Honestly Dearest You're Dead Read online

  ALSO BY JACK FREDRICKSON

  A Safe Place for Dying

  Jack Fredrickson

  Minotaur Books

  New York

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

  HONESTLY DEAREST, YOU’RE DEAD. Copyright © 2008 by Jack Fredrickson. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fredrickson, Jack.

  Honestly dearest, you’re dead/Jack Fredrickson.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-38092-2

  ISBN-10: 0-312-38092-2

  1. Private investigators—Illinois—Chicago—Fiction. 2. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3606.R437H66 2009

  813’.6—dc22 2008030429

  First Edition: January 2009

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Jack and for Lori

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Once again, Missy Lyda, Eric Frisch, Mary Anne Bigane, and Joseph Bigane III worked at more than the words.

  Once again, Kate Scherler worked at more than direction.

  Once again, Patrick Riley worked at more than the Web site.

  Once again, Marcia Markland and Diana Szu worked at more than keeping everything moving forward, and once again India Cooper smoothed over everything I missed, and some of the things I should have.

  And once again, as she has for forever, Susan…

  Lucky me.

  Prologue

  She wouldn’t have heard the back door glass being punched out, not in those winds. Later, the blueberry cop would say the Gazette reported they gusted up to fifty miles an hour, and that was in Kalamazoo, safer inland. Where she was, close to Lake Michigan, they would have raged louder. Hawking across the ice cliffs at the shore, building their furies as they screamed across the frozen fields, sucking the red branches of the lifeless blueberry bushes into grotesque tendrils, like twists of frozen blood, the winds could have hit her narrow little cottage at sixty, seventy miles an hour. Shingles clattering, windows banging, her place must have sounded like a cheap pine coffin being beat on by a hundred angry hands. She wouldn’t have heard the glass break.

  Nor would she have felt the sudden chill. Her thermostat was set down to a frugal sixty degrees, and there were gaps in the siding a fat man could stick his thumb through. There was no knowing what the inside temperature was that night—if it even was night—because nobody came by for days. By then the frigid air blowing through the three broken windows—the one on the kitchen door, broken carefully inward; the other two, larger, smashed out in panic, spraying bloody glass all over the snow-packed drive—had chilled the house to freezing.

  She’d fought. In her frenzy and her fear, she’d thrown herself at those two big windows. Each time, she’d been grabbed and dragged back, dripping bloody shards onto the frayed living room rug. I tried to step around them, but they were everywhere, crunching under my feet like bits of old bones.

  There was blood in the bedroom, too, frozen little droplets on the faded floral wallpaper, the oak table, the bare plank floor. On the knurled wheel that turned the rubber platen of the ancient black Underwood typewriter.

  I stopped, took a breath, like always when I saw one of those old Underwoods. A long time ago, I’d known a girl who owned a typewriter like that, a blond girl with a boy’s name. I was with her when she bought it, helped carry it home, watched as she turned it upside down to scratch her initials on it to make it her own.

  Outside, in the dimming light, the wind rustled, restless, waiting. I eased the old typewriter over and bent to look for marks made long ago. My eyes stung, wet. From the cold of the cottage, I told myself. From the horror of the butchery that had happened there.

  It had nothing to do with the past.

  One

  Three days earlier, I was up on a ladder.

  February is the wrong month to be outside on a ladder in Rivertown. It’s especially wrong when it is twenty degrees outside, the wind blowing up the Willahock River is strong, and the ladder, bought too well used from the widow of a housepainter who’d died in a fall, swayed like Katharine Hepburn sashaying through an old movie. But I had no choice. A pigeon, apparently still distraught from being evicted from the stone turret he’d spent a lifetime marking with excrement, the place I now called home, had killed himself smashing in the glass on one of my second-floor slit windows. That in turn sent what little heat I’d managed to trap blowing out that shattered window like smoke up a flue, and me up a ladder on a day when I should have been inside, bemoaning the fact that I didn’t have central heating.

  I’d just gotten to the top of the ladder with a piece of plywood and was hugging the top rung like life itself, waiting for the swaying to stop, when my cell phone rang down below.

  “Mr. Elstrom’s office,” Leo Brumsky said, on the ground. He’d insisted on coming over to hold the ladder. He’s a highly regarded provenance specialist, makes upwards of four hundred thousand dollars a year authenticating items for the major auction houses in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and has been my friend since grammar school. As a counterweight to my swaying ladder, though, his five feet six inches and one hundred and forty pounds was worthless. Carefully, so as not to excite the ladder, I looked down at the world shifting beneath me.

  “Who may I say is calling?” In the frigid air, Leo’s words made white puffs under the chartreuse knitted acrylic hat, topped with a purple pom, that he told me he’d bought for fifty-nine cents. He’d also told me the hat was new, but I didn’t believe it. The way the acrylic drooped below the fur of Leo’s black eyebrows suggested there’d been a previous owner, somebody with an enormous head. Either that or that the hat had been stretched, for years, over a basketball.

