Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Eight

A cell phone rang far away.

“Dek,” Amanda’s voice said from the sliver of light under my pillow.

“I love you,” I said as the phone rang again.

“Your cell phone,” her distant voice said, above the ringing.

“I love that, too.” I pulled down the pillow to close the little gap.

“Dek Elstrom’s phone,” she said, much fainter now, outside the darkness.

Several seconds of soothing, dark silence followed. Then, without warning, the pillow was torn away, a thousand daggers of white sunlight stabbed into my eyes, and the rude, cold plastic of a cell phone attacked my cheek.

“Dek Elstrom,” I said into the obnoxious intruder, because I had no choice.

“Top of the morning, Mr. Elstrom; Bill Aggert here.” I could almost smell the damned mints above his chirping words. “I just called your motel and was shocked to learn you checked out yesterday.”

I opened my eyes to squint at Amanda’s bedside clock radio. It was seven fifteen. We’d only slept for four hours.

“It’s seven fifteen,” I said.

“Eight fifteen in West Haven,” he said. “You can be back up here before noon.”

Amanda stood by the full-length window, looking out at Lake Michigan in the east. The view of the lake from her fortieth-floor condominium was roughly the same as I’d seen in Michigan-waves frozen in midcurl, chunks of ice floating far out-but the view from West Haven didn’t include Amanda in a sheer white wrap, made transparent by the sun as it, and part of me, rose.

I propped myself up on one elbow to get a better view. “I found a little key,” I said, tossing a morsel to make him go away.

“P.O. box or bank?”

“Louise had her mail held in Woodton. No box.”

“Anything in it that affects probate?”

“I haven’t gone through it all yet.”

“Bring it up today,” he boomed, “and I’ll go through it while you take that key to the rest of the banks and post offices. Bills and assets have to be included in the inventory.”

“You have a deadline to file something concerning her death?”

“The probate court likes timely filings.”

Amanda turned from the window to smile. The new view was just as breathtaking.

“I’ll call you,” I said, not caring much if Aggert heard before I clicked him away and dropped the phone.

I’d called Amanda at nine thirty the previous night, ten seconds after I’d thrown the last of my old business files across my office. There’d been no Carolina.

“I’ve been in Michigan, in the cold, but I saved myself for you,” I said.

“I’m sure I’m not worthy.”

“Nonetheless, I’d like to come over.”

“What about our one-week rule?”

“I know we must take things slow this time,” I said, “but Sunday’s horn concert wasn’t a date; it was work.”

“What about what we did afterward? Was that work?”

“That we must continue to practice. It’s why I’m calling.”

“No it isn’t. There’s something else.”

“I’m cold.”

“I’ll call down to the desk.”

Now, the next morning, an hour after Aggert called, Amanda and I were sipping coffee in her living room. Like the rest of the apartment, the walls were the palest of whites. She had almost no furniture in the two-bedroom condominium: a simple laminate table and four chairs in the kitchen; nothing in the dining room except boxes of art books; a dresser and an enormous bed, bookended by two nightstands, in the master bedroom; a computer workstation in the spare room.

In the living room, where we were now, there was but one glass coffee table and one soft white sofa, both facing two million dollars of miscellaneous artwork surrounding an eleven-million-dollar Monet. After her house in a gated community had been destroyed the previous year, she’d told me proudly that she’d furnished her new, high-security condo on Lake Shore Drive for less than four thousand dollars.

“Are you teaching today?” I asked.

“Got to pay the bills.”

She’d inherited the Monet and the other art from a grandfather, but she needed the teaching money to pay for the taxes, dues, and security system at the condominium. For a woman who owned millions in art, she was just getting by.

She set her coffee cup on the glass table, snuggled closer. “How are you?”

The day was looming fruitless. “I wanted to find Carolina in my files, a previous client from a job. She wasn’t there.”

“She could have been in the background: a secretary, a clerk.”

“That would have been a long time ago. Reynolds told me she bought her car some while ago and never titled it in her own name. She’s been running for years, and that’s what nags.”

She squeezed my arm. “You must have made an indelible impression, for her to remember you from so long ago.”

“You should have seen her place, a tiny cottage with missing shingles, set in the middle of nowhere. She was so alone.”

“Dek…”

“If she’d called, maybe I could have helped.”

Amanda straightened up so she could look at my eyes. “She didn’t know you well enough for that, Dek. You’ve got to accept that. People have all sorts of casual relationships. You have to stop making more of this than it is.”

“A casual acquaintance, fearing for her life, doesn’t worry about an executor, especially not for an estate that has no value. She goes to the cops. A friend, or at least someone who knew me better, would have called me, told me she was in trouble, and asked for help. Unless…” I looked past Amanda, at the frozen lake.

“Unless?” She reached out and touched my arm.

“Unless…she didn’t think I would help.”

“Have you ever refused to help anybody?” Her brown eyes caught the brightness from the windows; a smile, coaxing, played on her lips.

I didn’t answer.

Her grip on my arm got stronger. “She was someone you knew briefly a long time ago, someone who went on to write advice columns. Someone who liked to live in seclusion. That’s all.”

