster!’
‘So it was no big deal. The kid called me. I said a friend – meaning you, Dek – wants some info on Rickey Means. No way, he said; no way was he talking about Rickey. Then say nothing for a hundred bucks, I told him. A C-note for doing nothing and saying nothing ain’t bad change, so he said OK and to pick him up at a bus stop in Oak Park. I brought him to you. He told you nothing, remember? We collected our hundreds and left. He didn’t rat anybody out about anything.’
I relaxed my hands on his shoulders. ‘And then?’
‘And then this morning,’ he went on, still in a monotone, ‘I’m in the hall at the courthouse, waiting to go in to snag an assignment like usual, when my phone rings.’ His eyes were wild. ‘It was Rickey on top of that boxcar, wasn’t it? Bad teeth, expensive suit? That’s what Mister Shade meant about Rickey being gone?’
‘Who called this morning?’
Weasel licked his lips, missing the milk smear, and looked back toward the alley, as if someone was listening. ‘The kid’s mother,’ he said. ‘She found my phone number on a piece of paper in the kid’s room, I guess. I had to tell her I’d arranged a meet between her kid and somebody. She said the kid never made it home the night I dropped him back at that bus stop in Oak Park.’
‘Did she call the cops?’
He laughed. ‘She and the kid live someplace on the west side, Austin. Nobody trusts the cops in Austin, and few cops go there if they can avoid it. I told her maybe you’d help.’
‘I’ll call her right now.’
He paused, as if struggling to remember. ‘No phone. Her account got cut.’
‘How’d she call, then?’
‘She must have called from work.’
‘Why didn’t you just give her my phone number?’
There was another odd pause, and then Weasel said, ‘Like I already told you, I said maybe you could help, all right.’
‘For a fee, Weasel? Did you shake her for a fee?’
‘Nah,’ he said, quick enough for it to be true.
‘Let’s go see her.’
‘What? Now?’
‘Her kid’s missing.’
‘I told you, she called from her work. I don’t know where she lives. I’ll call her first thing in the morning, get the address.’
‘Give me the number now. I’ll call tomorrow morning.’
‘My phone’s at the courthouse.’
‘This is all bullshit, Weasel.’
‘I don’t know her name or even the kid’s. He just calls himself Mister Shade. I’ll call and get the address in the morning.’
‘I’ll come by for you first thing.’
‘It’s just a kid, Dek. Maybe you ought to forget it.’
Drunk or not, I wanted to slap him, but I just grabbed at his necktie and tugged. He screamed, but there was no one to hear, not in that deserted part of town – no one but me. His panic came as music.
‘Not just a kid?’
He flailed at me with both hands. I let go of his necktie to slap them away, but one flapped back against his face. Blood squirted from his nose.
‘I’m telling you, better you forget the kid!’
‘Tomorrow morning, first thing, Weasel.’
‘I’ll call you.’
‘I’ll find you if you don’t.’
I let him break loose and take off down his gangway.
TWENTY
A black Chevy Suburban was parked in the shadows of the short street off Thompson Avenue, just before the turn onto mine. I stopped well back, about to cut my headlamps, but then I spotted the lights on in the turret’s first and second floors and the car parked directly in front of the turret. It was an old white Toyota Celica, spotted with the brown beginnings of rust.
It was Amanda’s car, the one she drove when we first met, which meant the Suburban belonged to the bodyguards that began accompanying her, almost all the time, when she became CEO and major shareholder of her father’s electric utility. A CEO worth hundreds of millions of dollars, batting around in an aged Toyota, offered up an enticing target for a kidnapper.
I drove past the Suburban, parked in front of the Toyota and got out slowly. Bracing a man against a wall, even one as greasy as Weasel, had caused aches. Moving too quickly in front of guards with guns might well cause more.
The timbered door was locked, which was as charming as it was unnecessary. Amanda was still adjusting to her new life. If she’d paused to think as she let herself in with her key, she would have realized she didn’t need to relock the door behind her. Her guards were vigilant. They wouldn’t let the president of the United States into the turret uninvited if Amanda was inside.
‘Hi, honey; I’m home!’ I called up to my ex-wife, like starched men did to their starched spouses on television sitcoms in the fifties when folks just hung around starched and didn’t much divorce.
She stepped out from the kitchen, looked down from the landing, and screamed.
It was the blood – Weasel’s from when his flailing hand backslapped his nose. I was smeared with it.
Mumbling that it was someone else’s, as though that made it all right, I hobbled up past her to the third floor, dropped my clothes on the old plank floor and eased into the fiberglass shower enclosure. I had no strength left to jump around as usual in the frigid stream – I’d not as yet found funds for a serviceable water heater – and I supposed the stupid part of me needed to stand stoically beneath water as punishing as anything hosed up from the Arctic as penance for bringing hell to a kid. But the cold water offered nothing salving, and I shut it off feeling as much a bastard as before, except colder. I dressed quickly in unbloodied clothes and went down to the kitchen.
‘Warm cider,’ Amanda said.
‘In new cups.’ I sat down at the plywood table to admire the beige cups emblazoned with a picture of a bank in Dubuque.