  “I’ll try to catch him as he’s coming down.” Tilting his head back to grin, preening with his wit, he covered the mouthpiece between two mittened hands, chartreuse to match, and waved the cell phone high, like Muhammad Ali back in the day, after a victory.

  “Is this necessary?” I called down.

  “How many business calls do you get?”

  He had a point: I hadn’t gotten a client call in five weeks. I undulated down to the frozen snow, set the plywood against the ladder, and took the phone.

  “Dek Elstrom,” I said.

  “Vlodek Elstrom, of Rivertown, Illinois?” a man’s voice asked.

  “How may I help?” Unless the guy was offering unbreakable windows, installed free, I wasn’t interested. I was cold.

  “My name is William Aggert. I’m an attorney in West Haven, Michigan. A client of mine, Louise Thomas, has passed away.”

  He paused so I could mumble the appropriate regrets.

  “Never heard of her,” I said.

  “Never heard of Louise Thomas?” I learned long ago that lawyers like to repeat themselves. It doubles their billable hours.

  “Never,” I said, switching phone hands and jamming the cold one in the pocket of my surplus store pea coat. One doesn’t risk gloves when clinging to life aboard a moving ladder.

  “Never heard—”

  It was too damned cold. “Are you going to try to bill me for this?” “Miss Thomas named you executor of her estate,” he said.

  “If I don’t know M
iss Thomas, how can I be her executor?”

  “You’ve never heard of Louise—?”

  I stomped my feet, switched hands again, thought this time of plunging the cold one under Leo’s hat. There was plenty of room between his bald head and the acrylic.

  “Happens all the time,” he said.

  “Misidentifying an executor?”

  He gave a lawyerly laugh, dry and uncomprehending. “Executors being named by people they don’t know.”

  Leo pulled the basketball warmer down to his chin and started to dance around, stomping his feet to keep warm. In the orange traffic officer’s jacket he’d gotten at the same place he’d bought the hat, he looked like a fire hydrant with rhythm.

  “My obligation is to inform you of her passing, and to provide you with the necessary instruments for you to fulfill your responsibilities,” Aggert said.

  “To be executor.”

  “Exactly.”

  “How much would that cost me?”

  Aggert made a clicking sound. It could have been a loose tooth, or it could have been a breath mint. “Ms. Thomas gave me money to be escrowed for your fee.”

  “How much?” I asked, perked up like a falcon sighting a field mouse.

  “Seven hundred dollars.”

  “Seven hundred dollars to close out the estate of someone I don’t know?”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  “When did she pass?”

  “Recently.”

  “How recently?”

  “How flexible is your schedule?” he clicked. No doubt, he was working on a breath mint. “West Haven’s just a couple of hours from you.”

  I didn’t tell him I had no appointments scheduled, for anything. “I can rearrange things, be up there on Monday.”

  “Morning, then?”

  “What’s the rush?”

  “I try to close out estates quickly. I like things nice and tidy.”

  “Afternoon,” I said. It wouldn’t hurt to create the impression I had other things to do besides rehabbing a limestone turret to sell, should Rivertown ever become fashionable.

  “One o’clock,” he said and started to say good-bye.

  “Wait,” I said. “Who inherits?”

  “It’s an odd will, Mr. Elstrom. Yours is the only name stated.”

  “No one is named a beneficiary?”

  “You merely execute, Mr. Elstrom.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I look forward to meeting you on Monday,” Aggert said and hung up.

  Next to me, Leo was still stomping, his hat down over his chin. I tapped his hand with the phone in case the chartreuse had been too noisy for him to hear.

  “That sounded intriguing,” he said, proving me wrong. He lifted his knitted veil.

  I handed him the phone, picked up the plywood, and swayed back up the ladder.

  A half hour later, we were on that half of the second floor that I call my office, because it’s where I keep my card table desk, the electric blue La-Z-Boy recliner I bought for twelve bucks, thirdhand, and the cartons of files from the days when I had a healthy business, chasing down information for law firms and insurance companies.

  Leo, huddled in the white plastic chair and still bundled in orange and chartreuse, waved a mitten at the curved limestone walls. “What is it with you and inheritances?”

  I’d inherited my grandfather’s five-story turret, the only part of his dream castle he ever got built, from an aunt who hadn’t liked me much. At the time I’d scoffed—it had come plastered with decades of pigeon poop, old tax liens, and a zoning classification that made it unsalable. Then my business and reputation got trashed, my bank account vaporized, and my marriage collapsed. My perspective got altered. I moved into the pigeon-scented turret prepared to shovel my way to a new life.

  “It didn’t turn out so bad,” I said to the limestone walls.

  Leo pulled the chartreuse another inch down his head.

  “Besides,” I went on, “I’m not inheriting this time; I’m merely executing.”

  “The estate of somebody you’ve never heard of.” He pulled the chair closer to the oil space heater I drag around in the winter. It won’t heat the whole room, but it keeps the coffee from icing over.

