Read A Safe Place for Dying Online
Authors: Jack Fredrickson
A Safe Place for Dying (12 page)
We worked through my expanded contractor list, highlighting with yellow marker the ones we guessed might have had the opportunity to plant explosives at the guardhouse, the Farraday home, and the bus shelter lamppost. Our prime candidates were contractors that had reason to be working in the groundâroad installers, cement workers, landscapers, electricians, plumbers and sewer outfitsâbut there were dozens of other potentials as well.
I stood up to stretch. It was eleven o'clock, and I was starting to suspect the kitchen hardware installers and the interior decorators. “According to the dates on these records, Crystal Waters must have been one huge beehive, crawling with workers.”
The Bohemian set down his fountain pen. “It was. Because all the houses went up at the same time, only contractors large enough to handle several structures at once were used.”
“Why was that? Why didn't the developer treat the project like other residential projects: sell the lots individually and build the houses one at a time, according to the purchaser's specifications?”
The Bohemian smiled, but it didn't reach to his eyes. “Security. Crystal Waters was always about security. The plan was to build the
houses all at once, then lock out the world. If the houses were built one after another, the project would have gone on much longer. Workmen would have been coming and going for years, and there would be no chance for tight control until the last house was finished.” He shrugged at the irony of it.
houses all at once, then lock out the world. If the houses were built one after another, the project would have gone on much longer. Workmen would have been coming and going for years, and there would be no chance for tight control until the last house was finished.” He shrugged at the irony of it.
We finished the revised contractor list at midnight. By our estimate, at least one hundred and six contractors had had opportunities to plant multiple bombs at Gateville. The Bohemian said he'd have the list researched for current addresses by the following morning.
He leaned back in his chair and laced his fingertips together behind his head. “Let's say we get lucky and we find a just-paroled exâCrystal Waters worker and the police capture him with D.X.12 dust on his fingers. Say he confesses and tells us where he buried all the D.X.12, and we go and dig it up. Could we be sure we're safe then?”
I shook my head.
As arranged, we were back in the Bohemian's conference room the next morning at eight. As I'd come in, I passed a young man leaving the office, carrying a cardboard box filled with desk items and pictures in frames.
The Bohemian wore a crisp, muted glen plaid suit with a soft beige shirt and a perfectly knotted, tiny-figured maroon tie. With his silver hair, glowing tan, and sparkling teeth, he was burnished and polished like a man who'd won the lottery for the second time. Except for his eyes. They looked haunted.
Sitting next to him, Stanley fidgeted in his rumpled security uniform like he'd slept in it. I'd been on the roof all night. I felt like Stanley looked.
The Bohemian tapped a thin stack of stapled papers with a different fountain pen than the one he'd used the day before. Today's pen was fat, like a torpedo, with an iridescent blue barrel and a cap that looked like solid gold.
“I had Buffy come in early to run these contractor names against the State of Illinois active database. She also searched nearby states for the same names, in case any had moved.”
“Who's Buffy?” I asked.
“My secretary.”
Startled, I laughed, and then said, “Fatigue,” to cover it. That the dour Griselda was named Buffy went beyond misnomer; if she'd been a product, it would have been felonious false advertising. I needed sleep.
The Bohemian slid one set of the stapled copies across the table to Stanley, the other to me. “Of the one hundred and six contractors we deem to be candidates, fifty-eight are out of business. The forty-eight actives are asterisked, split twenty-four to a page.”
Each of the two pages had a double column of names, addresses, and phone numbers. Stanley scanned both pages. “I'll check out the second page, you take the first,” he said to me.
“Will you have time?”
“Stanley will have to make the time,” the Bohemian answered sharply, then forced a smile. “Excuse me, I'm beginning to agree with you, Vlodek. This looks hopeless. Too many of the contractors have gone out of business, their worker rosters forever lost to us. Of the ones still operating”âhe tapped his set of the copiesâ“you can bet most of their records will be long gone as well. All of which makes finding our man, assuming he even was one of the workers at Crystal Waters, almost impossible.”
“You've just made the argument for turning this over to the Feds right now,” I said.
The Bohemian nodded.
