An automobile backfired at four-fifteen the next morning, not waking me up because I wasn’t asleep.
I got out of bed and went to the window in time to see it clatter off Thompson Avenue and cut its lights and its engine on the short street that led to mine. Few cars could sputter that loudly and still move, so had it been a little earlier, I would have taken its driver to be the most frugal of the johns. They favored the dark of that short street. End-of-shift bargains could be gotten there from the hardiest of the late-night hookers that worked Thompson Avenue, Rivertown’s road of lust. But four-fifteen was too late for professional ministrations, even in Rivertown. The neons and the girls had flickered out over an hour before.
Conversely, four-fifteen was too early for some overserved Rivertown cop to be bumping his car along the curb, feeling his way to the police station behind city hall. Shift change didn’t happen until six. Besides, Rivertown police cars never clattered like the one that had just stopped on the short street. They were kept in tip-top shape, daytimes, by the mayor’s uncle’s crew over at the city garage.
I beat it up the stairs and the ladders to the balustrade in time to hear a car door open and slam, though no interior light had flashed on. A second later, another door opened and slammed.
Two sets of footsteps grew louder, running onto my street. Giggling. Kids, I figured, intent on the bench by the river, perhaps to watch the plastic debris glint as it bobbed by, or more probably to touch love.
The street went silent as the kids crossed onto the grass directly below me, and then more giggling arose, approaching the bench. My mind wandered, then, to my own old young times down by the river with a girl who was now dead. Now I would be a voyeur, and I didn’t want that. I turned to go back inside.
The familiar banging and tapping began, rising up alongside the turret. The last time I’d been on the roof when it came, I’d let the trap door drop loudly behind me as I charged down the ladder, scaring the tapping thing away. This time I would wait.
The banging and tapping got louder, rising. And with that came a new sound I’d not been close enough to hear before: a soft whirring.
In the next instant, whatever was whirring whirred itself over the top of the balustrade, almost cuffing my ear as it passed by. I swung at it but I was too late. It disappeared over the opposite balustrade.
It had a small light.
I hurried to the street side to look down. The light had been extinguished and the night was too dark to see anything else, but there was no missing the sound of footsteps pounding the pavement toward the short street. The creaking car doors opened; the clattering car started up. It switched on its lights, turned around, and headed back to Thompson Avenue.
I climbed down into the turret, understanding the tapping at last. It would be simple to stop it.
But I had only the barest idea of what to do about Herbie Sunheim.
Violet Krumfeld, the Herbie Whisperer, remained evasive when I stopped in later that morning. ‘I told you, I don’t know where Herbie is,’ she said, somewhat audibly.
‘Look, he hired me to take some pictures—’
‘Of what?’
‘That’s confidential, but he sent along a—’
‘Ah, yes, that retainer,’ she said, starting to sniffle at the preposterous hilarity of that.
‘He’s not checking in with you?’
‘We discussed this. I can’t help.’
‘Where’s he living?’
‘I can’t give you his home address.’
‘He moved out of his home.’
She sighed. She knew. ‘I don’t know where he is now, and his wife pretends like she doesn’t know, either.’ She whispered so softly I couldn’t hope to tell if she was lying.
‘She knows; she just won’t say. What was he working on most recently?’
She shook her head.
I called Amanda on my way over to the county recorder of deeds. ‘I’m twice as flush as the last time I evaded buying you lunch.’
‘How come?’ she asked, but it sounded perfunctory. She was distracted.
‘My client sent me double the agreed-upon amount, and in greenbacks.’
‘Hold for a moment,’ she said, and covered her mouthpiece. Then, coming back, she asked, ‘He paid you a thousand bucks in cash for snapping phone pictures?’
‘To do more, I’m almost sure.’
‘You still haven’t talked to him?’
‘He’s been incommunicado since I sent him the first photos, but a skinflint like Herbie Sunheim never overpays. Fortunately, I had an inspiration, and went back to take more photos.’