“Or she was someone who knew she was going to die.”

Amanda sighed, reaching for her coffee. “What can you do?”

“I’ll finish going through all her mail, see if there’s some hint in there as to why an advice columnist hides out in Rambling. I’ll contact the banks I didn’t visit, see if anyone’s got a lockbox for a Louise Thomas.” Outside her window, everything was white and frozen, easy to see. “But if she rented the box using the Carolina name, I’ll strike out. I’ve only got authorization to act for a Louise Thomas.”

“Are you going to call that editor, Charles?”

“If I can rule out that she wasn’t running from him. He still thinks she’s living in Florida.”

She looked out where I was looking. “Such respect for a dead lady,” she said.

“I want to know why she chose me.”

“What happens when you run through the seven-hundred-dollar fee?”

I shrugged.

“You didn’t know her, Dek.”

“I want to believe that.”

Amanda set down her coffee and turned to touch my shoulder again. “Her house was cold?”

“Her house was dead.”

I got back to Rivertown at nine thirty. By then, the jukeboxes that pulsed the tonks had long gone silent. The street drunks with a few bucks had shuffled off to the health center, the ones without to the warm spots beneath the viaducts. The girls who hadn’t been girls for decades had made their last slow parade down Thompson Avenue, to ease back to their rooms and drop away their fake furs and peel off the mesh stockings that hid more than they revealed.

Midmorning, when the town is quiet and the sky is clear, helps me make my peace with Rivertown. Midmorning, when the sun hangs behind the dead smokestacks of the abandoned factories and makes them cast long shadows, giving them a sort of new life; midmorning, when the still soft light blurs the accordion fences fronting the pawnshops and the liquor stores just enough to shroud the despair that, come noon, will be sold in those places again. Midmorning, there can be hope in Rivertown.

The little red flag on my rural-style mailbox was up, announcing to the world that I’d received correspondence. Since my business had tanked, it was a rare enough occurrence. I dropped the curved door and found an envelope with a drawing of my turret on its lower left corner. It was from the City of Rivertown. I wanted to wad it up and throw it toward city hall, but reason prevailed. I brought it inside, pinched between my forefinger and thumb, as one would carry an expired rodent.

I went upstairs, nuked cold coffee, and walked across the space that would one day be a hall. My office was warm, fifty-some degrees. In my haste to get away from the files I’d thrown all over the floor the previous night, I’d left without shutting down the space heater. I took off my pea coat, took a sip of coffee, and confronted the envelope.

There was no letter, just a violation notice. The crime, scribbled almost illegibly, as though by a child in a hurry, was “Use of Unhistorical Material in Historical Structure.” The fine was one hundred dollars.

It was signed by one E. Derbil, and the bastard had ticketed me for temporarily covering a shattered window with plywood.

Elvis Derbil and I had disliked each other since grammar school. He detested my smart mouth. I detested the way he squealed with laughter every time he did something cruel to a classmate or a small animal. I tried to forget Elvis, like I tried to forget everything about Rivertown, when I fled to Chicago for college and then a career. For years it worked. Then my reputation got ruined, my business collapsed, and Amanda tired of nurturing a whining, self-pitying drunk. I came back to Rivertown and moved into the crumbling turret that had been my grandfather’s dream because I’d run out of dreams of my own.

That put me squarely under Elvis Derbil’s thumb.

My grandfather had been a small-time bootlegger. According to the mutterings I’d overheard from my mother’s three sisters, he’d been broke most of his life. There’d been a time, though, at the beginning of the Great Depression, when his larger competitors had stopped brewing and set instead to killing each other off. In the ensuing shortage, demand for my grandfather’s brew soared. Too small to be much noticed before, he now enjoyed great prosperity. But unfortunately, his hinges had not been fully attached. Instead of investing his new wealth in land or equities or even more vats, he bought truckloads of limestone blocks, to build a castle on the Willahock River.

Just after my grandfather began construction, his competitors came to their senses. They stopped shooting and went back to brewing beer, and that disintegrated my grandfather’s good fortune. Restored to being broke, he died of a stroke soon after, leaving behind only a lone turret and a small mountain of limestone blocks.

The turret and the limestone sat abandoned until the end of World War II, when the lizards who ran Rivertown sniffed new shakedown opportunities from the coming postwar factory expansions. They’d need a temple from which to dispense building permits and accept gratuities. So they declared the small mountain a public eyesore, seized it and the land on which it sat, and built a magnificent hall of stone terraces and darkened corridors, expansive offices and closet-sized public rooms. They’d had no use for the turret, however, and left that with my grandfather’s daughters, accruing unpaid taxes, deserted except for wide-strafing pigeons.

I scoffed when I inherited it from an aunt who’d refused to inflict it upon her own children. It lacked electricity and hot water; its roof leaked, and it was littered with rat carcasses. Then my life unraveled. I got hauled back to Rivertown in a stupor and dropped at the health center like a sack of broken bones, to spend the night in a Lysol-soaked room just vacated by a fellow who’d died in his own vomit. I awoke the next morning looking up, because there was nothing left beneath me. And I quit scoffing. I dragged my clothes to the turret, telling myself that my grandfather’s dream could be rehabbed and sold for a grubstake to a new life.

