Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, No. 5. Whole No. 813, May 2009

For the Jingle by Jack Fredrickson

Jack Fredrickson’s fiction debut, “The Brick Thing,” was in our Department of First Stories in 2002. He has since had two novels published by St. Martin’s Press, to rave reviews: 2007’s A Safe Place for Dying (which was also nominated for the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award) and 2009’s Honestly Dearest, You’re Dead. Both books feature the private eye protagonist of this new story, Dek Elstrom, whom PW calls “an appealing combination of bloodhound and bulldog.”

The secretary telephoning could have been French. “Hold please, for Mr. Ruffino.” She pronounced it roof-eeno, instead of rough-eeno, as truth demanded.

Before I could laugh, the lawyer was on the line, saying, “Dek Elstrom!” like we could stand each other.

“You handling zoning cases in Paris, Harry?”

He chuckled with the sincerity of a siding salesman. “I’ve moved downtown, in Chicago. Only big-buck zonings now. How about you?”

“I continue to bask in Rivertown.”

“In that castle?”

“Turret, Harry; there’s just the one turret. And yeah, I’m still here. Because I might never be able to sell it. Because you couldn’t get my zoning changed.”

“It takes money to fight city hall.”

“A privately owned structure, zoned as a municipal building? That should have been a slam-dunk for you.”

“Don’t blame me; blame your aunt. She’s the one cut the deal with the city.”

“Why are you calling, Harry?”

“I got a job for you. Come to my office this afternoon.”

“Let’s discuss it on the phone. Save gas.”

“I’ll pay you five hundred dollars.”

“Up front, today?”

He sighed, and gave me an address far enough north of the expressway to be impressive. Harry Ruffino had indeed crawled downtown.

I told him I’d be there at two.

Harry’s building was tall, and had views of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan. Harry’s office, though, didn’t. It was buried in an interior corridor next to a door marked “Maintenance.” Still, the secretary — she of the French accent — who ushered me into his private office had red hair, a South Side strut, and an amazing decolletage. I supposed that was enough view for Harry until the huge money rolled in.

He sat behind a mahogany desk. He wore a conservative pinstriped suit that was considerably less shiny than the last one I’d seen him wearing. He’d toned down his shirt, too. Today’s was a respectable white, with no hint of a geometric pattern. But amid the careful, muted stripes and soft white broadcloth lay an iridescent purple necktie that sparkled when he shifted in his chair. He was still the same old Harry.

He got right to it. “I have a client, Albert Petak, in the Rivertown jail.”

I dropped into the black leather chair across from him. “The five hundred, Harry.”

He slid a check across the desk. Written in black ink on heavy, cream-colored paper, it was not the kind of check people got on the Internet, the ones that come with free, misspelled address stickers. I put it in the pocket of my blue blazer.

“Rivertown,” I said. “Naturally you thought of me.”

“I figured it would be efficient, you living there, in that castle—”

“Turret,” I cut in. There was no sense being grand about a stone tube, five stories tall. It was meant to be the corner of a castle, but my grandfather ran out of money and breath before he could get past the one cylinder. “What’s your client been charged with?”

“Small stuff, but it’ll be arson, upped to murder.”

“In Rivertown?”

He nodded.

“The Sherman Stamping Works.” It had been the only big fire recently, collapsing an entire wing of the abandoned old factory and crisping a homeless man. Accelerant had been found. “Is Petak guilty?”

An ordinary lawyer would have put on the mask. Not Harry. He nodded right away. “An eyewitness put him there right before the flames broke out. I want you to talk to him, see if he will give you anything I can use.”

“What’s he telling you?”

“Nothing, other than he’s innocent. That’s why I need you to dig at him.”

“You mean, to show the court you didn’t just sit on your hands.”

“I’m doing what I can.”

“Who’s the eyewitness?”

“A scrapper named Wildcat Ernie, but I’ll handle him at trial. Just talk to Petak, see if you can shake something loose.”

Harry slid open the center drawer of his desk, pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He switched on a small air purifier, lit a cigarette, and blew smoke at the machine. It made him look like an idiot.

“As I said, they’re holding Petak on lesser charges,” he said above the fan. “Criminal trespass, damage to property. But they’re going for murder.”

“Doesn’t sound like your kind of case, Harry.”

He raised his arm, peeled back a cuff so he could pretend to see the time and I could see a pretend gold Rolex. Little was genuine with Harry.

“Go see Albert,” he said, once he was sure I’d had time to admire the timepiece.

