The first few drops of rain fell as I ducked into Union Station. I called the Bohemian. ‘You’re sure I can’t get in front of Timothy Wade?’
‘You got nothing from Delman Bean?’
‘He’s angry with Marilyn Paul and jealous of Timothy Wade. But he’s downright furious with Halvorson, Shea and Piser. They quit his campaign just before the election. He blames their desertion for his loss.’
‘You’ll never get in front of Wade.’
‘Isn’t staying incommunicado a big risk?’
‘Especially after running scared from a toy axe and plastic bones? I would think so, but Theresa Wade knows more than I do about politics. As I said, she’s passing it off as a security issue, which it probably is. And, don’t forget, he’s polling twenty-five points ahead of his Republican opponent. Tim Wade’s your next senator.’
‘Can you get me in to see the sister?’
‘To discuss a twenty-year-old congressional race?’ He laughed. ‘I’ll see if I can find someone who knows her and forward your request, but she’ll say no.’
My cell phone had beeped with a missed call. I called back. A Sergeant Bohler of the Cook County Sheriff’s Police answered. I recognized her voice from the middle of the night.
I took a breath, waiting for her to tell me to come in for questioning. Instead, she said, ‘We’re done with your vehicle.’
‘I’m downtown, at Union Station, not at home.’
‘There’s a train stop four blocks from us.’
Thunder sounded in her background as she gave me her address. I stepped out and looked at the sky. It was black in the west. ‘It’s raining there?’
‘If there’s to be justice.’
A fast-driving rain was beating down by the time I got to her stop. There was no station building, just a flat, unprotected platform. And there were no cabs.
I got drenched running to the overhang of a gas station across the street. I called the sergeant. ‘It’s raining buckets,’ I said, so she could say she’d send a car.
‘That’s the least of your worries,’ she said, and hung up.
I remained under the overhang, worrying about what she’d just said. She sounded like she’d found ripe evidence, blood or DNA traces. I tried to tell myself that was impossible, that she’d only had the Jeep for a few hours. And then I told myself I’d only grabbed the knife and a few Burger King wrappers. I hadn’t looked for anything else Marilyn’s killer might have left.
I ran the four blocks to the gray cinderblock, six-bay garage and would have stopped short, to swear, if it wasn’t pouring.
My Jeep was parked in front, red, glistening even where it was rusted. And topless. My vinyl top, which I’d not dared lower in years for fear of disturbing the artful mosaic of silver tape that held the rips closed, lay in a crumpled heap on the ground a few feet away, its mending strands loose and curling upon it like a tangle of shiny gray snakes trying to slither away.
I ran inside. Sergeant Bohler sat at a desk in a glass-windowed office. She smiled delightedly when I sloshed to a dripping stop in her doorway.
She tossed two overstuffed, clear plastic bags at me, one after the other. ‘Know what those are, Elstrom?’
I’d recognized the contents even as the bags were in flight, and understood the reason for her pettiness. ‘Memories,’ I said.
‘Excellent,’ she said, nodding approvingly at my sodden clothes.
I stepped up to her desk. She pushed her chair back from the torrent of drops that fell from my hair, face and shirt. ‘Damn it, Elstrom.’
I upended the contents of both bags onto the papers on her desk. ‘What we have here are Burger King wrappers,’ I said, speaking softly so we could both enjoy the gentle patter of me dripping onto the wrappers and other papers on her desk.
‘Step back, for Pete’s sake,’ she said, lurching up from her chair.
‘Not just ordinary Burger King wrappers,’ I opined, a tropical rain forest standing pat. ‘But Whopper-with-cheese wrappers, to be precise.’
By now, her work papers and my wrappers lay sodden on her desk like leaves pasted lifeless to a sidewalk by a hard autumn rain.
‘There were eighty-four of those damned wrappers inside your Jeep, Elstrom,’ she said, pressed up against the file cabinets at the back wall.
I remembered the cadaver-sniffing dog going berserk inside my Jeep. To its nostrils it must have seemed like a meat paradise.
‘They ruined the dog’s nose,’ she said. ‘He can’t differentiate between scents anymore.’
‘Perhaps counseling?’
‘I like you for Marilyn Paul in the Willahock, Elstrom. Our dog may have given up, but I won’t.’
‘No blood, no hair, no murderous weapons?’ I asked, feigning outraged innocence, for clearly they’d found nothing.
She stepped forward to open a side drawer, grabbed my key and tossed it at me. ‘I’m not done. Do not leave town.’
I went out into the rain, hefted the vinyl top into the back and took the slow way to Rivertown. I didn’t dare risk the speeds needed on the expressway. It was challenging enough to drive even slowly while wiping my eyes constantly to see through the rain falling between my face and the windshield. I got plenty of honks from other motorists. Some smiled; in shock, I supposed. Most sped up to pass, tight-faced, anxious to escape an obvious crazy driving a topless Jeep in a thunderstorm.
I shivered, from the downpour and in relief that Bohler had found nothing. But mostly I shivered from the certainty that I now had a cop who was going to be relentless in tagging me for Marilyn Paul’s murder.
Despite all that, I was mindful that I owed a homage. My usual Burger King outlet rests at the extreme western edge of Chicago, right at the Rivertown city line. They know me there.
I turned into the drive-through lane, dripping and grinning in the rain, and paid the delighted teenage window attendant with a drenched bill.
I ate as I drove through Rivertown, savoring as always the magnificent taste – even sodden – of my cheese Whopper.
Yet that day, I savored the wrapper even more.