A Safe Place for Dying

Eleven

I shifted so I could see Leo’s reaction to what I was going to say. It was eight thirty Tuesday morning. We were drinking coffee from Ma’s scratched porcelain mugs, sitting on his front steps. The rain had stopped in the middle of the night. After emptying the buckets and wastebaskets out the windows on the fifth floor, I’d spent the rest of the night on top of the turret, riding my lawn chair, spinning fancies, and I wanted Leo to tell me I was crazy.

“We’ve got old explosives and old paper. The first explosion occurred in 1970.”

“Right.” He sipped his coffee.

“The note they received last June, just before the Farraday explosion, demanded fifty thousand dollars. Small change by today’s standards.”

“But big dough in 1970?”

“I’m getting there.”

He motioned for me to continue and took another sip of coffee.

“The last amount demanded, the five hundred thousand, is bigger money, but is it big enough?”

His eyebrows arched. “Meaning?” But he knew where I was going.

“Three-million-dollar homes, Leo, and all the guy wants is a sixth of the value of one house?”

“Half a million is still a lot of cabbages.”

“Is it a lot of money to the Bohemian?”

“Dek, you’re a dog chewing one meager bone to death. If the Bohemian’s got money problems, he needs a lot more than a half million.”

“That’s what I’m starting to think, too. Maybe the relatively small amount of the money demanded exonerates the Bohemian-”

“Hallelujah.”

“-and clears people inside Gateville as well. Because the half million is only a fraction of what any of those houses is worth.”

“And that in turn leads you to…?”

“Somebody from the past.”

His eyebrows crept up another inch.

I asked again the same question I’d called him with a half hour earlier. “Tell me one more time how impossible it is to date the writing on those extortion notes.”

“Pretty damned impossible. Pencil lead is graphite crystalline carbon with binders and hardeners. You can separate these components chemically to isolate the waxes, resins, and clays, but you need a known reference sample to date them. Pencil lead is very stable, unlike ink, which evaporates over time. So, without a comparison sample, pretty damned impossible.”

“But the letters could have been written years ago?”

“Or yesterday.”

“Stay with me on this, Leo.”

“All right. Yes, the letters could have been written many years ago.”

“That would explain the relatively small amounts demanded in the letters-the fifty thousand that was never arranged to be picked up, and the half million that was. Those demands were valued in 1970 dollars, because the notes were written in 1970.”

“O.K.”

“We’ve passed through dot-com times, Leo. Things have gone up. Why hasn’t the guy upped the dollars to keep up with the times? Why hasn’t he written new notes, used a library computer?”

“My point at the beginning.” Leo shrugged. “Maybe the best we can assume for now is he’s a guy who sticks to his plan.”

“Exactly. Because he meticulously laid this whole thing out in 1970.”

Leo watched my face and waited.

I set my coffee cup down on the steps. “What if he also buried the D.X.12 back then?”

He didn’t react at first, not visibly, but I knew the signs: rocksolid stillness as his mind shot into warp speed, analyzing the permutations. Then the agitation, the twitching eyebrows, the tapping fingers.

He jumped up from the stoop and went down the six steps to pace on the sidewalk, his mouth struggling to verbalize what was flaring in his mind.

“Put there by a construction worker at the site,” he said, looking up.

“Yes.”

“Jeez, it’s perfect.” He grinned up at me like he’d discovered gold. “Fricking beautiful. The Gateville developers were paranoid about security from day one. Yet during construction, one of their workers was planting D.X.12 like a guy hiding Easter eggs, so he could come back, attach a fuse, and start setting off bombs. Fricking beautiful,” he said again, still pacing back and forth. “They hired a fox, with bombs, to build the henhouse.”

I looked down at him. “But why wait so long to put the plan in high gear? Why did he quit after the first little bomb at the guardhouse?”

He stopped pacing and looked up. “Cold feet?”

I shook my head.

“The ten grand was enough?”

“Not when he’d already written other notes demanding more.”

He came up the stairs two at a time and sat down. “Then tell me,” he said, watching my eyes, ready to play.

Even when we were kids, he’d loved the mental sparring. But this time, I was ahead of him. I’d spent most of the night on top of the turret, working my way through it. I might have been a little light on sleep, but I was rehearsed and I was ready. And I had a plan.

“Either we’ve got the world’s most lethargic extortionist,” I began, “taking decades to get his letters in the mail and do the crime, or…”

“Or?” Leo’s black eyebrows tangoed on his forehead, prompting.

“Or the bomber has been away for a long time.”

“Like where?” He leaned closer, almost leering.

“Like prison,” I almost shouted.

Leo beamed. “Excellent. It explains the long lapse between the bombs. In 1970, the guy comes up with a plan. He writes the notes, plants the D.X.12, sets off the first explosion behind the guardhouse, and collects ten thousand dollars. But that money is only supposed to be the first installment, the test run, the priming of the money pump. There’s going to be more, a lot more.”