And I did, right after I stopped at his bank to cash the check.

The Rivertown jail is in the basement of the police department, which is within spitting distance of city hall. People used to joke that the close proximity was deliberate, so that when reform came, the lizards who’d corrupted the town wouldn’t catch cold perp-walking between city hall and the jail. Nobody in Rivertown joked that way anymore. Nobody believed reform was coming.

I didn’t know the cop at the desk, but I knew his DNA. He had the same last name as the mayor, village clerk, and two of the city’s trustees. He didn’t bother to look up from his soft-porn magazine when he told me to wait in the green cinderblock room down the hall.

Albert Petak came in wearing an orange jumpsuit. I expected that, like I expected the beard stubble and the build-up of oil in his hair. Jail can change a man in a hurry, make him jettison hygiene along with hope. But no way had I figured the missing teeth, nor the eyes that darted around nervously, like a rodent scanning for lunch. Albert Petak didn’t look like somebody who could afford Harry Ruffino.

He sat down at the brown-grained, plastic table and played those nervous eyes across my face.

“Harry Ruffino asked me to look into your case.”

“You a private investigator?” His voice had a twang, Deep South.

“I nose around sometimes. I’m not licensed.”

His eyes left my face, started looking at the baseboards. “They got rats here.”

“What can you tell me?”

“I didn’t figure Ruffino would pop for a professional,” he said, checking the far corner.

“I meant about the stamping-factory fire.”

Petak stood up, went to tap on the door. A cop in the hall opened it almost immediately.

“I need smokes,” he said. “Marlboros.” And then he went out.

I walked outside, took out my cell phone, and called downtown.

“Bonjour,” the Queen of France breathed into my ear.

“Bonjour, mademoiselle. Monsieur Ruffino,s’ il vous plait.” It was all I remembered from high school.

She hesitated just a fraction, then put me through.

“Your man is reticent, all right,” I said when Harry picked up.

“That’s it, then.” He didn’t sound surprised.

“I’ll chase down Wildcat Ernie.”

“You’re done. I’ll try to muddy things up in court.”

“Why Albert Petak, Harry?”

His little smoke vacuum started whirring, and his lighter clicked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean he’s been living under cardboard someplace. Not your kind of client.”

“Sometimes I do pro bono.”

“Admirable, you working for free.”

“Don’t believe all the lawyer jokes.”

“I still owe you a few hours from that five hundred. I’ll look around the factory.”

He exhaled quickly. “Don’t uncover anything that can hurt us.”

I went back inside, asked the sergeant at the desk who was working the stamping-factory fire. This time he looked up. He told me it was an officer named Brockhouse, and that he was in.

Brockhouse was in his mid twenties. He led me to a small room similar to the one where I’d met Petak, except the cinderblocks were beige.

“Albert Petak has been around for a couple of years, doing odd jobs,” he said. “Lately, he’s been scrapping in the stamping factory.”

“Which means many people could have seen him there regularly?”

“Sure,” Brockhouse said, understanding my inference that Petak could have been set up.

“Homeless?”

“Depends. If the scrapping’s good, Petak sleeps at the Health Center. Otherwise, he’s under a viaduct.”

“I thought Rivertown was scrapped out years ago.”

“The copper wire has been gone for years. Same with the aluminum. But scrappers collect all kinds of stuff. I’m hearing now they’re after clinkers, those old dark bricks rich people use to build fireplaces.”

“A scrapper named Wildcat Ernie placed Petak at the factory just before the place went up?”

He nodded. “He’s at the Health Center sometimes, too.”

I was starting to like Brockhouse. He didn’t make me beg for information.

“How about the dead guy? Petak have any link to him?”

“You never know. Sometimes one gets on another’s nerves, next thing knives are out, or bottles are broken. Or, I suppose, fires started. Scrappers have their own rules.”

I thanked him for his time, started to leave, but stopped at the door. Brockhouse wasn’t a Rivertown name. “College man?” I asked.

He grinned. “Northwestern. Bachelor’s in Criminology.”

It didn’t make sense, not in Rivertown. Unless...

“What’s your mother’s maiden name?” I asked.

He gave me the name of the mayor, and the village clerk, and the two village trustees.

I left, grinning too. Maybe there was hope for Rivertown if the lizard DNA was beginning to get washed by universities.

