The Dead Caller from Chicago

Twenty-eight

Someone called less than an hour after I got home.

“I’m inquiring about your security systems.” He spoke smoothly, but there was an element of rough behind it. He was a Chicago guy, probably South Side.

“Yes?” I asked, a businessman anxious for clients.

“I’d like to look at a current job.” Definitely, he was smooth.

“I’ve just begun installing systems. I’ve got a friend, see, who was recently burgled-”

“Oh, no,” he said, with almost no inflection. “Was anything taken?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re not sure?”

“My friend’s gone, off on a trip with his mother. I found the door glass broken. Lucky for him I’ve been reading up about security systems, what with the economy and all, and me needing work of any sort. I offered to rig his place right away, so long as I could use it as a showplace. He wasn’t crazy about the showplace part, but he needs a system fast. I’m already hard at work and only came home to make a sandwich for lunch later.”

I paused for breath.

“You think nothing was taken?” he asked. An ordinary buyer wouldn’t have asked such a thing.

“He was big-time lucky,” I said. “Now I’m rushing to get the system installed.”

“I suppose the police will keep an eye on his place until you’re finished?” It was another question asked too smoothly.

I made a fake laugh and threw in a freebie. “Not a chance. He lives in Rivertown.” The information wasn’t necessary. My caller knew where Leo lived; he’d been on his block, probably watching as I put up the signs.

With Wozanga gone, unaccounted for, likely enough the caller was his employer.

“Yes, everybody knows about Rivertown,” he said, rushing now. “I’d like to see the installation.”

“I’ll be back there in fifteen minutes.”

He had the presence of mind to ask for the address, as though he weren’t already parked nearby.

I had the presence of mind to not laugh at the charade as I gave it to him.

He got out of a black S-Class Mercedes, smoked windows, top of the line, before I’d even slid out of the Jeep. He knew whom to expect, from watching the house.

He was silver haired, wore a dark wool topcoat, and had a ten-thousand-dollar gold Rolex around his wrist. Or maybe it cost more. It had been light-years since I’d priced new Rolexes. I’d worn a used one once, but that was back in the day. I’d sold it after I’d become a news item.

Before I could extend my hand, he put his in his coat pockets like mine might be dirty. He gave me a nod, but not a name. It was just as well. The name would have been false. I’d already memorized his license plate, but that wouldn’t matter either. Guys with his kind of dough leased their Mercedeses, so they could switch them out when the floor mats got crudded up.

I took him around back. “It’s a modest job, you’ll see, but it’s a start.”

“Burglary, you mentioned,” he said, when I unlocked the kitchen door.

“Through the back door here.”

“But nothing was taken?” Again he asked the question that shouldn’t have mattered to him.

“Maybe I just don’t know.”

He’d brushed past me to step into Leo’s bedroom. Right off, he knew to duck beneath the last of the psychedelic squadron dangling from the ceiling. He’d already gotten a description of the room, from his man Wozanga.

“My friend told me some of the things he’s worried might have been stolen.”

It was like tossing chum off a fishing boat. He spun around. “Jewelry?” he asked, but something in his monotone made him sound like he thought it was what I wanted to hear.

The thought of someone lifting Ma Brumsky’s rosaries was a laugh. “Sure. And the flat screens, the camera, stereo…”

He wasn’t interested. He walked to Leo’s closet, looking down at what might have been behind the clothes. “Nothing else?”

“Like what?” I asked, a doofus.

“I don’t know; other things,” he said, fingering one of Leo’s more outlandish tropical shirts, a medley of colors that should never have been joined. “Flamboyant fellow, your friend.”

“One of the neighbors saw a suspicious-looking guy hanging around.” It was more chum.

His fingers froze on the sleeve of Leo’s shirt. “What did he look like?” he asked, without turning around.

I gave him a vague description of Wozanga, lying just a few hundred yards down the block, awaiting a ton of concrete.