“But something happens,” I cut in, percolating with brilliance now. “He gets sent to prison for something else, and his big Gateville caper gets put on hold. Until recently, when he gets out and puts everything in motion again.”

“Precisely.” Leo nodded approvingly.

“The only thing I can’t figure is, why bother with the old notes he wrote long ago? Why not punch out new letters, with bigger dollars, when he’s using the computer to address the envelopes?”

“A trifling issue. You’ll come up with an answer.”

“So now,” I charged on, “all we have to do-”

Leo held up his palm, his lips moist. “Allow me to speak for the great Sherlock. All you need do is assemble a list of the people whoworked construction at Gateville, who then got sent to prison, and who recently got out.”

I nodded quickly. Damn, I was good.

Leo smiled a particular half-smile, and the coffee in my stomach roiled. I knew that smile. It was his executioner’s smile, given to those who’d overlooked something as they dared to match speed and wits with him. I’d seen it a hundred times, right before he tripped the blade.

He spoke. “Since at least half the contractors who worked at Gateville must have gone out of business by now, and the other half threw out their old payroll records decades ago, you will be forced to try to reconstruct employee names from interviews with hundreds of older people who may or may not remember who they worked with back then. If you skip lunches and don’t sleep more than an hour a night, you ought to be able to come up with an inaccurate, incomplete, and completely erroneous starting list of candidates in four or five years.”

The guillotine blade had plummeted, severing my empty head.

I started to open my mouth, to protest, but no words would come. There were no words; Leo was right.

“What do I do?” I finally asked.

“Go to the Bohemian. Tell him that the D.X.12 might already be in the ground. Tell him that no amount of security is going to keep the bomber out forever.”

“I don’t trust the Bohemian, not completely.”

“Dek, you’ve got to abandon the deranged money manager theory.”

“It’s not that. It’s that he knew the significance of the lamppost.” I’d told Leo about the X erasures on the blueprints.

“And didn’t tell you right away? That proves nothing. He’s your client.”

“He was around Gateville when it was under construction, and since then, he’s had the only set of blueprints.”

“Jeez, Dek. He’s protecting his own clients. You’ve got to go to him, convince him to bring this to the Feds.” Leo looked into my eyes. “You don’t really believe he’s involved, do you?”

“I like my recent parolee theory a lot better.” I stood up. We walked down the steps, and I got in the Jeep.

Leo leaned close to the driver’s window. His small, dark eyes were worried. “If that ground is laced with D.X.12, they’re going to have to change the name of the development.”

I waited.

“They’re going to have to call it Bombville,” he said.

I wasn’t armed enough to spar with the Bohemian. I drove to the Maple Hills Municipal Building instead.

The big guy with the pocket rainbow of colored felt tips was alone in the Building Department, like before. Unlike the last time, though, it was early, only ten in the morning. He was still on the front section of the newspaper. He raised his eyes and scowled across the empty desks at me. “Back again?”

“I’m not here about blueprints this time,” I said, fighting my own joy at seeing him. It’s never manly to gush. “I need the names of the contractors that worked at Crystal Waters. They must have applied for permits.”

“We don’t keep permit copies that long.”

“How do I get the names?”

His chair creaked. “Perhaps if you made an appointment.”

I was short on sleep, long on cranky. “Do I go upstairs to the mayor’s office to make one, or have one of the Board members at Crystal Waters make it for me?”

I’d pressed the right button. His huge hands dropped to the arms of the chair, and he started to push. It was like watching birth, the slow way he emerged from the oak chair. “Come with me.”

I followed him as he lumbered through the empty office to a small file room jammed with mismatched tan, black, and graymetal cabinets. He squeezed down the center aisle and stopped next to a gray four-drawer file. Steadying himself with one meaty paw on top of the cabinet, he aimed his eyes down to read the labels on the drawers. “Open that one,” he said, pointing at the bottom drawer.

I knelt and opened a drawer filled with black vinyl ring binders labeled with white tags. I pulled out the one marked PERMIT RECEIPTS. 1966-1980. I stood up and handed it to him. He set the book on top of the cabinet and began thumbing through the ledger pages.

“Here’s the first entry for Crystal Waters,” he said, pointing with a large thumb. It was the fifth entry on the 1969 ledger page, done in fountain-pen ink, and showed receipt of fifty dollars for a permit to demolish a barn. “This ledger will have the names of all the contractors who posted a bond for Crystal Waters.”

We went back to the general office. He pointed to a vacant desk and shuffled, wheezing, back to his newspaper. I sat down, opened the book, and began making a list of every permit issued.

I closed the ledger at two fifteen. Maple Hills had done very well from the sale of permits. From the first demolition to the final posting for the electrician who’d installed the pump in the pond fountain, they’d collected permit fees from one hundred and seventy-two different contractors for the Gateville project.

I brought the ledger to the big man’s desk and set it down next to his newspaper. He was on the classified advertisements, his day well over half done. He didn’t look up when I thanked him and left.

One hundred and seventy-two contractors. Leo was right. It would be impossible.