‘A quarter apiece, at an odd-lots store. I bought you four,’ said the heiress who kept eleven million dollars of art in her lakefront condominium and hundreds of millions more in her investment portfolios.
‘I have cups,’ I said.
‘Not ones picturing a bank in Dubuque. Besides, you shouldn’t reuse Styrofoam,’ she said, giving a nod to the ones on the counter.
I shrugged. The cider she’d warmed felt good, but her being there warmed me most of all.
‘So, there’s been blood?’ she asked of my pre-showered self.
Always, I told Amanda everything, but knowledge of the theft and concealment of a corpse is a felony everywhere. Like Leo, she needed to be innocent of what she didn’t know, so I gave her an amended version of what I’d been bumping against.
‘You’re going to see the child’s mother?’ she asked when I was done.
‘Tomorrow, with Weasel, as soon as he gets me her address,’
I said.
‘Weasel will be of help?’
‘Weasel’s tongue has always been forked. Some of what he said didn’t quite make sense.’
‘Your morose, Nordic-Bohemian genes are thinking the boy is dead?’
‘Potentially Nordic,’ I corrected. ‘My supposed sailor father left no trace of himself behind.’
‘Except you, of course.’ She smiled. ‘Trust me, you have Nordic genes. They’ve embraced the notion that the boy is dead and that it’s your fault.’
‘Among other puzzles,’ I said.
‘All stemming from why that courthouse hustler, Rickey Means, was pitched out of a window?’
‘He’s the key to why Herbie overpaid me, why I got chased off the Central Works grounds, where Herbie expected to get the loot to lease a big-buck Escalade for his wife, why one building got blown up and what Triple Time intends to do with the others.’
‘And whether Herbie is dead and not just missing?’ Her eyes were steady on mine. ‘What about him?’
I got up, took Kopek’s bakery bag from behind the Styrofoam cups and sat back at the table.
‘I already peeked inside,’ she said. ‘Nothing but prune.’
‘There was cheese and apricot, but Kopek the cop and I ate the good ones, me perhaps a little more than him.’
‘You’re not going to tell me the rest of what you know about Herbie, are you?’ asked the woman who knew my subterfuges better than anyone else.
‘How is your jobs idea faring with your board of directors?’
She let it go. ‘Lemon pants,’ she said.
‘You used that term before,’ I said, understanding. ‘You refer to older country club men who dare only to wear outrageous pants to play golf? Conservative men, too cautious?’
‘Men who lack the stones to ripple the waters. Men who don’t want to rile the mayor by inferring he doesn’t have a plan. Tired men who have offered only to form a committee to study my proposal.’
She reached down to her purse on the floor and pulled out a folded front section of a Chicago Tribune. A picture of a shirtless boy, a couple of years younger than the kid I was worried about, took over a quarter of the page. A scar ran down the boy’s bare chest and across his abdomen.
‘The scar is from cutting a bullet out,’ she said. ‘He had to carry it for a while before the doctors said it was safe to operate.’ She stared at it for a moment, and then put it back in her purse. ‘It’s getting late for my guards.’
‘They’re down the block, pretending they’re not down the block.’
‘So we can all pretend I’m not worth a pile if kidnapped.’ She sighed. ‘Our taking that one unscheduled flight in my father’s jet made them crafty. They hid a GPS device on the Toyota somewhere.’
‘No sense getting rid of it,’ I said.
‘They’d just plant another.’ She stood up and headed for the stairs.
‘You forgot your purse,’ I said.
She nodded but started down anyway. I grabbed the purse and followed her, thinking she hadn’t heard me.
At the bottom, she opened the door, but instead of stepping out, she flicked the outside light two times in fast succession. The Suburban shot up instantly. She motioned to whoever was behind the black glass on the passenger’s side to come to the door. Two hundred and fifty pounds of solid beef packed in a wide suit jumped out, surprisingly agile, and came up.
‘Jerry, this is Dek. Dek, this is Jerry.’ Jerry gave the purse I was holding in my left hand only the briefest of glances before we shook hands.
‘Jerry, step in for a moment, please,’ she said.
He stepped in and Amanda closed the door. ‘This, ah, structure was constructed to be historically accurate,’ she said, reaching for the four foot, rough piece of wood that had hung next to the door mostly untouched, except for once when I’d shown her what it was for. She fitted it, horizontally, to the forged steel brackets bolted to the wall on either side of the door. ‘Not even a battering ram can break the door down from outside now,’ she said to Jerry.
He shrugged, accepting. ‘What time in the morning, Miss Phelps?’
‘Six sharp. I’ve got a meeting at eight,’ she said, lifting the wood bar so he could leave.
‘Nice to meet you,’ he said to me now, without the slightest peek at the purse in my hand, and went out the door. No doubt, Jerry had seen much in his professional life.
She closed the door after him and fitted the bar back into the brackets.
‘We’ll have fire on the third floor?’ she asked, of the fireplace in the bedroom.
‘I’ll bring up wood.’
