The Dead Caller from Chicago

Four

The next morning, I grabbed for my cell phone before I got out of bed, even though I’d left the ringer on. None of my calls to Leo or Endora had been returned.

I dressed quickly and drove down Leo’s street. Workers were unloading a huge pile of cement forms in front of the new excavation. They were going to be pouring a big basement.

I parked in front of Leo’s bungalow and got out carrying my tool bag, like I’d come to fix something. It was true enough. I hoped to repair my peace of mind.

Even though it was cold, right at freezing, and early, the neighbor woman was out in the snow in her backyard, wearing galoshes and a black down coat. She was hanging laundry. The array on her line, large ladies’ undergarments all, showed that she lived alone. I supposed the wet things would freeze quickly and make sounds like huge thunderclaps when they cracked, should the wind pick up.

“Get hold of Leo?” she shouted through the wood clothespins in her mouth.

“There might be a problem with the hot water heater,” I said, to explain the tools.

“Then why are you going to the garage?”

“Just checking everything,” I said.

“You tell Leo how it’s dangerous to walk around unshoveled walks?”

“He was mortified.”

Her eyes and nose followed me as I walked to the garage. Turning my back to hide my hands, I rummaged in my tool bag for my thinnest putty knife and slipped it between the service door and the jamb. The door popped open on something I hadn’t expected to see.

Leo’s purple convertible was inside. He rarely kept his Porsches longer than two years and always kept them immaculate. No longer. A foot-long scrape of brown paint had been cut into the rear fender on the passenger’s side.

Pa Brumsky’s monstrous old Ford LTD, painted that same brown, was gone. It had been backed out for the first time in a decade, hurriedly enough to scrape the Porsche.

I slammed the service door shut and quickly walked to the house.

The flimsy porch door was unlocked, as usual. Ma didn’t worry about thieves coming for her Diet Dew, prunes, and All-Bran. The barrel of nonsplits rested where Leo and I had dropped it, the object of one of the last laughs we’d shared.

The thick back door was locked. Again the thin putty knife worked fast magic. I stepped inside.

My shoes crunched on pistachio shells. A sparse trail of them had been dragged all the way back from the front room. There’d been another movie night since Leo and I had vacuumed, but this time, impossibly, no one had cleaned up. The trail of shells fit with the scraped Porsche. Leo and his mother had been in a panic to get away from Rivertown.

Leo’s bedroom was at the back. I went in, ducking under the plastic airplane dangling from the ceiling. There’d once been a whole squadron suspended there, painted in psychedelic variations of yellow, purple, green, and pink. Even as a child, Leo had seen the world brightly. Now only one remained, a World War II Spitfire he’d painted in orange and green stripes.

His bed was made, but that meant nothing; he spent most of his nights downtown with Endora. I checked his closet. The same startling mix of pants and Hawaiian shirts was nestled in with the plain white shirts and conservative two-thousand-dollar designer suits he wore for work. I couldn’t tell if anything was missing. He could have packed little to nothing if he was in the kind of hurry that caused him to trash his Porsche.

The kitchen was a mess. The sink was piled with supper dishes, and more pistachio shells lay on the wax-yellowed linoleum. The door of one cabinet was open. It was the low, easily reachable one that Leo kept stocked with the tiny, airline-sized bottles of whiskey, gin, and vodka that he thought would slow Ma’s drinking. The shelf had been swept clear. It was a good sign. Ma had been in a hurry, but she’d been lucid. She hadn’t left her booze.

I opened the refrigerator. It was full, as always stocked with store goods and a dozen of Ma’s scratched, opaque Tupperware containers. Two unopened gallons of milk rested on the top shelf. Even after he’d stopped growing at five foot six, Ma always insisted that Leo drink two glasses a day.

Ma’s bedroom opened off the dining room. Her bed was unmade, and two of her dresser drawers had been pulled out. She’d packed fast.

Christ on the cross, her only decoration on the dark papered walls, was slightly askew. It could have happened when she’d jerked open the closet door beside it.

