Tagged for Murder

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘How would that matter?’

  ‘They’re lawyers. No one understands how lawyers think, not even other lawyers.’

  ‘The medical examiner will examine the body for signs it was dropped from higher up and they’ll find them, because that building is the only one around.’

  ‘Of course.’ He sighed. ‘We pay our law department big money for such obvious advice.’

  ‘I have photos of deep tire ruts in the ground and fresh scratches on the rails. Both indicate that the boxcar was towed to the end of the spur by a fat-tired, big horsepower off-road vehicle.’

  ‘Those might be interesting, if they help point to a perpetrator. Send them to me.’

  ‘And so I ask again: what was in the shipment?’

  ‘Very large, very expensive, and apparently very fragile kitchen fixtures,’ he said without hesitation. ‘The shipper told the purchaser that routing the boxcar directly to the rail siding would be more expensive than having the goods picked up at the rail yard and redelivered by truck, but the purchaser wanted to minimize the risk of damage from double-handling.’

  ‘The building was slated to become a restaurant?’

  ‘I guess so, but now that the building’s been destroyed, we’ll probably never know.’

  ‘The shipment’s intact, still in the railcar?’ I asked.

  ‘No. The police told us the boxcar was empty when they discovered the body. Everything must have been already loaded into the building and lost in the fire. We’re waiting for the police to release our car so we can take it away.’

  I didn’t tell him that the shipment hadn’t been lost, that I’d been in the Central Works just before the fire and that it had been empty. Nor did I mention Walter Dace saying he’d never cared about the Central Works building, that it was scheduled for demolition. Dace wasn’t a clever liar. Shipping new fixtures to a building meant to go down obviously made no sense, just as scrubbing away its graffiti made no sense. I told Hanson I’d email him the pictures of the tire ruts and hung up.

  I kept an eagle’s eye on the rearview as I drove to Weasel’s, but no one followed. I tried to think that meant the gunfire in Austin might have been ordinary night play in that neighborhood, but pushed those thoughts away. That kind of relaxed thinking could get me killed.

  Weasel’s car was still parked in front of his house. The basement bulb was still off. I called his phone from the Jeep, and got routed to voicemail like before.

  I walked up and tapped on the glass. I got no response. I tapped harder. Still, there was no response. By all appearances, Weasel was not home, which might have been precisely the appearance he desired.

  I went around back to bang on the kitchen door. He didn’t answer, the weasel.

  I tried the knob. It turned easily.

  ‘Weasel?’ I called in. When there was no response, I shouted it: ‘Weasel!’

  I went in.

  Despite it being early March, the kitchen was as humid as a sweltering dog day in August. Ancient gray vinyl wallpaper curled at the tops of the walls, a likely tip that snow had melted in, and down from the roof all winter.

  The plastic garbage basket in the kitchen was overflowing. A capped, half-full plastic half-gallon of milk sat on a counter stacked with dirty plates and bowls. The top plate was covered with yellow noodles. I poked at them with one of the dirty forks lying on the counter. The noodles were soft, not yet dried. They could have been that morning’s breakfast, I allowed, because that’s how my mind and stomach worked – anything goes at dawn. Or they could have been last night’s late dinner, after he’d returned from Austin.

  And that led me to wonder how, if Weasel had made it home, he’d gotten there. Seeing the Jeep returned to the turret, freshly cleansed and unmarked by bullet holes, meant not only that Booster Gibbs had found it wherever Weasel had left it, but that Weasel had not gotten caught by gunfire, at least not while driving. And that pointed to him as a delivery man, where the item to be delivered was me. He might well have set me up to approach that abandoned property on foot, in a neighborhood where a few gunshots would not arouse any real interest.

  I walked through the first floor, but that wasn’t where Weasel lived. It was where he stored. The living room, dining room and the two bedrooms were piled with bicycles and tricycles, small kitchen appliances, cheap wristwatches in small boxes and what seemed to be a thousand other items. Empty Amazon, Kohl’s, Target, and Wal-Mart shipping cartons were strewn everywhere. All had names and addresses of people who lived in Chicago. Weasel supplemented his legal fees by cruising neighborhoods to snatch from sidewalks and doorsteps.