At first glance, the Sherman Stamping Works squatted low in the heart of Rivertown exactly as it had for eighty years, a four-block long, dark brick building hard by the railroad tracks. But then the eye picked up the double row of shattered windows, the rust on the hundreds of yards of rail siding. And the newest indignity, the rubble of scorched bricks lying where an entire wing had stood.

I walked through an opening made jagged by its doors being ripped away, and entered one of the main stamping rooms. It was a huge brick cavern, at least two hundred feet long. Fenders and floor pans had been punched out of sheets of steel there once, but now puddles of rain water lay between the square concrete islands where the presses had stood. High up on the dark trusses, pigeons fluttered at my intrusion, and then went silent. There were no light fixtures, no hardware on the windows. The gutted building still stood because land wasn’t worth anything anymore, not in Rivertown.

The pigeons started fluttering again. Above the rustling of their wings came a slight pinging sound. Somebody was hammering.

The huge room led into another great hall, identical to the first except that the concrete pads were smaller and set closer together, for smaller machines. A man in stained, torn clothing was using a claw hammer and a chisel to loosen the clinker bricks on an interior wall. A scrapper.

I gave the room a cough.

The scrapper turned. I raised my hands. “Got somebody who likes old bricks?”

He gave me the once-over, decided I wasn’t a cop, and nodded his head. “A couple of snazzers in a Mercedes Benz. They’ll give me twenty bucks for a hundred of them.”

“If you load them in their trunk?”

He looked at me, confused. “Sure.”

They must have been real snazzers if they were throwing around money like that.

“You know Wildcat Ernie?” I asked.

“This about Albert?”

I pulled out a twenty — a trunkload of bricks, in the current currency of the realm — and handed it to him. “Ernie fingered Albert for setting the fire.”

“Lots of guys come here. Could have been anybody set that fire.”

“Did you know the dead guy?”

“Never seen him, and I been around here plenty. I think he just wandered in that night. Bad luck, him getting dead.”

“Ernie around?”

“Not since the fire. Heard he came into some jingle. He’s roosting at the Health Center.”

“How well do you know Albert?”

“People keep to themselves.”

“Albert set fires?”

“If he did, he had a reason.”

I thought about that, walking out: A man has to have a reason.

The Rivertown Health Center used to be a residential YMCA. That was back when people came to Rivertown to make new things in the factories and new starts in their lives. Nowadays, the factories were dead, and all that got made in Rivertown were the girls who worked the curbs along Thompson Avenue, and the bets in the barrooms behind them. But the Health Center still served as a transient center, except now its guests were in transition either to the viaducts or to the afterlife. I’d stayed there for a night, once, in a room just vacated by someone who’d expired in the remains of his supper. One night had been enough.

“Wildcat Ernie,” I said to the grizzled gentleman at the desk.

He shook his head. Whether in refusal or incomprehension, I couldn’t tell.

I flashed a five-dollar bill. Everything is cheap at the Rivertown Health Center.

“Four-twelve,” he said.

I didn’t bother with the elevator. Even if it was operating, there was no certainty its ancient motor would hum all the way up to the fourth floor. And there was the likelihood it was already occupied by a passed-out resident, similarly unable to hum his way up to his room.

Four-twelve was two damp spots past the stairs. The door was slightly open.

So, too, were Wildcat Ernie’s eyes. But the rest of him had closed down for good. He lay on the thin mattress, a dead man in a flannel shirt, clutching an empty bottle of Gentleman Jack. The pockets of his stained blue pants had been pulled out. He’d been tossed, post-mortem, probably by another resident. Death, too, was cheap at the Rivertown Health Center.

I saw no marks, no blood. I rolled him onto his side. There was a second bottle of Gentleman Jack beneath him. This one was full. Whoever had plundered Wildcat Ernie had missed it.

I looked around the room. It seemed to be furnished identically to the blur in my memory of my own stay: metal bed, chipped pine dresser, one small bulb hanging from the ceiling, a ripped vinyl shade drooping, unsprung, over the window.

There was another empty Gentleman Jack bottle lying in the corner.

A three-pack of Gentleman Jack. Booze enough to float Wildcat Ernie into oblivion.

I went down the stairs, walked past the desk to the front stoop. I had to call the cops. But first I had to call my client. The Queen of France put me right through.

“Big news, Harry: I just found the guy who fingered Petak dead at the Rivertown Health Center.”

He fired up his smoke-eating fan, then his lighter. “Won’t help,” he said, exhaling. “The cops didn’t take a chance on Ernie disappearing. They videotaped him making his statement.” He took another drag. “Cops there?”

