A Safe Place for Dying (10 page)

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Authors: Jack Fredrickson

BOOK: A Safe Place for Dying
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I held up the photocopy of the
Assembler
photo and studied the brick wall across the street. There was no bus shelter there now, nor had there been when I'd lived at Gateville with Amanda. But I wasn't looking for that, I was looking for the fragment of the ornate shape in the upper left corner of the picture.
I found it right away, as I knew I would back at the library. It was the finial atop the marble column to the right of the entrance to Gateville. I moved a few paces until I was looking at the exact perspective the photographer had used.
Thunder crackled then, and the sky let go, pelting me with hard, cold rain.
I stood unmoving, letting the rain hit. There was no doubt. Across the road, immediately to the right of the entrance column, the repaired lamppost stood gray and indistinct, ghostlike in the downpour.
Right where those kids had stood in the newspaper photo.
Monday night rush hour traffic jammed the four inbound lanes on the Eisenhower, every driver frantic to beat the next wave of the storm slinging in from the west. The radio said it was still ninety-four degrees at six o'clock. I was soaked from standing in the rain at Gateville, the inside of the Jeep was dripping like an Indian sweat lodge, and the closest I was to air conditioning was the 7 Series B.M.W. in the next lane, driven by a suit talking on a cell phone. I wanted to kill him but supposed it was because I was angry about other things.
I'd called the Bohemian's office as I raced away from Gateville. The British-voiced secretary said he was on another call and was already late for a dinner engagement—a dinner with important people, she added. I told her to stuff a candy bar in his face and tell him to wait, then hung up before I got even more personable. Finding out I'd been handled had not made for a mellowing afternoon.
I got to his building at seven o'clock. In the elevator mirror, my damp hair, soaked T-shirt, and paint-splattered Levi's made me look like a guy who didn't have any money. Or one who had too much.
The reception area was empty, but the Bohemian's secretary, whose name I didn't know but decided must be Griselda, materialized at the side door before I could drip much on the oriental carpet. She must have heard the elevator chime. She led me back to the conference room, left, and returned with a roll of paper towels, all without uttering one articulated word. No doubt she was smoked by my tone on the phone, though it could have been she was afraid I'd cause the furniture to mold. I dried off my hair and blotted at my T-shirt with the paper towels.
The Bohemian came in five minutes later, resplendent in formal black trousers with a silk stripe down the side, a pleated white shirt with a high collar, and a black bow tie with enough irregularity to it to show it had been hand-tied. Guys in his crowd don't wear clip-ons. He looked every bit the man off to an important dinner, as Griselda had said. If I'd worn that outfit, people would assume I was a waiter in a French restaurant.
“Vlodek.” He said it as a necessary pronouncement of fact, without enthusiasm, like something he'd discovered stuck to his shoe. He sat down without offering to shake hands.
I pushed the damp picture of the kids at the bus shelter across the table. It left a wet streak. “That was target number two.”
He barely glanced at it. “The children don't take the bus anymore. A van picks them up at their homes. That shelter was torn down in 1982.”
“You knew the significance of that site. It wasn't just some damned lamppost, outside the wall.”
He shrugged. “I checked the old Crystal Waters blueprints. As I said, the shelter was torn down in 1982.”
“Your bomber was telling you he can blow up kids.”
He leaned forward abruptly, both meaty forearms on the table, and glared. “I know no such thing. You can't assume that's the message he was sending.”
“Let the police decide.”
“He's been paid, Vlodek.”
“We
think
he's been paid.”
“That's right. Thanks to you, we cannot be sure. However, I continue to believe the matter is over.”
“Like 1970?”
He leaned back. “Exactly.” His wide, Slavic eyes didn't blink.
“You said you checked the blueprints for Crystal Waters. I went to the Maple Hills Building Department today. They don't have site plans for Crystal Waters.”
“For security, I have the only set.” He folded his big hands. “Why were you looking for them?”
“To verify the location of that.” I pointed at the picture of the bus shelter. “I want to see those prints.”
“For what?”
“For the next strategic target.”
The skin around his eyes tightened. “Strategic target?”
“That lamppost was not a randomly chosen little reminder. It was a strategic target, as you well knew, blown up to send a very specific, and frightening, threat: He'll kill children.”
“We've done what the man demanded, Vlodek. We've paid.”
“An installment. If getting five hundred thousand is that easy, he'll be back for more.”
He looked out the window at the rain beating against the glass. “When do you want to look at the prints?”
“Now.”
He pulled an antique gold pocket watch out of his trousers pocket and flipped open the lid. “You may look, but you must leave them here,” he said, closing the lid with a soft click. “I have to leave. I'm expected at a fund-raiser for our junior senator.” He stood up and looked down at me. “Wendell Phelps, your former father-in-law, will be there.”
“Tell Wendell I send my love.”
“Indeed.” He moved to the door but paused, and the corners of his mouth twitched. “Trick or treat,” he said as he went out.
Griselda brought me the big roll of plans, then went out again and returned with a thermal pitcher of coffee, a pale blue Wedgewood cup and saucer, a little china basket of cream containers, and a bowl of white crystals that could have been sugar or could have turned me into a toad. I gave her a winning smile and told her I didn't use sweetener. She frowned and left. I poured the coffee and unrolled the blueprints.
The top sheet showed the site plan for the whole development: the footprints of the residences, road, streetlamps, guardhouse, and school bus shelter.
Crystal Waters had been built around one elongated oval street, Chanticleer Circle. Ten homes were inside the oval, on wedgeshaped lots that sloped gradually down to a center pond. The remaining seventeen houses were strung around the outside, backed by the brick perimeter wall. The whole plan resembled a doughnut, squeezed at the sides.
