A Safe Place for Dying

Twenty-four

The Bohemian called at seven fifteen, his voice quivering like he was a hundred years old. “Four have died. Turn on your T.V.”

“Till hauled me out there. I just got back.” I held the cell phone next to my ear as I went down the stairs to the first floor. I’d left my television on the table saw.

“What the hell’s happening?”

“Hold on.” I switched on the little T.V., fiddling one-handed with the wire antenna until the snow went away. Agent Till was on Channel 7, standing at a plywood lectern in front of the green cinder-block wall at the Maple Hills police station. Black microphones with local T.V. logos were clustered in front of him. The crawler at the bottom of the screen said it was a live broadcast. “I’ll call you back,” I said, and clicked off. I turned up the volume.

Till was nodding at a perky young thing in a thin sweater. “Of course, we have to assume this explosion is related to the one in June. We’re not ruling anything out.”

The live shot on the screen switched to the composite renderings of Michael Jaynes. “What you are seeing now is computer-aged pictures of a man we are seeking for questioning,” Till’s voice saidover the image on the screen. “His name is Michael Jaynes, he is sixty years old, and we believe he may have information about the explosions at Crystal Waters. We don’t have a current picture, only an old Army photo, which we have used to prepare several views of what he might look like now. We are asking anyone with any information to call us or the Maple Hills Police Department.”

“Any other suspects?” one of the reporters shouted.

The screen flashed back to the lectern. Till was looking right into the camera, like he was looking right into my eyes.

I squeezed the little television with both hands, as if I could keep the screen from showing the photo the Tribune had taken of me during the Evangeline Wilts trial. “Don’t do this, Till,” I heard myself say.

Till paused and then said, “None at this time.” He shifted his eyes from the camera lens-and from me. I breathed and relaxed my grip on the television.

“What else can you tell us about Michael Jaynes?” the early morning man from the local Fox affiliate asked.

The cameraman widened the view to include the area to the side of the lectern. Chief Morris, wearing a tight uniform, was standing a full step back and off to the side from Till.

“Unfortunately, very little,” Till said. “He was an electrician who worked on the construction of Crystal Waters. We believe he may have gained information back then that pertains to the current situation.”

“You’re going back to 1970 with this?” a reporter called out from the back row.

“We’re being thorough.”

“There is speculation that this is actually the third bombing at Crystal Waters this summer, the second being a lamppost outside the walls. What have you been doing since the house explosion in June?”

The room went silent. Behind Till, Chief Morris took another step back. Till gripped the sides of the lectern.

“We’re asking residents of Crystal Waters to vacate their homes temporarily-”

Pandemonium broke out as all the reporters began screaming questions at once.

“Are there more bombs?” someone shouted above the din.

“We’re going to conduct a house-to-house search for evidence,” Till yelled, holding up his hand for quiet.

He waited until the shouting stopped. “We have no reason to believe there are any more bombs. As a precaution, the road outside Crystal Waters is being closed to all public traffic, effective immediately. We need to keep spectators away while we conduct our investigation.”

“Are you cutting the electric to Crystal Waters?” a reporter at the front of the throng asked.

To the side and back from the lectern, Chief Morris shut his eyes.

“We might have to shut off the current to check the security of the electrical lines. Again, we’re just being thorough.”

A female voice: “You mean the bombs might be hardwired into-”

“What about Anton Chernek?” the Channel 5 field man said loudly from the front row, cutting her off. I turned up the volume on the T.V. The Channel 5 man had good sources, maybe good enough to have learned that I was a suspect as well.

“What about Anton Chernek?” Till repeated, looking almost gratefully at the Channel 5 reporter. The other reporters hadn’t picked up on the trampled question about hardwiring, the one question that, if answered, would have caused all the television stations to abandon local programming in favor of a vigil outside Crystal Waters, their cameras aimed for the big blow.

“You also have Chernek,” the Channel 5 reporter prompted.

Till stared at the reporter, feigning confusion. “We don’t ‘have’ Anton Chernek. We’re A.T.F. Mr. Chernek was arrested on an unrelated financial matter by the F.B.I., and he’s free on bond. Thank you,” Till said abruptly, as he stepped away from the lectern. Chief Morris scrambled after him.

The sweet young thing in the thin sweater filled my four-inch screen. “That’s the situation from Maple Hills,” she said, signing off, as the screen went to a live helicopter shot of Crystal Waters. From up high, the fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances parked crazily along Chanticleer Circle looked like toys discarded by a monster child.

I stared at the helicopter shot of the charred ruins of the house that had exploded just hours before, the newly landscaped Farraday lot around the bend toward the guardhouse, and, across the wall, the lamppost next to where the school bus shelter had once stood. All were in the same northwest quadrant of Gateville. I kept looking at the screen, still seeing the helicopter shot, long after the picture had cut away to a commercial.

I went outside. This morning’s Crown Victoria was black. The two young men inside were pretending to read yesterday’s newspaper.

