A Safe Place for Dying (9 page)
Read A Safe Place for Dying Online
Authors: Jack Fredrickson
And I could never tell Amanda again that I loved her.
“I staked out the money drop last night.”
The Bohemian inhaled sharply at the other end of the connection.
“I hid in a garage and watched Stanley drop off the money, and then I watched the Dumpster for the rest of the night.”
“What did you see?”
His words were terse, clipped. If he was acting, he was good.
His words were terse, clipped. If he was acting, he was good.
“I fell asleep.”
“What do you mean, you fell asleep?”
“I didn't see anybody pick up the money.”
“Damn it, you don't think the garbagemenâ?”
“I don't know. They showed just before six. I broke my cover, went through all the bags. The money was gone.”
“So it was picked up.” His breathing came easier.
“That's what I think, but I'm worried the bag got tossed into the garbage truck before I got to the Dumpster.”
“For God's sake, Vlodek. What are we to believe?”
“That the bomber got to it sometime between two thirty and six, when it was still dark.”
“When you were asleep.”
“Yes.”
“What were you doing there, Vlodek?”
“Trying to get a photo of the bomber, or a license plate number.”
“Did Stanley authorize this?”
“No.”
“You took the initiative to jeopardize Crystal Waters by yourself?”
“No extra charge.” I sounded hollow. And stupid.
“Yet you saw nothing?”
“Nothing.”
He stopped talking. If he was involved in the extortion, he was relieved that no one had seen the money get picked up. If he was innocent, he was furiousâand might spread the word through the legal community that I was unreliable and should not be hired. Even if I were sitting across from him, watching his face, instead of waiting at the other end of a phone, I doubted that I'd be able to tell what was running through his mind.
I was right. He surprised me.
“What is your billing rate?”
“One hundred twenty-five an hour for research; one fifty for field work, plus expenses.”
He had enough style to not laugh. Even when I had a fullfledged office, I rarely got my clients, insurance companies and lawyers, to pop for more than sixty-five an hour.
“Start your meter now, Vlodek. You will report to me on everything pertaining to this case. You will also keep me apprised, beforehand, of your steps.”
“What about the Board?”
“Your contract with them was completed. They hired you to analyze the notes.”
“What are you really hiring me to do?”
“Follow your nose, as I said. But don't risk Crystal Waters again.”
I told him I'd think about it. He was shrewd, and maybe a
bluffer of the highest order. He wanted to know what I was thinking, up front, before I made a move. He wanted me in a bag, tied tight by the double knot of forewarning and client confidentiality.
bluffer of the highest order. He wanted to know what I was thinking, up front, before I made a move. He wanted me in a bag, tied tight by the double knot of forewarning and client confidentiality.
The question was whether that was importantâand why.
The sky had turned overcast while I was on the phone with the Bohemian. After I hung up, I set out my buckets, pans, and wastebaskets on the top floor, guessing at the drip points. Then I called Stanley Novak and told him I was driving out to Gateville. I was guessing at that, too, figuring ace investigators substituted movement for thought when they didn't know what to do next.
The sky to the west was black when I got to Gateville. A heavy, studded steel beam hinged to a thick iron post had been installed in front of the decorative wrought-iron gates. The tuckpointers were gone, but there was a man up on a ladder, cleaning the glass globe of one of the lampposts. I would have bet there was a Glock in his plastic tray, next to the Windex. I pulled off the road and parked next to the entrance.
Stanley and another guard hurried out of the guardhouse as I shut off the engine. Stanley recognized the Jeep, motioned for the guard to go back, and came over. He wasn't wearing his usual smile.
“Mr. Chernek called after he spoke to you. He said you staked me out.”
“Not you. The bomber.”
“You took a big risk.”
“We're all taking a big risk, Stanley.”
“Mr. Chernek said you didn't see the pickup.”
There was nothing to say to that.
“So what are you going to do now, Mr. Elstrom?”
“Chernek told me to follow my nose, but to do it with my mouth closed.”
Stanley smiled, a little. Things were thawing.
I opened the door and got out. “I thought I'd start with 1970.”
