The Dead Caller from Chicago Read online

  “This is going to improve flexibility how?” I asked.

  “It might even cure the ’Zheimers,” he said. He undid the clips on the barrel and lifted the lid so I could see inside.

  “Pistachio nuts,” I said.

  He jabbed a hand into the nuts and withdrew a few as if he were cradling tiny torpedoes of gold. “Look closer; behold the miracle.”

  I took one from his palm. “A most ordinary pistachio,” I said, having keen observational skills.

  “How would you open it?”

  It had not burst open. There was no seam.“Nonsplits,” I said, at last understanding his earlier use of the term—and not.

  A Home Depot plastic bag lay on the case of All-Bran. He smiled, reached inside, and pulled out a pair of needle-nose pliers. “Comprende?” Sometimes he switches to Spanish, though never for very long, because he does not know the language.

  “Oui,” I answered in flawless high school French. “Ma and her lady friends will have to use pliers to open the pistachios, thereby strengthening their motor and mental skills. Thus the world will be saved, bronze Brumskys will be erected, and pigeons everywhere will have something appropriate to aim at.”

  “Genius, huh?”

  “Drive me home.” I had no time to dawdle. Yups were coming.

  Five minutes later, he pulled up to the turret. “Come over tomorrow, and behold the beginnings of the new age.”

  As I climbed out of his rental van, I told him I would bet every one of my newfound twenty-eight hundred and fifty-three dollars that nothing but good was on the horizon for us both.

  I will remember that moment for as long as I live.

  Two

  I awoke the next morning early and optimistic. I shrugged into my three sweatshirts, XL, XXL, and XXXL, and fairly raced down to the second-floor kitchen to make coffee. I was anxious to embrace the day and all the yups it brought forth, exactly as Lester Lance advised.

  Burbling along with Mr. Coffee, I looked around with new satisfaction. I’d learned finish carpentry and cabinetmaking in that kitchen and thought the new oak cabinets, moldings, and trims looked fine indeed. True, the badly dented microwave offered a discordant note, presenting as it did the tiny potential of glow-in-the-dark aftereffects, and the rusty avocado-colored refrigerator I’d found in an alley worked well enough in the winter but was not at all reliable in the summer. No matter; they’d be gone soon. Only high-end stainless steel appliances would impress yups, and those were on the horizon. I had a new client, talking retainer.

  Mr. Coffee gasped at last, and I took my coffee across the hall. As on each of the five floors, a huge fireplace was set into the southwest curve. It had been used only once, to share a fire with a woman reporter whom I’d never quite gotten to know.

  I pulled the plastic garbage bag down over my desktop computer, covered my card table desk with a bedsheet, and began cutting thin strips of oak molding to surround the slit windows.

  Architecturally, the narrow windows were historically accurate, ideal for archers to repel attacking marauders. Because they were set into rough stone, trimming them was fussy, slow work. By one o’clock, I’d only finished two and was ready for a break.

  I went into the kitchen, drank the last burned dregs of the coffee, and ate half a cup of Cheerios, dry. Drinking burned coffee was a longtime habit. Dry Cheerios, though, were new. I’d had the happy yellow box since my divorce, but I’d used it simply as a cabinet divider to separate the small mounds of Twinkies and Ho Hos that were my ordinary staples. I’d been inspired to a wider view when, simultaneously, Lester Lance Leamington moved up into the daylight and I acquired a generous client. Change was in the wind for sure, and I reasoned I should improve my nutritional life as well. I began supplementing the Twinkies and Ho Hos with small test doses of Cheerios, administered one half-cup at a time. It had been almost a week, and I’d experienced no ill effects from the little sawdust-colored circles. In fact, that day I thought I noticed more spring in my step as I bounded up to the third-floor bedroom, where I keep my clothes piled on a chair next to my bed. I changed into unstained khakis and my least wrinkled blue button-down shirt, slipped on my blue blazer and peacoat, and walked my new health and optimism down the street to city hall.

