The Dead Caller from Chicago

Twenty-six

Robert Wozanga had lived behind a screen of tall bushes next to a 7-Eleven. The other houses on the block were just like his, modest two-bedroom homes painted in conservative whites, beiges, and pale blues that were sure to draw no attention. Wozanga’s was one of the blue ones, perhaps as blue as Wozanga himself was now, lying in the frozen ground beneath what was destined to become a rich person’s rec room.

I parked behind the 7-Eleven, went in to get coffee like that was the objective, and took it to the bare tendrils of the privet hedge that bordered Wozanga’s property. Without leaves to block the light, his backyard was as bright as the parking lot. I set my coffee down at the edge of the asphalt and pushed through the branches. I was still fifty feet away when I saw I wouldn’t need to take out his keys. The back door was ajar, its window smashed. I slipped inside the kitchen and stopped.

No sounds came from the rest of the house. I hoped that meant whoever had broken in had left.

The wattage from the convenience store seemed to light the whole of the house as brightly as the backyard. Wozanga looked to have lived neatly, and apparently alone. There was one dirty bowl and one milk-smeared glass in the sink. Nothing cluttered the counters except for one yellow box of Cheerios, and that gave me pause. The little life-extending O’s might have been Wozanga’s last meal. He’d been disciplined, eating for better health. Yet the low-fat cholesterol-scrubbing O’s had ultimately done nothing to prolong his life. Somehow, that seemed like a cruel irony, even on a killer.

The living room was as tidy as the kitchen. A three-seat sofa was set against a long wall. A worn upholstered chair was placed next to it, alongside a scarred low table that held a dozen car magazines stacked neatly. A big flat-screen television was hung so it could be seen from both the sofa and the chair.

There were two bedrooms. The largest had a queen-sized bed, a lamp table, and a dresser. The bed was made, but the drawers and accordion closet doors had been pulled open in a hurry. The room had been searched.

He’d used the smaller second bedroom as an office. It was trashed. The desk drawers had been pulled out and upended. File folders lay on the floor in front of a black four-drawer cabinet. A computer keyboard rested on the desk, but there was no computer. Whoever had ransacked his office had carted it away, perhaps along with some of the paper files.

A shelf hung from brackets on the wall. It held two tiny cacti in little clay pots, a larger framed version of the picture of the Shelby Mustang, and a three-ring binder imprinted with the name of an office furniture store, set upright next to the picture of the car.

The binder was meant to hold catalogs. It was a good binder and would be useful to a frugal man for holding more than catalogs. Wozanga had been such a frugal man. Inside were copies of the invoices he sent clients. It was what I needed.

I went out to the garage. I didn’t need the door opener I found in his Malibu. The side service door had been kicked in, like the door to the kitchen. Inside was the Mustang, pristine in white with two wide blue strips running trunk to hood. I guessed the car was worth more than his house.

Behind the car, a lawn mower sat next to a snow blower, two shovels, and some quarts of weed killer. Like the Shelby, he’d never need them again. I crossed the brightness of the lawn and pushed through the branches to the parking lot.

The coffee was still warm. I took a sip as I stepped back to study the hedge. I’d left marks where I’d pushed through. So had someone else, a few yards down. The man who’d ransacked Wozanga’s had left not long before. Since Wozanga was less than twenty-four hours dead, the other person was likely either a mystic or someone who’d found out fast that Wozanga was dead.

That meant either he’d been tailing Wozanga or he was his client, come to remove any link between the killer detective and himself.

I wondered, then, if that also meant that the intruder knew about Leo killing Wozanga. And about me, thumping the man’s corpse down front stairs and into the frozen ground of an excavation.