Thunder clapped far in the west.
“The guardhouse explosion?”
“Or before.”
Stanley shook his head. “We never found any link to anything, back then. There was the first note, then the guardhouse bomb, then the second note with the payment instructions.”
“Then the ten-thousand-dollar payment, and the bomber went away.”
“That's it, Mr. Elstrom.”
A few drops of rain fell. Fifty feet away, the guy on the ladder continued polishing the lamp glass. In the rain. Clever, that disguise.
The lights on the entrance pillars and the row of lampposts came on, bright as surgical lamps. I turned away from the glare.
“Have you upped the wattage on those bulbs?”
“No.” Stanley gestured at the guy on the ladder. “But as you can see, we're keeping the glass really clean.”
“I don't remember these lights being so bright.”
“You only saw them from your car, Mr. Elstrom, coming or going at night. They're brighter when you stand next to them.”
Ten feet away, the lamppost that had been blown out of the ground sat on a new metal base, on new concrete, surrounded by fresh sod. I walked over to it.
“Our man could have pulled off the highway, faking a flat tire,”
I said. “He could have dug down with a little collapsible shovel or a garden trowel while he was hunched down by the tire, twisted a dial or pressed a button and dropped the device into the hole, then scooped the dirt back in and taken off. What would you guess that would take? Two or three minutes if he'd practiced, from the time he pulled off to the time he got back on the highway?”
I said. “He could have dug down with a little collapsible shovel or a garden trowel while he was hunched down by the tire, twisted a dial or pressed a button and dropped the device into the hole, then scooped the dirt back in and taken off. What would you guess that would take? Two or three minutes if he'd practiced, from the time he pulled off to the time he got back on the highway?”
He nodded.
The raindrops started falling heavier. Stanley looked up at the darkening sky.
“But none of your guys saw anything like that?”
“No. I had to be careful how I asked, because they don't know about the letters or the D.X.12, but they didn't see anything. Remember, we weren't watching outside the walls back then,” he said, his gaze shifting to the man on the ladder. He held his palm up to catch a few drops. “It's raining, Mr. Elstrom.”
“Here's my question, Stanley: There are five of these iron lampposts strung out along the wall on each side of the gate. Why blow up the one closest to the entrance?”
He wiped a raindrop that had fallen on his nose. I couldn't tell whether he was thinking about my question or worrying about the approaching storm.
I touched the repaired lamppost. “At night, this one's not only illuminated by its own bulb but also by the lights from the entrance. Why risk burying a bomb under the best-lighted lamppost? Why not plant the bomb in the shadows at the end of the wall”âI pointed down the roadâ“where it's darker and less visible?”
Thunder boomed closer in the west. Big raindrops started falling, dotting Stanley's pale blue uniform shirt. We started toward the entrance.
“Is that important, why he chose one particular lamppost?” he asked over his shoulder as I opened the door of the Jeep.
“Beats me.”
The rain came down then, hard. Stanley ran for the guard shack. I shut the door of the Jeep, started it, and pulled away.
I drove a half mile west, took a right, and went north through the woods, past the sculpted yews of the golf club that stretched down to the road. It cost a hundred grand to drive through those yews, and that was just for openers. The rain was falling in sheets now; the golfers were inside, deepening their sun flushes with gins, tonics, and limes. I doubted that any of them had set out pickle buckets before coming to the club.
The Maple Hills Municipal Building is a single-story, redbrick confection with stubby white pillars and black shutters, meant to look like it's been there two hundred years longer than it has. It holds both the library and the village hall. I parked and ran through the rain to the arch that opened into the library. Two old men in pastel shorts,
National Geographics
spread open on their laps, dozed in big nubby chairs across from the reception desk.
National Geographics
spread open on their laps, dozed in big nubby chairs across from the reception desk.
I asked the sturdy woman behind the counter for old issues of local papers. She led me to the microfilms of the
Maple Hills Assembler.
