The Dead Caller from Chicago (18 page)

With Wozanga gone, unaccounted for, likely enough the caller was his employer.

“Yes, everybody knows about Rivertown,” he said, rushing now. “I'd like to see the installation.”

“I'll be back there in fifteen minutes.”

He had the presence of mind to ask for the address, as though he weren't already parked nearby.

I had the presence of mind to not laugh at the charade as I gave it to him.

*   *   *

He got out of a black S-Class Mercedes, smoked windows, top of the line, before I'd even slid out of the Jeep. He knew whom to expect, from watching the house.

He was silver haired, wore a dark wool topcoat, and had a ten-thousand-dollar gold Rolex around his wrist. Or maybe it cost more. It had been light-years since I'd priced new Rolexes. I'd worn a used one once, but that was back in the day. I'd sold it after I'd become a news item.

Before I could extend my hand, he put his in his coat pockets like mine might be dirty. He gave me a nod, but not a name. It was just as well. The name would have been false. I'd already memorized his license plate, but that wouldn't matter either. Guys with his kind of dough leased their Mercedeses, so they could switch them out when the floor mats got crudded up.

I took him around back. “It's a modest job, you'll see, but it's a start.”

“Burglary, you mentioned,” he said, when I unlocked the kitchen door.

“Through the back door here.”

“But nothing was taken?” Again he asked the question that shouldn't have mattered to him.

“Maybe I just don't know.”

He'd brushed past me to step into Leo's bedroom. Right off, he knew to duck beneath the last of the psychedelic squadron dangling from the ceiling. He'd already gotten a description of the room, from his man Wozanga.

“My friend told me some of the things he's worried might have been stolen.”

It was like tossing chum off a fishing boat. He spun around. “Jewelry?” he asked, but something in his monotone made him sound like he thought it was what I wanted to hear.

The thought of someone lifting Ma Brumsky's rosaries was a laugh. “Sure. And the flat screens, the camera, stereo…”

He wasn't interested. He walked to Leo's closet, looking down at what might have been behind the clothes. “Nothing else?”

“Like what?” I asked, a doofus.

“I don't know; other things,” he said, fingering one of Leo's more outlandish tropical shirts, a medley of colors that should never have been joined. “Flamboyant fellow, your friend.”

“One of the neighbors saw a suspicious-looking guy hanging around.” It was more chum.

His fingers froze on the sleeve of Leo's shirt. “What did he look like?” he asked, without turning around.

I gave him a vague description of Wozanga, lying just a few hundred yards down the block, awaiting a ton of concrete.

He could have been an excellent poker player, or there was the chance he hadn't known the dead detective. “That's it?” he asked, turning to look around the room, at the desk, the dresser, even the long curtains Ma had made from a hard-to-find pattern of dancing ducks. “Just a vague description of a big man?”

“Any questions about what I plan to do in the other rooms?” I asked, chumming for the third time.

He beat me to the door. “Good idea. Let's look around.”

No doubt, the man was looking for something. Passing through the kitchen, he gestured at my tool bag. “When will you be done?”

“Very soon.”

He stopped in the dining room. It offered a view of Ma's bedroom.

“Mind if we talk about what you're planning to do in here?” He pointed at the wide window that faced the bricks of the bungalow next door. That's what windows in brick bungalows in Rivertown mostly did; they looked out on more bricks.

“Sensors,” I said, hoping he wouldn't ask questions. I had no idea what kind of sensors a home security system would require.

“Of course,” he said, but he was no longer looking at the window. He was looking past my shoulder, through the door of Ma's bedroom.

We went up to the front room. He stopped in the center and looked everywhere but at the lace-covered windows stretching across the front of the house.

“Charming room,” he said. Then, “Same thing in here?” He'd stepped through the arch into the little room set behind the front porch. Most bungalows in Rivertown had them, though for reasons nobody seemed to understand.

“More sensors,” I said. It was a preposterous game. He was definitely looking for something.

“How about the basement?” he asked.