  The Building and Zoning Department was in the basement, the darkest floor of all. Unlike the mayor’s first-floor office, where the big bundles from pimps, bookies, and tavern operators were counted out behind thick mahogany and closed drapes, the windowless basement offices were for collecting ordinary, day-to-day gratuities for permits that in any other suburb wouldn’t require a bribe at all. I hadn’t been down there since before Elvis Derbil had been perp-walked out by federal agents.

  His door had been changed only slightly. The opaque glass now read J. J. DERBIL, BUILDING AND ZONING COMMISSIONER. Only the first name had changed. Official positions were passed along through families in Rivertown like genetic disorders.

  The secretary in the outer office hurried out another door when she saw me. That had been her habit since the first time I’d come to scream at Elvis.

  “Ahem,” I said, clearing my throat behind the counter in the now empty outer office.

  “Do you have an appointment?” a woman’s voice called from inside Elvis’s old private office.

  “Purely an introductory call,” I called through the door.

  “You are?”

  “Dek Elstrom.”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “We’ve met?”

  “You’re the pain in the ass that lives in that limestone toilet-paper tube. Go away.”

  “I’m a taxpayer. You work for me.” I laughed. Even I saw that as ludicrous.

  “Make an appointment, Elstrom.”

  “Who are you?”

  “The building and zoning commissioner, you idiot.”

  “I meant your name.”

  “Derbil.”

  “I meant your first name.”

  “Make an appointment,” she said for the second time. She certainly had Elvis’s communication skills, though my nose told me she didn’t use his coconut-scented hair spray.

  “I want you to rezone my property from municipal to residential.”

  She laughed. I left, thinking that to stay longer might jeopardize our budding relationship.

  Since I was all dressed up, I drove to Leo’s. I needed humor, and good coffee to wash away the dregs I’d just had at home, and heat, in which to enjoy them both.

  I parked in front. As always, his walk and steps were immaculate, despite the snow that seemed to have fallen every day since November. Oddly, Leo’s old aluminum baseball bat lay on the snow next to the walk.

  The sound of a vacuum cleaner came through the front door. As did a sort of pinging, as though gravel were ricocheting inside, against the walls and windows. I had to knock loudly for almost a minute before the vacuuming stopped and Leo opened the door. Though he was dressed with his usual absurd cheeriness, in a too-large aqua-colored Hawaiian shirt festooned with monkeys riding balloons, and red cargo pants, he was not smiling. His normally pale face was flushed dark, perhaps from exertion.

  “Vacuuming, Leo?” I asked, affably enough.

  “With a normal vacuum cleaner, not a Shop-Vac like others must use,” he said, trying for a smirk. On a head so pale and thin, a smirk was always an interesting contortion, because it made his thick black eyebrows look like they were trying to mate.

  “I’m here for coffee,” I said.

  “First we clean.” Leo never gets sidetracked. He thinks and lives sequentially. He is not like me.

  I stepped inside. The living room had been shelled, literally. Splintered beige pistachio shells and crumbly bits of yellowish green nut meat lay on the carpet, the tops of the picture frames, the windowsills, and the yellowed plastic slipcovers that had protected every piece of upholstered furniture since Leo was an infant.

  Two vacuum cleaners sat in the middle of the floor. One was an upright, the other a canister on wh
eels. A broom and a dustpan were set against the big-screen television. Shells crunched beneath my shoes as I took another step into the room.

  The needle-nosed pliers Leo had bought for Ma and her friends to manipulate their minds and hands into better mental and motor health lay loosely spilled out of the Home Depot bag, apparently untouched. More interestingly, different, heavier tools—three wood-handled hammers, a handsaw, two silver adjustable wrenches, even Pa Brumsky’s huge pipe wrench—were scattered all over the floor.

  Several twisted, smashed-in tray tables were propped against the wall, ruined.

  I understood why Leo’s short aluminum baseball bat was lying on the snow outside. It was another tool, grabbed from the basement.

  “Ma and her lady friends decided heavier implements would be more efficient?” I asked, summoning up my own smirk as I imagined the sounds such heavy weaponry must have made, whacking at tiny nonsplit nuts.