  The basement had a washtub, but no washing machine or clothes dryer. A bedroom of sorts had been fashioned behind a partition made of wood studs and mildewed fiberboard. The single bed was unmade and filthy. The dresser looked to have been hurriedly emptied, its four open drawers containing only a couple of black T-shirts, one pair of ripped men’s briefs, and two socks, one orange, one brown. A beige suit, a red shirt and a dozen empty hangers dangled from a metal clothing rack on wheels. More empty hangers lay on the cement floor, as if clothes had been tugged away in panic.

  The unlocked back door, the food left out to spoil and the ripped away clothes all pointed to Weasel fleeing the house in fear.

  Except that his rusted Taurus was still parked at the curb.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I left Weasel’s hovel and drove into the city, to Dace’s office. Only the man fronting for the Triple Time Partners could explain how a building slated for demolition needed a boxcar full of restaurant fixtures, or why it had been fitted with new electrical conduit, or why it needed to be torched and blown away, or why the thing hadn’t been pushed over in the first place, as he’d told the fire chief it was slated to be, or who was responsible for unloading the railcar before the fire.

  And probably only he could say why Herbie Sunheim, his realtor, and Rickey Means, his real estate lawyer, had been killed, but I didn’t expect to catch anything from him on that, either.

  I opened the hall door, took one step inside, and stopped.

  The glass wall lay shattered in a wide line of a thousand sparkling bits on the floor. Crazily, its glass door was still intact and leaned open against the side wall. I walked up close enough to see all the way inside.

  Gunfire had done it. The receptionist had caught several bullets in the chest, likely fired from outside the glass wall, with enough force to knock her backwards, out of her chair and onto her back on the floor. Shards of glass lay on top of her and in the glistening, still-growing puddle of blood seeping out from beneath her. It hadn’t happened very much earlier.

  Her keyboard and screen rested on her desk, but their cords dangled unconnected. Her computer was gone.

  Walter Dace had tied his last bow tie. He lay face down in his office doorway, shot multiple times in the back. It wasn’t hard to imagine: he’d lurched halfway out of his office, drawn by the crash of shattering glass and perhaps the unfamiliar popping sounds of gunfire as well. Seeing his fallen receptionist, and probably the gunman, he’d tried to turn, to lunge back into his office to lock the door, but he’d understood too late.

  I didn’t need to step farther in. His computer would be gone too.

  The office had been searched, but neatly. Several file and desk drawers had been pulled open, but no papers or file folders were tossed about. It had been eradication, simple and fast. The killers had known what they were looking for. They’d silenced Dace and his receptionist, taken their computers and their relevant papers, and left.

  I backed out into the hall, wiping the doorknob, inside and out, with the tail of my shirt, then looked up at the walls and the ceiling. I’d been caught by high-mounted security cameras once, recorded as a fumbling fool, but this building was old. I saw no cameras.

  I skipped the elevator and took the stairs down to the basement. There were fenced-in storage spaces there, and doors marked for furnace and utility and maintenance. Another door led
up to the street. It was fitted with an old-style battery alarm meant to sound at an outside break-in. I unscrewed the cover with a dime, disconnected the battery, opened the door and wiped down what I’d touched.

  I had no watch cap to tug low on my head. All I could do was raise the collar on my peacoat before climbing the stairs up to the alley. There would be security cameras mounted on some of the buildings outside, front and back, but I could do nothing about those.

  I hurried, head down, along the alley, not wanting to tally the dead but unable to resist doing the count. Four, five, maybe six in total. Rickey Means, Herbie, Dace and his receptionist, all for sure. And maybe the kid, Mister Shade, that Weasel had brought around, and maybe Weasel himself.

  And maybe the mouse-voiced woman; she’d make seven.

  A cab would be quickest. I ran out to the street, flagged a cabbie and promised him an extra twenty if he’d speed to Herbie’s office, scared Dace’s killers had found her, too.

  I beat it up all the stairs to Herbie’s floor, unable to wait for the elevator. I ran down the hall, twisted the doorknob open and hurried in.

