Authors: Jack Fredrickson

A Safe Place for Dying (13 page)

BOOK: A Safe Place for Dying

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The first of the two landscapers was a mile and a half north of the turret, on a side street off LaGrange Road. It was just getting light when I pulled into the gravel lot Friday morning. I parked between a flatbed truck loaded with balled shrubs and a rusty black Chevy Nova that had been old twenty years before.

The owner was behind the wood trailer office, making marks on a clipboard as two Mexicans loaded evergreens onto another flatbed truck. He was in his early forties.

“Sure, I remember Crystal Waters. I was a kid, but I worked on the job with my dad and the crew. There were workers everywhere. It was a big deal for my dad, getting hired to work on a major site like that one.”

“Do you still have records from that job, employee lists?”

He looked at me, reappraising the story I'd given him. I'd said there were sewer leaks at Crystal Waters and I was looking for anyone who might know about changes to the original blueprints. That didn't explain wanting employee rosters, and he'd caught it. “Employee lists?”

“We think there were deviations from the sewer plans that
might have caused you to change your own ground work. We're hoping some of your old employees would remember.”

He didn't believe me. I wouldn't have, either.

“We don't keep payroll records that long.”

The dim bulb that's loose-wired in my head flickered weakly as I realized my mistake. Landscapers don't always keep names. Some of them hire workers for cash, undocumented people up for the summer.

He put down his clipboard. “We've got nobody here from that long ago, except for me.” He made a laugh with his mouth. “But I was more interested in Little League than landscaping in those days.”

He walked me around front to make sure I got back in the Jeep. He probably didn't figure me for Immigration and Naturalization, because my story was too cheesy, too full of holes, but he knew I wasn't telling the truth. I gave him one of my cards. It has my name, the word RESEARCH underneath, and my cell phone number. I asked him to call if he remembered anything.

As I pulled away, I looked in the rearview mirror just as he dropped my card into the trash barrel.

The electrical contractor worked out of a whitewashed converted gas station in a rundown section on the western edge of Chicago, next to Oak Park. I pushed open the peeling green wood door and stepped into the dank dark of what had once been the gas station office. An old man sat behind a dented metal desk, reading a tattered copy of
Popular Mechanics
in the dim light of a gooseneck lamp. He put down the magazine, pulled his feet off the desktop, and smiled up like he was grateful for the interruption.

I skipped the story about sewer leaks and just said I was trying to track down people who'd worked at Crystal Waters.

“I remember that job.” He offered me coffee from a scratched aluminum Thermos. I shook my head. He poured some for himself
into a clear plastic cup and went on. “Never worked in a place so fancy. I was hired at the last minute to wire the marble fountain in the pond. Job only took two days.”

I remembered the Bohemian's comment about hiring only big contractors to work at Gateville. “Weren't you a little small for a project like Crystal Waters?”

“You bet,” he laughed. “Those projects always go to the big boys. I've always been small time, adding outlets in somebody's home, putting in patio lights, or some such. That, and fixing electric motors.” He pointed at the doorway to the old auto service bay. I looked, and saw shelves piled high with dozens of small, oily black motors and dusty spools of colored wire.

“One of the main electrical contractors at Crystal Waters had a problem at the last minute,” he continued. “Somebody quit sudden or something, just as the job was almost finished. They called me, on the hurry-up, to finish the wiring to the fountain so they could get the final city inspection and people could start moving in. I figured they got me out of the yellow pages,” he said, pointing to a wood sign on the wall: A-1 Electrical. “My name's Ziloski, so I go with A-1. I get a lot of calls because I'm the first name in the book.”

As he talked, I turned to look again at his inventory of electrical motors and coils of colored wire. Something about them nagged at me, a question I should know to ask, but I couldn't think of it.

“Need a motor?” Ziloski chuckled, his voice nudging me. “I got plenty.”

I laughed at that and asked him more questions to keep him talking. I wanted time to think of the question I couldn't grasp.

“I never worked around buildings so posh,” he said again. He sounded like someone who'd caught a glimpse of a movie star as he described the fountain, the houses, and the expensive, mature trees that were planted to make the development look like it had been there for years. The details were as fresh in his mind as if he'd seen them yesterday.

I was only half-listening; my mind was still clutching for the question that would not come. I gave up, finally, after an hour of jawing, and left him to his ragged magazine, rusted motors, and dusty coils of colored wire. I doubted he'd been at Gateville long enough to do much of anything, but I had to give him a question mark on the list because I didn't have solid reason to cross him off.

I visited another landscaper and then one of the generic names that turned out to be a fertilizing operation. Neither seemed a likely candidate, but each had had access. I gave them angry question marks, too. I was getting nowhere.

I went east, then north up Western Avenue, to the second plumber on my list. I pulled off the street in front of the white frame building and parked between two vans.

“I need some help with a plumbing project you guys did in 1970,” I said to the black-haired man working at a cluttered desk in the paneled front office.

“Warranty ran out yesterday,” he said over his reading glasses. Then he laughed. “Which project?”

“Crystal Waters, in Maple Hills. Is there anybody here who worked on that job?”

“I did, start to finish. Over a year.”

I looked at him more closely. I'd thought he was in his early forties when I walked in, but the lines around his eyes made him older than that. He could have been at Gateville.

I didn't bother with coy. “There have been a couple of recent disturbances that we think might date back to the construction of the development.”