Stanley looked up from his list. “Where's the harm in checking these first?” He turned to the Bohemian. “If we get nowhere, we'll go to the Feds.”
“Nowhere or not, we go to the Feds tomorrow, Friday, at four,” I said.
“Agreed,” the Bohemian said.
“What about that list of parolees?” I asked Stanley.
“Chief Morris said he'd fax it here this morning.”
The Bohemian leaned toward Stanley. “What did you tell him?”
“Like you said, that we were receiving minor threats, and we suspect a worker from long ago.”
“He didn't make the connection to the Farraday explosion?”
“He doesn't want to make that connection, Mr. Chernek. Chief Morris is very appreciative of Crystal Waters's past support. If he has questions, he won't risk asking them if he doesn't have to.” Stanley went out to check on the list of parolees.
The Bohemian and I sat for a few minutes, listening to each other breathe. It was like straining to hear water drip. After a few minutes, I said, “Maybe we'll get lucky, find somebody who remembers something.”
The Bohemian looked at me. “Do you really think so, Vlodek?”
“Not a chance in hell.”
We went back to silence.
Stanley came back with a stack of photocopies. “I had Buffy make a dozen sets for each of us. That way, we can leave the list at the companies if needed.” He handed one stack of sets to me.
I scanned the list. The parolees were listed alphabetically, along with their ages.
“I masked out the names of the releasing institutions, so nobody can tell this is a parolee list,” Stanley said.
“We're only interested in men old enough to have been at Crystal Waters.” I flipped through the pages. Ignoring the younger parolees still left a few hundred candidates. It looked futile. I stood up, anxious for the next day and a half to be over, and looked at the Bohemian. “Tomorrow at four o'clock.”
He met my eyes and nodded.
Stanley followed me out the door, and we rode down in the elevator together. We walked to my Jeep.
“We can't give up on this, Mr. Elstrom.”
I leaned against the fender. “You don't think we need the Feds?”
“Maybe. But they won't come running. They're being pulled
every which way in these times. Better we do the spadework and bring them something they can get their teeth into quickly.”
every which way in these times. Better we do the spadework and bring them something they can get their teeth into quickly.”
He was probably right; suddenly I was too tired to know. There had been too many nights of too little sleep, even before the mess at Gateville started. I unlocked the Jeep and sat with the key in my hand, watching him as he walked across the parking lot to the baby blue Crystal Waters station wagon. His head was down and his shoulders sagged. He looked like a fat, balding child, about to cry.
Of the twenty-four contractors on my list that were still in business, two were pavers, two were landscapers, three were plumbers, and one was an electrician. The remaining sixteen were a hodgepodge of other things. All had been paid at least five hundred dollars at Gateville, which meant, by our guess, they'd been there long enough to plant explosives in multiple locations.
I pulled a metro map out of the glove box and circled the locations of the companies on my list. They were scattered all around Chicago and its suburbs. The closest, something called The Tillotson Partners, was less than a mile away.
I drove south through the old factory district. Cement mixers, flatbed trucks loaded with lumber, construction vans, and pickups clogged both sides of the dirt-crusted old street, reducing it to one lane. Huge, bright banners hung on half of the old factories and warehouses, advertising residential lofts starting at four hundred thousand dollars per unit. ONLY A FEW LEFT, many read, and I didn't doubt it. Chicago was full of people ready to plop down big scratch to look like they were starving artists. It wasn't for me, and not just because I didn't have the four hundred thousand dollars. The closest I'd ever gotten to art was a paint-by-number canvas of an owl an aunt had thrown away out of sheer embarrassment. Even as a child, I'd had difficulty operating inside the lines.
The rehabbers had not yet gotten around to the ancient, sootstained building that housed The Tillotson Partners. There was no
elevator, and my footsteps echoed loudly on the linoleum steps, nicked and scuffed dull from decades of commerce.
elevator, and my footsteps echoed loudly on the linoleum steps, nicked and scuffed dull from decades of commerce.
