Read The Dead Caller from Chicago Online
Authors: Jack Fredrickson
The Dead Caller from Chicago
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For Mildred Kohout Fredrickson,
who always, always believed
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Once again,
Mary Anne Bigane, Joe Bigane, Patrick Riley, and Marcia Markland prod me into doing better,
India Cooper polishes a thousand things,
Kat Brzozowski keeps track of it all, with grace,
Jack and Lori give me meaning,
and Susan gives me wonder.
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CONTENTS
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Prologue
It was March, well past midnight, and it was cold. The only light came dimly from the streetlamp at the far corner.
The blurred shape of the bundled-up man moved low through the shadows of the fronts of the darkened houses. His feet crunched loudly on the crusted snow. The noise would sound no alarm. It was late. No one would be about.
Except this night. Another man followed fifty yards behind, tight to the same dark buildings. His shadow, too, was formless and indistinct. This man dared to make no sound at all.
Suddenly, the bundled-up man in front froze, then in the next instant rose from his crouch to look behind. In that moment, he was backlit by the pale milky light at the corner, a man wrapped so thickly against the cold he appeared more square than tall. He strained, listening.
There was nothing, only the wind moving restlessly up the street.
The shadowing man had melded into the darkness, invisible.
The bundled-up man dropped back into his crouch and ran on, down to the last house before the gap torn in the row, and disappeared up the stairs into the darkness of the brick arch.
The shadowing man charged at a dead run, his feet loud on the hard snow. He ran up the stairs and slammed open the door.
For an instant, there was nothing. Then bright flashes of blue-white fire lit the front windows, one, two, three. Gunshots, muffled by thick plaster and old glass.
An instant passed, and then another, and then the door banged open again.
The man in the center of the room, a faint ghost in the acrid gunpowder haze made yellow by the light of the streetlamp, turned without haste at the new intrusion. The revolver dangled heavy in his right hand.
Behind him, a man lay with his back against the wall that faced the dining room, where a piano topped with graduation pictures and perhaps a flower in a vase might have once stood. His eyes were still open, and still surprised. Three little holes surrounded by irregular spots showed dark on the wall above him. Through-shots; blood splatters.
The man in the center of the room raised his gun. “You're here for your friend?” he asked softly.
“Of course.”
He shrugged. His knuckles bulged as he squeezed the trigger.
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One
By my adjusted new standard, I'd become almost rich, and I felt myself swelling with optimism as Lester Lance Leamington, astute television advertiser, allowed as to how he could make me even richer. All I had to do was follow his advice, conveniently presented in a five-disc DVD series enticingly entitled
Making Millions from Molehills
. Though his features were blurry on my elderly analog four-inch television, its reception now modified by a government-mandated digital converter that dangled from it like an anchor on a chain, there was nothing fuzzy about his latest achievement. Lester Lance Leamington had hit the big time. He'd moved from late-night commercials jammed between spots for fast juicers and miracle scratch removers up to midday infomercials. If that wasn't testament to his financial acuity, I couldn't imagine what was. No more would he be talking to stupored, drowsy people; Lester Lance Leamington had risen into the clarity of sunlight. Now, for only twenty-nine ninety-nine, including shipping, he was going to show folks how to ascend just like him.
“All it takes is attitude,” he was saying as I squinted in rapt attention, for on my tiny TV, he was only an inch tall. “Embrace your future. Call our toll-free line today. If you're not completely satisfied, we'll refund your money immediately; less, of course, the modest eighteen ninety-nine for processing, shipping, and handling.”
Miraculous though it sounded, I was not yet ready to embrace my financial destiny. My new money, almost three thousand dollars from a tiny insurance company that promised more work, was already budgeted for past-due utility bills, a paydown on the lone credit card that hadn't canceled me, and wood, lots of the good oak I needed to continue trimming out my turret. There was the complication, too, that I had no DVD player, nor plans to buy one. My eyes were set on affording a furnace, ductwork, and a gas line to set it all to humming. It was early March, I lived in an unheated stone turret set beside a frozen river just west of Chicago, and the notion of warmth was constantly on my mind.
