Tagged for Murder Read online

  Despite his frequent infusions of powdered sugar, Benny had a metabolism that ticked at the rate that oaks grew, and so he required frequent naps. That was fine with the lizards that ran Rivertown. Frequent snoozing was perfectly acceptable so long as it didn’t interrupt his revenue stream, and folks around town were used to seeing him asleep in his Maverick, mouth agape, at all hours of the day.

  Never, though, had I ever seen him fall asleep in the midst of parking his car. Even more worrisome was the partially full box of doughnuts sitting on the seat beside him. Benny rarely rested until the entire day’s dozen was consumed.

  ‘You feeling all right, Benny?’ I asked, leaning in the open door for a better look. The skin around his mouth was its familiar hue, pale white from the usual dusting of powdered sugar trapped in his unshaved stubble of whiskers, but now his entire head had turned almost the same shade of white.

  ‘Just need some … just need some … sleep …’ he stammered.

  ‘Tuck the nose of your car closer to the curb, Benny,’ I said, shutting his door and leaving him to his rest.

  At the turret, I uploaded the pictures I’d just taken onto my computer. The photos clearly showed that the scratches on the rusty rails between the building and the end of the rail spur were shinier than those on the tracks between the building and the main rail line. I made a note to tell Herbie that someone had moved the railcar very recently, and that he’d better hope it had not been his property owner attempting to tamper with evidence.

  I forwarded to the new pictures of the building that I’d taken that morning. Even partially obscured by the workmen on the scaffold, they confirmed what the photos I’d taken yesterday showed. The body could have dropped directly onto the top of the boxcar from any of the windows above the spur.

  I leaned closer. I hadn’t paid much attention to the graffiti that was being power washed away when I was taking the photos, other than recognizing it as colorful and part of a larger picture. Now, though, there was something about the bits and specks left of the rendering that was troubling.

  I printed several of the clearest images on plain paper and then, with a soft lead pencil, spent the next hours sketching in my guess as to what had been removed before I’d gotten there. By late afternoon, I was sure. I emailed my sketches to Herbie, and then called him.

  ‘You’ve got a bigger problem than incriminating scratches on rusted rails, but maybe that will give you an opportunity,’ I said.

  FIVE

  Herbie didn’t call. So, after two hours, I called him again, and again got routed to voicemail.

  ‘My sketches might show something big-time serious, Herbie,’ I began. ‘I think a tagger painted a head on your building, set inside what appears to be an open window, and it might be horrifying. The head is low; and there’s a hand on what might be the head’s shoulder, perhaps tossing the man out the window. You’ve got a witness to a body dump and maybe even a murder: that tagger. I’m also guessing your owner has panicked, towing that boxcar away from the building, and then hiring power washers to obliterate the art. Your best shot is to tell your owner to calm down, and to try to find that tagger. He’d be able to testify that the victim didn’t simply fall because of owner negligence, but was deliberately pitched out. And since the old building looks to have been securely boarded up for some time, your owner wasn’t keeping an attractive public nuisance, open to anyone looking to do bad things—’ The voice messaging shut off.

  I called back to finish. ‘I’m guessing your owner, or at least his representative, is the well-dressed young guy I photographed by the No Trespassing sign yesterday, back again this morning to make sure the tagger’s message got scrubbed away. Talk to your owner, Herbie. Find that tagger.’

  And that, of course, meant hiring me.

  I drove to Leo’s ma’s house. Leo Brumsky has been my pal since seventh grade. He makes upward of a half-million dollars a year as a provenance consultant for most of the major auction houses, authenticating the age and history of items put up for sale, wears designer suits for work and outrageous, discount Hawaiian duds for play, and drives a hundred-thousand-dollar Porsche roadster that he changes every year and a half or so. He spends half of his time at his ex-model girlfriend’s Chicago condo and the other half at his mother’s brick bungalow in Rivertown, where he keeps his office. He’s smarter than anyone I’ve ever known and certainly more patient with disjointed thinking than anyone I will ever meet.

