Tagged for Murder

by Jack Fredrickson

  Amanda stood off to one side, behind a middle-aged man in a short-sleeved white shirt whose pocket was crammed with more pens and pencils than anyone normal could use in a year. Surely the owner of the green Volvo outside, and likely a manufacturing engineer, he was inserting multicolored wires into a red plastic connector, showing the kids how to assemble small wiring harnesses with the components that lay before them in the tubs and trays.

  My mind drifted, as it so often did, to that first time I saw Amanda. It had been through a glass window very much like the one I was standing in front of now, only that window fronted a high-end art gallery on North Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s most magnificently expensive mile. Being uneducated in art, then as now, I’d made a face at the painting on a wall that she was scrutinizing. She’d looked up, caught me, and made a face at the painting, too. I knew then that a moment like that was more than any man could wish for in a lifetime.

  The manufacturing engineer set down his wiring assembly. Amanda clapped. The kids did, too, standing to grab coats and jackets piled on a table against the wall.

  I stepped aside as the kids filed out, flushed, it seemed, with a strong sense of achievement. They were wearing jackets of another sort as well, those eight kids – jackets of promise. They split into two groups of four, crammed into the two cabs and were driven away.

  I waited outside as Amanda finished talking to the man in the white shirt. He came out and, with a brief nod to me, headed down the block to the Volvo wagon.

  She followed. Seeing me, she grinned. ‘Slick, huh?’ she asked.

  ‘A fine beginning, for sure.’

  She gave a thumbs up to her guards in the Suburban, linked her arm in mine, and we went to the Jeep. ‘This is only a pilot project but already I have exciting news,’ she said, strapping on her seat belt. ‘At least one pair of lemon pants must be coming around. The landlord who owns this whole block of empty stores stopped by before we got started. The rent for our space plus the one next door has been prepaid for the next several years. Can you imagine?’ she asked, flashing her huge grin at me. ‘Several years? I’ll have room for fifty, maybe even a hundred kids, by summer.’

  ‘Magnificent,’ I said, easing us east, toward Lake Shore Drive.

  ‘Don’t you want to know who stepped up to help?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘Someone anonymous,’ she said, laughing. ‘Someone who doesn’t want it known he’s not quite solid behind the mayor.’ Then, serious, she turned to me, ‘Any news with you?’

  ‘I called every law enforcement agency again,’ I said. ‘City, county, state, Belle Plaine, even the forest preserve cops. Nothing. Nobody’s got anything on a Violet Krumfeld.’

  ‘And that nags,’ she said.

  ‘More and more, and less and less.’

  ‘There’s that cryptic business again.’

  ‘It’s nothing I want to talk about, yet.’

  ‘OK.’ She knew my moods, my reluctance to put optimism into words for fear of jinxing a hope. ‘How about the bodies in that burned-out car? Any identification?’

  ‘Not in the news. I think the police are fervently hoping the press will back off,’ I said.

  ‘Kopek and Jacks, or Cuthbert and Raines?’

  ‘Not one of them has returned my call,’ I said. ‘The brass knows who didn’t show up for work. I think they’re trying to keep the lid on while they investigate how far the corruption has spread.’

  ‘The press will stalk the police superintendent every day.’

  ‘Even Keller, with his grape-sized attention span, will probably follow up.’

  ‘Understandable. It was his story, his and yours,’ she said, turning to me. ‘Speaking of Keller …?’

  I shook my head. ‘Nothing from him, either. I called him again today. He’s not gotten one tip about Violet Krumfeld.’

  ‘Mysterious lady,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe too mysterious,’ I said. I’d been thinking that way since I made up my mind about who to send the gun to at police headquarters.

  We passed Navy Pier and the enormous new Ferris wheel, lit up and ready for the riders who’d be coming in just days.

  ‘You brought a change of clothes for Leo’s?’ she asked.

  ‘Sometimes you’ve got to anticipate every possibility,’ I said.

  ‘Pajamas?’ she asked, touching my shoulder.

  ‘I anticipated that possibility, too.’

  She kept her hand on my shoulder. ‘And?’

  ‘Nah,’ I said.

  She touched me even harder.

