Another Dead Republican (19 page)

My Dad said, “I think eccentric is one of the milder words I’d use for the Grums in general. Coupons clipped and guns collected?” He shrugged. “Who are we to judge?”

He was right about that. After we spent a few minutes glancing at the displayed items my dad asked. “You know what’s missing?”

I shrugged.

“A bazooka.”

“Huh?”

My dad said, “Wasn’t he supposed to be a lousy shot?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, to compensate, why doesn’t he have extra fire power. Knowing Edgar, I’d presume he’d need a bazooka, or a tank, to equalize the odds between him and Bambi.”

“You might be underestimating Bambi.”

None of the guns mounted on the walls, and none of the shelves of boxes of shells told me who killed him.

My dad said, “There’s a bank of switches here.” He flipped several. Bright lights illumined the guns, racks of track lighting, spot lights.

One card said that the AK-47 on display was the one that had killed Osama Bin Laden. I pointed it out to my dad. “That can’t be real.”

“It’s really a gun,” my Dad said, “as to its provenance and history.” He shrugged.

I asked, “How could you prove it was real? I wouldn’t take what it says on that display card as proof. Can you buy this kind of thing from the military?”

“More likely he got scammed.”

“The better question is why aren’t the cops all over this place? Why haven’t the cops been all over this place?”

My dad said, “What’s this red button?” It was at the end of the row of switches he’d flipped. He pushed it. Racks of guns six feet wide slid sideways. The two walls behind them parted a few feet, it revealed a small room. The floor was a door like that on a storm cellar. Dad checked a newly revealed panel of switches. Flipped them, nothing happened. I saw another red button on the end of the row. Before I could say anything, he pressed it. Hinged on one side, creaking louder than the sound effects in a thirties horror movie, the door rose like the lid of Dracula’s coffin. Steps led down.

I said, “Plot thickener if I ever saw it.”

“Do we descend?”

“We’re not doing anything illegal. We have permission from the current owner.”

We had to duck our heads. The door at the bottom was not locked.

I flipped a light switch on the wall to my right. A six-feet-by-six-feet workbench rested against one wall. Again, absolutely everything was labeled. The walls here were corkboard. On them pieces of equipment were outlined in black magic marker. Then below each outline was a label of what tool was to be placed there. It looked like everything in the room had a color-coded laminated label. The tools all had pink labels, the guns yellow, the label maker had a green label saying “label maker”.

“Edgar was this organized?” my Dad asked.

“Apparently.”

The wall on the left had shelves filled with gun paraphernalia. There were plastic containers labeled and filled with barrels, chokes, stocks, sights, pads, muzzle breaks, trays and trays of different kinds of bullets in boxes. On the floor next to the workbench was an Armorer’s Tool and Gun Parts organizer bag. It was nylon with about a million zippers, compartments, a sunglass case, side pockets, expandable mesh outer pockets.

Another wall had tools: a barrel nut wrench, a hay teeth wrench, armorer’s wrenches in different sizes with different size holes, a torque wrench, several different sized rubber mallets, a metal punch. Camping and outdoor gear sat on the cement floor to the right of the door.

On the workbench there was what looked like a very large toothpaste tube labeled ‘white lithium grease’.

One wall had a few guns displayed. One was a Barret 50 Caliber Sniper Rifle, which I knew could pierce an engine block from a mile away. If it hit a human, all that would be left would be a pink mist.

A small display case had several 45 caliber US Marine service pistols from 1911.

On the work bench a small card said Holographic Weapon Sight Eotech 3X Magnifier flip to side mount. Next to the card was what certainly could have been the described item. I knew people used such a thing instead of a regular sight. This kind magnified the target and crosshairs to, in theory, make your shot easier.

Dad summed it all up. “Why the hell did he have all this crap?”

I said, “What’s weird is maybe he made the gun that killed him.”

My Dad shuddered.

We heard steps on the stairs and turned to look.

A voice demanded, “What the hell are you doing down here?”

It was Barry Grum.

My dad and I turned to face him. I blurted the first thought I had. “What the hell are you doing here?”

His voice was filled with disdain. “We live in the same subdivision. We don’t have to go through gate security. Veronica hasn’t banned us from the house. You’re not in charge.”

I said, “From this moment on, you will treat us with civility and keep your tone and your language within the accepted realms of decency and politeness.”

He said, “Fine.” With the tone and sneer I would expect from his nephew David.

I said, “I accept your acquiescence, and will ignore your inability to do so with anything approaching civility.” See, I could compromise with these assholes.

Barry stormed out.

“Something is hidden here?” I asked.

My dad said, “There has to be some reason these people keep cramming their noses into every crevice they can find.”

We hunted through the place upstairs and down, lifted every tool, opened every box, examined every manual. For a half hour’s work, we got nothing.

