The Dead Caller from Chicago (19 page)

“I'm Dr. Feldott,” she said, extending her hand. She was about forty, prematurely gray, and wore bright red glasses that would surely please Leo if he were feeling well. “Mr. Smith is doing quite well, considering,” she went on as she led me back, through the electronically locked doors.

“Considering?”

“He's begun acting in a most determined manner. We believe he's trying to tell us something.”

“He's not speaking?”

“Occasionally, but he's not communicating with words. You'll see.”

We walked down a hall that looked more residential than institutional. Paintings hung on the walls, glass vases filled with fresh flowers sat on narrow tables. The only tip off that we were in a healthcare facility was the doors. They were wider than residential doors. They had keypad locks, and they were all closed.

“His blood is good; everything physically seems to be fine,” she said as we turned a corner. “His issue stems from a shock. You know about his shock?”

I nodded.

“It would help if we could discuss the details of that.”

“I cannot.”

“He's been eating and sleeping well, and smiling almost all the time, until this morning, when he went into a sort of frenzy. He grabbed a pen from one of our nurses and began motioning for paper. I was called. We took it for an encouraging sign, this new desire to share. But almost immediately, he threw the pen down. He wanted another writing instrument. It was only after some time that we realized he wanted crayons—” She stopped abruptly, seeing the smile on my face. “Something is funny about this?”

“He likes colors. Like no one you've ever met. Did you get him the sixty-four-piece set?”

“Not at first,” she said. “We brought him one of the small packs we keep here for children. He got furious, shook his head back and forth. I went out to Walgreens, brought back the largest set, though we removed the little sharpener. He's been drawing on typing paper ever since, not happy, not unhappy, just … purposeful; driven. He hasn't eaten at all today, so fixated has he been on drawing. As you'll see, he draws only one picture, over and over, and presses one upon everyone he sees. At first, we thought he was offering his artwork as gifts, but as he kept drawing the same thing over and over, we realized he's trying to tell us something with the pictures. We're hoping they'll mean something to you.” She stopped at a door, entered a code on the keypad, and pushed it open. She motioned for me to go in first.

Leo sat at a small table, stabbing a white sheet of typing paper with the stub of a red crayon. He wore khakis and a light blue knit shirt. The Leo I knew would never have sported such a boring ensemble. The tip of his tongue was sticking out of the corner of his mouth as it sometimes did when he concentrated. He looked up as I came closer.

His face was even more pale than usual, and haggard. Too haggard.

“About time,” he said.

It was the beginning of relief. “You know me?”

“Of course.”

“Who is he?” Dr. Feldott asked, coming up to stand beside me.

“The gun man.” Not gunman; gun man. Two syllables.

Dr. Feldott inhaled sharply.

Leo was beginning to remember, linking me with the gun he'd used on Wozanga, the gun he'd been about to use on me.

“Relax,” I told the doctor. “I haven't killed for a month, maybe more.”

She smiled, sort of, but took a couple of steps back anyway.

I looked down at the picture Leo was drawing. It wasn't much, just a hundred red dots in several clusters.

“What are you drawing?” I asked.

He began attacking the paper in front of him with more red dots.

I looked over at Dr. Feldott and shook my head. I had no idea what he was trying to draw.

“Are you going to give this nice man your drawing?” Dr. Feldott asked him. She hadn't asked my name because she expected I'd give her something phony.

“Not nice man; gun man,” he said.

Apparently satisfied with the hundreds of dots he'd put on the paper, he put the stub of the red crayon back into the flip-up box and studied the other colors. Like the red crayon, many of the others had been worn down to stubs. His fingers dug deep into the box, pulling out a lavender crayon even shorter than the red one.

“That's one of your favorites, isn't it?” Dr. Feldott asked.

“No time.” He drew a rectangle on the sheet of paper and began filling it with broad strokes of lavender.

I knew then, as surely as I'd ever known anything.

“You're going to give your friend this drawing?” I heard Dr. Feldott ask again.

“The gun man,” Leo corrected, running the lavender crayon back and forth.

I turned to the doctor. “You said there are other pictures?”