The gray-haired lady behind the scarred wood desk on the third floor told me they made signs. Interior and exterior. Road signs, street signs, and washroom signs. That's all they'd ever done since 1956, she said: make signs. She'd never heard of Crystal Waters, but she thought it quite possible they'd made the lettering on the brick wall and the fancy, filigreed iron posts and name signs for Chanticleer Circle. She did not know if the company kept old payroll records. The woman who did the payroll wasn't in; she only came in twice a month. I left my card and asked that the bookkeeper call me. As I went down the stairs, I wondered how the developers of Gateville had chosen the name, Chanticleer Circle, for the project's only streetâand, for that matter, why they had bothered to erect signs at all. When there's only one street, and it's a circle, there's not much potential for confusion about where one is.
In the Jeep, I checked the Bohemian's master list. Safe Haven Properties had paid Tillotson forty-eight hundred dollars back in March of 1970, a month before the guardhouse explosion. That was at the end of the project, when the paving was done and the grounds had been smoothed over and landscaped. Still, Tillotson had had access, and nobody would have questioned them digging holes. I put a question mark next to Tillotson and pulled away.
If even the signage installer was a potential, the hours until the next afternoon, at four, were going to be the most futile of my life.
I hit two more placesâa plasterer and a roofer, neither with records or recollectionsâbefore my stomach reminded me I'd been up for hours and had never had breakfast. I pulled into a true Chicago-style hot dog stand, authentic right down to the flies and the red-and-yellow-striped awning, and scanned the menu painted on the flaking plywood for quick, morning food that would be easy on a nervous gut, like scrambled eggs and whole
wheat toast. They didn't have that, so I ordered a hot dog, French fries, onion rings, and a diet Coke to neutralize the calories, and ate off the fender of the Jeep, standing up.
wheat toast. They didn't have that, so I ordered a hot dog, French fries, onion rings, and a diet Coke to neutralize the calories, and ate off the fender of the Jeep, standing up.
The hot dog had two peppers, plump, fresh green ones. For as long as I could remember, Kutz offered only one, a shriveled, brown little thing that regular customers, when they forgot to tell him to hold it, threw into the bushes so they wouldn't have to look at it. I'd always suspected Kutz offered only the one tiny pepper because he knew his customers would toss the grizzled thing anyway, and, rodent lover that he was, he didn't want to cripple the tender stomachs of the rats that foraged in the hard dirt of his dining area with too many peppers.
I finished greasing my palate, got in the Jeep and spent the rest of the morning and all of the afternoon working my way west, paralleling the Eisenhower Expressway. I stopped at an outfit that made planters, geese, and ducks out of cement and, after them, a drain-tile manufacturer, a curb installer, and an asphalt seal coater. None had people who remembered the Gateville job; none had payroll records from back then. But all had had access inside the gates, and none could be ruled out. As with the companies that morning, there was no point in leaving the list of parolees.
Nobody knew anything; not anymore.
I got to the first plumber on the list just as he was closing up. He was outside his storefront, a block from the expressway, fumbling with a metal accordion security fence. He was about sixty, with a three-day beard stubble, gin on his breath, and a case of the shakes. We talked on the sidewalk as his trembling fingers struggled to snap the padlock. He'd installed the underground sprinkling system at Gateville with three other fellows but hadn't seen them in decades. He made a quick show of looking at my list of parolees, but his eyes kept straying to his watch. He was late for a tavern. He finally got the padlock snapped, told me he had to leave, and took off down the sidewalk as fast as he could aim his wobbling legs.
I scratched him off the list. If that man had just pulled five hundred thousand dollars out of a Dumpster behind Ann Sather's, he'd never have opened his storefront again. He would have stayed home, curled around a bottle, and drunk his way through as much of the money as possible before the reaper punched his ticket.
It was five thirty. I got in line outbound on the Eisenhower and called the Bohemian to report I had nothing to report.
“No likely suspects?”
“Most of them were likely suspects. All had access to the grounds. All could have done a little extra digging and dropped devices into the dirt. The only one I can scratch is the plumber.”
The Bohemian sounded tired. “Are we wasting our time?”
“Yes, along with wasting your money. But if we're getting you closer to calling the Feds tomorrow, it's progress. Have you heard from Stanley?”
“He visited two of his names before he had to get home. He got nowhere, as well.”
“I'll start up again first thing in the morning, but it's going to be the same, so use this evening to convince yourself this thing is too big for us.”
“That's what I told Stanley,” he said.
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