The Farraday house had been the first residence on the outer circle to the right of the guardhouse, driving in. On the blueprint, the inside of the Farraday house outline was slightly lighter than the bluish tint of the rest of the sheet. I bent down closer to the drawing. Someone had penciled, and then almost completely erased, a light
X
on the Farraday house.
The small rectangle of the school bus shelter, outside the wall, across from the Farraday house, had also had an
X
drawn on it and then erased. I studied the two little rectangles for a minute but could see no relationship between the two other than proximity.
I flipped slowly through the rest of the blueprints. They contained the detailed construction specifications—the material lists, cross-sections, and dimensions that had been needed to build Gateville. There were nine sheets for the road alone, a dozen just for the
landscaping. Electrical, plumbing, concrete, sewerage, they all looked normal enough.
I went back to the site plan on top, and this time I noticed a little triangle of torn paper hanging from the binding. A previous sheet, perhaps a cover, more likely a contents index, had been torn off.
I went through the prints again. This time I counted pages. It didn't take long, because the sheets were numbered. Blueprint numbers fourteen, nineteen, twenty-seven, forty-one, and fifty-eight were missing.
I checked the little list by the conference room phone and called the Bohemian's extension. Griselda answered on the first ring. She told me he had left. Her hurried tone suggested she'd left her broom idling by the outside door and was anxious to leave, too. Outside, rain was coming down heavy, obscuring the lights from the surrounding buildings. I checked my Timex. It was past nine o'clock. I told her I was finished.
She was there in a minute and walked me out to the foyer. Once she had me safely blocked inside the elevator, she handed me a thick cream-colored business card, almost the same shade as some of the paint splats on my jeans. ANTON CHERNEK, the card read, in raised dark green letters, along with his office telephone number. There was no address. Another phone number had been handwritten in green fountain-pen ink below the printed number.
“Mr. Chernek requested you call him when you finished. That's his private cellular number.” She made no move to step aside to let me back in to use the reception phone.
I ran through the rain to the Jeep. I tried the Bohemian's cell phone before starting off, but it forwarded me to voice mail. I left a message saying that I would try back in a few minutes.
I started the Jeep and put it on the Eisenhower, not wanting to use the cell phone again until I was sure traffic would keep moving. Steering and shifting a Jeep in traffic, especially in the rain, is, at minimum, a two-handed sport, but three hands are needed if a cell
phone is being used, and four if it's all to be done in the proper Chicago style, with one arm waving an upraised finger at the other oblivious morons talking on their own cell phones.
It's bumper cars, played with obscene gestures, but I have hope for the future. Evolution ultimately corrects physical limitations, and I have no doubt that in a thousand years, humans will have sprouted cellular antennae and the necessary two extra hands.
Two miles west of the Bohemian's office, traffic opened up enough to call. This time he answered right away. In the background, I could hear the clink of heavy glasses and the loud laughter of scotch drinkers.
“Do you have more blueprints?”
The clinking and the laughter got softer. He'd moved away from the noise so he could talk. “You have everything I have. What are you looking for?”
“Some pages are missing.” I didn't say anything about seeing the
X
's drawn on the two bomb targets.
For a minute the only thing that came through the phone was people talking in the background, and then he said, “Can you tell which pages?”
“No, just the page numbers. Was there an index page, a cover sheet?”
“I don't recall,” he said. “I just keep them in safe storage.”
“Who has had access to them?”
“Over the years?” He paused. “All kinds of people. Contractors hired by the Members come over to reference them all the time.”
“Do they take them with?”
“Absolutely not.”
“So those prints have never left your offices?”
For a minute, the only sounds coming through the phone were background voices at his party. “Except for the Board,” he said finally.
“Board members have taken them out?”
“Why is this important, Vlodek?”
“I don't know.” I went on. “Does anyone think the D.X.12 was buried outside the house, or could it have been inside?”
“Nobody has established that.”
“Nor will they, given that you bulldozed the site. Our best shot now is the lamppost. Because of the depth of the hole, I'm thinking the bomb must have been buried two or three feet down, under the base.”
“You told Stanley it could have been left by a guy faking a flat tire. Would he have had time to dig that deep without being noticed?”
“I don't see him taking the risk, but it's still my best guess. You're sure there are no other sets of blueprints?”
“They don't exist, not anymore. The developers numbered each set and then made sure those drawings were seen only by the contractors who really needed them. When the project was done, I got them all back. I destroyed them myself, except for my own set.”
“You covered every base, didn't you?”
“Good security comes from absolute attention to detail. Electrical, plumbing, and sewer pipes are all ways into Crystal Waters, even if some of the pipes are less than a half inch thick. We tried to think of everything.”
“The Farraday bomb might have been planted by someone posing as a landscaper, squatting behind a bush,” I said, “but the lamppost, lit up, out in the open, bothers me. Someone planting a bomb there, even with the car jacked up and a spare tire on the ground, took a big risk of being seen digging, and that doesn't fit with the caution our man has been using.”
“Unless the explosive was pushed through a pipe or something, from inside Crystal Waters?”
“It's a speculation,” I said.
“Surely not that electrical conduit pipe beneath the lamppost? It was too small to push anything through.”
“As I said, it's just a speculation.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
In the rain, in the traffic, I couldn't make out the inflection in the Bohemian's voice.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, exactly,” I said.
The snakes came again that night. All colors of them, backlit by the orange flames of the burning houses, writhing and contorting as first one house, then another and another, blew up like monstrous firecrackers on a long string, sending sparks and flaming roof rafters high into the night sky. Until, at last, all the houses were gone, and the ground was flat, scorched black, and nobody was left alive.

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