  FORTY-NINE

  Such was the reverence for Kutz’s wienie wagon that fifty cars beat us to the clearing by the time we rolled down the river road, leading Amanda’s guards, the next morning.

  The three-dozen seniors roosting on Kutz’s equally senior picnic tables had obviously arrived first. Ma Brumsky’s age and older, they’d likely come at dawn, ready for lunch, as seniors often do. They sat, stood or leaned at various angles at the pigeon-strafed old tables, smiling, remembering. Many of them had been coming to that clearing since Kutz’s old man ran the place, and plenty had carved their initials on the trailer’s back wall, right above where Leo’s new, multipurpose freezer now sat. No doubt more than a few had earned their first sexual splinters upon those very same wood tables, on mad, moonlit midnights long ago. It was barely the middle of March – the trees were bare, and the ground was still spotted with the last of the winter’s snow – but for those at the tables, and just as probably for those standing along the Willahock, cradling hot dogs and fizzy sodas and cheese-slathered French fries, and those waiting in line to order, it was spring once again.

  I couldn’t see much of Leo behind the order window other than the flash of the red vinyl vest he wore to call at Ma’s bingo nights or, more recently, when he’d chauffeured Ma, her lady friends, and me – crouched behind the driver’s seat – to the home of an almost US Senator, where we’d gone to search for corpses.

  I gestured to Amanda’s two guards, invisible behind the dark windows of their Suburban, that I’d get the hotdogs I promised when the line shrunk a little, and Amanda and I went drifting, enjoying the sounds and smells of the old place. The white flecks curling off the forever peeling wood trailer, the bare dirt that would never nurture grass or even weeds, the pigeon-splotched picnic tables – all were as they’d been when I’d gone down to that clearing after school to wait while my mother’s sisters took turns bickering over whose turn it was to take me in for a month. I’d never had money, but the curmudgeonly Kutz never shooed me away, and more than once the old crust slipped me a tepid hot dog and an even warmer Coke. That clearing by the Willahock had been a refuge, as had, later, Leo and his parents. It seemed a perfect symmetry that he was in charge of it now.

  Endora, Leo’s girlfriend, came up, all grins and grease. A former fashion model, truly a cover girl, she’d made enough to blow that off to become an underpaid researcher at Chicago’s Newberry Library. She was a head taller than Leo but shared his stratospheric intellect. And, judging by the yellow and red stains on her white apron, she fully shared his latest dream, too.

  ‘I’m in charge of the barbecue cheese fries!’ she announced, giving Amanda a hug and me a kiss on the cheek.

  ‘Like everything, you wear it well,’ Amanda said, laughing.

  A great bell rang, the folks waiting in line to order froze, and Leo stepped out from the trailer. He’d dyed his white chef’s toque into a swirl of orange, yellow and red that made him look like an oversized wooden stick match, on legs, on fire. He carried an enormous antique megaphone.

  ‘Welcome, welcome all!’ he announced through the horn, high-stepping majestically to the gate in the fence surrounding his race track. ‘Welcome to the grand resurrection of Kutz’s Wienie Wagon and the introduction of thoroughbred racing to the banks of the magnificent Willahock River!’

  Everyone clapped as Leo, with great flourish, turned with outstretched arms to the padd
ock. On cue, the veterinarian I’d seen on earlier visits opened the gate and emerged, leading a small parade. Up front were four goats, restrained on red leashes by Ma Brumsky and three of her most ambulatory friends, all wearing very short poodle skirts and pink down jackets. Each held a long branch festooned with silver bells in her free hand. The goats were surely large enough to drop each of the frail septuagenarians to the ground with one strong tug, especially the beast Gregorio, who was being guided by Ma Brumsky, but all seemed well behaved and moved forward docilely.

  Mrs Roshiska, Ma’s oldest and portliest friend, brought up the rear, pushing her walker. She also wore a poodle skirt, though hers, because of her size, was decorated with substantially more poodles. Unlike the others, she wore no pink down jacket, but rather her customary pink sweatshirt and clearly, judging by the restless shifting of the fabric, nothing of restraint underneath. Mrs Roshiska, for all her advanced years, had the free-swinging spirit of a lustful teenage girl.