“I called you first.”

He blew smoke at our connection, but no more words.

“He drank himself to death, Harry. With Gentleman Jack.”

“What are you saying?”

“Gentleman Jack, Harry. That’s the good stuff, twenty-five bucks a bottle. He had three bottles. That took jingle.”

“Obviously he made some money, if he could afford Gentleman Jack.”

“Booze like that never makes it into the Health Center. The residents buy cheap, to stretch the buzz.”

“Whatever.”

“Somebody gave him those three bottles.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’re screwed. No hope now of tripping up his testimony.”

I left him to his little fan and clicked off.

Brockhouse was in. I told him I’d just found his chief witness drowned in whiskey. He muttered something appropriately profane. I said I’d be outside, waiting.

The ambulance siren came in less than two minutes. Brockhouse was right behind it. He let me follow them up the stairs. The medical techs took a second to verify that the spirit of Wildcat Ernie had indeed left the building, and then stepped back to allow Brockhouse to look around. He was thorough, and respectful of the man dead on the bed.

As he finished, he shook his head at Wildcat Ernie’s pulled pockets. “Whatever he had has been plucked.”

I pointed to the full bottle on the bed. “Except for Gentleman Jack.”

He turned to look at me. “What do you make of that?”

“Twenty-five bucks a bottle.”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m still paying off my college loan.”

“Three bottles of that stuff doesn’t fit here.”

He nodded slowly, then said, “Good thing your man Petak is locked up solid with an alibi. He has motive.”

“Harry Ruffino says this screws Petak. Now there’s no chance to take apart Ernie’s videotaped identification.”

“There is that tape; yes.” Then, nodding at the dead man, he said, “We’ll autopsy.”

“You’re kidding.” Drunks never got autopsied in Rivertown.

“He was the chief witness in a murder case. But like you, I’m seeing alcohol poisoning.”

“Good alcohol,” I said.

“Too good, if it’s twenty-five bucks a bottle.”

“It took jingle,” I said.

I met Albert in the same basement room. Again he scanned the corners, too concerned with vermin to be interested in the pack of Marlboros and book of matches I’d set on the table.

“Wildcat Ernie is dead,” I said.

His eyes worked the baseboards between the corners. “There’s rats here.”

“So you said, the last time. I need more, Albert.”

He looked down, saw the cigarettes. He picked them up, put them in his pocket. “There is nothing more. I didn’t set that fire.”

“Why did you get fingered?”

“I was convenient.”

“For what? Why would Wildcat Ernie give a damn?”

He smiled a little as he stood up. “Thanks for the smokes.” He went to the door, knocked, and was let out.

I started to reach for the matches he’d forgotten. But I didn’t need them. I left them on the table.

The Queen of France told me Harry was gone for the day. I asked her to give me his voicemail.

“You can tell me,” she murmured Frenchly.

“I’ll bet,” I said. “Tell Harry that I got nothing from Albert Petak. Tell him I still owe him a few hours.”

“Merci.”

“I’ll bet.”

That evening, after microwaving something that was pictured to taste like haddock but went down like paneling adhesive, I brought coffee up to the roof to sit in the night air. I was hoping the coffee would cleanse the chemical taste from my mouth and the mud from my mind.

It wasn’t just the Gentleman Jack that was nagging. There was the motive for the fire. The homeless man who’d burned to death was new to town; nobody alleged that Albert had even known him. That made the dead man an accidental victim. And that left the more obvious, and the more usual, motive for the fire: jingle.

Looking out that evening at the jumble of neon from the honky tonks, and the headlights of the slow-cruising parade of johns looking for fast love on the cheap, it was easy to see an insurance motive. Crime for money, big and small, made Rivertown run. Someone had paid Albert to torch the husk of the stamping works, to collect on a policy.

But it didn’t explain Wildcat Ernie’s bottles of booze.

And it didn’t explain Albert’s almost insolent indifference.

I knew a guy who worked for the county. First thing the next morning, I called, asking him to find out who carried the insurance on the Sherman Stamping Works. Then, switching gears in my clever brain, I spent the rest of the morning sanding wood.

He phoned me back before noon. “You owe me, Elstrom.”

“I’d have it no other way.”

“The Sherman Stamping Works has been in bankruptcy for years, but the factory was never seized. Call it...” He paused, not wanting to offend me by being honest about my hometown.

“...the fact that Rivertown real estate is worthless? Who carries the insurance?”

