The Dead Caller from Chicago

Twenty-one

His slight cough woke me.

Leo’s hands were clasped primly in front of him, as attentive as a small child in a museum, as he stood facing the curved wall. First-time daytime visitors to the turret are always dazzled by the way the sun streaming in through the slit windows changes the hues and the shadows on the limestone blocks every few minutes. It’s quite a show.

Leo had seen it before, hundreds of times.

I got up off the floor. “Coffee?” I asked.

He turned at the sound of my voice, his face as blank as it had been the night before. Leo, the Leo I knew, was still checked out from the trauma of his gun work.

“Follow me,” I said.

He understood. We crossed the hall to my almost-finished kitchen. I pulled out a chair, told him to sit at the plywood table.

I had Cheerios, and I had bowls. I mated one into the other in front of him. The fact that I had no milk didn’t concern him. I gave him a spoon. He just stared at everything.

It chilled me worse than anything the night before. I tugged at my peacoat, to pull it tighter. I saw dirt and grime-and blood.

“Damn it,” I said. I had the thing off in an instant.

Leo watched me like he’d watched the limestone-silently, with mild interest, nothing more.

I laid the coat on the counter, sloshed Tide on the dark wool, and scrubbed it with my fingers. After a minute, I put it in the sink, ran water on it, and rubbed at it some more. It wasn’t just the blood I was trying to wash away; it was the memory.

I set the coat on the back of a chair to dry and looked again at Leo. He was eating the Cheerios, uninterested in my sudden laundering.

Amnesia was supposed to give the brain time to heal from trauma, but amnesia meant Leo couldn’t tell me anything to make him safe. I was certain the man he’d killed hadn’t been the only cranky monkey in the circus. That bruiser had worked for someone who would simply hire another cranky monkey, but for what, I could not imagine.

I set a cup of coffee in front of Leo. Invariably, he refused to drink my coffee, claiming I brewed the worst stuff on the planet. It was true enough, since I rarely indulged in absolutely new grounds. Now he was drinking it slowly, passively, without expression.

I called the Bohemian.

I’d known Anton Chernek since the day my marriage to Amanda Phelps was dissolved. He was a CPA and certified financial manager and worked out of a fancy factory rehab full of licenses, degrees, and awards, but the wall shingling told only a small part of Chernek’s story. Mostly, he was a quietly influential adviser to many of the wealthiest people in Chicago and their offspring, of which my ex-wife was one.

He’d come to the settlement conference with her three-man team of lawyers. I came alone. The conference lasted barely ten minutes, and that long only because her lawyers brought a huge sheaf of papers for me to sign. I read none of them. I wanted none of her money.

Chernek liked that. He also liked that I was half Bohemian and had been tagged with the thoroughly ethnic and quite unwieldy name of Vlodek. He enjoyed rolling it on his tongue: Vuh-lo-dek. We reached an accommodation: I let him call me something I wouldn’t name a dog; he offered his quite considerable resources when I got in a jam.

“Vuh-lo-dek,” he said now, relishing the three syllables when we both knew there were merely two. “What sort of mess are you in, these days?”

“I need a very private, very discreet medical clinic, for a friend.”

His tone changed from kidding to serious. “To treat what?”

“Amnesia, I think, and shock. Lots of other head stuff, potentially.”

“How discreet?”

“Discreet enough to admit him under an assumed name and to never tell anyone he’s a patient. Do you know of such a place?”

“I must put you on hold.”

He was back in five minutes. “As a matter of fact, I do know such a place. It’s very pricey.”

“I have about forty-five hundred dollars.”

“Amazingly, Vlodek, that is precisely what I estimate it will cost for an indefinite stay.” He chuckled. He’d find a way to take care of the balance, through favors he was owed, or merely his own considerable funds. Friendship with me isn’t always cheap.

“Is there a capital crime associated with the amnesia?” he asked.

“Yes. I think his life is in danger, too, but the immediate problem is his amnesia.”

He did not hesitate. He’d heard worse, from the people who ran most of Chicago. “Does your friend require transportation?”

“I don’t know how to do that. He is with me at the turret. It’s probably being watched.”

“What does your friend look like?”

“Five-six, one-forty, pale skin, bald as an egg.”

“Do you own a hat, Vlodek?”

I was probably the only one he’d ever had to ask such a question.

“Chicago Cubs,” I said. “It’s one of two I own, the other being a knit.”

“In about an hour, put your Cubs hat on your friend, along with your peacoat-”

“You remember I have a peacoat?” I interrupted.

“Every time I’ve seen you in cold weather, you’ve worn navy surplus. I assumed it’s your only outer garment.”

“Please continue.”

“Thusly attired, put your friend in your Jeep and drive to this address on Archer Avenue.” He gave me the street number. “It’s a spring coil manufacturer. They have a ground-level loading dock. They will be waiting for you. When they open the receiving door, drive in. Your friend will be immediately transported in a windowless service van to a clinic. You, however, will wait thirty minutes before driving out of the factory. You will be accompanied by one of their employees, who will be wearing your surplus coat and Cubs hat, sitting slouched down in your, ah, vehicle. That person will instruct you what to do. It’s the best I can offer on such short notice.”

“Don’t tell me where you’re taking my friend.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. He’ll be admitted as John Smith. All communication will be done through me.”

He hung up before I could thank him.

I called Endora. “I have good news and some temporarily not so good news. I have him with me, but he’s suffered a mild concussion. It’s resulted in a bit of amnesia.”

“We’ll leave now.”

“Absolutely not. Leo wanted you out of town because he got into something bad. I don’t know what that is yet. He’ll be at a clinic, safe, getting his health back. You stay out of Chicago until I know what’s going on.”

“Which clinic?”

“Someone I trust made the arrangements. I told him I don’t want to know where Leo is.”

She paused, then, “It’s like up at Eustace?”

“Have you heard anything about how Arnie Pine died?”

“I forbade my mother to call her friend.”

I’d told her I’d call her later.

I held out my peacoat, still damp, and Cubs cap. Leo put them on without asking why and followed me docilely out to the Jeep. I walked with my sport jacket open, his revolver tucked inside the waistband of my khakis. I didn’t like packing the gun, a murder weapon with his and my fingerprints on it, but I liked the idea of being defenseless against some friend of the dead man’s even less.

The spring coil company was in an old factory building that took up most of a city block. The street-level dock door opened as soon as I drove up. I pulled in next to a beat-up panel van with the company’s logo on it. A man in a quilted down jacket with a reassuring bulge under his left armpit stood by the driver’s door. A woman who might have been a nurse got out of the van as soon as the dock door closed. She came over and led Leo to the sliding door at the side of the van. She came back with my peacoat, the Cubs hat, and what I took for a reassuring smile. She and the driver got in the van and backed out of the adjacent bay.

I sat in the Jeep for fifteen minutes, watching shipping department people move large wood pallets of thick wire, until a small Latina, no more than twenty-five, came up to the passenger’s side. She put on the peacoat over her hot pink ski jacket, tucked her long hair up inside the Cubs hat, and gave me the whitest smile I’d ever seen. The transformation was good enough. She slouched down in the passenger seat like she was asleep, the dock door opened, and we drove away.

She directed me through the old factory district. At the westbound entrance to the expressway, she told me to park between two cars in front of a crowded strip of stores. She tugged off the peacoat, dropped the Cubs hat, and slipped out. Even in hot pink, she disappeared into one of the stores in an instant.

The Bohemian, that knower of all things, had done me well. Leo was in sharp, professional hands. Protected, for now.

Only for now.