The Dead Caller from Chicago (7 page)

“The girl is gone?”

“Finished high school, at least. But then she took off, pregnant, most likely.”

“Snark was bad news?” I asked the bartender.

“Burglaring, breaking into cars and houses. Everybody knew him and disliked him.”

The second patron stood up quickly and went to the window. The sound of a car engine came from outside. “Damn fool, running without lights,” he said.

The first man got up and went to join his friend. “I can't see who it is,” he said, peering out the window.

“Damn fool, that's who it is. He'll get run up on, if he doesn't turn on his lights.”

The engine noise moved on and disappeared.

“The funeral home is closed?” I asked the bartender.

“Why do you want to know that?”

“Official death record, for the file.”

“Never was no funeral home in Center Bridge. Closest one was ten miles north, but it closed in the nineties,” the bartender said. “Now we got to get shipped almost to Champaign upon expiration.”

“Don't matter. He didn't die here,” the bartender said.

“Somewheres out west, or down south,” the first patron said.

The other two men laughed at that, moving back to the bar.

“The newspaper's gone, too?” I asked, when the mirth subsided. “
The Center Bridge Bugle
?”

“The what?” the first patron asked.

“It might have been that ad sheet down at the Super Food,” the bartender said. “It folded ten years ago, with the Super Food.”

There was nothing left to ask. I went out into the snow.

Before starting the Jeep, I called Jenny. “I need a favor. I'd like you to call your police contacts, see if anyone has anything on an Edwin G. ‘Snark' Evans.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm striking out on something I'm looking into.”

“Does this have something to do with why you're keeping an eye on Leo's place?”

“Haste will be appreciated,” I said.

The wind and the sleet were endurable for five miles, and then a key piece of silver tape gave way, freeing my vinyl top to billow like a brake chute on a dragster. I pulled off to the shoulder on a side road, cut the engine and the lights, and got out with one of the rolls of duct tape I carry.

I'd just stepped up on the doorsill when I heard an engine sound above the wind. A vehicle passed on the highway. It was running without lights, and I couldn't see it for the storm. It was heading east, though, and I had the chilling thought its driver might have been hoping to run unseen behind the lights of a red Jeep.

I took my time retaping the roof, straining for the sound of the engine returning. There was only the wind, swirling around me. After a decent amount of time had passed, I drove back up onto the road.

I'd poked at a nerve, picked up a tail.

 

Nine

I slept until early afternoon, and awoke shaky. I tried telling myself that my muscle trembles came from fighting the Jeep against the wind, five hours down to Center Bridge, more than that back. I didn't believe myself. The trembles came from knowing Leo and his mother and Endora were in a bad place, hiding, held captive, or worse, and someone willing to drive blind in a snowstorm had taken an interest in my interest in that.

I pushed out from under my blankets, slipped fast into frigid jeans and sweatshirts, and stomped to the window, as much to warm my legs as to see outside. Rivertown was whiter, but barely. The snowstorm had deposited little more than a new dusting on the old, dirty snow before moving on to the more worthy suburbs in the west.

Down the road along the river, almost out of sight from the turret and farther still from city hall, the hood of a bronze-colored car stood out stark against the new snow. A car tucked in at the end of the river road didn't need to belong to someone who might have tailed me down to Center Bridge. Daytimes, lots of men used that spot, like they used the side road leading to the turret, to enjoy the services of the girls who worked Thompson Avenue or the back of the bowling alley.

I went down to the kitchen, added water to the previous day's grounds, and ignited Mr. Coffee. I had no Twinkies, I had no Ho Hos, so I shook out a handful of my old Cheerios. I supposed they'd lost some of their taste to age, but the little circles had certainly kept up their robust circularity. Not a one gave in to dust the instant it hit my tongue, and I had the hope that my own old age, still decades into the future, would also be accompanied by such comforting rigidity.

I thought about what little I knew. Leo had gotten a phone call from Snark Evans, someone he'd thought was dead. It had triggered panic. Leo had run, taking along those he loved. He'd tried to call me, to tell me what was going on—but only once.

