The Dead Caller from Chicago

Fourteen

The adrenaline that had been propelling me since I’d first gotten to Mackinaw City vaporized like steam in a strong wind just west of Kalamazoo. I pulled into a McDonald’s drive-through for coffee and a McMuffin, drove to the back of the parking lot to eat, and fell asleep before I could touch either.

When I awoke, it was after ten. I drank the cold coffee, ate the cold McMuffin, and called Jenny as I pulled onto the interstate.

“Nothing so far, Dek, except a record of his birth, in Champaign,” she said. “I called three different sources, including one with the FBI. No Edwin G., no Snark. But don’t forget, juvenile records get expunged. One thing I do know, and don’t ask how: He hasn’t filed an income tax return under that name, either. Maybe he changed his name.”

“Or he really is dead, as I heard.”

“No one’s found that, but that’s not surprising, especially when it’s that far back and the deceased died in a small town. How does this fit with what you’re not telling me about Leo?”

“I’ll call you,” I said.

“We must do this again,” she said and clicked off.

I got to Rivertown’s city hall at one and blew straight into Tebbins’s office. He looked up, red faced and sweating, as though anticipating a heart attack. Or me, coming to agitate him about things he hoped I didn’t understand, such as a killer who’d followed me up to Eustace Island.

“I just got back from an amazing trip,” I said. I couldn’t tell if that upset him, since his face was already so deeply flushed.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I was on a little island, off Mackinac. A guy crashed his boat and died.”

He sat up straighter in his chair, but it might not have been from surprise. “I have no time for this, Elstrom.”

I’d decided I’d come at him fresh and not tell him I’d learned anything from his boss, Robinson. “Tell me about Snark Evans.”

“Like I said the last time, I had all kinds of kids washing trucks.”

“This one had a little burglary business on the side.”

“Where the hell would you hear such a thing?”

“Good news gets around.”

“I don’t know anything about burglaries.”

“You had to brace him about selling stuff out of the city garage.”

“All kinds of punks worked for the city. Not all of them were memorable.”

“Why cover for him after all these years?”

He took a couple of long breaths and said nothing.

I sat down in the guest chair, uninvited, and smiled. “So, what’s new?”

“OK,” he said after a moment, “maybe I do remember one of them selling junk in the garage. But it was only junk.”

“I’m guessing it was more than that.”

“Look, I remember Snark Evans enough to know I should have canned him right away. I found out about his little extracurricular activities, but I tried to cut him a break. I was hoping, with regular work, he’d quit thieving. It didn’t matter. He quit before the summer was over.”

“What else?”

“He died, later that summer.”

I was tired. I was confused. “What the hell else, Tebbins?” I yelled.

A vein in his cheek started pulsing. “What do you care, anyway?” he asked. “And don’t give me any crap about being here for Leo Brumsky.”

“Ever wonder if Snark is really dead?” It was all I could think to shout.

“Adios, Elstrom,” he said, after his face didn’t change.

I had one more button to push. “About that house going up across town? What the hell is going on?”

That got a response. He pushed himself up out of his chair, drawing shallow breaths, his face a wet purple mask of fury. “Get the hell out of here, Elstrom.”

His mouth hadn’t said much, but the beads of sweat blooming larger on his forehead were saying a lot more.

I left.

I drove to Kutz’s. I wasn’t hungry for the greasy hot dogs Kutz floated in tepid water no one had ever seen him change. I needed a calm place to think, and maybe I needed a laugh, if only for a moment.

The wienie wagon beneath the viaduct was more Leo’s place than mine, so much so that he prided himself on being among the very first to visit Kutz’s each spring. That year, Kutz had roused himself early in the calendar and had opened the peeling wood trailer just a few weeks before. There’d been plenty of snow on the ground, and ice stuck to the bare branches of the trees. No matter. Leo breezed over to the turret that morning, grinning his wide grin. He always knew, always, when Kutz would open.

“Spring has arrived,” he said, stomping snow off his red galoshes. “Kutz is cooking.”