  None of that had anything to do with why I drove over to his mother’s place that day. I wanted to see him because he makes me laugh.

  ‘Yah?’ Ma Brumsky called out, muffled from somewhere inside, after I knocked.

  ‘It’s me, Mrs Brumsky. Dek.’

  ‘Yah?’

  ‘Dek!’ I shouted.

  The lacework fluttered behind the window to the right of the door. A moment later, three sets of chains slid back and the door opened only a crack, restrained by the remaining two. One rheumy eye appeared in the gap. ‘Vat you doink here, Dekkie?’

  I couldn’t be sure because of the narrowness of the door opening, but it looked like Ma Brumsky was done up in some sort of fifties’ costume, judging by what I could see of part of a white felt poodle’s head that was stitched on an inappropriately short pink skirt. Not far enough below it, I saw more wattled leg flesh than any considerate septuagenarian should flash.

  ‘Looking for Leo,’ I managed, trying to accept that any skirt on Ma Brumsky, no matter how short, was an improvement of sorts. Not that many months before, Ma and her friends had been arrested for co-ed skinny dipping in Rivertown’s health center pool and carted off, in towels, to the police station. She was a marvelously free-spirited woman and a constant burden to her son.

  ‘Hot dog, Dekkie,’ she said.

  ‘Hot dogs? He went out to get hot dogs?’

  She laughed and closed the door. Chains slipped back in place.

  There was only one reasonable place for hot dogs in Rivertown, and that was Kutz’s peeling wood trailer beside the Willahock River. Beginning toward the end of every February, Leo began anticipating the wienie wagon’s season opening the way other Chicagoans anticipated opening day at Wrigley Field, Sox Park or the Bears’ Soldier Field. Swinging down to Kutz’s clearing to be sure of when the irascible old crank was set to slide back his greasy plastic window and declare his lukewarm, partially contaminant-free lunch fare available for ingestion was a ritual for Leo, reaffirmation of a rite he’d been practicing since we were kids. But always, toward the end of every February, Leo kept me apprised of the status of the forthcoming grand event so I might accompany him to be among the season’s very first to pounce on Kutz’s gristly fare. That, too, was tradition. But that day, leaving Ma Brumsky’s bungalow, I realized Leo hadn’t peeped once in anticipation of Kutz’s reopening.

  I headed to the outskirts of town, turned onto the road that led down to the viaduct. And then I slammed on my brakes.

  An enormous new, black-on-white sign stood alongside the road.

  KUTZ’S WIENIE WAGON REOPENING SOON!

  SAME FOOD!

  TABLE SERVICE!

  THOROGHBRED RACING MAYBE!

  ICE CREAM TOO!

  As if all those excited exclamation points weren’t shocking enough – Kutz never got excited, he merely swore softly, mostly at his customers – a bulldozer was directly ahead, sending out great black clouds of diesel smoke as it labored to smooth the rutted, occasionally graveled ground that Kutz offered as a parking lot. Kutz never concerned himself with smooth, either – not in his behavior, and certainly not on his land. I parked at the very edge of the clearing where, I hoped, the odds were better that the Jeep would not get flattened by a dozer operating blind in black smoke.

  Leo walked into view from behind the trailer and stopped. ‘Ah, jeez,’ he said, flashing only half of his oversized, bright white teeth into a tentative smile. ‘I wanted to surprise you most of all.’

  Leo’s outlandish costume for the day cons
isted of blaze-orange slacks, a neon-green ski jacket and yellow high-topped canvas sneakers. All usual stuff, but that day he was adorned with something new.

  ‘What’s that on your head?’ I inquired of the rumpled white cloth cylinder rising above his pale head like a rippled chimney. It extended his five foot six inches by another full foot.

  ‘A toque.’

  ‘A chef’s hat.’

