Tagged for Murder

by Jack Fredrickson

  The night stayed silent.

  A minute passed, and then another, and then a car engine began growing louder in the distance. I moved up to the curb. The night stayed dark; he was approaching without headlamps – smart, to avoid being seen – just as I would have done.

  The engine was loud now, too loud. It was too powerful to be the Jeep’s. I ran back into the alley and dropped down behind a trash barrel next to a garage a hundred feet back.

  The engine rumbled up and slowed, approaching the alley. Turning in, the driver switched on his high beams, lighting it up as if it were noon. I pressed tight against the barrel and held my breath; any movement would be magnified in that glare. He stopped, his engine idling strong, a man with a gun. I dared not look.

  A moment passed, and another, and then he gave it up. He backed into the street and drove slowly away. Finally, the engine grew faint enough for me to hear my own breathing. I got up from behind the trash barrel.

  I felt for my phone, then realized I’d left it in the Jeep’s cup holder.

  There were no other motor sounds in that night. Weasel Wurder, the bastard, was likely miles away.

  I’d die if I stayed in those blocks, not just from gunmen looking for me but from roving gangbangers drawn by the sound of gunfire, looking to fight, rob, or worse. I hurried north across the side street and into the next alley, half-running, half-walking, trying for silence but knowing every footfall pounded loud, like a drum beat in the silence of that night.

  I crossed another side street, and then another, and then the alley dead-ended at Chicago Avenue, the main east-west drag we’d taken to Austin and the same street where Weasel had picked up the kid at a bus stop, to bring him to me. That bus stop was in Oak Park, safely to the west. A bus headed there had to be coming along at some point.

  It was almost eleven o’clock. The stores that still struggled along that part of Chicago Avenue were closed up tight for the night, their recessed doorways barricaded flush by thick accordion fences. I moved west in their shadows, looking for a place to hide and wait. Two blocks up, I came to a burned-out storefront that nobody had cared enough to barricade. It would have to do. I stepped in through the smashed front window.

  A car passed, heading east into Chicago, but it passed fast. No driver wanted any business with anyone out in that neighborhood after dark.

  Ten, fifteen minutes went by. Two more cars sped by, one going into the city, one going west. Neither stopped for the red lights at the intersection. Not even traffic laws applied to that stretch of Chicago Avenue, come darkness.

  And then I heard it – a bus coming from the east – but it was coming too fast. I jumped through the broken window just as it shot by, and I ran after it, yelling, as it lumbered into the next block. Somehow the driver heard, or saw. He stopped suddenly in the middle of the block. The door hissed open, and I ran up the two steps.

  ‘What the hell?’ the driver shouted, shutting the doors and starting up without waiting for me to get a hand safely on the rail. He was older, black, gray-haired.

  I looked down the aisle. His only passenger was an old black woman halfway down, clutching a worn cloth shopping bag, sound asleep.

  ‘Oak Park?’ I asked.

  ‘Sit the hell down behind me and stay low,’ he said. ‘I don’t need no damned white man drawing fire into my bus.’

  ‘How much?’ I asked, dropping down behind him.

  ‘Forget the damned fare. Just stay low.’

  He drove on for a mile before he spoke. ‘Damn, man, ain’t nobody up to any good out in that neighborhood this late. Nobody black, sure as hell nobody white.’

  ‘I was waiting inside a store.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ he said, nodding but not believing. ‘Ain’t no stores open there, this time of night.’

  ‘This one suffered a fire.’

  ‘That don’t narrow it down.’

  ‘There’s a cab stand in Oak Park?’

  ‘Ain’t no cabs be prowlin’ this late, even in fancy neighborhoods. You got a phone?’

  ‘Left it in the car,’ I said, in what surely was one of the grandest understatements in my life.

  ‘You are one crazy man, for sure.’

  We drove another block. ‘You want a cab?’ he asked.

  ‘I surely do.’