  I switched off the computer, ending a quick Internet search for Louise Thomas, L. Thomas, Lou Thomas. There were hundreds, but none listed near West Haven, Michigan. “All I can figure is that she worked for a client,” I said, pointing to the boxes of old files. Nowadays, all that got added to the cartons was dust.

  “I’ve got to get out of this igloo.” Leo stomped his feet as he stood up. Jamming his mittens into his traffic jacket, he angled his purple-pommed head toward the huge stone fireplace. There was one on every floor, each large enough to roast Paul Bunyan and his ox. “Don’t you ever want to build a fire?”

  “It would take a cord of firewood just to get it going.”

  “But jeez,” he said, tapping the space heater with the toe of his boot, “how long will that little thing take to warm up this pile?”

  Central heating was several thousands of dollars away.

  “Come July, this place will be toasty,” I said.

  Sunday afternoon, Amanda Phelps stood behind the lectern on the stage of Fullerton Hall in the Art Institute of Chicago, her face owlish in the yellow glow above the little hooded lamp. She is round-faced and beautiful, and she is my ex-wife.

  She snapped off the display from the overhead projector, ending her presentation. “Immediately following the concert, we will meet at the top of the Grand Staircase for a short tour to view Jean-Baptiste Joseph Wicar’s Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Augustus, Octavia, and Livia, 1790 to 1793, Pompeo Batoni’s Peace and War, 1776, and Antonio Canova’s Bust of Paris, 1809.”

  Of such came excitement—hers, not mine, although I did let myself hope that the name of the last piece, Canova’s, promised something akin to presenting Dolly Parton as the Bust of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

  Amanda introduced the brass quintet, lit the hall with a dazzling smile, and left the stage to sincere applause.

  She’d gotten me a center seat in the second row. “To keep an eye on me, to make sure I’m paying attention,” I accused. “To fully appreciate the interplay of the trumpets, trombone, French horn, and tuba,” she said, shaking her head. “To make it impossible for me to sleep discreetly,” I said. Winters, I get drowsy when exposed to heat. She smiled and said nothing more.

  The five hornists, or whatever they’re called, materialized in suits dark enough to enthuse funeral directors and arranged themselves on the stage in a semicircle, trumpets at the outside, tuba fellow at the base. Amanda had carted me to enough performances at Chicago’s Symphony Center to learn to distinguish a violin from a drum, but never had I sat so close to the horns. For the first part of what the program called Hellendaal’s Centone No. 10, all went well enough. Then the group stopped, and the trombonist and the French horn player slid curved pieces off their instruments and began shaking them vigorously, as though they’d discovered cockroaches dancing inside their horns. It wasn’t bugs they were shaking out, though—it was spit, lots of it, glistening as it cascaded onto the hardwood floor. Incredibly, no one laughed; the audience sat patiently and silently, as though what they were witnessing was normal behavior.

  The trumpeters got into the spirit of the event after the second part of the Centone, and removed their own bits of brass for a solid shake and spray. The performance became complete at the end of the third part, when the tuba player, a bald, genial-looking fellow who could have passed for a television weatherman, lifted the tuba above his head and began shaking it as if he were summoning Zeus to send down the rains. His face went purple as, indeed, the rains did come. Great gobs of spit pelted the floor like a summer thunderstorm. So it went, to the end of the program. It was wet work for sure, and at last I understood why, in full orchestras, the horn players are kept at the back of the stage.

  Afterward, I followed the audi
ence up the Grand Staircase to join Amanda for the gallery tour. I stayed with the group for fifteen or twenty minutes as Amanda explained some of the nuances in the works she’d presented during her slide presentation, though once I’d ascertained that Canova’s Bust of Paris had nothing in common with Dolly Parton, I lost interest and hung back as the group followed Amanda through the galleries. When it was over, I waited downstairs in the marble foyer.

  She came down in a hooded black wool coat that matched her hair and was only one shade darker than her eyes. “What did you think of the performance?” she asked, slipping her arm through mine.

  “Drainage,” I said, holding the door open for her.

  “Hopeless,” she said as we went out.

  We ate at the little trattoria where I’d proposed, two years before. Even though we were divorced, we were still trying, and it was still our place.

  She tore a piece of Italian bread and dipped it in olive oil. “Tell me more about this mysterious phone call.”

  “I’ve been named executor of a will written by a person I don’t know.”

  “No clue?”

  “None. I’m guessing Louise Thomas is someone I brushed against when my business was healthy.”

  “But you’ll be paid?” She was looking at me intently, inspecting my eyes for visions of dancing sugarplums. Amanda likes it when I’m solidly grounded.

  “Seven hundred clams,” I said, before she could test the point. “The lawyer told me lots of executors are not personally acquainted with their decedents.”

  “What’s to do if there are no beneficiaries?”

  “I’m guessing the estate has just enough money to pay all the outstanding bills. Should be a quick seven hundred.”

  “You didn’t really discuss what’s involved with the lawyer, did you, Dek?” Her eyes sparkled from the candle burning atop the wine bottle.

  “Just the important part: the seven-hundred-dollar fee. I’ll drive up tomorrow morning, and then the rest will be known.”