The Dead Caller from Chicago (20 page)

The babushka was on her front porch, dressed in dark clothes for another dark day. She moved her head back and forth, making a pointed comparison between her own neatly shoveled walk and Leo's, covered thickly with new snow.

“Wonderful day, is it not?” I asked, pasting on what I was sure was a fine wide grin.

She frowned. “Last night was disturbing.”

I lessened my smile, fearing I might resemble a crazed jack-o'-lantern. “All the new snow?” I asked, hoping it was only the snow. “Not to worry; I came to shovel.”

“Odd soft noises, coming from the Brumsky place.” She pointed at Leo's bungalow as though I didn't know where it was.

“Noises from the snow?” I asked, an idiot, but an innocent.

“Not from the snow, you fool. There was a shout, like people were fighting in the backyard. By the time I could get to my back room to look out, someone was escaping up the gangway. I got to the front just as a car started. The snow was falling thick, and the sneak was crafty. He pulled away without turning on his headlamps. I couldn't see dink squat.” Pausing for air, she stared at me, then, “Only one person's been interested in coming around much, lately.”

“I've been working here, rigging up a burglar alarm, checking the furnace and the hot water.”

“That's another thing about last night,” she said. “I didn't hear any alarm.”

“I'm not done,” I said. “See anything else?”

“You'd best get shoveling, then,” she said.

“Oh, you bet.” She'd seen nothing, called no one.

I high-stepped to the back and saw that the snowfall had obliterated any signs of my clubbing Cassone. I got the shovel from the garage, came back, and began stabbing at the new blanket of snow, hoping to hear the clink of aluminum.

“What on earth are you doing?” the neighbor shouted across the chain-link fence. She'd made no sound coming out her back door, a true stealth-babushka.

“Chipping ice off the shovel.”

“Shoveling the walk will get rid of it quicker.” She went back inside.

I shoveled my way to the front, did the walk and the steps, and returned to the back to take more stabs at the snow. Nothing clanked; the bat was gone. He'd taken it with him.

I went up the back porch stairs. There was no broken glass, but the door was open. Cassone had jimmied the new high-security lock I'd installed. I went inside.

He'd not trashed the house. He'd known the dimensions of what he was looking for. The clothes in Ma's and Leo's bedroom closets had been pushed to the sides, so he could peer behind them, but he'd been unhurried and orderly, a professional.

I went down to the basement. The clutter had been spread farther out and gone through carefully. Nothing appeared to be broken.

He'd found what he wanted in Leo's office, of course, on the wall above the file cabinets. I went upstairs.

“I suppose I should call the police,” the babushka said from her back step.

I stomped across the snow to her fence, one last probe for the bat. “About that ruckus last night?”

“They could search the property, like maybe you've just been doing.”

“I came to shovel and thought I might as well check the furnace and the hot water heater,” I said.

“Why are you standing in deep snow?”

“To hear you clearly,” I said, giving her my best smile.

She snorted and turned her back.

 

Thirty-three

By most accounts, my grandfather was a courtly, small-time brewmeister, a guy looking to make good beer and, of course, a castle. Part of his being in the bootlegging business during Prohibition must have required a place to stash money and perhaps long guns, because I'd come across his hiding place, a large cavity tucked into the floor, quite accidentally only months before.

I lifted the fitted planks and brought Leo's painting down to the lighted Luxo magnifier on my card table desk.

At first glance, it was nothing more than a kid's painting, eighteen by twenty-four inches, done by a child fated for a career in anything but art. The lavender barn was lopsided. The pink, green-spotted cows had misshapen legs, each of which was a different length, and the tree trunks were tendrils, too spindly to support so many red leaves. He'd signed it “Leo B.” in the lower right corner.

I turned the painting over. Always a stickler for detail, he'd written “To Ma, from Leo,” in a big, looping child's hand.

