The next morning I followed the shore of Lake Michigan north.
It was one of the finest of the October days we get in Chicago, crisp at sixty degrees and so deeply colored with magnificent reds, oranges and yellows in the trees that we almost forget the excesses of our other three seasons. It even made me forget that I was the target for a murder frame and I found myself whistling in counterpoint to the rhythmic flapping of the loosened shreds of my vinyl top.
In seemingly no time at all, I got to the college town of Evanston. A homecoming football weekend was approaching and the season’s bright hues were joined by an abundance of the purples and whites of the Northwestern Wildcats. Staggering among them, I supposed, were more than a few returning Northwestern sorority Bipsies, though they were deeply purpled year-round, from lives of long lunches.
My cell phone rang. I clicked it on.
‘You there, Elstrom?’ a woman’s voice yelled.
‘I am!’ I screamed back.
‘This is Bohler. I can barely hear you.’
I dropped it on the passenger seat. ‘In accordance with Illinois law, I’m operating a motor vehicle and therefore unable to pick up a hand-held phone to communicate,’ I shouted to the policewoman. ‘Plus, you separated my vinyl top into many pieces. Each one is flapping and slapping now, letting in deafening traffic noise.’
‘Pick up the damned phone!’ she shouted.
I picked it up. ‘How’s Sniffy?’
‘Who?’
‘Sniffy, the wonder dog.’
‘I like you, Elstrom.’
‘Me, too,’ I said, agreeably.
‘No. I mean I really like you. For Marilyn Paul’s murder.’
‘The woman in the river?’
‘Don’t act dumb.’
There were ninety-nine ways to respond to that, most of them truthful, but I chose the hundredth and said nothing.
‘You dumped that woman in the river,’ she said.
‘What lies have you manufactured to prove that?’
‘You screwed up. You bagged her watertight. She’s giving us DNA to compare to those bits of hamburger we took from your Jeep. Plus, someone called who can tie you to Marilyn Paul’s murder weapon.’
‘The same anonymous tipster that sent you to grab my Jeep?’
‘A charge of destroying evidence material to a murder investigation will be just for openers.’
‘What evidence, exactly?’
‘The knife that killed Marilyn Paul. We’ll be dragging the river.’
Whoever I’d scared off after he’d planted the knife in the Jeep hadn’t run very far. He’d circled back to watch and had seen me throw the knife into the river.
I figured recovering it, even so close to the turret, would only offer circumstantial evidence. Fingerprints and blood evidence are fragile. On cardboard furnace boxes, they don’t withstand fire. On knives, I doubted they’d withstand long immersion in polluted water, even if the knife was recovered from the debris at the bottom of the Willahock.
Nonetheless, Bohler’s cheery certainty turned my mouth to chalk. For a day or two, I’d been thinking about what I hadn’t thought about at first: carpet fibers. Some could have gotten trapped in the bag Marilyn had been put into and compared to samples from my Jeep. They, too, would be circumstantial, but evidence nonetheless that Marilyn Paul’s body had spent time in a Jeep very much like mine. Circumstantial evidence, piled high enough, can become damning evidence.
Bohler coughed. I’d gotten so lost in the newest of my worries that I’d forgotten she was still on the phone.
‘Anything else, Sergeant?’ I asked, in what sounded like a child’s voice.
She laughed and hung up.
The Wade estate in Winnetka was on familiar turf, a few miles of multimillion dollar homes south of my ex-father-in-law’s ex-digs in Lake Forest. Though the Wade grounds only backed down to a road that ran along Lake Michigan and were not on it, like the late Wendell’s, the Wade property looked to be many times more valuable. The thickly wooded grounds covered at least twenty acres of prime North Shore real estate and had to be worth tens of millions.
The house was set in a clearing at the top of a rise along another road, across from more woods nestled between two upscale housing developments. The Wades’ was a rambling white-frame affair with black shutters and yellow awnings landscaped with precisely trimmed yews fronted with those little yellow and purple flowers rich people buy in small cement urns to let die on their front lawns after the first frost. The rich are odd ducks.
I got stopped at the curved drive by the black-iron gate I’d seen in the satellite photo. The small white security hut behind it looked to have been painted as recently as the house, which might have been that morning, such was its sparkle.
I thought again of the only photo I’d found of Theresa Wade as an adult. It had been snapped with a long lens through the rightmost, second-floor window. Then, as now, a gauzy curtain hung behind the glass. It had obscured the woman sitting behind it into a blur.
A guard walked up to the gate. I stuck my head out through the shreds of my own gauzy curtain, though mine was of yellowed plastic, slashed on several different occasions at the health center by thumpers too stupid to remember they’d already boosted my radio.
‘I’m here to see Miss Wade,’ I said to the unsmiling fellow. He wore a gray uniform and a Glock semi-automatic holstered on his hip.
‘Appointment?’ he asked through the gate.
I got out. ‘Nah; I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop in for coffee.’
‘Get back in your vehicle.’
I complied and he opened the gate just enough to step out. I handed him the envelope I’d brought. ‘Miss Wade will want to see me after she’s read this.’
‘Stay in your vehicle.’ As he reached for the envelope his jacket sleeve slid up enough to reveal the edge of a gold wristwatch, and for an instant I was reminded of the last time I’d seen Amanda’s father, who’d lived not so far away. He’d been wearing a gold wristwatch almost the same color as the guard’s, though Wendell Phelps’ timepiece had been a hugely expensive Rolex.
The guard pulled out a cell phone and made a call. A moment later, another gray-uniformed man came down the drive to retrieve the envelope. The inspiration for the letter was a long shot, but long shots were all I had to fire.
I remained behind the steering wheel as instructed, though the day was warming the interior of the still-drenched Jeep to the humidity of an Ecuadorian jungle. Ten minutes passed, then another ten. I would have played it nonchalant by listening to the radio but I was sweating too hard and the radio had been stolen years before, leaving nothing on the dashboard to look at except the multicolored wires Amanda had braided the time we’d come up to see her father. It was one of the last times I’d seen him alive.
So it went, the guard looking at me sweating inside the Jeep and me looking at the little yellow and purple flowers, destined for death at the first frost. The purple ones were the same hue as the sweatshirts and sweaters worn by the Northwestern alumni I’d spotted on the drive up, as well as the Peeps I’d been nuking lately, and that got me wondering how many other colors the Discount Den might begin offering once they’d gotten too old to be sold elsewhere.
The second guard returned and bent to my slashed plastic window.
‘Plastic garbage bags for seat covers? Clever,’ he said, no doubt in admiration.
‘The interior is drenched,’ I said.
‘I don’t wonder,’ he said, glancing at the rips in the top. ‘Miss Wade doesn’t want to see you,’ he added.
‘Does she ever see anybody?’
He handed me a small notepad and then entrusted me with the kind of pen even the cheapest motels leave lying around everywhere, knowing they won’t be stolen. ‘She’ll email you,’ the guard said. ‘Or not.’
‘Did she read my note?’ I asked, writing down my Gmail address.
‘I put it in the mail slot and then waited for a few minutes. Nothing.’
‘Maybe she’s a slow reader.’
‘Winter’s coming. Your seats might ice over before she gets to it.’
I gave him back his paper and pen and drove away like I’d been victorious.