For a time we sat in his open convertible and looked at the rubble at the west end.
“What finally made him set the plan in motion?” Leo asked, when the silence got too loud.
“Our divorce.”
“Atta boy, Dek. Suck up the guilt for this, too.”
“It’s true enough, Leo. Obviously, the Board’s rejection of his request for a loan, and then his son’s death and his wife’s deterioration, were the reasons. But they festered, and might not have gone any place, except that Amanda and I divorced, and she went to Europe for what was to be at least six months. God knows he’d had the motive; now he had the means and opportunity. He’d never forgotten the letters, blueprints, and D.X.12 that were in the tunnels with Michael Jaynes. Now he had the keys; he was supposed to check on the house. He cut into the tunnel and began blowing things up.”
“And hired you to misdirect the investigation that was sure to come, by feeding you clues about Michael Jaynes.”
“He controlled the investigation every step of the way. Usingthe old notes was genius, because it forced everyone’s attention back to 1970, to someone who had worked building Gateville. When that looked to be a dead end, he fed me Jaynes’s name to keep me going.”
Leo turned from looking at the ruined houses. “And when that lagged, he set you up to take the fall.”
I shook my head. “He didn’t set me up.”
“What about the money missing from the Dumpster? Stanley had to know you would stake it out, even if you didn’t tell anybody beforehand.”
“Sure, but he couldn’t know I’d admit to being there. Nor could he anticipate I’d be so lame as to fall asleep and admit that, too. My announcing that I’d been there but didn’t see the money disappear made me look worse than stupid; it made me look like I was lying and stupid. That’s what got Till interested in me in the first place. He thought I was covering up the fact that I’d grabbed the money myself. I dug my own grave on that one.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It made me look like I was lying-”
“That’s not what I meant. What happened to the money?”
I gave him my happiest grin. I knew what was puzzling him, but I wanted to savor the sensation of knowing something he hadn’t worked out.
“The money never went to Ann Sather’s,” I said.
“Jeez-” he said, and then the confusion left his face. He smiled.
I blurted ahead, though he already knew what I was going to say. “Even if I’d brought binoculars, I wouldn’t have caught it. Stanley came to the drop with a white bag full of food scraps he’d picked out of Ann Sather’s Dumpster a few days before and had kept refrigerated at home. Only he’d put the white bag inside a black bag. Assuming that I would be watching, he made a show of leaning into the Dumpster, like he was jamming the black bag allthe way in so he could close the lid. What he was really doing with all that fumbling was ripping the black outer bag off and balling it up in his fist. It was just thin plastic. Then he drove away with his wadded-up black plastic bag, leaving behind a white bag full of nothing but authentic Ann Sather kitchen garbage. He figured when I saw no one come for the black bag, I’d rummage in the Dumpster. I wouldn’t find the money, but worse, I would realize that if I told anyone that the money had disappeared right under my eyes, they wouldn’t believe me. They’d think I took it. I must have really shocked him when I told everybody I’d been watching the Dumpster but had fallen asleep. That was a bonus for him; it made me look even more guilty.”
“That wasn’t setting you up?”
“No, because he never expected me to admit I was there.”
“What about blowing up your shed? That wasn’t a setup?”
“It was time to get me out of the picture, because I was making too much noise about doubting the bomber was Michael Jaynes. He needed more time to string out the bombings, to make the Members suffer slowly, like he and his wife had, watching their son die. But he didn’t use D.X.12 on my shed, Leo, which would have tied me to the Gateville bombs much more closely.”
“Jeez,” Leo said.
“That’s it exactly,” I said. “Jeez.” I looked down the street at the ruined houses.
“So he was never looking for money?”
I shook my empty head in my Tilley hat. “It was too late for money. His son was dead, his wife was headed for an institution. No, he wanted to punish the Board, and the Members, by destroying all of Gateville.”
“Wanted it bad enough to kill.”
“No. I saw his face when he learned that that family had come home from Door County and was in the house he’d blown up.” I pointed at the pile of rubble that had once been the dead family’shome. “‘Bastards,’ Stanley said that night. I thought he was referring to more than one bomber, but it was actually a slip. Stanley was referring to the Board, blaming them for the family’s death just like he did for the death of his son.”
We sat for a while then, in the sun, without speaking, like we were waiting in a graveyard for a grounds crew to come to cover new graves.
“Drive on, Jeeves,” I said finally.
Leo put the Porsche into gear and eased up Chanticleer toward the turn.
“What’s going to happen here?” Leo asked.
“This last batch of destroyed houses will be scraped away. Their owners, including Amanda, are the lucky ones. They’ll get insurance money to buy someplace else. I don’t know about the others, because technically their houses have not been damaged. The Board will plant grass and trees, like they did earlier, to try to perfume the development, but it won’t work. The story is out. No one wants to live in a minefield.”
“What about the report in the paper that said the whole development would be rewired? Won’t that end it?”
“That’s just whistling past the graveyard. The D.X.12 is still here. They’ve found a lot of it, maybe even all of it. But even if they bulldoze all the houses, they’ll never know if they missed one tiny cube. That’s what makes this place a ghost town for a long time to come.”
Leo started the Porsche and crept along in first gear. “So Stanley Novak got what he wanted?”
“More like what he needed.”
Leo nodded at the justice of that, and we continued around Chanticleer Circle until we got to what was left of Amanda’s house. Two men in white hard hats stood in front of the pile, next to a dump truck loaded with debris. Only the front wall of Amanda’s house remained.
Leo put the Porsche in neutral. “She sure had a lot of guts, bullying those E.M.T.’s to go in to get you, even as the roof was coming down.”
“Never underestimate the force of Amanda’s determination.”
“Is she going to be staying a while in Rivertown?” Leo kept looking straight ahead, but I could see him smile. When he got that big slimeball grin on his face, I could swear his lips touched the lobes of both his ears.
“She bought a condo downtown. She’ll be moving out in a month.”
“No grand reconciliation?” The disappointment in his voice was genuine.
“She’s leaving the hot water heater, the portable shower, and the big bed. She’ll be back to visit.”
“Still…”
“She says we’re too young to get married.”
“You’re both looking at middle age.”
“She’s right, Leo.”
The men climbed into the cab of the dump truck.
“Big greed,” Leo said. “It’s always big greed.” He turned to look at me, his eyebrows riding high on his forehead.
I looked at my watch. “Fire it up, Leo. Amanda wants me back by three.”
He slipped the shifter into first gear. “What’s the rush?”
“Amanda said we’re having sweets.”
Jack Fredrickson
Jack Fredrickson's first Dek Elstrom mystery, A Safe Place for Dying, was nominated for the Shamus Award for Best First Novel. His short fiction has appeared in the acclaimed Chicago Blues and in Michael Connelly's Burden of the Badge anthologies. He lives with his wife, Susan, west of Chicago, where he is crafting the next Dek Elstrom novel.