  ‘People of refinement know it as a toque.’

  ‘You’re not a chef, and no one of refinement would be caught anywhere near this hot dog trailer.’

  ‘Didn’t you read the sign?’

  ‘Yes. Ice cream is coming to join Kutz’s normal, flammable fare. But table service and thoroughbred racing? Never. Also, I can’t help but notice that as well,’ I said, pointing to the bulldozer spewing noxious black smoke. ‘Kutz is making changes, and you’re actually helping?’

  The place had remained especially sacred ground for Leo and me precisely because it had never changed since we were kids. The pigeon-splattered picnic tables were the same ones we’d eaten on; what little white paint still clung to the trailer was the same as when we were kids, only there was less of it. The wood menu hanging in front was also mostly unchanged, though Kutz did paint on price increases whenever he could. And he did serve up something different, occasionally. His most recent offering was barbecue cheese French fries, a gelatinous mingling of red ooze and orange ooze and dissolved potatoes.

  We reveled in it all, particularly Leo. He was a great believer in the propriety of tradition.

  ‘Kutz has found love,’ he said.

  ‘In spending money?’ I asked, incredulous.

  ‘He’s run off with the girl of his dreams, a spry seventy-something in need of financial stability.’

  ‘Kutz?’ I laughed.

  ‘They’re rocking a trailer he bought in Sarasota.’

  Mercifully, a new realization pushed the rocking thought away before it could stick, intractable, like the man’s barbecue cheese fries. ‘Kutz’s bundle of love, the one seeking financial stability, somehow heard that you make big money and that you love this place?’

  ‘Actually, it was Kutz who called me, offering a ten-year lease on his operation,’ he said evasively.

  ‘Kutz is in his upper eighties,’ I said, and then realized more. ‘Ah, but though his sweetie is only a few years younger, you said she is spry. She’s breathing new life into him, of a fashion?’

  ‘Perhaps not breathing, exactly.’

  ‘Who picked up your check?’

  ‘She did, but who can know about affairs of the … heart?’ he said, letting the delicately phrased thought trail away. He didn’t want to let the thought of Kutz rocking a trailer in Sarasota linger, either.

  ‘Speaking of affairs of the heart, you’re giving up more than half a million a year in provenance work just to sell hot dogs here?’

  ‘Now you’re talking about the real beauty of this enterprise,’ he said, adjusting his toque to be sure it still stuck straight up. ‘Ma and her friends are going to operate the establishment.’

  ‘No,’ I said, but it was more to the two flashbacks that had just collided in my mind. One was of the new sign at the front of the clearing, advertising table service. The second, more horribly, was of the glimpse I’d gotten of Ma Brumsky’s too-short, pink poodle skirt.

  ‘No,’ I said again, because such thoughts needed to be banished twice. ‘Not Ma and the ladies, not table service. Oh, please, not poodles.’

  His furred eyebrows arched high on his pale forehead. ‘You stopped by the house?’

  I could only nod.

  ‘The girls are making their own costumes,’ he said, actually beaming.

  ‘You’ve seen them, then,’ I said.

  ‘Better than the stripper outfits from a few years ago,’ he offered up. ‘Better than the health club, too,’ he said of the skinny dipping just months before. ‘Those ladies need to be busied with things that require full clothing.’

  My mind wandered for a moment, as it is prone to do, to wonder if some sort of lustful rejuvenation was spreading across the elder community of Rivertown. First, Ma and her friends had been caught frolicking naked with a man at the health center pool, and now Kutz and his sweetie had taken off to tango in Sarasota. I pushed the thought away; I didn’t want to imagine walking down to the river some night to find eighty-year-olds rutting on my lawn.

  ‘Where did you find that bulldozer?’ I said, pointing to the dark cloud. It was turning toward the river, as though lost.

  ‘City of Rivertown insisted I use their approved contractor.’

  ‘He’s going in circles, or at least in one circle,’ I said.