Something irregular caught my eye. I moved the magnifier and saw that a tiny seam had opened up along the inside edge of the wood frame. An artist's canvas was always stretched around a wood frame and tacked in back. A seam inside the frame made no sense.

I used my fingernail to pull gently at the seam. A tiny speck of glue fell away, revealing what looked like an older piece of canvas underneath.

It was obvious what Leo had done. He'd painted a ridiculously colored farm scene right over another picture. He'd thought to disguise the back of the old painting as well, by gluing on a piece of new canvas.

It was enough to build a scenario: Snark Evans, installing a security system at Cassone's house for Tebbins, had stolen a picture. Likely enough, Snark didn't know what he had, other than a raging case of second thoughts. He dumped the picture on an unsuspecting Leo, thinking maybe he'd come back for it when things cooled. Snark hightailed it out of Rivertown, going so far as to fake a report of his own death so Cassone wouldn't come hunting for him. Leo, a kid finishing his first year of college, probably thought nothing of adding a picture to the pile of other artifacts mounded in the middle of his basement.

For years, Snark's ploy worked. Snark drifted on to new things under a different name. Cassone settled into believing his picture was gone for all time. Leo forgot about the painting in his basement.

Then, just a week or a month before, something triggered each of them into action. Snark called Leo, wanting his picture back. Cassone hired Wozanga, who ultimately traced the painting to Leo. Leo dug out the picture and saw something he hadn't seen before, something that needed camouflaging with a child's version of a lavender barn and pink, green-spotted cows.

My scenario was sure to have big holes, but I knew one thing: Leo was the most honorable of men. He would have researched the painting and likely found out it belonged to Cassone. He would have returned it to him, whether or not the man was a hood. That he hadn't meant he'd learned something that prevented that.

I called Jenny. “I need a favor.”

“How's Leo?” Jenny asked.

“Improving.”

“Are you going to take me to someplace memorable if I do this favor for you?”

“I took you to the beach once.”

“You took me to a trailer park
near
the Indiana dunes. We found a corpse covered with flies.”

“Wasn't that memorable?”

“What do you want, Elstrom?”

“I want you to call your police friends and find out whether Rudy Cassone ever reported a theft from his house in Falling Star.”

“Rudy Cassone, the big-time gangster?”

“Yes.”

“This has to do with Leo?”

“Yes.”

She hung up without waiting for me to dodge a next question. I told myself it was gamesmanship.

I looked across the room to admire the black char in the fireplace, the residue of the only fire that had ever been lit there. Jenny and I had inaugurated that fireplace, not two hours after we discovered the corpse in Indiana. Shivering, although it was July, we'd spoken of our ghosts, her dead husband and my ex-wife. Sometime into the night, the adrenaline gave out, and she fell asleep in the electric blue La-Z-Boy as I sat beside her, alert, lecherous of thought but virtuous of action, until I became too aware of myself watching her breathe, and I covered her with a blanket and went upstairs to the bed across from another fireplace, one that I'd inaugurated with Amanda, my ex-wife.

Amanda knew art. She used to write big glossy art histories before her estranged father found the right way to lure her into his electric utility and back into his life. Amanda didn't write art histories anymore. She no longer taught at the Art Institute. I hadn't spoken to her since late in the previous year.

Still, she knew art.

I did not stop to wonder about motives and needs and what used to be. I dialed her number.

“Dek?” Vicki, her assistant asked, surprised. It had indeed been months.

“Alas, the very same.”

“She called you already?”

“What?” I asked, confused.

“You're on her call list. I was supposed to remind her to call you later this afternoon.”

It didn't make sense. “Is she free now?”

“Hold, please.”

“Dek?” Amanda asked, after a longer wait than ever before.

“I have an art question,” I said quickly and preemptively.

“I know,” she said, stunning me.

 

Thirty-four

She had people … I said I'd be hanging … She said she'd call.