“It’s February. There’s more than a foot of snow on the ground.” Kutz never opened for the season until the first of his most relentless visitors, the flies that called Kutz’s trailer their summer home, were ready to take wing. That wouldn’t happen for weeks.

“Which is why I’ll suffer a ride in your Jeep. I’m assuming your ultralow four-wheel drive will work today?”

It was a cheap shot. My low-gear transmission worked more than half the time. That day, it worked particularly fine, blazing a new trail in the snow, for there were no other tire marks. Only Kutz’s snowshoe tracks led down to the trailer beneath the viaduct.

Leo and I were first for the new season. Again.

“I could say I’m pleased to see you jerks, but I’m not, so I won’t,” Kutz had said, as Leo and I trudged across the snow.

As always, a scowl creased his grizzled, unshaved face. Young Kutz, as he was most formally known, was on the wrong side of eighty and looked every bit of it. That day, he was bundled up in thick coats and a sagging knit hat, as shiny with old grease as the hot dogs he served up.

Charitable people said his lack of social grace stemmed from his advanced years. Others, who’d known Kutz for many of those eighty years, said it was less complicated: Kutz had always been a mean son of a bitch.

“Happy to see you too, Mr. Kutz,” Leo said, effervescing at the thought of the delights to come. He ordered his usual six dogs, cheese fries, and huge root beer.

“And you?” Kutz fixed his beady eyes on me.

“My usual as well. One hot dog, and a small Diet Coke to soften part of the grease.”

Waiting for Kutz to snag the hot dogs from the muck of last year’s water, we stomped our feet and studied the peeling paint on the menu board. The items were the same, but he’d lined out last year’s prices and marked in new ones.

“Your prices have gone up twenty percent,” I said.

“Ain’t you heard? There’s been a depression.”

“Recession.”

“Recession, depression, whatever. They all mean the same thing: hard times.”

“Exactly. And that’s why you raised your prices, because people are having a harder time getting by?”

“Some TV asshole says I got to embrace my financial destiny. That means I charge more. I keep the recession away from me, it spreads. Pretty soon the whole planet is doing better.”

Clearly, Kutz hadn’t been idling over the winter. He’d been watching Lester Lance Leamington, same as me.

Our lunch was slid out beneath the scarred Plexiglas window in less time than would be needed if he served things hot, and we stomped around to the picnic tables in back. We brushed the snow off a table and two benches and sat down.

Surrounded by drifted snow that was almost knee deep, Leo lined up his six hot dogs like torpedoes in a row. “Ah,” he said, as he took his first bite of the season. With Leo, so much was ritual.

That had been less than a month ago.

“Where’s the other jerk, the tiny one?” Kutz asked now, as I walked up alone.

“In the hospital, with tubes in every orifice, draining what he ate here the last time.”

His face lit up with joy. He loved compliments.

I pretended to examine the unmarked snow around the trailer. “Business good?”

“Word’s getting around. We got celebrities coming here now. We’re going to be on the news, any day.”

“Board of Health?”

“Laugh your ass. That broad from Channel 8, she came around.”

“Jennifer Gale?”

“That’s the one. Nice rack, though you can’t see much when she’s wearing a coat.”

“She was here to eat?”

“She said she didn’t have time, but she heard I was real popular with the construction trade, and was they coming around, now that they was building that new mansion? Millionaires is coming for sure, I told her. I’m going to be busting my butt real soon, with all the new houses going up.”

I took my hot dog and diet around to the back. Most of the snow was gone off the same table Leo and I had used that first time this season. I sat there. With me, things could be ritual, too.

I took a sip of the Coke and tried to think. Stumbling around, I’d exposed Endora and Ma to a bulky killer. Stumbling around, I’d turned one of Rivertown’s building inspectors purple at the mention of the only new construction to come to town in years. Stumbling around, I was seeing Jennifer Gale everywhere.

I took out my cell phone and called her. She didn’t answer. I left a message and took a bite of the hot dog. It was cold. I was cold.

I downed the last of the Coke, left the hot dog on the table for the pigeons, and got out of there.