I looked down at the check lying on the card table I use as a desk. “One more thing. If there’s another bomb, and this becomes public, using me to show your insurers you took action could backfire. I’m tainted goods.”
He made a laugh. “Stop trying to talk yourself out of a job. You were exonerated. Life goes on. Find out what you can.”
We hung up. I’d told him to go to the cops. I’d pressed it enough to almost convince myself I was a stand-up guy, not some schlump on the make for a roof. He said enough to convince me he wasn’t telling me everything. I picked up the check from the table, folded it, and put it in my shirt pocket. One thing was sure: It was going to rain again.
I called Amanda’s home phone, said hello to her voice mail, and left a message. We hadn’t talked in months. Then I called Leo Brumsky and told him I’d buy him a hot dog.
Leo reclined in the driver’s seat of his black Porsche roadster, his pale, bald head angled at the sun, his eyes hidden behind enormoussunglasses, tapping his fingers as Astrud Gilberto sang about the girl from Ipanema. It was one thirty, and the gravel lot in front of Kutz’s Wienie Wagon was empty of construction workers and truckers. I stopped next to him, revved the tinny Jeep engine like a greaseball going home alone after a no-score Saturday night, and killed the ignition.
He didn’t open his eyes. “You’re late,” he said above Astrud’s seductive voice.
“I’m worth the wait.”
He nodded, shut off the C.D. player, and eased his five feet, six inches out of the Porsche. He wore pilled gray polyester slacks and a drooping, shiny blue Hawaiian shirt with red parrots on it that I hadn’t seen before.
“How much did you pay for the shirt, Leo?” I asked as I got down from the Jeep.
“Four bucks, on closeout, at the Discount Den. They only had double XLs,” he added, as if I hadn’t noticed the way the shoulder seams hung down to his elbows.
“Could be handy,” I said as we started across the lot, our shoes crunching the gravel. “You can invite people inside your shirt if it starts to rain.”
He nodded, all chin-up cool behind the sunglasses, and veered off to scope out the ancient picnic tables around back. Kutz lets the squirrels and the pigeons do his cleanup, but sometimes they get bloated from the peppers and the onions and start ejecting more than they pick up. Then it can take a while to find a dry table. While Leo searched, I walked up to the trailer window and ordered.
Kutz’s-first the old man, and now Young Kutz-has been selling hot dogs out of the peeling white wood trailer under the Thompson Avenue overpass since the days when the trucks rumbling above were delivering hootch to the speakeasies in Rivertown. Oldtimers say nothing about the place has changed muchsince then, except perhaps for some of the water Young Kutz uses to boil the hot dogs.
Young Kutz, who’s pushing eighty and is mad about it, piled the five hot dogs, the double-large cheese fries, a huge root beer, and a small diet cola on the flimsy red tray and pushed it through the window. I could feel his eyes hot on my hands as I picked up the tray by its underside, palms up, fingers splayed. I paused to look through the window at him, mano a mano. He gave me the nod, a gesture of respect from one warrior to another. Young Kutz uses thin, cheap trays that flex in the middle and are easy to drop. It’s how he builds repeat orders. But not with me; I haven’t dropped a tray since high school.
I went around back. Leo sat at a brown plank picnic table near the dented, galvanized trash cans. He’d chosen well; there were very few white clumps on the table. I took one hot dog and the small diet off the tray and pushed the rest across the wood.
Leo Brumsky was already balding the summer we graduated from Rivertown High School. That was when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, and much had been said about him being the oldest man ever elected president. Maybe so, I remember thinking that summer, but Reagan, with his impossibly brown hair and rouged cheeks, still looked younger than Leo Brumsky did the day he graduated high school.
“How’s Ma, Leo?”
He was already through half of his first hot dog. He kept chewing until the swelling in his cheeks went down, then set the half-eaten dog on the tray next to the others he’d lined up like torpedoes.
“The usual.” He picked up a French fry oozing with the yellow stuff Young Kutz tells everybody is cheese. “Ailments.”
Leo lived with his mother in Rivertown in the house where he’d grown up. He was a provenance specialist, authenticating and datingitems for the big auction houses in New York, Chicago, and L.A. When he wasn’t traveling, he worked out of the basement of her brick bungalow and made upwards of four hundred thousand dollars a year. His Porsche cost double what his mother’s house was worth, but the pilled, too-loose clothes hanging on the one-hundred-forty-pound frame and his worried, thin, pale face made him look like he slept under cardboard and foraged for dinner in alley barrels.
“And Endora?”
“Mercifully, also the same.” He smiled around the French fry. Endora was Leo’s twenty-five-year-old girlfriend. She was thin, quirky, dark-haired, and gorgeous and had an upper-register I.Q. to match Leo’s. She was a researcher at the Newberry Library and dressed for it, in shades of charcoal and black that kept everything tight and controlled. But in the summers, after work, on the beach or on the sidewalk, she wrapped things lighter. Then even the birds stopped to witness. I will go to my grave wondering what incredible good deeds Leo did in a previous life to merit Endora.
He picked up the half-eaten hot dog and took another big bite, replenishing his cheeks. “How’s the turret coming?”
I told him I was going to buy a new roof. He nodded, chewing. Sometimes we joked that thirty years from now, he’d still be living with Ma, and I’d still be working on the turret.
“I’ve got this document job, Leo.”
He tapped his bulging cheek. “I figured there was a reason for the big spending,” he said through the food.
“It’s about that explosion last week at Gateville.”
Leo’s eyebrows, thick and black, moved up his pale forehead, almost touching, like caterpillars about to mate.
I’d brought Stanley Novak’s tan envelope. I pulled out the freezer bag and set it on a clean spot on the table, out of range of his cheese fries. “This arrived a couple of weeks before the house blew up.”
Leo leaned over to read through the plastic.
“They think it’s either a coincidental scam attempt or a ruse, disguising the real objective of killing the people who lived in the house. My fear is it’s neither, that the letter is a threat aimed at all of Gateville, with more explosions to come. Whatever it is, there’s been no follow-up to collect the money demanded.”
He looked up from the freezer bag. “They gave you the originals?”
“They haven’t gone to the cops.”
“Jeez.” He started to shake his head, then stopped when the obvious hit him. “Why hire you?”
“To show their insurance company they acted responsibly in case the threat proves to be legit. Plus, they think they can control me because of Amanda.”
“Ah, Amanda.” His eyebrows kissed at the top of his forehead.
“It’s a job, Leo. I need a roof.”
“You betcha.” He glanced down at the hot dog wrappers and sodden French fry tray that now held only a tiny, coagulating puddle of the cheese-colored substance. “How much are they paying you?”
“Three grand.”
“And my cut?” He smiled, because we both knew he wouldn’t take a dime.
“You just ate it.” I put the freezer bag back in the tan envelope.
“Not quite,” he grinned. “I’d like another root beer.”
After lunch, I went to the bank drive-up, pleased that I remembered the way. It had been two months since my last deposit. I put the Gateville check in the scratched plastic canister, punched the button, and watched the vacuum suck it up like a Kansas tornado. The gray-haired lady behind the bulletproof glass gave me a wink and a grape lollipop with my receipt, and I motored out of there, sucking on my lollipop, knowing exactly what it was like to be Bill Gates.