Tagged for Murder

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘There’s that name again,’ she said. ‘I told you, we got no file for them.’

  She opened the envelope. Unlike the records I dummied up with Herbie’s letterhead to leave at Mean’s answering service and Dace’s office, listing too many visits I’d supposedly made to each Triple Time property, the sheet I made for Violet Krumfeld was an invoice on my own letterhead.

  ‘An invoice for your time, Mister Retainer?’ She contorted her face into a laugh.

  ‘As I said, for the Triple Time file,’ I said. ‘That buyer you keep saying you’ve never heard of.’

  ‘How come you don’t ask Herbie if I’ve ever heard of it, huh?’ She looked at me with unblinking eyes, the brushes of her eyelashes staying up high and accusing. ‘And this?’ she asked, holding up my phony invoice. ‘I don’t imagine he’s going to pay you anytime soon for anything. And if he gets around to asking me, I’ll tell him I don’t know what you’re up to except trying to find him.’

  I looked past her to Herbie’s desk, which was now as empty as hers. ‘What do you do all day?’ I asked.

  ‘Answer dumb questions, every time you call. When is His Lordship coming to the office?’

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘When you talk to him next, ask him when I’m going to get paid. I got bills.’

  I started to go, but then turned back, feeling too much like too big a crumb. ‘You know what, Violet?’

  Her eyes widened behind her glasses. ‘What?’ she whispered.

  ‘You ought to look for another job.’

  Her eyes stayed wide. ‘I … I thought he was coming in soon.’

  ‘He’s staying away; his wife wants to take what he’s got and divorce him, and you haven’t been paid. You’re sitting here all day with nothing to do. That’s reason enough to quit.’

  ‘There’s seven grand in the checking account. He owes me.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll never pay either one of us again.’

  ‘Ask him, will you? Ask him when he’s coming in?’ Her face was starting to scrunch up, like she was going to cry.

  I gave her what I could manage of a smile and left.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Herbie’s soon-to-be ex-wife’s soon-to-be ex-Escalade was parked at her curb. The doors were unlocked and the key was in the ignition.

  ‘It’s almost out of gas,’ a voice called from behind me. And then she said, ‘Oh … you. I thought you were from the dealer to repo the car.’

  ‘Have you missed any payments?’

  ‘I called them. I want it gone. They said I have to pay because my name is on the lease. I said the bastard forged my signature and they had to talk to Herbie. They said they’re not handwriting experts and since both our names were on the lease along with signatures, I was responsible, same as him. I said I’d leave the doors open and the key in the ignition.’

  ‘They won’t pick it up. There’s a contract, forged signature or not. After you’ve missed a few payments, they’ll send somebody to pick it up and then sue you for the thousands they’ll say they can’t recover in selling the vehicle.’

  ‘I told them the thing’s going to get stolen.’

  ‘After you left it unlocked with the keys in the ignition? They’ll say you’re negligent. Best you make the payments yourself.’

  ‘We don’t have the money,’ she said, her voice breaking just a little.

  ‘Then how did Herbie get you a Cadillac?’

  ‘He was sucking up, trying to keep things going. I told him no dice.’

  I walked up and handed her the envelope. ‘Herbie wanted me to drop this off here,’ I said of the same dummied-up invoice that I’d left with Violet Krumfeld.

  ‘Why bring it here?’

  ‘It’s what he said.’

  She looked at me like she was looking at a liar, which was true enough. ‘You’re telling me you talked to him?’

  ‘OK, maybe not about this specifically, but I need to get paid.’

  ‘Me, too, pal.’

  ‘The best thing for both of us is if I brace him, face-to-face.’

  She shook her head, unwilling to give me the whereabouts she’d given Kopek and Jacks.

  I pointed to the For Sale sign stuck in the ground. ‘The house is owned jointly by you and your husband?’

  ‘And the bank, big time. We got a mortgage.’

  ‘You put the place up for sale after he moved out?’

  ‘I told him that was the next step. I’m cashing out.’

  ‘You’re angry about the Escalade?’ I asked, of the obvious.

