He picked up the half-eaten hot dog and took another big bite, replenishing his cheeks. “How's the turret coming?”
I told him I was going to buy a new roof. He nodded, chewing. Sometimes we joked that thirty years from now, he'd still be living with Ma, and I'd still be working on the turret.
“I've got this document job, Leo.”
He tapped his bulging cheek. “I figured there was a reason for the big spending,” he said through the food.
“It's about that explosion last week at Gateville.”
Leo's eyebrows, thick and black, moved up his pale forehead, almost touching, like caterpillars about to mate.
I'd brought Stanley Novak's tan envelope. I pulled out the freezer bag and set it on a clean spot on the table, out of range of his cheese fries. “This arrived a couple of weeks before the house blew up.”
Leo leaned over to read through the plastic.
“They think it's either a coincidental scam attempt or a ruse, disguising the real objective of killing the people who lived in the house. My fear is it's neither, that the letter is a threat aimed at all of Gateville, with more explosions to come. Whatever it is, there's been no follow-up to collect the money demanded.”
He looked up from the freezer bag. “They gave you the originals?”
“They haven't gone to the cops.”
“Jeez.” He started to shake his head, then stopped when the obvious hit him. “Why hire you?”
“To show their insurance company they acted responsibly in case the threat proves to be legit. Plus, they think they can control me because of Amanda.”
“Ah, Amanda.” His eyebrows kissed at the top of his forehead.
“It's a job, Leo. I need a roof.”
“You betcha.” He glanced down at the hot dog wrappers and sodden French fry tray that now held only a tiny, coagulating puddle of the cheese-colored substance. “How much are they paying you?”
“Three grand.”
“And my cut?” He smiled, because we both knew he wouldn't take a dime.
“You just ate it.” I put the freezer bag back in the tan envelope.
“Not quite,” he grinned. “I'd like another root beer.”
After lunch, I went to the bank drive-up, pleased that I remembered the way. It had been two months since my last deposit. I put the Gateville check in the scratched plastic canister, punched the button, and watched the vacuum suck it up like a Kansas tornado. The gray-haired lady behind the bulletproof glass gave me a wink and a grape lollipop with my receipt, and I motored out of there, sucking on my lollipop, knowing exactly what it was like to be Bill Gates.
All I could do was wait for Leo's examination, so I drove to the Rivertown Health Center. I fight to keep my weight at the plumpness of an overinjected Thanksgiving turkey, but it's a battle I lose. Still, I go to the health center to keep the dream alive. And to take hot showers. A water heater is on my list for the turret, but it's halfway down.
The parking lot was nearly empty, except for the usual dozen abandoned cars rusting on their axles. I crept along the rutted, weed-spotted asphalt to my regular space next to the doorless '73 Buick by the entrance. I got out, checked my doors twice to make sure they were unlocked, and went in. My Jeep has a vinyl top and plastic side windows, and I don't need anyone slitting them to verify I don't have anything worth stealing.
The Rivertown Health Center had once been a showplace Y.M.C.A., with a big exercise room, an indoor pool, and five floors of temporary rooms for good Christians new to town. That was in the 1950s, when there'd been manufacturing jobs in Rivertown. Now the sheet metal on the roof streaked tiger stripes of brown rust down the yellow bricks, the last of the paint had flaked off the gray, sun-rotted wood windows, and the good Christians had fled, leaving the upstairs rooms to trembling winos hanging on for the salvation of fresh pints at the first of the month, when the disability and public aid checks arrived.
Downstairs, the pipes leaked, the running track was a greasy, crumbling obstacle course of silver-taped rips, and the locker doors had all been beaten in by punks hunting for watches and wallets. But it was cheap, the water was hot, and so long as I got out of there before the punks came to hang out in the late afternoon, it was safe enough for a workout and a shower.
I changed into my blue Cubs T-shirt and red shorts and went upstairs. Barney, Dusty, Nick, and the rest were there, roosting on the rusted fitness machines like crows on fence posts. Old men, retired from the tool cribs and stamping rooms of the factories that
used to be in Rivertown, they came early every afternoon to reassure themselves that they were all still alive. Nick told me a joke, the same joke he told every Tuesday. I laughed. He smiled, proud of his wit. It was ritual.
I left them to their talk and ran laps and did maybes. Maybe the Bohemian was too practiced at telling his clients money could make their problems go away, maybe the threat in the letter was real, maybe there would be another bomb, maybe somebody would get killed. Maybe I should not let myself be used, insist instead that the Bohemian take the note to the cops. Maybe I shouldn't worry about Amanda's house. After six laps I staggered off to hug the wall, sucking air. There was no maybe about me carrying too much weight.
I hit the showers and thought about the only thing that wasn't a maybe.
The Bohemian was holding something back.
Leo called at 9:00 A.M., two days later.
“Can you come over?”
I could hear something tapping, his heel maybe, or a pencil.
“You don't want to extort another gourmet meal?”
“I don't want to waste any time.”
I told him I'd be right over.
Leo's mother's place was seven blocks away, a narrow dark brown brick bungalow in the middle of a block crowded with narrow dark brown brick bungalows. They had been built in the late 1920s, when Rivertown had Florida bungalow fever. And hope.
