‘I’m guessing they’re the only ones big enough to have acquired four sites at once.’
‘Three buildings caught fire and exploded in the same night?’ She arched her eyebrows. ‘Three in one night?’
‘I did light one.’
‘I was afraid of that.’
‘I only torched the one they were fitting out. Others did the Vanderbilt Supply, where Herbie was found, and the Bureski building.’
‘Are you insane, Dek? Arson?’
‘It was going to make chemicals to kill kids.’
She sighed. ‘Do the people behind Triple Time know who torched what?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘That’s great,’ she said, the doubt thick in her voice. ‘How about the police – do they know?’
‘Something’s wrong at headquarters. Two teams of detectives are investigating the Central Works victim—’
‘Rickey Means.’
‘Right, but they’re still not releasing his name or any potential motive for his murder. And the two teams are not working together. More important, a lookalike for a detective’s car passed slowly by me just before the drug lab went up. It stopped right next to the Jeep.’
‘They knew you were there?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Cops.’
‘Don’t know for sure.’
‘So why go to Keller?’
‘Nothing’s being done about Herbie’s assistant.’
She glanced down at the newspaper. ‘“Violet Krumfeld, killed while out jogging; send tips to Keller.” She was your price?’
‘She was a mousy thing. Sweet, well intentioned. Her life is a mystery. No one knows where she’s from, where she lived.’
‘She’s involved more than you thought?’
I shrugged. ‘I want her killer found.’
‘And Herbie, your client?’
‘I’ve discharged my obligation to him,’ I said. ‘He got greedy – went to the dark side.’
‘And swiped that three hundred thousand?’
‘I think that was cash for the next factory buy. For sure, Triple Time’s looking for it – his wife’s house got burgled. And one of the pairs of cops is looking for whatever was stashed behind his baseboard.’
‘Was that smart, taking it?’
‘I want to know who cares about it.’
‘So, Triple Time didn’t kill Rickey or Herbie for stealing?’
‘I think Herbie remained a loyal soldier, so now I’m questioning whether it was Triple Time who killed him and Rickey Means and Dace and his assistant. I used to think the Triple Time people were covering their tracks, eradicating witnesses who could testify against them if things went wrong. But now there have been two fires that I didn’t set, fires that draw even more attention to them, fires that have left me even more confused. I’m not sure what to think.’
‘If not Triple Time, who could be doing the killing?’
I took a breath, and decided to tell it all, because I always ended up telling her everything.
‘Whoever saw me bring Herbie to Rivertown,’ I said
‘You don’t mean after …?’
‘I found his body inside the Vanderbilt Supply building a few days ago,’ I said, ‘and I got inspired.’
She groaned. She knew about my inspirations.
‘I thought if he wasn’t found,’ I went on, ‘I might flush out his killer, so I sort of—’
Her eyes crinkled at the corners, the first tell of her succumbing to laughter. ‘You took poor Mr Sunheim from—’
‘It was meant to be a temporary relocation.’
‘This is horrible, not funny.’ She bit her lip, anxious to force away any hint of disrespect for the dead. ‘Where on earth did you keep him?’
‘Remember I told you Leo was planning on widening Kutz’s traditional product offering?’
‘To include ice cream. Sure, he bought a gigantic new freez—’ Again she stopped, but this time she looked at me wild-eyed. ‘You froze Mr Sunheim like fudge ripple?’
She howled, mumbling in short breaths between screeches of laughter, ‘I’m so sorry, so sorry, so …’
‘To no avail,’ I said. ‘My plan didn’t work out.’
She leaned back, fought for air and, for a moment, simply admired the ceiling. Her breathing calmed, and her face turned serious. ‘So you returned him? Surely you didn’t leave him propped up in front of that Vanderbilt—?’
‘No,’ I interrupted. ‘I intended to drop him in back, because the place was now guarded. But when I went to get him, he wasn’t in the freezer. Whoever saw me take Herbie’s body tailed me to Kutz’s clearing, substituted a lock identical to the one I used to delay discovery and took Herbie back, probably within hours of when I first grabbed him.’
