The Dead Caller from Chicago

Thirty-nine

The bar I’d named was on Thompson Avenue.

It had small tables jammed in the front window, a rarity in a town where people didn’t much like to be seen, and had a good view of the turret. From one of those tables I’d see my sensor lights go on if someone smashed down my front door while Cassone had me otherwise engaged.

It made me feel clever until I realized I was not about to go speeding home to confront an intruder, even with Leo’s revolver tucked in my peacoat.

Rudy Cassone came into the bar dressed immaculately, in a dark gray topcoat, navy business suit, white shirt, and muted blue tie. He sat across the table, three feet from my nose. A waitress came over, a big blowsy blond in her early sixties. I’d heard she used to work Chicago’s Viagra Triangle off Rush Street when she was young. When she got older, she came west, to the curbs along Thompson Avenue. When the glare of the headlights became too unflattering, she moved to the alley behind the bowling alley. Now she served beer in small glasses. A lot of careers in Rivertown followed that trajectory. We ordered beer.

“Cop company?” Cassone asked, cocking his head toward the street. One of his elbows was moving. He was feeling under the table for a microphone.

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“A man in a car seems to be very interested in you sitting here.”

“Black car, Impala?” I hadn’t noticed it, coming in.

He shook his head. “Crown Victoria. Chicken shit, if you’re attracting cops and you lead them into this. Chicken shit, like a baseball bat.” His eyes were steady on mine but, strangely, not angry. There was too much money at stake to give in to rage, at least for the time being.

I looked out the window. “I’ve got nobody watching us.”

The waitress came with our beer. He held up his glass to the little light that came from the bar. A smear of lipstick was on the glass. He set it down, apparently concerned about where that lipstick had been previously.

“You took something of mine,” he said. “I want it back.”

“You were stealing it from somebody’s house.”

He turned his beer glass so that the lipstick stain faced me. It was only the lower lip, but it looked angry.

“I got robbed, years ago. Brumsky knows it; you know it.”

“You never filed a police report.”

“Why are you talking so stupid?”

“How about your insurance company? Did you file a claim?”

He raised his wrist and slid back a French cuff to check the gold Rolex. “We’re wasting time.”

He stood up, turning suddenly to look at the people standing clustered at the bar. A man in shadow, at the far end, abruptly turned away.

“Ten o’clock tomorrow morning, you will come to 15 Falling Star, where I live. I will tell the guard that you’re expected, as I do when any friend comes to visit. You will bring a picture, a gift from you to me.”

He went out the door, leaving me alone with the two untouched glasses of beer.

I got up, too, and put a ten between the two untouched glasses.

“Something wrong with the beer, honey?” The blowsy blond had come up, anxious to clear the table.

I felt a chill on the back of my neck. Someone else had gone out.

“Everything’s fine, for you and for me,” I said, and it was. Cassone hadn’t tried to kill me, and the blond would be able to re-serve the beer.

Outside, I looked up and down the street. Every parking place was taken, even in the loading zones where the short-skirted women liked to lean into stopped cars. I didn’t see a black Impala or a Crown Victoria. No one else seemed interested in me.

I called Jarobi. He picked up before the second ring. “Have you got people following me?” I asked.

“You mean at the request of your father-in-law?”

“Ex-father-in-law.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Black Impala or a Crown Victoria?”

He made a laugh, but he didn’t sound amused. “Such obvious cop cars? We’re more cunning than that.”

“Would you tell me if you did?”

“No.”

“Why is Wendell Phelps interested in me?”

“I told you-”

“I know what you told me. I pose no threat to Wendell. I pose no threat to his daughter, as she’ll tell you. So what’s the interest?”

“Maybe it’s time for you to tell me about your jitters, Elstrom. Why so nervous? You’re in a bar, and all of a sudden you’re seeing spooks, shadows in the night? Maybe it’s your own shadow you’re seeing… and that’s becoming interesting.”

“Jarobi?”

“Yes?”

“How do you know I was in a bar?”

He said nothing.

“Call them off anyway.”

“What do you mean ‘them’?”

“At least one outside, and the one at the bar.”

“I told you: I had no-” I clicked him off. It was early enough, and I had things I needed to do.

I drove north, to a strip mall. I’d bought my box of Cheerios there, back when Amanda and I were still married. Tonight, it wasn’t the supermarket I was headed for. I went into the giant craft store next door. I’d never before thought to enter such a place, because I’d never had the urge to get crafty with glitter and glue, or clay, or tubes of colors and brushes. That night, though, they had what I needed, and all for less than a hundred dollars. I had them partially disassemble the largest piece, so its shape would not be apparent when I strolled artily out, in case one of Jarobi’s men had followed me. I ducked into the supermarket next, to make it look like a normal shopping trip, bought a small jar of olives and a large box of cupcakes, and drove back to the turret.

I had three of the olives and three of the cupcakes for dinner and went across the hall. I propped Leo’s painting up at the back of the card table and put together the wood stretchers I’d had the craft store people disassemble. I now had a canvas the same size as Leo’s.

I glued another piece of canvas to the back, careful to leave a slightly opened seam like Leo’s original. I laid out all the tubes of acrylic colors and unscrewed their little caps.

Beyond primitive, Amanda had called Leo’s repainting of the supposed Velvet Brueghel. I wished he were there at that moment, so I could laugh at him, but things had gone to hell. He was in an institution, fumbling to unscramble his brain.

I painted a new lavender barn and pink, green-spotted cows. I dabbed red leaves all over spindly black trunks and limbs, and I made orange rolling hills. I tried to work fast, but I had to work carefully, measuring everything on Leo’s original before doing my own. There was no way of knowing how closely Cassone had looked at Leo’s painting.

The person at the craft store said the acrylics would dry quickly. To make sure, I aimed a box fan at the painting before I went up to bed.

Though I was dead tired, sleep wouldn’t come. I kept imagining a black Impala and a colorless Crown Victoria parked along Thompson Avenue. If they hadn’t belonged to Cassone or Jarobi, one or both might have been a rental, picked up at Midway or O’Hare by someone fresh off a plane from L.A.