“No insurance.”

My certainty vanished like smoke into Harry’s machine.

“However, I did discover something interesting,” he went on. “All the back taxes were recently paid up.”

“How recently?”

He gave me a date that was two days after the fire.

Paying up the taxes made sense if the property was about to be sold. Arson without the promise of an insurance payout made sense if the motive for the fire was to kill.

But that both had occurred within two days of each other was too coincidental.

I thanked him and hung up.

I switched on my computer, searched through the Internet for any business news on the Sherman Stamping Works. Other than the news of the fire, there was none. In the world of business, the stamping works was dead.

Noodling, I clicked into one of the newer satellite photo sites, and brought up the aerial view of Rivertown. I saw Thompson Avenue, the Willahock River, city hall, and the turret. Saw, too, the railroad tracks that ran like a spine down the center of Rivertown, broken only by the spur onto the railroad siding alongside the long building with the blackened mound of bricks at one end.

And saw motive.

I called back the man at the county. “Was it a lawyer who paid the back taxes on the stamping works?”

“Yes.”

“Was it Harry Ruffino?”

He put me on hold for a minute to check. When he came back, he said, “I’m impressed, Dek.”

“It wasn’t me,” I said. “It was Gentleman Jack.”

Neither Harry nor the Queen of France picked up his line, and after three rings I got sent to his voicemail. “I’ve tripped over the game you’re running, Harry. My guess is that Petak doesn’t know about the game. My guess is that Wildcat Ernie did. You stink on this, Harry. Try to get to me before I get to the cops.”

It was unethical, bluffing a client. But my mind kept seeing Albert Petak twitching at the Rivertown jail, scanning the corners for rats.

I spent the next hour trying to cut wood trim for one of the turret’s slit windows. Carpentry normally calms me, because there’s a sureness to it, a logical route to a certain conclusion. But that afternoon, I kept making bad cuts because my mind was too tensed for the phone to ring. Finally, I gave up on the wood and went upstairs to the second floor, to what will be an office, which is across the hall from what will be a proper kitchen. All I need is money, and the stomach to keep encountering people like Harry Ruffino.

I sat at my card-table desk and called Harry’s office. Again I got routed to the tape. “Harry, I’m going to get rough. Call me.”

I got Harry’s home address and phone number from an Internet service that offers thorough privacy-invasion for a modest monthly fee. He lived in one of the better burbs northwest of Chicago. I aimed the Jeep there and arrived in a half-hour. A black fastback Mustang with its door ajar was parked in the driveway of Harry’s two-story colonial. I stopped a couple of doors back and cut the engine.

It took no time at all to deduce that the Mustang belonged to the Queen of France, because she was banging on Harry’s front door. Even from two hundred feet away, I could see the flush on the back of her neck, though it was not quite as red as her hair.

Her fist wore out after a couple more minutes and she marched back to the Mustang. The way she peeled out of there led me to believe her neck was going to stay red for some time.

I tried Harry’s office number again, gave his machine another yell. “Harry, I’m coming for you.” Next, I called his home phone. “I’m outside your house. I’m going to bang on your doors until I crash my way inside.” Then I pulled into his drive and revved the tin engine of the Jeep loud enough to rattle its failing muffler and, I hoped, his windows.

My cellular and automotive tantrums didn’t work. Harry didn’t call, and he didn’t come outside. So I got out, walked up to the house, and picked up where the Queen left off. I banged on his front door, and on the huge front window. Then I went around back and pounded on the kitchen door long enough to satisfy myself he wasn’t home. On my way back to the Jeep, I noticed a dark brick lying in the flower bed at the side of the house. It looked to be a clinker from the stamping factory. I wondered if Harry had picked it up as part of his guise in getting to know Wildcat Ernie.

To let Albert squirm much longer at the Rivertown jail, perhaps cowering from the sounds of little feet scratching near his head, was unconscionable. But so was short-circuiting Harry’s chance to go to the cops. I decided I’d give him the afternoon to get back to me.

I called Leo Brumsky and suggested lunch. He has been my friend since grammar school. He makes me laugh.

“I’ll even pay,” I added.

“You must be agitated.”

“I’m packing large. I got a five-hundred-dollar fee.”

Leo made that much in a morning as a provenance specialist for the nation’s largest auction houses. That morning, as he always did whenever I earned anything, he expressed amazement. “You rob a bank? If you did, I want to stay home and watch you being arrested on television.”

I told him I’d meet him at Kutz’s.