It nagged, his calling only once. He should have called again, and again, if he were in trouble. Unless, of course, he couldn't call.

I pushed the thought away; it would bring scenarios of forced abductions, and I couldn't give in to those. I considered again, for perhaps the thousandth time, whether I should report Leo missing. Not in Rivertown, where the cops were as bent and lazy as the river, but in Chicago, where I could lie and say Leo and his mother and his girlfriend had been abducted, say, from Endora's condo. That would make it a Chicago crime, and that would bring in better, or at least less crooked, brains.

Except the case would be dropped as soon as the cops questioned Leo's neighbor and learned he'd said he was going on a vacation.

I got up to check the window. The bronze car was still at the end of the road. It had been there longer than was required for a curbside quickie.

I called Endora's boss. “Did you get in touch with Endora's mother?”

“I left three messages yesterday afternoon, and one just now. All contained variations of the word ‘Urgent.' She's returned none of them.” Then, “I trust you went to Center Bridge?”

“Dead or not, Snark and kin are long gone. Leo's in trouble. So's his mother. So's Endora. I need to talk to Endora's mother.”

He didn't hesitate. “Her name is Theodea Wilson. She lives in Blenton, in northern Michigan.” He gave me the phone number and address.

I tried the phone number. It rang and rang without cutting to an answering machine.

The bronze car was still down the street, and the mild twinge of paranoia about that was still in my gut. I skipped the duffel bag, put my change of clothes and shaving kit into a paper shopping bag, and went out hoping I looked like I was off to return something to a store.

I drove west, watching the rearview. There were too many cars behind me to tell if one was bronze. Two miles up, I had an inspiration. A traffic light was turning yellow. I slowed, as would any law-abiding driver, but then I punched the Jeep through the intersection just as the light turned red.

There was silence for an instant. Then horns honked behind me. The bronze sedan had followed me through on the red.

I drove on sedately, giving him time to slip back out of my sight, behind other cars. I passed increasingly wider lots and houses of affluence, then got to the weed-choked rubble that was Crystal Waters, the once-gilded, gated subdivision where things had gone so horribly wrong. Amanda and I had lived there during our marriage, in the house she'd bought from her father. She'd never much cared for the place, but walls and a gatehouse surrounded the grounds, and the house had a state-of-the-art security system. It was good for protecting the eleven million dollars' worth of art she'd inherited from her grandfather's estate. Her house and her art, like our marriage, were no longer there.

As I'd told Jenny, Amanda and I hadn't spoken in months, and those last conversations had taken on the sounds of last gasps. She'd given up the last vestige of her former life, teaching at the Art Institute, to head her father's philanthropy. I saw her mostly in the society pages of the Chicago papers now, a glittering brown-eyed vixen, usually on the arm of one particularly distinguished-looking silver-haired bastard. Looking happy to have gotten past the sort of fumbler who would live in a turret.

Leo had helped me through all of that.

I pulled into the parking lot of a Home Depot, went in, and watched from behind the door glass. The bronze car, an older Chevy Malibu, had pulled in to park between two panel vans, three rows from where I'd left the Jeep. I bought a box of finish nails to have something to carry out, got into the Jeep, and turned north.

A mile up, there was a huge shopping center that must have been designed by an angry architect. It had a particularly vexing layout, consisting of six octagonal clusters of stores separated by green spaces with small trees. And speed bumps. The crazy quilt of interconnected parking lots had tons of speed bumps.

Amanda and I had gone there several times during our marriage. It was a place of high-end chain stores and old ladies, driving slowly because speed bumps can loosen old teeth or new dentures. They approached the asphalt mounds as though they were scaling Everest in a blinding blow, slowly, evaluating every twitch of the steering wheel. Traffic coagulated.

Narrow little unloading alleys had been cut through to the centers of the clusters, for trucks to access the receiving docks behind the stores. The alleys were difficult to see. More important for me, it was easy to presume that the trucks exited the same way they went in. They did not. The trucks went out the opposite side of the cluster, onto an unseen side street.