‘To the Vanderbilt Supply building,’ she said, to be sure.
‘Not necessarily,’ I said, ‘just someplace where he wouldn’t be discovered before they could use him. That time came the night before last, when they torched the place.’
‘They wanted Herbie to be noticed,’ she said.
‘A message, perhaps to Triple Time.’
‘Who knows who’s sending the message?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know that either, but I think I know who knew.’
I told her what I didn’t know about Violet Krumfeld.
FORTY-THREE
After Amanda left, I drove again to Weasel’s, as I’d done a dozen times since Austin.
I never had shaken off worrying about the kid, though it seemed almost certain that Weasel’s story about his disappearance had been a ruse to get me shot at. Since I knew nothing about the boy other than he called himself Mr Shade, Weasel was the only one who could help me learn more.
But I supposed that what I really hadn’t shaken off was my need to slap the truth out of Weasel about who wanted me to get shot at.
So far, I’d had no luck finding Weasel. Each time I stopped by, day or night, his house was dark. His back door was always open and the same mess lay on the kitchen counter. And his heap of a Taurus rested rusted and low on weak tires at the same exact spot in front of his house. That I was the surest of, because I’d chalked where the tires rested on the pavement, the first time I drove by after Austin.
It was that Taurus that nagged the most. Weasel was broke. He couldn’t afford to hide out somewhere out of town without a car. So, if he was getting by without his car, he was getting by at home. And if he was getting by at home, he was stepping out now and again for milk to ease his ulcers. So I’d been driving by at various times, hoping to catch him loose inside his house or hoofing to a grocery.
Finally, it occurred to me that I was tipping him off each time to my arrival. Jeep sounds reverberated loudly in Weasel’s otherwise deserted neighborhood, because there were no other sounds for them to compete with. The factories were long shuttered, and those houses that hadn’t been burned were empty. Weasel might well have heard me driving up every time, and slipped into some secret place in his warren of cluttered rooms until the sound of my Jeep disappeared. Or, if he’d been outside, he’d have known to scuttle into some abandoned building until he heard me drive away.
So, that day I decided to play more cagily. I came up his alley on foot and marched right to his back door. The door was unlocked, as always, and just as he’d supposedly left it, fleeing in panic after he’d returned from Austin. I stepped inside, whistling loudly to announce my presence. If he were inside, tucked behind some mound, he’d know to stay hidden. That was fine. I wasn’t looking to snag him in the first instant.
A half-gallon of milk rested in the same spot on the kitchen counter. I’d never actually touched the milk, figuring it sour and best avoided. This time was different. I felt the jug and found it cool. To be certain, I unscrewed the cap and sniffed. It was fresh. Crafty Weasel had left milk on the counter to confuse anyone stopping by, but he’d not thought of the way it should have smelled if it had gone bad from being left out for days.
>
Still whistling, I poured it into the sink and tossed the empty plastic container onto the floor beside the garbage spilling out of the overfilled trash basket. That overfilled basket might have been intended as another display of Weasel’s cleverness, but I thought it more likely it had always been like that. Weasel was disgusting on many levels.
I looked inside his refrigerator. Another half-gallon of milk, fresh and unopened, lay on its side behind a wilted bag of lettuce that looked as if it might have been old when Weasel was but a small creature. I poured that half-gallon out in the sink, too, and tossed the empty container next to the other one on the floor.
And then I went outside and down the alley. The only close grocery was a struggling family operation that had been struggling for decades, five blocks away. I stepped between two leaning garages, figuring a Weasel out of milk would be a Weasel in a hurry.
Ten minutes later, footsteps came pounding along what gravel was left in the alley. When the pounding got really loud, I jumped out and punched Weasel in his anxious gut.
‘What the hell!’ he shouted, doubling over.