There was one final concern, I supposed. I watch television while semireclining in an electric blue La-Z-Boy that I acquired, well used, in an alley, perching the set on my breadbasket. Balancing a DVD player wired to a converter box wired to a television seemed like an awful lot of precariousness, just to get rich.
My cell phone rang, saving me from having to ponder the dilemma further.
“You doing anything worthwhile?” Leo Brumsky inquired.
“I'm being advised by Lester Lance Leamington.”
“That TV lunatic with the red hair and green suit?”
“I don't know; my television is black-and-white. What matters is I am on the road to wealth.”
“That insurance job up north?”
“My new client is delighted with the photographs I took of their insured, he of the broken back, up on a ladder, cleaning his gutters. They're talking about putting me on retainer.”
“How much?”
“The company saved two hundred grand, easy.”
“No, I meant you. What was your take?”
“Twenty-eight hundred and fifty-three dollars,” I said. Then, to maximize the impact, I added, “Plus change.”
“Ordinarily, I wouldn't intrude on a man burdened by such weighty considerations, but I have need of your brawn. I'll be right over.”
I did not protest. His car had a fine heater.
Ten minutes later, a white Ford Econoline van rattled up to the turret where, since evicting the pigeons, I've lived alone. I'd been expecting a Porsche cabriolet, but the flash of a too-large orange traffic officer's jacket and purple pants, bright as beacons even at fifty feet, confirmed it was Leo.
He gave my own outerwear the fisheye as I got in. Hypocrisy, especially concerning clothing, was one of his most pronounced traits.
“A rented van?” I asked.
“Two coats?” he dodged, still round-eying my duds.
My blue blazer was longer than my peacoat, so it wasn't like he'd experienced a moment of deductive brilliance.
“I'm wearing my blazer in case Lester Lance Leamington drops by to give me personalized investment advice. Word of my newfound wealth is sure to spread.” I aimed the heater vents to blast directly at my face.
A smile full of big white teeth split his narrow bald head, topped as it was, preposterously, by a chartreuse knit hat adorned with a purple pom. “You're wearing two coats because your limestone monstrosity retains cold like the arctic,” he said, pulling us away from the curb.
I loosened the collar of my peacoat to more fully absorb the truck's free heat and asked where we were going.
“Once again, I'm branching out beyond my usual realm of expertise,” he said.
Leo's usual realm of expertise was establishing provenance. The big auction houses in Chicago and on both coasts paid him in excess of half a million dollars a year to establish the lineage and authenticity of the pieces they offered to bidders.
“How far outside your realm?” I asked, as he swung northbound onto the Tollway.
The rented van shuddered its way up to sixty miles an hour. “Medical frontier,” he said, grinning. “I've come up with a cure for aging baby boomers who suffer reduced physical and mental dexterity. Soon all will rejoice at the sound of my name. The visage of me, Leo Brumsky, the man who saved them from decrepitude, will adorn parks everywhere. They'll erect statues, bronze if not solid gold, of the Great Brumskyâ”
“As targets for pigeons?” I myself had become an expert on pigeons, or at least their eviction.
“All will hail the name Brumsky, the genius who discovered the cure.”
I pressed him no further. Silence would be the only way to drive him crazy.
His eyes remained fixed on the road. “Nonsplits,” he offered up, after a moment.
I stared ahead, as silent as would be any bronzed Brumsky.
He lasted less than another hundred silent yards. “Aren't you curious about nonsplits?”
“Sundaes without bananas,” I threw out, quite nonchalantly.
“Ah,” he said, squeezing the wheel with his chartreuse-mittened hands to keep from blurting out anything more. It was to be a standoff between us.
After fifteen minutes of absolute silence, he left the tollway, turned into an industrial park, and backed into a loading dock of the Great Prairie Nut Company.
“I'm sure they don't need another nut,” I said.
“Stay here.” He got out.
Ten minutes later, two men bounced a tall barrel into the back. They secured it with the yellow web straps lying on the floor and slammed the tin doors.