The Dead Caller from Chicago (2 page)

“I thought you needed my brawn, heroic as it is,” I said, when Leo got back in.

He said nothing, easing the truck up the dock incline as though the barrel contained eggs. The game was still afoot.

It was too much. “OK. What are we hauling that must be so carefully secured?”

“Spent fuel rods. I'm converting your turret into a storage facility.”

“I do investigations, and have deduced you've bought a barrel of nuts.”

“Not mere nuts: nonsplits, the gateway to a more flexible life.”

“And Brumskys, bronzed, will adorn parks across the land?”

“The world will rejoice.” Once again we lapsed into silence, until we got to his street.

I turned my head to look out the side window, shocked. “What's going on?” A backhoe and a bulldozer were demolishing two bungalows toward the end of his block.

“Amazing, huh?” He sounded not at all happy.

“New homes? Here?” It was stunning news. Rivertown, the greasiest of the empty factory wastelands stuck like barnacles to the edge of Chicago, hadn't seen new construction in decades.

“Rumor has it there's to be only one, a McMansion on three lots. The bungalow just to the west is also coming down.” He shook his head. “It's going to ruin the neighborhood.”

His block, like almost all the residential blocks in town, was built solid of brick bungalows put up before the Great Depression for workingmen when manufacturing, instead of stripping women and stripping cars, was what pulsed in Rivertown.

“Who's building it?” I asked.

“No doubt some fool egoist, anxious to set himself above respectable, working-class neighbors.”

“Be still, my lusting heart.” Unlike Leo, who held the past dear, I had mixed emotions. The grit of Rivertown was deep under my skin, too; I was comfortable with solid lower-middle-class. Yet, if there was interest in redeveloping the crooked old burg, then my five-story turret might attract someone with lots of money and a crazed need to live in a tube. I could move up, like Lester Lance Leamington, to a place with central heat.

“I suppose you should see a lawyer about your zoning again,” Leo said, turning up the alley.

There was the rub. The turret, built by my lunatic bootlegger grandfather as the beginning of a castle, had sat empty and ignored following his death at the start of the Great Depression. That changed at the end of World War II, when the town's fathers—an especially shameless lot of lizards, even by Illinois standards—sought to build a new city hall. They seized most of my grandfather's land along the Willahock River, and his mountain of unused limestone blocks, and erected a magnificent city hall of huge private offices and tiny public rooms. They'd had no need for the turret, though, and it continued to languish empty, racking up property taxes no one in my mother's family thought to pay. Sixty more years passed, and then the children and grandchildren lizards now running things thought to invite development, with its prospect of big-time bribes for construction and operating permits. For that, they needed to perfume the city's corrupt, tank-town image. They announced a new era, terming it the Rivertown Renaissance, and decided to use the turret on the Willahock River as an icon to plaster on their trucks, stationery, and the porta-potty in the town's one park. The lizards offered up a greasy deal: My aunt, the churlish bull-headed woman who'd inherited sole ownership of the turret after her sisters died, would get decades of unpaid property taxes wiped away. In exchange, the turret would remain in my family's hands, but it would be rezoned as a municipal structure, making it unsalable and thereby ensuring the city could use it forever as its new symbol. My aunt was elated … and cunning. To make sure her children would never suffer responsibility for the turret's upkeep, she willed the place to me on her deathbed, as a sort of grand last flush as she exited the planet.

Being of reasonable mind, I ignored her munificence at first. Then, disgraced by a scandal not of my making, and emotionally trashed by behavior that was, I got tossed out of my ex-wife's gated community. Drunk and utterly broke, I needed a roof. The turret had that, though it leaked. It also had pigeons, and no heat. Still, it was indoor living, of a fashion, and offered the faint hope that I might convert it into a residence to sell.

Right after moving in, I began petitioning to get the turret's zoning changed back to residential. Elvis Derbil, nephew of the mayor and the town's building and zoning commissioner, always refused. The turret was the city's icon; they'd invested too much in splattering its image all over town.