  He ignored me. Pointing to the two vacuum cleaners, he asked, “Upright or canister?”

  I took the upright, since it required less bending.

  Even though the front room was tiny, it took a full twenty minutes because the two vacuum cleaners kept sending bits of shells and meat zinging in new directions. Finally, he shut off his vacuum and took a last look around. Leo’s five-six, and that day he looked every bit the perfect miniature of a general surveying the field of an earlier, disastrous battle.

  “Movie night?” I asked.

  “Movie night,” he agreed sadly, picking up an empty quart of vodka that had been kicked under a chair.

  It had taken her less than a month, once Leo bought Ma the big-screen television, to discover soft cable porn. Only days after that, she found the harder, pay-per-view stuff. I could well imagine the rapid-fire chattering, in Polish, as Ma called her friends, all but one widows, with news of what could be summoned into her front room.

  Gone was bingo at the church. Gone were rotating weekly bridge evenings. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays were now for new adventures, as Ma’s circle of septuagenarians and octogenarians tottered over to Casa Brumsky to witness the slicked contortions on Ma’s new TV.

  I’d stumbled into one of those movie nights the previous summer. Eight old ladies sat primly in front of tray tables, sipping vodka from water glasses, munching from bowls of bridge mix, fried Wheat Chex, and prunes, staring at things on television they’d never previously dared discuss, in Polish, English, or any other language.

  They’d looked up, red faced, when I knocked on the open screen door. The three that had walkers began banging their wheels on the floor, summoning Leo up from his basement office, where he’d taken to hiding on the nights when the girls came over. He charged up the gangway from the back of the house and yanked me off the front porch like I was explosive. He told me it was best to call before coming over; the girls liked privacy on movie nights.

  “I still believe cracking the pistachios will spark them up a bit,” Leo said now.

  “Don’t movie nights do that?”

  He shook his head at my lack of vision. “I figured by the time they worked through the barrel of pistachios, they’d have improved their finger dexterity, loosened their shoulders and necks, and be thinking at warp speed.”

  I gestured at the heavy tools lying on the sculpted brown carpet. “They thought faster than you, for sure.”

  “Ma even got her meat tenderizer, the big square one she used to use on whole sides of beef. And someone messed up the garage, looking for Pa’s tire iron.”

  “Your old baseball bat, too. It’s lying on the snow outside.”

  “Jeez, you should have heard them, Dek. They sounded like a highway crew jackhammering a road.” He sighed. “Let’s bring coffee down to my office. Ma will be too embarrassed to show herself with you around.”

  Leo’s office was directly under the living room. It must have been deafening, beneath a loud cloud of moaning porn stars, banging walkers, and falling wrenches.

  Leo read my mind as always. “I couldn’t stand it and spent the night at Endora’s.” Endora was his girlfriend. An ex-model and current Newberry Library researcher, she was a head taller than he was, though both their heads possessed the same oversized IQ. She lived in a condo, downtown.

  His office was furnished with mismatched furniture, files, and equipment and was always orderly and neat. He sat behind the ancient wood desk, and I took the huge green upholstered chair his father had died in, all those years before.

  “Tell me about this new client that’s going to make you rich.” He took a yellow wood pencil from the cup on his desk and leaned back. Leo was amazingly dexterous and often walked a pencil up and down between his fingers.

  “Offices in ten states. They’ve hinted that the twenty-eight hundred was just for openers, that there will be a retainer coming for a lot more work. Maybe I’ve hit a golden confluence—”

  “Confluence?” he interrupted.

  “Confluence. It means a joining of two or more streams, like—”

  “I know what a confluence is, you jackass. I just can’t let you throw around such words as though they’re part of your regular vocabulary.”

  “Confluence,” I went on. “Maybe I’ll have the dough to finish the turret and get my zoning changed just as yups are a-gathering right here in Rivertown—”

  His landline phone rang. “Leo Brumsky,” he said, holding the receiver with his left hand as his right kept finger-walking the pencil.