  ‘And a lot more than that.’

  ‘You threw him out?’

  ‘Bet your ass,’ she said. ‘But not just because of that damned Escalade.’

  ‘Selling this place is going to be another pesky problem for you, and one that I can make worse,’ I said. ‘You need his signature for the sale to go through. Even if you forge it on a sales contract, like he did with your signature for the Escalade, I can stop you from collecting if I put a lien on his assets.’ I was blowing smoke through a hat, but the lies were flowing fast out of me now, like they were greased.

  I gave her a moment to mull that, and then said, ‘You told the cops where he is. Tell me.’

  ‘He’s never there,’ she said.

  ‘Give me the address anyway.’

  Still she held out. She didn’t want me to get at Herbie before she could get her own hooks onto his wallet. And that was enough to convince me that she, along with the purple plate man, had nothing to do with Herbie’s murder. The woman didn’t know she’d become the Widow Sunheim.

  ‘Maybe I can get him to sign something saying you had nothing to do with contracting for that Escalade,’ I coaxed.

  ‘Ah, hell, stucco house off Ogden Avenue in Brookfield,’ the poor woman said, giving me the address she must have given Kopek.

  I told her I’d be in touch and started down the block toward the Jeep.

  ‘But he’s never there,’ she called out after me.

  I didn’t doubt that at all.

  The white two-story residence in Brookfield looked to be like any of the tens of thousands of ordinary homes in Chicagoland that rented out a room or two without the troublesome involvement of a tax man or a health inspector. It was on a quiet, tree-lined street, two blocks south of a major east-west drag.

  A fiftyish, gray-haired woman in a yellow floral housedress answered the door. I gave her one of my cards, and said I’d come to see Herbie about an insurance matter. She said he hadn’t been around for a few days, adding, ‘I think he’s hiding from the wife.’

  ‘Mind if I take a look at his room?’

  ‘Absolutely not!’ she said.

  ‘But he’s owed,’ I said, lying to yet another unsuspecting woman.

  ‘He’s in arrears,’ she said.

  ‘An insurance settlement might help with that,’ I said, to my shame.

  ‘Cops were here, looking for him, too,’ she said, no doubt of Kopek and Jacks.

  ‘That wouldn’t have been about insurance,’ I said.

  ‘They said it was about parking tickets. He’s owed money, you say?’

  ‘A large settlement. Anyone else come looking for him?’ I asked, thinking of his killer.

  ‘I don’t always answer the door myself. People come to visit that I don’t know about.’

  ‘It would help if I could see his room. We need to find him so we can pay.’

  She shook her head, but it was slowly.

  ‘He’s in arrears, you said?’ I said then.

  ‘Just a week’s rent, but still …’

  ‘You could file a lien on the insurance payout.’ It was indeed a shameful day, tossing lien lies around with abandon. ‘You wouldn’t even need a lawyer, just fill out a form, but first I need to check his room for ideas as to where he might have gone.’

  Once again, greed proved to be the best grease. She led me up the stairs to the second floor. His room was at the back, on the left. She produced keys, unlocked th
e door, and made to go in ahead of me.

  I quickly stepped in front of her. ‘I’ve done this before. Best you let me look alone, so there’s no liability issue. Why don’t you go downstairs, write down what you’re owed, and add in the next two weeks for good measure?’

  She fairly skipped – or would have, if she’d been younger – down the stairs, and I went in.

  The room was immaculate. The bed was wrinkle-free, there was no dust on the headboard or the dresser, and the tiny chair was properly squared to the small table. The room had been recently cleaned by an inquisitive landlady, looking for anything of value she could hold hostage for rent.

  I felt through the socks and underwear in the dresser and found not even lint. The pockets were empty in the one suit hanging in the closet. Three once-white, now-yellowed dress shirts hung on hangers next to it, and two neckties, both striped, both spotted, were looped on another hanger next to them. There were no shoes, no sports clothes. The man seemed to have had nothing, and yet he’d leased his wife a Cadillac. Then again, he might have left most of his stuff back at his house, thinking his rented room days would be temporary. Perhaps he hadn’t known about the man selling purple paper plates.