The bronze Malibu followed me toward one of the store clusters. I darted into one of the parking lots and drove down, as though looking for an empty space. He turned into the lot, too, though two rows back.

I came back up the adjacent aisle, as though I were still looking for a parking place. Then I left the lot and butted into the line of cars in front of the stores. The Malibu had no choice but to do the same, though by now he was well behind me.

It came my turn to take a shallow turn to the left, toward a new store cluster, and I became unseen to anyone more than five cars back. I swung sharply into a loading alley, drove all the way through, and came out onto the access road. Twenty minutes later, I was eastbound on the Illinois Tollway, headed toward Indiana.

I scanned the rearview now and again, but no bronze Malibu could have followed me. Still, to be doubly safe, I got off at Route 12 and followed that beneath the curve of Lake Michigan until I got into Michigan and could pick up the interstate again. For two hours, I passed increasingly bigger pines and smaller towns until I ran out of daylight and interstate and had to cut over to side roads where I could see not much of anything at all.

Downtown Blenton, a forlorn, block-long strip that looked only marginally more prosperous than Center Bridge, appeared an hour later. Theodea Wilson lived in a cottage set well away from the other three houses on her street. Her place was dark.

It was too late to bang on doors in the neighborhood, so I headed back to a Super 8 motel I'd passed a mile earlier. It sat next to a restaurant that had a stuffed deer's head encased in glass and lit up on its roof, as though to keep an eye out for the hunter who'd dispatched it to an afterlife of riding a roof without legs and a torso. The 8 had two pickups in its parking lot. One was rusty and red; the other was rusty and green. Combined with the vigilant Rudolph high across the lot, the compound had a sort of perverted-Christmas air.

I checked into the 8 and walked over to the restaurant. Three Harley-Davidson motorcycles were parked by the door. The knotty-pine interior was decorated with broken Detroit Red Wings hockey sticks, a large electric Jack Daniel's sign, lit up, and three ample blond women in tight, low-riding jeans sitting on stools at the bar. All three swiveled in unison as I walked in, making me feel like two hundred pounds of fresh meat being wheeled to a buffet. I took a table by a window so I could be the first to see if any more motorcycle women showed up.

When the waitress brought a menu, I couldn't help but glance past her at the three women at the bar. Their tight low-riding jeans had ridden even lower, displaying three identical Harley tattoos above the beginnings of three identically deep great divides. I should have taken that view as added incentive for continuing to forsake Twinkies and Ho Hos for aged Cheerios, but I was tired. I ordered a burger, fries, and, after the briefest of hesitations, the house specialty, maple apple pie. I promised myself to rectify it all by eating twice as many Cheerios the next day.

The burger was good, the fries were crisp, but it was the maple-flavored apples encased so lovingly in crusted lard that set my mind to reminiscing. I'd had instances where good pie had accompanied revelations. There'd been an exceptional key lime in Bodega Bay that foreshadowed my tracking down a woman who had a fondness for bombs. More recently, a fine apple, topped with Velveeta, had come along with the discovery of a satisfactory-enough development in the case of a missing woman. I liked harbingers, especially if they were pies, and there was no reason to think that a maple apple pie, up in piney country, would not lead to finding my best friend alive and well.

I bid a silent adios to the tattooed backsides at the bar and tumbled off to my room at the 8, sure to sleep well and safe.

Clever me.

 

Ten

“She ain't been home for two, three days,” Theodea Wilson's nearest neighbor told me the next morning. “School's probably out for Easter break. She might be gone to her summer place.”

I was holding my shopping bag of clothes like I was trying to make a delivery. “Man, they must have gotten things screwed up down at the store.”

“What store?”

“Hardware,” I said vaguely. I didn't know any of the nearby stores.

“It's mighty cold for that right now.”

“Hardware?”

“Eustace,” she said loudly.

“Eustace?”

“Eustace!” she yelled, like I was hard of hearing. “This time, she screwed up. She didn't stop her mail. I been pushing it through the slot and watching out for packages. I can take your bag.” She held out a hand.