I had no money for a long-term legal battle, so I retreated. Even after Elvis resigned because of a scandal of his own—he'd altered freshness and fat-content labels on truckloads of stale salad oil—I hung back. My income from researching insurance claims and photographing accident scenes was little more than what I needed for materials to rehab the turret; I'd fight the zoning battle after the turret had been fixed up. However, if upscale yups were now about to charge Rivertown, bent on pushing over bungalows to build McMansions, times were changing faster than I'd dared hope. My future needed to be embraced, pronto. That meant reigniting my zoning battle.

Leo turned into the alley and stopped at his garage. Though the bungalows in Rivertown were built of the same dark brown brick, the colors of their frame garages varied within a subdued palette of whites, beiges, and grays. Not Leo's. His was a particularly vibrant shade of yellow, trimmed in neon green. Ma Brumsky loved her only child.

He got out, opened the big door, and disappeared behind his late father's ancient brown Ford LTD. Pa Brumsky had been dead for years, and his mother didn't drive, but Leo still kept the old beast in its usual spot and in prime running order. He respected the totems of his past.

He came out wheeling a dolly, and together we muscled the barrel out of the van, along the narrow walk, and up into the screened rear porch. Like all the neighborhood women who had enclosed back porches, Ma Brumsky used hers as a walk-in pantry. Leo had created a space for the barrel between cases of Diet Mountain Dew, bagged prunes, and All-Bran.

“This is going to improve flexibility how?” I asked.

“It might even cure the 'Zheimers,” he said. He undid the clips on the barrel and lifted the lid so I could see inside.

“Pistachio nuts,” I said.

He jabbed a hand into the nuts and withdrew a few as if he were cradling tiny torpedoes of gold. “Look closer; behold the miracle.”

I took one from his palm. “A most ordinary pistachio,” I said, having keen observational skills.

“How would you open it?”

It had not burst open. There was no seam.“Nonsplits,” I said, at last understanding his earlier use of the term—and not.

A Home Depot plastic bag lay on the case of All-Bran. He smiled, reached inside, and pulled out a pair of needle-nose pliers.
“Comprende?”
Sometimes he switches to Spanish, though never for very long, because he does not know the language.

“Oui,”
I answered in flawless high school French. “Ma and her lady friends will have to use pliers to open the pistachios, thereby strengthening their motor and mental skills. Thus the world will be saved, bronze Brumskys will be erected, and pigeons everywhere will have something appropriate to aim at.”

“Genius, huh?”

“Drive me home.” I had no time to dawdle. Yups were coming.

Five minutes later, he pulled up to the turret. “Come over tomorrow, and behold the beginnings of the new age.”

As I climbed out of his rental van, I told him I would bet every one of my newfound twenty-eight hundred and fifty-three dollars that nothing but good was on the horizon for us both.

I will remember that moment for as long as I live.

 

Two

I awoke the next morning early and optimistic. I shrugged into my three sweatshirts, XL, XXL, and XXXL, and fairly raced down to the second-floor kitchen to make coffee. I was anxious to embrace the day and all the yups it brought forth, exactly as Lester Lance advised.

Burbling along with Mr. Coffee, I looked around with new satisfaction. I'd learned finish carpentry and cabinetmaking in that kitchen and thought the new oak cabinets, moldings, and trims looked fine indeed. True, the badly dented microwave offered a discordant note, presenting as it did the tiny potential of glow-in-the-dark aftereffects, and the rusty avocado-colored refrigerator I'd found in an alley worked well enough in the winter but was not at all reliable in the summer. No matter; they'd be gone soon. Only high-end stainless steel appliances would impress yups, and those were on the horizon. I had a new client, talking retainer.

Mr. Coffee gasped at last, and I took my coffee across the hall. As on each of the five floors, a huge fireplace was set into the southwest curve. It had been used only once, to share a fire with a woman reporter whom I'd never quite gotten to know.

I pulled the plastic garbage bag down over my desktop computer, covered my card table desk with a bedsheet, and began cutting thin strips of oak molding to surround the slit windows.

Architecturally, the narrow windows were historically accurate, ideal for archers to repel attacking marauders. Because they were set into rough stone, trimming them was fussy, slow work. By one o'clock, I'd only finished two and was ready for a break.