  I felt for tape beneath the dresser drawers, and ran my hand between the box spring and the mattress. Kneeling down to look under the bed, I spotted a few specks of white paint, tiny flakes against the white baseboard, where the woman’s vacuum cleaner wouldn’t find them unless she moved the bed first. They were odd, those flakes, in a protected spot where they shouldn’t have been chipped loose.

  I pressed against the baseboard and felt it jiggle. I lay on my belly so I could see beneath the bed, and pressed again. More little specks of paint fell on the carpet.

  I worked my fingers along the top of the baseboard. It loosened and came out an inch – enough to slip my fingers in deeper. A faint pull brought a four-foot section away from the wall. There were no nails holding it, but the nail holes were white and sticky. Someone, likely clever Herbie, had recently filled the nail holes with toothpaste.

  The house was old, built in the days when craftsmen smoothed real plaster on slats of wood lath. Removing the baseboard exposed a gap between the bottom of the plaster and the top of the wood flooring. The cavity was filled with edges of paper, tightly crammed in. They were packets, set in length-wise. I wiggled one out. It was a packet of hundred dollar bills. Fanning it, I guessed there were a hundred bills, to make a total of ten thousand dollars.

  I pulled out thirty packets before my fingers could find no more – three hundred thousand dollars in all. Or maybe there was only two hundred and ninety-nine thousand, since Herbie had likely removed ten of the hundreds to send to me.

  I pressed the baseboard back in place, did what I could to brush the paint flecks up against the wall, and stood up. I jammed the cash into the inside and outside pockets of my peacoat and the pockets of my khakis. Most had to go inside my blue button-down shirt, by my belly. I sauntered downstairs clutching the front of my coat tight to my gut, opened the front door and almost made it out.

  ‘Hey!’ the landlady yelled. ‘My accounting!’ She thrust a sheet of paper around from behind me.

  ‘Bad back,’ I mumbled, to explain my contorted posture. I grabbed the paper fast and clutched it to my stomach.

  ‘Find anything useful?’ she asked.

  I eased outside, stepping carefully down the cement stairs so that ten or twenty or thirty thousand dollars wouldn’t tumble out from my coat, or my pants, or my shirt.

  ‘Superior neatness,’ I called back.

  Weasel called as I was driving back to the turret.

  ‘It’s all set for ten o’clock tonight,’ he said, but he said it softly, tentatively. Then again, I’d slammed him up against the side of his house when we’d last met.

  ‘What’s the address, Weasel?’

  ‘Like I said, it’s in Austin,’ he said, giving me a house number on North Livermoor.

  ‘Why so late?’ Austin was one of the worst of the bad crime districts in Chicago. Lives didn’t count for much there, especially at night.

  ‘Maybe she works late.’

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘Ten o’clock.’

  ‘I’ll pick you up at nine-thirty.’

  ‘Just you. I’m not feeling well.’

  ‘We go together. The mother won’t know me.’

  ‘She don’t know me either, remember? All I did was pick up her kid at a bus stop. Anyway, I described your Jeep – red and green. Make sure you park in front so she can see you.’ He repeated the street number on North Livermoor.

  ‘Nine-thirty sharp,’ I said.

  ‘I won’t be here.’

  ‘Then I’ll hunt you down.’

  ‘Nobody wants to be out in Austin that late.’

  ‘A kid is missing. We go together tonight.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Weasel’s house was dark. I expected that. But his car, an aged Taurus, was parked at the curb. If I hadn’t been so nervous about heading into Austin I would have laughed at him hiding in such plain sight.

  I tapped on his basement window and got no response. I tapped louder. Still no response.

  ‘I’m going to break the window and come in,’ I yelled through the glass.

  That got a muffled yell back and, a moment later, the slam of a rear door.

  ‘No problem setting this up, Weasel?’ I asked when he finally materialized in the gangway, coming from the back of his house.

  ‘I told you, I’m not feeling good,’ he said, mumbling. Even in the dim moonlight, I could see his face was pasty, about the same color as the milk inside the quart carton he was carrying.