“Same thing, except smaller windows, higher up.”

He turned and started toward the back of the house. Instead of walking straight through, he ducked into Ma's bedroom. Like the dining room, it had windows that faced the bricks of the bungalow on the other side. To live in Rivertown required joy at the sight of bricks.

“Sensors,” I said.

He smiled a little as he scoped out the room. When she'd come back with Endora, Ma had straightened Christ on the cross and closed her closet door. His eyes lingered on that closet door. No doubt, he wanted a peek inside.

“I guess that about does it,” I said. He hadn't seen enough, but I had. He was looking for something that was big enough to be left in plain view and easy to spot.

He hurried through the kitchen and down the basement stairs.

“As I said, more windows, higher up,” I said, at the bottom of the stairs.

“And more sensors, I suppose?” he asked, eyeing the massive pile in the center of the room. He must have been imagining how long it would take to go through it all.

“Shall we go up?” I asked.

He started toward Leo's office. I hurried to step in front of him. “We'd better avoid going into Mr. Brumsky's private office.”

He stopped. “Where do you put the control panel?” he asked.

I smiled. “Can't tell you that.”

“Good man.”

I followed him up the stairs but paused as he went out the back door. We'd made plywood key racks in seventh-grade wood shop, Leo and I. They were cut in the shape of a key and were about eight inches long. I'd dropped mine in a Dumpster, the day we were supposed to bring them home to delighted parents. Ma Brumsky had hung Leo's, the only one in the whole class striped yellow and black, like a wasp, by the back door. It had hung there ever since.

Leo's key ring wasn't there, of course, but a spare set for the Porsche dangled from the middle hook. I had an inspiration and snagged them before easing the back door shut to follow my inquiring guest down the back steps.

“Give me a call if you have more questions,” I said.

My visitor nodded as he disappeared into the gangway.

I'd left the service door to the garage open. I ran in, pressed the electric opener to raise the big door, slipped into Leo's Porsche, and gunned it out of the alley.

My visitor drove sedately, perhaps pleased by his tour of Leo's bungalow. I hung back, keeping cars between us. He was smart enough to be checking his rearview, but he'd be looking for a red Jeep, not a purple Porsche with a brown rub on its fender.

We headed west, past the ruined ground of Crystal Waters and the other, healthier gated communities west along the highway. He pulled into Falling Star, one of the oldest of the secured communities, and stopped to give the guard in the gatehouse a good look at him. The thin white gate rose, and the nameless man in the S-Class Mercedes motored on in.

I hadn't gotten much, but it might have been enough.

 

Twenty-nine

I figured he wouldn't make a move until well after nightfall.

After switching cars, I went back to the turret and called an acquaintance who worked for the State of Illinois. Like so many Illinois bureaucrats, he was willing to break the law, by providing me with information from the state's confidential database. What made him rare was that he didn't charge for doing it. That ran contrary to the public service culture in a state where two of our former governors were simultaneously doing time in federal prisons.

“Leased vehicle, Dek,” my acquaintance said, after looking up the auto license number I gave him.

“From a dealership in Westmont, according to the license plate frame.”

“You know more than I,” he said and clicked me away.

I didn't expect much from the license plate, but I had better luck going through Robert Wozanga's tidy notebook of invoice copies. He'd done work for a Mr. R. Cassone, of 15 Falling Star Lane. Two weeks before, Wozanga billed thirty-eight hours for unspecified services. I would have bet Wozanga had done more work since then, including taking a bumpy boat ride to and from Eustace Island.

The name Cassone nagged. I'd heard it but couldn't remember where.

I started with the county's property tax Web site. It told me that Cassone owned the home at 15 Falling Star Lane and that it was worth a little over four million, even in current depressed dollars. He had no mortgage.

Switching over to Google lit my computer screen with the promise of ten thousand sites and lit my memory at last. Rudy Cassone was one of the quieter hoodlums that worked the Chicago area. He'd been in the news for years, linked to charges of illegal gambling, prostitution, and construction-bid rigging in the suburbs around Chicago. Always, though, he'd been a rumored participant, never a primary suspect. I found no incidences where he'd been arrested.