I tapped on the windshield pillar. The agent in the passenger’s seat put down the newspaper and looked up at me, acting surprised.

“Tell Till I’m going to see Anton Chernek.” I walked away.

Five minutes later, as I finished changing clothes, my cell phone rang.

“Why do you need Chernek?”

“Nice job on T.V., Till. You lied about everything.”

“I kept you out of it, Elstrom. Now answer me, or I’ll have you brought downtown. Why do you need Chernek?”

“He’s got old blueprints of Crystal Waters. I want to look at them.”

“For what?”

“For divine inspiration, Till. And for proximity. Have you noticed that all the bomb sites have been clustered together in one section of Crystal Waters?”

“I’ll send an agent to get the prints.”

“No. Let me talk to Chernek; he’s not going to work with you. Besides, you know damned well it isn’t him. Or me.”

He paused. “Knock yourself out,” he said.

I called the Bohemian.

Till must have told the agents tailing me to give me some space. I was already out of the Jeep and going into the Bohemian’s building when they pulled into the parking lot.

Griselda Buffy sat at the desk in the empty reception area.

“He’s expecting me,” I said.

She gestured toward the door to the general office. “Entrez,” she said in what might have been flawless French.

The office was a crypt. No one was in the cubicles. I walked to the back.

The Bohemian’s door was open. I tapped on the jamb, and he looked up.

“Vlodek,” he said, trying to roll the first syllable on his tongue like always. But there was no enthusiasm in it now. He sat small behind his desk, a paled man going through the motions. On a table in the corner, a small color television flickered, its sound turned off. He motioned to a chair.

“A man, his wife, two daughters barely starting school.” His voice was dry, raspy. His eyes searched my face. “How can they think I did this?”

“They don’t. Remember, they’re watching me, too.”

“Agent Till mentioned Michael Jaynes on T.V. Are they getting close?”

“I doubt it. Till said that to give the illusion he had a lead.”

“Was there a note like the other times?”

“Two days before. Two million. But the bomber didn’t wait for the reply.”

The Bohemian put his elbows on his desk and leaned forward. “What is to be done?”

“I’m here to look at your blueprints again.”

He sank back in his chair. “Surely you don’t think I’m involved in the explosions.”

“No.”

“You don’t think I would kill a man, a woman, and two little girls.” His eyes looked like they were pleading.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You give people chances, not take them away. Like you did when you hired me.”

He gave me a tired smile. “I’d like to take credit, but it wasn’t me. Your friend Stanley said you would be ideal and could use the work. I liked the spirit of his suggestion and recommended it to the Board.” He pushed himself up. “Let’s get the blueprints.”

We went to a storage room. He unlocked a cabinet and took out the big paper roll. As he did, he dislodged a tan folder that fell to the floor. He leaned the roll against the cabinet, bent down to pick up the folder, and handed it to me. “I found this among the other papers. The sales brochure. Very selective, very private. We only printed three hundred and didn’t use half of them. As you know, the sites sold out immediately.” He picked up the roll of blueprints and locked the cabinet, and we walked down the hall. “Might as well use the big conference room. Keep the dust off the table.”

He switched on the lights in the large room we’d used only a few weeks earlier, when Till, Chief Morris, Stanley, the Bohemian, and I had met to strategize. Just a handful of weeks. Now a whole family was dead because the people in that room couldn’t put anything together.

The Bohemian set the drawings down on the table. “I will leave you to it, Vlodek,” he said, and went out.

I sat midway down one side of the table and started to unroll the blueprints, but then set them aside and picked up the manila folder the Bohemian had handed me. The sales brochure inside was printed on the kind of heavy tan parchment stock they use for menus at high-end restaurants. CRYSTAL WATERS, the cover proclaimed in two-inch dark brown script. Stacked below, one word per line, it read: BEAUTY. TRANQUILITY. SECURITY.

The first five of the six inside pages presented lavish half-tone drawings of the various stone and brick houses that were going to be constructed. Each residence was shown surrounded by mature trees and featured a view of the fountain in the middle of the pond. Superimposed on the renderings were short, pithy blurbs in tall script: “Secure in our world,” “Safe, because our children trust us,” and, across one idyllic scene of a family picnicking under an oak tree, “Chanticleer Circle, the safest street in America.” The bottom of every page was bordered, side to side, with a drawing of the brick wall that would enclose the development.

With serene drawings and soothing words, the marketing people had rendered the perfect world well. The only thing they’d missed was a sketch of the Stepford Wives, sauntering along in gingham, clutching bouquets of daisies.

The sixth page was the only one that gave details. As I started reading, I recognized the verbiage; they were the same words that had been used by the corn soufflé lady in the Maple Hills Assembler before Crystal Waters had been built.

I reread the closing paragraph several times. “From the impenetrable walls that enclose the community, to the fireproof construction, the security of the guardhouse, and the safety in the underground shelters, Crystal Waters will be the safest community in America.”

Underground shelters.