‘Ah, your inspirations.’
‘Let’s discuss them, yours and mine, over lunch.’
‘Can’t. Lemon pants,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Sorry, that’s my new shorthand. I pitch to the board this afternoon.’
‘You’re optimistic?’
‘Guardedly; I still have selling to do. I just finished two hours with our marketing and advertising people, trying to get prepared. Raincheck on lunch?’
‘You betcha,’ I said, because that’s what we’d learned to say to each other since out divorce. It implied that there would be a tomorrow, no matter what.
The county recorder’s office was on Clark Street, not far from the Art Institute where Amanda had happily worked for years. Local news reporting had it that, even in tough budgetary times, the county recorder had managed to create dozens of jobs, though all of them had gone to relatives and other connected people. Such employment practices were common in Cook County, and had been known for forever as hiring ‘somebody who somebody sent.’ Along with the killing and the corruption and the pie-eyed real estate developers, Chicagoans accepted that thousands of such somebodies would forever be feeding at the public trough.
Unsurprisingly, the recorder’s office had the feel of a county agency designed for such people, hushed and dimly lit for the slow, zombie-like movement of the walking dead. Though no one was in line, it was twenty minutes before a woman responded to the relentless clearing of my throat, and another thirty before she came back with the name written semi-legibly on a slip of paper. The Central Works property was owned by a real estate trust named Triple Time Partners. Its address was only blocks away.
It was one of the first warm days of March and the sidewalks were filled with earnest young people escaping the tall buildings on one pretext or another, to bustle from sunny patch to sunny patch along the cement. Though I was only a few years older than them, I could not recall a time when I’d ever felt like bustling, let alone been earnest.
Triple Time’s street address was in an old but stylish former jewelers’ exchange set beneath the elevated rail tracks along Wabash Avenue. It was not listed on the first-floor directory, but the suite number I’d gotten at the recorder’s office was on the fifth floor and belonged to something called Dace Property Management. I stepped in.
The glassed-off reception area was tiny but stylish as well. Two chrome and black leather chairs and one glass table sat on a bright red rug that was almost the same color as one of Leo Brumsky’s more subdued pair of pants. A glass door set in a glass wall separated the reception area from the equally stylish young receptionist, filing her nails. I opened the glass door and asked if I might speak to someone about one of their properties.
A lean, middle-aged man came out into the reception area smiling. He was about forty, wore a brown, houndstooth-checked jacket, beige slacks, white shirt and a yellow bow tie that contrasted nicely with the ruddy, healthy glow of his skin. I thought about telling him that my ex-wife, Amanda, had bought me a yellow bow tie as well, but that I’d worn it only rarely, since knotting it required consulting a YouTube instruction video each time I put it on.
He introduced himself as Walter Dace and led me back to the lone private office. We sat on silver mesh chairs around a small, round glass table. With all the glass in the reception area, and now his table, I imagined the man’s Windex budget was enormous.
He’d noticed me looking around the small suite as he led me back. ‘You’re wondering how large we are?’
I nodded.
‘Large enough,’ he said.
‘You manage properties for multiple real estate partnerships?’ I asked.
‘Which property are you inquiring about?’
‘The one where a man fell to his death.’
He stood up. ‘Thank you for coming.’
He walked me out past the receptionist, who was still filing her nails, and held open the glass door. I went through it without yielding to the childish temptation to leave a smudge, crossed the reception area to go out the hall door and rode the elevator down to the lobby, an exit as smooth as sliding down a greased chute.
An ‘El’ train rumbled overhead as I stepped out onto the sidewalk. Normal confidentiality concerns would have made Walter Dace reluctant to talk about any property he managed, and my asking about the one where a corpse was found certainly warranted my getting the bum’s rush. But the tempo of his little enterprise nagged. I’d been in plenty of property management offices, and all were hectic with concerns about leases, janitorial issues, equipment malfunctions and such.