  He pulled out his phone, tapped a number or an app and mumbled an order for a cab to be waiting at the Harlem Avenue intersection, with the meter running, and we drove on in silence: him thinking I was crazy; me thinking I was crazy; and the old woman asleep in the back, likely thinking nothing at all, all the way to Oak Park.

  I had the cabbie run past Weasel’s place first. His Taurus was parked at the curb and my Jeep wasn’t. The rat’s basement windows were dark.

  I was too tired to break in and look for his throat on the off-chance he was hiding inside, so I had the cabbie drive me to the turret next. That the Jeep wasn’t there was no surprise, either.

  My house key was dangling in the Jeep’s ignition somewhere, so there were two choices for a third stop. One was Leo’s ma’s bungalow. He had a key to the turret but might be at his girlfriend’s condo downtown. In any event, I’d likely wake his mother.

  There was a surer option to get in the turret, and one that was necessary anyway. I had the cabbie drive me to the city garage across town. It was now past two o’clock in the morning, but Booster Gibbs and his crew would be in full swing, stripping cars that bore bullet holes or troublesome vehicle identification numbers, and simply cleansing others of less worrisome bloodstains or fingerprints.

  I paid the cabbie and walked up to tap on the side door. The metal plate covering the small window slid back, and one of Booster’s eyes appeared on the other side. He stepped outside.

  As usual, he was garbed head to toe, cap to booties, in green surgical duds, purple latex surgical gloves and a full white face mask that covered his enormous beard. Booster, like his crew, took obsessive care to leave nothing of himself in the cars he was working on.

  He looked down the driveway at the curb. ‘Don’t see that fine Jeep I topped,’ he said, referring to the green top he’d installed some months earlier.

  ‘It’s elsewhere, but I don’t know where, exactly. It’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Unpleasant circumstances?’

  ‘Gunplay in Austin. Weasel Wurder was behind the wheel—’

  ‘That creep,’ he interrupted. Like me, he’d gone to school with Weasel.

  ‘I need you to send a crew to find my Jeep.’

  ‘Cops looking, too?’ he asked, so he’d know whether to dispatch a fenced flatbed truck with a tarp, or just a car.

  ‘Not yet, but I’m not sure.’

  ‘What’s the potential that Weasel will be inside?’

  ‘I heard glass shattering. He could have gotten hit, but he drove away.’

  ‘The windshield’s the only glass you got besides headlamps.’ Then, ‘You were out of the vehicle, on foot?’

  I nodded.

  ‘That creep,’ he said again. ‘There’s a chance he set you up …?’

  ‘I’m trying not to make that a conclusion.’ I told him to start on North Livermore, south of Chicago Avenue.

  ‘Hundred bucks an hour OK?’

  I gave him five hundred of Herbie’s C-notes. ‘If you find Weasel shot, tip the cops anonymously. If not, flatbed the Jeep back to you for a cleanse or more, depending on the nature of what you find.’

  He didn’t bother to ask if I had an ignition key, because Booster liked to say he found them needlessly time-consuming. He got his nickname for his prowess in hotwiring cars.

  ‘I also need a ride from a lock man,’ I said.

  ‘Your turret keys being inside your Jeep, of course.’

  Booster’s man was proficient. He picked my lock and had the door open with a flourish in seconds.

  I barred the door behind me, and hobbled up the stairs to the second floor and the card table I use as a desk, thinking to call Weasel. And then I rememb
ered that I’d given up my landline months before to save expenses.

  As for the next, last minutes of that night, I don’t remember hobbling up the next flight of stairs to bed at all.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  A banging on the timbered door woke me at nine-thirty the next morning. Violet Krumfeld stood outside in the too-bright sun.

  Right in front of my Jeep.

  ‘Why don’t you answer your phone?’ she said, somewhat audibly.

  ‘I didn’t hear it ring,’ I said, trying to look beyond her to see whether the Jeep had suffered anything incriminating, like bullet holes or a shattered windshield. Or both.

  ‘Know why?’ she asked, stepping closer to block my view.

