‘Rescue me, you cur.’ It was Leo calling, and it was ten-thirty the next morning.
‘You sound perky.’ It was a relief.
‘Deservedly. My swift brilliance saved your bacon.’
It had, for sure. I’d gotten home to find the furnace box in the back of the Jeep blessedly empty.
I was outside Endora’s building in thirty minutes. ‘Where’s my Porsche?’ he asked, through one of the newer rips in the passenger-side plastic curtain.
‘Parked in front of your bungalow. I slipped a note to Ma through the mail slot, saying you were with me.’ He got in and I pulled away from the curb.
‘How’d you get from my place to the turret?’
‘Hoofed.’
‘At four in the morning?’
‘The hookers were home; the cops were drunk. There was no one to notice.’
He turned to look at the cut-down furnace box lying collapsed in the back. ‘The box is still there.’
‘You emptied it.’
‘Residual DNA. Get rid of it, you idiot.’ He closed his eyes.
I am an orphan, of sorts – the product of a Norwegian sailor who might have been named Elstrom and an unstable high-school sophomore who’d taken off the day after I was born. Her three older sisters raised me haphazardly, passing me among themselves, bungalow to bungalow, a month at a time.
Diminutive Leo Brumsky had been the one towering pillar in my life, growing up. He latched onto me in seventh grade, on a day when an aunt had again forgotten to pack me a sandwich. He brought me home for lunch, and from then on the three Brumskys: an always silent, rarely seen Pa; irrepressible, bustling, quirky Ma; and Leo were my backstop. Whenever one of my mother’s three sisters, meaning well enough but sullen about it, forgot it was her turn to get me to a doctor or to a dentist, or even to jam a sandwich into my coat pocket for lunch, the Brumskys were there. Every time. Always.
‘Care to tell me where you made your disposal?’ I asked.
‘Kutz’s,’ he said. Kutz’s Wienie Wagon was one of his most sacred destinations. It would be a calming place to decompress.
‘Tell me everything on the way over, so you don’t choke on the hot dogs,’ I said.
He took a breath. ‘I dropped by your place last evening. The lights were off but I figured you were home because the Jeep was there. I even dared hope you might be in bed with your delectable former—’
‘Amanda and I aren’t edging back together that closely.’
He sighed. ‘So I gather, since I caught you rutting out in San Francisco. Anyway, I banged on your door. No answer. Banged louder. Still no answer. I started to walk down to the bench by the river, to see if you were outside, stealing better clothes from the winos dozing by the river, when I saw the box in the back of the Jeep.’
He made a vague motion at the box behind us and went on. ‘You’d been bragging about getting a furnace so I figured that was it, though it looked awfully small. And like I said, very much a target for thieves. When I didn’t find you by the river, I tried your door once more. Then I called you, thinking you’d fallen asleep in your La-Z-Boy. Surprise, surprise; you were in California, yelling at me to get the hell away from the Jeep.’ He managed half a smile. ‘That piqued my interest, of course. I peeled back one of the many pieces of silver tape holding your rear window together, reached in and pulled back the top flap of the box.’
‘Get to it, Leo; what did you do?’ He was taking such a long time.
‘There was a large plastic bag inside, done up at the top with a twist-tie.’ He took another deep breath. ‘There was a smell, Dek, even through the bag. Still, to be sure, I undid it.’ He shuddered. ‘I felt hair; oh, jeez, I felt hair. You were in trouble, big time, and I could help. Since I keep the turret key you gave me in my glove box, I let myself in and got your spare Jeep key from the hook in your kitchen. I was thinking clearly; I was in control. I would drive far out to the woods, unload the cargo – minus the box, of course, which maybe had your name on it – and get rid of whatever was meant to burn you.’
He slumped back in the seat and closed his eyes. He needed a break. We drove the rest of the way without speaking.
At Rivertown, I turned onto the old river road that led down to the viaduct. Kutz has been selling hot dogs in a trailer down there for more than half a century.
We drove onto the rutted ground, long bereft of gravel, that Kutz offers as a parking lot. Leo gasped. He’d turned to look at the river beyond the trailer.
A white Cook County sheriff’s car was parked down by the Willahock. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have been a surprise. Cops, too, liked Kutz’s lukewarm hotdogs and soggy French fries.
Not this day. The two deputies weren’t at the picnic tables; they were standing close to the water, looking down at the branches, empty anti-freeze jugs and other trash trapped along the bank.
Normally pale, Leo’s face had gone faintly green. Big beads of sweat had popped up on his forehead. ‘Oh, jeez.’
I focused on pulling to an easy stop well away from the trailer. ‘Please tell me the woods where you dumped the bag were far from here, Leo.’
He jerked around to look at me, his eyes wild and wide. ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’
‘And draw attention to ourselves? No chance. We’re going to stay and eat like nothing is wrong.’
‘I thought he’d be long gone by now, way downriver,’ he said, apparently meaning the previous passenger in my Jeep.
‘We’ll be calm. We’ll eat; we’ll leave.’
‘You can’t imagine,’ he said, his words coming high and fast, ‘driving with a corpse jammed behind my head. I was heading to the forest preserve east of us, in Chicago, but I swear he grunted every time I hit a bump. I freaked. All I could think was getting rid of the body. I swung in here, backed down to the water, opened the rear door and slid—’
‘Being careful to not pull out the box with it,’ I said, trying to sound approving, ‘because it had my name on it?’
‘See? I was thinking clearly. I slid the plastic bag out of the box and pushed it into the river.’
‘Right where those deputies are standing?’ I asked.
He moaned. ‘That would be the exact spot.’
‘You saw the bag sink?’
‘It didn’t.’ His voice had risen even more. ‘It bobbed; the poor bastard bobbed like he was in a balloon. Body gases, maybe. Oh, jeez.’ He wiped at the saliva on his lips. ‘I told myself he’d bounce right over the dam and be long gone by now.’
I looked down the river. Blue lights were flashing by the dam.
He’d followed my eyes. ‘Oh, jeez,’ he said again.
‘Oh, jeez indeed,’ I said.