I remembered the
Assembler;
I'd leafed through a couple of issues Amanda hadn't gotten around to throwing out. It was a ten-page local shopping and good news rag, just right for the bottom of a hamster cage, so long as the hamster wasn't looking for much beyond wedding announcements, real estate ads, and recipes for dishes that blue-haired old ladies could eat with little spoons. I threaded the spool for the 1960s and forwarded it to 1968.
Maple Hills Assembler.
I remembered the
Assembler;
I'd leafed through a couple of issues Amanda hadn't gotten around to throwing out. It was a ten-page local shopping and good news rag, just right for the bottom of a hamster cage, so long as the hamster wasn't looking for much beyond wedding announcements, real estate ads, and recipes for dishes that blue-haired old ladies could eat with little spoons. I threaded the spool for the 1960s and forwarded it to 1968.
The first mention of Crystal Waters came in September. The
Assembler
reporterâa woman with the same last name as the publisher, and whose own recipe for corn soufflé took up half of page threeâgushed with the news that Maple Hills, population 868, had been selected as the site for a new, high-security residential development. Coming so soon after the “unfortunate events of Martin
Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and those riots,” she wrote, “it is welcome news that occurrences such as those will not be taken lying down. Crystal Waters is going to be the state of the art, a virtual Tomorrowland of personal security.”
Assembler
reporterâa woman with the same last name as the publisher, and whose own recipe for corn soufflé took up half of page threeâgushed with the news that Maple Hills, population 868, had been selected as the site for a new, high-security residential development. Coming so soon after the “unfortunate events of Martin
Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and those riots,” she wrote, “it is welcome news that occurrences such as those will not be taken lying down. Crystal Waters is going to be the state of the art, a virtual Tomorrowland of personal security.”
The rest of the article read as though it had been lifted intact from a sales brochure. Twenty-seven homes, each in excess of five thousand square feet, each with a library, a three-car garage, multiple alarm systems, and access to a bomb shelter, among other amenities too numerous to mention, were to be designed by name architects and constructed on one-acre lots. The exteriors would be of brick, with cement tile roofs, to make them impervious to fire, and had been carefully designed to blend with one another to create a “harmonious whole.” An unnamed representative of Safe Haven Properties, the developers, said the homes would have features that would make them virtually impregnable, details of which, of course, could not be released. Surrounding the development would be a high brick wall with a guard structure at the only entrance. The
Assembler
article ended with the news that potential purchasers had already been invited to submit applications to the new development, and construction was expected to begin the following spring.
Assembler
article ended with the news that potential purchasers had already been invited to submit applications to the new development, and construction was expected to begin the following spring.
Safe, snobbish, and selective. No wonder the corn soufflé lady had gushed.
I slow-forwarded through the next issues. The year 1968 may have been a rough one for Americaâassassinations and “those riots,” as the reporter had put itâbut in Maple Hills, all the news was good. A vegetable market opened, a flower show was well attended, and the developers of Crystal Waters donated a new fire truck to the village. Even the recipes I read, in case I ever graduated past Lean Cuisines and microwaved macaroni and cheese, sounded positively delightful.
The next mention of Crystal Waters came two months later, just before Thanksgiving. The corn soufflé lady reported that over four
hundred applications for the twenty-seven homes had been received, some from as far away as Europe. All, she noted, had been accompanied by the requisite one-hundred-thousand-dollar deposits. I wondered how the reporter came up with such a tidbit. Good, hard journalistic investigation, I supposed, or perhaps she'd bribed one of the Safe Haven developers with a soufflé.
hundred applications for the twenty-seven homes had been received, some from as far away as Europe. All, she noted, had been accompanied by the requisite one-hundred-thousand-dollar deposits. I wondered how the reporter came up with such a tidbit. Good, hard journalistic investigation, I supposed, or perhaps she'd bribed one of the Safe Haven developers with a soufflé.
The vetting process must have been extensive, because it wasn't until March of 1969 that the
Assembler
reported that twenty-seven families had completed their final interviews with the developers and had been notified that their one-hundred-thousand-dollar deposits would be retained. It must have been a grand day for all.