  She was on the phone, absolutely and almost inaudibly alive. Instead of finding some way of expressing her usual mild irritation, she actually smiled.

  ‘For you,’ she murmured, and handed the phone to me.

  ‘Elstrom,’ I said, half out of breath.

  ‘What the hell do you have to do with anything?’ an enraged woman asked. I recognized her voice. She was Herbie’s wife.

  ‘Almost always, absolutely nothing,’ I said.

  ‘How’d you do with Herbie?’

  ‘Just as you predicted, he wasn’t in his room.’

  ‘Give me back to that mosquito-voiced bitch.’

  I handed the phone to Violet.

  ‘You were saying, Mrs Sunheim?’ Violet whispered into the mouthpiece. After listening for a moment, she said, ‘No, Mrs Sunheim. If I had signing capability on your husband’s accounts, I would have drained them of their cash, hopped a flight to the Caribbean and would be sipping a drink that comes with one of those little umbrellas you can stick in the sand to shade the bugs.’

  She sneezed, which I knew now could be the beginning of her descent into convulsive laughter, but she caught it and went on in a steady enough whisper, ‘Mr Elstrom is the only one who’s talked to your husband recently, Mrs Sunheim. That’s why I put him on the line with you but, as you heard, he’s not helpful. You have his card? Wonderful. He stays up really late, drinking and behaving reprehensibly with tarnished women, so don’t worry about calling him after midnight. Yes, ma’am, I’m hoping that works. Bye, now.’ She hung up.

  It was an amazingly aggressive performance from a woman I’d thought incapable of any such thing.

  Smiling sweetly, she said, ‘You seem nervous, Mr Elstrom. You’re fidgeting on one foot, then the other. And you’re out of breath.’

  ‘I was in the neighborhood—’

  ‘Jogging?’ She cut me off with an impatient wave of her hand. ‘Now, cut the razzle-dazzle and tell me what’s brought you here when we just talked, face-to-face, a couple of hours ago at your cylindrical abode.’

  No doubt the woman had swallowed gravel since she’d come to the turret that morning.

  ‘Other than Kopek and Jacks, has anyone else stopped by or phoned, asking about Herbie, the Central Works, or any of those other three properties I told you about?’

  ‘You mean anyone other than you?’ She batted her eyelash brooms. ‘Concerning something I know nothing about?’

  ‘Something Herbie knows something about.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him, Mr Elstrom? You’re the only one he seems to be communicating with.’

  ‘How about being followed?’ I asked, remembering the black Impala that might have been tailing her after she left the turret. ‘Have you noticed anyone following you?’

  She took off her thick glasses to look at me with now-unblinking eyes. ‘We’re getting dramatic here.’

  ‘You’re sure you’ve not noticed any strangers milling about?’

  ‘No one’s following me. And how long exactly has it been since you talked to Herbie? I mean, exactly.’

  When I didn’t answer, she said, ‘I thought so. You’re not in touch with Herbie at all, are you?’

  The murders of Dace and his receptionist changed everything. It was time for some truth. ‘Not since the day he hired me, and then only a text, early the next morning,’ I said. ‘That’s why I finally called the cops.’

  ‘You think Herbie’s dead?’

  ‘I don’t know who knows what’s happened to Herbie,’ I lied, meaning nobody but his killer. And me, who’d put him in a freezer meant for ice cream. ‘Two things are important now. The first is to identify the investors in Triple Time.’

  ‘The buyers of the Central Works and the other three properties?’

  ‘They might know where Herbie is.’

  She shook her head. ‘I went through all the files after those two cops left. There’s no file, no mention anywhere of them.’

  ‘How about a realtor’s commission?’

  ‘Not for Triple Time or any of those four properties. Will you please sit down? Your fidgeting is making me nervous.’ She waved the hand sporting the purple welding project at the black plastic chair squeezed between her desk and the wall.

  I squeezed down onto it.

  ‘I matched all Herbie’s commissions to deposits made,’ she murmured on. ‘None came from anything I didn’t know about. You just said there are two things important now. What’s the second?’

