The Dead Caller from Chicago

Fifty-seven

I called Jenny again, and again got sent to her voice mail. By now it was the eighth time.

I had two other calls to make. Demons were demanding to be let into the light.

I phoned Amanda’s office first. “Any word from the tycoon?” I asked Vicki, her assistant.

Vicki and I had always gotten along on a superficial level. Used to be, Amanda always took my calls, and that meant it was OK for Vicki to laugh, a little.

Not today. “She’s out of the office, Dek.”

“Out of the country,” I said, as though I hadn’t learned it from a cop instead of the woman I’d once loved. “I was just calling to see how she was.”

She softened, a little. “She’s been working awfully hard. She needs a rest. Taking some time off will do her loads of good.”

“Absolutely,” I said to the vagueness.

“I’ll tell her you called, when she phones in?”

“That would be swell,” I said and hung up.

I had to make the second call, even though it made me smaller.

“Rudolph and Associates,” the receptionist said.

“Mr. Rudolph’s office, please.”

“Mr. Rudolph’s office,” his secretary, presumably, said.

“I’m calling, really, to leave a message. He’s in Europe, right? Vacationing?”

“Well yes, but-”

I hung up. Richard Rudolph, the silver-haired and no doubt silver-tongued commodities broker who’d been waiting so solicitously when I drove her back to her condo, hadn’t just been Amanda’s social escort. He’d been there waiting, right with her father. Now he was escorting her to Europe.

Oddly, I did not feel anger, or hurt. Mostly, I felt relief, though I wasn’t ready to probe at that.

I called Jenny again, thinking to leave a ninth message.

“Yes?” she asked abruptly, whispering.

“I’m wondering-”

“Yes. Dinner. Next week?”

“I’d like that, but let’s also talk now. I’ve got questions about a tattooed Russian man, maybe three.”

I was expecting a laugh, as a mask, but what I got was a curt “Can’t talk” before she hung up.

It might have been nothing; it might have been more.

I sat down in the La-Z-Boy to watch a Chicago news show and promptly fell asleep. I didn’t wake up until after eleven. I was famished. I slipped into my peacoat and went out. Even though it was late, the night was unseasonably warm. The last of the drab dirty snow had melted, revealing a drab brown tinged green by the sickly yellow of my outdoor lamp. The glory of spring was on its way.

A drive to the Hamburgers was in order. A late-night, venerable fast food location on Thompson Avenue, it routinely changed owners and offerings, from hot dogs to Chinese, tacos, southern barbecue, and even once to fried fish, though images of things snagged whiskered and weeping from the Willahock killed that incarnation even quicker than the others. Never, though, had any of the owners been confident enough to gamble good money on a new rooftop sign, and so the place remained the Hamburgers.

Leo would be fine company, if he were home. He’d be up for grease and whatever laughs might be needed to settle unsettled thoughts about what was going down in Rivertown.

I’d just turned onto his block when a tiny white light flickered in a window next door to the excavation. There was no power in the empty bungalow. Someone was inside.

I drove on. A lamp was on in Leo’s front room, but there were no reflected images from the big-screen television. Ma and her friends must have been putting in bingo time at the church to salve their consciences about the movies that were soon to be flaring up again.

I edged forward a little to see down the gangway. There were no lights coming from Leo’s basement office either. He must have been at Endora’s, putting in bingo time of a different nature.

I continued to the end of the block, bothered by the flicker I’d seen in the empty bungalow. I was bothered, too, by Jenny’s abruptness on the phone.

I turned the corners. Sure enough, Jenny had parked on the next block over. I parked twenty feet behind and got out, pulling up the collar of my peacoat, tugging down my watch cap, and looking, I supposed, like a thug out for an evening stroll.

I continued around the block to the excavation and ducked behind a stack of extra forms that hadn’t been needed for the still-unpoured basement walls. After a moment, I snuck a look at the bedroom window across the hole. No tiny white light flickered from it now.

What I’d seen might have been a faint reflection of my own headlights or a lamp in a house nearby. I decided to give it ten minutes before taking my misfiring, suspicious mind down to the Hamburgers and feeding it something besides unfounded fantasies.

I only had to wait for half of those ten minutes before a van coasted silently to the curb, fifteen feet from where I was hiding. It had pulled up like a ghost ship, without headlamps or even brake lamps. Somebody had worked to make it run invisibly in the dark.

A door creaked open, and another, and then both were softly closed. Another set of doors opened. I eased up to look around the pile of forms. Two figures, one tall, one shorter, stood at the back of the van, silently sliding out an aluminum extension ladder. They carried it to the edge of the excavation and set it down gently. The shorter of them hurried back to the van and returned with a long-handled shovel and laid it next to the ladder. Both then walked back to the van and, together, tugged something out of the back.

It looked like a roll of carpet, wrapped in plastic. They each took an end and began lugging it to the excavation. By the way they struggled, it was heavier than carpet.

A woman’s voice softly counted out, “One, two, three,” and they heaved the bundle into the hole. It hit the gravel with a soft thud.

And perhaps a last gasp of outrage, though that was likely my imagination.

I tucked back behind the forms. They’d see me if they looked around.

The soft creak of aluminum against aluminum came next, as the ladder was extended past the forms. It rattled as it was set down into the hole and hard-soled boots began climbing down.

“Hurry, damn it,” the counting voice called softly. I’d heard that voice before.

From down in the hole came the faint sound of metal scraping at stones. I’d made those same sounds, the night I buried Wozanga. The person in the hole began grunting as the digging got harder, into the frozen clay. Several times the shovel clanked against rocks, and finally the person in the hole swore at the noise. I was sure of his voice, too.

Then, in less time than I’d taken, the sound of gravel being shoveled came again as the hole was being covered up. He’d not dug as deep.

Footfalls climbed the ladder. It was pulled from the hole. They took it to the van, and slid it inside. The woman hurried back for the shovel and put it in the van, and they were gone. Only at the corner did they switch on their headlights.

I stayed low, waiting. Less than a minute later, footsteps hurried down the front steps of the bungalow next door, growing louder as the woman’s shape came toward me. It could only be Jenny.

She stopped at the far side of the hole. Bright light from her video camera flashed into the excavation for an instant, and then she was done. She hurried down the block.

It was no time for a reunion. I waited until she got to the haze of light at the corner before I straightened up. I’d let her drive away before I headed to the Jeep.

She disappeared around the corner, and I stepped onto the sidewalk… and froze. A man had emerged from between two parked cars and was following Jenny from the street. He, too, was backlit by the streetlamp when he got to the corner. He wore a fedora. Few men wore them anymore. Except for two, outside the Rivertown Health Center.

I moved into the street, staying low and close to the cars like he was doing. He turned at the corner, toward where Jenny had parked her Prius.

I got there just as lights flashed briefly halfway up the block. Jenny was in the street, using a remote to unlock her car.

He was beside her in an instant. She stiffened. I could only stop, three cars behind them.

He reached around her, opened the driver’s door, and pushed her into the bright light of the interior. He gestured with something in his left hand; no doubt he had a gun. She scrambled onto the passenger’s seat, and he got in behind the wheel. The interior went dark.

I was only fifteen feet away but would be powerless against a gun.

He switched on the headlights. The Prius moved silently from the curb.

I slipped into the Jeep, waited until they got to the next corner, and started my engine.