Jack Fredrickson
A Safe Place for Dying
The first book in the Dek Ekstrom Mystery series, 2006
FOR SUSAN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have been blessed with the prodding, well-tempered criticism, and encouragement by the finest of individuals. To those who critiqued the whole blooming manuscript, to Mary Anne Bigane, Joe Bigane III, Susan Taylor Chehak, Kelly Fitzpatrick, Lori Fredrickson, Eric Frisch, Missy Lyda, and Beth Smith, I say again… and again: Thanks.
To Patrick Riley, who also waded through the words, and then sweated the marketing and applied the Taser at critical junctures, I can say only that you’re the best of pals.
To my new friends at Thomas Dunne, to Marcia Markland and Diana Szu, and to India Cooper, who did the copyediting, you made what I did much better.
And to my daughter, Lori, my son, Jack, and to my wife, Susan… you make what I am much better.
Prologue
It was a spectacle even on the four-inch screen of my fifty-nine-dollar television.
Edna Rectenberry, the white-curled fusspot of Chicago P.B.S.’s Our Prairie, Our Heritage, was on her knees outside the wall of the gated community, Crystal Waters, barking questions at six preschoolers about the purple wildflowers they’d planted there. She’d just poked her microphone at one fidgeting towhead, in short pants and a better necktie than I’d ever own, when the roof of one of the mansions behind the wall rumbled up like a flaming orange spaceship and vaporized into black smoke. The explosion pounded the ground as glowing cinders of charred wood and shattered roof tile began raining down like hell’s own charcoal.
Her cameraman stumbled back from the searing heat, into the suddenly blaring horns and squealing brakes of the cars on the highway, but he kept his videocam rolling as the screaming children and poor, arthritic Edna, her knees bleeding, her white hair clumped with black ash, staggered through the hailstorm of flaming debris into the street.
Nobody died. The people who lived in the mansion were away,and the wall had protected the children and Edna from all but small burns and minor cuts. And there the story would have expired, as a minor news item on page three of the metro section of the Chicago Tribune, along with the worst of the day’s other house fires, save for the tape. The videotape of Edna and the screaming kids running from a flaming roof made it perfect Big T Television.
All four local news shows hustled coiffures to Crystal Waters, to pose in front of the brick wall and to intone, live at five, six, and ten, that they didn’t have much to intone about at all. Voicing over endless replays of the P.B.S. video, they mouthed the obvious: It must have been a gas leak, and there was concern it might happen again.
After enjoying the footage for the sixth time, I blew the sawdust off my gallon of Gallo and poured a celebratory half inch into my coffee mug. I knew Crystal Waters. People from where I’m from drive by it sometimes for a peek at the good life through the iron gates. They call it Gateville.
I call it that, too. But I’d lived there, for the months of my marriage.
And so long as nobody got hurt, I was rooting for another gas leak.
One
The exploding house disappeared from the news, and already I’d half forgotten it when Stanley Novak called the following week, asking if he could come right over. I hadn’t seen Stanley since he’d carted me out of Gateville the previous Halloween, and I knew better than to think it was a social call, especially at 9:00 A.M. I had just enough time to wipe a dry varnishing rag over my two white plastic chairs before the doorbell rang. He must have called from a block away.
I opened the door. It was a cool morning for late June, but Stanley Novak’s pale blue uniform shirt was sweat-soaked under the arms like it was high noon in August. Even on his best days, Stanley Novak looked lumpy, like a failed attempt to jam toothpaste back in a tube, but this morning he looked worse than usual. His doughy face was shiny with perspiration, several long black strands of his comb-over had come unglued and dangled limp over his left ear, and he’d missed a couple of spots shaving. He rocked back and forth on his heels, his fingers working nervously at the lip of the tan envelope he was holding.
Stanley was chief of security at Crystal Waters. He was in chargeof the guards who manned the gatehouse and patrolled the grounds and was utterly dependable, anxious, and ever at the ready to protect his charges and their micromansions. I’d admired his sense of purpose when I’d lived there. He always seemed sure of what he was doing.
But this morning, Stanley Novak was sweating.
“Stanley Novak, as I live and breathe.”
“Mr. Elstrom.”
“Call me Dek, Stanley,” I said, holding the door open for him. “I no longer dwell among the chosen.” I motioned toward the two plastic chairs, the only furniture in what I hoped would one day be a living room I could unload on some urban professional with lots of money and a taste for the unusual.
Stanley stepped inside but ignored the chairs, going instead to the curved stone wall. I was used to that; first-time visitors always need a few minutes to check out the architecture before they want to sit down. The way Stanley was sweating, though, there was more. He was buying time. I sat in one of the chairs and waited.
He moved silently along the wall like he was in a rock museum, reaching out to lightly touch the rough yellow and white limestone blocks. Every few feet he stopped and looked up at the dark, timbered ceiling twelve feet above his head. Dust sparkled in the narrow beams of sunlight filtering through the open slit windows like bits of crystal. Outside, trucks downshifted on Thompson Avenue, lumbering up the railroad overpass.
“I’ve passed this place a million times, wondering if this was a silo,” he said from across the round room. “Then last year I heard it was supposed to be a castle, or something.”
“The first turret of one. My grandfather built it in 1929, but he died before he could get much done. It’s been vacant since then, except for some mice, a few rats, and a couple dozen pigeons. And me, since last November.” I pointed at the two orange buckets of roof patch on the floor next to the table saw. “I’m fixing it up to sell.”
He nodded and looked at the curved black wrought-iron staircase that hugged the far wall. “How many floors?”
“Five. Bathroom and kitchen and maybe an office will be on two, master bedroom on three. I haven’t figured yet what four and five will be.”
He’d stopped at the small, silver-framed snapshot I’d set on one of the protruding blocks. “Nice picture of you and Ms. Phelps.”
I hadn’t thought to put it out of sight when he called. “Crown Point, Indiana. Home of the quickie marriage,” I said, trying for casual.
He moved along the wall.
“How is she, Stanley?” The words came out too quickly.
“You’re not going to drywall this over, are you?” He touched one of the limestone blocks, dodging the question. He didn’t like to give things away about the residents of Gateville.
“Everything stays natural.”
“This place will really be something when you get it fixed up.” He gave the wall a last tap and came to sit in the other plastic chair, the sweat on his forehead gone now in the cool of the turret. He set his envelope on the floor.
“Coffee?” I pointed at the black Mr. Coffee balanced on the cardboard nail box by the table saw, thinking I should have dusted the carafe. It looked furry, like the beginnings of one of those grass-sprouting Chia creatures they sell on television in the middle of the night to people who can’t sleep.
“No coffee, thanks.” The wide eyes he’d had during his inspection tour were gone; he was all business now. He straightened up on the chair. “Mr. Elstrom, you probably saw it on T.V., last week the house at Sixteen Chanticleer Circle exploded.”