“All the same,” she said. “Can the gun
man
see some of the others?” she asked Leo.

His coloring hand stopped in the middle of a stroke. “Excellent!” he shouted. He opened the table drawer and pulled out a sheaf of papers. Thrusting them at me, he yelled, “Gun man.”

“Gun man?” Dr. Feldott persisted, but it was so unnecessary.

He'd handed me the sheaf upside down. I turned them over. As Dr. Feldott had said, the picture on top was the same as the one he was now drawing. It had hundreds of the same red dots, meant to show leaves. The lavender was there, too; broad swipes of plenty of it, all over a barn; along with pink, green-spotted cows against a background of orange rolling hills. The only thing missing was the “Leo B.” in the lower right corner, and that was only because he couldn't yet recall his own name.

“I understand,” I said quickly, though I didn't, at least not all of it.

Dr. Feldott looked alarmed. Leo looked up from his coloring and smiled.

I jabbed the sheaf of pictures back at the doctor and ran out of the room and down the hall. Dr. Feldott came running after me. She knew the electronic locks on the door would stop me.

She demanded to know nothing as she punched in the code to make the doors swing free.

“You'll call me?” she shouted, as I sprinted into the reception area.

“I'm the gun man,” I yelled back, running for the Jeep.

 

Thirty-one

I'd started the day establishing a burglary explanation for anything of Leo's the cops might find in the empty bungalow. Then I'd stuck signs in Leo's yard, hoping to lure one of Wozanga's compatriots, or maybe even his boss, into revealing himself.

I'd won. I could explain anything of Leo's that popped up anyplace inconvenient, and I'd flushed out Rudy Cassone.

I'd lost, too, because the picture that had caused Leo to get lost, and Snark Evans to get dead, was likely to get stolen away before I could use it to figure what was going on.

Traffic was a gnarled nightmare southbound on 294, a twisted jumble of obstinate idiots hell-bent on keeping me from Rivertown. I bobbed, weaved, and swore, and none of it did any good at all. It took over an hour just to get to O'Hare, and another thirty minutes to thread east through the last of the day's rush on the Eisenhower Expressway. By the time I charged onto Leo's block, it was dark, and it had started to snow.

A corner of my eye took in the unchanged excavation. Every day that passed without progress meant another day that Wozanga's corpse might be discovered. It was a worry for later. My fear now was I was getting to Leo's too late to act on the only signal he could send me.

I cut my lights and coasted to a stop across the street. The lamp on Ma's timer was on, casting a soft, semitransparent glow in the front room behind the lace curtains. I could make out the shape of part of the big-screen television, just to the right, and the high back of the sofa that Ma had kept pristine with so many generations of white-piped clear plastic slipcovers. I wanted to hope that the light from the front-room lamp, or the threat of my make-believe security system, or even the potential of drive-bys by the Rivertown cops would keep Cassone away.

I'd kept him out of Leo's office. Surely he'd not yet seen the supposed child's fanciful drawing of a lavender barn, pink and green cows, and red-leafed trees.

Still, my gut said to stay in the Jeep for a time, be cautious, and watch. Cassone, after all, was likely a killer, just like his man Wozanga. So I stayed behind the steering wheel and squinted at the light behind the lace. I watched for five minutes, and for ten more.

Then the faintest of shadows moved quickly by the big-screen television, right where I'd hidden the night my friend killed Wozanga.

The shadow retreated from the light behind the lace.

I'd been a fool. I should have brought Leo's gun. Not to fire, but simply to use to threaten.

I remembered the aluminum baseball bat I'd picked out of the snow the morning after Ma and her friends had gone berserk trying to open pistachio nuts. I reached behind the passenger's seat, felt its cold opportunity.

I grabbed it and eased out of the Jeep.

