The Dead Caller from Chicago (12 page)

He was no police officer, but Benny was pleased with his role in law enforcement. The last time he'd ticketed me, for being parked in front of a meter whirring in overdrive, its clock gone berserk, he'd given me a business card.
BENNY FITTLE
, it read.
PARKING ENFORCEMENT PERSON
. It, too, was adorned with the image of my turret.

Benny's was an outdoor job. Never had I heard of him being left in charge at the police station.

“Hey, Mr. Elstrom,” he said, rubbing too hard at a sugary crumb stuck to the uppermost of his unshaven chins. Benny was never far from a doughnut.

“Tebbins,” I said.

“He was kilt,” he said, looking over my shoulder at the entrance door.

“I know. I heard I might be a person of interest.”

“A what?” he asked, his eyes still on the door.

“Someone the police want to talk to about a crime.”

He swallowed hard, and for once I didn't think it was from processing a doughnut.

“Benny, are you all right?”

“There's nobody here now.”

“They're all at Tebbins's house?”

He shook his head. “Only two. The rest might be in a meeting.”

“Here?”

“No way.”

“Should I go there?”

“Where?”

“Where they're having the meeting.”

“Someplace on Thompson Avenue is all I know.”

Thompson Avenue was code. The first-shift officers were at a bar, drinking like on every other day. Even in Rivertown that made no sense. On such a day, the cops should have been out combing the town for leads in the killing of one of their own.

“Tebbins's house? I'm a person of interest.”

“You could go there.”

“Where is it?”

“Tebbins's house?”

“Yes.” He was looking at the door again, and I realized it was fear that was worrying his eyes, like he was afraid someone bad was going to charge into the police station.

“I'll get the house's address,” he said. He fairly ran to the back and returned with it written jerkily on one of his cards.

I was barely out the door before the electronic lock clicked on.

 

Seventeen

Tebbins had lived in one of the modestly upgraded bungalows in Rivertown. Its bricks were glazed and beige instead of the usual smudgy brown, and the roof was covered with green barrel tiles instead of curling asphalt shingles. In spite of what Benny had said, I'd still expected a swarm of cops, but Benny had been telling the truth. Only one Escalade was parked in front.

A lieutenant in a beige suit that almost matched the bricks opened the door a crack. I told him I was expected. He looked at me like I was nuts.

“My name's Elstrom,” I said. “I live in the turret across from city—”

He slammed the door.

I waited so they could take a good look at me from a window. After they realized I wasn't going away, the door was opened again, this time by another cop. This one I knew.

“Are you having a mental episode?” he asked.

“A fit of good citizenry,” I said. “I heard you think I might know something about the murder of Mr. Tebbins.”

He stepped out onto the brick porch and looked up and down the street. “We already checked out your little shouting match. You're clear.”

“The secretary overheard?”

“The secretary is hysterical. She said you and Tebbins got into it, screaming about a Leo Brumsky and someone named Shark.”

“That would be Snark, not Shark. And we weren't screaming.”

“Whatever. We already checked out Brumsky. He's off on vacation, and besides, a shouting match doesn't mean murder.”

“Tebbins was upset,” I said. “Red faced and sweating. Something agitated him before I got there.”

“You can run along.”

“What happened here?”

He looked up and down the street again. “A burglary gone bad. Tebbins caught a bullet, right to the head.”

“A burglary, really?” Like murder, burglary was unheard of in Rivertown. Out-of-town thugs knew to stay clear of the locally connected cadre of car boosters, dope peddlers, hookers, and pimps who kicked back to the lizards like franchise operators.

When I didn't turn to leave, the cop said, “Look, Elstrom, we're figuring some itinerant, probably a druggie, was passing by on foot and broke in. Tebbins caught him; the burglar shot him.”

“Isn't it unusual, an itinerant burgling a place, then hanging around to torture the homeowner?”

“We know where you live,” he said, “like everybody knows where you live. If we need you, we'll find you.” He took a last look up and down the street and stepped back inside.