‘That was for the running you set me up to do to get away from the gunfire,’ I said, clenching both hands together and bringing them down on the back of his neck. ‘And that’s for the crouching I had to do, when your friends came up the alley, looking for me.’ He fell satisfyingly to the gravel and began screaming. They were horrible, those sounds that came from my bullying, but the gunshots I’d run from in Austin rang louder.
I stepped on the back of his right hand and bent a little toward one ear. ‘There’s more, Weasel. I owe you for having to run all the way up to Chicago Avenue and having to hide in a burned-out storefront, waiting for a bus, and then there was the bus ride itself.’
‘I was hoping you weren’t supposed to die!’ he yelled into the gravel.
‘Nice that you weren’t sure,’ I said, conversationally enough considering I was stepping on his hand.
‘Get off my hand!’ he shouted, muffled a bit by the stones.
‘Who ordered the set-up?’
‘Some guy!’
I stepped down harder.
He shrieked. ‘Some guy on the phone who said he’d put two bullets into my front door! He said he had four more he could put in me.’
I took my foot off his hand and stepped back. ‘Who?’ I said again.
He pushed himself up to his knees, his face smeared with dirt and gravel dust. ‘I’m telling you, I don’t know. I asked around plenty until I found a lawyer who knew a guy who knew about a kid named Mister Shade who worked sometimes for Rickey Means. Anyone could have found out I did that.’
He reached up with his good hand and I pulled him up to standing.
‘Maybe I was supposed to die, but they took off too fast,’ he said, rubbing his damaged hand.
‘What about the kid disappearing?’
‘I was just supposed to say that to get you into Austin.’
‘How do I make sure he’s OK?’
‘You don’t.’ He rubbed his hand. ‘Damn it, Dek. You didn’t get hurt.’
I bunched the back of his greasy jacket in my hand and walked him out to the front and down to his house. The two bullet holes in his front door were fresh.
I told him I would always remember the gunshots in Austin, but that I wouldn’t be back.
Cuthbert and Raines showed up just before noon.
Cuthbert carried a copy of the morning’s Argus-Observer. ‘Read this, Mr Elstrom?’
‘Only when it’s useful, and today it’s useful.’
‘Were you useful to Keller?’
‘The radio said Herbie Sunheim was found dead outside a burning building. How was he killed?’
‘Broken neck.’
‘Was he tossed, like Rickey Means?’
‘We’re wondering what you know about it,’ Raines said. ‘Mr Sunheim was your client.’
‘And he was the realtor for the building where he was found and for the two others that burned that same night.’
‘Meaning?’ Raines said.
‘Meaning you already knew that, like you already knew that all three of those buildings, along with the Central Works, are owned by Triple Time. Surely that’s of huge interest to sharpies like you.’
‘Keller deals in innuendo, and that’s unproductive,’ Raines said. Then added, ‘That’s something you should know better than most.’
‘Sometimes he’s got a good nose.’
‘This time he got his nose pointed by you, and that could be dangerous for you, and for him.’
‘Keller reported that the fire department may have found lab equipment in the first of the buildings that got lit that night, equipment that could be used to concoct nasty drugs.’
‘The Chicago Fire Department has said no such thing.’
‘What about his reporting that two pairs of detectives are working this case, but are not communicating with each other? Who’s the lead?’
‘That’s unproductive,’ Raines said.
‘Yeah, but who’s the lead?’
He shrugged. ‘Kopek. He’s a legend, lots of good busts in the old days. He gets to work on what he wants.’
They turned to leave.
‘What got Violet Krumfeld killed?’
They got to their car, two officious, arrogant pups. Cuthbert paused to look across the roof. ‘We’re Chicago PD, not Belle Plaine.’
‘She was Herbie Sunheim’s assistant, and she’s just as dead as Herbie, Rickey Means, and Dace and his receptionist.’
‘She was found outside the city limits,’ Cuthbert said.
‘By whom?’
‘Not our jurisdiction.’
‘She was a Chicago resident, got a friend to rent her a car near Lincoln Square,’ I called back, but it was in desperation, grasping at a last straw.
‘A friend rented her a car in Chicago?’ Raines laughed, getting in the passenger’s seat. ‘That’ll get us jurisdiction for sure.’