Dace’s operation offered up none of that. Nothing seemed to be going on there. The place felt like a front, a name on a door.
It felt like a brick wall.
I’d struck out chasing the last of the leads I imagined Herbie might find productive and by now his voicemail was full. Without his permission, I couldn’t take the next logical step, which was to point the cops to the mural I’d discovered on the top floor of the Central Works. So I stopped at a sporting goods store on my way back to Rivertown and then swung down the river road to Kutz’s clearing.
Leo’s white van was parked alongside the wienie wagon with its rear doors open. Only a little of the lumber I’d seen inside remained. Most of it was now stuck upright in the ground around the oval that had been graded into the clearing. They were fence posts, like those surrounding the small clearing to the side of the trailer that I’d noticed the last time I’d stopped by.
Leo was marching along inside the graded oval. He waved and came up as I parked.
The day’s outfit was the usual medley of colors so outrageous they’d clash in a pitch-black cave. And once again he was topped by his chimney-like chef’s toque that, because it was white, almost looked normal. But that day, Leo had embellished his wardrobe even more bizarrely. He wore a carpenter’s tool belt. It was obviously new; there wasn’t a smudge on its gold faux suede. Nor did it look like it would get dirty soon, for the belt held no tools. No hammer hung from its loop, no nails, tape measure, screws, screwdrivers or any other thing bounced in any of the heavy-duty pockets.
‘Why are you wearing a tool belt?’ I quite naturally asked.
‘It’s just like yours.’
‘Identical to mine, in fact, when it was new.’
He nodded, as if my question had been answered.
‘I ask again: why are you wearing a tool belt?’
‘Look around,’ he said. ‘There’s much work to be done.’
‘But you have no tools.’
‘I have Pa’s, remember? You used them to put together the enclosure behind the trailer.’
‘I remember you wouldn’t say what the enclosure I built was for.’
‘That will now be revealed.’
‘And Pa’s tools? Where are they?’
‘In the trailer,’ he said, starting to lead me around to the back of the trailer.
‘Why wear a tool belt if you’re not going to carry tools?’
‘I’m no good with tools,’ he said.
It was nonsensical dialogue. I gave it up and followed him around to the back of the trailer.
A glossy white freezer the size of a fat man’s coffin had been set inside the hinged, slatted enclosure I’d built. He raised the wood lid and opened the freezer. ‘We’re going to offer six flavors of ice cream.’
‘Magnificent,’ I said of the freezer that looked just like every other large freezer I’d seen. ‘Now, what’s with the fence posts surrounding what’s obviously a track of some sort?’
‘That’s still a secret,’ he said.
‘You’re advertising thoroughbred racing on your sign,’ I said, reminding him.
Ever since we were kids, Leo could not keep a secret from me. Every time he’d tell me he was keeping a secret, I’d feign indifference. That made him turn purple, and always he’d spill within a minute. Not this time. There was no purple; there was no spill. Leo pursed his lips, staying mum about whatever he was planning to set loose to run in circles within his oval.
‘Speaking of secrets, how are you getting on with your case?’ he asked.
I told him I’d still not heard from Herbie Sunheim, and had struck out with Herbie’s wife and his office assistant about where he was living.
‘You don’t suppose something bad has happened to him?’ he asked.
‘I’m hoping he’s just taking a breather from life, living somewhere else because he’s on the outs with his wife. I’m going to try and chill.’
He laughed. ‘You never let anything chill. You’ll pick at it, over and over, until you find out why Mister Sunshine isn’t calling, and why he sent you the extra five large.’
I told him I’d checked on the ownership of the Central Works and gone to see its property manager, who’d thrown me out.
‘You’ve been thrown out of plenty of places,’ he said, accurately.
It was true enough. We walked to the Jeep.
‘What’s with the big fish net?’ he asked, pointing to my sporting goods purchase, visible through the clear plastic curtain on my new green top.
‘That’s for night fishing,’ I said.