It was a relief. And not. Not only did the cop not suspect me of the killing, he hadn't pressed me about anything Tebbins and I had been shouting about. One thing was certain: It wasn't some drifter the lieutenant's eyes had been nervously looking for, up and down the street. The cop had been looking over my shoulder for someone else.

Someone who he feared was coming back.

*   *   *

I drove to Leo's bungalow, thinking I'd give the place another once-over. I wasn't optimistic about finding something I'd missed earlier. I needed something to do.

Once again, Leo's back door yielded to my thin scraper. I walked in and immediately saw different.

The wide ribbon of pistachio shells that had been dragged from the front room toward the kitchen looked pretty much the same, but the trail from the kitchen and out the back door had been almost pulverized. What had been a trail of solid shells was now, in spots, little more than thick beige dust. Someone had broken in and walked over the shells since I'd last been in the house.

Leo's bedroom looked the same. His closet door remained wide open; his shirts and slacks still hung neatly inside. Ditto, Ma's bedroom. Her closet was in the same order, and the same two drawers remained tugged out as before. I quickly checked the dining room and the front room. They were unchanged as well. Whoever had broken in hadn't disturbed anything but the floor in the kitchen and the path to the back door.

I went down to the basement. No shells at all had been dragged down there. I thought that odd: Someone prowling a house would surely explore down there as well.

I went into Leo's office and sat behind his desk. Every piece of furniture was in its proper place. Bo Derek was as wet and beautiful as when I'd first laid eyes on her. Leo's childhood ideal of a bucolic farm scene, done up in lavenders, pinks, and greens, still brightened the wall, half obscured, above the light table.

Nothing had changed in the house, except everything. New footfalls had ground the shells lying between the back door and into the kitchen.

Bo Derek smiled back, wet and ripe and taunting.

“Well, damn it all,” I said to her and to Leo, suddenly inspired. I hustled up the stairs to the kitchen to be sure. I opened the refrigerator door. I always remembered food.

There was new disarray. Certainly there was less milk.

I left, savoring the possibility of relief.

 

Eighteen

Still, I decided on caution.

I waited until eleven o'clock, that hour when even the most nocturnal of the working folks in Leo's neighborhood were sure to be asleep. I parked three blocks away and came up to the bungalow on the front sidewalk, slow and purposeful and out in the open, like someone with nothing to hide, just coming home late. I'd decided against the alleys because Leo and I had spent too many summer nights out on his front stoop, drinking his fine Czech Pilsner Urquell, talking about not much of anything at all, and laughing every time a marauding raccoon set off a backyard security light. Rivertown was too lousy with backyard security lights to come up the back way.

I'd just walked onto Leo's block when headlamps switched on, farther down. A car pulled from the curb, sweeping its lights across the stacks of cement forms piled in front of the excavation. It was only as I bent down, as though to tie my shoe, that I realized I couldn't hear the car's motor. I turned my head just enough to be sure. It was a Prius passing by. I couldn't see the driver, or be absolutely sure of the car's color in the dark, but I knew it was green, the color of Jenny Galecki's. I wondered what needed watching, that late at night.

I straightened up and ducked into the dark of the gangway next to Leo's house. The back door was locked, as I'd left it. I slipped the bolt with my thin scraper and stepped inside, as quietly as I could. My shoes ground into the shells on the floor. I stood still for a moment. The house was silent, a tomb.

I didn't need to be stealthy. I didn't even need to slink in the dark. I could turn on the lights, dance around, sing show tunes. I knew who would be coming.

It was his game that was being played, though, not mine. I left the lights off and tiptoed silently through the darkness to the front room.

I'd decided on the triangular space behind the big-screen television. When he'd first brought it home, Leo had pushed it flat against one wall. But once Ma discovered what could be found on her new television, and in such glistening clarity, she insisted that the new set be angled in the corner, so that all her lady friends could come and behold the miracle of naughty pay-per-view.

