The Dead Caller from Chicago

Twenty-five

By six o’clock, it was dark enough to drive to Leo’s neighborhood. The construction site was deserted. The empty bungalow next door was no longer guarded, its yellow tape already beginning to sag.

Only a single lamp shone behind the thick lace in Leo’s front-room windows. No other lights were on. I hoped it meant merely that Ma Brumsky had set a timer before Endora dragged her away.

I continued on slowly and began thumbing the dead man’s key remote. The junior-grade daytime delinquents that hung out at the health center, Rivertown’s community college for budding thieves, prized such devices for their efficiency: Someone new to the health center leaves his keys in his locker. As soon as he goes upstairs, the supposedly dozing attendant cuts his lock, rifles the pockets, keeps the cash, and beats it outside to sell the keys to the slit-eyed juniors loafing about. He gets extra for remotes; all that’s needed is to wave them around to see what chirps. The victim’s car is long gone before the victim makes it to the showers.

Three blocks over and two blocks up, I lit the taillights of an older bronze Malibu with a ticket under its windshield. No surprise, it was the car that I thought I’d lost at the shopping center, before heading up to Michigan. I parked two blocks farther on, slipped on gloves, and hoofed my way back.

The dome bulb didn’t light, and the interior smelled of years of spilled coffee, fast hamburgers, and cigarettes. It was a surveillance car. I drove it to the Rivertown Health Center.

The parking lot was dark, as usual. The daytime crowd of junior-grade thumpers was content to lounge about in the open, but the night was reserved for the older criminals, the professional car strippers meeting to exchange cash for keys, and retailers of serious drugs. Once, after a particularly nasty midnight fight between rival drug retailers, the parking lot had been fitted with bright lights and security cameras. The nighttimers regarded the new brightness as counterproductive to the conduct of their businesses and smashed the new lamps and lenses. The folks that ran the health center, a derelict lot that rented rooms to other derelicts, understood. The parking lot was allowed to slip back into its former darkness.

I pulled in, immediately switched off my headlights in keeping with the after-hours protocol, and crept the car around the craters to the darkest of the dark corners.

I used the dead man’s penlight to search the car. The glove box contained a stash of poorly refolded maps of Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, and Illinois, a garage door opener, and a jumbo-sized Swiss Army knife. There was nothing jammed under the seats or in the door pockets.

I left the maps and the knife, pocketed the opener, and got out. I unlocked the trunk. The man had been careful there as well; the bulb was gone. The trunk appeared empty, but to be sure I undid the spare tire cover-and discovered treasure. A wallet was wedged beside the spare tire, along with another ring of keys. More ominous were the three automatic handguns. I put everything in my coat pockets and slammed the trunk lid.

I stuck the key back into the ignition and powered down the driver’s window, to ease the work of the cherubs flitting unseen in the darkness, and took off.

It took twenty minutes to walk across town to Leo’s neighborhood. I’d turned up his street, to make sure his bungalow looked well and empty of Endora and Ma Brumsky, when I saw something move in the shadows of his front porch.

An old, boxy station wagon was idling at the curb. Several heads moved inside.

I paused behind a tree, trying to decide which was dumber: charging up the stairs to accost the person by the door, or sneaking up to see who lurked in the idling car.

Neither felt particularly brilliant, but the three guns I had in my coat pockets offered a fortifying weight.

Pulling out the heaviest of the automatics, I ran across the street, jerked open the front passenger’s door, and thrust the gun barrel inside.

“Teef, teef!” the babushka in the front passenger’s seat screamed.

“Teef; morder?” the two octogenarians chorused from the back.

“Teef?” an old woman’s voice shouted from the darkness of Leo’s porch. Something metal-a four-footed metal cane-began clanking down the cement stairs.

They screamed other words then, but all of it was foreign. The ancient idling station wagon had become a Polish henhouse, erupted into chaos. I jammed the gun back in my coat and retreated to safety in the middle of the street

The woman with the clanking cane had rounded the front of the station wagon and now leaned against its front fender to catch her breath. “Creeminal,” she yelled, raising the metal cane two-handed like a battering ram at me, the would-be criminal.

I held up my empty hands. By now, all the windows in the station wagon had been powered down. “Creeminal, creeminal,” everyone but me screamed.

“No criminal,” I shouted back. “No thief; no murder.”

The aged woman at the front of the idling car lowered her cane and, leaning on it, pushed herself off the front fender and started hobbling toward me. I recognized her then. She was the friend of Ma’s who ordered the special movies that came in unmarked envelopes.

“Mrs. Roshiska,” I shouted. “I’m Dek Elstrom, Leo’s friend.”

The good black wool wrapped around her face fluttered. “Leo? You frenn?”

“Friend, yes. Dek Elstrom.”

“Dake?” Behind her, I heard more Dakes, cackled, coming from the car.

“Elstrom.”

At last, she recognized me. She lowered her cane. “Where Mrs. Baroomsky?”

“Away, on vacation.”

The old woman shook her head. “No goot; mus’ be home. Call today for us come over.” Then she gave me a sly look and added, “Moofies.”

“Moofies,” the girls in the car chortled.

It all came clear, then. Ma Brumsky had wasted no time after she returned. With Leo all right, things could get back to normal. She called her friends. Movies would resume. Endora must surely have had to drag her away.

“Vacation,” I repeated and walked away. I could add no words that would salve their disappointment.

I drove the long way back to the turret, so I could pass the health center. The old Malibu was gone, safely on its way to becoming parts of other old Malibus.

Two blocks later, I put fifty dollars in the parking ticket envelope and dropped it in a city box. Now, no Rivertown official would ever have cause to think of the Malibu.

I parked at the turret, but before going in, I walked down to the river. Broken sheets of ice moved white in the faint moonlight, drifting lazily downstream. They would shatter against each other when they hit the debris trapped by the dam.

Blue lights were pulsing rhythmically down there, along with two very bright yellow search beams aimed at the far bank. Cops and a city crew had been called out. Something had gotten stuck, impeding the flow of the water. I didn’t envy them, having to work so late.

The gaps between the ice sheets in front of me were wide enough to take guns that would never fall into the hands of kids. I threw the three automatics into them, one by one, and went inside.

I treated myself to a cup of cold coffee, sat at the makeshift plywood table, and opened the dead man’s wallet. The bright gold of a badge flashed at me. It had the seal of the State of Illinois set in the center of it, a wide-winged eagle at the top, and said PRIVATE DETECTIVE in letters circling the seal. It was the kind of thing that anyone could buy to impress morons.

There were two laminated detective licenses, however, that were the real deal. Robert Wozanga, a man who until yesterday had been alive, was licensed by the states of Missouri and Illinois to sniff around. He had an address in a suburb near O’Hare International. The wallet also contained a driver’s license, a Visa card, and a picture of a white Shelby Ford Mustang from the sixties.

There was a little money, just a few singles, two fives, and one ten. Mixed in with them, apparently forgotten, was the ticket stub for a ferry ride from Mackinaw City out to Mackinac Island.

I thought back to the three guns I’d just thrown into the Willahock. No doubt their serial numbers had been ground off, like the weapon the cops had recovered from the empty bungalow. For all of Wozanga’s legitimate licenses, he was ultimately just a thug who killed people.

The question was, for whom.

I went out and drove north, toward O’Hare.