Fifteen minutes later, Leo’s Porsche, top down, rolled onto the few remaining bits of gravel in front of Kutz’s, filling the air with the intertwining of modern, muscular German exhaust and the soft echoes of forty-year-old Brazilian bossa nova. I recognized the murmurings of Elis Regina and Tom Jobim. It was one of Leo’s favorite albums.

“Behold the diminishment of the sun,” he shouted, as he popped his five-foot-six, 140-pound frame out of the Porsche. Then, thrusting his hands out, V-fingered like Richard Nixon, he twirled slowly so I could admire the outrageous double-XLs flapping on him like bed sheets hung in a breeze. Leo’s girlfriend selects his suits, normally Armani. But for casual, he shops alone, with the flair of the truly colorblind.

I laughed a much-needed laugh. The brightness of his overlarge duds — a neon-yellow shirt billowing above orange trousers — did indeed diminish the sun. In fact, except for the dark fur of his eyebrows — caterpillars cavorting in mirth — they almost made his bald head, always as pale as a skinned, newly boiled potato, invisible too.

We walked across the parking lot to join the cabbies, cops, and construction workers lined up in front of the flaking wood trailer. Kutz’s Wienie Wagon has been resting on flat tires, under the viaduct, since Young Kutz’s old man opened the place during World War II.

When the person ahead of us stepped away, making us next up, Leo inhaled suddenly. “Damn,” he muttered.

“You jerks going to order?” Young Kutz’s unshaven face snarled from the order window. Young Kutz is on the wrong side of eighty, but he’d wasted not a minute of all those years developing people skills.

Leo ignored the greeting and tapped the glass at the side of the order window. “For real, Mr. Kutz?”

“You going to order?”

“Indeed, Mr. Kutz; indeed,” Leo said.

“You’re not,” I said, but I knew they were wasted words. Like Leo, I’d noticed the fresh sign taped behind the opaque residue of old grease fires. On a sheet of white paper, Kutz had drawn the outline of a paper boat. Inside the boat, he’d drawn several red squiggly circles, then scribbled over everything with a yellow highlighter. He’d titled his art, at the top, “New Menu Item.”

Leo grinned. “At least I won’t be wasting my own money.”

He ordered his usual five hot dogs and the big-swallow soft drink. But instead of the invariable tub of Kutz’s gelatinous cheese fries, he tapped the glass in front of Kutz’s art and ordered the New Menu Item. I shook my head, in wisdom and disappointment, added another hot dog and a small diet cola to the list, and peeled off a twenty from Harry Ruffino’s fee. Our food was ready in thirty seconds because Young Kutz never strives for freshness, and I carried the flimsy plastic tray, following Leo, around to the pigeon-strafed picnic tables behind the trailer.

I took my hot dog and the small diet drink, and pushed the rest across to Leo. Nodding at the New Menu Item, I said, “Surely it’s obvious where Kutz gets the ingredients.”

“Barbecue cheese onion rings.” He smacked his considerable lips.

“Ketchup crustings from the counter bottles. Mold-spotted, soft onions...”

“Recycling’s fashionable.” He made a pincer of his thumb and forefinger and plunged it into the substance coagulating in the little paper tub. A second later, his hand twitched; his fingers had caught something. He pulled it, quivering and slow-dripping the yellow goo that Kutz insists is cheese from the tub.

With a sly glance to make sure I was watching, he tilted his head back, a bird to a worm, and opened his pincer. But the lumpy yellow strand did not drop. It clung, trembling, to the tip of his forefinger. He made snapping motions with his middle finger and thumb, once, twice, and then it fell into the yaw between his grinning lips. He moved his jaws quickly, chewing, then swallowed. And it was done.

He laughed at the horror on my face, and reached for his first hot dog. “Now, tell me what’s got you upset.”

“Remember that shyster I hired to get the turret rezoned to residential?”

“Harry Ruffino.” He picked up the second of his five tube steaks. Leo has weighed one-forty since high school, a weight gain of zero. He attributes that to speed-eating the corrosive bacteria found in Kutz’s hot dogs.

“Harry’s representing the alleged torch behind the Sherman Stamping Works. He hired me to talk to the guy.”

“You mean look into the fire,” he said around the hot dog.

“No. He just wanted me to talk to the guy, a scrapper named Petak, to see if I could shake anything loose for Ruffino’s defense.”

“And?”

“I struck out. Petak’s acting more concerned with the rats in the jail than with saving his own skin.”

