A Safe Place for Dying (28 page)

Authors: Jack Fredrickson

BOOK: A Safe Place for Dying

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“I'll bet Ballsard was most enthused about writing that letter.”

“As you predicted, but he was persuaded when I told him I had every hope of recovering all the extortion money. Besides, as you also pointed out, Stanley dying a hero might minimize claims against the Board for negligence.”

“You looked around Stanley's garage?”

“Mrs. Novak's sister was quite cooperative once she realized I was acting in their best interests. She gave me the key and told me to take anything that belonged to Crystal Waters. It was in the attic of the garage: five hundred and ten thousand, untouched.” He patted my good shoulder. “As you requested, I told the Board only that I recovered the funds through a confidential source.”

“That ten thousandâ”

“âdid not have a bill newer than 1970.” He beamed. “And the five hundred thousand was still in the attachÃ© case. I don't think he ever opened it.” He watched me.

“AttachÃ©â” I started to stutter. “Son of a bitch.”

He patted my good shoulder again. “Perhaps surveillance is not your forte.”

“Thank you, Anton.”

“You're a moral man, Vlodek. I like that.” He stood up. “I told the Board you would be discreet.”

He took a step toward the street but then turned. “I meant to bring you a bottle of ink for your new pen, but there are so many colors. I didn't know which you'd like.”

I waved my good hand. “Anything will be fine.”

The Bohemian glanced over at Amanda, planting bulbs for the spring by the base of the turret. She was wearing my cutoff red sweatshirt. “I think red, perhaps,” he said. “Red is such a vibrant color.”

I followed his eyes. “Red is perfect.”

Leo drove me in the pink Porsche with the top down. “It's silver rose, not pink,” he said again.

“Pink enough, Leo.”

“Endora likes it.”

“And for that it must be treasured.”

He did some fancy downshifting, just to show me he could, and pulled up to the entrance to Gateville. A Maple Hills squad car was parked by the guardhouse, its uniformed officer talking to a guard. The guard came over to the Porsche.

“Brumsky and Elstrom,” Leo said, handing up our driver's licenses. “Anton Chernek arranged it with Mr. Ballsard.”

I loosened the chin cord and pulled off the tan big-brimmed Tilley hat Amanda had bought me to keep the sun off my stitches. The guard checked our faces against the license photos, and handed them back with photocopied waiver forms that absolved the Board of responsibility for anything that occurred during our visit, like us getting blown up by an undiscovered cube of D.X.12. We signed the forms and handed them back.

“Jeez, put the hat back on, Dek,” Leo said as we started up. “You look like Frankenstein, post op.”

I pulled on the Tilley as Leo turned left and started clockwise around Chanticleer Circle.

At first blink, the houses at the east end of Gateville looked the same: big and blessed in the sun. But then the uncut grass, untrimmed shrubs, and scattering of fast-food wrappers, dropped by the curious and blown over the wall, popped out like black teeth on a beauty queen. Nobody was at home in Gateville anymore.

We circled slowly around the east end and started up the back stretch. Around the bend ahead, the mounds of blackened bricks and charred wood looked like World War II photographs of Dresden, the day after the Allies had flown over and obliterated it.

“Jeez,” Leo said, stopping the car. He shut off the engine.

For a time we sat in his open convertible and looked at the rubble at the west end.

“What finally made him set the plan in motion?” Leo asked, when the silence got too loud.

“Our divorce.”

“Atta boy, Dek. Suck up the guilt for this, too.”

“It's true enough, Leo. Obviously, the Board's rejection of his request for a loan, and then his son's death and his wife's deterioration, were the reasons. But they festered, and might not have gone any place, except that Amanda and I divorced, and she went to Europe for what was to be at least six months. God knows he'd had the motive; now he had the means and opportunity. He'd never forgotten the letters, blueprints, and D.X.12 that were in the tunnels with Michael Jaynes. Now he had the keys; he was supposed to check on the house. He cut into the tunnel and began blowing things up.”

“And hired you to misdirect the investigation that was sure to come, by feeding you clues about Michael Jaynes.”

“He controlled the investigation every step of the way. Using
the old notes was genius, because it forced everyone's attention back to 1970, to someone who had worked building Gateville. When that looked to be a dead end, he fed me Jaynes's name to keep me going.”

Leo turned from looking at the ruined houses. “And when that lagged, he set you up to take the fall.”

I shook my head. “He didn't set me up.”

“What about the money missing from the Dumpster? Stanley had to know you would stake it out, even if you didn't tell anybody beforehand.”

“Sure, but he couldn't know I'd admit to being there. Nor could he anticipate I'd be so lame as to fall asleep and admit that, too. My announcing that I'd been there but didn't see the money disappear made me look worse than stupid; it made me look like I was lying
and
stupid. That's what got Till interested in me in the first place. He thought I was covering up the fact that I'd grabbed the money myself. I dug my own grave on that one.”

“I don't get it.”

“It made me look like I was lyingâ”

“That's not what I meant. What happened to the money?”

I gave him my happiest grin. I knew what was puzzling him, but I wanted to savor the sensation of knowing something he hadn't worked out.