  We started toward the Jeep, which I’d parked behind his heap, but a sudden thought stopped me. ‘The mother knows we’re coming, right?’

  ‘Why are you questioning?’

  ‘As you said, nobody wants to go into Austin after dark. I want to make sure this is solid.’

  ‘Solid,’ he said, looking away. He opened the carton and took a swallow of the milk.

  ‘What’s with all the milk, Weasel?’

  ‘Ulcer or something.’

  I took it for understandable nervousness. He got in the passenger’s seat, I got behind the wheel and we headed to Austin, where nobody wanted to be after dark.

  According to Chicago’s police superintendent, the Austin district on the west side was one of the toughest places to stay alive in the city. According to the news, gangbangers and innocents got shot there, in roughly equal numbers, every week. According to Amanda, who saw the link, black youth unemployment in Austin exceeded eighty percent.

  We took Chicago Avenue east through Oak Park, turned south a couple of blocks and then headed east again past Leamington, LeClaire and Latrobe, passing dark block after dark block. A quarter of the houses were boarded up. Another quarter were simply gone, burned or crumbled and pushed away.

  But there were signs – literally signs – put up by those who lived in the houses that still stood lit against the night. Hand-lettered, four-by-eight sheets of plywood stood at the head of many of the blocks, listing rules: no washing cars in the streets, no bare chests, no congregating on the sidewalks. No idling, no hanging around. And sure as hell, the signs read, no dealing, no dealing a damned thing. Folks who lived in those ruined blocks were attempting to take back, trying to wrest their neighborhoods from the twitchy gun fingers of the gangbangers that prowled their streets.

  Weasel was growing agitated beside me. ‘I don’t like this at all,’ he said, gulping at the milk. ‘There ain’t many lights.’

  ‘It’s late. Shades are pulled, drapes are drawn.’

  ‘Houses are gone.’

  We came to Livermoor. As I turned south, he said, ‘Best if you walk up from the next corner. I’ll keep the engine running in case we got to vamoose fast.’

  I shot a glance at him. ‘I don’t see how that’s going to help.’

  ‘I’ll leave the passenge
r door wide open.’ He reached to touch the steering wheel.

  I slammed on the brakes. ‘Damn it, Weasel!’

  ‘It’s in the middle of the next block. I don’t want to be waiting for you to open the damned door.’

  His hand shook as he pulled it away. He was petrified. So was I. There were too many burn-downs, too many board-ups. It was a war zone.

  I took a breath. Maybe the weasel was making sense. Things could go wrong fast in that neighborhood, and the quicker I could dive into a running car, the safer I’d be. I stopped at the corner and got out. He slid behind the wheel.

  The street lamp was dark, perhaps burned out, more likely shot out by young gunslingers readying themselves for livelier targets. Only the Jeep’s headlamps lit the intersection.

  I stayed with them, crossing the side street and into the next block. The lot on the corner was vacant; its home scraped away. The house beyond it was boarded up.

  Weasel sped up. I hurried along the sidewalk, trying to keep up, but Weasel was getting too nervous. He was a hundred feet ahead now. Some lamps showed faintly behind covered windows across the street. It was not hard to imagine a hundred eyes behind them, watching my shadow, fearful, afraid or angry for the fool on foot following the Jeep, exposed. My side of the street was dark.

  Weasel stopped. The house immediately ahead was boarded up, and that was wrong. From what I could tell in the dark, it had the right street number. It was where I was supposed to be.

  Gunfire lit the night, fast shots fired from the street. Glass shattered as Weasel gunned the Jeep and sped down the street. I could only duck and run into the gangway alongside the boarded-up house. Car tires squealed, farther away.

  The night went silent too soon, accepting. No doors banged open, no screams of outrage shouted out. Only my footsteps sounded in that black night, pounding on the crumbling gangway out to the alley in back.

  I turned and ran north up the alley, parallel to the street I’d just walked up, to the side street I’d crossed just minutes before. I stopped. Weasel, if he had any fiber left in his soul, would double back around with the passenger door banging open, to find me and speed me away.