“No one likes rats.”

“No one likes jail. Yet all he asked me to do was bring him a pack of smokes.”

“First things first, with us addicts.” He grinned, making a show of plunging his pincer into the cheese again.

“I went looking for the eyewitness who placed Petak at the factory. He was a guy named Wildcat Ernie.”

Leo caught my use of the past tense. He looked up as his fingers came out of the tub squeezing another oozing New Menu Item.

“I found him dead at the Health Center,” I said.

His fingers paused halfway to his mouth. “Murdered?”

“Alcohol poisoning. He drank himself to death with Gentleman Jack.”

The yellow-camouflaged bit of ancient onion fell back to the tray. “Gentleman Jack is good whiskey,” he said, watching my eyes.

“Too good for folks at the Health Center. Ernie had three bottles, but only needed two to send himself on his way. I’m thinking somebody gave Ernie those bottles.”

“Knowing he’d drink himself to death?”

“Absolutely.”

“Who?”

I shrugged, didn’t answer.

Leo, ever practical, said, “Does that free your man Petak?”

“No. The cops took the precaution of videotaping Ernie giving his statement. Harry says Ernie’s death worsens things, because Harry can no longer take him apart on the stand.”

“Ouch.” He slid across the tray of submerged New Menu Items in sympathy.

I pushed it back. “I don’t think Harry ever intended to attack Ernie’s identification.”

“Whoa.”

“Immediately after the fire, the back taxes on the stamping works got paid up.”

“By whom?”

“Harry.”

“Jeez.”

“I’m thinking Harry hired Wildcat Ernie to set the fire, to scare the owners into giving him a cheap option to buy the factory.”

“Why would he want that place?”

I took out the aerial photo I’d printed off the Internet, and put my thumb in the right place. “In case Rivertown ever comes around.”

Leo saw it right away. “Clever Harry. What do you do now?”

“He’s dodging me. I left him phone messages, threatening to go to the cops.”

He looked down, remembering the bit of New Menu Item that had fallen. It lay motionless — in rigor or in repose — a yellow squiggle atop a crust of more yellow. He picked it up and dropped it in his mouth. “No way he’ll ever confess to setting up his client, Petak.”

In a quite literal sense, Leo was right.

There were no messages on my cell phone, nor on the answering machine back at the turret. I spent the afternoon sweeping up sawdust and cleaning varnishing brushes. And listening for the phone. But Harry didn’t call.

At five-thirty, Brockhouse from the Rivertown police knocked on my door.

“Evening, Mr. Elstrom.”

“Like to come in?”

“I have, for some time.”

He stepped inside. Like most first-timers, he needed a short tour of the round room. It’s not the furnishings that grab them; there are only two plastic lawn chairs and a table saw. It’s the walls. My grandfather built the turret of good craggy limestone that seems to change color, almost continuously, in the light that drifts in through the slit windows. A wrought-iron staircase curves up, through the beamed ceiling, to the four floors above.

“They talk about this place over at city hall,” Brockhouse said from across the room.

“Because they rezoned it as a municipal structure, so the town can use its image everywhere?”

He smiled. “Rivertown will change, Mr. Elstrom.”

We sat on the plastic chairs.

“Any word on Wildcat Ernie?” I asked.

“Autopsy results won’t be available for a few days. But like you and me, the medical examiner is thinking it’s going to be alcohol poisoning.” He shifted in his chair. “I understand you’re feeling some frustration with Mr. Ruffino.”

“How did you come to that conclusion?”

“You left strongly worded messages for him today.”

I tasted oil at the back of my throat. “What’s happened?”

“Tell me about your calls to Harry Ruffino.”

“I think Albert Petak is innocent. I want to make sure Ruffino thinks that, too.”

“That Albert Petak was set up? By whom?”

“Wildcat Ernie is the obvious candidate.”

“He’s conveniently dead. Anybody else?”

“I’m not sure.” I was, but the ethics of my client relationship with Harry Ruffino still stuck to me as thickly as the cheese on Kutz’s New Menu Item.

“You also drove to Mr. Ruffino’s home today. His neighbors told us you appeared quite distressed.”

“Cut the crap. What’s happened?”

“Harry Ruffino is dead.”

My mind stutter-skipped over possibilities. Nobody I knew had motive and means to kill Harry. “How?” was all I could manage.

Brockhouse said nothing.

“I never saw Harry today,” I said.

“You were at his house. Angry.”