Blue television light flickered behind the lace curtains as I went up the cement stairs to the porch and rang the bell.
Leo opened the door almost instantly, as if he'd been waiting with his hand on the knob. Ma didn't look up as I stepped into the living room. On the big-screen television, a woman was interviewing a man sitting on a couch next to a chimpanzee. The chimp looked life-sized on the forty-five inch screen. “So nice Leo has friends,” Ma murmured, her eyes fixed on the television. “Yes,
ma'am,” I said. The chimpanzee smiled. Leo and I walked through to the kitchen.
I followed Leo down the stairs and through the basement, past the broken Exercycle, the train set on plywood I'd helped him put together in seventh grade, and the decorated three-foot artificial Christmas tree they shook off and put on the T.V. every December. We went into the space Leo had walled off under the living room for an office.
There was no door, and he'd never gotten around to priming the drywall or putting tile or carpet on the bare concrete floor. Equipmentâmagnifiers, three tall gray file cabinets, a light tableâtook up every available inch. Nothing was out of place. It was all pure Leo: functional and without a nod to aesthetics. Just like his shiny Hawaiian shirts.
He went behind the scarred, beat-up wood desk he'd found in the alley, sat backward on the listing chair, and wrapped his thin arms around its slatted back like he was hugging it for warmth. I dropped into the sprung green overstuffed chair that must have felt fine under Leo's bony one hundred and forty pounds but always made me feel like I was bungee jumping.
On the wall above the light table, shiny photographic enlargements of the Gateville envelope and letter were clipped to a metal holder next to an old poster of a wet but excited Bo Derek.
“Sorry about taking two days, but I wanted a friend of mine at the I.R.S. forensic lab downtown to take a look.” Leo's heels started beating a light riff on the cement floor. When Leo is on to something, his feet tap, and his fingers stretch and curl, probing for anything they can pick up. Today he twirled a yellow wood pencil between his fingers.
He pointed the eraser end at the blowup of the white envelope. “There's nothing remarkable about that; millions like it are sold in stationery stores and discount places. It's got a self-adhesive flap, so
I doubt there's potential for saliva D.N.A. It's postmarked at the main Chicago post office, and so it has plenty of fingerprints, none of which will help us. It was addressed recently with an ink-jet printer, probably a Canon, the kind that's in every public library.”
“No typewriter with a raised, cracked
e
?” I said, doing my growl of Humphrey Bogart doing his growl of Philip Marlowe.
Leo's eyebrows crawled up into a tired black arch. “Must I suffer your mimicry?”
“Forgive me, schweetheart. What about the note?”
“Much more interesting. Pencil lettering, done with a ruler to disguise the writer's hand as you suspected. And of course, the paper is from a kid's tablet, old stock.”
“Old stock?”
“The manufacturer discontinued this particular paper twenty years ago.”
“You're saying the note was written a long time ago?”
“That I can't tell.” He opened a desk drawer, rummaged inside, and pulled out a spiral-bound notepad with a school crest. He fanned the pages to a blank sheet in back. “This paper is old, too. I've had it since college. Means nothing; lots of people have old paper lying around. As for the lettering ⦔ He shook his head. “I can't tell its age. Pencil lead doesn't change much with time.”
I pointed at the enlargement of the note on the wall. “Fingerprints?”
“None.”
“So nothing can be learned.”
“Not so fast, Holmes.” His wide lips split into a grin. “To begin with, the lettering is precise, but also the color is consistent on every character. A ruler can help that, but the pencil pressure still had to be controlled throughout.” He stood up, went to the blowup, and used the pencil eraser to draw an imaginary line under the words. “See the evenness of color? Nice and consistent. No urgency, no anxiety. If this had been written by some nut as a
quick scam, one might expect evidence of agitation: uneven color, a trailing line, a missed connection between two lines, or any of a number of other things that would suggest haste. But this is precise and controlled. Your letter writer is serious.”
“Or he's a shakedown artist on Valium. What else?”
Leo came back to sit behind the desk. The smile was gone. “Why hand-print the letter at all? Why not type it on the library computer, or wherever, when he did the envelope? Why fool with a pencil and ruler to write the words and risk finger or palm prints?”
I thought for a minute, came up with nothing.
“It's a huge clue,” Leo went on, tapping again with the yellow pencil, “but we're not smart enough to figure it. This needs to go to the police.”
“The Bohemian thinks the problem's over. If the letter's not from a nut, it was a ruse to keep the focus off the Farradays, and they're gone.”
“How fortunate for the Farradays,” Leo said, his voice heavy with sarcasm.
“No, I don't think the Bohemian hung them out to dry. He said he showed Farraday the note, let him decide whether it should go to the cops. He said Farraday declined.”
Leo shook his head. “Somebody's got to take this to the cops.”
“The Bohemian won't allow it unless he's convinced the threat still exists. There are twenty-six homes still at Gateville. Figuring conservatively at three million each, that's seventy-eight million worth of real estate that could become close to worthless overnight.”
“Including Amanda's.” Leo watched my face.
