Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Thirty-eight

East Chicago, Indiana, was only an hour from the turret. It was all the time I could afford, but it was enough. East Chicago was plausible, little more than ninety minutes from Rambling.

I stopped at a men’s clothing store, bought a shirt, a pair of suspenders, and an extra-large golf hat that rode too low on my head. Then I pulled into the first bank I saw.

The Workman’s Bank of East Chicago was an old two-story building that was missing mortar from its rows of red bricks. Inside, the oak transaction tables, the granite-topped teller line, and the roll-top desk visible through the president’s open office door were old, too.

The safety deposit box vault was in the basement. The slender lady in the floral dress might have been younger than the bank, but only by a few hours. She wore glasses with thick lenses.

She peered at me. “You said the largest we have?”

“Yes, ma’am. I need to lock up a lot of stuff.”

“That’ll be a hundred and twenty-five dollars, for the one year’s rental.”

She cleared her throat politely. A careful woman, she wanted to see the money first. I paid with most of the rest of Maris’s cash. I hoped it was appropriate.

The slender lady fussed behind the short counter riser and slid a signature card through the opening.

I started to write, then said, “Darn.”

“Something wrong, young man?”

“I wrote my name illegibly. May I have another?” I moved the original card aside.

“Of course.” She handed me a second card. I printed the name, then wrote the signature as I remembered it, from studying it in the Jeep five minutes before. I slid the card back.

“Thank you, young man.” She filled out the four-part rental agreement and handed it to me.

“Bottom copy mine?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I printed and signed again, made a show of separating the pink bottom copy because I was a helpful young man, and handed back the remaining three copies, still attached.

She handed me a small blue envelope. “Two keys inside, young man. Twenty-five-dollar charge if you lose one key, fifty if you lose both and we have to drill the box.”

I opened the small envelope. The keys were old, and ridged; not like the numbered key Maris had left.

“What if I only want one key?” I asked.

“Two keys is the policy. Folks who don’t want the second key put it in the box and leave it there.”

Yes, ma’am.

I checked the clock on the wall. At least eight hours remained until dusk. I was back to expecting that my visitor driving up from Florida wouldn’t show up until after dark.

“One more thing, ma’am?” I smiled.

“Yes?”

“I want to make double sure I don’t lose these keys. May I have a letter envelope and a sheet of paper to wrap your little key packet in?”

She smiled at my caution-someday I would make a fine senior citizen-and gave me the envelope and a piece of stationery. Both had the bank’s name and logo on them.

“Perfect,” I said.

The folks upstairs were just as nice, more than willing to let me used the old Selectric typewriter abandoned on a vacant desk in the corner. I fed in my newly acquired sheet of letterhead and, on behalf of the entire staff of the Workman’s Bank of East Chicago, Indiana, typed a letter to its newest lockbox renter, welcoming him to Workman’s family of happy customers. I added that everyone hoped he would stop in again. I typed the matching envelope, folded in the letter, and stuck it with a postage stamp from my wallet. I mailed it outside.

I called Aggert’s cell phone from the Jeep. He didn’t answer, of course, but he’d still be checking for messages.

“A friend of mine got beat up last night, by someone looking for that lockbox key. I’m done working for Louise Thomas’s estate. This is all too risky. I’ve just mailed you the key. You give it to Dillard.” It would keep him in West Haven, waiting for the mail.

I started the Jeep, then called Dillard. He was in.

“False alarm,” I said. “That Kovacs brother that’s supposedly headed up here hasn’t left Florida yet.”

“Where exactly did you get that information to begin with?” he asked. I’d been brief and vague when I’d first called him, but he’d gone along. Now he was not happy.

I revved the Jeep’s engine, mumbled something about losing the cell signal, and clicked him away. He’d phone his contacts at the Cook County Sheriff’s Department, call off the alert. There would be no coppers standing by, to come to the turret that night. It was what I needed.

I threw away one of the new lockbox keys in Indiana and tossed the other out the window as I entered Illinois. I changed out of the new suspenders and checked shirt and threw them away with the hat at a gas station in Chicago.

Arnold Duddits was an artist, though instead of chalks and paints, he worked with rubber stamps, a computer, and the same kinds of papers, fonts, and inks that banks used. His forgeries of canceled checks and bank statements were excellent. Certainly they’d been good enough to ruin me.

Two years before, I had testified for the defense in a municipal corruption trial. The case had drawn a lot of media attention because it involved allegations of insurance skimming by a popular west suburban mayor. I’m no document examiner-I leave that to experts like Leo-but I can chase down a paper trail of deposits, cashed checks, and bank balances, and that’s what I did for the defense. I testified that their documents did not show any wrongdoing on the part of the mayor.

I’d been played. The documents were fakes, created by Arnold Duddits for an ally of the mayor’s. And when it was reported that the duped expert witness for the defense was the son-in-law of Wendell Phelps, one of the movers and shakers of what moved and shook in Chicago, the case took over page one of both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. Duddits made me a front page fool, and that tanked my research business, because demand for fact-checkers who get facts wrong is always zero.

I set to drinking, a common enough recourse for failures. Common enough, too, was my need to find someone to blame for my downfall. I chose Amanda. She was innocent of any involvement in the case, she loved me, and she was handy. Most important, she was Wendell Phelps’s daughter-something that, in my stupor, I took as the root cause of the publicity and therefore all my troubles.