Leo and I had laughed at that, too, on more than one of those summer nights, when the girls were over and we were relegated to the lawn chairs in the backyard, safely away from any moans that might slip through the front-room screens. “Can you believe it?” he'd ask. “Septuagenarians and octogenarians, primly munching bridge mix and prunes, cranking up their hearing aids to catch the softest of the grunts?”

“Every old lady should have a son like you to destroy her morals,” I'd said, more than once.

He'd shake his head at the absurdity of it all. Then we'd laugh again.

I slipped behind the television and settled on the floor. Soon I'd know what he was up to.

A car door slammed outside. Two voices sounded and then went away. Neighbors, coming home.

I relaxed against the wall, and my mind drifted to the last time I'd done late-night surveillance, and how Leo never let me forget it. It had been summer. I was perched in a vacant garage, watching a Dumpster behind a restaurant. I'd set up my long-lens camera carefully, at the ready to snap proof of a money drop. Then I'd fallen asleep. Leo loved that, and he rarely went a month without slipping some reference to my ace surveillance skills into a conversation.

This night, there would be no nodding off. Surely I'd be able to help, as soon as I understood what sent him into hiding.

The familiar tick of the banjo clock across the room, bingo booty Ma lugged home from church, brought back the times I'd spent in that house as a kid—the after-school hours, the dinners, the hundreds of unanticipated sleepovers when there'd been confusion, or perhaps it had just been indifference, about where I was supposed to be staying.

My mother, a high school sophomore, had taken off the day after my birth, never to be heard from again. My father, supposedly a Norwegian sailor named Elstrom, had moved on long before that. One of my aunts told me he hadn't been around long enough to learn he was going to be a father.

My mother's three sisters, all much older, agreed to raise me. Blood counted thick with them, though nurturing did not, at least not with two of them. A solution to keep me safe was reached … with exceptions. I spent a month with each of them on a rotating basis. By the time I got to kindergarten, I'd become an experienced traveler. I had a fiberboard suitcase and marching orders that required I move on at the first of every month.

Wires often got crossed. Vacations, doctor visits, and other things arose that sometimes resulted in locked doors. Often I slept outside, hugging my cardboard suitcase, rather than show up where I was not expected, or wanted.

That changed in seventh grade, when Leo Brumsky became my friend.

Ma Brumsky never said much to the boy Leo brought home, but she never said no. Many nights I spent in a spare sleeping bag on the floor of Leo's bedroom. Many mornings I lugged my battered fiberboard suitcase to school, made slightly heavier by two thick sandwiches wrapped in Saran for that day's lunch. There wasn't a day, from seventh grade clear through the end of high school, that I didn't wish I could spend the rest of my nights sleeping on a floor, any floor, in Ma Brumsky's bungalow.

The click of a lock echoed loudly through the still house. The back door creaked slowly open. I moved lower behind the big wide TV, smug with relief. I'd been brilliant, and I was going to be brilliant some more. Whatever was going on, whatever the reason he felt he had to hide, I would fix it.

His footsteps crunched on the pistachio shells as he went into the kitchen. He needed to eat.

Glass rattled, but no light came on. I'd already noticed that he'd unscrewed the refrigerator bulb. He always thought of everything.

Cabinets opened; cabinets closed; minutes passed. There was no scrape of a chair; he was eating standing up. Then his footsteps sounded, and again the back door creaked. The lock clicked. He was gone.

It was as I'd expected, and now I'd hurry to learn where he was hiding. I pushed myself up.

Footfalls pounded up the basement stairs. I slipped back behind the television, struggling to think. No one else was supposed to be in the house. I'd come in; I'd hidden.

I'd never imagined someone else was already inside, hiding in the basement. Someone who hadn't heard me come in.

The footsteps got to the back of the house. The door creaked open, fast. He crossed the back porch. Then he was outside, in the gangway, crunching the snow below my head.

It was wrong. There was only supposed to have been Leo, sneaking back to his house every night for food, playing a strange game I didn't understand at all.

Instead, there'd been two—and I wasn't sure which was which.