It was like that with us. We'd not been married long, really only weeks, before we developed senses of each other that were ordinarily reserved for people who'd been together for decades. She knew the endings of my sentences, as I knew hers. Answers to the big questions, though, we never had the time to figure out, and we crashed when I was wrongly accused of falsifying evidence in a suburban mayor's insurance scheme. I'd looked around for anyone other than myself to blame and saw Amanda, a rich man's daughter who'd brought me notoriety because of her father's prominence. Or so I reasoned, through the ninety-proof haze I'd taken to using to blur my shame. It killed my self-respect, her tolerance, and our marriage.

Our abilities to finish each other's sentences were taking longer to die. Even the last time we'd spoken, months before, we laughed awkwardly at that last stubborn vestige of our marriage.

Her knowing that I was calling about an art question, though, went way beyond that.

The afternoon faded into dusk, and the dusk into darkness. An hour after that someone knocked on the door.

Cassone wouldn't knock. Still, I grabbed Leo's revolver before running down the stairs. I turned on the outside light, raised the gun, and jerked the door open.

Her beautiful brown eyes, made even darker by the hood on her black parka, went wide at the sight of the gun. She was carrying one of those small plastic-wrapped bundles of firewood that gas stations sold. A little white bag was perched on top. I tugged her inside.

“What the hell, Dek?” she asked, staring at the gun.

“What a wonderful surprise, Amanda,” I said, slamming and bolting the door with the hand that wasn't holding an armament.

“Don't give me that.”

“Damned out of season trick-or-treaters?”

“Nor that.”

I jammed the gun, barrel down, in the waistband of my jeans, hoping it would not shoot off anything vital, and took the firewood and the little white bag that most certainly looked like it came from a bakery.

“Are you in danger?” she asked, in a small voice.

“Nah.”

“We'll talk.” She put a smile on her face, trying to summon up some of the old playful sternness she used to level at me, but her eyes weren't going along. They were wary, maybe from the gun I'd added to my wardrobe, or maybe from the fact that so many months had passed since we'd last talked. I followed her up to the second-floor fireplace. Certainly there would be no banter about bringing the firewood up to the one on the third floor, opposite the bed. I set the wood down next to the hearth and turned to her.

She was looking past me, into the huge fireplace. The last time she'd come to the turret, it had been unmarked. For a moment, neither of us said anything.

“Coffee?” I finally thought to ask.

“Great,” she said, relieved.

We walked across the hall. “My,” she said, looking at the cabinets, trim, counters, and absolute lack of new appliances. “You've done nothing with the kitchen since I was last here.”

“I found work, for a time.”

“Insurance?”

“Profitable, too.”

“It's coming back, finally?” The document scandal had left a long-lasting residue of doubt in the minds of my former clients.

“Slowly,” I said.

“Are you going to build a special cabinet in here so visitors won't have to look at your revolver?”

“Ah.” I took it out of my waistband and set it on the farthest counter.

We talked of safe things while I made coffee. The little white bag contained croissants from a Chicago bakery I'd never heard of. We brought them and the coffee back across the hall, and I started a fire with scraps of trim wood I'd conveniently left all over the floor. When those caught, I added three of the split short logs she'd brought. She sat in the electric blue La-Z-Boy, I sat on the tilted red desk chair, and we ate the croissants as the fire found strength.

“I only brought enough wood for a quick fire,” she said, warming.

“Always thinking.”

“What's with the damned gun?”

“Extra precaution for a little project I'm working on.”

“Leo?”

I paused midbite, a rare enough occurrence. “When I called, you said you were expecting to hear from me. Because of Leo?”

“Actually, I was expecting to hear from him, not you. He called me a few days ago—”

“How many days ago?” I cut in.

“I don't remember, exactly. It was the day we got a lot of snow, before the last day we got a lot of snow.”

It was the day he'd sent Ma and Endora away and disappeared himself. “Sorry. Go on.”

“He'd called about the provenance of an obscure set of paintings that had been in the news recently. He wanted to know if I had any sources.”

“Isn't that the sort of thing you'd be asking him about, and not the other way around?”