Every room in the babushka's house next door was lit up brightly, an old woman's defense against the night. I moved low through the gangway, trying for invisibility. I turned the corner at the porch and moved to the shadows next to Leo's outer door to wait. There were no basement windows back there, so I could not see the movement of a flashlight, but surely he'd go down there, and into Leo's office at the front. He'd look behind the cabinets and under the desk and behind the huge overstuffed chair. He'd look at the walls, at Bo Derek. At some point, he'd notice the painting above the file cabinets, with its oddly colored cows and barn and leaves. He'd know it not by the colors it was now but simply by its size. I didn't understand why, but I knew: The intruder would smile.

A half hour passed, in minutes each longer and colder than the one before. I huddled against the back of the building, ten feet from the door to the porch, too afraid to stomp my feet to keep warm. The snow was falling harder, big flakes, wet flakes.

The kitchen door creaked, cracking the hushing cover of the falling snow. Footsteps thudded across the porch floor. He paused at the steps, and then he came down, softly because the babushka next door might be in her backyard, having sensed a disturbance in the night.

The flimsy wood door at the bottom groaned as he slowly pushed it open. He came out, carrying the rectangle.

I swung as he turned toward the gangway, slamming the tip of the bat square between his shoulder blades, at the base of his neck. He dropped onto the cushion of snow with a soft thump and was still.

I dropped the bat. I tugged to roll him over, to be sure of the face. He wheezed, unconscious, a sack of live bone and meat that was Rudy Cassone.

I grabbed the rectangle. He'd wrapped it in layers of cloth, a sheet torn from one of the beds.

He moaned and shifted a little on the snow.

I ran through the spill of light in the gangway, across the parkway. Grabbing at the Jeep's door handle, I jumped in. My trembling fingers searched my pocket, found the keys, and dropped them like they'd been greased. Fumbling, frantic, I ran my hands around the floor. Surely the babushka had heard me pounding through the gangway and raced to a front window.

I found the keys, poked the rubber-headed one into the ignition, and was off. It was only when I reached the corner that I thought to switch on the headlights.

I saw the black Mercedes as I made the turn. Cassone had parked on the side street. He'd known to be cautious.

I unwrapped the rectangle on the card table, on the second floor. As I expected, several pink, green-spotted cows were standing in front of a lavender barn, looking right back at me.

They didn't look like they knew anything at all.

 

Thirty-two

A nightmare jerked my hand off the side of Leo's revolver the next morning.

I dreamed my feet were encased in hardened concrete, as tons of thick cement cascaded down from the chutes of a dozen monstrous churning trucks, into the excavation. Rudy Cassone was up above, running from truck to truck, working the levers, and laughing as I swung my bat futilely at the block of concrete trapping my feet. The block wouldn't chip. It was too hard. And the concrete kept coming, a dozen thick rivers filling the hole like a tub, up to my ankles, up to my calves, up to my arms until I could swing no more.

I pushed myself out of bed and into cold clothes and went to the window still groggy enough to fear seeing cement trucks lined up, churning. Mercifully, there was only new snow, six inches of fresh fluff lying on top of the Jeep.

It had been a nightmare like all nightmares, built of a jumble of a few very real blocks. The cement, Cassone, the bat …

The bat
.

I pounded down the stairs and out to the Jeep. I pawed through the Burger King wrappers, beneath the gym bag, and under the towel I keep to wipe the inside of the windshield when it's raining and the defroster has gotten too bored to work. I searched everywhere. The bat wasn't there.

I'd clubbed Cassone; I'd dropped it; and then I'd forgotten it, anxious only to get away, to protect the painting.

I hustled back into the turret, shivering from cold but more from fear, thinking that Cassone had likely regained consciousness in something of a foul mood and interested to know who clubbed him. He'd have grabbed the bat, and although Rivertown was small-town cheesy crooked, Chicago wasn't. Outfit guys knew cops, and cops could check fingerprints. Mine had been on file since the court case that had ruined me.

Still, he might have hobbled away, without noticing the bat. There was the snow, too. Enough might have fallen to cover it up after I'd knocked him unconscious.

I sped over to Leo's thinking I'd surely appear innocent, coming only to shovel the walk. No attacker, any right-thinking person would reason, would have the nerve to show up after beating a man senseless at that very place just a few hours before. With luck, I'd fish the bat out of the fresh snow and toss it away somewhere.