  The blood, still hot, soaking at Dace’s office had stayed fresh in my mind, as had Herbie, though colder. ‘As I told you before, I don’t think you’re ever going to see another paycheck. Lock the office and go find another job.’

  ‘I can’t just—’

  I cut her off. ‘I think I saw someone tailing you after you left the turret. A black sedan.’

  ‘Police car?’

  ‘Or a pretender.’

  ‘I’m not being followed,’ she said.

  ‘I was followed last night, by someone who shot at me.’

  Her hand went to her mouth. ‘My God!’

  ‘You’re not going to get paid here anymore, Violet. There’s no reason to hang around.’

  ‘What aren’t you telling me?’

  ‘Only half-baked fears, but they’re real enough. Lock up, go home.’

  ‘Because of what I don’t know?’ she asked, blinking her broom lashes hard, fighting tears.

  ‘Because of what I don’t know,’ I said.

  The image of Dace’s receptionist came back hard. Likely enough, she hadn’t known anything either.

  I got up, too fidgety to sit, stuck between the wall and her desk. ‘Leave this office, Violet, and never come back.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The fidgets remained.

  I’d learned nothing of what Herbie had stepped into, other than maybe it had gotten him three hundred thousand in cash, and for sure it had gotten him dead. Secreting away Herbie’s corpse and waving faked documents had agitated no one out into the open except perhaps a man or two with guns who’d come looking for me in Austin. All I was seeing now was Walter Dace and his receptionist lying sticky in still-drying blood.

  I thought, then, of Kutz’s clearing – one of my old refuges when I was a kid – and how peaceful it would be to sit at a picnic table and ignore what I’d stuffed in Leo’s ice cream freezer and watch the river and not think of much of anything at all until it was time to head to the city garage to ask the nocturnal Booster Gibbs what his crew had encountered, finding my Jeep.

  Leo’s white van was parked, as usual, next to the wienie wagon. The veterinarian’s big green van was also there, backed against the opened gate to the paddock.

  Ordinarily, the scene might well have been soothing. But that day, calm was not to be found at Kutz’s clearing. It was a madhouse.

  There were goats – four of them. One
goat was pure white, two were pure brown. The fourth and largest of them was a mix of brown and white.

  They were jumping about inside the fenced-in paddock, bleating in high-pitched falsettos like they were being accosted by hooded people with hatchets. But they were not. Only the veterinarian darted among them, attempting to soothe them with pats on the head. The man must have been a long-view optimist, for none of his patting was slowing the goats at all. They bleated and kept jumping all around him in a sort of hysterical ballet. Besides the courage to remain among so many leaping hooves, the man was surely blessed with deafness and a nose clogged solid with cement to have chauffeured four such agitated creatures to the clearing in an enclosed van.

  There was other movement there as well. Five gray heads bobbed slowly along the oval’s main straightaway. Ma Brumsky and three of her friends, septuagenarians all, formed a ragged sort of line at the front. They were waving long branches out ahead of them, side to side, like prairie farm hustlers used to do, dowsing for the presence of water. Except instead of forked ends, these ladies’ branches all had silver bells jangling on red velvet ribbons at their ends.

  Mrs Roshiska, Ma Brumsky’s largest and oldest friend, pushed her wheeled aluminum walker closely behind the four ladies in front. She wore her usual outfit of a pink sweatshirt and pink sweatpants, but waved no stick.

  ‘Amazing, right?’ Leo asked. For all the hysteria coming from the goat paddock, I hadn’t heard him sidle up beside me. Again, he wore his white chef’s toque and empty tool belt.

  ‘You like that hat, don’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Toque.’

  ‘Toque,’ I said. ‘What on earth is going on here? You’ve brought in agitated goats and you’ve given sticks with bells to Ma and her friends.’

  ‘A sort of wrangle,’ he said.

  ‘A wrangle?’

  ‘Or a jockeying, if you prefer.’

  ‘Ma and her friends …?’

  ‘Jockeys, of a kind.’

  ‘You consider goats to be thoroughbreds?’ I asked of the creatures shrieking fifty yards away.

  ‘Just arrived. They’re excited to be here.’