  I could only shake my head. I needed more sleep and I needed more peace, and for sure I needed to get to my Jeep, to see what it would tell. But more than anything at that moment, I wanted to step back inside the turret and bar the door, in case anyone who’d prowled about in Austin the previous night had the thought they might see me better in Rivertown in the light of the new day.

  She held up her own cell phone, thumbed in a number and smiled. A phone rang behind her. It was my phone, inside my Jeep.

  ‘What are you up to?’ she asked, I thought.

  I rubbed my eyes to signify that she’d woken me up.

  ‘I tried calling you until midnight,’ she said, summoning up a rouge-cracking smirk. ‘Late night?’

  ‘Working for Herbie, day and night,’ I said, taking a more comfortable step back into the gloom of the turret.

  ‘I’m sure,’ I think she said, stepping forward uninvited. ‘I have questions. Do you have coffee?’

  For such a mouse, she was persistent. I invited her in because she was already in. After barring the door, I started to lead her up to the second-floor kitchen.

  ‘What’s with the bar on the door?’ she said behind me.

  ‘I anger people occasionally.’

  She offered no objection to that, and began to follow. Then she stopped.

  I turned around. She was clutching the railing on the second step. ‘It’s loose,’ she murmured of the gently trembling wrought-iron staircase.

  ‘For almost a century without collapsing.’

  She hurried up behind me and followed me into the kitchen.

  ‘Plywood for a table,’ she said, waving the hand that sported the welded purple ring. ‘Charming.’

  I filled the other two cups Amanda had bought me and set them on the charming plywood.

  ‘Aren’t you going to warm the coffee in the microwave, at least?’ she asked.

  ‘My microwave leaks radiation,’ I said, which was true, but mostly I wanted her and her nose gone so I could get at the Jeep. Booster’s day had ended, so there was no chance to talk to him until nightfall, but it was likely Weasel’s day hadn’t yet begun, at home, and I wanted to slap his head.

  We sat down. She didn’t bother to taste the coffee, which was just as well since it was already two days old and hadn’t been any good when it was fresh.

  ‘So, working for Herbie until the wee hours?’ she asked.

  I nodded, lifting my cup to savor the chill of the coffee.

  She sighed. ‘At least he’s talking to someone, even if the jerk won’t call me for messages.’

  ‘He’s getting messages?’ I asked, trying to sound casual.

  ‘Which is why I had to drive out here.’

  ‘You drove all the way out from the city to deliver Herbie’s messages?’

  ‘Just one.’ She pushed her thick-lensed glasses farther up her nose. ‘And to find out what’s going on, but I’ll start with a message. CSB called the office yesterday.’

  ‘CSB, the railroad conglomerate?’ I asked, like I hadn’t triggered the call.

  ‘A man said Herbie called, inquiring about the routing of a certain railcar. The man wouldn’t say which railcar, exactly, but we sort of know, don’t we, Mister Retainer Elstrom?’

  ‘The Central Works one,’ I said, because there were limits to how stupid I wanted to look.

  ‘Of course, Central Works. The place where some unfortunate man was found dead on top of a boxcar. The place you keep asking me about. You and the cops.’

  ‘To be fair, I’ve started asking you about other properties.’

  ‘Yes! Those other places owned by that, ah …’

  ‘Triple Time Partners,’ I said. ‘Investors you say you’ve never heard of.’

  ‘Yeah, well, since Herbie seems able to talk to you and call CSB, he ought to be able to call me,’ she said, watching my eyes.

  ‘Give me the name of the CSB person.’

  ‘You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said, standing up. It was time for the woman to leave.

  ‘Then I don’t have to tell you what Mrs Sunheim called me about this morning?’

  I sat back down.

  ‘She called first thing. She said two cops stopped by as she was heading out the door to go to work. She thinks one of them was the one who’d called her at work before, asking about Herbie’s current living arrangements. She’d told him then that Herbie had rented a room and didn’t live with her anymore, and gave him the address so he could see for himself.’

  ‘Kopek and Jacks, your strudel friends,’ I said.

  ‘I described them to her and it was them who stopped by this morning, all right. Know what they wanted?’