First I needed an occupancy permit.

The person I had to see at city hall, across the lawn, was my old school antagonist Elvis, nephew of the lizard mayor of Rivertown. He looked older now, of course. His hair had receded halfway back on his head and was sprayed straight up, like the comb on a rooster if set perpendicular to its beak. It smelled of coconuts. He still had his squeal, though, amazingly not softened even a fraction of an octave by age.

He’d been waiting. He’d followed the newspaper reports of the corruption trial I’d gotten caught up in, no doubt exhausting his lips as he savored the words reporting my downfall. When I showed up at city hall, he made much of his power, and my lack of it. “Only temporary,” he’d said, waving a dirty fingernail over a blank permit application, “and only to fix up the inside. No modifications to the outside.” “Why’s that?” I’d asked, long removed from the ways of Rivertown. He grinned and turned the form around so I could see. That was the first time I saw the new symbol of the village-my turret-printed right at the top. “It’s a historical,” he said, the beginnings of a squeal forming in his throat. The turret, though now owned by me, had been zoned a municipal structure in a greasy deal with its former owner, my aunt. The lizards hadn’t wanted to own the turret, they just wanted to use it, as the symbol of what they were calling the Rivertown Renaissance, and they’d plastered its image on the town’s stationery, the police cars, and the portable outhouses in the town’s one park. It was a sleight of hand that could have occurred in no other town on the planet.

I had no choice. I took the occupancy permit, restricted though it was. In the fifteen months since, I’d plodded-renovating the interior as money allowed-and plotted, planning for the day when I could afford a lawyer to sue to get the zoning changed. All the while, Elvis and I fought over each repair. We argued about the color of the new roof, the sheen of the varnish on the timbered door, the hue of the caulk that would stop the winds from coming in around the windows. Everything was a cause for battle. So it was now, concerning the plywood I’d used to temporarily cover a broken window.

I sat at my card table desk, pushed Elvis’s citation to the farthest corner, and switched on my computer. Internet directories got me e-mail addresses for the rest of the banks on Aggert’s list, and I sent them all letters inquiring whether Louise Thomas had done business with them. It only took a couple of hours, but I was pretty sure it was two hours wasted. Carolina had been a secretive woman, and if she’d used her real name, or any name except Louise Thomas when renting a lockbox, I was stopped.

I sent the last inquiry at two o’clock. My office still seemed hot, but worse, it smelled of futility. I walked into the kitchen, in search of better air.

There was a jar of pickles inside my refrigerator and a third of a bag of Oreos. Between them was a plastic package of ham slices. The ham slices were sweating inside the plastic, in spite of the refrigerated air. I closed the door before the ham started to cry.

Things weren’t much better next door. Two generic Lean Cuisine knockoffs rested side by side in the freezer, and otherwise alone. I have a theory that a Lean Cuisine, ingested before Oreos, coats the stomach with a kind of chemical firewall that prevents the absorption of black and white calories. My belt indicates the theory has little promise, but I am still investigating.

I nuked the knockoff that had a picture of a fish dinner on it, but when I removed the plastic cover, I realized I’d been hoaxed. The fish had swum away, and its place had been taken by something that looked and smelled like a puddle of adhesive. I threw the tray in the garbage, poured coffee, and dunked Oreos.

Fifteen minutes later, I called Reynolds, thinking I’d get his voice mail, but he surprised me by answering.

“I’ve got news,” I said. “Louise Thomas’s real name was Carolina something. She wrote an advice column syndicated in shopping newspapers.”

“A gossip columnist?” He didn’t sound excited.

“More like a Dear Abby.”

“How’d you find this out?”

“I drove around your neck of the woods, checking to see if a numbered key I found fit a postal or bank box.”

“You didn’t say you had a key,” he said.

“I might never find where it fits. I did learn she was picking up her mail in Woodton.”

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “All the way over in Woodton.”

“There was a lot of mail there.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Advice column stuff. Reader letters, copies of her newspaper columns, and a note from her editor.”

“Anything else?”

“Like what?”

“Jesus, Elstrom, a clue to her murderer.”

“I’m going to read it all this afternoon. Listen, there’s something else: The Woodton postmaster told me a guy came in, wanting to get at her mail. The guy didn’t have any authorization, so the postmaster blew him off.”

“Did he tell the police?”

“I don’t think so. You might want to keep a special eye on that cottage.”

“You want me to run that key around, check the banks you didn’t get to?”

“You don’t have the authorization. Besides, I’ve sent them faxes,” I said. “How are you coming at your end?”

“You mean, did I find out if she was wearing a coat when she was killed?”

“With a pack of Salems in the pocket,” I added.

He didn’t laugh. “We’re having some vandalism, petty stuff from the local delinquents. Maybe I should run your key to the sheriff. He can contact every bank in the state.”

“You haven’t even had the time to find out who’s investigating.”

This time he laughed. “Get your butt up here with that key. And bring that mail. We can pass that on to the sheriff as well.”

I told him I’d be up when I learned something. “If ever,” I added.

We both laughed at that.