  The crowd applauded the spectacle with loud cheers. Leo, grinning with his ten thousand teeth, took a bow and another, and another. When the veterinarian, the goats and their tending ladies arrived at the rail, Leo pulled back the gate and motioned for them to line up behind the starting points chalked onto the dirt track. Mrs Roshiska, trailing pendulously, entered the fenced track last and pushed her walker to a spot behind the veterinarian, the goats and their minders.

  The crowd hooted and cheered. The Ringlings, Barnum, Bailey and now Brumsky; the ranks of the greatest showmen of all time had now been joined by Leo, at least in Rivertown.

  By now, everyone who was physically able had gone to the fence to watch what might be a race, or bedlam. Leo, ever the optimist, had also chalk-striped lanes onto the track, as if the goats would race in straight lines.

  The veterinarian moved across the starting line, unclipping the leashes from the collars of the four goats. The goats remained still.

  I shifted to catch the eye of Gregorio. He stared back, but gave no wink acknowledging the ride we’d shared in my Jeep.

  Leo raised his hand, put a whistle in his mouth, and blew.

  The four septuagenarian lady goat wranglers raised their sticks to the heavens and shook their bells as if summoning down the Greek gods of Chaos.

  The crowd cheered louder.

  The goats, panicked by the bells and the cheers, took off down the straightaway, precisely as intended.

  Despite his easy-going affability, the brown-and-white Gregorio, the largest and longest-legged of them all, quickly took a two furlong lead as the fast-moving pack approached the first turn.

  It was then that things went awry.

  Gregorio did not follow the turn. He lowered his head and charged the curve in the fence, hitting it full force with his horns. The rails flew up in the air like cheap balsa as Gregorio shot through the new opening and onto the cleared ground beyond the fence.

  Whereupon he skidded to a halt.

  And then, almost lazily, he turned around to stare insolently back up the track, as if daring any of the four wranglers – Ma or her three similarly poodle-skirted friends – to try to come down to get him.

  Gregorio’s three apostles wanted no part of any such confrontation. It was lunchtime and they’d sensed there was food around, loose. Charging through the break after Gregorio, they kept on going, circling outside the fence, past the paddock, through the space between the backstretch and the river to the hardened ground where the picnic tables had sat for all time. No one was there; the seniors had left their lunches to move to the track to watch the race.

  The three junior goats hit the tables fast, and literally, bucking them up onto their sides, spilling hot dogs and colas and the French fries coated with the yellow stuff Kutz swore was cheese. It stopped them, all that flying food, and the goats set about grazing, all thoughts of escape abandoned.

  I looked back at Gregorio, still standing past the section of fence he’d smashed. He was watching us all – the poodle-skirted wranglers, the suddenly silenced crowd, his fellow, foolish goats – with eyes that did not blink. Having established some rapport when I drove him back to the clearing, I guessed that freedom was not his objective. Mastery over any situation, controlling it on his terms, might have been what he was after.

  The frozen crowd stared at the goat perhaps staring at them, it being hard to tell because his eyes were on different sides of his head. And though there was no way of knowing for sure what was lurking in Gregorio’s mind, it was easy to read the spectators’. They were scared. They stood rigidly along the fence rails, their mouths working in silent prayer, their eyes intent on Gregorio. Even the three rambunctious goats who’d charged the picnic tables had stopped cavorting, sensing the stillness of the crowd, and now stood stiff like statues, though still chewing. They, too, seemed too frightened to move.

  And so, for a moment, nothing did. Not the large, muscular, Gregorio, not Ma and her fellow wranglers, not Leo, not any of the crowd, not the other goats. Like a main street in an old Western movie when breaths were held just before a gun duel, the clearing had gone completely and utterly silent.

  And then, just as in those old Westerns when the wind nudged a sign hanging on rusted chains, a single thin sound cut into the silence. Something creaked.

  It came from no hanging sign, though, but rather the tortured front wheels of Mrs Roshiska’s walker, screeching in protest as she put her considerable weight behind them to move forward. Snatching the red leash from Ma Brumsky, she pushed past her four frozen, poodled friends and began moving up the race track, slowly, deliberately, every bit as purposefully as any sheriff who’d ever stared down a gunslinger.