  ‘I’m hoping you’ll tell me.’

  ‘They wanted to come in her house for a look around.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For any sorts of clues as to what Herbie was mixed up in. They said they received reports that people were worried that Herbie was in trouble. She told them to go scratch, that Herbie was just dodging her so he wouldn’t have to pay her anything or go through with the divorce. She said they had to have a warrant to get in her house.’

  Violet gave a pronounced nod and raised her eyebrows.

  ‘There’s more?’ I asked.

  ‘Herbie’s wife said an insurance guy who works for Herbie stopped by again yesterday, bugging her for what she already gave the cops.’

  ‘Which was what?’ I asked, needing the maddening woman to be precise.

  ‘Come on, Elstrom.’

  ‘You mean the address of Herbie’s rented room? The cops had already been there, according to the landlady. Herbie wasn’t there. His room was as neat as a pin.’

  ‘You learned nothing?’

  ‘Nothing there even points to him being alive,’ I said, because technically, it was true.

  She stood up, handed me a pink phone message slip and headed for the stairs. I followed her as she clutched her way down, and I walked her out the door.

  A Chevy Volt was parked behind the Jeep. It had a ridiculous decal in the rear window – an index finger raised to the lips of a round cartoon head, making a shushing motion.

  It made sense, her driving an electric car as noiseless as she was.

  What made worse sense was the black Impala that started up behind her on Thompson Avenue, following her east toward the city.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  From the door, it appeared that no bullets had punctured my glass or vinyl or paint. Nor did it appear that anyone was lurking nearby. I walked out to the Jeep.

  The keys were under the seat. The carpet was damp. The car had been cleansed, shampooed top to bottom, fingerprints and bloodstains – if any – scrubbed away. For sure it had been Booster’s crew, and not Weasel, who’d brought the car back.

  I grabbed my phone from the Jeep’s cup holder, beat it back into the turret and up to the kitchen and my crummy coffee. I thumbed in Weasel’s number. As I expected, it went straight to voicemail. ‘How the hell did the shooters know I’d be at that address, Weasel?’ I shouted, though it was to nobody at all.

  Next I called the number Violet had written on the pink message slip. The man who’d called Herbie’s office from CSB was named Hanson. He was in the railroad conglomer
ate’s insurance department.

  ‘You spoke to one of my associates yesterday, Mr Sunheim,’ he said.

  ‘He said someone else would call me back,’ I said, because that, at least, was true.

  ‘The number you called from yesterday was blocked, like today, so we found your office number and called there instead. We can’t be too careful. The newspapers suggested we are a bunch of nincompoops who can’t keep track of our rolling stock.’

  ‘I’m cautious, too,’ I said, though my caution came from wanting to avoid discovery as a fraud.

  ‘You told us yesterday that you represent the buyer of the old Central Works,’ he said.

  ‘Only in the actual purchase of the property. I’m the realtor.’

  ‘Nonetheless, I’m sure we have the same objective.’

  ‘Limited liability,’ I said. ‘You don’t want there to be any hint of negligence. Neither do I.’

  He forced a chuckle, one empathetic negligence-avoider to another. ‘How may I help you?’

  ‘What was your railcar doing at that abandoned factory?’

  ‘Surely your building owner told you it was routed there as per his instructions.’

  ‘My owner has become extremely reticent, given all the publicity surrounding the discovery of the deceased,’ I said. ‘What was shipped there?’

  ‘Your owner must tell you that.’

  ‘Can you give me the name of the shipper?’

  ‘We don’t release information about our customers, but I will tell you we left it exactly where requested.’

  ‘Directly alongside the building, so it could be unloaded.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And then it was moved to the end of the rail spur,’ I said.

  ‘I’d planned on sending a man there to find proof that someone else had moved it without our permission, but the building burned down before he could get there. The building rubble is gone, and the ground around it and the tracks has been freshly graded. That’s a shame.’

  ‘Photos wouldn’t help you,’ I said.

  ‘Our legal people think there’s a chance the victim was put on top after the boxcar was moved.’