I went into the kitchen, drank the last burned dregs of the coffee, and ate half a cup of Cheerios, dry. Drinking burned coffee was a longtime habit. Dry Cheerios, though, were new. I'd had the happy yellow box since my divorce, but I'd used it simply as a cabinet divider to separate the small mounds of Twinkies and Ho Hos that were my ordinary staples. I'd been inspired to a wider view when, simultaneously, Lester Lance Leamington moved up into the daylight and I acquired a generous client. Change was in the wind for sure, and I reasoned I should improve my nutritional life as well. I began supplementing the Twinkies and Ho Hos with small test doses of Cheerios, administered one half-cup at a time. It had been almost a week, and I'd experienced no ill effects from the little sawdust-colored circles. In fact, that day I thought I noticed more spring in my step as I bounded up to the third-floor bedroom, where I keep my clothes piled on a chair next to my bed. I changed into unstained khakis and my least wrinkled blue button-down shirt, slipped on my blue blazer and peacoat, and walked my new health and optimism down the street to city hall.

The Building and Zoning Department was in the basement, the darkest floor of all. Unlike the mayor's first-floor office, where the big bundles from pimps, bookies, and tavern operators were counted out behind thick mahogany and closed drapes, the windowless basement offices were for collecting ordinary, day-to-day gratuities for permits that in any other suburb wouldn't require a bribe at all. I hadn't been down there since before Elvis Derbil had been perp-walked out by federal agents.

His door had been changed only slightly. The opaque glass now read
J. J. DERBIL, BUILDING AND ZONING COMMISSIONER.
Only the first name had changed. Official positions were passed along through families in Rivertown like genetic disorders.

The secretary in the outer office hurried out another door when she saw me. That had been her habit since the first time I'd come to scream at Elvis.

“Ahem,” I said, clearing my throat behind the counter in the now empty outer office.

“Do you have an appointment?” a woman's voice called from inside Elvis's old private office.

“Purely an introductory call,” I called through the door.

“You are?”

“Dek Elstrom.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“We've met?”

“You're the pain in the ass that lives in that limestone toilet-paper tube. Go away.”

“I'm a taxpayer. You work for me.” I laughed. Even I saw that as ludicrous.

“Make an appointment, Elstrom.”

“Who are you?”

“The building and zoning commissioner, you idiot.”

“I meant your name.”

“Derbil.”

“I meant your first name.”

“Make an appointment,” she said for the second time. She certainly had Elvis's communication skills, though my nose told me she didn't use his coconut-scented hair spray.

“I want you to rezone my property from municipal to residential.”

She laughed. I left, thinking that to stay longer might jeopardize our budding relationship.

Since I was all dressed up, I drove to Leo's. I needed humor, and good coffee to wash away the dregs I'd just had at home, and heat, in which to enjoy them both.

I parked in front. As always, his walk and steps were immaculate, despite the snow that seemed to have fallen every day since November. Oddly, Leo's old aluminum baseball bat lay on the snow next to the walk.

The sound of a vacuum cleaner came through the front door. As did a sort of pinging, as though gravel were ricocheting inside, against the walls and windows. I had to knock loudly for almost a minute before the vacuuming stopped and Leo opened the door. Though he was dressed with his usual absurd cheeriness, in a too-large aqua-colored Hawaiian shirt festooned with monkeys riding balloons, and red cargo pants, he was not smiling. His normally pale face was flushed dark, perhaps from exertion.

“Vacuuming, Leo?” I asked, affably enough.

“With a normal vacuum cleaner, not a Shop-Vac like others must use,” he said, trying for a smirk. On a head so pale and thin, a smirk was always an interesting contortion, because it made his thick black eyebrows look like they were trying to mate.

“I'm here for coffee,” I said.

“First we clean.” Leo never gets sidetracked. He thinks and lives sequentially. He is not like me.

I stepped inside. The living room had been shelled, literally. Splintered beige pistachio shells and crumbly bits of yellowish green nut meat lay on the carpet, the tops of the picture frames, the windowsills, and the yellowed plastic slipcovers that had protected every piece of upholstered furniture since Leo was an infant.