Assembler
reported that twenty-seven families had completed their final interviews with the developers and had been notified that their one-hundred-thousand-dollar deposits would be retained. It must have been a grand day for all.
Ground was broken the next month, and the
Assembler
carried periodic updates and photographs throughout 1969 and early into 1970, all of them on the front page. In May of 1970âthe month students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State had been shot by nervous National Guardsmen, an event that went unreported by the
Assembler
âthe paper ran a photo of a group of deliriously happy Mexicans laying the last bits of sod outside the wall at Gateville. There had been no report of the guardhouse explosion, as I'd expected.
Assembler
carried periodic updates and photographs throughout 1969 and early into 1970, all of them on the front page. In May of 1970âthe month students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State had been shot by nervous National Guardsmen, an event that went unreported by the
Assembler
âthe paper ran a photo of a group of deliriously happy Mexicans laying the last bits of sod outside the wall at Gateville. There had been no report of the guardhouse explosion, as I'd expected.
I advanced the film through June, the month the Members moved in, and then through July and August. The next mention of Crystal Waters came on the Wednesday after Labor Day, in a photograph on the front page. It was a grainy close-up of a dozen children waiting for a school bus in front of a brick shelter outside the wall of Crystal Waters. I stared at the photo, only dimly aware that my heart had started pounding like an oil derrick.
I leaned closer to the microfilm screen. To the left of the shelter stood a lamppost, and immediately to the left of that, in the upper corner of the photograph, appeared a fragment of an ornate shape. I stared at that shape in the corner of the photo for a full minute, then fed a dime into the printer and ran a copy of the picture. I rewound the spool and went out into the hall connecting the library
with the village offices, trying to tell myself that odd little ornate shape might mean nothing.
with the village offices, trying to tell myself that odd little ornate shape might mean nothing.
I followed the signs on the wall, every one of my footfalls echoing loudly down the green tile stairs. I turned the knob on the frosted glass door marked BUILDING DEPARTMENT. Only one of the six gray metal desks inside was occupied. A three-hundred-pound man in a plaid shirt, with a plastic shirt-pocket protector full of different-colored felt tipsâan assortment I would have killed for in third gradeâlooked up from the newspaper spread out on his desk. By the hard set of his jowls, he didn't appear delighted by the interruption.
“What do you need?”
The security of a city job,
I almost snapped at him, but that would have been the knots in my gut talking. “I'd like to look at the site drawings for Crystal Waters,” I said instead.
I almost snapped at him, but that would have been the knots in my gut talking. “I'd like to look at the site drawings for Crystal Waters,” I said instead.
His oak swivel chair creaked as he shifted his attitude to look at the wall clock. It was ten to five. “Can't do.”
“Can't do or won't do?”
“Can't do, won't do, whatever. We don't have them.”
“I thought site plans had to be submitted to get building permits.”
He took another look at the clock. Only nine minutes to quitting time now. He was probably thinking he still had to throw away his newspaper.
“You a resident of Crystal Waters?”
“I used to live there. I want to check an easement.”
He leaned his bulk back. The chair groaned. Oak is strong, big grained, but if it's stressed too much, it'll give up. Just like people.
He picked up his newspaper and started folding it. “Crystal Waters is like a separate country. They convinced the mayor their security would be breached if we had their prints.” He snorted, shaking his head. “You people. Always special needs.”
“I told you, I don't live there now.”
“Whatever.” He dropped the newspaper into his wastebasket and shifted his girth. He was preparing to stand up.
The clock ticked loudly, echoing off the gray metal of the desks. A site plan would have been good, but only to double-check what my fear already knew, and I did have the microfilm photo. I went out, letting the door slam, and up the stairs.
It had stopped raining, but the air was hot and thick and gray, as if it were holding the drops suspended, ready to unleash them in one sudden torrent of fury. To the west, lighting crackled in the dark sky, signaling the next storm front that was about to come through. I unzipped the driver's-side plastic window and drove back to Gateville, parking across the road from the entrance. I got out and waved at the guard who had moved out from between the pillars. He was the same one who had come out with Stanley earlier. He waved back in recognition but remained by the gate, watching me.
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