“The money never went to Ann Sather's,” I said.

“Jeezâ” he said, and then the confusion left his face. He smiled.

I blurted ahead, though he already knew what I was going to say. “Even if I'd brought binoculars, I wouldn't have caught it. Stanley came to the drop with a white bag full of food scraps he'd picked out of Ann Sather's Dumpster a few days before and had kept refrigerated at home. Only he'd put the white bag inside a black bag. Assuming that I would be watching, he made a show of leaning into the Dumpster, like he was jamming the black bag all
the way in so he could close the lid. What he was really doing with all that fumbling was ripping the black outer bag off and balling it up in his fist. It was just thin plastic. Then he drove away with his wadded-up black plastic bag, leaving behind a white bag full of nothing but authentic Ann Sather kitchen garbage. He figured when I saw no one come for the black bag, I'd rummage in the Dumpster. I wouldn't find the money, but worse, I would realize that if I told anyone that the money had disappeared right under my eyes, they wouldn't believe me. They'd think I took it. I must have really shocked him when I told everybody I'd been watching the Dumpster but had fallen asleep. That was a bonus for him; it made me look even more guilty.”

“That wasn't setting you up?”

“No, because he never expected me to admit I was there.”

“What about blowing up your shed? That wasn't a setup?”

“It was time to get me out of the picture, because I was making too much noise about doubting the bomber was Michael Jaynes. He needed more time to string out the bombings, to make the Members suffer slowly, like he and his wife had, watching their son die. But he didn't use D.X.12 on my shed, Leo, which would have tied me to the Gateville bombs much more closely.”

“Jeez,” Leo said.

“That's it exactly,” I said. “Jeez.” I looked down the street at the ruined houses.

“So he was never looking for money?”

I shook my empty head in my Tilley hat. “It was too late for money. His son was dead, his wife was headed for an institution. No, he wanted to punish the Board, and the Members, by destroying all of Gateville.”

“Wanted it bad enough to kill.”

“No. I saw his face when he learned that that family had come home from Door County and was in the house he'd blown up.” I pointed at the pile of rubble that had once been the dead family's
home. “âBastards,' Stanley said that night. I thought he was referring to more than one bomber, but it was actually a slip. Stanley was referring to the Board, blaming them for the family's death just like he did for the death of his son.”

We sat for a while then, in the sun, without speaking, like we were waiting in a graveyard for a grounds crew to come to cover new graves.

“Drive on, Jeeves,” I said finally.

Leo put the Porsche into gear and eased up Chanticleer toward the turn.

“What's going to happen here?” Leo asked.

“This last batch of destroyed houses will be scraped away. Their owners, including Amanda, are the lucky ones. They'll get insurance money to buy someplace else. I don't know about the others, because technically their houses have not been damaged. The Board will plant grass and trees, like they did earlier, to try to perfume the development, but it won't work. The story is out. No one wants to live in a minefield.”

“What about the report in the paper that said the whole development would be rewired? Won't that end it?”

“That's just whistling past the graveyard. The D.X.12 is still here. They've found a lot of it, maybe even all of it. But even if they bulldoze all the houses, they'll never know if they missed one tiny cube. That's what makes this place a ghost town for a long time to come.”

Leo started the Porsche and crept along in first gear. “So Stanley Novak got what he wanted?”

“More like what he needed.”

Leo nodded at the justice of that, and we continued around Chanticleer Circle until we got to what was left of Amanda's house. Two men in white hard hats stood in front of the pile, next to a dump truck loaded with debris. Only the front wall of Amanda's house remained.

Leo put the Porsche in neutral. “She sure had a lot of guts, bullying those E.M.T.'s to go in to get you, even as the roof was coming down.”

“Never underestimate the force of Amanda's determination.”

“Is she going to be staying a while in Rivertown?” Leo kept looking straight ahead, but I could see him smile. When he got that big slimeball grin on his face, I could swear his lips touched the lobes of both his ears.

“She bought a condo downtown. She'll be moving out in a month.”

“No grand reconciliation?” The disappointment in his voice was genuine.

“She's leaving the hot water heater, the portable shower, and the big bed. She'll be back to visit.”

“Still â¦”

“She says we're too young to get married.”

“You're both looking at middle age.”

“She's right, Leo.”

The men climbed into the cab of the dump truck.

“Big greed,” Leo said. “It's always big greed.” He turned to look at me, his eyebrows riding high on his forehead.

I looked at my watch. “Fire it up, Leo. Amanda wants me back by three.”

He slipped the shifter into first gear. “What's the rush?”

“Amanda said we're having sweets.”

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

A SAFE PLACE FOR DYING. Copyright Â© 2006 by Jack Fredrickson. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin's Press.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.minotaurbooks.com

eISBN 9781429996785

First eBook Edition : March 2011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fredrickson, Jack.

A safe pace for dying / Jack Fredrickson.â1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-35168-7

ISBN-10: 0-312-35168-2

1. Private investigatorsâIllinoisâChicagoâFiction. 2. Chicago (Ill.)âFiction. I. Title

PS3606.R437S24 2006
813'.6âdc22