He could have been an excellent poker player, or there was the chance he hadn’t known the dead detective. “That’s it?” he asked, turning to look around the room, at the desk, the dresser, even the long curtains Ma had made from a hard-to-find pattern of dancing ducks. “Just a vague description of a big man?”

“Any questions about what I plan to do in the other rooms?” I asked, chumming for the third time.

He beat me to the door. “Good idea. Let’s look around.”

No doubt, the man was looking for something. Passing through the kitchen, he gestured at my tool bag. “When will you be done?”

“Very soon.”

He stopped in the dining room. It offered a view of Ma’s bedroom.

“Mind if we talk about what you’re planning to do in here?” He pointed at the wide window that faced the bricks of the bungalow next door. That’s what windows in brick bungalows in Rivertown mostly did; they looked out on more bricks.

“Sensors,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t ask questions. I had no idea what kind of sensors a home security system would require.

“Of course,” he said, but he was no longer looking at the window. He was looking past my shoulder, through the door of Ma’s bedroom.

We went up to the front room. He stopped in the center and looked everywhere but at the lace-covered windows stretching across the front of the house.

“Charming room,” he said. Then, “Same thing in here?” He’d stepped through the arch into the little room set behind the front porch. Most bungalows in Rivertown had them, though for reasons nobody seemed to understand.

“More sensors,” I said. It was a preposterous game. He was definitely looking for something.

“How about the basement?” he asked.

“Same thing, except smaller windows, higher up.”

He turned and started toward the back of the house. Instead of walking straight through, he ducked into Ma’s bedroom. Like the dining room, it had windows that faced the bricks of the bungalow on the other side. To live in Rivertown required joy at the sight of bricks.

“Sensors,” I said.

He smiled a little as he scoped out the room. When she’d come back with Endora, Ma had straightened Christ on the cross and closed her closet door. His eyes lingered on that closet door. No doubt, he wanted a peek inside.

“I guess that about does it,” I said. He hadn’t seen enough, but I had. He was looking for something that was big enough to be left in plain view and easy to spot.

He hurried through the kitchen and down the basement stairs.

“As I said, more windows, higher up,” I said, at the bottom of the stairs.

“And more sensors, I suppose?” he asked, eyeing the massive pile in the center of the room. He must have been imagining how long it would take to go through it all.

“Shall we go up?” I asked.

He started toward Leo’s office. I hurried to step in front of him. “We’d better avoid going into Mr. Brumsky’s private office.”

He stopped. “Where do you put the control panel?” he asked.

I smiled. “Can’t tell you that.”

“Good man.”

I followed him up the stairs but paused as he went out the back door. We’d made plywood key racks in seventh-grade wood shop, Leo and I. They were cut in the shape of a key and were about eight inches long. I’d dropped mine in a Dumpster, the day we were supposed to bring them home to delighted parents. Ma Brumsky had hung Leo’s, the only one in the whole class striped yellow and black, like a wasp, by the back door. It had hung there ever since.

Leo’s key ring wasn’t there, of course, but a spare set for the Porsche dangled from the middle hook. I had an inspiration and snagged them before easing the back door shut to follow my inquiring guest down the back steps.

“Give me a call if you have more questions,” I said.

My visitor nodded as he disappeared into the gangway.

I’d left the service door to the garage open. I ran in, pressed the electric opener to raise the big door, slipped into Leo’s Porsche, and gunned it out of the alley.

My visitor drove sedately, perhaps pleased by his tour of Leo’s bungalow. I hung back, keeping cars between us. He was smart enough to be checking his rearview, but he’d be looking for a red Jeep, not a purple Porsche with a brown rub on its fender.

We headed west, past the ruined ground of Crystal Waters and the other, healthier gated communities west along the highway. He pulled into Falling Star, one of the oldest of the secured communities, and stopped to give the guard in the gatehouse a good look at him. The thin white gate rose, and the nameless man in the S-Class Mercedes motored on in.

I hadn’t gotten much, but it might have been enough.