He was a careful, successful man. He drove a hundred-thousand-dollar Benz and lived in a four-million-dollar house, set inside a well-guarded community.

I had an inspiration. I went back to the county assessor's property tax Web site. Cassone had lived at Falling Star for decades. He'd been able to afford very nice things for a long time.

I hustled over to city hall. Robinson was at his desk, studying a blueprint for a huge house. The drawing must have been for the house under construction on Leo's block, and I would have bet Robinson was looking for flaws.

“I saw you,” I said.

He looked up, startled. “Where?” His hands shook as he reached for his coffee.

“That new construction. You shut down the concrete work. Who's building that place?”

“A lawyer, fronting for another lawyer.”

“That wasn't why I stopped by. I was wondering if you'd heard.”

“Heard?”

“They fished a floater out of the Willahock last night.”

He set his cup down without taking a sip. “I heard. No one knows about that, too.”

“Ever hear of Rudy Cassone?”

“The gangster?”

“The very same.”

“I suppose Master Leo wants to know about him, too?”

“No. Personal curiosity.”

“I've been trying to call Leo,” he said, ignoring my lie. “Nobody's answering his home number. I even looked up his address and stopped by. The neighbor lady said he's still on vacation.”

“That's about it,” I said.

“He's calling you from wherever he is, asking all these questions?”

“Look—”

“Never mind,” he said, glancing down at the blueprint. “I got bigger things to worry about. All I know about Rudy Cassone is he lived, or maybe still lives, in a big fancy house in one of those protected communities west of here.”

“Did Tebbins sell him a security system?”

“I think it was the last one he did, as a matter of fact.”

“Anybody else help?”

“Sure. Snark—” Robinson jerked upright in his chair as he realized what I was inferring. “This is about stolen goods?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Yes you are, Elstrom. This is all about something that got stolen years ago? Leo's thinking Snark stole something from Cassone? No chance. Tebbins sure as hell knew Cassone was a…”

“A big time badass?”

“Snark Evans might have been a stupid punk, but he'd never mess with a guy like Cassone.”

“How can you be so certain?”

“I … it's inconceivable.”

“Maybe he was acting under orders.”

A sweat had broken out on Robinson's forehead. “You mean Tebbins? You're thinking Tebbins had Snark steal from Cassone, and because of that, Cassone killed Tebbins all these years later?” He wiped at his forehead and cradled his head in his hands. “Oh, sweet Jesus.”

“What do you hear about Tebbins's death?”

He looked up. “Nothing new. A transient. Nothing to do with Rudy Cassone.”

“Bad things happened to people who worked at his house that summer.”

“You mean Snarky?” His face got defiant. “Snarky died somewhere else that summer. Tebbins got killed by a transient.”

I met his stare, said nothing.

“Look,” he said, “I got to get back to work. Why don't you ask your friend Leo Brumsky about all this?” he asked. “Or is…” His face lost its defiance. “Is that what this is all about? Leo's worried he's in trouble, too? Because of Snarky? Because of Tebbins?” His hands shook as he squeezed the arms of his chair. “That can't be. I think Leo was out of here long before Tebbins and Snarky did the job at Cassone's.”

I left him to his nerves and his caffeine.

Walking back to the turret, I called the Bohemian. “Vuh-lo-dek,” he said. “I was just about to call you.”

“What is it, Anton?”

“Your Mr. Smith has become quite frantic.”

 

Thirty

The clinic was at the Illinois-Wisconsin line, set unmarked and secluded well back from the road. If the Bohemian's instructions hadn't been precise, I never would have found the driveway through the trees.

The reception area was designed to receive no one comfortably. It consisted of two hard plastic chairs and a stern-faced woman tucked behind a high counter. I was made to wait for only a moment before a woman in a cardigan sweater came through doors that opened with a faint electric snick. She smiled in spite of the surroundings.