  The muscular Gregorio did not move. He stayed in place, holding his ground, watching, waiting.

  Mrs Roshiska passed the front stretch halfway mark, both hands firm on the creaking walker, one also clutching the red leash. It occurred to me then that I was no longer seeing a replay of a high-noon movie Western; I was witnessing Hemingway’s Pamplona, el matador Mrs Roshiska versus the master bull Gregorio.

  Mrs Roshiska got to the three-quarter mark. Still, Gregorio did not move. And then, the eye that was closest to me rolled. It did not blink; it did not look up or down. It simply rolled, and I understood. He’d been unable to focus from either side of his head on her face, or her legs, or her walker. The pendulous, free-swinging Mrs Roshiska had trapped his eyes with what rolled beneath her sweatshirt in sympathetic rhythm, up and down, side to side, unmoored and independent of one another.

  She wheeled through the break in the fence and right up to Gregorio. He didn’t move as she reached out to snap the leash to his collar, turned around, and began leading him back toward the starting line. To my mind, poor Gregorio seemed almost grateful to be led, having now to face only the relative calm of the back of Mrs Roshiska’s sweatshirt.

  The crowd remained silent as the pair wheeled and walked back up the front stretch toward the waiting hands of the veterinarian, who’d watched the whole drama safely from behind one of the fence posts set solidly in cement. But once he took the leash from Mrs Roshiska, pandemonium broke loose. The three apostles, sensing the drama was over, resumed jumping up and down among the upended picnic tables and began making their frenetic goat noises. Half the crowd raced for their cars.

  ‘Hot dogs are on me!’ Leo announced through his megaphone and that stopped most of them. For that crowd, especially the seniors just getting by on reduced fixed incomes, being kicked to death by frolicking goats paled in comparison to enjoying a Kutz-style hot dog for free. Leo raced into the wienie wagon, turned his boom box on loud, and hot dogs on buns began flying out faster than Kutz used to let flies fly in, all to the tunes of his beloved Antonio Jobim. Clutching their free wieners, some began swaying to the gentle sambas and, suddenly, it was Brazilian carnivale along the Willahock.

  The three apostles, caught up in the merriment of the day, danced and darted in and out as the people shrieked and hollered and danced. Soon, ragged C
onga-like lines were formed, meant to herd the goats toward their paddock. Even Amanda’s guards, tieless but still dressed like stiffs in dark suits and unseen holstered guns, got caught up in the hilarity of it all, and had linked arms with the other revelers. It was bedlam and it was magnificent.

  It took two hours to coral the goats and upright the picnic tables. By then, Leo had run out of hot dogs, French fries, soft drinks, and even the yellow goo Kutz told everyone was cheese. People left laughing, swearing Leo’s grand opening was the most fun they’d had in years.

  Amanda and I laughed, too, sitting at last at a picnic table with Leo, still adorned with his flame-dyed toque, and Endora, sweat-stained, shiny and elegant. Mock-mortified, Leo cradled his chimney-topped head in his hands, mourning that in all the excitement, he’d forgotten to announce he was now also offering six flavors of ice cream, plus lime gelato.

  And then it was time to go. As I started us up the river road, Amanda’s guards following fifty feet behind in their Suburban, a massive black Hummer pulled out of the woods in front of us. There were plenty of such massive off-roaders lumbering around Chicagoland, but this one was tricked out with a solid row of lights above its windshield. Fear bumps danced up the back of my neck. I’d seen that Hummer twice before.

  The Hummer slammed on its brakes fifty yards before the turn onto Thompson Avenue. Just as I swung the steering wheel hard left to get around it, a black Impala roared up from behind and ducked between us and Amanda’s guards.

  Amanda sucked in a breath. ‘Damn,’ she said, in too small a voice.

  I cut the Jeep’s engine and jumped out before guns could be drawn.

  ‘It’s not a kidnap!’ I yelled to Amanda’s guards. ‘They’re here for me.’

  FIFTY

  I’d guessed right, when I’d addressed the box containing the revolver. It was Raines who got out of the passenger’s side of the black Impala, holding up both hands so Amanda’s guards could see that they were empty.