“I never went inside. He wasn’t around.”

“You were mad. You threatened him. The neighbors saw you banging on his doors and windows.”

“Then the neighbors saw that I didn’t go in. And they saw his secretary, too. She was also banging on his door, just as upset.”

“She got worried when he didn’t show up for work. Why the anger, Mr. Elstrom?”

“I told you: concerns about Petak’s case. How’d Harry die?”

He leaned back in the plastic chair and gave me an eighth of a grin. “In bed, probably of a heart attack.”

“You come here implying that I had something to do with Harry’s death, then tell me he died in bed, of a heart attack?”

I put my hands on the white plastic, like I was about to get up. “Unless you’re going to free Albert Petak, I’ve got to find him an honest lawyer.”

He made no move to rise. “Pure coincidence? Wildcat Ernie, and now Harry Ruffino?”

My ethics problem was dead. Giving Brockhouse what I suspected would hurry Albert’s release.

“Harry wanted an option to buy the stamping works. But he wanted it dirt cheap, so he hired Wildcat Ernie to torch a wing to put a little scare into the owners before he contacted them. The deal he cut must have included paying the taxes in addition to some dough under the table. Part of his deal with Ernie was to finger Albert. To make sure Albert went down for the fire, he offered to defend him for free. That way he could control the trial, make sure no unpleasant doubts arose about Albert’s guilt. Even with Albert convicted, though, Ernie would still be a loose end. So Harry gave Ernie three bottles of really good whiskey, knowing Ernie would lap at it until it killed him.”

“That’s a lot of cunning.”

“Albert Petak is innocent.”

Brockhouse made no move to get up. “I don’t see motive for Ruffino. I can’t see why he would have wanted that old factory. Nobody’s buying property in Rivertown.”

“You said it yourself: Rivertown will come around eventually.”

“That factory is shot. It’s a ruin.”

I ran up to the card table, brought down the aerial photo. “Harry didn’t want the factory. He wanted what runs up to it.”

Brockhouse studied the picture for a few seconds, then handed it back and stood up.

“The only railroad spur in town,” he said. “He’d have made a fortune in fees, charging people to ship through that siding.”

“When Rivertown turns around.”

He shrugged. “It’ll happen.”

“Albert Petak?” I asked him at the door.

“Awfully convenient for Albert, Ruffino dying when he did.”

“Albert Petak was in jail. And he didn’t set that fire.”

Both were true enough.

I didn’t race off to see Albert. I took coffee to the roof, to go over, one last time, the means I’d fitted to the motive. As Brockhouse was telling of Harry’s death, Leo’s throwaway line at lunch had come back to me, banging the facts into a row as straight as the boxcars used to be, lined up on the rail siding at the stamping works.

“First things first, with us addicts,” Leo had said, grinning as he plunged his fingers into Kutz’s New Menu Item. He’d been talking about the yellow stuff Kutz tries to pass as cheese.

And about Albert’s cigarettes.

I tossed the pack of Marlboros onto the table in the green cinderblock room. I hadn’t brought matches. They wouldn’t be necessary.

“The first time I came to see you, you asked for Marlboros — Harry Ruffino’s brand.”

Albert’s eyes stayed steady on mine. He didn’t look at the cigarettes. He no longer needed to scan the corners of the room.

“First things first, with addicts,” I went on. “Any smoker in this place would have lunged for the cigarettes I’d brought. But not you. You only needed one, for the rat powder you scraped out of some corner here.”

The trace of a smile fit onto his lips. “Rats come in all sizes.”

I handed him the receipt I got from the sergeant at the desk. “I wrote you a check for two hundred and fifty dollars.”

Surprise made his eyes flicker. “Why the jingle?”

“It’s half what I got paid by Ruffino. An officer named Brockhouse will probably release you this afternoon, because he doesn’t have enough to hold you anymore. Use the money to run like hell.”

He nodded, but said nothing.

“I’m guessing you only powdered one cigarette. But they could autopsy Ruffino, and then they might check the butts in his ashtray.”

He shrugged.

“They could question yesterday’s visitors, maybe find somebody who saw your hands on two packs of Marlboros as Harry was fumbling for something in his briefcase.”

“Ruffino wanted me down for murder.”

“Run like hell, Albert.”

He got up, walked to knock on the door. He’d left the smokes on the table. As the door opened, Albert Petak gave me a vague salute.

“Thanks for the jingle,” he said.

©2009 by Jack Fredrickson