‘What got Violet Krumfeld killed?’ I said again.
It was Raines who answered. ‘We want to know what’s going to get you killed.’
They sped away, having gotten nothing they didn’t already know, leaving nothing except their certainty that I’d been Keller’s rat. And maybe a warning as well.
I went upstairs to my computer and Googled the phone numbers of every hospital within a ten-mile radius of Belle Plaine. I lied the same lies to all, saying that I represented an insurance company seeking to pay out on a death policy, that our insured had apparently led a complicated life, perhaps under an assumed name, and that she might have been brought in by any one of a number of private ambulance services, accompanied by a cop from any one of a number of jurisdictions.
My lies got certainty and nothing else. No jogger, no unidentified woman – no one resembling Violet Krumfeld had been brought in on the date I mentioned.
I went outside, thinking to sit by the river and watch the debris pass by, but a visitor had arrived and was standing a few yards behind the Jeep. It was Gregorio, Leo’s largest goat. He didn’t bray, or bleat, or make whatever those crazed, high-pitched sounds I’d heard earlier at Kutz’s clearing were called. He merely looked at me with baleful eyes, as though life on the run had been a lonely disappointment. I wanted to tell him I empathized, that life often presented unhappiness, but I did not want to have a conversation with a goat outside, where I might be observed.
I walked to the back of the Jeep. Gregorio watched patiently as I unzipped the plastic rear curtain, folded it back and opened the half door. I’d removed the back seat a couple of years before, to use as casual seating in the turret’s third-floor master bedroom, so there looked to be enough room for Leo’s largest goat.
Gregorio looked at me, looked at the open door, and then, with what might have been a faint nod, he ambled up. After some initial clumsiness, he managed to put his right front hoof up inside the Jeep. And then he paused, no doubt evaluating what move to make next.
A Rivertown police cruiser drove up, heading to the police station behind city hall. Both cops waved, but did not honk or hoot. Such was my reputation for eccentricity, I supposed, that the sight of me holding a door open for a brown-and-white goat to get in my Jeep sparked no real interest at all, and they passed right on by.
Gregorio put his other front hoof up into the Jeep and then, with a massive kick of both hind legs, he popped up into the Jeep as smoothly as Baryshnikov ever leaped in any ballet. He pivoted on his belly so he could ride with his head sticking out. I closed the rear door gently, and we were off.
Some motorists gave us friendly waves, and a couple honked their horns. We were in Rivertown, after all, and many unusual things could be seen in such a town. Gregorio seemed to enjoy the ride and the fresh air on his head, and might have even offered the other motorists a smile, though I couldn’t be sure of that, being up front, driving.
Leo, though, did not offer up a smile when I backed the Jeep up to the paddock. He opened the gate and then the Jeep’s rear door. Gregorio jumped out and entered the paddock with dignity.
Leo closed the gate, and then my Jeep’s rear door.
‘This doesn’t square us with you letting a bear pee in my Porsche,’ he called forward through the open rear curtain.
‘I must keep trying,’ I said, of that and Violet Krumfeld, and drove away.
A white plastic bakery bag was set against my door when I got back to the turret. It contained six kolachkys – three cheese, three apricot. No prune. And it contained a white, three-by-five lined index card with 7:30 written on it in dark pencil.
Kopek had invited me to dinner.
FORTY-FOUR
Kopek called precisely at seven thirty that evening. ‘Enjoy the kolachkys?’
‘Just two, so far. One cheese, one apricot. Hard to tell which is better, but I’ll know more tomorrow.’
‘Cheese versus apricot; the dilemma for any Bohemian, even a half-breed like you,’ he said. ‘I’m at the eastern edge of your marvelous little town, at a place called The Hamburger. They don’t have hamburgers on the menu. It’s a fried fish place.’
‘The place changes hands rapidly, but every new owner keeps the sign to save costs. There’s little enthusiasm for fine dining in Rivertown.’
Tagged for Murder Page 21