In the front room, cocktail glasses and bowls of bridge mix and prunes lay on brand-new tray tables facing the big-screen television. Leo must have hid the big tools; only the Home Depot pliers lay on the new tables. Not surprisingly, the pistachio shells were the thickest on the front-room carpet.

Shells on the floors, dirty dishes, swept-away booze bottles, pulled-open dresser drawers, and one swiftly scraped Porsche all pointed to a fast escape.

Ma and Leo had fled.

My footsteps drummed on the old wood steps as I went down to the basement. Not many months before, Ma asked Leo to clear it out so she and her friends could exercise. Ever the positive thinker, he’d dragged the clutter to self-storage.

When she specified shiny dance poles, dimmable lighting, and the red velvet walls of a strip club, he remained optimistic. Anything that fought the arthritis was fine. He even kept a smile pasted on his face when she requested a new big-screen television to play the special high-bass, heavy-drum videos that one of her ancient friends found in a dirty-movies store downtown. When the ladies began sewing costumes of beads and pull-away Velcro, he began to pray for release.

It came, with pain. First, one of Ma’s most imaginative octogenarian friends, Mrs. Roshiska, was carted off to the hospital with a slipped disc. Another of the girls then damaged a rotator cuff, the result of tugging too exuberantly on the pole. Finally, Ma herself took to bed with sciatica.

Leo acted fast. He brought everything back from self-storage: the tiny artificial Christmas tree they used to shake off and put on top of the rabbit-eared television, before Ma got the big screen; the model railroad layout I’d helped Leo set up in seventh grade; the dozen boxes of drugstore china Ma liberated when she’d been young and there’d been such a thing as drugstore lunch counters. In no time flat, Leo restored the artifacts of the lives Brumsky to the same mounded mess they’d been in since I was a kid and would have given anything to live in a place so cluttered with memories of good family times.

That day, though, the pile in the middle of the basement had the musty smell of stuff that would never be needed again. Leo and his mother were gone and unreachable, as though they’d been sucked off the planet, and that made no sense at all.

Leo’s office looked neat and orderly and waiting for work, as always.

I sat behind his desk. The coffee cup of sharpened pencils rested where it had always been. I’d had a cup just like it, festooned with the name of some fool who’d dared to run against one of the lizards for water commissioner. Mine had gotten lost in one of the monthly moves I’d had to make as a kid, shuffling from one aunt to the next. Leo, though, still had his cup, like everything else from his youth. Once he owned something, he kept it for life.

Like me, as his friend.

The last time I’d been in that room, Leo had snapped a pencil he was taking from that cup. He’d gotten a phone call that drained the blood from his face. He’d called the man Snark.

He’d whispered, “But you’re dead,” disbelieving, into the phone.

He’d said something else I didn’t understand, about throwing something out because he thought it was a joke, and he’d mentioned someone named… what was it… Teddings.

I’d asked him about his caller, Snark. He hadn’t answered at first. He’d paused for a long moment and then, in a soft daze, mumbled something about the summer after I’d left Rivertown. I asked him again who’d called.

“A dead man,” he finally said.

I looked across the office. The very wet Bo Derek, sitting in the surf, smiled back. We’d been high school freshmen when he found that particular piece of art rolled up in a big can at the Discount Den. We still joked that was the moment we discovered love, or at least a sufficiently wet and excited approximation of it.

I leaned forward. A picture I’d never noticed before hung above the row of mismatched filing cabinets, barely visible behind the tall art reference books. It was a pastoral scene of a lavender barn and two pink, green-spotted cows against a background of rolling orange hills and leafy red trees, signed with a big “Leo B.” in the corner. He must have done it in fifth or sixth grade. Leo was forever resurrecting stuff from the massive pile in the center of the basement floor.

I rummaged through his desk. Pens and notepads and checkbook and envelopes and green Pendaflex file folders. Everything looked normal.

I went up the stairs thinking that I should bring out the vacuum and the broom and the dustpan. The Brumskys, Ma and Leo, kept their modest place neat. To see it a mess seemed somehow a sacrilege.

A thought then stabbed: There might be a need for cops and forensics people to see things exactly as they were now.

I went out the back way and tried to lock the door tight against that kind of thinking.