“The house that blew up earlier this summer?”

“No, not that.”

“They're thinking someone planted explosives in the plumbing when that house was being built?”

I looked out the window. He was reading me like I had a digital display wired on my forehead.

He whistled. “I'll be damned,” he said, not at all bothered by my lack of a response. “We had ten, fifteen guys on that job, all told. Had the contract for the rough and the finish plumbing for all the houses. Mister, that place was crawling with all kinds of workers, so it could have been anybody, not just plumbers. Unless you're telling me you're sure the explosives were planted in the plumbing?”

“I'm not talking about explosives.”

“Bet your ass you're not,” he grinned. “Well, hiding explosives on that job would have been easy enough. There was so much going on, nobody would have paid attention. That jerkweed Maple Hills building inspector sure wouldn't have caught it. He didn't look for much except where the doughnuts were.”

“Have you got employee records from back then?”

“You think we might have made a note in somebody's file: âGood worker, but plants bombs?'” He waited for my laugh and then said, “We keep good records, but only for seven years.”

I showed him the list of parolees. “Any names look familiar?”

He took ten minutes to examine the pages before shaking his head. “None of these were ours.”

“Do you remember anything unusual about any of your men from back then, like someone who acted strange, or was mad about something?”

“Mister, I remember something unusual about most of the men who worked for me, then and since. Crystal Waters was a long, dirty job. There was mud everywhere because everything was tore up. Contractors were trying to get all the homes done at once, so there was lots of push to get things done on schedule. Job like that, at any one time, half our guys would have been pissed off at something. But mad enough to plant bombs? Not likely.”

On my way out, I asked him to keep what we'd talked about quiet, because a lot of it was speculation. He said he would, and I believed him. But as I closed his door, I realized I wouldn't have minded if he used a megaphone to shout the story up and down
Western Avenue. It would chase the people out of Gateville, out of harm's way.

It was noon; four hours until the Bohemian was to call the Feds. I stopped at Kentucky Fried, skipped the fried, had the grilled, fooled no one. I ate at a counter by the window and watched the cars buzzing by. Reds and blues, greens and yellows. Cars of all colors, like the spools of wire at A-1 Electric. Like the snakes writhing in the firelight in the dream I'd been having.

I understood.

I left the food. I got in the Jeep and hurried back down Western, bits of Kentucky poultry stuck like grit to the dry roof of my mouth.

“Change your mind about buying a motor?” Ziloski smiled from behind the desk at A-1 Electric, setting down his magazine.

“Have you ever wired outdoor lampposts?”

“Only a couple thousand,” he said.

“Is there much to it?”

“Like wiring a lightbulb.” He blew the dust off a pad of paper, stood up, and came to the counter. “Wiring anything is simple: one wire in, one wire out.” He drew a circle on the sheet of paper. “That loop is called a circuit. A lightbulb, a lamppost, don't matter which, interrupts the circuitâfits itself into the circle.” He drew a lightbulb on the line that made the circle. “There's your lamppost.”

“You just need two wires to hook up a lamppost?”

“Basically.”

“Could you need more?”

“Sure, if you were using the lamppost electrical box as a kind of connecting point for other circuits.”

I told him I had to go to the car to make a call. Stanley wasn't in; one of the guards said he'd gone home early. But the Bohemian was in his office.

“I want the ground under the lamppost dug up right away. Can you arrange that?”

He didn't ask me for a reason. The tone of my voice must have been enough. He put me on hold for the five longest minutes of my life, then came back on. “It'll be done within the hour, Vlodek.”

I told him I'd call him later and hung up. I went back inside A-1 Electric and gave Ziloski a hundred dollars to follow me out to Gateville.

A security guard stood talking with the same two workmen who had been there the day of the blast. Next to them, a fresh hole had been dug at the base of the lamppost. As Ziloski and I walked up, I paid particular attention to the second workman, the one who'd said nothing the first time. The Bohemian's man. He avoided my eyes.

I looked down into the hole. The multicolored wires that had lain spilled at the bottom, like snakes of all colors, were now bundled and wrapped neatly with tape.

“Is Stanley here?” I asked the guard.

“Still home.”

“His wife?”

The guard nodded, then pointed at the hole. “How long will you need this open?”

“Not long,” Ziloski said.

I'd told him to just look, and tell me what he found when we were alone. Now, he knelt in front of the lamppost and, from a small tan canvas tool bag, pulled out a screwdriver and removed the access plate from the base. He used a penlight to peer inside the base cavity. After a few seconds, he reattached the plate and stepped down into the shallow hole.

I asked the guard if he'd been on duty the day the lamppost got blown over. He nodded.

“Did the blast knock out any other electrical fixtures in the development?”

The guard shook his head. “Just this light.”

I thought back to what Ziloski had told me about wiring. If the
lamppost had been used to route wires to other fixtures, then those would have been knocked out as well. But that had not happened. Just the one lamppost had gone out; only this one lamppost had been wired with something special.

The guard and I made small talk for several minutes as Ziloski picked at the dirt around the wiring going into the base of the lamppost. He separated two loose strands of wire that were capped with little red plastic cones, then looked up. “Who reconnected the wiring?” he asked the guard.

“The same electrician who does all the outside stuff for Crystal Waters.”

Ziloski nodded and climbed out of the hole. “Best get back to the shop,” he said to me.

BOOK: A Safe Place for Dying

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