The Dead Caller from Chicago

Thirty-three

By most accounts, my grandfather was a courtly, small-time brewmeister, a guy looking to make good beer and, of course, a castle. Part of his being in the bootlegging business during Prohibition must have required a place to stash money and perhaps long guns, because I’d come across his hiding place, a large cavity tucked into the floor, quite accidentally only months before.

I lifted the fitted planks and brought Leo’s painting down to the lighted Luxo magnifier on my card table desk.

At first glance, it was nothing more than a kid’s painting, eighteen by twenty-four inches, done by a child fated for a career in anything but art. The lavender barn was lopsided. The pink, green-spotted cows had misshapen legs, each of which was a different length, and the tree trunks were tendrils, too spindly to support so many red leaves. He’d signed it “Leo B.” in the lower right corner.

I turned the painting over. Always a stickler for detail, he’d written “To Ma, from Leo,” in a big, looping child’s hand.

Something irregular caught my eye. I moved the magnifier and saw that a tiny seam had opened up along the inside edge of the wood frame. An artist’s canvas was always stretched around a wood frame and tacked in back. A seam inside the frame made no sense.

I used my fingernail to pull gently at the seam. A tiny speck of glue fell away, revealing what looked like an older piece of canvas underneath.

It was obvious what Leo had done. He’d painted a ridiculously colored farm scene right over another picture. He’d thought to disguise the back of the old painting as well, by gluing on a piece of new canvas.

It was enough to build a scenario: Snark Evans, installing a security system at Cassone’s house for Tebbins, had stolen a picture. Likely enough, Snark didn’t know what he had, other than a raging case of second thoughts. He dumped the picture on an unsuspecting Leo, thinking maybe he’d come back for it when things cooled. Snark hightailed it out of Rivertown, going so far as to fake a report of his own death so Cassone wouldn’t come hunting for him. Leo, a kid finishing his first year of college, probably thought nothing of adding a picture to the pile of other artifacts mounded in the middle of his basement.

For years, Snark’s ploy worked. Snark drifted on to new things under a different name. Cassone settled into believing his picture was gone for all time. Leo forgot about the painting in his basement.

Then, just a week or a month before, something triggered each of them into action. Snark called Leo, wanting his picture back. Cassone hired Wozanga, who ultimately traced the painting to Leo. Leo dug out the picture and saw something he hadn’t seen before, something that needed camouflaging with a child’s version of a lavender barn and pink, green-spotted cows.

My scenario was sure to have big holes, but I knew one thing: Leo was the most honorable of men. He would have researched the painting and likely found out it belonged to Cassone. He would have returned it to him, whether or not the man was a hood. That he hadn’t meant he’d learned something that prevented that.

I called Jenny. “I need a favor.”

“How’s Leo?” Jenny asked.

“Improving.”

“Are you going to take me to someplace memorable if I do this favor for you?”

“I took you to the beach once.”

“You took me to a trailer park near the Indiana dunes. We found a corpse covered with flies.”

“Wasn’t that memorable?”

“What do you want, Elstrom?”

“I want you to call your police friends and find out whether Rudy Cassone ever reported a theft from his house in Falling Star.”

“Rudy Cassone, the big-time gangster?”

“Yes.”

“This has to do with Leo?”

“Yes.”

She hung up without waiting for me to dodge a next question. I told myself it was gamesmanship.

I looked across the room to admire the black char in the fireplace, the residue of the only fire that had ever been lit there. Jenny and I had inaugurated that fireplace, not two hours after we discovered the corpse in Indiana. Shivering, although it was July, we’d spoken of our ghosts, her dead husband and my ex-wife. Sometime into the night, the adrenaline gave out, and she fell asleep in the electric blue La-Z-Boy as I sat beside her, alert, lecherous of thought but virtuous of action, until I became too aware of myself watching her breathe, and I covered her with a blanket and went upstairs to the bed across from another fireplace, one that I’d inaugurated with Amanda, my ex-wife.

Amanda knew art. She used to write big glossy art histories before her estranged father found the right way to lure her into his electric utility and back into his life. Amanda didn’t write art histories anymore. She no longer taught at the Art Institute. I hadn’t spoken to her since late in the previous year.

Still, she knew art.

I did not stop to wonder about motives and needs and what used to be. I dialed her number.

“Dek?” Vicki, her assistant asked, surprised. It had indeed been months.

“Alas, the very same.”

“She called you already?”

“What?” I asked, confused.

“You’re on her call list. I was supposed to remind her to call you later this afternoon.”

It didn’t make sense. “Is she free now?”

“Hold, please.”

“Dek?” Amanda asked, after a longer wait than ever before.

“I have an art question,” I said quickly and preemptively.

“I know,” she said, stunning me.