I summed up, “He built his own guns?”

“Appears so.”

“But none of them are labeled as home made. I don’t see a completed gun or a being-worked-on gun. Could all of this have been for show? He just ordered a bunch of gun making stuff, owned a lot of gun making stuff, but never got around to making a gun, and was lucky not to accidentally shoot himself or blow himself up?”

“People do strange shit. You know that.”

I said, “I’ve just never seen it so blatantly displayed.”

“People collect guns, which is not all that strange.”

THIRTY-TWO

Thursday 2:30 P.M.

Back in the house, someone had delivered liquor. People were drinking liquids and scarfing down food.

I found Veronica in the middle of a gaggle of women I didn’t know.

I managed to get her aside for a minute.

“You okay?” I asked.

“It’s so good to have all my friends around me. They are too kind. I’m grateful they’ve come to help. The kids are with their friends in the play room.”

So much for worrying about her over-stressing because of the crowd.

I said, “We found a sort of secret gun making room down some steps out in the shed.”

Veronica took a sip of wine, smiled at some women, and said, “I know nothing about it. That shed was built about the time he had the skateboard park put in. If he built guns, he didn’t tell me about it.”

Scott and I got back to sorting for an hour. I was exhausted. I saw his eyes drooping over a glossy covered pro-gun manifesto. We stuck it out. I wanted to be at least half through by dinner time.

THIRTY-THREE

Thursday 5:00 P.M.

Just after five Todd Bristol called.

He asked how I was holding up and how the family was. I told him we were managing okay.

I asked, “Did you find out anything?”

“What I have so far is this. You’ve got the Grums and the Grums’ lawyers. Frankly, and I know this is prejudiced, but I’d be more afraid of the Grums’ lawyers than I would be of the Grums. The lawyers are professionals. They’d do vicious legal things to Veronica, you, Scott, your family, and probably their own grandmothers if any of you got in their way. Their firm is one of the biggest in the state. But even more, I’d be more afraid of the Grums’ minions doing hatchet jobs. Doing what they think are the Grums’ bidding.”

“I see the Grums as pretty much in the minion category as well.”

“And they may be. I guess most people must be a minion to somebody. Just remember minions tend to do stupid things to please their bosses.”

“Murder their own son?”

“Never underestimate the stupidity of those who think they are in the 1% or of those who want to claw their way into being among the 1%.”

“Any background on Edgar Grum?”

Todd said, “All I’ve got on him is that he was the family screw-up, but you already knew that.”

“I think a lot of the Grums are prejudiced against us.”

Todd said, “My guess is that it’s not because you’re gay they don’t like you. It’s because you’re in the way.”

“Or both, but what are we in the way of?”

“That my dear, I have no idea.”

I told him everything that had gone on, especially the madness of the Grums in seeming to want to get into the den and perhaps the gun shed.

Todd said, “It has to be connected with the murder or the election.”

I added, “Or both.”

“They could be connected. You have any proof of that?”

“Well, no.”

“I didn’t think so.”

I asked, “We’ve heard about a private investigator, Mike King, from Chicago. Supposedly some gay guy hired him to investigate election fraud. He found the body. You ever heard of him?”

“Mike King?
The
Mike King?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “how many Mike King detectives are there in Chicago?”

“He is very hot. Very successful. His operatives are mysterious and deadly.”

“Is there anyone in Chicago you don’t know?”

“When they are hot gay men connected with legal stuff in this town, I make it my business to know.”

“What did you learn about the crime scene itself?”

“That it doesn’t tell us much. He was probably shot around an hour before he was found. There were tons of fingerprints around, but people were in and out of his office all the time. Edgar loved to talk. It was one gunshot wound to the front of the head, just above right between the eyes. He was found leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed. The gun was there, wiped clean of prints. It is likely it is his own gun; at least others who worked there claim to have seen him waving it around. The police have been all over it. As far as I can find out they have found no clues to who did it from the scene.”

“Don’t they have surveillance footage?”

“Not for the campaign office. Anybody could have gotten in.”

“Where were all the Grums during the time the murder was committed?”

“If there is surveillance of the Grums, and that’s a big if, it has been destroyed, lost, stolen, gone into the ether. These people are very powerful.”

I asked, “Can we stop the cops from getting in here to investigate?”

“You told me what Enid Achtenberg did. I’d have complete confidence in her. She sounds like she’s worth her weight in gold and silver.”

Dinner that night was a buffet made up of foods neighbors and friends had brought in. A few of the friends and neighbors stayed to help eat it.

I was almost too tired to chew.

All of them left by seven. Scott, Mom, and Dad, and I cleaned the mess.

We tried going back to work sorting, but I saw Scott’s eyes nodding over another glossy-red covered pro-gun manifesto. I was trying to make sense of an insurance document. The words kept going in and out of focus.