Of course, Amanda divorced me. That slid me, on my dumb ass, the rest of the way downhill. I stopped only when I slammed into the turret. Unheated, uncleaned, it had been unoccupied by anything but vermin since 1929. Fittingly built of big stones, it literally was rock bottom.

Through my whole decline, I hated Arnold Duddits, and I did it publicly. Within hearing distance of several reporters hanging around outside the courthouse, I told Duddits I’d kill him. It was ninety-proof nonsense, but it made for an appropriate last sidebar on the front pages, before I disappeared into my stone cylinder in Rivertown.

Duddits worked in a depressed district of warehouses, in a tiny sham of a stationery store that could never have prospered enough to support his lifestyle of fast cars and slow women. It didn’t. Duddits made his real money with his stamps and computers and papers and inks.

Distaste curled his upper lip as I walked in. “Is this some kind of damned joke?”

“Do you see me laughing, Arnold?”

“Out, Elstrom. Out.” He pointed to the door.

I set the envelope on the counter.

“Out,” he said.

“Look inside.”

“I don’t want to see what’s inside.”

“Look inside.”

I like to think it was my skill with words, coupled with my boyish charm, that persuaded him. Realistically, though, it was probably the way my pounding heart made the vein in my sweating forehead pulse as I leaned across the counter.

“I’ll kill you if you don’t look inside that envelope, Arnold.”

He picked it up and took a half step back. Then he fingered it open with his forefinger and thumb, as if he were expecting anthrax.

“Money and papers,” he said, after taking the scantest of peeks.

“Forty-seven dollars. It’s all the cash I’ve got. I’m paying you so I’ll be complicit.”

“What?” Still holding the envelope with his two tweezing fingers, he pressed back against the shelves of dusty papers. I leaned farther over the counter. He had no more room for retreat.

“Complicit. Paying you makes me a co-criminal. You don’t need to worry that I’m setting you up.”

He shot a glance at the front door. “Out,” he said, but his voice was weakening. His eyes came back and locked onto my pulsing vein.

“You know you ruined me, don’t you, Arnold? Made me a chump? Sent my business tumbling, and me to the booze? That it got me divorced and tossed onto the street, and now I’m living in an unheated pile of limestone that’s going to cripple me with arthritis?”

Pressed against the back shelves, he tried a smirk. “I wasn’t charged with anything.”

“That pisses me off, too, Arnold.”

He shrugged, still working that smirk.

“I hate you, Arnold.” I strained to get my forehead another inch across the counter.

“Tough.”

“I’ve got nothing.” I paused to breathe in, and to give him yet another second to admire my pulsing vein. “Except a gun, Arnold. I’ve got a gun.”

His smirk trembled but didn’t shrink.

“I’ll kill you if you don’t do what I want.”

“You wouldn’t dare. You made front page news when you said that the last time.”

“I chiseled the numbers off the gun, and I’ve got somebody who’ll give me an alibi.”

The smirk went away.

I backed off the counter, named the sequence of states Maris could have followed, driving north. “Four different banks. You choose three. The last bank is in East Chicago. You don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be reasonable. Make photocopies, and copy those again. You can destroy the originals, anything with your fingerprints on it. I just need the photocopies.”

“I’ll think about-”

I told him the dates and the amount that had to appear on the documents. “You’ll remember them?”

“Maybe.”

I looked at my watch. “I’ll be back at three thirty.”

I had work lights, the ones that have shiny bowl shades and spring clips. I had extension cords. I didn’t have motion sensors. I stopped at a hardware store and bought the kind that have an outlet for a lamp cord. It took less than an hour to set them up-one on the first floor; two on the second, for the kitchen and my office; and one, which I hoped would not be triggered, for the otherwise empty third floor, where I slept.

I hoped they would appear to be a reasonable, and easily defeated, security system.

…

Duddits’s window was dark at three twenty. I banged on the door. There was no answer. I banged some more until a light flicked on at the back of the shop. A shape moved through the gloom, unbolted the steel door. Duddits’s hair was shiny. He was sweating.

“Busy day, Arnold?” I asked affably.

He turned without saying anything, and I followed him to the counter. He switched on the overhead fluorescents, disappeared into a back room, and reappeared in less than a minute, wearing thin surgical gloves. The flap on the envelope he was carrying was unsealed. Carefully, he bowed the envelope open and let the documents inside slide onto the glass counter. He folded the envelope three times and put it in his back pocket. Even though he was wearing gloves, his fingers had not once touched any of the photocopies inside the envelope.

I slipped on my own gloves, grabbed from a box in Leo’s hospital room, and spread out Duddits’s work. The papers were flyspecked from being copied, and copied again. The first three were from banks in Georgia, Ohio, and Michigan. They showed the transfer in, and then out, of one million two hundred and seventy-six thousand dollars-the exact amount stolen in Ida, Iowa-as Louise Thomas worked her way north. I had no idea where Duddits got the names and logos, but I knew he’d been careful enough to have used real banks.

The last of the photocopies were of the very real signature card and rental agreement for the lockbox at the Workman’s Bank of East Chicago, Indiana. Duddits had forged the signature exactly as it had been written on the witness line on Louise Thomas’s will.

I slid the photocopies into the envelope I’d brought.

“See you around, Duddits,” I said at the door.

“In hell, Elstrom.”

I parked the Jeep a mile away, on one of the side streets on the other side of Thompson Avenue, and walked to the turret.

To wait.