“I need a roof, Leo.” I pushed myself out of the folds of the green chair and picked up Stanley Novak's tan envelope off the desk. “As for Amanda, sure, I want her house to keep its value. Nobody takes a three-million-dollar whack easily.”
“You betcha,” he said, standing up.
We went up the stairs. On television, Ma was watching a deeply tanned woman wearing a white towel say something to a deeply tanned man wearing a white towel. It's always nice when people with similar interests find each other.
Leo opened the front door. “Will the Bohemian listen to you?” he asked as I stepped out.
“I don't know.”
“He'd better. He's got to call the police,” he said through the screen.
I checked my phone for messages as I pulled away from Leo's. Amanda had returned my call a half hour earlier and had left an international phone number. I swung back to the curb, shut off the engine, and called. She answered right away. It was a lousy connection, but there was no missing the wariness in her voice. It was the third time we'd spoken since our divorce. The two earlier times had been the previous October. I'd been drunk.
“I'm not pickled this time, but I'm going to sound just as foolish.”
In the background, I could hear cars and trucks, and people shouting in another language.
“Amanda, where are you?”
“Paris, in a little café across the Seine from the Louvre, drinking American coffee from a yellow cup on an orange saucer.”
The tight spot in my neck relaxed. She was nowhere near Gateville.
“What time is it there?” It was all I could think of to say.
“Just past five in the afternoon. Dek, are you all right?”
“Are you going to be over there long?” I asked, counting on the background noise to make my question sound casual.
“Through the fall. I'm doing an art history book for middle schoolers. Are you sure you're all right?”
“Absolutely.”
“Is your business coming back?”
“Slowly. You know lawyers, cautious as mice. I sent them all copies of the exoneration story in the
Trib.
It was two paragraphs long. You're sure you'll be away for a while?”
“Yes.” She paused, waiting. She was tensed, afraid I'd suggest I come to Paris.
When I asked a couple of quick questions about her book project instead, the relief in her voice was louder than our words. We filled another minute talking about the crowds of summer tourists, and then she asked, “What were you going to say?”
“What?”
“You said you were going to say something that would sound foolish.”
“I did? That was foolish. I just called to hear how you are. Paris for the summer sounds great. I've got to run.” I clicked off. There was no need to fumble with an explanation of why she should stay away from Gateville; she was going to be safe in Paris. Still, I wouldn't have minded talking some more. There were plenty of other foolish things I wanted to say.
It's the little stuff that haunts. The sound of her laughter, as it made something I'd said sound wittier that it was, or the way the burgundy highlights in her dark hair caught the fire of the sun. Little stuff, that comes at me in the middle of the night.
I first saw her on an unseasonably balmy February evening the year before. Chicago weather does sometimes, tosses out a lily of a springlike day in the middle of winter to lull everybody before burying them in a ton of snow in April. That night, the false spring made the walls of my tiny condo so tight they almost touched. I'd gone outside and walked west, restless, to Michigan Avenue.
She was standing just inside one of the small art galleries, a beige trench coat draped over her arm, frowning at an oil painting on the wall. She was about my age but wore it better. She had short,
dark hair, a pale complexion, and lips that looked like they could offer salvation.
She must have felt my eyes. She turned, smiled, pointed at the oil on the wall, and surprised me by motioning me to come in. I did, not pausing to wonder why she'd beckoned. Opportunity of that sort rarely knocked on my dusty door.
“What do you think?” she asked, pointing again at the painting she'd been staring at. Her voice was soft, lilting.
“My taste in art runs to blues festival posters.”
“Does that prevent you from forming an opinion of other art?” Her brown eyes sparkled mockingly.
I pretended to study the painting. It was abstract, I supposed; a mess of indeterminate shapes, mostly green.
“There's a lot of green,” I offered finally.
She laughed. “Anything else?”
I bent closer to the frame. The little card said it was being offered for one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. “It's obviously very good green.”
“Actually, it's not very.”
“Very what?”
“Good green. It's just very expensive.”
“Do you want to have a drink?”
She surprised me again. She said yes.
We drank beer in a dark booth in an empty ersatz Cockney pub on the ground floor of one of the shopping towers. She told me she wrote art history books that were too expensive to sell anywhere but to libraries. That was good enough for her, because of the potential that some kid might pick up a copy and get a switch turned on that would lead to a lifelong interest in art.
I told her I ran an information service, chased down records and photographs for lawyers and insurance companies. That was good enough for me, because it got me out of Rivertown where
most of the art was spray-painted in four-letter words, on the walls of abandoned factories.
We talked until the Cockneys threw us out at midnight. By then, I'd been enchanted, captivated, bottom-line crazy-in-love for three hours.
We met the next four times by the bronze lions in front of the Art Institute. She was teaching a class there that semester. We'd walk to one of the small places for dinner and we'd talk. We didn't do the theater, or the movies, or the clubs. There wasn't time; we were both in too much of a hurry chasing something we'd each thought had passed us by. And we had too much to say about not much of anything, before we ended up at my condo closet on the lake, where we wouldn't talk at all.
I proposed on our fifth date, at a little trattoria three blocks west of Michigan Avenue.