  Leo just grinned.

  I looked past him, noticing for the first time a small square of ground that had been fenced off, just past the trailer. ‘And that?’ I asked, pointing to it.

  He only grinned wider.

  ‘Thoroughbred racing … maybe?’

  ‘Things will be revealed in due time, my son,’ he said, nodding as gravely as he could with that white thing stuck to his head.

  Change was flying too fast at that clearing. I pointed to the trailer. ‘You’ll keep this the same,’ I said, to steer the conversation to calmer ground.

  ‘Peeling paint and all, but I’m changing the water,’ he said, almost sadly. Word was Kutz never changed the water he used to cook his hot dogs from year to year. Nobody questioned it, because that was preferable to him scooping fresh from between whatever was floating in the Willahock. ‘What are you doing this afternoon?’ he asked.

  ‘Apparently, not a thing,’ I said, because I had a client that wouldn’t return my calls.

  Pointing to a pile of precut lumber alongside the trailer, he asked, ‘Care to put together a wood enclosure in back? Pa’s tools are in the trailer.’

  ‘An enclosure for what?’

  ‘Ah, that would be a surprise, but there’ll be a free hot dog in it for you, sometime in the future.’

  The black cloud had just passed between the trailer and the Willahock, and the air back there would soon clear.

  ‘A hot dog made with fresh, pure, non-river water?’

  ‘I surely hope the new taste won’t disappoint the regulars,’ he said.

  I’d worked plenty of afternoons for less than the value of a hot dog, but what sealed the deal was the chance to busy my hands and maybe my brain without spinning puzzles about why Herbie Sunheim wasn’t returning my calls.

  SIX

  It made no sense.

  Herbie didn’t call that evening, demanding to hear exactly what I knew about the tagger that witnessed the murder at the Central Works – a tagger who might save his property owner from a negligence lawsuit.

  What began to make better sense was the likelihood that the tagger had seen that his work had been scrubbed away – work he’d risked coming to a crime scene to put up just hours after the body had been discovered. Taggers are gamesmen. I was hoping he’d dare to return to repaint his story.

  I drove to the Central Works at ten that night. This time, I parked four blocks west and came up along the highway on foot, staying close to the buildings and out of range of the car headlamps speeding by and the bright patches beneath the street lamps. I wore my black jeans, black running shoes speckled even blacker from when I painted the turret’s slit windows, and a brand-new black sweatshirt lightened only by the bright red image of Spiderman that Leo had given me because he said my wardrobe needed flair.

  There was but a stingy slice of moon, leaving the Central Works grounds in a milky darkness. I turned and crossed the four-lane side street in line with the railcar, moving low across the bulldozed ground and stepping gingerly to minimize any loud crunches from broken glass. It took ten minutes to creep to the end of the rail spur.

  I moved along the side of the boxcar to the end closest to the building. Looking up, I could see nothing in the darkness. The night was quiet; no noise came from the old bricks. I sat down, clos
e to one of the railcar’s big steel wheels, thinking to wait one hour to see if the tagger showed up.

  It didn’t take that long. A faint creak sounded thirty minutes later, high up in the old factory. A soft thud, like something had been set down, followed. A piece of the window board-up was being removed. The soft brush of clothing against bricks came next.

  I stood carefully to look up past the end of the boxcar. The black shape of someone only faintly darker than the building behind him leaned out of the open third-floor window, holding on tight with his right arm while his left arm was extended out toward the bricks. An aerosol can began hissing paint.

  And then the world went bright white, lighting the ground, the boxcar, the building.

  And the tagger, hanging out of the window. And me.

  Quick as a cat, the tagger dropped into the building and was gone.

  I spun around as a huge engine, loud and throaty, rumbled to life down by the highway. An enormous wall of blinding lights – some roof-mounted, others lower, driving lights and headlamps – lurched up onto the grounds, lighting me even brighter, and began charging toward me.