  I tuned him out and looked around the office. As always, there was no sign of any current project, but I knew there had to be several. Leo Brumsky was highly regarded in the auction world.

  On display, though, was Bo Derek. The movie goddess from the late seventies looked back at me from a poster above the light table. She sat in the surf and wore only a thin blouse, mostly unbuttoned. The blouse was wet. It was why Leo bought the poster when he was in high school. It was still the only work in his, an art examiner’s, office. Even as adults, we agreed, it was all the art he needed.

  The soft tap of his pencil hitting the tiled floor caught my ear.

  “Snark?” His voice was higher than I’d ever heard.

  I kept my eyes on Bo. The office had gone absolutely silent, except for Leo’s breathing. It had quickened.

  A moment passed, then another. Then he spoke, in a voice that was disbelieving. “Speak up, will you? You’re whispering.”

  I had to look. His normally pale face had gone absolutely white. He was staring at the blank place on the wall above his four-drawer file cabinets, seeing nothing.

  “No. I ran into Tebbins, and he told me about you, and all, so I threw it out; I didn’t figure you’d want—” he said, his own voice now barely above a whisper. “I tell you: It’s gone.”

  His free hand reached for another pencil. It snapped in his fist. He mumbled something that I couldn’t make out and hung up the phone.

  “Who was that?”

  His head didn’t move.

  “Leo?” I said, louder.

  He looked up at me, slowly, like his neck hurt.

  “That first summer you were gone,” he said softly. “After first year of college…” His voice trailed away, and he again turned to look at the blank spot above the filing cabinets.

  I remembered that summer. I’d left Rivertown at the end of the summer before, to begin college in Chicago, but really to get as far from Rivertown as I could afford. After freshman year, I stayed in the city because I had nowhere else to go. I took an early-morning summer session class, worked three part-time jobs, and waited for the memories to fade. A girl I’d known had died. For a time, I’d been suspected of killing her.

  I’d never wanted to summon back those times, but now I realized Leo had never mentioned that summer, either, other than once he’d said he’d worked at the city’s municipal garage.

  “Who called, Leo?”

  His eyes were glass, unblinking, as he turned back to look at me.

  “A dead man,” he sai
d.

  Three

  To my shame, I forgot about the strange call Leo had received. My new client called, offering a seventeen-hundred-dollar fee to document a fraudulent insurance claim in Cedar Rapids. I was packed and gone first thing the next morning, certain it wasn’t Iowa I was headed for but Fat City.

  Leo phoned a day later. I was in a meeting with two of my client’s agents. The call went to message but he hadn’t left any words, and I forgot about that as well. It was like that with Leo and me. When one of us—almost always Leo—got busy, calls didn’t get returned, unless someone yelled “Important.” He hadn’t.

  I’d been back in Rivertown for two days, typing up reports, before I drove over to his neighborhood just before dusk. Even then, it wasn’t Leo I was anxious to see, but rather that harbinger of coming good times, the new construction sprouting on his street.

  They’d made good progress, in spite of the fact that it snowed three inches right after I’d left for Iowa. A huge hole had been cut square into the ground for a foundation sizable enough for what would surely be the largest house in Rivertown. I supposed the third lot, where the bungalow slated for demolition still stood empty, would be used for a side yard, and perhaps a detached garage.

  I imagined some of the neighbors, good solid blue-collar types with sensible values, were appalled at what was sure to be a monument to an arrogant ego being plopped down smack in the middle of their neighborhood. I suspected more would be excited, like me, at the prospect of finally making out financially in a grub town like Rivertown.

  I continued on down the block, thinking that if Leo were home, I’d blow off about having been traveling, as he so often did, on professional business, as he invariably did, and about how my professional life was just like his, except he had multiple clients, made huge money, and was generally well regarded in his profession. Since my business, and my life, had been trashed in a falsified document scheme some time back, that kind of talk would be good for half a laugh.

  I coasted to a stop at his curb, surprised.