I unrolled the drawings, flipping quickly over the grading elevations, landscaping details, drainage specifications. I was looking for specifications for concrete, any kind of concrete. The road specifications were there, along with the foundations for the guardhouse, the fountain in the pond, even the base of the wall. But there was no information about underground shelters.

Without the torn-off index sheet, I couldn’t know for sure, but it was likely that at least some of the missing blueprint pages had to do with the underground shelters.

I rerolled the prints and took them to the Bohemian’s office. He was reading a computer printout on his desk, eating a small bowl of cottage cheese. “About the only thing my stomach can tolerate these days,” he said, gesturing with his spoon.

I leaned the roll of blueprints against the side of his desk. “Any chance the missing blueprints I told you about before had to do with bomb shelters?”

He set down the cottage cheese. “As I said, I keep the prints; I don’t use them.”

“It was you, though, wasn’t it, who drew light X’s on the Farraday house and on the old bus shelter?”

He nodded. “I was wondering about their closeness to each other.”

“And the house that just went up, that was close to the other explosion sites.”

“Yes.”

I set the brochure in front of him and opened it to the last page. “The last paragraph says there are underground shelters in Crystal Waters.”

He looked down at the brochure and read.

“They were never built,” he said, looking up when he was done.

“Why not?”

He pointed to the roll of blueprints I’d leaned against his desk. “Set those up here and I’ll show you.”

I put the roll on his desk, site plan on top. With a pencil, he drew five evenly spaced square hubs along Chanticleer Circle, centered within the edges of the street. “There were to be five bomb shelters, built under the road for additional protection,” he said.

Next, he connected each house to a shelter with double lines, in clusters of five or six houses for each shelter. “These were to be the tunnels, running from each basement to the shared shelter.” The tunnels fanned out from each shelter to a rough circle of individual houses. “I think some of the tunnels might have spurred off of one another, depending on the layouts of the houses, but this was the general idea.” He studied the clusters he’d drawn. They looked like five rimless wagon wheels running along Chanticleer Circle.

“That was the plan, anyway.” He picked up his cup of cottage cheese. “Narrow escape tunnels leading from the houses to central shared shelters under Chanticleer Circle, capable of withstanding a massive blast.”

“You say they were never built.”

“The first buyers weren’t comfortable with the idea of shared underground vaults. One who objected was your former father-in-law, Wendell Phelps.”

“Better to die than sweat together in fear?”

A tiny smile flitted across his face. “Perhaps, but by the time Crystal Waters was built, the big fear wasn’t nuclear war. It was the riots, the fires, the uprisings of the students and the poor, storming the citadels of the rich. Bomb shelters couldn’t protect against that. In fact, the shelters planned for Crystal Waters could be a threat. As Wendell, among others, pointed out, those tunnels were a way into the homes. Someone could break into one home, go through its tunnel to a shelter, and from there break into other homes. Wendell was right. The developers reconsidered and filled them in.”

“You just said they weren’t built. How could they be filled in?”

He tossed the cottage cheese cup in his wastebasket, picked up a pencil, and tapped the eraser on one of the hubs he had drawn along Chanticleer Circle. “The shelter vaults under Chanticleer Circle had to be built before the road was laid. I guess it would have been the tunnels that had to be filled in.”

“So the shelters are still there, under the road?”

He shrugged. “I would presume so.”

“And the tunnels going to them?”

“As I said, Vlodek, the idea was scrapped.”

“And the tunnels were filled in? Filled in, or never built?”

“Filled in-” He stopped when he saw the look on my face.

“For sure?”

He started to shake his head, then froze as the impact of what I was asking hit him.

“Where were the entrances to the tunnels?”

“Small openings, maybe three feet square, through the basement walls.”

“How about air shafts? Other ways in?”

“I don’t know. Shit, I don’t know.”

I looked down at the rimless wagon wheel he’d drawn in the northwest quadrant of the development. I grabbed a fountain pen from a tray on his desk, unscrewed the cap, and started darkening the blueprint lines with black ink. From the hub under the road, one spoke went to the site of the Farraday house. A second led to the house that had just exploded. I darkened the lines of a third tunnel and looked at him.

His mouth worked for a minute before the words came out. “Amanda’s house,” he said. He looked up from what I had drawn. “Did you ever see an entrance in the basement?”

“There was none. But I only lived there a few months. I never had reason to examine the basement wall.”

“I don’t think the entrances to the tunnels were ever cut in.”

“You don’t think, or you don’t know?”

He started to say something, but I already had my cell phone out, punching in Till’s number. I got his machine. I clicked off, called Stanley, got his voice mail, too. All of Gateville could be blown to the moon with the flip of one switch, and nobody had time to answer the damned phone. I told Stanley’s machine to tell Till to comb the grounds looking for air shafts leading down to tunnels and to begin in the northwest quadrant, where the two exploded houses had been. I said to check every basement for ways into the tunnels, starting with Amanda’s house.

I said that was where the bombs were.