After just the briefest lowering of her eyes, she said, ‘Yes, I imagine you will.’
TWENTY-ONE
She was gone when I woke up but she’d left a note propped against one of my splendid new Dubuque bank cups. What was that tapping outside in the middle of the night? I shook you awake. You said ‘lizards,’ and went right back to sleep! Surely lizards can’t tap! Lovely fire. A.
The morning was warm enough for al fresco thinking. I brought my phone, coffee and, in desperation, one of the hardening prune kolachkys down to the bench by the river.
I called Weasel but his phone had been set to switch immediately to voice messaging. ‘Today’s the day, Weasel,’ I said anyway. ‘We go to see the boy’s mother.’
I leaned back to watch the river. The Willahock had never been pristine. From the earliest days, entrepreneurs and gangsters up and down the river had used it as a drain. But that March, there seemed to be an increase in the volume of plastic trash floating by. Some said it was a freeing of debris caught in ice jams melting upriver. More saw it as the natural result of the mayor’s cousin – a man whose trucks never left Rivertown – recently being awarded the city’s recycling pick-up contract.
I nibbled at the crumbling lard at the edges of the small pastry and threw the dried prune center into the river. It sank in an instant, a mercy to my eyes, though I supposed it posed a threat to the whiskered fish that probed the muck at the bottom.
I mulled over what to do about Herbie, and then I mulled some more. And then I was sure enough. I headed up to the turret, to my computer and my printer, and for the next hour I played with formats and fonts and lies. When the lies were printed sufficiently, I hurried down to the Jeep.
There was much to do to keep Herbie Sunheim alive.
Rickey Means’ law practice address was an unmarked storefront sandwiched between a currency exchange and a place that sold rejuvenating skin-care products and janitorial supplies. Inside, six women wearing headsets sat behind a noisily vibrating soda-can machine.
‘Rickey Means?’ I inquired of the woman closest to the front. She seemed calm, despite her proximity to a compressor sounding like it was about to fire out a baseball-sized steel bearing.
Her phone rang and she held up a forefinger for silence, as if that were possible. ‘Appleton Insurance,’ she said loudly. And then, ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ and ‘Yes,’ before hanging up. Turning to me, she said, ‘Huh?’
‘Rickey Means. This is his law office, right?’ I asked, with what I hoped was a straight face.
‘Who?’ she asked, but she didn’t look startled. She knew the name.
‘Rickey Means, the lawyer?’
Her phone buzzed again, and again she held up a finger for silence. Answering as a towing service, she asked, ‘What year?’ Typing into her keyboard, she said, ‘One hundred, cash.’ Followed by, ‘We’ll be there by eleven.’
She sent off the email and looked up at me. ‘You were saying?’
‘Perhaps Mr Means is not in?’
‘We just absorb his mail and messages.’
I handed her a business-sized envelope to absorb. ‘This is information he requested.’
She looked at the return address I’d so cleverly computer-printed on the envelope. ‘Thank you, Mr Sunheim.’
‘Call me Herbie,’ I said, and left.
Walter Dace’s office went quicker b
ecause, like on my earlier visits, no phones were ringing when I stepped in. The receptionist cutie had finished with her fingernails and looked bored, at least until she recognized me. She buzzed Dace like she was stabbing a spider.
‘I forgot to ask the last time I was here,’ I called in, opening the glass door as he charged out of his office. ‘Your bow tie … did you tie it yourself, or is it one of those pre-tied jobs, perhaps a clip-on?’
‘Out!’ he said, marching forward.
‘Pre-tieds are cheating, like Velcro instead of laces on shoes,’ I said, handing him another of the white letter-sized envelopes. ‘I tie mine from scratch,’ I prattled, ‘though I have to consult that YouTube video we chatted about the last time I was here.’
‘Sunheim?’ he asked, looking down at the envelope. His confusion was encouraging.
‘You remember Herbie, right? He considers you one of his dearest friends, I think.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Herbie Sunheim, your realtor? The guy you turn to for all Triple Time’s commercial real estate needs?’
He touched one of the wings of his bow tie, perhaps seeking comfort. It was another gesture I found encouraging.
‘He asked that I drop it off,’ I said, ‘for you and the Triple Time folks. By the way, who are those folks exactly?’
His face paled. That was most encouraging of all.
‘I’ve gotten no word from him, I told you!’ Violet Krumfeld’s face reddened beneath her rouge as she attempted to yell.
‘Not to worry,’ I said. ‘I have.’
‘Thank God.’ She slumped back, her flush fading in relief. ‘Why can’t he call me? What am I supposed to tell his witch wife? She calls two, three times a day, screaming that she’s a co-owner of the business, demanding that I send her the checkbook. I tell her if I could sign checks on that account, I’d write a big one for myself, for all the worry he’s caused me the last few days. All she says is “What? What?” like she’s hard of hearing.’ She took a breath and asked, ‘So where is the jerk?’
‘He didn’t say. He phoned me last night, said for me to drop this off and that he’d be in touch.’ I handed her the white letter envelope. ‘For the Triple Time file,’ I said.
Tagged for Murder Page 10